sexwork

Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil, by Paul Amar, in Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 513.

. . . Operation Princess and its sister campaigns were launched by the police in seeming disregard for the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil. The Pentecostal evangelical leaders of Rio  . . . gave biblical legitimacy to the campaign, brushing aside questions of legality or sex workers’ resistance to being ‘rescued’. . . .

. . . proclaimed he would purge corruption and promote moral rectitude . . . by bringing back the spirit of the Vice Police stations (Delegacias de Costumes), which had been closed for the most part in the 1940s when prostitution was legalized. Simultaneously, President Lula declared a nationwide war against sex trafficking . . .

. . . ‘Operation Princess’ resonated perfectly with the 19th-century iconography of missionarism, child rescue, and abolition in Brazil. . . Avenida Princesa Isabel is the grand boulevard that brings travelers . . . into Copacabana Beach, a mixed-class and mixed-race coastal community that also serves as a center of sex tourism and international diplomatic conferences. Copacabana was a focal point of the new vice-policing operations. . . the statue of Princess Isabel, with her arms outstretched, blessing those she liberated from slavery and radiating a spirit of tolerance and welcome at the gateway to the topless dance clubs and all-night saunas of the Lido.  . .

. . . [the] Black Movement in Brazil ha[s] rigorously critiqued the ‘Princess Isabel Syndrome’, or the commemoration of this child monarch as the agent of abolition. . . it takes credit away from the centuries of sacrifice and mobilization among Brazil’s Afro-descendants and their efforts . . . Thus, the princess metaphor in Rio de Janeiro . . . resonates vibrantly with the politics of social ‘whitening’ (embrancamento), infantilization of black slave agency, and religious moralization.

. . . By the time Lula assumed power in 2003, a massive child-rescue initiative was deemed essential to Brazil’s plans to legitimize and empower itself on the world stage, as well as to address social-justice concerns at home. For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic global south and make a claim to the proposed new seat on the Security Council, it wanted to change the image of Brazilian law enforcement from death squad to rescue mission, authoritarian to humanitarian. The national landscape had to be cleared of lawless, victimized children.

‘Operation Carnival’ became the first test of this revived vice-police campaign. As if to mock the new police operations, a ‘Group A’ Samba School . . .  celebrated ‘Prostitution in Copacabana’ as their theme that year; their 4,000 sequined dancers, the ‘Lions of Nova Iguaçu’, marched through the downtown Sambadrome, singing a samba about the joys of the sex trade. In its debut, the police’s anti-sex-trafficking campaign netted a total of one arrest . . .

During ‘Operation Shangrilá’, the Federal Police raided a showboat in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Forty Brazilian prostitutes and twenty-nine American tourists were arrested for having committed the crime of ‘sex tourism’. This incident was immediately trumpeted as a major bust of a ‘human trafficking’ operation. . . . But . . no Brazilian law had been violated. None of the prostitutes were underage, nor had they violated any pimping or brothel laws. The only way this situation could be imagined as ‘trafficking’ was because the tourists had crossed international frontiers, although without breaking any laws or visa restrictions. Furthermore, ‘sex tourism’ is not against any Brazilian law, unless one assumes that sex tourism is the same thing as forced sex trafficking.

Red-light districts use red, pink and orange light for a reason: the warmth we feel at being bathed in them. These colours are found in all kinds of sex-industry businesses around the world, whether brothels in China or saunas in the West.

The eyeball experiences pleasure on its own looking at these colours.

It seems to be more visceral than aesthetic. We see prostitutes here but we also just take in the red colours. The green just acts as a frame above and the blue below.

I wonder how many monogamous couples have red bedrooms?

Everleigh Club, Chicago

When critics bring up the similarity of today’s trafficking brouhaha with white-slavery scares, they most often point to William Steads investigation for the Pall Mall Gazette in London in the late 19th century. In the April 2008 issue of Reason Magazine, Joanne McNeill reviews Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul, by Karen Abbott. I’ve highlighted some phrases that show how the same contradictory interpretations of ‘the evidence’ occurred back then and the same rhetoric from those who hate prostitution. 

The ‘White Slavery’ Panic: Anti-prostitution activists have been equating sex work with slavery for over a century. 

In 1907 a group of evangelicals visited Chicago’s Everleigh Club brothel, where they handed out leaflets that said, “No ‘white slave’ need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free.” According to the Illinois poet Edgar Lee Masters, an Everleigh Club regular, “the girls laughed in their faces.” In Sin in the Second City, the Atlanta-based journalist Karen Abbott recounts how Minna Everleigh, one of the club’s proprietors, “explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that [a doctor] examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada [Everleigh, her sister and co-proprietor] would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drinks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join the house. No captives here, Reverends.”

The Everleigh Club was an ornate mansion. Thirty themed boudoirs (“the Japanese Parlor,” “the Moorish Room,” “the Egyptian Room”) included absurd touches of decadence, such as hidden buttons to ring for champagne and a fountain that fired a jet of perfume. The city’s finest chefs prepared the women’s dinners. They read poetry by the fire with guests, who included the writers Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner. Sometimes Minna and Ada let swarms of butterflies fly loose throughout the house.

Some anti-prostitution activists nevertheless believed the Everleigh ladies were no different from slaves. Then as now, opponents of prostitution assumed that no woman in her right mind consensually exchanges sex for money. Abbott challenges that view in her account of Chicago’s red light district at the turn of the last century. She interweaves the stories of sex workers and clientele, evangelical activists and conservative bureaucrats, explaining how the term “white slavery” was routinely applied to consenting adults. Reading her historical account, you can hear echoes of that debate in the current crusade against sex trafficking, which similarly blurs the line between coercion and consent.

The Everleigh sisters, Abbott notes, believed a sex worker was “more than an unwitting conduit for virtue. An employee in a business, she was an investment and should be treated as such, receiving nutritious meals, a thorough education, expert medical care, and generous wages. In their house, a courtesan would make a living as viable as—and more lucrative than—those earned by the thousands of young women seeking work in cities as stenographers and sweatshop seamstresses, department store clerks and domestics. The sisters wanted to uplift the profession, remove its stain and stigma, argue that a girl can’t lose her social standing if she stands level with those poised to judge her.”

The attempt to portray prostitutes as professionals never made much headway against the tendency to view them as victims. At the beginning of Sin in the Second City, Abbott describes an event in 1887 that forever changed the American public’s perception of sex workers. Authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp, finding nine women working as prostitutes. Eight accepted their prison sentences, but the ninth woman protested that she was tortured and forced into sex slavery. The lumberyard proprietors claimed the women were well aware of what they were hired to do; “the job description,” Abbott notes, “made no mention of cutting trees.” But the public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

It was 20 years before another case of “white slavery” was reported in a Midwestern newspaper. But in the meantime, rumors of girls who were “trafficked” into sex slavery began to circulate. In 1899 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union missionary Charlton Edholm reported, “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks at this time, but little white girls —thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our Communion tables.” Perhaps they found themselves in a “false employment snare,” in which a young rural girl answered a city want ad and found herself locked in a brothel, her clothes held for ransom. Or maybe a gentleman from the big city, after plying her with drinks or drugs, deflowered her and sold her to a pimp.

Around the same time, anti-prostitution evangelical groups revised their platforms. Victorian society previously had reviled prostitutes as lost women who reduced men to animals. The rhetorical shift conveniently removed the prostitute’s responsibility for her actions. “Reformers across the country repeated and embellished Edholm’s narratives, panders used them as handy instruction manuals, and harlots memorized all the ways they might be tricked or trapped,” Abbott writes. These rumors reinforced rural Midwesterners’ fears of losing their children to the dirty, crime-ridden streets of Chicago. “Never before in civilization,” wrote Hull House founder Jane Addams in 1909, “have such numbers of girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Read the rest at Reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.’

Pious commentary on prostitution often revolves around the concept of Exit Strategies: getting out of the sex industry. Everyone agrees that anyone who doesn’t want to sell sex shouldn’t feel forced to and should be helped to get out. Quite right. And what about people who’d like exit strategies to get out of other unpleasing jobs? Many assume that prostitution is particularly difficult to get out of, especially ensnaring and fraught with obstacles, even when there are no exploiters stopping people from changing occupations (pimps or traffickers). Obviously when people are too poor, not only in terms of money but also in terms of social capital - contacts, information, resources, ideas - it is misleading to talk about ‘choice’, as though a lot of easy alternatives were lying about. I usually talk about preference, instead: the fact that those with limited options nevertheless can prefer one to another.

In this story from Ethiopia, maids in a rotten situation sometimes prefer sex work, possibly another rotten situation but in a different way they might tolerate better. Those so worried about prostitutes being locked in to brothels often don’t notice that the job of live-in maid usually involves being available to employer-families around the clock, having tiny unprivate spaces for themselves with no use of telephone or internet, being loaned out to employers’ friends and getting a single day off a week, or maybe one day and another afternoon. There are better situations and worse ones, so it is possible that switching to sex work, even if people don’t like it, can bring advantages like more flexible time in which to figure out what to do next. As the person from DKT-Ethiopia says, the beginning, when people know least, is when they are most vulnerable.

ETHIOPIA: Maids, condoms and kerosene

africanpress, 3 October 2009

Addis Ababa – The life of a domestic worker in Ethiopia is rarely an easy one. Often escaping a deeply impoverished existence in the rural areas, these women find themselves in employment hundreds of miles away from their hometowns as maids – or serategnas in the national language, Amharic.

A lack of education, minimal opportunity for normal interaction with society and anecdotal evidence of sexual activity and abuse have led health workers to classify domestic workers as a high-risk group for the contraction of HIV.

• “Many are coming from rural areas and they do not have awareness; many are sexually active with guards and are also frequently raped by their masters or their master’s children”
• “They go to night school and they might have affairs with their classmates,”
• ”The anecdotal evidence is that many domestic workers become sex workers”

Another potential pitfall for domestic workers is commercial sex work, which they frequently enter into if they run into problems with their employers. While sometimes preferable, the terms of employment are nevertheless incredibly harsh, with a working day of 18 hours, a paltry monthly salary of between US$9 and $15, and one day off per month.

“The anecdotal evidence is that many domestic workers become sex workers… this is one of the exit paths for them,” said Ken Divelbess, project coordinator of DKT-Ethiopia. “There is very limited evidence about domestic workers in general; it could be 5 percent who become sex workers, it could be 90 percent.

“It is critical [to reach them] as we believe that the first month as a sex worker is the most dangerous, as that is when people can take advantage.”

Sex at the Margins has now been reviewed 17 times in academic journals! And those journals focus on many different fields: sociology, anthropology, migration, feminism, gender, geography - here’s a full list. I marvel especially when someone I admire admires my book. Dan Allman, who wrote M is for mutual, A is for acts, has published a review of Sex at the Margins for the journal Sexualities. To be compared to Clifford Geertz means being understood, and what is better than that? And how about a comparison with Camille Paglia? Here’s Dan’s review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I published Forget Victimisation in 2003, but the more migration is discussed in the mainstream, the more we see two reductionist visions: one that blames migrants as grasping criminals, the other that sees them as sad victims. Unfortunately many people with leftist sympathies and visions fall into the trap of victimisation.

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her subject position of white, middle-class woman identifying as socialist, produced poor people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my inability to see her point.

Of course I believe that the world is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich and that men almost always have more power and money. It’s not fair. But given the unfairness, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, generalised categories like Exploited Victims. I also don’t agree that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. The same goes for people who get into prostitution or sex work - I prefer to give the heaviest weight to what they say they are doing! Here’s the longer version, and it applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status. Read the rest of this entry »

What an old-fashioned term Vice Squad sounds. I imagined, foolishly, that any contemporary police force would look for a blander, more politically correct term: Orderly Cities, or Safe Streets. But no, right there in Cape Town, South Africa, they are setting up a Vice Squad to get rid of prostitution, on the grounds that it attracts other crimes like money laundering. The vices that Vice Squads address involve drugs, alcohol, commercial sex including pornography and gambling. Even the word vice sounds dated to me.

Many people new to sex-industry debates don’t know what anti-prostitution laws actually mean for sex workers: what police do to stop their activities. I posted a video showing street round-ups in Spain not long ago. Here are tactics summarised by a Cape Town police official, relating only to street prostitution. These plans go directly against a court order obtained by SWEAT (Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce) preventing police and the city’s officers from detaining prostitutes without proceeding to prosecution. That’s another story; here I’ve included only excerpts from an article by Murray Williams in the Cape Argus, 28 September 2009. Note: 500 Rand = 44.6 euros.

        ‘The City of Cape Town has launched a vice squad to crack down on prostitutes working the streets of the city’s suburbs – and their clients can also expect harsher treatment. As part of the city’s new strategy, it also plans to arrest the sex workers’ clients, instead of just giving them spot fines as is the current practice. . . These officers would be specially trained to carry out surveillance on prostitutes, to arrest them and ensure their successful prosecution.

• 18 prostitutes were arrested along the main road through Bellville, Goodwood and Parow on Friday night.
• This week the squad plans to focus on the city’s other notorious red light areas. . .
  Smith said the police . . . would specifically aim to prosecute.
• “we are going to document these cases very carefully,” Smith explained. “In the past, [prostitutes] have lied about the details. So during the 12 hours that we are allowed to detain them, we will be checking up on their addresses, to ensure that we can compel them to pay their fines.” The fines were R500 for a first offence, R1000 for a second offence and R1500 for a third offence.
• the city would be photographing the prostitutes on their arrest, to enable officers to charge them accordingly for repeat offences.
• . . . the city would also be increasing the fines. . . [to] R1000 for a first offence, R2500 for a second offence and a “non-admission-of-guilt” charge for a third offence, meaning they would not have the option of paying a fine but would have to appear in court..

. . . “We want to find out why these cases are being thrown out, and what evidentiary chain is necessary. We will then train these staffers to get the evidence, so can successfully get convictions” . . .  Prosecution of prostitutes is governed by both the national Sexual Offences Act and the city’s bylaws preventing “nuisances in the streets and public places”.’

In campaigns protesting raids and other drastic actions against prostitutes and sex workers, Christianity is often slagged off. That’s not fair; it’s how people interpret their duty as Christians that can lead to abuse. Here’s an example of Christian outreach, carried out in the same sort of way that civilian harm-reduction projects are done. Note that this helper ‘won’t apply for federal funds because she doesn’t want anything to interfere with “preaching the Word,”’and doesn’t see her role as trying to get women out of the industry  Excerpts only - click on the title for the complete story.

Jesus & strippers

Emily Belz, WorldMag.com

Los Angeles. Near midnight. Industrial buildings. Empty streets. Full parking lot. Men wander into a nondescript building, “Fantasy Castle.” Bouncers stand at the door. Inside, on stage. women dance to earn their rent. Men watch in the dark. Booze, perfume, and loneliness.

A group of young women with fistfuls of flamingo pink gift bags approach the bouncer and offer him cookies—yes, cookies. This is the second strip club they have visited, pulling up in a church minibus: They have five more on their list as they canvass neighborhoods north of Long Beach, south of Compton. The bouncer takes the cookies and lets them inside to the bar, the customers, and the dancers, who are all lined up on the stage.

“I hated lining up—like a cattle call,” remarks Harmony Dust outside the club. Dust, a former stripper, started slipping notes on the windshields of dancers six years ago telling them “you are loved”—and her ministry, I Am a Treasure, was born. Along with other women including former strippers, she lavishes love on women in the sex industry and teaches that Jesus loves them too. On this night, several of the dancers turn away from customers to give the gift-baggers bear hugs and tell them their real names.

Treasures—that’s what most people call the ministry—has a simple recipe: Bring gifts of lip gloss, jewelry, and handwritten cards into dressing rooms in strip clubs. Wait for phone calls, texts, or emails from the women that often come in just hours after the visit. “This is largely a seed-sowing ministry,” said Dust—and when sprouts appear, volunteers help with childcare and rides to church. They listen, talk, mentor, wait, and hope.

. . .  70 percent of Christians admitted to struggling with porn in their daily lives. Another poll by Rick Warren’s pastors.com in 2002 showed 54 percent of pastors had viewed pornography within the last year. . . . Dust started stripping under the name Monique at a club by the airport and managed to complete her undergraduate degree even while she was working in the sex industry at night. . . .

In 2003, while driving to the airport to pick John up, she drove by the same club where she used to strip—but she couldn’t pass it by. Filled with emotion and conviction, she pulled into the parking lot, and the security guard let her put notes on the women’s windshields telling them that they are loved. Then she couldn’t pass by clubs anymore, and she and others who joined her work began building relationships with dancers. She saw women eagerly reach for that same love she found in Jesus.

Dust doesn’t see her role as trying to get women out of the industry or tell them that their jobs are sinful. No one needs to tell them, she said—anyone in the industry feels a certain sickness in her soul. What they need is someone to extend the gospel through love. But she’s quick to say that Treasures volunteers don’t see themselves as strippers’ “saviors.” “I have nothing—I have lip gloss,” Dust said, laughing. “And I probably only have that because of Jesus.” The organization functions off a skeleton of a budget—under $100,000 a year—and Dust won’t apply for federal funds because she doesn’t want anything to interfere with “preaching the Word.”