Bangladesh worker angry at US AIDS help restrictions
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A U.S. “loyalty oath” that aims to curb prostitution and prevent sex trafficking has stymied one group’s efforts to educate sex workers in Bangladesh and left thousands of women without support, a local activist said on Thursday.
Her eyes filling with tears, Hazera Bagum said her group, Durjoy Nari Shangha, had closed drop-in centers for sex workers in the Bangladesh capital in order to win U.S. funding.
“This feeling is like a broken heart, it’s like a broken family,” she said through a translator at a news conference during the 16th International Conference on AIDS in Toronto.
“All of them are street workers. The only house they have is when they go to a client for a few hours. Closing a drop-in center is like losing their homes, like losing their meeting point, losing their school, losing everything.”
The sex workers collective—its name translates roughly as “organization of women who are hard to repress”—had 20 drop-in centers before December, offering sex and literacy education as well as moral support, toilets and a place to wash and rest for up to 5,000 women.
It closed them after signing what aid groups call the “prostitution loyalty oath” that requires groups receiving USAID funding to have a policy opposing prostitution and sex trafficking. The group now has just four centers, geared to children and children’s’ rights.
Bagum said that before the centers closed, the group sold 73,000 condoms a month. That has fallen to 30,000, even though health experts agree that condoms are the best way of stopping the spread of AIDS.
A spokeswoman for U.S. President George W. Bush’s emergency plan for AIDS relief said the U.S. plan targeted at-risk populations with “specific outreach services, comprehensive prevention messages and condom information and provision” and its ambassadors had visited many projects for high-risk groups.
“Our office has not received information that drop-in centers have closed, or that there has been any interruption in services that target sex workers as a result of our anti-prostitution policy,” she said.
“Critics who continue to spread misinformation about (the plan’s) policies are causing fear and confusion.”
Some organizations say they have chosen not to accept USAID funding rather than compromise their positions, even though the locally available funding may be far smaller than the amount available through the United States.
“We are very proud of our decision,” said Gabriela Leite, who works with eight local sex worker organizations in Brazil.
“It’s our conviction that the sovereignty of our country should be respected.”
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