sexuality

On Monday Sarkozy threatened to make wearing a burka in public illegal in France. I wrote about this kind of thinking last year in The Guardian. This issue is related to migration, it is related to trafficking and it is related to commercial sex. Ideas about how the right kind of women should look predominate in the history of women: you’re meant to cover yourself up more, or less, or in some particular way. From the original text of Sarkozy’s speech:

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. Read the rest of this entry »

As regular readers know, I’m trying to figure out how the lovely utopian goal of Gender Equality landed us in a future I never expected, where ‘progressive’ and ‘feminist’ could be associated with policies that position women as innately passive victims. Activists interested in sex-industry legislation usually cite Swedish prostitution law as the fount of all evil, with its criminalisation of the buying of sexual services. This law is a cornerstone of an overall Swedish policy to foment Gender Equality, and so is rape legislation that has led to bizarre statistics commented on in this story published the other day in Sweden’s English-language daily The Local. 

The Local, 11 May 2009 

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden?

Laura Agustín

from okejsex.nu

Rape is a complicated crime. A research project funded by the European Commission’s Daphne programme reveals that Sweden leads Europe in reports of rape. At 46.5 per 100,000 members of the population, Sweden far surpasses Iceland, which comes next with 36, and England and Wales after that with 26. At the same time, Sweden’s 10 percent conviction rate of rape suspects is one of Europe’s lowest.

The report’s comparative dimension should probably be ignored. Instead of assuming that there are four times as many rapes in Sweden as in neighbouring Denmark or Finland, as the figures suggest, to understand we would have to compare all the definitional and procedural differences between their legal systems. It is significant that Sweden counts every event between the same two people separately where other countries count them as one. Most of Sweden’s rapes involve people who know each other, in domestic settings.

The countries reporting highest rates of rape are northern European with histories of social programming to end violence against women. In Sweden, Gender Equality is taught in schools and reinforced in public-service announcements. Should we believe that such education has no effect, or, much worse, an opposite effect? Raging anti-feminist men think so, and raging anti-immigrant Swedes blame foreigners. Amnesty International says patriarchal norms are intransigent in Swedish family life. Everyone faults the criminal justice system.

In contemporary Sweden, women and girls are encouraged to speak up assertively about gender bias and demand their rights. Public discussions have revolved around how to achieve equal sex: Gender Equality in the bedroom. We can consult okejsex.nu, an official campaign whose homepage shows pedestrians obliviously passing buildings full of scenes of violence, suggesting it is ubiquitous behind closed doors. Okejsex defines rape as any situation where sex occurs after someone has said no.

In many countries, and in many people’s minds, rape means penetration, usually by a penis, into a mouth, vagina or anus. In Swedish rape law, the word can be used for acts called assault or bodily harm in other countries.

That may be progressive, but it’s also confusing. You don’t have to be sexist or racist to imagine the misunderstandings that may arise. If younger people (or older, for that matter) have been out drinking and dancing and end up in a flat relaxing late at night, we are not surprised that the possibility of sex is raised. The process of getting turned on – and being seduced – is often vague and strange, involving looks and feelings rather than clear intentions. It is easy to go along and actively enjoy this process until some point when it becomes unenjoyable. We resist, but feebly. Sometimes we give in against our true wishes.

Sweden is also proud of its generous policy towards asylum-seekers and other migrants who may not instantly comprehend what Gender Equality means here, or that not explicitly violent or penetrative sex acts are understood as rape. That doesn’t mean that non-Swedes are rapists but that a large area exists where crossed signals are likely, for instance, amongst people out on the town drinking.

Discussions of rape nowadays use examples of women who are asleep, or have taken drugs or drunk too much alcohol, in order to argue that they cannot properly consent to sex. If they feel taken advantage of the next day, they may call what happened rape. The Daphne project’s Sweden researchers propose that those accused of rape ought to have to ‘prove consent’, but attempts to legislate and document seduction and desire are unlikely to succeed.

What isn’t questioned, in most public discussions, is the idea that the problem must be addressed by more laws, ever more explicit and strict. Contemporary society insists that punishment is the way to stop sexual violence, despite evidence suggesting that criminal law has little impact on sexual behaviour.

We want to think that if laws were perfectly written and police, prosecutors and judges were perfectly fair, then rapes would decrease because a) all rapists would go to jail and b) all potential rapists would be deterred from committing crime. Unfortunately, little evidence corroborates this idea. Debates crystallise in black-and-white simplifications that supposedly pit politically correct arguments against the common sense of regular folk. Subtleties and complications are buried under masses of rhetoric, and commentaries turn cynical: ‘Nothing will change’, ‘the police are pigs’, immigrants are terrorists, girls are liars.

Is it realistic or kind to teach that life in Sweden can always be safe, comfortable and impervious to outside influences? That, in the sexual sphere, everything disagreeable should be called rape and abuse? Although the ‘right’ to Gender Equality exists, we cannot expect daily life to change overnight because it does.

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.

Here’s a sex business with one traditional feature and one I hadn’t run into before. The company, Big Sister, provides you the opportunity to watch other people having sex, either live or filmed. Nothing new about that. What’s different is the sex scenes are filmed at a brothel where 

none of the attending guests (males or couples) to the club have to pay to have their desires fulfilled. Instead, they have to agree to consent to be televised and grant all the marketing rights to Big Sister Media for distribution across all media channels. . . Our current library consists of over 18.000 exclusive scenes to date.

The shows have been called  reality sex tv. Those who want to watch pay monthly subscription fees (said to be 29.95 euros a year ago). The website claims to get 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day.

As with other kinds of reality television, traditional entertainment models - professional performers on one side, audience on the other - are blurred. The customer (or exhibitionist) becomes the performer for other customers (voyeurs). At the same time, professional sex workers are employed in a traditional sense. Here are some excerpts from coverage by Bloomberg.com about the brothel itself:

Free Sex at Prague Brothel Tests Taboo as Reality Romps Hit Web

By Douglas Lytle and Yon Pulkrabek, 10 Jan 2008

The 36-year-old bank-security technician drove eight hours from his home in Metz, France, to Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet. . .

Visitors to Big Sister start at the electronic menu, which provides each woman’s age, height, working name and the languages she speaks. After a customer makes his selection, a manager makes sure the client signs broadcast release forms, and then the intimate details are arranged with the partner for the evening. . .

Big Sister is based in a renovated apartment building just outside the narrow, winding streets of Prague’s Old Town.  .  .

At the brothel, the Alpine Room is decorated like the backdrop to The Sound of Music with fake Styrofoam rocks and a forest. Other rooms include Heaven, decked out in white, and Hell, which resembles a dungeon. A giant stuffed polar bear watches over proceedings in the Igloo Room. . .

Big Sister has a staff of 25 to 45 women, depending on the season, and 45 workers behind the scenes. Three-quarters of the prostitutes come from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and they make 3,000 to 5,000 euros a month . . . Average wages in the Czech Republic are about 800 euros a month. .

 These photos document brothel activity for soldiers in German-occupied France during World War II. The Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) has classified them under Frankreich, Brest, Soldatenbordell. I’m interested in what commercial sex looks like, not in its reductionist meaning of money exchanged for ’sex acts’ but the whole social context. That means the male bonding, the drinking and laughing and flirting and showing off, and the activities of those employed as providers and enhancers of this male sociality.

Source Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Individual photo captions here, with the following caveat:

For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description. Additionally errors can be reported at this page to inform the Bundesarchiv.

Recently on a history-of-sexuality list, people complained about blanket statements regarding ‘Africans’, given the enormous diversity of people and cultures across the many countries on that continent. I agreed with the complaints, but at the same time I don’t care much for national orientations, either, as though people labelled Kenyan or South African exhibited a set of defining characteristics that can be pinned down, just because they were born there.

The following story is about one man in one city in one country, but for those of us who work in or study the sex industry anywhere in the world, it’s a familiar story. The headline emphasises the social status of the clients - as though it were big news - but there are other interesting details, which I’ve highlighted in bold.

Behind The Mask - a website magazine on lesbian and gay affairs in Africa

kenyan male sex workers serve ‘politicians and religious leaders’
26 January 2009

Nanjala Majale

MOMBASA – 26 January 2009: Panning out to Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya, a young good-looking well-groomed man sits on a bamboo chaise lounge. He is a male sex worker, who caters only for male clientele. He has a slightly bored expression on his face, but is willing to talk about his lifestyle and line of work.

“I don’t know why they think there are only a pocketful of homosexuals in this country”, Brian mused before the interview even started, staring absentmindedly at his nails. “Our main market is not the white tourists who come down here. We cater for people in Nairobi, Meru and even Mandera!” He went on to say, in a slightly feminine tone, that last December he spent the entire month, fully paid, in Nairobi. “I had fun!” Brian enthused.

Brian is one of many male sex workers who cater exclusively to male clients. He regularly attends one of four health centres that serve MSM in the coastal town, set up with the help of the International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICHR) an institution that teaches men about safe sex practices and offers occasional counselling. In a study published in the June 2007 edition of AIDS, researchers estimated that at least 739 MSM were selling sex to other men in and around the city of Mombasa, a “sizeable population that urgently needs to be targeted by HIV prevention strategies,” the research said.

24-year-old Brian says he initially got into the business to make money. “Nowadays sometimes I do it just for pleasure, but mostly it’s for the money. I work only five times a week,” he declared. Asked whether he is a homosexual Brian confided “I was raped by a neighbour when I was about eight years old and from that time I started getting sexual urges – more for men than women. I didn’t take any action after the rape, because I was threatened”, he revealed, explaining that he suffered emotionally for a while before coming to terms with it.

“I started actively going with boys when I was in secondary school. I was in a boarding school and I had about 40 boyfriends during my four years of studying there,” he said with a seemingly shy but proud expression. “I didn’t have sex with all of them, but I liked the romance. After college is when I came out and from then I would look for people who want serious relationships.”

Brian revealed that his first few relationships did not work. “Most people just wanted to have sex and then they would often cheat on me. I have never desired to have a sexual relationship with a woman though. Maybe one day I will, just to try.”

“In my business, I charge about KSH 1,200 per shot. But that’s on the lower side for the younger clients. I only give two shots, once at night and once in the morning. I don’t stretch myself.” “I don’t like old guys,” he confided with a low voice, “so with those ones I charge a bit extra, about KSH 2,500 and that is just for the night.” Brian says that despite the stigma that faces homosexuals, more specifically from society, police, and the church, their clientele is made up of people in these very segments.

It was revealed at a June 2007 conference on Peer Education, HIV and AIDS, in Nairobi, that MSM face high levels of stigma and discrimination. Agnes Runyiri of ICHR said at the forum that homosexuality is considered taboo, un-African and anti-Christian.

“It [homosexuality] is very common. The only problem is stigma. That is why we are scared to come out. But in a real sense, our clients are politicians, businessmen, religious leaders – I’m very sorry to say – but it’s true,” Brian pointed out. Since every business has its own down sides Brian narrated that “sometimes you get bad customers who pay you less than the agreed amount or disappear with your money.”

“Luckily, I have never had a violent customer although I was in a violent relationship once. He used to beat me up and say that it was because I had become naughty, that is why I had to break it off”, he said shrugging.

He also underlined that safe sex is key in his line of work, and even generally with men who have sex with men. “There is a safe clinic [ICHR] that I work with. I started as a peer educator, but since I have a background in journalism, I now work as a counsellor. We have very many gays, who are messing about and they don’t know that they are. We deal with prevention of HIV/AIDS and it is helping because many of us were dying.”

He says it’s unfortunate that homosexuals are mistreated in most health institutions, an issue which he thinks the government should look into. “I wish that the government would sensitise the whole country to accept that this thing [homosexuality] is there and we have to help these guys out. The more we push it under the table, the more we are going to die.”

“What we need is health rights, not even marriage rights because I don’t think even my family would allow me to do that [be a homosexual]. They need sensitisation. People don’t understand that we are normal human beings, it is just that our sexual preferences are different”, he concluded.

This piece was published in mid-December 2008 in a special edition of Ciudadaniasx (SxCitizenship) called Trabajo sexual: Derechos, estigma y discriminación.  In it I talk about the idea of sex work and its use as a base for demanding rights. I’ve added pictures here that are different from those the editors used (and which are more to the point).

Trabajo sexual y derecho al trabajo
Laura Agustín

Presentación

Desde los años 70 existe un movimiento social que condena la estigmatización y criminalización del intercambio de sexo y dinero. El movimiento está basado en un concepto de derechos de las personas que venden servicios sexuales, porque son ellas, y no los compradores, quienes han estado – hasta hace poco – persiguidas en todos lados del mundo. La persecución viene tanto de las fuerzas del órden público que quieren encarcelarles como de bienpensantes que quieren rescatarles. Entre los dos, y las leyes que les ningunean, los trabajadores del sexo no viven en paz: sobre todos las mujeres y los y las transgéneros y transexuales.

Estatua de trabajadora sexual en Amsterdam

Después de décadas, las protestas siguen intentando romper el estigma social que mantiene la idea que vender sexo es pecado, perversidad, acto criminal o violación, y la táctica casi universal de los grupos militantes es definir la actividad como un trabajo por el cual existen derechos laborales. Se presentan diferencias entre los contextos sociales de distintos grupos, pero cuando se comparan sus acciones políticas, tanto en Bangkok como en Montreal o Madrid, se ven las mismas quejas y los mismos sueños. Cada vez más las redes se comunican, más participantes hablan más de un idioma y existen programas informáticos y gratuitos que posibilitan la rápida traducción de una noticia a otros idiomas. Pertenecer a esas listas de difusión y utilizar esos sitios web significa ver información que viene de grupos de muchos países, que constituye evidencia de una fuerte comunidad de interés. Entre las redes regionales, algunas son más sólidas y duraderas (Asia-el Pacífico) que otras (América Latina, Africa). Sin embargo, existen nuevas iniciativas que hacen renacer la esperanza incluso en los contextos más criminalizados, como en los Estados Unidos.

Las demandas son las mismas que se sacaban hace décadas. El movimiento que está en contra del concepto del trabajo sexual está bien organizado y enfocado en unas cuantas estrategias, sobre todo la de simplificar lo complejo en un argumento captado rápidamente: que toda prostitución es violencia contra las mujeres, lo cual hay que erradicar. En cambio, el movimiento pro-trabajo sexual ofrece un discurso variopinto, complejo, no reduccionista y difícil de captar rápidamente, inevitable porque desea incluir un sinnúmero de realidades humanas. Dentro del mismo movimiento hay distintos planteamientos sobre cómo se debería proceder, lo cual complica la comprensión por parte de la sociedad en general. Pero todos están de acuerdo con el lema principal: El trabajo sexual es trabajo.

Graffiti en Rosario, Argentina: El trabajo sexual no es delito (foto Pablo Flores) 

Instituciones que pueden entender: Los sindicatos

La táctica más estrechamente vinculada a la lucha por el derecho laboral es buscar que algún sindicato general acepte el concepto del trabajo sexual para luego incluir a sus trabajadores en sus actividades convencionales. Ejemplos de esta iniciativa existen en Argentina, donde AMMAR pertenece a la CTA, en Gran Bretaña, donde la IUSW forma parte del GMB, en Cataluña, donde Comisiones Obreras han integrado a estos trabajadores y en California, EEUU, en un club de striptease.

AMMAR es la Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices Argentinas, también llamada Asociación de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Argentina, adherida a la Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos desde el año 1994, con 11 delegaciones en todo el país. IUSW es la International Union of Sex Workers, basada en Londres, fundada en 2000 y afiliada en 2002 con el antes llamado General Municipal Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union (que ahora se llama GMB sin más). Comisiones Obreras es la organización sindical más grande de España, y la mayoría de sus ramas regionales no han llegado a la misma conclusión que la oficina catalán.

En 1997, las bailarinas desnudas y demás empleados de un negocio del tipo peep show en San Francisco, California, logró organizarse como la Exotic Dancers Union y afiliarse al Service Employees International Union. En 2003 los trabajadores formaron un cooperativo después de comprar el negocio, y el sindicato ahora se llama la Lusty Lady Union. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2005 I proposed a cultural-studies framework for thinking about the sex industry. I then disseminated an announcement calling for articles using the new framework, for a special edition of the journal Sexualities, which publishes work from any academic field that ‘describes, analyses, theorises and provides a critique on the changing nature of the social organisation of human sexual experience in the late modern world.’  Which means the exchange of money for sex can be looked at just the way any other activity involving sex can.

The journal also likes ethnographic work, which means using information gathered amongst specific people in actual places rather than purely theoretical, such as whether you consider prostitution to be inherently exploitative or perverted or harmless or any other abstract term.

Although I received many responses to my announcement, most did not venture far from the traditional focus on the meaning and morality of prostitution, even when they used the term sex work.

Soi Cowboy, Bangkok

I chose eight articles, which then went through the usual academic review process, in which specialists in the fields discussed in the work give their opinions about it. All the articles were examined by at least two and sometimes three or four reviewers, people I found by searching high and low all over the globe. I had reviewers working on these articles in Japan, Australia, Israel, France and a long list of other places. For the same article they did not always agree, however, about whether the articles needed to be modified and how.

The best thing about this special edition is the absence of anything like victimising rhetoric or research results that prove anyone’s misery. Hurrah!

Here’s the Table of Contents for Sexualities, Vol 10, No 4, October 2007. If you have access to academic journals, the link to these pieces is here. 

• Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Laura Maria Agustín, Guest Editor
• Performance, Status and Hybridity in a Pakistani Red-Light District: The Cultural Production of the Courtesan: Louise Brown
• Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption: Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck
• No Money Shot? Commerce, Pornography and New Sex Taste Cultures: Feona Attwood
• Rent-Boys, Barflies, and Kept Men: Men Involved in Sex with Men for Compensation in Prague: Timothy M. Hall
• Sex Work for the Middle Classes: Elizabeth Bernstein
• Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil: Adriana Piscitelli
• Thinking Critically about Strip Club Research: Katherine Frank
• Questioning Solidarity: Outreach with Migrants Who Sell Sex: Laura María Agustín

Below is the full text of my Introduction to the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex (Sexualities 2007; 10; 403). Or here is the pdf. (I’m having trouble with this file; if you need it, write to me on the contact form in the sidebar).

Laura Maria Agustín

The articles in this collection explore how the meaning of buying and selling sex changes according to the social, cultural and historical processes in which transactions are situated. Read the rest of this entry »

Protocols attached to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime attempt to distinguish between trafficking and smuggling of people. The trafficking protocol explicitly mentions women, children, coercion and prostitution: absent is any mention of the will to migrate. The smuggling protocol, in contrast, discusses men as migrants and does not speak of sex or prostitution. This gender bias has several negative, confusing effects.

• Women are positioned as sexually vulnerable above all
• Women are lumped with children as though we were children
• Women are not seen as capable of initiating migrations
• Women are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are not seen as capable of being trafficked in the worst sense
• Men are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are associated with dodgy behaviour such as paying someone to help them get around the rules

The following three news clips illustrate how sex and gender often have little to do with irregular (also known as unauthorised) migrations. These incidents would be called smuggling. In at least two of the following cases migrants can’t be called undocumented, because papers have been provided for them - just not their own correct papers.  The point is that many skilled smugglers and traffickers go about their business without resorting to the sort of obvious violence and near-kidnapping that makes sensational stories. Whether a candidate for travelling abroad to work considers selling sex or not, his or her best route is to find someone to arrange for convincing papers. While campaigners shriek about near-kidnappings and women in chains, the industry in false papers goes on its merrie waye. This is one reason why queues get longer and slower at borders. 

Officials, one from an embassy and one from a national immigration bureaucracy, are the smugglers in two cases.

However NB: The fact that false papers were provided does not mean that no traumatic experiences were involved for migrants, that there was no violence or that they knew exactly what they were getting into. We also don’t know which jobs they got or whether they liked them. Sex is not the defining element to these stories, yet many migrants who sell sex use these conventional, if illegal, methods for entering other countries.

CASE 1 - ICE Investigator Arrested For Accepting Bribe

World Journal,  Nov 29, 2008

NEW YORK – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigator Pedro Cintron was arrested for taking bribes from human smugglers and helping them to illegally transport Chinese people from Ecuador to the United States. The World Journal reports that once convicted, he could be sentenced into prison for up to 57 years. Cintron, 52, investigated Chinese human smuggling from Ecuador to the United States in 2004 and 2005. He took over $20,000 bribe from the smuggler and helped several Chinese successfully land to the United States.

CASE 2 - Dominican Diplomat Arrested for Smuggling Dozens to US

CaribWorldNews, Dec 09, 2008

NEW YORK — An employee at the Consulate of the Dominican Republic in New York City has been arrested on charges of migrant smuggling.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested 48 year-old, Francisco Estevez, also known as “Danilo,” on charges of using his family’s passports and consular visas to bring dozens of illegal aliens into the United States from the Dominican Republic during 2007 through 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Click here for the pdf of one of my favourite articles and the first I published in a purely academic journal. In it I try to figure out why sexual services are widely thought to be so different from other kinds of services. I look critically at several traditional economic concepts, such as productive v unproductive labour, emotional and caring work and how the construction of a formal employment sector disappears the informal sector, where so many women carry out their lives.

A Migrant World of Services

Social Politics, 10, 3, 377-96 (2004)

Laura Maria Agustín

Abstract: There is a strong demand for women’s domestic, caring and sexual labour in Europe which promotes migrations from many parts of the world. This paper examines the history of concepts that marginalise these as unproductive services (and not really ‘work’) and questions why the west accepts the semi-feudal conditions and lack of regulations pertaining to this sector. The moral panic on ‘trafficking’ and the limited feminist debate on ‘prostitution’ contribute to a climate that ignores the social problems of the majority of women migrants.

In a variety of scenarios in different parts of Europe, non-Europeans are arriving with the intention to work; these are largely migrant women and transgender people from the ‘third world’ or from Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. The jobs available to these women in the labour market are overwhelmingly limited to three basic types: domestic work (cleaning, cooking and general housekeeping), ‘caring’ for people in their homes (children, the elderly, the sick and disabled) and providing sexual experiences in a wide range of venues known as the sex industry. All these jobs are generally said to be services. Read the rest of this entry »