Namibia sex workers call for decriminalisation, not legalisation, of sex work
Hey, so this is important.
THE Executive Director of the largest sex workers organisation in the country, Rights Not Rescue, Nicodemus ‘Mama Africa’ Aochamub says that decriminalising prostitution is better than legalising it.
Aochamub told The Namibian that “we are thankful that Kazenambo Kazenambo is brave to stand up for us, but we [prostitutes] prefer that sex work be decriminalised than be legalised.”
According to Aochamub who has been a sex worker for the past three decades, legalising sex-work will put limitations on their work.
“With legalising, we will work under municipal laws such as registration of the sex workers with the relevant authorities, creating specific red-light districts and forcing us to do regular medical checks as well as to carry identification cards,” reasoned Aochamub.
Aouchamub said that being confined to red-light districts and being required to register will negatively impact on prostitutes’ meagre income.
Decriminalising sex work, Aochamub said, would render all legislation outlawing prostitution ineffective.
“Time has come for sex work to be regarded like any other employment, as it income generating - children are sent to school and we put bread on our tables,” said the outspoken Aochamub.
There are more than 1 000 prostitutes’ who are members of the Rights Not Rescue organisation, according to the Executive Director.
However, Aochamub partly welcomed minister Kazenambo’s call to legalise sex work, because this will enable them to report cases of rape and abuse, which they presently cannot do as they are engaged in an illegal trade.
“We appreciate minister Kazenambo’s stance to have it legalised but we don’t want limited rights, therefore we asked for the trade to be decriminalised. Currently, we cannot even report gender based violence inflicted on us by our clients, boyfriends or husbands because we can be arrested,” Aochamub told The Namibian.
The Executive Director also lashed out at the law enforcement officers for threatening sex workers with arrest or demanding sexual favours as well as for taking money from prostitutes when they report cases of abuse to them.
Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne Doroshow, a black transgender woman from Brooklyn who while she was incarcerated on a prostitution conviction a few years ago, got inspired to write a memoir cookbook. We’ve made significant progress on the book: we have more than 50 recipes, plus an oral history about her life, and now we’re ready to start producing the book itself. We need $6000 to get it copyedited, pay for the cover photography, and have it designed and printed. This morning I hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign to raise that money.
Our rewards include signed postcards, copies of the book, baked goods, cooking lessons, and private dinners - all depending on the level you donate at. We need your support to make this book come to fruition. And really, any amount helps - the minimum donation is $1. If you don’t have cash to spare, please check out the video anyway - it really captures who Ceyenne is and why she’s amazing. Also, there’s paella and it is mouthwatering - we ate it at the shoot and wow.
If you think the project is cool, as I hope you will - please spread the word!
Often researchers approach the concept of whether or not sex workers make a lot of money. It is not so much the amount of money they make, but the immediacy of access to money that motivates them.
I am compelled to state what I believe is a fact: prostitutes, as well as legal or semi-legal workers such as strippers or dominatrices, can apply for a job in one day, work the night of that same day, and make enough to pay a bill the next day. There is no substitute for this in our society.
Until we acknowledge the unique economic need sex work fulfills, and acknowledge money as a primary motivation for working in the sex industry, there can be no useful approach to solving any of the problems in and around the sex industry.
Yet, as I stated at the beginning, this money comes at a unique cost.
It separates the women who would do such a thing for money from the women who would never do such a thing for money. The constant search for a single unified field theory of why sex workers are doing what they do cannot be solved by addressing only the sex side of the equation when a worker claims to be doing it for the money.
| — | Jo Weldon, Sex work research needs to focus on money - The Scavenger (via tiaramerchgirl) |
“I guess we all prostitute ourselves one way or another”
I nearly skipped cos most of the vids inspired by the Sh*t White Girls say to Black Girls’ circulating atm swap the racism expose for white self-parody and aren’t funny. But this = so accurate about sex worker etiquette fail [still mostly white].
There are growing expectations that governments will respond harshly and swiftly to the latest allegations of human trafficking and sex slavery.
As lawmakers however, we need to ensure that pressure to address these injustices does not lead to us creating a more dangerous working environment for the vast majority of Australia’s sex workers who perform their work safely and legitimately.
Placing tough restrictions on, or criminalising, the industry is not the answer.
The model for sex industry regulation that is increasingly being recognised as world’s best practice for both the human rights and health outcomes for sex workers and their clients is decriminalisation. Both New South Wales and New Zealand’s sex industries are decriminalised.
The current NSW framework was the result of many drivers for change, not least of which was the Wood Royal Commission and the recognition that in a criminalised environment, brothel operators and sex workers had strong motivation to seek out the protection of organised crime and corrupt law enforcement.
Even more importantly, decriminalisation removed the fear of being reported to police and allowed sex workers better access to the kind of health and information services other workers take for granted.
NSW is now a respected world leader with outstanding health achievements such as a 99 per cent rate of condom use amongst sex workers and lower rates of sexually transmitted infections amongst sex workers than in comparable groups in the general community.[1]
These health outcomes are thanks to the work of organisations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP). SWOP run a variety of health promotion programs and provide outreach to sex workers. They also work with owners to encourage the acceptance and maintenance of safe sex practices, and other forms of workplace health and safety.
SWOP, Scarlet Alliance and other sex industry health experts are alarmed at new speculation the NSW Government will legislate for a ‘Brothel Licensing Authority’. [2] The evidence against licensing is overwhelming, and we need to slow down and carefully consider what outcomes we want to achieve and how to achieve them.
Licensing schemes create a two-tiered system of legal and illegal brothels, increase illegal sex work, drive workers underground and reduce access to health services and law enforcement. In many cases, licensing will make monitoring of brothels and support for sex workers more difficult, not less.
Currently, brothels are a legitimate commercial land use, and regulated by local government through environmental planning laws. This means organisations like SWOP and the police can easily gain access to most sex workers.
Consider the impact on community health and organised crime if NSW went the way of Queensland where 90% of the sex industry is unlicensed and therefore unregulated, illegal and driven underground.[3]
Globally, the UN is advocating decriminalisation to remove obstacles to effective HIV prevention.[4] In NSW the 2001 ‘Brothels Task Force’ said “… care must be taken to ensure that planning controls do not create barriers to the implementation of effective public health policies and services directed at sex workers in all facets of the sex industry.”
One recent study from 2010, a collaboration between sexual health experts at the Sydney Sexual Health Centre, the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, Melbourne Sexual Health Centre and others, assessed the impact of the law on the delivery of health promotion and found that brothel licensing results in the unlicensed sector being isolated from peer education and support.[5]
NSW must avoid a knee-jerk and poorly considered reaction to the appalling crime of sexual slavery, which exists globally regardless of licensing schemes.
Police efforts are better placed investigating and prosecuting sexual slavery and human trafficking, which are already serious crimes, than enforcing new laws which make new criminals. Sexual slavery is a crime – sex work is not.
Similarly, the government should be looking at ways to address the sometimes arbitrary and inconsistent implementation of existing sex industry guidelines across local government, rather than making criminals out of currently law abiding citizens.
The evidence shows that brothel licensing in NSW could have the opposite effect of what is intended. The bottom line is that a licensing scheme is likely to reduce community health, put sex workers in more danger of violence and fail to reduce human trafficking.
http://catefaehrmann.org/2011/11/brothel-licensing-not-the-answer/
my bold. because in Queensland, anecdotal accounts from sex worker agencies indicate that corrupt police are among the common perpetrators of abuse of sex workers - specifically sexual harassment and entrapment.
ETA: to clarify that there’s a major gap in police relations depending whether workers are criminalized/street workers vs. having some legal rights/working in environments highly independent from police surveillance. A 2003 academic study found police harassment being reported by up to 54% of workers in the former categories vs. 2-13% of workers in the later groups.
“Sex workers know that what creates demand for the sex trade is not men “enslaving” us for sex, but the exigencies of survival. The demand for the sex trade lies in the demands of childcare, loan officers, debt collectors, landlords and dependent family members – in short, the demands most working people struggle to meet.
Given the gravity of these real, systemic demands that sex workers face, to focus only on ending men’s demand for sex is a cheap way out. In this way, sex workers’ needs are reduced only to what happens during the sex transaction; it ignores the rest of our lives outside the sex trade. By advancing this myth of male demand and sex workers being powerlessly enslaved in catering to it, the media and politicians fixate on the power of male desire more than sex workers ever do.”
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(via thedailyhavis) This a thousand times. (via crankyskirt) I love seeing something I wrote come ‘round again like this. (via melissa) reblog for perennial truth. |
These ‘Working Girls’ photos were taken for a fundraiser for the NSPCC by photographer Ali Mobasser in 2002. Mobasser told WLRI:
“I asked prostitutes in the Kings Cross area to take me to the locations where they would take their men by night and shot them in their working environment. It was at a time when Kings Cross was starting to get cleaned up (talk of Eurostar had begun) and they were being pushed out of the area up the road into Camden. Instead of being helped, the council just moved them to another borough.”
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SWOP-NYC Responds to the “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight” Debate — SWOP-NYC (via audaciaray) See also: I’m well over online feminist pundits, who infer that they know about sex work politics from reading Belle Du Jour, or some other essentially entertainment-for-income, with a vague nod to feminist audiences, worker blog. So they know it’s all a normative libertarian opportunists party now, and any queers talking like it’s a real politic must just be privileged haters. Truthfully: I don’t get that coming from people who can publish in their real names without worrying about having their kids removed by the state next week, who didn’t spend their youths homeless for being a minority who was public about being an also sexual minority, who claim they are the BEST queer ally, but whose main contribution to minority queer politics has been same-sex sexual harassment at clubs and plagarism in feminist publishing. Nothing against Belle Du Jour’s author: she has a niche and worked it well, whatever. But: I have read that book by Obama - about his dreams and his father - and I don’t think it qualifies me to be a USA president or tell anyone else how to be one, you know what I mean? |
If I ever wanted to socialize with men of considerable wealth, I’d have a hard time shaking the feeling that I ought to get paid for my time.
Likewise, when I try to date men in any conventional sense, I find myself falling back on cues I became skilled at giving as a professional mistress.
Whether or not I have legitimate interest, courtship still plays out for me on a continuum spanning the extent to which a practice looks like overt prostitution. Being paid to accompany wealthy men in their private lives is just how I learned to be heterosexual. It’s a trick. And it’s gratifying to see it investigated as such, in Elizabeth Alice Clement’s study Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945. We’re all still learning how to socially express our desires for sex and love. There’s no tradition, except the one we’re part of shaping right now.
We as Indigenous peoples who have current and/or former life experience in the sex trade and sex industries met on unceeded Coast Salish Territory in Vancouver on Monday April 11th 2011. In a talking circle organized by the Native Youth Sexual Health Network we wish to share the following points about our collective discussion so that we may speak FOR ourselves and life experiences:
-We recognize that many of us have multiple identities and communities that we belong to – some of us take up the title of “sex worker” while others do not see themselves this way. We have a myriad of experiences in the sex trade, everything from violence, coercion, to survival, getting by, empowerment, and everything in between. We want to give voice to these issues so that those who are CURRENTLY involved in sex work and the sex industries feel supported and are the primary place where decisions surrounding our lives are made. We should not be made to feel judged, blamed, or shunned from ANY of the communities we belong to or are coming from. We are the best deciders of what we want our lives to be.
-Despite the heightened statistics of the many realities we face as Indigenous peoples, we are not significantly represented in the leadership or decision making tables of sex work organizations and other social justice groups alike. By this we do not mean solely having one Indigenous coordinator or a few outreach workers – we mean meaningful, non-tokenizing, multiple positions and visible leadership roles across organizations, groups, collectives, and at any place where the sex trade is discussed. We are not interested in being included after the fact or having to continuously take a seat at a table we had to fight to be at in the first place – we want to be the center in which all decisions about our lives are coming from.
-We collectively and steadfastly resist the so-called “rescuing” and “saving” approaches to the issues going on in our lives that comes from the (in)justice system, social service agencies, prohibitionist groups, and many other areas. What we are asking for is not to be saved or rescued or consistently painted as victims – we come from generations of peoples who have resisted this approach for the last 500+ years so we could be here today. We are asking for support that is unconditional and meets us where we are at.
-We are living through legacies of colonialism and genocide – which are extremely present today. When various individuals and organizations say things like “we are all oppressed in the same way” or refuse to take a stance on colonialism – this directly silences and further oppresses us. Just because we as Indigenous peoples may be involved in the sex trade as well does not mean that we are all oppressed in the same way as other peoples who are involved in the sex trade or even within our own communities. We demand the right to self-determination about what is specifically true for us as individuals and we refuse to be constantly grouped in “the other” or “unknown” categories – whether from well-intentioned allies or those who have never even considered our realities as Indigenous peoples.
-We want to address the rampant amount of homophobia, transphobia, cissexism, and heteropatriarchy that we witness from Indigenous and allied people alike. Many of us are proud to be Two Spirit, trans, gender non-conforming, and many other identities that the English language cannot contain. We hold both our Indigenous community members and allies accountable to respect who we are and understand that these identities for many of us prior to colonization were honored and respected – and we take this seriously as we seek to reclaim who we are.
-While it is true that we may experience violence on bad dates, on the street, and in other places where we are, we want to state that VIOLENCE SHOULD NOT INHERENTLY BE PART OF THE SEX TRADE. What remains unchallenged and inadequately criticized are the role and actions of the state, the police, and social service agencies that create and allow the conditions that create violent situations for us to begin with. The very creation of Canada and the United States is based off of the genocide and land theft of our peoples and fast forward to 2011 this is still happening. It is now sanctioned through the law, in the court system, and other organizations wishing to further control and exploit us by continuing to remove us from our homelands, or our communities of choice, or warehousing us in jails and prisons
-There is a severe lack of resources and support for those of us on reserves, in northern territories, and in rural and remote areas. So much of the dialogue about the sex trade is urban and metropolitan focused when so many of our rural and remote communities have the evidence to prove the urgency of shifting the dialogue to listen and support what is going on in the north and on the reserves. Where can sex workers go when there are no supports in their own communities? Why should they always have to come to the city?
-While the criminalization of the sex trade is indeed harmful to us and we consistently resist the regulations forced onto us by a colonial white law and order system, we want to move beyond just discussing criminalization and decriminalization. There are many other factors that contribute to the realities of our lives specifically as Indigenous peoples that are being largely ignored because of these kinds of debates constantly happening
-At public events or in the media, supposed ‘experts’ or ‘allies’ often focus exclusively on violence and victimization, over-representation and exiting strategies. While these issues are important, we want to move the dialogue beyond this focus on ‘being saved’ and instead to hear from sex workers themselves about all the complex realities and needs they face. Why is it that in public forums, the only voices we hear are those wanting to save sex workers from violence rather than from sex workers themselves? Sex workers should be invited to speak to their own issues, representing a diversity of perspectives and experiences. For example, sex work is often seen as an exclusively urban issue. In reality, lots of people in rural areas are trading sex for money, rides, clothes, and many other reasons – but because of shame and silence, this aspect of sex work remains invisible. Expanding our understanding of Indigenous involvement in sex work will entail including a diversity of perspectives, allowing these voices to inform policy and programs.
-Sex workers and those involved in the sex trade are part of our communities – all of the things we are advocating for in terms of Indigenous rights and land sovereignty sex workers need to be part of as well. Internationally sanctioned Indigenous rights are determined by states – so how do we see our own rights in our own territories within the sex trade? We aren’t going to have only one approach – Indigenous peoples have never only had one approach. There are multiple nations, multiple view points, and multiple ways of dealing with things – Indigenous peoples are not one homogenized group and we need to move forward being accountable to all of these differences.
-There exists an extreme amount of stereotypes surrounding Indigenous sexuality and our bodies that have been used to legitimize violence against us and make the settlement of our territories by the colonizers possible. Distancing ourselves from stereotyping has in many cases also meant distancing ourselves from sexuality and ultimately from sex workers. This is just not about our own individual stories – we need to look at how are we treating all our relations and that especially means people who are most pushed aside by those in our communities.
-We want to move forward to a place where we can discuss sex work and sex trade sovereignty – having autonomy of our bodies, our spaces, and the right to govern ourselves. We want to talk about our humanity instead of talking over people who are involved in the sex trade. We are more than just the numbers or statistics coming from the realities in our lives. We have voices, we are Indigenous peoples involved in the sex trade and sex industries, and we need to be heard
Written by the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and co-signed by:
Sarah Hunt, Kwakwaka’wakw
Bambie Tait, Gitxsan nation
Ivo Haggerty (Cargnelli)/Sta’xai’luum Blackstone
Lyn Highway
Elena Jeffreys, president of the Scarlet Alliance, representing sex workers’ rights at Slut Walk Melbourne.
Elena and Hexy are total BAMFs.
Poet Susana Chavez’s Death Sparks Outrage in Juarez « News and Resources
*trigger warning for violence against Mexican women*
The details are horrific: Susana Chavez, an internationally renowned poet and long time activist who spoke out against the decade-long femicide of woman in Juarez, was found murdered this week. She had been tortured and suffocated; her left hand had apparently been dismembered with a saw.
Chavez is one of over 500 women in Juarez who have been found murdered in the last decade. And her death has caused an uproar because she had been one of few to speak out against the growing femicide, coining the phrase, “Ni una mas,” (“Not one more) and routinely criticizing local authorities for refusing to properly investigate the crimes. Her death has cast new suspicions about local authorities’ ability to handle the cases. That is to say that they’ve largely chosen to ignore them; so far, 92 percent of cases of women who’ve been murdered in the region remain unsolved.
Many who knew and loved Chavez are accusing authorities of trying to silence the publicity surrounding her murder. Within days of her murder, police announced the arrest of three suspects, two of whom were under 18 years old. Police said that Chavez had gone out drinking with the suspects and was killed after refusing to have sex with them.
