By Jeni Harvey. Writer and Feminist.

In October 2021, the largest annual feminist conference in Europe was held in Portsmouth. Organised by FiLiA, a grassroots and woman-led volunteer organisation, it saw women from across the globe come together to discuss their rights, freedoms and the many issues that affected them. Speakers from Afghanistan, India, Zimbabwe, Russia, Australia and all over Europe came to learn from each other and to express their solidarity. Many were survivors of male violence, and of political violence too, of human rights abuses that had shattered their lives and communities.

A mere suspicion that unfashionably feminist beliefs about sex and gender might get a hearing at the conference saw protesters standing outside with placards bearing the slogans: I AM WHO I SAY I AM and LOVE IS A HUMAN RIGHT. Stamped and legitimised with the Amnesty International logo, these mingled with other, far more offensive signs held by individuals who deliberately tried to intimidate conference goers, who chanted ‘fuck terfs’ and who scrawled in chalk outside the venue entrance: ‘transphobes can suck on my pink strap’. A femicide vigil mourning the many thousands of women and girls murdered by men all over the world saw women forced to step on these obscene threats in order to pay their respects.  

One wonders how the world’s largest human rights organisation, whose main claim is to ‘work to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied’ has found itself in opposition to women ‒ some of whom have been victim to the most egregious suppression of their rights and dignity ‒ discussing what has happened to them and why. Just whose truth and dignity can be said to matter when such an organisation finds itself standing shoulder to shoulder with young male activists who scream at women scarred by the horrors of war rape to ‘suck their dick’.

It wasn’t always like this. Founded in 1961 Amnesty International began with a sharp focus on political prisoners, campaigning practically and tirelessly for the release of prisoners of conscience and working to draw attention to issues of torture, human rights abuses, and failures of justice. It organised mass letter-writing campaigns to raise awareness, putting pressure on authoritarian governments and regimes, and in 1977 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It has always claimed not to endorse any political ideology, yet recently ‒ as with many organisations concerned with social justice ‒ seems captured by the kind of postmodern and ultra-liberal ideas of progress which can put ethics into question and rights into conflict.

On February 9th 2018, the Times newspaper led with a front-page article accusing top Oxfam aid workers of paying women in Haiti for sex. After an earthquake that had killed up to 300,000 Haitians and displaced over a million more, they were accused of exploiting local women and children trying desperately to survive in the aftermath. Lurid descriptions of ‘Caligula-style’ sex parties in which local women and girls were dressed up in Oxfam t-shirts and brought to houses used by staff filled the papers.

The furore that followed revealed many more allegations of a similar nature levelled at aid workers based in poor and war-torn countries, revealing a large-scale issue of exploitation and abuse of power within the humanitarian sector. In some cases, women who were quite literally starving were alleged to have been offered food and basic aid in exchange for sex by men whose job it was to help and protect them. Haitian president, Jovenel Moise, condemned what he described as an ‘extremely serious violation of human dignity’ and accused predatory aid workers of exploiting ‘needy people in their moment of greatest vulnerability’. The response from many lead organisations and public figures was one of abject horror.

But not all. Laura Agustin, writer and author of Sex at the Margins, gave a distilled version of the pro sex work argument when she opined in a series of tweets that: ‘Buying sex from professionals is not sexual misconduct and women in Haiti may well have been glad to get the sex work… It’s HAITI for God’s sake, would you rather they starve?’

These same arguments run through the entirety of Amnesty International’s prostitution policy which advocates for the decriminalisation of all ‘sex work’. The policy states: ‘We believe that policies which purport to support and improve the situation of the resource-poor must focus on empowering the disenfranchised and directly addressing structural disadvantages such as poverty.’ They go on: ‘Many jobs involve using some aspect of sexuality for economic gain. Throughout this policy we refer to “sex workers” as those who exchange sex acts for money or some other form of renumeration (i.e., food or shelter).’

In other words, one way for the disenfranchised to seek empowerment could be through the exchange of sex acts for money or ‘other forms of renumeration’, such as food. Or aid, perhaps. Amnesty is careful to include a caveat, that any such exchange should not involve violence, abuse or coercion, but seems unable to recognise the flagrant contradiction in terms inherent in that, for what is the threat of starvation if not coercion? What is it if not violence and abuse when a woman must capitulate to an aid worker’s demand for sex if she wishes to survive? Under such circumstances he may as well be holding a gun to her head.  

In the wake of the scandal and under huge public pressure Amnesty were eventually forced to put out a statement declaring that: ‘Any staff members found to be using sex workers in the course of their work would face an immediate investigation and potential disciplinary action.’ But no attempt has been made to square the circle: their policy regarding women exploited in prostitution remains the same, their threats to discipline staff in direct contradiction to it.

On the 23rd August this year, in what many have deemed a landmark case, an Australian court ruled that an individual named Roxanne Tickle had been indirectly discriminated against by social media platform Giggle for Girls on the grounds of gender identity. In creating an app reserved only for women, CEO Sall Grover sought with her legal team to argue that Tickle, a trans identified male, had indeed been discriminated against, but that Grover had done so legally on the grounds of sex. Citing legal precedent, however, the judge stated that ‘on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable’ and Grover lost her case.

The response from Amnesty came the same day: ‘This is a step forward in ensuring transgender women are not discriminated against on the basis of their gender identity.’ Specifics of Australian law set aside, a basic failure to acknowledge any legitimate conflict between the rights of women and those of individuals who identify as trans, or the importance of women not being discriminated against on the basis of their sex, must surely be a dereliction of duty. Instead of taking a neutral position in which they call for the rights of all groups to be balanced and respected, Amnesty has instead chosen to drown out women’s voices entirely with mindless mantras such as I AM WHO I SAY I AM.

To illustrate the extent of such ideological capture, in a piece entitled: ‘Women in Afghanistan: the back story’, published on their website to provide an overview of the recent and varied history of women’s rights in Afghanistan, as well as the current horrors being inflicted on them by the Taliban, one could until recently read that women and girls were ‘discriminated against in many ways, for the “crime” of identifying as a girl’. The article listed the ways in which women and girls in the country were prevented from studying or working, forced to dress in such a way that no skin at all was visible, and imprisoned in their homes, unable to leave without a male chaperone. Men, it said, ‘could commit domestic violence, injure and even kill their female family members with impunity’.

It took thousands of women on the internet to cry that if being female were only a matter of identity ‒ that one could adopt or not ‒ there could be no good reason as to why anyone would choose to be a woman under the Taliban for the piece to be changed so as to better reflect reality. A tsunami of distress and fury has meant that potential donors can now be reassured that women and girls made to suffer for the crime of actually being female are not, in fact, considered by Amnesty to have simply failed to opt out.

Yet the edit was made without fanfare or acknowledgement of just how offensive the original wording had been, suggesting that a clear analysis of exactly how and why women’s human rights are threatened by religious and patriarchal fundamentalism is now considered unmentionable within the organisation. Women, who make up fifty percent of all the world's human beings, whose rights to freedom of movement, expression, association and choice are under attack because of our sex, deserve better. From Afghanistan to India, Zimbabwe, Russia, Australia and all over Europe women’s rights are human rights.