SWOP Behind Bars Advocacy from the Margins

America has produced an alarming number of serial killers who discovered the same thing: if you wanted to murder women repeatedly, sex workers were among the least protected victims you could choose.
But when Gary Ridgway, Samuel Little, Joel Rifkin, Robert Pickton, Anthony Sowell, Rex Heuermann, and others all independently arrive at the same conclusion - that women involved in the sex trade are easier to hunt because their disappearances generate less urgency - we should stop treating these cases as isolated tragedies.
The disturbing question isn't why so many serial killers targeted sex workers.
The disturbing question is why so many of them independently reached the same conclusion - and were right.

There is a photograph that appears almost every time Robert Pickton's name is mentioned.
It is not a photograph of the women he murdered.

Whenever a serial killer targets sex workers, the same political argument seems to emerge. Before the victims are even buried, someone claims their deaths prove we need stronger laws against buying sex. The logic sounds simple enough: if fewer men bought sex, fewer women would be harmed. It is a comforting explanation because it suggests that another law, another arrest, or another slogan could have prevented unimaginable violence.

Let's clear something up before it calcifies into conventional wisdom: the Long Island serial killer case is not evidence that the Nordic Model works. It is not a signal. It is not a case study. It is not, despite what was said from a podium at the recent NOW conference, that criminalizing buyers saves lives. And yet there it was, presented like a smoking gun - as if a man capable of stalking, torturing, and killing multiple women over the course of years was one solicitation charge away from a moral awakening. He wasn't shopping around for the right incentive structure. He wasn't weighing the legal risk of buying sex and deciding it was finally too steep. He was picking victims he believed no one would look for hard enough, fast enough, or at all - women he correctly calculated the system had already deprioritized.

Because if we have learned anything from the annual Super Bowl trafficking panic ritual, it is that major sporting events are never just major sporting events. They become convenient stages for moral panic, police funding, surveillance expansion, anti-trafficking theater, and breathless claims about “protecting women and girls” that somehow rarely translate into housing, health care, labor protections, immigration support, reentry services, or actually listening to sex workers and trafficking survivors.

I started standing up for myself in business about my respect and self-worth. For that, I lost friends who felt like I was acting “better” than them. But I continued walking in my truth no matter the cost. There’s no hustle without sacrifice. 

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is one of those people. She has spent decades surviving systems that were never designed to allow Black trans women to live safely - much less to lead movements, shape political conversations, or be recognized as the architects of community infrastructure that kept people alive when every institution available had decided they were disposable. Her survival is not incidental to her politics. It is the foundation of them. Everything she built, every conversation she entered, every institutional assumption she challenged emerged directly from the lived experience of navigating conditions that most movement leaders have only theorized about.

The internet has changed sex work in ways no one could have imagined a generation ago. It has created more independence, more control over screening, and more ways to build safer work. But it has also created new dangers: stalking, doxxing, blackmail, phishing, identity theft, hidden recording, and digital harassment.
For sex workers, online safety isn’t optional. It’s survival. Protecting your personal information, your identity, and your digital footprint can make the difference between maintaining control of your work - or losing it.