clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:For sex workers, there are no legal protections against discrimination
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead: For sex workers, there are no legal protections against discrimination, should we become associated with our current or former occupations. Current and former sex workers risk losing their housing or being refused service by landlords, property owners, and co-op boards. Sex workers are also often unable to transition to other work. I worked as an exotic dancer and then a Craigslist call girl on and off until 2007, and when my boss at my new job as a public school teacher became aware of my career history, I was eventually fired, and I couldn’t get another job in elementary school education in spite of my education and teaching credentials. Current and former sex workers can also lose custody of their children. Finley Fawn is a cam model—a taxed, legal profession—who has been fighting for custody of her six-year-old son since April of this year. According to Uproxx, Fawn was served with an emergency order to remove her son from her home after her ex-husband told authorities that Fawn was an unfit mother because she had let their child learn too much about her work; he alleged their son had “shared details with him about his mom’s job.” In 2008, a tantra provider lost custody of her children to a man with an extensive documented history of domestic violence. According to the parenting blog Mommyish, in 2013, former sex worker Tanaha Koontz lost custody of her three children to the abusive husband who Koontz claims sex trafficked her during the course of their relationship. Then there’s the devastating case of Petite Jasmine, a Swedish sex worker whose children were taken away from her due to her involvement in the sex trade. Jasmine was an outspoken sex worker’s rights advocate, arguing against a system called the “Swedish model,” which criminalizes the clients of sex workers but not the sex workers themselves. In spite of a documented history of abuse, Jasmine’s ex-husband was granted full custody of their two children, leaving Jasmine with supervised visits. During one such visit in 2013, he killed her in the social work office. Those who view sex work as incompatible with motherhood often cite a concern for the children’s safety. They conflate issues related to poverty with sex work—unstable housing, food insecurity, and erratic incomes, for example—even though sex work can often be the very solution to these economic woes. People also assume a relationship between sex work and addiction, but the idea that all sex workers use drugs is a myth. Perhaps the only legitimate concern having to do with explicit relationship between sex work and a child’s safety is the fact that individuals working in prostitution are still being criminalized, so these women tend to be incarcerated or face arrest, which can mean having their children sent to a relative or taken under the dysfunctional care of the state. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/sex-worker-mother -- source link