By IPS Correspondents
BULAWAYO, Apr 5 2004 (IPS)

It is retold so often that the account of how an embarrassed government minister rescued a female relative, who had been caught in a police sex worker crackdown he sanctioned, has become something of an urban legend.

Some say it is surprising that the woman’s embarrassment – not to mention that of the official – did not lead him to entertain the possibility that police may have acted too arbitrarily when they set out to banish the world’s oldest profession in the 1980s.

Officers’ methods included accosting – and even arresting – any ‘suspicious’ woman walking around after dark, especially if she was daring to move about unaccompanied.

Only after outcries from women’s lobby groups did police action ease. Sadly, though, it had already resulted in some ‘respectable’ women seeing the interior of police stations without any justification for their being detained.

Recently the arrest of suspected sex workers has again picked up. This is due to periodic enforcement of the ‘Miscellaneous Offences Act’, which makes it a crime for a woman to ‘loiter’ for ‘purposes of prostitution’.

Just last week police arrested 54 women for the offence. According to the state-owned ‘Herald’ newspaper, Zimbabwe’s only daily, their arrest was part of a new operation, code-named ‘Restore Sanity Phase One’.

Police say the sting was planned after officers received complaints that ‘most of the city’s lodges and night clubs have been turned into brothels’.

Another law, the ‘Sexual Offences Act’, makes it an offence to live on earnings from a brothel. In effect, it seeks to suppress sex work without actually making the act of having sexual intercourse with a sexual worker illegal.

One of the primary areas targeted by the police is the ‘Avenues’, a district of Harare popular with young professionals and sex workers. In the late evening hours the locale’s leafy splendour provides ideal cover for scores of scantily clad figures who make brief, albeit well-timed, appearances aimed at attracting the attention of passing motorists.

It is this soliciting police say they want to eradicate. Police spokesman, Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena, says the operation is double-pronged. It is aimed at sex workers as well as illegal immigrants, many of whom survive by selling the only product they have – their bodies

But human rights campaigners are not convinced this is the best way to deal with a problem they say is increasing, partly because of widespread hardships.

Janah Ncube of ‘Women in Politics Zimbabwe’, a non-governmental organisation, says the issue of sex workers is “a very sad and complicated one”. She maintains it is a question of supply and demand, and suggests that if police want to eradicate the trade they should also target men since “the women are there because there are people who are after them”.

Ncube says women engage in sex work because they have little alternative in a country where inflation has risen above 600 percent and unemployment at 70 percent. Unless they are able to earn a decent living in any other way, she says, they simply return to the streets.

Ncube says even if it was desirable, legalising sex work would be hard in culturally sensitive Zimbabwe. “For me legalising it is a moral issue”. She says the ideal solution is to generate employment which, in turn, depends on economic growth. “No woman wants to have sex with strangers every night; it’s something you do when you’re really desperate,” she says.

Petty Govathson is the co-coordinator of a 300-member fraternity of practicing sex workers and ‘potential’ sex workers, who include widowed and divorced women. Operating from central Zimbabwe, the name of the Gweru Women’s AIDS Prevention Association (GWAPA) reflects the fact that it began, in 1993, as a local authority initiative committed to raising awareness about HIV/AIDS.

“But we have gone further,” Govathson says. “It’s not condoms the women want, but status and a respectable livelihood.” With support from donor agencies, GWAPA is able to impart some basic skills to members who are interested, although Govathson says capital is what most members need the most.

To date, one of GWAPA’s major achievements has been easing tension between sex workers and law enforcement officers. “When we started there was mistrust between the police and the women,” Govathson says. “Now we can talk.”

But this does not mean police have stopped arresting sex workers plying their trade. “That has not changed much, but it has opened avenues for discussion,” Govathson says. “We are not promoting prostitution and our goals are what they support.”

Govathson says she does not know if legalising sex work would starve the profession of its practitioners. “I’m not saying let’s legalise it,” she explains. “Let’s talk about alternatives and, if they’re there, then provide them to women who want to abandon prostitution.”

While ‘solutions’ to the problem will always be debated, lawyer Wozani Moyo warns that police’s targeting of sex workers gives them the license to harass all women. It is quite common for police in the Avenues – and elsewhere – to stop any unaccompanied female after 8 p.m. On two separate occasions, Moyo says she was confronted by police while walking to a grocery store. Her mistake, she says, was that she had chosen to wear shorts.

Debates surrounding the problem, and various solutions, continue while the current law – and police action – remains. What is worrying, Moyo argues, is that the charge of loitering is highly discretionary. “It’s really the policeman’s word against yours,” she says.

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