Let Me Tell You A Little Story About The Polaris Project

caseykin:

leighalanna:

thepeacockangel:

My friend Bella is a full service sex worker and activist.  She’s also a survivor of trafficking and incarceration (and SWERFs still tell her she’s “privileged”).  She does decriminalization work, and tries to find housing, beds, and so on for at risk workers.  She also deals with trafficking victims, they’re relatively rare, but they do exist, and so she finds this young woman who is in fact being trafficked.  She doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Bella can’t have her stay with her because then the girl might be arrested for trafficking because Bella’s a fssw.

Bella gets in touch with the multi-million dollar budget per year Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking org, begging them to help her find this girl a safe place to stay.

Do you know what they tell her?

“We just raise awareness, we can’t help you.”

She goes through all the big anti-trafficking orgs, they do pro-criminalization legal work, they do awareness, but not one of them does anything for actual victims of trafficking.  

So tell me again how you care for victims of sexual slavery?  Tell me again how SWERFs fight for the sex workers who don’t have privilege?  Tell me a-fucking-gain about how you care for sex workers?

Exit programs get women jobs that pay nothing, wages you can’t live on, because you middle class fucks prefer women to starve standing on tired aching feet, than to spend an hour on their back.  You’ve never experienced material deprivation and so you think getting screamed at by fast food customers is somehow less dehumanizing than getting fucked.

Piss off.

Let’s take a moment to think of all the grant money, all the donations, all the money that goes to the Polaris Project and orgs like them in the mistaken belief that women will be helped thereby.

I wonder how many lives would be different (I wonder how many people who aren’t alive now might be) if that money actually went to provide services to the people they’re so concerned about.

I just want to reblog to put this here:  https://www.facebook.com/redeemingloveca.    

It’s an org that is raising funds so they can pay for a safe house with actual beds and mental health counseling for former sex workers.  They’re small right now, but they’re scrappy.

Here’s why that skeeves me out: the word former, everyone wants to reform sex workers and there’s no support for women who continue to do sex work. Like I said my friend Bella is a trafficking survivor and still does fssw, and no one would help her unless she promised to stop. The idea that we don’t deserve help unless we stop being sex workers is vile and harmful.

Also the attention sex trafficking gets while other human trafficking is ignored, like the huge numbers of domestic, agricultural and construction workers who are trafficking victims