Prioritise Sex Workers with Dignity!
This note is in response to the recent article titled ‘Sex workers seek separate vaccine drive at APSACS clinic’ that was published in 3 Telugu papers and 2 English papers through United News of India in Vijayawada on the 5th of May 2021. At the onset, the article seems ‘supportive’ of the fact that sex workers must be given priority for vaccinations.
What it fails to do though, is humanise the sex worker. COVID 19, as we all know, does not discriminate. Informal workers of all kinds on the front line need the vaccination sooner than most of us who can afford to work from home. Workers on the frontline, who have been working day in and day out at crematoriums, workers still delivering milk, workers still in sanitation and cleaning jobs, and more. All workers need priority of vaccinations, and in the same breath, so do sex workers. The article frames sex workers’ needs as separate from the needs of other workers, by suggesting that vaccines be given through APSACS centers. All vaccines should be given through health centres, and to insinuate that sex workers want these vaccines provided only through HIV-AIDS centers further pathologises them and do not offer any real support or solution.
The article, by its very phrasing of sex workers’ homes and localities as ‘prostitution localities’ puts into the mind of the reader an image of dirt, ‘overpopulation’ and disgust that has been attached to sex workers for the longest time to stigmatise them; through media narratives, news articles, research work, and policy that has not consulted with workers about their needs and lived realities. The article also refuses to look at the tremendous efforts being made by sex worker-led CBOs and allied organisations on-ground to take precautions, handle lockdowns, and do ad-hoc work to support each other in these trying times.
The tone of these kinds of articles continues to be anti-worker, anti-poor and this is not what we need in a capitalist society that assigns value to people based on the money they have. These assumptions about sex workers’ lives do not fall far from pieces like the Harvard Yale study that called sex workers super spreaders. They offer a false sense of support to people who are sex workers and instead end up further stigmatising and adding to the violence sex workers have to face on an ongoing basis. Start first, with listening to the sex worker. Reducing vulnerabilities, making the workplace a safe place to be able to work in should be the priority. Positive discrimination needs to be enabling and empowering. Sex workers need to have a choice, just like any common citizen on where they get their vaccines rather than through ‘pity’, as is the tone of this article or to ‘wish them away’.
P Devi, from Women’s Initiatives, adds- ‘Historically, in AIDS work, the focus was (unfortunately) not on transforming gendered and social relations and structures that are oppressive. The burden of carrying out government AIDS prevention work, called ‘targeted interventions’ fell on female sex workers. This, to us, as human rights defenders sum up their attitude — to the government, sex workers are targets, but to the movement and allied movements, they are partners in development’.
Some CBOs, like WINS, started HIV Prevention work, and as they grew stronger, they understood that gender, sexuality, and rights were core to empowering the community. While some NGOs and State Actors saw their work, it was often only from the (narrow) prism of reduction of HIV AIDS infections. They failed to encourage, acknowledge and understand the stigmatised communities’ interest and as a result, they did not gain the insights into working with stigmatised communities, further only pathologising them and not supporting them in their work.
Sex workers, like all workers, deserve priority to get their doses of the vaccine, but not because they will ‘probably spread the illness because they live in proximity to each other’, but because they are on the frontline, they are vulnerable and they are citizens of the country.
Spread the word, ask for better writing and accountability when writing about sex workers.
