No help, no medicine, no programs, no interest from academics, public health institutions, etc results in brutal and lethal suffering for poor women and their families. On the other hand, by the language they use to talk about prostitution systems, WPA authors practice and perpetuate serious forms of structural violence against poor women and children. Even in their own vignette of Lata, a prostituted teenager, which is such a typical case in prostitution or the rape tourism industry, which exemplifies so many of the forms of violence suffered by prostituted children and women, the authors use mostly a falsely non-violent language that serves to make invisible and push away from conscience the very violence the authors are describing.
Authors can come up with something less irresponsible than that.
Albeit WPA provides some very important information, plus heartbreaking profiles of diverse women, nationally and internationally brutalized by AIDS, plus the discussion of various serious problems regarding poor women and AIDS, it felt, in my view, like two steps backwards, one step forward. Purporting to raise issues of the violence of poverty towards women and their families P of which prostitution is a significant destroyer of human rights-the authors end up caught up in the same problem they are trying to denounce.