Challenging Demand

“As long as any woman anywhere in the world is being bought or sold – none of us are free”  Andrea Dworkin

The Women’s Support Project first started to actively address commercial sexual exploitation as part of the spectrum of men’s violence against women, following the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship, held in Brighton in 1996. Our work in this area has included developing and delivering awareness raising workshops and training, particularly around responding to prostitution. We have organised a range of conferences and seminars about prostitution and pornography under the heading of ‘Challenging Demand’, and have taken part in an international survey into the attitudes and behaviour of men who buy sex. From 2008 – 2011 we have secured funding from the Scottish Government ‘Violence Against Women Fund’ to develop this work across Scotland. For more information on the Scottish Government approach to tackling violence against women, please click here.

The aims of the ‘Challenging Demand’ work are to reduce the exploitation and abuse of women through commercial sexual exploitation, and improve service responses to women affected.

This will be supported through:

• Increasing awareness of the definitions, cause, extent and impact of commercial sexual exploitation.
• Broadening understanding of the spectrum of gender based violence against women, to include commercial sexual exploitation.
• Building capacity to address commercial sexual exploitation. This will include the development of educational tools and materials, and ‘training for trainers’.
• Increasing opportunities for networking, information sharing and promoting good practice around work on commercial sexual exploitation through organisation of events, forums, seminars.
• Increasing opportunities for individuals to contribute to discussion and campaigning.

 For more information on commercial sexual exploitation, go to our information pages