Male and transgender sex workers are now being rounded up and sent off to be “rehabilitated” in Cambodia, and the police are currently conducting extensive rescue/raids on gay bars in Pattaya.

You can see interviews with male and TG sex workers in Cambodia on our video
http://www.sexworkerspresent.blip.tv

Thanks for the confirmation from Long Island, Tracy!

The photo’s in the public domain now, so please, everyone, feel free to disseminate it.

Laura

I know the work Empower has done over the years. It will be interesting to invite Empower’s coordinator to write into this blog to provide the context for the poster.

I can share a bit of my experience with Empower. One of the projects I was involved with called, Kumjing. Paper mache dolls were made by the migrant sex workers at the Thai-Burmese border. One of the dolls was transported from the border to Bangkok, and from Bangkok, by a student volunteer, to Massachusetts, then to Minnesota. Along the way, the doll ’spoke’ of the plights of migrant women from a repressive regime in Burma to the limited opportunities in Thailand as illegal migrant workers and then sex workers.

I adopted the doll which allowed me to give talks about the socio-polical and cultural contexts, esp. on gender inequality, not just poverty, surrounding the lives of these migrant women, instead of how to rescue them.

Perhaps rescuing these women made the raiders look good on their reports to the Thai government and the U.S., but it did nothing to support long-term economic nor educational opportunities to these women.

Empower’s work is different that she helped provide these women access to education and the choices to exit from their sex work voluntarily and when they are better equipped with skills and education. Along the way, the women learned about women’s rights and participated in the mainstream women’s rights movement in Thailand, esp. with the grassroots women’s movement.

I also witnessed Empower’s work to advocate for labor’s rights for sex workers at a meeting at the Thai Parliament with the Senate Committee on Labor and Welfare. I got to know a few Empower’s members from the North and even worked on a plan for a forum on women’s rights in Northern Thailand.

I can’t tell you how impressed I have been with Empower from working with the coordinator, other women from Empower and from observing Empower’s political actions.

The poster tells just one small facet of the great work Empower has been doing over these years.

I urge you to invite Empower’s coordinator to contribute to your blog here.

In Solidarity,

Joy–

Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.

In a cruel irony, HIV+ sex workers on ARV’s are caught more often as they don’t have the energy to run from the police. They then end up in former Khmer Rouge prisons without their ARV’s… and with no food.

One woman we interviewed commented “they promise you a sewing machine- but we didn’t even get food and instead we were scared we would be beaten to death and broke the windows of the locked room and jumped out to escape”

We really need activists in the US to bring this up. To show the real impact of anti-trafficking laws… Before the US forces these laws on more countries and send more right wing Christian nutters with millions of dollars (and Jesus) in hand to convince poor governments to make the selling and buying of sex illegal… so they can profit off the massive interest they charge people from their micro-credit loans for rehabilitation(but that’s another whole story…)

see the videos at http://www.sexworkerspresent.blip.tv