Posts tagged ‘HIV’
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
World AIDS Day and sex work
An article from Jerker Edstrom at the Institute of Development Studies looks at sex work in relation to the Day’s theme of leadership.
Policy on supporting and addressing people selling sex has been marred by deep divisions in perspectives and guidance. This has been marked by a conservative approach to ‘abstinence’, and the criminalisation of prostitution, coming from the US administration; and a more ambivalent European approach which increasingly demonises and criminalises the male clients of sex workers.
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.
Sex Work Policy, the blog 