Violence Against Women: Too much of a bad thing? 

Laura Agustín, The Local, 10 November 2009

It might sound odd to talk about silences on the topic of gender equality in Sweden, since discussions of it seem to run non-stop. But that is how hegemony works: a constant bombardment of words, most of which reiterate the opinions of a single powerful group. Differences of opinion are usually quibbles over details to a central idea that’s accepted as being indisputable because it’s supposed to be normal.

Gender equality in Sweden is a perfect example. Voices that want to question its foundations are not heard, which is what Maria Abrahamsson, a veteran editorial writer for Svenska Dagbladet, meant when she said that ‘open discussion’ is missing about certain aspects of gender law and policy.

Some of what you hear from state feminists refers to assuring that women are represented in government and paid as well and have the same opportunities to work as men, and that men have the same opportunities to be good parents that women do. These are the policies for which Sweden ranks highly compared with most other countries. When the word jämställdhet is heard here, chances are that the details of these issues are being discussed. I say details because the policies have been in place for some time, and no one questions the need to make citizens in general more ‘equal’ in a democratic-type society.

The problem is that much of what state feminists say centres around the concept of Violence Against Women (våld mot kvinnor, often referred to as kvinnofrid, the legal protection of women). The mantra is ‘We have a big problem with violence against women’. Repeated over and over, it becomes a truth difficult to break into questionable pieces, rather providing a reason for endless conversations about how to stop men from committing aggressions against women. A point of view that says ‘Wait a minute, all those things you’re talking about shouldn’t be called violence!’ is rarely heard in public discussions.

It’s not that people in Sweden, feminists and non-feminists alike, never discuss this exaggerated notion of violence in bars, cafes, emails, blogs and occasional seminars. The issue is that the basis of policy, the quite extreme definition of violence and the reductionist idea of what’s ‘good for women’ is so rarely questioned in any visible, public way, whether the mainstream media or parliament. And by questioning I don’t mean the occasional online article with its cloud of comments; I mean a sustained conversation.

Violence Against Women (often known in English-speaking countries as VAW) is problematic when it relies on the idea that women are always, innately weaker than men. More than physical strength is at stake, although the words heard most are abuse, assault, battering. VAW has come to signify different sorts of coercion, threats, and moral strangleholds men are conceived as naturally committing on women, just because men are born that way. Women’s bodies are conceived as inherently vulnerable to men’s invasion and use, which oddly doesn’t produce a demand that women be granted full autonomy over their own bodies.

Partial autonomy is granted: women shall be allowed to have abortions and be listened to when they say No to sex. These are great as far as they go. But on other issues, women’s bodies are conceived as objects for government policymakers to decide about: a contradiction that drives many women, the world over, round the bend. Gender policy is also problematic when it assumes that women are innately better than men – kinder, more peaceful, more capable of love, less capable of violence, preferring certain forms of balanced, meaningful sex.

Louise Persson’s blog frihetspropaganda is the best place I know to hear the other point of view in Sweden. Blogging since December 2003, Persson is the author of Klassisk Feminism. Discussing an H&M advert that showed a woman wearing underwear in her home, which one state feminist, Gudrun Schyman, not only denounced as soft porn but also equated with hard porn, prostitution, trafficking and slavery, Persson complains that Schyman presumes to speak for All Women. In the case of the underwear advert, we can ask: What about women who want to wear sexy lingerie at home, or be photographed wearing it, or make money being photographed wearing it or wear it as a prelude to selling sex?

It was a rare occasion the other night when Aschberg brought Abrahamsson together with Schyman to discuss how gender-equal Sweden is. Abrahamsson said yes, Sweden is gender-equal, especially relative to the rest of the world, and would like to stop talking about jämställdhet and switch to jämlikhet – another word for equality that hasn’t got the baggage of gender and sex. Schyman said no, Sweden isn’t gender-equal and, interestingly, complained that she has no one to discuss the problem with. (Would she like to talk with the model in the H&M ad?)

I’ve got questions about the idea of equality in the first place. Must it mean sameness, exact balance, symmetry? Especially in the area of sex and bodies, that will always be impossible. The core complaint against Sweden’s version of gender equality is that the diversity of women’s mental, spiritual and sexual desires is not recognised and that women who conceive of their bodies differently, who feel empowered in other ways than VAW hegemony recognises, are ignored.

This difference of vision is the subject of exhausting, resource-wasting battles all over the world – which I wrote about some years ago under the title Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes? The conflict, if possible, has only grown more venomous since then. How is it that Sweden, with its cultural value on avoiding conflict, can reconcile causing so much of it?

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

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

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

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

Criminalization of clients

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

Obviously, different terms function better or coincide more with different situations, but when social movements consciously work to change language they almost inevitably eliminate these differences. Since there are still plenty of places in the world where prostitutes are simplistically viewed as evil, contaminated, immoral and diseased, campaigns to change language so as to see the lack of choice and elements of exploitation in prostitutes’ situations are positive efforts to help them. Why, then, do these positive efforts have to be based on finding a different villain, to replace the old one?

I am referring to the discipline-and-punishment model that these efforts to change language and change perception inevitably use: in constructing a victim they also construct a victimizer—the ‘exploiter’, the bad person. After that, it is inevitable that punishment becomes the focus of efforts: passing laws against the offense and deciding what price the offender should pay. This model of ‘law and order’ is familiar to most of us as an oppressive, dysfunctional criminal justice system. We know that prisons rarely rehabilitate offenders against the law; we know that in some countries prison conditions are so bad that riots occur frequently, and if they don’t, perhaps they should. We also know that it is usually extremely difficult to prove sexual offenses (because of how the law is constructed, because of the difficulty of all these definitions of victimization, because legal advice can find ways out, etc.). Yet we continue to insist on better policing and more effective punishment, as though we didn’t know all of this.

International regulations on trafficking and sexual exploitation

My own work examines both the discourses and the practical programming surrounding the European phenomenon of migrant prostitution, the term used to describe non-Europeans working in the European sex industry (and, indeed, everyone who travels from one place to another in that vast network of diverse businesses). In most countries of the European Union, migrants appear now to constitute more than half of working prostitutes, and in some countries possibly up to 90 percent (Tampep, 1999). This situation has caused a change in the thinking on violence: now ‘traffickers’ of sex workers are discussed more than their clients. Because so many of the migrants come from ‘third world’ countries, ‘trafficking’ discourses have become a forum for addressing ‘development’ projects such as structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund. But the more active debates have concerned violence, in a way that constructs them as organized crime.

One of the fora of this highly conflictive discussion was the United Nations Commission for the Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice, which met various times in Vienna to elaborate protocols on the trafficking of migrant workers. Two distinct lobbying groups argued over definitions of words such as consent, obligation, force, coercion, deceit, abuse of power and exploitation. Two distinct protocols were produced, one which applies to the ‘trafficking of women and children’ while the other to ‘smuggling of migrants’. The gender distinction is clear, expressing a greater disposition of women –along with children– to be deceived (above all about sex work), and also expressing an apparently lesser disposition to migrate. Men, on the other hand, are seen as capable of migrating but of sometimes being handled like contraband, thus the word agreed on is not trafficking but smuggling. The resulting protocols now form part of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UN, 2000), which member countries will debate individually and decide to sign or not.

What is the problem? In an effort to save as many victims as possible, the protocols totalize the experience of all women migrants working in the sex industry, and all those who help them migrate—a wide array of family, friends, lovers, agents and entrepreneurs, as well as small-time delinquents and (probably, but this is not proved) big-time criminal networks—are defined as traffickers. Every kind of help, from preparing false working papers, visas or passports to meeting migrants at the airport and finding them a place to stay, is defined as the crime of trafficking.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) specifically tries, both at the Vienna meetings and internationally, to fuse the two concepts of ‘trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’ and to define them both as crimes of violence against women. Not only everyone who helps people migrate and work in the sex industry but everyone who buys sexual services ends up defined as an exploiter, a rapist and a criminal. CATW favours legislation to penalize clients of prostitutes (CATW, 2000).

The booming sex market

The problem with proposing the penalization of sexual ‘exploiters’, or clients of prostitutes, comes from the magnitude of the phenomenon, which is almost never confronted. Statistics are unreliable for all sectors of an industry overwhelmingly unrecognized legally or in government accounting, and which operates informally and relies on bribes, legal loopholes and facades. However, we can understand from the many studies of different aspects of the sex industry that it is booming. Prostitution and exploitation sites are so numerous everywhere that customers cannot be exceptional cases (yet they are often spoken of as if they were ‘perverts’ or ‘deviants’). Rather it is clear that adult and adolescent men everywhere consider it permissible to buy sexual services, and some estimates calculate that most men do it at some time in their lives.

More than 20 years ago, one Roman prostitute calculated this way:

Rome was known to have 5,000 prostitutes. Let’s say that each one took home at least 50,000 liras a day. Men don’t go more than once a day. That means that for someone who asked 3,000 liras in a car, to arrive at 50,000 she had to do a lot, maybe twenty or so. Figure it out, 20 times 5,000 comes to 100,000 clients. Since it’s rare for them to go every day, maybe they go once or twice a week, the total comes to between 400,000 and 600,000 men going to whores every week. How many men live in Rome? A million and a half. Take away the old men, the children, the homosexuals and the impotent. I mean, definitely, more or less all men go. (Cutrufelli, 1988: 26, author’s translation)

A French report calculated in 1977 that an average of 40,000 men a day have sexual relations with prostitutes (Crimi, 1979). In 1996, a Spanish NGO estimated that 300,000 prostitutes might have three clients a day, making a million buying sexual services every day in Spain (Hernández Velasco, 1996). Other measures may demonstrate the size of the clientele: counts of the number of overt sex businesses, figures on users registered at Internet commercial sex sites, condom sales in sex establishments, turnover of vehicles at a given business site, etc.

The fact that practically none of these consumers acknowledge what they are buying should not distract us. Millions of men lie every day about this aspect of their lives, to someone: wives, friends, girlfriends, children, and themselves. This is a powerful amount of bad faith or bad karma, but do we want to put all these people in jail?

Changing attitudes to sex and power

Far from a utopic vision of freedom and equality for all people, what is being constructed here would have vast numbers of otherwise conventional people locked up or otherwise punished. Perhaps if the history of the penal justice system were more positive, we could say it would be worth it to get the cleaner, better society awaiting us afterward. But there is no such history in general; societies seem to be resigned to recidivist crime and unrehabilitated criminals. So why do we go on pretending prison works?

A focus on defining crimes and letting people know they are at risk of arrest for committing them furthermore relies on a theory of ‘deterrence’; that is, that potential criminals will not commit crimes if they know they may be punished for them. Conclusive evidence does not exist to show that this theory works, however, and perhaps least of all with sexual crimes. Many sexual activities are technically against the law, in both third and first world countries, but continue to be widely practiced, tolerated and accepted socially. There are States that forbid oral or anal sex or sadomasochism or homosexuality, but motivated people continue to engage in these practices. This is not to say that sexual exploitation or violence are the same as such practices but to demonstrate that penalizing sexual activities has a long history of failure. Above all, social efforts to abolish prostitution and penalize clients (in Europe and North America, where it might be thought possible) have failed for 200 years. Those involved simply move to less visible locations.

So where are the proposals that show a real utopian vision, of societies and cultures where exploitation is not routine? There do not seem to be many, as most projects make no attempt to work with victimizers/clients themselves as subjects. The proponents of this particular social change are largely women, and on this subject they distance themselves from men, making them potential criminals impossible to study, reason with or include in building a better world. This simplification also obscures the role of the many women who participate in exploitation/prostitution as procurers, business owners, managers and clients, as well as disappearing the fate of many male victims who deserve to be seen as needing support or help.

My suggestion is that we begin to move on to proposals that would work directly with people at all levels to change attitudes to sex and power. The changes would involve how we conceive of our personal desires and our potential power over others—absolutely fundamental changes. Thinking this way moves us away from classic prostitution debates and battles (a welcome relief) but also proposes to include ‘the other half’ of the problem in projects for change. Many of those working on the ground with victims of sexual exploitation cannot conceive of working with victimizers, whether they are sex business owners, taxi drivers or clients. But it should be remembered that not so long ago prostitutes were thought to be morally lax and contaminated, recalcitrant and generally unredeemable. That attitude has been changing, so we might contemplate possible change with those who exploit and commit violent acts, too.

If language is important to social movements, then the language being heard widely on the subject of sexual exploitation and prostitution needs reshaping. At the moment what is heard is disciplinary, which may make sense in the short run, but what we need are long-run, hopeful visions that do not continue to divide the world into two gendered camps in the traditional battle of the sexes.

References

CATW (2000) Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

Crimi, B. (1979) ‘La prostituzione in Francia’. Paper presented at a Conference on Biological, Social and Legal Aspects of Prostitution, Rome, November.

Cutrufelli, M.R (1988) ‘La demanda de prostitución’, Debats, no. 24, June.

Hernández Velasco, I. (1996) ‘Un millón de hombres al día va de prostitutas’, El Mundo [Sociedad 26], 27th December.

Tampep (1999) Health, Migration and SexWork: The Experience of Tampep. Amsterdam: Mr. A. de Graaf Stichting.

UN (2000) Convención de las Naciones Unidas contra la Delincuencia Organizada Transnacional. Anexo II: Protocolo para prevenir, reprimir y sancionar la trata de personas, especialmente mujeres y niños. Anexo III: Protocolo contra el tráfico ilícito de migrantes por tierra, mar y aire. Vienna: UN Commission for Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice.

Brothel Museum, Taiwan

The other day activists were happy because Taiwan’s government announced a plan to decriminalise prostitution. Here is the rather predictable follow-up, with both sides’ arguments represented. One point needs to be clarified, however. When anti-prostitutionists say that Amsterdam’s recent actions ‘prove’ that legalisation doesn’t work they are vastly oversimplifying and misleading. The law is a process, a series of initiatives that are considered, written up and tried out. It’s quite common for them to be modified, whether by liberalising or specifying or narrowing, without the fundamental sense of the law changing. No one law’s passing is going to change a culture overnight or, probably, get everything right the first time! Note the anti-migration component in New Zealand’s law, often cited as the best available. To understand the Dutch situation, read an in-depth analysis.

Taiwan’s women split over prostitution issue

Brothel, Taiwan

Amber Wang, 8 July 2009

Taipei (AFP) — Sex workers in Taiwan have cautiously welcomed a government plan to legalise prostitution, but the scheme is being opposed by an alliance of women’s groups who fear it will breed crime and violence. A red-light area similar to Amsterdam’s famed canalside sex-for-sale district has been proposed for the capital Taipei, with legal and zoning measures due in place within six months. Prostitutes and their supporters say they see a ray of hope after many years of campaigning for legalisation to protect them from both customers and police, but some are concerned about being moved into special zones.

“I hope the government will allow us to stay where we are and give us legal protection,” said one prostitute who wanted to be identified as Hsiao-feng. “I don’t want to move to a new place to start again.” Hsiao-feng earns a living in Taipei’s Wanhua district, which is believed to be home to thousands of sex workers plying their trade illegally even though prostitution was outlawed in the city in 1997. “Who wants to have red-light districts near homes?” she asks. “The government would have to put us in the mountains but then we can’t make a living because nobody wants to travel that far.”

Observers say paid-for sex remains big business and the ban has driven it underground, where brothels operate under euphemistic names such as tea houses, massage parlours, clubs and even skin-care salons. There are also women known as “liu ying” or “floating orioles” — a metaphor for flirtatious and seductive women — who find patrons on the streets.

There is no official record on the scale of Taiwan’s sex industry but the advocacy group Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters (COSWAS) estimates that it involves 400,000 people and is worth 60 billion Taiwan dollars (1.8 billion US) a year.

“Right now we are helpless when customers don’t pay, or even rob or hurt us,” Hsiao-feng told AFP. “We have to watch out for the police and their informants because we can end up in prison if caught.”

Prostitutes face three days in detention or a fine of up to 30,000 Taiwan dollars if arrested, while their clients go unpunished. “The government should protect sex workers’ human rights and stop treating them like criminals,” says COSWAS chief Chung Chun-chu. “It should allow a blanket decriminalisation to regulate the sex trade.”

The public is divided on the issue, with 42.3 percent supporting the plan to legalise prostitution while 38.8 percent oppose it and the rest are undecided, according to a poll by the local China Times.

Arielle Su, an elementary school teacher in Taipei, says legalising the sex trade cuts both ways. “I think it can help prevent sex crimes as some people have needs and they would prey on the general public if they are unsatisfied,” she said. “But as a mother and a teacher I am also concerned that it would corrupt morals.”

A dozen local women’s groups have formed an alliance against legalising prostitution, warning that it would encourage crime and injustice against women. “We oppose making prostitution a legal industry because it fosters sexual violence and exploitation of women,” said Chi Hui-jung, head of The Garden of Hope Foundation.

Chi pointed out that the Dutch authorities were reducing the size of Amsterdam’s red-light district due to concern over criminal activities such as human smuggling and money laundering. “The government should offer welfare programmes and job incentives to women so they won’t go into prostitution out of economic desperation,” Chi said.

Hsiao-feng, a 45-year-old divorcee, says it is difficult for street walkers like her, with little education or job skills, to find regular work. “I don’t like what I do for a living but I have to raise my children and pay the bills. I don’t regret becoming a sex worker. I just hope the government will protect my safety so I am not always at the mercy of others,” she said.

Copyright © 2009 AFP

Patrons were not forced to take the jobs or even look at the listings, and presumably some job-seekers were grateful to come upon them. One would think otherwise, however, by protestors’ language at a demonstration held against these adverts. Sometimes I think their vision of Woman’s Place looks more like this: 

Jobcentre picketed by anti-sex industry protestors

Louisa Peacock, 27 March 2009. This article first appeared in Personnel Today magazine

Anti-sex industry campaigners have branded Jobcentre Plus ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ for continuing to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry.

As the government’s consultation ‘Accepting and advertising employer vacancies from within the adult entertainment industry by Jobcentre Plus’ draws to a close today, human rights organisations and women’s rights campaigners have urged the government to stamp out any escort or masseuse services as those jobs are “euphemisms for prostitution”.

Members ofthe campaign group Object and the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution stood outside Brixton Jobcentre with ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ placards in protest.

Anna van Heeswijk, grassroots co-ordinator at Object, said: “It is not acceptable for a government agency to be promoting jobs to women which often involve violence and abuse and which send out the message that women are sexual objects to be bought and sold.”

The Department for Work and Pensions began to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry after a 2003 legal ruling that Ann Summers should be allowed to advertise through Jobcentre Plus.

But van Heeswijk said: “It is nonsensical for the government to extend a decision applicable to retail premises to virtually the entire sex industry. It is well known that ‘escort’ and ‘masseuse’ are euphemisms for prostitution. Working in Ann Summers is very different from providing direct sexual services in prostitution or lap dancing.”

The DWP consultation, which aims to investigate whether more can be done to strengthen the safeguards in place for the safety of jobseekers, ends today, 27 March.

The Em- of Empowerment

Laura Agustín

Research for Sex Work, 2000, 3, 15-16.

The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves. It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed. In Latin America, in educación popular, one of the great cradles of this kind of concept, the word itself didn’t exist until it was translated back from English. To many people, if they know it at all, the word empoderamiento sounds strange. It’s an NGO word, used by either volunteer or paid educators who view themselves as helpers of others or fighters for social justice, and is understood to represent the currently ‘politically correct’ way of thinking about ‘third world’, subaltern or marginalised people. But it remains a transitive verb, which places emphasis on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way. These good intentions, held also by 19th-century European missionaries, we know from experience do not ensure non-exploitation.

In the current version of these good intentions, ‘first world’ people and entities use their funds to help or empower those less privileged. They spend money to set up offices and pay salaries, many to people who remain in offices, often engaged in writing proposals that will allow them to ‘stay in business.’ These organisations have hierarchies, and those engaged in education or organisation at the ‘grassroots’ level often are the last to influence how funds will be used. Those closer to the top, who attend conferences, live in Europe or have career interests in the organisation, know how proposals must be written to compete in the crowded funding world. This condition of structural power should not be overlooked by those concerned with empowerment, who more often view themselves as embattled, as non-government, as crusaders situated ‘against’ conservative policies. Yet, when a concept like empowerment comes from above in this way, we needn’t be surprised at the kind of contradictions that result—literacy programmes that don’t keep people interested in reading, AIDS education that doesn’t stop people’s refusing to use condoms.

To empower me as a sex worker you assume the role of acting on me and you assume that I see myself as an individual engaged in sex work. If I don’t see myself this way, then I am disqualified from the empowerment project, despite your best intentions. The ‘identity’ issue here is crucial; funders and activists alike are currently interested in valorising cultural and individual difference.While it is a great advance to recognise and ‘give voice to’ human subjects who were before marginalised or disappeared, the problem remains that if you want to inject pride in me that I am a worker and supporter of my family and I don’t recognise or want to think of myself that way, the advance won’t occur, in my case.

But, you say, those are the real conditions, we live in a world of funders and partial successes. We’re doing the best we can, and we acknowledge that these empowerment projects often fail. Since it’s to no one’s benefit that successes be quite so partial, let’s consider whether there is any way which this empowerment concept might be conceived differently, forgetting for the moment the funder and his funds.

In educación popular, in programmes sometimes called capacitación [capacity-building], people get together to talk, sometimes with the encouragement of a person from ‘outside’. This person might be called an animadora or an educator, her job to facilitate conditions where subjects might realise they have a problem in common which, if they acted together, they might be able to move toward solving. I’m describing a very fundamental, ‘pure’ version, perhaps, now complicated in many places in many ways by different histories, international contacts, hybrid forms. Still, it’s worth considering what the most basic idea always has been.

Here, the most the outsider does is provide the suggestion of a time and place, with perhaps a very basic reason for getting together, perhaps just ‘meeting neighbours’. Who finds out about this meeting? Everyone who lives there, if it’s a village or small barrio and people talk to each other fairly freely. Letting people know can be an important task of the outsider. Sometimes, in larger places, an ‘identity’ is targeted, but it can be a very general identity, such as everyone concerned to improve conditions in the community.

The educator/animator might suggest the group talk about a topic such as how to get running water, bus service or rubbish collection—topics of concern to everyone, including sex workers. Or she might present a question—such as why everyone is talking about migrating to work somewhere else—and hope people will respond. But if they don’t, and if nothing seems to happen, her job is to resist the temptation to push the conversation. The hope is rather that if people feel free to talk, they will, eventually, if only to see if others share their feelings. This process can be extremely slow and even invisible, and no money or materials from outside are required. The profound assumption is rather that people themselves already know a lot—what they want, what they need. If they agree after some time that a technical fact or help is needed that none of them possess, then they might feel ‘empowered’ to search for that fact on the outside.

Does the ‘outsider’actually need to be there during this process? The answer depends on the person, on how quietly encouraging she is, on how patient and undisappointed if the group doesn’t ‘take off’, agree on anything or agrees to a programme the opposite of what the funders want.

Can this vision be applied when funders seem concerned solely with the sex organs of people assumed to ‘identify’ themselves as sex workers? If educators must ‘target’ prostitutes as those who come to a meeting? Perhaps, if the same kind of mostly undirected sharing of experiences is encouraged. Many times sex workers will then be heard to discuss not sex, clients and condoms—the topics always brought up by funders—but all the other aspects of their lives, which are not peculiar to them as prostitutes. They might talk about a new song, a new dress, a new club—or a new idea for getting together to protect and help each other.

Because the prostitution controversy is about women who sell sex to men, most of male sex work passes unnoticed. And people who do talk about it often slip into the assumption that it’s a phenomenon happening between men, whether you call them gay or MSM. Consider host bars, which welcome female clients to be treated as men are in Japan’s numerous hostess bars.

The basic work is providing company whilst customers sit in the venue: good conversation, graceful flirting, lighting cigarettes and making sure drinks are correctly poured and always full. The relationship takes place in public but has an intimate quality. Venues differ, and sometimes employees are obliged to meet customers outside the clubs. Wages are low, and employees depend on the commissions they earn on promoting the sale of drinks, whose prices can be very high indeed.

I have read good research about Japanese hostess clubs but not about  host clubs. You can find a lot of media reports that all say the same thing about how they work. They say that even professional Japanese women are supposed to be passive and submissive. They correlate the rise of  host clubs with such women’s desires to have a place where they can be assertive and uninhibited. It is often said that a lot of the customers at host bars are hostesses who arrive after their own wearing shifts.

I’ve been studying the sex industry for 15 years, and I understand that the conflict about prostitution - and therefore about trafficking - derives from the belief that biological women are innately vulnerable to sexual violence. Therefore, information about men who sell sex (or are exploited) is usually marginalised, unless the men are technically boys.

But what about women who buy sex from men? Evidence about that is usually dismissed, too, by those who want to abolish commercial sex. When it’s not dismissed, the women are denounced as ‘acting like men’ - exploitative, objectifying, dominating, selfish. This critique comes up most in treatments of middle-class women tourists in poorer countries, where it’s common for local men to act as guides, advisers, drivers, cultural mediators and lovers. More everyday situations of women paying men are said to be few and exceptional, except for cheerful accounts of places like Chippendales.

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.

Since January 1st, paying for sex (or attempting to) has been illegal in this wonderful oasis of gender equality and social democratic sex. Exactly ten years after our blond neighbours, Norway has installed an abolitionist law that reaches further than the Swedish one: Also buying sex abroad is made criminal. In principle, then (disregarding the obvious difficulties of enforcement), a Norwegian citizen can be fined or sent to jail for having made the deal anywhere in the world. No need even to be caught with your trousers down. Selling sex is, as before, not illegal, but all forms of organising are.

On Jan 4th, the first “whore client” (the charming Norwegian expression most commonly used for men who buy sex) was caught in Oslo. According to newspapers, the 44-year old man made a deal with a Norwegian street worker, who, when the car they were driving was stopped by the police, confirmed that they had agreed on a price (no action had still taken place, thank God!!). The man’s photo is shown in the tabloids; his face blurred but he must be easily recognizable for those who know him. He will be fined about €1000 for his crime, in addition to a life in shame. Not more than he deserves, the pig.

As this case indicates, convictions under the new law will depend heavily on either confessions by clients, or on sex workers’ willingness to admit that they’ve sold sex to, or, as in this case, made the deal with someone. Since most won’t admit this, for obvious reasons, a spokeswoman for the Oslo police says that prostitutes (sex worker is not a PC word in Norway) will be informed about their “duty to act as witness”. Reassuring indeed, for those who feared that the new law could turn out to be ineffective.

Whereas the Swedish sex-purchase prohibition was largely defended in terms of women’s equality, the Norwegian one has been framed as a measure against sex trafficking: If there is no demand, then there is no money to make dealing in supply. In this way, Norway confirms its self-congratulatory image as a human rights superpower. Yesterday, the Oslo police anti-trafficking squad announced that eight female Nigerian sex workers had been taken in for lacking legal residency, during an anti-trafficking operation directed at the indoor market. As none of them qualified as victims of trafficking (fortunately, or unfortunately?), they will be expelled, probably to a nice place called “home”, where, according to Norwegian folklore, foreigners are much better off than here.

In short: No reason not to open the champagne bottles and celebrate! Our peaceful streets and glorious consciousnesses will become cleaner than ever, tourists and good citizens will no longer be offended by visible and offensive whoring, and Norway will undoubtedly get an excellent grading in the next TIP report. I have never been so proud as in this very moment of being Norwegian. Let’s only hope that this wonderful policy will continue to spread, so that more and more oppressed women will come to enjoy the unmatched benefits of the Scandinavian model for sex: Always free, always equal, and always mutually enjoying.

Dag Stenvoll

Late last year I put up some positive pictures of Women Doing Things and promised I would be following up on this idea called Gender Equality. Dag’s comment on the different motivation for the Norwegian versus the Swedish legislation is important, so listen up: Sweden’s law is not about prudishness on the subject of sex - this is a widespread misunderstanding. If you’re not that old, you remember when Sweden was considered a sexual-liberation paradise. No, the goal of many Swedish policies is Gender Equality, and the prostitution law is a centrepiece. Now it’s ten years later, and the Norwegian government uses another justification for its law: to stop sex trafficking. Is the idea of Gender Equality changing?

Seducing woman

Sewing woman

Drinking woman

Reigning woman

Migrating woman

 Street trading women

Factory working woman

 Inspiring woman

I’ve been collecting this sort of image lately as I think they’ve become a bit unfamiliar nowadays. I’m fretting about what is meant by ‘gender equality’ and why it as a policy, or framework, seems to be leading us backwards to the idea of special, fragile, female vulnerabilities. More on that next year.

A Migrant World of Services

Social Politics, 10, 3, 377-96 (2003)

Laura Maria Agustín

Abstract: There is a strong demand for women’s domestic, caring and sexual labour in Europe which promotes migrations from many parts of the world. This paper examines the history of concepts that marginalise these as unproductive services (and not really ‘work’) and questions why the west accepts the semi-feudal conditions and lack of regulations pertaining to this sector. The moral panic on ‘trafficking’ and the limited feminist debate on ‘prostitution’ contribute to a climate that ignores the social problems of the majority of women migrants.

In a variety of scenarios in different parts of Europe, non-Europeans are arriving with the intention to work; these are largely migrant women and transgender people from the ‘third world’ or from Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. The jobs available to these women in the labour market are overwhelmingly limited to three basic types: domestic work (cleaning, cooking and general housekeeping), ‘caring’ for people in their homes (children, the elderly, the sick and disabled) and providing sexual experiences in a wide range of venues known as the sex industry. All these jobs are generally said to be services.

In the majority of press accounts, migrant women are presented as selling sex in the street, while in public forums and academic writing, they are constructed as ‘victims of trafficking.’ The obsession with ‘trafficking’ obliterates not only all the human agency necessary to undertake migrations but the experiences of migrants who do not engage in sex work. Many thousands of women who more or less chose to sell sex as well as all women working in domestic or caring service are ‘disappeared’ when moralistic and often sensationalistic topics are the only ones discussed. One of the many erased subjects concerns the labour market—the demand—for the services of all these women. The context to which migrants arrive is not less important than the context from which they leave, often carelessly described as ‘poverty’ or ‘violence.’ This article addresses the European context for women migrants’ employment in these occupations. Though domestic and caring work are usually treated as two separate jobs, very often workers do both, and these jobs also often require sexual labour, though this is seldom recognised. All this confusion and ambiguity occurs within a frame that so far has escaped definition.

For the rest, get the pdf at the top of this post.