#AIDS2016: Sex workers fight for their rights

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Published Jul 22, 2016

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Durban - Some sex workers find a way past the everyday violence and abuse they experience at the hands of law enforcement officials by becoming activists.

“I come from a very poor Muslim community in Karnataka in India,” said Sakina Sayed, who has been a sex worker for 11 years because of the frequent abuse and low pay she experienced as a domestic worker for a wealthy family.

One night, community members burnt down her house. "I lost everything I had worked so hard for.

“I went to the police for help but they said to me: ‘What the community has done to you is right, you are a bad woman, a whore’.”

Her eyes welled with tears and she wiped them away briskly and said: “But that was not enough. A group of teen boys in the neighbourhood came to me at night and forced me out of the house where I was staying into the street where they abused me and asked when my younger sisters would come out.”

Sayed is part of an organisation of sex workers in her area which advocates for the rights of women to be free from police harassment, and for access to HIV and other health services, called Uttar Karnataka MahilaOtkuta.

Speaking to Health-e News at the International Aids Conference, Sayed said that since she has become an activist, she has experienced less brutality. “Today the joy of my life is those very same boys who burnt down my house and abused me in the street now come to me for help.

"I make sure to always give them some money because I am earning enough money to do so. That is my personal victory over them.”

Nosipho Vidima’s experiences as a sex worker in Durban are similarly tainted with violence and discrimination.

She said she chose sex work because she could not support herself and her child on her income as a waitress.

Vidima is a human rights and lobbying officer for the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce. “I’ve been arrested so many times I can’t count."

Vidima said that although sex work was illegal in South Africa, police needed to catch someone “in the act”.

“They usually arrest us on grounds of disturbing the public or for loitering. They like to arrest us on a Friday and keep us locked up for the whole weekend – which is our busiest time.

“The violence is everywhere. I have been raped, pepper sprayed, assaulted and verbally abused by police.”

Vidima is studying law, paid for by her job as a sex worker, but worries about whether her criminal record will stop her from being admitted to the Bar when she graduates.

Vidima hopes the government will consider decriminalising the industry soon because “all the evidence shows it is the intelligent decision”.

Health-e News

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