SWOP Behind Bars Advocacy from the Margins

December 17: Day 2 Why We Need December 17

Violence against sex workers doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It is created and sustained by the systems around us - criminalization, stigma, and neglect.
When sex work is criminalized, it forces workers into the shadows, often without legal protections or safe ways to report violence. Fear of arrest, deportation, or child removal keeps many silent, even when they are victims of assault or exploitation. Stigma adds another layer, painting sex workers as disposable, immoral, or somehow deserving of harm. Too often, when sex workers are murdered, assaulted, or disappeared, the news cycle dismisses them as cautionary tales instead of people whose lives were valuable. This systemic erasure normalizes violence and makes justice an exception, not the rule.

December 17: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers

December 17 is recognized worldwide as the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers—a day of remembrance, resistance, and solidarity.
It began in 2003 in San Francisco as a memorial for the victims of the Green River Killer. Gary Ridgway, who confessed to murdering more than 70 women—many of them sex workers—said he targeted them because he thought no one would notice if they disappeared. His words revealed a truth sex workers already knew: stigma and criminalization make our lives more vulnerable to violence, while the wider world often looks away.

Bad girls of the Bible – Tamar: The Widow Who Tricked a Patriarch

Tamar doesn’t usually make it into Sunday School flannelgraph sets. Her story in Genesis 38 is messy, scandalous, and uncomfortable for anyone who wants the Bible to be a neat moral guidebook. She was Judah’s daughter-in-law, widowed twice, promised security but denied it, and ultimately forced to take matters into her own hands. And what did she do? She disguised herself as a prostitute, slept with her father-in-law, and conceived the children that secured her future.
For centuries, Tamar has been branded immoral - a trickster, a schemer, a femme fatale. But in reality, she wasn’t a seductress playing games. She was a widow maneuvering in a system stacked against her, surviving in the only way the law left open to her.

When the Record Keeper Knows What It’s Like to Be in the Records

In New Orleans, Calvin Duncan - a man who spent 30 years incarcerated for a murder conviction later vacated - has just been elected clerk of criminal court. His victory isn’t just historic; it’s a reminder that the people most harmed by the criminal legal system often understand its failures better than anyone else. 
For decades, Duncan fought simply to access the records that shaped his life: transcripts, filings, police reports, all the documents that many incarcerated people, sex workers, and survivors are routinely denied. His election matters because records matter. 

Weekend Hot Takes: Beyond Scandal - Seeing the System Behind the Story

There’s a story making headlines again - a powerful man, a teenage girl, and a media cycle eager to flatten everything into a tidy narrative about “trafficking.” But when you read past the outrage and into the details, something else becomes painfully clear: this isn’t a story about sex work. This is a story about intersecting vulnerabilities, about a young person navigating homelessness, debt, instability, and the absence of any stable adult support. It’s about how a system fails a girl long before a man in power ever enters the picture.
This week’s New York Times reporting lays out the circumstances surrounding the girl at the center of the Matt Gaetz scandal: a teenager whose life had already been shaped by instability, a homeless parent, and the kind of financial insecurity that makes you choose between braces and survival. These are not the ingredients of empowerment - they’re the ingredients of desperation. And desperation is what predators, institutions, and power structures exploit.

When Burnout Reveals the Truth: What the Anti-Trafficking Field Can No Longer Ignore

Every few years, the anti-trafficking field releases another report diagnosing its own dysfunction. The Safehouse Project’s recent white paper is the latest to outline the emotional toll of the work, the predictable cycles of vicarious trauma, low wages, inconsistent leadership, and the churn that destabilizes survivor support. 
To many in the field, these findings feel revelatory. 
But to sex workers, survivors, and people who have lived inside the systems that claim to “save” us, none of this is new. We have been naming these problems for decades. The core issue is simple: you cannot build trauma-informed services on top of carceral logic, exploitative labor conditions, and structures that burn through staff as quickly as they burn through donors’ goodwill.

Bad Girls of the Bible: Rehab – The “Harlot” Who Saved a Nation

If you’ve ever heard Rehab’s name in church, it almost always comes with a label: Rehab the prostitute. Out of all the things she did, all the roles she played, the one word attached to her forever is her occupation.
She’s remembered as the “harlot of Jericho,” a shady woman living on the city wall, useful only as a prop in Israel’s conquest story. But dig a little deeper, and Rehab turns out not to be a disposable side character at all - she’s a hero, a strategist, and one of only five women named in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
 

A Season of Solidarity - From Mourning to Movement

As we move toward December 17 - the 22nd Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers - we remember those we’ve lost and honor the fight that continues.
For many of us, this day is not just a memorial. It’s a reckoning. It’s the reminder that every name read aloud at a vigil represents a life cut short by stigma, criminalization, poverty, and indifference. And yet, even in mourning, we find movement. Grief has always been our catalyst.
This week, as we close our Season of Solidarity campaign, we’re reflecting on the power of remembrance - and how honoring the dead means fighting like hell for the living.