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 Health & Beauty | August 2006 
Sex Workers Show Red Light to AIDS at Global Forum
 Catherine Hours - AFP
| | Sex workers perform a show about safe sex during the XVI International Aids Conference in Toronto, Canada on 15 August 2006. (AFP/Jorge Uzon) |
With the crack of a whip and swish of maracas, dozens of prostitutes from Bangladesh to Brazil and from Cambodia to Canada demanded recognition of their frontline role in the war on AIDS.
"Sex Workers' Rights: Time to Deliver," they chanted Wednesday, as their rowdy protest echoed through the vast Toronto conference centre hosting the world's biggest-ever meeting on a disease which has filled 25 million graves.
With sexy ribbon silhouettes drawn on their tight blue tee-shirts, they drew numbers from more than 20 nations, including Thailand, Brazil, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India and the United States.
An Indian transvestite lent a splash of color in a sari, as protestors shook maracas and blew whistles, while passing from hand to hand a mean-looking leather multi-thonged whip, which sparked hilarity at a security checkpoint.
"People must realize we are doing a job," said Anna-Louise Crago, a founder-member of Stella, the first sex worker association set up in Canada's French-speaking province of Quebec.
"The world needs sex workers to battle AIDS, and we need to be recognized by authorities as crucial to the struggle against HIV," she said.
A Thai woman, who didn't give her name added: "Sex work is work. Sex workers are workers. We need job security, health care."
Their cause won immediate support from top brass of the global AIDS battle, as Mark Wainberg, co-president of the 16th International AIDS conference, happened on the protest, by chance.
Slightly red-faced, the besuited, bespectacled Canadian academic took up their chants, which reverberated through the conference centre hosting 20,000 delegates.
Statistics back up sex workers' claims to be at the epicentre of the epidemic.
According to the agency UNAIDS, the march of the disease in many nations is underpinned by paid-for sex.
In China, it is estimated that sex workers and clients represent 20 percent of those with HIV. In Ethiopia, 73 percent of sex workers are infected, along with 50 percent in South Africa and 31 percent in Ivory Coast.
Demonstrators denounced hassle from governments and police from numerous nations, which they said forced them to operate clandestinely and cut them out official HIV prevention programs.
Canadians among them accused their country's new Conservative government of forcing them out of major cities in clean-up campaigns.
One woman from Mali bemoaned the lack of funding for anti-AIDS programs for sex workers, and all denounced the United States over rules which bar HIV aid from groups that support prostitution.
"Society must accept the existence of sex workers, and we need free condoms," said Awa Dambele, from Bamako, who warned that condoms were expensive in Mali and poverty-stricken prostitutes had to work without them.
Catherine Healy, a sex worker from New Zealand, said the situation for her counterparts had got better.
"The Ministry of Health was one of our first allies -- the ministry funded us to distribute condoms to our peers," she said.
But up until prostitution was decriminalized in her country in 2003 -- police still harassed sex workers, seizing the condoms and hampering effective HIV prevention.
For the Indian transvestite, who refused to be named, the logic was simple: unless sex workers are brought into the fight, AIDS will never be conquered.
"All the governments should give rights to sex workers, all the policies will go down the drain if sex workers don't get their rights." |
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