Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 04:37 AM - Edit history (1)
As long as humans have survival needs and sex organs, there will be people willing to barter.
Legalization can't exist in a vacuum. Myanmar next door has created an STD/AIDS hell with criminalization- I can't see how that helped anyone either, yet your post places the full blame for the problem on the legal aspect. That's what all those questions are about. From the article:
“It is the basic right of every citizen to have minimum access to all information related to drugs being sold in open market,” she points out. “Responsible NGOs in this field must be more assertive, to ensure information regarding this particular medicine be accessible to all girls consuming this drug. This is a basic human right.”
Tasmima Hossain, former member of Parliament in Bangladesh and longtime feminist, suggests that the core issue is poverty, which informs every aspect of this problem.
“Poverty pushes women to do anything to survive,” Hossain explains to me. “These pills also suppress the appetite, so the sex workers do not feel how hungry they are.” Hossain contends that this issue is also just one aspect of the much larger issue of women and girls’ oppression in Bangladesh.
“Sex workers are called potita in Bengali, which means ‘the fallen group of society,’” Hossain says. “But the men who sleep with these women are referred to as gentlemen, or Babu, a term of respect given to males. Society creates labels for the benefit of men while degrading women.”
Poverty control, social safety nets, health care, decent jobs to exit into, workplace protections for those who stay in, raising the status of women in general and destigmatizing female sexual activity on a cultural level have to go along with legalization for it to be of any use. These are things we should be fighting for anyway, and are supposed to be fighting for anyway. Why fight for human dignity for women in every other labor field, but not these particular women?
I agree that stronger punishments for traffickers would be a good thing, but that's a lot like an outcry for stronger punishments for rapists- it makes a nice rallying cry and is not a bad thing to rally around, but unless it goes hand in hand with an environment where the authorities are willing to make the arrests and follow through with the prosecution, it's pretty well worthless. That environment does not exist in Bangladesh. They aren't even enforcing the laws they have now. (ETA Google tells me the penalties for sex trafficking in Bangladesh are already pretty harsh with minimum sentence being 10 years and the usual sentence being life in prison)
Yes, poverty has a lot of cultural causes. I don't understand this statement.
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