Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes
Our thoughts are always with the masses.
. . .
We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with open mouth.
. . .
Enough of these verses—on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray god the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.
In India, where I was part of a team in mid-1994 to monitor the Bank’s loan for the national AIDS program, I could be an insightful judge of the Bank’s work because of my own prior knowledge.
Disbursement of funds had begun two years earlier, and there was evidence that the Bank’s money and related technical support were being used well to implement the national AIDS program. That was conducted through the National AIDS Control Organization, or NACO, which was led by an experienced senior bureaucrat. His staff was energetic and committed, and quite a few had technical expertise. They worked with almost every state government to raise official concern, build HIV prevention programs, and improve medical care. Actual performance varied from state to state, depending on the overall quality of the state administration. NACO was backing the Bank’s demand that poorly performing states be pulled up. It was a relief to see that in India, by virtue of the professionalism of its senior bureaucrats, there was a largely productive working relationship between Bank staff and the government, rather than the harmfully lopsided relationships I had witnessed in Kenya and Uganda.
But even there, and that, too, with a project that had no complex issues of equity or harm involved, the weakness of the Bank’s work was glaringly evident. Bank staff remained utterly cut off from reality. On one leg of our monitoring visit we were put up in the lap of luxury at the Taj Fort Aguada in charming Goa and on the next leg an equally plush beachfront resort in Kovalam, Kerala. “Why?” I wondered to myself.
On our second day in Goa, with a senior state government official fussing over us, we were ferried two hours south to Baina, which was, at that point, home to one of the major sex-work sites in western India. We alighted from our luxury minibus. From a great distance, we watched sari-clad women standing along the seafront or sitting on the low wall and scores of men propositioning them. We noted the unending expanse of the shanties where the women lived and sold sex. We took in the windswept beauty of the site, with the monsoon waves rising dramatically in the background. We asked the solicitous government official a few questions. Then we drove away.
The whole episode was surreal. I was left with scarcely any understanding of what I had just seen, beyond the rudimentary facts that our government colleague seemed to know himself. (The gist was that the women were mainly from the impoverished regions of neighboring states and came to Baina to sell sex during the lean agricultural months. Their clients were both locals and tourists; the day of our visit, several busloads of schoolteachers had been their main customers.) Even a foreign tourist visiting the Taj Mahal would have learned more than what we did on that Baina visit. I would have plumbed far deeper by working as a journalist in a single day, pen and notepad in hand and feet on the ground, than on those ten days of jet-setting and official visits.
Nonetheless, for all the Lords of Poverty buffoonery on display, the Bank was attempting at that point to refashion itself into a poverty-focused institution. It was faced with mounting criticism that the harshly inequitable policies that it and the International Monetary Fund had enforced through the 1980s debt crisis had led to the impoverishment and destabilization of entire nations in Africa and Latin America, a pattern now being repeated in Russia and the former Soviet Union. The campaigners’ slogan, “Fifty Years Is Enough”—the Bank and the IMF had been established in 1944 as the linchpins of a US-designed postwar global economic order—had sent a chill down the spines of the top officials of those institutions.
Advocates for the Third World noted that the men governing those twin institutions were the very ones—rich white men—who had been exploitative colonial lords until forcibly ousted just a few decades back and were now plundering poorer countries using discreet neocolonialist methods rather than bloody conquest. The Bank president is always a US political appointee, more often than not a former bank CEO or a secretary of defense, and the IMF managing director a Western European.
Whether the changes under way would lead to a fundamental break with the past in policies and impact or would amount to window dressing was too early to tell. (I had strong doubts. These twin institutions seemed incapable of moving even to recommend the democratic socialism of the Nordic nations over the winner-takes-all-and-losers-be-damned capitalism of the United States.)
The upshot of that repositioning was that the Bank’s leaders realized they now needed to know the impoverished, the disenfranchised, and the excluded—to understand them, speak their language, and woo them. That process had begun by the time I joined the Bank, and the Bank’s responsiveness to ABVA’s demands that it should not lend to India for AIDS prevention until the government agreed to end its draconian policies was an early sign of its new responsiveness that was now gathering momentum.
The Bank began to hire staff from nongovernmental and activist organizations so as to improve communication at the grassroots level. It began to invest in operational research that solicited the views of the poor. Infrastructural projects began to address how to resettle those who were displaced. The Bank also began to require all its staffers to spend a week or so every second year in impoverished urban or rural settings, de facto admitting that its technocrats knew scarcely anything about the realities they were supposed to be improving. (Tellingly, the Bank’s intranet was soon full of unintentionally hilarious commentary by staff members who—seemingly for the first time—realized that people in shantytowns and impoverished villages lived in hovels, did not have toilets or running water, and often went hungry.) It moved large numbers of staff from Washington, DC, to country offices, to stay closer to their areas of responsibility and keep their ears to the ground.
The Bank also began to take an unexpected interest in the health of gay men and sex workers. It was an outgrowth of the Bank’s work on AIDS: the economic devastation caused by the pandemic had led the Bank to rapidly become the largest funder of national AIDS prevention programs in developing countries.
Management already had some firsthand understanding of the subject of gay men, from the considerable number of staffers who were open about their orientation. Within days of joining the Bank, I had found, to my astonishment, advertisements on hallway notice boards and the intranet announcing meetings of a gay group for Bank and IMF staff—the World Bank/IMF Gay Lesbian and Other Bisexual Employees Association. The first meeting I could attend was, I found, held openly on the premises, its atmosphere cheery and unafraid. The group had several dozen members, largely American and European men, but there was a sprinkling of people like me from developing countries. It was reassuring to see several senior staff members at the meeting.
In my two years at the Bank, I found that the management was fairly responsive to our demands that we, and our partners, be acknowledged and treated on a par with heterosexual staff and their families. Haltingly, the Bank began to provide basic benefits and legal protection, such as medical insurance for same-sex partners and prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Some managers did all they could to secure visas for partners of staff wherever they were posted.
Just those small steps put the Bank far ahead of the UN system, where gay and lesbian staff continued to work in fear and secrecy. Indeed, at that point, the Bank was also ahead of the US government. This was the era of the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act, which denied recognition to same-sex partners for all federal benefits and rights. M
any factors contributed to that—including the value placed by top management on job performance, the Bank’s operational autonomy from member countries, and the singular outspokenness of the prominent Bank economist Hans Binswanger about being both gay and HIV-positive.
However, none of that convivial familiarity applied to the other set of sexual outlaws: sex workers. To all intents and purposes, they were still unidimensional, faceless ciphers that were of interest only in terms of slowing the pandemic.
But then, in August 1994, at the 10th International Conference on AIDS in Yokohama—where I was part of a small team of Bank staffers—I felt something change tentatively.
At one of the plenary sessions, I heard a former sex worker and activist for sex workers’ rights, Ms. K, speak about the epidemic’s impact on sex workers. She spoke with outrage about how AIDS had been decimating sex workers since the pandemic’s earliest days, even as those with the power to help them did not act because of overpowering bigotry. Everyone in that massive hall kept exceptionally quiet through the speech, as if ashamed by the truth of her words.
In that speech, I heard Ms. K call for reforming the laws that criminalized sex work in country after country. Decriminalize sex work! It immediately made sense to me—just as decriminalizing homosexuality was the first step that gay men and women needed to emancipate ourselves, so, too, women, trans women, and men who sold sex needed to be freed from the fear of criminal prosecution in order to begin tackling the myriad hardships they faced, of which HIV was the latest. Coming from Ms. K—someone with as personal an experience of sex work as I had of being gay—the call had an unquestionable authenticity.
I sought out Ms. K, a self-assured woman with the charismatic style of a nightclub singer, to ask if she would contribute an article to the health policy newsletter that I edited at the Bank. Would she write about what sex workers thought the World Bank should do to turn around the pandemic’s onslaught on sex workers and their clients? She agreed on the condition that she ask a colleague to author the article, given the short deadline.
A week later, the article arrived by email. It turned out to be written by Priscilla Alexander, the activist and researcher on sex work whom Jonathan Mann had recruited to WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS in 1989. Alexander had left WHO in 1993 to coordinate the efforts of the National Task Force on Prostitution, a coalition of US and Canadian organizations for sex workers’ rights.
Alexander’s article began by discussing the terrible stigma and persecution that have been visited on women sex workers for eons in most societies. “Prostitution has often been called the oldest profession,” Alexander wrote. “However, it has rarely, if ever, been respected as a profession.” Following centuries of overwhelming discrimination, the emergence of AIDS and “epidemiologic characterizations of female prostitutes as vectors who will speed up transmission of HIV to men, to men’s wives, and to babies” had worsened the vilification of sex workers. It had also legitimized a spate of brutal, unjust health regulations.
“Papers in prestigious medical journals have described female prostitutes as ‘reservoirs of infection,’ ‘pools of contagion,’ ‘vectors,’ and—my favorite—‘core groups of high-frequency transmitters,’ ” Alexander wrote acerbically. (For all her frankness, Alexander was being diplomatic—she could have noted that the Bank was also a leading offender in using exactly these alarmist, blame-the-victim terms in its documents on HIV and sex workers.)
Sex work was illegal in all but twenty-odd countries, with countries varying only on the extent of criminalization and the specific aspects of sex work that were prohibited. Though many countries specifically criminalized the selling of sex, others, such as the United States, also criminalized buying it. Great Britain and many of its former colonies, including India, had adopted the contradictory approach of the 1949 United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which targeted sex workers despite its ostensible goal of protecting the women as victims of criminal exploitation; these countries made it impossible for sex workers to engage in their profession without breaking the law, as they criminalized every aspect of selling sex—such as soliciting, advertising, using their homes to sell sex, being found in a brothel, or selling sex near any “public place”—rather than the sale of sex itself.
Revealing the depth of animus against sex workers, most countries used every possible law to prosecute them, typically combining specific antiprostitution laws with the discriminatory use of broad laws targeting vagrancy, public nuisance, adultery, or sodomy (in the case of male or transgender sex workers). The punishments were stunningly harsh, including monetary fines, jail terms, indefinite incarceration in reformatories, eviction from their homes, forced removal of their children, and being listed in public records as a “common prostitute” or “sexual offender”; in a handful of countries, women convicted of prostitution were put to death. The pattern that sex workers bore the brunt of the punishment was true both in India—where virtually every arrest was of sex workers, even though the law did not directly criminalize them—as well as in the United States, where three-fourths of the annual 125,000 arrests were of women and transgender sex workers (disproportionately black) and just 10 percent of arrests were of clients or pimps.
“At the present time, as we near the end of the 20th century, there are essentially three dominant paradigms for how society should approach the subject of prostitution,” Alexander wrote. “The oldest one is ‘control the prostitute,’ which has, as its corollaries, ‘protect the client,’ ‘protect the neighborhood’ or ‘protect society’ from the prostitute. The second is ‘rescue the prostitute,’ from herself, from the clients, from the pimps.” Those two traditional paradigms were the ones that had “left sex workers so vulnerable to violence and disease.”
In contrast, she said, “A new voice has begun to make itself heard, the voice of sex workers powerfully enunciating a new paradigm. This paradigm is ‘control working conditions,’ in the context of sex work as a legitimate occupation.” She ended with a half-dozen bullet points, stripped of any flourishes, laying out what sex workers’ organizations wanted the World Bank and governments to act on. They included decriminalization of adult, consensual sex work, alongside a crackdown on forced prostitution and child prostitution, avoiding prostitution-specific legislation in favor of improved and well-enforced general laws against rape, sexual assault, kidnapping, and child abuse. (Decriminalization differs from legalized regimes, such as that in Nevada, since it focuses on empowering sex workers themselves, rather than the state, to have greater control over their work.) She laid out ways to ensure better work conditions for sex workers through paid sick leave, medical and disability insurance, retirement pensions, and broad health care. She emphasized that sex workers needed the right to engage in collective bargaining and other kinds of advocacy, just like workers in other industries.
From everything I had seen, read, and understood of sex work so far, those demands seemed legitimate and reasonable. I thought that my Bank colleagues’ notions about sex work and HIV would be usefully challenged by Alexander’s article. But Alexander now wrote, her frustration evident, “With any other occupation, such basic demands would not be controversial, but with sex work, few policy makers are even willing to participate in an open discussion.” Those closing words of hers were prophetic.
My immediate boss read the draft and curtly told me that he would not allow it to be published in the Bank’s health policy newsletter. I was appalled: he had been wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the idea when I had checked with him before asking Ms. K to contribute to the newsletter. But he now maintained that it was inappropriate for sex workers to tell the Bank and its partner governments what they wanted, and that, too, in such forceful terms.
I argued that we had made a commitment to both Ms. K and Alexander, that, too, on a sensitive matter, and we could not renege on it. He retorted that if I didn’t like his decisio
n, I was free to resign. From his expression, it was clear that he hoped I would.
It took several weeks and several meetings with the director of the division and other senior staff to present my case, but eventually the director told me that he had decided that Alexander’s article should be published in its entirety. I was overjoyed; I knew that almost no other international organization would have run such an article. Whatever my criticisms of the Bank’s wasteful functioning and damaging impact on the world, there was no doubt that there was greater freedom for debate there than at other comparable institutions.
Eventually, Alexander’s article appeared as the lead front-page item in the fall 1994 issue of the Bank’s health policy newsletter, distributed among Bank staff as well as to the public. I noted candidly in the introduction that the Bank had solicited the article “because of the continuing disregard by decision-makers of the views of sex workers’ rights organizations.” As I expected, the article attracted more attention than any other in the newsletter’s history. One reason was that it marked the first time a community so severely affected by AIDS had the chance to convey to Bank staff, indelibly in print, their view of what the Bank and its partner governments needed to do to make real headway against the epidemic. Several years later, when the Bank first fully enunciated its thinking on HIV prevention among sex workers and their clients, I was gratified to see that it was informed by Alexander’s perspective—particularly her vital insight that criminalization harmed the well-being of sex workers as well as the goal of tackling the spread of HIV.
But though I felt glad that I had played a role in opening a dialogue, I was never confident that it would deepen into genuine understanding. We gay people were no longer outcasts at the Bank; we were welcomed on staff and even in senior positions, and the Bank now understood that our fundamental human rights needed to be assured. But sex workers remained outcasts, even more of an alien species than the merely impoverished, whose needs the Bank struggled to respond to anyhow. I wondered whether that great distance could ever be bridged.
An Indefinite Sentence Page 19
