helping

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.

Mira este video de una marcha en Lima llevada a cabo el 2 de junio, Día Internacional de los/as Trabajadores Sexuales. Here’s a great, colourful video of a pro-rights march held in Lima on 2 June on International Sex Workers Day.

La marcha forma parta de un proyecto de CiudadaniaSx: activismo cultural y derechos humanos, que enfrenta el estigma y la discriminación a través del arte y el activismo cultural. El proyecto sobre el trabajo sexual, llamado Intervención Bochinche, tiene como meta

confrontar el estigma y la discriminación que sufren cotidianamente las trabajadoras sexuales mujeres y trans (travesti, transgénero, transexual) debido a la criminalización del trabajo sexual, motivo por el cual suelen ser víctimas de diversas formas de violencia y violación de sus derechos.

Según donde estés, la palabra bochinche significa jaleo, alboroto (mess, row, racket, upheaval) o chisme (gossip). En el caso de esta inciativia, los dos significados pueden servir. Antes de la marcha, el proyecto colocó por Lima pancartas con interesantes mensajes, jugando con las palabras y las políticas represivas de la municipalidad. Entonces:

Street prostitution is advancing - neat!

Caresses available

Pick them up - We’re not watching you

The city is filling with lust - great!

Operation Sodom is also coming

Hookers’ Summit in Lima

The new Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) has once again been issued by the US government. I went back to a piece I wrote about this annual shameful phenomenon in 2007, when the Philadelphia Inquirer rang to solicit a piece on the subject. The only thing different now concerns the perceptions of US citizens outside the US: abysmal and worsening then, slightly better now with the election of Obama. It remains to be seen whether this new administration will be able to see and grapple with the imperialism inherent in the TIP, however. Everything else I said two years ago I stand by today. The paper didn’t change my text but did change the title badly (my original appears first below). 

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.

Not long ago I wrote about advertisements for sex-industry jobs in UK government-funded (un)employment offices called Jobcentre Plus. The other day, a government consultation on their presence came to an end.

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.

Since my current project is thinking about the idea of Gender Equality, I’m looking back at different eras of my life when women were not talked of as they are now. I’m listening to Janis Joplin, whose laments about men and love do not make women into victims. I’m not saying it was better when women suffered in silence, love was meant to justify everything and we didn’t know how widespread violence against women was in ordinary daily life. I’m trying to understand, though, how we got to a place where lots of people refer to women routinely as inherently vulnerable and men as ever-aggressive perpetrators of gender crime. I went back to a little essay I wrote nine years ago when I kept running into references to Empowerment. Here it is again, and here is that non-victim Janis.   

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. Read the rest of this entry »

As a longtime appreciator of Don Kulick’s Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, I am happy that he appreciated my book, too.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

There seems to be some confusion about another book of mine, which was published in Spain at the end of 2004 by Gakoa, in the Basque Country. Its translated title is Working in the Sex Industry, and other clichés about migration and consists of a series of essays plus a report written for Colectivo Ioé in 2000. I did the Ioé field work in Pamplona, talking with migrants, sex workers, social workers, police and other government officials. Sex at the Margins is not a translation of the first book. Below I tell a bit about how the first one came to be. If you are interested in buying the first one write to hiruga01@sarenet.es.

Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. Publicado en el Pais Vasco, España, en 2004 por Gakoa. Pedidos: hiruga01@sarenet.es

Gakoa es la editorial que publica la revista Mugak. Peio Aierbe se puso en contacto conmigo cuando querían sacar una edición sobre migrantes que trabajan en la industria del sexo, que salió en 2003.

El sitio de Gako dice sobre Mugak que ‘está concebida como una herramienta al servicio de los movimientos de solidaridad frente al racismo y la xenofobia. El camino recorrido desde su aparición, en 1997, nos permite afirmar que es una herramienta consolidada. Hemos podido comprobar que existe una amplia franja de personas que se acercan a estas cuestiones desde una postura solidaria. Sea desde la práctica militante o desde la inquietud intelectual, o incluso, desde quienes tienen que prestar un servicio en el ámbito de la Administración, la sintonía que hemos encontrado con todas nos hace ser optimistas de cara al futuro.

Esta sintonía es la que convierte a la revista Mugak en un actor de primer orden en la labor de construir redes por las que transite el debate, la solidaridad, el contraste, las propuestas y, en definitiva, parte del caudal solidario que existe en nuestra sociedad. Las oportunidades y los retos que plantean las migraciones afectan, de manera transversal, al conjunto de ámbitos en los que se desarrolla nuestra vida diaria. Esta complejidad exige una mirada detenida sobre cada uno de ellos y recurrir a muchos puntos de vista. Ése es el ámbito de trabajo de Mugak.’

Puedes leer sobre El Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre Inmigración, Racismo y Xenofobia Mugak y sus ideas en euskara.

The following story comes from Moldova, a country whose citizens are often said to be more likely to be trafficked or traffickers than others in Europe. Given that stereotype, it is interesting that this news, while brief, is more nuanced than most coming out of richer countries.

Human trafficking cases decline as illegal migration expands
Info-Prim Neo, 16.12.2008

The number of cases involving persons actually being trafficked tends to decline in favor of an increase in the number of illegal migration cases, according to the Board of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Moldova, Info-Prim Neo reports.

The Office said in a press release there have been recorded 510 trafficking-related offenses in 11 months of this year; of them, 209 were cases of trafficking of adults, 28 cases of trafficking of children, 152 cases of sexual exploitation, 106 cases of illegal migration, and 15 cases of child smuggling.

The prosecutors remark an alarming trend of trafficking cases where relatives and acquaintances have complicity. Cases where previously trafficked persons became traffickers represent another alarming trend. These cases are particularly difficult to investigate and examine in court.

According to the prosecutors, an element that facilitates human trafficking is corruption among persons in positions of authority. Trafficking and corruption are mutually reinforcing as they foster bribery and undermine the efforts made to counter these phenomena.

In the course of December the General Prosecutor’s Office is to finalize a series of acts that will make a priority to find criminal links between traffickers and persons in posts of authority.

The first good thing here is the absence of the abhorrent term sex trafficking : This authority is not making the fact of selling sex into a particular evil category. Next, the term illegal migration is used in the same breath as trafficking. Finally, they distinguish between child trafficking and child smuggling. I don’t believe it’s easy to make such distinctions, but I’d rather see them than the usual vast, reductionist statements.

Then these authorities mention, which everyone who studies migration knows very well, that relatives and friends are very often those who facilitate migrants’ journeys and jobs, whether those turn out happily or not. What outsiders decry as exploitation are often family strategies to get ahead. Are families often repressive instruments that punish girls more than boys? Yes. Should we lump all such family members into one messy bag called trafficking? It doesn’t help anyone. Migrants who’ve been selected as the most capable of being able to help the family as a whole do often suffer, but their greatest consolation can be knowing that they are helping their family. So dividing an exploited person from those she identifies with and loves is not kind. I would like to see things change, but not by imposing an idea about gender equality that does not take into account local realities.

The main point the Moldovan authority wants to make is the link between trafficking and corruption. Corruption is another word that can be misused and end up covering way too much, including ordinary local customs. But again, migration scholars know that getting the right papers to allow travel and work depends in many cases on the complicity of officials of all sorts: consider the cases of using false papers described here. And for those interested in some historical perspective, consider what refugees from Germany say about being smuggled in the 1940s, in a book by Dorothy B. Hughes.

It’s an uphill, possibly hopeless task to go against the massive tide of uninformed ideas about migration and the sex industry (called in blanket fashion sex trafficking and sex slavery), but a growing number of people are asking questions about images such as this one:

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? Read the rest of this entry »

The author of a new review of my book for a Portugese journal, Lorenzo Bordonaro, wrote to me the other day to tell me about it. At the same time, he sent me a copy of a research report he co-authored with Filipa Alvim at CEAS (Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Social), in Lisbon, entitled Tráfico de Mulheres em Portugal: Análise da construção de um problema social (Women Trafficking in Portugal: Analysis of the construction of a social problem).  From the English summary:

Asking why recently we are so concerned with women’s trafficking in Portugal sounds like a dumb question. After all, we are daily informed, trafficking is one of the greatest criminal endeavours of our times, with millions of people trafficked and enslaved every year, and billions of dollars of profit. It is normal therefore that Portugal is eager to stand up against this ‘inhuman form of crime’. Things, we have learned in the research that led to this book, are not so simple.

Without denying the existence of some cases of prototypical ‘women trafficking’, and the actual and daily violence that is perpetrated against women migrating to Portugal, we have come to the conclusion that the contemporary crusade against (women) trafficking in Portugal and Europe is motivated less by the wish to protect migrant’s (women’s) right than by the moral and political concern about prostitution and undocumented migration.

You can see why I’d be glad to hear from Lorenzo, given the overwhelming victimisation of migrants dominating so many cultures nowadays (see my pre-Christmas post on Women Doing Things for an antidote!). Here’s his review of my book. It begins ‘We live in an age of helping victims…’ Please send the link to any readers of Portuguese among your acquaintances.

Análise Social, Vol XLIII, n 4 (2008)

Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, London, Zed Books, 2007, 248 páginas.

Vivemos na época da ajuda e das vítimas: quotidianamente são identificados novos “problemas” e patologias sociais e psicológicas, assim como as respectivas vítimas; são procurados novos trabalhadores sociais e criados novos programas e figuras profissionais. As populações de migrantes não europeus, especialmente, surgiram nas últimas duas décadas, na Europa, como o novo campo da “acção social”, da actividade humanitária e da investigação científica. Financiamentos consideráveis são, por isso, anualmente destinados a programas para estas “populações alvo”: para investigar e melhorar a sua saúde física e mental, pesquisar a sua vida religiosa, as “disfunções” das suas famílias, a sua sexualidade, o sucesso e insucesso escolar dos mais novos, o saneamento das suas casas, a protecção das suas crianças… Todas as formas de intervenção nas vidas e na moralidade destes “novos outros” são legitimadas em nome da ajuda, do seu bem-estar, saúde e segurança.

Quanto às ciências sociais, não deixa de ser inquietante a forma como, na maioria dos casos, têm assumido acriticamente o seu novo papel em relação às finalidades (agenda) sociais e políticas — ciências sociais e “filantropia” parecem estar num processo de simbiose, se não de identificação. Poucos questionaram até agora este desejo de ajudar e de salvar, bem como as evidentes implicações políticas destas acções humanitárias, sendo a sobreposição entre protecção e disciplina uma das dinâmicas fundamentais da intervenção social, como Foucault já tinha salientado.

Em Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, Laura María Agustín analisa este aparato de ajuda reservado aos migrantes, questionando a abordagem, as motivações e a eficácia das intervenções e das políticas, no caso específico das mulheres migrantes trabalhadoras do sexo. O interesse da autora pelo sector “social” deriva da sua experiência profissional, já que trabalhou inicialmente em vários projectos de educação para adultos (inclusive de trabalhadoras e trabalhadores do sexo) na América Latina e nas Caraíbas. Esta experiência despertou-lhe o interesse pela lógica dos financiadores e dos operadores, pelo que passou um ano em várias capitais europeias, falando com operadores de várias ONGs e com migrantes, e começou, depois, um trabalho de campo em Madrid sobre a relação entre projectos de ajuda e migrantes trabalhadores do sexo. Read the rest of this entry »