It’s no surprise that sex workers continue to face societal oppression. Throughout history, demands for women’s sexual agency and erotic autonomy have acutely threatened mainstream ideals of femininity as respectable, white, and middle-class. Sex workers, like lesbians, Black women other groups of women deemed ‘deviant’, have also been relegated to the margins of gender equality movements – where their lived experience has been dismissed as too troublesome for a sanitised version of women’s rights. Thus, there is an urgent need for funding sex worker-led movements.

It was very clear, however, that the 15th AWID International Forum, was wholly disinterested in upholding the status quo. Sex workers and sex worker advocates loudly occupied all corners of the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, calling for self-determination, legal recognition, and funding for their movements across Europe, Latin America, Africa, South East Asia, Australia, and the US.

In one session titled: ‘Roses in the concrete: Sex worker movement building in a shrinking funding environment’, advocates from the Sex Worker Donor Collaborative and a handful of sex worker activists shed light on the chronic lack of philanthropic funding for sex worker movements and the consequences of this trend for feminist movements around the world.

Globally, sex worker organisations receive 0.2% of all human rights funding. Recently, these movements have faced a storm of funding cuts and blows. In the early 2020’s Open Society Foundation (OSF), the largest donor to sex worker movements worldwide, withdrew all of its funding for sex worker organisations. On top of this setback, key funders including Aids funds, Mama Cash and the Count Me In! Consortium are all set to reduce their funding by two-thirds in 2026. Global HIV funding, another major source of finance for sex worker movements, is also predicted to plummet in coming years.

It’s no shock that funding cuts have real and prolonged impacts on communities. In 2023, 40 sex worker-led organisations around the world were forced to shut down to due loss of funding, leaving them susceptible to violent backlash from governments, religious conservativism, and right-wing movements.

Read the full article about funding sex worker-led movements by Kit Muirhead at Alliance Magazine.