For most people, safety means calling 911, trusting social services, or turning to institutions for protection. For sex workers, those options often don’t exist - or worse, they make things more dangerous. Mainstream institutions continue to treat sex workers as problems to be solved rather than people with the right to safety. Too often, we’re criminalized, pathologized, or “rescued” against our will. Police raids are framed as interventions; child welfare agencies use sex work as grounds for family separation; courts label us as unreliable witnesses. The result is a system where safety is conditional - available only to those who fit a narrow moral mold. When protection comes with punishment, when help looks like handcuffs, when “rescue” means losing your home, your kids, or your freedom - people stop asking for help. That’s the quiet violence of neglect. It’s not that systems don’t know how to protect sex workers; it’s that they choose not to.

Too often, when sex workers make the news, it’s because of tragedy. The headlines focus on loss, sensationalize violence, and erase the person behind the story. But every day, across every city and small town, sex workers survive in systems not built for their safety. They navigate stigma, manage risks, and create networks of resilience out of necessity and love. Survival, for many sex workers, isn’t just about making it through the night. It’s about carving out space for dignity and autonomy in a world that too often denies both. It’s about finding ways to protect each other when the systems that promise safety instead bring harm.

If Tamar makes church folks squirm, Lot’s daughters practically blow the doors off the Sunday School classroom. Their story in Genesis 19 is short, shocking, and often whispered about: two sisters who got their father drunk and conceived children by him.

They’ve been branded immoral, perverse, and shameful for thousands of years. But when you step back, their story looks less like scandal and more like survival. These weren’t reckless temptresses - they were women trying to preserve their family line after losing everything.

What happens when sex workers seek justice? Too often, the system betrays them. Reports are dismissed before evidence is even reviewed. Investigations stall without explanation. Prosecutions - if they happen at all - are token gestures that rarely result in accountability. Courts treat sex workers as unreliable witnesses or, worse, as criminals. When families of murdered sex workers plead for justice, they encounter indifference, closed doors, and coded language about “lifestyle choices.”

Stigma is a shadow that follows sex workers everywhere—often more destructive than the law itself. It doesn’t just appear in criminal codes or police reports; it shows up in the waiting room at a doctor’s office, in the judgmental glance of a teacher, in the housing application that never gets approved, and in the courtroom where custody decisions are made. Stigma whispers a dangerous lie: that sex workers are less than, immoral, and unworthy of protection. And when violence happens, stigma makes sure it is excused, minimized, or erased altogether.

For many people, laws are supposed to protect. For sex workers, laws often do the opposite. Criminalization - whether full, partial, or through the so-called “Nordic model” - creates conditions that make violence more likely, not less. When sex work is illegal, sex workers cannot safely report abuse without risking arrest. Clients and predators know this and exploit the vulnerability. Police raids, stings, and surveillance are framed as “protection,” but in practice, they destabilize lives, disrupt safety networks, and push people further underground. Criminalization doesn’t end sex work - it just makes it more dangerous.

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 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.

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.

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.