For the last 30 years, WWAV has organized in partnership with sex workers through an intersectional human rights analysis. We center our communities’ own analyses of the violence they survive daily, and fight with them to make the solutions that they imagine a reality.

• In our 1st decade, our foremothers worked in partnership with sex workers and people who use drugs to pioneer harm reduction in the South; the practices they developed continue to guide national standards for syringe access and community outreach.
• In our 2nd decade, we took on sex work criminalization and predatory policing in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina; our NO Justice project ended the use of Louisiana’s ‘crime against nature’ statute to prosecute sex work as a registerable sex offense.
• In our 3rd decade, we have continued to fight against the ways that sex workers’ basic survival is criminalized; our EMERGE program has been successfully diverting people arrested for selling sex from prison into our Black feminist community of organizing and support.

As we look towards our 4th decade, we are focused on using grassroots change to build the support structures that our community needs. We applaud Mayor Cantrell for joining us in this work and for expressing her unwavering commitment to this vision for justice and healing for sex workers across race, class, and gender!

‘Stigma and shame put lives at risk’: Mayor Cantrell joins call to support sex workers
BY ALEX WOODWARD | Dec 17, 2018 – 5:30 pm | Gambit
Mayor LaToya Cantrell says the city is working to “secure and uphold the human rights of all individuals, especially those most at risk of abuse and neglect,” following a week of events in New Orleans centered around decriminalizing sex work and shedding light on disproportionate levels of violence against sex workers. “All of our residents matter and deserve equal protection under the law,” Cantrell said in a statement.
Cantrell issued the statement on International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a now-global expression of solidarity to raise awareness of the violence and hate crimes committed against sex workers and a memorial for their un- or under-reported deaths in those communities.
“This is a public health issue, and one we need to discuss openly as a community,” Cantrell said. “Stigma and shame put lives at risk.”
Cantrell’s statement, echoing concerns from the city’s Human Rights Commission and its LGBTQ+ Task Force, marks one of the first of its kind from a U.S. mayor.
Organizers planned the first International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers in 2003. Public health organization Women With a Vision — entering its 30th year in New Orleans next year — concluded a week of events and clinics for sex workers in New Orleans with the second annual Black and Brown Sex Workers Second Line through Mid-City and Treme to Claiborne Avenue on Dec. 15.
“These women have the right to make money and feel as safe as they can,” Women with a Vision Executive Director Deon Haywood told Gambit. “They deserve public health, safety and care.”
Advocates argue that violence also manifests in legislation aimed to “protect” sex workers that often ends up making their livelihoods less safe, with lawmakers and officials talking about sex work rather than to people who rely on it — from officials conflating sex work with trafficking to crackdowns associated with the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers acts (FOSTA/SESTA) and raising the age to dance in strip clubs.
“When we talk about ending criminalization, reducing incarceration rates for women — we need to be talking about sex work,” Haywood said. “You can’t leave that out of the conversation.”