In May 2024, a group of organizers, scholar-activists, movement lawyers, and community members gathered in so-called Toronto (unceded territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Metis and Wendat First Nations) to discuss the impacts of sex work criminalization on Black sex workers, and the ways in which advocates pushback against the erasure & racialized, gendered policing of sex work through court challenges, organizing, and community care.

We are immensely grateful to our panelists for this enriching discussion and for A Different Booklist for hosting us in the space!

Film recorded and produced by Alicia Reid in partnership with Pivot Legal Society.

Watch the Discussion

• Video accessibility: A highlight of this film is available with English captions below.

• Content warning: This video includes discussions of themes relating to racism, policing and gender-based violence.

Full Length Video

Highlights with English Captions

Participant Bios

Rabbit Richards

Rabbit Richards was born on occupied Lenni Lenape territory in Brooklyn, NY. Their people have never rooted for more than one generation anywhere for as long as their history can trace. Their father's family claims Kyiv and Minsk; their mother's family remembers St Thomas and St Croix, islands of the Carib, Arawak, and Ciboney. Rabbit is learning how to exist on stolen land in a marginalized body. Relentlessly compassionate with fierce integrity, Rabbit is passionate about anti-oppression and accessibility work and is deeply invested in the conversations that are provoked by their art. Currently they serve as Systems Change Coordinator at PACE Society in k'emk'emaláy, commonly known as the downtown eastside of Vancouver BC, where they focus on harm reduction within community care.

Ellie Ade Kur

Ellie Ade Kur is a sex worker justice organizer engaged in community work that strengthens Black sex worker mutual aid efforts. Building on her doctoral research in Human Geography and Urban Planning at the University of Toronto as well as archival work on the City of Toronto’s development and enforcement of regulatory frameworks targeting sex workers at licensed venues and broader policing efforts to clear local strolls of street-based sex workers, Ade Kur’s project, in collaboration with Maggie’s Toronto, will host community consultations for sex workers and develop digital resource guides and a virtual workshop series to support community members in navigating criminalization and stigma – including best practices in navigating issues of discrimination, workplace harassment, physical and sexual assault on the job and more.

Professor Rai Reece

Dr. Rai Reece is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work broadly examines how carceral logics are relationally organized by racial capitalism and white supremacy, and how historical and contemporary narratives of white settler colonial violence maintain carceral processes in Canada. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University where she teaches and has published in the areas of ‘race’ and racism, Black Feminist Methodology, abolition, and anti-Black racism. Dr. Reece’s work also focuses on community-based collaboration, and she has conducted numerous anti-racism facilitations with organizations at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. In addition, she provides annual anti-racism training for the Walls to Bridges (W2B) Instructor Training program with incarcerated women at Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) and is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors for the HIV Legal Network (HLN).

Her most recent works include the co-authored ninth edition of “Unequal Relations” with Augie Fleras (forthcoming 2024), “Critical Collaboration: Black Feminist Methodology and Praxis with (Formerly) Criminalized Black Women” with Denise Edwards (2024), and “Black and Racialized Women in the Canadian Criminal Justice System” (2022) which marks the first time a chapter focusing on Black and racialized women in the Canadian criminal justice system was featured in the textbook Women and the Canadian Criminal Justice System (3rd edition). An award-winning educator, Dr. Reece’s teaching and research centers liberatory anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogies to deeply reflect and hold space for personal, interpersonal, and collective care for ourselves and our communities.

Nana Yanful

Nana is the former founding Legal Director at the Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC). She played a crucial role at BLAC by developing the legal clinic’s test litigation strategy and spearheading their first interventions. These interventions included a landmark decision by the Court of Appeal for Ontario regarding anti-Black racism and sentencing (R v Morris, 2021 ONCA 680), a Charter challenge that supported the rights of Black sex workers, a Coroner’s Inquest that shed light on systemic anti-Black racism present in immigration detention, policing and healthcare settings, and a police discipline appeal that paved the way for future cases to consider systemic racism when assisting the reasonableness of a police officer’s use of force.

Before joining BLAC, Nana worked as criminal defence lawyer in Toronto. She also worked as an equity speciality, advising on and investigating human rights and health equity issues in healthcare and public health settings. Nana received the Community Service Award from the Canada Association of Black Lawyers and was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to Watch She was awarded the Ontario Bar Association’s President’s Award in 2021, and in 2020, Lexpert recognized her as a rising star: Leading Lawyers under 40. Nana is proud to serve on the boards of the Women’s Health in Women’s Hands Community Health Centre and the Collective of Child Welfare Survivors.

Alicia Reid

Alicia Reid is a Jamaican-Canadian Prize-winning photographer, journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto. Specializing in music and event photography. Featured on media outlets Toronto Star, Global News and Complex Music. In 2022, She graduated J-school from Toronto Metropolitan University and continued to pursue a career in the creative arts through mentorship programs like ARTWORKSTO and The REMIX Project. Her purpose as an artist is to create a positive outlook to be shown in the city especially towards people in marginalized communities and her goal is to continue to change the narrative of places in the city that are often misrepresented.