Women’s Work, 2021

By Arwa Aburawa & Turab Shah

Women’s Work is filmed after five years of collective work by An Untold Story-Voices. This self-organised group of women with lived experience of street sex work in Hull, and their supporters, have worked with Other Cinemas to produce a document of friendship, care, resistance and resilience. Their film tells the story of how they came together, their campaign work and its connections to systemic marginalisation on the basis of class and gender.

In 2014, Hull became the UK’s only city to ban sex workers from its red-light district, effectively making prostitution a criminal offense, known as Section 222. This legislation served to make the situation for sex workers in the city even more precarious, isolated and dangerous.

An Untold Story-Voices seeks to address the multiple and complex disadvantages faced by many women who are involved in street sex work, created and compounded by all forms of marginalisation, the misapplication of legislation, and punitive policies which further impoverish those who struggle the most. In 2020, the collective’s campaign achieved a huge success when a Judicial Review against the section 222 brought by the collective resulted in Hull City Council’s retraction of the order. They are now working in collaboration with the Council for a better system.

This empowered and articulate collective, whose ongoing commitment to transformative justice for sex workers and women in Hull promotes understanding via human stories, and working together as an inclusive community to shift cultural perception and effect justice and systemic change.

Write up by Louise Shelley for Humber Street Gallery.