Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV/AIDS (BONELA) has reiterated its call for commercial sex work to be legalised in the country.

BONELA official Annah Chalmas said the move will help sex workers as human beings and give them dignity. Addressing a workshop in Selebi-Phikwe, she stated that sex work must be treated as a labour and economic issue. She asserted that there is great harm in ignoring the sex work community. She regretted the fact that efforts to abolish commercial sex focuses on the moral aspect to make the workers feel guilty. She added that powerful economic and other factors that draw people into sex work tend to be overlooked.

Chalmas said legalising commercial sex work should come with anti-HIV interventions, safer sex negotiations and economic empowerment initiatives for those plying the trade and their clients. "What can also be done is to identify them and ensure that they have access to healthcare, job training, education and opportunity to earn a living wage.

There should be enforcement of laws against their assault." She expressed concern that once sex workers come out in public, the stigma will not be easy to neutralise and their rehabilitation is more difficult. She urged people to try and separate trafficking of women from sex work. She said sex work must be projected as cutting across all gender and sex workers must be engaged as part of the solution. "Whatever their legal status, sex workers deserve safety against physical and sexual assault as any other person and legalising sex work will really work. That is the stance of BONELA," she stressed.

However there were mixed reactions to BONELA'S position. Some participants maintained that sex work should not be legalised but it should be decrimilaised so that it does not benefit those trafficking sex workers. They said that this will help in identifying people engaged in trafficking sex workers because it will be done in segmented areas. They said the police must be sensitised not to arrests sex workers alone but clients as well because they provide the market.

They noted that sex workers must be viewed as contributing to the country's economy and that it helps men who are not assertive enough to seduce women.

Others felt that legalisation of sex work will defeat the country's efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. They said that sex work is not part of Botswana culture. "It creates more harm than good and it is total human degradation. Let us see ourselves as dignified human beings rather than copying western behaviours. What BONELA is doing is totally uncalled for," one of them said.

In response Chalmas said sex work is not a behavior but work/job hence it needs specific interventions and said they teach sex workers safety in the workplace through outreach programmes that encourage safer sex. She added that the biggest problem they encounter in their outreach efforts is that they cannot access important things like lubricants because they are not supplied in the local health facilities and importing them attracts trade hassles in that BONELA has to give thorough explanation why they need them. "If sex work was legal it would be easy to ship those things into Botswana."

She stressed that "If BONELA talks ethics they do it in terms of humanity and how best we can help sex workers as human beings with dignity. The harm we are doing is ignoring the sex work community."