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Stripping: Empowerment or Objectification? An Examination of the Literature on Stripping as an
Occupation & Life-style Choice By Raina Lenney

Shut Up, I can't Hear You by Jo Weldon

Ouch! Western feminists' 'wounded attachment' to the 'third world prostitute'

Prostitution and Feminism by Silja J. A. Talvi

Sex Workers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes? — By Laura M^a Agustín. Development, Society for International Development, Vol. 44, No. 3, September 2001.
"…uncovers some of the myths around sex workers and the men engaging their services within the context of building a movement to end 'violence against women'. She argues that totalizing all experiences of prostitution with a view to punishment and criminalization does not work and advocates a much more visionary and pluralistic approach." Courtesy Walnet

At Home in the Street: Questioning the Desire to Help and Save
In The Regulation of Intimacy and Identity, E. Bernstein and L. Shaffner, eds., 67-81. New York: Routledge Perspectives on Gender, 2004.
LAURA Mª AGUSTÍN
Western discourses of ‘prostitution’ have changed little since the late eighteenth century, when populations outside nuclear-family units began to be feared by ‘society.’ Medical, sociological, criminological and psychological discourses have been fixated on those selling sex rather than on those buying it, on women rather than men, on individuals rather than families or communities and on particular body parts rather than whole persons. The wide variety of commercial-sexual relations are essentialized as ‘prostitution’: an isolated, two-party, sex-for-money transaction, which deviates from a supposed norm, sex with a loved partner, or between spouses in a nuclear family. Yet vast numbers of people every day, all over the world, want to spend time, sometimes having sex, outside the family and away from spouses. Not only state agencies of social control but non-governmental agencies (NGOs), feminists and others interested in bettering society continue to ignore the limitations of ‘home’ and ‘family.’

This is the report from a ground-breaking workshop on sexual rights held in Sweden. Some of the key issues discussed were:

• who defines a right and how are they defined?
• going beyond identity politics
• sexuality and morality
• women, men and transgendered people who sell sex for money.

Some of the key points were:

• there is a need to strike a balance between the autonomy and universality of rights and the contexts around the realisation of these rights
• we should begin to name sexual rights without shame, as what is unnamed is more likely to be unsupported, ignored or misunderstood
• it is important to support those with same-sex sexualities, or transgender and intersex genders in non-western settings, without imposing particular models of what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender
• sexuality is nothing new to development, but most interventions have focused on the negative issues such as population control, disease and violence
• the focus has been on encouraging people to say no to risky sex, rather than empowering them to say yes to, or ask for, safer and more satisfying sex
• there has been an assumption that poor people would not want to talk about sexuality
• as initiatives that promote sexuality education which embraces pleasure, openness and inclusion become more common, so do the efforts to stop these programmes
• hearing from ‘the ground’ rather than from researchers alone gives a new conceptual understanding and also ideas and knowledge on how to take these issues forward.

Recommendations from the workshop were:

• to mobilise political support, as well as financial resources, for programmes to be implemented and for activists to continue their struggle and be able to connect across borders
• to include and work with sex workers, listening to them and understanding their priorities, in the efforts that are made to combat prostitution and trafficking in persons for purposes of sexual exploitation
• to engage in and develop sexuality education which builds upon people’s curiosity about sex and encourages positive and inclusive approaches, as this is likely to make these initiatives more effective
• to engage in research grounded in action and informed by the diversity of people’s experiences, especially those who have been forced into silence.

In UN Conventions, prostitution is often defined as a human rights violation on a level with slavery. A recent research report issued by Anti-Slavery International argues against such identification and calls for a redefinition of prostitution as sex work. Studies revealed that prostitutes, or sex workers, face working conditions that are similar in nature to those experienced by others working in low status jobs in the informal sector. The researcher examines existing human rights and labour standards and suggests that these should be extended to cover sex work in order to provide protection from abuse in many forms.