GENEVA — Jordanian activist Reem Alsalem, a special rapporteur on violence against women and girls at the United Nations Human Rights Council who recently issued a controversial report recommending that governments abolish all forms of sex work, including porn, will speak at anti-porn lobby NCOSE’s 2024 summit in August.
As XBIZ reported, sex worker groups and activists traveled to Geneva last month to denounce Alsalem’s stigmatizing report and her persistent calls for criminalization.
Alsalem’s most recent report makes broad claims about sex work and adult content, conflates trafficking and prostitution with pornography, and dismisses the phrase “sex work” — coined in 1979 by pioneering activist Carol Leigh, and embraced around the world — as a euphemism that “sanitizes the harmful reality of prostitution.”
Alsalem insists all governments must recognize sex work as “a system of violence, exploitation and abuse,” ideas consistent with the pro-criminalization positions of NCOSE, formerly Morality in Media, the United States' most powerful and influential religiously inspired pro-censorship organization.
“Prostitution reduces women and girls to mere commodities and perpetuates a system of discrimination and violence that hinders their ability to achieve true equality,” Alsalem claims in the report, ignoring the existence of sex workers who are not “women and girls” as well as the free will and agency of adults who consent to engage in sex work by choice.
Consistent with NCOSE’s position, Alsalem also views all adult content as prostitution that should be eradicated to save “women and girls.”
“The normalization of prostitution, including pornography, creates harmful sexual expectations for men and boys and undermines the safe and equal participation of women and girls in society,” Alsalem has stated. “Many girls feel distressed by the pornification and sexualization of women and girls, particularly in pornography.”
Last month, sex workers from the Netherlands told the U.N.'s Human Rights Council that “viewing sex workers as more than mere victims is essential,” and demanded more details on how sex workers were engaged during the creation of Alsalem's report.
Kholi Buthelezi of the Sisonke National Sex Workers Right Movement commented on a panel, “Saying we are ‘commodities of men’ is hurtful. It confuses trafficking with sex work and uses the code of feminist women and girls. We need the feminist movement to come on board. Our lives continue to be in danger.”