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