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Hello and welcome back to Behind the Powder Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. We are continuing reading Revolting Prostitutes. Sorry, I just had a message from one of my really old clients who I haven't seen in like two years. And I'm pretty sure I didn't want to see him again, but um okay, we'll deal with that later. Absolutely different, but that absolutely what? I'm just trying to read the message. I'm like, what? Um Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. That is what we're gonna carry on reading. This is page 132. So as we see time and time again, the requirements for quote the perfect victim that Kaber and Schultz outline not only routinely exclude black women from safety, but actively sweep them up into the definition of criminal. Centoya's case briefly gained international attention, although as of this writing her appeal has been denied. The cases of Alicia and Gigi, those stories open this chapter, have been taken up by sex work organizers and by the wider survived and punished movement to free incarcerated survivors of violence. A movement Kaba has been instrumental in organizing, but these cases are of course only the tip of the iceberg. In the US, the criminalization of people attempting to survive is routine. For some, police attention means arrest as often as it means any kind of safety. The Atlanta Solutions, not punishment coalition found that encounters with the police leave trans people less safe than they were before. This is true even when we have called the police ourselves for help, because we were in danger or to report a crime. 38% of trans women of colour in Atlanta report that when they called the police for help, they ended up getting arrested instead. Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 2016 presidential run was dogged by anger from the left, in part over her role in promoting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as the Crime Act, signed into law by her husband. She infamously justified the 1994 Act with reference to quote super predators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heal. In the 2010s, organizations like Black Lives Matter ignited public concern over deaths at the hands of the police and drew attention to how over policing and mass incarceration disproportionately hit black communities and perpetuated the systematic devaluation of black lives. The Crime Act sent a hundred thousand more police onto the streets, earmarked nearly 10 billion for prisons, retained the racist 100 to 1 sentencing ratio for crack versus powder cocaine, and continued with free strikes and mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that put hundreds of thousands of mostly black and poor Americans in jail for long stretches for drug offences. Part of the aim of the law was to use mandatory arrest policies to force police to take domestic violence more seriously. However, where the police weren't sure who was the aggressor or felt unsympathetic to both parties, they often responded by arresting both perpetrator and victim. As a result, arrests of women shot up. In Los Angeles, the number of women arrested as a result of domestic violence calls doubled in 1995. In Maryland, the arrest rate for women tripled between 1992 and 1996. In Sacramento, it went up by 91%. A key reason that mothers were criminalized for failing to protect their children from the man who was abusing both mother and child. As researcher Susan Miller puts it, quote, an arrest policy intended to protect battered women as victims is being used against them. Battered women have become female offenders. Black and Latin ex women were disproportionately arrested. When one young black trans woman in Los Angeles called the police about her partner's violence, the police returned to arrest her for an old prostitution offence. Tia Wanda Moore, a young black woman in Chicago, was sexually assaulted by a police officer when she called for help regarding her partner's violence. When she sought to complain about the assault, she was dismissed on the grounds she had been a stripper. When she recorded the officers talking about her in order to gather further evidence of the appalling way she was being treated, they arrested her and charged her with eavesdropping, an offence that could have seen her jailed for 15 years. Thankfully, she was ultimately acquitted. These policies can impact doubly on sex workers. Black women in the sex trade are routinely subject to dual arrest when both parties involved in a domestic violence incident are arrested. If they call the police to report domestic violence. When it passed, some feminists hailed the 1994 Crime Act as a triumph because it included major legislation that sought to tackle violence against women. The Violence Against Women Act, VAWA. In a 2015 Feminist Current essay titled A Thank You Note to Cosrell, Sex Negative Feminists, writer Penny White typifies this mainstream feminist praise for the VAWA and the police, writing that feminists of the 70s and 80s were, quote, heroes who paved the way for the Violence Against Women Act, which gave law enforcement $1.6 billion to investigate and prosecute sexual and domestic violence. This transformed our culture into a bigger, safer, and freer space for women that I had ever dreamed possible than I had ever dreamed possible. Rhetoric like this doesn't just forget about victims of police and state violence. It throws them under the bus. Liberal commentator Amanda Marcott caused outrage when she wrote an article titled, Prosecutors Arrest Alleged Rape Victim to Make Her Cooperate in Their Case, they made the right call, arguing that it was understandable that prosecutors might try to do everything within their power to convict the perpetrator, including jailing his victim, adding that we have to decide what's more important to us, putting abusive men in jail or letting their victims opt out of cooperating with the prosecution as they see fit. Carceral feminism prioritizes punishing wrongdoers above all else, even protecting victims. These competing perspectives on the 1994 Crime Act speak to larger conflicts within the feminist anti-violence movement and illuminate some of the problems with seeing the police as the solution to violence against women. Identifying the problems of this law and order to approach punishes us to locate violence against women within the broader texture of state violence, including arrests, deportations, evictions, loss of child custody, anti-homelessness ordinances, the war on drugs, genterification, and racism in policing, and in the criminal justice system. The fight for decriminalization is just one strand. Working to end the power of the police to assault, arrest, prosecute or deport people in the sex trades is part of a larger struggle for safety. A struggle which includes freeing incarcerated survivors, ending cash bail, and fighting for investment in the things that make people safer, not cops and prisons. Organizing. In such an intensely criminalized context, organizing and speaking out come with huge risks. The experience of Monica Jones is a case in point. Monica, a social work student, sex workers' right activist, and black trans woman, was arrested in Arizona in 2013. The day before her arrest, she had spoken against the punitive approach of local police at a sex worker rally, and on the day of her arrest, she had publicly tipped off sex workers about an upcoming police sting. She was convicted of quote manifesting prostitution, a broad and ambiguous law that encompasses a range of everyday activities, including simply walking in the street. Campaigners often refer to it as the criminalization of quote walking while trans. And sex worker-led research elsewhere in the US has found that such laws are used overwhelmingly against black women. Monica's Activision, race, and gender operated in concert to make her hypervisible to the police. She was targeted for arrest in part because as she told a journalist, quote, I was very outspoken about the arrests of sex workers being out there protesting. The police knew about me. Sex worker activision is frequently on the radar of the police. In New Jersey in 2016, a sex worker was arrested as she left an activist meeting. Law enforcement officers were using sex workers' self-organisation as an opportunity to surveil and criminalise them. A colleague of the worker wrote about this incident in the local press, and on the day the article appeared, its author was herself arrested. When almost two dozen sex workers were brutally murdered in Uganda, 44 sex worker activists gathered for a crisis meeting in a hotel. The main agenda of the meeting was to share safety advice while the killer was at large and to raise funds for the funeral of one of the murdered women. All 44 women were arrested and charged with public nuisance offences, held for two weeks in jail, and given large fines. Incidents like this go largely ignored. While bravely planning more public actions relating to the murders, in the following months, an activist from Ugandan Sex Worker Group, Women's Organization Network for Human Rights Advocacy, W-O-N-E-T-H A, remarked, quote, No other women's organization is paying attention. Despite this context of state surveillance mixed with feminist obliviousness, the sex worker movement in heavily criminalized countries. Buzzers with energetic grassroots organizing. An uplifting 2012 video shows dozens of sex workers disrupting a special session of the US Congress on the global AIDS epidemic to draw attention to the failings of the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief. PEPFAR PEPFAR is the largest source of government funding for HIV and AIDS in the world, but requires recipient organizations to be explicitly anti-sex work. The quote anti-prostitution pledge. Opening red umbrellas, they stormed the stage loudly chanting, repel the pledge, reform PEPFA. One activist named Sharmus Outlaw addressed the delegates from the stage. Before I'm transgender, before I'm a sex worker, before I'm anything, I am human. Sharmus Outlaw tragically died in 2017 as a result of a litany of failures in the US healthcare system relating not only to her poverty, but also to her status as a black trans woman. A biopsy that she desperately needed was delayed for months because her healthcare providers claimed to be, quote, confused about her gender marker on her documents. Although she was taken far too soon, Outlaw archived a huge amount in her campaigning work for LGBTQ people, people living with HIV and sex workers. Penelope Saunders, a close friend of Outlaw, says, quote, she would say to me every time we met, the girls need jobs, they need jobs. Never has Sharmus backed away from defending someone who society has shunned or stigmatized. Outlaw inspired and supported numerous other activists and never lost an opportunity to advocate for human rights and harm reduction, whether she was addressing politicians or arriving home to see her family in North Carolina, trips on which she would take condoms and information on HIV and LGBTQ rights, in case she met people during the journey who needed help or advice. She did all of this tirelessly while battling her own numerous arrests, living in poverty, and never even having secure housing of her own. African sex worker activism also keeps going in the face of adversity. Kaya Danimbarko writes that African sex workers refusing to swallow the bitterness of their suffering have sparked a sex workers' rights movement that is spreading like a bushfire across the continent. There are 80 organizations representing sex workers of all genders across 27 African nations, with more than 30 sex worker collectives in Kenya alone. Health options for young men on HIV, AIDS, and STIs, H-O-Y-MAS, for example, is a male sex worker-led organization in Kenya. It fights for access to HIV AIDS services and hosts regular discussion groups among gay and bisexual men and men in the sex trade. One of its leaders is a plaintiff in a suit to overturn Kenya's anti-homosexuality law. In Cape Town, South Africa, Sex Worker Collective Sistashood creates safe community spaces for street workers, for streetworking trans women and tackles transphobic police violence. Their efforts have ensured that when trans women are arrested, they are searched by women officers and not put in cells with cis men. Sex worker organizing is often characterized by tenacity, creativity, and a touch of irreverence. In Kenya, 300 sex worker activists carrying brooms and mops, marked World's AIDS Day in 2012 by cleaning a hospital. The action was designed to illustrate that sex workers are not a quote problem, but part of a solution, and that they want to help healthcare staff do their jobs better. Mafenj Mukaburu, a Kenyan activist who helped to organize the event, explains, quote, we wanted to sensitize the community and the health workers who often stigmatize us. We wanted to show them we need them, but they need us as well. In Russia, sex worker group Silver Rose joined the May Day March without authorization to protest against rotten morals, social prejudice, capitalism, and inequality. Sex worker Irina Maslova explained the decision to start the group. Eight of us teamed up and decided to run this state system. For sex workers, effective organizing has to mean solidarity that branches out further than a single issue. The most criminalized and marginalized sex workers have more problems than the criminalization of sex work. In Kenya, sex workers are part of the People's Parliament, an anti-poverty social movement for low-paid workers, street vendors, homeless people, bus drivers, squatters, and other street-based communities that face harassment from law enforcement. In the US state of Massachusetts, sex worker Katy Simon, whose organizing work has included resisting the criminalization of panhandling and fighting for legal needle exchanges, spoke at a local meeting to protest the implementation of surveillance cameras in the downtown area. As a harm reduction activist, I must address the effect it would have on Northampton's illicit substance using poor, who often are used as scapegoats to justify targeting all our poor people, preventing their reintegration into the community when the solutions are clear, expansion of voluntary treatment and harm reduction resources. Many activists focus on ensuring that sex workers' basic needs are met. Bonnie has been providing tireless outreach to street based sex workers in Maryland. Virginia and Washington DC since 2001. Bonnie and other DC based organizers, particularly Sharmus Outlaw, were key in overturning DC's prostitution free zone ordinance. She described her role to community site Tits and Sass. Up until very recently I provided housing. I had to stop. And now I provide referrals and transportation to shelters or transitional living or an affordable place to live. Whatever is asked of me. My current venues are our methodon clinics, BDSM clubs, immigrant sex worker apartments, drugs testing clinics. I never leave someone who wants to be inside outside. What if it was the last time I saw that person? What if they were arrested for being homeless? It took eight years for us to rid DC of the prostitution free zone, which was profiling for standing, walking, or walking up to a car. How many people were killed and caged in that time? New York's Lististrator, Mutual Care Collective and Fund, sprung up in the aftermath of the closure of Backpages Sex Worker Ads section. Without it, many sex workers, particularly those closest to the poverty line, were stranded without a way to find indoor work. Through Lysistrator, sex workers share funds to each other through times of scarcity. As disabled former sex worker, Sorit Fisherman comments, there is no safety net for most of us. There's no such thing as a union or pension fund. Peer-led sex worker activision is even more impressive given its shoestring budgets. Funding is hard to come by, but prosecution can provoke inspiration. Activist communities in fully criminalized countries are often notable for their passion and solidarity. Sex worker Daisy describes the enthusiasm among Ugandan activists. Someone will be arrested today, stay in a police cell for a week, but the day they come out, before they even get home, they're talking on behalf of sex workers' rights. I think that's something to be proud of. Maslova of Silver Rose says, I won't give up until sex work is decriminalized in Russia. Even though I will be burned at the stake as a witch. This spirit of bold defiance is typical of the global sex workers' rights movement. There is a sense that change is coming. Grassroots organiser Dion Haywood works with women with a vision. From 2008 to 2013, they spearheaded the No Justice campaign to get the Cannes and Sex Offender Registry penalties changed in Louisiana. After the passage of a new bill that meant no sex workers would be newly added to the register, they went on to lead a class action lawsuit that resulted in the names of 800 people being expunged from the list. One WWAV client who had been on the registry since 1980 said at the time, I can taste my freedom. It was a freeing triumph shared by Haywood. I challenge those people who say that change can't happen in the South, she says, because it did. And don't say the little man can't win, because we did. We are all marinating in a culture which hates people who sell sex. As the persistence and prevalence of full criminalization makes painfully clear. In the US, the mainstream feminist movement often pushes Borcriminalization without removing existing criminal laws. It should be clear, however, that criminalization does not prevent commercial sex. It does not deal with the root causes of why people sell sex, which is to get the resources they need. Chapter 6 The People's Home Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Canada The Swedish Model, a legal regime that criminalizes the purchase of sex and punishes third parties such as managers, drivers and landlords, while ostensibly decriminalizing those who sell sex, also called the Nordic model. Sex by law, sex purchase ban, asymmetrical criminalization, quote en demand, also seen in Northern Ireland, France and Ireland. When the Swedish Parliament passed the N Demand or Sex Purchase Ban in 1999, feminist activists were ecstatic. Finally they thought they had achieved a feminist prostitution law, a law which aims to reduce prostitution but lifts the threat of criminalization from the seller, instead, placing it where power really lies in the transaction. The punter and the pimp. Sweden would be a model for the world. They argue that criminalizing the demand of the client and profiteering of the manager would go some way towards shrinking the sex industry and redressing the huge power imbalances that make sex workers so vulnerable. Feminist professor Catherine McKinnon describes this idea when she writes, quote, against this demand to buy her for sex, this Swedish law says she is not for sale, or rent. Eliminating her criminality raises her status, criminalizing him lowers his privilege. Meanwhile, the fairy states the woman is given support to leave the harmful situation she has found herself in, and targeting demand will have a disciplinary effect on a culture of patriarchal male entitlement. Men will be rehabilitated. This should mean that over time, fewer women will be exploited in prostitution, making countries with such a law less attractive destinations for traffickers. Prostitution is a richly symbolic terrain. It is where our society's anxieties about power, womanhood, and the national coalesce. For feminist women, the figure of the prostitute often comes to represent the trauma that is inflicted on all women within patriarchy, the ultimate symbol of women's pain, of the violence that women suffer. The client thus becomes the symbol of all violent men. He is the avatar of unadulterated violence against women, the archetypal perpetrator. We deeply sympathize with this perspective. Our lives too have been shaped by gendered violence, and we understand the political impulse to punish the man who has come to symbolize this trauma. Indeed, we are only too familiar with the specific risk of violence at the hands of clients. And of course, proponents of the Nordic model are right in identifying prostitution as a deeply unequal transaction. One scarred by patriarchy as well as by white supremacy, poverty, and colonialism. It seems intuitively right to criminalize the men who are, in many ways, the living embodiments of these huge power differentials. Add Scandinavia to this mix and you get an even more potent feminist cocktail. For decades, the countries of Scandinavia have been seen as the feminist nations. The Swedish government describes itself as the first feminist government in the world, going viral on social media with photos illustrating an all women line up at the signing of a bill. In some ways this self-presentation is reasonable. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark regularly top global charts measuring women's rights. Abroad, left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn point to them to support their policy proposals, and are in turn praised by commentators who see them as carrying the flame for the idea of a more generous, holistic social democracy. Feminists around the world often think of Scandinavia and Sweden in particular as a kind of utopia, a place where patriarchy has been largely defeated. Of course there are no utopias. People of colour, migrants, transgender people, and people who use drugs are among those who the generous feminist Swedish state have a tendency to surveil and police, perceived as they are to fall outside Swedishness. But for those who do not follow those issues closely and who submiss that Sweden is, quote, getting it right on childcare or the pay gap, it seems reasonable to connect Scandinavian prostitution law to wider perceptions of the success of feminism over there, and to think it is probably getting it right on sex work too. In other words, many advocates of the Nordic model are driven by straightforwardly progressive concerns, deeply held fears about gendered violence, anger at racism in the sex trade and in society at large. The mostly correct sense that Nordic style societies are generally better, kinder, more feminist places than somewhere like the United States. We know that many hold these views in good faith, but prostitution law is always ideologically capacious, and this law in particular has sufficient political room for both progressive and regressive strands, which are sometimes in collaboration and sometimes in conflict. Moreover, there are key differences between the ideal Nordic model laid out by its advocates in policy discussions and the different versions of the sex purchase ban in the various places it has been implemented around the world. The easiest way to set aside these ideological and legislative confusions, of course, is to look at the law through a sex worker's eyes. Right, that is the end of this uh chapter. We um I'm guessing we're gonna be talking more about the Nordic model, which is very, very, very important right now because if you listen to my last one, you can happily skip forward about me rambling about Ash Regan of the Alba Party, who is trying to get the Nordic model into Scotland currently. We do not want that. Sex workers actively do not want a Nordic model. If the Nordic model comes, that means more power will be in the police's hands and the government hands, not the sex workers' hands and the clients' hands. And more sex workers will then have to choose, not even really choose, they'll have to get more riskier clients than the more nicer ones, if that makes any sense. The reliable ones, because they're going to be afraid of getting prosecuted. And so the ones that are criminals, the punters that are criminals aren't afraid of the police, have um done things wrong, maybe in drugs and other parts, are very dangerous. The ones that are very dangerous to sex workers, and the ones which are not nice, basically. We will lose those privileges of being able to choose our clients. And for the ones for the sex workers who currently can't choose their clients, well, it will become even more dire for them. And we don't want that to happen. We want full decriminalization of sex work in the whole of the UK. So there's a rat grassroots campaign currently, which is Scotland for D-Crim, which is very, very, very important. And I urge everybody to go look and go follow them, read more into it, please support us. Any any help, um, even if it's just a like or a share or a follow, um, it's very, very important. So if you type into Google Scotland for D Crim, we should come up. And yeah, we really do not want this to pass. I think by the time this episode will come out, I think there still will be the Ash Regan's unbiable bill, which she is still trying to pass, and you can absolutely object to that and email into her and email um to anybody else, really, and share it around and be like, this is not okay, this is not the right way to do this. We should actually listen to sex workers. We want decriminalization, we really, really do. And there is another bill coming out which um is called Well, trying to, which is the crime and policing bill, which they want to now stop us from advertising online. And come on, we've just read Revolt and Prostitutes, and we've just read about in other chapters as well, how when you take away advertising online, it doesn't make prostitution any better, it makes it even worse. So, what you can do with that is you can type in the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 ECP, which stands for English Collective of Prostitutes, and you should be able to find on the English Collective of Prostitutes website that you can email your MP to say that this isn't okay, we don't want this, this is why it's bad, and you just need to write in your postcode and it will automatically come up with what MP you actually have. It's amazing, and it will also have a default letter. You can add, you can minus stuff to it, and you do not have to put your real name, you do not have to put your real email address or anything like that. Your support means the world to us, it really does, especially in this day and age where there is so much hate against sex workers. We need to stand up and we need to actually speak on this, otherwise it's just gonna get worse and worse. And this is like what I like to say the domino effect, where they're already in the UK coming for our abortion rights, they're coming for sex workers, they've come for trans women. Like, what else is next? What else is really next? They've come for so much. This needs to end. We need our freedom. So thank you for listening to my lovely little rant. And yeah. Thank you very much for listening. This has been Behind the Padder Podcast. Please leave a review on Spotify, Spotify, Apple, wherever we're on YouTube. Um, I now am putting all my videos on YouTube, the ones where I'm not naked. Um, the dark fans is still up. I will still have that up, but I will be posting all of the videos on YouTube because I it's more exposure, really. I will either be posting um the nudes and stuff on my many vids and dark fans. The one thing which I've realized with dark fans and many vids is that I can't go over like half an hour with videos, which really sucks because then I have to edit it down and it's a lot more work. And yeah, I will see everybody on YouTube. But yeah, those pages will stay up, um, just in case. And yeah, if you want any of my personal information or anything like that, you'll be able to find it through all of behind the paddle links. And yeah, that's it. I think that's it. I think I'm done. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a good day.

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