National Ugly Mugs (NUM)

Ending All Forms of Violence
Against Sex Workers

National Ugly Mugs (NUM) is a pioneering, national organisation that provides greater access to justice and protection for sex workers who are often targeted by dangerous individuals and face obstacles to reporting, access to service and police protection. Those who harm sex workers offend against all of us!

We serve sex workers of all genders, ages, abilities, cultures and modes of work and offer a digital reporting and alerting mechanism to warn these communities about dangerous individuals who may target them. We provide individualised specialist support from experiential support staff and others trained as Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVA) who ensure sex workers have the information and resources needed to make informed choices about their lives.

We recognise three ways of understanding sex work issues: Lived Experience, Practitioner Know-how and Scholarship. We privilege people who embody all three and work as a blended team of experts to lead NUM, design and deliver services, conduct community-based research, develop and deliver education to professionals, and participate in policy advocacy to change the conditions that lead to survival sex work.

We see this approach to our work as the best way for active sex workers to gain rights and recognition, organise to combat discrimination, stigma, criminalisation they face, and work towards improving community safety for UK-based sex workers.

Ending All Forms of Violence<br />
Against Sex Workers

Our Principles

Our work is guided by three core principles:

Sex Workers First

NUM privileges lived experiences in sex industries as a primary way of knowing and responding to the safety, health and rights priorities of these populations.
NUM hires and collaborates with sex workers and sex worker-led groups in the UK and around the world that work towards ending all forms of violence, oppression and poverty.
Safety is a top priority for NUM and we believe that sex workers have the right to be safe while in sex industries.

Quality Support

NUM works in a practical sense with sex workers to prevent violence or to support victims and survivors in seeking justice, health and recovery from the harms that they experience.
NUM tackles achievable goals around ending the conditions that lead to destitution and survival sex work, such as poverty and fighting for the equitable inclusion and treatment of sex workers in all aspects of civil society.

Learning and Innovation

As a learning organisation, NUM creates ways to learn and grow. It’s not about perfection, it’s about finding ways to best support our beneficiaries and ensure that our services are relevant and sustainable.
Innovating helps NUM to be dynamic in its approach to delivering on its mission and guides what we do, why we do it, how we do it and when we do it.

What We Do

We provide direct support to sex workers who have been victims of crime, linking them with information and resources in communities as well as from within the legal system.
We take reports of incidents of harm to sex workers and process alerts to warn others in adult industries and front-line services about dangerous people and conditions affecting sex workers in the UK in order to prevent violence.
For sex workers who choose to engage police and courts in their healing and justice-seeking, we support and facilitate their respectful and equitable access to these resources.

We believe in and advocate for the human rights of sex workers including;

the right to self-determination
the right to live free from violence
the right to live free from intimidation, coercion or exploitation
the right to work safely and to organise their labour
the right to legal and social protection

Our Aims

To increase sex worker safety and prevent crime and harms against this diverse population of adults across sex industries in the UK.
To support sex workers in generating knowledge and sharing their experiences in ways that advance the well-being of their communities, lead to the social inclusion of sex workers and an end to stigma, discrimination and violence.
Provide victim-centred and trauma-informed support services.
To facilitate sex workers in safely accessing the public services of their choosing and in educating communities of stakeholders to ensure that:
- sex workers are the ones characterising their work and defining their circumstances, needs and priorities;
- services are informed about the needs and priorities of sex workers in order to promote non-judgemental support and respectful engagement;
- all sex workers, irrespective of class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, status in the country and type of sex work they do, receive consistent, protective responses from police when they access them for help;
- sex workers inform justice, victim support, anti-violence initiatives and policies to facilitate their engagement in civil society, the criminal justice system and court processes.

Our History

Sex workers have been sharing information and warning each other of dangers for generations before ‘Ugly Mugs’ schemes were ever managed by sex worker support organisations. ‘Ugly Mugs’ schemes were first introduced in Victoria, Australia in 1986 by the Prostitutes Collective. They realised that formally circulating descriptions of ‘ugly mugs’ could warn other sex workers about dangerous people and situations.

After 10 years of appeals to the Home Office to invest in protecting sex workers, NUM was funding as a pilot project in April 2012. Although various local reporting schemes were in place at the time, NUM is the first national mechanism that centralised reporting and shares information in ways that reflect the fact the offenders are mobile and sex workers deserve to have a reliable source of information about dangerous people and conditions that pose a threat to their safety.

There are various reasons for ‘ugly mugs’ schemes. Sex workers in some sectors frequently suffer violence and other crimes committed by people posing as clients. Others experience harm to due working conditions, laws and policies that reduce their abilities to control their work and work places. Many sex workers choose not to make formal complaints to the police for a variety of reasons including to avoid the harms of being ‘outed’. NUM provides a means to share information in sex working communities that will prevent further harm, while supporting victims/survivors to cope and recover in ways that they choose.

Ending all forms of violence against sex workers