Ella Smook
21 August 2008
Moves to legalise the sex industry that suggest women voluntarily choose prostitution as a viable profession should be vociferously opposed, a multinational conference focusing on the impact of the 2010 World Cup on trafficking of women and children was told.
Gunilla Ekberg, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, on Wednesday told 80 delegates from six continents that all paid-for sex was in fact a form of violence.
The three-day Cape Town conference is highlighting the 2010 World Cup as an important opportunity to develop a response to violence against women generally, but more specifically to the trafficking of women and girls.
Conference host and director of the Masimanyane Women's Support Centre, Lesley Ann Foster, said it was necessary to actively develop and enforce effective legislation which would offer safety and security to victims of trafficking and reduce the vulnerability of women and children.
Ekberg told the delegates that any country wishing to call itself democratic was obliged to put in place laws and policies to close down legal and illegal brothels, and to strongly enforce those laws in a bid to target the root cause of prostitution, men who buy sex and human traffickers.
It was an "offensive idea", she said, to suggest that some women voluntarily chose prostitution as a viable profession.
The reality was that most women were forced into the business from a position of inequality and disempowerment.
She warned that instability and oppressive conditions, as found in many developing countries, drove women to prostitution because they were left without alternatives. The normalisation of the idea that women were "for sale" affected all women in a country that condoned such views, Ekberg said.
Intensive research into trafficking and prostitution was required, as well as the removal of legislation which criminalised women involved in prostitution.
Rather, legislation which addressed all forms of violence against women, including the violence perpetrated by the buyers of sex, and the violence and inequality enshrined in religious and traditional practices, should be implemented.
The conference, presented by Norwegian group Fokus Forum for Women and Development, continues on Thursay and Friday.
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