Sex workers and other marginalized demographics have always bore the brunt of cultural stigma around HIV. More than thirty years after the onset of the AIDS epidemic, the disease persists, with real people paying the price.
Like any other industry, sex work comes with its own job-related risks. The possibility of acquiring an STI, like HIV, is a concern, as are threats to physical and mental health; however, unlike other professions where risk is curbed through standard health and safety regulations, society has made sex work unnecessarily dangerous. Stigmatization-which ranges from the public perception of sex workers as morally corrupt and socially unproductive, to laws that criminalize their profession-is central to that. While stigma itself can easily marginalize and alienate a demographic, a series of intersecting stereotypes and inequities coalesce for sex workers
Earlier this year, sex worker and advocate Grace Bellavue died by suicide; before her passing, she had been a fierce advocate for decriminalization. The note she left on her Facebook page before taking her own life account spoke to the harrowing, horrifying reality she endured as a sex worker: “It isn’t the industry per say, it’s just accumulated PTSD and constantly guarding your back or screening… I’ve had guns put to my head, yelled at too many people, removed people from clubhouses, been approached by lawyers from all sides of the fence, approached to run parlours [sic], watched a lot of people slip and fall in a bath with the their throat slit,” she wrote.