A Brock researcher is sounding the alarm over a new report, and the way it was developed, from the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls.

The report, “Prostitution and violence against women and girls,” was published online earlier this month and is being discussed at the 56th session of the Human Rights Council, currently underway.

In January, Assistant Professor Julie Ham in Brock’s Department of Sociology answered the call for submissions to inform this report, in part due to concerns over how the call was framed and the apparent conflation of sex work with human trafficking.

“Given the tone of the call, it was obvious that Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem was looking for justification to eliminate or reduce prostitution and sex work,” says Ham. “Sex worker rights organizations were concerned that any submissions that challenged that view would possibly be disregarded.”

Ham volunteered to draft a submission on behalf of the Sex, Work, Law and Society Collaborative Research Network (CRN6), part of the Law and Society Association. She then worked with several collaborators to complete a response with evidence-based recommendations around the decriminalization of sex work as a means of protecting both the safety and rights of sex workers.

Other advocates for the rights of sex workers also made submissions to the Special Rapporteur’s call — more than 60 were compiled by the Count Me In! Consortium and are now available for public review. Ham says these are not reflected in the report.

“Given the number of submissions from sex worker rights advocates, these should be noted in the report to the Human Rights Council,” she says. “Numerous sex worker rights organizations took the time to develop a submission to provide the Special Rapporteur with information, commentary and analysis, but all of it has just been blatantly ignored.”

The report includes many claims that Ham describes as not only harmful but also out of step with other UN bodies, including UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, the Secretary General, the World Bank, the UN Development program and the Special Rapporteurs on Trafficking in Persons and Contemporary Forms of Slavery.

“There is an ongoing project to market what has been termed ‘the Nordic model,’ which we use in Canada, and which purportedly does not involve criminalizing sex workers but instead criminalizes people who buy sexual services,” says Ham. “The premise of the Nordic model is that women are inherently victims in prostitution, and clients and customers are almost always assumed to be male and inherently positioned as exploiters.”

Ham says this notion has been “emphatically challenged and opposed by people working in the sex industry, who say that if you criminalize the purchase then you criminalize the whole enterprise,” which in turn heightens risks for workers.

In contrast, a recent report from the UN Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls was written in consultation with sex workers “and is much more measured in its discussion about reducing discrimination and stigma against sex workers,” she says.

The impact of Alsalem’s report on the people whose voices have been left out of the process is of particular concern to Ham.

“Any UN Special Rapporteur holds and communicates authority internationally,” she says. “When wild claims are made by a Special Rapporteur in the context of a submission to the Human Rights Council, even when they are not based on evidence or seem to be plucked out of thin air, the worry is that they will automatically be taken as credible because the person making them is located within the United Nations system.”