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Saaleha E. Bhamjee | The Review | June 2013
When Arizona, at age 30, decided she’d be leaving her emotionally abusive husband and taking her four children with her, she began looking for work. She scanned the newspapers. Opportunities for women with limited work experience, especially ones who had been at home for the last eight years, were sparse. What was on offer promised long hours and little remuneration. ‘Girls wanted’ – the ad jumped out at her. It was three months before she finally worked up the courage to call the Escort Agency. She began her ‘career’ as a sex worker, a week before ending her marriage. Seven days later, she’d made enough to pay for a car. By the week, enough to pay the deposit and rent for a place of her own. She walked out.
Arizona has been in the industry for 14 years now. She has put two of her brood through school, and two are now in high school. All this without them finding out what she really does in order to live the life she does. When asked how she’d feel if her kids ever found out, she sighs heavily. “I hope they don’t. It’s hard you know. I want to protect them. I don’t want them to ever feel guilty that I did this, that I had to do this for them. I made the choice. It wasn’t an easy choice. Ultimately your children are blessings. I think the least I could do was be the best mum I could be and at that point, that was the only way I thought I could do it. You kinda trade off a part of yourself to do this. I said to myself when I started, I will do it until they finish school. When they finish school, I’m moving on.”
When asked about her plans for the future, she smiles. “I’m exporting some things into the DRC and Zambia at the moment. I’m just setting up. I’ve got lots of options open. I’m thinking about moving to Thailand and teaching English there. It’s not that I’m not educated. I have an education. A lot of the other girls do. It’s just that this becomes a comfortable lifestyle.”
For Charmaine, sex work wasn’t her first option when it came to seeking employment, but a combination of fate and circumstance led her to an agency in Johannesburg. She was one of few women of colour. Many of the white girls who worked at the agency were runaways from children’s homes, she told me. Some, she suspected, weren’t quite 18 at the time.
She’s been in and out of the trade for well over 14 years now. It has always been her “something to fall back on when jobs weren’t going well.” Like Arizona, she too advertises on a website, dedicated to helping working girls promote their ‘businesses’. I ask her about human trafficking. Media would have us believe that prostitution is characterised by this scourge.
“I’ve never come across it personally,” she says. “I only know of it from what I hear. A lot of it exists on the street. I hear that women are brought in from neighbouring countries. You see it with the Asian women. The agencies move around all the time, never stay in one area for too long.”
I ask her the legalisation question. “Yes, it needs to be legalised. But legalisation won’t fix things in the problem areas. The working girls who get raped, the street girls. How is that going to be controlled? If legal systems cannot protect a wife (in an abusive marriage) how is it going to protect girls on the street?”
I ask her how her work has impacted on her, personally. Decades of sex workers being portrayed as tragic victims of life, or women waiting to be rescued by the likes of Richard Gere, has made me wonder.
“I’ve always had an inferiority complex. My mother never told me I was pretty. It has boosted my self-esteem. ”
I am reminded of Arizona speaking of sex work as having empowered her. I put this question to Charmaine. “Not really,” she says. “It has empowered me in that I no longer have illusions about men and relationships.”
I remember reading somewhere that many women who go into the industry have either been raped or molested as children. I put this question to Charmaine. “I was molested as a kid by a family friend from the age of twelve to the age of fourteen. I was very naïve and didn’t believe that any of my friends had been molested. I used to believe it had something to do with a woman’s reason for going into the industry. But I know now that that is not so. It’s just that people don’t talk about it… Even when it comes to drugs. A lot of the girls do drugs but drugs are all over the place. It’s not just the girls in the trade. I’d never seen drugs but I’ve been to corporate parties where drugs were laid out like a buffet.”
I then ask about religion. Charmaine laughs. “I go to church once every few months. I know that what I’m doing is wrong but I don’t believe in there being a big sin or a small sin. Just sin.”
Urmila has been a sex worker for the last year. She’d been in the corporate world, working in property development and when her husband’s company was liquidated and all her assets sequestrated, her world fell apart. Her marriage ended. All the people they’d helped in the past turned their backs on her. It was a business colleague who suggested she enter the industry.
Urmila has used her earnings to study. At the beginning of this year she paid up front for a two year diploma. “When my clients heard I wanted to study, they would tip me well. They were very supportive.”
She’s begun a career in complimentary healing.
The advantage ladies like Urmila, Charmaine and Arizona have, is that their advertising their services to a computer literate clientele means that they attract an upmarket, educated lot of punters. Men who happily pay the R700-850 an hour that they charge.
I ask her about her daughter. “She doesn’t live with me,” she says.” She’s studying towards a BSC and wants to go into the medical field. I pay towards her studies. She only knows that I do complimentary healing.”
To Legalise or not to Legalise – sex work – is the question
In May this year the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) launched its Position Paper on Sex Work and called for the decriminalisation of prostitution. A move that was lauded by the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce or SWEAT, as well as Sisonke, the national movement of sex workers in South Africa, advocating for sex workers’ rights.
The process of determining whether to legalise the trade in South Africa started in 2009. The South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) released the Adult Prostitution (project 107) Discussion Paper and calls were made for civil society to submit comments. The report from this Discussion Paper was meant to be released in 2011, but has been delayed indefinitely due to the Commission having no commissioners. This according to Ntokozo Yingwana, SWEAT’s Advocacy Officer.
The discussion in the media has been animated. Shortly after the Gender Commission’s announcement, talk show host and media personality, Eusebius McKaiser wrote in The Star, “By bringing the sex worker into the legal fold, the state can reduce exploitation by being able to legitimately make available state resources to actively protect sex workers,” echoing SWEAT’s Yingwana who said in an interview, “Decriminalisation will allow sex workers to take ownership of their own bodies, which are essentially their businesses. They won’t be a need for sex workers to depend on pimps and brothel owners for protection or working facilities. When sex work was decriminalised in New Zealand in 2003 there actually was a shift from outdoor to indoor sex work, with sex workers coming together to form small businesses of their own. This allowed them to own all their earnings, without having to share with pimps or brothel owners who sometimes exploited them. We anticipate the same will happen here in South Africa once sex work is decriminalised. “
Taryn Hodgeson, international co-ordinator for Africa Christian Action disagrees.
“The illusion that prostitution is a choice is manipulative and deceptive. It allows the buyers and the pimps to obscure the abuse involved and to confer a form of right on the abuser. The fact that money is exchanged cannot disguise the fact that what occurs in prostitution, the bodily and psychological violations involved are in fact sexual abuse and harassment and would be seen as such in any so-called ordinary workplace or social setting.
By recognising prostitution as a violation of the right to dignity of women, government and civil society should do their utmost to discourage women from entering prostitution and to help women escape this slavery and abuse. Legislation therefore needs to focus on criminalizing the “buyers” (i.e. the pimps, brothel owners, customers etc).”
This was the approach adopted by Sweden who saw prostitution as incompatible with a society dedicated to gender equality. In January 1999 they enacted the Kvinnofrid law which criminalised ‘the buying of sex’ and decriminalised ‘the selling’. The gender of buyer of seller are immaterial under the law. This, after decades of legalised prostitution.
In 2007 Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, reported that according to the Swedish police, 400 to 600 foreign women are brought into Sweden annually to work as prostitutes. Compare this to the between 10 000 and 15000 women who are brought into Finland annually for the same purpose? Finland, a country, half the size of Sweden.
In the work-up to the enactment of Kvinnofrid Law, Roslyn Phillips, BSc, Dip Ed and the Swedish commission on prostitution summarized the main problems of its legalised sex trade as follows:
1. Harm to woman – Prostitutes often have a bad start to life with poverty and sexual and other abuse. Prostitution adds further abuse.
2. Harm to man – Prostitution gives men sexual release, without the need of proximity, relationship or demands. Many men who use prostitutes are unable to form satisfactory relationships, and would benefit from treatment.
3. Harm to family/society. Families are the building blocks of society, and prostitution damages families. For instance the wife of a man who uses prostitutes always has to sexually live up to the man’s extra-marital sexual experiences. Sexually transmitted diseases are brought into the home. Money and time is spent on prostitutes that should be spent on the family.
4. Human rights. Prostitution mainly involves women being used by men. Prostitution transmits an unacceptable view of human beings in that they can be used, bought and sold as commodities.
5. Child prostitution increases where adult prostitution is legalised.
6. Criminalisation restrains females from entering trade, as well as clients.
When Germany legalised prostitution in December 2001 they had the same hopes with regards outcome as SWEAT, here in South Africa have. Yes, they did indeed find that legalisation gave sex workers access to better healthcare, allowed for them to have their own unions and be a part of medical schemes, but they also found an increase in human trafficking, with German’s chief police reporting an 11% increase between 2009 and 2010 and an overall 70% increase over a 5 year period.