by Jodi Jacobson

Source: RH Reality Check

Sex Work….

Law enforcement in many settings and in many countries is complicit in the dehumanization and exploitation of and in perpetrating violence against persons in sex work. In research I conducted in 2005, there were numerous cases of endemic police and law enforcement corruption through which representatives of “the law” demanded continuous bribes from sex workers and often raped them, whether or not the bribes were paid.

If you don’t see sex workers as human beings with basic human rights whether or not they are in sex work, then you don’t feel the need to address police brutality and violence against them or other realities of their daily lives. You can just stand aside and moralize or victimize.

US policy won’t allow us to give funding to any group that works on “empowerment” with sex workers, including sex worker unions, despite the fact that many of the programs we no longer fund have been found to be among those most successful in improving health conditions and the rights of sex workers. Yet unions are the very nucleus of finding means to ending violence against persons in sex work, to ending the spread of HIV, to ensuring safe conditions for the women etc. It is the US with its politically-driven policies that ends up further exploiting sex workers by taking away their basic rights to free speech and you and I never have to be faced with that because they’re just a group called sex workers, and they’re “over there.”

Various studies show that because of the extremely poor levels of pay in wage labor positions and in informal markets in countries or regions with high levels of unemployment, women enter sex work willingly –whether full time or on a part time transactional basis–because in fact it is either the only, or it is the most lucrative form of employment/work and they, like others, want to feed and clothe their kids, send them to school, etc. If you want to address sex work and/or labor exploitation, start with looking at the effects our own international trade policies have on the economic displacement of vulnerable populations and the effect, in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia, and India, that these policies have on driving women into sex work as a means of survival.

Sex workers are not stupid. They don’t need “rescue” in some traditional sense. They are human beings, with human rights, who have brains and know better than anyone else the issues they face and the means of solving them.

This is an extraordinarily complex issue. Like with any social group, it is best to engage with the people actually involved in the work, activity, or issue, rather than coming in from on high and deciding you, we, I know what is best for “them.” We don’t.

If we just listened and supported the actual movements for sex worker rights, so much more could be accomplished than all our false victorian-era, “feel-morally-superior” poilcies can ever achieve.

Jodi Jacobson
Submitted by Jodi Jacobson, Senior Political Editor on December 5, 2009 – 3:54pm.