We are seeking the stories of individual sex workers, sex workers advocates, and sex worker-connected people and organizations that have lost access to any type of financial service or been denied financial services.
We are specifically looking for people and organizations that lost access to financial services when it was unrelated to suspected fraud or credit worthiness. For example, if you are a sex worker and had your PayPal account frozen, even if you have used it the same way you have before, please share your story. If you are the spouse of a sex worker and you applied for a bank account and were turned down for no reason, please share your story. If you engage in advocacy around sex worker rights and had your organization’s Stripe account shuttered, please share your story. If you aren’t sure if your story is a good fit, feel free to email us at research@financialcensorship.org and we can discuss it.
Account closures could be in any type of financial service, such as a credit card account, Paypal account, Venmo account, Stripe account, banking services, or any other financial service. If this has happened to you, please share your story by emailing research@financialcensorship.org
We are looking for about three stories we can feature in a book about financial censorship and potentially on a website connected to the book. The book will track the impact of financial censorship on communities, websites, organizations, and individuals. We are investigating how banks like Chase, payment intermediaries like Paypal and Square, and credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard shut off the accounts of people and organizations without legal process, effectively censoring them. We will include stories from many different people and organizations, including investigative journalists, political activists, free software developers, sex workers, and booksellers.
The project will include personal stories, a legal analysis, and policy proposals, thus creating a vital and unique resource for policymakers, the media, and the general public.
Why you might want to do this
Sharing your story can help make a big difference!
This project will help shape public opinion, provide resources to investigators and the media, and inform policy makers. The hope is that this project will spur public outrage and media involvement, and may prompt legislators and regulators to investigate the issue and ideally ensure that financial companies have more accountability and transparency around how and when they deny services.
Long term, the project may help result in changes to the law so that financial companies have to serve everyone equally, including sex workers and sex worker advocates. By sharing your story, you’ll help make this fight personal and relatable.
Compensation
We understand that taking time to do an interview can be burdensome, and so we are offering $100 per completed interview. If you prefer to contribute your story as a volunteer, you may waive compensation.
How to share your story
If you are a sex worker, sex worker advocate, or work with a sex worker-connected organization that suffered from financial censorship, please email research@financialcensorship.org and tell us a little bit about what happened. We will ask a few questions over email to see if it is a good fit for our project. If it seems relevant to our research, we’ll schedule a time to interview you.
Interviews typically last about an hour and a half. Interviews typically include:
- Telling us about yourself, your background and history;
- Telling us about having your accounts closed or denied, and whether you were provided an explanation;
- Explaining what losing access to financial accounts felt like to you;
- Describing any hardship you may have suffered as a result of losing financial accounts; and
- Describing how you coped after losing your financial accounts.
If you have any documentation about your account closure or denial, we will request to see that as well. We will need some form of evidence that you lost access to your account or were denied a financial service.
Note: If you prefer not to use your real name in this project, let us know and we will substitute a pseudonym into the written version.
Photo Credit: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Sally T. Buck