Carrie's Outreach

Three times a week, volunteers go into the community to speak to women who sell sex on the street.

The women are offered hygiene essentials, snacks and little luxuries in ‘bags of love’. The purpose of outreach is to show the women that we are thinking about them and we care very much about their safety.

By building positive relationships built on trust we hope to enable women to feel secure enough to visit the drop-in and to engage with support services.

Twice a week, volunteers run a trauma-informed drop-in service for women who sell sex at a time and venue suitable to the women’s needs.

The women can collect ‘bags of love’ and get support to engage with a range of support services who work with Carrie’s Outreach to provide services in a way that the women can access.

​Each woman who works with Carrie’s Outreach is regularly risk assessed and has an individual care plan to ensure that she is kept safe from harm and has her needs met. Care plans might include support with physical and sexual health need, mental health and emotional wellbeing, housing, contact with children and substance misuse.

Carrie’s Outreach are instrumental in the safeguarding forum and other multi-agency meetings for women who sell sex in Southend.

We work collaboratively to ensure that women get the support in a way that is suitable to their needs.

We raise awareness of the realities of selling sex and make sure the women’s voices are heard and listened to.

Carrie’s Outreach has funding to continue to deliver high quality, trauma-informed training for volunteers and others organisations who work with women who sell sex.

Most recently, Carrie's Outreach hosted a day’s training by the wonderful Kirsty Day from Nelson's Trust. This was CPD certified training for third sector workers to educate them in Trauma Informed Approaches with Women Who Sell Sex.

Women who sell sex are at high risk of all forms of harm, be that physical violence, sexual violence or the psychological impacts of trauma.

Historically, prostituted women have been seen as disposable and less important. The murders of women in Yorkshire in the 1970s and in Ipswich in 2006 show us how women who sell sex, or who are suspected of selling sex, are seen by the police and media as someone responsible for the harm that is perpetrated against them.

It took five vulnerable women to be murdered for agencies to come together to put an exit strategy in place in Ipswich.

We refuse to allow that to be what needs to happen in Southend for a service to developed.

Exit strategies work but they need to be available.

Carrie’s Outreach wants to make that a reality.

For Carrie, for Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell, Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol and Annette Nicholls and for all the women lost to prostitution.