by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 10, 2018 | Prostitution
by Joanna Pinkiewicz / Deep Green Resistance Australia
Australia has different legislations in regards to prostitution in each state. For example New South Wales has almost full decriminalisation and definitely in favour of brothel owners, less so for individual, who can be charged for “living on the earnings of prostitute” or soliciting for prostitution outside dwelling, school, church or hospital. In Victoria street sex work is illegal and brothels and premises based work needs to be licenced. In reality, NSW police reports show that legal operations have connections to organised crime, drug and people trafficking and in Victoria we are seeing surge in premises, both registered and under the cover of massage parlours and unchecked conditions and practices within registered brothels.
While many countries in Europe and recently in the US (US Greens Party voted for change in policy on prostitution and support the Nordic Model) the push to introduce the abolitionist approach has been coming from the left in the name of justice and equality for women, in Australia the left has been supporting the “sex worker” lobby groups and the sex industry itself, contributing to normalisation of sex purchase by men and expansion of the sex trade industry.
It came as a bit as a surprise to see that in April a branch of Victorian Liberal Party proposed a motion in support of the Nordic Model, which aims at addressing the demand for prostitution via penalising the buyer and not targeting those who are in prostitution.
It also came as a surprise to have a very public supporter of the Nordic Model within the Greens Party, Kathleen Maltzahn, state that she won’t support the Vic Liberal Party’s motion for the Nordic Model if and when it goes up for a vote. Maltzahn is known for her grass roots work, Project Respect, an exit program for women in prostitution, which she established after working in Philippines and seeing first-hand the insidious nature of sex trade. She has been going against her own party’s policy, which supports full decriminalisation. She has been widely criticised by those in her own party as well as those in the pro sex lobby groups. Upon the release of her statement, a criticism also came from parts of the abolition movement. I does look like a significant pressure has been placed upon her from the party leaders to make that statement. One thing is clear, we need more radical feminist analysis of prostitution in the Green’s party, more radical feminists being active within the mainstream left to bring about change.
Many activists within the abolishion movement hesitate at working with the Liberal Party or Christian organisations, due to disagreements on details or due to their stand regarding other women’s rights issues.
I have asked Simone Watson, director of Nordic Model Australia Coalition, what she thinks about working with the Liberal Party on this and she said this:
“My concerns around the Victorian Liberal Party endorsement of the Nordic/Abolitionist Model were that their first proposal was not in fact the Nordic/Abolitionist model at all.
“The initial draft was a serious red flag to me as it only focused on criminalising buyers in illegal brothels. It is already illegal to buy sexual access in illegal brothels. Yes, it aimed to decriminalise the prostituted women in those same brothels, but offered no exit programs and no changes to legislation across the board. So my reading of it was that it would be doomed to failure. I do not think my concerns around such a premise are unwarranted. It failed to take in to account the inefficacy of prohibition laws on prostitution; it failed to capture the intrinsic and essential point of the abolitionist approach. Their proposal was still rooted in the dangerous ground of prohibition. And prohibition fails. Some saw this as at least a start, however, the Nordic/Abolitionist Model cannot be undertaken half-baked. To do so would be incredibly dangerous and anathema to the law they claimed to be endorsing. To their credit they have since recognised that their initial proposal was incomplete.
“Do I trust them? Well, I have some trust, especially as they took considerable time to listen to survivor’s and our allies’ concerns on this. They certainly have taken more time than the Greens or Labor, which is why the Green Party USA should be commended for their determination to support the abolition of the sex trade and all major parties here should take note of that.
“For me, working with political parties as a sex-trade abolitionist is fraught because I often do not agree with many of their other policies. For example the Liberal’s alliance with anti-woman organisations, those who are against abortion and so on. But if a party is truly dedicated to abolishing the sex-trade, extinguishing the ongoing commodification of women, and women’s rights to be free from sexual exploitation, then I will support them on that particular policy. Again it is hard to trust any particular party on this issue, but if they are willing to amend their initial proposal and actively endorse the Nordic/Abolitionist model as it is intended in full, I support that unequivocally.”
Simone’s response highlights critical issues in approaching the Nordic Model with wrong motivation, poor understanding of the process involved as well as half-baked financial commitment, all critical to its success.
To summarise, the Nordic Model requires a three pronged approach:
- Establishment of exit and support programs for people in prostitution.
- Education of the public and retraining of the police
- Enforcement of the new laws by providing funding to dedicated police people and social workers.
The laws themselves aim at stoping trafficking and curbing growth of the global sex trade via penalising the buyers and pimps.
Other important news from Australia is the upcoming Australian Summit Against Sexual Exploitation (ASASE) on 27-28 of July in Melbourne. Key speakers of the summit on the subject of prostitution are:
- Julie Bindel (UK)
- Sabrinna Valisce (SPACE International)
- Simone Watson (Normac)
- Sarah M Mah (Asian Women for Equality, Canada)
I’m hoping that the summit will bring more allies to the abolition movement in Australia, who can then plan for the consultation process needed when the Nordic Model gets a motion vote in Victoria.
Joanna Pinkiewicz is a DGR Australia member; environmental activist, women’s right activist artist and mother.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 10, 2018 | Women & Radical Feminism
Featured image: The International Coalition Against Human Trafficking
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” – bell hooks
Last weekend, I was tabling for Deep Green Resistance at an environmental conference. A young man, who looked to be in his early 20’s, came up to the table. I approached him and asked if I could answer any questions.
He pointed at the sticker on the table: “Patriarchy + Capitalism = Pornography.” With a sneer he asked, “Do you really believe that?”
I told him I did. “So are you a SWERF,” he asked, using a common acronym for sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. “What about agency?”
What an insane thing for a leftist to ask! Would anyone say that I’m “denying the agency of U.S. soldiers” because I oppose US imperialism? Would anyone say that I’m “excluding McDonald’s workers” because I oppose capitalism and the fast food industry?
Of course not. These arguments are self-evidently bullshit. It’s possible (and I can’t believe I have to say this) to oppose larger systems while still having sympathy, and even acting in solidarity, with those who are trapped inside those systems. And just because some women “choose” and “enjoy” working in pornography and prostitution doesn’t mean that we can’t critique the industry—and even critique these women for choices that have harmful effects on others.
The fact that a member of an oppressed class chooses to participate in the oppressive system doesn’t mean their choice can’t be criticized. After all, as the wonderful anti-porn activist Gail Dines has said, “Systems of oppression are flexible enough to absorb some members of subordinated groups; indeed, they draw strength from the illusion of neutrality provided by these exceptions.”
So why does this young white man believe that when it comes to pornography, “agency” is more important than the real, material impacts of the porn industry?
What I explained to the young man is that mass media and culture shapes the way we think. This has been a fundamental understanding of the left for decades. We can call it manufacturing consent, propaganda, or cultural hegemony.
Advertising works. Propaganda works. That’s why they use it.
That’s why Arundhati Roy, writing about right-wing police forces battling indigenous land defenders in rural India, quotes the superintendent of police chief as saying, “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem [sic] can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Take the same approach and apply it to patriarchy, and you’ll have the last 50 years of this culture: pornography becoming more and more normalized, softcore porn moving into pop culture and social media, and ubiquitous access to demeaning, woman-hating content 24/7 from the device in your pocket.
The pornography industry in the United States is more profitable than Hollywood. It’s also more profitable than the NFL, NBA, and MLB—combined. Porn sites, at any given time, have about 30 million unique visitors watching.
As Sheila Jeffries writes, “Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.”
Do you really think that getting paid a small amount of money in order to have a strange, smelly man aggressively fuck you is “empowering?”
Here’s the reality: prostituted women are often “physically revolted and hurt by the sex.”
Women who have escaped prostitution have higher rates of PTSD than soldiers who have been in combat.
Read that sentence again.
There are an estimated 40 million people in prostitution worldwide, most of them (more than 80 percent) women and children. Women of color make up a highly disproportionate number of prostituted women. Of the 40 million, 2.5 million are trafficked. In other words, they are sex slaves. The average age of entry to the industry is 13 years old.
Thirteen fucking years old.
But in the face of this violence, the “agency” of a few relatively wealthy “sex workers” who claim to enjoy their jobs is more important.
If we call prostitution a “job” (rather than a form of abuse), it would be by far the most dangerous job in the US, with a murder rate of 204 per 100,000. Even if we don’t call every sex act within the context of prostitution a rape, about 80 percent of prostituted women have been raped, and they are raped an average of 8-10 times per year.
As indigenous feminist Cherry Smiley writes (brilliantly) in the Globe and Mail, “Prostitution, akin to the residential school system, is an institution that continues to have devastating impacts on the lives of aboriginal women and girls, who are disproportionately involved in street-level prostitution. Prostitution is an industry that relies on disparities in power to exist. We can see clearly that women, and especially aboriginal women and girls, are funneled into prostitution as a result of systemic inequalities such as their lack of access to housing, loss of land, culture, and languages, poverty, high rates of male violence, involvement with the foster care system, suicide, criminalization, addiction, and disability. To imagine that prostitution, a system that feeds these inequalities, should be allowed or encouraged, is dangerously misguided and supports the ongoing systemic harms against our women and girls.”
The whole notion of a SWERF is ridiculous. As Jindi Mehat writes, “Supporting an argument that excludes the majority of women in prostitution, while calling the very women who consider the whole picture ‘exclusionary,’ shows how intellectually vapid and hypocritical so-called liberal feminism is. Just like calling support of prostitution, which exposes the most marginalized among us to increased levels of violence and abuse, a feminist position, this isn’t about women’s liberation, it’s about feeling good and progressive and not having to actually change anything…
“Supporting prostitution and screaming ‘SWERF’ at abolitionists isn’t feminism, it’s capitulating to male supremacy and writing marginalized women off as collateral damage. It’s living in a dream world of consequence-free individual choices. It’s refusing to go beyond scratching the surface, and instead hiding behind buzzwords and tepid half-measures while trying to silence women who are willing to dive deep no matter the cost.”
So what do we actually want?
Radical feminists generally advocate for what is called “The Nordic Model,” a legal approach in which the people (almost entirely men) who buy sex are criminalized, and the people (almost entirely women and children) who work in the industry are provided with resources and programs to help them exit the sex trade and build alternative livelihoods.
This approach has been proven to result in positive outcomes. First, it teaches sex buyers (“johns”), who are primarily men, and the broader society, that women are not for sale at any price. Second, it provides support and full decriminalization to those who are prostituted, giving them options to exit the inherently-violent industry.
In my book, that’s not exclusionary, that’s human rights. That’s feminism.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 17, 2018 | Prostitution
Featured image: Bridget Perrier speaking at Julie Bindel’s book launch. Image: YouTube. Numerous ex-prostituted women spoke at Julie Bindel’s book launch in London, telling the raw, brutal truth about the sex industry.
by Rahila Gupta / Feminist Current
Prostitution or sex work? Your choice of words gives the game away, marks out where you stand on the issue. Violence against women or just a job? It is a serious battleground for the soul of feminism.
Into this contested territory lands Julie Bindel’s well-researched book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. At a time when “sex work” appears to be gaining ground in official circles, Bindel is a passionate abolitionist, meaning she does not believe that decriminalization or legalization can protect prostituted women from the inherent violence of prostitution. As such, she advocates for what’s commonly known as the Nordic Model, in which johns, pimps, and profiteers are criminalized and prostituted women are supported to exit the industry. To date, versions of this model have been adopted by Sweden, Norway, Northern Ireland, Canada, Iceland and France.
Unsurprisingly, the Nordic model is vociferously opposed by those who profit from the sex industry, because it will decrease demand, though they choose to cite concern for the women’s safety instead, saying criminalizing pimps and johns will drive the trade underground. However, as a Swedish police officer quoted in Bindel’s book says:
“How can women in Sweden be in more danger than they were before the law? When all she has to do is pick up the phone, even if [the punter] is rude to her, and we will arrest him because he is already committing a crime.”
The panel at Bindel’s book launch in London, attended by more than 400 people, featured three women who have exited the sex trade: Sabrinna Valisce from New Zealand; Bridget Perrier, an Indigenous woman from Canada; and Vednita Carter, a black woman from the US. Their testimonies about the reality of the sex industry were moving, but the stuff of nightmares. It was absolutely clear that prostitution is not another job in need of regulation or unionization. It is a distillation of patriarchy in its purest form.
During the panel, Valisce explained that she rejects the term, “sex worker,” because it glosses over the “sucking and fucking” she had to do. She described her daily routine of standing around for 12-17 hour shifts, wearing only lingerie and six-inch heels, waiting to be chosen by men who would come in bellowing, “Which one of you cunts wants to suck my dick?” This was in New Zealand, where prostitution has been decriminalized since 2003, and is held up as a model of good practice by the pro-prostitution lobby, even though women continue to be killed by johns and pimps.
Perrier was lured into prostitution at the age of 12 and stayed for 10 years. The havoc wreaked by men has left her cervix permanently damaged. As a grown woman, she sleeps with her lights on to keep the nightmares at bay. Perrier talked about the racism she experienced in the industry as an Indigenous woman, and how even funeral homes won’t “touch our dead bodies.” “It’s not the laws that kill our women. It’s not the streets that kill our women. It’s the men,” she said.
Perrier founded Sex Trade 101 to support women who want to leave the industry. She said that 98 per cent of the 400 women she has helped wanted to get out of prostitution at some point. The same point was made by Carter, who has worked with 300-500 women each year, for the last 30 years, through her organization Breaking Free. Carter reports that even women who said they “liked” working in the sex trade complained that they were depressed all the time. “It eats at your soul,” she said.
It seems psychologically and politically consistent that so many of those in the abolitionist movement are female survivors who exited the sex trade. Those who continue to work in the industry not only have a vested interest in its growth, but also in bigging it up — especially to its critics. Fiona Broadfoot (who exited at the age of 26 after 11 years of working in the trade) once told me that she used to challenge anyone who dared question her choice of work, but nonetheless would wash herself, inside and out, with Dettol every night. When I asked Bindel if her research confirmed these experiences in the industry, she said she only came across one survivor among the 250 people she interviewed who continued to promote “sex work” as empowering.
While the gap between the pro-prostitution lobby and abolitionists has grown into a chasm, it was not always so. Bindel’s book reminds us that the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), founded in 1975, were abolitionists in the early days. Their slogan, “For prostitutes, against prostitution” could easily be the tagline for Bindel’s book. They did not argue that sex work is empowering or enjoyable — they saw it as exploitation, as they saw all labour under capitalism.
In recent years, supporters of prostitution have increasingly framed it as a question of choice and women’s agency. Brooke Magnanti — the self-defined “happy hooker” behind the Belle De Jour blog — popularized that narrative; but by all accounts only a tiny percentage of women freely choose and personally profit from it. And it is their voices we hear the most, echoed by their academic supporters and the pimps, whose vested interests it serves, as Bindel has demonstrated. This narrative of “choice” is the poisoned chalice handed down by neoliberalism to feminism. To continue to believe that women freely choose the lives of violent victimization that were laid before us by the panelists at Bindel’s book launch would be grotesque.
This is why I believe that Bindel made an error of judgment in choosing not to devote any space to trafficking. Although she recognizes its importance, in almost the same breath she dismisses trafficking. In a typically memorable Bindel phrase, she says that “sex trafficking is an embarrassment to the pro-prostitution lobby in the same way that lung cancer is to the tobacco industry.” Quite. Trafficking, based as it is on coercion and deception, undercuts the central argument of the sex work lobby, which claims women are exercising their free choice when they enter the industry. Much energy has been expended by these lobbyists in attempting to separate “sex work” from trafficking — the first is presented as harmless and potentially empowering, only the second is accepted as exploitative and harmful. All the while the obvious fact that a thriving sex industry acts as a green light to traffickers is ignored.
Although the statistics are unreliable and heavily contested, trends show that more and more migrant women are being prostituted in the West. A 2009 studyfound that in a majority of European countries up to 70 per cent of women in the industry were migrant women. While not all of them will be trafficked, this is a telling statistic — it demonstrates the unequal economic desperation of migrant versus local women.
Bindel describes trafficking as “international pimping” and believes “that the only difference between international and local pimping is that some women are pimped across borders, and others are not.” But from the phrase “across borders,” a whole series of vulnerabilities flow, as I argued in my book Enslaved. Most notably, not being able to access the protection of the state, such as it is, and living in the shadow of imminent deportation.
Both lobbies acknowledge it is important to tackle the factors which drive women into prostitution, like poverty. It is no surprise that, as Valisce explained, even when women choose to leave, they can spend years exiting and re-entering the industry because of the difficulties of finding work elsewhere.
As long as women are trapped in these situations, we must focus on exit strategies, while also supporting policies that will ensure that women’s health and safety needs are met and that they can live as free from abuse as possible.
Rahila Gupta is a freelance journalist, writer, activist and longstanding member of Southall Black Sisters. She is author and editor of several books, and is currently collaborating with Beatrix Campbell on a book titled, “Why Doesn’t Patriarchy Die?” which will investigate how patriarchy fits with diverse political systems.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 25, 2017 | Pornography
Featured image: From left to right: Cherie Jiminez, Per-Anders Sunesson, Gail Dines, Julie Bindel, Clara Berglund. By Gail Dines/Facebook)
by Susan Cox / Feminist Current
I remember when I was first struck by the question: If prostitution is against the law in the US, why isn’t porn?
A friend of mine was telling me about an undercover sting operation at the massage parlour down the street from her apartment in New York, wherein police arrested some of the Asian women who “worked” there. This story made me wonder what kind of men would go to a “massage parlour” and exploit a woman’s desperation and marginalization as an immigrant in the US. Just the men should be thrown in jail for doing that, not those women, I thought.
I recalled the disgustingly racist way I have seen so many white men fetishize Asian women, imagining them to be extra-submissive. I thought about how there were probably hundreds of thousands of porn films promoting this view online, featuring Asian women “servicing” white men — many of which were probably even set in a massage parlour. Then it hit me: Why was it illegal at the place down the street from my friend’s apartment, but when the same thing is done with a camera, it’s considered totally legitimate?
It’s been years since this incongruity occurred to me, but I still don’t have an answer to that question… Because there isn’t one.
Last week, a panel held during the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York addressed this bizarre disconnect between pornography and prostitution in law, activism, and consciousness. Moderated by Clara Berglund, Secretary General of the Swedish Women’s Lobby, the panel featured pornography expert Gail Dines, writer Julie Bindel, prostitution survivor and abolitionist Cherie Jimenez, and Sweden’s Ambassador at Large for Combatting Trafficking in Persons, Per-Anders Sunesson. All panelists advocate for the Nordic Model (a legal model which decriminalizes those who are prostituted and instead targets the demand side of the sex trade, by criminalizing pimps, brothel owners, and johns). The panel was preceded by a screening of Gail Dines’ documentary, Pornland: How the Porn Industry Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.
“When I first saw this documentary, I did not know how bad pornography had gotten,” Jimenez said, referring to the extreme acts of degradation and physical violence (slapping, gagging, choking, prolapsed anuses) that have come to dominate online porn. As a survivor of prostitution who now does frontline work with women trying to exit the sex trade, Jimenez has noticed a parallel between the increase in the brutality of porn and the increasingly sadistic demands of johns experienced by prostituted women today. “It’s a whole different game now,” she said.
Through her journalistic research in Cambodia, Bindel found that the prostituted women she interviewed shared a similar experience. They told her the demands of johns had gotten much worse since gonzo porn had flooded Cambodia, becoming more accessible to men through smart phones. Men would even play this kind of porn on their phones during the encounter and make prostituted women re-create the brutal acts performed in it.
Pro-”sex work” lobbyists like to frame prostitution as something natural, that has always been present throughout history. However, the disturbing requests and acts prostituted women say are expected of them since the Internet porn revolution show otherwise. The demand for prostitution has changed, suggesting it is no more natural than modern cultural norms like the pressure on women to shave their vulvas bald as per porn standards.
“Do you think men are born johns?” asked Dines. “Do you think they just suddenly wake up one day and decide to go to a trafficked or prostituted woman? No! That takes a socialization process. And what is the biggest socializer of sexuality in the world today? Pornography.”
Dines argues that pornography is the ideological arm of what is essentially one and the same sex trade, facilitating the demand for prostitution by normalizing sexual violence, dehumanizing women, and killing empathy in johns. Nonetheless, a sharp legal distinction is made — while prostitution is illegal in many countries, porn is considered to be an above-ground industry.
Its legitimate status means that the porn industry is in a position to dump massive amounts of money into influencing politicians and legislation. Ironically, it also enables the industry to facilitate illegal actions, such as sex trafficking in minors. Dines explains:
“The porn industry has put a ton of money into fighting a law called 2257. All that law says is that, on a porn set, you have to prove with some form of ID that everyone is 18 or above. The porn industry has been fighting that for years, claiming that it inhibits their free speech.”
Although industry lobbyists claim pornography is simply “free speech,” what happens in porn happens to real women (and girls, apparently). The fact that the act is filmed does not make the prostitution disappear, but effectively ensures the trauma is captured for eternity.
After exiting prostitution, Jimenez says she struggled “for a long time trying to feel whole again.” Dines extended this to the experiences of women in pornography, citing research by Melissa Farley which found that prostituted women who had pornography made of them experienced even higher rates of PTSD.
According to Dines, this is most likely due to the fact that, for women in pornography, there is no way to ever truly exit the sex trade. Their exploitation is frozen in time, allowing millions of johns to re-victimize women endlessly, even after their deaths. “Think of the trauma of never again having any sense of bodily integrity or privacy,” said Dines.
Bindel attended the 2015 LA Porn Awards as a journalist and learned about yet another way the industry makes it impossible for women to truly exit porn. She explained:
“The biggest category in 2015 was ‘Milf.’ And it was because when the women were retiring at the age of 35 or 36, the industry wanted to get more out of them. And someone told me something about this that left my blood cold. When the women are about to drop out of making films, for the most popular women, they make a ‘real doll’ from her. And it’s anatomically correct in every way. So men are ordering these exact replicas of these women and their orifices. They mold from her body, inside and out, which means that whatever happens to her, wherever she goes, there are men literally fucking her replica and writing about it online, etcetera. And that to me is the height of sadism.”
Considering the impact of the industry on women prostituted through porn (never mind on women and girls as a whole), Dines’ delivers an impassioned plea to the anti-trafficking movement:
“Don’t forget pornography and don’t forget the women in the industry…The less we think about it, the more we ignore the women in pornography and say, ‘You don’t count. We’re not even including you in this.’”
In her final comments, Dines called upon governments like Sweden to incorporate pornography into the legislation that already exists: “Now has come the time, after so many years of the Nordic Model, that if you’re going to fine or imprison [men] for sexual exploitation, you have to also do that for the exploitation of women in pornography.”
As the Nordic Model continues to spread across the world, this landmark legislation for women’s rights could also be a huge blow to the multi-billion dollar porn industry. It may be some time before feminists can convince states to craft and implement specific policy that includes pornography within the Nordic Model, but it is imperative we push for it. Anything less would abandon so many women and girls, arbitrarily denying them their humans rights and the justice they deserve.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Oct 25, 2015 | Prostitution, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Women & Radical Feminism
By Janie Davies / Feminist Current
Women protested in 50 countries on October 23, united in their opposition to Amnesty International’s recommendation for full decriminalization of the sex industry, including pimps and johns.
The campaign was organized by a coalition of individual women and women’s groups, collectively referred to as Amnesty Action.
All these women know that where full decriminalization or legalization of the sex trade take place, trafficking rises. This stands to reason because as scrutiny is removed, organized criminals are able to operate more freely.
They know that an estimated 89 per cent of women in prostitution want to get out; that about half have been raped, approximately 70 per cent have been assaulted, and that the average age of entry is 13-15 years old.
In London, police estimated the number of women outside Amnesty International’s headquarters at 200. There were exited women there, with activists, researchers, journalists — all in sisterhood. The youngest were in their twenties, the oldest were in their eighties.
They were later joined by a few men, one of whom said he’d heard about the protest in an Italian Facebook group two hours before and apologized for not having got involved sooner.
The protesters stood alongside the busy road in London’s rush hour and chanted: “Lock up pimps and johns!” “Women’s rights are human rights!” “Women’s bodies are not for sale!” One brought a mobile speaker and played “All Night Wrong,” a protest song written by Jeanette Westbrook.
They stayed for an hour and a half, refusing to move when asked, reminding Amnesty International staff that the pavement they were standing on was private property.
A particularly enthusiastic security guard was told off more than once for ordering the women around and pointing his finger at them.
His attempt at directing proceedings was feeble and failed miserably.
London’s red double-decker buses stopped in traffic, with passengers watching with interest. Drivers opened their windows to receive cards handed out by the protesters. Passers by gave their details, intending to get involved with the wider campaign.
The was one minor altercation with a passing man who objected to having his path obstructed.
The Amnesty Action women were in an unexpected position; having to oppose the world’s leading human rights organization in the name of women’s and girls’ rights. Women and girls are human, after all…
It speaks volumes that since Amnesty International agreed to the policy in August. A large number of women’s rights organizations have came out in opposition of the decision and in support of the Nordic model, which decriminalizes only the sale of sex and promotes exit plans to get women out of prostitution.
Amnesty International’s policy lets women and girls down, putting their rights last as it declares that access to sex is a human right.
Actually, the right not to suffer inhuman or degrading treatment is guaranteed by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is also guaranteed under both the Palermo Protocol (the UN Trafficking Protocol) and theConvention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), as well as the 1949 Convention, which recognize prostitution as exploitation.
The absurdity of the situation was summed up by Lisa-Marie Taylor, chair of UK women’s rights charity Feminism in London.
“We cannot and will not stand by whilst a human rights organization supports, encourages, and lobbies for the prostitution of women and by extension girls. This flies in the face of the available evidence and we call for human rights organisations to review their position in the light of emerging data from areas that have implemented the model of legalization with appalling consequences,” Taylor told Feminist Current.
The global Amnesty Action protest took place a day before Feminism in London’s annual conference, so a lot of women’s rights activists were already in town
Among them were Canadian registered nurses Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson, the world’s leading authorities on Non-State Torture.
The two founders of Persons Against Non-State Torture know that trafficked and prostituted women are extremely vulnerable to acts of torture committed in the private sphere.
“I am here to share the voices of women who talk about the grave suffering they have endured in their ordeals in Non-State Torture, including the torture that happens in prostitution. I want to shout to the roof tops and to Amnesty International that torture is not work,” Linda MacDonald told Feminist Current.
The two women have spent 22 years supporting victims and campaigning for Non-State Torture to be classified as a specific human rights crime.
“We will never shut up about Non-State Torture,” Jeanne Sarson told Feminist Current.
Feminist Current also caught up with feminist writer and activist, Anna Djinn.
“We are already seeing the Amnesty resolution being used to justify decriminalization of the sex trade and men buying sex, even though everywhere that has implemented full decriminalization has seen an upsurge in sex trafficking. [In Germany], 55 women have been murdered by pimps and punters in the 13 years that the country has had full decriminalization. Only one woman has been murdered in Sweden during its 16 years of the Nordic Model. Amnesty’s policy is steeped in the mindset of male supremacy and has failed to realize that women and girls are human beings with inalienable rights to live in dignity. We are here to remind Amnesty that they are wrong and must redress this terrible mistake,” Djinn toldFeminist Current.
If pimps and johns cannot be arrested and prosecuted for simply participated in an abusive supply chain, authorities must wait for them to actually harm women in the sex trade before they can act.
This is why Amnesty Action will not stop until Amnesty International sees sense and commits to respecting the human rights of women and girls, worldwide.
Janie Davies is a British journalist and feminist living in South West London. She volunteers with women’s rights groups and supports those campaigning for the implementation of the Nordic model. Follow Janie Davies on Twitter @Janie_R_D.