horizontl Collaborative works to promote protective digital inclusion for the public benefit by working with people in the UK and EU who are socially, digitally and financially excluded on the grounds of being identified with a stigmatized, marginalized community, with a particular focus on full-service sex workers, to relieve the harms against such people and assist them in equitable participation in society.

Our primary service is designing and implementing programs that allow a marginalized community to speak for and represent itself regarding the design and governance of technology that is in both their, and the general public's, interest. Much of what is considered inevitable about existing technology, including exploitation and abuse, is, in fact, the result of deliberate, self-interested business, design, and policy choices by existing technology companies. Our work produces public research on best practices for the digital (and by extension, social and economic) inclusion of some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. Our work is designed to inform responsible, community-supporting technology innovation and to meaningfully represent marginalized, often ignored voices, regarding existing and proposed technology regulation. 

Our work matters because estimates find that 90 - 95% of the estimated 40M sex workers globally are consensual, but the majority are marginalized and vulnerable (poor, migrant/refugee, LGBTQI+, disabled, single mothers). In the UK, the estimated 70,000 - 100,000 consensual workers are 88% women; 74% cite the need to “pay household expenses and support their children.” Social stigma, an absence of protections, and misguided policy & interventions marginalize them further. A majority of workers have experienced workplace violence. Labor exploitation is the norm, with coercion & trafficking the most extreme forms.

The internet, largely by accident, made sex work safer and less exploitative. Work moved from the streets to safer indoor environments; workers put protective distance between the first point of contact and in-person meeting and shared best practices & information. For the first time, many were able to work independently, controlling their labor, keeping more of their income, and exiting work more quickly with the achievement of financial stability. Researchers have linked the introduction of Craigslist’s Erotic Services, a marketplace for sexual services, to a 17.4% decline in the overall female homicide rate in the US.

But digital platforms were never an intervention by design; they reinforced old forms of exploitation and introduced new ones. Offline norms of exploitation migrated online and default anonymity provided cover for traffickers and abusive clients. It has triggered a backlash. Threatened with fines and prosecution for enabling trafficking, but not built to identify it, big tech is increasingly, and unaccountably, profiling all sex work-related behaviors and pushing sex workers out of essential, protective digital spaces. Sex workers are unaccountably tracked/profiled and arbitrarily, unanswerably, and permanently banned from essential, often general use, platforms. Thanks to workers’ lack of digital sophistication, or platforms’ hidden or required data collection practices, workers’ real IDs are tied to sex work for lifelong professional, financial, and social exclusion. The result is a return of pre-internet forms of exploitation and the rise of new forms of digital and financial exploitation and exclusion for an already marginalized group.

Yet none of this has helped victims or reduced exploitation or trafficking. US tech-focused anti-trafficking legislation FOSTA/SESTA, which other countries seek to emulate, is now considered failed policy by anti-trafficking experts: it has limited law enforcement mechanisms for identifying exploitation and failed to help victims. The prosecution of traffickers—a key metric of meaningful action—has remained stubbornly low.

We believe that by working with marginalized communities, we can help everyone understand how to build better digital technologies that protect and include everyone.