The Global Fund for Women's Position on Prostitution and Trafficking 

The Global Fund for Women is deeply committed to advancing women's human rights. Our grants support initiatives led by groups of women who are making life decisions based on their objective and lived reality. We recognize that the forces that push or pull women into various exploitative personal and labor relations are complex and nuanced. Our grants help women to address the underlying gender, economic, social and political inequalities that enable continued discrimination against them in many arenas.

In most parts of the world, women are forced to make choices within the context of unequal economic systems and a political and cultural reality that is patriarchal and disrespectful of women's agency, dignity and equality. We are particularly concerned about the impact of globalization that has resulted in mass scale migration of women working in unregulated and unprotected labor sectors such as agriculture, domestic work and prostitution.

We oppose the use of all forms of coercion, deceit and violence that result in the trafficking of women as articulated in the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementary to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (the Crime Convention), 2000.

We oppose the growing militarization of societies that creates and maintains conditions in which women and girls are further devalued and made vulnerable to increased violence and coercion.

We strive to hear the voices of women in prostitution; we support their demands to be recognized as workers in the sex industry, with full labor rights and protections, full access to health care and benefits, and equal treatment under the law.We oppose the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work as these measures make sex workers more vulnerable to disease, exploitation, violence and fear.

We support the struggles of women migrant workers in unregulated and unprotected labor sectors to claim full labor rights and protections, full access to health care, and benefits and equal treatment under the law.

In conclusion, we believe that it is only through strengthening the overall economic, social and political position of women in every society, and by ensuring that women have voice and agency in all societies, that women's human rights can be guaranteed and protected.