Read the Center for Social Justice's Comments on The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Bill of 2022 [PDF]. Below is an extract from the submission:
Conclusions and recommendations
7.1 As CSJ, we support the removal of criminal and other laws targeting sex workers, buyers, third parties, and sex work-related activities as an important first step in the decriminalisation of sex work.
7.2 We believe this is important, particularly as the context of criminalisation is deeply entrenched in a history of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Conservative moralities, restrictive (gender) norms and institutionalised forms of discrimination have ensured a continuum of sanctioned stigmatisation of sex workers. They have been excluded from the “circle of moral consideration”, which prevents us from harming those we consider as fully human, yet in harming them, we are all dehumanised, as ubuntu teaches us.
7.3 Those on the supply side of selling or rendering sex services are a highly marginalised group, suffering human rights abuses with high incidences of sexual and other violence, unemployment, stigmatisation, discrimination and lack of access to legal and health services. Police violence, harassment and abuse are a constant threat in their lives, with many who supply sex services reporting intensified police abuse and discrimination during the lockdown period due to COVID-19.37 This complex intersection of interlocking constraints underpins sex work, structures its demand and shapes the choices that are available to sex workers. As Ratele argues, historically, the Immorality Acts not only contributed to how masculinities and femininities were constituted and relations between males and females viewed, but it also simultaneously formed part of the materials and sources that were given to constitute personhood in our country. Relations (including social, psychological, sexual, and racial ones), identities and differences, and sexual morality, all informed the complex justifications that led to the apartheid government’s regulation and control of all aspects of South Africans’ lives. But these acts were also located within a longer history, as a continuation of and entrenchment of prejudice and discrimination that already developed during colonialism and even earlier.39 Therefore, we urge you to consider that far from being something obvious and an expression of some kind of natural law, the regulation and criminalisation of sex work have always been unstable and contested and have always served larger agendas of colonial and apartheid governments. Let us move away from a framework that seeks to control, punish and police to a broader political project aimed at institutionalising democratic justice across multiple axes of social differentiation.