Making Sex Work Safe in the Face of HIV/AIDS

This programme is not an effort to abolish sex work, but, rather, is an attempt to improve the lives of women who find themselves selling sex to survive. Organisers believe that, in the long run, an unsafe sex industry will have detrimental effects on public health on a broader scale.

The programme uses poetry and drama to introduce discussion around the factors that make sex work unsafe. Sex workers are given opportunities to share their experiences in the sex industry. The drama addresses two main concerns that have been identified by the organisers as contributing to lack of safety in the sex trade: poverty and police harassment.

The programme also explores challenges faced by women working in the sex industry in Nigeria, as well as the legal environment surrounding sex work issues in the country. What the law says about sex work is compared to the fundamental human rights of citizens, stating that sex workers "need a face" in order to attract legal support.

The programme has inaugurated an association of sex workers known as the Nigeria Vulnerable Women Association NiVWA). "The group consists of HIV positive and negative FSWs who have come forward to give sex workers a face, resist stigma and discrimination meted out to them by society and to fight the violence and injustices they suffer at the hands of their clients, the police, and other law enforcement agents."

The mission of NIVWA is to ensure that deprived and marginalised women especially sex workers are given the recognition and support they deserve such as protection of the law, acceptable living/working conditions and access to healthcare and other social services that are available to every other Nigerian citizen. "This will be achieved through research, advocacy, information sharing, and capacity building."

HIV/AIDS, Women, Rights, Children.