GENEVA, Switzerland — Jordanian activist Reem Alsalem — a Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls at the United Nations Human Rights Council who recently issued a controversial report recommending that governments abolish all forms of sex work, including porn — will be one of the speakers at anti-porn lobby NCOSE’s 2024 summit in August.
As XBIZ reported, sex worker organizations, activists and individual sex workers traveled to Geneva, Switzerland last month to denounce Alsalem’s stigmatizing report and her persistent calls for full criminalization.
Alsalem’s most recent report made broad claims about sex work and adult content, and also endorsed different forms of criminalization. It report conflates trafficking with prostitution and pornography, prostitution with pornography itself, and even dismisses the phrase “sex work” itself — coined in 1979 by pioneering activist Carol Leigh, and embraced around the world — as “a euphemism.”
Alsalem’s ideas are consistent with the pro-criminalization positions of NCOSE, formerly Morality in Media, the U.S.’ most powerful and influential religiously inspired pro-censorship organization.
Alsalem, who consistently refers to sex work with the stigmatizing criminology term “prostitution,” insists all governments must join in “urgently recognizing it as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse.”
“Prostitution reduces women and girls to mere commodities and perpetuates a system of discrimination and violence that hinders their ability to achieve true equality,” Alsalem claims, dismissing the free will and ability to consent of every adult sex worker who does it by choice, as well as the existence of sex workers who are not “women and girls.”
Other notions espoused by Alsalem is blaming the existence of all sex work, regardless of context for “sexualizing and racializing poverty, and targeting women from marginalized backgrounds.”
Alsalem added, “Given the immense harm experienced by women and girls in prostitution, it is important to use terminology that aligns with international human rights law and standards. Terms like ‘sex work’ sanitize the harmful reality of prostitution.”
According to Alsalem’s notions, consistent with NCOSE’s, all adult content is part of “prostitution,” and thus should be eradicated to save “women and girls.”
“The normalization of prostitution, including pornography, creates harmful sexual expectations for men and boys and undermines the safe and equal participation of women and girls in society,” Alsalem said. “Many girls feel distressed by the pornification and sexualization of women and girls, particularly in pornography.”
Last month, sex workers from from the Netherlands told the U.N.’s Human Right Council that “viewing sex workers as more than mere victims is essential,” and demanded more details on how sex workers were engaged during the creation of the Alsalem’s report.
Kholi Buthelezi of the Sisonke National Sex Workers Right Movement commented on a panel, “Saying we are ‘commodities of men’ is hurtful. It confuses trafficking with sex work and uses the code of feminist women and girls. We need the feminist movement to come on board. Our lives continue to be in danger.”
