Sex Work Abolitionists: “Good” People, “Bad” Data
As a sex worker community, we attract a lot of negative attention from a variety of special interest groups who fear us, hate us, and/or ignorantly want to rescue us from our career choices.
These special interest groups work tirelessly night and day to bring us down. And, they are very well funded by their communities! In particular, the sex work Abolitionists leverage their influence to lobby governments to change laws so as to deny us our human rights, prevent our participation in our own communities, discriminate against us, endanger our safety in the workplace, and more.
So, how did the sex worker Abolitionists get to have so much power?
First of all, as sex workers we already know that the mainstream world discriminates against us for our career choices, and we tend to be seen as “the bad guys” in society, right along with the murderers, thieves, and the poverty class.
When the mainstream world makes rules that pertain to us “others,” their systemic bias towards us causes them to be blind to issues of fairness that they would easily identify if they were applying these rules to their “own” type of people.
But, since they already have a discriminatory belief system towards us in place, they are unable to recognize that they do bad research, come to the wrong conclusions, and overall inflict severe damage to the health and safety of sex workers with their misguided ideology.
You’ll find sex work Abolitionists in respectable positions throughout every community – as teachers, religious leaders, politicians, judges, to name a few. They are known as “good people” who dress well, go to all the important events, and have great reputations. They volunteer, keep nice gardens, and are well regarded in the community.
Sex work Abolitionists also have dark sides
They have a sick need to feel superior to others and they choose sex workers as the target of their domination. And, because we are such easy targets, they are very successful at what they do!
The Abolitionists are charismatic, engaging speakers. Their passion for their cause can rouse the spirit of almost any audience. They way they package their hate towards sex workers as altruistic concern for the community is pure genius. And, they never fail to give everybody in the crowd a satisfying dose of ‘righteous hatred’ to carry with them for the rest of the day.
Some of the ways that Abolitionists’ generate bad research data are:
- Cherry-picking members of research groups,
- Inappropriate exclusion of certain groups,
- Inaccurate extrapolation of data from other sources,
- Unfounded attribution of causation or correlation
I don’t blame the Abolitionists for trying to sneak in bad data to support their agenda
What really gets me is that, for some strange reason, the quality and source of the Abolitionists’ data is never analyzed by the Canadian government to ensure it meets the requirement to be accepted as valid research for federal government policy consideration, or as evidence in a Canadian court of law.
If it was, the Canadian government would quickly discover that nearly all the evidence that recent policy decisions on sex work have been based on doesn’t meet the gold standard.
The Abolitionists’ data would be thrown out, there would be a need to commission good research to support smart policy decisions, and then life would start to get better for sex workers in Canada.
But, for now, the personal biases of the people entrusted to fact-check these important documents continue to override their fiduciary duties to effectively perform their role for the people of Canada. And everybody around them just lets it happen.
One failure to act at a time.
That’s what systemic discrimination against sex workers looks like here in Canada in 2022.