The Devil Is In The Demographics
The December 17th list is many things. It is a list of names of sex workers to be memorialized, a way to remember those we have lost, a way to share hope while celebrating the tenacity of the sex work community, and a way to bond a global community together through our shared struggles, triumphs and (our often unrecognized) humanity.
The list is also something a bit more technical. The list is a compilation of details and demographics that we curate in order to maintain a database with as much information as possible. Normally we focus on the data surrounding sex workers- where are they dying? How are they dying? What is their race? Gender? Income level? What other relevant details can we pull from the news media? We need this information because it can help us discover patterns and help us create plans to engage in outreach and harm reduction based policies. That was the original goal of the list, but as time went on, we realized there was so much more information to be found in these stories.
The data goes beyond information about sex workers, we have learned it also includes information about the men who murder sex workers. As we looked closer at the information we’ve obtained in recent years, we have started seeing a disturbing trend.
It seems, based on our data, the men who have been caught killing sex workers might be getting younger.
A few examples of the cases that we have seen:
Chelsea Davidenas, a sex worker in Calgary, Canada went missing in late February of this year. By April, her family had already posted her obituary, and police had arrested Steven Aaron Zwick, and he has been since charged with her murder. Zwick is only 26 years old.
A man in India identified only as Manikandan, a 26 year old man, murdered a sex worker in a particularly horrific fashion. After beating a woman known as Deepa with a hammer, he left her to bleed on the floor while he went to bed. When he realized family members were coming to visit, he bought a suitcase and left Deepa’s body inside, abandoned at a construction site.
The case of Sifiso Mkhwanazi rocked South Africa earlier this year. He murdered 6 sex workers in the matter of a few months in 2022. He was tried and convicted and ultimately sentenced to 170 years in prison this past September. Not only did he end the lives of six sex workers, he is also tied to a suicide. A son of one of his victims committed suicide after not being able to deal with the grief of knowing his mother had been brutally murdered. Mkhwanazi was only 21 at the time.
In October this year, the body of sex worker Cortney Hall was found abandoned in an empty field in Texas. A landscaping company had discovered her body, and after examination of nearby surveillance footage, police focused on 25 year old Christopher Daniel Bernard and arrested him for her murder.
That same month Davonte Fore, 26 and Jaquan Brooks, 25 were convicted of the 2021 murder of a Black trans woman named Skyler Gilmore, who did survival sex work in Georgia.
In Orange county Florida, police celebrated the arrest of Carlos Baez-Nieves, who was accused of strangling two sex workers to death. Police say Baez-Nieves murdered Fatiah Flowers in March and then murdered Nichole Daniels only a month later. Police said they had stopped a budding serial killer. Baez-Nieves was only 24 at the time of his arrest.
The most obvious questions are why? What is happening? How is it happening? And most importantly, how can we prevent future murders?
There are multiple theories, one being the idea that maybe killers are being more careless, and admitting incriminating evidence on social media. This might seem plausible, since we do have several examples of people posting about everything from committing non violent crimes such as people exploiting a “banking glitch” that was actually just check fraud to flat out admitting to murder on their social media profiles. But this theory falls flat in the stories we examine for December 17, because there hasn’t been evidence that investigators are using social media to track the killers.
Some suggest that maybe it’s a result of the manosphere becoming a mainstream influence on young men. The manosphere is a group of predominantly male content creators who claim they want to help young men by addressing their problems. However, the manosphere has come under scrutiny for becoming a place where young men are exposed to increasingly extreme views of gender dynamics and radicalizing users over time. Many parts of the manosphere, especially those that align with so-called "incels" (involuntary celibates), promote a view of women as objects to be abused or even killed. This objectification often extends to blaming women for men’s struggles in dating, relationships, and societal success. In recent years, prominent figures within the manosphere such as Andrew Tate have gained massive followings on social media for promoting misogyny and violence against women. This ideology came to a bloody finale when a teenager who was obsessed with Tate murdered a woman named Lorna Woodnutt.
Could the surge of younger killers be an overall result of a general rise in violence against women? According to the WHO, 1 in 3 women experience sexual violence, and when women are victims of homicide, they are most likely to be killed men. There are even theories that modern technology is enabling police to locate murderers faster, but we haven’t seen data that suggests that homicide clearance rates have drastically improved, but the data doesn’t support this theory either. As noted in an article from NPR from 2023, the homicide clearance rate in the United States dropped to 50% in 2000 and hasn’t increased much since then.
So, where does this leave sex workers? Sex workers are already more vulnerable due social stigma, criminalization, and lack of police concern. No matter what the root cause, I can only fear what future years will look like and how these changes will impact the fight for sex workers rights, but rest assured we will be watching.
