Sacro is delighted to receive significant financial support from the UK Government's "Tampon Tax" to increase the availability of support to women involved in prostitution who use online services to find clients.
The Scotland-wide project will reach out to women online, provide basic safety information and support and signpost them to specialist one-to-one support services.
Sacro Chief Executive, Tom Halpin said: “This is great news for Sacro and our partners from Womens Support and the Encompass Network. Our “Another Way” service established our support working with women involved in prostitution for 14 years and we’ve seen how the landscape has changed with the advent of digital technologies. This will enable us to reach many more women; focusing on their safety and health and ensuring they can access support as and when they need it”.
The vast majority of the money received will be used to boost frontline service provision, providing specialist support in areas that previously had no services available.
The funding also includes some provision to develop an app and website aimed at providing details of local services that may be of interest to women, and the option to participate in an online chat.
Aaron Slater, Service Manager at Sacro said: “We recognise that more women are advertising on online spaces and we hope that an online platform will provide an additional opportunity for some of these women to get information and access to services. Sacro’s online presence will be designed to complement existing harm reduction services and a key consideration in the development of this will be ensuring that personal data isn’t gathered so women can be confident of accessing the resource completely anonymously.
“Now that this funding has been secured we are able to progress the development of the service and our engagement with women and key stakeholders. Service user involvement is a key aspect of this piece of work, as we recognise that any new service should reflect the needs of the people it serves”.
Sacro’s ethos is always to support the needs of those who use its services and is uncompromisingly non-judgmental in its approach with the welfare of the service user at the heart of any service delivered by the organisation.
The funding of £1,092,194 has been awarded from the UK Government’s “Tampon Tax” fund which allocates the proceeds of VAT on women’s sanitary products to charities supporting women.
