Don't Trust 'Feminists' Fighting To Keep Sex Work Illegal

It’s not something you expect to hear from a women’s rights group: our prostitutes are better than yours. But that’s the tone struck by Equality Now in their new campaign against United Nations recommendations that sex work be decriminalized. Claiming that the UN “ignores survivors of prostitution,” Equality Now and their allied anti-prostitution organizations have offered their own experts who have worked in the sex trade - who all also happen to agree with them that prostitution must remain illegal.The UN’s reports concerning sex work weren’t front page news outside of some HIV and human rights circles. To recap: after several years of consultations with a range of stakeholders, including sex workers, two reports published by the United Nations in 2012 called for an end to laws that criminalize sex workers. A joint report from UN Development Program (UNDP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) assessed laws in 48 countries in Asia and the Pacific; likewise, UNDP’s Global Commission on HIV and the Law examined 140 countries. Both reports draw from hundreds of firsthand accounts; stakeholder submissions, including those made by sex workers, are available to read online. The joint UNDP/UNFPA/UNAIDS report reads, “Sex worker organizations were key partners in this study,” including developing study methodology itself.What’s so galling for anti-prostitution groups about the results, then? “The legal environment in many countries exposes sex workers to violence and results in their economic and social exclusion,” the Global Commission report concluded - identifying more than 100 countries that criminalize some aspect of sex work. “There is no evidence that decriminalization has increased sex work,” the joint report finds. Evidence gathered also indicates that “the approach of defining sex work as legitimate labour empowers sex workers.”