A night of fun ended in tragedy for the family of OnlyFans model Adriana Vieira. The content creator was attending a party on an unnamed rapper’s yacht in the evening of September 21st, and her body was found floating in a Miami Harbor on the morning of September 22nd. Her death is still under investigation with an autopsy pending to determine whether or not there is suspicion of foul play.
Vieira was originally a model from Brazil, and relocated to the United States with her husband and young son 2 years ago. Her husband decided to leave, which meant that Vieira had to find a way to raise and support her child on her own. As so many beautiful young women do, she turned to OnlyFans, and was doing well as a content creator there. Her untimely death is a stark reminder of the heightened risk factors that sex workers accept in their lives in order to go about the work they do that allows them to pay the bills, and provide for their families.
Regardless of the impending autopsy findings, the end result is the same; a young mother who happened to engage in sex work via OnlyFans for a living has died far too soon, and her 6-year-old child will now have to go through life without his mom. Tragic, and unfortunately common.
Women in sex work— yes, even with the barrier of a screen that OnlyFans provides— have the tendency to die young. Some via complications from what should have been a routine surgery, like Christina Ashten Gourkani, but far more women in sex work are at risk of death by violence. In 2004, a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology determined that women who engage in sex work have a mortality rate of 391 per 100,000; and violence was the leading cause of death. It would seem that in 20 years, we haven’t really come much farther.
OnlyFans models consistently see higher threats of stalking and violence than women in other professions. The increased visibility of being an online personality, and the perceived intimate relationship that they have with their clients puts those who choose to engage in content creation on OnlyFans into a higher risk category when it comes to threats of violence, and overall life expectancy.
It’s 2024. It’s long past time that as a society, we accept that sex workers deserve to go about their work safely, regardless of anyone’s personal feelings about the nature of their work. People deserve safety, sex workers included. But due to the stigmatized nature of sex work, the hurdles that have to be overcome in order to make the world a safer place for this particular group of people are much steeper than they are in so many other professions.
OnlyFans models are here to stay. Sex workers are here to stay. The demand for their services began back when humans were still living in caves, and the only other profession options were “hunter” and “gatherer”. Sex work is as old as humanity, and the people who engage in it for income deserve to go home to their families when they clock out, and their children deserve to have that parent see their childhood. So how can we as a society reduce violence and improve safety conditions for women in particular in the sex work industry?
We can’t provide the answers all in one go, but by collectively continuing to pose the question, maybe someday more women like Adriana Vieira will make it safely home to their children instead of being fished out of a harbor.
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