Suhakam's position that those who receive services from prostitutes be punished is misconceived.

Suhakam said that its findings from detention camps and prisons revealed that the majority of young foreign women detained for prostitution were trafficked into the country, cheated and forced into prostitution by agents of entertainment centres here.

I am sure some of these women might be but I doubt this can be said of the majority.

Many of these foreign women come here in search for money. When they are rounded up in one of these raids by the authorities and found wanting of proper papers and detained, what do you expect them to say in defence if not that they were cheated and forced into their circumstances?

Suhakam's members should conduct their findings by having a drink in any evening around the Beach Club area in Kuala Lumpur. They will be befriended by both foreign women and local women posing as foreign women who are there to market their sexual services.

If Suhakam's members are not interested in their services, they can at least buy these women a drink, and these women will tell how much money they aspire to make here to take back home. They are not coerced. They are just entrepreneurs negotiating for the correct price to be picked up.

The prostitution trade has survived since time immemorial.

Being a human rights organisation, Suhakam should fight for the right and acceptance of these women in their work of commercial sex.

Whilst we do not, on either moral or religious ground, encourage or extol the flesh trade, yet the reality that all persons have a human right to choose their profession and that some women would, by inclination choose sex work has to be grasped and accepted by Suhakam.

I would argue that the stigmatisation of sex workers as immoral and evil and the persecution of them and their customers is a direct violation of human right to work of one's choice and dignity of such work. It is something that Suhakam, as a human rights organisation, should fight to legitimise rather than criminalise!

What we are against is abuse, violence and criminal elements within this trade.

So by all means prosecute the perpetrators including agents or owners of entertainment outlets, if there were proof of cheating, coercion and forced slavery but otherwise fight to legalise this kind of work.

It is only when their sex work is accepted as not illegal that these women will dare to surface and make the proper complaints to the authorities of instances where they are abused, forced, cheated or beaten up by exploiters and criminal elements.

It is only when sex work is decrimininalised that it can be regulated to ensure that the health of those professing this trade and those of their patrons may be monitored and receive regular medical attention to mitigate the problem of the spread of sexually transmittable diseases and HIV to the general population.

It is only when sex work is not stigmatised that one can work towards a time in the future where conditions of sex work can even be legislated to ensure that sex workers are not financially exploited unscrupulously by intermediaries and agents.

To be politically correct with governmental, religious authorities and women groups, Suhakam may find it expedient to justify its anti-sex work stance by recommending the prosecution of customers on dubious findings from its interviews of detainees.

That is however not reality. One should not bring forth all kinds of moral religious and philosophical arguments to justify the continuous suppression of reality that refuses to go away and has been there since the history of humankind began.

If Suhakam strives to work towards an enlightened civil society that continuously seeks to solve its own social problems to bring it to a higher organisation where things are done intelligently and problems worked around and solved, the approach should be realistic and empirical rather than moralistic.