Sex Workers Rights : a glass half full or half empty ?
Cheryl Overs
Advocacy for sex workers’ rights is a mountain of challenges. Not only is constructive dialogue impeded because the language is contested, but sex workers rights are problematised by confusion with various forms of sexual abuse. Sex workers have very limited opportunities to input, and those outside the US and Europe have little access to the technology and education needed to form an effective voice.
Despite this, over the last 20 years the Global Network Sex Workers Projects has successfully pushed the idea that sex work is work and have pressured governments the UN and the media to replace the term ‘prostitute’ with ’sex worker’. More than mere political correctness, this shift in language had the important effect of moving global understandings of sex worker rights towards a labour rights framework that could potentially resolve many of the problems faced by sex workers. This language also questions the stigma of sex work because it represents greater recognition of sex workers as rights bearers with the capacity to make their own choices.
Despite the turning tides, there is progress that is yet to be achieved. There is mounting evidence of an insidious trend to conflate the labour rights of sex workers with the issue of sexual exploitation. Although one UN conventions, the Palermo Protocol defines trafficking as including force, abuse, deceit or coercion it, and several other protocols promote criminalisation of ‘sexual exploitation’ which means any profiting from sex work and effectively mean outlawing the whole sex industry. This means that people who consent to sell sex are in the same category – victims – as those who do not consent. This supports the ideological agenda that sex work should be eliminated because, among other things, it is inherently abusive and/or it drives trafficking.
Statistics on human trafficking and/or sexual exploitation are inconsistent and self evidently flawed. Ronald Weitzer contends that “anti-trafficking campaigners erase women’s agency in sex work arguing instead that it is violence against women”.[i] Weitzer also exposes methodological flaws in sampling and response bias which have “[victimized] prostitutes” in the zeal to promote an anti-prostitution agenda. Yet several key institutions including the US government, UNICEF, United Nations Office in Drugs and Crime (UNODC) UNIFEM and several other UN agencies promote the idea that human trafficking is caused by the sex trade despite the lack of evidence.
As sexual exploitation and trafficking continues to elude a well-accepted definition we are witnessing the introduction of more anti-sexual exploitation and anti-trafficking laws that are driving crackdowns on sex work and closure of brothels that have resulted in abuse of sex workers and shifts from safe to very unsafe workplaces.[1] This is happening at the behest of the US government’s Trafficking in Persons reporting process and in the absence of any proven causal link between sex trafficking and HIV.
The link between anti-trafficking measures and reduced access to HIV prevention and treatment has not been empirically established but there is ample anecdotal evidence from countries including Korea, Cambodia and Guatemala that such laws have reduced attendance by female sex workers at STI clinics and caused condoms to be banned from sex venues for fear they will be used as evidence of ‘trafficking and sexual exploitation’
Treating people who sell sex with respect and enabling them to access safe workplaces and health services is clearly a much more effective framework for the prevention of HIV/AIDS than attempting to close the sex industry down in a misguided attempt to prevent trafficking and sexual exploitation.
When there is HIV programming for sex workers, it is often fraught with human rights violations. Female sex workers continue to be forced into unnecessary, costly and intrusive HIV and STI tests in all global regions and results are often not confidential. Some are shared with brothel owners, outreach workers and NGOs and the quality of pre- and post-test counselling frequently fails to inform sex workers of their right to refuse tests. In some places female and transgender sex workers are forcibly tested and pictures of HIV positive sex workers are even posted on the internet by police and penalties for prostitution are much higher for those who are living with HIV.
On a positive note, there are calls for a rights based approach. UNFPA has convened an standing Advisory Group on sex work with several UN agencies and some sex worker involvement. The Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health has also strongly supported calls for decriminalisation of sex work. [2] In Asia and the Pacific a meeting of government officials and NGOs concerned with sex work as held in Thailand last year. (Regional Consultation in Asia Pacific on Sex Work and HIV) recommendations for decriminalization of sex work, including laws against sex businesses, were endorsed. So to was UN commitment to the involvement of sex workers at all levels. There was a sympathetic response for calls to end violence faced by sex workers which are largely perpetrated by law enforcement agencies. It remains to be seen whether any of the government delegations have taken steps since to reign in the violent excesses of their police forces.
In March 2011, the US released a report to the UN Human Rights Council affirming that “no one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution.” However, the policy that requires all organizations that receive global HIV/AIDS President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funding to explicitly oppose prostitution remains in place and continues to impede sex workers’ access to services.
These developments reflect the view that human rights should not be viewed as separate from HIV prevention and treatment programmes. While programmes need to look at the legal and human rights issues for marginalised populations, it must be ensured that these programmes do not breach the human rights of any marginalised group. To overcome this, sex workers must be meaningfully engaged as partners in the development and implementation of HIV programmes and be given the capacity to strengthen their advocacy, networks and external relationships.
Sex workers have long advocated for changes to the laws, rules and policies that affect female, male and transgender sex workers. While some demands are country specific – according to local legal systems and cultural context – across the world there is an urgent need for the legal recognition of sex work as an occupation and the recognition of sex workers as full legal persons. This would not only improve the lives of sex workers but also achieve public health, social and economic goals and advance gender and sexuality rights. Moreover, the agenda to decriminalize sex work has the potential to create an environment in which child sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other exploitation and crimes associated with criminalised commercial sex can be effectively addressed.
So far those calls have gone unheeded except for some supportive statements by individuals in the UN. There is a Commission on Law and HIV whose report may change that but only if it can succeed where others have failed. To do this it must take the politically unpopular step of rejecting the notion that there is value in a law against profiting from sex work and acknowledge sex workers right to trade as employees or sole traders. This is what is meant by accepting that sex work is work.
It is important that people who work for HIV prevention, treatment and care, see female sex workers’ concerns as interconnected – which incidentally involves the category ‘sex worker’ being understood to include men. It is to be hoped that the positive developments we have mentioned are expanded, that agreements made at the Bangkok meeting last year are acted upon and that such ideas continue to gain interest and support internationally. Hopefully, over time, we will also see sex workers take over positions as advocates within the Global Fund, the UN and the women’s and labour movements.
Until then the question remains – is the sex workers rights glass half full or half empty ?
Thanks to Rathi Ramanathon for her contribution to this post.
[1] Noy Thrupkaew http://www.plri.org/resource/crusade-against-sex-trafficking and Overs C Caught Between the Tiger and the Crocodile http://www.plri.org/resource/caught-between-tiger-and-crocodile-apnsw
[2] Grover A 20101 http://www.plri.org/resource/report-special-rapporteur-right-everyone-enjoyment-highest-attainable-standard-physical-and
Penina Mwangi on New Law in Kenya.
Our main objectives are to serve as a focal organisation and voice for bar hostesses and sex workers through providing the bar hostesses and sex workers with information and linkages to services on key issues affecting them. We also promote self and behaviour change among bar hostesses and sex workers and strive for justice and welfare of bar hostesses and sex workers in Kenya and support them to claim their rights.
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| Penina says all stakeholders were not consulted. [PHOTOS:EVANS HABIL] |
We are opposed to the new Alcohol control Act because of the adverse effect it has had within our members. This Act was also not comprehensively thought over and its implementation mode is far more costly to our members too. Even though the Act has a positive moral standing, the social and financial implications are far fetched and its effects have been disastrous for our members.
With regulated hours of drinking, there has been massive loss of jobs with our current statistics standing at around 5,000. One thing the law didn’t address was that most of the bar hostesses are casually employed and thus remunerated on the hours worked and with reduced hours means reduced wages. Secondly, most bar owners are cost-cutting on the number of employees and this directly affects our members who have lost jobs and most of them are resorting to be commercial sex workers to eke out a living.
On the implementation stage, we are helpless since we cannot raise the required fine because they are hefty. For example, if a reveller is already drunk and he or she orders more bottles or tots and is served, the seller will be liable to a Sh100,000 fine while the buyer risks parting with Sh5, 000. As casuals, we have targets in terms of sales and when we flout these rules, not even the employers will fork out this amount to bail their employees yet we have to put food on the table.
We were never consulted and we feel short-changed since this bill did not have in mind the massive job cuts that it would come with. The drafters of this bill did not consider all the stakeholders and as much as the bill was in good faith with its moral high standards, it has terrible failed as a result of its economic implications to the industry as a whole.
We are in talks with the bar owners association with a view of striking a balance over the effects of the Alcohol Act. This is with a view to help curb more job losses amongst our members. We are also participating in relevant forums and convening meetings that bring together all stakeholders and working closely with beneficiaries in the search of practical and efficient solutions to their challenges. We are also involved in educating and empowering our members who have lost jobs with skills and confidence necessary to create a healthy lifestyle rather than resorting to the streets to supplement their earnings.
LA REDTRABSEX ECUADOR Denounces Abuses of Sex Workers in Quito
Michael Williams via Elena Reynaga
Wednesday, Feb 7.
LA REDTRABSEX ECUADOR La Red de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Latinoamérica y El Caribe today publicly denounced the abuses of human rights persecution and violence against the organisation Redtrabsex de Ecuador that happened lastThursday, for the part played by the police force in Quito.
Due to the constant police operations that imprison sex workers for their work, the workers are seeking a meeting with the Mayor to ask for the regulation of sex work and a cessation of the violence against the workers. After receiving no response, they organised a peaceful protest outside the Quito Council building last Thursday. With placards ‘sex work is a reality, say no to repression, say yes to a solution’ they waited for the council session to finish for the council members to come out, when the workers had to run bruised and injured after being beaten by the metropolitan police. One of the workers, a militant defendant of human rights was gravely injured, and others received heavy blows. La Redtrabsex says ‘Ecuador has for a long time proposed a lot of legislation for workers in the district of Quito, but the Secretary of Security does not consider the claims of the workers and does not even meet with them to hear our claims. The sex workers of Ecuador have been subjected to illegal detention and multiple assaults by the state that have been denounced nationally and internationally. We express emphatic support for the initiative of REDTRABSEX Ecuador for sex worker to be recognised as equal work to any other form of work’.
Sex Workers in Ecuador demand:
1. Immediately cessation of the violence and repression by the Quito City Council against sex workers
2. That the Ecuadorian state engages in dialgoue and enacts law to regulate sex work throughout the country
Don’t expect Barbados to be legalising prostitution.
Claudette Kay and Miriam Edwards want sex workers in the region to be treated fairly. (Kenmore Bynoe)
Sex workers in the Caribbean want to be treated fairly and given the same respect as other people involved in demanding professions.
Miriam Edwards, president of the Caribbean Sex Work Coalition, Kay Forte of Guyana and Claudette Johnson of Jamaica, as well as Ivan Cruickshank of the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition made the call at the closing ceremony of the Sex Work And HIV TechnicalWorking Group meeting put on by UNAIDS.
Edwards says her organisation, which had members in 13 Caribbean countries, is battling for sex workers’ voices to be heard in order for the legal framework to be instituted for such them to obtain the medical and other necessary services.
“We need to accept sex workers as human beings and we want the same level of treatment and service when we come forward as anyone else,” Edwards says. she also warns that it is pointless setting up programmes for a few sex workers and prefacing the offer with the command that they must give up their profession in order to get funding for education or skills training.
The trio later met with Minister of Health Donville Inniss, who had earlier delivered the closing address at the session. “It is not for me to deliberate on the morality or illegality of sex work in the Caribbean, but rather it is for me to face reality. We will not, certainly at the policy level, move ahead if we start by operating with any stigma attached to the issue of sex workers or if we start to bring our own prejudices to the table and bury our heads in the sand and pretend that such a thing does not exist. In addition, the increased risk of HIV transmission which may be found in some informal and formal sex work contexts heightens the need to take definitive steps to reduce the risk of transmission in these settings,” Inniss adds.
BUT DON”T EXPECT BARBADOS TO BE LEGALISING PROSTITUTION : What the Minister said
By Tracy Moore |
Minister of Health Donville Inniss stated this on Wednesday at a top-level regional meeting on HIV/AIDS at Hilton Barbados. Inniss said that legalising prostitution in Barbados would not be one of those laws to be modernised on our statute books any time soon. “The issue of legalising prostitution would always be a heated one, filled with emotion and sometimes a lack of objectivity,” he said. “If the goal is for sex workers to have access to health care, systems are already in place that work and allow them access to health care. “When you go to a doctor’s office or a Barbados polyclinic or the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, I do not know that you are discriminated against or that you are denied access to health care if you indicate that you are a sex worker,” he said. He added, “What we may want to debate is the issue of not discriminating against people based on their perceived sexual orientation or perceived sexual practice as a profession. I think we need to be a lot more all-embracing. “That does not mean that we have to drop our moral guards and say that all of these things are to be accepted. I am not promoting homosexuality or prostitution. I am simply saying that we have to have a more open mind and accept that not all of us are the same,” he said.
The two-day meeting was held by the United States-Caribbean Partnership Framework for HIV/AIDS as part of the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). On the second day of discussions, United States Global AIDS co-ordinator and adviser to President Barack Obama, Ambassador Eric Goosby, told the SATURDAY SUN that accessibility and eliminating stigmatisation were better weapons against HIV/AIDS than legalising prostitution. He said judgement and stigmatisation caused more fear in those who needed access to medical care. Minister of Health Donville Inniss stated this on Wednesday at a top-level regional meeting on HIV/AIDS at Hilton Barbados. Inniss said that legalising prostitution in Barbados would not be one of those laws to be modernised on our statute books any time soon. “The issue of legalising prostitution would always be a heated one, filled with emotion and sometimes a lack of objectivity,” he said. “If the goal is for sex workers to have access to health care, systems are already in place that work and allow them access to health care. “When you go to a doctor’s office or a Barbados polyclinic or the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, I do not know that you are discriminated against or that you are denied access to health care if you indicate that you are a sex worker,” he said. He added, “What we may want to debate is the issue of not discriminating against people based on their perceived sexual orientation or perceived sexual practice as a profession. I think we need to be a lot more all-embracing. “That does not mean that we have to drop our moral guards and say that all of these things are to be accepted. I am not promoting homosexuality or prostitution. I am simply saying that we have to have a more open mind and accept that not all of us are the same,” he said. The two-day meeting was held by the United States-Caribbean Partnership Framework for HIV/AIDS as part of the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). On the second day of discussions, United States Global AIDS co-ordinator and adviser to President Barack Obama, Ambassador Eric Goosby, told the SATURDAY SUN that accessibility and eliminating stigmatisation were better weapons against HIV/AIDS than legalising prostitution. He said judgement and stigmatisation caused more fear in those who needed access to medical care.
Hungary’s Constitutional Court Bans Mandatory Health Checks
Hungary’s Constitutional Court has annulled a legal provision requiring sex workers to provide a doctor’s certificate on the ground that it conflicts with article 17 of the 1950 New York Convention. The ruling is to come into force on December 31 this year.
The reason given for its Monday ruling is that the certificate demanded by Hungarian law counts as a type of document which should be held by the sex worker, and this conflicts with UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.
The legal provision annulled set the stage for the stigmatisation of sex workers and violated their right to human dignity, the court said
Who’s the Ugly Mug then ? – policing violence against sex workers in the UK
by Cheryl Overs
That December 17, the day against violence against sex workers is the big day in the sex workers rights calendar speaks volumes. Violence against sex workers and inadequate police responses are the single biggest issue I have encountered in all my time as a sex workers rights activist. Violence has been at the top of every sex workers list of priorities I have seen and in every one of the sex workers’ meetings I have attended in dozens of countries. Only the extent and nature of violence and the degree of malpractice by police varies.
When the Australian Prostitutes Collective was formed in the mid eighties, and we began what later became known as ‘outreach’, violence emerged quickly as a key issue. We came up with the idea of publishing and distributing a list of descriptions of bad clients, from timewasters and non-payers to bashers and rapists. One day a timely street worker came in to the Sydney APC office cursing an ‘ugly mug’ and the brilliant name of the list was born.
The list was an immediate hit in Melbourne and it’s still going. Then it was an A4 sheet with descriptions of men, cars and addresses to be avoided, updated daily and handed around the street working area, brothels and escort agencies. It was the early days of computers and only one person in the office could use it, Brett, a local sex worker that the women adored and trusted. The street sex workers were keen to open, update and print the list around the clock so Brett taught some of them how to do it. Fabulous.
For me the Ugly Mugs stands out as a beacon of success of the sex workers rights movement – it empowers sex workers to prevent violence and it is an excellent tool for lobbying for better law enforcement. I know it works. When politicians and senior police saw the lists of unreported violent crime we were publishing they were embarrassed into coming to see us to discuss ways to ensure that crimes were properly reports and dealt with. Over the years the Ugly Mugs became an institution and I am delighted and proud to see it taken up by our counterparts in the UK, the US, Canada
So yesterday I was surprised to see the network of services for sex workers in the UK call on “government to implement a UK wide scheme of ‘Ugly Mugs’ so that intelligence about violent offenders can be shared between police forces.” (http://www.uknswp.org/news.asp?id=59) . I can see ‘where they are coming from’ but I wonder how many sex workers have contributed to the idea that government/police should run the Ugly Mugs list. But then I saw this which goes even further :
A database of men suspected of attacking sex workers should be introduced say police chiefs ( my italics) Sex workers in some parts of the country are already distributed (sic) with pictures of so-called “ugly mugs” – men who have in the past been violent or threatening towards prostitutes – but it is not co-ordinated across the country. A national roll-out is being examined by the Home Office. http://www.shropshirestar.com/uk/uk-news/2010/12/28/call-to-reform-prostitution-laws/#ixzz19SABMDoI
This is a significant shift away from Ugly Mugs idea. A data base held by police of names of people accused by someone of committing unspecified crimes for which they have not been charged or convicted is a very different creature from descriptions of troublesome people compiled by sex workers and distributed within their own communities.
Police already have intelligence data bases that they should be using properly to track all kinds of suspected criminals. I guess a special one for offenders against sex workers is a good idea but they should get their own name for it and not take ours!!!
Because data bases are only as good as the information put into them the UK government should be making sure police create an atmosphere where sex workers are confident to report every problem they have and that they are all properly recorded. To create that atmosphere police have to actually turn up, behave respectfully, gain trust, take complaints seriously and record them faithfully – which, not co-incidentally, are all things Brett did so well all those years ago.
Sex workers should also be worried about registers of people who are ‘violent’ given the total confusion over what violence and rape means in the context of sex generally (as Julian Assange has found out) and commercial sex specifically.
Whether any or all aspects of sex work are illegal does not affect the obligation of the state to deal with a crime against that person. Everybody that commits a crime against a sex worker must be subject to police attention and possibly the justice system without regard to the occupation; sexual orientation, HIV status or sexual history of the victim.
Clearly the law is at the heart of this. Street soliciting and doing clients in cars and bushes can never be safe. We know what a safe workplace looks like. The illegality that keeps British sex workers in these conditions and vulnerable to violence is not located in the laws that that address selling sex. Women alone in flats can sell sex legally in the UK. Rather it is the so-called pimping laws such as brothel keeping and living off immoral earnings that prevent commercial sex taking place in normal workplaces governed by labour laws and contracts.
The UK government currently puts its resources for sex work into clinics and local governments projects tasked with distributing condoms and provide health checks to criminalised female sex workers who work in horrific conditions in British streets. It is hardly surprising that despite the best intentions of the many wonderful staff of those projects they haven’t maintained a strong mechanism for empowering sex workers to share information and demand improved responses to violence and other unlawful behaviour. Rather than putting police in charge of the Ugly Mugs, to reduce violence against British sex workers two things need to happen:
- The law must be reformed to enable all sex workers to access safe workplaces and labour rights.
- Resources must be provided to build up sex worker groups so they can develop and use tools like the Ugly Mugs list that reflect their perceptions and demands rather than those of police or government.
Cheryl Overs was a founder of the Australian Prostitutes Collective, the Scarlet Alliance Australia and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. She has worked in sex work projects since the 1980s, including in the UK where she lives.
Ugandan sex workers petition Parliament over HIV bill
Monday, 13th December, 2010
By Madinah Tebajjukira
SEX workers have petitioned Parliament over the HIV prevention and control bill which they say promotes discrimination among some people and that it violates human rights. Through their umbrella organization:Womens Organization Network for Human Rights Advocacy (WONETHA), the sexual workers petitioned the Speaker of Parliament demanding an urgent action on some clauses of the bill which seeks to control the spread of HIV in Uganda.
Led by WONETHA executive director Macklean Kyomya, the sex workers want Parliament to review clauses which call for mandatory testing of HIV, mandatory disclosure of a persons HIV status and the criminalization of intentional spread of HIV. We know that a large majority of the Ugandan public have moral objections to the work we do. However, is that a good enough reason to shut us out, ignore us and push us away when we are an integral and undeniable part of society that cannot be wished away, reads the petition.
The HIV Prevention and Control Bill 2010, which is under scrutiny by the Parliamentary committee on HIV/AIDs, if enacted, it requires mandatory disclosure of ones HIV status to sex partners. The bill states that a medical practitioner who carries out an HIV test will give an HIV-positive person reasonable time to disclose his or her status to the partner. However, if the person fails to do so, the doctor on behalf of the client, will disclose to the partner. It also gives powers to a medical doctor to disclose to people who are in close and continuous contact with an HIV-positive person if there could be a risk of them getting HIV through this person. In addition any person, who transmits HIV to another person knowingly, commits an offence and upon conviction is liable to five years in prison.
Many non government organizations have persistently opposed the above clauses, saying the bill if not reviewed is a threat to the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, especially women and children. Human rights NGOs urge that the mandatory disclosure of ones HIV status threatened women with increased domestic violence and abuse. The Speaker, Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi, promised to forward the petition, to the relevant committee of Parliament- HIV/AIDS committee to review it. The sex workers emphasized that if the bill is enacted in its current form, it will discriminate the sexual workers from the HIV prevention and care.
The NSWP : sex workers rights in action.
by Cheryl Overs
At the Vienna Aids Conference earlier this year I arrived to the finale of the NSWP pre-meeting for sex worker delegates. It was a great moment to go in to a room with over a hundred activists from all over the world who had been working all day planning sex worker participation in the conference. There were many I have known for many years, some of whom I have had the opportunity to see working in their own countries, and lots of exciting new faces, and bodies ( as the conference was soon to find out ! ) I was so struck by the mix of activists from different cultures, generations and genders and by non sex workers there who were all true allies who have earned sex workers trust by contributing their skills and time. I so well remember when the entire NSWP pre meeting could fit around a single table. And there was no money for translation. What a long way the NSWP has come. While most of the credit goes to sex workers themselves, OSI deserves huge credit for the resources they have provided to sex worker networks and their commitment to our rights agenda.
That meeting wasn’t an isolated good moment for sex workers networks. Since then the APNSW has pulled off a wonderful meeting with UNFPA and UNAIDS in Thailand where sex workers voices from 9 countries were truly heard and treated as full partners, many people thought for the first time in such a UN meeting. Again most of the credit goes to sex workers themselves and to their leadership who have sometimes been treated badly, but a lot of it goes to Jenny Butler and Steve Kraus of UNFPA, Michele Sidibe and other UN folks who are taking partnership with the APNSW and NSWP seriously.
The NSWP board is meeting this week in Amsterdam and I am sure that this diverse and vibrant group that had everyone amazed in Vienna will have a great meeting that takes the NSWP and the regional networks forward at the same cracking pace as we have seen these last few months. The NSWP has a great new website thanks to communications officer Audacia Ray and preparations are underway for the next edition of Research for Sex Work whose editor is long time ally Nell Beelan.
Great credit goes to NSWP Co-ordinator Ruth Morgan Thomas whose leadership, dedication and sanity in the face of chaos is remarkable. Thanks to Ruth and Andrew Hunter the president and other leaders, the NSWP is in great shape to deal with persistent challenges in international policy – Pepfar, the anti-trafficking movement, travel restrictions, access to HIV meds etc. Crucially it now has many of the partnerships and support needed to address them.
Every day brings news on sex work and law from one country or another. We are seeing law reform and recognition of sex work as an occupation expanding not just through legislatures but through courts that are giving weight to human rights and constitutional obligations. Although much of the news is still about crackdowns of course, it is more and more frequently about conversations about decriminalisation. The Commission on HIV and Law is looking at criminalisation of sex work so there is work to do there to ensure that sex workers demands around human rights and law are well understood by the Commission. Its all about opportunities and challenges.
See NSWP website for more news. ( www. nswp.org)
What bought on thinking about the NSWP this week as its new board is meeting was pictures I came across while doing some much overdue filing. This is a previous board of the NSWP at Robin Island, Cape Town in 2002. Dr Melissa Ditmore (USA) ; Shane Petzer ( Sth Africa) ; Dr Smarajit Jana (India) (EU) Khartini Slamah (Malaysia); Paulo Longo ( Brazil) ; Dr Anna Lopez (EU) . Dr Penny Saunders ( USA) ; Dr Jo Doezema. And lots of gorgeous people at an
APNSW meeting in Yokohama in ?
STOP – feminist violence against sex workers
By Leena Neena
“ The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) has been for years delivering a clear political statement committed to work towards a Europe free from prostitution, by supporting key abolitionist principles which state that the prostitution of women and girls constitutes a fundamental violation of women’s human rights, a serious form of male violence against women, and a key obstacle to gender equality in our societies. The EWL Centre on violence against women is now working on an EWL campaign to deliver a strong message towards a Europe free from prostitution.”
It is beyond belief that this kind of campaign can take place in this day and age. How do these people feel when they sit around deciding to do things like this without speaking to sex workers ? No sex worker, no matter how they came to the sex industry, could mistake what this fist means. It means violence. No doubt the euro feminists fantasise about the punch they are recommending landing on bad men – the fantasy pimps of their imagination – and helping innocent girl victims who also live in their imaginations. But every sex worker knows that every punch lands on her /him no matter what fantasies are in the heads of the punch throwers.
That this is a group that says it opposes violence is a joke. These middle class women who think they know better than us should be made to take responsibility for the violence they advocate. This campaign is what the Americans call ‘ hate speech’ But who will stop it ? Who can raise a voice in the face of the millions of dollars and euros driving violence against sex workers all over the world.
Read anti trafficking superstar Leela Neena’s blog at http://thisisleelaneena.tumblr.com/
Sex Tourism and Trafficking
By Megan Rivers-Moore
(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
… [D]iscussion of trafficking, a much talked about but often poorly understood topic, is at the forefront of concerns about migration, labour, and sexuality. A key problem in so many discussions of trafficking was reproduced in an October 15th article in the Stabroek News, titled ‘Sex tourism growing in favoured destinations in Caribbean’, namely, that sex tourism and trafficking are conflated, as if they were one and the same. The Organisation of American States (OAS) co-ordinator of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit in the Department of Public Security, Fernando Garcia-Robles, reportedly noted that several tourist destination countries in the Caribbean have a growing sex tourism industry, and acknowledged “concerns that the Free Movement of Skilled Nationals in Caricom could result in increased human trafficking.”
Tourists travel to the Caribbean for many reasons, including in search of sexual experiences with local people, sometimes explicitly commercial, sometimes a much more ambiguous exchange of gifts, affection, and sex. This complex phenomenon is made possible by a variety of factors, including tourism dependent economies, global inequalities of wealth and mobility, and problematic ideas about the race and sexuality of people in the Caribbean. Sex tourism is not, however, the same as trafficking. Trafficking refers to the use of violence, coercion and exploitation to recruit and transport workers across borders to carry out various kinds of work. Most crucially, trafficking does not just include sex work, but rather all kinds of labour, including domestic and agricultural, for example. Yet trafficking is often simplistically equated with commercial sex and sexual ‘slavery.’
The use of the term ‘slavery’ so loosely should give us pause, as it is a concept fraught with history and emotion, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America, where it calls to mind the brutalities of the middle passage, plantation economies, and the outright ownership of human beings. In fact, the little reliable research that has been done suggests that trafficking more often resembles debt bondage, and unfair and exploitative contact labour. There is of course a long history of these kinds of labour practices in the Caribbean as well, but this is an important distinction in terms of how this work takes place within labour markets and their relationships to the global economy. As last week’s article attests, men, women, boys and girls are all trafficked for many ends to, through, and from the Caribbean region and around the world.
Significant numbers of women are indeed coerced into the sex industry, but the conditions of their lives are similar in many ways to the lives of other migrant women who struggle to get by in a world where racialized and gendered inequalities help to structure a lack of viable options and opportunities. Because of the ways in which trafficking is often mistakenly assumed to mean sexual slavery across border, it is crucial to acknowledge that not all migrant sex workers are trafficking victims. Sex work is often one of many strategies that women engage in for economic survival and advancement. Because few countries classify sex work as work, women tend to migrate in other immigration categories (for example, on tourist or domestic work visas) and then make their way into the sex industry. Others pay smugglers, often agreeing to or finding themselves in situations of debt bondage or indentureship. One of the consequences of seeing migrant women who work in the sex industry as trafficking victims is that concerns about trafficking can be used for immigration control. By conflating trafficking with sexual slavery, women can be ‘saved’ by deporting them. This allows governments to appear benevolent, it deals with xenophobic fears about immigration, but it also conveniently ignores the massive violations of the human and labour rights of sex workers that take place with impunity throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. One wonders, then, about the wisdom of the OAS focusing on strengthening the capacity of law enforcement officials, immigration officers, judges, and prosecutors.
The relationship between sex workers and police has been notoriously difficult in much of the world, and indeed, a great deal of the violence that sex workers face comes from the state. Because of their experiences with state violence, sex workers are not likely to report abuse from clients or management, and most importantly in terms of trafficking, sex workers’ are cautious about voicing their concerns about the use of force or coercion against migrants in the sex industry. This is especially the case when migrant sex workers face deportation upon discovery. These women are unlikely to testify against those who transport undocumented workers, as many trafficking victims who have been ‘saved’ go on to use these same networks in order to cross borders undetected once again. We must pay attention to the broader conditions that make men, women and children vulnerable to smuggling, deception, and coercion in migrating, including the ever increasing demand for cheap, exploitable labour and the dire economic contexts that make precarious and dangerous choices for survival attractive or unavoidable. By defining sex work as a form of labour, alongside other kinds of labour like domestic and agricultural work in which workers potentially face unjust and unsafe working conditions, we can begin to explore ways of addressing these issues without resorting to fear mongering, alarmist and largely unsubstantiated claims about sexual slavery.
