Support workers in Liverpool are calling for urgent investment in frontline services.
Streetwise, an outreach project for street sex workers in the city, was set up by Jo Abela who is warning that street sex workers are facing increasing risks and danger amid homelessness, addiction, and violence.
The project has a mobile van, which is a harm reduction unit, providing their presence, condoms, food, hot drink, clothes, and any reports that need dealing with.
When speaking about the conditions of these vulnerable girls, Jo, the project manager of Streetwise, said: “It’s glamourised and it’s so dangerous, you know the incidents we pick up.
“I’ve never come home and said ‘she looked great’ or ‘no incidents tonight, yay’, that’s never, ever the case.”
Sex work services argue that work needs to be done to help access to recovery and prescriptions easier for these girls and the root of their problems is not the sex work, but their feeding addictions.
Jo said that the girls, biggest challenges were the drug circle they are surrounded with. She said: “It’s a hard circle to break out of.”
CGL drug services, advanced practicioner, Julie Smedley argued that they are major barriers to street sex workers seeking drug recovery.
She set up the IRIS project five years ago, opening up a clinic in one of the red-light areas to make access to prescriptions easier for the women.
Julie said: “Clinicians were asking these women who haven’t got a phone, who haven’t got a home, who were selling themselves.
“You know they haven’t got a diary, they haven’t got a smartphone, how they ever going to get to these appointments?”
Her hopes are that with more resources and funding from the government, these women will one day run the clinic as workers or peer mentors, which means she’s done her job and got a lot of them into recovery.
She added: “My hope is that the IRIS Project becomes a project for sex workers that is run by sex workers, you know, that it’s a lived-experience project.”
Featured image: Jo Abela
