SWERV! Sex Workers Evaluate Reporting Violence
In 2012, NUM was a pilot project of the UKNSWP, created for the sole purpose of establishing a national reporting mechanism to improve safety for sex workers, assist them in sharing information and reporting violence, as well as improving community safety. Our core work in reporting and alerting follows a millennia-old tradition of sex workers sharing information with one another for protection and safety, allowing them to make more informed decisions about who they see.
In 2018, NUM began a shift towards greater accountability to sex workers as a priority stakeholder group, while also continuing strategic partnerships with practitioners, researchers, police, and intelligence agencies. NUM’s deepest partnerships are among sex worker-led groups to collaborate on rights, inclusion, and recognition, calling for an immediate end to criminalisation, stigma, and discrimination against sex workers. Subsequently, NUM’s mandate expanded to focus on ‘ending all forms of violence against sex workers; and NUM’s principles became: ‘Sex Workers’ First’, ‘Quality Support’ and ‘Learning and Innovation’.
Our strategies, support services, advocacy and education are informed by lived experience, sex worker-led research, global scholarship, and practitioner ‘know-how’. NUM established a small case work team of Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVAs) to provide direct support to sex workers because they deserve non-judgmental services and not to be left to recover from violence on their own.
Today, NUM’s membership sits at 9700, comprising 85% UK-based sex workers and 15% practitioners. NUM continues to work with, ‘by, for and with sex workers’ and in practitioner communities to provide direct support, establish referral pathways, and share information and resources across the UK to end violence against sex workers. NUM’s work extends globally, as contributors to the international sex worker rights and safety movement. We have also supported organisations internationally to develop similar reporting, alerting
and support mechanisms with sex workers in their communities.
Now we want to engage in a national listening exercise and learning journey, to hear from sex workers to better understand NUM as a health and safety intervention, its impact and value.
This research, being done with ethical researchers, sits within our principle of ‘Learning and Innovation’ and as a learning organisation, we invest addressing the priorities and concerns of communities in adult industries, both those who use NUM and those who do not, in order to ensure that NUM fulfills its mandate.
SWERV! (Sex Workers Evaluate Reporting Violence) is a 30-month study run by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of Brunel and NUM. It is funded by the Public Health Research Programme at the National Institute of Health Research. We aim to explore how NUM’s alerts, the NUMChecker tool, reporting system and casework support have an impact on NUM members and non-members including their safety and mental health.
The research team has expertise in service delivery alongside sex workers; epidemiology; social sciences; evaluation; and economics. More importantly, we have strong links to sex worker communities in the UK. This proposal has been developed alongside sex worker-led organisations, and sex workers will continue to be involved throughout the project as researchers.
We are hiring 3 researchers to work alongside the team. The Research Coordinator role will be based at NUM.
The 2 Research Fellow roles linked below will be based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
We encourage qualified applicants from our communities to apply.
