UN Health Boss Confronted Over Pro-Prostitution Teen Vogue Article
An United Nations health rapporteur who wrote a pro prostitution article in Teen Vogue has defended her position after being confronted over the exploitation, trafficking and abuse rife within the sex trade.
Tlaleng Mofokeng, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health, addressed the Human Rights Council as governments and activist groups lined up to praise her record.
“The failure of states to adopt anti-racist, anti-colonial and dignity-based approaches through extractive capitalistic practices, pillaging of resources, coloniality and genocides crushes people under the weight of indignity,” she said.
“Health cannot be realised without dignity.”
The weight of indignity or the weight of maintaining a calorie deficit and getting some exercise.
During the council session, a representative speaking on behalf of Amnesty International and 36 other feminist organisations celebrated Mofokeng’s work.
“I’m a proud African trans woman delivering this statement on behalf of 37 feminist organisations, we commend the special rapporteur for calling for the decriminalisation of abortion and sex work,” the representative said.
Sex work…
That sanitised phrase is increasingly used by activists and NGOs seeking to normalise prostitution by presenting it as an ordinary profession rather than an industry associated with trafficking, coercion, violence and misery for millions of women around the world.
Take heed of the language, lads. These activists are talking about your wives, your daughters and the kind of society they expect them to inhabit at the highest level of the UN.
Back to Mofokeng.
According to UN Watch, an NGO that monitors the performance of the United Nations, she is a prominent advocate for the decriminalisation of prostitution.
The organisation highlighted an article she wrote for Teen Vogue in 2019 titled “Why Sex Work Is Real Work” a publication aimed at teen readers.
In the article, Mofokeng encouraged readers to view prostitution as a legitimate form of labour.
“I am a doctor, an expert in sexual health, but when you think about it, aren’t I a sex worker?” she wrote.
“And in some ways, aren’t we all?”
No, doctor. We are not.
Perhaps you are thinking that Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, must have misunderstood something. Surely there is no way the United Nations appointed an obese woman as its health rapporteur, only for her to promote prostitution in Teen Vogue.
That would be far too on the nose.
To his considerable credit, Neuer recently confronted Mofokeng at the Human Rights Council.
“Given the widespread exploitation, trafficking and abuse in the prostitution industry, do you still stand by those remarks?” he asked.
However Mofokeng said she was the victim here.
“In the face of fierce, personal, targeted attacks, incitement of violence against me, escalating into domestic spaces as professional harassment and intimidation, both in real life and in online spaces, I stand here today with very few answers to the grand scale of human suffering,” she said.