“I don’t know any woman whose own personal sexuality drives her to be with a succession of strangers, catering to these strange men’s desires while struggling to uphold the very minimum of safety precautions, until we are sore, raw, swollen, chaffing, and torn. This is not consent, this is coercion. This is not sex work, this is rape. This is economic exploitation. This is women’s oppression” – Chelsea Geddes, NZ writer, artist, survivor (from exhibition catalogue foreword)

Artwork: Isla Macgregor/Karla Gjini

Renee Gerlich, my friend, writer, feminist activist and co-conspirator, has curated a special global exhibition of women’s groups from around the world engaging in activism against the sexploitation of women and girls.

Renee Gerlich

The exhibition opens in Wellington, New Zealand, September 25. I am delighted that Prostitution Narratives: stories of survival in the sex trade co-edited by myself and Caroline Norma, is part of this exhibition, along with other Spinifex Press titles.  Collective Shout’s work will also be included. Renee has compiled a 40-page booklet with colour images and an essay about the exhibition, its contributors and its message, with a powerful foreword by Chelsea Geddes, extracted above.

More information about this significant and timely exhibition in this media release:

Women’s exhibition opposing sexploitation opens September 25 in Wellington

The New Zealand media has recently released reports revealing that girls as young as nine are being purchased for sexual exploitation from their own homes in New Zealand.

These reports are timely: the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) – which saw the pimping and purchase of women fully decriminalised in 2003 – is due for review in 2018. Revelations of child trafficking and exploitation should be contributing to public pressure for a critical review. An exhibition in Wellington this month, called Too Much Truth, aims to do the same.

From September 25 until October 1, Wellington’s Thistle Hall will host the exhibition Too Much Truth: Women’s global resistance to sexploitation.

The exhibition will present posters, paintings, magazines, photographs and street art by over 35 sex trade abolitionist organisations, activists and artists worldwide. Many of artists and activists involved with Too Much Truth have survived prostitution.

Among the organisations represented will be Stígamót in Iceland, Filipino organization Gabriela, transnational feminist organisation Af3irm, Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, and photographs from Apne Aap in India, which runs schools to help save girls from a system of “hereditary” prostitution. Copies of feminist magazine off our backs will be available as well as Spinifex press publications Prostitution Narratives and Radically Speaking.

All groups, artists and activists with work in Too Much Truth are survivors and feminists who advocate for the abolitionist model of prostitution policy, which uses fines paid by pimps and “sex” buyers to assist prostituted people out of the sex trade.

Under New Zealand’s legislation, which is promoted by the sex trade lobby worldwide, pimps and “sex buyers” become entrepreneurs and customers, and violence tends to be minimised.

For instance, in 2016, NZPC spokesperson Anna Reed referred to sex trafficking as a “working holiday”. Too Much Truth curator Renée Gerlich says that public debate on prostitution policy has been monopolised by the sex trade lobby and the politically conservative for too long. “The issue is a feminist issue, and a decolonisation issue,” she says.

“The global sex trade lobby cleverly markets prostitution as a woman’s “choice”, and even openly persuades women to “call ourselves whores” in the interests of legitimising the industry. But in New Zealand and worldwide, poor and indigenous women are disproportionately represented in prostitution. The push to legitimise the industry and call it women’s own “choice” is nothing but sexism and racism. That these narratives have also been sold to women in the guise of so-called third wave “feminism” is a tragedy.”

The exhibition Too Much Truth will show how the sex trade is an industry that women in India to South Africa, Germany to Iceland and Canada to New Zealand are imprisoned in, and fighting against for their lives – and the freedom of all women.

Too Much Truth will be dedicated to the legacy of Grace Molisa, ni-Vanuatu freedom fighter, feminist, poet, publisher, educator and abolitionist.