A rare encounter with
truth and honesty.
Isn’t it amazing how much more difficult it is to try to do
something properly, compared with the relative ease of simply shooting one’s
mouth off with whatever vacuousities
pop into one’s cavernous skull at any given moment?
Such as it is that this year’s World AIDS Day post seems to
have taken me quite a few weeks to write.
The reason being that for this year’s post, I’ve decided to hold-up on
the belly-aching introversion and soul-searching from years gone by, and
instead focus very much on the here and now.
This year I am going to come clean on a whole chapter of my life which certain,
pretty awful circumstances demanded I kept secret from this blog, and the
internet generally. I’ll leave it up to
you and yours to decide on whether action is required. But in short, for this one-post-only,
never-to-be-repeated occasion, I am going to have a go at using this blog for
good, rather than evil.
Most of you will know a little something about Tibet; maybe
you’ll be aware of the chuckling fat statesman living in India’s hilly north,
and perhaps you’ll know that he’s there as a result of an invasion of an
ancient kingdom by a now-great superpower some sixty-odd years ago. If you know that, then you’ll have heard that
many countries (a majority of those being ‘Western’ ones), while verbally
condemning said super-power for its continued occupation of Tibet and rumoured
oppression of its people, have never once made a substantial attempt to moblise
international, diplomatic, political and/or military pressure towards the exiled
leader’s return, nor the restoration of Tibetans’ religious, political and
civil freedoms.
This is the stuff which makes the news (albeit still a long
way from the headlines), but what is not so well understood outside of the
politically secluded and media-shrouded Tibet Autonomous Region, is some of the very real vulnerabilities
which the average Tibetan faces on a daily basis.
A rough business.
Within what I could only, honestly describe as a pretty
fortunate life, I consider one of my greatest fortunes to have been the four
and half years I spent working with an amazing, dedicated group of young
Tibetans who, every day for the past eight years, have taken to the streets of
Lhasa to provide educational resources and condoms to young Tibetan women and
men who work in, or live on the periphery of the Tibetan capital’s thriving sex
industry.
This might seem a little surprising to the reader who knows
Tibet only as a seat of Buddhist enlightenment, but it’s not uncommon in
societies whose culture and practices have not been influenced by conservative
Christianity, to have fewer hang-ups when it comes to handing over a tenner for
a quickie on the way back to the office after a heavy lunch of soup and wontons.
But despite the remarkable client through-put, one shouldn’t
go mistaking the commercial sex scene in Lhasa as akin to the seemingly sexual
enlightenment of say, Bangkok or São Paulo.
On the contrary, this is an industry whose continued existence is very
much driven by the political, social, religious and economic oppression of
these unfortunate people. The reality
for Lhasa sex-workers (and their clients) is gritty, grubby, dangerous and (in
terms of health, well-being and life-expectancy) very, very dire.
Tibetan sex workers are young; they hail from rural areas,
and in most cases, have never engaged in sex work prior to arrival in the city. They were drawn to sex work as the only
alternative for survival, due to a variety of factors which severely limit
their opportunities for formal employment.
First and foremost, the majority of Tibetan sex workers have
little or no formal education (a few might have completed the poor standard of
primary education available in their home county), so literacy is low.
Many of them are also non-citizens. While there is some relaxing of China’s One
Child Policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region, larger, traditional Tibetan
families are penalised such that the third, fourth and fifth children are not
registered as citizens, and therefore are ineligible for government work,
housing and all other state-run services (healthcare, education, social welfare
etc).
But one government service that Tibetan sex workers, be they
registered citizens or otherwise, are all too familiar with, is the security
service. As the Central Government
decrees quotas for city clean-ups, sex workers are systematically and regularly
harangued, harassed, locked-up, exploited and abused by the civil and military
security forces, of which there has been a dramatic increase in recent
years. Since the civil unrest in Lhasa
in March 2008, poor and hungry sex workers have had little alternative than to
risk incarceration by working the streets during regular security crackdowns
and week-long curfews. With military
foot patrols working day and night and perhaps one of the most sophisticated closed-circuit
TV camera networks in the world operating on every street corner, sex workers
are regularly caught and/or extorted by the authorities, and incarceration is common.
Added to this, their state-supported, Han-Chinese bosses
further exploit them by taking the lion’s share of their meagre earnings, and
are complicit in the government’s regular rounding-up of sex workers for enforced
blood tests; a human rights violation in itself which is further compounded by
the authorities rarely bothering to communicate the results to the frightened
sex workers who have unwillingly contributed to meeting government HIV testing
quotas.
These young women work out of grimy, confined,
poorly-ventilated, unsanitary spaces designed for shop store-rooms, seeing
upwards of ten clients a day. With few
exceptions, these Tibetan women had no awareness of sexually transmitted
infections (and certainly not HIV) before commencing sex work. Most had never seen (or even heard of) a
condom.
Tibetan sex workers are frighteningly vulnerable to the
short and long term effects of sexually transmitted infections; their poor
knowledge of these infections and how to prevent them makes them vulnerable, as
does their limited literacy, which excludes them from accessing safe sex
messages within information booklets and pamphlets. Added to this, they have few resources with
which to obtain condoms, and even if they can buy them, they have little power
to negotiate safe sex with their clients.
In the event of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, many have limited
legal opportunities to access the government treatment and counselling services,
and are forced to secure health care services from exploitative private
providers who peddle questionable treatment regimes.
A glimmer of hope.
So you see … not a feel good story this year. But there is hope, and that hope lies in the
hands of that dedicated team I mentioned earlier. They have been working with young women and
men from the Lhasa sex industry for nearly a decade, educating them about the
dangers of sexually transmitted infections, both in terms of their immediate
health, and their long-term opportunities to give birth to healthy children.
The program works hard to assist young women and men to remain
disease free and healthy long enough for them to reach the inevitable end of
their sex work careers. In the meantime,
the program staff engage with the sex workers to foster an understanding of,
and promote healthy sexual relationships and gender equality with a view to
their contributing to a family and/or community in the future.
Sadly, the program is in danger of coming to an abrupt end
early next year. Since the civil unrest
in Lhasa in March 2008, China has made it very clear to the outside world that
it will not tolerate political dialogue from other nations on Tibet. It has closed ranks on the issue and shut
international tourist traffic down to a well-muzzled trickle. As such, governments and other international
donors who used to support HIV prevention programs in Lhasa, are now too scared
to do so for fear of damaging those all-important trade relationships.
And so it is not even a slight exaggeration to say that
without support from interested, non-government donors, the vulnerable young
women and men of Tibet who find themselves with little alternative than to work
the Lhasa sex trade, will soon lose one of the last vestiges of support open to
them. And without this support, they
could well be denied the opportunity of reaching any kind of potential as
citizens, or simply to dream for a healthy future.
Maybe you’d like to
help?
This World AIDS Day, or perhaps this Christmas, if you
really want to make a difference to someone’s life, get onto your local MP and
tell him or her and their government to grow a pair. Tibetans suffer some of Asia’s worst poverty,
are poorly educated, have limited access to health care and suffer the ongoing
physical and emotional abuse of systematic oppression. The Australian Government should be doing
more, and supporting non-political programs like the one I have described could
well be a way to make a difference to Tibetans’ lives, without contributing to
the propping-up of an unjust regime.
Thanks for remembering World AIDS Day, everyone, and Merry
Christmas.
