Pulling Back the Sheets: Sex, Work and Social Justice Register Now!

~Desiree Alliance Presents~
In partnership with BAYSWAN, Sex Workers Outreach Project-USA, SWANK, H.I.P.S. Different Avenues, COYOTE, Best Practices Policy Project, $pread Magazine, St. James Infirmary, Harm Reduction Coalition, PONY, SWOP-Chicago, SWOP-Las Vegas, SWOP-Los Angeles, SWOP- Northern California, SWOP-Arizona, SWOP-Portland, & SWOP-EAST

“Pulling Back the Sheets: Sex, Work and Social Justice”

July 16-20, 2008 Chicago, IL

REGISTER NOW!

The Desiree Alliance is a diverse, volunteer-based, sex worker-led network of organizations, communities and individuals across the US working in harm reduction, direct services, political advocacy and health services for sex workers. We provide leadership development and create space for sex workers and supporters to come together to advocate for human, labor and civil rights for all workers in the sex industry.

This convergence will create space for dialogue between hundreds of sex workers and their allies to share their personal experience and skills, identify workers’ most pressing needs, share training and networking skills for developing solutions, and to collaborate on strategies for social and political change on local, state, national and international levels.

Some of the scheduled workshops include:

• “Safety for Sex Workers Through personal Privacy – Legal and relatively simple ways for working and living out of harms way”

• “Tantra: How it can uplift the plight and struggle of sex workers and clientele”

• “Self marketing and self branding: How to run a profitable (and more safe) sex worker business”

• “Safety 411”

• “Falling Through All the Cracks: Young adult transgender sex workers”

• “Challenging Discrimination Among Sex Workers: Reconstructing ‘sex work’”

• “Bad Date Line: How to start, run + maintain a dam good project”

• “Sex Workers Against Rape”

• “Sex Workers Rights and Direct Services in Urban Los Angeles”

• “Adult Entertainer’s Guide to Disabled Customers – 2008 Edition”

• “We, Asian Sex Workers”

Conference registration fees are $150 if you register by June 10^th, and $200 if you register between June 10^th and July 10^th. All participants must register no later than July 10th. Fees include registration materials, admission to the opening reception, breakfast and lunch Thur-Sat, admission to the after party on Sat and brunch on Sunday. To register for the conference visitour site and submit theregistrant screening form. After you submit this form, a registration packet and payment information will be sent to you.

For more information on registration scholarships, contact: Liz Copl at hdfemme@gmail.com
If you have registration questions please contact: tara@birl.org.

The Desiree Alliance is a diverse, volunteer-based, sex worker-led network of organizations, communities and individuals across the US working in harm reduction, direct services, political advocacy and health services for sex workers. We provide leadership development and create space for sex workers and supporters to come together to advocate for human, labor and civil rights for all workers in the sex industry.

www.desireealliance.org
Desiree Alliance is a Project of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

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The latest stop in the Melissa Farley traveling roadshow

While not wanting to distract from the more important and tragic news of Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s death, I just wanted to point out that Melissa Farley has been in the news again, this time in Scotland, co-authoring a new report on Scottish johns, just in time for the Scottish Parliament’s consideration of Swedish-style laws against the purchase of sex for Scotland.

The report is signature Farley – a mix of shabby pseudo-sociology and high rhetoric. Elizabeth at Sex in the Public Square has an excellent analysis of the new report:

Melissa Farley and her fringe research mill Prostitution Research and Education have teamed up with a Scottish anti-prostitution group to produce a new ‘research’ report with the problematic title “Challenging Men’s Demand for Prostitution in Scotland: A research report based on interviews with 110 men who bought women in prostitution”.

Readers of this site will understandably be rolling their eyes and groaning, “not again!” But it is important to remember, awful though it is, that other folks take Farley’s research seriously and that it deserves serious attention to help mitigate the damage it can do to real efforts to advocate for women’s safety and sex worker safety. Such ‘studies’ play to particular political positions, in this case pressure to export the Swedish ‘solution’ through Europe, but political expedience is not the same as sound policy. Check today’s Daily Record (Scotland) for the most recent orchestrated flood of bad news coverage of a poor study to support wrongheaded policy.

It is important to stress, again and again, that Farley’s research cannot be considered reliable and certainly doesn’t approach even basic scientific standards. The problems with the current study are many but can be summed up in terms of ethical concerns, bias and inadequate attention to detail in the write up. The write up is problematic enough that it is hard to judge the quality of the research, but the very clear bias is enough to call the findings into question. The bias also leads to the making of recommendations that are not proportional to the findings. Below I address just a few of the major problems. (Watch this space for links to critiques by other feminist sex worker advocates and researchers.)

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A PDF of the Farley and company report can be found here. A response to the Farley report drafted by some 20 academics and activists (including such familiar names as Michael Goodyear, Ronald Weitzer, and Petra Boynton), and also submitted to the Scottish Parliament, can be found here. An op-ed in The Scotsman by Margo MacDonald, a member of the Scottish Parliament who is against the proposed Swedish-style law, can be found here.