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.

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.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup coming to North America, it’s already shaping up to be the “new” Super Bowl for trafficking rhetoric, complete with recycled myths, inflated statistics, and the same cast of anti-trafficking organizations eager to cash in on the global spotlight.

This week, the national conversation once again spiraled around the so-called Epstein “client list.” The same question resurfaced:Where is it? Who’s on it? When will it be released? And just like every other time, the obsession with the list revealed more about the public’s craving for spectacle than their actual commitment to justice.

The sex worker rights movement has long explored how the public—and too often, the courts—struggle to grasp the realities of exploitation, especially when it hides behind wealth, consent, or celebrity. We’ve written about coercion, manipulation, and the blurry gray lines that survivors are expected to define in black and white.

When a certain child rescue organization—you know, the one whose name sounds like a Christian indie band—published their recent reflection titled “Mistakes happen in anti-trafficking work. We must learn from them,” a strange thing happened across the sex worker rights community.

Remember when tariffs were marketed as the golden ticket to economic salvation?

It started with a question. “What college degree do you have?” Tasha had just been released and was sitting in the intake office of a...

For years, prisons were called “crime schools” because people learned more about how to survive in the underground economy than how to build a stable life.

Good morning, Red Umbrella fam. Hope your coffee is strong and your boundaries stronger, because this weekend delivered a full-course meal of carceral nonsense, QAnon fever dreams, ICE agents crashing into elementary school zones, and a grown man throwing himself a military parade for his birthday.

When people imagine what “freedom” looks like for trafficking survivors, they often picture a dramatic rescue or a courtroom triumph—handcuffs off, a predator jailed, a survivor walking into the sunlight.

There’s something about Friday the 13th that makes people lose their ever-loving minds.

There’s a version of feminism out there that wears a pussyhat, clutches her pearls, and still calls the manager when a sex worker speaks at a panel.

Education is more than a classroom, a test, or a diploma. For criminalized women, survivors, and sex workers, it’s a form of resistance. It’s a survival strategy. It’s a way to reclaim power in systems designed to keep us voiceless.

No mother should have to write a letter to her child from prison.

There’s a shady hustle circulating again—and this time, ts showing up in strip clubs across the country

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), a time set aside to educate, honor survivors, and call for an end to sexual violence. But...

When we talk about mass incarceration in the United States, the conversation often centers around numbers—how many people are locked up,...

Survivors bring with them a unique set of survival skills honed through their lived experiences of exploitation and violence.

For survivors of exploitation, and particularly with multiple intersecting issues like domestic violence,