SWOP Behind Bars Advocacy from the Margins

Receipts Please! Myths Don't Stand A Chance! Myth #6: All Clients Are Predators

The idea that every client is a predator is one of the most persistent myths about sex work. While violence against sex workers is real and must be taken seriously, painting all clients with the same brush is inaccurate and harmful. This stereotype distracts from the real structural risks sex workers face and fuels policies that make their work more dangerous. From TV dramas to crime podcasts, the “violent john” trope is everywhere. But the evidence doesn’t support the claim that all clients are predators—and focusing on this myth obscures the actual source of risk.

The Ironic Death of Charlie Kirk

Heads up: this one’s messy, hard, and urgent. Charlie Kirk - 31, political firebrand and cofounder of Turning Point USA - was fatally shot at Utah Valley University while doing a Q&A about, of all things, gun violence. His last words to a crowd of 3,000 were literally “gun violence” before a single shot from a rooftop ended his life. It’s almost too on-the-nose, like the universe writing satire in real time. Kirk, who spent years cheerleading for a culture where more guns supposedly meant more safety, died in a moment that collapsed his rhetoric into reality. The shooter is still unknown.

Safety Is a Feeling, Not a Destination

For survivors, safety isn’t a destination or a set of rules. It is not found in the locks on the doors, the cameras on the walls, or the paperwork at intake. Those may create a sense of control for institutions, but they rarely create comfort for survivors.
Safety is a feeling that grows in the body over time. It comes when someone listens without judgment, when choices are honored, when identities are respected, and when support doesn’t come with strings attached. Survivors like Jenna know instinctively that being told “you’re safe here” doesn’t make it true.

Passing the Gravy: How Systems Perpetuate Violence Instead of Ending It

She was twelve the first time the bruises should have mattered. The teacher noticed. The nurse filed a report. A caseworker visited the home. But nothing stuck. Each institution touched her life just long enough to shuffle her along, like a plate passed around a crowded table. The bruises faded, the paperwork filed away, and the cycle resumed—because each system acted as though acknowledgment was enough.
By fourteen, the abuse had become exploitation. Older men promised safety, then abused that promise. She disappeared from school, only to be criminalized for truancy. Courts scolded her for not showing up to class, while no one asked why she couldn’t stay there. Police ignored her when she reported assault, but arrested her for curfew violations. Providers looked at her survival sex work and saw delinquency, not desperation. Every system had its turn, and every system passed her off—never fixing, never listening.
This is where the cycle sharpens its teeth: one institution punishes what another ignored. Teachers flag concerns, but courts punish the outcome. Police fail to protect, but probation officers punish the response. Foster care offers instability, then blames her when she ages out without resources. Each handoff creates new trauma, each failure pushes her deeper into harm, and each punishment ensures the next system inherits her with more baggage than before.

Receipts Please! Myths Don't Stand A Chance! Myth #5: Sex Work Is Glamorous and Easy Money

When sex work shows up in mainstream culture, it’s rarely depicted as the ordinary, complex labor that it is. Instead, it’s boxed into one of two caricatures: the tragic victim or the glamorous hustler. Tabloid headlines, reality TV, and glossy magazine profiles often play up stories of women who supposedly “made it big,” while crime shows and news specials focus on “fallen” women to be rescued. These dueling myths - pity on one end, glamor on the other - do the same kind of damage: they erase the daily realities of people who engage in sex work to survive, to provide for their families, or to pursue financial independence.
While the “tragic victim” trope props up carceral feminism, the “glamorous and easy money” myth is its cultural twin. Both flatten sex workers into archetypes that serve someone else’s agenda, while ignoring the truth that sex work, like all forms of labor, exists on a spectrum - and is shaped by the same structural forces that shape every other job market: inequality, precarity, and lack of protections.

Carrying Life, Carrying Love: Pregnancy, Homelessness, and Two Cats Who Never Left

In my last post, I touched on what it meant to be pregnant while navigating homelessness and sex work. What I didn’t share then was how another part of my family—my cats—fit into that chaos. People told me to give them up, that it would be easier. But this post is about why I didn’t, and how their presence carried me through some of the hardest days.

Receipts Please! Myths Don't Stand A Chance! Myth #4 Sex Workers Should Just Get a "Real" Job!

This myth comes from a mix of moral judgment and economic denial. For generations, society has drawn a sharp line between “respectable work” and “immoral work,” framing sex work as a failure of character rather than a rational response to economic need. Media stereotypes and anti-trafficking campaigns reinforce the idea that sex workers are simply choosing the “easy way out” instead of pursuing “honest jobs.” At the same time, this myth lets governments and employers off the hook - it hides the fact that many so-called “real jobs” pay poverty wages, exclude people with criminal records, or discriminate against trans and marginalized workers. In short, this myth thrives because it shifts blame from broken systems onto the individuals who survive them.

WEEKEND HOT TAKES: When Women and Girls Disappear from the Report

We want to give credit where it’s due: More To Her Story, a youth-led feminist platform, was one of the first to sound the alarm on a deeply disturbing change in the 2023 U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports - the complete erasure of any dedicated section on women’s rights. Not a single mention of gender-based violence, maternal mortality, or structural inequality facing half the global population. While mainstream media outlets like The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post eventually picked up the story, much of their coverage couched it in cautious, bureaucratic language. Let’s be clear: this isn’t a formatting update. It’s a strategic deletion. And if you think this won’t affect sex workers, survivors, incarcerated women, or criminalized communities - you haven’t been paying attention.