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I do not think that there is a coherent view in the human rights community about sex work.
I think that you have many different opinions and many of those opinions
are motivated through using human rights language.
On one hand, you have people who argue that sex work is inherently degrading and exploitative of women.
Therefore, we should work towards its eradication. On completely the opposite extreme,
you have people who argue that this is an issue of autonomy and agency for women,
so women have a right to chose.
Even though women might make those choices in very constrained and limited circumstances,
we should still, from a human rights perspective, be supporting their agency and choice.
I myself am very conflicted and I am not sure where I place myself on the spectrum.
From a pragmatic point of view, I think we have to protect women who are in sex work
- whether we are working to get them out of sex work
or whether we are working to support their choice to be in sex work.
I think what we have to do is make sure that women in sex work are not criminalised,
and that they do not experience human rights abuses at the hands of the criminal justice system,
at the hands of clients, at the hands of people in the sex industry.
I think that when you criminalise conduct, it means that you push people away from services,
because women who are in sex work, where it is illegal, are not going to walk into a healthcare centre
and say, “I am a sex worker, so I need one hundred condoms”; similarly with men.
It is very hard then to develop services and strategies that help people to protect themselves.
It is very hard for out-reach workers to go out and find people because they are going to be in places
that are hard to reach because they are afraid of being arrested, of being incarcerated.
So, criminalisation as a prevention strategy and as a strategy to encourage health-seeking behaviour
is an absolute disaster, because it just isolates people from services.
And even where there is a will or you have civil society that wants to develop services,
it is extremely hard to reach people.
So from a public health perspective, criminalisation never works.
For further information on human rights, ***/AIDS
and to endorse Now More Than Ever, the Joint Statement,
visit, www.HIVhumanRIGHTSnow.org
Subtitles: Arielle Reid, István Gábor Takács �