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Free Sex: SWEAT Documents Sexual Bribery

by Thilaka Ravi on Mar 10 2009 3:19 PM

Seeking “sexual favours” from sex workers in return for not arresting them may be practised on the sly by policemen in many parts of the world. But Cape Town policemen are heading for trouble for forcing some women to have sex with them because the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) has filed an affidavit asking Cape Town High Court to order the South African Police Services (SAPS) and the municipal police to stop the “arbitrary arrests and harassments.”

SWEAT has filed the affidavit to draw the Court’s notice to the blatant violation of basic human and constitutional rights of a vulnerable section of South African society. In the first affidavit, former SWEAT director Jayne Arnott has cited supplementary affidavits in which three sex workers claim that policemen enforce fear, not law, as far as they are concerned. One of the sex workers who made statements to SWEAT described being forced to have sex with police officers in exchange for not arresting them or releasing them early from police lock-up.

The affidavits follow SWEAT’s extensive research for some years into prostitutes’ experiences of arrest, detention, verbal abuse and deliberate humiliation by some policemen.

The women described a typical situation in which one policeman would come to the lock-up cell in the police station, choose the sex worker he would like to have sex with and offer to release them all in return. If the particular sex worker that he fancied did not oblige, then all of them had to spend the night in police lock up.

One sex worker said she was arrested while returning home with her shopping bags, another while she was going to her own birthday party.

"It is not unusual for sex workers to be made to clean the offices, the kitchen, the mess halls or the toilets at the court cells where they have been held before being released," said Jane Arnott.

While observing that some policemen were trying to harass and punish sex workers without bothering to have them appear in court, Jane Arnott said that on one occasion an arresting officer told a prostitute after locking her up in the Woodstock police cell for the night that, “the magistrates have better things to do than to deal with prostitutes.”

Source-Medindia
THK/L


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