Randall Tobias: Of Pledges and Prostitutes

By, Melissa Gira, from remarks introducing Taking the Pledge at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, May 3rd, 2007

As a sex worker rights activist, based primarily in the US, one of my biggest frustrations is that the rhetoric of anti-prostitution activists mobilizing against trafficking attempts to draw a connection between the sex industry in the US and what they call "sex trafficking" or "commercial sexual exploitation" globally.

What's very challenging as a US-based advocate is to get a solid, evidence-based view of how the sex industry operates in the places that anti-prostitution activists focus on: the global south, the former Soviet republics, and especially, Southeast Asia.

In March of 2006, I had the honor of representing the Desiree Alliance's US network at the Sexual Health and Rights Project's annual meeting, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The meeting brought together members of the international sex workers' rights movements to strategize a global agenda for sex worker's human rights. You will see, in Taking the Pledge, members of many these groups and workers and allies who were present.

We were privileged to meet members of Cambodia's sex worker rights organizations, the Women's Network for Unity and Womyn's Agenda for Change, two groups that organize sex workers & advocate for their health & safety, civil and labor rights. These are two of many sex worker organizations who have had their HIV prevention and human rights work significantly curbed or halted by the anti-prostitution policies set by the US government as part of their own strategies - non-strategies, really - to combat HIV and human trafficking - as if a better solution to preventing AIDS and forced labor is to jail someone, not to educate them about their health and rights.

Now here is a place where the sex industry in the US, the sex industry in the developing world, and the anti-prostitution movement do connect, and it's a story that you already know, if you've been following the news this
week: at least, a small part of this story is hitting the press.

Deborah Jean Palfrey is the former proprietor of an adult fantasy and escort service, who, in October of last year, woke up to find her bank accounts frozen. She quickly learned that she was under Federal investigation alleging that her money had been made illegally through running a prostitution business. Now on the eve of her trial, as part of making a case in her defense, she is releasing forty sevens pounds of cell phone records from her business to the media, and this week, making them available one page at a time on her website. Now the media is consumed with extrapolating names from these telephone numbers. So far, only one man named as a customer has confirmed that he did, in fact, use Ms. Palfrey's escort service, and this is a name that no one in this room should forget: Randall Tobias.

Randall Tobias was the Bush appointed administrator of the United States Agency of International Development, or USAID. He has been called the Bush administration's "AIDS Czar," and, until his unexpected resignation last Friday, was responsible for holding NGO's and CBO's to what we in the sex worker rights movement call "the pledge," a signed loyalty oath stating that their organization opposes prostitution. As of 2003, under Tobias, organizations around the globe - with histories stretching to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, who, through peer education, direct services, community education and organizing have a proven record of increasing the health and welfare of sex workers - were now condemned for doing anything that the US believes to be "promoting" prostitution.

Drop-in centers in Bangladesh serving some of the country's the most vulnerable and impoverished women and children were shutdown because they accepted sex workers into their programs. English language education programs in Thailand were defunded because they taught sex workers. Condoms for sex workers in East Africa became so hard to come by that sex workers would wash and reuse them out of desperation. In Brazil, in resistance, $40 million of USAID funds were returned to the US on the grounds that excluding sex workers from their work was a public health and human rights failure too great to risk any money over.

If the "pledge" were, as the Bush administration and its supporters in the anti-prostitution movement contend, an effective strategy to end violence and human rights violations against vulnerable workers, then why are its only measurable effects the closing of social service programs that better the health and welfare of sex workers, and the increased kidnapping and incarceration of sex workers "for their own good"?

When you watch this video, I want you to reflect on the fact that the government agency, the very man himself responsible for enforcing this "pledge" is himself a client of sex workers. Tobias does not deny that he's used Ms. Palfrey's services - in fact, he's bragged to ABC news how easy it was to invite "gals over to the condo for massages." We, in this room. well, those of us who can or do who pay taxes. pay his salary, with which he hires sex workers for his own pleasure and robs other sex workers of their human rights to education, health, and safety. But Randall Tobias isn't to be condemned for his desire for erotic companionship - rather, for his utter hypocrisy and his agency's direct role in violating the human rights of the very people it claims to serve.

We in the US - sex worker rights advocates and our networks of supporters - all have a role to play in ensuring the wellbeing of sex workers around the world, and holding policies like those of USAID and its most celebrated now-former administrator accountable - are one of the most sound steps we can take, as our actions against these polices are, unlike the policies themselves, based in evidence of these programs failures, the hypocrisy of their administrators, and the requests of sex workers themselves around the world to take a stand in their name, for our collective good.

Now, Taking the Pledge.