[Badgirlz-list] from italy on new proposed legislation on pr…

NextGenderation]


-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

A press release of 11 September 2008 from The Transsexual Identity Movement
(Movimento Identità Transessuale/MIT) and the Committee for the Civil rights
of Prostitutes (Comitato per I Diritti Civili delle Prostitute) in a press
release of 11 September 2008 disapproves the proposal concerning
prostitution of the Minister Carfagna. Three ministers devised this proposal
without any form of consultation with relevant associations, which were
denied a meeting. We contend that this proposal constitutes nothing more
than window dressing whilst the real problems, neither confronted nor
resolved, will surely increase. The prohibition to work on the street will
have serious and grave consequences for all those persons who are incapable
of organising themselves elsewhere or within closed quarters, given the
impossibility of an individual transsexual and/or an individual woman to
obtain a rental contract or acquire a house where one may work. This
situation of greater precariousness will strongly restrict the contractual
power of sex workers, thereby placing at risk their personal security and
safety from physical harm and, as a consequence, the health of all citizens.
The weakness of the sex workers will leave space for the reinforcement of
criminal organisations that exploit prostitution and those who profit from
commercial sex and induction therein.

If we truly want to diminish prostitution and not merely hide it, we must
try to eliminate its causes: one of which surely regards the blatant and
hurtful discrimination to which transsexuals are subjected. Today there are
thousands of transsexuals who "willingly" prostitute themselves principally
because they have no other choice of work because they are implicitly
excluded and discriminated in the workplace on a daily basis, even if they
may not be explicitly REFUSED. We now have hundreds of adult Italian women
that have appeared on the street in recent times just to overcome a family
economic emergency, PRECARIOUS female workers, underpaid and/or fired, with
husbands in analogous situations, single mothers forced to cover the expense
of raising their children.

What is needed are policies against discrimination, safeguards for workers,
social policies that support women without work and for their children.
There are thousands of foreign women that have paid a high price to come to
the West, who finally are now autonomous, but still practise prostitution.
Whosoever wants to expel them and send them back to their homelands must
also assume the responsibility of again consigning all these women to the
international racketeers for the trafficking of human beings.

Pia Covre Comitato Per i Diritti Civili delle Prostitute Onlus

Porpora Marcasciano MIT (Movimento Identità Transessuale)
_______________________________________________