NGOs Defend Prostitution at UN Human Rights Council
How unfortunate that the UN Human Rights Council is used by some groups as a platform to promote women’s abuse as a form of empowerment.
Speaking at an annual UN Human Rights Council meeting on women, Ms. Precious Msindo identified herself as a sex worker, a mother of two, and then proceeded to advocate for a world where the “rights [of] sex workers are respected”, their dignity “upheld,” and their “lives are valued.”
Other NGO leaders made similar remarks, flagging that a recent UN report is undermining the rights of “sex workers” by referring to prostitution as a form of exploitation.
But can “sex work” and “women’s rights” ever go hand in hand? Simply pretending prostitution is empowering and safe does not make it so. A closer look into the nature of prostitution reveals its intrinsic link with physical and mental abuse, irrespective of whether society stigmatizes it or not.
In her 2024 report on prostitution, UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem referred to it as a “system of violence, which reduces women and girls to commodities” and warned against calling it “sex work,” saying that such terminology misleadingly “depicts prostitution as an activity as worthy and dignified as any other work. It fails to take into account the serious human rights violations that characterize the prostitution system and ‘gaslights’ victims and their experiences.”
Prostitution is an inherently exploitative system that sells a woman’s body for a profit. But the body is an innate part of one’s personhood. Separating it from the “person” had far-reaching implications and encourages women to downplay the abuse thinking, “they are not using ‘me’, they are only using ‘my body’”
Derecriminalizing prostitution makes the case that men have a “right” to purchase sex. It’s disappointing that the UN sets such a low bar for women. Efforts should be made that provide women with an exit strategy to leave prostitution not towards legitimizing “paid rape” that keeps women in bondage.
Instead of promoting messaging that diminishes or even outrightly erases the severe negative impact of prostitution on women, we should have the backbone and moral sincerity to call it for what it is and work to reduce the demand for such exploitation.
Alsalem’s research reveals that “the normalization of the purchase of sexual acts gives the sexual act a transactional value and places sexuality in the realm of the market,” “ Prostitution therefore bears a deeply archaic and sexist vision of the role of women and of the relations between women and men, as women are reduced to receptacles for men’s sexual “needs.”
