/ 20 May 2009

Pride and prostitution

Prostitutes say the most frightening aspect of being deemed criminals is the way they are treated by the police. Men and women who work the streets say that police are not just indifferent to crimes committed against them, but are often the perpetrators.

But sex workers may now have a chance to change their working lives. The South African Law Reform Commission released a discussion paper on adult prostitution this month, calling for public comment until the end of June. The paper situates prostitution in the Constitution’s commitment to human rights and social justice and suggests the existing law might breach South Africa’s international obligations. It could lead to changes in the profession’s legal status.

The paper outlines four legal models of sex work:

  • Total criminalisation — the current regime;
  • Partial criminalisation, which would target only the buying of sex;
  • Non-criminalisation of adult prostitution; and
  • State regulation of adult prostitution, restricting it to specific zones.

Sex workers who spoke to the Mail & Guardian last week were overwhelmingly in favour of total decriminalisation.

Ray is a 40-year-old prostitute who works the streets of Woodstock and Salt River in Cape Town. She is a member of the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat), a non-profit organisation that works with sex workers.

Ray is most frightened of the police. ”We are targets for them on the road,” she says.

”I was raped by three cops; and sometimes they come and take my money out of my pocket.”

Zodwa, who works in Hillbrow and is a counsellor at Sweat’s Johannesburg counterpart, Sisonke, says the police approach prostitutes on the street and ask for a ”cold drink”, which translates into a bribe.

”If we don’t pay they take us to the cells and they rape the girls in there.”

Police intervention is often bad for business, but not in the way the law intended. ”When a client is busy with a girl, the cops come and tell the client ‘Come with us to the bank or we’ll tell your wife,”’ Zodwa says.

It is extremely hard for sex workers to lay complaints about rape or abuse involving either police personnel or customers, according to Busie, a pretty 25-year-old who works in a Hillbrow brothel.

”If you go to the police station, they say ‘we won’t open a case, you deserve it’.”

Sex workers resent the stigma that comes with being criminals. ”If people see us as criminals they don’t see us as human beings,” says Thando, a male prostitute in Sea Point. Prostitutes experience stigma at hospitals when they test for sexually transmitted diseases and when they are treated for physical abuse.

”If one nurse knows you are a sex worker, then the whole hospital knows,” says Busie, ”and then they make you feel like an outsider.”

The prospect of being taxed if sex work is decriminalised does not bother the prostitutes interviewed. ”We don’t mind paying tax,” says Thando, ”because we’ll be able to open accounts.” On an average night he earns about R1 500.

Busie says: ”We will be earning more because we won’t have to give our money to cops. We could work whenever we want, and our clients won’t be scared.”

The Commission’s paper is the latest step towards reforming the country’s laws on prostitution. It has taken seven years to produce, says commission researcher Dellene Clark, and draft legislation will probably be ready for presentation to the justice department only in 2011. How long the process might take ”depends on what is a priority for government at the time”, says Clark.

And which option to put your money on? ”With Zuma, I don’t know,” says Busie. ”He doesn’t recognise women’s rights.”

Zodwa is cynical too. ”I’m a Zulu and Zuma is a Zulu,” she says. ”In his tradition a man is supposed to have many women, not the other way around.”