On day two of our ‘Sixteen Activists or Organisations Around the Globe Fighting to End Digital Violence Against all Women and Girls‘ campaign, Lynsey Walton discusses the interconnections between digital violence and stigma, NUM’s critical safety and advocacy services, alongside the necessity of frontline support.
Lynsey Walton is the CEO of National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a pioneering, non-profit organisation that facilitates access to justice and protection for sex workers across the UK. This community can be targeted by dangerous individuals, while facing barriers to reporting, services and police protection. NUM provides digital reporting and alerts about such individuals, alongside specialist advocacy and services informed by lived experience, professional practice and research.
Founded in 2012, NUM grew out of decades of “ugly mugs” schemes created by sex worker communities themselves and peer-led warning systems dating back to the 1980s. NUM formalised this critical work into a national, rights-based organisation to ensure that sex workers could report violence safely, receive support and share information that prevents further harm. This was especially crucial at a time when statutory systems routinely failed to protect them.
Lynsey became CEO because this work has been close to her heart since she was a teenager, driving her empathy for why “it matters.” With close connections to the community, she understands the realities sex workers deal with and how badly systems can fail them. Lynsey wanted to be in a role where she could actually change that rather than just work around the gaps.
Lynsey also maintains a “real passion for amplifying the voices of sex workers because no one knows better what they want or need in their own lives than workers themselves.” She stresses that NUM is one of the few organisations that “genuinely listens and puts sex workers first.” Leading it felt like a natural place for Lynsey to concentrate her energy and skills.
In this interview, Lynsey talks about the nature of digital violence and stigma towards sex workers, NUM’s critical safety and advocacy services, alongside the need for frontline support and resistance to the policies and platforms that harm this community.
How does digital violence manifest towards sex workers?
Digital violence towards sex workers shows up in a lot of interconnected ways, and it rarely stays “online.” It can involve doxxing, where people share a worker’s real name, address or personal details as a threat, or image-based abuse such as stolen content, hacked accounts, screenshots shared without consent, or whole galleries scraped from subscription platforms. Harassment and coordinated pile-ons are common, alongside fraud, impersonation, fake bookings, chargebacks and people posing as workers or clients. Extortion often sits on top of all of this, using stolen images or hacked profiles to pressure people. For sex workers, these harms blend quickly into offline risks of violence, loss of income, housing problems, immigration issues, and mental health strain, because digital abuse is never just digital for this community.
What has your experience been like working within a non-profit organisation that advocates for sex workers? Have you encountered any specific challenges or barriers?
It’s incredibly meaningful, and it’s also messy because stigma is sticky! You see very quickly how much harder everything becomes when the people you support are constantly judged or politicised.
One big barrier is navigating systems – funders, policymakers, even parts of the VAWG sector – where sex workers are still treated as an afterthought or a ‘problem’ to be managed. That impacts everything from partnership work to how seriously people take digital violence against sex workers.
But the flip side is that the community is resilient, talented and collaborative. That’s what makes the work worth doing.
What services and tools does NUM offer to survivors of digital sexual violence?
NUM offers specialist, practical support that’s designed around the realities of sex work. This includes our national reporting and alerting system, which helps track digital and offline violence and prevent further harm, alongside 1:1 casework that covers safety planning, advocacy with police and online platforms, and specialised mental health support. We also provide hands-on digital safety help, whether that’s removing harmful content, dealing with impersonation or stolen images, or navigating platform reporting routes that are often not built with sex workers in mind. Our evidence and analysis highlight patterns of harm and help us push for better policy and tech responses. When people need support beyond our expertise, such as legal advice or immigration guidance, we connect them with specialist partners. Everything we offer is trauma-informed, non-judgmental and built to meet people where they are.
Is there adequate visibility of sex worker voices within research on technology-facilitated gender-based violence?
Not yet and the gap is glaring! Sex workers are one of the groups most affected by digital violence, but they are routinely left out of mainstream gender-based violence research. Studies rarely include sex workers as participants, and many frameworks fail to recognise the specific dynamics of digital harm in the sex industry.
There’s also a historic reluctance within academia and policy spaces to engage with sex worker-led organisations. When sex workers are excluded, the research becomes less accurate and less useful.
Visibility improves when researchers treat sex workers as partners, not subjects, and when funders recognise sex worker-led expertise as essential rather than optional.
What needs to change on a policy, platform and societal level to address digital sexual violence in the sex work community?
Addressing digital sexual violence against sex workers requires change on several levels. At a policy level, sex workers need to be recognised as victims of crime and included in digital safety strategies, and the criminalisation of online activity has to stop pushing people into riskier environments. Reporting routes also need to be safe, without exposing workers to arrest, immigration issues or child protection fears. Platforms need to involve sex workers in designing their safety features and moderation rules, end blanket bans that punish workers instead of those causing harm and build reporting systems that are actually usable for people dealing with digital abuse. And socially, we have to challenge the whorephobia that underpins so much of this because online harm towards sex workers is gender-based violence, not an occupational inevitability.
What are your hopes for ending digital violence towards women and girls, and the part that NUM will continue to play in such a complex task?
My hope is that digital spaces stop being places where women, girls, and marginalised genders are targeted or punished for existing ….and that absolutely includes sex workers, who are often the first to face harm and the last to be protected. NUM’s role in this is to keep pushing for practical, evidence-based change: providing specialist frontline support, building tools that reflect the real patterns of digital violence we see every day, challenging policies and platforms that put sex workers at risk, and making sure sex workers’ expertise shapes digital safety conversations from the outset rather than as an afterthought. Ending digital violence is complex, but it becomes far more possible when the people most affected are part of designing the solutions.
