Hurt discount has lengthy been thought-about a nonjudgmental, evidence-based method to drug use that reduces overdose deaths and infectious illness—adversarial penalties exacerbated by the warfare on medicine. Nevertheless, few individuals know that this compassionate, community-centered method has purposes past substance use, together with decreasing potential adversarial penalties related to intercourse work.
For many years, individuals within the intercourse commerce have been elevating consciousness about the dangerous results of criminalization on their livelihoods and well-being. Their calls for have largely remained the identical: Intercourse staff need protected working circumstances, the decriminalization of their work, and an surroundings that enables them to deal with violence and exploitation when it occurs.
Sadly, the rampant criminalization of intercourse staff and their purchasers has remained a barrier to those primary human rights. Nevertheless, Physique Autonomy: Decolonizing Intercourse Work and Drug Use, an anthology that I edited, suggests an instantaneous step: Bolster hurt discount inside the intercourse commerce to arm intercourse staff with the data and assets mandatory to stop and reply to violence and exploitation inside their work and private lives.
Disgrace shouldn’t be a productive agent of change, and robbing individuals of assets solely decreases their possibilities of survival.”
As I write within the e-book, hurt discount is “the understanding that disgrace shouldn’t be a productive agent of change, and robbing individuals of assets solely decreases their possibilities of survival.” Typically, hurt discount can embody offering security provides, akin to condoms, lube, sanitizer, boric acid, and unhealthy date lists. Different instances, hurt discount can embody security planning and guaranteeing there’s neighborhood accountability and room for self-care. Hurt discount also can embody broad entry to low-income and inexpensive housing, protected drug-consumption areas, and rights-based coverage reforms. Hurt discount is a “blueprint for survival and the assumption in one thing past survival,” I write. “‘Simply say no’ isn’t as efficient as ‘What do you should be OK?’”
At present, the warfare on intercourse trafficking is the dominant sociopolitical method to the intercourse commerce in america. Most native, state, and federal anti-trafficking legal guidelines conflate consensual intercourse work with intercourse trafficking, thereby pushing intercourse work underground, the place trafficking, violence, and STI transmission are literally extra prone to happen. Most every thing the mainstream media tells us about intercourse trafficking is twisted and sensationalized, together with the variety of individuals being trafficked. When social providers depend consensual intercourse staff as intercourse trafficking survivors, it skews the information, additional stigmatizing intercourse staff and endangering those that are victims of trafficking.
In distinction, consent, self-agency, and intercourse employee management are central to hurt discount.
Hurt-reduction applications that middle intercourse staff—together with SPARC Ladies’s Middle in Baltimore; G.L.I.T.S, a Black trans-led advocacy group in New York Metropolis; and Aileen’s, a peer-centered organizing and hospitality area for intercourse staff in Seattle—supply individualized care and lessons that assist intercourse staff navigate police harassment and different types of state violence. These organizations additionally supply occupational well being and security provides; meet intercourse staff the place they’re, whether or not on the road or on-line; and supply peer help freed from disgrace, stigma, and sensationalism. In these applications, sex-trafficking survivors self-identify as such and are linked to further providers as requested.
Physique Autonomy illustrates the methods through which sexuality and sexual labor have been colonized and weaponized in opposition to girls, femmes, and queer and trans individuals of coloration. It contains antidotes from healers of the worldwide majority that encourage us all to reclaim the sanctity of our our bodies and our bodily autonomy. “If everybody on Earth felt fulfilled, healed, entire … or a minimum of knew methods to entry a platform for therapeutic … the world can be a special place,” Melodie Garcia, an erotic service supplier, hurt reductionist, and author, says in her piece in Physique Autonomy. “It’s completely true that folks can discover this by way of intercourse, kink, artwork, and medicines.”
The reality is marginalized intercourse staff, together with intercourse staff of coloration, transgender intercourse staff, undocumented intercourse staff, and intercourse staff with disabilities, expertise probably the most hurt within the intercourse commerce, from criminalization to intercourse trafficking. When insurance policies and social providers are designed with these populations, who’re probably the most marginalized, in thoughts, everyone advantages.
Because the consensual intercourse staff I labored with for Physique Autonomy affirm, intercourse work is figure—and it’s neither inherently disempowering and exploitative, neither is it inherently empowering and glamorous. Like most work, it may possibly typically be a mixture of all these traits and extra. If we as a society can embrace this reality, then we will work towards a world the place compassion, care, and collaboration are prioritized.
In an effort to maintain intercourse staff protected, we should re-learn and re-frame ideas of public security and public well being, uplift compassion, and think about new worlds. Embracing hurt discount can assist get us there.
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Justice Rivera
(she/they, ella/elle) is a queer Jew Rican author and harm-reduction marketing consultant based mostly in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is collector, co-author, and editor of Physique Autonomy: Decolonizing Intercourse Work and Drug Use (Synergetic Press, April 2024), and is engaged on her memoir, Sweet Coated. She speaks English and Spanish. Comply with them @justicerivera_writes, and her consulting work by way of Reframe Well being and Justice @harmreductionfemmes. |
