[insert pseudonym]: audaciaray: marginalutilite: Going to Holyoke city council meeting...
Going to Holyoke city council meeting today in which the Department of Health will be discussing street sex work—with no street sex workers in attendance, of course. Yuck.
Intense. Hope you have a plan to take care of yourself after. Its super important…
Re: example of a US municipal government focusing more on condom distribution, social welfare services, and etc than criminalization, so do any of you know of one Holyoke could model itself on? And the activist I came with told me that people in Holyoke city gov are so ignorant that they prob. aren’t even aware that other countries don’t criminalize prostitution, so I’ll make sure to discuss that at the forthcoming meeting as well.
The legit part of this request is that they want examples as best practices so they can see how it has functioned in other areas, what the challenges and potential benefits are. But the bullshitty part is that when governments seek out “precedent,” that’s typically an indication that they are chicken shit and don’t want to do a thing that another governments or agency hasn’t tried out (and probably been lambasted for, in the case of controversial/unpopular issues like sex work). I don’t know that there is a municipality that is trying this out with any success. But I could be wrong.
I think one of the really important things to point out to people who are being jerks about street workers is that street workers are your neighbors, not criminal interlopers. Its tricky to figure out the extent to which you want to play on the sympathies of people and pitch the “poor women, hard times” angle… this can be totally dicey (and probably not politically how you actually think about the situation), but this is not the space for nuance, its space for trying to get shit done. Something to think about.
