Monthly Archives: January 2015

Commission on the Status of Women 2015 in New York

9. – 20.03.2015 – UN Headquarter – New York, USA –

UN-Women-logocsw59

The fifty-ninth session of the Commission on the Status of Women will take place at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 9 to 20 March 2015. Representatives of Member States , UN entities, and ECOSOS-accredited non-governmental organizations (NGO) from all regions of the world attend the session.

Mrs Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of CATW (http://www.catwinternational.org/), will moderate following panel:

“20 Years After Beijing:
Prostitution, Sex Trafficking and the Question for Equality”
– New Voices, New Models, New Solutions –

Panelists are: Dr. Ingeborg Kraus (Initiator of the Appeal “Stop Sexbuying” of the German Trauma Experts), Rachel Moran (founder and director of SPACE INternational, Author of “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution”), Vednita Carter (also a “Survivor”, founder and directorof “Breaking Free” in Minnesota) und Dr. Melissa Farley (founder and director of “Prostitution Research and Education”). Please look here for further information: http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw59-2015

Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

At international level Melissa Farley a.o. have published the most relevant results with data from nine different countries (2004). According the study two-thirds of the examined 854 women in prostitution showed symptoms of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which were comparable with them of healthcare-seeking veterans, women who fled to shelters, rape survivors and refugees who were exposed to state-sanctioned torture. The intensity of trauma-related symptoms depended on the intensity of the activity in prostitution. Women with multiple suitors reported harder physical symptoms. The longer the women were active in prostitution, the more likely they were infected with a sexually transmitted disease.

Click here for the study “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” by Dr. Melissa Farley.

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Trauma Repetition and Revictimization Following Physical and Sexual Abuse

Dr. med. Wolfgang Wöller

The tendency of victims of physical or sexual childhood abuse to become revictimized in later life has well been documented empirically. Moreover, there is a high stability of violent and abusive relationships. The aim of this paper was to summarize perspectives from psychodynamic theory, attachment theory, and posttraumatic stress research to explain revictimization phenomena. The term repetition compulsion has little explanatory valuewithout additional theoretical assumptions.

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Tanja Rahms Speech at the International Abolitionist Congress, Paris 2014

After 3 years in prostitution, I almost jumped out a window – from the third floor. That was how prostitution made me feel, – that I had nothing to live for. I had been sexually violated so many times, that there was almost nothing left of me – neither inside, or outside. I was nothing. I was worth nothing. I felt completely useless. I was a machine for other people’s amusement, their sexual desires and their perverse exploitation.

I spent 9 years in therapy, to get where I am today. And even though I persist in telling about the violence experienced in prostitution I still live with the traumas and the re-traumatizing. But we, as survivors have to. We have to keep on telling about the violence, so no one will ever forget or be manipulated into thinking, that prostitution is even close to something you can define as sexwork.

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