The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls holds a powerful mandate to shape global norms and influence policy on gender-based violence. Yet she was already known for her anti-trans and anti–sex work stance. When she called for input in late 2023 on “prostitution and violence against women and girls,” the framing confirmed fears that sex worker rights-based evidence would likely be excluded. Many feminist organisations hesitated—some had already stopped responding to the exclusionary and discriminatory calls and invitations of this Rapporteur, unwilling to legitimise a process they saw as flawed and hostile. The Count Me In! consortium decided that silence would only allow anti-rights actors to dominate. Together with a diverse group of sex worker leaders and feminist allies, they chose to make themselves impossible to ignore by creating an online repository that collects, analyses, archives, and amplifies submissions from across the globe.
CMI! members acted quickly through the Sex Work Advocacy Group (SWAG) and the Opposition Working Group, mobilising sex worker networks, feminist allies, and supportive governments to respond to the Rapporteur. WO=MEN pressed the Dutch government and others to send in submissions and issue statements. Guidance developed collaboratively with the Global Network of Sex Work Projects made it easier for grassroots groups to contribute their expertise. Recognising that submissions risked being ignored, CMI! created an online space to publish them, ensuring they remained visible and accessible.
The result was unprecedented. The Sex Workers’ Rights Tool collected 67 submissions spanning every region: Africa and West Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Oceania, Central Europe and North Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, and global networks. Over 132 organisations, platforms, and individuals contributed, offering evidence grounded in lived realities and feminist analysis. These submissions emphasised the importance of recognising sex workers’ labour and human rights. They clearly stated that the best way to take action to address violence against sex workers is by fully decriminalising sex work. To make the material more usable, each submission was paired with a short summary so policymakers, journalists, rights defenders, and researchers could quickly grasp the key arguments and evidence provided.
Promotion was deliberate and wide-reaching. Members and allies pushed the repository across feminist listservs and social media, among government delegates, and in UN spaces. In coordination with NSWP, CMI! joined a two-week campaign during the Human Rights Council in Geneva and followed up with its own month-long online effort under the banner #Feminists4SexWorkersRights. Campaign posts reached more than 70,000 impressions on X (Twitter), and the repository became the most visited page on the CMI! website, with over a thousand views in its first weeks.
When the report was launched, the Special Rapporteur ultimately did publish the submissions she had received—a move activists and diplomats linked to the visibility of CMI!’s alternative repository, which had exposed the risk of selective silencing. The report itself misrepresents and dismisses evidence that sex work is not inherently violent. But the Sex Workers’ Rights Tool had already shifted the dynamic. By revealing resistance, sex workers and allies claimed space at the UN, transforming erasure into visibility. A year later, the online repository continues to circulate as a resource and model of resisting anti-rights strategies through feminist solidarity and digital organising.
This urgent and strategic response by CMI! was possible thanks to its infrastructure, and to the trusted internal and external relationships that enabled members to share resources, act quickly, and respond without bureaucratic delays. The Sex Workers’ Rights Tool became more than a technical fix: it showed how collaboration can resist silencing, digital platforms can amplify excluded voices, and feminist allies can turn marginalised expertise into a collective record. In doing so, sex workers rebalanced power—claiming space at the UN and proving that collective action can challenge even the most entrenched exclusion.
