Fighting for mothers who do sex work: An interview with Dudu Dlamini

ABSTRACT

Sex workers in South Africa face numerous forms of stigmatisation. This stigma contributes to isolation from family – even if the sex worker financially supports family members – cruelty and verbal abuse from health workers, and violence at the hands of police, who often profile sex workers. Horribly, feelings of shame, can extend to the children of sex workers as well. Sex workers interviewed for a 2018 Human Rights Watch report ‘Why Sex Work Should be Decriminalized in South Africa’ repeatedly expressed fear that their children would discover they did sex work, and that other people would treat their children badly because of their sex work. This creates a scenario where sex workers feel that, in order to love and care for their children, they have to hide their work. Supporting children is a main reason that marginalised people do sex work in South Africa but this fear prevents many sex workers from proudly joining advocacy efforts for decriminalisation. For this interview, the author of the 2018 report speaks with South African sex worker and advocate, Dudu Dlamini, who runs a project focused on mothers who are also sex workers, to learn more about the problem of self-advocacy for sex workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex work
• decriminalisation
• advocacy
• motherhood
• stigma

Dudu Dlamini is a South African sex worker rights advocate who has built a significant platform for her activism including a media profile. In the movement ‘Dudu’ is famous. Together with others in SWEAT¹ and the Sisonke coalition, Dlamini has demanded equal respect and treatment for sex workers with the uncompromising clarity and loudness of an activist. SWEAT is South Africa’s largest and most vocal sex worker organisation and is now more than 20 years old. The advocacy organisation has long called for decriminalisation of sex work and dignity for sex workers and provides services including emergency assistance, in case of arrest for example. Sisonke emerged out of SWEAT and is a South African movement of sex workers and is sex worker led (Figure 1).

Figure 1. ‘Dudu Dlamini at an advocacy meeting’. SWEAT (2021).

I am a researcher-advocate with the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch and a middle-class white woman living in the US. I met Dlamini in 2018 when, in partnership with SWEAT, I researched (Human Rights Watch, 2019) the experiences of criminalisation on sex workers in South Africa. These experiences include unlawful and cruel police profiling, arrest and detentions that are more about harassment than anything else, beatings, rape and humiliation.

Dlamini is also the founder and coordinator of ‘Mothers for the Future’, a SWEAT programme that seeks to support sex workers who are mothers and their children. I was especially interested in her work with mothers who sell sex as so many of my interviewees were mothers of dependent children. Mostly children they had birthed but also, and often in addition, other children who they took care of, mothered, and had lasting connections with.

When I interviewed sex workers in South Africa I often heard about the daily financial responsibilities of parenting banded together with hope for less difficult lives for their children. Interviewees were most often single mothers and, like other single parents, faced stresses like difficulty accessing decent childcare. The mothers I interviewed were mostly street workers, mostly cis gender but also sometimes transwomen, all Black and from poor backgrounds with little education and in almost every case parenting without a partner. They were often additionally marginalised because they were immigrants with less family support and no government support. They all said sex work was the only means they could find to support their children and doing so was the reason they did this work, which is currently hazardous – sex workers face significant risk of violence – and stigmatised in South Africa. Caring for their children gave their work meaning but also created extra problems. Mothers often said in interviews that their dominant daily fear was not a ‘client’ raping them or police harassment but of their children finding out they sell sex and being disgusted or ashamed, or their children facing isolation, beating or other cruelty from others because of their mother’s occupation.

Interviewees I met during my research with SWEAT seemed resilient. But as Dlamini notes in the interview below, parenting can close the door on the chance to speak out about being a sex worker even for the bravest. Speaking out about being a sex worker can be, and for Dlamini has been, a defiant act of activism that encourages self-love and solidarity with others and the experience of new kind of personal strength. Dlamini works with the Mothers for the Future group to provide a safe and private place of quieter solidarity but still one housed within the conviction that criminalisation and stigmatisation is unfair and violates human rights.

Why does your work at SWEAT and Sisonke centre on empowering others?

For the government to hear us, we need to be a big group on the same page, crying for the same thing. The Sisonke movement of sex workers – nothing about us without us – means dignity, power and solidarity and also accountability for ourselves. Sex workers have to be visible to themselves – others cannot speak on our behalf.

But many sex workers have fear. The criminalisation is there – even when you’re out shopping the police can harass you because they know your work. There is also discrimination in this culture. You can lose your family, your community. Even when you go to the clinic you face stigma. That fear can take away your confidence and dignity, that fear can get you depressed. It is lonely – you think no one will support you. The first thing is to empower sex workers about the reality of the laws that criminalise them; that these laws are against human rights.

What has it meant to you being such a high-profile and vocal activist and member of a stigmatised group?

I joined SWEAT in 2009 – at that time there were few sex workers in the movement. My first work was as a peer educator doing education on human rights, distributing condoms to other sex workers, and getting them to join the Sisonke movement and into safe spaces to talk together. In 2011 and 2012, I started to become more vocal, become an activist and get training, for example from COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions). I was growing as a person as the movement was growing. I was in the room when the African Sex Worker Alliance was born in Johannesburg. Platforms were being formed to share experiences, sex workers were talking together, and that got me more and more involved and more and more vocal. I was promoted by SWEAT to become a national organiser: I came up with a programme called ‘Empowerment’ and on a personal level I was really feeling myself as powerful and the fear was really gone. I started with 15 sex workers; I’ve now done ‘Empowerment’ with more than 200 sex workers and we’re expanding the work and watching sex workers become active. We watch the fear go and them get stronger and stronger.

I’ve developed power and dignity from my activist work. It gave me the power to answer questions about human rights, the court system, the law. People in my community, and not just sex workers, come to me now to ask advice.

You talk about organisational support and the power of shared experience with others, but why else did your activist voice develop so quickly in a context where sex work is criminalised and many people attack and shame sex workers?

I never realised when I was growing up, but those qualities I had to become powerful in this way, I took them from my mum into my future. I didn’t have much education, we were poor, poor, poor. My mum never had any education at all, she worked in factories and as a cleaner, but she was also a deeply cultured and spiritual person, she was honest, she prayed a lot and she fought for the truth. My uncle tried to force her out of her house. He had the culture behind him, that was normal, people hated her, but she fought for that house. She died in 2010, I have kept the house, it is my mum’s heart, and no one will take it from me either.

Why did you start working with mothers who do sex work in particular?

There was a hard time for me when I was beginning this work of empowerment. I was a sex worker and peer educator and a mother. A lot of the work we were meant to do was about HIV education and prevention. But we all felt the same thing: HIV and safe sex were not the only problems I and other mums faced. We worried about our children’s education, getting enough food for them, struggling with breastfeeding when at work, childcare, what happens to the kids if I die, our problems with their fathers. We also worried about other aspects of our healthcare, getting pap smears, safe abortions. So, we formed ‘Mothers for the Future’ a small support group, maybe 15 or 17 of us at any time.

It’s hard because many mothers cannot be open with their children about their work. They think their children will become very angry and hate them or leave them. It can cause heartbreak when a mother is not ready to tell her children but the neighbours or someone else tells them. And a mother can lose their children, have them taken away by social workers because of their work. I talked to someone last week who had lost their kid in this way.

I didn’t tell my four kids when they were little about what I did for work and even when I was arrested, I never told my family, but now they know. I do not encourage or discourage the mothers I work with to be open. People have to follow their hearts and accept that any result may come about after telling them, positive or negative.

The kids also need help, and that is hard. We have activities and parties for them, to show them support and give them small gifts like toiletries and have opened a new programme for education and sports for these kids. These kids often do not have a lot of support aside from their mothers working and some themselves go into sex work and often we see them taking drugs on the street. The government does not help them and instead criminalises and stigmatises their mothers for working to support them. Criminalisation affects the whole family – how healthy they are, their feeling of safety. There are other things the government can do to better support these families, but we will keep fighting for decriminalisation. We will never stop; we don’t want to wait any longer.

Conclusion

Sex work is illegal in South Africa. South Africa’s government has been prepared to hear arguments for decriminalisation, both in favour of both full decriminalisation, SWEAT’s hope, and an alternative legal set up that criminalises the buyer but not the seller (in the hope of ultimately ending sex work), often known as the Nordic model. Despite years of debate, nothing has happened. Talking to Dlamini about the experiences of mothers who sell sex helped underline for this researcher at least ‘full’ decriminalisation, which may be able to do the most to destigmatise sex work, is the right path forward.

Acknowledgements

Respectful gratitude for Dudu Dlamini for doing this interview and sharing her experiences and also for her wonderful colleagues at SWEAT and the Sisonke coalition for their inspirational work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more information about SWEAT, see the organization’s website: http://www.sweat.org.za/.