by Alison Bass | Jul 8, 2015 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
Law enforcement officials have been unable to shut down Backpage, a website for personals and sex work ads, by legal means. So they have resorted to a more indirect approach: asking credit card companies to deny transactions by sex workers seeking to pay for ads on...
by Alison Bass | Jun 16, 2015 | pimps, prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
At the beginning of June, northern Ireland became the only part of the United Kingdom to outlaw the purchase of sex, adopting what is known as the “Nordic model” because Sweden was the first country to criminalize the buyers of sex. The Nordic model has...
by Alison Bass | Nov 8, 2014 | prostitution, public health, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
Nick Kristof is at it again. On Sunday, the New York Times columnist wrote yet another column about sex trafficking that was filled with inaccuracies and misleading statements. He was writing about a new lawsuit filed by two young women who say they were trafficked as...
by Alison Bass | Oct 6, 2014 | prostitution, sex trafficking, sex work, Uncategorized
For the past four years, I have been working on a new book that is a departure from my previous book, Side Effects. Tentatively titled Getting Screwed: Sex Work and the Law, the new book weaves the true stories of sex workers (past and present) together with the...
by Alison Bass | Nov 26, 2012 | biotech industry, drug marketing, medical devices, opiods, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, public health, Uncategorized
In my previous blogs about West Virginia’s shockingly high rate of prescription drug overdoses — the Mountain State has the second highest rate of overdoses in the nation — I focused on “the culture of disability” that created this...
by Alison Bass | Sep 24, 2012 | prostitution, public health, Uncategorized
Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes? I thought of his famous quote when my husband passed along a link he had received (from a social work listserv he subscribes to) to a...
