Values

Dignity & Respect

Sex workers are human beings who deserve the same dignity and respect given to non-sex working people. Society has historically used respectability politics (ideas of what is and isn’t “socially acceptable”) as an excuse for tolerating the abuse, murder, and criminalization of sex workers. We firmly reject the idea that a person is undeserving of respect because of their involvement in the sex trade, and we dedicate ourselves to ending discrimination against sex workers in all of its many forms. We recognize that no one story represents sex work, and we honor the vast variety of experiences that people in our communities have lived. We validate all forms of sex work as equal, and actively work to dismantle whorearchy (the idea that certain types of sex work are more or less dignified than others) in the public, as well as within our sex worker and activist communities

Community

The Sex Workers Outreach Project strives to create conscious sex worker communities, valuing anti-racism and anti-oppression education as a means of fostering safe environments for all. We rely on strong communities to keep us safe, share information on harm reduction, and fund and organize peer support. When we stand together as a community, we are better able to organize and advocate for our human rights and protections. Our communities are strengthened by honoring diversity among our members, and each individual’s right to self-representation

Accountability

We recognize that people in our communities come from a vast array of backgrounds, and that we are all at different stages of understanding the intersectional issues that relate to our movement. We strive to provide educational materials to our members on overlapping social justice issues, and to promote a culture of self-awareness and learning. We assume the best intentions of peers and seek to both offer and accept constructive criticism as a gift for growth. We actively work to identify, acknowledge, and dismantle forms of oppression that manifest within our groups, our organization, and ourselves, and hold ourselves accountable to make good on incidents where we fall short.

Self-determination

Our bodies are our own. As members of SWOP, we demand that individuals retain the exclusive right to determine how they use their own bodies under all circumstances, including in making occupational, health, lifestyle, sexual and reproductive choices. We support harm reduction principles, believing that each individual is an expert on their own life, and thus in the best position to determine their needs, and how to get those needs met. We strive to provide information and materials to help people make informed choices and access the resources they need to stay safe. We condemn the structural oppression that seeks to take away our power and control through violence, labor exploitation, and economic marginalization. We acknowledge that methods of survival, self care, and asserting autonomy differ from culture to culture and person to person, and value non-judgement as a means of offering support to all people.

Sex work is work

We stand by sex work as a form of emotional and physical labor that people of all backgrounds undertake as a means of supporting themselves and people who depend on them, and as a means of surviving. We maintain that consent and the upholding of individual rights are key differentiators between sex work and sexual assault, and we reject the notion that sex work is inherently linked to violence. We maintain that addressing root issues of poverty, racial and gender discrimination, drug use, and immigration reform (to name a few) will give people who do not want to engage in sex work more income options and reduce sex worker vulnerability to violence and exploitation.

The presence of sex workers in social movements, the visibility of sex workers in communities of all kinds, and societal awareness of sex worker rights as fundamental to human rights in no way perpetuate violence, sexual assault, slavery and trafficking in persons. We believe that when sex work is decriminalized, and when sex workers do not suffer from stigma and discrimination, issues of abuse in the sex trade can be better identified, addressed and nullified.

Politics

Decarceration & Police Accountability 

We at SWOP Boston work to bring our community home from prison’s and jails and abolish the criminalization of our lives. We mobilize against police violence against and surveillance of our communities. We work to remove laws that target poor and street based sex workers, such as vice and drug laws. Together, we work towards transformative justice that seeks to address the root of harm and systemic violence. 

Mutual Aid

We believe that sex workers are the best people to help ourselves and our communities. We work to build community support infrastructure that is run by sex workers and is accountable to the greater sex working community while organizing against state, non-profit, and for profit entities that seek to “save” sex workers through stigma, coercion, and criminalization. 

Against White Supremacy

Policies that criminalize sex workers disproportionately effect black and indigenous women and LTBGQ people. Policing is highly racialized and  Black, Indigenous, and immigrant people are incarcerated & subjected to police violence at far higher rates than their white counterparts. SWOP-Boston stands against white supremacy in all its forms and works to eradicate it within sex working communities and beyond. 

Gender Liberation

Sex work is gendered labour. 

Labour Rights & Decriminalization

Sex work at its core is labor. Regardless of where one is in the sex industry, it is a job that provides us with money to access housing, food, and healthcare. SWOP-Boston works to decriminalize sex work and fight for labor rights for all workers in the industry.

Membership Policies

Members of SWOP boston are current and former sex workers. One becomes a member by attending 2 or more meetings and being voted in by the current membership. Members can vote on internal organizing decisions.

You do not have to be a member to participate in SWOP Boston events or organizing. Non-members are more than welcome, they just cannot vote on internal organizing decisions.

To attend closed SWOP-Boston events, individuals must go through a brief screening process with a current SWOP-Boston member. This is to protect our membership from law enforcement and abusive clients. This screening is normally a conversation and we will never keep any of your information.