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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Selling sex, saving lives American policy is an abuse of human rights By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 794 words Publication date: July 10, 2005 As I wrote last week, people have sex for many different reasons, often subconscious and often determined by forces around us as much as by our own desires and fears. Sex is a central part of many people’s identities and cannot be constrained by a “morality” which is driven by superstition rather than the pursuit of happiness. Sex is often driven by economics. Many people spend their lives sharing a bed and their bodies with long-term partners who they have chosen for financial security. Only in the last two hundred or so years has love has become a priority in marriage, and in much of the world it is still a secondary consideration, if considered at all. Much short term sex is money-based. Prostitution is as old and as widespread as humanity. Most customers are men and most suppliers are women, but many men sell to men and women and, occasionally, women buy from other women. People sell sex for many different reasons, with money or its substitute – gifts, clothes or food – usually top of the list. It may be as basic as survival – my child and I will not eat tonight if I do not hire out my body. It may be for little luxuries – a cellphone, a new pair of sneakers. It may be short-term – I’m only doing it to get the money to go home – or life-long. It may be on the streets or in five-star hotels, through the internet or a newspaper advertisement. Not every sex worker (the politically correct term) is primarily motivated by cash. Some do it to be reassured of their desirability – I must be good-looking because people pay for my body. And gay men in countries where gay bars do not exist and gay social networks are weak sell sex as the only way of meeting the man they hope to fall in love with. Some sell sex because they have no option, like the young women in Bangladesh who were raped and cannot find a husband, or the East European girls who come to London as waitresses and find themselves trapped in grungy brothels or the teenage Albanian boys whose fathers sell them to middle-aged Italian men. Others sell sex precisely because they do have a choice. The perky girl from North-East Thailand can earn a hundred dollars in a month in a Bangkok McDonald’s or five or ten times that amount selling herself in a bar in a red-light area – and enjoys herself much more. And the young man at UCLA who sells sex twice a week has much more time to study than if he has to spend every evening waiting tables. Into this highly complex global phenomenon rushes, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, the American government. Since 2003 the Agency for International Development has required foreign organizations receiving its funds to pledge their opposition to prostitution. Last month it expanded the requirement to US groups working overseas – an action that some see as a violation of the First Amendment. (A similar policy on abortion has been operating since 2001.) There is a kernel of good sense underlying this requirement – trafficking of women, and occasionally young men, for sex – is an appalling abuse of human rights that deserves strong action and condemnation. But voluntary sex work – one individual’s choice to hire out their body and another individual’s choice to rent it – is a human right, albeit one that is not fully recognised. Banning all sex work on the grounds that some workers are exploited is no more reasonable than banning all sneakers because some manufacturers use child labor. On a practical level, much of the battle against HIV depends on working with sex workers and their clients. Refusal to work with these groups is to encourage the spread of a virus that has destroyed the lives of tens of millions and threatens the lives of millions more. The Brazilian government recognizes the harm such a policy would cause and has refused American funding that would cripple its highly effective anti-AIDS campaign. This policy is the child of American ignorance and arrogance. The ignorance lies in the lack of understanding among the country’s policy-makers and opinion-leaders of the reality of lives beyond these shores. The arrogance lies in their assumption that the principles that theoretically guide their own actions are valid for all others. The current policy is cruelty, not compassion. It is dictatorship, not freedom. It leads to poverty, disease and death and increases anti-American resentment. Contact your Representative and Senator and tell them it’s time to reverse this disastrous, immoral decision. It’s time to respect others’ freedom. It’s time to save lives. No mention of God this week. Addicted atheists need not worry – he’s back in the next column.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |