#rescueindustry — Public Fediverse posts

«Pink Patriarchy Pride Edition - The Perfect Survivor Problem»

https://www.swopbehindbars.org/post/pink-patriarchy-pride-edition-the-perfect-survivor-problem

— SWOP Behind Bars 🇺🇸

> Movements love survivors, at least certain kinds of survivors.

> The inspirational survivor. The grateful survivor.

> The survivor whose trauma can be packaged into a fundraising campaign.

> But the moment survivors become politically inconvenient support has a way of evaporating.

> It's the largely unspoken investment in what might be called the "perfect survivor." It shapes which voices get amplified, which stories get funded, which people get invited to speak.

> It determines who counts as credible, who counts as a liability, and who gets to define what harm looks like.

> The perfect survivor is sympathetic, compliant, non-threatening.

> The narrative confirms existing frameworks rather than challenging them, leaving the audience with the sense that the systems in place are fundamentally working.

> The problem is that real people almost never fit these narratives.

> Many survivors have complicated relationships with the systems that claim to be helping them.

> Some have criminal records accumulated while surviving. Some still engage in sex work by choice or necessity. Some return to underground economies because alternatives they were offered proved unstable.

> Some survivors simply refuse to organize their entire sense of self around victimhood - not because they are in denial, not because they have not processed what happened, but because their identity is larger than their trauma and they decline to perform otherwise for an audience.

> Movements that cannot tolerate complicated survivors will never build liberation for the people most exposed to violence in the first place.

> They build something that looks like liberation, uses the right language, and celebrates the right symbols, but quietly abandons the people who needed it most

> Liberation movements built on conditional acceptance do not dismantle hierarchies. They reproduce them with better branding. The logic of deserving and undeserving, of credible and incredible, of safe to platform and dangerous to elevate, persists.

#SWOPBehindBars #RescueIndustry #Victimhood #Feminisms #AntiTrafficking #Survivors

«Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant sex workers fighting for justice»

👤 Chanelle Gallant 👤 Elene Lam
🗓 2024-11-12
📔 Haymarket Books 🛒 https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2258-not-your-rescue-project
🌐 Website: https://www.notyourrescueprojectbook.com

> A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

> In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

> Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

> An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

#SWBooks #SexWork #Migration #Policing #RescueIndustry #Abolition #AntiTrafficking #Colonialism #Intersectionality #NotYourRescueProject #Book #Books #Bookstodon #November2024