FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 1995
FAULTY UPI REPORT CIRCULATING-
BEIJING CONFERENCE PLATFORM DOES NOT CALL FOR ELIMINATION OF VOLUNTARY PROSTITUTION:
Recently there have been a rash of incorrect reports regarding the United Nations Platform For Action (Beijing 1995) stand on prostitution, based on a UPI report of mid September (also appearing in the Bay Area Reporter) stating that the final draft of the Platform for Action, "...calls for the elimination of gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment, prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery and exploitation, including violations resulting from cultural prejudice, racism, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, religious and anti-religious extremism and international trafficking in women and children."
In fact, sex worker representatives from the Network of Sexwork Projects were extremely successful in revising the above language in the Platform to thwart the current tide of anti-prostitution and anti-prostitute solutions to problems of forced prostitution.
The incorrect report was based on an early (and rejected) version of the Platform in Section 225, as follows:
"Gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment, prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery and exploitation, including those violations resulting from cultural prejudice, racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, religious and anti-religious extremism and international trafficking in women and children, are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and must be eliminated."
While newspapers around the world have carried the incorrect report, calling for an end to prostitution, that paragraph is not included in the final language of the Platform for Action. The final language as it appears below, calls for an end to forced prostitution, not prostitution per se.
"Taking into account the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women and the work of Special Rapporteurs, gender-based violence, such as battering and other domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual slavery and exploitation, and international trafficking in women and children, forced prostitution and sexual harassment, as well as violence against women, resulting from cultural prejudice, racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia, pornography, ethnic cleansing, armed conflict, foreign occupation, religious and anti-religious extremism and terrorism are incompatible with the dignity and the worth of the human person and must be combated and eliminated."