Giving sex workers condoms and advice will not bring down HIV rates, says Elena Reynaga, general secretary of the Latin American and Caribbean Sex Workers Network. But giving them their rights will.

Elena Reynaga was 15 when she married, 17 when her husband left her with two children and she began selling her body for sex and 47 when she learned to read and write. It has been an unconventional education, but she believes on some matters she is better informed than the experts who devise social policy in long office hours over their computer screens. She knows that handing out condoms and advice to sex workers will not bring down their high rates of HIV.

What will, she says, in defiance of the greater part of the western world which thinks the trade is morally repugnant and should be driven further into the shadows, is legalisation. She wants healthcare, education and the protection of the law, like any other profession. And she wants the donor community to help sex workers get it.

Reynaga is General Secretary of the Latin American and Caribbean Sex Workers Network (RedTraSex) and I met her when she was in Europe at the invitation of the International HIV/Aids Alliance and anticipating a meeting with the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. She is taking the argument to the Fund. It is of little use giving condoms and HIV prevention advice to women who are harrassed by the police and abused and cheated by their clients because of their illegitimacy, she says. If you want sex workers to negotiate with their clients, you have to give them status. They have to have some rights.
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