Sex Workers (and Liberalism)

Yesterday I was somewhat hastily invited to sit in on a meeting for which I hadn’t been briefed. Three people came into the office and exchanged business cards with us (I definitely wished I had sprung for York business cards before I left). From their cards and the conversations I could see they were all advocates for Ugandan sex workers’ rights and were currently seeking to follow through on a case against an abusive police officer and secure protection for the litigating victim in the interim. Two of the people present were women (one of whom was the litigant) and were both coordinators of separate but collaborating sex worker advocacy organizations. I assumed the litigant was an advocate who had been harassed due to the nature of her work, I did not think she was a sex worker. The third person present was a male doctor who has taken a role in the case. As we filled out an intake form, I was somewhat annoyed seeing the man tell the woman exactly, word-for-word how to fill out the intake form which asks her to describe her case. After the meeting was complete I did some research on the organizations and found out that both women who came to us were (as of their last public writings) active sex workers who had taken up advocacy and organizing within their working environment to respond to the abuses they had experienced and witnessed in their line of work.

I am someone who is open minded, and I have for a long time supported the rights of sex workers, and been against their criminalization . I don’t flinch talking about or advocating for sex workers rights any more than I would talking about gay rights or anti-racism (ie: not at all). Yet I still displayed an implicit reaction when I assumed that neither woman was a prostitute. Mind you, I don’t think I should start assuming that women I meet ARE prostitutes, but that’s not my point. Rather, there is an implicit classism present in assumptions about who is able to be an advocate (or trustee), and who is able to speak eloquently and directly in the public and judicial domains about social and legal issues. ’Advocate for sex workers’ is consonant, whereas ‘advocates who are sex workers’ is dissonant.

My Googling turned up an article (link) written by one of the women at the meeting wherein she describes her experiences turning to sex work (a term I now greatly prefer to ‘prostitution’) as a way to fund herself through the completion of her secondary school, which turned out to be so profitable she was able to support her sibling’s schooling as well as her mother. Eventually she politicized her experiences after a colleage was attacked and began to seek advocacy opportunities.

The other woman present had shared her own story in a collection of stories called “When I dare to be powerful”. The editor of that collection recounted the launch event for the book:

“As the audience listened to Daughtie Akoth of Kenya and Daisy Nakato of Uganda share parts of their stories, we could see the transformation happening before our eyes. Although one person in the audience assumed that we were ‘preaching to the converted’ it became apparent during the question and answer session that there were in fact a number of people that were engaging with the discussion of sex worker rights for the very first time, and still held negative perceptions about the industry and the people engaged in it. We also later discovered that when Daughtie and Daisy began to speak a lot of people in the room were surprised that there were sex workers in the room, and that they could speak for themselves in a powerful and articulate manner.”

This audience was surely as caring and liberal a bunch as any. Yet liberalism and humanitarianism in general still rests on a similar classism to my own which only allows the members of the upper strata of society (generally based on educational achievement) to be the legitimate (and well-paid) advocate for equality.

This is a paradox which resonates when I visited the large secured UN village in the heart of Kampala (secured by the Ugandan Police), when I make the transition from the untarmacked road leading up to my workplace to the large and stately building housing my modern office, as well as when I look around posh offices apartments then look at poorly paid domestic workers. Or perhaps when my housemate, after hearing my small diatribe against Coca-Cola and bottled water, reminded me of how I turned my nose up at the prospect of using boiled tap water in my morning coffee.

So, retrospectively, I could see that the male doctor was facilitating a process for a politically active sex worker whose moderately hindered literacy might otherwise hinder her from filling out a form which assumes that human rights advocates are fully literate English speakers (who can fill out a form in 10 minutes instead of an hour).

I think this critique dives into a discussion about voice, agency, and the subaltern – a discussion which also dives into totally unintelligible and inaccessible academic language (see Butler, Spivak, Homi Bhabba, etc…). But let me briefly put it (and these are not rules, but patterns)… when injustice occurs to articulate members of liberal society, it is intolerable, prosecutable (as Judith Butler would say, grievable). But when injustice occurs to inarticulate (sub-altern) non-members of liberal society, it is perhaps regrettable (when relayed by articulate elites), but largely invisible, as in the case of refugees warehoused in camps for decades, sex workers raped by police officers and beaten by clients. The result is a tiered system of justice both nationally and globally in which some people lose access to that justice due to their ‘invisibility’.

Sex workers who are advocates belong to the same group of people as Brazil’s landless persons movement (MST) or perhaps the Zapatista’s of Mexico: people who seek representation, rights, recognition, ‘a seat at the table’, but who do so outside the historically bourgeois liberal sector of professional human rights workers and activists.

Follow up::

Read Macklean’s personal story

Contact Akina Mama wa Afrika to get a copy of ‘When I Dare To Be Powerful’, the collection of stories from East African sex workers.

Check out the websites for the African Sex Workers Alliance

Rwanda, Research, Elections, & Human Rights Defense

I’ve been intending to write a more general explanation of the organization I’m working with and the work I’m doing with them however I’ll take the chance given to me by a rather exciting presentation I attended yesterday to give another glimpse into the human rights world of the East African region.

As everyone knows, Rwanda experienced a horrific genocide in 1994. The genocide was not a singular event but rather one development in a series of struggles which have displaced people into neighboring countries and around the world for decades. The genocide was ended with a military victory by an army comprised mainly of one ethnic group. This army proceeded to establish a new government based on a rhetoric of peace and reconciliation with the goal of erasing the social division between the two ethnic groups which led to the genocide. This goal has led to the criminalization of ‘genocide ideology’ and ‘discrimination and sectarianism’. In addition, local courts have been set up to try genocide perpetrators, called gacaca courts, in a speedy manner.

Despite the return of a military peace to Rwanda, there is still a significant Rwandan refugee diaspora in the region. Thus, in the view of the Rwandan government and the UNHCR (the UN Refugee organization), it is no longer “justifiable or necessary” for Rwandan refugees to remain receiving support outside their country. Yet refugees remain in Uganda and refuse to return home. Why won’t they go?

There is an organization under the Makarere University’s Faculty of Law called the Refugee Law Project which does frequent high-quality research on refugee issues in Uganda. They had completed a report on a settlement for Rwandan refugees in Uganda in which they interviewed over 100 refugees on the reasons they have decided not to return to Rwanda. There is a belief that refugees might act as a sort of barometer reflective of the situation in a home country: when the situation is supportive, most will return, when it is exclusionary, they would rather live elsewhere, even if living elsewhere brings its own uncertainties. Thus the data the report collected was highly critical of the current Rwandan government (more on that later) and the overall situation in that country.

So the Refugee Law Project had sent out an invitation for us to attend the presentation of the findings. Myself and two others arrived at the Hotel Africana which had heightened security due to the presence of a governmental bigwig (possibly the President) at a separate event – our car was briefly searched, we were asked if we had handguns in our bags, and we had to step through metal detectors. At the presentation the researcher ran through the findings – namely that Rwandan refugees fear repatriation due to a repressive political culture intolerant of dissent, the existence of ethnic discrimination, the assignation of collective guilt upon all members of the ethnic group which perpetrated much of the genocide, and the use of gacaca courts as a means to settle political and personal scores instead of reach post-genocide justice.

The report made recommendations aimed at the three principal parties handling Rwandan refugees: the Prime Minister’s Office of Uganda, the UNHCR, and the Government of Rwanda. As is good form, representative from each of these parties were invited to the presentation. The first two parties did not attend, but, as some were surprised to learn, the Rwandan ambassador to Uganda came to the presentation and had apparently already read the report. His presence was acknowledged by the first speaker, who invited him to say “three or four words” following the presentation of findings.

Let me first ask my colleagues of this blog to imagine returning home to Canada, arranging a presentation for your research, and having the top diplomat from the country of your research arriving to watch and comment upon your research. Add the facts that your research is highly critical of that country’s administration, the government in question is domestically very repressive, and that political refugees of that country were present at the event. Yes, the ambassador was invited, and there were recommendations in the report directed at the government of Rwanda, but I suspect his presence and response was a surprise.

The ambassador prefaced himself by defending his own diplomatic credentials, however excused himself from being diplomatic for the present event. He then proceeded to ask why his office was not involved in the research from a much earlier stage, as then it could have been directed to be useful rather than arriving at the ludicrous conclusions which it did. It was not so much a report as a non-report full of outrageous accusations. What is more, the researchers did not even enter Rwanda to confirm these accusations, they merely asked refugees, many of whom are genocidaires, what their opinions were. If the researchers were genuine in their intent they would have asked experts in the World Bank and United Nations what was happening in Rwanda, they would have asked human rights organizations in Rwanda [note: Human Rights Watch has recently had an employee banned from operating in Rwanda]. He hoped that the research findings were presented out of good faith and total ignorance, but he has to suspect that they were made in bad faith and with malicious intent. As he had nothing more to say on the subject he would not remain to answer questions but could be reached in his office at the embassy for further discussion. He then walked out unceremoniously.

(See I told you it was exciting!). The truth is Rwanda is becoming a real point of concern. Paul Kagame has been in power for 16 years, since his military victory in 1994. His administration, much like Museveni’s in Uganda, has had great accomplishments in reconstructing Rwanda’s economy and returning a sense of normalcy to the country, however peace and reconciliation is backgrounded by Kagame’s grip on power and a pervasive anti-hutu sentiment which is made invisible by the philosophy of a post-ethnic Rwanda.

In only the time which I have been here in Uganda, a Rwandan general living in South Africa who posed a risk of political opposition to Kagame was shot in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The editor of a Rwandan newspaper was successfully assassinated in Kigali, and other journalists have left the country. Kagame was named one of the top predators against press freedom by Reporters Without Borders in 2010. Why is all of this worsening now? Rwanda is going into its presidential elections on the 9th of August, 2010, one of a string of elections occurring across the region in 2010/2011. Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti have all either already had or are schedules to hold elections in this period, in addition to a constitutional referendum in Kenya and a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan.

Elections are periods of increased insecurity for people whose professional calling is speaking truth to power and public education through media. The mandate of the organization I am working for is to provide protection, both through advocacy and training in the hope of preventing insecurity, and through reactive protection measures, of these people, who we call human rights defenders. The issue of the elections, advocacy, and the role of the different organs such as foreign embassies in protecting human rights and defending the defenders of human rights are all things I should be writing about and sharing, however I think I’ve gone over the limit of what a reasonably-lengthed blog post should be, so I’ll try to write about those things another day, though in truth it’s hard to put the time into blogging because I find the work of the organization much more engaging! Adieu for now…