CREA, a feminist human rights organization based in India, published a paper by Svati P. Shah that examines key issues in the relationship between sex workers’ and women’s movements, using the United States and India as its examples. The paper explores the history of women’s movements and sex workers’ movements, as well as whether and how they intersect. It goes on to discuss the contemporary context, including the status of alliances and dialogue between women’s movements and sex workers’ movements, the ways that HIV/AIDS have structured this relationship, and the question of agency.

The Sunday, September 22nd edition of the New York Times featured an op-ed by Noy Thrupkaew entitled “A Misguided Moral Crusade.” Read the piece here. 

Sharing and comments welcome.

A commentary by Noy Thrupkaew on the “Women in the World” summit. Read the full article on the Open Society Foundation website here.

For the past decade, the U.S. government has devoted a great deal of attention and resources to combating human trafficking, particularly into the sex sector. Now, policymakers are taking a new look at campaigns to end the demand for sexual services as a way to curtail trafficking. But are such approaches successful?

The Open Society Foundations and the Women and Law Program at the American University Washington College of Law will host an expert panel discussion to explore the available evidence. Are prohibition policies on sex work effective, and what is the impact on marginalized populations.

Talk participants: Noy Thrupkaew, Lisa Kelly, Pye Jakobsson, Andrea Ritchie

Find the audio file here on the Open Society Foundation webpage.

2010 was the tenth anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. In a recorded discussion, former Open Society Fellow Noy Thrupkaew assessed the successes and failures of U.S. trafficking policy over that period. Drawing on examples from a trip to Cambodia, the case study offers both cautionary tales and the possibility of innovative engagement and partnerships between government, civil society actors, and human rights activists.

Thrupkaew’s fellowship project looked at the unintended consequences of the conflation of prostitution and trafficking and the overreliance on the law-enforcement practice of “raid and rescue.”

Thrupkaew is introduced by Heather Doyle, project director of the Sexual Health and Rights Project, part of the OSI Public Health Program.

Link here to the Open Society Foundation page where the audio is found.

The first of a two-part series on trafficking Thrupkaew published in the October 5, 2009 edition of The Nation. Get the article here: The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking.

This article analyzes recent developments in U.S. anti-sex trafficking rhetoric and practices. In particular, it traces how pre-9/11 abolitionist legal frameworks have been redeployed in the context of regime change from the Clinton to Bush administrations. In the current political context, combating the traffic in women has become a common denominator political issue, uniting people across the political and religious spectrum against a seemingly indisputable act of oppression and exploitation. However, this essay argues that feminists should be the fi rst to interrogate and critique the premises underlying many claims about global sex trafficking, as well as recent U.S.-based efforts to rescue prostitutes. It places the current raid-and-rehabilitation method of curbing sex trafficking within the broader context of Bush administration and conservative religious approaches to dealing with gender and sexuality on the international scene.

Read the article here: Running from the Rescuers

The second article in Thrupkaew’s series in The Nation. Published on October 26, 2009. Find the article here: Beyond Rescue.