The Living in Community report points to the ever-present danger of violence at work or on the street, but many women are also at risk at home, where they live with violent partners. We are extremely lucky to have the work of Jenny Horsman (1996; 1998; 2000) to draw on for this important aspect of Harm Reduction. Horsman has worked with literacy learners in contexts similar to ours, and argues that if we want learning to happen, we need to recognize and address the violence and trauma that learners have experienced at some point in their lives. This has many effects, including learners’ ability to trust, to feel safe and to express themselves. These all, in turn, affect their ability to learn.
There is an interesting parallel between what Horsman says about conditions that enhance learning and what Harm Reduction practitioners say about conditions that support drug users to become healthy. According to Horsman, when we are working with learners who have experienced abuse, we need to accept and work with them as they come to us — not tell them to come back after they have dealt with emotional problems resulting from their abuse. Likewise, literacy practitioners working from a Harm Reduction perspective would not tell drug users to go and get straight and come back when they are ready, or require sex trade workers to leave the trade before they engage in learning. And so Alderson and Twiss (2003) point out that the WISH Learning Centre is “one of the few places where women can be active in their addictions and active in their learning” (p. 26). Also, unlike some educational programs, WISH does not require learners to exit the sex trade before they engage in learning.
Sex Trade workers are susceptible to sexually transmitted disease, addiction-related health problems, and are at risk of suffering post-traumatic stress. According to the Living in Community report (and our research participants confirmed this), most sex trade workers use condoms for work, but it is sometimes difficult to negotiate condom use with boyfriends and pimps. (p. 16). Similarly Green and Goldburg (1993) found that the sex trade workers they interviewed in Glasgow did not always use the same rules for safe sex in their personal lives as they did at work, even when their partners were injection drug users (p.13).
The issue of sexual health and prevention of sexually transmitted disease is well represented in the Harm Reduction literature (for example, N. L. Brown et al., 2005; Erickson et al., 1997; Marlatt, 1998; Robertson & Poole, 1999; Tatarsky, 1998). We will not go into that here, except to say that there is a lot of expertise in the community we can draw upon, and we need to continually promote safer sex and respond to participants’ requests for information on this.