Co-authored with Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Chantal Thomas
Feminist advocacy projects on rape and prostitution have, by now, a signiccant track record of achievement in international law. Feminists have scored important advances in international humanitarian law governing rape in armed conflict and have helped to devise international protocols and aid/sanctions schemes governing sex trafficking. We came together in this conversation in order to figure out whether feminist achievements have become sufficiently institutionalized to warrant our describing them and the advocacy networks that produced them Governance Feminism (“GF”). Our answer: Yes. And we wondered whether, by comparing our different projects on sexual violence and prostitution/trafficking, we could find any common features in GF. We kept comparing the legal results, the legal attitudes taken by the feminists who prevailed, the strands of feminism that “docked” most effectively in GF or the legal results it helped to produce, and the situation of feminists operating in the First or the developing world: were there any patterns? Our answer: Yes.
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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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“Sex, sin and Craigslist” with Heidi Matthews, The Globe and Mail (30 December 2010). Link to article here.
]]>“Why anti-john laws don’t work” with Katrina Pacey, The Toronto Star (19 October 2011). Link to article here.
]]>Multiple participant contributors:
Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir, (Chantal Thomas)
This Article is the result of an intense series of text and telephone exchanges among the four of us, taking place from December 2005 to April 2006. Each of us has her own project which forms the basis of her contribution to this conversation. Janet Halley is working on new rules governing wartime sexual violence in international humanitarian law, specifically the place of rape and sexual slavery in the decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Chantal Thomas has published widely on the law of trade;1 one of her papers examines the feminist debate over the 2001 U.N. Trafficking Protocol.2 Hila Shamir and Prabha Kotiswaran have studied emergent national regimes addressing the connection between local prostitution markets and international “sex trafficking” in Holland, Sweden, and Israel (Shamir) and in India (Kotiswaran). Shamir compares legal regimes for governing sex trafficking and the related prostitution industry within national borders; Kotiswaran studies the highly local negotiations between stakeholders in the sex industry in India through ªeld work in Tirupati and Kolkata. Shamir and Koti-swaran take special note of the striking but very different impact of the 2001 Protocol and the United States’ Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (the VTVPA)3 in Israel and India.
]]>In the decade since it became a priority on the United States’ national agenda, the issue of human trafficking has spawned enduring controversy. New legal definitions of “trafficking” were codified in international and U.S. law in 2000, but what conduct qualifies as “trafficking” remains hotly contested. Despite shared moral outrage over the plight of trafficked persons, debates over whether trafficking encompasses voluntary prostitution continue to rend the anti-trafficking advocacy community—and are as intractable as debates over abortion and other similarly contentious social issues. Attempts to equate trafficking with slavery invite both disdain and favor: they are often rejected for their insensitive and legally inaccurate conflation with transatlantic slavery yet simultaneously embraced for capturing the moral urgency of addressing this human rights problem. The antitrafficking movement itself has been attacked by those who believe it is built on specious statistics concerning the problem’s magnitude and by others who think it undermines human rights goals by drawing attention away from migrants’ rights and efforts to combat slavery in all its contemporary forms.
]]>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.
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