Cops Don't Keep Us Safe

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In May 2019, SWARM hosted a three day festival to celebrate ten years of organising. This included panel discussions across a wide range of topics that impact on sex workers, and which connect and intersect with sex worker rights organising as well as broader struggles for justice. The conversations and discussions from that festival lay the groundwork for the Decriminalised Futures project.

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Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal (May 2019)

Police are there to keep you safe and prisons are built to keep the bad people away. But what if this weren’t true? What if the police were the source of violence, and prisons a method of social control? Who gets to decide who the “bad people” are? And how does this affect migrants, people of colour, and sex workers? This panel discussed the intersections between prison abolition and state violence, and broke down who exactly is targeted by these structures.

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Speakers: Aviah Sarah Day (Sisters Uncut), Melissa (SOAS Detainee Support), Niki Adams (English Collective of Prostitutes), Ru (London Campaign Against Police And State Violence), Kelsey M (CAPE)

Credits: composition and mix by Sherry Ostapovitch, edit by Tamara Schreiber and Radio Ava, recording by Hollis Robin.

Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal is the 3rd panel discussion of the SWARM 2019 Festival of Resistance.

The topics included:

  • Imagining Feminist Futures

  • Radical Transfeminist Activism

  • Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe: When Survival Is Made Criminal

  • Sex Work and Migration in Europe

  • The Impact of Austerity

  • Sex Workers of Colour Roundtable

  • (Resisting) Systems of Violence

  • Sex Workers on the Nordic Model

  • Artists Talk Bodies, Visibility, and Violence

  • Radical Histories: Exploring the Archives

  • Aesthetics vs Ethics: Expanding Definitions of Feminist Porn

  • How Do Disability and Sex Work Intersect in the UK Today

  • The Future of Work

  • Technology, Surveillance and the State: How We Resist

  • Examining Anti-trafficking Measures: Academic Perspectives

  • Researching Sex Work

  • Strength, Resilience, and Healthcare

  • A Decriminalised Future

Year: 2019
Type: panel discussion
Series: swarm festival of resistance
Subject(s): police violence racism state violence vawg migration prisons police