History of the Sex Worker Rights Movement

Chouf Minorities is a feminist organisation advocating for LBTSW women’s bodily and sexual rights in Tunisia. It was formed in 2012, and officially registered the following year. The NGO’s main objectives are empowering, building and creating positive visibility for women with non-normative sexualities. Chouf aims to ‘break the image and label of “sexual minorities” given to us by civil society and the “criminal” one by the government’, said the President of Chouf, Khouloud Mahdhaoui. Chouf defines women as everyone who biologically, socially or politically self-identifies as a woman.

The Stonewall Riot is often considered the starting point of the modern gay rights movement in the Global North, despite earlier outbreaks of resistance such as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966 in San Francisco. What is not often clear in the popular retelling of the story is the fact that a transgender sex worker of colour was at the front of the action.

The Stonewall Inn, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, was well-known as a hangout for sex workers, transgender people of colour and other marginalised people – which made it a target for the police who raided it regularly.

On the 27^th of October, 1995 a support group for sex workers, which would later become known as PEERS Victoria Resources Society, was formed by a group of women involved in street-based outreach work in downtown Victoria.

Co-founder Jannit Rabinovitch was a community organiser who had spearheaded many innovative women’s services in the region and Barb Smith, another co-founder, had been in the sex industry and recognised the need for sex worker specific services in Victoria.

PACE Society is run by, with and for sex workers and is located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, BC, Canada. PACE offers low-barrier programming and support in order to serve Vancouver’s most marginalised populations and promotes safer working conditions by reducing harm and isolation through education and support.