By name, the Cupcake Girls might seem playful. But the nonprofit is not messing around when it comes to helping survivors of sex trafficking and shattering stigmas surrounding sex work.
It’s important work, considering Las Vegas has the third-highest rate of human trafficking in the U.S., according to data from the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The Cupcake Girls combat that through outreach, advocacy, resources and referral services.
Executive director Amy-Marie Merrell says the organization, which was founded in Las Vegas in 2011, serves about 250 to 300 clients per year. In addition to helping clients navigate a network of more than 400 partnering service providers across the U.S.—“doctors, dentists, lawyers, daycare providers, auto mechanics, counseling, you name it”—the Cupcake Girls also offer “trauma-informed” trainings for the community, helping promote a broader understanding of traumas surrounding trafficking, and how the community can help.
“We’ll provide community education to first responders, but also to businesses,” Merrell says. “We do a really good job when it comes to understanding that everybody is human and valid and wanted.”
The Weekly sat down with Merrell to talk about how she became an activist, the difference between sex work and sex trafficking, and the Cupcake Girls’ new resource center planned for the Arts District.
The Cupcake Girls’ mission is to support people in the sex industry and to provide prevention and aftercare to those affected by sex trafficking. How did you become interested in this kind of work? I moved to Portland, Oregon in 2009. And [what] kind of solidified my life’s work [was] ... I went on a run with my dog, and it was like 4:30 in the morning, and I ran past this man. And I thought that he was hugging this woman who was crying. And I realized that he was actually holding her with his left arm and punching her in the side with his right arm. And so I ran backwards to a security guard to ask if they could call 911. And the security guard laughed at me and he was like, “She’s a prostitute. They’re just going to arrest her anyway.” And so I ran to my apartment, and I called 911. But by the time the police got there, the woman was gone, and the man was gone. And I asked the officers, “Hey, is this true? Is this what would have happened?” And they [said], “Well, if it’s the woman that this guy says it is, then yeah. She does have a few warrants.” And I was like, “This is crap.”
Within two weeks, I was sitting across from the chief of police. And she told me that if I wanted to make any change in this world, I needed to get involved with changing legislation or work with grassroots nonprofits. So then I dedicated my life to doing both of those things, and was working alongside houselessness nonprofits, domestic violence shelters, and anti-trafficking groups.
How did you end up finding the Cupcake Girls? The more that I was working with a lot of these groups, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for volunteers to provide actual tangible change opportunities for the folks that were in their services. And so I thought it was really cool that the Cupcake Girls allowed for volunteers to work with folks that were in the industry and be able to share and have peer support.
What do you wish more people understood about the connection between sex trafficking and sex work? A lot of folks assume that [since] they’re out of sex trafficking, they’re not wanting to do sex work at all. That’s not really true. Many times, folks continue in sex work as a means to survive, because of many reasons including the intense stigma on sex trafficking survivors and sex workers. And so these folks, they have a hell of a time trying to get a nine-to-five job.
The Cupcake Girls have a slogan posted on social media: The difference between sex work and sex trafficking is consent. Why is that distinction so important? It’s important that we’re not conflating sex work and sex trafficking for a few reasons. A, we don’t want to accidentally put somebody in jail when they’re literally trying to survive and escape a terrible [situation]. B, we want to make sure that people have the wraparound support that they need when leaving a traumatic situation.
And C, we want to make sure that we’re destigmatizing and decriminalizing sex work as a whole, so that we can truly be funding the thing that we’re trying to fund. We see millions of dollars going into the anti-trafficking world. But when we’re looking at the amount of folks that are actually being helped, we’re just really spending money under the guise of spreading awareness, or actually not serving anybody.
The Cupcake Girls announced it will be opening a new resource center in the Arts District. What can we look forward to there? [Director] Asia Duncan is leading that. … We’re going to have space for workforce development, for folks to come in with their own nonprofits and be able to put on different resume-writing events; different marketplace events where our participants can sell their wares; free grocery opportunities, because that area of town is a food desert. So that’s all happening on one side of the building. And then on the other side of the building will be Cupcake Girls offices, so that we will be able to serve our participants well, in a really central location.
I think that a lot of the time when it comes to oppressed people, we want to push them away and pretend like they don’t exist. … We need to make sure that we’re front and center as an organization.
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