Rethink Resources

I just found this link to a July 12th radio interview with Mariko Passion of the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project LA and ‘Ivy’ with the Young Women’s Empowerment Project. ‘Ivy’ is part of the youth staff at YWEP and absolutely amazing. We’ve known each other for years.

The interview highlighted the We, Asian Sex Workers visual and performance art show in San Francisco last month. More youth, the girls of Banteay Srei of Oakland CA, were a part of the art show too. Here’s a photo from the show.

KPFA is an independent community radio station so they were able to devote a whole 30 minutes to the interview. ‘Ivy’ explained how “youth have complicated struggles” that bring them to the sex trade and use all kinds of different words to describe their experiences but rarely the term sex worker.

She talked about the “systems of oppression that create the sex trade” in the first place and how it’s not in individual problem as many people believe but a bigger community issue. ‘Ivy’ offered why harm reduction is so valuable, being non-judgmental is essential and how transformative justice has the power to make community based justice real.

Go listen to it now. You can find the KPFA broadcast here. The entire show is almost an hour long but the first half is about the Hip Hop convention, which I’m sure is very interesting. But I just wanted to listen to ‘Ivy’ so I fast forwarded it to the start of the interview with Mariko and ‘Ivy’ which is at 32:00.