It’s time to fund sex worker NGOs

A number of sex worker organisations across the globe are well organised, transparent and delivering services and advocacy to their community in ways that only sex workers can. Yet they are all too often excluded from funding. It’s time for governments, donors and grant bodies to show sex workers the money, writes Elena Jeffreys.

13 March 2011

The Scavenger

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called for the decriminalisation of sex work in 2008 and again in 2009. Not only would this constitute a significant advance in the fight against the spread of HIV, but it would help prevent the trafficking of women and grant sex workers the kind of human rights they only enjoy at present in a small number of jurisdictions, such as New South Wales in Australia, and New Zealand.

I am an Australian sex worker and the President of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian Sex Workers Association, the peak body that represents 12 sex worker organisations in Australia. Together we have a combined outreach of more than 20,000 occasions of service a year.

We believe granting bodies, governments and donors should develop closer relationships with sex worker NGOs, and stop excluding them from funding.

We advocate at top level. A representative from the Scarlet Alliance sits on the Commonwealth Attorneys-General Roundtable on People Trafficking, and was part of the expert committees that put together the Australian National Strategies on HIV and Sexually Transmissible Infections, as well as our own sex worker publications such as the “little red book” on STI’s and HIV transmission.

Bars girls of Phnom Penh

Net is a bar girl working in Phnom Penh. A peep into her life and her home. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 22/10/2010. Images here taken February 2010.

 

Net is a bar girl working in Phnom Penh. A peep into her life and her home. Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

22/02/2010

Demotix

S is a sex worker in Phnom Penh. Her working soubriquet is Net. She lives in a 3 x 3 m cell on the highest floor of a shared enclave in a Phnom Penh slum. I use the word slum accurately, as her accommodation meets many of the internationally agreed markers defining a slum dwelling.

Access is through a gloomy passageway off a main street, vibrant with street vendors. Climbing the two cracked and slippery staircases to her room, I ascend passed her neighbours filthy living spaces, too small to sit in so they sit in the passageway playing cards and chatting. It’s impossible to avoid placing your feet in the pools of oily wastewater or stepping onto the discarded detritus.

Her room is a roughly nailed plank construction, a wooden coffin, the bamboo topped bed occupying one third of the space. No toilet. No shower. No washbasin. A small clothing rack to store her sexy work clothes, a blaring TV prominent on a shelf above the few treasured personal items she keeps - photo albums of her baby and mother, a clear HIV-STD certificate and a few bottles of perfume which are mostly empty. A rusty fan recirculates the hot mosquito infested air.

Net is 26 and originates from the poor rural provinces in northern Cambodia. Her only child is now three years old and lives with her mamma in her own home town, where her brother and his family also live. Her estranged husband lives with a “new girlfriend” in Thailand. Tall and snake thin, her cheekbones protrude deeply into her dark facial skin. She is no classic beauty queen just charmingly pretty with a pleasant smile. Chatting fluently in bar girl English, she does however, command the English language better than most of her co-workers, a real asset when advertising herself adjacent to her beautiful and highly competitive friends. She tells me “after leaving my husband I try to live for more [than] one year in the provinces with my baby”. She struggled to earn enough money to live and to support her offspring. Someone in the village tells her that she should go to Phnom Penh to “make lots of money”. The streets are paved with gold farang in Phnom Penh! Telling her family that she is going to the capital to work in a “tourist restaurant”, which she did for a while, she uprooted herself from her family and moved into a shoe box room in the capital city.

As a daughter her Asian culture demands that she earns money, not only for her baby but also as a social welfare system for her parents. In a region without state care for the elderly, adults have children with the expectation that they will care for them when they are ageing, although perhaps not when they are old as life expectancy in Cambodia is only 59.5 years, middle age in Western society.

Net was not sold by her family as a young virgin girl to a rich man in Phnom Penh or to a wealthy Chinese businessman. She was not beaten, raped and coerced - broken - as a novice brothel worker like so many young girls in Cambodia. She found herself, in her mid-20s, with few choices; she had no money to support her family and was totally estranged from her errant and promiscuous husband. He wanted to keep her as a second wife, a mia-noi, an offer she tearfully declined believing that to be unacceptable and morally repugnant. He gives her no money to support his child. Little education, lacking formal employment skills other than house work, she tried the one option she believed would make her “big luy [money]” -milking the farang as a bar girl in Phnom Penh.

Net does not find acclimatisation into the sex industry at all easy. Her first employment is in one of Phnom Penh's infamous walking street saloons. She struggles to “wet kiss” the “farang” [Western male tourists] as instructed by the Mamasan boss. Chat to her and it’s obvious that sex work is not her first career option but it is lucrative; the bar pays her around $60 a month, $15 of which goes to rent her shared room. Clients, if she can secure one, pay maybe $25 or more for a night with her, depending on the work. “Best work”, nights in Sinhouville or Siem Reap, acting as an Asian trophy girlfriend for an “old man”; this is the work she “enjoys” and it’s a bonus as she gets a holiday in a nice room, clean showers and free food. They “pay bar fine” for the time she is away from her work and she still gets paid by the bar.

Five weeks into her new role at this bar she is dismissed by the manager because she blatantly refuses to “wet kiss” the sex tourists in the bar, as demanded by the boss. She tells me "It's not good. No do wet kiss in bar".

At 26 Net is quite old to become a bargirl. This combined with her apparent inaptitude for sex work, her unwillingness to let go of her morality and her plain looks, means that she struggles to find a new job in a different ladybar. Restaurant work is physically very hard and she tells me that she “does not want to work hard” to earn money when she sees pretty young girls [cash] “rich” from the “easy work” with western sex tourists.

What are her options now I ask? Slightly confused she replies “she may move to Sinhouville to earn more money”. The streets are lined with gold farang in Sihanoukville, the beach resort of Cambodia similar to Pataya in Thailand. To tap into this gold rush though net knows she must crush her innate morality, totally destroying her belief that some things are not for sale. Prostitute herself fully. It appears to be a seriously challenging option for Net, even though she cannot face the routine demands of traditional employment in a restaurant, in a clothing factory or as a rice worker in the provinces.

What does she do now? She tries to freelance. Disguised in working girls clothing she emerges from her shoebox home, ventures into the night, onto the pulsating streets and into the seedy bars and nightclubs of Phnom Penh to try to earn her living by entertaining a paying western man. Her sex tourist clients never venture into the hidden backstage of her life. She acts out her roles for them- lover, sex toy, girlfriend - on the sanitised stage of their hotel rooms. Rooms cheap at $20 a night or less, cleaned daily. They never see or understand the real side of her life. She leaves them after they pay her and returns on foot, or maybe side sitting on a moto, to the dark staircase which climbs up to her room. To her life watching TV, playing cards in the alleyway and cuddling her childhood teddy bears. Until the late evening when she dresses and the game starts again.

I have withheld Net's full name in this article in the hope that she finds less painful employment in the future.

Cambodian cafe cooks up alternative to sex work

July 28, 2010
ABC Radio Australia

Prostitution is still a major problem in Cambodia where an estimated 60,000 women, many just children, are hired by locals and foreigners. Hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid is pouring in to the country to try and give women better opportunities to keep them off the streets. Among those seeing results is the Yejj cafe, where women can be trained to work in hospitality.

Presenter: Conor Duffy
Speakers: Darren Marshall, Operations Manager, Yejj; Susanna West, Trainer, Yejj

Click here to listen to the audio program (Windows Media)

Informal Sex Trade Threatens to Undercut Gains in HIV

By Irwin Loy

PHNOM PENH, Jul 20, 2010 (IPS) - On a muggy evening, a handful of men in suits were quickly getting drunk in a beer garden here in the Cambodian capital. One man rested his hand on the thigh of a slender woman sitting uncomfortably in a short skirt.

A sign above the table read: "Be responsible. Use a condom."

"The customers play around with us all the time," said Neang, glancing at the scene unfolding at the next table. "They touch my breasts, or put their hands on my thigh while I’m sitting down. I don’t like it, but I have no other choice."

Beer promoters like Neang and others who work in places where Cambodia’s informal sex industry can be found are a growing concern for health experts in this South-east Asian country, as sex work shifts from traditional settings like brothels to informal ones in the entertainment sector.

Women who work in karaoke bars or beer gardens like this one may not identify as sex workers, but some occasionally sell sex to top up their meager earnings.

Neang, who asked that her full name not be used, said she recently decided not to have sex with her customers after she got married. In the past, though, many of the men who propositioned her would refuse to use a condom.

"The NGOs tell us to wear condoms properly to prevent HIV infection," she said. "But in the past, when I slept with customers, some insisted it was not necessary. It is hard to refuse."

Cambodia is seen as a success story in HIV prevention. It has managed to reduce its HIV prevalence rate among adults from a high of two percent in 1998 to an estimated 0.7 percent last year. If this trend continues, Cambodia will be on track to meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) for cutting HIV prevalence rates by 2015.

But critics say the government’s drive to stamp out human trafficking has actually exacerbated HIV risks for sex workers because it is forcing many to go underground. Without a renewed emphasis to reach those in the informal sex trade, Cambodia could face a stumbling block in meeting its MDG target on HIV.

Authorities have targeted suspected brothels as part of their crackdown on human trafficking. But advocates say the raids have resulted mainly in the arrest of sex workers, many of whom were driven to the trade by poverty, not trafficking.

The end result has been to push sex workers into hiding – and away from the reach of HIV prevention programmes.

"The more crackdowns, the more people will be pushed underground and disappear," said Tea Phauly, the most at- risk populations adviser with the Joint U.N. Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) in Cambodia. "And it is very difficult to structure a response to reach these people."

Government studies here have shown that brothel-based sex workers are more likely to use condoms than women who sometimes sell sex in entertainment establishments.

But advocates say they now have difficulty reaching sex workers, many of whom have ended up in beer gardens and karaoke bars. "We can approach them, but not like before. They remain hidden," said Ly Pisey, a technical assistant with the advocacy group Women’s Network for Unity.

Ly says outreach workers used to be able to easily access brothels and talk to sex workers about HIV prevention and health care. "But now if you go … and ask, ‘Are you a sex worker?’ they say no," she said.

In March, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen delivered a speech that was interpreted by police officials as an order to intensify a crackdown on human trafficking. Within two weeks, raids on suspected brothels sent more than 280 sex workers into hiding, according to a local non-government group that tracked the enforcement.

Police actions have eased up in recent weeks, but the raids are a cyclical part of a longer-term trend that has helped change the nature of Cambodia’s sex industry.

Bith Kimhong, director of the Ministry of Interior’s anti- trafficking bureau, said: "We shut down clubs that are related to sex trafficking. We want to eliminate such sayings that Cambodia is a place for sex tourism."

Sex workers, he says, are not the targets of such enforcement. "We know when closing such establishments, there are more people losing their jobs," he said. "We cannot avoid this. The benefit is that we want to guarantee safety and security for our country."

UNAIDS and Cambodian authorities are developing a plan to ensure that sex workers – especially those in entertainment venues like the beer garden Neang works in – are able to access HIV education and health care. Officials hope such a plan will include broad community partnerships, particularly with police officers.

"What we don’t want to see is a second (HIV) epidemic," said Tony Lisle, the UNAIDS country coordinator in Cambodia.

In 1996, the HIV prevalence rate for female sex workers was well above 40 percent. Ten years later, this rate had dropped to around 14 percent, according to the last countrywide survey.

"There’s been an enormous amount of work done in reducing both incidence and prevalence of HIV," Lisle said. "But we have to be mindful that if we don’t continue to roll out innovative, effective, scaled programmes in prevention and continue to normalise condom use, if we don’t keep the pace up and the intensity up with populations at risk for HIV, we could well see a reemergence of an epidemic - which we don’t want."

One Cambodian woman picked up by Malaysian police during brothel raid

34 foreign women picked up during vice-operation

2008/01/31
V. SHUMAN
New Straits Times (Malaysia)

SUBANG JAYA: Thirty-four foreign women were picked up during a vice-operation at a budget hotel in Bandar Puchong Utama early yesterday.

Federal police anti-vice, gaming and secret society division (D7) principal assistant director SAC II Rodwan Mohd Yusof said the women were found hiding in several rooms on the top floor of the four-storey shoplot.

“The raiding party took several hours to round up the women, aged between 19 and 25. There are secret passages leading to the rooms where the women were hiding.”

The women comprised 16 Chinese nationals, 12 Vietnamese, four Thai and an Indonesian and a Cambodian.

Checks showed they entered the country last November on work permits.

Two hotel employees, both in their 20s, were also detained after police found 15 boxes of firecrackers inside the premises. Police are looking for the hotel owner.