Sex Worker conference is coming up.  Read the whole column at The Province….

Sex workers and advocates meet to discuss reducing stigma
By Sarah Petrescu

When Thea Cunningham helps sex workers find a place to live, visit a doctor or speak to a lawyer, she knows firsthand the kind of humiliating treatment they can face.

“I’ve gone to the hospital with pneumonia and had doctors and nurses ignore me like I was garbage and it was my fault because I was on the street,” said Cunningham, 36, who was a sex worker and a drug addict for 10 years before becoming sober just over a year ago. Now she co-ordinates a daytime outreach program at the Prostitutes Empowerment Education and Resource Society (PEERS). “A lot of the girls are my friends and I feel so good being out there for them . . . That’s what saved me.”

Cunningham was part of a group of sex workers, academics and advocates from around the world who came together in Victoria this weekend to brainstorm how to reduce the stigma sex workers face in their lives and the media.

“We’d like to find a way to get the message out that those — mostly women — involved in the sex trade are complex human beings,” said Cecilia Benoit, a sociology professor at the University of Victoria who organized the Challenging Myths and Misperceptions conference with the Women’s Health Research Network.

“The stigma that they cannot break free from is constantly being defined by what marginalizes them — the sex trade, poverty, race — and nothing else.”

That stigma has been around for a long time — in this newspaper in the latter part of the 19th century, sex workers were referred to as “women of ill-repute” and high-end brothels were known as the “sporting industry.”