Sexual Assault Awareness Month

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), a time set aside to educate, honor survivors, and call for an end to sexual violence.

But for sex workers, this month can feel like a cruel joke. Because while everyone is shouting “believe survivors,” we know from lived experience that not all survivors are considered believable—especially when they trade sex for survival, for rent, for money, for power, for safety, or even just for pleasure.

Sex workers are not safe to report.

That’s the headline. And it’s been that way for decades.

While mainstream advocacy groups roll out teal ribbons and talking points, many sex workers are calculating risks: Will the cop I report to turn around and arrest me? Will they ask me what I was wearing or if I “consented to everything else”? Will my rapist say I’m just a whore who can’t be raped? Will they care if I have a record? If I’m Black? If I’m trans? If I’m undocumented?

Spoiler alert: They usually don’t.

Reporting sexual violence isn’t a neutral act. For sex workers, it can mean arrest, child welfare investigations, public outing, or immigration consequences. It can mean retaliation from violent clients, pimps, or even police. It can mean being coerced into becoming an informant or being labeled as trafficked without your consent. And for many incarcerated sex workers? There’s literally no one to report to who doesn’t hold power over you.

So, no, it’s not that sex workers “don’t report.” It’s that we can’t—not safely.

And when we do? We’re often ignored, discredited, or punished.

Ask any sex worker who’s ever tried to file a police report about a violent client or officer. Many of us can name names—cops who laughed, who asked for favors, who threatened to “make things worse” if we kept pushing. Others were funneled into the anti-trafficking industrial complex, stripped of agency, and used as token survivor voices to justify carceral solutions that do more harm than help.

Sex worker survivors often live in the margins of a movement that claims to be for all survivors—but still uses language that erases or stigmatizes us. Even campaigns for “consent” often fail to understand the complexity of consent in a world where poverty, criminalization, and power imbalance are the norm.

So what do we want this April?

We want you to say “sex workers are survivors too.”

We want you to stop demanding we report to systems that harm us.

We want funding for us, not for programs that “rescue” us.

We want you to believe us even when we don’t follow your script.

We want you to fight for decriminalization, housing, healthcare, and safety on our terms.

Because until the violence of criminalization ends, sex workers will keep being assaulted in the shadows—silenced by systems that were never meant to protect us.

And we’re done being polite about it.

This April, let’s make the movement mean something.

For all survivors.

Even the ones you’re still trying not to see.

Because if we had been seen—if sex workers had been treated as worthy of protection instead of prosecution—someone like Joey the Player wouldn’t have been allowed to roam free for over two decades.

Sex workers reported him. They whispered warnings to each other. They posted his face in backchannels, shared bad date lists, swapped stories of abuse, rape, and psychological torment. But law enforcement didn’t care. They shrugged off reports, blamed the victims, or—worse—used Joey’s information to target other sex workers. And as long as his victims were people society labeled “unworthy,” “criminal,” or “complicit,” Joey kept playing his game.

It wasn’t a lack of evidence. It was a lack of willingness to believe us.

It took years of organizing, whisper networks, and survivor solidarity before anyone outside our community took him seriously. And even now, his case is being spun through a media and legal system that still doesn’t quite know what to do when the “perfect victim” isn’t part of the story.

Joey the Player is just one example. But he’s not an anomaly—he’s the inevitable product of a system that sees sex workers as disposable. And until that changes, SAAM will always be incomplete.

So this April, if you’re wearing teal, remember the survivors who can’t call 911.

Remember the ones still choosing between silence and survival.

And if you’re truly listening?

Start by believing us.

Then fight like hell beside us.

This April, let’s make the movement mean something.

For all survivors.

Even the ones you’re still trying not to see.

Want to do something real for SAAM? Donate to SWOP Behind Bars. Share their stories. Call out carceral solutions masquerading as justice. And listen to the people who have always been surviving in plain sight