Trafficking and sex work
GAATW has always been an ally of the sex worker rights movement. As feminists and human rights activists, our founding mothers thought it natural to support self-organising among this group of women. In the beginning, some were uncomfortable with the idea that ‘sex work is work’. However, their repeated interactions with individual sex workers and fledgling collectives forced them to question their middle-class mores.
A few months ago, I met a feminist activist in Thailand who now works in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights. She explained that she had been close to GAATW since the very beginning, and that back in the 1980s she had wanted to rescue Thai sex workers in the Netherlands. To her surprise, they had told her they didn’t want to be rescued. They did not mind trading sex for money but wanted to earn more and work in better conditions. If she could help them with that, she was welcome. This and other similar interactions changed her views of sex work and sex workers.
“The personal struggle for me was to overcome the mainstream moral hypocrisy into which I had been socialized.”Lin Lap Chew, GAATW founding mother
When she told me this story, I remembered something that Lin Lap Chew, one of GAATW’s founding mothers, wrote in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered about the evolution of her own views at the time: “I [was] convinced that I was not against the women who worked as prostitutes, but that the patriarchal institution or prostitution should be dismantled”, she wrote. “But soon I was to learn, through direct and regular contact with women in prostitution, that […] the only way to break the stigma and marginalization of prostitutes was to accept the work that they do as exactly that – a form of work.” She ended with the observation that “The personal struggle for me was to overcome the mainstream moral hypocrisy into which I had been socialized.”
