The Cupcake Girls: Building Respect, Resources, and Relationships
The Cupcake Girls
At the intersection of supporting sex workers and fighting sex trafficking, there is a lot of stigmatization, misconception, and a lack of nuanced care and support. That’s where The Cupcake Girls step in, envisioning a world where sex trafficking is eradicated and consensual sex workers feel safe and empowered.
Executive director of Cupcake Girls, Amy-Marie Merrell, shared the organization’s mission.
“The Cupcake Girls provides confidential support to those involved in the sex industry, as well as trauma-informed outreach, advocacy, holistic resources, and referral services to provide prevention and aftercare to those affected by sex trafficking,” Merrell explained. “We provide nonjudgmental support to empower our program participants in their pursuits through respect, resources, and relationships.”
Ultimately, The Cupcake Girl’s goal is for their clients to leave the program having built enough self-determination and self-empowerment to continue to achieve their own goals in their time.
The Cupcake Girls Resources and Programs
Founded in Las Vegas in 2011, The Cupcake Girls provide their participants with access to a network of over 400 partners and professional resources nationwide like safe dentists, lawyers, and doctors, as well as advocacy, mentorship, and outreach services. This includes local organizations like The Shade Tree, The Center, Dress for Success of Southern Nevada, and Signs of Hope, to name a few.
If you are someone in need of support or resources, you may submit a request for Direct Support, or you may check out some of the organization’s community resources.
The organization also offers resources through its Local For All Program.
According to The Cupcake Girls’ website, “We are building Local For All, a collaborative social impact hub built around the needs of our clients. Local For All is both a funding stream and community space for The Cupcake Girls’ clients and staff.
Local For All is a trauma-informed community comprising a marketplace, wellness, co-working space, and The Cupcake Girls offices. Our building will exist to provide an energizing, creative, inclusive, yet safe and supportive community for Las Vegas’ most vulnerable populations. Local For All combines the mission-driven work of a nonprofit with the sustainability of a public-facing business, which will help sustain the work of The Cupcake Girls for years to come!”
The Cupcake Girls Events and Fundraisers
To help raise funds for the organization’s efforts, The Cupcake Girls hosts events and fundraisers throughout the year. In the past, this has included game nights like Drag Bingo, dances like their adult prom, and community care events.
The organization just launched its 9th annual peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, “Change Takes Action.” This campaign kicked off on September 15, 2023, and concludes on October 6, 2023. During these three weeks, their goal is to raise $300,000 so they’re able to continue making positive impacts on the hundreds of lives in our communities. They have raised $121.5K+ as of the time of this publishing.
The organization also recently hosted its “Superbloom: Delightfully Out of Place” fashion show benefit on September 7th. This event featured local artists, models, vendors, and local food and drinks, integrating desert allure with city charm. Guests immersed themselves in a world of fashion, art, and community support while redefining beauty standards. With a goal of $10,000, The Cupcake Girls hit their goal and more, raising $11,173!
The Challenges and Misconceptions of Addressing Sex Work and Sex Trafficking
In the fight to support people consensually working in the sex work industry while addressing the horrors of sex trafficking, there are a lot of challenges to overcome.
According to Merrell, some of the organization’s biggest challenges involve a lack of funding and a lack of community education and awareness on the differences between sex work and sex trafficking.
“Many people do not understand what sex work is or the differences between sex work and sex trafficking,” Merrell explained. In particular, many people assume that everyone working in sex work is forced into this line of work. As a result, they assume that all sex work inherently involves sex trafficking. This poses other major challenges to the organization’s efforts.
“The biggest challenges we face as an organization are directly related to the criminalization of the work that many of our clients are doing to support themselves and their families,” Merrell added.
As a result, the criminalization of sex workers not only feeds into the stigmatization of sex work but also puts sex workers at risk. And without protections in place for consensual sex work, it opens the door for those who choose to work in this industry to end up becoming victims of sex trafficking.
And despite Nevada being the only state to legally permit prostitution in some counties, there are currently no laws or proposed laws in the state to decriminalize sex work.
That’s why, as Merrell explained, The Cupcake Girls, along with organizations such as Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the World Health Organization, support the decriminalization of sex work.
The Difference Between Sex Work and Sex Trafficking
Sex Work/Sex Workers
According to the Sex Workers Human Rights Commission that commenced on July 15, 2021, in Portland, Oregon, there is a stark contrast between consensual sex work and sex/human trafficking. Per their report, they define sex work and sex workers as the following:
“[The term] sex workers include female, male, and transgender adults (18 years of age and above) who receive money or goods in exchange for sexual services, either regularly or occasionally. Sex work is consensual sex between adults, can take many forms, and varies between and within countries and communities. In addition, sex work may vary in the degree to which it is “formal” or organized. [The term] “sex work” is used in this commission brief when referring exclusively to adults aged 18 years or older. When referring to those below the age of 18, including 10–17 years old, reference is made to sexual exploitation of children.”
Human Trafficking
The Commission then defines human trafficking as follows:
“Human trafficking can be compared to a modern-day form of slavery. It involves the exploitation of people through force, coercion, threat, and deception and includes human rights abuses such as debt bondage, deprivation of liberty, and lack of control over freedom and labor. Adults and children can be trafficked or enslaved through forced labor or sexual exploitation.”
The key factors here are the matters of both consent and age. In other words, if someone is underaged, they can’t consent. If someone is forced, coerced, threatened, or deceived into sex work, consent doesn’t exist and is, therefore, sex trafficking.
[In] the efforts of decriminalizing sex work, the Commission outlines that decriminalization involves “the removal of criminal penalties and laws prohibiting and regulating prostitution, including those against facilitating and buying. Other laws, including those against sexual trafficking, child exploitation, and public indecency, still apply under the decriminalization model.”
As such, people who want to fight the issue of sex trafficking but conflate sex work with sex trafficking as an inherent part of the industry must learn the difference between them. From there, they can learn how supporting sex workers does not mean they are supporting sex trafficking.
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Ten Reasons Why We Should Work to Decriminalize Sex Work
The commission’s report also further outlines ten reasons to decriminalize sex work.
1. Decriminalization reflects respect for human rights and personal dignity.
“There are many reasons why adults enter into sex work, including as their main livelihood or temporarily for survival or short-term revenue.”
2. Decriminalization reduces police abuse and violence.
“Police are often the perpetrators of abuses against sex workers. Where sex work is criminalized, police wield power over sex workers in the form of threats of arrest and public humiliation.”
3. Decriminalization increases sex workers’ access to justice.
“The incidence of rape is high among sex workers in many settings. …Sex workers who are criminalized are unlikely to feel safe going to the police to report violence perpetrated against them. The criminal law is also a barrier to access to civil protections, such as restraining orders, or to obtaining treatment and support after rape and abuse.”
4. Decriminalization promotes safe working conditions.
“One important way in which decriminalization promotes safer working conditions for sex workers is by enabling workers to organize. Collectively, sex workers can address risk factors in their workplaces and insist upon improved conditions.”
5. Decriminalization increases access to health services.
“Researchers have assessed whether different legal contexts affect the delivery of health services and occupational health and safety outcomes among sex workers. One study found that decriminalization is associated with the greatest financial support for sex worker health programs and the best access to brothels for outreach workers.”
6. Decriminalization reduces sex workers’ risk of HIV.
“Criminalization diminishes sex workers’ bargaining capacity and the time and space available to negotiate condom use with clients. Fear that visible condoms, or the process of negotiation, will make sex workers more vulnerable to arrest is a likely deterrent for condom use, particularly among street-based sex workers who are often at highest risk for HIV. When sex work is decriminalized, sex workers are more empowered to insist on condom use by clients.”
7. Decriminalization challenges stigma and discrimination, and the consequences of having a criminal record.
“In many countries, harsh application of criminal law ensures that a large proportion of sex workers will have criminal records and will be put in jail or police lock-ups at some time in their lives. Sex workers are particularly susceptible to physical and sexual abuse in prisons, pretrial detention facilities, and police lock-ups, with dire health and human rights consequences.”
In addition, being a former prisoner with a criminal record is a deeply stigmatized condition; the intersection of this stigma and the stigma already associated with sex work is a heavy burden. In some parts of the United States, for example, people convicted of sex work-related crimes are registered as “sex offenders” and must carry documents identifying them as such. They are then ineligible for public housing and other social services and are greatly impeded from finding non-sex work employment.”
8. Decriminalization does not result in an increase in the population of sex workers.
For people who assume that allowing sex work will heavily perpetuate its existence, the Commission states that “There is no evidence to support the claim made by some that removing criminal prohibitions on sex work will result in an expansion of the sex industry. In New Zealand, a study estimating the number of sex workers in five locations throughout the country before and after decriminalization demonstrated that the Prostitution Reform Act of 2003 had little impact on the number of people working in the sex industry.”
9. Decriminalization facilitates effective responses to trafficking.
Regarding how sex trafficking relates to sex work as an industry, the commission also stated, “Concerns that decriminalization will promote sex trafficking are founded on a mistaken conflation of sex work and trafficking. In fact, jurisdictions that decriminalize sex work can retain and even strengthen criminal prohibitions on trafficking, sexual coercion, and the prostitution of minors.”
Decriminalizing sex work does not cause an increase in trafficking. “For example, New Zealand, which decriminalized sex work in 2003, continues to be ranked in Tier 1 by the United States State Department’s Trafficking in Persons report—that is, the country is judged to be among those doing the most effective work on human trafficking. Laws and policies that encourage or enable the collectivization of sex workers may also facilitate the enforcement of anti-trafficking laws. When not themselves under the threat of criminal penalties, sex workers and their organizations can work with law enforcement to combat trafficking.”
In tandem with this assertion, Merrell of The Cupcake Girls added that “Decriminalizing sex work has been documented to reduce sex trafficking; this is proved by studies done by Amnesty International, The World Health Organization, and the ACLU.”
The final reason outlined by the Commission goes hand-in-hand with the first reason for decriminalizing sex work relating to human rights and personal dignity.
10. Decriminalization challenges state control over bodies and sexuality.
“The different treatment of sex work from other types of work is an example of governments’ long history of exerting control over bodies and sexuality. Decriminalization is an issue of gender equality and sexual rights. Laws against sex work intrude into private sexual behaviors and constitute a form of state control over the bodies of women and transgender women, who make up a large majority of sex workers worldwide. Like state controls over reproductive rights and limits on abortion, criminal laws prohibiting sex work attempt to legislate morality without regard for bodily autonomy. Decriminalizing sex work is a step in the direction of recognizing the right of all people to privacy and freedom from undue state control over sex and sexual expression.”
From addressing the matters of human rights to fighting the very issue of sex trafficking, it’s clear that decriminalizing sex work is the right thing to do to create a more just and equitable society while protecting the people who work in the sex industry.
#GetinMotion With The Cupcake Girls
If you want to fight sex trafficking and support sex workers in our community, #GetinMotion with The Cupcake Girls!
Start by following the organization on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and checking out the website for more information.
From there, the best way to support their efforts is by donating to the organization. This ensures that they can continue to provide support and resources to both the sex workers and the victims of sex trafficking who come to them for help. Pledge Your Birthday with the organization and create a fundraiser to “Make your birthday count” and “celebrate you and your favorite cause.”
Support the organization by shopping with the organization’s affiliates, who donate portions of their proceeds from their sales. Our magazine is currently conducting a poll of some new Stickers For Solidarity designs that we created to support The Cupcake Girls! Vote for your favorites here through October 8th.
The next best way to take action is by volunteering with The Cupcake Girls.
“We are always looking for more volunteers and more community partners willing to give discounted or pro-bono services to our program participants,” Merrell explained. Opportunities to volunteer are available in both Nevada and Oregon, as well as nationally.
Lastly, Merrell said, “The best support that you can give is to educate yourself on the differences between sex work and sex trafficking, as well as on important issues like legalization vs. decriminalization. In addition to educating yourself, working to educate the people around you is also a huge step toward supporting sex workers and sex trafficking survivors.”
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