Dr. Raven Bowen

Raven joined NUM as its CEO in September 2018. Although being originally from the UK, Raven spent much of her career in Canada in the third sector working with sex workers, survival sex workers and marginalized populations on programming, systemic advocacy, policy change and social justice. Raven has built an extensive network of sex industry workers, scholars and other stakeholders in the UK and around the world in her 25 years’ contributing to advancing rights, social protections and other entitlements for sex working communities. Raven was a frontline practitioner in Canada during periods of heightened social stigma and criminalization of sex workers, bearing witness to how the combined effects of limited access to social and police protection, displacement and predatory violence on the life chances of people who trade sex. Raven’s past research and PhD work contributes to nuanced understandings about stigma and victimization; transitioning (exiting) to and from sex work; and ‘duality’ —concurrent involvement in sex industry work and square work. Raven is the former administrator of the Sex Work Research Hub (SWRH), a UK-based scholarly community of over 150 sex work researchers, and a former Trustee of ScotPEP, a Scottish sex worker-led charity. She is a co-founder of CRN#6 ‘Sex, Work, Law and Society’ a collaborative research network that hosts international scholars at Law and Society Association Annual Conferences.