Shane Petzer

Shane Petzer is creating a powerful global movement to champion sex workers' rights and legitimize the profession by addressing two obstacles that have hindered the movement's growth and success. First, he is building the organizational and leadership capacities of individuals and groups concerned with empowering the laborers. Second, through concerted outreach, he is uniting a divided movement by addressing the practical realities and needs of sex workers instead of the rehabilitation and reform efforts that merely alienate them.

Efforts to create an efficient and effective international movement for sex workers' rights remain largely unfulfilled for several reasons. Internally, organizations championing sex workers' rights, while passionate in their agenda, are plagued by poor leadership and lack proper management skills and capacity for strategic planning. Moreover, despite the proliferation of organizations addressing the needs of sex workers, collaboration among them is patchy and uncoordinated. As a result, within this sphere of activism, there is a telling absence of an internationally recognized advocacy organization.

A major problem hindering the development of a powerful global force for the promotion of the rights of sex workers and the legitimacy of the profession is a paternalistic and divisive problem-solving approach that focuses on rehabilitation and reform while ignoring the practical realities of the sex workers' lives. In most countries where sex work is criminalized or deeply stigmatized, sex workers are exploited by their managers, abused or killed by their clients, and face numerous other injustices and have no legal or moral recourse. By focusing on rehabilitation and reform, organizations offering assistance to sex workers fail to address these issues or to recognize the potential these workers have for making their own choices and decisions about their lives. This approach alienates sex workers and organizations committed to addressing their practical needs, shattering the possibility of a unified and effective global movement for sex workers' rights.

Shane's strategy for building a global movement for sex workers rights has two main components: capacity-building for local leaders and the cultivation of a more cohesive sex workers' rights movement that shares a common platform of legitimizing the profession. In the capacity-building stage, he will help local leaders and organizations to realize their goal of changing societal norms and laws to accord sex workers the same socioeconomic privileges other professions enjoy. Shane will assist fledgling national and international organizations to become effective lobbying organizations. He will do so by distributing printed material and holding workshops on organizational development, management, and other strategies of strengthening advocacy organizations.

His first target will be the international organization he currently directs, the International Network of Sex Workers Projects (INSWP). Shane aims to transform INSWP from a loose coalition of organizations acting largely in disunion to a formalized and authoritative center of international sex workers' rights advocacy. This effort is well underway; he has consulted other like-minded organizations working with marginalized peoples, like the South East Asia Harm Reduction Network, which works to reduce injuries associated with drug use, and he has received support from the International AIDS alliance in the UK to host a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, for the entire core of the INSWP from around the world to discuss the formalization process.

When fully formalized, Shane envisions an organization that will have greater leverage in capacity building of individual sex workers, empowering them to take leadership roles among their constituencies and effect change of the work conditions in which many sex workers find themselves. For those wanting to leave sex work, it will open doors for more appropriate methods of alternative employment training.

In addition to developing organizational capacity, Shane is determined to build a cohesive sex worker rights movement that shares a common platform of legitimizing the profession and thus catering to the practical needs of sex workers, rather than splintering advocacy efforts and alienating sex workers by pursuing an approach that calls for rehabilitation and reform. To achieve this objective, Shane will conduct relentless and hard-hitting outreach efforts radiating out from South Africa to the immediate geographical vicinity and then to the rest of the world: for instance, he has arranged to meet with organizations utilizing the rehabilitation and reform approach in Zambia, Nigeria, and Thailand. However, since lobbying may not always produce the desired result, Shane will set out to form alliances with reputable like-minded organizations like the World Health Organization, crime-fighting agencies, progressive women's groups, migrant labor groups, and human rights projects. The entry point for this coalition-building-and-legitimizing effort will be to lobby to include sex workers among the beneficiaries of broader projects aimed at improving the health and education of marginalized groups.

Shane is confident that the two strategies–building the capacity of local leaders and organizations and unifying sex worker advocates around a common position of legitimizing the profession–will produce a powerful global movement with unlimited potential.

Shane has a history of activism with human rights issues. He has been a supporter of the pacifist movement and spent 12 years working in HIV/AIDS counseling and prevention. His interest in working on rights for sex workers comes from his five-years labor as a sex worker, which gave him firsthand experience as a worker in a marginalized and stigmatized profession. It took him many years to "come out" as a sex worker to his friends and colleagues. He saw the need for a self-help project and started SWEAT (Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce), a nonracial, sex worker-led, advocacy group as a vehicle to educate sex workers and to advocate for change. At his departure three years later, SWEAT had become self-sustaining and is still recognized as the leading South African sex workers' rights organization, with such signature victories as changing federal policies with respect to sex workers. Shane believes he must use his life experience and years of work to assist other activists and institutions to achieve similar effectiveness.