A letter to DBH, AACO, and all funders of Prevention Point Philadelphia
Dear Department of Behavioral Health, AIDS Activities Coordinating Office, and all funders of Prevention Point Philadelphia,
Before we proceed, we want to state that we firmly support and are fighting alongside all survivors, especially the Black trans women who have offered their testimony. We are painfully aware that harms against trans women have been historically erased and minimized in harm reduction spaces. Additionally, we recognize the labor and care that many low-level workers of Prevention Point Philadelphia put into the organization and that PPP would not be functioning without them.
It is important to name that harm reduction - a framework pioneered by some of the most marginalized - is not immune from white supremacy, trans misogyny, and rape culture; violence which has long eroded the integrity of Prevention Point Philadelphia and continue to today. Examples of these are littered throughout the recent Inquirer article and Billy Penn article. To be clear, we have eyewitness testimony which states that issues detailed in these articles remain present and are not merely relics of the past. Executive Director José Benitez gaslighting survivors and outright denying the wrongs committed is but a small example. Not named is Silvana Mazzella, Associate Executive Director, who actively fosters a destructive culture which is ratified by the Board of Prevention Point Philadelphia.
To be clear, a culture of white supremacy and transmisogyny is not the result of one person’s power or influence. A hostile organizational environment persists at organizations because there is also a culture of cover up in which everyone in power participates. Hence, we are moved to name that the entire leadership team and the Board must be held accountable. We do not see how the conditions at Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP) can be made better unless the entire structure of the organization is overhauled.
Further, we want to name that the harm reduction work that continues to primarily be spearheaded in Philadelphia by grassroots organizations and informal networks of People Who Use Drugs (PWUDs) will continue to exist and thrive in spite of the violence that PPP as an institution commits. PPP has long co-opted conversations on drug use and harm reduction in the city and has presented its structure as the be-all and end-all on these topics. Our existence is proof that this narrative is false. PPP’s denial of grassroots efficacy allows for the violence at PPP to continue unchecked. Grassroots harm reductionists in Philadelphia are threatened that if Prevention Point Philadelphia is made to be held accountable for required changes, somehow access to supplies and harm reduction services in Philadelphia would disappear. This fear is unfounded. Time and again, rather than engaging public dialogue around harm reduction and drug use, they instead stoke community tensions and redirect public anger about drug use towards grassroots harm reduction organizations. This severely impedes progress on any radical work that can be done to move our communities forward. Neither have they upheld the harm reduction principle on centering current PWUD and sex workers in making programmatic or other decisions that affect their daily lives. This performative harm reduction carried out by PPP feeds white supremacist notions of profit pursuit and saviorisim. It does not uplift our communities and it does not make our conditions better.
As the primary funders and colleagues of PPP, we urge you to consider the violence you are cosigning, aligning with and enabling. We encourage you to listen to the survivors and other harm reductionists who have been on the ground doing this work in Philadelphia for nearly 20 years.
Our members who are the survivors of PPP’s structural violence have the following demands:
An apology from Prevention Point Philadelphia for both the violence that was silenced and the retraumatization which was created from the gaslighting found in the articles.
All staff members, including management and Human Resources, must be required to take training classes on decreasing human rights violations for queer and transgender clients, participants and staff.
Affected former and current staff must be reimbursed for lost wages from coping with the unsafe environment created by José, Silvana, and the entire Board. This must be supplemented by compensation for previous, current, and any potential future therapy bills, which have already accumulated substantially and will only rise.
Resignation of the entire leadership team and Board of Prevention Point Philadelphia and a rehaul of the entire working structure.
Signed,
Project SAFE Philadelphia, SOL Collective, and The Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance
September Newsletter
Hello good folks!
Thank you for signing up for Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance’s newsletter. For our first newsletter, we are going to tell you about some things that are happening for us in September 2021! This month:
alongside other s3x working organizers across the U.S., we spoke to The Nation: “When Sex Workers Speak, Who Listens.”
we are teaming up with Reclaim Philadelphia to bring you programming and to raise money for the Philadelphia S3x Worker Relief Fund. Come learn online about why law-enforced diversion programs are harmful on September 21st @6pm EST and how the work of fully decriminalizing sex work intersects with your social and organizing work on September 28th @6pm EST
Silvia Sage, celebrity film star and comedian featured on ABC, Hulu, NYT, OnlyF@ns and The Daily Beast is coming to Philadelphia on her comedy tour. Purchase tickets AT THIS LINK or mention PHILLY RUA @ checkout to send some proceeds to Philadelphia S3x Worker Relief Fund. Show is on September 22nd at 7pm and 9pm at Frank Bradley’s. Disclaimer: views expressed at the show are her own.
And finally: we are joining Cannonball Festival on September 29 @ 7pm - 8pm for an hour long panel! Come have a chat with us and learn more about our work!
As always, follow us on Twitter HERE and Instagram HERE. You can donate to us through the following ways:
Venmo: @phlrua Cashapp: $phlrua Paypal: phillyrua@gmail.com
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Community Agreements: Call and Response
The following Community Agreements were written in preparation for the event “No Humans Involved (N.H.I): A Day of Remembrance”. This event was held on July 22, 2021 in Malcolm X Park. The following agreements were written collaboratively between Zalika Ibaorimi of Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Raani Begum and Sultana Bibi, members of Project Safe and Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance.
We pledge:
To recognizing violence committed against Sex Workers and Drug Users as acts of anti-Black violence
To center sex workers and drug users in anti-violence initiatives & other community organizing initiatives
To destigmatize criminalized pleasure such as sex work and drug use
To recognize sex work & drug use as part of thriving communal ecosystems
To recognize sex work and drug use as a solution created by oppressed people to reduce harms of capitalism
To commit to unlearning stigma around sex work and drug use as individuals and organizations
Destigmatize, Decriminalize, Decarcerate: A Racial Justice Lens on Sex Worker Rights and Harm Reduction
The following essay is written by Raani Begum and Sultana Bibi, members of Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance and Project Safe. Significant contributions on “Safe Supplies Saves Lives” from Jen Bowles, Project Safe
In her 1992 essay “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Sylvia Wynter brought her colleagues’ attention to the LAPD’s inhumane use of the N.H.I acronym which means “No Humans Involved.” Wynter begins by telling us about the police’s use of the acronym to refer to “any case involving a breach of the rights of [Black people] who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettos.” She then explains how people are only classified as human when they fall in line with the thinking and behaviours of the status quo. Nonconformance with the established order of white supremacy renders Black and other people of color inhuman.
It is in this context that we bring up the rights of people who trade sex and people who use drugs. The use of erotic labor and drugs has existed in all of our communities over millenia. In fact, some of the earliest written documentation of sex work organizing dates back to the Vedic Era (early iron age). Suffice to say, all people have engaged in erotic labor and drug use for spriritual, medicinal, and recreational purposes historically. We recognize the deep pains that slavery and colonialisim have brought to our communities and the means by which white supremacy has disrupted our original ways of being. Concurrently, we believe that criminalization and blanket solutions of prohibition and recovery won’t address the root issues of lack of safety, access to livelihoods, and security facing our communities. Communities thrive on connection; sex work and drug use, when occuring in particular conditions, foster connection and cohesiveness and can meet a community’s unspoken needs.
The ruling, white supremacist class recognizes the power of sex, sex work, and drugs and uses the legal system to inflict violence on and murder our loved ones who create and provide access; it deems them inhuman. It often successfully disappears the memories of our dead. The psychic impact of this on our community is devastating. Those deemed forgettable and “undesirable” are then further considered disposable in our own communities and relentlessly targeted from both within and without.
We believe that sex work and drug use are not inherently harmful activities. The harm of sex work and drug use comes from policing, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. Policing drives people underground and exposes them to the risk of violence and death.
OUR ADVOCACY CENTERS THE FOLLOWING ISSUES:
⭄ Full decriminalization of sex work: Neither sex workers nor their clients must be criminalized. Neither should any governing body wield the power to decide who gets to work, how and where (i.e. licensing systems that are used in countries where sex work is legalized instead of decriminalized). No legal entity should be in control of anyone’s body. All workers have a right to work without harassment or fear of governmental or communal stigma. No worker’s families or communal ecosystems deserve to be threatened simply because of the economic activities they are engaging in.
⭄ Full decriminalization of selling and purchasing of drugs: Neither people who sell drugs or buy and consume them must be criminalized. Drug dealers often provide important and crucial medicines and substances that enable people to cope with the nightmarish conditions that they endure under capitalism.
⭄ Decriminalization as a project of Police Abolition: Decriminalizing the sex and drug trades abolishes the need for vice units. This is a concrete step towards defunding the police, one department at a time. Additionally, people must be able to engage in these activities without the fear of police harassment. Many of our community members engage in the informal economies for various reasons. They have a right to work without fear of police, ICE, or any other harassment imposed by the State and their agencies.
⭄ Decriminalization as a project of Community Restoration: Money saved from defunding the police should be used to pay for needs identified by communities themselves. For instance, Project SAFE members have identified housing, transportation, and food as primary unmet needs. Diverted money could be used to enable communities to build a foundation that they have never been able to secure. The sex and drug trades and the constellation of services surrounding these trades can all thrive and become important contributors to economic sustainability and stability.
⭄ Safe Supply Saves Lives: Safe supply drug program are a critical pathway to reducing drug-associated harms, including fatal overdose. The unregulated drug supply has become increasingly adulterated with harmful agents like fentanyl, which often occurs unbeknownst to drug sellers. Safe supply programs are being implemented in various countries and show promise in reducing harms associated with using unregulated drugs. A safe supply program consists of medical providers who prescribe medications like hydromorphone at doses that reduce or eliminate reliance on unregulated drugs. Prescribers and patients work together to find appropriate doses. This way, people who use drugs have certainty of the quality and strength of the drugs they are using, which reduces harm. When people give or sell drugs received through safe supply programs to peers, they are helping improve the quality of the community drug supply and assist people who can’t access such services safer drugs to use. They are practicing harm reduction.
⭄ Decriminalization as a project towards Land Back: We believe that stewardship of land must be returned to indigenous people across the globe. The harm of drug use comes from settler colonialism and white supremacy, not from the plants that are used for their psychoactive qualities. Our drug supplies must be thoughtfully curated so that they do not further harm the land or fuel our way towards a greater climate crisis. The only way to stop the climate crisis and grow plants in harmony with the land is to return the stewardship of land back to the First People.
⭄ Decriminalization as a project of Bodily Autonomy: Bodily autonomy for marginalized and racialized people is always up for debate under white supremacy. We believe that the right to access sex work ties intimately with the right to access abortion, and other medication as needed without the fear of stigma. Abortion is not “shameful” and should not be considered as a solution of last resort. Rather, it is part of the human experience and healthy sexuality. In the same way, our community should be able to ask for pain and other prescriptions from their health providers without the taboos of any substance being “addictive.” Afterall, water and food is necessary for survival and is “addictive.” So is medication regardless of whether people use it medicinally or recreationally. This is intimately tied to disability justice.
⭄ Decriminalization as a project of Survivor Justice: Sex workers and other criminalized people often come up with unique solutions to combat sexual violence and intimate partner violence in their own communities. Turning to the police is not an option and we do not believe that policing can eradicate rape and intimate partner violence. Sex workers are often intimately aware of how revenge porn is used and how abusive family or community members can weaponize stigma into coercing victims to stay in abusive situations. We believe that eliminating barriers to resources such as housing, healthcare, and increasing wages across the board allows survivors to lead the autonomous lives they desire and deserve.
Follow Up: An Open Letter to the Harm Reduction Community
Since our letter published on June 22nd, 2020, there has been public and private testimony about Devin Reaves, co-founder and now former Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Coalition (PAHRC). These testimonies have shaken the harm reduction community at large. Like all frameworks and industries, harm reduction is not immune from the culture of toxic masculinity. It is, however, especially upsetting that the paradigm most critical of and resistant to the conventional harms of all types of oppression is being appropriated and misused by those in leadership positions. Before we proceed, we want to state that we firmly support and are fighting alongside all survivors, but especially those that are sex workers - as harms onto sex workers have been historically erased and minimized. The last two weeks seem to be a dawning for many organizations that the needs of sex workers have not only been unaccounted for, but this erasure has created space for their exploitation in harm reduction.
Our letter three weeks ago deliberately named an organization perpetuating harm, not a single individual. As we witness painful testimony pouring out, we’re finding ourselves referring back to our letter and the questions we asked. At the same time, we are witnessing the fight in Philadelphia and elsewhere for defunding the police. We are watching as more community members engage in ideas of what abolishing carceral systems look like, and consequently, what community safety truly is and can be. In the words of various Black women abolitionists, we are watching and struggling with our community as we engage in the project of building new structures.
This project is mired in pain. As Black women abolitionists, many of whom are queer and sex working remind us, powerful institutions that feel threatened will resist their destruction ever more powerfully. This resistance will come from the State, but it will also seep into our communities from non-State actors designed to weaken us from within. It is in the spirit of learning, struggle, and self reflection, that we feel compelled to name interconnected harms.
The first harm, the most “obvious” harm to name, is the actions and behaviours of Devin Reaves himself: the harassment, exploitation, and manipulation of sex workers and interns that occurred over years. This behavior predates his entry into harm reduction 3 years ago when he founded an organization with minimal-to-no harm reduction background. Rather than use his social work training to examine implicit biases and ingrained misogyny, Devin perpetuated them first in abstinent-recovery spaces and then in harm reduction arenas. For Devin, it appears harm reduction became a space to coerce women into non-consensual and manipulative sexual situations.
His is the script followed by misogynist, whorephobic abusers. And by “reclusing” himself to follow a self-developed plan of growth, he continues to follow the script of abusers who use the blueprint of progressive language but shield themselves from the real, meaningful work of vulnerable accountability. His actions and his response to being identified as a perpetrator of harm violate the fundamental principles of harm reduction. In the spirit of “nothing about us without us,” harm reduction has relentlessly insisted that people who use drugs (PWUD) and sex workers be centered in all decisions - whether programmatically, politically, or in the research world - that impact them. We extend that call now to survivors who should unequivocally be centered in all decisions regarding restorative and transformative justice processes. We ask why is it that Devin is engaging in a reflection and accountability process without the input of survivors? Why is this process happening on his terms rather than on the terms and timelines of those he harmed?
Some have claimed that white men who cause harm in this field are being protected, while a leader of color is being singled out. But fewer people in general sought the intense public spotlight Devin has, and so his transgressions and the public nature of their revelation mirror his spotlight. The amount of attention and resources he achieved were a product of performative harm reduction, not PWUD and sex work-centered harm reduction, which speaks to the larger concerns happening in the harm reduction movement more broadly. Devin was protected for years, even with concrete evidence of behavior antithetical to harm reduction. Claiming that he is being targeted is incredibly painful to those of us who asked that his behavior be addressed over years because our own attempts to talk to him about it were dismissed and resulted in his attacking our reputations.
As we are watching this unfold, we are reminded of the now decade-old research findings of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP), a former member-based social justice organizing project led by and for young people of color who had current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. In their 2009 ground-breaking report, YWEP members found that, “The individual violence that girls [in the sex trades] experience is enhanced by the institutional violence that they experience from systems and services. The violence included emotional and verbal abuse as well as exclusion from, or mistreatment by, services.” This pattern of the amplification of individual violence by institutional complicity continues today.
It is in the same spirit that we ask to not be misconstrued. We named an organization, and we named structural harm. We ask the harm reduction community to not weaponize the language and work of transformative justice to silence us and increase harm. Sex workers have always occupied an uncomfortable space in harm reduction; they have been seen as a subculture that needs to be accommodated and tolerated. In practice, sex workers comprise a counterculture that is continuously driving forward harm reduction agendas and pushing harm reductionists to do better and more radical work. And so while our initial questions were directed only towards PAHRC, now we direct these questions to the entire harm reduction community: 1) what is motivating the larger harm reduction community to address sex work in your spaces at this particular moment and not before and 2) why have you not always consulted with sex workers as a matter of course.
Because we are naming the deeper and parallel harm that is occurring simultaneously everywhere. Every time harm reduction nonprofits participate in diversionary programs without offering any critique, they collude with the police and State. This directly harms sex workers. Every time harm reduction organizations “forget” to invite sex working people who use drugs into rooms where policy decisions are made about their lives, they participate in building an institutional culture of erasing the work of most marginalized people who stand at the intersection of people who use drugs and are sex workers. It is this same institutional culture that paralyzed community members into the bystander effect. It is this same institutional culture that allows individuals such as Devin Reaves to hold enormous power.
As we move towards accountability and justice, we must remember that this process requires all of us to be present. We are reminded of how many excellent harm reductionists our movement loses when one’s introduction to this framework is under the auspices of a toxic organization such as PAHRC, as those who had a rightful home in harm reduction were dissuaded by harms perpetrated by an abusive leader. We can prevent this. We are not interested in “punishment”, but rather, in the work of supporting the needs of survivors and seeing meaningful transformative changes occur. This is not callout or cancel culture, which are tropes being pit against survivors to belittle and dismiss their experiences or frame them as petty and immature when they name harms that they have experienced. When asks for call-ins fall on deaf ears for years, people have no other choice. As Mariame Kaba and other Black women abolitionists teach us: we cannot hold anyone accountable. Rather, we must create conditions that allow people into entering accountability themselves. The manner in which a survivor creates awareness of who harmed them and how they were harmed is not a decision for anyone but the survivor to make. It takes an immense amount of strength combined with willingness for public vulnerability to supposedly “callout” unacceptable behavior. In this spirit, we must confront the reality that all of us perpetuate harm by the very fact that we internalize brutally oppressive lessons. And therefore, we must continuously interrogate ourselves and our systems on how harm gets perpetuated. We need institutional systems that ensure that survivors have a space to heal and be retained within harm reduction so we don’t lose crucial organizers with lived and living expertise in favor of abusive leaders who hold more power. This is the work of radical vulnerability and transformative justice that we're interested in. This is community work. We invite you to this.
And finally, we are infinitely thankful to Sherae Lascelles, a Black sex working harm reductionist all the way from Seattle. Thank you for hearing us and for offering us your unwavering support without question. Your radical solidarity gave us the courage to write the original letter in the first place. It allowed ground shaking conversations to unfold. And so as we chant in the streets, we repeat back with deep love, gratitude, and solidarity: “We protect us!”
Final Reflections and Asks:
PAHRC should fold. It is not an organization premised on principled harm reduction.
A. Basic tenets of transformative justice demands that each person connected to this organization interrogates their complicity - either through direct or indirect action - that resulted in their proximity to these abuses.
B. Basic tenets of transformative justice also demands that we interrogate our reliance on the criminal justice system to serve our communities. PAHRC has made no effort to decouple from the criminal justice system and therefore, is not rooted in harm reduction work or the principles of transformative justice.
C. Redirect all PAHRC funding to grassroots organizations (better) equipped to be running such programming.
D. Harm reduction organizations need to be rooted in revolutionary practice. This cannot be achieved without centering the most marginalized amongst us. Full stop.
We ask that people who are invited to sit on director or advisory boards of organizations learn more about the organization and leadership involved prior to board participation.
Protectors of abusive persons in harm reduction need to be called out.
A. We have witnessed people writing and saying they know they need to work harder to pay attention to the needs of sex workers. You cannot support sex workers while protecting those who harm sex workers or flippantly call sex work organizations trouble-starters for rejecting exploitation.
B. Leaders protecting abuse is an example of the institutionalized misogyny that is foundational in harm reduction, that we should be collectively resisting.
C. It is a manipulation to say that to stand in the way of this leadership is to stand in the way of harm reduction progress. Radically transparent organizations who center people who use drugs and sex workers at the core of their programs should be doing this work. Otherwise, harm reduction is merely recreating cycles of non-profit complexes that rely on the marginalization of others to maintain a salary.
We ask that if you are not from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia in particular, and weren’t exposed to local harms, to stop making statements about your analysis of Devin’s behavior and his ultimate redemption. These statements are incredibly dismissive of those that have come forward and revealed the harms done to them. Those of us routinely exposed to Devin’s behavior are reeling from the dismissal of our voices and watching him contort harm reduction in a manner that pleased cops and decentralized people who actively use drugs and do sex work.
PAHRC needs to honor - as an institution - the asks of survivors. Creating barriers to those asks is emblematic of the culture of high-threshold harm reduction. We must consistently work towards a culture of providing no-barrier access to all resources needed by survivors, people who use drugs, sex workers, and other members of the harm reduction community.
Signatories,
Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance
Project SAFE Philadelphia
Open Letter to PAHRC
The following letter was originally published to our Facebook on June 22, 2020
To the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Coalition (PAHRC),
It is unfortunate that you are continuing a long tradition of erasing sex worker organizing. You have used our fundraiser to boost your Webinar on Harm Reduction and Sex Work and it is clear to us that you are using the labor of harm reductionist sex workers to position and legitimize yourself as a progressive harm reduction organization. We are curious as to: 1) what is motivating PAHRC to address sex work in PA at this particular moment and not before and 2) why PAHRC is not consulting with sex workers in the state it claims to represent.
Good harm reduction practice engages with local conditions and while we admire the work of the panelists that were chosen to participate, they cannot speak to the experiences of Pennsylvania workers.
It is also good harm reduction practice to consult the people receiving the resources. You did not contact either of the organizations hosting the fundraiser to confirm whether they wanted to be affiliated with this event.
Many have assumed we are a part of this event. To be clear, we do not endorse this event because we were not included in the planning or execution of it. If attendees want to donate funds to our mutual aid fund, they can donate directly to us. Details can be found at phillyrua.com.
Philadelphia Red Umbrella Alliance