December 17 Day 7: Building Our Safety
- Alex Andrews
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Why Systems Fail
For most people, safety means calling 911, trusting social services, or turning to institutions for protection. For sex workers, those options often don’t exist - or worse, they make things more dangerous. Mainstream institutions continue to treat sex workers as problems to be solved rather than people with the right to safety. Too often, we’re criminalized, pathologized, or “rescued” against our will. Police raids are framed as interventions; child welfare agencies use sex work as grounds for family separation; courts label us as unreliable witnesses. The result is a system where safety is conditional - available only to those who fit a narrow moral mold.
When protection comes with punishment, when help looks like handcuffs, when “rescue” means losing your home, your kids, or your freedom - people stop asking for help.
That’s the quiet violence of neglect. It’s not that systems don’t know how to protect sex workers; it’s that they choose not to.
Grassroots Safety Strategies
Out of necessity, sex workers have built our own networks of care - systems designed to fill the gaps left by institutional abandonment. These grassroots safety strategies are not new; they’ve been part of sex worker culture for generations, passed quietly from one person to another as acts of survival and solidarity.
Workers circulate warnings about violent clients or unsafe encounters. They’re collective memory in action - an informal database built on trust and shared responsibility.
Buddy systems ensure that someone always knows where you are, when you’re expected home, and what to do if you don’t check in. It’s a simple act that saves lives.
Community funds cover everything from emergency shelter to medical bills, legal defense, and bail. They turn scarcity into mutual survival.
Peer outreach teams bring harm-reduction supplies, condoms, and safety resources directly to the people most at risk - meeting them where they are, without judgment or conditions.
These aren’t temporary fixes or charity projects. They are fully functional systems of care, built by people who have never been allowed to depend on anyone else. They exist because traditional institutions have failed to do their job. And they prove that when the state refuses to keep us safe, community steps up.
The Strength in Autonomy
Safety created by sex workers, for sex workers, is more effective than any top-down policy or police intervention. It’s not rooted in surveillance or punishment - it’s built on consent, autonomy, and lived experience. These grassroots systems recognize what most policymakers overlook: that safety is not something you can impose from above. It grows from trust, respect, and control over one’s own life. When sex workers lead harm-reduction strategies, they create approaches that actually work because they reflect the realities of the street, the club, the track, and the inbox - not the assumptions of outsiders.Supporting these systems isn’t just solidarity - it’s smart policy. The same models that keep sex workers alive can improve community safety for everyone. When people are empowered to protect themselves and each other, entire neighborhoods become stronger.
Action Steps
Contribute: Support sex worker-led mutual aid funds, outreach teams, and safety projects. These programs operate on the front lines and stretch every dollar toward direct impact.Spread the Word: Share harm-reduction information and challenge “rescue” narratives that erase autonomy. Talk about how real safety comes from empowerment, not control.Advocate: Push for public funding that strengthens community-based safety initiatives instead of criminalization. Call on local leaders to redirect resources from raids and arrests to housing, healthcare, and harm reduction.
When sex workers build their own safety nets, they model what true harm reduction looks like: community care, mutual respect, and survival without permission.
On December 17, we not only mourn those we’ve lost - we celebrate the people keeping each other alive today.
Because every warning, every buddy call, every mutual aid fund is a declaration of resilience. It’s how we stay here, how we resist, and how we remind the world that our safety is not negotiable.
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