On December 17

On this day in ...
... 2010 (today), is marked the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. (image credit) The date 1st was set aside by activists seeking to remember the victims of the Green River Killer, who from 1982 to 1998 murdered scores of women, many of them sex workers, in Seattle, Washington. Developing the day both to commemorate these women and to "shine a spotlight on the epidemic of violence against sex workers happening globally" were Robyn Few, founder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, and Dr. Annie Sprinkle.

(Prior December 17 posts are here, here, here.)

On June 2

On this day in ...
... 1975 (35 years ago today), between 100 and 200 workers in the sex trade occupied a church in France, camping in sleeping bags. Their leader, identified only as Ulla, said they would not leave Lyon's Église Saint-Nizier (left) until the government lifted the sentences, for unlawful solicitation, that some in the group had recently received. The occupation lasted a week, and the sex workers' rights movement spread to other cities.


(Prior June 2 posts are here, here, and here.)

On April 13

On this day in ...
... 1828, a 7th child, Josephine, was born into the Grey family (relatives of the Prime Minister who leant his name to Earl Grey tea) in Northumberland, England. In 1852 she married George Butler. Josephine Butler (right) had been a feminist since her 20s, and she and her husband were radicals for their times, opposing slavery and supporting the Union during America's Civil War. After the couple's only daughter died, Josephine began to do charity work. She's best known for her campaigns to improve the health and lives of prostituted children and women, by taking part in international campaigns against human trafficking and by eliminating laws that discriminated against prostitutes. Butler, who chronicled her work in a memoir entitled Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896), died in 1906.

(Prior April 13 posts are here, here, and here)

A glimmer of hope . . .

On Wednesday, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization released a report on the AIDS epidemic. Much of the news is grim: in 2008, over 33 million people worldwide were living with HIV, nearly 3 million people were newly infected with HIV, and an estimated 2 million people died of AIDS, including nearly 300,000 children under the age of 15. While these numbers are of great concern, they represent a continuing decline in new HIV infections and HIV-related mortality. New HIV infections were 30% lower than at the epidemic's peak in 1996, and HIV-related deaths were 10% lower than at their peak in 2004. The number of children newly infected with HIV has dropped by nearly 20% since 2001, in part due to the significant increase in services to prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission (from 10% in 2004 to 45% in 2008).
The continued spread of HIV has a significant gender dimension, which UNAIDS aims to address through two of its central goals for 2009 to 2011. First, UNAIDS seeks to prevent mothers from dying and babies from becoming infected with HIV. Its suggested strategies include the reduction of unwanted pregnancies among HIV-positive women, the provision of antiretroviral drugs (which can decrease the risk of mother-to-child transmission from 30-35% to 1-2%) during pregnancy and delivery as well as appropriate treatment, care, and support for mothers living with HIV.
UNAIDS also sees stopping violence against women and girls as a crucial component of ending the AIDS epidemic. This focus is particularly crucial in sub-Saharan Africa, where women account for approximately 60% of estimated HIV infections, "not only [because of] their greater physiological susceptibility to heterosexual transmission, but also to the severe social, legal and economic disadvantages they often confront." The report highlights a study from Lesotho finding that sexual and physical violence against women are key components of that country's AIDS epidemic. Unsurprisingly, the risk of contracting HIV is even higher for marginalized groups, including girls and young women and female sex workers, and in the United States, African-American women, who are more than 19 times more likely to contract HIV than Caucasian women. The social stigma that attaches to women who contract HIV may in turn lead to greater marginalization including divorce at a time when they may be in dire need of financial and emotional support. Here's hoping that the holistic approach prescribed by UNAIDS is pursued with vigor by those committed to ending the spread of HIV/AIDS.

A better way to combat trafficking?

I'd lke to thank Janie Chuang for her excellent post yesterday and follow up by promoting the work of my friend Johanne Vernier (photo at right), currently a doctoral student at the University of Paris I and intern at Echanges et Partenariat in Amsterdam. Johanne's work focuses on the relationship between trafficking, migration and prostitution and the fact that criminal laws in these three areas are at cross purposes and tend to punish the foreign victims of trafficking instead of protecting them from exploitation. According to Johanne, shifting the focus to preventing and punishing exploitation while protecting human dignity would help create a better balance between protected interests and criminal repression. Johanne will be discussing the results of her research at the upcoming 11th Joint Stanford-University of California Law and Colonialism in Africa Symposium, which this year will focus on Trafficking Women and Children after the End of Slavery: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Africa and Beyond (at Stanford, March 19-21). Johanne's work is based on models developed by Mireille Delmas-Marty to describe who in society responds to crime and/or social deviance in light of the interests protected and shows, as Janie's post highlights, that with respect to trafficking, states are often focusing on the wrong behavior for the wrong reasons.

A new direction for U.S. anti-trafficking policy?

For many in the anti-trafficking advocacy community, President Barack Obama's election was a basis to hope for much-needed change in U.S. policy to combat cross-border trafficking in human beings. But statements by Hillary Clinton (left) during her hearings for confirmation as Secretary of State signal that change may not be as forthcoming as one might have expected, as a recent post by Columbia Law Professor Katherine M. Franke (below right) notes. Augmenting these concerns is the fact that key actors who influenced the Bush Administration anti-trafficking policy are now positioned to affect anti-trafficking policy in the United Nations. Those actors left a legacy, moreover:
► Over the last eight years, the complex issue of human trafficking has been grossly oversimplified into a campaign to rescue women from brothels (as IntLawGrrls blogger Dina Francesca Haynes has analyzed here). Notwithstanding a legal definition (developed during the Clinton Administration) that encompasses the trafficking of men, women, and children for both sexual and non-sexual purposes, Bush Administration policies largely focused on sex trafficking (a phenomenon often inaccurately equated with "sexual slavery," as IntLawGrrls blogger Karen E. Bravo has noted here) and prostitution. This was in no small part due to the highly effective, coordinated advocacy efforts of self-described "abolitionist" feminists and faith-based organizations to turn trafficking into a crusade against prostitution-writ-large.
► These efforts culminated in State Department model legislation (for adoption by other countries) that targets prostitution and grants restrictions that require non-governmental (and certain international) organizations applying for U.S. funds to sign an anti-prostitution pledge -- measures that are problematic as a matter of international law and constitutional law.
► The abolitionists most recently sought -- unsuccessfully -- to amend the Mann Act to expand federal criminal jurisdiction to cover all local and in-state prostitution cases, raising strong objections from women's and immigrants' rights groups, the DOJ, national associations of district attorneys, attorneys general, and fraternal order of police, and even the Heritage Foundation.
So, given Secretary Clinton's conflation of trafficking and prostitution in describing her plans to address sex trafficking during her confirmation hearing, one has to wonder whether she will be willing or able to stand up to the same abolitionist pressures she once withstood during the negotiations over the U.N. Trafficking Protocol. After all, the Clinton Administration's refusal to adopt an abolitionist platform during the Protocol negotiations led then-First Lady Clinton -- as head of the President's Inter-Agency Council on Women -- to be viciously attacked by abolitionist feminists and conservatives for being "pro-prostitution."
On the international front, the appointment of the former President of Equality Now to head the New York office of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) raises the question of how much influence Equality Now's strong abolitionist stance will bring to bear on U.N. High Commissioner Navi Pillay (below left), who actually co-founded Equality Now. Until now, the OHCHR has stayed above the fray, hewing to the UN Trafficking Protocol's explicit guidance (in the official interpretive notes) that the legal treatment of prostitution be left to individual states to decide. Hopefully, High Commissioner Pillay will stay the course, if for no other reason than to avoid dividing the women's human rights community by taking sides in this fight.

So why the fuss? Whatever one thinks about the merits of prostitution/sex work, we cannot afford to have the limited resources devoted to anti-trafficking diverted to the broader issue of fighting prostitution, particularly given recent studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of such campaigns and their potential for collateral damage. And the trafficking of men, women, and children for non-sexual purposes is a problem in desperate need of attention. Thankfully, the recently-passed 2008 William Wilberforce Trafficking Protection Reauthorization Act makes inroads towards addressing trafficking for non-sexual purposes, noting the "sense of Congress" that the Secretary of State should work with the ILO and UN to establish a multilateral framework between labor exporting and labor importing countries to ensure migrant worker protection. The 2008 TVPRA specifically addresses trafficking and exploitation of domestic workers by diplomats, a problem first exposed by Human Rights Watch nearly 8 years ago. Responding to problems identified by the GAO in this report, the 2008 TVPRA ensures that domestic workers are given an employment contract and made aware of their rights by US consular officials trained in U.S. labor standards. It also requires the State Department to keep records of allegations of trafficking or abuse by diplomats, and to suspend issuance of visas to missions concerning which the State Department has received credible evidence of worker exploitation that was tolerated by the mission.

Marching orders in place, the task now is for the State Department to see these provisions through and -- hopefully -- not get enmeshed in the interminable prostitution debates.

On April 13

On this day in ...
... 1933 (75 years ago today), Ruth Bryan Owen (left) became the 1st woman chief of a U.S. diplomatic mission when she was appointed Minister to Denmark. Daughter of 3-time Democratic Presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, Owen presented her credentials on May 29, 1933 and served until June 27, 1936. During World War I she'd been a member of the executive committee of the American Women’s War Relief Fund in London, England, and served as a war nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in the Middle East. In 1929 she had become the 1st woman Member of Congress from Florida. After completing her mission in Denmark she was a special assistant at the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations and an alternate delegate to the U.N. General Assembly. She died on July 26, 1954, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
... 1946, on account of the campaigning of Marthe Richard, a onetime prostitute and spy turned politician (shown below pursuing another of her pastimes, aviation), a law that bore her name, which mandated the official closure of all brothels in France, took effect in that country. (photo credit)