Women With a Vision’s Executive Director Deon Haywood will be on msnbc’s Melissa Harris Perry Show this Sunday, February 2, 2014 at 10:00 a.m. EST. Deon will appear on a panel entitled, “Sex, Money, and the Super Bowl,” and she will be joining an array of guests including Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation, Joy Reid, Managing Editor of TheGrio.com, and Yamiche Alcindor, National Reporter at USA Today.
Deon plans to discuss the increased criminalization of sex workers during the Super Bowl, and the policies that result in heightened policing, harassment, and the further marginalization of low-income women and transgender women.
WWAV believes that the hyper-criminalization of street-based sex work surrounding the Super Bowl works to exacerbate the structural factors that keep women and transwomen marginalized — mass incarceration, poverty, economic discrimination, HIV vulnerability, exposure to sexual violence, and poor health care. As WWAV sees every day in our work, local laws and policies can impact sex workers’ ability to parent their children, and can limit their access to health services, government programs, education, employment, and housing, in essence locking women in poverty. The heightened policing around the Super Bowl results in more poor women, transwomen, and women of color filling jails and prisons.
To hear more, be sure to watch Melissa Harris-Perry Sunday at 10 a.m. EST on msnbc! WWAV will be live-tweeting Deon’s appearance on twitter, so feel free to follow us here, and follow the MHP Show twitter here!
Read more about the Super Bowl’s Sex Worker myths.