Sex Work Decrim Fight
Raven Frederick and Elsye Defree in their “Sex Work is Political” T-shirts, holding red umbrellas before the 2nd Annual Black and Brown Sex Worker Second Line begins on the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, December 15, 2018. Photo courtesy of WWAV Archives
Spring 2021
After more than 30 years of abolition feminist work alongside sex workers to reduce the harms of criminalization, Women With A Vision and our Sex Workers Advisory Committee (SWAC) mounted the first sex work decriminalization campaign in the Deep South. This was an act of refusal and otherwise world-building. We refused the destruction that criminalization had long wrought in our communities, and we refused to be limited by what our oppressors said was politically possible. Their authority, granted to them on stolen land — their power, rooted in the ongoing legacy of chattel slavery — could not contain the dreams we worked to make reality.
We partnered with SWAC as accomplices, supporting the vision they laid out in the Deep South Decrim toolkit. We helped to organize a statewide campaign, which challenged the isolation, blaming, and criminalization of sex workers and articulated the ways that criminalization destabilized our communities.
“[The foremothers made history] by going to drug users and sex workers, by making knowledge with them, by building innovative health programs that grew directly from their lived realities, and then by working with them to imagine and create the world otherwise. … they also expressed the promise of their fire dreams in every space they occupied, funders and politicians be damned. In doing so, they created space for visualizing and actualizing the ways in which the health-work, spirit-work, and justice-work of Black women could open very different worlds —ones built through solidarity, respect and care.”
On Tuesday, May 4, 2021 the SWAC and accomplices convened at the state capitol for a day of action. They looked directly into the eyes of our elected officials and spoke the truth of the terrors of sex work criminalization, violence, and stigma to which they were subjected daily. Most importantly, they spoke their vision of a world otherwise into being — a world where their efforts to feed themselves and their families would be looked upon like any other job. Holding that space was powerful, creative work. And the fight for decriminalization continues!
The Deep South Decrim billboard in New Orleans, 2021, which reads “No Jail For Any Job: Decriminalize Sex Work.” Photo courtesy of WWAV Archives
