Europe

I am in Porto, Portugal’s second-largest city, to give a plenary talk at the opening of a conference on harm reduction called CLAT (Conferência Latina sobre Redução de Riscos in Portugese). I had rather sketchy notions of how harm reduction could be used as a framework for talking about sex work/prostitution, which is most often understood in relation to reducing the harms of injecting drugs. On top of that, the panel I’m speaking on is titled Human Rights and Harm Reduction, which found doubly confusing. So I have been asking around amongst academics and activists and now feel at least capable of describing the complexities. There are five panels addressing sex/sex work and several good activists will speak, mixed with outreach/academic folk. 

Some people in the harm-reduction field don’t think sex work should be there; they want policy on drug injection to be the focus. And some people in the sex workers’ rights field don’t think it should be, either. But the conference has six streams:

1 Drugs on the Street
2 Parties: Pleasures Management and Risks Reduction
3 Alcohol and Harm Reduction
4 Sex: Pleasures, Risks and Sexual Work
5 Other addictions
6 Human Rights and Penal Control

So all kinds of ‘addictions’ and ‘excesses’ are potentially included. A broad definition of harm reduction in Wikipedia is as clear as any:

Harm reduction, or harm minimisation, refers to a range of pragmatic and compassionate public health policies designed to reduce the harmful consequences associated with drug use and other high risk activities.

Many advocates argue that prohibitionist laws cause harm, because, for example, they oblige prostitutes to work in dangerous conditions and oblige drug users to obtain their drugs from unreliable criminal sources. This usually involves softening punishments on risky behaviour, assisting people to stop the behaviour and addressing the reasons people engage in such behaviour.

Pragmatic sounds good, but compassionate sounds condescending. The emphasis on the harms caused by laws that prohibit and criminalise activities sounds good, while assisting people to stop is problematic.

It’s also true that some people who want to abolish prostitution and the sex industry hate harm reduction efforts, which they see as conspiracies to continue the enslavement of women. I’m told the term harm reduction is forbidden at some of their conferences. See interesting comments on this issue at Bound Not Gagged.

Both sex work and drug injection are widely criminalised: that’s the most important point to keep in mind. Prohibitions on activities often don’t succeed in stopping people from doing them, which leads to their taking place in hidden, more dangerous ways, including relying on dodgy if not criminal characters (drug/sex traffickers, for example). Decriminalisation is therefore a major demand of harm reduction.

On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:

Le problème de la burqa n’est pas une problème religieux, c’est un problème de liberté, de dignité de la femme. Ce n’est pas un signe religieux, c’est un signe d’asservissement, d’abaissement. La burqa ne sera pas la bienvenue dans notre République française.

From the BBC story:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

Women wearing burkas are not welcome in France. That ‘Frenchness’ should depend on clothing I find very scary. That the idea of personal identity should be institutionalised by the French state I find even scarier. The original title of the following piece was Which migrants assimilate best? How do we know?, which editors changed to

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

A woman from Morocco who has lived in France for eight years with a French husband, has three French children and speaks fluent French, was refused citizenship recently on grounds of being insufficiently assimilated. The Conseil d’etat said Faiza Silmi’s way of life does not reflect “French values”, particularly the goal of gender equality. The judgment claims she lives in “total submission” to the men in her life because she wears the niqab, which covers all of the face except the eyes. The decision was approved by commentators from right, left and centre. Fadela Amara, the urban affairs minister, called Silmi’s clothing a “prison” and a “straitjacket”. Predictable debates about fundamentalism unfolded in the media, with Silmi appearing as a strange, distant object.

What does Silmi herself say? The website Jeuneafrique.com has just published her first interview with the French press, corroborating another in the New York Times. Silmi’s voice emerges clearly:

I am not submissive to the men in my family nor do I lead the life of a recluse and I go out when I want. When I drive my car, I wear my niqab. I alone decided to wear it, after reading some books. I respect the law and my husband respects my decisions.

While she talked, her husband served tea. Read the rest of this entry »

Lisboa, 1 de mayo 2009

Este texto viene de Alexandra Oliveira de Portugal, autora de un excelente libro sobre el trabajo sexual llamado As vendedoras de ilusões. La foto es de Sérgio Vitorino, quien cuenta su experiencia aquí con más fotos. My English translation of Alexandra’s text follows her original.

‘No dia 1 de Maio, um grupo de prostitutas integrou a manifestação do May Day, em Lisboa. Acho que foi um dia histórico: foi a primeira vez que tal aconteceu em Portugal e partiu delas, spontaneamente. Elas perguntaram às trabalhadoras sociais de um projecto de intervenção porque não iam juntar-se aos outros trabalhadores no dia do trabalhador. Eu estive lá com elas, a dar apoio. Foram 7 mulheres que desfilaram sem máscaras, cheias de coragem - duas delas levaram as filhas pequenas com elas. O apoio veio das Irmãs Oblatas - umas freiras fantásticas que fazem trabalho de rua com mulheres trabalhadoras do sexo -, dum grupo de activistas LGBT (Panteras Rosa) e duma associação artística que tem uma bailarina que faz com elas trabalho de dança e expressão corporal (c.e.m - centro em movimento). Fomos todos no desfile. Eramos um pequeno grupo mas chamamos a atenção com os nossos guarda-chuvas vermelhos. Aos poucos, está a criar-se um movimento. Fiquei feliz e orgulhosa por estar lá.’

On the first of May, a group of prostitutes joined the May Day demonstration in Lisbon. I think it was an historic day: it was the first time this happened in Portugal and came from the women spontaneously. They asked the social workers from an outreach project why they shouldn’t join other workers on workers’ day. I was there with them to give support. They were 7 women who marched without masks, full of courage - two brought their little daughters with them. Support came from sisters of the Oblatas order - fantastic nuns who do street work with women sex workers -, from a group of LGBT activists (Panteras Rosa - Pink Panthers) and from an artistic association that has a dancer who works with the women on dance and body expression (called c.e.m/centro em movimento - movement centre). We were all in the procession. We were a small group but we attracted attention with our red umbrellas. So a movement is created, in gradual steps. I was happy and proud to be there.

Albertine, by Alfred Seland, 1940s

This relief is sculpted into a corner of Oslo’s City Hall. Stories about what it represents vary, but Tourist Information in the city, as well as people who have written to me, confirm that the woman in the centre represents the protagonist of Christian Krohg’s novel Albertine, published in 1886. Albertine is a poor woman who takes up prostitution in the city’s old Vika district. The well-dressed man on the right is said to be a client. The difference of opinion amongst commentators revolves around the man on the left. Some say he is Albertine’s working-class sweetheart, and some say he is her pimp. As we know, he could be both, if by pimp we just mean that Albertine ever gave him some of the money she made. I haven’t read the novel so don’t make a guess myself.

We should perhaps be glad that no one has proposed that a sculpture representing not only a prostitute but her male companions be removed, since Norway has now legislated that paying for sex is a crime. Recently there was a fuss over whether the remains of Grisélidis Réal should be allowed interrment in Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois. They were, finally, but many people thought it was wrong, that no prostitute or sex worker ought ever to be honoured. Another statue to prostitutes stands in Oudekerksplein in Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Belle, by Els Rijerse , 2007

As regular readers know, I’m trying to figure out how the lovely utopian goal of Gender Equality landed us in a future I never expected, where ‘progressive’ and ‘feminist’ could be associated with policies that position women as innately passive victims. Activists interested in sex-industry legislation usually cite Swedish prostitution law as the fount of all evil, with its criminalisation of the buying of sexual services. This law is a cornerstone of an overall Swedish policy to foment Gender Equality, and so is rape legislation that has led to bizarre statistics commented on in this story published the other day in Sweden’s English-language daily The Local. 

The Local, 11 May 2009 

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden?

Laura Agustín

from okejsex.nu

Rape is a complicated crime. A research project funded by the European Commission’s Daphne programme reveals that Sweden leads Europe in reports of rape. At 46.5 per 100,000 members of the population, Sweden far surpasses Iceland, which comes next with 36, and England and Wales after that with 26. At the same time, Sweden’s 10 percent conviction rate of rape suspects is one of Europe’s lowest.

The report’s comparative dimension should probably be ignored. Instead of assuming that there are four times as many rapes in Sweden as in neighbouring Denmark or Finland, as the figures suggest, to understand we would have to compare all the definitional and procedural differences between their legal systems. It is significant that Sweden counts every event between the same two people separately where other countries count them as one. Most of Sweden’s rapes involve people who know each other, in domestic settings.

The countries reporting highest rates of rape are northern European with histories of social programming to end violence against women. In Sweden, Gender Equality is taught in schools and reinforced in public-service announcements. Should we believe that such education has no effect, or, much worse, an opposite effect? Raging anti-feminist men think so, and raging anti-immigrant Swedes blame foreigners. Amnesty International says patriarchal norms are intransigent in Swedish family life. Everyone faults the criminal justice system.

In contemporary Sweden, women and girls are encouraged to speak up assertively about gender bias and demand their rights. Public discussions have revolved around how to achieve equal sex: Gender Equality in the bedroom. We can consult okejsex.nu, an official campaign whose homepage shows pedestrians obliviously passing buildings full of scenes of violence, suggesting it is ubiquitous behind closed doors. Okejsex defines rape as any situation where sex occurs after someone has said no.

In many countries, and in many people’s minds, rape means penetration, usually by a penis, into a mouth, vagina or anus. In Swedish rape law, the word can be used for acts called assault or bodily harm in other countries.

That may be progressive, but it’s also confusing. You don’t have to be sexist or racist to imagine the misunderstandings that may arise. If younger people (or older, for that matter) have been out drinking and dancing and end up in a flat relaxing late at night, we are not surprised that the possibility of sex is raised. The process of getting turned on – and being seduced – is often vague and strange, involving looks and feelings rather than clear intentions. It is easy to go along and actively enjoy this process until some point when it becomes unenjoyable. We resist, but feebly. Sometimes we give in against our true wishes.

Sweden is also proud of its generous policy towards asylum-seekers and other migrants who may not instantly comprehend what Gender Equality means here, or that not explicitly violent or penetrative sex acts are understood as rape. That doesn’t mean that non-Swedes are rapists but that a large area exists where crossed signals are likely, for instance, amongst people out on the town drinking.

Discussions of rape nowadays use examples of women who are asleep, or have taken drugs or drunk too much alcohol, in order to argue that they cannot properly consent to sex. If they feel taken advantage of the next day, they may call what happened rape. The Daphne project’s Sweden researchers propose that those accused of rape ought to have to ‘prove consent’, but attempts to legislate and document seduction and desire are unlikely to succeed.

What isn’t questioned, in most public discussions, is the idea that the problem must be addressed by more laws, ever more explicit and strict. Contemporary society insists that punishment is the way to stop sexual violence, despite evidence suggesting that criminal law has little impact on sexual behaviour.

We want to think that if laws were perfectly written and police, prosecutors and judges were perfectly fair, then rapes would decrease because a) all rapists would go to jail and b) all potential rapists would be deterred from committing crime. Unfortunately, little evidence corroborates this idea. Debates crystallise in black-and-white simplifications that supposedly pit politically correct arguments against the common sense of regular folk. Subtleties and complications are buried under masses of rhetoric, and commentaries turn cynical: ‘Nothing will change’, ‘the police are pigs’, immigrants are terrorists, girls are liars.

Is it realistic or kind to teach that life in Sweden can always be safe, comfortable and impervious to outside influences? That, in the sexual sphere, everything disagreeable should be called rape and abuse? Although the ‘right’ to Gender Equality exists, we cannot expect daily life to change overnight because it does.

I am in Budapest. Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics is the first conference I’ve been interested in attending in a long time. I swore off the whole conference genre for a while, but the description of this one caught my eye, so I got in touch with two very interesting minds and we proposed a panel. It’s a small event, 35 or so people, and no competing sessions, so you can actually relax and reflect on everything you hear. Our session is:

Monday 4th May 2009, 1600

Session 2: Breathing New Life into Old Fears: Cultural Studies of Prostitution, Pornography and Bad Sex

This panel will explore continuing impulses to criminalise and prohibit forms of ‘bad’ sexual practice. The three papers examine continuities and transformations in recent regulatory impulses to ‘protect’ the ‘innocent’ and the public from individual instances of bad sexual conduct. We ask whether fixed ethical frameworks, with concomitant laws, are appropriate in an age where diversity, autonomy and agency are prime values.

The Evil is in Paying: Sex with ‘Trafficked Women’
Laura Agustin

Prominent politicians and feminists have come to maintain that paying for sex with a ‘victim of trafficking’ is a heinous crime equivalent to violent rape. All migrant workers in the sex industry are considered subject to ‘serial rape’ and ‘sexual slavery’. The movement purposely conflates all prostitution with ‘trafficking’ and attacks those who disagree as pimps and anti-feminists. The justification is Gender Equality, a utopic vision that defines good sex as symmetrical, mutual, personally close, loving and equitable. Resulting laws criminalise the buying of sex on the grounds that introducing money creates a power relationship antithetical to the right kind of sex. This paper posits a different ethical vision in which money is not granted defining status in sexual acts.

Going to Extremes: Understanding New Online Pornographies
Feona Attwood

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about permissible and impermissible sexual practices and about good and bad representations of sex. They have also become the focus of broader concerns with ‘extreme’ images of the body, for example in the horror subgenre which has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, in images of real violence and conflict (sometimes referred to as ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’), and in the wider set of ‘shock’ images which proliferate online. This paper considers the significance of contemporary concerns about extreme online pornographies in a cultural context where norms of sexuality and notions of obscenity are fiercely contested and where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.

Five Dominatrices and a Thrashing: the Classifications of Sadomasochism
Clarissa Smith

During 2008 two of the UK’s most august institutions resounded to discussion of activities involving pain and sexual pleasure: the House of Lords debated the rights of British citizens to possess images of ‘extreme’ sexual practices and the High Court was regaled with tales of supposed Nazi orgies starring Max Mosley (Formula 1 President and son of British wartime fascist Sir Oswald Mosley) and five women he had paid to beat him. The rights and wrongs of sadomasochism, consensual violence and the commodification and commercialisation of sexual desire were thoroughly aired across the media. This paper will consider the multiple meanings of sadomasochism and other ‘extreme’ sexual practices in public discourse and the continuing failures of the legislature to understand such practices as anything other than evidence of deviant or irrational impulses.

Mexicans running across deserts in a ragged line: that’s the only image many people have seen of undocumented migrants sneaking aross a border. Videos from the BBC show one of numerous other ways. The scenes were shot recently in and around Calais, the closest French port to the UK and the entry to the Channel Tunnel. The first video shows migrants, apparently all men, attempting to jump into the backs of large trucks without being spotted by police or drivers. The report shows the informal camp, which is horrible, where migrants wait until they make it onto a truck (if they ever do). The back doors must be quickly openable, so there are people hanging about to sell advice about which lorries to try. The second video addresses the same phenomenon from the point of view of truck drivers and police. Note how public it all is. [The introductory advertising bits are quite short, hold on]

An earlier post discussed an Observer article illustrating the chaos in this small part of France. There used to be an official refugee camp at nearby Sangatte that migrants waited in, but the British pressured the French to close it several years ago. Since then, makeshift shacks and tents have grown up without control. The other day, however, French police swooped in and rounded up many migrants. The BBC says:

The police operation came two days before Immigration Minister Eric Besson was due to visit Calais for talks on the migrant situation, a state spokeswoman said.

“It is an attempt to dismantle people-trafficking networks,” she said. “It is an operation to destabilise the networks and try to find the smugglers.”

Really, the word trafficking is being used for everything.  The contradictions are impossible to resolve: migration law versus ‘humanitarian concerns’. Where will these migrants move to when policing makes the Calais area too much trouble and danger to deal with?

A search for ‘webcam girls’ just bought me 4, 470, 000 hits in google. I was investigating the following story from The Local, a news source in English about Sweden. I noted a couple of suggestive points in bold in the text and made further comments at the end of it. Note that the statistics treat Sweden alone. And what about webcam boys?

Swedish taxman chases webcam strippers 

Charlotte West, 8 April 2009

The culprits are primarily girls who take off their clothes and offer sexual services in front of a web camera. The Swedish Tax Agency, Skatteverket, estimates there are between 300 and 500 individuals who earn money this way. So far the agency has identified close to 200 people. What the majority have in common is that they have neglected to declare their income.

“Young people are usually seen as poorly informed about how to file their taxes. That might be one explanation, but another reason is that their clients don’t want to be identified,” Dag Hardyson, project manager for Skatteverket’s investigation of online businesses, told TT.

In the last three years, Skatteverket has looked into three different areas: pills, poker and porn. During the course of their investigation, they noted that paid pornography sites have had an increasing difficulty peddling their wares as so much free content is available. But they also discovered that the demand for “webcam girls” has increased. At first, Hardyson and his team didn’t believe the phenomenon was particularly widespread in Sweden. “But our colleagues in Holland said, ‘We have a problem, so it’s obvious that you have a problem’,” he said.

They also explained that the success of the “webcam girls” rests in the fact they can speak Swedish with their Swedish customers, and it is that interaction that is most important. The business is entirely legal, but requires those offering the service to register for a corporate taxation certificate, as well as maintain records of expenses and income. According to Sveriges Radio, only one of the individuals audited by Skatteverket has submitted an income declaration. The businesses are estimated to generate around 40 million Swedish kronor ($5 million), at least 20 million of which is tax revenue.

While people usually imagine the biggest issue for webcam workers to be having the nerve to perform on camera, other problems are more important. As with phone sex, it’s an advantage to be able to work from home, but the question is how clients will find you, which leads to chat rooms, advertising and/or being part of big website agencies. Virtual brothels provide rooms and technology and pay wages. As usual with unregulated businesses, workers can get very bad deals. Recently I was sent a link to Cam-girl Notes, a site that describes itself as a place to ‘discuss the cam life and how people can cope with it.’

Most of the sex industry now uses the Internet in one way or another. Not long ago I posted something about paying to watch brothel sex. Let me know about other new forms you hear about (contact form to the right). I’m always interested in the blurry boundaries between commercial and non-commercial sex. Read about the cultural study of commercial sex here and here.

The Suffering of the Immigrant is still one of the best books I know about the experience of migration. The book demonstrates how suffering does not have to equal victimisation and, most importantly, how migration is the inevitable consequence of colonialism. The migrants discussed left Kabylia, in northern Algeria, and went to France.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to several readers who sent me versions of this news.

Morning Star online.co.uk

Sex workers rally against new Crime Bill

Tuesday 31 March 2009 - Paul Haste

Sex workers smothered London’s Piccadilly Circus in red umbrellas on Tuesday to protest against the criminalisation of their profession.

Scores of workers from the nearby Soho district gathered at the Eros statue in the heart of the capital, stopping traffic to highlight their opposition to the government’s Policing and Crime Bill.

Carrying the red umbrellas as a symbol of their resistance to the new law, sex workers’ rights activists declared that it would “push prostitution further underground and push us into more danger.”

English Collective of Prostitutes organiser Cari Mitchell explained that the Bill, championed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, would “make it easier to for the police to arrest sex workers on the street and give them powers to seize our earnings and property regardless of whether there is a conviction.”

Referring to reports that Ms Smith’s ministerial expenses included pornographic DVDs, Ms Mitchell said: “It is ironic that the minister makes expense claims for products from the sex industry while waging this fundamentalist moral crusade against us.”

Ms Mitchell pointed out that “many sex workers are single mothers and prostitution is a survival strategy to deal with debt, low wages and unemployment.

“As the recession hits harder, more women are likely to resort to prostitution and the government should be providing resources and support for them, rather than stigmatising and criminalising them.”

Sex worker activist Ava Caradonna, who organises English classes for migrant workers in Soho, insisted that the women and men who sell sexual services “don’t need and don’t want other people making choices for us.

“Ministers want to criminalise our work, but we want to do what we do - and we want to organise and take charge of our own lives to make conditions better,” she added.

Danish activist Zanne agreed, pointing out that “sex workers all over the world are organising,” while Italian Andrea added that the government should “legalise the industry instead of attacking us.”

Ms Caradonna added that “those who want more oppressive laws need to listen to the workers and their union.”

“Abolition is not the answer because prostitution will never end. Instead we need some respect,” she stated.