trafficking

Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil, by Paul Amar, in Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 513.

. . . Operation Princess and its sister campaigns were launched by the police in seeming disregard for the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil. The Pentecostal evangelical leaders of Rio  . . . gave biblical legitimacy to the campaign, brushing aside questions of legality or sex workers’ resistance to being ‘rescued’. . . .

. . . proclaimed he would purge corruption and promote moral rectitude . . . by bringing back the spirit of the Vice Police stations (Delegacias de Costumes), which had been closed for the most part in the 1940s when prostitution was legalized. Simultaneously, President Lula declared a nationwide war against sex trafficking . . .

. . . ‘Operation Princess’ resonated perfectly with the 19th-century iconography of missionarism, child rescue, and abolition in Brazil. . . Avenida Princesa Isabel is the grand boulevard that brings travelers . . . into Copacabana Beach, a mixed-class and mixed-race coastal community that also serves as a center of sex tourism and international diplomatic conferences. Copacabana was a focal point of the new vice-policing operations. . . the statue of Princess Isabel, with her arms outstretched, blessing those she liberated from slavery and radiating a spirit of tolerance and welcome at the gateway to the topless dance clubs and all-night saunas of the Lido.  . .

. . . [the] Black Movement in Brazil ha[s] rigorously critiqued the ‘Princess Isabel Syndrome’, or the commemoration of this child monarch as the agent of abolition. . . it takes credit away from the centuries of sacrifice and mobilization among Brazil’s Afro-descendants and their efforts . . . Thus, the princess metaphor in Rio de Janeiro . . . resonates vibrantly with the politics of social ‘whitening’ (embrancamento), infantilization of black slave agency, and religious moralization.

. . . By the time Lula assumed power in 2003, a massive child-rescue initiative was deemed essential to Brazil’s plans to legitimize and empower itself on the world stage, as well as to address social-justice concerns at home. For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic global south and make a claim to the proposed new seat on the Security Council, it wanted to change the image of Brazilian law enforcement from death squad to rescue mission, authoritarian to humanitarian. The national landscape had to be cleared of lawless, victimized children.

‘Operation Carnival’ became the first test of this revived vice-police campaign. As if to mock the new police operations, a ‘Group A’ Samba School . . .  celebrated ‘Prostitution in Copacabana’ as their theme that year; their 4,000 sequined dancers, the ‘Lions of Nova Iguaçu’, marched through the downtown Sambadrome, singing a samba about the joys of the sex trade. In its debut, the police’s anti-sex-trafficking campaign netted a total of one arrest . . .

During ‘Operation Shangrilá’, the Federal Police raided a showboat in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Forty Brazilian prostitutes and twenty-nine American tourists were arrested for having committed the crime of ‘sex tourism’. This incident was immediately trumpeted as a major bust of a ‘human trafficking’ operation. . . . But . . no Brazilian law had been violated. None of the prostitutes were underage, nor had they violated any pimping or brothel laws. The only way this situation could be imagined as ‘trafficking’ was because the tourists had crossed international frontiers, although without breaking any laws or visa restrictions. Furthermore, ‘sex tourism’ is not against any Brazilian law, unless one assumes that sex tourism is the same thing as forced sex trafficking.

Everleigh Club, Chicago

When critics bring up the similarity of today’s trafficking brouhaha with white-slavery scares, they most often point to William Steads investigation for the Pall Mall Gazette in London in the late 19th century. In the April 2008 issue of Reason Magazine, Joanne McNeill reviews Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Karen Abbott. I’ve highlighted some phrases that show how the same contradictory interpretations of ‘the evidence’ occurred back then and the same rhetoric from those who hate prostitution. 

The ‘White Slavery’ Panic: Anti-prostitution activists have been equating sex work with slavery for over a century. 

In 1907 a group of evangelicals visited Chicago’s Everleigh Club brothel, where they handed out leaflets that said, “No ‘white slave’ need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free.” According to the Illinois poet Edgar Lee Masters, an Everleigh Club regular, “the girls laughed in their faces.” In Sin in the Second City, the Atlanta-based journalist Karen Abbott recounts how Minna Everleigh, one of the club’s proprietors, “explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that [a doctor] examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada [Everleigh, her sister and co-proprietor] would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drinks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join the house. No captives here, Reverends.”

The Everleigh Club was an ornate mansion. Thirty themed boudoirs (“the Japanese Parlor,” “the Moorish Room,” “the Egyptian Room”) included absurd touches of decadence, such as hidden buttons to ring for champagne and a fountain that fired a jet of perfume. The city’s finest chefs prepared the women’s dinners. They read poetry by the fire with guests, who included the writers Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner. Sometimes Minna and Ada let swarms of butterflies fly loose throughout the house.

Some anti-prostitution activists nevertheless believed the Everleigh ladies were no different from slaves. Then as now, opponents of prostitution assumed that no woman in her right mind consensually exchanges sex for money. Abbott challenges that view in her account of Chicago’s red light district at the turn of the last century. She interweaves the stories of sex workers and clientele, evangelical activists and conservative bureaucrats, explaining how the term “white slavery” was routinely applied to consenting adults. Reading her historical account, you can hear echoes of that debate in the current crusade against sex trafficking, which similarly blurs the line between coercion and consent.

The Everleigh sisters, Abbott notes, believed a sex worker was “more than an unwitting conduit for virtue. An employee in a business, she was an investment and should be treated as such, receiving nutritious meals, a thorough education, expert medical care, and generous wages. In their house, a courtesan would make a living as viable as—and more lucrative than—those earned by the thousands of young women seeking work in cities as stenographers and sweatshop seamstresses, department store clerks and domestics. The sisters wanted to uplift the profession, remove its stain and stigma, argue that a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.”

The attempt to portray prostitutes as professionals never made much headway against the tendency to view them as victims. At the beginning of Sin in the Second City, Abbott describes an event in 1887 that forever changed the American public’s perception of sex workers. Authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp, finding nine women working as prostitutes. Eight accepted their prison sentences, but the ninth woman protested that she was tortured and forced into sex slavery. The lumberyard proprietors claimed the women were well aware of what they were hired to do; “the job description,” Abbott notes, “made no mention of cutting trees.” But the public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

It was 20 years before another case of “white slavery” was reported in a Midwestern newspaper. But in the meantime, rumors of girls who were “trafficked” into sex slavery began to circulate. In 1899 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union missionary Charlton Edholm reported, “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks at this time, but little white girls —thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our Communion tables.” Perhaps they found themselves in a “false employment snare,” in which a young rural girl answered a city want ad and found herself locked in a brothel, her clothes held for ransom. Or maybe a gentleman from the big city, after plying her with drinks or drugs, deflowered her and sold her to a pimp.

Around the same time, anti-prostitution evangelical groups revised their platforms. Victorian society previously had reviled prostitutes as lost women who reduced men to animals. The rhetorical shift conveniently removed the prostitute’s responsibility for her actions. “Reformers across the country repeated and embellished Edholm’s narratives, panders used them as handy instruction manuals, and harlots memorized all the ways they might be tricked or trapped,” Abbott writes. These rumors reinforced rural Midwesterners’ fears of losing their children to the dirty, crime-ridden streets of Chicago. “Never before in civilization,” wrote Hull House founder Jane Addams in 1909, “have such numbers of girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Read the rest at Reason.

Over the 15 years I’ve studied migration, I’ve seen remarkable consistency in the reasons migrants give for travelling to other countries to work, whether they end up in factories or brothels. The report Assessment of Mobility and HIV Vulnerability among Myanmar Migrant Sex Workers and Factory Workers in Mae Sot District, Tak Province, Thailand, published by IOM-Bangkok in 2007, describes qualitative and quantitative research to assess HIV vulnerability among migrant sex workers and migrant factory workers. I’ve reproduced a few small excerpts that show the economic overlaps and interdependencies amongst migrant workers in both factories and brothels and the people that facilitate their travels and jobs. 

‘About crossing the border to Thailand

A range of companions and contacts facilitate the migrant’s journey to Thailand. Many cross the border with relative ease together with a family member or friends who had been to the Thai side previously. . . .

Some . . .  are brought to the Thai side of the border through the employment of “carriers” or brokers (commonly referred to as gae-ri in Bamar or nai nah in Thai), who offer migrants job placement opportunities that would otherwise be almost impossible to achieve without a contact. . . .

Brokers are present on both sides of the border and seek to make money through providing transport and employment assistance to migrants in need.

In the context of sex work, some brokers inform the women about the specific type of work prior to providing assistance while others merely explain that the women could make a substantial amount of money sitting and talking with customers at a bar.

There is evidence to suggest that brokers provide the initial capital for the women to migrate to Thailand and then sell them to a karaoke bar or brothel. The women are then bound to work off the amount of money that was paid by the brothel to the broker.

Not all brokers work in conjunction with the brothels and karaoke bars in Mae Sot. Some facilitate contact with factories and farms and are paid directly by the migrant. . .

Factory versus sex work

Though factory work is certainly the most sought after type of employment, it is not consistently available. Many migrants are forced to wait several months for positions or find other endeavours as day labourers, farmhands, construction workers or housemaids, or simply return home. “Those who come back say if you work for one year here you can’t even save enough to build a bamboo hut, whereas if you work in Thailand for one year, it is possible to build a proper house.”6

Commercial sex services in Mae Sot District tend to be located around construction sites and factories. These establishments employ mostly female migrant workers and tend to cater to Thai nationals. . . . “if available, male migrant workers will seek out karaoke women or sex workers who are of the same language group in order to communicate more easily . . .”.21

The narratives of the sex workers often described the following environment: . . .  They usually work for an initial four to eight months. In most instances this allows them to save a substantial amount of revenue, which they in turn use to invest in a business or other endeavour in Myanmar. After paying off any debt owed to the brothel or karaoke boss, several of the respondents returned to Myanmar. . . and began a small business, such as a teashop, or provide for the family to continue working as farmers. 17

All the sex workers that took part in the discussions said they wanted to stop working in the profession and were actively building their savings for the future. One 24-year-old sex worker said: “I have to work here like I am a businesswoman. It’s good to work for one, two months or at the most four to five months. I work till I get some things for my kids, like a house, then I have the capital to invest.” After returning home and new difficulties have arisen, many young women return to their old life in Mae Sot, a life that provided them with enough money for their dependents and their future. This story of migration was described very often during the discussions and interviews. Some respondents said they returned to Mae Sot as many as three or four times.’

Sex at the Margins has now been reviewed 17 times in academic journals! And those journals focus on many different fields: sociology, anthropology, migration, feminism, gender, geography - here’s a full list. I marvel especially when someone I admire admires my book. Dan Allman, who wrote M is for mutual, A is for acts, has published a review of Sex at the Margins for the journal Sexualities. To be compared to Clifford Geertz means being understood, and what is better than that? And how about a comparison with Camille Paglia? Here’s Dan’s review.

Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007.

Some books about prostitution and sex trafficking can make for challenging reading. Not because of the subject matter necessarily, but because of the ways contemporary politics and voice give rise to a kind of morally-charged discourse.

What makes Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry so enlightening, is that while it is very much a book about prostitution and sex trafficking and the ways in which societies have evolved to culturally construct the regulation of sex work within free labour market practices, on another level it is a book about how history, modern migration patterns and the marginality of the ‘other’, and the rise of the social have come together to shape European and global sex markets.

For the book’s author, Laura María Agustín, much earlier writings evade ‘experiences and points of view that do not fit, silencing difference and producing unease in those who do not see themselves as included’ (p. 9).

The observations that ground Agustín’s study of sex at the margins began during the 1990s while she worked along the US/Mexican border with those seeking asylum in the USA. Such experiences are supplemented with work to document NGO activities in the Caribbean, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Spain – all of which provide rich loam for Agustín’s analytic replanting of tourism, migration and how women within different sectors of the labour market are routinely conceptualized by a variety of helping social sectors.

Throughout her journeys, Agustín’s ‘position in the field was a mix of insider, outsider, stakeholder, political actor and researcher’ which ‘shifted according to the conditions of the moment’ (p. 141).

In the book, such multifaceted positioning is complimented by an approach to fieldwork which is anthropological in theory and methodology. This is primarily because of the ability of this disciplinary lens to avoid the moralizing frameworks and the labelling of the buying and selling of sex as ‘deviance, victimisation or violence’ (p. 137).

Embracing an ambiguity somewhere between participant, observer and informant such as that promoted by Clifford Geertz as at the heart of successful anthropological research, Agustín describes and justifies her shifting roles and the perspectives they allow as a form of multi-sited ethnography. Part of the work’s success is due to the author’s ability to weave both first and third person narratives in such a way as to maintain the reader’s interest without diverging from the intrinsically academic nature of an argument which positions social programming aimed at helping migrants as a form of social control.

The book succeeds also in its contribution of an outstandingly detailed and researched history of prostitution, which is used to lay the groundwork for a nod to the governmentality school of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, and an emphasis on how the helping professions have developed beyond charitable foundations to a form of bonded solidarity, and in the process have come to label and marginalize the very women they seek to help.

At its core, Agustín’s work takes on the polemic of prostitution and contextualizes it relative to three kinds of professions: domestic work, caring activities and sex services. It then applies changing theories of tourism and migration to help explain how sex work has come to be uniquely positioned at the margins. It describes how rescue industries’ tactics and practices reproduce a prostitute discourse, essentially perpetuating the divide between the morally-sound helpers and the morally-corrupt helped, suggesting that ‘if the definition of the “prostitute” was to change to describe only suffering victims, perhaps the conflict over terms could be resolved’ (p. 181).

While Sex at the Margins is not politically neutral, it does pay homage to its politic through evidence, analysis and canny interpretation. This is in large part why the book manages to triumph over the intelligent but often-lacking literature which has preceded it.

As one might say of the scholarly writings of Geertz or Goffman, were Agustín’s new book to be expanded or elaborated at all, it could well be through further detail of the successes and also challenges of combining a historian’s reading with an objectivist’s ethnography and a participant’s observation.

Yet at the same time, it is through an attention to multiple perspectives and diverse sources that makes Agustín a scholarly storyteller of the best kind. Well travelled, observant, erudite and extremely knowledgeable, she reminds one of Camille Paglia at her most formidable – only dare say sexier, and a touch more caustic.

Sure to be interrogated for her perspective while respected for her scholarship, Agustín and her new work promise to contribute new thoughts to the contentious debates between the growing minority who see migrant sex work as a contextually viable migrant labour practice, and the steadfast majority who declare that prostitution is always, in all situations, the antithesis of love.

Dan Allman
The University of Edinburgh, UK and University of Toronto, Canada

I published Forget Victimisation in 2003, but the more migration is discussed in the mainstream, the more we see two reductionist visions: one that blames migrants as grasping criminals, the other that sees them as sad victims. Unfortunately many people with leftist sympathies and visions fall into the trap of victimisation.

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status. Read the rest of this entry »

I just gave a talk about irregular migration and informal-sector jobs, including in the sex industry, at a conference in Copenhagen. The talk was well-received, but as always most people say they have not heard my point of view before. So to make sure everyone realises that my ideas are not the result of an ideology about prostitution, I run this photo again of a poster prepared by migrant sex workers (self-identified so) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre.

See for yourself the list of reasons migrant sex workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for opposing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on all rescuers’ good intentions, but it shows how they obviously haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful!  The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has terrible consequences both for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of all nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has extensive interesting information!

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.

How is it feminist, if the goal is improving society and achieving more equality amongst human beings, to focus on crime and punishment? Published in 2001, this article provoked horror in some sectors. Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime?

Sex workers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

In the movement to construct a discourse of ‘violence against women’, and thus to raise consciousness about kinds of mistreatment which before were invisible, the stage has been reached where defining crime and achieving punishment appears to be the goal. While it is progressive to raise consciousness about violence and exploitation in an attempt to deter the commitment of crimes, I hope to show that the present emphasis on discipline is very far from a utopic vision and that we should now begin to move toward other suggestions for solutions.

The following argument uses the example of prostitution or ‘sexual exploitation’ as an instance of ‘violence against women’, but the approach can apply to any attempt to deal with not only definitions of gender and sexual violence but with proposals to deal with them. When applied to adult prostitution, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ attempts to change language to make ‘voluntary’ prostitution impossible. For those who wish to ‘abolish’ prostitution, therefore, this change in terms represents progress, for now language itself will not be complicit with the violence involved. For those who may or may not want to ‘abolish’ prostitution but who in the present put the priority on improving the everyday lot of prostitutes, this language change totalizes a variety of situations involving different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose practical solutions. When applied to the prostitution of children, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ represents a project to change perceptions about childhood. For those who believe that the current western model of childhood as a time of innocence should become the ‘right’ of all children in the world, this term is very important.

Criminalization of clients

Efforts to change sexist, racist and other discriminatory forms of language have long been a focus of projects of social justice in western societies, and the push to define ‘violence against women’ clearly forms part of this movement. Along with this, we see a strong move to have actions that fall within these new definitions proclaimed as crimes and their perpetrators punished. If prostitution is globally redefined as sexual exploitation (by ‘globally’ I mean that no distinctions are made according to whether prostitutes say they ‘chose’ sex work to any extent), therefore, all those who purchase sexual services, called usually ‘clients’, become ‘exploiters’. Read the rest of this entry »

English below. Mucha gente no entiende cómo es posible que haya tanto rechazo y acciones policiales en contra de las trabajadoras sexuales migrantes en Europa y sin embargo siguen estando tantas allí, ejerciendo la prostitución. El otro día coloqué un video sobre redadas en España que demostró cuán normal se han vuelto. También puse algo sobre algunos taxistas que no quieren que la policía mallorquina pasen tanto tiempo acosando a sus pasajeras del oeste de Africa. Many people don’t understand how there can be so much protest and police action against migrant prostitutes in Europe and yet there are always so many there.

Este artículo de Barcelona se enfoca en el grupo que molesta más a los europeos: las mujeres negras de Nigeria y paises vecinos, y explica los impedimentos a sacarlas: 1) la prostitución en sí no es delito en España; 2) se les detiene por una infracción menor, a la ordenanza cívica, o bien 3) porque no tienen papeles que demuestran su permiso de estar; así que 4) se les intenta expulsar del país; pero 5) no se puede acreditar a cuál país estarían destinadas; o 6) se van las mujeres en vez de mantenerse localizables para cumplir los requisitos burocráticos. ¿Qué tal? This article from Barcelona focuses on the group that bothers Europeans most: black women from Nigerian and neighbouring countries, and explains the obstacles to getting rid of them: 1) prostitution is not a crime in Spain; 2) they are arrested for a minor infraction, of a civic ordinance, or 3) because they have no papers demonstrating their permission to be there; so that 4) they try to expel them; but 5) they cannot prove what country they would be sent back to; or 6) the women go somewhere else instead of staying where police can locate them and get them to fulfil the paperwork necessary. Some contradiction, no?

El artículo interesa también porque dice secamente que no se puede saber fácilmente cuáles de estas mujeres son víctimas y cuáles están vendiendo sexo porque les parece la mejor opción del momento. The article also says, as though it’s not big news, that it is not easy to know which of the women are victims and which are selling sex because it seems to them to be their best present option.

Detienen a 100 prostitutas irregulares en La Rambla en lo que va de año

Europa Press, 23 agosto 2009

Barcelona: La Policía Nacional ha detenido en lo que va de año a más de un centenar de prostitutas de nacionalidad nigeriana en situación irregular en seis redadas en La Rambla de Barcelona, en las que se identificaron a cerca de un centenar de ellas en cada una de las operaciones. Según han informado fuentes de la Jefatura Superior de Policía de Catalunya, en 2008 se realizaron menos operaciones de este tipo, en las que se detuvo a 50 prostitutas en tres redadas por infracción a la Ley de Extranjería, todas ellas nigerianas. En estos últimos años han proliferado las prostitutas de esta nacionalidad en La Rambla, que en ocasiones protagonizan altercados con potenciales clientes, muchos de ellos turistas, a los que abordan en plena vía y a los que a veces tratan de robar.

Según explicaron las citadas fuentes, la mayoría llega en una situación muy precaria a la ciudad, después de un viaje que empezó cruzando el Estrecho en patera, y con una deuda con quien les ha facilitado su llegada a España. Algunas fuentes apuntan a que esta deuda puede servir para explotarlas, aunque no es fácil determinar si son víctimas de redes de proxenetismo o si ejercen la prostitución ante la falta de otra salida.

La Policía no puede detenerlas por prostitución, ya que se trata de una infracción a la ordenanza de civismo del Ayuntamiento, aunque sí las detiene por infringir la Ley de Extranjería, si bien la mayoría de ellas no tiene ningún tipo de documento y es imposible expulsarlas porque no se puede acreditar oficialmente cuál es su país de origen.

En el caso de abrirles un expediente de expulsión, muchas veces éste no prospera porque las mujeres no son localizables y no siguen el procedimiento, que requiere del cumplimiento de varios trámites.

It’s become possible to talk about sex work in the same breath as other jobs for migrants, finally - at least occasionally. At a migration conference in Copenhagen called Metropolis, which takes place from 14-18 September, I will give a plenary talk on Friday the 18th for a theme called Irregular Migration and Labour Market Activities. From the programme:

Irregular migration is often linked to the informal labour market, where on the one hand economic gains at times lead to exploitation of foreign workers and on the other hand facilitates opportunities for socio-economic mobility. This rather paradoxical nature of the informal/irregular labour market will be debated and seen in the context of different trades as for example caretaking, domestic work, construction, agriculture, and the sex industry.   

I will mention trafficking in the context of irregular migration in general. By the way, these adjectives - irregular, unauthorised, informal, undocumented - keep changing all the time as people try to find words that are both inclusive and neutral.

David Kyle and Elspeth Guild are the other plenary speakers for this theme.

«Diese Frauen sind nicht naiv.» Eine Soziologin sieht nicht alle Prostituierten als Opfer

Prostituierte in Zürich: Nicht alle sind Opfer, Bild Reuters

NZZ am Sonntag - Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 Juli 2009

Sind Prostituierte aus der Dritten Welt alle Opfer von Frauenhandel und Ausbeutung? Nein, sagt die renommierte Soziologin Laura María Agustín. Die Entrüstung unter Feministinnen ist gross.

Interview: David Signer

Fast täglich lesen wir irgendwo über afrikanische, asiatische oder osteuropäische Frauen, die gegen ihren Willen in den Westen verschleppt und hier zur Prostitution gezwungen werden. Die Sklaverei existiere fort in Form des Frauenhandels, heisst es in diesem Zusammenhang gern.

Hunderttausende von ahnungslosen Frauen würden unter falschen Versprechen von zu Hause weggelockt, mit Gewalt ans andere Ende der Welt verfrachtet, unter Drogen gesetzt, von dubiosen Organisationen ausgebeutet. Sicher gibt es solche Fälle. Aber das generelle Bild ist komplexer.

Die Soziologin Laura María Agustín beschäftigt sich seit vielen Jahren mit diesem Thema, zuerst als Mitarbeiterin von NGO in verschiedenen Ländern Lateinamerikas, später als Forscherin. In ihrem Buch «Sex at the Margins» stellt sie sich entschieden gegen den «Frauenhandel-Mythos», der die Prostituierten zu wehrlosen Opfern degradiere. Bei einem Gespräch erklärt sie, warum Prostitution unter gewissen Umständen durchaus eine valable Option sein kann.

NZZ am Sonntag: Frau Agustín, Sie schreiben in Ihrem Buch, der vorherrschende Diskurs über Prostitution sei geprägt von einem «fundamentalistischen Feminismus». Was meinen Sie damit?
Laura María Agustín: Damit meine ich Feministinnen, die davon ausgehen, dass Frauen über alle kulturellen und sozialen Grenzen hinweg eine gemeinsame Essenz und ein gemeinsames Schicksal teilen: nämlich Opfer der männlichen, sexuellen Gewalt zu sein. Frauen sind für sie generell Opfer und Prostituierte ganz besonders. Prostitution heisst für diese Art Feministinnen Vergewaltigung, und also müssen die Prostituierten gerettet werden. Diese Axiome zu leugnen, ist für sie gleichbedeutend mit einer Leugnung des Holocaust, denn auch hier geht es angeblich um eine Art Genozid: an den Frauen. Das Leiden und der irreparable Schaden, der durch Sex ohne Liebe verursacht wird, ist für sie mit keinem andern Leiden zu vergleichen. Das sind Vorstellungen von weissen, christlichen Mittelstands-Frauen, die dann auf die ganze Welt projiziert werden. Ursprünglich ging es im Feminismus doch darum, Verantwortung zu übernehmen, oder? Aber heute sieht man nur noch überall Opfer.
Sie relativieren damit aber den Sonderfall der Sexarbeit.
Ist Sex mit einem Mann, den man nicht liebt, wirklich so viel schlimmer als die Arbeit in einer Mine oder als Soldatin in einem Krieg? Den meisten Leuten auf der Welt, Männern oder Frauen, stehen – im Gegensatz zu Europa – nicht viele berufliche Möglichkeiten offen. Eine junge Frau in der Dominikanischen Republik hat oft nur drei Alternativen: Haushaltmädchen, Strassenverkäuferin oder Prostituierte. Manche von ihnen sagen: Lieber sterbe ich, als meinen Körper zu verkaufen, andere sagen, lieber sterbe ich, als mich als Haushaltmädchen ausbeuten zu lassen. Es gibt also individuelle Präferenzen, und nicht alle haben dasselbe Verhältnis zu Sex. Man ist nie total von äusseren Umständen determiniert, aber diese Frauen werden genau so dargestellt, als ob sie keine Ambitionen und keine Entscheidungsfähigkeit hätten. Die Feministinnen sagen: «Schrecklich, ich kann mir gar nicht vorstellen, wie es ist, mit einem Mann für Geld Sex zu haben!» Andere können sich das sehr wohl vorstellen. Wenn man die Prostituierten zurückschafft, dann ist die Frau halt gezwungen, als Haushaltmädchen oder Strassenverkäuferin zu arbeiten, that’s all. Read the rest of this entry »