#sex workers

A new report highlights the many ways that LGBT people and those living with HIV/AIDS are treated throughout the criminal justice system. One policy — using condoms as evidence that people, especially transgender people of color, are engaging in sex work — strikes many as particularly wrong-headed, yet remains surprisingly common, most notably in the NYPD.

“One time I was standing on the street [in NYC] talking with some friends [on a Saturday night] and an officer approached me. She asked for my ID. … The dispatcher told her that my record was clear, but instead of letting me go, she said she wanted to see in my purse….

When she looked inside, she saw two condoms. She called the precinct back and asked for a police car to come. I asked her, ‘Why are you locking me up? I can’t carry condoms?’ She replied, 'You are getting locked up for prostitution.’

When police take our condoms or lock us up for carrying condoms, they are putting our lives at risk. How am I supposed to protect myself from HIV and STDs when I am scared to leave my house with condoms in my purse?”

—Trina, a youth leader with the NYC group Streetwise & Safe, quoted in “A Roadmap for Change, Federal Policy Solutions for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People with HIV”

New York state lawmakers are considering a bill to end the practice. More on that here. Meanwhile, the NYPD told the Associated Press that it is reviewing the legislation, as well as its condom policy.

UPDATED 5/12: associatedpress

“The NYPD will no longer confiscate unused condoms from suspected sex workers to be used as evidence of prostitution, ending a longstanding practice that had been criticized by civil rights groups for undermining efforts to combat AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections. Under the new policy announced Monday, officers may continue to seize condoms as evidence in sex-trafficking and promotion of prostitution cases, but they will not use them in support of prostitution cases….

"A policy that inhibits people from safe sex is a mistake and dangerous,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

(Buttons by Streetwise & Safe, photos by K. Lundie)

Rupert Everett

The Observer, Sunday 19 January 2014

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Rupert Everett: “these poor girls will always be swimming against the tide.” Photograph: Perou for the Observer

The other night I watched Stephen Ward at the Aldwych Theatre, a morality musical about the destruction of an innocent man by the combined forces of Her Majesty’s Government, her judiciary and her Metropolitan police force. Written by Lord Lloyd Webber, directed by Sir Richard Eyre, it is the best sort of British story, set against a world of stately homes and Soho drinking clubs, of peers, politicians, prostitutes and bent cops – with a few thrilling Jamaicans wielding guns thrown in – all ending up at the Old Bailey, where that deep wave of British hypocrisy (masquerading as fair play and crested by the usual police bullshit) drags Ward out to sea and drowns him. Convicted of being a pimp – he was not – Ward committed suicide on the eve of sentencing.

That night, behind the glitter and tinsel of theatreland, life was imitating art. Fifty years on, the same puritanical forces were at work, the same women under attack. Nothing had changed.

It felt like the perfect moment to look up my friend Nicki, who works with her maid Jodie in a cosy flat at Walkers Court by Brewer Street, for a cup of tea and a chat. Unfortunately, the police seemed to have got there first. Flashing police vans blocked the road. Swarms of bulletproof officers surrounded the doorway of Nicki’s building. It was an image of war, replete with entrenched photographers and journalists as Nicky and Jodie were led away. I shrank back (couldn’t help it) and watched as they marched past, fragile but poised. A woman yelled “Shame”, but otherwise everyone looked busy and made for the shadows. Cameras flashed, sirens wailed and it was suddenly over. Picturesque Soho flickered back to life – blinking neon in halos of rain, red lights glowing in empty windows, the distant roar of Piccadilly Circus shaking the air, and a taxi grinding round the corner into the empty street. “Why?” said the woman watching, to no one in particular, as she walked off through Walkers Court.

There is a land grab going on in Soho under the banner of morality. That night, while Stephen Ward was bowing to an entranced audience, 200 of our boys in blue raided more than 20 models’ flats, arresting 30 girls and confiscating their earnings. (This money, by the way, is virtually impossible to retrieve, due to various glitches in the law concerning legitimate earnings etc.) They broke down doors, intimidated girls into accepting cautions (ie criminal records) and served civil-eviction papers that, unless you were a lawyer, you would not know had hidden in their depths (20-odd pages) the time and date you were to appear in court if you wanted to appeal.

All this in the name of human trafficking. In witness statements I have read, the police claim to have identified at least 300 cases of human trafficking in London alone. Half of them, they believe, have “at some point passed through a Westminster brothel”. So grave is the situation, we are told, that it is written about in a US Department of State report called Trafficking in Persons. Presumably it is as accurate as all their other reports concerning foreign countries. Anyway it is so terrible, the number of trafficked girls so overpowering, that the EU has provided the police with a funding stream to tackle the issue.

Human trafficking is a horrific reality. In the course of making a documentary on prostitution last year I met girls who were abducted, imprisoned and forced into sex work. Escape for these girls is more or less impossible. Their families back home are beaten and tortured. One girl I met managed to get away with the help of a client. Interestingly, when she contacted the police she was told there was nothing they could do. But while even the police say that more than 90% of prostitutes work of their own accord, trafficking has become one of the new “it” words in the bankrupt moral vernacular, craftily used by puritans, property developers and rogue feminists to combat the sex trade in general.

Sections 52 and 53 of the Sexual Offences Act – which relate to control and incitement in sex work – shelter under the anti-trafficking umbrella. These laws are created to protect women. In reality, they are putting working girls on to the street and into great danger.

“The police lady said the raids were not about the prosecution of prostitutes,” one girl told me over coffee a few days later, “but to close down brothels where they have evidence of serious crimes happening, including rape and human trafficking. I say to her: 'Show us the evidence.’ I haven’t heard of one arrest for rape or human trafficking. Instead some of my friends were held for 23 hours and bullied into accepting cautions for criminal offences. Other women I know were taken to a 'place of safety’ despite them saying that they weren’t being forced to work.”
Stephen Ward hearing Dr Stephen Ward, a key figure in the Profumo affair, leaves a court hearing. Photograph: Fred Mott/Getty

In the days after the raid, the musical Stephen Ward haunts me. In the second act huge spangled curtains swish back to reveal Court Number One at the Old Bailey.

A judge in silhouette observes from his throne. Stephen, the defendant, sits beneath him, a pathetic smile in a pool of light – he is watching his own death – while on either side two street walkers give (coerced) testimony claiming that Ward introduced them to clients and took a cut.

At a west London magistrates court Lloyd Webber’s deathly Russian theme (replete with funeral gongs and timpani) rings in my ears as I observe the morning session. The police and the magistrate must find their own Stephen Ward. If they can prove that someone is controlling or inciting these girls to work as prostitutes, they can get closure orders and evict the girls from the flats.

Nicki, Jodie and several others are appealing. They are supported by a few others, and some of the maids, older busty sweethearts with smoker’s coughs and droopy eyes. As far as I can see the girls are all from Eastern Europe, the maids from East Anglia. I sit among them at the back of the court, while the barristers and solicitors – prosecuting and defending – sit in front of us at their desks in frayed suits and unpolished shoes. They joke and confer among themselves, a band of brothers (pale shadows of men like Jeremy Hutchinson, who defended Christine Keeler all those years ago). The prosecuting counsel is a lumbering elephant of 30. I hate him on sight, but our barrister is not much better. He is a skeletal bird, and before the judge arrives is extremely impertinent to one of the girls. “And he’s defending us!” whispers Nicki.

The police constable is a big man of 45, slightly overflowing from a crumpled suit, with thick hair and sensuous lips, a sloppy TV cop come to life, with lashings of rough- diamond charisma. He was probably once very good looking. Maybe he also had a heart of gold, but I doubt it. He has a threatening charm, and when one of the girls asks him how he can sleep at night, his eyes bulge slightly and an artery throbs on the side of his neck. “I sleep very well, thank you!” (Must be a Christian, I think to myself. They seem to be able to sleep through anything.)

He has taken down the witness reports and is clearly in charge of the whole operation. He is humorous with the lawyers and obsequious to the magistrate, whom he addresses as “Ma'am” at the end of every sentence. She is small and neat in a tweed suit, with a thin fringe and a parting across the top of her head, an old cartoon lovebird in reading glasses with a delivery borrowed from the Queen. Her demeanour – the gruesome hairdo, the tight temper, the voice – is contrived to shock. It works. I have seldom felt so demoralised by someone’s behaviour.

We lose the first case. It turns out the police have given everyone documents with differently numbered paragraphs, so the court has to go into recess while it is sorted out. The magistrate is impatient with the arguments of our barrister, dismissive of our ladies’ evidence and endlessly sympathetic to the policeman.

It’s a disaster. But on the second day a miracle occurs. Our skeletal bird of a barrister is suddenly replaced by a dashing silver fox – a Sotheby’s Smoothie – in a sky-blue shirt and a pink tie. Good looking, 50, charming and assertive, he looks at me before the session starts – thinks to himself for a second and says: “1979. Ginger Donelson. New York.” A shared friend, another world.
Rupert Everett with Niki of the English Collective of Prostitutes Night shift: Everett with a senior figure in the English Collective of Prostitutes. Photograph: Perou

A pulpeuse Romanian beauty in skintight jeans steps into the witness box. She is jolly and humble, a solitary woman in a pen surrounded by baying hounds. “Miss Petrinopolous,” breezes the Smoothie. “You are – and I’m afraid there’s only one way to put this – a sex worker.”

“Thank you,” giggles the lady modestly.

“Explain to us, if you will, how you came to be working in the Walkers Court flat?”

“I was desperate.” Miss Petrinopolous is marvellously matter of fact. Her legs crossed, arms neatly folded over an exotic bosom, leaning forward, she seems quite comfortable under scrutiny. Her hands rotate, punctuating her testimony and waving along any discrepancies in tense or grammar. Miss Petrinopolous lives in the present. “Seven years ago. I go to this flat and give the girl working there my number. Maybe if she go on holiday, I think [full rotation], or want some time off [both hands], I can fill in for her. In this way she gives me three days. That is the way we do it. Between girls.” She leans earnestly towards the lawyer.

“Please speak to the judge,” he says gently. She turns to the magistrate. “Nobody force me to do this work!” She explains how girls organise schedules between themselves, that they leave the rent in a microwave to be collected.

“A microwave?” squawks the magistrate, the Lady Bracknell of legal aid.

“Well. It get wet in the fridge.” Big laugh.

“I see.” The lovebird is not convinced.

Later.

“I suggest to you…” thunders the prosecuting elephant, fingers twiddling behind his back, “that a third party was organising your hours and that this third party decided how much you were paid!” He is a damp squib, no competition for Miss P.

“No. We decide ourselves. It depends on the client. If he is rich – not like you – maybe I charge him a little more.” She makes a guilty face. “Sorry!”

The magistrate is amused, charmed actually. Things seem to be taking a turn for the better. The Smoothie has mesmerised the lovebird. And he has drawn out his client magnificently. She totters back to her seat. Now he wheels on the policeman who takes to the witness box, clutching the Bible [promising fingers], rushing through “the truth the whole truth and nothing like the truth” as if it is a shopping list, then regards the Smoothie with a sham working-class reverence.

Never has the class system seemed more alive than in this courtroom. Both men use it against each other to great effect. They are well matched, charismatic and adroit, wrestling with wry humour over the meaning of the word “incitement”. “Prompt!” trills the magistrate, victoriously consulting her dictionary.

The controlling, inciting, prompting character is still elusive. Is he the person putting up the signs directing the clients to the models’ flat? (Incitement?) Is he the freeholder? (Control?) Is he simply a friend who said: “Why not give it a go?” (Prompting?) How seriously have the police attempted to contact the freeholders?

“Not very!” according to the Smoothie.

“Everythin’ oomanly possible, Ma'am,” volleys the policeman. The freeholder’s address is written down as Notting Hill, Cheshire, a deliberate decoy according to the officer, a brick wall at the end of “an extensive line of enquiry”.

“But if you just look here at the postcode after the word Cheshire…” snaps the Smoothie, waving his notes. “W 11 5 S 2 Z. Why did you not pursue that line of enquiry? A postcode, after all, is a hint, is it not, as to where someone lives? And you would find…” The policeman rumbles out a litany of complications.

“No. No. No!” commands our man with a dramatic swipe. But the policeman won’t stop. “Let. Me. Speak. Officer.” There is a sudden pin-dropping silence. “You would find that the freeholder’s address is Holland Park Avenue. But you didn’t really try, did you?”

“We did everything possible, Ma'am.”

“You went through the motions.”

“We did not, Ma'am.”

The magistrate squeaks at the Smoothie: “You have made your point.”

She is torn between the two of them and suddenly it feels as if we could win. In a reasonable screech she weighs up the case, acquiesces to everything the Smoothie has proposed, praises Miss Petrinopolous’s “truthful and compelling testimony” – and now we’re all holding our breath – this is it. The girls hold hands and the maids shut their eyes. The lovebird turns to Miss P – two women, face to face, for the last judgement. In a firm regretful voice she banishes her from all the safety and familiarity of the models’ flat, its Christmas tree still twinkling in an empty room, and consigns her to the streets – to sex in cars on laybys and parking lots, to all manner of danger.

The policeman’s hearsay has trumped the sworn testament of the working girl.

“It’s not fair” is all Miss Petrinopolous has to say, and it is pathetic to watch her leave the witness box. A black Christmas awaits her, shivering on a street corner, while the magistrate reads under a lamp in Wimbledon, carols on the radio, mince pies in the fridge, and the officer stuffs himself with turkey on the Isle of Dogs in a paper hat.

As the next case begins the Smoothie despairs of repeating his arguments and says, simply: “It’s not really worth going into all this, is it?”

“No, not really,” replies the magistrate, looking him in the eye. And so, inevitably, Nicki and Jodie lose their flat, too.

A few weeks before all this happened I joined the English Collective of Prostitutes and other ladies of the night in a demonstration outside the offices of Soho Estates, which owns the Walkers Court flats. It was very sweet. The girls wore masks, carried banners and were draped in tinsel. We all chanted: “Save the girls. Save Soho.” One girl had a megaphone, and soon the CEO came down among us. “We want to build more theatres,” he proclaimed loftily. More theatres? We can’t fill the ones we’ve got.
Paul Raymond with family Soho’s players: Paul Raymond with daughter Debbie and granddaughter Fawn. Photograph: PA

Soho Estates is a property empire built by the late Paul Raymond during the second half of the last century. It is a fortune built on flesh, on the sex trade. It has been inherited by Raymond’s granddaughter Fawn. She wants to become an actress. In the meantime she is playing Monopoly and seems determined to redevelop Soho and double her money. In a curious coincidence, the week after the big raid she receives permission from Westminster Council to knock down the houses on Walkers Court, where many of the models’ flats are located, and build two hideous towers replete with heliports, so that Soho can take its place in “Cool (tax-haven) Britannia”.

Fawn seems to have no feeling for the hard work that has kept her warm and wealthy all these years. Much of every dividend she enjoys, after all, comes from the toil of some long-forgotten vagina. But now she has bigger prostitutes on her books – Westminster Council and British Heritage. She has “prompted” them into selling their bodies – our home – but nobody seems to notice.

A burst pipe brings me back to town at Christmas. I walk through Soho on Christmas morning. There is not a soul about. I am suddenly transported to those days when London died each Sunday and the only noise was church bells.

Bar Italia is closed. The theatres are dark. No lights in the models’ flats. The Christmas Eve storm has blown everyone away. A couple of brain-dead queens stumble across Old Compton Street towards an elusive orgy. Under the blue sky, in the weird silence, the ghastly Christmas spirit hanging there, just the sound of the queens’ slurred voices asking directions, everything is suddenly clear.

Rupert Everett with prostitutes campaigning Out on the street: sex workers join Rupert Everett in a protest about evictions in Soho. Photograph: Perou

In the current climate, with its curious puritanical undertow, these poor girls will always be swimming against the tide. To really get on these days you must be what the world wants, what it perceives you to be, and it wants all prostitutes to be victims. As soon as you declare that you are not one, you are charting a course across hostile waters and you will probably sink.

At the end of the musical, Stephen Ward takes his place in Madame Tussauds, another waxwork. He sings his last goodbye and freezes as a translucent curtain closes around him and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s principal theme – the Russian dirge with funeral gongs – swells to a climax.

The translucent curtain is closing around Soho, too, our historic village of vagrants and immigrants, of hookers and queens, of cheese shops and coffee shops and sex shops and peep shows. It, too, is being reduced to a giant waxwork in a museum, nothing more than the set for a foreign film.

Source:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/19/rupert-everett-in-defence-of-prostitutes

jfraseruk‏@jfraseruk16h

Rupert Everett and 3 working girls protesting against the ‘cleaning-up’ of Soho. I fully support them #Sohopic.twitter.com/mEpBqx4TkP

‘It’s just a land-grab,’ says Hollywood star Rupert Everett as he joins protests over closure of legal Soho brothels

Published: 19 December, 2013
EXCLUSIVE by WILLIAM McLENNAN
Email: [email protected]

HOLLYWOOD actor Rupert Everett joined a group of sex workers in court this week as they protested against the closure of scores of legal brothels in Soho. 

Earlier this month 200 police swooped on dozens of businesses in Soho in an attempt to clamp down on the trade of stolen goods. They raided more than 20 “walk-up flats”, where sex workers can legally ply their trade, and have now gone to the courts to seek “closure orders” claiming use of the flats is illegal. 

The English Collective of Prostitutes, whose campaign for sex workers’ rights is being supported by Mr Everett, have said that half the flats in Soho have now been closed. Dozens of women have been left without work and are now facing the dangerous prospect of selling sex on the street. 

The ECP said the raids “appear to prioritise the interests of property developers and the gentrification of historic Soho for the super-rich, over women’s rights to work in safety and support their families.” It added: “Some women have been discussing working on the street, where it is 10 times more dangerous, because they need money for Christmas.”

Mr Everett – who starred in My Best Friend’s Wedding alongside Julia Roberts – told the West End Extra: “It’s just a land-grab, facilitated by the police. It’s the puritanical sanitisation of London. London has become Monaco, it’s a tax haven for the ultra rich and we haven’t even noticed. 

“The whole of this town is slipping through our fingers. It’s a real example of the total corruption that’s going on in this country at the moment. They have no interest in the people who live in the town and work in the place.”

He echoed fears that women would be forced to work on the streets and cited the death of Elizabeth Valad, who was murdered by serial killer Anthony Hardy in 2002. He said: “They’ll be like the lady who was killed in Camden who had so many problems with the police in Soho that she moved to Camden outside and was killed by the Camden Ripper.” 

Police have sought the closure orders because they believe an unknown ringmaster is behind each flat and that they break laws by “causing or inciting prostitution for gain”. They also say that by agreeing working hours and rates, the women are being “controlled” by a third party, which is also illegal.

However, sex workers have attended court this week to argue their case, telling judges that they work of their own free will, for their own gain. At Hammersmith Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, district judge Sue Williams ordered a flat in Brewer Street to be boarded up after listening to lengthy evidence from a sex worker who has used the flat for the last seven years. 

The woman, from Albania, told the court: “Nobody tells me what to do. I’m 39 years old. Nobody can control me. I work and pay the bills, just like you do.” She added: “Nobody is controlling me.”

She said that she chooses how much to charge and told Robert Cohen QC, representing the Met police: “If he looks poor I can’t charge him a lot, but if he looks like you I will charge him more, I’m ­sorry.” 

She said that when she came to Britain she decided to become a sex worker. She then approached another woman in Soho and asked to use her flat, when she had days off or was on holiday.

Mr Cohen asked if she had been persuaded to start working by a third party who had told her “it was a good way to make money and live a good life.” But she denied anyone else’s involvement and said: “I decided myself. 

“When I got to this stage, I had already decided.” She added: “With the girls there we became friends as well. After work we would go for coffee. We have a community thing be­tween us. It’s nothing to do with anyone else.”

Source:

http://www.westendextra.com/news/2013/dec/%E2%80%98it%E2%80%99s-just-land-grab%E2%80%99-says-hollywood-star-rupert-everett-he-joins-protests-over-closur#.UrQlaWpo_2Q.twitter

Decades before he would take on the Nazis, Cadet Winston Churchill of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst launched his first foray into (politicall) battle as the (self-appointed) champion of sex workers, brandishing his wit against the “prudes” who demanded stricter regulation of prostitution.

It was the Naughty Nineties and Churchill, grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and son of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was caught up in the excitement of the popular reaction against Victorian Puritanism. The young soldier’s passion was the music hall and his favorite venue was the Empire, which featured a men’s bar alongside a promenade where dollymops and toffers strolled, advertising their services, showing off their wares and negotiating their fees.

When a crusader against prostitution with a name suited for a Monty Python sketch, Mrs. Ormiston Chant, succeeded in persuading local officials to separate the courtesans from their potential clients with a barricade, Churchill mustered his burgeoning skills as a political activist. He hocked his watch for funds to support a protest and on the evening of the third day of November, 1894, three weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, the cadet hopped onto a chair among the tipsy Empire clientele and declared, “I stand for Liberty!”

His first public speech triggered a lawless outburst which culminated in the destruction of the barricade. The sense he could motivate people with his words intoxicated Churchill. “It was I who led the rioters,” he wrote excitedly to his younger brother.

The victory was temporary. The London County Council sided with Mrs. Chant and the barrier keeping the vices of alcohol and prostitution separate reappeared. The Bishop of London chastised Churchill in The Times: “I never expected to see an heir of Marlborough greeted by a flourish of strumpets.”

Unapologetic, the heir of Marlborough wrote to his aunt, “It is hard to say whether one dislikes the prudes or the weak-minded creatures who listen to them most. Both to me are extremely detestable.”

Was Cadet Churchill a personal patron of the sex workers? Probably not, historians say. A music hall girl who spent the night with him reported, “Winston had done nothing but talk into the small hours on the subject of himself.”

In power, Churchill did not pursue formal decriminalization, but he continued to believe that using the legal system to oppose sex workers was, as he once told his father, “coercive and futile.” Prostitution flourished in London during the Second World War; even the streets of posh Mayfair were crowded with businesswomen offering succor to young soldiers. Cabaret star Florence Desmond sang what may have been a typical sales pitch:

I’ve got a cozy flat.
There’s a place for your hat.
I wear a pink chiffon negligee gown.
And do I know my stuff,
But if that’s not enough,
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.

Churchill later recalled the Empire incident in his official biography. The old warrior said his speech had been “a serious constitutional argument upon the inherent rights of British subjects; upon the dangers of State interference with the social habits of law-abiding persons; and upon the many evil consequences which inevitably follow upon repression….”

(Additional sources: First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill by Sonia Purnell; The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester; London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People by Jerry White.)

It’s International Sex Workers Day!

It’s always a good day for journalists to talk to sex workers about their stories and how they are impacted by criminalization.

Exciting presentation at the Urban Survivors Union sex worker working group conference call this Tuesday at 9 PM EST–Cora Colt, the co-founder of Lysistrata will be speaking about starting and maintaining a sex worker collective fund! https://www.gotomeet.me/LouiseVincent or join us on your phone in the US–+1 (786) 535-3211 Access Code: 615-430-549

Sex worker collective funds are a thriving practice in African sex worker movements, as documented in Chi Adanna Mgbako’s To Live Freely In This World, and in Indian sex worker orgs, but in the US they are few and far between. Lysistrata is one of the oldest and most consistent sex worker mutual aid funds around, established in the wake of the first major Backpage shakeups/ad category closures a couple of years ago. W/the economic devastation sex workers are suffering post-FOSTA/SESTA, esp. marginalized sex workers such as drug-using sex workers, the creation & management of collective funds are invaluable skills for sex worker communities. So, sex workers/ex-sex workers, esp. drug-using sex workers, as well as respectful allies w/connections to drug users’ unions and harm reduction, are welcome to join us at 9PM EST Tuesday for the presentation.

Cora Colt is co-founder & treasurer of the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and Fund, an online-based sex worker activist cooperative and emergency fund to support marginalized workers in crisis. Cora has been a sex worker since 2007, primarily working as a stripper. She began organizing through producing underground percentage profit share stripper events in NYC. Those events led Cora and others to hosting broader sex worker community meetings/events, highlighting the need for more direct services and productive partnerships between folks of all experiences in the sex industry. Then Lysistrata was founded in the aftermath of the Backpage raids and the 2016 presidential elections.

We will also be talking grants, the connection between sex workers and the Urban Survivors Union #reframetheblame women/feminist-led campaign against drug-induced homicide laws, bad date list sites, and more! We want to develop this call into a national resource for drug-using sex workers and sex workers connected with/interested in harm reduction to use drug user union movement resources.