Con todo el debate ideológico sobre la prostitución, salen poco simples testimonios de personas que han decidido viajar y trabajar en la industria del sexo. Cuando digo ‘decidido’ quiero decir que puede que tengan pocas opciones para salir adelante pero sí tienen algunas y pueden preferir unas a otras. Es un planteamiento básico, que no niega el sexismo del mundo ni la injusticia para los países menos ricos sino que destaca la dimensión personal donde el candidato a la migración mira su situación y opta por viajar. Y muy fácilmente sale una historia no solo de ganarse la vida sino una visión empresarial y emprendedora, de personas que calculan sus chances, planifican sus futuros y son todo menos víctimas. Los siguientes relatos vienen de un trabajo de Adriana Piscitelli, de la Universidade Estadual de Campinas/UNICAMP, Brasil. He marcado frases en las que se puede oir la voz de personas que están informándose mediante redes, que están tomando decisiones y que tienen una visión a largo plazo de sus vidas.

    ‘¿Salir de mi país para trabajar para comer? Comida tengo en mi país. No preciso estar lejos de mi familia para comer. En Brasil si plantas una mandioca, crías una gallina, comes. No es hambre. Es tratar de hacer algo… Siempre me preocupé por el día de mañana. Cuando tenga 60 años… Tengo un objetivo, quiero juntar dinero para mandar a Brasil y hacer las cosas… Y aquí, si fuera a trabajar en otra cosa, ¿en que sería? ¿Limpiando pisos? Eso no entra en mi cabeza porque se gana muy poco. Si ganase bien, barrería la calle, sin ningún problema. ¿Pero trabajar y ganar 800, 900 euros?

Cuando él [cliente italiano que pasó un período de vacaciones en Fortaleza] se fue, me mandó un e-mail… Empezamos a hablar varias veces por día. . . .  En un mes pagó las deudas que yo tenía en Brasil. Me mandó dinero para que comprase mis cosas, para que hiciera la documentación… Y compró mi pasaje. . .  Hice lo que tenía que hacer, porque si no me casaba tenía que volver al Brasil… Y funciona así. Si una brasileña conoce un extranjero, tiene que casarse porque si no, no deja la vida de allá.

Yo iba siempre a una discoteca… Y había un taxista, que era conocido nuestro. Y me dijo: ¿nena, no quieres ir a trabajar al extranjero? Invitó también a una amiga y a una prima mías… Dijo que se ganaba muchísimo. Le dijimos que sí. Fue con nosotras para que sacáramos el pasaporte. Y un día llamó avisando que íbamos a viajar… Nos dieron el pasaje en el aeropuerto, fuimos a San Pablo y ahí tomamos otro avión. Vinimos por París… Teníamos que venir a Bilbao en tren, donde nos esperaba un hombre… Cuando nos encontramos, nos llevó a tomar café y después a la casa de él, para descansar y después nos llevó al club…  Ellos pagaron el pasaje, la deuda fue un poco más de 3000 euros…

Había una amiga mía que conocía otra, que conocía otra… Y así conseguimos la información, en una agencia de viajes que tiene contactos con clubes de Andalucía. . .  si tú sabes del sitio específico, club de José o de María, pues bien, te damos la información, te ponemos en contacto con la persona. Fui primero a un club de Almería… No era un lugar muy bueno. Pero yo tengo una amiga y ella tenía contactos con una chica de Barcelona que había trabajado en un club y era muy amiga de la dueña. Al final la dueña de ese club de Barcelona nos ha enviado el dinero para pagar nuestra deuda y para venir hasta Barcelona… [Cuando llegué a Barcelona], me quedaban 800 euros por pagar, pero en la primer semana tuve suerte porque he cobrado 1700 y pagué y me quedó dinero para enviar a mi país y ya.

Mi hermana está haciendo una carrera en Brasil, en diciembre acaba y como no hay trabajo, ella viene a España y pagaré yo el billete. Está intentando venir con contrato de trabajo. Eso se consigue en Brasil en el consulado de España. Podría trabajar media jornada en trabajo normal, en el área de ella, ella hace tecnología de producción en Brasil, trabajar en esto y la otra media jornada en la prostitución… que es donde se gana el dinero.

Pagué la deuda en un mes, decidí quedarme [en el club en Bilbao] hasta completar los tres meses. Volví a Brasil. Pero cuando volví, mirando el cambio, me di cuenta que no compensaba más hacer “programa” allá. Dejé pasar los tres meses necesarios y volví a España. Llamé al club y pedí que me enviasen un pasaje, que quería volver para trabajar. Y en una semana estaba de vuelta.

Planeo volver. Tal vez tarde diez años, pero quiero comprar unas casitas, pequeñas, de R$10.000,00 o R$ 15.000,00 alquilarlas y vivir del alquiler. Digamos que compre cuatro casitas baratas, y las alquile a 100, 200R$, ahí tienes un dinero fi jo, sin hacer nada. Y, al mismo tiempo, puedes tener un negocio. Digamos que tienes 6.000 euros, y si aquel negocio no va bien estás arruinado. Pero todavía tienes el alquiler de las casas.

Todo el dinero que gano aquí, lo invierto en Brasil, porque en dos o tres años quiero estar allí. Quiero estar aquí tres meses y tres meses en Brasil con mi familia. Tengo tierras, tengo vacas, en Rondônia. Mis hijos están en Rondônia, entonces mi hijo cuida de estas cosas… Voy enviando dinero para mejorar, para no tener que trabajar más en un par de años. Mando más o menos 1500 por mes para Brasil. Por eso, siempre di valor a lo de aquí. Tengo paciencia con los [clientes] viejos porque sé que con los 20 euros que me dan por veinte minutos, pago cuatro días un peón, allá, en el campo. Hay que tener una visión de las cosas.’

Relatos extraídos de ‘Tránsitos: Circulación de Brasileñas en el ámbito de la transnacionalización de los mercados sexual y matrimonial,’ Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre, 15, 31, 101-136, 2009

The sex industry is seldom mentioned, but here are a couple of excerpts that show how some migrants find temporary relief through supplying sexual services. The first excerpt tells about men who find male sexual protectors; in the second the protectors are women. In the latter description, you may detect some ambiguity: is this ‘pure business’ or is love and affection involved, too?

The boys with a baba were sheltered. They were paid good pocket money, wined and dined, and dressed in nice outfits. They were young Iranians and Kurds from northern Iraq, men in their early or late twenties. The Kurds came from the villages, the rugged mountains of northern Iraq. The Iranians arrived from small towns, ghettos of big cities, and poor neighborhoods of the capital. They came with a dream. Many failed. They remained in Athens and became the ‘bar kids’ of Victoria Square. Dressing up in their best, they would frequent the gay bars around the square looking for a baba or a customer in search of sexual pleasure. [p 203]

[In Calais] a few fared better than the rest. In their teens or early twenties, some found love in the arms of older French women, some in their sixties. The women had kind and motherly looks, gave the men love and attention, tucked them in their beds, and slept with them. The young men had the comfort of a home and all that came with it. Sex was the central part of the agreement. There was no shower or clean bed for those failing to deliver. This was a strict business deal, with its own rules and codes of conduct. [p 307]

Embracing the Infidel, Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West, New York: Bantam Dell, 2005.

There is a large literature on inter-generational relationships involving exchanges of sex and protection that are considered traditional and conventional in many parts of the world. One example is Enjo Kosai: Compensated Dating.

Sex workers in Wuhan vulnerable and exploited

China Labour Bulletin, 23 September 2009

Young, poorly educated sex workers in the central Chinese city of Wuhan are routinely abused by clients but have little or no recourse to justice. Most do not trust the police and the vast majority (about 80 percent) have no knowledge of their legal or civil rights, according to a recently published survey

Researchers from Wuhan University interviewed 300 low-end sex workers, mainly employed in small-scale hair salons and saunas in the city’s red light district, and found that around half had been the victims of crime, with clients usually stealing money or mobile phones. Most “leisure” (休闲) establishments in Wuhan had a “pay first” policy but, nevertheless, 37 percent of the interviewees said they had been cheated by their clients. Over half the respondents said they had been verbally abused by clients, while 20 percent had been beaten or physically abused, and small number were even raped or abducted while working.

For the majority of sex workers, their only recourse in these situations was to go to their boss or their boyfriend for help, but in the majority of cases there was little the boss could do. Only 26 percent of respondents said they would definitely report an abusive client to the police, 37 percent said they would not go to the police, while the remaining 37 percent were ambivalent. Two thirds (64 percent) of the respondents said they’d never had any dealings with the police, and over half thought the police were of no help, while 16 percent considered the police to be a hindrance. Only one third (31 percent) thought the police could provide any help.

The majority (56 percent) of the 300 interviewees were aged between 18 and 25 years, 12 percent were younger than 18-years-old, while 15 percent were over 30 years of age. Most (62 percent) only had a middle school education at best, 21 percent had been to high school, and 16 percent had attended technical high school, while only one interviewee had been to university.

The survey indicated that many sex workers were driven by poverty in rural areas in Hubei and neighbouring provinces to come to Wuhan in search of work. However, their lack of education meant they could not find any better jobs in the city. About half (51.8 percent) had been working the sex industry for less than a year, and the vast majority regularly moved from salon to salon in search of better conditions. Only three percent of those interviewed had been in the industry for more than three years.

The vast majority worked irregular hours, between eight and ten hours a day, and earned up to 3,000 yuan a month. Nearly half (44 percent) earned less than 1,000 yuan a month, while only 16 percent could earn more than 3,000 yuan. The plight of Wuhan’s sex workers is largely representative of China as a whole, and is indicative of the many dangers that young women from the countryside face when they travel to the city in search of work.

See for yourself the list of reasons migrant sex workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for opposing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on all rescuers’ good intentions, but it shows how they obviously haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful!  The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has terrible consequences both for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of all nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has extensive interesting information!

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.

Rachel Aimee: I think there’s this myth among dancers that the industry is “going downhill” and that dancers across the board are expected to do more than they used to do. I know women who have been working since the 90s and refer to that decade as the “golden age of stripping,” when dancers got paid tons of money just to dance on stage and didn’t even have to touch the customers, but it seems . . .  that dancers have been doing more than just dancing for a long time.

Lauri Shaw: Yes, and in the 90s there were girls who said the same thing about the 80s.  . .

Jodi Sh Doff: In the late 70s there was a lot less regulation. It was years before AIDS reared its ugly head. Tourists, particularly Japanese men, could come off the plane at Kennedy airport, hand a cabbie a slip of paper with just the word “Cookie” on it. Places like the Cookie Jar and Winks were standing room only, bottomless, with stages no higher than, well, than your dinner table. Girls were there for your dining and dancing pleasure, hot lunches they used to be called. The money was insane and there was no hustle. You couldn’t sit and drink with a customer — there was no room. . . By the early 80s the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) code called the shots, and if a club served booze, the girls had to be a minimum of six feet away from the customers and they had to have g-strings. No pulling aside the g-string (although girls did), no touching yourself or them (of course we did that too). That’s when a lot of stages moved behind the actual bar. Diamond Lils was a renegade bar, hence the lack of register tape or financial records of any kind.

RA: Yes, you couldn’t get away with anything like that at clubs I’ve worked at, but I think it’s the norm for lapdances to be pretty heavy contact and sometimes include “extras” (hand jobs, etc.), especially in private rooms. Then of course there are plenty of dancers who just dance and don’t do anything illegal.

LS: All of that’s true, in fact last year Scores lost its liquor license after getting busted for prostitution in 2007. But in the 90s, blatant tricks didn’t happen out in the open like that, out on stage for everyone to see. The rule was generally “no touching the girls onstage.”

RA: I’ve also heard cops arresting dancers just for allegedly agreeing to perform an illegal act. In cases where dancers get busted, of course the clubs never take any responsibility, even if they knew perfectly well what was going on and may have been making money off it.

LS: I do remember one place where a scenario like at Diamond Lils might have flown — the Harmony Theatre. I was only there once. They kept it really dark and made no pretence of being “entertainers.” I don’t think they even bothered serving drinks. I do not remember there being a bar at all. Men sat in those theatre seats and haggled with the girls over the price of a lapdance, which was often a euphemism for a hand job or more.

JshD:The original Harmony was uptown, on 48th Street, right by the Gaiety Burlesque. The Gaiety was an all male dance house with live sex shows and a lot of action going on back stage between sets. Working girls used to hang out in the back rows just to get off their feet for a while. It was a blast, I had a few guy friends who worked the Gaiety. But the Harmony used to be specialty acts, old school star strippers and girls that could pick a dollar up off the table with their cooch. Very impressive if you ask me. I believe the name was changed to the Melody Burlesque and then the Harmony re-opened downtown and it was that free-for-all you’re talking about. All lap dancing, no pretense of being “entertainment” at all.

LS: Exactly, it was a free-for-all. Men could buy anything they wanted at the Harmony, and working girls could buy the freedom to give the men whatever they wanted. There wasn’t a bouncer in sight. The shift manager sat in the coat room, away from all the action.

RA: I’ve never worked at a place that was that free and easy, but I’ve definitely preferred working at clubs where management was more hands-off. At some of the big corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” that have taken over modern-day Manhattan, management are constantly micro-managing everything the dancers do, policing lapdances and pressuring dancers to take customers to private rooms (because they make a huge cut). I think most dancers prefer the freedom to decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with. But in general I find it’s very difficult to have open conversations about who does what in strip clubs because it’s so easy to offend people. There’s so much stigma attached to sex work that it’s easy to unintentionally make someone feel bad if you’re not willing to do something that they are willing to do. Everyone has different boundaries, so I think that tension is always going to exist in the industry.

Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work and hand over a portion of his tips: So commented a lawyer in Boston, where a group of strippers claim they are treated like indentured servants. That anyone would pay to wait on tables sounds absurd, but it is the conventional employment arrangement for strippers, pole dancers, table dancers and lap dancers. In so many sex-related businesses, normal employment practices go out the window: Owners claim that those dancing or having conversations and sex with customers are not employees but independent contractors, and that the contracts occur between worker and customer, with owners providing only drinks and a location. Which allows owners to wash their hands of any responsibility, conveniently.

This is ridiculous for more than one reason, not least the much higher prices owners can charge for those same drinks when they are imbibed in the presence of dancers. Employers routinely make the argument, however, implying that they are clean and their businesses are not raunchy. In the case of puticlub owners (big brothel and entertainment venues in Spain), owners make the collateral argument that their venues are in every way superior to other sex-industry venues, so that they should be allowed to operate while street sex work and other sorts of sex businesses should be prohibited. Yes, another self-serving argument.

Judge upholds strippers’ pay suit   The Boston Globe

By Jonathan Saltzman, 11 August 2009

About 70 strippers who worked at a Chelsea club are each entitled to recover thousands of dollars in damages in a class-action lawsuit because their employer misclassified them as “independent contractors,’’ depriving them of wages and tips, a judge has ruled. The suit, which a lawyer for one of the strippers described as the first of its kind in Massachusetts, seeks to recover money they should have received at King Arthur’s Lounge in Chelsea since 2004.

King Arthur’s Lounge . . .  did not pay the strippers any salaries, required each to pony up $35 to perform each night, and kept $10 of every $30 that each made for “private dancing’’ in secluded booths, according to a state judge who granted a stripper’s motion for summary judgment on the issue of liability.

The club had argued that selling alcohol is its main business, not putting on strip shows, and that the performers were independent contractors who provided extra entertainment akin to televisions and pool tables at a sports bar.

Suffolk Superior Judge Frances A. McIntyre dismissed that argument. “A court would need to be blind to human instinct to decide that live nude entertainment was equivalent to the wallpaper of routinely-televised matches, games, tournaments, and sports talk in such a place,’’ she wrote. “The dancing is an integral part of King Arthur’s business.’’

McIntyre certified the suit brought by Lucienne Chaves, a 32-year-old former stripper at the club, as a class action on behalf of her and other dancers who were misclassified as independent contractors, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston lawyer for the strippers. About 70 other strippers who worked at the club are part of the class proceeding to trial on damages.

Liss-Riordan said the strippers at King Arthur’s were like indentured servants, given the $35 fee they had to pay management. “In this case, we have an employer who was charging its employees to work,’’ she said. “They weren’t making minimum wage. They weren’t making any wage. Imagine a restaurant where a waiter has to pay to come to work’’ and hand over a portion of his tips. She estimated that some of the strippers will be entitled to tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

Under the Massachusetts tips law, waiters, bartenders, skycaps, and other service employees must earn a minimum wage of $2.63 an hour. Employers are prohibited from taking a portion of their tips, although a number of restaurants, bars, hotels, and other businesses have violated that provision. The strippers at King Arthur’s were allowed to keep all the tips they received when they performed in an open area, but had to turn over a third of what they made in the private shows, Liss-Riordan said. Chaves, who worked at the club from 2005 to 2007, declined to comment through her lawyers.

Robert R. Berluti, a Boston lawyer for King Arthur’s, said that some of the strippers made hundreds of dollars a shift. That raises questions about whether they suffered financially, he said, although the judge rejected a similar argument in her July 30 ruling. Berluti said McIntyre’s ruling reflected the fact that Massachusetts has one of the strictest laws in the country concerning misclassification of workers as independent contractors. “This was a case where the judge was saddled with a Massachusetts law that makes it an outlier with respect to the rest of the country,’’ he said, adding that his client is considering appealing.

In arguing that the strippers were independent contractors, King Arthur’s said that Chaves got to pick her own music, costumes, partners, and routines. The club also said it never gave her written rules to follow or documentation that she was an employee.

McIntyre rejected that argument, pointing out that the club hired and fired strippers, determined what hours they worked, and “apparently hired its dancers based solely on whether they ‘look good’ rather than individual performance experience or talent.’’

Susukino by Daisuke Morita

The keyword here is demand, as in how much money are customers prepared to pay to have sex? Which businesses thrive because they are popular?

The Bank of Japan commissioned a report entitled Susukino, Recent Trends and Changes to a Pleasure District, hoping that, by counting brothels, it would be able to gauge the demand for services, a sector of the economy becoming more important as exports fail. The Pleasure District investigated is Susukino, in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan’s second largest island.

The report says Susukino is currently home to 264 sex businesses (soaplands and others), along with normal hotels, love hotels, restaurants, cafes, fast-food shops, discos, nightclubs, karaoke, cinemas and many kinds of bars. The creative and practical aspect of the bank’s report was its focus on services in general, in the form of entertainment, whether sex, food, drink or music.

Bloomberg.com , 6 August 2009

The number of sex parlors in the Susukino red-light district in Sapporo more than quadrupled in the past 20 years.

“Any study into services is most welcome,” said Martin Schulz, senior economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo. “We’ve got hundreds of studies on exports and manufacturing. What’s needed is creative thinking on services and if that includes brothels, so be it.”

Massage parlours

Place: Mostly in the coastal belt

Operate from: Stalls erected behind beach shacks, hotels, lodges and rented houses. While some are high-class massage/beauty parlours, others operate from dingy rooms. There are registered as well as unregistered parlours that traffic. A security guard at most places facilitates entry into the parlour.

CSWs: From Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nepal. Of late, Goan girls have also been found working in such parlours.

Customers: Domestic, foreign tourists, even local youngsters have been found visiting those located in Bardez taluka.

Modus operandi: Customers do not approach massage/beauty parlours directly. They are solicited by mostly young boys. After soliciting, the customers (either alone or in groups of 2-4) are brought to the parlour via private or commercial vehicles. In a majority of cases, vans are used to transport the solicited customers.

Price: Varies from Rs 2,500 to Rs 25,000

Hotels & lodges

Place: Almost everywhere in Goa

CSWs: Predominantly from Maharashtra (mainly Mumbai, Pune and Sawantwadi), Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nepal. Young, smart, modern, fashionable and Hindi-speaking girls are preferred.

Modus operandi: The girls are accommodated at the hotel or in a nearby rented house. After agents fix a deal with customers, the girls are made available. Those put up in rented premises are contacted over their mobiles and picked up from their residences.

Agents in hotels and lodges also contact girls who openly solicit in markets and beaches. On receiving the details, the girl proceeds to the hotel/lodge.

In another variant, in Bardez taluka rooms are rented to girls on an hourly basis.

Some hotel managers also have contacts with CSWs from other states in order to meet demand. If the girl does not have money to travel, she is instructed to board a particular bus where the ticket is paid for directly at the travel agency by the hotel manager. She disembarks at the said destination and is taken directly to the hotel.

Customers: Domestic and foreign tourists

Rented Rooms

Place: CSWs are kept in rented rooms and houses in villages

CSWs: From Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Nepal.

Modus operandi: The girls are brought to Goa by bus or train on contracts that range from a week to a month.

In Bardez taluka, they are mostly picked up from the Mapusa bus stand or Thivim railway station.

They are not allowed to leave the rooms/houses. Whenever they are taken out, vehicles with black tinted glasses are used. After the contract period they are paid and sent back.

Fishing trawlers

Place: Fishing jetties and nearby market areas. Though entry into fishing jetties is restricted, the girls are permitted.

CSWs: Mostly from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Modus operandi: Soliciting is done by the CSW herself. The room is often a trawler anchored a distance away from the jetty.

Though cash is paid, in many cases the girl gets fish or prawns which she later sells.

Customers: Migrants from Kerala, Orissa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, who work on contract basis with trawler owners.

Brothels

Place: Baina, Vasco

Modus operandi: Customers are solicited by motorcycle pilots and taxi drivers at bus stands, railway stations, markets, gardens and brought to Baina beach.

Here, a deal is made with the madam’ (brothel owner) and once finalized the girl is sent with the customer to a nearby, pre-determined room.

The amount paid is shared by the pimp, room owner, madam and the CSW. At times, the CSW is forced to solicit customers herself.

Isolated places

Place: Prime areas include the KTC bus stand, Municipal garden, Railway bridge and railway station in Vasco city. Also Sada, Bogda, the Japanese garden, Kharewada, Birla, Zuari Nagar, Verna industrial estate, Kelsim and Thane and Cortalim.

CSWs: Mostly those displaced after the demolition of the red light area in Baina.

Modus operandi: CSWs solicit customers on the roads and take them to nearby hotels, lodges or thickly forested areas.

Highways

Place: Highways passing through some of the state’s interior talukas. Mostly in highly industrial and mining areas.

CSWs: Mostly from migrant populations settled in slums or rented houses.

Modus operandi: CSWs solicit at different locations along the highways. The customer is taken to a room or the girl travels to another location in the latter’s vehicle.

Customers: Mostly truck drivers and helpers.

Tax for sex workers proposed 

2 July 2009, Walakira Nyanzi, Ultimate Media

Commercial sex services in Kampala and the nearby districts are likely to cost more following an introduction of an annual operating fee by the local authorities. The authorities have ordered commercial sex workers in divisions to pay 100,000 shillings before they are allowed to operate.

The Resident District Commissioner (RDC) of Kawempe, Edward Sekabanja says the move is aimed at reducing prostitution in Kampala and other towns. He says Kampala, Mukono, Wakiso and Mpigi RDC’s in their recent general meeting proposed for the new tax and urged local authorities to implement it.

Sekabanja also urges government to come out with the law that will legalize tax for sex workers. Sex work or prostitution is still a crime in Uganda. Sekabanja says there are more than 5,000 sex workers permanently stationed in Kampala alone. The RDC says town councils will be able to collect millions of shillings if the sex work tax is fully introduced in all town councils.

According to research this reporter conducted from the main sports of Kampala where prostitutes operates most, sex workers earn an average of 15,000 shillings daily. This writer talked to most of the sex workers in Kampala but the majority of them said the tax is illegal but they are ready to pay it to avoid arrests.

Documented by: Gulnara Kurmanova, Tais Plus NGO, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic
With kind assistance from: Selbi Jumayeva

Presented at: 24th Program Coordinating Board (UNAIDS) Meeting, Thematic Segment People on the Move, June 2009

About me: My name is Gulnara Kurmanova. I have worked in HIV programs in partnership with sex workers in Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia, since 1997. We actively support sex workers’ empowerment and self-organization. I would like to present a story documented by me in my own country.

About my country: My country is very poor. Recently it became the poorest country in Central Asia which is the poorest region of the post-soviet world. My country is corrupt. Many people in my country have no stable source of income and must think every day about food and a roof. The majority of those who think about them are young women and men who have no education or needed skills but have families who need their support.

About people who sell sex. For these women and men, sex work becomes an income-generating activity and way of surviving. Many of them seek an opportunity to sell sex to earn a lot of money (in their dreams) and at least some money for bread for their children and a place to sleep (in their reality). Many sex workers I know personally are braver and more enterprising (in order to become financially independent, self-sufficient and to survive) than their peers who are housewives and suffer their husbands and mothers-in-law in villages. But women, men and transgendered people who sell sex are often poorer, not well educated and deprived of family support. Their first motivation for sex work is to earn money. Sex work is work; this is an income-generating activity. But to earn money they must leave their town or village.

Activists from Tais Plus

Case of Venera, a 31-year-old transgender woman who is a sex worker. Five years ago she came to Bishkek from a small village in the north of the country. Her mother died giving birth to her younger sister. She lost her father because of tuberculosis when she was still a kid. She had changed schools and been placed in an orphanage in the village near the bigger town of Talass. Venera didn’t receive her secondary school diploma; like many others, she is embarrassed to say she is barely literate. She has no chance to get a good job in a nice place. At the same time she has dignity; Venera wants to be the woman she sees herself to be. Unfortunately, street sex work is the only space where she can come close to being herself. She is ok with earning money by selling sex. As a sex worker, she cannot work in her village because neighbors know her and judge her. She cannot work in Talass because she cannot wear women’s clothes there, a city with old Muslim traditions. Venera came to the capital city, Bishkek, to do sex work.

Currently Venera lives and works in Bishkek. She has problems with the police often, once or even two times a month and recently every week. The police arrest and detain her ‘because she has no passport.’ She prefers to say that she lost her passport, because her passport is a man’s passport, and her appearance is a woman’s appearance. For these reasons, she is currently an undocumented migrant. The police tell her that she is arrested for doing sex work and that she is not a human being anymore since she is a prostitute. She cannot argue that sex work is itself decriminalized in Kyrgyz Republic, because she is nobody to the police: she has no passport. The police ask her about money. They use her vulnerability to extort as much money as they can. She feeds the police, not herself, because they extort almost all the money she earns. Maybe the passport and resident permit could make her life better, but it is too expensive to pay for trip to Talass where she originally got her passport, and it would take months to collect all the necessary documents.

Her clients and street hooligans beat Venera often because of her feminine appearance. They think that she is not a human being anymore if she neglects ‘men’s honor’. Last October she faced a life-threatening situation when young men dragged her to their fancy black Mercedes without plates and took her to the outskirts of the city. They beat her severely, her face, her chest, her genitals; they raped her, burned her eyelashes, nipples and genitalia and threatened her with a gun. They said they would kill her if she told anyone. She wanted to file a report with the police, but they insulted her for being transgender and for sodomy and did not accept her complaint. Now she trusts the police even less.

Venera learned about a health problem three years ago but didn’t believe those who tested her. She didn’t receive proper pre-testing counseling. A doctor just told her that she should be tested when her friend convinced her to visit a clinic to ensure that she had no STIs. The doctor didn’t speak Kyrgyz, and Venera doesn’t speak Russian well. She didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Venera doesn’t discuss her health status with her friends. She does not trust medical services that treat her behavior, not her needs. In order to identify whether she needs treatment or not, she has to visit a doctor. She doesn’t visit a doctor because she doesn’t believe in any governmental institutions and tries to avoid contact with them. She knows from her experience that there is no confidentiality in governmental clinics and her secret could be revealed. She is afraid they might inform the police about her health status. She thinks that in this case she will be not able to work any more and lose her only source of income. She knows that other sex workers prefer to move to another city to be tested there. She is going to do the same later when she earns enough money. But if it is revealed that she needs expensive treatment, how will she pay for it?

Tais Plus works in collaboration with Labrys, a local LGBT NGO. Contact: taisplus at gmail.com.