admin
Daisy Jeremani Gender Editor
Zimbabwe should target HIV and Aids hotspots and empower sex workers if the battle to reduce the country’s prevalence rate of the deadly virus is to be won.
Presenting a report in Parliament on a visit by a Zimbabwean delegation of HIV/Aids Learning and Exposure Study to Karnataka, India, Ruth Labode, said one of the objectives of the visit was to understand how Karnataka Health Promotion Trust was building capacity for sustainability programming for Sex Workers by Sex Workers, including community mobilisation as well as formation and maintenance of support groups.
After the visit, the team resolved that they would set up a technical working group that would meet every month with UNFPA to look at where they can find money to start working with sex workers.
“We’ve since identified that the ILO has actually started an income generating project for sex workers in Beitbridge and that programme is going on very well,” she said.
Labode said there was also need to establish cooperatives like in India where sex workers would contribute money and create a small SME bank where they borrow money and start tuck shops among other smaller businesses.
She said her delegation also resolved to invite interested parties in issues to do with HIV and Aids and sex workers. They had also decided to lobby for the de-criminalisation of loitering which was, however, recently addressed when a court order barred police from arresting women suspected to be touting for sex.
In March, the Constitutional Court made a landmark ruling in a case that involved nine women who were being accused of loitering to sell sex in central Harare.
Their defence lawyer argued that their arrest was unconstitutional if no male could testify that he had been approached for sex and also just because they were on the streets after dark didn’t mean they were soliciting for the purposes of prostitution.
In what’s being seen as a victory for women’s rights, the Constitutional Court ruled that the nine women could no longer be prosecuted.
Defence lawyers had argued that section 81 of the Criminal Law (Codification Reform) Act, which made it an offence for women to loiter in the streets soliciting for sex, was discriminatory along gender lines as only women were arrested for the offence.
Online Reporter