HIV-Prevention Groups Protest Anti-Prostitution Pledge

[nosmokes]

why is it that when shrubco does do something worthwhile, they still manage to fuck it up by gumming up the works with their*morals* and ideology? if the point is to stop the spread of HIV/aids, a noble and worthy cause, you can't do it by telling the very people you're trying to help what bad, dirty people they are. criminy. my kingdom for a little horse-sense.-joe
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original-New Standard

HIV-Prevention Groups Protest Anti-Prostitution Pledge
by Kari Lydersen

A ban on US funding for AIDS-prevention groups that don't denounce the sex trade is meeting stiff resistance from advocates who say they can’t do their job if they have to demonize their clients.

Jan. 24 – Fourteen years ago, Meena Saraswathi Seshu and other women in the Indian state of Maharashtra founded SANGRAM, a collective of female sex workers that grew to include thousands of members. Curbing the spread of HIV has been one of the group's primary goals, and the women have earned international awards for their successful work.

So when SANGRAM was told to adopt a pledge opposing sex work if they wanted to receive funding from the US government, the women refused and forfeited a grant funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

SANGRAM is one of various international and US-based groups that, along with the Brazilian government, have forgone US funding for critical HIV-prevention work because they refused to take an explicit stand opposing sex work and its decriminalization.

When President Bush signed the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003, otherwise known as the AIDS Leadership Act, he described the $15 billion, five-year initiative as a way to step up the US commitment to addressing HIV and AIDS globally.

Noting that the sex industry contributes to the spread of HIV, the law says, "Prostitution and other sexual victimization are degrading to women and children and it should be the policy of the United States to eradicate such practices."

But groups working internationally to stem the AIDS epidemic say a provision of the Act twists the legislation into a counterproductive and hypocritical measure.

The Act says groups receiving US government funds, usually administered through USAID, must have in place a pledge "explicitly opposing prostitution or sex trafficking;" and that no funds "may be used to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking." At first the pledge didn't apply to US organizations, but government officials reinterpreted the pledge, and in 2005 began to apply it to US-based groups that do international work.

Public-health and women's rights groups in the US and abroad say that if put into practice by groups fighting the disease, this requirement will prevent sex workers from seeking counseling and aid, and hence bar outreach to one of the populations most vulnerable to contracting HIV.

Two lawsuits filed in 2005 call the pledge an unconstitutional violation of free speech, and in 2006, federal district judges separately ruled that the pledge was indeed unconstitutional. But the government has appealed the cases, which now sit before three-judge panels in two federal appeals courts.

The Alliance for Open Society International (AOSI) is the lead plaintiff in one of the cases. The Alliance has received USAID funding for its work against HIV/AIDS in Central Asia.

The AOSI adopted an anti-sex-work statement in order to continue a five-year program aimed at drug users in Central Asia, funded in part by a USAID grant. According to the lawsuit documents, after months of confusing correspondence with USAID officials who failed to clarify whether AOSI's policy did actually satisfy the pledge or not, in 2005 AOSI sued USAID over the pledge requirement.

"Since USAID began implementing its pledge requirement, the plaintiffs have been torn between their desire to continue this successful, life-saving work, and their desire to avoid adopting an ideologically driven government policy that will hurt their ability to do their life-saving work with their own funding," states the lawsuit complaint.

The other lawsuit was filed by the group DKT International after USAID stopped funding its condom program in Vietnam because it refused to adopt the anti-sex-work pledge. With offices in the United States and eleven other countries, DKT focuses on condom distribution and reproductive rights around the world.

The group does not have a policy either supporting or opposing prostitution, according to the complaint, and it says it will not adopt a policy opposing sex work because it predicts such a position would stigmatize and alienate sex workers who are vulnerable to the HIV virus.

In May 2006 a Washington, DC district judge ruled in DKT's favor. The government's appeal was heard earlier this month, and now the parties are awaiting the judges' decision.

More than 25 public-health and women's rights organizations have filed "friend of the court" briefs in each case, arguing the pledge will seriously curtail the international fight against HIV/AIDS and put lives at risk.

"It's a women's rights issue, it's a freedom of speech issue, it has a lot of different implications," said Claudia Flores, staff attorney at the women's rights project of the ACLU, which filed the briefs. She described the Act as "a conflation of two different goals" on the government's part: "the goal to eradicate AIDS, and the government's position on the harmful effects of prostitution."

Donna Barry, acting director of women's health at the Boston-based NGO Partners in Health, said her organization and many international groups have taken the pledge and tried not to let it affect their relationships with clients. Partners in Health doesn't post the pledge at their facilities or otherwise go out of their way to make it known to the people they serve. Barry said there aren't many sex workers in the rural parts of Haiti where Partners works anyway; the issue is likely more pressing for urban organizations.

"Clearly people who earn a living as sex workers are the highest risk group for HIV," Barry said. "If is followed to the letter of the law, people will get sick and die."
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complete article here