Women Are Not Commodities, Human Rights & Social Justice

 A conversation with Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Executive Director of Embrace Dignity on prostitution, power, and the fight for a law that finally protects the vulnerable.

Every morning in cities across South Africa, children walk to school past women standing on street corners. They ask their parents questions. And too often, those parents don't know what to say. It is precisely this everyday silence this collective discomfort that Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge has spent her life refusing to accept.

A former Deputy Minister of Health, former Deputy Speaker of Parliament, and lifelong anti-apartheid activist, Madlala-Routledge co-founded Embrace Dignity in 2010, a Cape Town-based women's human rights organisation dedicated to confronting one of South Africa's most misunderstood forms of gender-based violence: prostitution.

Sitting down with Bush Radio during Human Rights Month. This is what she had to say.

"In every family, we come across these issues. It's better if families can talk openly together so that the children are empowered and can make informed decisions."

Most South Africans don't realise that the law criminalising prostitution dates back to 1957 the Immorality Act, passed during apartheid at a time when interracial relationships were themselves illegal. Decades later, its legacy continues to fall most heavily on those it was never designed to protect.

"The law victimises only those selling sex," Madlala-Routledge explains. "We find that it is women who sell sex who are arrested by the police, harassed by the police, who are made to pay a fine and a lot of the time, they have to go and sell sex simply to be able to pay that fine. They find themselves caught in the system and they can't get out."

This is total criminalisation: both buying and selling sex are illegal. But in practice, enforcement lands almost exclusively on women already pushed to the margins by unemployment, poverty, and structural inequality.

Embrace Dignity is not calling for things to stay as they are. Nor are they calling for full decriminalisation, which they argue would expand demand and normalise harm. Instead, they are advocating for what Madlala-Routledge calls "the equality law” sometimes called the Nordic Model, first passed in Sweden in 1999 and since adopted by Norway, Canada, France, and Ireland.

The principle is clear: decriminalise the selling of sex; maintain criminalisation for buying, pimping, and brothel-keeping.

"Those who are selling sex act obviously out of desperation should be totally decriminalised themselves," she says. "But not the sex industry. Because the harms are inherent in the system of prostitution."

The practical difference matters enormously. Under the current law, a woman cannot report abuse without incriminating herself. She cannot carry a condom without it being used as evidence against her. She cannot go to the police if a buyer refuses to pay, assaults her, or worse.

 

Madlala-Routledge does not allow the conversation to stay abstract for long. She describes a woman who came to Embrace Dignity's attention recently, her arms marked with injection sites from where two men had kept her captive in a garage for two weeks, forcibly injecting her with hard drugs.

"They inject these drugs and make them do things they would not do normally. Very abusive." The sex trade, she insists, is increasingly inseparable from drug trafficking and organised crime. "It thrives largely because it's about trafficking the drugs."

And then there is the corruption. Police find men and women together. The women are arrested. The men pay bribes and walk free.

"The police benefit from a situation of exploitation. The woman is being exploited. They can see that. And yet they take a bribe from the men, because men don't like to be exposed."

"A man says: I've bought you, so you need to do anything I ask you to do — even if it's violent. When money comes into it, this is when the violence comes in."

One of Embrace Dignity's core arguments is about where blame and shame are currently directed and where they should be. HIV statistics track women. Police arrest women. Communities stigmatise women. But the men who buy sex, carry infection, refuse condoms, and perpetrate violence remain largely invisible in the data and in public discourse.

"Nobody is looking at the buyers to say how many have HIV," Madlala-Routledge points out. "And yet we know that HIV is sexually transmitted. So whoever has it, passes it on."

The stigma, she argues, must shift. "Accountability and stigma must go to those who exploit them. And those who exploit them are those who buy them for sex."

A Court Case That Could Change Everything

The legal and political landscape is in flux. A case brought by SWEAT (Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce) calling for the full decriminalisation of prostitution is headed to the Western Cape High Court a ruling with potentially national implications. Embrace Dignity is opposing it.

At the same time, a government draft bill that included decriminalisation as a pillar of the national gender-based violence and femicide strategy was introduced and then quietly withdrawn.

"There's no political will," Madlala-Routledge says plainly. "Political parties need votes and they don't want to talk about this issue openly. And this affects women largely and girls. They are dying. And yet political parties are shying away."

For fifteen years, Embrace Dignity has held this ground insisting that prostitution is not a choice freely made, but a system shaped by poverty, violence, and demand. That women in the sex trade are not criminals to be punished, but people to be protected. That a law change is not only possible it is proven.

"There's absolutely no constitutional right for men to buy sex," Madlala-Routledge says, with the calm certainty of someone who has been saying this for a very long time. "Sex should be about a mutually equal relationship. When money comes into it, this is when the violence comes in."

Take Action with Embrace Dignity

Sign the CAPA Charter — the Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution in Africa — and join a growing movement across the continent to end commercial sexual exploitation.

Go to embracedignity.co.za and become the change.