Sex Worker Activists Increase Visibility at the 22nd Annual International Harm Reduction Conference

Sex work and harm reduction communities overlap in many ways and can benefit from information sharing and collaboration to provide effective services for their constituencies and advance shared advocacy goals. Sex worker activists have identified the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA)’s annual conference as an important venue for furthering the dialogue on these opportunities.

IHRA has committed to increasing the presence and diversity of sex workers’ voices at its April 2011 conference in Beirut, Lebanon, and has hired a sex work coordinator to conduct outreach with sex worker networks about abstract submission and scholarships and to assist in designing the conference program. Conference organizers selected 16 sex work-related abstracts for oral presentations—nearly double the number selected for the 2010 conference—and an additional 28 were chosen as poster presentations. The abstracts will be presented in sessions specifically devoted to sex work and woven throughout the conference program in panels on law enforcement, community development, women, and risk environments. 

Increasing sex worker involvement in the IHRA conference is an important step towards strengthening support for sex worker issues among allies in the broader harm reduction community and will ideally lead to greater collaboration between these groups in the future.