Legalise prostitution � councillors

Onalenna Kelebeile | Wednesday February 26, 2014 15:41

 

Commenting last Thursday on the address to full council by Silence Kills, a support group that revealed appalling commercial sex work in Selebi-Phikwe in which even schoolgirls as young as 13 are involved, Councillor Koos Mashaba said in addition to legalising commercial sex work, government should provide places of operations (brothels) for the trade and issue licences for practitioners because suppressing it has proved difficult to win.

 Afterall, Mashaba noted, some countries had legalised commercial sex work. Prohibiting it was impossible because prominent people, among them professionals and influential members of the community who had cash power, were driving it. Only those who traded on highways were easy targets for the hopeless effort to fight prostitution, but the trade was bigger than this small and vulnerable group. “Accord commercial sex workers the dignity they deserve,” he said.

Councillor Mmapula Mmidi-Phuduhudu said legalising the trade would allow for regulation. “It is difficult to regulate something that is not recognised by the law,” she said. “So let us think along those lines.”

Councillor Kgakgamatso Ramatopi agreed, adding that abolishing polygamous marriages had bred concubines. However, keeping concubines was expensive to maintain, and prostitution has taken its place. “We cannot resist change,” Ramatopi said. “Let us embrace it.” Councillor Leungo Mathaio noted that commercial sex workers existed because they had customers. She asked what Silence Kills was doing to ensure that hotels were not havens of commercial sex work as in other countries. More specifically, she wanted to know how much the support group was doing to address the situation in Serule where sex workers from this mining town went to meet truck drivers.

From the opposite end, Councillor Mbaiwa said young girls were going into prostitution because their parents had failed them. “If we condone prostitution and give it nice words like commercial sex work, we are killing the nation,” Mbaiwa said. “We should not give up the fight and degrade our moral values for the sake of receiving financial aid from other countries.” he added.

The coordinator of Silence Kills, Dalton Bontsi, had stated that some of the support group’s structural HIV prevention interventions included life skills training to empower sex workers to start income generating projects as alternatives to sex work. These interventions were availed through the Women’s Emancipation Project that places teenage prostitutes in psychosocial camps for rehabilitation. “Nine of the 13 have proceeded to high school level while we lost follow-up on the rest,” Bontsi said.

 Four ex-sex workers now run their own businesses, two with funding from the Department of Youth and Culture. Four other ex-sex workers had furthered their studies through BOCODOL and Francistown Technical College, while two had secured formal employment with government, Bontsi disclosed.

He said 868 Most At Risk Populations (MARPS) were tested for HIV/AIDS between 2011 and 2013, including 34 sex workers.

He added that the challenge was that while selling sex remained illegal in Botswana, the law ignored buyers of sex.