This excerpt is too thin to judge fairly, so no score is asserted. The Lens never fakes precision.
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Scores the coverage against responsible-reporting standards — never the event or the people in it. Grounded in journalist guides by SWAN Vancouver, BSÖ Austria, Red Canary Song, Sonke / SWEAT / Sisonke / WLC and the Sex Workers Project. Beta — {{ live.lensBasis }}
Every news article on Sesha is rated on how it covers sex work — the journalism, never the events or the people in it. The Reporting Lens scores each article 0–100 across six dimensions — language, legal framing, whose voices are heard, narrative, privacy, and sensationalism — and shows a plain-language reason for every one.
The standards are not our opinion. They come from the sex-worker movement’s own published guides for journalists. We built and calibrated the Lens against resources from:
It reads the full article text where it can, and tells you when it is working from an excerpt or from another report on the same story. It flags recurring failures the guides name specifically — conflating sex work with trafficking, rescue narratives, police-only sourcing, stigmatizing language, outing, and racialized framing.
The Lens is media literacy, not censorship: every article stays visible, labeled. We keep the exact scoring method private so it can’t be gamed — but the standards it measures against are public, we cite the organizations behind them, and every score shows its reasons so you can judge the judge.
Beta — we are actively refining the Lens with more of these guides as we find them.
Project Sesha takes its name from Seshat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of writing, record-keeping, measurement, and the ordering of knowledge — “the female scribe,” “lady of writings,” “lady of plans.” She did not simply write things down; she made sure important things were recorded, ordered, and preserved, and through the rite of “stretching the cord” she helped lay the foundations of what was still to be built.
Sesha carries those ideas forward. It gathers what is otherwise scattered across countries, languages, and sources: the daily flow of news, policy and research; appeals for sex workers who have gone missing; a memorial record of those who have been killed; and a global directory of the organizations working for the community’s safety, rights and support. Any one of these can be lost as the news cycle moves on — so Sesha finds, organizes, and preserves them together, to be searched, followed over time, and understood as a whole.
Recording is never neutral: what we collect, how we classify it, and how people are represented all shape the record that remains. So Sesha pairs technology with careful sourcing, transparent classification, and human oversight — especially where stories involve violence, criminalization, stigma, or risk.
Project Sesha — because every story counts.
Sources: the British Museum, UCL Digital Egypt, and the Global Egyptian Museum.
Project Sesha was founded by sociologists Dr. Raven Bowen and Dr. Patrick Burnett. They met in 2014 through a University of British Columbia research project and have collaborated on sex-worker safety, data, and technology ever since — much of it through National Ugly Mugs. Sesha grew from a problem they kept hitting: vital stories about sex work are published every day, yet scattered and easily lost. It joins Raven’s advocacy, research, and policy leadership to Patrick’s data infrastructure and applied machine learning — so sex workers’ lived experiences can no longer be made invisible.
A sociologist, researcher, and author with three decades in sex-worker communities across Canada and the UK. CEO of National Ugly Mugs (2018–2025), now its Head of Research, Innovation and Expansion. Her book Work, Money and Duality won the 2022 British Society of Criminology Book Prize. She created Red Umbrella Research, a public-sociology channel that will form part of Sesha’s knowledge ecosystem. For Sesha she leads research scope, policy relevance, editorial standards, and the community-informed governance of sensitive stories.
A computational and relational sociologist, applied data scientist, and tool builder in British Columbia, with a PhD in Sociology from UBC. He works across natural-language processing, machine learning, mapping, and relational analysis, focused on sex-industry safety and communities poorly served by conventional technology. Since 2021 he has partnered with National Ugly Mugs on data and technology projects supporting sex worker safety. For Sesha he leads software, architecture, data collection, search and classification, mapping, and the responsible use of AI.
Social links coming soon.