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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The concept of sex tourism is another that gets thrown around without much investigation about what it means in specific circumstances. Many people on holiday feel like experimenting, want to go wild, enjoy breaking their hometown’s sexual norms. Paying may be involved, but payments may be made to guides, translators and natives who present as pick-ups. To say sex tourist is to imply that someone conspired to travel abroad for the express purpose of having sex; more often tourists buy all sorts of services, sometimes including sex, and sometimes not getting what they bargained for.

I talked not long ago about different prices for sex workers from different ethnic groups, in relation to a sign in Hong Kong. This issue arises here, too.

Beirut’s seamy side offers sex and fun for Arab tourists

22 August 2009, dpa

Beirut: On the surface, the Mediterranean coastal city of Beirut is an upmarket tourist destination, offering Arab tourists good weather, good food, and good times. But beyond the tables heavy with food and the shining lights, Beirut’s greatest attraction is sex. Arab tourists flock in the thousands to Lebanon from Gulf countries every summer. More and more, Arab men seem to be attracted by the growing opportunities to engage in sex tourism.

Lebanon has long been known to cater to all desires: a place where Arab tourists can break taboos they must contend with in their home countries. Some just want some freedom. Hind, an 18-year-old Saudi girl, is spending her summer in Lebanon, enjoying the chance to show off her striking red lipstick, large black eyes and black veil. She cruises in her three-wheel all-terrain vehicle at midnight in the overcrowded main streets of Aley, a town 30 kilometres from Beirut, where most of the cafes and restaurants are packed with Gulf tourists and Lebanese expatriates.  “For me this is total freedom, I can meet people and enjoy the night life as well,” Hind told the German Press Agency dpa.

But much of the growing tourism industry is still focused on men interested in sex. One man from Saudi Arabia, who requested not to be identified told dpa, “in Beirut there is good life, good weather, good service and most of all beautiful girls.” Lebanese women - with their outgoing characters, love of life and, most of all, their trendy European looks - have in recent years become central to attracting more Arab tourists into the country.

One of the hottest spots for such tourism is Maameltein, the red- light district of Lebanon, 20 kilometres north of Beirut. It’s a place where Arab tourists can watch beautiful women from Belarus, Ukraine, and Romania performing naked on stage. A night out with one of the dancers can cost 1,000 dollars.

One pimp in Maameltein, who asked to be identified as Carlos, told dpa that there’s no shortage of women, either local or from Europe, in Maameltein. ‘The rates vary, the Eastern European girls are the most highly paid, Lebanese come next, and then Iraqis,’ Carlos said. ‘During the summer our main clients are men from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states, while in winter we have many Lebanese clients,’ he said. In his late 40s, Carlos is often described as the best pimp in the district, catering to a clientele of mostly rich Saudi men.

Touring Maameltein with Carlos, one can see dozens of cars packed with young and middle-aged Gulf tourists cruising the area to get what Carlos describes as a ‘good catch.’ During the drive, Carlos receives calls from his clients. ‘My friend, I need three Ukrainian and one Lebanese for tonight to come to a party at my residence,’ Carlos quoted the caller, whom he said was from Saudi Arabia. This would cost ‘between 5,000 and 6,000 dollars per night because this is delivery to the residence,’ he said, puffing a large cigar.

Elsewhere, many of the women are Iraqis who have fled their wartorn country and discovered prostitution as an easy way to earn money. ‘I fled to Lebanon after the war in Iraq, with my mother and sister after my father and two brothers were killed,’ said one woman who wanted to be identified as Noura. ‘We were without money, so we started working here.’ Noura, her mother and sister work in three different bars. I know this is not a good job but we want to live and this is the easiest way to earn a living,’ she said, waving goodbye as her client arrived.

Noura’s pimp, who asked to be identified as Kamal, said Iraqi women find that ‘this is their only means of survival, especially if they have no other training or skills in which to support themselves.’ Asked the rate for an Iraqi woman, Kamal says: ‘If they are virgins and it is their first time, I can get a good price: between 1,000 and 1,500 dollars. If they are experienced, then it’s between 400 and 500 dollars.’ As for Lebanese women, ‘we sell them only to foreign men for fear that one day their families would know about their secret job,’ added Kamal. ‘I can tell you this has been a good season this year for us here,’ Kamal said as he drove away.

Prostitution in Lebanon is practised undercover after a 1998 law forbidding brothels. Legal licenses are limited to places offering sex shows. Many local groups are have started to work with young girls working in the industry. Dar al-Amal, or ‘House of Hope,’ was established in 1969. It says part of its main mission is to help children and adults ‘re-establish their dignity and recapture the meaning of their lives’ after leaving the sex industry.

‘In the old days prostitution houses were closely observed by the government. But now? Chaos. The rise of the sex industry in Lebanon is a threat to Lebanese society and Lebanon’s reputation in the Arab world and Europe,’ says Hoda al-Kara, head of Dar al-Amal.

La idea de que ‘las nigerianas’ son las más agresivas es, claro, discriminación flagrante. Viene de su estilo de trabajar: en grupos, plantándose frente a los carros para hablar con los choferes. El grupo invisible que no está nombrado en este reportaje son los clientes, así que pongo una imágen de chicos aquí.

Taxistas de Palma, molestos por los controles sobre las prostitutas, diariodemallorca.es

I. M. Calvià: Taxistas de Palma han expresado su malestar por la excesiva rigurosidad de los controles policiales que ha habido en los últimos días a la entrada de Magaluf, unos controles que, según el relato de varios profesionales, iban encaminados a disuadirlos de transportar prostitutas a la zona turística de este núcleo calvianer.

La explicación ofrecida a este diario por algunos conductores fue corroborada posteriormente por el presidente de la Asociación de Autónomos del Taxi de Mallorca, Gabriel Moragues, quien detalló que esta semana han mantenido una reunión con representantes municipales para pedir explicaciones acerca de estos hechos.

En esta reunión, los taxistas reprocharon que la minuciosidad de los registros se centrase únicamente en aquellos vehículos que transportaban mujeres subsaharianas. Según destacó Moragues, los representantes municipales les pidieron disculpas y les garantizaron que no se volvería a producir una situación así.
Los conductores consultados por este diario relataron que en los controles policiales objeto de polémica se paraba a los taxis que llevaban mujeres subsaharianas, se las obligaba a bajar y eran registradas por policías equipados con guantes y mascarillas, ante el temor a un posible contagio por gripe A. A continuación, de acuerdo a esta versión, los agentes procedían a inspeccionar con esmero la documentación del taxi.

Young girl in Benin’s largest market in Cotonou. Whether she is an economic migrant or victim of trafficking is central to a study of children’s migration in West Africa. Photo Phuong Tran/IRIN

Research into how ‘child trafficking’ works is revealing the flaws inherent in this notion. Recently I published a post on some of the cultural contradictions that impede research with migrant children in the US. The following article confirms problems in West Africa. I’ve highlighted significant new ideas from people questioning issues in the region.

WEST AFRICA: But is it really trafficking? 

Lomé, Togo, 6 January 2009 (IRIN) - For years children’s rights groups have been fighting child trafficking in West Africa. Now, some of those groups are questioning how children have benefited from anti-trafficking interventions as they launch a project to understand children’s perilous migration throughout West Africa.

The nearly one-million dollar initiative led by UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), International Organization for Migration (IOM), and NGOs Plan International, Save the Children Sweden, and Terre des Hommes will conduct national and regional workshops and focus groups to produce a 2010 report on the reasons behind children’s regional migration. Terre des Hommes’ Olivier Feneyrol told IRIN assigning blame for children’s exploitation on rogue traffickers is misdirected.

Mobility

Largely absent from the planning documents of the project, “Mobility of children and youth in West Africa,” is the word trafficking. Rather, partners undertaking the study in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Togo speak of regional mobility.

“Children have been moving around the region for centuries and working just as long. That is the cultural reality here,” said Feneyrol, regional adviser for the West Africa office of non-profit organisation Terre des Hommes. “Some of that movement and work is dangerous. For years, we have approached this problem as a fight against trafficking, but this has not really benefited children. We have to move beyond focusing exclusively on trafficking to a more global strategy where we take into account children’s reality.”

Child rights groups and law enforcement agencies are fighting something they have not truly understood, Feneyrol told IRIN. “Do we really know the varied forms of migration? Who are the intermediaries? How are these voyages financed? What are the conditions that children leave behind? “Why are they taking risks and what are they searching? How can we fight a phenomenon we do not truly understand?”

Victim, but of what?

Trafficking is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by the means of threat, or use of force or other forms of coercion…for the purpose of exploitation,” according to the 2000 UN Convention Against Transnational Crime. Despite most West African governments having ratified the 2000 convention, and some passing laws criminalising trafficking, rights organisations estimate hundreds of thousands of children continue making precarious journeys to take on risky jobs throughout West Africa.

Not all are trafficked, according to IOM director, Ambassador William Lacy Swing at a November migration conference in Dakar. Some may instead be economic or environmental migrants, internally displaced people or refugees. If a child falls under the trafficking definition, Terre des Hommes’ Feneyrol said traffickers are not the root of the problem: “Putting so much of the blame for a child’s misery on the notion of trafficking…has not helped us better protect the majority of these children.”

Revolving door

Feneyrol said thousands of children on the move are uncounted while repatriated ones are not necessarily trafficking victims. “Just because they are working in a stone quarry in Nigeria does not mean they are a victim of trafficking. Breaking up stones can be less tiring and abusive than the agricultural work they did on their farms in the village.”

He said it is not always in the child’s best interest to return home. “They are too old to enter school. They come from large families that cannot afford to raise them and there is no way to earn a living wage where they came from, which is why they left.”

Feneyrol added that as long as rural families live in dire conditions, children and their parents will seek relief wherever they can. “It makes no difference if you arrest someone accused of being a trafficker. It does not address the root cause of economic misery that propelled the child down a risky path. International conventions do little to address the sociological and economic reality in West Africa.” More than 92 percent of the population in northern Togo, for example, earned less than US$511 in 2006, the amount required to cover basic needs, according to the government.

Friend or foe?

Terre des Hommes’ Feneyrol said people vilified as traffickers could be trained to protect children during their at-times perilous migrations. “These are the children’s uncles, neighbours, and cousins. They are rarely, if ever, international operators of organised crime networks. We need to explore more what role they can have in protecting children on the move.”

But for CARE International’s director Phillipe Kodko Yodo, this would be tantamount to collaborating with criminals: “These are people responsible for the misery of so many children. We cannot moralise such criminals, only punish them.” Antonio Mazzitelli, the West Africa director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – which is part of a regional anti-trafficking working group along with the mobility project’s five collaborators – said his office supports the proposed mobility study, but cautioned researchers against softening the stance against trafficking or child labour.

“The right to migrate freely or a family’s right to make a living wage cannot become a cover-up for trafficking or justification for child labour,” said Mazzitelli, “We cannot sit back and accept a situation just because it is the social norm. Slavery, female genital cutting, and child marriage were widely accepted ‘cultural and sociological realities’ even though they were illegal. And the fight is still not over on those fronts.” The UN adopted a protocol in 2003 to make it easier to prosecute human-traffickers. “This protocol does not end rural poverty, one critical element in the fight against economic exploitation,” said Mazzitelli, “And it will not wipe out trafficking in the next 10 or even 20 years. But we cannot relax our vigilance after five years. Even if we only save one child from trafficking, then our conventions, laws and enforcement are worth the effort.”

Copyright © IRIN 2009
The material contained on www.IRINnews.org comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the IRIN copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The New Statesman       27 March 2008

The Myth of Trafficking 

Brendan O’Neill

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

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

Laura María Agustín Zed Books, 224pp, £16.99

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked

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?

The first article describes advantages for sex workers in New Zealand. Those are pretty clear for people who work in the kind of establishments described. But the BBC reporter did little more than interview the usual two or three workers and includes ridiculous, titillating details such as the towel one woman wears. This is traditional, uninformative, anecdotal reporting on prostitution.

The second article attempts to develop the argument that there’s a gigantic contrast between New Zealand and Europe - and has the nerve to reproduce factoids and misrepresentations already outed in the Guardian:

‘Something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker,’ MP Fiona Mactaggart told the BBC in November.

No. Fiona doesn’t have evidence to back this up. The figure 80% was given by the Poppy Project, a government-funded abolitionist shelter, to refer to the number of foreign women working in places in London. They came to this conclusion by hiring men to ring telephone numbers found in contact adverts. The callers elicited statements on women workers who might come from other countries. No follow-up research was done, no visits were made to the sites. The research results are suggestive but nothing more; methodogically there are serious questions about them, which were asked publicly last October. However the mistake resurfaced shortly afterwards and the Guardian had to debunk it again, publicly. Foreign does not equal trafficked.

Apart from the BBC’s apparent ignorance about these well-known events, there are other questions to ask about this pair of articles. Is the contrast really so great between New Zealand (decriminalising sex work) and Europe (growing movement towards criminalising punters as a way to preventt trafficking)? Some observers wrote to question the insistence always on national policies, as though each country enjoyed a hermetically sealed set of cultural characteristics that lead them to instate specific – and the implication is original and justified - policies.

The truth is that both policy trends – decriminalisation and abolition/prohibition - exist in all countries. If one trend wins in a particular parliamentary vote, it is because the politicians of the moment swayed one way or the other. It is never a permanent state, and ‘progress’ is pretty hard to find. European countries have wobbled back and forth between loosening and tightening laws, according to the zeitgeist. Moreover, in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, which presently have more tolerant and regulated systems, there are those who fight to clamp down. No society simply is one way or the other, and all could change fairly easily.

At the moment, a few UK politicians are trying to impose a law criminalising buyers of sex (the same law found in Finland), but there is also a movement against this imposition in Britain, and not only from sex workers and their allies. A strong libertarian argument is made that boils down to Government out of our sex lives. Last week an event was held at London’s ICA in which no anti-prostitution people were speakers (which sparked silly protests). At a recent event in Copenhagen a former New Zealand politican praised as progressive the country’s prostitution legislation but nonetheless argued against allowing migrants to work in the country - as a way to prevent trafficking. This came across as both conservative and illogical: If you have faith in decriminalisation, why not allow anyone to do the work? Any meaningful engagement with sex-industry law nowadays really must address the issue of mobile workers, and rights activists argue that decriminalisation could help prevent trafficking.

The insistence on national separateness is particularly ludicrous when dealing with the sex industry, which is characterised by movement: workers, investors, facilitators, businesspeople, all are wont to travel, whether to the next town or another country. Before ‘migrant sex workers’ or ‘trafficking’ were big topics, everyone was moving every which way and selling sex along the way. Neighbouring countries have always seen prostitutes cross borders to distance themselves from home and become more exotic to customers. Travellers stop a while and sell sex in order to keep travelling. This mobility applies not only to conscious sex workers but also to migrants who expected to be able to make money legally and find out that they can’t, or who are supposed to accept very low-paying jobs and instead switch to selling sex.

I also dispute the usual assumption that these laws make reality on-the-ground very very very different. On the contrary, if someone were to come to Earth from Mars, they would look at commercial sex in the USA, which mostly has mean criminalising laws, and look at it in New Zealand or the UK or Germany, and not see much difference at all. The endless debating about legal systems to control prostitution is bizarrely irrelevant, except for its symbolic value. I wrote about this in Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution, a dense academic article but with some interesting ideas in it.

I know. Sex-worker rights activism pushes for New Zealand-type legislation. And yes, laws make a difference to individual sex workers’ rights when being harassed or arrested. But the vast majority of activity carries on similarly, if not identically, no matter which law is in place, and that’s because prostitution law is often vague and unenforceable, in the end having less impact than people assume.

The Lautrec picture at the top portrays women in a brothel dining room. It helped me think.

.

Below are exceprts from a migration story in the Observer. There’s quite good information here but also note the confusion about the word trafficking: much of what’s described here should be called smuggling, according to UN protocols. Note particularly:

Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey

If migrants ‘use’ people to help them cross borders illegally, these are meant to be described as smugglers. It’s a hard distinction to maintain consistently, but in this story people are clearly travelling because they chose to and sometimes paying for help. The help can end up being abusive, of course.  The word refugee is also used. Some of the people interviewed might have a case for asylum but many do not. Also the word criminal is peppered around unnecessarily.

Gender note: Everyone mentioned in the story is male, but what’s described applies to women who migrate without documents as well, and illustrates why getting into a ‘protected’ situation can be tempting, why getting into sex work may be a temporary solution, and so on.

I’ve highlighted in bold some common realities known to those who study or hobnob with undocumented migrants, and removed some material you can read on the original site. Note the immensely pragmatic attitude shown by those interviewed: they are going against legal policy, they know it, they will keep trying, they are not crying about it. It’s not a victimising article.

Why do I want to get to Britain? It has to be better than everything else

Jason Burke, Norrent-Fontes, France, 8 March 2009

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. . . .A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

There are camps as far west as the Normandy port of Cherbourg. . . and as far north as the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. In Paris, an estimated 200 young immigrants who are on their way to the UK sleep in parks every night. . .

. . . In one camp, in a wood off the A26, groups of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants looking for work in the UK are living under plastic sheets stretched across traces of old first world war trenches in a wood. . .

. . . the fault lies with the progressive closure of facilities for immigrants in towns such as Calais, a French government drive to disperse and harass asylum-seekers who cross its territory, and new security measures implemented by the UK that have made it harder to physically penetrate the ports – forcing immigrants to try new ways to cross the Channel. Each week a new camp is established. The true number of them is unknown. “There are many that no one notices” . . .

Most of the immigrants do eventually reach Britain. Activists monitoring the refugee population notice when there are big “crossings” and the internet and mobile phones allow refugees who get to the UK after stowing themselves in lorries to give tips and encouragement to those coming behind. “My brother got over 10 days ago in a Polish lorry. He sent me a text from London”. . .

. . . Around a third have already spent time in the UK and are making their second, third or even fourth clandestine crossing of the Channel.

. . . Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey to the Channel. Inok, a 23-year-old at Norrent-Fontes, recounted how he had paid £3,000 to get from Sudan to Turkey and a further £2,500 to get to Greece hidden in a car. From Greece he was “freelance”, he said, and found the Norrent-Fontes camp eight weeks ago after being tipped off by other east Africans. “I’ve been unlucky so far and haven’t got a good lorry yet,” Inok said. “I’ll keep trying, but if I can’t get to the UK I might try Norway. I know lots of Eritreans there.”

Though the organised criminal gangs try to maintain control of the trafficking, less organised “semi-professional” networks also form where there is demand. The result is vicious turf wars with gangs using extreme violence to maintain their control over key sites such as busy laybys on useful routes.  . .

. . . living in one of the half-dozen makeshift camps hidden along the side of the motorway linking Calais and Dunkirk. Every evening they joined the other inhabitants of the shacks on a thin strip of wasteland behind the Dunkirk ferry port known as Loon-Plage to head out toward the carparks to stow away in the lorries. But with new security precautions and British officials posted on the French side of the Channel, the task was not easy. “The key is to get past Calais and Dover because the officials there lock you up,” said one. “Once you are into the country itself you can escape easily and then hide.”

First the immigrants – most of whom do not have the €500 (£450) demanded by the amateur traffickers camped in plain view of the ferry port – had slept in disused port buildings. Police raids forced them into a band of thick vegetation where they thought their makeshift huts were well hidden. . . .  Local authorities insist that the bulk of its inhabitants have been offered alternative accommodation in Calais.

. . . “It’s the same story across the whole of Europe. The refugees keep moving because they think it is going to be better elsewhere and that is exactly the authorities here and elsewhere want them to think,” Zaibet said. “Each government pushes them further down the road and the end of the road is the UK.”

The camp at Norrent-Forentes was the target of a recent police raid. All those living there were arrested and held for a day in Calais before being released and returning to their makeshift homes. The police ripped holes in tent walls and took all cooking equipment but left the camp standing. “We are sensitive to human suffering of course but there can be no question of effectively helping human trafficking (by allowing camps to develop),”[said] the local government chief. Recent statistics reveal that only 12% of the nearly 30,000 asylum demands received in France were granted in 2007 – one of the lowest levels in Europe.

Arrest and deportation are seen by most of the immigrants as occupational risks – like breaking a leg while jumping from a lorry. “I try not to think about it,” said Anthony as he strummed his krar in the ditch by Norrent-Fontes. “It would be really tough to have to start out all over again. But if that’s what happens that’s what I’ll do.”

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión,  Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . .  says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . .

“I took my first ‘chickens’ across when I was nine years old, and when I grew up I started moving drugs across the border. My mother taught us the business and made us tough. She hated poverty. For her, power was everything,” says Cristal, daughter of the notorious drug smuggler Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiveros, . . . And like their male counterparts, female coyotes engage in extortion and bribery – of both Mexican and American authorities – which are prerequisites for setting up and maintaining human trafficking rings.

“In this business, everybody gets a share. The ministries, the Border Patrol and the narcos. You have to keep them happy so they let you do your job. Here, no money means no business,” says Adamaris, a young woman in El Paso, Tex. As she tells it, her children’s hunger drove her to turn her home into a “safe house” where more than 500 undocumented migrants have passed through in less than a year.

In addition to bribing federal agents, the women coyotes must also fill so-called “quotas” – monthly payments ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 – demanded by members of the major drug smuggling cartels, in order to be allowed to operate.

According to the women La Opinión interviewed – all U.S. citizens except Adamaris – many female coyotes smuggle migrants through the border crossings, rather than the mountains or the desert. “It costs more but it’s safer. That’s why they come to us. We don’t mess around with walking for three lousy days in the desert, but you gotta have balls to take people across the border,” says Margarita, who limits herself to smuggling women and children through California border crossings.

“We all got into this business out of necessity. Some of us are single mothers, and others have husbands in jail. The fact of the matter is that we’re all on our own. What bastards are gonna blame us for what we do? Who wouldn’t do the same thing if the miserable pay you get in a factory couldn’t be stretched far enough to feed your kids, and you find you can get twice the money for just giving a drink or taking care of a goddamn ‘chicken’ (an undocumented migrant)? Anybody who blames us has never seen their kids cry out of hunger,” affirms Esperanza, who smuggles undocumented migrants, money and narcotics in the Nogales, Ariz. region.

As Esperanza says, women’s stories of smuggling must not remain untold, because, she says, “Getting laid by the coolest guy at the party isn’t worth it if your gang doesn’t know about it.”

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 Gakoa 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.