Building Bridges - Substance use and women selling or exchanging sex

Joint Session: Women’s Support Project & Scottish Recovery Consortium

This session is delivered as a joint collaboration between the Women’s Support Project and the Scottish Recovery Consortium, bringing together expertise in gendered harm, violence against women and girls, and lived and living experience of substance use and recovery.

By combining WSP’s long‑standing work on women involved in selling or exchanging sex with SRC’s leadership in recovery‑oriented systems of care, the session aims to bridge policy, practice and lived experience. The joint approach will explore how stigma, trauma, criminalisation and inequality shape women’s experiences, while also highlighting opportunities to strengthen trauma‑informed, rights‑based and recovery‑focused responses across services.

Drawing on frontline insight, national evidence and lived experience voices, this collaborative session will support participants to reflect on what effective, compassionate and joined‑up support looks like for women at the intersection of substance use and selling or exchanging sex, and how sectors can work together to reduce harm and improve long‑term recovery outcomes.

Substance use is a key issue in the lives of women involved in selling or exchanging sex. In Scotland, the Encompass Network snapshots have shown the links with almost half of the women involved disclosing substance use issue.

The links are clear with substance use acting as a pathway for women into selling/exchanging sex and increases risks whilst they are involved. It poses a double-stigma when accessing support and can reduce women’s options when they decide to move on from both these situations. It can continue to pose challenges for women in the longer term and in accessing recovery support.

This session will bring together a mix of policy makers, service leads and front line staff to discuss the links between substances, recovery and women selling / exchanging sex and the opportunities for the way ahead

Agenda

This session aims to create a safe space for open conversations on themes such as pathways into, risk and vulnerabilities, choice and consent and will include a mix of presentations and speaker inputs along reflective exercises and lots of discussion.

Who should attend?

This event is open to frontline workers and support services, and it will be of particular interest to those working in the sectors of violence against women; substance use and recovery; mental health; sexual health and relationships; housing; advice and support; criminal justice; public health; and social work.

Please note this event is funded through Delivering Equally Safe and follows the Scottish Government’s approach to commercial sexual exploitation

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Host or Publisher Scottish Recovery Consortium