Written by Melissa Gira Grant for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

No on Prop 35 Banner

California voters hold the power this Election Day to decide if many thousands of people convicted of prostitution-related offenses in their state must now register as sex offenders. These are their neighbors, their friends, their family — whether they know it or not — and many are women: trans- and cisgender women, poor and working class women, and disproportionately, they are women of color.

This attack on women already made vulnerable to violence and poverty is just one of the possible consequences of Proposition 35, a ballot initiative marketed to voters as a tough law to fight trafficking but is instead a “tough on crime” measure backed with millions of dollars from one influential donor, written by a community activist with little experience in the issue. If it passes? Advocates for survivors of trafficking, civil rights attorneys, and sex workers fear that rather than protect Californians, it will expose their communities to increased police surveillance, arrest, and the possibility of being labeled a “sex offender” for the rest of their lives.

Trafficking is a hot-button issue, where even defining what is meant by the term is contentious and deeply politicized — but at a minimum, it describes forced labor, where the force may be physical or psychological in nature. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that nearly 22 million people may be involved in forced labor worldwide, the majority of which does not involve forced labor in the sex trade. In the United States, anti-trafficking law developed over the last ten years has advanced definitions of trafficking. In addition to Federal law, states have passed their own trafficking laws, which overlap with existing laws against forced labor, child labor, minor prostitution, or prostitution in general.

A good deal of advocacy around trafficking is concerned with proposing new laws, with several organizations — such as the Polaris Project and Shared Hope International — focused on introducing copycat legislation state-after-state, focused on increasing criminal penalties associated with trafficking and moving resources to law enforcement. There is little evidence that strengthening criminal penalties and relying primarily on law enforcement are strategies to end forced labor; in fact, advocates who work with survivors of trafficking, as well as people involved in the sex trade and sex worker rights’ advocates, have documented the limitations and dangers of a “tough on crime” approach on trafficking. Still, the “tough on crime” approach has become dominant in what some anti-trafficking advocates now call “the war on trafficking.”

Treating Those In the Sex Trade as Sex Offenders

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Written by Ruth Messinger for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Nevada Brothel sign (Photo: Joe Tordiff / Flickr)

A few years ago, I traveled to Thailand where I met a sex worker for the very first time. A 37-year-old mother of three, she very succinctly told me about her life: “These were my options: I could be apart from my children for 10 hours each day while working in a sweatshop sewing buttons on shirts, or I could spend the day with my kids and, at night, talk to an interesting Western man, lie down with him for 20 minutes in a familiar, safe place and make a lot of money. Which would you choose?”

Like many Americans in my generation, I was taught that prostitution is immoral, “dirty” and coercive. Selling sex for money has always been loaded with stigma — and it still is today.

Now I am the president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international organization that supports the human rights of marginalized people in the developing world, including sex workers. In recent years, I’ve heard countless stories from sex workers themselves. Their stories are human stories, and their struggles are human struggles. Many sex workers that AJWS supports are mothers doing what they need to do to support their families, just like the woman I met in Thailand.

In some ways, these women are much like me: they work hard and they care about their kids. But our lives are radically different in one fundamental way. These women are denied the basic human rights I’ve always had: protection from violence, access to healthcare, and the opportunity to earn a living however I choose.

Nearly everywhere in the world, sex workers are detained, arrested, fined and driven out of their homes or places of work. In both developed and developing countries, discriminatory policies enable police to rape and beat sex workers and confiscate their belongings, including condoms, which increases their risk to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

Religious groups, police officers and non-governmental organizations routinely carry out violent raids on adult brothels. This violence is often justified as a “rescue operation” and legitimated by anti-prostitution laws. In Cambodia, for example, many adult sex workers are “rescued” against their will. They are retrained for jobs in low-wage garment factories or repatriated into their villages without access to the income they need to survive or to support their families.

Little is written about the aftermath of these “rescue operations.” Whether trafficked or not, women are often detained for months and, sometimes, for more than a year. Often, they return to sex work because it best meets their financial needs.

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Written by Marianne Møllman for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Part of RH Reality Check’s coverage of the International AIDS Conference, 2012.

As the International AIDS Conference ended in Washington D.C. this week, rumor has it that the lead organizer invited participants to celebrate the fact that “criminals” had been kept out of the conference. This with reference to the fact that sex workers and those convicted for drug crimes were prevented by current law from obtaining visas for the gathering.

Setting aside for a moment the insanity of excluding the voices of two groups very much affected by the HIV epidemic in general and by misdirected prevention policies in particular, and regardless of whether the rumors are true, we can use this opportunity to reflect on the definition, use, and potentially manipulative power of criminal laws and policies.

For starters, our concept of what is criminal is relative and fluid at best. When I did research on access to abortion for rape victims in Mexico in 2006 and 2007, I was shocked to learn that child victims of incest were considered criminals in many jurisdictions. Meanwhile, rapists could escape the label by marrying their victim, a relatively common provision in several other countries too, including Cameroon and Brazil. This notion of incest victims as criminals and rapists as…not criminals, illustrates the fluidity of the concept.

Sex workers too are not always breaking the law. In some jurisdictions, such as Canada until very recently, sex workers can avoid criminal sanctions by doing only out-calls or by working alone — conditions that tend to render their work more dangerous. In other jurisdictions, such as for example Nevada and New Zealand, sex work is generally legal, subject to regulation.

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Written by Darby Hickey and Cassandra Warren for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

In July, the International AIDS Conference is being held in the United States for the first time in over twenty years, after the successful repeal of the ban on HIV-positive foreign nationals entering the US. However, US immigration law still bars entrance to anyone who has engaged in sex work in the past 10 years – even if they have no criminal convictions or work in a country where it is legal. This exclusion will prevent many current and former sex workers from outside the US from attending the conference. Yet sex workers and their clients are two of the populations at greatest risk of HIV infection.

Without the input, knowledge, and resources of those most directly affected by the disease, there is no chance of stopping the AIDS epidemic. To hold the government accountable for its harmful policies and in solidarity with those unable to attend the conference, US-based sex workers and allies collaboratively drafted A Call to Change US Policy on Sex Work and HIV – in consultation with numerous sex workers and sex worker-lead organizations in the US and abroad. We invite all people committed to ending AIDS to endorse this statement.

Structural issues drive HIV within the sex sector – criminalization and stigma compound health disparities already affecting those on the wrong end of racial, economic, and gender inequality. But when sex workers design and lead HIV prevention efforts, receive services and resources, and are supported to address social injustice, sex workers have successfully curtailed the spread of AIDS. For example, a decade of research documents the Sonagachi Project in India as an HIV prevention success story. Indigenous in origin and locally-led, the project is successful because of its focus on principles of empowerment enacted in a multidimensional spectrum – on individual, group, and structural levels – and the underlying premise of sex work as a valid profession.

Such excellent rights-based efforts are undermined by US policies. SANGRAM is another Indian program working with sex workers – USAID even highlighted it as a best practices model. But SANGRAM has turned down USAID funding because of the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath. This misguided requisite for US global AIDS funding stipulates that recipients condemn prostitution – and prevents them from using best practices such as peer leadership and empowerment programs with sex workers. The US imposes and continues to expand such harmful policies both domestically and abroad, putting sex workers at increased risk for HIV.

The removal of the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath and other AIDS funding restrictions is one of the demands of the Call to Change. These four demands are based on research and the UN’s examination of the US human rights record via the Universal Periodic Review in 2011 – during which the US government agreed, “that no one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on… their status as a person in prostitution.”

• We demand that the US repeal and eliminate restrictions on domestic and global AIDS funds (such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath) and support evidence-based best practices for HIV prevention, treatment and care targeted at sex workers.
• We demand that the US repeal the prostitution inadmissibility ground for immigration and provide non-judgmental social services and legal support for migrant sex workers, as part of comprehensive immigration reform.
• We demand that sex workers not be subjected to arrests, court proceedings, detention, mandatory testing or government-mandated “rehabilitation” programs; the government must institute mechanisms that allow sex workers to find redress for human rights violations and implement rigorous training of law enforcement officials on legal and human rights standards.
• We demand the US reorient anti-trafficking campaigns to be in line with the standards set by the United Nations and engage sex workers in helping stop exploitation in the sex sector.

These four action points address the different levels at which the AIDS epidemic can be disrupted – from the individual (access to prevention supplies and programs) to the structural (law reform). If the US government were to adopt these demands, it would be a game-changer – helping turn the tide in the fight against HIV.

Evidence-based best practices and human rights principles must inform the global response to AIDS. Please join us in calling on the US government to change its policies and save lives. Your endorsement will help build a movement for change.

Click here to read the Call to Change and endorse.

Written by Martha Kempner for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

When Julia Roberts pulled a strip of colorful condoms out of her boot in her break-out roll as a prostitute in 1990’s Pretty Woman and declared “I’m a safety girl,” I breathed a sigh of relief.  While I was waiting for her inevitable happy ending (and forgetting to be outraged by the offensive messages of this modern fairytale), I was glad to see that she was protecting herself and her future by avoiding STDs (and pimps and kissing on the mouth). Turns out that my reaction to her condoms is one of the many things about the lives of sex workers that wasn’t exactly on-target in this star-making movie. Rather than being considered a sign of good protective behavior, in New York City carrying condoms can be used as evidence of prostitution, and therefore a crime.

Written by Chi Mgbako for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

When we think of violence against sex workers, we conjure up images of dangerous clients and serial killers who target prostitutes.  Indeed, the origins of the International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers, observed on December 17, lay in the decades-long serial murder of sex workers by the Green River Killer.  While these are heartbreakingly real forms of violence against sex workers, one area that receives scant public attention despite its entrenched global reality is police abuse of sex workers.

The illegal status of sex work in most countries has not eradicated prostitution.  Instead, criminalization has increased sex workers’ vulnerability to human rights abuses and created fertile ground for police exploitation, especially of street-based sex workers.

For example, in South Africa, where sex work has been illegal since the former apartheid regime criminalized it in 1957, police officers often fine sex workers inordinate sums of money and pocket the cash, resulting in a pattern of economic extortion of sex workers by state agents.  For some sex workers, the cost of a police bribe to evade arrest can equal an entire night’s worth of work.  In other instances, police have exhibited shameless levels of exploitation: In one reported example, a police officer in Cape Town demanded a sex worker give him money in lieu of arrest; when the sex worker told him she possessed only a meager 10 South African rand, or the equivalent of $1.25, the police officer even pocketed that pittance. Read the rest of this entry →

Written by Melissa Ditmore and Andrea Ritchie for RHRealityCheck.org – Information, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

In 2007, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, sponsored a Senate resolution creating the National Day of Human Trafficking Awareness, which we observed on
Sunday, January 11. Human trafficking is rarely on the pundits’ list of priorities for President Obama’s administration, but he knows that early action in this area could have global impact. For starters, he should reconsider the current approach of raids, raids and more raids. It’s not working.

The Sex Workers Project at New York’s Urban Justice Center recently interviewed law enforcement personnel, service providers who have helped hundreds of trafficking victims, and a small sample of immigrant women trafficked into sex work and other forms of labor, including domestic work. We found that while there have been some successes, raids are generally an ineffective anti-trafficking tool, and in many cases are harmful to people who have been trafficked.

Trafficked women reported that they were repeatedly arrested, in some cases up to ten times, in police raids on brothels and other sex work venues, without ever being identified as trafficked. Yet that is the ostensible purpose Read the rest of this entry →