Stories brought to you from the front lines of sex worker and sex trafficking survivor advocacy through services and support.
Labor trafficking doesn’t always involve chains or cages. Sometimes it looks like contracts written in legalese, passports held just out of reach, or threats veiled as “rules.” It’s coercion in a cocktail dress. It’s violence dressed up as opportunity.
Whether it’s happening in a garment factory, a massage parlor, or a strip club - it’s still labor trafficking. The only variable is whose pain we believe, and whose we dismiss.
After nearly two decades under Polaris, the National Human Trafficking Hotline has a new operator: Compass Connections, a San Antonio nonprofit with deep ties to child welfare, foster care, and adoption. On paper, this looks like a routine management change. But for those of us on the ground - sex workers, survivors, and people criminalized by “anti-trafficking” systems - it’s not just paperwork. It’s a shift in power. Hotlines are...
Over the past few months in Receipts, Please, we’ve tackled ten of the most common myths about sex work—debunking them with data, lived experience, and truth. But those ten are only the tip of the iceberg. Myths about sex workers are everywhere, multiplying in the gaps left by silence, stigma, and fear. They persist because they serve powerful social functions: keeping women in line, upholding respectability politics, and justifyin...
When it comes to “bad girls of the Bible,” Eve takes the crown as the original troublemaker. She’s the woman who - according to centuries of sermons, paintings, and pop theology - single-handedly ruined paradise. Humanity was just vibing in Eden until Eve got hungry and gullible, right? That’s the story we’re told.
When systems abandon us, we take care of each other. This week, we’re reflecting on how mutual aid - not charity - has kept sex workers alive and connected for decades. Join us as we launch our Season of Solidarity and celebrate the power of community-led giving.
Let’s skip the polite economic euphemisms and call this what it is: we are headed straight for the mountain, and the seatbelt light just came on. Inflation’s not cooling; it’s calcifying. Wages haven’t caught up, rent’s still a blood sport, groceries feel like luxury items, and if you’ve tried to buy a used car lately, you know it’s giving “end times barter system” vibes.
And yet - corporate profits are fine. Wall Street’s fine. P...
“End demand” laws—sometimes called the “Nordic Model”—are promoted as a solution to sex work and trafficking. The idea is that if you punish clients, the industry will collapse. In practice, it has failed everywhere it’s been tried.
Spoiler Alert! It doesn't!
We’re in strange terrain now: the federal government is treating cities like Portland and Chicago as frontline zones in a migration war. ICE, Border Patrol, tactical units, tear gas, mass arrests - this is no longer about border states. It’s urban invasion. And in a twist that surprises no one who works with criminalized communities, even police forces in those cities aren’t fully signing on.
This myth is the flip side of the “glamorous and easy” narrative—the belief that all sex work and pornography are simply harmless fun, no different than any other form of adult entertainment. On the surface, it’s a comforting idea, especially for consumers who want to enjoy without questioning the conditions under which porn or sex work is produced. But the truth, as always, is more complicated. Sex work and porn are forms of labor...
This myth frames laws against sex work as protective shields for vulnerable populations. It suggests that arrests, raids, and crackdowns are acts of compassion—that by criminalizing sex work, the state is keeping people safe from exploitation. On the surface, this framing feels persuasive because it appeals to both morality and fear: who wouldn’t want to “protect” women, children, and marginalized people from harm? But in practice,...
From city zoning boards to neighborhood watch meetings, sex work is often blamed for everything from falling property values to rising crime. The stereotype of the “red light district” as a breeding ground for danger and disorder is deeply ingrained in public imagination, and its influence stretches far beyond dinner-table gossip or neighborhood complaints. This myth has directly shaped legislation and policy: city councils pass ex...
The idea that every client is a predator is one of the most persistent myths about sex work. While violence against sex workers is real and must be taken seriously, painting all clients with the same brush is inaccurate and harmful. This stereotype distracts from the real structural risks sex workers face and fuels policies that make their work more dangerous. From TV dramas to crime podcasts, the “violent john” trope is everywhere...
Heads up: this one’s messy, hard, and urgent. Charlie Kirk - 31, political firebrand and cofounder of Turning Point USA - was fatally shot at Utah Valley University while doing a Q&A about, of all things, gun violence. His last words to a crowd of 3,000 were literally “gun violence” before a single shot from a rooftop ended his life. It’s almost too on-the-nose, like the universe writing satire in real time. Kirk, who spent yea...
For survivors, safety isn’t a destination or a set of rules. It is not found in the locks on the doors, the cameras on the walls, or the paperwork at intake. Those may create a sense of control for institutions, but they rarely create comfort for survivors.
Safety is a feeling that grows in the body over time. It comes when someone listens without judgment, when choices are honored, when identities are respected, and when support d...
She was twelve the first time the bruises should have mattered. The teacher noticed. The nurse filed a report. A caseworker visited the home. But nothing stuck. Each institution touched her life just long enough to shuffle her along, like a plate passed around a crowded table. The bruises faded, the paperwork filed away, and the cycle resumed—because each system acted as though acknowledgment was enough.
By fourteen, the abuse had ...
When sex work shows up in mainstream culture, it’s rarely depicted as the ordinary, complex labor that it is. Instead, it’s boxed into one of two caricatures: the tragic victim or the glamorous hustler. Tabloid headlines, reality TV, and glossy magazine profiles often play up stories of women who supposedly “made it big,” while crime shows and news specials focus on “fallen” women to be rescued. These dueling myths - pity on one en...
In my last post, I touched on what it meant to be pregnant while navigating homelessness and sex work. What I didn’t share then was how another part of my family—my cats—fit into that chaos. People told me to give them up, that it would be easier. But this post is about why I didn’t, and how their presence carried me through some of the hardest days.
This myth comes from a mix of moral judgment and economic denial. For generations, society has drawn a sharp line between “respectable work” and “immoral work,” framing sex work as a failure of character rather than a rational response to economic need. Media stereotypes and anti-trafficking campaigns reinforce the idea that sex workers are simply choosing the “easy way out” instead of pursuing “honest jobs.” At the same time, this...
We want to give credit where it’s due: More To Her Story, a youth-led feminist platform, was one of the first to sound the alarm on a deeply disturbing change in the 2023 U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports - the complete erasure of any dedicated section on women’s rights. Not a single mention of gender-based violence, maternal mortality, or structural inequality facing half the global population. While mainstream media outl...
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