The exercise of human rights should not be contingent on whether or not you think a person’s choices or circumstances are a good way to live or be. Entangling morality with a conversation about rights and painting a portrait of people in the sex industry as victims without voices only perpetuates their disempowerment.

Since becoming a part of the U.S. sex worker rights movement

five years ago, talking about contentious issues concerning bodies, labor,

money, and rights has very much become my calling. In the past year alone, I’ve

been quoted on CNN

about the value of virginity, talked about South Carolina’s Governor Mark

Sanford on WNYC’s The Takeaway,

and admonished the Boston Herald for its slurs toward sex

workers. Suffice to say, I give my

opinion freely and often loudly.

I thought I knew a lot about sex work, rights, and

organizing when, in September, I set off for two weeks in India with my colleague

Khushbu Srivastava,

Program Officer for Asia at the International Women’s Health Coalition.

But as much as I am accustomed to being an “expert,” I

quickly realized that I knew next to nothing about the nuances of Indian

culture and the dynamics of the local struggle for sexual rights and

reproductive health. While there are many things that I learned during the two

weeks I spent time with our partners at CREA, The YP Foundation, Commonhealth,

and SANGRAM,

perhaps the biggest lesson I learned–as a leader, as an advocate, and as

privileged white lady from the United States who was way out of my element–was

to shut up and listen.

I spent almost a week in Sangli, a

rural district that’s six to nine hours (depending on who’s driving!) southeast

of Mumbai. Maharashtra state, where Sangli is located, has

progressive laws that afford many rights to its citizens, particularly in

respect to accessing healthcare. However, populations that are already marginalized

in their communities and in local institutions—like sex workers, HIV-positive

women, and people who are not literate—do not know their rights or how to

navigate the legal structures and institutions that facilitate access to these

rights and services.

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In Sangli, I spent time with the

staff and organizers of SANGRAM, which empowers

individuals with the knowledge and tools they need to understand and claim their

rights. SANGRAM was founded in 1992 to address the growing HIV infection rate

in Sangli district, and they soon realized the value of mobilizing sex workers to

become agents of change in fostering a sustainable and effective response to

the epidemic. Today, one of the

organization’s largest projects is a collective of 5,000 sex workers that

manages a peer HIV prevention education and condom distribution program in

Sangli. This collective also advocates to ensure equal access to health

services and end violence and discrimination against sex workers. While many organizations train and bring

in people from outside the community to help and support people in need (the

social work model), SANGRAM operates under the principle that the only way to

empower people is to provide them with the tools they need to claim their

rights and facilitate change.

It was inspiring to meet the HIV-positive rural women,

illiterate sex workers, and community health advocates who are working together

to facilitate change in their communities. Many told me how for years, doctors in the local primary

health centers refused to provide health services to sex workers or avoided

touching them by giving them inoculations with extra long needles. With

SANGRAM’s assistance, sex workers have been able to form alliances with some of

the doctors and achieve a higher standard of care and respect. Their efforts

have resulted in health system

improvements that benefit the entire community: advocates have been successful

in demanding that the primary health centers be functional, with trained staff,

adequate supplies, and medicine.

In Sangli, I worked with SANGRAM to

document their work and successes.

On International Human

Rights Day, we released a five minute video about sex worker

organizing, the first collaborative media project of the International

Women’s Health Coalition & SANGRAM.

Since we posted the short documentary about SANGRAM and the

mobilization of sex workers in Sangli, it’s been interesting to read the posted

comments and reactions. One of the most frequent responses is a well-meaning

but slightly problematic one. To paraphrase: “It’s so great to see these women getting the

protection and help they need!” Obviously, the respondents want what’s best for

women, but this response doesn’t instill much trust in the agency of sex

workers to realize what’s best for them on their own. Furthermore, it casts sex

workers as damaged goods: victims in need of saving, delicate flowers in need of

protection.

Why is it that there has been a shift in how advocates

describe those who experience gender-based violence from “victim” to

“survivor,” but when speaking of people in the sex industry, the word “victim”

has persisted? Why is it that US-funded HIV prevention programs require a

denunciation of sex work by organizations best poised to reach sex workers with

life-saving information and services? Why is it that while in other social

justice movements, the voices of the people most affected are at the forefront,

yet some feminists are quick to leap into conversations about sex work and

trafficking to speak for the affected communities?

The basic answer to these questions is that many people

regard the sex industry as something that must be halted, one that at its core

perpetuates violence against the people who work in it, a business from which

no good can come. I won’t argue that the sex industry is a well-functioning

industry that respects the rights of all its workers, or that most sex workers

feel safe and fulfilled in their jobs. However, there are a variety of

contributing factors that might keep a sex worker in the business, even if the

worker has the choice to leave it for other work.

SANGRAM works to prioritize the voices of sex workers

themselves, so that sex workers can articulate what they need to be safe,

healthy, and able to provide for themselves and their families. Sometimes this

includes an exit strategy, but often the sex workers’ circumstances and the

economic and social climate in which they live make exit from the sex industry

unrealistic.

Programs that are designed to rescue and protect sex workers

from the industry usually don’t comprehensively consider the well-being and

economic stability of the people they are supposed to serve. One of the tactics

these programs often employ is abstinence education – and we all know how well that’s worked for sexuality

education. Another recent example of an attempt to rehabilitate sex workers is

an initiative launched in India in which men volunteered to marry sex workers to get

them out of the sexually exploitative situation of the sex industry.

As any survivor of intimate partner violence knows, marriage isn’t exactly a safe

haven from violence or HIV infection for women.

As

a major Open Society Institute report titled “Rights,

Not Rescue” indicates, programs that aim to get sex workers out of

the industry do little to reduce violence or improve health and working

conditions within the industry.

According to the report, which analyzes rehabilitation programs in

Botswana,

Namibia, and South Africa, “None of the

interviewed sex workers who had completed rehabilitation programs had managed

to obtain gainful employment from their training.” Domestically, in a recent program launched by the

Dallas, Texas police to rehabilitate sex workers, half of 375 arrested

sex workers chose rehabilitation over being charged with prostitution, but only

21 of those who went through the rehabilitation program had left the business

upon follow up.

Despite

these numbers and testimonies by sex workers about the problems with rescue and

rehabilitation programs, getting sex workers out of sex work is widely posited

as the way to end exploitation.

The exercise of human rights should not be contingent on whether

or not you think a person’s choices or circumstances are a good way to live or

be. Entangling morality with a conversation about rights and painting a

portrait of people in the sex industry as victims without voices only perpetuates

their disempowerment.

The feminist movement is built on the principle that women

should have opportunities that are equal to those granted to men, a lot of

which is about economic opportunity – things like pay equity and the ability to

own property. It is also built on the struggle for women’s rights to control

their own bodies and make choices about their sexual rights and reproductive

health that are unfettered by cultural and familial demands. The struggle for

sex workers’ rights is at the intersection of the struggle for economic justice

and bodily rights, and it is perhaps that combination that can often make

discussing sex work uncomfortable.