PRESS RELEASE

THE WOMEN’S LIBRARY EXCLUDES WORKING WOMEN

Sex workers protest at Library’s exclusion of Women Workers

The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW), a sex worker organisation and the official sex workers’ branch of the GMB union, will stage a protest outside the Women’s Library’s Annual Lecture entitled ‘Prostitution in the era of Neo-patriarchy’ against the failure of the exhibition to represent sex workers as workers. The protest outside the Women’s Library at:

18.00 PM on

23 NOVEMBER 2006

THE WOMEN'S LIBRARY
LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY
OLD CASTLE STREET
LONDON E1 7NT

Sex workers and allies will be handing out leaflets, carrying banners and red umbrellas.

The Library’s programme of speaker events excludes sex workers, sex workers’ organisations, as well as anyone speaking from a perspective that considers their struggles in the UK and around the world.

The exhibition is patronising and offensive in its representation of sex workers and the sex industry. It gives the idea that sex workers are poor women victims (read: weak) of sexually aggressive men. And clearly, as too often, prostitution is only spoken about sex workers and not by sex workers.

No space is given to represent sex workers as working women, men, and transgender people who attempt to individually and collectively struggle to improve our lives, be freer, move across countries, and work in better conditions. No space is given to analyse how the exploitation and coercion that do exist in the sex industry are due not to evil men but to precise and changeable laws, regulations, and discourses, which produce the criminalisation of the industry, the impossibility for sex workers to work together, to unionise and organise, the impossibility for most people in the world to migrate in a legal way, the impossibility for many people, traditionally but not only women, to make good (read: ‘highly skilled’ and male) money in legal and regulated areas of the labour market.

Branch president Ana Lopes said:

“By choosing to represent and discuss prostitution in such a way, the Women’s Library has made a serious political choice, and inscribes itself in a larger strategy of exclusion of migrants, sex workers and allied activists around the world who try to organise to change conditions in the sex industry from a labour and migrants’ rights perspective.”

 “There is more than one feminist position on sex work. We believe in a feminism which starts from and talks to the people for whom sex becomes labour. We ask the Director of the Library to include the present leaflet in the exhibition, and the IUSW banner, along with the Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto, endorsed by a conference of 120 sex workers in Brussels in October 2005 (www.sexworkeurope.org/manifesto ) and the Declaration of the Rights of Sex Workers (www.sexworkeurope/declaration)”