BELLA ROBINSON BIO-
is a sex worker rights activist and advocate with four decades of experience in the sex industry. Driven by her firsthand experience and a deep commitment to justice, she founded the Rhode Island chapter of Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE RI) in 2009, following the state’s reversal of its decriminalization of indoor sex work (originally achieved in 1979).
As director of COYOTE RI, Bella focuses on building and strengthening support networks for sex workers in Rhode Island, collaborating with activists nationwide to center the voices of sex workers and trafficking survivors in policy discussions. Her advocacy is informed by her own experience with incarceration, including five years at Lowell Correctional Institute in Florida in the late 1990s, where she experienced sexual assault at the hands of the state. This experience fuels her advocacy for sex worker rights as a crucial alternative to carceral approaches to sex trafficking.
Bella’s expertise is unparalleled, shaped by decades of navigating the criminal justice system and the sex industry. Through COYOTE RI, she connects with national and international sex worker rights organizations, mobilizing support for those impacted by violence, both interpersonal and state-sanctioned. She believes in helping to lift less empowered women into leadership positions.
Continuing COYOTE’s legacy of impactful advocacy, which includes the landmark 1976 case COYOTE vs. Roberts that initially decriminalized indoor sex work in Rhode Island,= Bella conducts research to amplify the lived experiences of sex workers and trafficking survivors for legislators. She champions the rights of sex workers and advocates forpolicies that prioritize their safety and autonomy, employing legislative strategies, policy statements, and direct engagement in political arenas.
Bella’s leadership extends to several other organizations. She is a member of the Erotic Service Providers Union (ESPU), which promotes sex workers’ agency through industrial organizing for legal, occupational, social, and economic rights. She served on the board and as secretary of the ESPU Legal, Education and Research Project (2012-2016), a California-based non-profit supporting decriminalization. She also serves on the advisory committee of the Sex Worker Outreach Project Behind Bars (SWOP Behind Bars), supporting incarcerated sex workers, the steering committee of the Womxn’s Project, and the advisory committee of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.
A sought-after speaker, Bella has presented at dozens of universities and conferences across the US, sharing her expertise on sex work and trafficking. She also conducted five of the six surveys informing the influential “Sex Work Policy” publications, a project based on over a decade of her work.
Learn more at http://linktr.ee/coyote.ri
Email: bella@coyoteri.org.
BELLA’S STORY: “From Teenaged Prostitute to Sex Workers’ Rights Advocate. Activist Bella Robinson feels victimized by laws intended to help people like her” [Link]
MORE ABOUT BELLA:
From 2012 to 2018, Bella also serves as a board member and secretary of The Erotic Service Providers Union Legal, Education and Research Project (ESPLERP), a diverse community-based erotic service provider-led group which seeks to empower the erotic community and advances sexual privacy rights through legal advocacy, education, and research. In our legal advocacy, we seek to create change through a combination of impact litigation, policy statements, and voicing our concerns for our community in political arenas. Through educational training and outreach, we will empower and capacity builds to address discrimination of erotic service providers and the greater erotic community. Lastly, we strive to archive and rate much of the research which has been done by and for the sex worker community and build on this history with research that seeks to be increasingly inclusive, respectful, and ultimately, relevant to the erotic service providers and the larger erotic community.
Bella is also on the advisory committee of the Sex Worker Outreach Project Behind Bars (SWOP Behind Bars), an organization that supports incarcerated sex workers. With SWOP Behind bars, Bella works to send over 1,000 incarcerated sex workers a newsletter every month. Incarcerated sex workers are also supported through pen pal programs, a book program, and 6 paralegal correspondence courses every year. SWOP Behind Bars and COYOTE also act as case managers and help those being released to access reentry services. Most importantly, Bella works to create a community, among sex workers and advocate for their collective rights.
Through COYOTE, Bella also networks with several other sex worker rights organizations nationally and internationally. Through these networks, we can rally around people within the sex workers’ community who have been victims of physical violence as well as state-sponsored violence. COYOTE has worked to support many youths who have engaged in survival sex and the criminal justice system refused to acknowledge their status as domestic sex trafficking victims. Bella works with activists from other organizations to educate public defender offices county by county, so they better understand how to best defend people with prostitution-related charges.
Bella has also upheld COYOTE’s history of advocating for a more just sex work policy nationwide. In 1976, COYOTE sued the Rhode Island Attorney General, in the landmark case COYOTE vs. Roberts, regarding the constitutionality of the state’s prostitution laws, resulting in the decriminalization of indoor sex work between consenting adults. In 2009 indoor sex work was recriminalized and since then Bella has undertaken research projects within the state to better understand how this policy change impacted sex workers directly. Bella is a vocal advocate for the rights of sex workers and the creation and implementation of a policy that protects the safety and autonomy of sex workers.
Bella was also featured in the 2013 award-winning film American Courtesans as Gina Robinson. Bella is now known around the world as an authentic activist and advocate with a lifetime of lived experience in the sex industry.
BELLA ROBINSON / ACTIVIST EDUCATION
2012
December 10th, 2012 Bella and Christina Parreira presented on “Sex Worker Rights” for Vicky J Wysoczanska’s Human Sexuality Class at Rutgers University
2013
July 2013 Bella and Maxine Doogan presented on ESPLER v GASCON and the Erotic Service Providers Union at the 5th Annual Desiree Alliance conference
November 4th, 2013 Bella presents “Sex Workers’ Rights, the trafficking narrative and the effects of criminalization” at the University of New Hampshire for Dr. Ryan’s class, After a screening of the 2012 award-winning Film “American Courtesans” which featured Bella as Gina Robinson
December 11th, 2013 Bella presented on “Sex Worker Rights” for Vicky J Wysoczanska’s Human Sexuality Class at Rutgers University
2014
May 5th- May 11th, 2014 Bella and Miss R, both members of ESPU (The Erotic Service Providers Union) attend the Regina v Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference
July 26 -July 31st, 2014 Bella attends the 39TH Annual Northeast Regional Summer School for Union Women at Queen’s University
October 2014 Bella is certified in “Human Trafficking” by Ohio University in affiliation with Coursera Online learning, becoming more acquainted with the many flaws of conflating trafficking with sex work.
November 5th, 2014 Bella presents on Sex Workers’ Rights at the University of New Hampshire for Dr. Ryans’s class.
August- November 2014 Bella participated in a weekly study group by phone conference with members of several sex worker’s rights organizations in the US, and they studied the book “Taking the Crime Out of Sex Work, New Zealand Sex Workers Fight To Decriminalization”
2015
March 12th, 2015 Bella attended an alumni event at Brown University and confronted Katherine Chon the co-founder of Emerita Polaris Project regarding “Polaris Project” publishing false statistics on trafficking. This resulted in Polaris Project, taking down the page on their website that said the average age of entry was 13.
April 27th, 2015 Bella presented on the “policing identities panel” at Brown University.
April 30th, 2015 Bella and Professor Shih attended a conference “R.I. task force developing protocols on handling sex-trafficking cases”
November 10th, 2015 Bella presented at Southern Connecticut State University for DR Alan Brown, Assistant Professor of Criminology
July 26th-30th 2015 Bella and M Dante who are members of ESPU (The Erotic Service Providers Union) attended the 40th Annual Northeast Regional Summer School for Union Women at Penn State University
September 19th, 2015 Bella was a keynote speaker at The Libertarian Party of Connecticut 2015 convention
November 18, 2015, Bella hosted Alaskan native Tara Burns for a class “Community Action Research Methods: Policing and Sex Trafficking Alaska” which is the work we mimicked the RI survey after.
December 6th, 2017 Bella meets with Chris Sowa to organize activists nationwide to participate in a podcast called “Fighting the Trafficking Narrative from Alaska to Rhode Island” Episode 26
December 17th, 2015 Bella organizes and hosts Providence’s first “International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers” event at the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
CoyoteRI 2015 Annual Review & Reflections
CoyoteRI 2016 Annual Review & Reflections
Coyote RI 2017 Annual Review & Reflections
Coyote RI 2018 Annual Review & Reflections
Coyote RI 2019 Fact Sheet – Coyote RI At A Glance
Coyote RI 2019 Annual Review & Reflections
Coyote RI 2020 Annual Review & Reflections
Bella Robinson- 2019 Resume for Soros Justice Fellowship
