Straight.com  Vancouver, 2 July 2009, Carlito Pablo
Bill targets foreign workers 

Gaston Bussière, Exotic Dancers, c 1880

A bill that makes it tougher to hire foreign exotic dancers will also make it harder for live-in caregivers and other temporary workers to come to Canada.

. . . Under Bill C-45, tabled by Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney on June 17, a visa officer “shall refuse to authorize the foreign national to work in Canada if, in the officer’s opinion, public policy considerations that are specified in the instructions given by the Minister justify such a refusal”.

The instructions, according to the bill, “shall prescribe public policy considerations that aim to protect foreign nationals who are at risk of being subjected to humiliating or degrading treatment, including sexual exploitation”.

Kenney’s ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.

However, Kurland said that bill is a “blank cheque to refuse people. The path that I see is.…‘Let’s attack exotic dancers because we want to but we’re not allowed to,’ ” he said, adding that exotic dancing in strip clubs is a legal activity. “They can’t use the criminal law so they’re going to use the immigration law on a morality issue.”

Alice Wong, Conservative MP for Richmond and parliamentary secretary for multiculturalism, explained that the bill is intended more for exotic dancers, agricultural labourers, and those who may end up in “sweat shops” than it is for live-in caregivers.

According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight. Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.

Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the Justicia for Migrant Workers B.C. doesn’t agree with the Conservative approach. Fuchs told the Straight: “If there’s a problem with human trafficking, they should go after traffickers, not the people being trafficked.”

In May, two Filipino caregivers alleged mistreatment by Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla’s family. The caregivers claimed that they worked 12 to 16 hours a day and that their passports were confiscated. If the bill becomes law and is applied to cases similar to the Dhalla affair, Kurland said that the only remedy available for caregivers would be to get kicked out of Canada.

“The only way I see them helping people is to say, ‘We’re going to help you by not letting you come here,’ ” Kurland said.

Strip club owners already find it almost impossible to bring women to Canada. In a letter to Parliament’s citizenship and immigration committee in 2008, Tim Lambrinos, executive director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada, pointed out that from about 1,000 visas for strippers issued in an unspecified previous year, the government issued only 17 in 2007 and half of 2006 combined.

In a phone interview from Toronto, Lambrinos said that in 2008, only about 10 visas for foreign strippers were granted. “I want to know the name of one Canadian employer, of an exotic club owner who has been charged or convicted of any crime of any form of exploitation against foreign women working as an exotic dancer in Canada in the last five years,” Lambrinos told the Straight. “There’s not one.”

In 2008, 192,519 temporary foreign workers were admitted to Canada. On the day the Conservatives tabled Bill C-45, Liberal MP Joyce Murray sought unanimous consent on her motion for a plan to address human trafficking and sexual exploitation of vulnerable persons. According to Murray, all parties supported the motion except the Conservatives. “This is a poor excuse for addressing human trafficking,” Murray told the Straight. . . .

The New Statesman       27 March 2008

The Myth of Trafficking 

Brendan O’Neill

Most migrant women, including those in the sex industry, have made a clear decision, says a new study, to leave home and take their chances abroad. They are not “passive victims” in need of “saving” or sending back by western campaigners.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Laura María Agustín Zed Books, 224pp, £16.99

It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. Laura María Agustín’s trenchant and controversial critique of the anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter - in this case, “human trafficking” - on the operating table, dissects it, unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a capital W. It’s a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years.

Most of us recognise the ideological under pinnings of old-style baiting of migrants. When newspaper hacks or populist politicians talk about evil Johnny Foreigners coming here and stealing our jobs or eating our swans, it does not take much effort to sniff out their xenophobic leanings. Agustín’s contention is that the new “discourse” on migrants (in which many of them, especially the women and children, are seen as “victims of trafficking” in need of rescue) is also built on ideological foundations. Like its demented cousin - tabloid hysteria about foreign scroungers - the trafficking scare is based on a deeply patronising view of migrants, rather than any hard statistical evidence that human trafficking is rife.

Agustín begins by challenging the idea that there is a “new slave trade” in which hundreds of thousands of women and children are sold like chattels across borders. The US state department claims that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labour or sex worldwide every year; Unicef says a million children and young people are trafficked each year. Upmarket newspapers - which have embraced the seemingly PC “trafficking discourse” with the same fervour as the tabloid newspapers screech about fence-leaping job-stealers from Sangatte - tell us that “thousands” of women and children have been trafficked into Britain and “traded for tawdry sex”, and that some of them (the African ones) “live under fear of voodoo”.

Agustín says the numbers are “mostly fantasies”. She does not doubt that there are instances of forced migration, or that, in a world where freedom of movement is restricted by stiff laws and stringent border controls, many aspiring migrants have little choice but to seek assistance from dodgy middlemen. Yet, having researched trafficking and sex workers’ experiences for the past five years, both academically and through fieldwork in Latin America and Asia, she concludes that the figures are based on “sweeping generalisations” and frequently on “wild speculation”. “Most of the writing and activism [on trafficking] does not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by academics,” she notes. Many of the authors rely on “media reports” and “statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity about definitions”.

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to inter national issues), even though the CIA refuses to “divulge its research methods”. The reason why the “new slavery” statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes “trafficked persons”, basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that “all children and the majority of women in the sex trade” should be considered “victims of trafficking”. As Agustín says, such an approach “infantilises” migrant women, “eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent”. Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not “passive victims” who must be “saved” by anti-trafficking campaigners and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape “small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating families”. Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what Agustín refers to as the “rescue industry”, she has discovered that some poor migrant women “like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others”. I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín’s chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes about the “rescue raids” carried out by police and non-governmental organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent back home - for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it is called “rescue”.

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as autonomous, sentient, albeit “morally depraved”, adults. By contrast, as the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

Agustín reserves her most cutting comments for the flourishing “rescue industry”, arguing convincingly that it is driven by a colonial-style, maternalistic attitude to foreign women. In its world, “victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers become saviours - a colonialist operation”. Bitingly, she compares today’s anti-trafficking feminists with the “bourgeois women” of the 19th century who considered it a moral virtue to save poor prostitutes, who were “mistaken, misled, deviant”. Like them, anti-trafficking crusaders see women as weak, easily victimised, and in need of guidance from a caring chaperone.

In truth, poor women - and men and children - migrate for many different reasons and have many different experiences, some good, some bad, some tragic. Such migrants are wise and wily, says Agustín; they have gumption, ambition and hope; they are often cosmopolitan, too, working, mixing and having flings with migrants from the other side of the world whom they meet in some big city in Europe or the United States. And many of them have far more liberal attitudes to freedom of movement than the westerners who campaign on their behalf. She quotes a Kurdish migrant to the Netherlands who thinks borders should be abolished: “I don’t come from the sun or moon. I’m from earth just like everybody else and the earth belongs to all of us.” Now that’s an argument I can get behind.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked

However, let’s imagine that such a report could be of great use to many people. In that case, I want to know how the data was gathered, which sources were consulted, who was allowed to give information, whose estimates were deemed authoritative and how data were confirmed. I want to know precisely how researchers handled the considerable international muddle over definitions, since the fact that people mean different things when they say the word trafficking is a notorious source of conflict and confusion, not to mention that a lot of the English keywords cannot be reliably translated into all other languages (for example, abuse, exploitation, force, coercion). Yet every year since the beginning the Report has fudged explaining how it’s compiled. Instead of concrete information on methodology we get the vaguest of statements, really worthy of a Cold War spy operation. This is what the 2009 document says about this contemporary Crusade:

Methodology

The Department of State prepared this report using information from U.S. embassies, foreign government officials, nongovernmental and international organizations, published reports, research trips to every region, and information submitted to [an email address]. This email address allows NGOs and individuals to share information on government progress in addressing trafficking. U.S. diplomatic posts reported on the trafficking situation and governmental action based on thorough research that included meetings with a wide variety of government officials, local and international NGO representatives, officials of international organizations, journalists, academics, and survivors.

No, a list of nameless institutions and groups does not qualify. The vaguer and longer the list, the more impressive it appears, but we have no way to know how the particular people were chosen and who was not consulted. Research studies can never be completely objective but they can and must address their own biases, and one of these concerns Gatekeepers: Who is chosen to tell researchers whom they should talk to and believe.

To compile this year’s report, the Department reviewed credible information sources on every country and assessed each government’s antitrafficking efforts. In prior years a “significant number” (defined to be 100 or more) of trafficking victims had to be documented for a country to be ranked in the TIP Report. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA of 2008) eliminated this requirement, thereby expanding the scope of countries included in this year’s report.

Let readers judge the credibility of sources: Who were they, exactly? Some local informants don’t want their names revealed, fine; list everyone else. Local readers can then judge which political groups informants belonged to, which officials were consulted, which NGOs. This is called Transparency. Again, if it’s judged better not to name all names, name as many as possible, and if not of individuals then of groups.

Some countries have held conferences and established task forces or national action plans to create goals for anti-trafficking efforts. While such activities are useful and can serve as a catalyst toward concrete law enforcement, protection, and prevention activities in the future, these conferences, plans, and task forces alone are not weighed heavily in assessing country efforts. Rather, the report focuses on governments’ concrete actions to fight trafficking, especially prosecutions, convictions, and prison sentences for traffickers as well as victim protection measures and prevention efforts.

So the evaluation is completely focussed on criminal-justice actions: that’s clear, anyway. It’s not as though a lot of proclamations condemning slavery ought to qualify as real efforts, but everything mentioned here is about criminals and victims except the extremely vague and silly term ‘prevention efforts’.

Although critical to increasing anti-trafficking efforts, the Report does not give great weight to laws in draft form or laws that have not yet been enacted. In general, the Report does not focus on governmental efforts that have indirect implications for trafficking, such as general efforts to keep children in school or general economic development programs, though the Report is making a stronger effort to identify trafficking vulnerabilities and measures taken by governments to prevent trafficking that may result from such vulnerabilities. Similarly, this report attempts to identify systemic contributing factors to particular forms of human trafficking. These include particular policies or practices, such as labor recruiters’ charging of excessive fees to prospective migrants and governmental policies allowing employers to confiscate passports of foreign workers—factors that have been shown to contribute to forced labor.

Well, honestly. So they’ve got no interest in underlying causes but are probably paying a bunch of US civil servants to compile a list of them and another list of how smuggling works, which everyone already knows. It’s egregious, self-benefiting, colonialist interference, on top of which they can’t accept research that’s already been done but have to pay themselves to do it. Humbug.

What’s Wrong With the ‘Trafficking’ Crusade?
Well-meaning interference?

The Philadelphia Inquirer   Sunday 1 July 2007
Op-Ed page

Laura Agustín

It’s the season when the United States issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). Having named sexual slavery as a particular evil to be eradicated, the United States grades other countries on how they are doing.

On the one hand, it sounds like an obvious way to do good: Describe the ghastly conditions you as a rich outsider observe in poor countries. Focus on places where sex is sold. Say all women found were kidnapped virgins and are now enslaved; announce to the world that you will liberate them. Organize raids. Denounce anyone who objects - even if their objection is that you are intervening in their country’s internal affairs. Ignore victims who resist rescue. Use lurid language and talk continuously about the most sensational and terrible cases. Justify your actions as a manifestation of faith, as though it exists only for you. Mutter about “organized crime.”

This is also the season when tourists leave the United States en masse to visit the rest of the world, where their country is more disliked all the time. People who used to say: “It’s just the president [or the government], ordinary Americans are all right,” now say it less often. Ignorant, destructive interventions into other countries’ business have been going on too long.

Grading everyone else on moral grounds is highly offensive, particularly when such grades are accompanied by threats of punishment if the line isn’t toed. It’s distressing to witness the deterioration of what good will is left toward this country since the post-2001 wars were initiated and campaigns intensified that presume the United States Always Knows Best.

For crusading politicians and religious leaders, a rhetoric of moral indignation is effective in uniting constituents and diverting the collective gaze away from familiar problems at home. So the culprits, those who get bad grades in the TIP, live far away from U.S. culture, which is assumed to be better. Intransigent local troubles - prisons overflowing with African Americans, millions of children malnourished - are swept aside in the call to clean up other people’s countries.

This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors’ bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.

It is easy to haul out sensationalistic language (sex slavery, child prostitution), but it is much harder to sort out the real victims from the more routinely disadvantaged and trying-to-get-ahead. Those who know intimately the problems of the poor in their own cultures rarely deny that they can decide to leave home and pay others to help them travel and find work, in sex or in any other trade.

“But sex for money is disgusting and degrading; no one should have to do it.” And should anyone have to clean toilets all day? Risk being maimed in unsafe fireworks factories? Should children have to spend their lives in lightless tunnels of mines, or women have to remain married to men who are cruel to them? The world is full of things we wish we could eradicate - but isn’t starvation the first of them? Why is there no equivalent moral furor over hideous poverty? Are we meant to believe that sex without love is worse than military violence? All over the world, selling sex pays better than most jobs readily available to women, and many do not believe it is the worst possible experience they can have.

What’s questionable about the TIP is not the defense of children or anyone else against true violence - it’s one government’s assumption that it has the right to judge everyone else and apply a draconian definition of exploitation that does not ask people whether and how they would like to change their lives. Questionable is the focus on the photogenic, cowboy moment of rushing in to rescue slaves, with no interest in what will follow.

Victims are “protected” rather than granted autonomy. At the Empower Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, signs written by migrant women “rescued from” selling sex include: “We lose our savings and belongings”; We are locked up”; “We are held till deporation”; “We are interrogated by many people”; “Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.”

From the standpoint of social science, the TIP is gravely faulty. It never explains how data were gathered and compared across so many languages and cultures, or who did it exactly under what circumstances. A raft of other research shows enormous diversity among people who sell sex, and a wide variety of experiences in the sex industry among both migrants and people who stay at home. Studies show that the worst kind of trafficking can happen to people doing other kinds of jobs - and to men. Women all over the world, including the poorest, repudiate being characterized as above all sexually vulnerable.

In assuming its creators’ moral values are or should be universal, the TIP ignores local cultures and the complexities of human desires and functions - yet another reason tourists from the United States will be less welcome everywhere this summer.

Book Review by Laura Agustín in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 pp 703-15, September 2005

Abdelmalek Sayad, 2004: The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Initially I thought this book’s title might signal the growing trend to victimize migrants, but I was wrong. On the contrary, The Suffering of the Immigrant presents the strongest possible arguments for recognizing migrants’ agency in the face of inherent, structural conditions that are all against them and whose consequences they must, undoubtedly, ‘suffer’.

Whereas many contemporary commentators refer to migration as a phenomenon of ‘globalization’, Abdelmalek Sayad makes no bones about which stage of globalization we should be looking at: the north’s imperialist colonization of the south. Most commentators agree that current migratory flows are related to free-market capitalism’s need for flexibility, moving its workplaces around the world while workers move to find them. And probably few would deny that ‘earlier’ colonial relations were implicated, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’.

But Sayad obliges us to consider a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study is the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, during which time many migrants passed from being French (citizens of the colony) to Algerian (citizens of an independent Algeria) and back to French (as legal workers and residents in France), with the complication that the majority were Berber peasants. The colonial relationship is seen in the subordination of the economic and social life of rural colonies to the industrial activity of the country in which peasants become ‘workers’.

Sayad’s arguments, however, go much further than this particular case. First, he demonstrates how discourses of migration focus on the situation of ‘immigrants’ — meaning, on how receiving countries view immigration as their own social problem. With this move, the dominant member of the migration relationship firmly maintains control over knowledge and management of this ‘problem’, according to which immigrants are always ‘lacking’ necessary skills and culture. Sayad insists that research must begin at an earlier stage, a demand that has begun to be met by a trend towards studies of ‘transnational’ migrations. But Sayad points to a more intransigent problem here, in which countries of origin participate in the negative construction of their own citizens abroad, construing them as simply absent, treating them as martyrs to the country’s economic good and considering them traitors who lose their original culture and become contaminated by another. If they do manage to return, they are pathologized as being difficult to ‘reinsert’ into society. Sayad shows how individual migrants reproduce this colonialist view of themselves as subaltern misfits only useful in an accountant’s version of migration that selectively calculates ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’.

Sayad debunks categories of migration imagined to be separate, in which ‘settler migrants’ supposedly value families and domestic morality more than ‘labour migrants’, as well as the idea that labour migrations are transitory and without a political dimension. Rather, he suggests that all migrants are united by a distancing from their original home, wracked by guilt that they should never have left and, having done so, that they will not perform well enough. Though they may achieve legal status, they are always treated as foreign by their second country and referred to via ‘digestive’ metaphors about their capacity to be assimilated, integrated or inserted into society. They fail to perceive the social, medical and other ‘helping’ sectors as being on their side. Their loyalties are divided, they don’t know which patrie iis really theirs and they experience an alienation from their own children, who may have no interest in their ‘homeland’. They are doubly excluded from real political participation in both countries of origin and reception, thus being deprived of even

the right to have rights, to be a subject by right . . . to belong to a body politic in which [they have] a place of residence, or the right to be actively involved — in other words the right to give a sense and a meaning to [their] action, words and existence (p. 227).

While some of this may seem familiar to migration scholars, its presentation renders it new. Sayad belonged to the group he studied: emigrant from Kabylia, immigrant in France. He gives significant space to migrants’ own words, sometimes in the form of long, repetitive and even confusing testimonies. Although one can imagine his anger over the many injustices he recounts, he recognizes their cultural logic.

Sayad makes an important contribution to migration study in his development of Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘state thought’, which he considers one of our most intractable cultural givens. Slurring migrants as ‘hybrids’ and ‘bad’ social products, society manifests its fear of those who ‘blur the borders of the national order and therefore the symbolic value and pertinence of the criteria’ used to establish differences between nationals and foreigners (p. 291). For Sayad, nothing less than the delegitimizing of the state is necessary, the denaturalizing of what we consider passionately real — our national being.

This is a book about men. The Algerian case that Sayad details was initially about single males, who are pictured as alienated from a natural cycle of courtship and marriage. Sayad reproduces one man’s speculation on a potential woman migrant’s fate: ‘whilst she might gain something by coming here . . . she’d pay a high price for it . . . she would be imprisoned in one room . . . she would miss the sky’ (p. 156). Given the current protagonism of so many women in migration, their absence here is notable, and in this sense Sayad’s case study imposes a restriction. Given the wealth of ideas here that go far beyond any single case, this restriction can be forgiven.

Before Sayad died he asked his friend and colleague, Pierre Bourdieu, to make a book of the disparate manuscripts he had produced over the years. The result is intellectually rigorous, anthropologically perceptive, moving and poetic.

Joong Ang Daily, Seoul

Commercial sex survives despite crackdown

A man walks down an alley in Mia-ri Texas, Seoul, where sex workers still operate.

By Brian Lee, 16 March 2009 

“Oppa, wanna have some fun?” A middle-aged woman throws a questioning look at a male passerby who shakes his head and goes about his business. She’s standing at an intersection in Yeongdeungpo, western Seoul, which used to be one of the better known red-light districts in the capital. Most of the storefronts are shuttered during the daytime and come alive at sundown.

But business is slower than usual, partly because of the bad economy but also, according to government officials, due to the success of the Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, which was enacted five years ago amid great fanfare to beef up existing anti-prostitution laws. However, except for cosmetic changes, the lucrative sex trade is still very much around, experts say. The only difference is that since the law was enforced, the sex trade has evolved.

More visible outlets such as the one in Yeongdeungpo have taken the brunt of the law as have the once notorious neighborhoods of northern Seoul’s Cheongnyangni and Mia-ri Texas, which are both scheduled for urban redevelopment. But it is still possible to buy sex in these areas, like Cheongnyangni, for as little as 70,000 won ($47.50).

Business as usual

A tell-tale sign that business was, if not booming, reasonably healthy came earlier this month when the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced it would transfer hundreds of police officers in the southern Seoul districts of Gangnam, Seocho and Suseo. The move has been widely interpreted as an effort to sever ties between the police and entertainment establishments offering sex services. The decision to transfer the officers, all from a range of departments, came after it was discovered that police officers had inappropriate relationships with massage parlors in those areas. The current going rate for massage parlors is 170,000 won in cash and 190,000 with a credit card. As credit card records are easy to trace, customers and owners tend to prefer cash.

3000 Seoul sex workers protest Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, 2007

Nowadays, adding to the sex-for-cash businesses,  hyugae-tel (resting rooms), where customers can call up sex workers and then later join them at another venue, are expanding rapidly, while commercial sex offered online, which is harder to track, is also growing. Still, government officials say the implementation of the law from five years ago has helped significantly reduce the scale of the sex industry. “If you look at the numbers, coming down from a 24 trillion won industry to a 14 trillion won one is a step forward,” said Cho Sin-suk, an official at the Ministry of Gender Equality. According to ministry estimates, there were 269,000 active sex workers in Korea in 2007, a decline from 320,000 five years earlier.

Sex for sale

Some critics of the government’s efforts argue that it’s relatively easy to crack down on the more obvious targets, such as the capital’s red-light areas. But in a society where there are plenty of outlets that are not strictly selling sex but carry that option depending on clients’ requirements, the squeeze on one side is certainly helping business on the other. A room salon falls into that category, a venue often used for business meetings but which also offers other services.

“Our clients are very specific. When they have a business meeting they ask me who is available for icha [stage 2 of an evening’s entertainment],” said Ye Ji, not her real name, who is a madam, a person in charge of young women whose job description includes singing, conversation and sex. Her shop is in Yeoksam-dong, southern Seoul, where many upscale room salons are clustered. Icha can be used to refer to the second bar or restaurant for a group to head to, but the slang meaning is sex with a female partner. Even in the midst of a global economic downturn, Ye said her business is doing well. She has her own driver and car, an Audi, a sekki madam (second in charge) and a handful of waiters. “My clients don’t ask for a discount,” said the madam in a matter of fact tone.

Depending on what liquor and side dishes are ordered, a four-man party might pay anything from 1.3 million won to 1.7 million won for a 12-year-old or 21-year-old bottle of whisky, the brand determining the price. The icha fee is not included in this price. A customer usually pays around 600,000 won to the madam, who creams off her fee, and the sex worker takes the man to a nearby motel.

Sex trafficking

Prostitution also involves sex trafficking in and out of the country, something the U.S. State Department highlighted last month in its latest annual report on human rights. “Women from Russia, other countries of the former Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries were trafficked to the country for sexual exploitation and domestic servitude,” reads the passage referring to South Korea’s sex trade. They were recruited personally or responded to advertisements and were flown to Korea, often on entertainer or tourist visas, the report said.

In some instances, the report went on, once these visa recipients arrive, their new employers illegally hold on to the women’s passports. In addition, some foreign women recruited for legal and brokered marriages end up, once married, in situations of sexual exploitation, debt bondage and servitude. Korean women were likewise trafficked primarily for sexual exploitation in the United States, sometimes through Canada and Mexico, as well as to other countries, such as Australia and Japan, the report said.

Clamping down

To try to curb prostitution, Korea introduced a special law in 2007 that gave the authorities the power to deny the issuance or renewal of passports to men who had a track record of purchasing sex. In addition, the Ministry of Justice is running an education and awareness program for men who have been prosecuted for buying sex. Last year, 17,956 men took part in the program.

One positive aspect of the story is the government is not in denial. “We check if we think the findings in the U.S. report are true or not true and then file a protest, but at this point we do not have any plans to do so,” said Park Yu-ri, a Foreign Ministry official. An official at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that before the visa waiver program became effective, one of the reasons South Korea was not accepted to the program was due to concerns regarding sex trafficking.

“Per year we were looking at maybe 40 to 50 cases,” said the official. The recent U.S. State Department report also noted that “NGOs continued to express concern that sex tourism [for Korean men] to China and Southeast Asia was becoming more prevalent.” Just last week, the police arrested a group of traffickers who had recruited Korean men and transgenders and illegally transported them to Japan’s brothels in Yokohama’s red light district.

More recently, the sex trade involving North Korean defectors has become a rising problem. After visiting Southeast Asian nations to survey North Korean defectors, Park Sun-young, a lawmaker from the Liberty Forward Party, reported that female North Korean defectors in China are often forced to work as prostitutes in China. While bribes provide an obvious incentive for overworked, low-paid police officers and officials, experts point out that the legal framework currently in place in Korea won’t curb the sex trade here anytime soon.

Who’s to blame?

Some observers think the country’s sex industry took off during Japan’s colonial rule over Korea (1910-1945). “There were some brothels before but Japan industrialized the sex industry for its own needs,” said Lee Jeong-han, a sociology professor at Cheongju University. “Even today the whole culture of doing business in room salons comes from Japan.” Nevertheless, Korea’s past governments are not free from blame. In the aftermath of the Korean War, the term yangbuin, a term reserved for Korean bar girls and sex workers at major U.S. camptowns, came into use. These brothels provide sexual services for U.S. soldiers.

The camptown economy peaked in Korea during the 1960s when the country desperately needed foreign currency to rebuild its war-torn economy. Katharine Moon, a professor of political science at Wellesley College, said in a 2002 study that at one point the camptown prostitution industry contributed nearly 25 percent of the country’s gross national product.

Ongoing challenges

One of the problems facing the police is that it is very difficult to prosecute an individual for buying sex services because of the lack of evidence, a point highlighted by an Asia Foundation study in 2006. “It has become a new trend in the sex industry to use other body parts [hands] to perform sexual service without having intercourse. Up to now, the Korean courts have made different decisions on whether to regard this as sex trade or not,” the study said.

A police officer who declined to be named admitted that the current focus of all crackdowns is geared toward the better known red-light districts as a successful campaign is more visible to the public. “We have limited resources and there is only so much you can do,” said the officer in Yeongdeungpo. “We know that when we close the red-light districts these women will just use another venue. There is no perfect solution.” The numbers seem to reflect the reality. In 2003, the number of men arrested for buying sex services stood at 12,737 but that number is expected to reach 40,000 this year.

Even with the government initiative to clamp down on the sex industry, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention says that more than 100,000 women in massage parlors and room salons are required to take mandatory tests every six months for venereal disease under the Epidemic Prevention Act.

A state of mind

Eradicating one of the oldest trades is perhaps a Sisyphean challenge for the government and law enforcement agencies, a task made doubly difficult by the ingrained attitude among many men that commercial sex is not wrong. Three years ago, in a survey of 448 males by the Korean Institute of Criminology 58.5 percent said they had experienced buying sex at least once. In recent surveys conducted by the Ministry of Gender Equality that number still hovers around the 50 percent mark.

“You can’t put a plug on sexual desire. People who look like they never would buy sex suddenly go wild once they get some alcohol in their system,” said the room salon-owner, Ye Ji, cynically. “This is almost a recession-proof business.”

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Vol. 5/4, 95–96 (2008)

Don Kulick

A few years ago, as my colleague Deborah Cameron and I were lamenting how much academic life is spent wrangling over debates fueled by misinformation and polemic, we half-jokingly came up with an idea for a book series we thought would be fun to edit. The series would be titled Let’s Stop Talking Crap About… and would consist of short, no-nonsense texts that explained why debates about some particular topic were misguided and pointless wastes of time.

Debbie and I have not (yet) done anything with that idea. But if we were editing a series like that, Laura María Agustín’s Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry is the kind of text we would be commissioning. The book easily could have been titled Let’s Stop Talking Crap About Prostitution and Trafficking. It offers a sensible, levelheaded, knowledgeable, and accessible overview of why current debates about prostitution and trafficking are so flawed and confused, as well as a careful discussion of why laws and policies resulting from these debates are harmful to precisely the people they supposedly protect.

The author is a well-known scholar and advocate who has worked for many years both among migrants in various countries and among the professionals—social workers, nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees and volunteers, and others in the social sector—who administer and assist those migrants. She summarizes both her own research and a great deal of secondary literature. By highlighting the enormous variation that exists among migrants who sell sexual services, she demonstrates that debates about prostitution and trafficking can proceed as they do only because very few of the social workers, policymakers, government representatives, and others involved in these discussions actually know what they are talking about.

Agustín spells out the basic message of Sex at the Margins on page 5: “This book argues that those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalisation they condemn.” She goes on, several pages later, to explain this message more fully: “Social agents’ current practices in services, education, outreach, publications and policy-making…perpetuate a constructed class—‘prostitute’—which justifies their actions and serves an isolationist immigration policy” (p. 8).

This frank assessment is unlikely to sit particularly well with many of the social agents who work with prostitutes and prostitution. But the author does not blame, lecture, or scold. She acknowledges that social workers and others who work with prostitutes are genuinely interested in helping them. The problem is that most of the policies and interventions concerned with prostitution and trafficking are grounded in (a) statistics pulled out of thin air, (b) ideological posturing devoid of knowledge about how migration actually operates, (c) moral evaluations of sex that regard it as fundamentally incomparable with any other human activity, and (d) patronizing understandings of women that ultimately rely on the idea “that poorer women are better off staying at home than leaving and possibly getting into trouble” (p. 39).

Agustín is a skillful narrator. She draws the reader into the text by presenting the material as a kind of journey of discovery. She expresses her surprise at how little all the passion and effort focusing on prostitution and trafficking have managed to improve the lives of people who sell sex. On the contrary: Much of the current rhetoric and many of the programs and practices in which social workers and policymakers engage have meant that, still, debates center on how to

“control prostitution,” unpredictable local toleration predominates, police abuse is endemic, commercial sex is blamed for spreading sexually transmitted diseases, thriving networks facilitate workers’ mobility and entrance into commercial sex, which pays far better than any other job available to women, male and transgender workers are overlooked, and research focuses repeatedly on individual motivations for buying and selling sex. (p. 135)

The first half of Sex at the Margins contains a very strong chapter about the dynamics of migration that summarizes research on how migrant women actually get to Europe. This research effectively debunks the myth of the sinister, malevolent trafficker that is so dear to the hearts of many who dilate about trafficking. Agustín also quotes extensively from women who sell sexual services, providing a range of opinions on how these women feel about working in the sex industry once they are in Europe and pointing out that

even when migrants feel deceived, they usually complain of working conditions, not that the work is sexual. And they often prefer to remain in the industry. Many migrants’ primary goal is paying off debts in the shortest possible time, so they focus on the future and play down the unpleasant stages already behind them. (pp. 34–35)

Another chapter discusses the ways in which women who sell sexual services perceive their occupation: Many view it as a kind of service job comparable to that of domestic servant or nanny. In this chapter, Agustín argues against the view that sex is incommensurable with anything else. She summarizes:

In the end, it is only possible to isolate sexual services from other services if sexual communication and touching are accepted as totally different from all other contact. This isolation also requires us to accept that the only thing that happens in a sexual service is “sex,” reducing the relationship to physical contact between specific points of the body and
pretending that nothing else happens. (p. 65)

The second half of the book provides a nutshell history of how prostitution came to be a social problem in Western discourse, and how that view of prostitution as immoral continues to structure contemporary policy, philanthropy, and NGO outreach programs. In the final two chapters, the author provides examples of how work designed to assist migrants who sell sexual services in fact only tends to entrench their marginalization and suffering.

Anyone teaching about migration and sex work will want to assign this book to students of all levels. Undergraduates will appreciate the way in which the arguments slowly and compellingly. They will like the calm, reasoning quality of the prose, as well as the fact that the analysis is grounded in a solid understanding of a wide range of data and geographic settings. Graduate students will benefit from Agustín’s general overview of the field and from her analysis of ideology, policy, and social services. If everyone interested in migration and prostitution were to read this book, then maybe people really could stop talking crap about these topics. Or, as the author concludes:

Were government employees, political appointees, feminists, NGO spokespersons and other social agents able to shed their certainty of knowing how everyone else should live, they might be able to dispense with neocolonialism, admit that agency can be expressed in a variety of ways, acknowledge their own desires, and accept that Europe’s dynamic, changing, risky diversity is here to stay. (p. 194)

From the Salvation Army’s anti-trafficking programme

All too often even a mild analysis or questioning of the current shrill public discourse on this subject is attacked as monstrous and cruel. To the contrary, measured skepticism about such brouhaha is healthy. Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of Spiked. Her reporting on immigration and migration issues include the following analysis of the UK Home Secretary’s proposal to criminalise clients of sex workers ‘controlled for another’s gain’. My own analysis of this legislation appeared in the Guardian as The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders. 

Prostituting women’s solidarity

Spiked, 27 November 2008

The UK government’s call to British women to help combat ‘sex trafficking’ amounts to a crackdown on immigration.

Nathalie Rothschild

Women around Britain have been asked to unite to liberate their prostitute sisters from the shackles of modern-day slavery.

Last week, UK home secretary Jacqui Smith unveiled a proposal to protect women from exploitation by tackling the demand for prostitution – in other words, by punishing punters. Anyone who pays for sex with someone who is ‘controlled for another person’s gain’ could be fined and receive a criminal record. Under the proposal, ignorance of the circumstances would be no defence.

On Tuesday, Harriet Harman, the minister for women, followed up on Smith’s proposal by sending out a rallying call to members of the Women’s Institute (WI), the UK’s largest voluntary women’s organisation. She asked the ladies to help tackle the sex trade by complaining to editors of local papers that run ‘sleazy adverts’ for sexual services.

Harman believes this will help stamp out sex trafficking, which she has described as a ‘modern-day slave trade’. One WI member told the BBC that the ‘sleazy ads’ may be for services that the girls involved are not giving willingly. They may have been tricked and forced into prostitution, she said. Spokeswoman Ira Arundell said the WI’s aim is ‘to raise awareness and spread the message about what is happening with these girls’. Just how complaining to editors about newspaper ads will counteract exploitation of women or reveal what happens behind the doors of massage parlours, brothels and erotic DVD shops is not entirely clear.

The images broadcast this week of middle-aged and elderly British WI members, gathered around tables to scour local papers – scissors and marker pens at hand – and tut-tutting at ads for erotic services, were reminiscent of those old gatherings of women knitting sweaters and collecting toys for starving, black babies. In effect, Harman and the WI view the foreigners who they are so intent on rescuing as childlike, helpless victims; as easily cajoled and loose women in need of the watchful guard of respectable, morally superior British ladies.

This war against international prostitution may be well-intentioned, but it looks like a puritanical ‘white woman’s burden’ mission. Far from engaging in an act of solidarity, the WI members who heed Harman’s call will only help to reinforce the image of migrants as a danger to themselves and to British society.

The numerous charities, non-governmental organisations, official bodies and police that work to root out human trafficking form what some have termed a ‘rescue industry’, whose collective efforts reinforce a dehumanising view of migrants. As writer Laura María Agustín points out it in Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, migrants become reduced to ‘passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved and helpers become saviours’. This, Agustín says, is ‘a colonialist operation’.

Besides, who says migrant workers employed in the sex industry (which includes everything from charging for sex to pole-dancing, providing attentive dinner company and selling erotic lingerie, literature or DVDs) want to be ‘rescued’ in the first place? The debates and policies around trafficking and people smuggling rarely acknowledge that migrants can exercise free choice, that the decision to leave one’s home country in order to seek a better life expresses a desire to control one’s destiny. Instead, more often than not, migration is seen as a tragic solution which brings misery, exploitation and chaos into people’s lives.

Migrants who sell sex are viewed as particularly oppressed and desperate, and it is unthinkable to many that they should not feel victimised. But sex workers are not necessarily enslaved – many will have chosen to enter the sex industry over other options available to them. Of course, it is wrong to force women into sex and it would be silly to romanticise prostitution as an empowering profession. There are undoubtedly cases in Britain and elsewhere of women being forced into the sex industry and ending up abused and exploited. Yet others refuse to be labelled as victims in need of ‘rescuing’, which is effectively a trendy new word for repatriation.

A poster recently produced at a workshop at the Empower Foundation, a collective of sex workers, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is instructive. It lists reasons why the women there do not want to be rescued by police or charity workers, including that it leads to them to getting locked up, interrogated and deported without any compensation for them or their dependants. The final reason listed on the poster is ‘we must find a way back to Thailand to start again’.

This is a far-away example, from a very different context than Britain, yet it shows that where women and others are determined to take any means necessary to improve their own and their families’ lives, migration control and rescue missions can never be strong enough deterrents. In fact, the actions of rescue workers seem to pose a bigger threat to these sex workers than anything they face on the job.

The women associated with Empower turn the usual image of foreign sex workers as exploited, vulnerable and fooled victims on its head. This is how they describe themselves: ‘We are sex workers. We are workers who use our brains and our skills to earn an income. We are proud to support ourselves and our extended families. We look after each other at work; we fight for fair and safe standards in our industry and equal rights within society. We are a major part of the Thai economy, bringing in lots of tourist dollars. We are active citizens on every issue… politics, economics, environment, laws, rights etc. We try and find the space in society to stand up and be heard. Some see us as problem makers but actually we are part of the solution…’

Perhaps British WI members relishing the opportunity to rescue fallen, foreign women should visit the Empower Foundation’s website.

Smith’s proposal has been described as a ‘backdoor ban on prostitution’. It is a symbolic, not a realistic proposal – a way for the government to send a moral message about prostitution and an attempt to score easy political points. After all, who is for exploitation, kidnapping and forced labour? But does Smith expect a woman who really is exploited to open up to a punter she’s never met before? Does she expect the punter and the prostitute to engage in an existential conversation about the nature of exploitation, coercion and free will before they have sex?

Smith’s and Harman’s proposals have been greeted with much scorn and criticism. It has been argued that they will only help exacerbate the exploitative conditions that the government is trying to stamp out. If they can’t advertise openly, establishments that offer sexual services will only be driven underground and the women working there will be even more vulnerable to exploitation. This will not stamp out trafficking, critics have said, but it will turn it into an even more covert, uncontrollable activity.

But what really needs to be questioned here is the validity of the term ‘trafficking’, which is notoriously difficult to define, measure or tackle. Even those who campaign against trafficking often refer to it as a ‘hidden’ activity and they acknowledge the difficulty of gathering accurate statistics on undocumented migrants or those who work in ‘the shadow economy’.

While forced kidnapping should be clamped down on, trafficking typically refers to the recruitment, transportation, harbouring or receipt of people for the purposes of ‘labour exploitation’. What counts as exploitation, however, will differ depending on who you ask. Migrants are for example often willing to take menial jobs for relatively low wages as this is still preferable to the poor opportunities in their home countries.

Many migrants pay strangers large sums of money to be transported across the world and they will not always have been certain, at every step of the way, where they would end up and how they would fare. What is rarely acknowledged is that ‘trafficked’ individuals in fact take a conscious decision to migrate and, because of the lack of legal options, they are willing to pay strangers to take them to their desired destination and then to do crappy jobs once they get there. If they enjoyed freedom of movement, foreigners could simply buy a plane ticket - a cheaper, safer and more practical option.

Those who have been defined as ‘trafficked’ or ‘enslaved’ have worked in everything from agriculture and housekeeping to elderly care and, indeed, in the sex industry. Britain does not grant work permits for unskilled non-EU migrant workers and so they are led to take illegal routes here and then to take up illegal employment. In effect, stamping out trafficking amounts to stamping out the movement of people.

Harman and the WI’s mission may look like a benevolent rescue operation for ‘enslaved foreign women’, but ultimately it amounts to a clampdown on immigration itself, which will only make it more difficult for women to improve their lot.

So much for women’s solidarity.

Nathalie Rothschild

Need cheering up? Check out last week’s satirical view of this ‘utopic’ trend.

The Guardian - Comment is Free

The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders

The government’s latest proposals for sex workers do little to tackle the problem of human trafficking

Laura Agustín

19 November 2008

Today the government proposes that paying for sex with those “controlled for another person’s gain” be a criminal offence. High on the list are victims of trafficking, and punters’ defence that they didn’t know women were trafficked is declared inadmissible. But clients may still have an out. How, they will ask, can the police prove that sex workers were trafficked?

The police will have to identify the real trafficked victims in order to identify customers at fault – a notoriously difficult enterprise. In a few high-profile cases, self-identified victims name and help find their exploiters, and sometimes these traffickers are successfully prosecuted. But these cases are few and far between. More often it is difficult to point to migrants who knew nothing about their future jobs, who agreed to nothing about their illicit travels and who are willing to denounce perpetrators who may be family or former friends and lovers.

More than a decade ago, while working in a Caribbean Aids-prevention organisation, I visited a small town famous as a market for informal migration. In one cafe, a waiter offered me anything I asked for in return for helping him reach anywhere in Europe. Later, I met a woman determined to travel to Paris to work. Highly informed about prices, she steered clear of brokers promising to “take care of everything”.

I visited a village where most families spoke proudly of daughters who maintained them by selling sex abroad. And I met many people who arranged papers and transport for travellers, some charging fees and others as a family obligation. Scholars understand these as social networks and community strategies used to get migrations underway. Where few jobs are available at home, local institutions rarely try to prevent such trips. To those involved, this travel may feel irregular but not criminal, given the market for migrant labour abroad.

The rub is that most jobs available are not recognised by national immigration regimes that only value highly educated professionals and formal-sector employment. Work permits are not granted for low-prestige jobs in kitchens, sweatshops, night clubs or agriculture. The strict regulation of labour markets can fairly be said to promote an increase in unauthorised workers.

The UN convention against transnational organised crime tries to distinguish between the trafficking and smuggling of human beings, but there is still confusion about which means what. The trafficking protocol mentions women, coercion and prostitution but not the will to migrate, whereas the smuggling protocol discusses men as migrants. Meetings to arrive at definitions were prolonged and conflicted, and disagreement is still rife as to what key words like coercion, force and deceit mean in concrete situations.

No one can have the right statistics where journeys involve false papers or overstayed visas and where jobs are in the informal economy. The US federal government’s annual trafficking report relies on CIA, police and embassy guesstimates of situations that are not understood the same way across all cultures and social classes. Some figures for trafficked victims refer to all migrants who sell sex, while others require proof that the victims knew nothing about what was happening. To prove a case, investigators must focus intensively and at length; knowledge of multiple cultures, political contexts and languages are required. Even then, stories tend to be ambiguous and victims implicated in wrong-doing.

Successful migration requires some sophistication and access to social networks providing knowledge, contacts and expertise. Migrants find them amongst friends, families and small-time entrepreneurs, most of whom would not qualify as organised crime, with its demonic overtones, or even as gangsters. This helps account for the failure of the police to locate large numbers of traffickers: migrants are not eager to denounce people who helped them, even when they didn’t get the deal they hoped for. Successful migrants need to be adventurous, flexible risk-takers; they are often proud of the trials and tribulations they have survived.

Some imagine migration involving the sale of sex as fundamentally different, because they view sex as intrinsic to the self and ruined by money. Others view sex as yet another human activity engaged in for all kinds of reasons. What is not realistic is to insist that all migrants who sell sex be either completely forced or completely free. Many of these migrants object to being pigeonholed as passive victims – a poster brothel-workers made in Chiang Mai, Thailand, lists how rescue operations do harm. This is not to say that the situation is fair or that no one suffers, but rather that rescuers often don’t understand.

If, as many Guardian commentators declare, you believe a British woman may prefer selling sex to her other options, then you must allow that possibility to people of other nationalities, whether they are living outside their birth countries or not. Anything else is colonialism. It’s similarly patronising to declare that they were always forced to migrate, as though they had no will, preference or ability to plan a new life.

The problem for the government proposal to criminalise the buying of sex from those “controlled for gain” (whether migrants or UK citizens) is how to define control – another word with slippery meanings that don’t jibe with relationships that may involve feelings of affection and obligation as well as coercion and deception. Clients of sex workers may demand that prosecutors prove the unprovable: that migrants were unambiguously exploited against their will and wish instantly to be deported – or, as the government will put it, returned to their families and homes.

The underground nature of so much migration promotes all kinds of exploitation. But these networks have always existed. It’s only with the current hyper-anxiety about the sex industry that the entrepreneurial side of crossing borders is attacked en masse, as though a new evil race were trying to take over the civilised world.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to maintain two ideas at the same time: some people prefer selling sex to their other options, no matter where they were born, while some other people find it unbearable. Some migrants get a raw deal from intermediaries or do not want to migrate at all, while other migrants get more or less what they want by paying people to help them. The greater issue is the near-impossibility of getting legal permits and visas based on informal-sector work. If that problem were ameliorated, those who don’t want to sell sex could move into other jobs, and those who do would not be worried about police persecution – or, indeed, being rescued when they don’t want to be.

In a battle of statistics and ‘evidence’ last week on the Guardian’s comment website, both sides claimed to have the correct, evidence-based analysis of the extent of trafficking in the UK. To my thinking, this is a fruitless debate. That is, I agree with the 27 academics arguing that figures have been extrapolated and manipulated shamelessly by fundamentalist-feminist politicians. I was one of the first people, many years ago, to say so and take the flak. But the painful conflict is not about numbers It’s about definitions, visions of the world, passions, sex and money. My contribution to this business has been, from the beginning, to complicate conversations that present black versus white versions of something that is very grey indeed. For those who would rush to legislation my vision is not satisfying because it says ‘Wait, stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind.’ This is not useless ‘postmodern’ dithering. It is a position that says that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives, you cannot responsibly take actions to help them.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual enough not to use the term prostitutes, but I wasn’t and still am not in a position to make a clear substitute with the term sex workers. Here I was trying to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out okay for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. This is also the piece that suggested that many migrant sex workers can be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects. The reference to ‘challenging place‘ derives from the editorial focus, for a journal issue, on women and place, the local and the global. I couldn’t fit migrant workers into that framework, and this was the result.

Challenging ‘Place’: Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 45.1, Spring 2002, 110-117.

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For a long time I worked in educación popular in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration. So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery. This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.[3] The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it. But if one of our goals is to find a vision of globalisation in which poorer people are not constructed solely as victims, we need to recognise that strategies which seem less gratifying to some people may be successfully utilised by others. Therefore, this essay is not about whether domestic service can ever be pleasant or prostitution should be accepted as ‘work’.[4]

The bad beginnings or sad, frightening or even tragic moments of people’s migrations to work need not forever mark them nor define their whole life experience. Relative powerlessness at one stage of migration need not be permanent; poor people also enjoy ‘multiple identities’ that change over life-courses composed of different stages, needs and projects. By insisting on the instrumentality of migrating under less than ideal conditions, the existence of the worst experiences are not negated. The abuses of agents who sell ways to enter the first world extend to migrants who work as domestic servants and in sweatshops, maquiladoras, mines, agriculture, sex or other industries, whether they are women, men or transgender people. But these most tragic stories are fortunately not the reality for most migrants.

Displacement or misplacement? Questions of will and ‘choice’

Research among migrant prostitutes and domestic workers reveals little essential difference in their migration projects and demonstrates that migrations that may have begun as a kind of displacement (a feeling of being pushed out, of having no reasonable choices) are not doomed to be permanently sad stories.[5] Even the poorest and even the partially ‘trafficked’ or ‘deceived’ look for and find spaces to be themselves in, run away, change jobs, learn to utilise friends, clients, employers and petty criminals. In other words, they do the same as other migrants and in all but the worst cases tend to find their way eventually into situations more to their liking, whether that means finding a good family to clean for or a decent brothel owner or the right contacts to work freelance.

Neither are migrations totally economically motivated. Exposed to media images that depict world travel as essential to both education and pleasure, potential migrants learn that first world countries are highly comfortable and sophisticated places in which to live. They are excited at the prospect of meeting people from other countries. All poor people do not decide to migrate; many that do are people interested in and capable of taking the risks involved in uprooting in order to ‘find a place in the world’.

My example here is migrant women and transsexuals in Europe, but the discourses which construct them as ‘trafficked’ exist all over the world and are being addressed by international bodies.[6] At the time of this writing, the majority of migrant prostitutes in Europe come from the west of Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and countries of the ex-Soviet Union. While domestic workers have begun to unite across ethnic borders to demand basic rights, sex workers have not, making them impossible to fit into classic migration frameworks, in which associations are formed as an essential step to ‘settling’ down. For a variety of legislative and social reasons, not least of which are the repressive policies of police and immigration all over Europe, prostitutes tend to keep moving, from city to city and from country to country.[7] This itinerant lifestyle creates a particular relationship to ‘place’ that impedes doing the things migrants are ‘supposed’ to do, related to establishing themselves and becoming good (subaltern) citizens (the Roma suffer from the same impediment). While nomadism is found romantic in people who live far away (such as the Bedouin) it tends to be seen as a social problem inside the West.

Writers on migrations and diaspora maintain a nearly complete silence about migrant prostitutes,[8] though they can be studied as daring border-crossers who typically and (repeatedly) arrive with little information, luggage or local language. But the only aspects of their lives discussed (by everyone, not only by lobbyists against prostitution) are their victimhood, marginalisation and presumed role in the transmission of HIV/AIDS, injustices which reproduce stigmatisation. Yet it is safe to surmise that if men were the large group using prostitution as a strategy to get into Europe and good wages then it would be seen as a creative move and not routinely characterised as a tragedy.

Finding pleasure in the margins

A crucial element in this gendered reaction is the widespread assumption that a woman’s body is above all a sexual ‘place’, where women’s experiences of sex and their sexual organs is essential to their self-respect. While this may be true for many, it is not universal, and the use of the body for economic gain is not considered so upsetting or important by many prostitutes, who usually report that the first week on the job was difficult but that later they adapted.[9] Some theorists assume that something like the soul or real self is ‘alienated’ when sex occurs outside the context of ‘love’, and that women are fatally damaged by this experience, but these must remain moralising hypotheses impossible to prove. Some women feel this way and some find pleasure in prostitution, which only means there is not a single experience of the body shared by everyone—no surprise, after all. In any case, even prostitutes who don’t like what they do say it’s better than a lot of other options that they also don’t like; learning to adapt to necessities and ignore unpleasant aspects of a job is a normal human strategy.

In the sentimentalising that occurs around ‘uprooted migrants’, the myriad possibilities for being miserable at home are forgotten. Many women, homosexuals and transsexuals are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets, overbearing fathers and violent boyfriends. ‘Home’ can also be a boring or suffocating place, as evidenced by the enormous variety of entertainment sites located outside of it. In many third-world cultures, only men are allowed to partake of these pleasures, occupy these spaces; in Europe, everyone can. People in prostitution also have private lives, go to films, bars, discotheques, restaurants, concerts, festivals, church parties and parks. Their wish to leave work behind and be ordinary is no different from that of other people; in the context of urban spaces they become flâneurs and consumers like anyone else.

Social constructs of prostitutes’ ‘place’

Various NGO projects in Europe work with migrant prostitutes and would like to foment their self-organisation to defend their basic rights.[10] Such projects inevitably require, however, that subjects identify as prostitutes, which few do; rather, they identify as migrant people from Cali or Benin City or Kherson who are doing sex work temporarily as a means to an end. This means they are less interested in questions of identity than in being allowed to get on with earning money the way they are without being harassed and subjected to violence on the one hand or pitied and subjected to projects to ‘save’ them on the other.[11]

Very often the discourse of solidarity sets up a dichotomy about ‘place’ for migrants which consists of (1) home (which you loved and were forced to leave) and (2) Europe (which you don’t want to be deported from). The complicated relationships migrants have to ‘home’, which may or may not be a place they wish to visit or actually live in again, are excluded from discussions about them. And when migrant prostitutes are constructed as ‘trafficked’ they are assumed to have been wrested away against their will, allowing immediate unsubtle deportation measures to appear benevolent (and to be characterised by some ironic activists as ‘re-trafficking’).[12] Various theorists have pointed out how migrants’ work of caring for children, the elderly and the sick creates ‘chains’ of love and affection which take in the families migrants leave behind, the families they come to work for and new relationships started abroad. This more nuanced vision of the role of ‘place’ in women migrants’ lives is generally not extended to sex workers, however.

Milieux as workplaces

All this theorising impinges little on women focussed on getting ahead, whose relationship to ‘places’ is dramatically mediated by the industry they work in, a series of milieux. A rural woman from a third-world country can arrive in Europe and, with the right contacts, soon be in a position to earn 5000 or more euros a month. This figure does not refer to what are sometimes called ‘luxury’ prostitutes who work with ‘elite’ customers (and who can earn much more) but refers to an amount commonly earned in large or small clubs and brothels as well as flats, whose names and particular characteristics change from country to country.[13]

With this amount, a migrant may be able to pay back debts undertaken to migrate fairly soon, and to earn it she works in multicultural, multilingual clubs, brothels, apartments and bars. Here you find people from Ecuatorial Guinea working alongside people from Brazil and Russia and people from Nigeria alongside people from Perú and Bulgaria. Milieux are ‘workplaces’ for those selling sexual services in them, who spend many hours in the bar, socialising, talking and drinking with each other and the clientele as well as other workers like cooks, waiters, cashiers and bouncers. In the case of flats, some people live in them while others arrive to work shifts. The experience of spending most of their time in such ambiances, if people adapt to them at all, produces cosmopolitan subjects, who, by definition, have a special relationship vis-a-vis ‘place’. The cosmopolite considers the world his oyster, not his home, and there is nothing in the concept which impedes him or her from being poor or a prostitute.

It is easy to find migrant sex workers who have lived in multiple European cities: Turin, Amsterdam, Lyon. They have met people from dozens of countries and can speak a little of several languages; they are proud of having learnt to be flexible and tolerant of people’s differences. Whether they speak lovingly of their home country or not, they have overcome the kind of attachment to it that leads to nationalist fervour and have joined the group that may be the hope of the world, the one that judges people on their actions and thoughts and not on how they look or where they are from. This is the strength of the cosmopolite.

Some doubt that ordinary work relations can exist in milieux. This doubt seems to construct all other work sites as less alienating: office, medical, factory, domestic, mining, sweatshop, farming, academic, homework, etc. But the sex industry is huge, taking in clubs, bars, discotheques and cabarets, erotic telephone lines, sex shops with private cabins, massage parlours and saunas, escort services, some matrimonial agencies, flats, pornographic cinema, erotic restaurants, services of domination and submission and street prostitution. Much of this work is part-time, occasional or a second job, and working conditions for these millions of jobs worldwide vary enormously, so they cannot be generalised in terms of ‘place’. Though frequent change of personnel is common, this is also a characteristic of work in the cinema and performing arts, as well as of ‘temporary’ office and computer workers (where no one doubts that normal relationships occur). Relationships with colleagues may cross ethnic lines or not, according to the individual; the chance of this is increased where a great variety of people is found with no one type predominating. This is the situation in the milieux, now that migrants constitute the majority of prostitutes across Europe—as many as 90 per cent in Italy (Tampep 200).

. . . and milieux as borderlands

Milieux are not only multi-ethnic; they are borderlands: places of mixing, confusion and ambiguity, where the defining ‘lines’ between one thing and another are blurred. Since so many of Europe’s migrant prostitutes are foreigners, languages spoken in the milieux include pidgins, creoles, signing and lingua francas, where Spaniards learn to communicate with Nigerians, Italians with Russians, French with Albanians. Similarly, many clubs would appear to be carnival sites, the world upside down, where the prostitute is like the pícaro, the half-outsider who substitutes trickery for dignified work, living the role of “cosmopolitan and stranger . . . exploiting and making permanent the liminal state of being betwixt and between all fixed points in a status sequence” (Turner 1974, 232).

The milieux are sites of experimentation and show, where masculinity is performed by some and femininity by others. Investigations as far apart as Tokyo and Milan demonstrate that for many the sexual act carried out at the end of a night on the town or puttan tour is not at the centre of the experience, which rather resides in sharing with male friends an experience of talking, drinking, looking, driving, flirting, making remarks, taking drugs and, in general, being ‘men’ (Allison 1994, Leonini 1999). The prostitute in her work uniform does what will lead to making money, in the case of the transsexual a hyperperformance of womanliness. While any sexual service contracted usually occupies no more than fifteen minutes, not only workers but clients spend long hours having no sex at all.

In the patriarchal institution of the sex industry it is men who are publicly ‘permitted’ to experiment with their masculinity and relate to people they would not meet anywhere else. The availability of migrant women, homosexual men and transsexuals means that millions of relationships take place every day between people of different cultures. The essentialisation of these relationships as undifferentiated ‘acts’ and their elimination from cultural consideration because they involve money cannot be justified.[14] For some who theorise sex as culture, sexual practices are seen as constructed, transmitted, changed, even globalised, and migrant sex workers as the bearers of cultural knowledge.[15]

Everyone agrees that the sex industry exists within patriarchal structures. Some critics will continue to lament migrant prostitutes’ loss of home and the near impossibility of their organising formally. But one must also give credit where credit is due, recognise the resourcefulness of most migrant women and allow them the possibility of overcoming feelings of victimhood and experiencing pleasure and satisfaction within difficult situations and in strange places.

Notes

[1] The word ‘home’ in English connotes much of this all by itself, but this is not omnipresent in other languages.

[2] David Sibley has contributed invaluable evidence of this in his chapter on W.E.B. DuBois’ rigorous sociological research on ‘The Philadelphia Negro’, which never was accepted by the academy (1995).

[3] Domestic service involves many of the same isolating characteristics as work in the sex industry, and the two are undertaken simultaneously by numerous women looking to acquire more money in a shorter amount of time.

[4] As one member of Babaylan, a migrant domestic workers’ group, said: “We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but a restructuring of gender relations.This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations.The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute.” Anny Misa Hefti: 1997 (my emphasis).

[5] Published findings by and personal communications with researchers in Spain, the U.K., Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland.

[6] Important other current sites of discourse on the issues are India, the Mekong Delta, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, as well as Canada and the U.S.

[7] Police and immigration efforts to ‘clean up’ prostitution sites or pick up ‘undocumented’ workers vary from city to city across Europe, change from day to day and are targeted, according to the moment’s policy, on street, bar or brothel workers. Few workers are completely exempt from fears of police attention.

[8] The most notable exception to this silence is negative and emblematic. Discussing Mira Nair’s film India Cabaret, Arjun Appadurai begins by describing young women from Kerala who “come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay”, a neutral enough treatment of the situation. Two sentences later, however, he refers to “these tragedies of displacement”, without providing any justification, and likewise criticises the men who frequent the cabarets as returnees from the Middle East, “where their diasporic lives away from women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be”. Appadurai provides no references and no theoretical backup for these typically moralistic opinions about how sex and relationships ‘ought’ to be. (Appadurai 1996, 38-9) It is also interesting that he did not change his vision of this phenomenon since its first publication six years earlier, in Public Culture.

[10] Note that these are solidarity projects with sex workers and not composed of sex workers.

[11] Many will note that being allowed to ‘get on’ in sex work relies on the prior social proposition.

[9] I am not referring here to particular people who actively enjoy their sex jobs and want their rights as workers recognised. Some of these are organised and lobby against the criminalisation of prostitution and for prostitutes’ rights.

[13] The surprise this figure may cause is related to the media’s nearly exclusive coverage of either street prostitution or interior sites of worst exploitation. The ability to earn such an amount depends on being introduced or introducing oneself into this market, having the skills to operate there and learning to manage this kind of money (a frequent problem is large-scale consumption which tends to cancel out high earnings). Working fewer hours or days or taking breaks between contracts reduces income. For more on the ‘skills’ required, see Agustín 2000.

[12] The late realisation that such arguments are convenient to conservative immigration policies—those basically intended to close borders and exclude migrants—has led to various national proposals to allow trafficked people to remain, whether they agree to denounce their exploiters or not.

[14] The latest ‘place’ to be inhabited by migrant prostitutes is cyberspace, like cosmopolitan space borderless. The stigmatisation of prostitutes and the wish of many clients to hide their desires make cyberspace ideal for everyone, and, in a rapid proliferation of forms, sexual services are offered and/or completed in chat rooms, on bulletin boards, in pages with images and recorded sound, in direct advertisements with telephone numbers, and, via webcams, in both one-on-one and more ‘public’ shows. Here women are emerging as consumers, perhaps because of the dearth of ‘places’ where women may go to seek anonymous, public or commercial sex. Consider a study carried out in Europe which showed women to make up 26 per cent of visitors to pornographic websites. (Nielsen Netratings 1999)

[15] “Contextualising sexuality within political economy has underscored how extensively prevailing notions about sexuality, gender, and desire are fueled by a colonialist mentality that presumes a crosscultural rigidity and consistency of sexual categories and the durability of geographic and cultural boundaries imposed by Western scholars.” (Parker, Barbosa, and Aggleton: 2001, p. 9).

References

Agustín, Laura. 2000. “Trabajar en la industria del sexo.” OFRIM Suplementos, No. 6,
June, Madrid. English translation, “Working in the Sex Industry”, at
http://www.swimw.org/agustin.html

Allison, Anne. 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a
Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. “Globalization and Migration”. Presentation at conference Responding to Globalization, 19-21 September 1997, Zurich.

Leonini, Luisa, ed. 1999. Sesso in acquisito: Una ricerca sui clienti della prostituzione. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.

Nielsen Netratings, published in Ciberpaís, 9, March 2001, p. 13, Barcelona.

Parker, Richard, Barbosa, Regina Maria and Aggleton, Peter. 2000. Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sibley, David. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge.

Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention Among Migrant Prostitutes in
Europe Project). 1999. Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep. Amsterdam: Mr A de Graaf Stichting.

Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.