Letters to Juliet

by Charlotte Page

This is not a love story.

I took the title for this blog post from the latest summer romance film ‘Letters to Juliet’. It’s a feel-good movie about a lost true love and a letter written to Shakespeare’s character Juliet. However, seeing trailers and posters for the film everywhere just reminds me of a Juliet I met recently. She was far away from the naive and lovestruck teenager of Shakespeare’s creation and even further from the glossy Hollywood film that’s gracing our cinema screens.

Juliet is 15 years old. She lives in Zambia and is in grade 8 at school. She is also a prostitute who supports herself by selling her body for £1.30 – less than the amount we would spend on a coffee. Having lost her parents at a young age to HIV/AIDS, and needing an income to provide for herself and her grandmother, she turned to the only way of making money that she could. Juliet’s story is not unusual. With so many young girls in poverty and a ready market for sex at a price, this happens a lot.

There is a culture among many of the men that buying sex is normal, something they are entitled to do and their wives have no say over. They will also pay up to ten times the normal price for unprotected sex, caring little about the possibility of spreading HIV/AIDS or leaving the girls pregnant. I saw the situation in Zambia for myself when we were taken out to a bar one weekday evening by a local woman who runs a project with commercial sex workers. At first glance everything seemed like a normal night out in the UK – loud music, men milling around a bar, women in groups chatting and drinking, drunk men dancing with girls. However, all of the women in the bar who were not part of our group were ‘working’ the bar and the men with them were negotiating prices then disappearing outside. This scene was being repeated in bars all over town and it was a real eye opener into the scale of the demand for bought sex. Meeting Juliet and the other girls was a complete shock to me, not because I didn’t know this happens, but because it put a real person’s face and story to the theoretical knowledge.

The project I visited is working with the women, bringing them together and helping them to gain skills to provide an alternative income. It seems a small start compared to the scale of the problem, but working with these women and girls to help them shape their own futures seems like the right place to start. I started by pointing out that this is not a love story and it isn’t if what you are expecting is letters, romance and a cheesy soundtrack. The whole reason I wear black on Thursdays is to remind me of stories like Juliet’s and that we are standing beside women who are victims of gender discrimination and violence and standing up for true equality.

I think that is a love story in itself and though at the moment there is no happy ending, at least we’re still telling the story so far and demanding a change in the plot.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Perry