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

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

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

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

Criminalization of clients

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

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

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

International regulations on trafficking and sexual exploitation

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

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

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

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

The booming sex market

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

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

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

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

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

Changing attitudes to sex and power

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

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

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

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

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

References

CATW (2000) Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the BBC story:

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

Note the applause from politicians when he makes these statements.

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

What Not to Wear - if you want to be French

The Guardian, Comment is Free,  6 August 2008

Laura Agustín

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

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

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

While she talked, her husband served tea.

There is no universally accepted definition of gender equality. For some, the simple act of wearing a veil proves Silmi is oppressed. Others see her as having made choices, adapted, evolved. Silmi does not proselytise about religion or gender, but she does not like men staring at her in the street. While some observers interpret her adoption of more traditional clothes than she wore in Morocco as a sign of regression, Silmi demonstrates a typical migrant desire to validate the past while finding her way in a new life. This is a process and she may well change her style again in years to come.

Candidates on dating sites like Muslima.com reveal an array of headgear. Some describe themselves as modest, long considered a positive trait. Are we now meant to believe that bare arms, face, calves, midriffs and cleavage are not simply fashion but a progressive state of dress? Societies teem with differing ideas about what kinds of clothing denotes modesty, liberation, oppression, equality, sexiness and beauty. One wonders whether the social workers and judges in Silmi’s case believe no one influences their own clothing choices.

Western societies like to think they are at the forefront of a cultural timeline that applies in the same way to all cultures. A neocolonialist predisposition to see migrant women as oppressed and backward becomes inevitable but, logically, if Silmi is insufficiently evolved then many women born in Europe also do not deserve their citizenship: those who stay with violent partners, perhaps, or who fail to work outside the home.

Many countries require longtime foreign residents to pass language and culture tests before being allowed to naturalise. It would be nice to avoid judgments based on the most superficial and cliched of markers: how women look.

The Manhattan Institute has produced an assimilation index comparing the census data of different migrant groups with the established US population. The measures are economic (jobs, education, home ownership), cultural (language, marriage, childbearing) and civic (naturalisation, military service). Most groups do better by one measure than others. In this scheme, Silmi’s desire – and two attempts – to become French would count as indicating more assimilation.

Instead, she and her husband feel alienated and rejected. What exactly did France gain with that result?

Alternate Ethics, or: Telling Lies to Researchers

Laura Agustín

Research for Sex Work, June 2004, 6-7.

On the subject of ethics in sex work research, we usually think of the insensitivity and careerism of researchers whose interest is in obtaining information they will take credit for. I want to point to another problematic angle: the issue of whether those being researched are honest with researchers. Why, after all, should people who are being treated as objects of curiosity tell the truth?

We are all so surrounded by research projects that they seem to be a natural part of life, but what is research for? While often presented as pure advancement of knowledge, research is often integral to people’s jobs, whether they work in government, NGOs or universities, and the audience for whatever they find out is first and foremost whoever paid for the research.

Institutional research projects are required to explain the investigator’s ethical responsibility to the people researched. But the assumption is that once research begins, researchees will cooperate, freely telling researchers what they want to know. Since this side of the research relationship has not usually been given any choice about participating, it has also not been required to agree to an ethical standard of behaviour. Since no universal ethics exists, it is no criticism to say that research subjects simply may not tell (all) the truth to researchers.

Sad stories, omissions and outright lies

When a person working in an ‘irregular’ trade is approached by a professional-looking person from the straight world, and is not a paying customer, he or she is naturally viewed with suspicion. In the worst case, the visitor may be working for the police; in the best case, be someone giving out free condoms or needles. Of course, researchers have to find a way to ‘gain access’ to their subjects, making friends with the head of an NGO or a bar or convincing a doctor of their good intentions, and thus may be introduced as an ‘ally’. This goes for those conducting any kind of research using any kind of methodology. But even if the person comes with a good introduction, how does it feel to have him or her move toward you with the intention of asking personal questions? In most cultures, such a situation does not occur naturally. A Nigerian sex worker in a Spanish park once commented on outsiders asking questions:

I don’t understand what they’re doing, they don’t have anything to offer. The others that come are doctors, they give us medicine, exams. But these want to talk, and I don’t have any reason to talk to them.

It has long been recognised that people who are considered ‘victims’ or ‘deviants’ are likely to tell members of the mainstream what they believe they want to hear. Given that so much research with sex workers has focused on their personal motivations (wanting to know why they got into sex work, which is assumed to be bad), it’s not surprising that many make their present circumstances appear to be the fatal or desperate result of a past event. After all, if we were forced to be what we are now, we cannot be blamed for it. One Dominican woman told me:

All those social worker types feel sorry for me. They don’t want to hear that I prefer to do this work, so I tell them I have no choice. They want to hear that I was forced to do this, so that’s what I tell them. Anyway, I was, because my family was poor.

Ethics or self-protection?

There are other reasons to tell sad stories. When behind the research project sex workers know that a certain health-care service may be at stake, or that only if they can present convincingly as victims will they get help, it is not surprising if they tell stories that serve their own interests. Or, in the case of research for health promotion, workers may not want to talk about their own failures to use condoms or their own getting drunk—who does, after all? Or, in the case of research on ‘trafficking’, sex workers may not want to admit they thought boyfriends really cared about them, when it turned out they were only using them, or admit they paid people to concoct false travel documents for them. It really doesn’t matter whether their answers will be treated ‘confidentially’, because they simply may not want to talk about such intimate matters.

To put it another way, keeping secrets may help sex workers gain independence or control over projects to help them. Talking about sexual risks with people who think it’s wrong to ever take any risks may cause them to treat you as irresponsible. Admitting the desire to stay in sex work after getting out of the clutches of abusers can render you ineligible for victim-protection programmes. The best policy may be to omit certain information from responses or to put on the expected front. There are deeper reasons to keep personal secrets, too:

To be able to hold back some information about oneself or to channel it and thus influence how one is seen by others gives power. . . To have no capacity for secrecy is to be out of control over how others see one; it leaves one open to coercion. (Bok 1984: 20)

But there are also researchers who second-guess people’s responses. Negre i Rigol tells about an interview with Leonor, who presents her own entrance into sex work as a rational choice. When she starts to talk about other girls who were raped and coerced, the interviewers ‘realise perfectly that Leonor is telling them about her own life for the first time’ (Negre 1988: 39). Here interviewers are presented as omniscient, capable of seeing through lies. If Leonor saw this interpretation of her words, she might decide not to talk with interviewers any more.

Ways around the problem?

No formula exists for avoiding these problems. Some people believe that using ‘insiders’ to contact the target group is the solution—people who have shared the same life of those under research. It sounds better, having a sex worker do the interviewing of other sex workers, but other differences between ‘insiders’ can be more important than whether they have worked or not—class, colour, nationality. A Colombian woman once commented to me on a Colombian ‘peer’ interviewer:

I wouldn’t tell her anything, she’s from Cali. You know how those women are.

One researcher I know says she is perfectly aware that sometimes people are lying (or at least hiding something), and she tries to find out the truth by going back to the same point on different occasions to see if the cloudiness clears up. Or, she may check one person’s story against another’s to see if they coincide. To her, it’s a question of instinct:

It’s not so different from daily life, you ask yourself every day if people are telling you the truth and you acquire mechanisms for selecting information.

Researchers need to understand that if their access to those researched comes from a particular agency then informants may be less than candid about that agency, or if access comes from a friend of a friend, who is the madam of a club, then those that work for the madam will probably not share their complaints about her with you.

The best way to avoid being lied to is to spend long amounts of time with the people under research. Participant observation for at least a year is a standard technique of anthropological ethnography:

. . . my practice of noting conversations greatly helped me to establish how clients and sex workers lied to me about factual matters. I found that initially people lied to me considerably concerning where they lived. For a considerable amount of time Rita, one of my main informants, lied to me about her role as a madam. . . It would seem that Rita did not want me to know that she was charging the other sex workers to use the flat because she did not want me to think that she exploited them. (Hart 1998: 67)

Beyond ‘truth’

Is a failure to tell the truth to researchers ‘unethical’? Only if you believe that some universal standard of ethics exists and that it is better to be ethical than not. The version of ethics that is usually referred to in research is, like so much else, a thoroughly western one. But we should remember that other ethics exist and refer to values that make sense within particular cultures and subcultures. And, in fact, keeping secrets can be seen as another system of ethics (Bok 1984).

One of my favourite pieces of research was carried out in New York crack houses. The tape-recorded conversations of Puerto Rican crack dealers leave no doubt about their version of ethics: selling drugs, ripping people off and even rape come across as logical within their extremely disadvantaged world system (Bourgois 1995). At the same time, dealers’ own positive values, such as the search for ‘respect’, come across, too. Of course, do we know that they ‘told the truth’ to the researcher? We can only guess.

Works cited

Bok, Sissela. 1984. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bourgois, Philip. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, Angie. 1999. Buying and Selling Power: Anthropological Reflections on Prostitution in Spain. Boulder [Colorado]: Westview Press.

Negre i Rigol, Pere. 1988. La prostitución popular: Relatos de vida. Barcelona: Fundació Caixa.

Book Review by Laura Agustín in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 29.3 pp 703-15, September 2005

Abdelmalek Sayad, 2004: The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Initially I thought this book’s title might signal the growing trend to victimize migrants, but I was wrong. On the contrary, The Suffering of the Immigrant presents the strongest possible arguments for recognizing migrants’ agency in the face of inherent, structural conditions that are all against them and whose consequences they must, undoubtedly, ‘suffer’.

Whereas many contemporary commentators refer to migration as a phenomenon of ‘globalization’, Abdelmalek Sayad makes no bones about which stage of globalization we should be looking at: the north’s imperialist colonization of the south. Most commentators agree that current migratory flows are related to free-market capitalism’s need for flexibility, moving its workplaces around the world while workers move to find them. And probably few would deny that ‘earlier’ colonial relations were implicated, especially where migrants move to their former ‘mother countries’.

But Sayad obliges us to consider a more serious proposition, that migrations are a structural element of colonial power relationships that have never ended. His case study is the Algerian migration to France in the second half of the twentieth century, during which time many migrants passed from being French (citizens of the colony) to Algerian (citizens of an independent Algeria) and back to French (as legal workers and residents in France), with the complication that the majority were Berber peasants. The colonial relationship is seen in the subordination of the economic and social life of rural colonies to the industrial activity of the country in which peasants become ‘workers’.

Sayad’s arguments, however, go much further than this particular case. First, he demonstrates how discourses of migration focus on the situation of ‘immigrants’ — meaning, on how receiving countries view immigration as their own social problem. With this move, the dominant member of the migration relationship firmly maintains control over knowledge and management of this ‘problem’, according to which immigrants are always ‘lacking’ necessary skills and culture. Sayad insists that research must begin at an earlier stage, a demand that has begun to be met by a trend towards studies of ‘transnational’ migrations. But Sayad points to a more intransigent problem here, in which countries of origin participate in the negative construction of their own citizens abroad, construing them as simply absent, treating them as martyrs to the country’s economic good and considering them traitors who lose their original culture and become contaminated by another. If they do manage to return, they are pathologized as being difficult to ‘reinsert’ into society. Sayad shows how individual migrants reproduce this colonialist view of themselves as subaltern misfits only useful in an accountant’s version of migration that selectively calculates ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’.

Sayad debunks categories of migration imagined to be separate, in which ‘settler migrants’ supposedly value families and domestic morality more than ‘labour migrants’, as well as the idea that labour migrations are transitory and without a political dimension. Rather, he suggests that all migrants are united by a distancing from their original home, wracked by guilt that they should never have left and, having done so, that they will not perform well enough. Though they may achieve legal status, they are always treated as foreign by their second country and referred to via ‘digestive’ metaphors about their capacity to be assimilated, integrated or inserted into society. They fail to perceive the social, medical and other ‘helping’ sectors as being on their side. Their loyalties are divided, they don’t know which patrie iis really theirs and they experience an alienation from their own children, who may have no interest in their ‘homeland’. They are doubly excluded from real political participation in both countries of origin and reception, thus being deprived of even

the right to have rights, to be a subject by right . . . to belong to a body politic in which [they have] a place of residence, or the right to be actively involved — in other words the right to give a sense and a meaning to [their] action, words and existence (p. 227).

While some of this may seem familiar to migration scholars, its presentation renders it new. Sayad belonged to the group he studied: emigrant from Kabylia, immigrant in France. He gives significant space to migrants’ own words, sometimes in the form of long, repetitive and even confusing testimonies. Although one can imagine his anger over the many injustices he recounts, he recognizes their cultural logic.

Sayad makes an important contribution to migration study in his development of Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘state thought’, which he considers one of our most intractable cultural givens. Slurring migrants as ‘hybrids’ and ‘bad’ social products, society manifests its fear of those who ‘blur the borders of the national order and therefore the symbolic value and pertinence of the criteria’ used to establish differences between nationals and foreigners (p. 291). For Sayad, nothing less than the delegitimizing of the state is necessary, the denaturalizing of what we consider passionately real — our national being.

This is a book about men. The Algerian case that Sayad details was initially about single males, who are pictured as alienated from a natural cycle of courtship and marriage. Sayad reproduces one man’s speculation on a potential woman migrant’s fate: ‘whilst she might gain something by coming here . . . she’d pay a high price for it . . . she would be imprisoned in one room . . . she would miss the sky’ (p. 156). Given the current protagonism of so many women in migration, their absence here is notable, and in this sense Sayad’s case study imposes a restriction. Given the wealth of ideas here that go far beyond any single case, this restriction can be forgiven.

Before Sayad died he asked his friend and colleague, Pierre Bourdieu, to make a book of the disparate manuscripts he had produced over the years. The result is intellectually rigorous, anthropologically perceptive, moving and poetic.

The Em- of Empowerment

Laura Agustín

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

The below excerpts are from a news report about Lowell Bergman’s documentary on smuggling; his comments were made during a recent briefing at the University of California.

Corrupt U.S. Agents Aid Human Smuggling at Border

New America Media, Annette Fuentes, 6 Feb 2009

‘Building a fence and wall at the border and putting more border agents down there creates a bigger pool of potential corruption targets.’

The build-up of security agents on the border, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, hasn’t slowed illegal migration . . . Those who would have tried crossing alone are more likely to pay a smuggler to shepherd them across. ‘If people try to get across the border, they eventually get across . . .  Part of the fee to the smuggler is the guarantee that they’ll get you across. If they fail the first time, they’ll try again.’

. . . Proponents of the militarization of the border have used the threat of terrorist attacks in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify the build-up. But Bergman noted that there is no evidence that terrorists have ever entered through the Mexico-U.S. border. Of all those apprehended at border crossings, there is no record of non-Mexicans. . .

. . . there has been no effective internal oversight of border agents since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Multiple agencies, each with some responsibilities for immigration, customs and law enforcement, have meant no coordinated approach to investigations. ‘They completely lost any idea of what was going on . . . Only now are they beginning to find out, and they are overwhelmed by the number of leads and cases to follow up on.’

The FBI . . . now has about 200 open cases of human smuggling involving corrupt border agents. But the agency is swimming against the tide. ‘People coming through checkpoints . . . is still a growth industry.’

Here the whole black and white, law-and-order idea loses ground, and we see instead a multi-national social setting. Placing people at a border to enforce it provides them with opportunities to make money doing exactly what their formal job pays them to prevent. This is, of course, a widespread phenomenon amongst police of all kinds. Many people take law-enforcement jobs not out of an inspired devotion to the State but because they can get those jobs.Maybe they perform many aspects of their jobs correctly, but they don’t believe in ‘the law’ enough to resist opportunities to freelance. 

Here are three more examples of specific cases where those with power were paid to smooth crossing the border: a Dominican diplomat in New York, a filipino in New Jersey and a US customs officer and Chinese smuggler of people via Ecuador.

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.