Posts tagged ‘policy’
Now that sounds familiar…40,000 sex workers on the move…again
Our media monitoring over the last week or so has picked up a steadily increasing number of news stories in which it is claimed that 40,000 sex workers will descend on South Africa in response to the increased demand for sexual services from football fans enjoying the World Cup. But where does this figure come from and what does it mean for sex work policy?
Matt Greenall has picked up this issue on his blog and, with his permission, I have posted it below.
40,000 new sex workers for the South Africa world cup? Really? Anatomy of a number
David Bayever of South Africa’s Central Drug Authority’s announcement that the World Cup in South Africa would lead to 40,000 foreign sex workers being brought to South Africa (“many… from Eastern Europe”) has received blanket coverage in the press (http://tinyurl.com/ygpz8wp; http://tinyurl.com/ya35p3k; http://tinyurl.com/yfwfluh). The only hint of a source for this very high figure is the “event organisers” (in the Telegraph article).
But it looks like this particular figure wasn’t made up on the hoof by anyone in South Africa. Try googling “40,000, world cup, prostitute, germany” and you’ll see that exactly the same figure was being given in the run up to the Germany World Cup in 2006 (http://bit.ly/clc6dN; http://bit.ly/c44hgv; http://bit.ly/aLuhoM), amid accusations that the German government, having legalised prostitution in 2002, was facilitating trafficking and coercion. (more…)
Website launched on International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
Today is International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers. The Paulo Longo Research Initiative (PLRI) marks this important day with the launch of its new website, www.plri.org.
The PLRI website is a substantial library of resources about sex work in the context of economics, law, health, gender and sexuality, and migration. As it grows the site will increasingly showcase important research findings, host discussions among academics and sex workers and provide text and video news about relevant events and publications. The site will provide health service providers, policy makers, social workers, human rights advocates and students invaluable opportunities to learn about issues that affect sex workers.
December 17 provides an opportunity to reflect on why research is needed to provide evidence to guide measures to protect sex workers from violence and exploitation. Sex workers from all over the world have long argued that criminal laws against sex work render them vulnerable to abuses, including unprotected sex and lack of access to services and justice. But many countries continue to criminalise sex workers and sex worker organisations everywhere receive frequent reports of violence.
Sex workers all over the world are subject to violence, exploitation and abuse. For example:
- USAID research conducted in 2006 in Cambodia found that of the female and transgender sex workers surveyed approximately half were beaten by police; about a third gang-raped by police and about three-quarters were gang-raped by other men during the past year.
- In Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa Jane Arnott and Anna Louise Crago found that repeated violence, extortion and detention by law enforcement officers leave sex workers feeling constantly under threat in a climate of impunity that fosters further violence and discrimination against sex workers from the community-at-large. Migrants and transgender sex workers are particularly affected.
- In Pakistan research into sexually transmitted infections by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that HIV services need to be tied in with efforts to reduce discrimination, exploitation and violence against sex workers if they are going to be effective. This includes support programmes designed to increase sex workers’ abilities to defend their own human rights.
The World Health Organisation has recognised clear links between violence and sex workers’ vulnerability to HIV and recently both Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary-General, and Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director, have recommended that laws that punish sex workers be repealed in the light of evidence that they increase HIV vulnerability.
On December 17 sex worker organisations in dozens of countries demand an end to violence. Browse the PLRI website to read about the nature and causes of violence against male, female and transgender sex workers and the successes and failures of efforts to reduce it. Help to promote the site by circulating the press release to your contacts.
New film from SANGRAM and the International Women’s Health Coalition
To celebrate International Human Rights Day the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), SANGRAM, and rural Indian sex worker advocates have released a new short film. The film explores how the creation of a grass roots sex worker collective has helped improve access to health commodities and services, spread information on and understanding of human rights, created spaces for broader discussions on women’s health and rights and facilitated political advocacy.
IDS Comment on World AIDS Day
To commemorate World AIDS Day our colleague Andrea Cornwall wrote a story for the IDS website about Uganda’s new Anti-Homosexuality Bill. This dangerous and discriminatory Bill will violate the fundamental human rights of sexual minorities, compound their exclusion from access to services and exacerbate the stigma people living with HIV and AIDS experience. Cornwall challenges Britain, as the original architect of the discriminatory laws that remain on the statute books of so many of its former colonies, to ensure that British aid does not abet regimes of this kind in such flagrant abuses of human rights. (more…)
Legal services for sex workers
Where governance is poor and the rule of law is weak, female, male and transgender sex workers are typically exposed to severe and pervasive human rights abuses. Abuses may consist of violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, unlawful confiscation of property, limits on freedom of movement, and discriminatory and corrupt treatment in both public and private domains.
Chronic abuse of this kind will impact negatively on any person’s physical and mental health and wellbeing. Responding to these matters has been a key focus of sex worker activism globally. Sex workers have been involved in many projects in order to reduce the occurrence of these harms. There range from local anti-violence initiatives and police training to international human rights advocacy.
However the impact of legal services for sex workers generally, the relationship between legal services and health status, and the place of legal services amongst other responses has not been rigorously examined. (more…)
Sex work and the law in India: An AIDS INDIA e FORUM debate
A recent discussion about sex work from the AIDS INDIA e FORUM provides an insight into how the laws to control and regulate sex work in India are viewed by various stakeholders.
The AIDS INDIA e FORUM is a virtual organization responding to the HIV and AIDS crisis in India, by connecting the key stake holders together. This FORUM facilitates networking, communication and collaboration among those who are involved or interested in HIV and AIDS related issues in India. One of its main functions is a moderated email list through which members share information and mobilise around issues of common interest.
The discussion was prompted by the defeat of a new law to regulate sex work – the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Amendment Bill. According to Tripti Tandon of the Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit the Bill:
‘Intended to shift legislative policy on sex work from tolerance to prohibition. This was sought to be done through the introduction of a new offence of visiting a brothel, which would penalise clients. It also sought to broaden the meaning of prostitution to include all transactional sex, as opposed to acts involving exploitation on a commercial scale.
By inserting a definition of trafficking for prostitution, the bill attempted to criminalise poverty induced sex work. Other changes included lowering rank of Police authorized to arrest, search and raid brothels and extending detention of sex workers to seven years. Sex workers vehemently opposed these measures which, they believed, would offset any positive effect of decriminalizing soliciting.’ (more…)
CHANGE meeting on US policy and sex work
The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), with the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law, sponsored a symposium two weeks ago to highlight the importance of engaging sex workers in anti-trafficking and HIV/AIDS efforts, and to demonstrate how anti-prostitution policies and campaigns such as those supported by the US government undermine the US’s own policy objectives to end human trafficking and HIV and AIDS.
Speakers included:
Sara Bradford, Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers in Cambodia
Shilpa Merchant, Population Services International in India
Sylvia Mollet, DANAYA SO in Mali
Gabriela Leite, Davida in Brazil
Useful blogs and articles on sex work and mobility
There has been a great deal of media interest in sex work, immigration and trafficking in the UK in the light of UK Government proposals that paying for sex with those ‘controlled for another person’s gain’ be a criminal offence.
Laura Agustín was featured in the UK newspaper the Guardian. In an article ‘The shadowy world of sex accross borders: The government’s latest proposals for sex workers so little to tackle the problem of human trafficking’ she makes the point that;
If, as many Guardian commentators declare, you believe a British woman may prefer selling sex to her other options, then you must allow that possibility to people of other nationalities, whether they are living outside their birth countries or not. Anything else is colonialism. It’s similarly patronising to declare that they were always forced to migrate, as though they had no will, preference or ability to plan a new life.
Laura has an excellent blog ‘Border Thinking on Migration and Trafficking: Culture, Economy and Sex’ where she writes as a lifelong migrant and sometime worker in both nongovernmental and academic projects about sex, travel and work.
Sex work and HIV: Only rights can stop the wrongs
The UK Government is currently running a consultation on its institutional relationship with UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) and UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS). For sex workers and their allies this is timely indeed.
UK Government supports sex workers rights
The UK Government has a strong record of supporting sex workers’ right to health – for example the current DFID AIDS strategy acknowledges that sex workers are vulnerable to HIV infection and associated human rights abuses in many developing countries. Of sex workers and other vulnerable groups they state,
‘They are more likely to be living with HIV than the general population, are less able to deal with the impact of the epidemic and are most likely to be failed by existing policies, programmes, support and services. This is a direct result of their unequal position in society and the negative effects of gender inequality, harmful sexual norms, stigma and discrimination, and economic need and status.’
The document goes on to suggest that it is more difficult to reach sex workers with health interventions because national authorities deny their existence or make sex work illegal. Sex workers rights advocates and their networks wholeheartedly agree with this position and argue that legal and policy frameworks that protect workers’ rights in the sex industry and their human rights, including health and safety at work and ensure access to services, are the best way to reduce their vulnerability to HIV.
UNAIDS Guidance steers away from UN stance
Unfortunately recent policy guidance from UNAIDS, led by UNFPA, has appeared to shy away from previous UN statements on the central importance of respecting, protecting and fulfilling the rights of sex workers in programmes and policies related to sex work and HIV.
Rather than pressing a harm reduction approach the April 2007 UNAIDS Guidance Note: HIV and Sex Work places a strong emphasis on strategies to reduce the number of women who sell sex by encouraging sex workers to leave the sex industry and preventing young women taking up sex work. Unfortunately, despite little evidence that this approach can lead to the reductions in numbers of sexual partners required to slow HIV epidemics, a number of governments have adopted it, especially in Africa. The result is that resources are allocated away from the other crucial components of comprehensive prevention and care or ‘combination prevention’ targeting large numbers of sex workers to moderately successful income generating projects for a very small number.
UNAIDS approach condemned
Another focus of the Guidance Note is reduction of demand for sex work as an HIV prevention strategy by criminalising or otherwise repressing the purchase of sexual services. Human rights advocates have condemned this approach, which is sometimes called the Swedish model, as it can increase the risks of HIV for sex workers by driving sex work underground and limiting the choice of working conditions and the choice of clients.
Trafficking laws need review
The conflation of sex work with sexual exploitation and human trafficking has led to laws aimed at eliminating sex industries and ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ operations of ‘victims of sexual exploitation and human trafficking’ throughout the developing world, often led by evangelical Christian organisations. Changes to the legal framework on trafficking have undermined HIV prevention and care programming and generated human rights abuses, most recently in Cambodia as well as many other countries including Korea, Nigeria, India and The Philippines.
Sex workers recognise the importance of combating human trafficking and argue that to identify and help the real victims, trafficking must be delinked from consenting adult sex work. They also argue that adult sex worker communities can play a vital role in programmes to reduce trafficking along with HIV and cite impressive achievements where that has been the case.
A call for more evidence-based policy analysis
At a meeting in April at IDS Meena Seshu, who works with one of India’s most successful projects for sex workers Sangram in India, said that the gulf between the thinking of the sex workers’ networks and that of the US government, the UN and HIV/AIDS donors has occurred in a relative vacuum of independent scholarship on sex work.
Sex worker rights activist and researcher Cheryl Overs has commented,
‘Despite 20 years of the HIV pandemic, various conferences, declarations, programmes and publications reliable research and policy analysis of sex work and prostitution as a gender, human rights and public health issue is lacking. Too often the information upon which sound policy and effective, rights based programmes could be built is not produced, not disseminated or simply not listened to.’
In the case of the UNAIDS Guidance Note it appears to be a case of evidence ignored as sex workers took part in consultations leading up to its creation and have launched a high profile campaign to prevent the Guidance being adopted by UNAIDS and to have it amended to reflect learning and experience in this area. Since action at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico last month it appears that UNAIDS may be becoming more receptive to their argument. However, the role of key international donors and partners, such as the UK Government, will be decisive in promoting a research and policy environment that shapes evidence based rather than ideologically driven responses to sex work and HIV and human trafficking in the developing world.
