Anti-trafficking advocates often push for definitions of sexual exploitation to include sex work. In a victory for sex work advocates, the amended section 370 of the Indian Penal Code recognizes the difference between sexual exploitation and sex work.
Sex workers and women’s rights activists across India have welcomed the Government’s move to drop the word “prostitution” as exploitation from the amended Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code. The new formulation targets sexual exploitation and not adult consensual sex work.
To read the article in The Hindu click here.
The treatment of sex work as necessarily sexually exploitative can have a negative impact on public health programs for sex workers in India.
]]>Aziza Ahmed, The Guardian (March 26, 2012).
This article originally appeared on The Guardian’s website. Click here to read the original article.
First, anti-sex trafficking activism has an extremely negative impact on HIV programs. Sex workers are highly vulnerable to contracting HIV. A key victory for anti-sex trafficking organizations was the insertion of the anti-prostitution loyalty oath (APLO) into the US Leadership Act for HIV/Aids, TB, and malaria. This provision requires that organizations agree to oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. The APLO has the effect of disempowering sex worker organizations who refuse to sign on, shutting health services for sex workers, and alienating sex workers from public health programs.
Further, implementation of the APLO alongside raids and “rescues” disrupts HIV projects that have sex workers as peer-educators and leaders. Attempts to provide necessary health services to sex workers may lead to accusations of aiding in trafficking. Despite these negative outcomes, anti-sex-trafficking organizations, including women’s rights groups, support the US government in their effort to implement the APLO to the detriment of women’s health.
Second, when women and girls are “rescued” by the anti-trafficking organizations, they may be taken to state-run rehabilitation homes that have jail-like conditions. Human rights and sex worker organizations have long documented what rehabilitation might mean for a sex worker: overcrowded conditions, a lack of healthcare, and violence at the hands of the police and guards. The rehabilitation activities of some organizations are also often suspect – the staff of a rehabilitation home in Maharashtra, India that I visited last year told me that one of their rehabilitation activities includes getting the rescued women married.
Finally, the ongoing attempt to shut down safe places where sex workers can advertise services, like the Village Voice and Craig’s List, drives sex work underground and makes sex workers less capable of screening clients. The cast of characters that feature in Kristof’s blogs and Twitter feed, who call for the closure of “adult advertising”, and who advocate for provisions like the anti-prostitution loyalty oath are often one and the same. Not being able to do business in the open means that sex workers are driven to dark and hidden places to conduct business. This makes sex work unsafe.
We must interrogate when advocacy puts lives at risk and shuts down HIV services for the most marginalized. Kristof has become the pied piper of anti-sex trafficking efforts for many well-meaning people and organizations in North America and beyond. To follow without question is dangerous.
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Co-authored by Margo Kaplan, Alison Symington, and Eszter Kismodi
This paper provides an overview of the use of the criminal law to regulate sexual behaviour in three areas of critical importance: (1) HIV exposure in otherwise consensual sex, (2) sex work and (3) sexual activity largely affecting sexual minorities. It analyses criminal law pertaining to these three distinct areas together, allowing for a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of criminalisation and its effects. The paper highlights current evidence of how criminalisation undermines HIV prevention and treatment. It focuses on three specific negative effects of criminalisation: (1) enhancing stigma and discrimination, (2) undermining public health intervention through legal marginalisation and (3) placing people in state custody. The paper also highlights gaps in evidence and the need for strong institutional leadership from UN agencies in ending the criminalisation of consensual sexual activity. This paper serves two goals: (1) highlighting the current state of research and emphasising where key institutions have or have not provided appropriate leadership on these issues and (2) establishing a forward-looking agenda that includes a concerted response to the inappropriate use of the criminal law with respect to sexuality as part of the global response to HIV.
]]>In Libby Adler’s article “Gay Rights and Lefts: Rights Critique and Distributive Analysis for Real Law Reform” Adler highlights the need to bring critical tools to bear on legal reform strategies.
]]>This paper highlights the impact of raid, rescue, and rehabilitation schemes on HIV programmes. It uses a case study of Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (VAMP), a sex workers collective in Sangli, India, to explore the impact of anti-trafficking efforts on HIV prevention programmes. The paper begins with an overview of the anti-trafficking movement emerging out of the United States. This U.S. based antitrafficking movement works in partnership with domestic Indian antitrafficking organisations to raid brothels to “rescue and rehabilitate” sex workers. Contrary to the purported goal of assisting women, the anti-trafficking projects that employ a raid, rescue, and rehabilitate model often undermine HIV projects at the local level, in turn causing harm to women and girls. We examine the experience of one peer educator in Sangli to demonstrate and highlight some of the negative consequences of these anti-trafficking efforts on HIV prevention programmes.
With Meena Seshu
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To bring the United States in line with prevailing human rights standards, its National HIV/AIDS Strategy will need to explicitly commit to a human rights framework when developing programmes and policies that serve the unaddressed needs of women. This paper focuses on two aspects of the institutionalized mistreatment of people with HIV: 1) the criminalization of their consensual sexual conduct; and 2) the elimination of informed and documented consensual participation in their diagnosis through reliance on mandatory and opt-out testing policies. More than half of US states have HIV-specific laws criminalizing the consensual sexual activity of people with HIV, regardless of whether transmission occurs. Many of these laws hinge prosecution on the failure of HIV-positive people to disclose their HIV status to a sexual partner. The Obama Administration should explore administrative and legislative incentives to eliminate these laws and prosecutions, and target a portion of prevention funding for anti-stigma training. Testing policies should be reconsidered to remove opt-out and/or mandatory HIV testing as a condition for receipt of federal funding; incentives should encourage states to adopt local policies mandating counseling; and voluntary HIV testing should be offered regardless of the provider’s undocumented perception of an individual’s risk.
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UN Women must take an aggressive role in the standardization of laws and policies at the global and national level where their incongruence has negative and often criminal consequences for the health and lives of mean and girls. The is article focuses in on thee such examples: opt-out testing for HIV, criminalization of the vertical transmissions, and the new World Health Organization guidelines on breastfeeding.
]]>This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an “anti-trafficking” approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the “anti-prostitution pledge” found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by abolitionist feminists and demonstrates the unintended consequences of the abolitionist position on women’s health. By examining the actual impact of abolitionist positions, in favor of the anti-prostitution pledge and the criminalization of clients, we see that there are negative consequences for women despite the desire by abolitionists to improve women’s health.
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