Thank you all for a wonderful ISWD!

The Josephine Butler Society was privileged to host a fantastic event on Tuesday 2nd June at the iconic St Anne's Church in Soho, London, to celebrate International Sex Workers' Day. Despite the strikes and the storms, we had an excellent turnout of sex workers, practitioners, academics, and activists, all allies in the movement to improve the dignity and safety of sex workers in the UK and around the world.

We had three excellent speakers:

• Professor Julia Laite - celebrated author and historian - spoke passionately about the work of Josephine Butler, and the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH - the forerunner to JBS), the organisation founded in the wake of her death to honour her legacy and continue her mission. Julia's presentation focused on Josephine's and the AMSH's opposition to moral puritanism and the crusade to criminalise the lives of sex workers, and concluded by arguing that Josephine and her allies would be opposed to the equivalent crusade being waged today.

• Dr Lillith Brouwers - Research Fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds - presented their excellent and widely acclaimed research on the impact of sex work criminalisation on "third parties". These they identify as managers, but also maids, cleaners, drivers, and any other individual with a professional relationship to sex workers other than clients themselves. Lillith pointed out that the law covering third parties is deliberately vague, creates more difficult and dangerous working conditions for sex workers, and ultimately criminalises them further, as about half of identified "third parties" are friends of sex workers, and are often in turn sex workers themselves.

• Dr Mary Laing - Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of York - presented on TransActions, a group she co-founded along with fellow academics and practitioners, including our very own Del Beach-Campbell, to improve healthcare provision for trans sex workers. Since being set up in 2016, TransActions has continued to grow, reaching more organisations and healthcare institutions, sharing best practice in supporting trans sex workers, and developing a practitioners toolkit which is now being widely distributed across the healthcare and sex worker support sectors.

We were also thrilled to announce the brilliant Kate Lister - the country's foremost sex historian, author and podcaster extraordinaire - as our new patron, and also long-time ally and sex worker activist Marin Scarlett as the newest member of our committee! We will be sharing more about these appointments separately.

A huge thanks to our speakers, attendees, and members of the JBS committee, who came together to make this wonderful event possible. Not only was specialist knowledge and insight shared, but also a strong sense of solidarity, hope and joy was sparked by everyone coming together to celebrate this important day. And this will only grow as our movement gathers momentum, and we continue the fight in Josephine Butler's name for equality and justice for all.