SWOP Behind Bars stories

This myth comes from a mix of moral judgment and economic denial. For generations, society has drawn a sharp line between “respectable work” and “immoral work,” framing sex work as a failure of character rather than a rational response to economic need. Media stereotypes and anti-trafficking campaigns reinforce the idea that sex workers are simply choosing the “easy way out” instead of pursuing “honest jobs.” At the same time, this...

We want to give credit where it’s due: More To Her Story, a youth-led feminist platform, was one of the first to sound the alarm on a deeply disturbing change in the 2023 U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports - the complete erasure of any dedicated section on women’s rights. Not a single mention of gender-based violence, maternal mortality, or structural inequality facing half the global population. While mainstream media outl...

Reality: Men, nonbinary, and trans people also do sex work, and ignoring them erases real needs, advocacy, and data from the conversation.

This myth isn’t just about who people imagine when they hear the words “sex worker”—it’s about who feminism has historically chosen to see, and who it has chosen to leave out. Much of mainstream feminist rhetoric around sex work has centered cisgender women, casting them either as victims in nee...

That injustice ...

Each month, SWOP Behind Bars will pull back the curtain on some of the most stubborn myths and misconceptions in our movement, armed with facts, figures, and a healthy dose of righteous indignation. This is where tired narratives come to die, and where we bring the receipts—cold, hard data you can quote at the next dinner table debate. Written and narrated by Alex Andrews, an internationally recognized sex worker rights advocate, c...

There’s a familiar narrative that follows mega sporting events in the U.S.—that they spark an inevitable rise in human trafficking, especially the ever salacious sex trafficking. The Super Bowl is the most common example: reports of thousands of underage sex workers flood headlines, but the evidence doesn’t back that up. While adult-oriented online ads may tick up modestly, rigorous studies consistently debunk the notion of dramati...

Being in the sex industry started for me at the age of 20. I was raised in one of the most dangerous cities, Camden, New Jersey. I was a single mother of 2 daughters at the time whose fathers were both absent, one was incarcerated and the other was absent by default. I was raised with family violence and my children and I were kicked out of my mother's house and sent to a women's shelter. At the time I wasn't bothered much emotiona...

Violence and incarceration are everyday realities for people who trade sex. Fear of police encounters. Fear of arrest. Fear of being assaulted, exploited, or ignored. These aren’t side notes. They’re central to our lives—and yet they’re often brushed aside in public policy debates.

We talk about the intersections of p...

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.

At SWOP Behind Bars, we spent the week unpacking what this really means—for survivors, for sex w...

Let’s start with a cold, hard truth: the so-called “anti-trafficking” initiatives that claim to “rescue” sex workers often function more like a conveyor belt straight to jail. And spoiler alert—if your “rescue” ends with a mugshot, trauma, and court-mandated shame therapy, it wasn’t a rescue. It was a raid with a PR team.

Despite all the glossy PSAs, billboards, and tearful press conferences, most “anti-trafficking” operations disp...

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.

But there’s something else we need to talk about. Something that resurfaces every few months like clockwo...

Spoiler: If your feminism relies on police and prisons, it’s not protecting us—it’s punishing us.

For a movement that claims to be rooted in liberation, carceral feminism sure loves a cage.

At its core, carceral feminism is the belief that the best—or only—way to address gender-based violence is through criminalization, policing, and punishment. It rose to prominence in the 1990s alongside tough-on-crime policies and second-wave ca...

One of the most immediate and damaging barriers is the college admissions process itself. Many schools still include criminal history questions on their applications—known as “the box.” While “Ban the Box” efforts have succeeded in pushing back on this in employment and housing, college applications remain a site of unchecked bias. Applicants with records are often forced to write justification essays or go through special discipli...

For most people, the idea of college brings to mind lecture halls, laptops, and late-night study sessions. But for incarcerated women—especially survivors of trafficking and violence—higher education looks very different. It’s not about campus tours or dorm life. It’s about handwritten essays, 37-page packets, weeks of waiting for feedback, and figuring out how to pay for a textbook with commissary wages. In this second post of our...