This post provides access to audio and video recordings of our Challenging the ‘Sex work is work’ narrative webinar that was held on 24 April 2022. We plan to release a transcript of the webinar. We’ll add a link here once it is available.
Video
Podcast
Duration: 1 hour 12 minutes | File size: 50.6 MB | Play in new window (with option to download file)
Speakers
Luba Fein: Luba is a feminist abolitionist activist from Israel. She has actively promoted the Nordic Model in her country, where the Sex Purchase Ban was enforced two years ago.
Marjorie Saylor: Marjorie is a survivor of CSE, and both sex and labor trafficking in the US. She is the current Program Director of Alabaster Jar Project’s long term shelter program and drop in resource center for adult women survivors of sex trafficking in San Diego, CA She is also the Board President of the Survivor Leader Network of San Diego, which advocates for legislation recommendations for victims of trafficking while working to mentor survivors into leaders. In 2017 she became the Founder and CEO of The Well Path, which provides emergency shelter services to all gender sex trafficking and CSE survivors across the US with her hotel voucher program. Marjorie has been very active in the local and national communities helping to educate and inform delegates, law enforcement, healthcare workers, community advocates, legislators, students at all levels of higher education, and at-risk youth as she works to ensure the safety of her communities.
Diane Martin CBE: Diane has spent over 25 years supporting women to exit commercial sexual exploitation, including 15 years as the Founder and Director of a specialist service for women involved in or exited from prostitution; developing a range of services from street outreach, drop in and court diversion through to aftercare, counselling and life skill groups.
She has worked extensively with government, local authority partnerships, the criminal justice system and NGO’s to develop and improve strategy, policy, frontline services, prevention and exiting options within a violence against women and girls framework. In 2013 Diane was awarded a CBE for services to vulnerable women in prostitution. She is currently Chair of the ‘A Model for Scotland’ campaign and a Vice Chair of OCSE/ODIHR’s International Survivors of Trafficking Advisory Council (ISTAC).
Sophie Sherratt: Sophie is an anti-violence, socialist feminist who campaigns for an equal distribution of wealth, power and resources for all oppressed groups. In our current socio-economic climate of punitive austerity measures, a threadbare welfare state and inhumane and discriminatory immigration laws, she cannot – and will not – accept the sex industry as a viable means of “alternative welfare” for the poor or an accepted survival method for any individual or group of people. Instead, we should be resisting and fighting back against the patriarchal, racist and capitalist systems which continue to perpetuate the ideology that being subjected to the sex industry “is just like any other job”, and dismantling the myths that are so prominent within society today. Sophie chaired the webinar.