Legalise sex work call to Parliament

Protect prostitutes, release commission’s report – Sisonke

ANEW “girl” arrives on the city streets daily to join the sex industry. That is according to Durban’s Sisonke Sex Worker Movement media liaison officer, Nomusa Jali, as sex workers converged on Parliament this week to plead with MPs on the multi-party women’s caucus to take up its call for the decriminalisation of sex work.

Jali said Sisonke members were supportive, saying it would provide some protection for sex workers.

“There are challenges sex workers face all the time, raped by clients, raped by police. When police pick up sex workers, they are often assaulted. Their rights have been violated for many years, but we are starting to see attitudes slowly changing.

“In Durban there is a new girl on the streets every day. They arrive from rural areas and can’t find a job, so they start doing sex work.”

In Parliament, former Durban sex worker now based in Cape Town and Sweat (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce) human rights and lobbying officer, Nosipho Vidima, spoke of the need for protection for these women.

According to research provided by Sweat, 11 sex workers were murdered, 908 assaulted and 383 sexually assaulted or raped in one year in Joburg, Durban and Cape Town.

They are routinely picked up by police, raped, assaulted or kept in cells without access to legal assistance or family.

The problem, said Vidima, was that sex workers had been waiting 19 years for promised legislative reform to ensure their constitutional rights to freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, from violence, and the right to bodily integrity, were respected.

Sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than other women.

Preventative measures were useless, she said, if police continued to rape sex workers, rendered more vulnerable by the criminal status of their occupation .

The Commission on Gender Equality gave its backing to decriminalisation, as did MPs. The SA Law Reform Commission, which was asked to investigate the legal landscape relating to sexual offences and propose legislative and non-legislative alternatives, questioned whether it would have the desired results.

The commission’s lead researcher, Deliene Clark, said countries that had tried decriminalisation were increasingly recognising the intrinsic “harm and exploitation” that went with prostitution.

Violence continued despite decriminalisation of prostitution as it was not possible to “neatly excise” it from other illegal activities, Clark said.

Socio-economic factors that concentrated crime in areas of poverty, inequality and unemployment continued to breed violence against women.

Research showed while 10 percent of men made up the clientele, this group was especially violent and prone to other illegal activities.

Clark was criticised by MPs in the women’s caucus, who accused her of relying on research from developed countries which didn’t apply to Africa.

But she said she was unable to defend herself because the commission’s report had been handed to the Justice Department and it was up to Minister Michael Masutha to release it.

Giving details of its contents would be equivalent to her releasing it, Clark said.

Vidima complained that Sweat had made numerous applications under the Promotion of Access to Information Act to be given the commission’s report, without receiving a response.

Johan de Lange, specialist state law adviser on legislative development, said the delay in the release of the report, which was first submitted towards the end of 2014, was a result of the Justice Department being taken “unawares” by its recommendations, which were not what had been anticipated.

But its release was “imminent”, he said, and once it became public, he expected the debate to “grow wings”.