CORRUPTION

International Affairs Forum Fall 2016
(FGM) have been reconsidered and categorized
as human rights issues. When Equality Now (of
which I am a founding Board member) begged
Amnesty International in the mid-1990s for
its help during one of the Equality Now’s first
campaigns to address FGM, Amnesty refused,
stating that it considered FGM as a religious
practice, not a human rights violation. Thankfully,
this has changed, but it took many years for
other violative practices against women and girls,
historically considered cultural or traditional—
child marriage, widow burning, or breast
ironing—to be deemed unlawful.
Governments have an affirmative obligation to
protect all of its citizens, regardless of gender.
Now, there is an understanding, from the United
Nations to the World Bank, that economic
development and peace, to name two issues,
require women’s participation. That recognition
extends toward investing in empowering women
at all levels— political, economic, educational,
etc. Women’s control over her reproductive
health is also key to that empowerment. This
includes the right to do own your body and that
your body is your own. In the context of the sex
trade, however, we need to make an important
distinction: There is no right to prostitution. There
is no male right to purchase another human
being for sexual acts. On the contrary, women
have the right not to be prostituted. So, in my
view, you cannot bend fundamental rights to suit
your own interpretational preferences, which
is what a number of human rights groups are
doing by putting prostitution under the category
of sexual rights. Exploitation can never be a
sexual right. Although women have the right to
sell their bodies (although most national laws
forbid the sale of organs), this practice cannot
exist in a vacuum. It has to be examined within
the socioeconomic and cultural framework of
the sex trade, exploitation, and gender-based
violence. Part of that framework is recognizing
that violence against women and girls—whether
child marriage, female genital mutilation, rape,
or prostitution—are about unwanted sexual
access to women’s bodies, When it comes to
prostitution, unfortunately, in most societies
including our own, money is seen as constituting
consent to that undesired sexual access.
When people categorize prostitution under
sexual rights, they are essentially framing
prostitution as an exception to violence against
women. They do not see it as exploitation
or as violence, but rather as a very narrow,
contractual transaction. And this narrow view is
problematic—the Executive Director of Human
Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, once tweeted: “All
want to end poverty, but in meantime why deny
poor women the option of voluntary sex work?”
It is this logic that is problematic. If you extend
his argument, consider the following: children are
often poor, why not let them work in factories?
Men can be poor too, why not let them be debtbonded?
The answer is simple: Human rights
groups have, or should have, a vision of a world
in which human beings should live; exploitation
and violence are not part of it. Degradation and
dehumanization are not part of that vision, either.
The sex trade should not be considered an
exception to systems of oppression and violence
and exploitation for profit, but a cause and
consequence of it.
CATW clearly opposes the use of terms like
“sex work” and “sex worker”. What terms
should be used in their place? Something like
“exploitation”?
Well, we fail in language, we really do. Terms
like “prostitute” are not only stigmatizing, but
prejudicial: up until the adoption of the Trafficking
Victims Protection and Justice Act (TVPJA) last
year by the New York State Assembly, the state’s
penal code used the term “prostitute”, which
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