Thursday, March 25, 2010

Criminalizing transmission

I saw this Nyasa Times article on a Tiyeni Tipewe listener's Facebook page:



There's a lot to talk about. Please read the article, and the responses that follow it. I will be including it in the program on Saturday. What are your reactions to the issues the article brings up? What was not addressed? What do you think about the law that's being proposed? Share your thoughts here and on Saturday! You can do both!

9 comments:

  1. The problem with Malawian society is that we pretend to be saints. We don't want to accept that gays exist and that prostitutes exist. We would rather accept that witchcraft exists. Yet we see prostitutes everyday. We sleep with them. We buy sex from them. Yet when it comes to policy, we choose to pretend they don't exist.

    The first step should be to legalise prostitution. When prostitution is recognised as a formal trade, government can easily regulate it by registering the prostitutes, giving them identity cards, and keeping their medical profiles. The prostitutes will be required to undergo medical tests for STIs, including HIV every month. Those wwho fail to present themselves for tests will be de-registered and, if they continue plying their trade, they will be prosecuted.

    Malawi can learn from Senegal, where the above practices are in place. The HIV rates in Senegal now stand at a meager 1%.

    As the draft law currently stands, it assumes that only women can transmit HIV. This law is selective. It is discriminatory and gender insensitive. The prostitutes have every reason to protest!

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  2. I would concur with Pradeep in many issues raised. I think in Malawi we have a "quick fix" syndrome that deters is from getting to the bottom of the problem. For instance in 2004 there was a fatal at the not so famous Linthipe, we a lot of lives were lost. At that time it was agreed that drives should have there times checked at different spots along the way. That was only done in no more than two months. Some accidents have happened after, this does not mean if we had to stick to that we could not have accidents anymore. But this lack of vision and how best to sustain interventions defeats the purpose.

    One more example, in the legal front, I remember between 1999 to 2004 there was a motion in parliement where legislators were supposed to discuss how best to prevent HIV transmission in the prison. At that time it was noted that prisoners were among the vulnerable group in terms of HIV infection rate. So one member suggested that they should start distributing condoms in the prison. This member said that in our prisons there men who do have sex with men, therefore we will be doing good to them. It was not hard to think in that way. But the problem was that our laws do not allow people of same sex to have sexual relationships. Perhaps that why one is couple in jail.

    These issues seems to be shwoing to us how void our laws are. I am told our laws do nto recognise that witchcraft does exist. but lately we heard people being arrested after being acused of practicing the same. Prostitution is not legal and is not recognised, here we are learning that Prostitutes were demostrating.

    Therefore, in this scenario it will be hard for the law enforcers to arrest someone on the pretext that has infected somebody with HIV having known ones status. How many people are willing to go for testing? How will we know that it is she and he who had HIV in the first place.

    Unless we make HIV testing compulsory, that will help in knowing who has and who does not. However, that will be tantamount to violating ones fundamental human rights.

    Again, where were such ideas conceived? Was there any input from the public. If yes how were such people mobilised? Because for the past three years I have been attending NAC's AIDS conferences in Malawi I have not come across ideas of that sort. Therefore, there is a need for a greater engagement of all the people in determing what is best.

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  3. When I first heard about this bill last year, it was targeted at rapists and others who willingly infect others with HIV (the motivation for the bill at that time was the proliferation of rape cases involving children). I have yet to read the full bill, so I obviously don’t know that much about what it intends to address and the strategies that are to be used. As usual, our legislators are always good at formulating laws but enforcement is another different thing altogether. There is already a ton of laws that seek to contain the spread of HIV, but probably there is some sense of achievement that is derived by the authorities each time a new law is formulated and passed.

    I would like to think that men and women who engage with prostitutes do so with the full knowledge of the risks associated with such activities. If you can afford to buy sex, then chances are you know all there is about HIV/AIDS. Whether those consenting people choose to protect themselves is beyond the control of any authority. I have heard prostitutes charge more for unprotected sex, and there are stories of men who refuse to believe that a woman is HIV+ even after being told that bare truth in their face. Forcing prostitutes (or “people who frequent public places”, as one Gender Minister politely called them) to undergo HIV tests is a gross violation of their human rights. I would like to read about how the issue of attribution will be addressed in the bill – how do you attribute infection to one person if buying sex is your habit? (We can’t even conduct a simple DNA test to establish paternity). The primary reason for the high HIV prevalence rate in Malawi is NOT prostitution.

    It is unfortunate that in the majority of cases that involve HIV/AIDS, women are portrayed as the agents and victims of the epidemic. In my opinion, there would be no prostitution - the act or practice of engaging in sex acts for hire – if there were no buyers of sex. Thus both men and women are agents and victims of AIDS in equal measure. While I personally do not condone those that trade sex for money and those that buy it, I want to believe that there is more in the bill that seeks to address the spread of HIV than just an attack on the women folk.

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  4. Thank you all for taking the time to write such thoughtful and interesting responses to the issues discussed in this article!

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  5. I read the article and as a result found the issue already complex enough. Having read all of the above comments, I am somewhat overwhelmed by the even deeper complexities you all have raised.

    I was interested in Chris’s comment, “I have heard prostitutes charge more for unprotected sex.” It brought to my mind the question of how much negotiating power a prostitute might have. What I’ve read (not about Malawi, specifically) is that it is often with the pimps that the men negotiate, and that they pay more to the pimp if the girl/woman doesn’t use a condom. What struck me is the difference in the two scenarios - the power or lack thereof of the sex workers when it comes to negotiating, or to disclosing their status (also the role of pimps in all this, especially with young girls).

    Another article I read about the protest against the HIV/AIDS bill by the sex workers pointed out that some of their messages were aimed at policemen who arrested women for prostitution and then demanded to have sex with them.

    I wonder, does anyone know more about the program offering low-interest loans to sex workers in return for getting out of prostitution? I would imagine the loan would need to be fairly substantial and ongoing support great in order for such a program to be effective.

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  6. THIS IS GREAT, AM RUTH KAMCHACHA, SENIOR TRAINING OFFICER FOR THE SEX WORKERS THAT PROTESTED IN LILONGWE.
    AM VERY HAPPY FOR THE COMMENTS THAT YOU ARE ALL POSTING AND THAT THERE WILL BE MORE PUBLIC DEBATE ON THIS ISSUE.
    to start with, the group that protested on 23 march, 2010, was formed in 2007, they have gone through behaviour change training all this while through sharing their experiencces and negotiating effectively for safer sex with their clients as well as knowing their status in the workshop. through the workshops, all of them knows their status now without making it compulsory.as the sex workers continued to be on this journey of behaviour change, they build up their stories and perform them to people that influences their lives such as the police, policy makers, community and their clients. the purpose for the perfomances is to let the audience feel the realities of sex work and if it was them in gtheir shoes, what could they do to change the situation, so it becomes an interactive perfomance. through these perfomances, awareness behaviour change and action is observed from the audience, others would make a decision right there to go for HIV test, so during these perfomance we set up a VCT tent, the programme is really impacting on a lot of people. most sex workers in our programme have changed their behaviour after a 6 months-a year.

    having given this back ground, during the march, the sex workers were presenting a petition to the ministry of women,gender and child development, mainly it contained two major policies, the criminalisation of HIV exposure and transmission and mandatory HIV testing which they were advocating that they should not be passed. the arguement by the minister was thatit was going to benefit the sex workers beacuse they will know their status and that opf their clients hence making informed choices and that after chasing the street kids they will chase the sex workers out of the streets as well. the bill is targeting the uniformed people as well as sex workers and clients. ( but really, there are things better said than done, sex workers are money oriented, is that true that compulsory testing will help the disclose their status to the client whether is positive or negative?, the same with client? everyone will definitely be negative inoredr to stll have sex and get money, its questionable

    our question is to what extent is all this achievable?, who are the clients and which sex woekers and how will they know one is sex worker. we are afraid that this will drive sex work underground and people wont disclose their status any more and what about human rights?

    failing to recognise existence of sex workers in our country is suffocating effective interventions to reduce HIV infection.

    it is important that we take this as an issue or emergency among the vulnerable group list, if given a chance they can change, we have seen it

    applying criminal law to HIV exposure will create fear and stigma thereby passing on tansmission silently, nearly 30 years of addressing AIDS has reinforced the importance of breaking the silence and taking openly about HIV and encourage people to live positively. by passing this lwa, all this will go into the dust bin.

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  7. I guess what Ruth has managed to put the issue in perspective. We need such conversations for us to deal with the problem.

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  8. Heather raised a really good point about the level of bargaining power that sex workers have. Except in very rare circumstances, the way prostitution is practiced in Malawi is quite different from other parts of the world where the girls/women/men are essentially employees of some pimp. In Malawi, prostitutes usually trade all by themselves, and therefore one would expect them to have very low bargaining power. It's a very risky trade, the clients might as well walk away without paying for the 'service' as agreed.

    About the loan program, I heard that it is at a proposal stage. At the moment there's nobody offering such loans on a large-scale to keep the sex workers out of the streets. But as Heather pointed out, such a program would really need to offer substantially huge packages (money + business training) to effectively deter them from going back to sex work. Whether government has that money remains to be seen, besides there always being competing development needs for the same money.

    I also agree with what Ruth has said, forcing people to get tested for HIV would be very counter-productive. Identifying sex workers would be a huge nightmare, the authorities do not have a register of sex workers because prostitution is considered an illegal activity in Malawi. I am also not convinced about how the government would enforce the disclosure of HIV statuses between two consenting individuals. Is it not up to the persons involved to agree on such issues? And what if the person selling sex lied about their HIV status (they might not want to loose the night's only client: gotta pay the bills, right?). It's great to hear that some of the sex workers are already practicing safe sex, as Ruth pointed out and obviously the training that they received is helpful. In my opinion, that's what should be encouraged.

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  9. Great discussion, everybody! Ruth, I'd love to have you (or your coworkers or some of the women or men you have been training) on the radio show sometime. Please email me if you're interested in setting something up - stein.kathryn@gmail.com - thanks!

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