Sex Workers Outreach Project Calls on Vallejo to Embrace Alternative Approaches to Prostitution Concerns

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For Immediate Release

Sex Workers Outreach Project Calls on Vallejo to Embrace Alternative Approaches to Prostitution Concerns

 

Contact: Robyn Few, Co-Founder
Sex Workers Outreach Project USA (SWOPUSA)
415-895-1500
swopusa@yahoo.com

March 3rd 2011 is International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Around the globe sex workers and allies are celebrating the strength and resilience of their communities. Locally, the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project of the San Francisco Bay Area (SWOPSF) is calling on Vallejo to proceed with compassion and justice while addressing  recent concerns of residents who object to a visible increase of prostitution activities in their neighborhoods.

“Prostitution crackdowns just push sex workers from one city to the next, the problem is not being solved, people are simply being displaced.” Says Robyn Few, co-founder of SWOPUSA. “Community groups would do better to look at economic empowerment approaches rather than shame and hatred.”

We must look at the conditions that put people into street economies in the first place. Economic disadvantage, inadequate employment and educational opportunities lock people into the sex trade, whether by choice or circumstance or a combination of the two. “If you want prostitutes off of your streets, then support viable economic alternatives, not arrest or incarceration which impose further economic and life hardships,” Shannon Williams of SWOPSF said, “Spraying people with hoses is not only inhumane and dehumanizing, it’s ineffective and sends a message that violence toward sex workers is acceptable.”

Women are hit the hardest by economic recession, resulting in more of them entering the sex industry. Many turn to private venues, but online sites such as Craigslist Adult Services have been shut down, forcing people to seek business in open-air black markets. Federal anti-trafficking efforts that have been misdirected into prostitution abatement efforts have worked to censor sex workers, removing safer and more private ways of doing business.

Few says, “It’s time to come up with new solutions. Arrest, incarceration and shame have not succeeded in curbing prostitution in any city anywhere else. Don’t expect these tactics to solve any of Vallejo’s problems either.”

 

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