Women, Assume Position
Sathi Patel calls for dismantling patriarchy and capitalism’s exploitation of prostituted and homeless women. Read Project Priceless’s incisive letter to the Worcester City Administration.
By Sathi Patel
Sisters,
No one is coming to save us. No institution, no state, no “community” will step in to liberate women from the brutal systems of oppression that imprison us. If we don’t act, no one will. If we don’t fight for the women cast aside, forgotten, and left to die in the streets, their stories will remain untold, and their suffering will be erased.
But here’s the truth: we do have the power to change the world. We just have to rise and take it. It is imperative to act now. Talk to the women in your city. Talk to the women on the streets. Listen to them. Learn from them. Organize with them. Together, we can dismantle the systems that reduce women’s bodies to public property—owned, abused, and exploited by the average man and the state alike.
The recent Department of Justice report on the systemic abuses of prostituted women by the Worcester Police Department is yet another grim confirmation of what we have always known: the state colludes with the patriarchy to exploit and subjugate the most vulnerable among us. These are not “bad apples” or isolated incidents. This is the logical outcome of systems that treat women’s lives as disposable and their bodies as commodities for male consumption.
We refuse to let another generation of women be resigned to this fate. We refuse to let them be brutalized, discarded, and forgotten. The fight for prostituted women is not a separate struggle; it is the frontline of the global feminist revolution. These women are at the nexus of sex and class oppression, where patriarchy and capitalism intersect to maintain their domination. If we liberate the women at the very bottom, we create a pathway for liberation for all women.
This is our charge: to organize, to resist, to build. Start where you are. Talk to the women who endure this oppression every day. Create spaces of solidarity and organize actions. Build collectives that center their leadership and amplify their voices. Don’t wait for permission or resources to fall into your lap—start with what you have. The world will not change unless we change it.
This is not charity; it is revolution. It is a call to action for every radical feminist who refuses to let another woman die in the streets, unremembered and unavenged. The women that society has abandoned have so much to teach us about survival, about resistance, and about hope. They are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.
We have the power to change the world. It is our responsibility to do so. Together, we will ensure no woman is left behind, no woman is silenced, and no woman is forgotten. The time is now. The revolution is ours to build. See how the leadership of prostituted women on the feminist front has average people who care shifting their language from upholding the liberal sex-work paradigm to condemning the institution of sexual slavery in front of our municipality? We must because we can and because it works.
On December 9th, 2024, the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division report detailing the Worcester Police Department’s pattern of racial discrimination, excessive use of force, and “outrageous government conduct that violates the constitutional rights of women suspected of being involved in the commercial sex traded by engaging in sexual contact during undercover operations” was leaked to the press. This is Project Priceless’s response.
Project Priceless is a grassroots collective of women surviving and struggling to exit prostitution in the city of Worcester. Our vision is to legitimize the struggle for women’s liberation from the state-sanctioned markets that commercialize women’s bodies and to expose the failures of legal reforms to address the subordinate civil and class status of all women to male dominance.
I am 21 years old, standing at the precipice of a fight that so few are willing to undertake. Without institutional support, without a thriving feminist movement in the First World, I have turned to the women society deems unworthy of care. It is an incredible honor of mine to know, to love, and to learn from women who have nothing left to lose but their shackles. These women—homeless, prostituted, dehumanized—are not victims to be pitied; they are leaders in this sexual revolution. Their courage, resilience, and refusal to be erased inspire me every day.
Be inspired by the resilience of the women of Project Priceless while confronting their most powerful rapists: the johns of the local police department. Let this moment in history inspire us all to come together to organize a women’s rebellion out of sexual slavery.
December 11, 2024
To the Worcester City Administration,
The initial reactions of Project Priceless to the DOJ report were a mix of disgust, disappointment, and a grim acknowledgment that these findings, while jarring, confirm what we have long known about the systemic abuse of prostituted women by those in power. We are outraged but not surprised by the depth of misogyny and violence revealed. Most importantly, we see this as a critical opportunity to unite all women in Worcester on the feminist front against rape, exploitation, and male violence. This moment demands collective action to dismantle the systems that perpetuate these abuses and to demand justice and liberation for all women.
The recent Department of Justice findings on the systemic violations of women’s constitutional rights by the Worcester Police Department are an urgent indictment of the systems of male dominance and patriarchal violence that govern our city, our nation, and indeed the world. These findings, which detail the coercion of prostituted women into sexual acts under threat of arrest and the broader neglect and abuse of our rights, make it clear that this is not merely a local issue. It is part of a global feminist struggle for liberation from subjugation—a struggle in which homeless women are emerging as leaders in the advancement of feminism in the First World, fighting for justice against the overlapping oppressions of sex, class, and state power.
Prostituted women are at the nexus of the global sex–class struggle. Their oppression is not incidental but systemic, rooted in the economic and patriarchal structures that treat women’s bodies as commodities. Homeless women are preyed on by the industry of prostitution out of economic desperation, only to find themselves further dehumanized by criminalization and abuse. The revelations about the Worcester Police Department demonstrate that state agents, who should protect the vulnerable, are instead using their authority to perpetuate and deepen the exploitation of destitute women. They are paid, with public taxpayer money, to rape women. This is not simply a failure of policy, “a few bad apples,” or so-called gender bias; it is a reflection of entrenched male entitlement and state-sanctioned violence that prioritize power over justice.
This abuse of prostituted women represents the intersection of capitalist and patriarchal exploitation. Under capitalism, poverty forces women into the street economy while patriarchy legitimizes the commodification of their bodies so men can have public access to sex. Worcester police officers, in leveraging their power to coerce sexual acts, have embodied both systems of oppression, using their authority as a weapon against women who have already been pushed to the margins of society. Prostitution itself is a manifestation of male dominance, where women’s subjugation is institutionalized and protected by patriarchal law. The Worcester Police Department’s actions, as outlined in the DOJ report, are the logical outcome of a system that sees women’s bodies as instruments for male use.
This is a moment of reckoning for the Worcester city administration. At stake is not just the integrity of law enforcement in our city but the broader struggle for women’s liberation. The abuse and exploitation of prostituted women are not isolated incidents; they are part of a global war on women, where patriarchal institutions collude to maintain control over women’s lives and bodies. Prostituted women stand on the front lines of this battle in the First World. We are leading the charge not because we have the luxury of choice but because we are forced to resist or be crushed under the weight of oppression.
We have already lost too many women to this cycle of violence, criminalization, and neglect. Women subjected to prostitution are disproportionately victims of femicide, battery and assault, and untreated trauma. The lack of meaningful resources for women on the streets—housing, healthcare, mental health services, and viable economic alternatives—leaves us at the mercy of systems that exploit our vulnerabilities. These cops are also not at the crux of our day-to-day survival of male violence; we are the subject of the daily abuse of random homeless men, boyfriends, pimps, and johns. It is precisely because of this vacuum of care that Project Priceless exists. Our organization fills the void left by a society that devalues women’s lives and deems our survival unworthy of investment. Every woman in Worcester should be livid about these findings because they set a dangerous precedent: that it is permissible to rape women by virtue of our class position. The systemic abuses exposed by the DOJ send a chilling message—that the lives and bodies of poor women are disposable. This should outrage every woman because it reinforces the hegemonic power of patriarchy and male dominance. Our fight is the fight of all women, and it demands your immediate and decisive action.
We, as Project Priceless, a self-determined and self-organized collective of homeless prostituted women, demand the following from the Worcester city administration:
Acknowledge and Apologize: Publicly acknowledge the harm caused by the Worcester Police Department and issue a formal apology to the women affected. Words alone will not suffice, but they are a necessary step in admitting systemic failure.
Empower the Work of Project Priceless: We are currently organizing outside in the cold. We are in dire need of a building to both shelter homeless women and to securely organize and store the material aid we distribute to the homeless. Knowing what we know about the vulnerabilities of women to exploitation and abuse, there is no one better to run a female-exclusive shelter than us. We are collecting financial and material donations in general.
Provide Reparations: Allocate financial reparations and mental health support to women harmed by these systemic abuses. Reparation is not charity; it is justice.
Criminalize exploiters: The abuse of any woman is a crime against all women. Prosecute men who buy sex & commodify and sell women. Put their names on a list like you have a list of women charged with “sexual conduct for a fee”—give them a Scarlet Letter just like ours.
Commit to Abolition: Recognize prostitution as a form of systemic exploitation and commit to its abolition. This requires creating pathways out of prostitution by addressing the structural inequalities that force women into it—poverty, homelessness, and the lack of viable economic alternatives. According to the DOJ, women have not been prosecuted for selling sex in Worcester since 2018; this should be the precedent going forward to ensure women are no longer criminalized for what happens to us. The only two organizations in the city taking care of this class of women are both politically struggling to abolish prostitution—we suggest you listen to us if you “care about women”. The struggle for “decriminalization of sex work” in Massachusetts is led by a meth-dealing child rapist. Good luck supporting that front.
We do not support the DOJ’s recommended remediations. It is not enough to pay cops to take equity and “gender-bias” trainings. Men don’t need to be told over and over again that rape and exploitation are antithetical to human rights. The stakes could not be higher. The struggle for women’s liberation is the struggle for humanity’s liberation from systems of domination, exploitation, and violence. Worcester must decide whether it will be complicit in the perpetuation of these systems or whether it will stand on the side of justice. The women who have been failed by this city and its institutions are leading the fight for our dignity and survival. We demand not charity, not pity, but real, structural change.
The Worcester city administration has the power to act boldly and decisively. The world is watching—not only because of the DOJ’s findings but because the struggle in Worcester reflects a broader feminist movement to dismantle patriarchy and liberate women from all forms of oppression. This is your opportunity to be on the right side of history. Your names are all a matter of public record. You want Worcester to be known and remembered? Definitely wasted your breath on that ballpark. Worcester will never be known for WooSox but will definitely never live down the legacy of its brutal misogyny. And we’ll make sure of it.
Signed,
Project Priceless
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