The December 17th project is a collaborative effort designed to bring awareness to sex workers who have been victims of violence. Too often, sex workers are overlooked as victims when they have been victimized or abused. The media routinely dehumanizes sex workers and blames them when violence is enacted against them. In 2004, SWOP-USA co-founders teamed up to honor the victims of the Green River Killer in Seattle, designating December 17th as International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers to put an end to this stigma. Since then, SWOP-USA, sex workers, advocacy groups and allies across the globe have continued to honor December 17th by providing advocate toolkits, global event details, and an annual list of names of deceased sex workers, as well as providing event funding to related groups. One of our primary goals is to maintain the December 17 list, which not only includes names of sex workers that have passed, but also a compilation of data about sex workers, which historically has been difficult information to obtain and record. The Sex Worker community is largely unrecognized as is its population. This is an injustice and impacts our ability to gather statistics about both our losses and our resiliency

The only to help sex workers stay safer is to provide information that stops stigma, and advocate for laws and policies that humanize people in the sex work industry.

As the saying goes, only rights can help fix the wrongs.