research

Over the 15 years I’ve studied migration, I’ve seen remarkable consistency in the reasons migrants give for travelling to other countries to work, whether they end up in factories or brothels. The report Assessment of Mobility and HIV Vulnerability among Myanmar Migrant Sex Workers and Factory Workers in Mae Sot District, Tak Province, Thailand, published by IOM-Bangkok in 2007, describes qualitative and quantitative research to assess HIV vulnerability among migrant sex workers and migrant factory workers. I’ve reproduced a few small excerpts that show the economic overlaps and interdependencies amongst migrant workers in both factories and brothels and the people that facilitate their travels and jobs. 

‘About crossing the border to Thailand

A range of companions and contacts facilitate the migrant’s journey to Thailand. Many cross the border with relative ease together with a family member or friends who had been to the Thai side previously. . . .

Some . . .  are brought to the Thai side of the border through the employment of “carriers” or brokers (commonly referred to as gae-ri in Bamar or nai nah in Thai), who offer migrants job placement opportunities that would otherwise be almost impossible to achieve without a contact. . . .

Brokers are present on both sides of the border and seek to make money through providing transport and employment assistance to migrants in need.

In the context of sex work, some brokers inform the women about the specific type of work prior to providing assistance while others merely explain that the women could make a substantial amount of money sitting and talking with customers at a bar.

There is evidence to suggest that brokers provide the initial capital for the women to migrate to Thailand and then sell them to a karaoke bar or brothel. The women are then bound to work off the amount of money that was paid by the brothel to the broker.

Not all brokers work in conjunction with the brothels and karaoke bars in Mae Sot. Some facilitate contact with factories and farms and are paid directly by the migrant. . .

Factory versus sex work

Though factory work is certainly the most sought after type of employment, it is not consistently available. Many migrants are forced to wait several months for positions or find other endeavours as day labourers, farmhands, construction workers or housemaids, or simply return home. “Those who come back say if you work for one year here you can’t even save enough to build a bamboo hut, whereas if you work in Thailand for one year, it is possible to build a proper house.”6

Commercial sex services in Mae Sot District tend to be located around construction sites and factories. These establishments employ mostly female migrant workers and tend to cater to Thai nationals. . . . “if available, male migrant workers will seek out karaoke women or sex workers who are of the same language group in order to communicate more easily . . .”.21

The narratives of the sex workers often described the following environment: . . .  They usually work for an initial four to eight months. In most instances this allows them to save a substantial amount of revenue, which they in turn use to invest in a business or other endeavour in Myanmar. After paying off any debt owed to the brothel or karaoke boss, several of the respondents returned to Myanmar. . . and began a small business, such as a teashop, or provide for the family to continue working as farmers. 17

All the sex workers that took part in the discussions said they wanted to stop working in the profession and were actively building their savings for the future. One 24-year-old sex worker said: “I have to work here like I am a businesswoman. It’s good to work for one, two months or at the most four to five months. I work till I get some things for my kids, like a house, then I have the capital to invest.” After returning home and new difficulties have arisen, many young women return to their old life in Mae Sot, a life that provided them with enough money for their dependents and their future. This story of migration was described very often during the discussions and interviews. Some respondents said they returned to Mae Sot as many as three or four times.’

«Diese Frauen sind nicht naiv.» Eine Soziologin sieht nicht alle Prostituierten als Opfer

Prostituierte in Zürich: Nicht alle sind Opfer, Bild Reuters

NZZ am Sonntag - Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 Juli 2009

Sind Prostituierte aus der Dritten Welt alle Opfer von Frauenhandel und Ausbeutung? Nein, sagt die renommierte Soziologin Laura María Agustín. Die Entrüstung unter Feministinnen ist gross.

Interview: David Signer

Fast täglich lesen wir irgendwo über afrikanische, asiatische oder osteuropäische Frauen, die gegen ihren Willen in den Westen verschleppt und hier zur Prostitution gezwungen werden. Die Sklaverei existiere fort in Form des Frauenhandels, heisst es in diesem Zusammenhang gern.

Hunderttausende von ahnungslosen Frauen würden unter falschen Versprechen von zu Hause weggelockt, mit Gewalt ans andere Ende der Welt verfrachtet, unter Drogen gesetzt, von dubiosen Organisationen ausgebeutet. Sicher gibt es solche Fälle. Aber das generelle Bild ist komplexer.

Die Soziologin Laura María Agustín beschäftigt sich seit vielen Jahren mit diesem Thema, zuerst als Mitarbeiterin von NGO in verschiedenen Ländern Lateinamerikas, später als Forscherin. In ihrem Buch «Sex at the Margins» stellt sie sich entschieden gegen den «Frauenhandel-Mythos», der die Prostituierten zu wehrlosen Opfern degradiere. Bei einem Gespräch erklärt sie, warum Prostitution unter gewissen Umständen durchaus eine valable Option sein kann.

NZZ am Sonntag: Frau Agustín, Sie schreiben in Ihrem Buch, der vorherrschende Diskurs über Prostitution sei geprägt von einem «fundamentalistischen Feminismus». Was meinen Sie damit?
Laura María Agustín: Damit meine ich Feministinnen, die davon ausgehen, dass Frauen über alle kulturellen und sozialen Grenzen hinweg eine gemeinsame Essenz und ein gemeinsames Schicksal teilen: nämlich Opfer der männlichen, sexuellen Gewalt zu sein. Frauen sind für sie generell Opfer und Prostituierte ganz besonders. Prostitution heisst für diese Art Feministinnen Vergewaltigung, und also müssen die Prostituierten gerettet werden. Diese Axiome zu leugnen, ist für sie gleichbedeutend mit einer Leugnung des Holocaust, denn auch hier geht es angeblich um eine Art Genozid: an den Frauen. Das Leiden und der irreparable Schaden, der durch Sex ohne Liebe verursacht wird, ist für sie mit keinem andern Leiden zu vergleichen. Das sind Vorstellungen von weissen, christlichen Mittelstands-Frauen, die dann auf die ganze Welt projiziert werden. Ursprünglich ging es im Feminismus doch darum, Verantwortung zu übernehmen, oder? Aber heute sieht man nur noch überall Opfer.
Sie relativieren damit aber den Sonderfall der Sexarbeit.
Ist Sex mit einem Mann, den man nicht liebt, wirklich so viel schlimmer als die Arbeit in einer Mine oder als Soldatin in einem Krieg? Den meisten Leuten auf der Welt, Männern oder Frauen, stehen – im Gegensatz zu Europa – nicht viele berufliche Möglichkeiten offen. Eine junge Frau in der Dominikanischen Republik hat oft nur drei Alternativen: Haushaltmädchen, Strassenverkäuferin oder Prostituierte. Manche von ihnen sagen: Lieber sterbe ich, als meinen Körper zu verkaufen, andere sagen, lieber sterbe ich, als mich als Haushaltmädchen ausbeuten zu lassen. Es gibt also individuelle Präferenzen, und nicht alle haben dasselbe Verhältnis zu Sex. Man ist nie total von äusseren Umständen determiniert, aber diese Frauen werden genau so dargestellt, als ob sie keine Ambitionen und keine Entscheidungsfähigkeit hätten. Die Feministinnen sagen: «Schrecklich, ich kann mir gar nicht vorstellen, wie es ist, mit einem Mann für Geld Sex zu haben!» Andere können sich das sehr wohl vorstellen. Wenn man die Prostituierten zurückschafft, dann ist die Frau halt gezwungen, als Haushaltmädchen oder Strassenverkäuferin zu arbeiten, that’s all. Read the rest of this entry »

Aquí va un video de la ponencia de Ángela Villón Bustamante, presidenta de la asociación Miluska Vida y Dignidad, Asociación Civil de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Lima, Perú. Rosario Sasieta, miembro del Congreso Nacional del Perú, presenta a Villón.

Propuestas desde el Movimiento de Trabajadoras Sexuales del Perú

La ponencia de Villón sigue en dos partes mas: 2da y 3ra.  

Otra ponencia de la misma ocasión habla de un estudio con trabajadoras sexuales transgéneras. La ponente es Ximena Salazar de la unidad de salud, sexualidad y desarrollo humano de la Universidad Cayetano Heredia.

Conclusiones y Recomendaciones por parte de Sasieta.  

What I hate most about the annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) is the very idea: that one country should presume to judge all others vis-a-vis some topic and then publish a report card with simplistic, childish rankings (all the world fits into 4 classes). Then, not content with simply judging Rest-of-World, the USA threatens to cut off aid and social programming to countries that do not toe its line. It’s the worst kind of cultural arrogance, and it would be if any other country presumed to do it, too.

However, let’s imagine that such a report could be of great use to many people. In that case, I want to know how the data was gathered, which sources were consulted, who was allowed to give information, whose estimates were deemed authoritative and how data were confirmed. I want to know precisely how researchers handled the considerable international muddle over definitions, since the fact that people mean different things when they say the word trafficking is a notorious source of conflict and confusion, not to mention that a lot of the English keywords cannot be reliably translated into all other languages (for example, abuse, exploitation, force, coercion). Yet every year since the beginning the Report has fudged explaining how it’s compiled. Instead of concrete information on methodology we get the vaguest of statements, really worthy of a Cold War spy operation. This is what the 2009 document says about this contemporary Crusade:

Methodology

The Department of State prepared this report using information from U.S. embassies, foreign government officials, nongovernmental and international organizations, published reports, research trips to every region, and information submitted to [an email address]. This email address allows NGOs and individuals to share information on government progress in addressing trafficking. U.S. diplomatic posts reported on the trafficking situation and governmental action based on thorough research that included meetings with a wide variety of government officials, local and international NGO representatives, officials of international organizations, journalists, academics, and survivors.

No, a list of nameless institutions and groups does not qualify. The vaguer and longer the list, the more impressive it appears, but we have no way to know how the particular people were chosen and who was not consulted. Research studies can never be completely objective but they can and must address their own biases, and one of these concerns Gatekeepers: Who is chosen to tell researchers whom they should talk to and believe.

To compile this year’s report, the Department reviewed credible information sources on every country and assessed each government’s antitrafficking efforts. In prior years a “significant number” (defined to be 100 or more) of trafficking victims had to be documented for a country to be ranked in the TIP Report. The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (TVPRA of 2008) eliminated this requirement, thereby expanding the scope of countries included in this year’s report.

Let readers judge the credibility of sources: Who were they, exactly? Some local informants don’t want their names revealed, fine; list everyone else. Local readers can then judge which political groups informants belonged to, which officials were consulted, which NGOs. This is called Transparency. Again, if it’s judged better not to name all names, name as many as possible, and if not of individuals then of groups.

Some countries have held conferences and established task forces or national action plans to create goals for anti-trafficking efforts. While such activities are useful and can serve as a catalyst toward concrete law enforcement, protection, and prevention activities in the future, these conferences, plans, and task forces alone are not weighed heavily in assessing country efforts. Rather, the report focuses on governments’ concrete actions to fight trafficking, especially prosecutions, convictions, and prison sentences for traffickers as well as victim protection measures and prevention efforts.

So the evaluation is completely focussed on criminal-justice actions: that’s clear, anyway. It’s not as though a lot of proclamations condemning slavery ought to qualify as real efforts, but everything mentioned here is about criminals and victims except the extremely vague and silly term ‘prevention efforts’.

Although critical to increasing anti-trafficking efforts, the Report does not give great weight to laws in draft form or laws that have not yet been enacted. In general, the Report does not focus on governmental efforts that have indirect implications for trafficking, such as general efforts to keep children in school or general economic development programs, though the Report is making a stronger effort to identify trafficking vulnerabilities and measures taken by governments to prevent trafficking that may result from such vulnerabilities. Similarly, this report attempts to identify systemic contributing factors to particular forms of human trafficking. These include particular policies or practices, such as labor recruiters’ charging of excessive fees to prospective migrants and governmental policies allowing employers to confiscate passports of foreign workers—factors that have been shown to contribute to forced labor.

Well, honestly. So they’ve got no interest in underlying causes but are probably paying a bunch of US civil servants to compile a list of them and another list of how smuggling works, which everyone already knows. It’s egregious, self-benefiting, colonialist interference, on top of which they can’t accept research that’s already been done but have to pay themselves to do it. Humbug.

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

What’s Wrong With the ‘Trafficking’ Crusade?
Well-meaning interference?

The Philadelphia Inquirer   Sunday 1 July 2007
Op-Ed page

Laura Agustín

It’s the season when the United States issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). Having named sexual slavery as a particular evil to be eradicated, the United States grades other countries on how they are doing.

On the one hand, it sounds like an obvious way to do good: Describe the ghastly conditions you as a rich outsider observe in poor countries. Focus on places where sex is sold. Say all women found were kidnapped virgins and are now enslaved; announce to the world that you will liberate them. Organize raids. Denounce anyone who objects - even if their objection is that you are intervening in their country’s internal affairs. Ignore victims who resist rescue. Use lurid language and talk continuously about the most sensational and terrible cases. Justify your actions as a manifestation of faith, as though it exists only for you. Mutter about “organized crime.”

This is also the season when tourists leave the United States en masse to visit the rest of the world, where their country is more disliked all the time. People who used to say: “It’s just the president [or the government], ordinary Americans are all right,” now say it less often. Ignorant, destructive interventions into other countries’ business have been going on too long.

Grading everyone else on moral grounds is highly offensive, particularly when such grades are accompanied by threats of punishment if the line isn’t toed. It’s distressing to witness the deterioration of what good will is left toward this country since the post-2001 wars were initiated and campaigns intensified that presume the United States Always Knows Best.

For crusading politicians and religious leaders, a rhetoric of moral indignation is effective in uniting constituents and diverting the collective gaze away from familiar problems at home. So the culprits, those who get bad grades in the TIP, live far away from U.S. culture, which is assumed to be better. Intransigent local troubles - prisons overflowing with African Americans, millions of children malnourished - are swept aside in the call to clean up other people’s countries.

This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors’ bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.

It is easy to haul out sensationalistic language (sex slavery, child prostitution), but it is much harder to sort out the real victims from the more routinely disadvantaged and trying-to-get-ahead. Those who know intimately the problems of the poor in their own cultures rarely deny that they can decide to leave home and pay others to help them travel and find work, in sex or in any other trade.

“But sex for money is disgusting and degrading; no one should have to do it.” And should anyone have to clean toilets all day? Risk being maimed in unsafe fireworks factories? Should children have to spend their lives in lightless tunnels of mines, or women have to remain married to men who are cruel to them? The world is full of things we wish we could eradicate - but isn’t starvation the first of them? Why is there no equivalent moral furor over hideous poverty? Are we meant to believe that sex without love is worse than military violence? All over the world, selling sex pays better than most jobs readily available to women, and many do not believe it is the worst possible experience they can have.

What’s questionable about the TIP is not the defense of children or anyone else against true violence - it’s one government’s assumption that it has the right to judge everyone else and apply a draconian definition of exploitation that does not ask people whether and how they would like to change their lives. Questionable is the focus on the photogenic, cowboy moment of rushing in to rescue slaves, with no interest in what will follow.

Victims are “protected” rather than granted autonomy. At the Empower Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, signs written by migrant women “rescued from” selling sex include: “We lose our savings and belongings”; We are locked up”; “We are held till deporation”; “We are interrogated by many people”; “Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.”

From the standpoint of social science, the TIP is gravely faulty. It never explains how data were gathered and compared across so many languages and cultures, or who did it exactly under what circumstances. A raft of other research shows enormous diversity among people who sell sex, and a wide variety of experiences in the sex industry among both migrants and people who stay at home. Studies show that the worst kind of trafficking can happen to people doing other kinds of jobs - and to men. Women all over the world, including the poorest, repudiate being characterized as above all sexually vulnerable.

In assuming its creators’ moral values are or should be universal, the TIP ignores local cultures and the complexities of human desires and functions - yet another reason tourists from the United States will be less welcome everywhere this summer.

The following comments reveal some of the contradictions experienced while trying to work within the framework of ‘trafficked children’. The study was funded by the US National Institute of Justice ‘to examine the experiences of children, mostly girls, trafficked to the United States for sexual and labor exploitation and analyze their prospects for reintegration.’ I make many of the same comments in my book Sex at the Margins and am glad to see that numerous other researchers are now writing about cultural differences that mean that campaigns to save young people from doing paid work often oppress and make them unhappy. These are just a few excerpts from the article, so if you’ve got questions go to the original. I’ve highlighted some points in bold, and made sure to leave in concepts not often mentioned in debates (child fostering and child circulation).

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81/4, pp. 903–923, (2008)

On Challenges, Dilemmas, and Opportunities in Studying Trafficked Children

Elzbieta M. Goździak, Institute for the Study on International Migration, Georgetown University

In the United States the system of care for trafficked children has been developed within a framework based on middle-class Western ideals about childhood as a time of dependency and innocence during which children are socialized by adults and become competent social actors. Economic and social responsibilities are generally mediated by adults so that the children can grow up free from pressures of responsibilities such as work and child care. Children who are not raised in this way are considered “victims” who have had their childhood stolen from them. This framework views universal concern for children as transcending political and social divides; assumes a universally applicable model of childhood development; presupposes a consensus on what policies should be in place to realize the best interest of the child; assumes that child victims have universal needs (such as a need for rehabilitation); and promotes a therapeutic model of service provision. . .

. . . we understood that “disagreements over [child trafficking]’s magnitude are underpinned by different understandings of the term ‘child’ and ‘trafficking’” and that “this is a conceptual and political problem that cannot be resolved by more data alone” (Manzo 2005: 394).

. . . many of the children did not consider themselves trafficked victims, but thought of their experiences as migration in search of better opportunities that turned into exploitation. Many also did not think of their traffickers as perpetrators of crime and villains; after all in some instances the traffickers were parents or close relatives.

. . . Almost all of the children were highly motivated to migrate to the US in the hope of earning money. Many of them had compelling reasons to send money home and had to repay smuggling fees. Typically, the children’s desire to earn money did not change once they were rescued. [State programs] reflect US laws requiring children to attend school, defining the age of employment and number of hours a minor child is allowed to work. . .  These restrictions may run counter to many children’s goals and lead to a struggle as they adjust to their new lives. These issues have longterm consequences for the children’s commitment to education and affect their desire to remain in care. The children’s reluctance to see themselves as victims stood in sharp contrast to the perceptions of service providers who referred to the children as victims, often because the law conceptualizes them as victims.

. . . Middle-class Eurocentric ideals often assume that, apart from exceptional cases, children live in nuclear families, experience childhood together with their siblings and have access to resources provided by both biological parents. Research contradicts this assumption and documents a wide range of living arrangements experienced by children in resource-poor countries (Lloyd and Desai 1992).

. . .  child fostering or child circulation is a long-standing cultural practice in many regions. . .  including West Africa, . . . Latin America . . .  and the Pacific. According to Demographic and Health Surveys, covering 10 African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal), the percentage of foster children ranges between 10 and 20 percent in the six to nine age bracket, and between 13 and 25 percent in the 10 to 14 age group. In the overwhelming majority of cases, both parents are alive but do not live with their children (Pilon 2003). . .

. . .  In West Africa, fostering is an important technique rooted in kinship structures and traditions. Children are not sent out only in the event of crisis; sending of children is practiced by both stable and unstable families, married and single mothers (Isiugo-Abaniche 1985, 1991).

. . . According to the British Agencies for Adoptions and Fostering, 10,000 children, mostly from West Africa, were living with families other than their own in the United Kingdom in 2001 (Economist 2003). . .

. . . In Latin America, “child circulation” is a principal way in which Peruvian rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality (Leinaweaver 2007). Poverty and vulnerability shape Peruvian practices of kinship formation through child circulation. For the receiving family, child circulation represents strategic labor recruitment; for the sending household, it spells relief from the economic burdens of child rearing and constitutes a source of highly desirable remittances. A considerable proportion of children in Mexico and Colombia were found to spend some time during childhood without a father. When births outside a union are included, one-fifth of Mexican children and one-third of Colombian children were affected. An additional five percent of Mexican children and nine percent of Colombian children do not live with their mothers (Richter 1988).

. . . For the societies involved, child circulation is a characteristic of family systems, fitting in with patterns of family solidarity and the system of rights and obligations. Fostering is a component of family structure and dynamics (Pilon 2003). Indeed, the majority of the children in our study lived with other family members or friends prior to being trafficked and most were sent to live with family members or friends in the United States and ended up being trafficked.

Sex Work: A Review of Recent Literature

Qualitative Sociology 32, 1, pp 213–220 (March 2009)

Tijuana, México. Photo: Tomas Castelazo

by AnneMarie Cesario and Lynn Chancer

This sex-positive review essay should be very useful to students.

Political economy and bounded authenticity, agency and risk, globalization and migrant
service work, the relationship of men to ‘prostitution’ and its stereotyped image as just “women’s work”: the four books surveyed take research on sex work farther than it has been, sociologically, in years. Surely, more yet needs to be done to fill in other parts of the enormous social scientific canvas with which we began. But . . . at least the study of sex work seems well on its way to establishing its own deserved legitimacy.

Books reviewed:

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

Temporarily Yours. Elizabeth Bernstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Male Sex Work: A Business Doing Pleasure. Todd G. Morrison and Bruce W. Whitehead (Eds.). Binghamton: Haworth Press, 2007.

Sex Work: A Risky Business. Teela Sanders. Portland: Willan Publishing, 2005.

Since I’m at this conference considering the idea of ethics in relation to sex law, it might be a good moment to reprise this piece I wrote a few years ago. What do we think ethics are, who gets to define them?

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I am in Budapest. Good Sex, Bad Sex: Sex Law, Crime and Ethics is the first conference I’ve been interested in attending in a long time. I swore off the whole conference genre for a while, but the description of this one caught my eye, so I got in touch with two very interesting minds and we proposed a panel. It’s a small event, 35 or so people, and no competing sessions, so you can actually relax and reflect on everything you hear. Our session is:

Monday 4th May 2009, 1600

Session 2: Breathing New Life into Old Fears: Cultural Studies of Prostitution, Pornography and Bad Sex

This panel will explore continuing impulses to criminalise and prohibit forms of ‘bad’ sexual practice. The three papers examine continuities and transformations in recent regulatory impulses to ‘protect’ the ‘innocent’ and the public from individual instances of bad sexual conduct. We ask whether fixed ethical frameworks, with concomitant laws, are appropriate in an age where diversity, autonomy and agency are prime values.

The Evil is in Paying: Sex with ‘Trafficked Women’
Laura Agustin

Prominent politicians and feminists have come to maintain that paying for sex with a ‘victim of trafficking’ is a heinous crime equivalent to violent rape. All migrant workers in the sex industry are considered subject to ‘serial rape’ and ‘sexual slavery’. The movement purposely conflates all prostitution with ‘trafficking’ and attacks those who disagree as pimps and anti-feminists. The justification is Gender Equality, a utopic vision that defines good sex as symmetrical, mutual, personally close, loving and equitable. Resulting laws criminalise the buying of sex on the grounds that introducing money creates a power relationship antithetical to the right kind of sex. This paper posits a different ethical vision in which money is not granted defining status in sexual acts.

Going to Extremes: Understanding New Online Pornographies
Feona Attwood

Online pornographies increasingly provide a focus for debates about permissible and impermissible sexual practices and about good and bad representations of sex. They have also become the focus of broader concerns with ‘extreme’ images of the body, for example in the horror subgenre which has been dubbed ‘torture porn’, in images of real violence and conflict (sometimes referred to as ‘warporn’ or ‘atrocity porn’), and in the wider set of ‘shock’ images which proliferate online. This paper considers the significance of contemporary concerns about extreme online pornographies in a cultural context where norms of sexuality and notions of obscenity are fiercely contested and where the circulation of sexual imagery is more prevalent than ever before.

Five Dominatrices and a Thrashing: the Classifications of Sadomasochism
Clarissa Smith

During 2008 two of the UK’s most august institutions resounded to discussion of activities involving pain and sexual pleasure: the House of Lords debated the rights of British citizens to possess images of ‘extreme’ sexual practices and the High Court was regaled with tales of supposed Nazi orgies starring Max Mosley (Formula 1 President and son of British wartime fascist Sir Oswald Mosley) and five women he had paid to beat him. The rights and wrongs of sadomasochism, consensual violence and the commodification and commercialisation of sexual desire were thoroughly aired across the media. This paper will consider the multiple meanings of sadomasochism and other ‘extreme’ sexual practices in public discourse and the continuing failures of the legislature to understand such practices as anything other than evidence of deviant or irrational impulses.

This week I got wound up for the silliest of reasons: media reporting on prostitution. The prompting event was a two-part series (Selling sex legally in New Zealand and Europe and NZ poles apart on sex trade) from the stodgiest of sources, the BBC, supposedly revealing a huge contrast between New Zealand and European prostitution policy. The second story’s headline isn’t even supported by the report itself: Well, what else is new? The mainstream media regularly deal with sex-industry topics in an ignorant, reductionist way. I got irritated because I was sent this junk eight times: too many! In my opinion, the BBC reports fall into a category we all know well: Delete Upon Reading Subject Line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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