Last week, four episodes of a film entitled Prostitutes of Godwere posted on VBS.TV, which is owned by Vice Magazine. Prostitutes of God producer Sarah Harris, spent time with members of Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad (meaning ‘Prostitutes’ Freedom from Injustice’) or “VAMP,” and let her into their lives, their families and their workplace.  The result?  Films that are inaccurate and misrepresentative, and insulting to the people who agreed to participate and to the Hindu culture.

VAMP was formed in 1996 and now works with more than 5000 women, men, and transgenders in sex work to promote and protect their human rights and health. The group covers six districts in Western Maharashtra and two in North Karnataka. VAMP has been internationally recognised by groups like Human Rights Watch for their contribution to human rights and for their work in HIV/AIDS prevention.

However, you would not know any of this from Harris’ film, which is full of stereotypes and representations of Indian culture that are designed to mock and belittle.  In addition, Harris’ film puts people in danger– of stigma, discrimination and misinformation—through her uninformed and judgemental editorial lens.  In a recent interview of Harris in the UK Independent —in which she describes her interest in sex work as having originated when she spent time as a volunteer “with a charity in southern India which rescues victims of sex trafficking—Harris recounts someone who told her that HIV/AIDS is like “plucking a bunch of grapes.  As soon as a woman is infected, then her whole family becomes infected.”

This ignorance and irresponsibility runs rampant throughout Prostitutes of God.  One case in point is that of Belavva. The film maker wrongly states that the “Devadasi” religious ritual demands that poor families traffic their daughters into prostitution (that is dedicate them to the goddess Yellama). She then states that when Belavva was young her family sent her to work for a landlord who asked her parents to dedicate her – or pimp her out. This is stated, not implied. It is not true, neither in the instance of the individual concerned, nor with respect to Hinduism.

Sadly there are many more examples throughout the film, examples that prompted VAMP to issue the following rebuttal:

It is to be hoped that a person would pretty sure of their evidence when making these sorts of allegations to the world. Sarah Harris has managed to misconstrue most of what she has reported, has exploited a trusting community in the worst possible ways, and has produced a series of films that are extraordinarily offensive. She has demonstrated racism and has behaved in ways reminiscent of the most unpleasant forms of colonialism. She has abused the poorest of people for her own ends.

To manipulate poor people to meet one’s ends is blameworthy. It is reprehensible to betray the trust of a most vulnerable people merely to make a film. To, in addition, vilify and disparage a culture and religious beliefs, as Sarah Harris and VBS TV have done, requires either wilful ignorance or a determination to produce work that panders to the worst type of media sensationalism imaginable. The people in the film are part of a community that wishes to tell their stories and be understood by a broad audience, but we will not stand by while we are being misrepresented to the world.

Sarah Harris and VBS must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. VAMP members are people with rights including reputational rights.

Bebe Loff is Associate Professor and Director of the Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Monash University in Australia.

Watch Meena Seshu, co-founder of our Indian partner SANGRAM, deliver the Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture at the International AIDS Conference (IAC) plenary yesterday in Vienna (her speech starts around the one hour mark in the taped webcast embedded above).

In her speech, Meena details SANGRAM’s path to success in working collaboratively with sex workers to claim their rights, including missteps based on good intentions. It’s interesting to hear these stories and see the way Meena’s thinking has evolved, and most importantly, how she has listened to the people she’s trying to help and let them take charge of their own projects, their health, and the destinies of their communities.

Here’s an excerpt from Meena’s follow-up post on the IAC website:

When I, an educated, upper-class woman began to spend time with sex workers as a population “vulnerable” to HIV, I found that they were treated almost as non-humans by society, and I could hardly fathom how they could live and work amidst so much social disdain and dismissiveness. I quickly realized that I knew nothing about them, their community, or their work. But, as I learned by letting them teach me, amongst themselves they were not disempowered. They managed their work, their clients, their families and the community that they made for themselves. AIDS was a terrible threat in their world, but they only needed the right tools, and they would manage AIDS too.

But instead of listening to them, the AIDS establishment – led by well-intentioned health service providers and educators – wanted to teach them “client negotiation skills” and turn them over to the same health services that had always treated them with hateful abuse. It was ridiculous that anyone should think they could teach sex workers anything about clients.

Meena, who came from an upper-class background and worked for years as a social worker, was admittedly new to working with sex workers. She describes going to a meeting of sex workers in which she handed them a plan for dealing with clients and convincing them to use condoms. The sex workers in the meeting listened patiently, but couldn’t stop laughing. They made her understand how “ridiculous” the plan was, while asking if she had any experience dealing with men. Then they told her, “you get us good quality condoms, we’ll do the rest!”

She also describes her role in a collaborative project with a local hospital in which ten doctors set up a clinic just outside the brothel area. Sex workers not only didn’t come to the clinic, but actually fled from their houses and the city to avoid getting treatment. This made the doctors furious, but taught Meena that you can’t tell people that they must get tested and treated, and that it must be a collaborative process based on free, informed consent: At-risk populations have a right to say both yes and no to medical treatments.

In her speech, Meena outlines SANGRAM’s Bill of Rights, a set of great guidelines for programming interventions around HIV and AIDS:

1. People have a right to be approached with humility and respect.
2. People have the right to say YES or NO to things that concern them.
3. People have the right to reject harmful social norms.
4. People have the right to stand up to and change the balance of power.
5. People have the right not to be “rescued” by the outsiders who neither understand nor respect them.
6. People have the right to exist how they want to exist.

Alex Garita, IWHC’s Program Officer for International Policy, had this to say about this Bill of Rights: “This fundamental set of human rights principles, if upheld throughout developing policies, programs, and budgets for HIV prevention and treatment, would change the course of the epidemic. I am convinced by the experiences of rural women; of HIV positive women; of transgender, male, and female sex workers; and gay rights activists, that only when communities and people are empowered to know and claim their rights, will there be a reversal in the spread of this disease. As one of the stories in this lecture illustrated, putting the power of prevention in women’s hands can achieve this. I hope the world is listening.”

The study was part of a monitoring project by IWHC colleague The Asian Pacific Resource and Research Center for Women (ARROW), which seeks to review and monitor progress towards the commitments made in the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Program of Action (PoA). The project, focused on 12 Asian countries – Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, China, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia—provides crucial insight into the ways laws and policies impact the health and rights and increase marginalization of the transgendered community.

Highlights of the report include:

- Transgender people are at great risk for violence across the continent. “Apart from Thailand,” the report states, “laws in none of the countries studied recognize that transwomen can also be raped …thus not providing protection or legal recourse…in the face of [violent] crimes.”

- Families in the countries studied were generally not accepting of gender diversity and sexual freedom, and many transgender people faced coercion and/or violence from their own family and/or community. This can often result in a lacking support system, homelessness, and poverty. It is noted  that “interventions are needed that educate families about sexuality and gender diversity, enable them to accept plurality within and play a supportive and empowering role.” The report also recommends providing “low cost or free housing to needy transgender people in order to provide the social support that they lack so that they may focus their resources on skills building and acquiring work.”

-Even within the LGBTQI community, discrimination against transgender people is common. “In society, transgender people are viewed as a sexual minority, but within LGBTI movements, they are often considered to be of a lower status.” Beyond this, discrimination occurs within the transgender community based on social class, occupation and femininity. For instance, the report details numerous ways in which transgender sex workers are discriminated against by other members of the transgender community.

-There is often a difference in the treatment of trans women and trans men. The report details: “Suman Tamang from Kathmandu shared that while people curse transwomen [sic] and police beat them and pick them up off the streets, transmen [sic] in Nepal do not face the same kind of social ridicule or police harassment.” The report identifies “a need to develop further discourse on masculinities and femininities, which promotes respect for plurality.”

- There is lack of knowledge about issues related to gender, sexuality, and health, including HIV, among health personnel. Thus, “governments need to take action to ensure that HIV infected persons and AIDS patients [including transgender people] have access to appropriate treatment and adequate medical care.”

-Attitudes need to change along with policies in order to achieve real change. The report points to “a need for a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum to be developed and taught in schools after training teachers; a curriculum that includes information on sexuality, gender diversity and gender equality.”

The report’s overarching conclusion is clear: Progressive laws and policies relating to gender and sexuality can empower marginalized communities, reduce stigma, discrimination and violence, improve access to essential information as well as reproductive and sexual health services, and facilitate constructive social engagement. These and the rest of the findings in the report are meant to serve as a resource for advocacy groups, as well as a wakeup call to legislators and policymakers about the public health ramifications of discrimination.

Click here to read the full report in PDF.

For more on IWHC’s work around human rights and sexuality in Asia and around the world, click here.

Despite all the positives to report on, the media loves a downside–and for huge sporting events, the downside is human trafficking, which the United Nations defines as:

“The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”

Mainstream media outlets have been reporting that 40,000 women have been trafficked into South African brothels for the World Cup. That’s a pretty horrifying statistic – except that there simply aren’t any good citations that confirm it.

Matthew Greennall wrote a great blog post that deconstructs the 40,000 figure and links to several articles that have used this “statistic” but can’t corroborate it; Global Voices likewise has a post flagging this problematic bit of reporting. Laura Agustín, author of the book Sex At the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry, points out that in 2006 the same 40,000 number was reported with regards to the World Cup in Germany (where prostitution is legal). Her post also highlights some of the important parts of a very in-depth academic article from Globalization and Health, Sex work and the 2010 FIFA World Cup: time for public health imperatives to prevail.

To be fair, there is some critique of the World Cup trafficking scare happening in mainstream media – for example, this month Yahoo! Sports ran piece called “Debunking the World Cup’s Biggest Myth” and the Wall Street Journal published an article called “Suspect Estimates of Trafficking at the World Cup”– but the voices of South Africans, and particularly people who work in the sex industry, were entirely absent from the articles. It’s a shame, because people in South Africa certainly have quite a bit to say on the subject.

The South African grassroots organization Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force (SWEAT) has recently launched an online resource about their push to decriminalize sex work in South Africa.  In addition to useful resources about myths and facts, and why people should support decriminalization, the website features the perspectives of sex workers themselves and critique of the reports on trafficking and the World Cup. SWEAT is careful to make the distinction between trafficking (which involves coercion or explicit force) and sex work (which, like many jobs, is often undertaken because of the circumstances of a person’s life), while many news reports present these situations as interchangeable. SWEAT supports anti-trafficking initiatives while also supporting sex workers’ rights to a livelihood without violence or discrimination. Their work also focuses on the examining the realities of HIV transmission among the sex working population.

South African Researchers Marlise Richter and Tamlyn Monson wrote up a Human Trafficking and Migration issue brief on the subject, in which they write:

… there is no evidence to support claims that trafficking is already a significant problem in the Southern African region. Furthermore, there is no evidence to support the expectation that a large sporting event such as the 2010 Soccer World Cup is likely to increase human trafficking levels. The claim that trafficking is linked to large-scale sporting events is based, implicitly or explicitly, on the belief that events which attract large numbers of tourists – especially male tourists – increase the demand for paid sex. This supposedly increased demand is then assumed to be filled through women (and children) trafficked for sex.

Germany’s experiences during the 2006 Soccer World Cup contradict claims that trafficking volumes will rise during the 2010 event in South Africa. Before the 2006 Soccer World Cup, media reports and NGOs claimed that 40,000 women and children would be trafficked into Germany. Yet, in research conducted after the 2006 World Cup, researchers found evidence of only five cases of trafficking.

Trafficking is a very serious topic, but it’s important to recognize the differences between trafficking and sex work, without doing so, we do a disservice to both victims of trafficking and sex workers. It’s great that the World Cup has brought attention to these issues, but we need to make sure we’re doing it in the right way, and that the voices of those who are affected are included in the solutions.

Last fall, when I took a trip to India, visited with SANGRAM in Sangli district and shot a lot of video, I got to see the beginnings of a video project that was giving people in the community the skills to produce their own films. The Community Video Unit (CVU) is a project run by Video Volunteers over the course of eighteen months, and 10 people in Sangli were just starting to learn how to operate a camera, see a good shot, and edit their own footage.

SANGRAM is a nationally and internationally rights-based organization in India’s Maharashtra State working towards halting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India through assisting sex workers, rural women and girls, and other marginalized groups to mobilize and secure their rights and access to health services. They do this not only through advocacy at the local, national and international levels, but by empowering local communities to make change for themselves. One of the ways they are making this change is by documenting the experiences of people in their communities.

The above video, “The Reason I Left School,” is the group’s first effort. The video focuses on the struggles of the children of sex workers in Sangli to get an education and stay in school when faced with ridicule and discrimination. It’s especially interesting to hear the perspectives of adult children of sex workers as they talk about their experiences and how their thoughts on school, and their mothers, have changed as they have become adults. The plight of the children of sex workers in India has gotten plenty of attention over the years, but there are frequently overtones of moral judgment in the pieces. It’s refreshing to hear directly from the children themselves, in a piece of media that is self-produced. Seeing the difficult challenges they have faced through their eyes is important in and of itself, and essential to gaining a better understanding of the economic and social circumstances their communities face.

Back in December we were excited to debut the above video, a short documentary about our partner SANGRAM and the collaborative work they do with sex workers in the rural south of India.

Here’s an excerpt about the project, from a feature that I wrote for RH Reality Check entitled Neither Victims Nor Voiceless: Sex Workers Speaking for Themselves:

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 the past few months the video has gotten lots of great attention – it’s been watched online almost 12,000 times, and in just the last month had public screenings at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington and The Tank in NYC preceding a panel called Sex Work and Human Rights: Feminist Advocacy Strategies.

• Last fall, IWHC and our partner SANGRAM collaborated to make a short film: SANGRAM: Sex Worker Organizing in India. The film features Indian sex workers talking about their organizing process and the issues they work on. It will be screening as part of a program of sex worker documentaries at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle on March 20.
• The Open Society Institute has a great report called Rights Not Rescue: A Report on Female, Trans, and Male Sex Workers’ Human Rights in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. At the link, you can download a PDF of the report, plus listen to audio stories from sex workers.
• This blog post from Asia Catalyst give some details about a recent capacity building training for sex worker non-governmental organizations in China.
• The Association of Women Prostitutes of Argentina (AMMAR) (site in Spanish) is working with sex workers to strengthen the integration of organized sex workers with the feminist movement in Argentina. Read the interim update at AWID’s site (they are funding the trainings).
• Read all the Akimbo posts on sex work.

A longer excerpt from the excellent feature:

“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….”

You can read the entire feature over at RHRealityCheck.org.

And be sure to check out our short documentary on sex worker collectivization in India.

What’s next: Sex workers in India are among the most marginalized, and their access to healthcare is severely limited. Continued efforts are needed to promote coalition-building among sex workers, labor activists, and feminist activists for health and rights. Sangram and other grassroots human rights organizations are pushing the dialogue beyond vice and victimhood to support for the rights and health of sex workers worldwide. Bringing sex workers’ voices to the policy table is an essential component of sound rights-based based policy at the local, national, and international levels.

Find out more:

1. View a video documenting SaNGRAM’s sex worker collectivization in rural India in honor of International Human Rights Day.
2. Click here to read a blog by Meena Seshu, founder of SANGRAM, about the campaign to battle stigma and discrimination against sex workers in India

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Sixty-one years ago today, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure dignity and equality for all. Sadly, these ideals are still a distant dream for many girls and women.

In celebration of the International Human Rights Day and the tremendous gains the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) and our partners have made towards securing the human rights of girls and women, we are proud to present a new short documentary. The video is the product of a collaboration among IWHC, SANGRAM, and rural Indian sex worker advocates.

Based in a rural community in India’s Maharashtra State, SANGRAM works to ensure equal access to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support: Over 6,000 women in rural India have participated in HIV testing as a result of these efforts. Drawing on 15 years of work to empower marginalized communities to claim their rights, SANGRAM is becoming an increasingly strong advocate nationally, and globally for health policies and programs that are responsive to the real-life needs of local communities.