The 16 days of activism against gender violence are behind us. And now we ask for another day to draw attention to violence against sex workers.
December 17 is the second International Day of No Violence Against Sex Workers. Violence and victimisation of sex workers is an international trend, but we do not need to look beyond our borders to find justification for the need to address violence perpetrated against sex workers.
There have been many reports in South Africa about the possibility that serial rapists and murderers target sex workers.
A year ago in the United States Gary Ridgway was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, having pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women, most of them sex workers. In his plea Ridgway said: “I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
The case against Sebastian Fabian Fillis is being heard in the Cape Town Regional Court. He is accused of killing Elizabeth Frazenburg, a 28-year-old sex worker and mother of two, by throwing her over the railings at Sea Point and on to the rocks below, after she had allegedly refused his advances. Five years after the murder took place the trial has not been concluded, and the accused will be back in court next week.
Clearly not all sex workers are women. But, in the context of South African society where violence against women is prevalent, female sex workers are especially vulnerable to violence, both as women and in the context of the work they do.
The sex work industry cannot be considered separate from society, just as the women themselves are not separate from society. They have homes and families and they experience the same degrees of violence within the home as other women do. And they face the additional burden of trying to earn an income by means of something considered immoral by some, and criminal by the state.
Their work, by its nature, increases their exposure to violence simply because they have to negotiate sexual interactions more often than other women. This increased risk of violence comes with diminished protection on the basis of their status as criminals. Sex workers make themselves vulnerable to arrest if they attempt to lay a charge of rape or assault against a client.
A study by the Medical Research Council, published in the April 2001 edition of Aids Bulletin, revealed that “41% of the sample polled argued that a prostitute should not file a crime report if she is raped”. The study also found that sex workers are vulnerable to sexual violence because of the stigma attached to their work and the way they are treated by the public.
Sex workers are vulnerable to an additional threat — violence committed against them by police officers. It is difficult to report a crime committed against you to the very authority that has allowed this violence to be perpetrated by its uniformed officials. If this violence is allowed to continue then police services simply become unavailable to sex workers and will exist only as another source of abuse.
Sex work remains illegal in South Africa and this gives police officers the right to arrest sex workers whom they suspect of having committed a crime. Society’s view of sex workers, as reinforced by the government’s continued criminalisation of these women, is reflected in the treatment sex workers receive from police.
Will December 17 be added to the calendar of activism, and will we hear the same outrage aimed at the perpetrators of violence against sex workers as we did during the 16 days of activism?
Britta Rotmann is the legal advocacy and lobbying coordinator for the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce