Sex Work Awareness


Vice President, March 2008 - Present

Sex Work Awareness (SWA) builds the media, communications, and advocacy capacity of sex worker-serving and sex worker member-based institutions as well as the skills and resources of individual sex workers themselves through training and support. SWA also conducts research about sex workers and the sex industry in order to better understand it, develops public education initiatives, and advocates for the rights of sex workers.

SWA’s flagship project is Speak Up! Media Training for the Empowered Sex Worker, which Audacia co-developed over the last several years. The training started as the session “Journalism for Sex Workers” at the 2006 Desiree Alliance conference and has blossomed into an annual, weekend-long workshop. The seminar teaches sex workers how to evaluate media requests and to formulate strategic responses to the media in a variety of formats. Along with skill-building, participants examine already existing regionally and nationally-focused sex worker media and talk about how sex workers can contribute to these and other efforts. Audacia produced a 50 plus page training manual for the public to access for free. The second edition PDF, which was released in June 2010, can be downloaded here (link starts automatic download). Audacia also provides ongoing support to the participants of the workshop as they move into the public sphere and use media to forward their projects.

In 2009 and 2010, participants in the Speak Up! Media Training collaborated on awareness-building online media campaigns. The 2009 campaign, “I Am a Sex Worker,” centered around an one-minute public service announcement video which has gotten more than 45,000 views and has been screened publicly at awareness-raising events in New York, San Francisco, and Amsterdam. The not-yet-debuted 2010 campaign focuses on the intersections between harm reduction for drug users and harm reduction for sex workers. The campaign will feature a public service announcement video as well as text materials on the subject.