«The Red Book Online: STI and BBV resources, for sex workers, by sex workers»

🗓️ N/A (live guide)
👥 Scarlet Alliance (+ lots of contributors)
🌐 Live text: https://redbook.scarletalliance.org.au/
💬🇬🇧🇨🇳🇹🇭🇰🇷
(Available in English, Chinese, Thai and Korean)

> The Red Book Online contains health and safety information by sex workers, for sex workers. There are a lot of ways sex workers can use the Red Book Online! There are a few different ways to find the information you’re looking for: BROWSE the resource, SEARCH for what you’re looking for, or use our QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE.

> This resource is a sex worker-led project. It has incorporated the efforts of sex workers, peer educators, sex worker organisations, community organisations and health professionals across Australia. It is made by sex workers, for sex workers.

> Much of the content builds on the printed resource, The Scarlet Alliance STI Handbook: A Reference Guide for Sex Workers to Sexually Transmissible Infection (“Red Book”). Red Book was first developed in 1998 with updates in 2003 and 2009. Many sex workers may be familiar with the pocket-sized Red Book that sex worker organisations have been handing out on outreach to sex worker workplaces for many years. The book is not currently available in that format, but all of the information it contains is regularly updated here on Red Book Online.

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This week I'm bringing something a little different for the #SWBooks series (also to expand it a little, since I'm mostly adding to the Spanish one…).

The Red Book is a collection of practical information on STIs, sexual health, and sex work on Australia, designed by and for people who very much cannot afford NOT to know but who nevertheless might not have had any real chances to learn any of it (and revised by physicians, yes…).

I'll say it outright: this is an absolutely wonderful resource for just about everyone with a sex live, and whose usefulness extends weeeeell beyond its original scope (be that sex workers, or Australia).
Yes, it's mostly basic; that's what high pragmatism tends to entail.
But for real, I've seen actual medical manuals and guides over an order of magnitude worse…

There are indeed sections specific to sex work (such as the extensive list of #SWTips for online SWers) or to #Australia (those on SW orgs, the legal mess, specific services available there, etc).
However, just about anyone can — and most certainly WILL — benefit from the core of the book: overview, signs and prevention guides for a whole host of STI, accompanied by basic sexual health and care information, and a bunch of tidbits such as, among others, how to check for STIs, making a dental dam, other safer sex resources…

The whole guide does have the unspoken but still kinda loud disclaimer of “upon doubt, consult a clinician”. Yeah, you can't actually get around this. That doesn't reduce one bit its usefulness, however; specially so when sex education is just cringeworthy just about everywhere.

But, at the end of the day… #SexWorkers ARE experts on their field. 😉

#SexWork #SWResources #SexualHealth #STI #ScarletAlliance #RedBook #RedBookOnline