Someone's mother, sister, or daughter: Street sex workers, their families and transitioning out of street sex work

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October 25 - 26, Winnipeg

An event is being organized to share results with participants of the ongoing research project entitled, “'Someone's mother, sister, or daughter':  Street sex workers, their families and transitioning out of street sex work".

This research is being conducted by Susan Strega, Leslie Brown, Jeannine Carriére and Robina Thomas, Caitlin Janzen and Sinead Charbonneau from the University of Victoria. Members of the research team visited Winnipeg in 2010 to conduct interviews with women involved in street sex work and family members of women involved in street sex work.

The research team is inviting those who have participated in this project to come to an event to share where the researchers will their findings.

Their invitation says:

The purpose of this research was to broaden our understanding about street sex work. Specifically, we wanted to know how media coverage about street sex work and/or sex workers and their families impacts sex workers and their families.  We sought to understand more about relationships between workers
and their families (family = birth, adoptive, foster and ‘street’ families). We also wanted to understand how both media coverage and family relationships impact on processes of transitioning away from street sex
work, including to ‘safer’ parts of the sex industry.

We have now analyzed 99 interviews and are ready to return to your city to share our preliminary findings with past participants, current or former street sex workers, family members of current or former street sex workers and their staff and peer supports at services who provide frontline service to street sex workers. From the outset of this research we said we would be returning to organize community events. On October 25th we will be holding such an event at Thunderbird House (715 Main Street) from 10:00-4:00.

This event will serve not only as an opportunity to share our findings (dissemination), but also as a means to test our emerging theories with past participants and staff in agencies that provide service to street sex
workers. As the identity of our original participants are confidential, we are opening the event to all women who have worked in street sex work in the past five years as well as family members of women who have worked in street sex work in the past five years. We also invite staff from sex worker serving organizations to participate in the event and focus group.

The upcoming knowledge sharing and dissemination event will include presentations by the research team on key areas of our findings. In the effort to garner input from participants, we will also incorporate large and small group discussions about the findings and their implications. We would
like to use these participant discussions as data for this final stage of our research study. As a result, the discussion sessions will be considered focus groups and will require the informed consent of all participants. The process and conditions of informed consent will be explained at the very beginning of each event. We feel these focus group discussions to be crucially important to ensuring the validity of our findings. The focus groups will also help us determine how the community would like this research to be used in order to work towards more safety and better health and social supports for women involved in street sex work and their families.

On October 26th, we will be hosting a showing of the powerful film Finding Dawn. Following the film there will be a panel discussion with the maker of the documentary, Christine Welsh and members of the research team. We are hoping that this will be a well-attended community event to raise awareness about violence against street sex workers in Canada.

We asking for your support to help the Someone’s Mother, Sister or Daughter Project by posting or circulating the attached posters. If you or someone you know is experiential in sex work or has a working family member please mention Day One's event to them or post the poster. We just ask that you reply to this email with an estimate of numbers so we order enough food for all Day One participants.