Women Radically Transforming a World in Crisis

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Year
2020

In August 2019, a group of feminist activists from diverse regions and social movements gathered in Mexico City to strategise towards the 25th anniversary of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, which was held in China in 1995 and produced the Beijing Platform for Action.

A number of engagement forums were held in 2019, with sex workers participating in the Africa, Asia and the Pacific and European review meetings, and the final Beijing+25 platform, known as the ‘Generation Equality Forum,’ will be launched in Mexico City in May 2020 and culminate in Paris in July 2020. 

A group of feminist activists have sought endorsement of their vision for Beijing+25, in advance of these conferences. ‘Women Radically Transforming a World in Crisis’ is a collective framework for resisting the critical, structural obstacles to gender justice and women’s human rights. NSWP has endorsed the framework, as it includes the voices of marginalised women, including sex workers, and condemns the punitive laws imposed on them. The framework is rights-affirming with regard to sex work, using the term “sex work” and not “prostitution” in addition to expressing concerns about criminalisation:

“states (…) using criminalization as a tool to punish and increase stigma, discrimination, and violence against and exclusion of LGBTI and people of non-binary identities; people who seek or have had abortions; and others who transgress sexual and social norms, such as sex workers”

and the lack of labour rights and protections for sex workers:

“… women workers’ labor is disproportionately more likely to be unregulated due to their broader social, political, and economic marginalization. For example, migrant workers are often denied basic rights in their country of work; domestic workers, often doubly marginalized as migrants in the informal sector, exist in a heightened state of precarity due to inadequate labor protections; and sex workers, largely constituted of women, and transgender and gender non-conforming people, experience some of the highest rates of workplace violence due to the stigmatized and unregulated nature of their work.” 

Other associations and groups are encouraged to sign and endorse the Framework.

Read more about sex workers’ engagement in the Beijing+25 review process here.

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