Dear reader, 

Welcome to our first bulletin of the year! In this edition, we spotlight another key issue that women who sell or exchange sex have highlighted to us - substance use. 

The dynamics between selling sex and substance use are far-reaching and complex, and make it challenging for women to break cycles and have options and choices to move on. We explore these complexities in our insight article, which looks at the the links and harms related to substance use and selling or exchanging  sex. We have also included an interview with the Scottish Drugs Forum team, who spoke to us about what harm reduction looks like in practice. 

Alongside these Insights, we have gathered interesting documentaries, theatre plays, videos, reports and events which could help your understanding of other aspects of the lives of women who sell or exchange sex. 

We hope you are as excited as we are to learn together this year! Our next bulletin will look at sexual health . For now, we hope you find the information we have included here helpful. 

The CSE Aware Resource Worker

Whilst a woman’s involvement in selling sex doesn’t automatically mean that she uses substances, the vulnerability to developing a substance use issue and/or being exploited exists and must be acknowledged. The prevalence of substance use among women in the context of selling sex, as well as the double-stigma that women face when accessing services make it essential for all types of services to be aware of these overlapping situations.

In this article, we explore the links between using substances and selling or exchanging sex and how these become cycles that sustain each other.

Substance use and selling/exchanging sex can be very interconnected issues in the lives of some women. To better understand how these cycles overlap, we spoke to two members of the Scottish Drugs Forum (SDF): Adrienne Hannah (Programme Manager) and Louise Bowman (National Training and Development Officer).

Adrienne and Louise were part of the team which researched the vulnerability, harm and risk for women in Scotland who use drugs and who also sell or exchange sex – their findings were published in an academic paper in 2022. In this interview they share insights from this research and from their vast experience working closely with women and service providers.

Research, reports & other information

• Vulnerability, Risk and Harm for People Who Use Drugs and Are Engaged in Transactional Sex 
• Prostitution, Drug Use, and Coping with Psychological Distress
• Improving services for women involved in prostitution and substance use
• Women and Drug Related Death 
• The Scottish Needle Exchange Directory

Wednesday 1st March, 11:30am - 1pm

Substance use can serve as a pathway into selling/exchanging sex, it can present women with multiple risks whilst they are involved, and poses a double-stigma when accessing support, which ultimately reduces women’s options when they decide to move on from both these situations. 

Open to services and organisations, this free event will offer an introduction to the needs of women involved in selling/exchanging sex who also use substances.

For this issue, we want to reflect on the impact of vicarious trauma and frontline workers’ coping strategies. With this in mind, we asked members of the research project Women working to support women in the welfare sphere to share some of their learnings and findings. Below is an excerpt from our interview with three of the researchers - Michele Burman, Loraine Gelsthorpe and Joana Ferreira:

The term vicarious traumatisation is often used interchangeably with other terms such as ‘burnout’ and ‘secondary traumatic stress’, but it is not the same. Unlike burnout – which is a fairly common experience and can be understood as an overwhelming state of physical and emotional exhaustion caused by excessive work-related stress, and secondary traumatic stress which may be acquired by a single incident of disclosure/exposure to another’s experiences, resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder – vicarious traumatisation is a cumulative process of psychological and somatic symptoms of acute and post-traumatic stress that can result from the close and constant work of service providers with traumatised individuals. The term captures the impacts of this constant ‘exposure’ to trauma – it highlights the ‘build-up’ process that often occurs for those working in these environments.

We are currently developing a project around handling women's disclosures of selling or exchanging sex and we would like to hear the perspective of services. If you have supported women who have disclosed and you would be willing to take part in a short anonymous interview, click on the button to fill out a contact form.