The root cause of violence against women is that our society allows violence against women and young girls to go unpunished. If we truly want to stop violence against women, stricter polices for those perpetrating women would be put into place telling men that any act of violence against any woman is not okay. Our silent acceptance of violence against certain cohorts of women must be addressed if real change is to occur.
The State of Rhode Island seems poised to take a significant step backwards on its legal treatment of both sex work and trafficking when legislators resume their session this fall.
A lot of people, especially white people, are invested in defending geisha, in putting them on a pedestal. And when they do that, it does harm to Japanese-American women and to all Asian-American women.
On December 17, sex workers will converge in Washington, D.C. for a National March for Sex Worker Rights where marchers “will take a stand for justice, and the freedom to do sex work safely.”
In the global crisis of violence against women, there is a heated debate about the best way to approach the issues at the intersection of HIV/AIDS and human trafficking. Advocates of “harm elimination” push the abolishment of sexual slavery, trafficking, and prostitution. Those who believe in “harm reduction” are working to ameliorate the HIV/AIDS crisis in a pre-existing negative situation.
Proposition K, San Francisco’s measure to prohibit the use of public funds to enforce laws criminalizing prostitution, would change the landscape for sex workers in the city in critical ways.
Hundreds of women of the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria have turned to prostitution. But advocates understand it for what it really is – “survival sex.”
A senior public health official in Jamaica recently called for decriminalization and taxation of commercial sex work. Other government officials decried the proposal, but have few effective suggestions of their own.
Next month, the Parliament of India will vote on an amendment that could further stigmatize and violate the human rights of sex workers by criminalizing the purchase of sexual services in India.
A leading figure in the Christian right anti-trafficking establishment, Linda Smith embodies the tensions between feminists and religious right activists working on this issue.
