Global History of HIV/AIDS Activism

Ruth Morgan Thomas is a sex workers’ rights activist who has interacted extensively with activists from the Global South. She elaborates on those interactions in this interview. #UK #India #Africa

Note from Nikolaos Papadogiannis: I would strongly recommend that you read this interview in conjunction with Ruth Morgan Thomas’ interview with Agata Dziuban and Todd Sekuler, published in Agata Dziuban, Todd Sekuler (eds.), “We are infecting people with activism”. Oral Histories of European HIV/AIDS Activists, Kraków 2022, pp. 75-115. The latter interview offers an overview of Morgan Thomas’ engagement with sex workers’ rights activism, whereas this interview focused on her interactions with activists from the Global South.

 

Nikolaos Papadogiannis: It’s an honour for me to discuss with you today. And I remember both from your discussion with Agata [Dziuban] and Todd [Sekuler], but also our workshops last year, that you stressed the significance of activists from the Global South. So I would like to start with a broad question: do you remember any important moments of your interaction with activists from the Global South with regard to sex work, HIV, or both?

Ruth Morgan Thomas: I think it’s always been both to a certain extent. I mean, there are two things that really are held in my memory with great fondness and admiration. The first was when I went out to Kolkata in 1995-96. My memory’s not so good on the dates, but I went out to Kolkata as a consultant for the WHO to look at negotiating skills with clients and see if I could come up with a way to increase negotiating power and run training sessions for sex workers. So, I spent eight weeks in Kolkata with what was known as the Sonagachi project. I was with SCOT-PEP at that time, we were founded by 11 sex workers, and I thought, wow, 11 sex workers coming together. Wow. And I had the real privilege of being present in Kolkata when DMSC [Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a collective of sex workers in West Bengal, India], the West Bengali collective, held its inaugural board meeting. There were 500 sex workers there, and others who couldn’t get into the hall were interested. And what absolutely amazed me about the women there was that they hadn’t just mobilised because of HIV. They were peer educators. They ran an amazing program funded by the Norwegians and then the British Council. But the group, the core group of women, had come together about 17-18 years before.

There were ‘hooligans’, men attached to a political grouping in the area who were trying to clear sex work out of the red-light area of Sonagachi and trying to drive sex workers out, and the strategies that they used were quite horrendous. So they’d set a few women on fire, pour gasoline over them, and kill them by burning them in public places, and they’d slash others with Stanley knives to scar them, because clients wouldn’t go to a woman who was scarred – it was heartbreaking. There were a couple of women with scars who were part of the DMSC, and who told their story about how the police refused to do anything because of the connections that the hooligans had to powerful political players in the city. So, instead of giving in and moving away, the women besieged the police station. The national government then was proposing to send in the army against the sex workers, not to interfere with the police. Luckily, the sex workers were also well-connected with some influential people who actually stopped the government from taking such a move because, at that time, they cared about how they would be viewed. The government were persuaded that this would not look good if they sent in an army against these women who were protesting murders and extreme violence. So they gave in and the police were told to round up the ‘hooligans’. They knew who the individuals were. They had their identities, they rounded them up. That sort of activism, that sort of fierceness, is something I hadn’t experienced in the UK political movements I’ve been involved in at all. So that was so inspirational.

The other thing that happened while I was in Kolkata was that the first of the men who were convicted were actually released from prison while I was there. And a party of sex workers went to meet them on their release, and they promised good behaviour. You know, that sort of thing is really inspirational. And I came back thinking, goodness, you know, we are incredibly, incredibly privileged in high-income countries in the Global North for the most part. There’s something quite unique and inspiring about that community in Sonagachi, which is lower than the Dalit castes in India. Being able to have that sort of power and victory. And they maintain that. They maintain that the collective, which became a sort of bodyguarding sort of thing. So, they maintain the collectiveness, which is what led to the success of the Sonagachi project and DMSC and all that they’ve become.[1] When I met them all, they were all part of the Sonagachi project, which was an HIV response, and it was so successful. They had had the lowest level of any other Indian city in terms of HIV infections. And the WHO were intrigued by this, BUT I don’t think they ever found out really why it was so. DMSC were very active in HIV and in peer education as well.

So that’s what I mean: it was a combination of human rights activism, social justice activism, and health, and they’re still thriving today. I think the collective [DMSC] now has between 60,000 and 75,000 members. They set up their own credit union, which provides proper economic empowerment. It allows sex workers to get loans for the education of their children; for buying land so they can build a house, so that when they retire and get too old to continue in sex work, they can move to the house and have somewhere to live. They set up a home for their children, not a children’s home, which was active when I was there in 95. It was out on the edge of Kolkata. I’m sure it’s been swallowed by the city now, but it had space for 40 kids. They employed teachers and cooks, and people to look after their children. And every brothel that allowed women to send their children, they needed to get permission, because the condition was that they were allowed to spend a minimum of one day a week with their kid in the home.  Children were removed from the brothels by authorities which were also their homes and they were never seen by the parents again. The home for children proved really popular. And they continued with that model, so amazingly effective in terms of improving the quality of life, as well as having a positive impact on HIV.

I love them to bits. If you’re interested, there is a paper where a NSWP staff member wrote a short four-page paper on the Usha Cooperative as a model of economic empowerment. So you’ll find it on the NSWP website.

So, I think there might be other things because I was always an admirer of theirs, even though Doctor Jana, who was their Marxist doctor who led them and honoured like a god in my opinion, was a pain in my ass. But it is just amazing what they achieved. Without Jana, they wouldn’t have got so far, I should admit. But he was not the one doing the work in the community.

Nikos: Were there only women or were there people of other genders in the DMSC?

Ruth: Not only women. Trans and male sex workers as well. And I mean, the piece of work that I did there, the sex workers were very supportive of and it involved me interviewing pimps and the mukhiya (their bosses). So the pimps were not the typical vision of a pimp in the global north. At that time women who weren’t allowed to walk publicly on the street and solicit. So that was just not okay in their culture. And so, um, the mukhiya who were the head of different groups of pimps would employ men to walk the streets, and they would talk to clients and ask them what sort of person they were interested in. And then they would take them to whichever brothel best matched or for which they were getting a bigger commission, but the commission was fixed at 25% of the fee for them. Then the madam also took a percentage. We live in a capitalist society where, you know, people make a profit off of one another’s labour.

And the mukhiya in particular were intrigued that there was this British sex worker coming out about being a sex worker when I was there talking to them. We had interesting conversations which were related to HIV, which is about how HIV is not good for our business, and if we can protect and enable the women to protect themselves and be protected from STIs and other health issues, then it’s more profitable for everyone. They bought into that. I had to go and have a meeting with them once a week for the entire time I was there. They were intrigued. There was a Scottish guy there working as a mukhiya in the port areas. Um, who said it was so lovely to talk to somebody from Scotland. It was interesting times.

Nikos: So, you felt you were well received, or were there moments of misunderstanding and tension?

Ruth: When the media published that there was this British sex worker in town, everybody panicked, because they’d put us in a very small local hotel where my fellow national consultant was sexually harassed by the staff. The media came out the same day as we were reporting the sexual harassment to the British Council and to Sonagachi. They moved us to this very posh hotel, and they moved the entire workshop in the last week of their stay. So it must have cost them a lot of money, but they were fine. What was interesting was that the hotel put in security so that anybody who was coming into the hotel was stopped and asked who they were, and they took it really seriously about protecting me. Now, that’s interesting because I wouldn’t have expected that. My fellow consultant appreciated staying in a five-star hotel. I was like, ‘I’m not sure how comfortable the community will be when they come here’. But anyway, it all worked out.

Nikos: That’s interesting. And did you retain contacts with the collective of sex workers in the subsequent years?

Ruth: Quite often, we would cite them as something that is a really positive model. In all honesty, I think there are very few positive models in the UK. They’re so focused on their strange ways of health service provision that only focus on genitalia and not anything else. So, I did maintain contact. And when we eventually boycotted the Washington conference, we organised what we called the Sex Worker Freedom Festival, where we had 120 international activists come in, and it was about HIV, but a holistic approach to HIV. DMSC was the local host, and we worked with them very closely. Doctor Jana and I fell out several times because he didn’t realise he would need to obtain government approval for people coming in. I had to go out every two weeks to hit him on the head (I didn’t actually physically assault him), but I spent a lot of time in planes leading up to that. Three weeks before he told me that they hadn’t got the necessary equivalent of the Foreign Office and Home Office approvals, and he didn’t know how to get them. Luckily, I had contacts with other collectives in India and national networks, and two of the other networks that had really good connections, and we got approvals from the Foreign Office and the Home Office and the Health Office, actually, as well. All signed off within a week. Like, for example, one where they flew out to Japan because the Minister of Health, who had to sign it first, was there on a visit. So one of the doctors, flew out to get the signature. Incredibly effective support network. They were all Marxists. So it’s like a little cabal.

Nikos: And how was your experience of this alternative conference in 2012?

Ruth: It nearly killed me. It was amazing. I suppose I do have a regret about it because I was so busy managing all the conflicts. Jana treated it like it was an India conference and didn’t want to give us the venue for the international program that we had planned. And it was just a constant battle. Including that it was his birthday during the festival, and he used one of the halls we had a satellite session linked to Washington set up for his birthday party. And I had to find another venue because he wouldn’t leave. He was very drunk. So, managing that sort of thing really took away from me actually participating.

But it was such a rich experience. I mean, all the international sex workers that came and the Indian sex workers, because there were about 1500 Indian sex workers who came. So I understood we were in India, and that wasn’t a problem, but it could have been much smoother. But I do think that what we did demonstrate then was the power of what a community can do, because it was well received by Washington participants when we did get the satellite sessions up and running, and I think we only had one that didn’t work. It meant that we were online at midnight because of the time difference. But the international sex workers are quite used to working through the night. And it was incredibly powerful. There was an amazing report that was done, a video of it.

Dale, who was Andrew Hunter’s partner, from APNSW did all of it. Andrew passed away in 2013 and that disrupted everything as Dale left APNSW, but he completed the video.

Nikos: Did it happen before the publication of The Pink Books, or was it after, Ruth?

Ruth: No, it was before because I think we were still doing the Pink Book, which came out in 2013. The WHO guidelines were 2011, 2012.

Nikos: So did the Freedom Festival have any impact on the preparation of the Pink Book and its content?

Ruth: It was definitely before the Pink Book because the UNFPA rep, and the USAID people actually came to the festival. So, it was definitely before [the publication of the Pink Book], and it did have an impact because for those people that attended, they couldn’t deny the power and the collective organisation and voice. They experienced the community and not just one person who’s able to speak. For me, this is always the best way to persuade people: actually letting them see that it’s not just one person. It’s a really powerful community and a community that was backed by the 1500 Indian sex workers. So, we all joined the big demonstration that they had. In the meantime, I fell and smashed my dentures. And I fell over, and I was really quite severely injured. And the march was the next day. But everybody was like, ‘oh, Ruth, we need you’. So, I did two hours of a four-hour march, and then they took in the back of a truck to the hotel.

I was doing TV interviews with no teeth, and with panda black eyes. Anyway. So that power couldn’t be denied. And the UN staff came on the march with us. There’s pictures of UNFPA and WHO staff on the march.

The other example is, I’ll say Africa, but it was primarily KESWA in Kenya that we worked with to develop the project, it’s linked to the Sex Worker Freedom Festival. So, we had funding, which we used to bring three teams of six sex workers from three African countries to Kolkata for the festival. And after the festival, we sent different teams to different collectives outside of Kolkata, so they’d see more than DMSC. However, there are two very distinct types of movements and collectives. So one was VAMP and Sangram in Sangli, and that’s very political. Not a service provider, not doing research on HIV prevalence, etc., but very much empowerment-focused. So we sent the sex workers from one country there, and we sent another group of sex workers from two other African countries to Ashodaya Samithi in Mysore. Ashodaya Samithi was born out of the University of Manitoba HIV research. They were good doctors. I love VAMP and Ashodaya Samithi and I’m still in contact with them. Ashodaya Samithi run a clinic. They developed a respite home. They developed a community restaurant for sex workers living with HIV. So, a very holistic approach to service development. And when people came back and they joined us in Ghana at the Pink Book validation meeting, I had some side meetings with them to get feedback on how it went. And they hadn’t talked to one another. It was 2013. We had the validation meeting. They hadn’t talked to one another since the India trip because they were from different countries. They got together, and they suddenly realised how different the learning had been for each other. And they called an additional meeting afterwards and asked me to come to this lunch. They were like, ‘you didn’t tell us we were going to see completely different types of programs and activism’. And I said, ‘well, you know, you’ve each learned something useful for your context’. And they said, ‘yes, but so we want to know both types of activism’. And their initial request was that they then go back to India and do the other training. And I went, ‘we just don’t have the money for that. Nor can we justify sending the same group back when we have about 15 other countries in Africa that are members’. That was always my big thing. We don’t favour any particular country or group.

John Mathengi who was the executive director of HOYMAS, a male sex worker group in Nairobi, said they would like to set up a learning institute for Africa in Kenya. What NSWP had planned was to send country teams from other countries to India to bring the learning back but once I understood their intention wediscussed reprogramming the funds to support developing an academy in KENYA And we started to really talk through that. And I left Ghana thinking, you know, that’s a much better use of resources. So, one year later, once we met with people, all three people from Kenya who were still involved. So that was a success. But there were fewer people from the other countries who were still involved. I mean, one person can do so much, but you actually need more than one person around you if you’re going to be effective in achieving your goals. So, I came back and we started talking and we reprogrammed the budget to start development. Now, what they’d asked for didn’t work very well, by the way. They asked that VAMP and Sangram, and Ashodaya Samithi and the academics that worked with them to collaborate in developing the academy with the Kenyan representatives with financial support from NSWP.  the academy team had to be Kenyan, because NSWP couldn’t afford to bring people from across the continent to train and run the academy. Once the faculty had been selected – they were imitating a university. I think they’re smarter than most academics. So, they went out and visited both Ashodaya and Sangram, and so they understood the context the Indians were coming from. The Indians then came back into Nairobi and spent three weeks, in Nairobi, understanding the context in Africa, because it’s totally different in how sex work is organised. there were two sex workers from each of the collectives from India who came along with one interpreter and supporter. However, they would contradict one another. And it became really quite confusing when they were talking to the Africans. Because there was an unhealthy tension between the Indian sex workers, and the people who were with them, felt their organisation knew better. The sex workers spoke different languages and had to work through interpreters, so they didn’t have a shared language that they could talk to one another. And if one says something, the other will want to say something different. And so we had some hard conversations between and with them. We had one training session where both were there doing the training with the faculty. And it just didn’t work.

And so they decided to divide the academies, developing the program separately, with each taking on certain modules. And then one of the groups would come and run a training, and then the group would do the next training, and it was on-site training with actual participants. We started with 12 Kenyan sex workers, and then we introduced country teams of six sex workers with an Anglophone country team joining the next one, and then we introduced a third country team from a Francophone country, and we also had a Portuguese-speaking country coming in.

However, very few of the Indian sex workers were literate, and therefore, the way that they had constructed the training and the academy program did not have any written material. However, the African sex workers wanted something, because all of the faculty were fully literate. I think in the country teams, at least four of them were literate, whether in their own language or in a colonial language. So, they wanted written stuff. That’s what they’d been trained to expect. I mean, they were trained in a British education system, which is 40 years out of date. Nevertheless, none of the Indians had thought they would have to produce a manual, a handbook. We had to wait quite a while for them to give us bits of the handbook. And some of the non-sex workers in Sangam were arguing that the Africans didn’t need written materials. I said, ‘they read and write English’. I was told, ‘that’s a colonial language’. I responded, ‘I’m more than aware it’s a colonial language. But that’s how they were taught in school. That’s how they operate normally within. So, that’s what they are asking for and that’s what we’ll provide’. Eventually, I took over doing the manual and developed all the resources because we just weren’t getting anywhere fast with it. So those are the sorts of tensions; you just have to be really flexible and go back a step and think, ‘okay, how can I do this differently with the community, always driven by what they need and their expressed needs?’

Ashodaya stayed with us much longer than Sangram did. Because Akram, who’s a male sex worker, and Manjula, female sex worker, they got what they could share. They would actually take somebody’s hand and show them and draw a picture. And, you know, it was fascinating to see, whereas the Sangram sex workers just felt that the Sangram was being looked down on and not considered as experts. And I think that came from the non-sex workers because I didn’t see them being treated differently.

Nikos: Ruth, was this program funded by an international organization?

Ruth: It was one of the things that the board took a decision on in 2010 when they first met, and we got the funding for the country visits from an Aids Fonds grant that we had. We then became part of Bridging the Gaps and we used it. But the board had actually explicitly said we will prioritise movement building in Africa because we didn’t have enough money to take on the whole world. APNSW was very strong at that point. Andrew was alive and kicking everybody out there like he’s very good at it, much, much more polite than me. We just felt we had to concentrate on one region at a time. We left North America to its own devices because they’re not collectivised at all. And Latin America was also recognised as having a huge need. But we did prioritise Africa because the funding we had was for HIV, and Africa was hit with HIV, and Latin America wasn’t. And so the funding that we got through Bridging the Gaps was focused on developing the academy. And then, as it became better known, other donors wanted in. So, we managed to sustain it. And NSWP withdrew its support after ten years of support – as had always been intended. So we supported from 2010 through. And then we said, you have to fundraise for this yourself.

Um, there have also been the MSM [men who have sex with men], I hate that term, but the gay men and other men who have sex with men, they took this concept on board in Kenya and developed an MSM academy. So it sort of filtered out.

Nikos: Were there any discussions from African communities, whether this funding model is difficult for some of their members to follow?

Ruth: I’m sorry, I should clarify. They, the individuals, didn’t apply for funding to come to the academy. The academy had an advisory group of sex workers from six countries. So it wasn’t just Kenya, although the ASWA board determined which countries would be invited. Then, a call was put out for individuals in each country who had an interest in coming. Then, those applications were reviewed locally in their country, not by Kenya. And they would nominate six people who would be reviewed by the faculty and the advisory committee, who would either say yay or nay. They did say no to a couple of people who they believed were just big mouths. Then, NSWP provided the funds to pay their fares, to cover the accommodation and everything. So it was all through NSWP funding. And the donors funded NSWP to be that catalyst, I suppose, and a pass-through. But NSWP provided technical support throughout and included technical support around financial management as well. So Gillian, the finance manager at NSWP, came out with me for a couple of academies and did training with both KESWA and finance teams, which they sorely needed.

At one point, the Coordinator who was trying to do a budget for another donor application that they were doing. She was holding a calculator and punching in numbers, then writing down the total. And I said, ‘what are you doing?’ She said, ‘oh, a funding application’. I’m like, ‘have you ever used Excel? You’ve got a computer and you’ve got word and you’ve got Excel. Would you like to learn to use Excel to do your budgets? Because if I came back to you tomorrow and said, okay, so you’re asking us for $10,000? Please give me a breakdown of all costs. How many people? Howmany days? What’s the cost of the hotel per night?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘yes, they asked that’. I said, ‘you’ve seen the budgets we provide for the academy that you have to work within’. She was like, ‘I hate computers, Ruth!’. And I said, ‘How about if you do one full day with me doing Excel training, I’ll take you for a pedicure’. And we went to the pedicure, and she taught everybody in the organisation that, when it comes to fundraising and finances, you need to use Excel. She loved it. One of the things she says to me, even today, ‘has changed my life’.

Nikos: This funding pattern for the Academy was it also used in Europe, being modelled on what had been done in Africa first?

Ruth: Not to the same extent. Interestingly, ICRSE [International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe] changed its name to ESWA, which is the European Sex Workers Rights Alliance, the same as the African Sex Worker Alliance (ASWA). So I do think people in Europe had some discomfort, I suppose, about NSWP explicitly choosing to focus on the Global South. We felt that the Europeans and North Americans had access to resources, even though they’re limited. I acknowledge that, but they had more access than people in the Global South. And sex workers were explicitly being excluded from other big international programs. You know, they weren’t being considered. They were offered services in which they were exploited as peer educators. And I used that term really realistically. And in one case, I think people were getting $3 a week to work five full-time days. And they had to bring in 100 new sex workers. That’s just ridiculous. I mean, the targets were difficult enough. And then they introduced fingerprinting in the clinics because different sex workers were being used by the team of peer educators, and they would go to 4 or 5 different clinics with a different peer educator, in order to meet the targets. The response was, we’ll fingerprint them. I said, ‘Really? And how about making your targets more realistic and giving a decent wage?’

And the other thing they used to do was that they used to promote somebody into a project leader for the team, but only for six months. And then they created anew project leader, and there was no thought about, will the initial project leader go back into the team? Often, they felt they couldn’t, because their place there had been filled as well. And I was like, ‘well, what about career development? Professional development?’  Service providers talk about it for themselves. But where are the sex workers options?’ So there was all these sort of systems that were set up explicitly for sex workers by institutions that exploited and disenfranchised them.

And the sex worker-led services that developed, like the Lady Mermaid Empowerment Centre in Uganda, like the Bar Hostess Empowerment and Support Programme in Kenya, they didn’t operate like that. Once they started taking USAID money, they challenged the strange systems as much as they could, and they didn’t use them if they could get away with not using them.

I know I’m going to sound very anti-European, but I actually think too many people in the Global North think they know better and are not necessarily willing to open their minds and their eyes to what people have done [elsewhere]. I think there were a few individuals who went to and had connections with the sex workers at the various international conferences, so there were opportunities for them to talk, and they took what they wanted and perhaps adapted it. However, I don’t think they ever thought about seriously allowing the Africans to come in and train them in a different way. And I’m not sure how effective that would have been. In all honesty, because if I look at what happened between India and the Kenyan culture, that was challenging.

Then, when I went to the first few academies every morning, they would have a Christian prayer. And after the first academy, I offered the feedback, ‘could we have one day of silent prayer and could we start the prayer by saying those who are not Christian could pray in their own religion? They’re not expected to repeat the word “Christian”, and those who don’t have a religion can just be silent.’ And they went, ‘what? Don’t have a religion?’ I said, ‘well, I’m an atheist. I have no religion and I have no time for Christianity’. And they were shocked. They couldn’t believe it. And I don’t think that would go down well in Europe. What was interesting is they adapted and they stopped the prayers. They told people, ‘If you want to pray, please do so before you come into the room.’ You can do it as a group in the little sitting area outside. But when you come into this space, we’re multi-faith and no faith. They included ‘no faith’.

I think we don’t realize how much influence we have sometimes, because I didn’t think that my comment would lead to that sort of radical change. But, I have a huge admiration for Phelister Abdalla, who’s still president of NSWP for the next three to four months, huge admiration. Because if you talk to her and you explain something to her and she feels it’ll be useful and it’s valid and legitimate, she’ll implement it.

Nikos: What about perhaps the influence of African or Asian South Asian sex workers on migrant sex workers in Europe, or on TAMPEP [European Network for the Promotion of Rights and Health among Migrant Sex Workers]?

Ruth: I think TAMPEP did work with a number of African migrant communities. I think there was severe conflict. Particularly, the Nigerian sex workers were constantly being mentioned as being aggressive. So, when things heated up in Italy, they moved up to Nordic countries and the Nordic, even Nordic sex worker support groups were complaining about them, because they would attack the national sex workers. So it’s not untrue. But there was no attempt to try and see how they could be integrated. And they had a right to be in the EU once they’d been through the Italian process. So it wasn’t that they were illegal. But many of them got deported and run out of the country.

So, I think that was so it wasn’t a question of welcoming the migrants. It was that resentment, ‘you’re coming and you’re stealing my clients and you’re charging less’, and I think that’s something that, as white European activists, we needed to continue to remind people that actually, as a community, we should stand together and support one another rather than seek to drive others out. And I suppose that’s what we did in SCOTPEP in many ways, because the Glasgow sex workers used to come through to work in Edinburgh, and initially there was lots of tension, and then we developed a way of, them not taking any of your clients. I mean, you’re all here doing the same thing. You’re all protecting one another. And it became a community that supported one another.

It’s interesting because you can create a sense of community among people from really diverse backgrounds. So, most of the women who came from Glasgow were heroin users. Not all, but most and most of the local Edinburgh women were not active heroin users. They might have previously been heroin users. They were drug users without any question. But they weren’t in a stage of dependency, which meant that they would come out and be stoned when they were on the street working. So, if they’d had a hit, they would come into the drop-in and wait until they felt able to go out and work. Whereas the Glasgow women, would often be stoned when you’d meet them on the street.

Nikos: I forgot to ask earlier about the academies in Africa. Was HIV the most prominent or one of the most prominent or one of the most important topics?

Ruth: Not necessarily. We’ll start by saying the funding was HIV funding. However, community empowerment and violence prevention and aftercare responses were also included in the curriculum. So, it went beyond just HIV. It looked at STIs and family planning. And I think if you look at the SWIT, a lot of what’s in there came from sex worker communities, so the SWIT was the basis for the academy. So when we did the curriculum.[2] Okay, um, we used the SWIT in terms of when your governments say what you’re asking for is not in line with any international guidance, there’s the little pink book, which is the WHO guidelines from 2011-2012, and there’s the big pink book, SWIT. And you just hit them over the head with the big book. And the African sex workers called it the sex workers’ Bible. And it was what they learned at the academy. And that was done intentionally, as we developed the curriculum with the Indians, and when I took over writing it, it was very intentional to feature the SWIT, and community empowerment is a central part of the SWIT. So, the country teams visited sex worker-led organisations as part of the academy. Those projects talked about community empowerment and the political process of collectivisation, although that’s not how many donors talk about community empowerment, referring to community mobilisation as a means of getting people to clinics – that’s donor language, they don’t like collectivisation. But that was always fundamentally underlying everything we did. It was about empowering the communities to have the expertise and the resources and know the international guidelines.

Nikos: You mentioned the issue of translation in the case of the academies. What about the Freedom Festival? How did the translation work there?

Ruth: People who came from non-anglophone countries brought with them a community translator. If there were only 1 or 2 people, who were part of their organisation, they came as participants. And maybe it wasn’t professional translation, but I think people got a lot out of it. I think it was a success. For others, we brought translation equipment from NSWP for groups above three. And there was translation for the Indian participants. They didn’t use technology. They would have huddles of 20 and 30 people with a translator sitting in the middle shouting. That was even for the India sessions, because they don’t speak the same language across India. Well, I think there are 123 different languages in India. Um, and English isn’t the dominant one.

I think one of the things, initially, when I took on the role of coordinating NSWP, Cheryl Overs and I worked together at that point, and we fell out very severely over a few things. But this is one of the things she was like, ‘no, we don’t do translation. That’s a waste of money’. And I said, ‘We can’t be a global network if we don’t enable translation, at least in the colonial languages, at the very least’. So, the board agreed, and we did colonial languages. We did, Spanish. French. Russian. They’ve added Arabic now as well, which I’m really happy about. And we added Chinese before that, because in China, they’re all literate. If you’re going to produce a resource online, they can get to it. There’s no such thing as an illiterate sex worker in China. The state education system makes sure of that. But not saying it’s a good thing. I think translation has always been critical. I don’t know if NSWP is working with Middle Eastern sex workers now, I don’t follow anymore because I think founders should step away and let organisations grow. So translation has always been important for me; if we’re doing a global network, particularly with communities that are not academic educated for the most part. How do you communicate if you don’t do translation? It’s impossible.

I can tell you some of the online translation software that was used initially was really bad – one of the translations for sex work, was genitalia trade. I’m like, ‘how do you get that’? And so the language was really inappropriate. Then DeepL online translation, which NSWP from the get-go. stopped using the word sex in sex worker and I withdrew my account in protest.  I wrote to them they said, ‘well, we’re really sorry’ but I immediately cancelled my account and said, ‘I’ve been with you since you were a beta program because I needed to be able to communicate in writing with members. And I can’t believe that you’ve introduced this AI thing that takes out the very core of our communications’.

I think the most successful translation, in terms of helping people really understand, has been by what I call community translators. They may not be sex workers, but they’re allies, friends, colleagues who understand the language but also are completely and utterly non-judgmental. That’s a difficult combination to find.

Nikos: Ruth, speaking of HIV and sex work, given that in South Africa, HIV activism became quite strong in the 1990s and 2000s, and that there were also groups of sex workers, like Sisonke, also engaging with HIV activism. How important was the connection between HIV activism and sex work in your activities?

Ruth: Within NSWP? Absolutely. It wasn’t just HIV activists. So, we worked very closely with networks of people who use drugs, gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men. The trans community started to really organise again more strongly with a focus on human rights, health and well-being, not just the very narrow focus of HIV. And so we built very strong relationships. We sought to work together to build a platform around trying to engage with donors like the Global Fund, UN, and others. I think we have had some successes working with the people living with HIV. At times it’s been quite difficult. For instance, if I think about GNP+. At one point, NSWP employed more people living with HIV than GNP+ did, which was quite shocking to me when I found that out. But it wasn’t always easy because not everybody within that community was supportive. And do you know the Stigma Index that was developed? At one point, the Stigma Index was done in, and I’m trying to remember which of the countries. I think it was Zimbabwe. And they found that they excluded the sex worker community! And they identified that from the Stigma Index training they got from, I don’t know if it was GNP+ or not, but then they actually took action about correcting it within their own institution. Now, that caused quite a bit of a stooshie in a country that is so Christian. I also think there are a number of people within that network who are abolitionists around sex work. So I think we relied more on working with, and I always chose to work with GNP+ and connect with them as much as we could and try and force them to be inclusive. I think it’s absolutely critical. Andrew, who was the first president of NSWP, was a member of ACT UP, was living with HIV, was a gay man, and was a drug user. He ticked all the boxes, and was very outspoken on HIV access to treatment for sex workers. I think he made some really powerful statements at the Sex Worker Freedom Festival [in Kolkata in 2012] about every dollar spent is wasted if you’re not funding sex worker prevention. Because the reality is we are vulnerable, but not helpless.

Nikos: Was the International Community of Women Living with HIV part of your discussions and your interactions at all?

Ruth: Yes, but not in the way you’d expect. I mean, so we used to go to the big events of the HIV-related civil society and associated networks and movements. And one of them, they did a poster on the wall thing about what you would want. ‘What message would you want to give to other people here in the room?’, she said. She was an ICW rep. I won’t name her because that’s not fair. She said, ‘Stop dividing the bad girls and the good girls. Stop defending the bad girls all the time’. And I’m thinking, ‘well, I know I’m very good. So who are these bad girls?’ I have a reputation for being quite difficult at times but I was looking at the person as I said it, ‘I know I’m a good girl’. So, ICW was a bit of a difficult one because there were many members of ICW who were of an abolitionist leaning rather than a right to have control and agency over bodily autonomy.

Nikos: If I may go back to your point about transgender people, I was thinking that understandings of being gender-non-conforming beyond the West might differ from those in the West, like the hijras in India. Were non-Western understandings of gender and transing discussed in the NSWP?

Ruth: Absolutely. I mean, at the Freedom Festival in 2012, if you look at the report, you’ll see Lakshmi. Her stories are amazing. Her jewellery is just too heavy to wear, I think. And she was the bad girl ambassador originally for APNSW. And then she and I met, and we got on famously, and she said in a press conference, ‘I am the NSW bad girl ambassador now’. Which I was like, thank you very much for the honour. We made enormous efforts to ensure they were included across the activities.

There was an activist from Papua New Guinea, who is no longer with us. She passed away. She lived with HIV and had no access to treatment but she used to lead marches with a flag and calling out and I think really set the tone for us more than Europe and the trans movement in Europe. Not just because of hijra in India, but the trans gender non-conforming communities across Asia, like in Bangkok. So that very much influenced, and I think it helped us inform and bring the conversation to other regions. We didn’t need to interact with gender-non-conforming people in Latin America because they’re quite fierce out there. However, our interaction with gender-non-conforming communities in Asia and the Pacific certainly informed conversations in Africa.

So trans and gender diverse is the language that NSWP adopted. The Sex Worker Academy Africa (SWAA) had to include male, female, and gender non-conforming or trans diverse in their country teams. Most countries accepted it, which was a bit of a surprise. but if they couldn’t, bring a trans and male sex worker they lost a space and they could only send five people or four people if they were all cis-gender female.

And do I feel guilty about exerting that pressure? No, I don’t because it builds solidarity within. And in Uganda, where there were real divides between the different groups, the academy team, we insisted, had to come from both the opposing factions and the LGBT. So the male sex worker was part of an LGBT organisation. The trans person was part of a very small trans group that they set up with two other people, but it still counts. They actually came together and actually overcame some of their difficulties. So they had not been getting any Global Fund money because they were competing. The sex worker community was losing out. So, by coming to the academy and bringing them together, they actually built a much stronger understanding of one another. I won’t say “respect” and “understanding”; still, they came to the conclusion that infighting was harming them.

Nikos: And in all those discussions, interactions and entanglements, Ruth, may I ask whether the fact that you come from Scotland, played any role? Was it insignificant?

Ruth: The fact I’m British was significant,  because of our colonial past. So when we did the Academy, and I talked about colonial languages when I did my spiel, and somebody said, ‘what do you mean?’ I said, ‘well, I’m British, okay? And you all know Kenya was a former colony, as are all the Anglophone countries in Africa. And that has an impact on power’. And people asked if we could go and have coffee or dinner somewhere. And they’re not taught the colonial history. They were never taught the colonial past in their primary schools, which is as far as Phelister and many other participants in the Academy, went. However, perhaps amongst the higher educated people, there’s an awareness [of colonialism], and I think the fact that I’m British, initially created people going, ‘here’s another expert’ [ironically].

I have a very different approach, though, to the programme implementers, donors and politicians than the one they’re used to. I think my belief in community and them having a voice. So, my own personal politic, my ability to speak in plain English, because my English grammar is crap and they had to edit some stuff, put it into proper grammar, [made a difference to them]. I don’t care, actually. So, if I finish an article, I say you can change the grammar, but if you change the meaning, and I will know, I’ll change it back.

I was born in England, by the way. So I’m actually English. I’ve lived in Scotland for 64 years now, so I moved here when I was four. But the Scots I know still remind me I’m not Scottish. I’m an internationalist, although I will vote for SNP, because I’ve had enough of the English.

So, coming back to your question, I think it’s more about personality. I think it’s more about approach. It’s about a willingness to accept others’ expertise and not view yourself as the fountain of all knowledge worth knowing, um, and a willingness to listen and take the time to understand people. Actually, sometimes that can take years.

Nikos: And speaking of your experiences, Ruth, do you feel that your internationalist ideas or practice changed over time, perhaps also because of your interaction with activists in India or Africa?

Ruth: I think I’ve become more ardent in advocating for recognition of the expertise from the Global South. I always believed in internationalism. I voted no to independence in the first referendum [in Scotland in 2014] purely because I don’t believe in borders. And I think we need less borders rather than more. I do regret that vote.

So, I think [my interaction with activists from the Global South] hasn’t changed my understanding of how much I have to and had to advocate for acceptance of people from the Global South as equals. I don’t expect to remind people that you don’t put words into the community’s mouth. and you do not edit a community quote in an academic paper because the journal editor says ‘it’s too community language’. Actually, what has changed is that I’ve become more fervent and ardent in calling that out and not tolerating it.

And I suppose I have some power because I’m part of the leads on some of these academic things. There was a World Bank book that had a disclaimer from NSWP in the front saying we do not endorse this book, in particular the chapter on modelling. It was about cost effectiveness of HIV prevention for sex workers. And I’m not a modeller, but I do understand when modellers take the time to explain something to me. The cost of saving one infection in Thailand, they estimated it to be $67,000. And they didn’t count the extended infections that come. So the infection doesn’t stop with the sex worker. And you’re not spending that on a sex worker. You’re spending on public health. And they would not change their mind to revise their analysis. Tim Brown, who’s an economic modeller who had done some work with sex worker movements before, said, ‘this is bullshit, Ruth’. And we argued with the World Bank, and they stuck to their guns as I stuck to mine. And so when I said to the World Bank, ‘We want a disclaimer and I’m not taking the sex workers’ names out of the chapters, which we have the right to do’.

And so it had a disclaimer. They can never forget that the World Bank lead never forgave me. He sent his boss to meet me in Geneva to try to persuade me not to insist on this. Just before they printed it that night. I said, ‘I don’t change my mind. And my board agreed on this. I’m not going to call another board meeting to discuss whether they want to change their mind’.

Nikos: Thank you very much indeed. I don’t have any more questions unless you would like to add anything we have not discussed, and you feel it’s pertinent to the topic.

Ruth: So this is a little bit about Scotland. And this is because I was having a conversation with somebody else recently, and I thought ‘oh these things that you, you don’t forget, but you sort of leave aside’. I think within HIV campaigns in Scotland, the public media was always referring to sex workers living with HIV as ‘killers’. So when we did the research initially, I think there were three national media outlets that had headlines of ‘12 killers on the street’. Now, not all those sex workers who self-reported as living with HIV were street workers. But that portrayal, that failure to recognise…It’s something that I don’t think we ever got across as successfully as we could have, as we should have. Actually, sex workers are experts in safer sex. That’s something that’s missing. We value the gay community as well for their contribution. That’s much more easily achieved in Scotland, Europe than recognising sex workers in that role or people who use drugs, actually.

Moreover, we haven’t talked about decriminalisation of sex work in detail, but that’s a critical part of HIV prevention. We do it [HIV prevention] under a criminalised system, which is questionable. We are as successful as we can be. We could be so much more successful if it wasn’t for the legal barriers.

Nikos: Thank you very much, Ruth! That’s been a really thought-provoking discussion.

 

[1] The Sonagachi Project was established in 1992 to engage with sex workers and address vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections and HIV transmission.

[2] The tool Implementing comprehensive HIV/STI programmes with sex workers: practical approaches

from collaborative interventions, also known as the Sex Worker Implementation Took or  “SWIT,” was published by the World Health Organisation

in 2013 and developed in collaboration with NWSP; http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/

10665/90000/9789241506182_eng.pdf?sequence=1. On the SWIT, see also the interview of Ruth Morgan Thomas with Agata Dziuban: Agata Dziuban, Todd Sekuler (eds.), “We are infecting people with activism”. Oral Histories of European HIV/AIDS Activists, Kraków 2022, p. 94.