To Our Community, At Maggie's we’re making changes to build better privacy and confidentiality policies in order to deter the growing content mining practices that are harming our communities by publishing sensitive, identifying information about community members and our support services. We have become acutely aware of this growing trend and are making every effort possible to prevent these practices from further affecting our work, our responsibility to protect sex workers, and are making a commitment to counter this voyeurism. We have a duty to protect the sex workers we serve and support. Your life histories, experiences of struggle and requests for support are not to be turned into content or trauma porn for journalists, writers, film-makers, researchers or academics. We recognize this as a deep breach of trust, and something that jeapordizes the safety and dignity of sex workers who approach Maggie’s, confide in us, and seek out services and supports for survival. Sex workers accessing our services engage and confide in our staff trusting that their lives, struggles and histories will remain confidential. Revealing information about the lives of sex workers in community and sensitive details around service provision is not an ethical practice, and it is not a reflection of our values at Maggie’s or the organization we strive to be. It is clear to us that these practices have caused a great deal of harm, and that long-standing concerns flagged by our local community have not been taken seriously by our organization over the years. The stories, lives and experiences of sex workers in our community are not content for anyone to profit from. We view this as a failure on the part of our entire organization to protect the safety, privacy and dignity of sex workers everywhere. For this we’d like to apologize and outline the steps we will take to work towards repair. We are committed to:
Providing support to those negatively impacted by content mining practices.
Implementing internal policy changes around confidentiality, non-disclosure and collaboration to prevent breaches of confidentiality.
Updating our currently guidelines for writers, media, researchers to apply to all sex-working and non-sexworking parties evenly.
Establishing clear and transparent processes for collaboration and consent..
Creating more clear feedback and complaints processes for sex workers accessing our services.
Updating our outreach programming and related services to protect the privacy and security of community members and our staff.
We’d like to encourage any sex worker who has concerns or who has been negatively effected by content mining practices to get in touch with us for support by connecting with our Executive Director, Estelle, at estelle@maggiesto.org and our Board Chair, Jenny, at boardchair@maggiesto.org.