Ain’t I A Woman? A global dialogue between the sex workers’ rights movement and the stop violence against women movement

This report arose from a dialogue hosted by CREA and CASAM in 2009 as part of CREA’s “Count Me In” programme on addressing violence against women in south Asia. The topic of the dialogue was the sensitive issue of sex work and violence, and the spectrum of views on the issue – from seeing all sex work as violence per se, to seeing violence against sex workers as a significant human rights violation that has been ignored by women’s and human rights movements. The dialogue was ground breaking in that it brought the different, and often conflicting, perspectives and voices of sex workers and anti-violence against women activists together, highlighting their own words and viewpoints. Participants considered how they can work together to address violence within adult sex work, build alliances across movements to ensure that sex workers are seen within a human rights context, and expand campaign and policy frameworks in this area beyond a focus on trafficked women.

The report provides an overview of the dialogue sessions in which speakers discussed issues such as the relationship between sex work and women’s movements, the experiences of sex workers in resisting violence, and of feminists who have become sex worker rights advocates. The dialogue resulted in some recommendations for future collaborative action:

• A campaign to influence mainstream human rights organisations to include sex workers’ rights within their mandates
• A strategy to present the issue to regional feminist coalitions
• A political statement by feminists to reclaim the anti-violence feminist space so that it is not also an anti-sex work space
• A process for sex worker rights groups to define their negotiables and non-negotiables
• A mechanism to document best practices in fighting violence against sex workers