Cape Town, 20 March 2007 — The time for silly arguments about the decriminalization of prostitution is long past, the Treatment Action Campaign said on Monday, as it threw its weight behind a proposal to legitimize sex workers as a way to fight HIV and Aids. More

"The time for silly moralising about whether sex work is right or not is long past," said TAC spokesman Nathan Geffen.

He was responding to a plan emanating from last week’s HIV and Aids conference in Gauteng that proposed decriminalising prostitution as a means to fight the disease.

"Nobody knows how many sex workers have the disease because much of their trade is underground."

Removing the legal constraints would allow the industry to become safer through proper regulation.

"Decriminalising them will allow sex workers to protect themselves and their clients" he said.

Geffen said a glaring gap in current efforts to fight the disease was that there was currently no HIV and Aids awareness programmes directed at sex workers.

He said this was partially because of the underground nature of their activities.

He said HIV and Aids education programmes would be possible once sex work was seen as a legitimate trade.

The proposal forms part of a new plan launched last week to fight the HIV and Aids pandemic.

It revealed that a number of "high risk groups" like sex workers continue to face legal barriers to accessing HIV prevention and treatments services because of the criminalisation of their activity.

Dr Nomondo Xundu, head of the Department of Health’s TB and HIV and Aids programme and adviser to the South African National Aids Council, said yesterday, however, that the two-day consultative forum in Boksburg did not call for the decriminalisation of sex workers per se but only identified them as an "obstacle" to fighting the disease.

"We feel the sex industry needs to be regulated," she said but how that is done was left to legislators.

The Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Task Force’s acting director Helene Combrink strongly supported the proposal.

She argued that the stigma attached to sex work often prevented prostitutes from seeking help for diseases which they encountered.

Making it legal, she said, would enable to them to seek help without the fear of being arrested.

Combrink also attacked the notion that decriminalising it would lead to boom in the sex trade.

"The only country in the world to totally decriminalise prostitution is New Zealand and you can’t call them the centre of the sex trade," she said.

Combrink said Sweat had been working with a number of other groups calling for the decriminalisation of sex work and for improved access to HIV and Aids medication.

Source: Independent Online