Reem Alsalem

Reem Alsalem (born 1976) is a Jordanian independent consultant and former civil servant. Since August 2021 she has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She is gender-critical, and has been accused of being anti-trans by LGBT+ and women's groups.

Biography

Alsalem was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1976. She was educated at the American University in Cairo where she completed a master's degree in International Relations in 2001. She subsequently graduated from the University of Oxford in 2003 with a Masters in Human Rights Law.

She was employed for 17 years as an international civil servant by the UNHCR where she worked with refugees in 13 countries. She left in 2016 to work as an independent consultant on humanitarian and gender issues. She speaks Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish.

Alsalem was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls and took up the role in July 2021. She listed five priorities for her work there:

* intersections between gender-based violence against women, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression;
* violence against indigenous women and girls;
* gender-based violence in the context of disaster risk reduction and climate change;
* psychological violence against women; and
* relationship between the condition of statelessness, gender, and gender-based violence.

Prostitution and pornography

Alsalem has expressed support for the abolitionist approach to prostitution and voiced opposition to the pornography industry. She developed these views in her thematic report titled ''Prostitution and violence against women and girls'', presented to the Human Rights Council in June 2024. She says prostitution is a consequence of patriarchal structures, economic inequalities, and conflict situations. She also highlights the intersection of racism and prostitution, noting that women and girls from marginalised groups, particularly those facing multiple forms of discrimination, are disproportionately affected and often enter the sex trade due to socioeconomic precarity.

Legal and feminist scholars Susana T. Fried, Alice M. Miller, Rupsa Mallik, Ivana Radačić and Esteban Restrepo-Saldarriaga criticized Alsalem, saying that she misused evidence and ignored dissenting voices in her report on "prostitution and violence"; they wrote that "there is no agreement in international human rights law about what laws best protect the rights of people who sell sex" and that "evidence is strong that criminal law making both the buying and selling of sex a crime hurts the very people who are most at risk".

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