Prostitutes find gold in Chirimba, The weekend nation

Date: September 7, 2002

Sex workers find a new location to work and to evade law enforcement agents.
Sex workers find a new location to work and to evade law enforcement agents.

This article may be used to:

Examine the coverage of sex workers in the media.

Trainer’s notes

Sex work is a problematic area of reporting in the media for the following reasons:

Stories on sex workers are often veiled in a tone of sarcasm, jest and humour with no regard for the dignity of the person.
Stories are told in a sensational way. Very few of them convey the problems that these women face.
Requests for confidentiality are ignored.
Stories focus almost exclusively on sex workers and not their clients.

In the case study, ‘Prostitutes find gold in Chirimba’, the derogatory term ‘prostitutes’ instead of sex workers is used throughout the story which carries the stigma of women who are ‘loose’, ‘immoral’ and involved in a criminal activity. The language also refers to the women as sex objects: ‘women lining the streets in their semi-nude attires’; or the reference to the new area where the reporter states that the the women ‘cam expose themselves to customers…’

The language used also depicts the sex workers as ‘women on the run’. The reporter refers to their ‘flushing out’ and ‘removal’ from an area, as well as to their ‘invading’ other areas alluding to sex workers being viewed as ‘unwanted’ or as ‘a bad influence’. This is further emphasized by the police sourced in the story who describe the women as ‘elusive’ and ‘clever’ in their ability to evade the law.

The story is told through the voices and perspective of men – the police and a male resident. A veil reference is made to the clients when the resident attributes the rise in the number of women in one area to the emergence of more bars and nightclubs in the area. But the story primarily focuses on the women as the ‘bad ones’ and not the clients. No women are sourced in the story. The sex workers are written about and spoken about as passive participants.

By focusing only on women as sex workers, the media sends a message that it is women who lure men into sex.

The headline is misleading in that the ‘gold’ referred to could at first be construed to mean that the women have become involved in a gold panning trade. But the ‘gold’ referred to here is more clients and money as they move into a new area.

This article is a typical example of how the media covers sex work. Although it does not have sensationalism or jest found in many articles, it still fails to explore the reasons why Malawian women go into sex work; why women and not their clients are considered the criminals in Malawi; and there are no voices and perspective which raise the human rights and gender issues which continue to push women and young girls into the trade.

This article also illustrates how and when women often make news in the media. The objectification of women is not only in images which portray women as sex objects, but also occurs through what seems to be a media obsession of tagging women as sexual objects by only bringing women to the news agenda when they are involved in sex work or other forms of deviant behaviour.

Training exercises

Exercise one: Study the article ‘Prostitutes find gold in Chirimba’ and discuss the following:

What stereotypes of sex workers are conveyed in the article?
How are these reinforced by language?
What does the article convey with regard to the dignity of the persons covered?
Does the story give a sense of what the women face?
What issues are missing from the story?

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