Lessons Learned: Sex work, Mutual aid, and COVID-19

East Tower 

To enhance and inform federal and provincial pandemic and emergency preparedness plans in Canada, governmental and institutional reviews have taken centre stage, evaluating the effectiveness of Canada's public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy reviews have generated important insights around the impacts on vulnerable communities; however, in reviewing these examinations, it quickly became evident that sex work was rarely addressed. Sex workers' experiences, we argue, point to the need to expand the scope of lessons learned especially in thinking through the often-fraught relationship between community- and care-based approaches to public health on the one hand, and policing-based responses on the other. Sex worker-led mutual aid offered a powerful if fraught alternative, one largely ignored in lesson learned reviews.
The goal of this paper is to mirror governmental lessons learned reviews to provide an initial assessment of how sex work and workers were impacted across three areas of COVID-19 responses: provincial lockdowns and stay at home orders; emergency economic and financial supports; and vaccine rollout plans. We argue sex workers and grassroots sex worker organizations have been at the forefront of identifying the problems they faced under COVID-19, even if their expertise has been largely ignored. Our work builds on and seeks to amplify those voices in both our analysis of limitations to COVID-19 policies and in our recommendations for alternative approaches. Specifically, we draw on sex worker-led radical mutual aid and collective care projects to imagine a deeper transformation of exploitative and harmful social relations. The lack of attention to the pandemic experiences of sex workers has particularly negative implications for those workers, but it is our contention that those experiences also offer lessons with implications for a wide range of workers and communities.