travel

Here are excerpts from a BBC story from a couple of years ago that I post now because most people have no idea what ’smuggling’ and ‘trafficking’ look like where they begin. An entire boat-building industry exists to supply vessels that will make one trip and then be destroyed at their destinations: see BBC photo collection. This story is about undocumented migrants leaving from Gambia and arriving at Spain’s Canary Islands.  

Gambia - new front in migrant trade
Lucy Fleming, 10 October 2006

The cost of the journey is between $880 to $1,250… “The agents tell you that you have a 50/50 chance - the boat may sink or you may get sent back,” says a tourist resort worker in his thirties, who was approached in Serrekunda about making a trip two months ago.

“Senegalese carpenters have been brought in to build the boats, which take about a month or two to build,” a local trader in the area explains. “That will cost more than 100,000 dalassis ($3,539), but the boats can hold between 60 to 120 men,” he says. As well as getting passengers and boats, the agents also purchase supplies: between 10 to 15 barrels of fuel, food for the trip - which takes about one week, water, first-aid packs and medicine for sea sickness.

Many Gambians complain about the near impossibility of obtaining a visa for the European Union; and the allure of being able to earn the equivalent to several months’ wages in one day . . .

Photos © BBC 

More and more people are having border experiences like the one described here in a piece first published on the Greek site Re-public in June 2008. For all the people writing to me about this sort of thing, and all those who were thinking about it, here it is again. Footnote: I’ve been through the queue at Stansted a few times since, this time with a new and better passport-visa combination, but I always feel the same spooky insecurity.

Border Thinking,

Last month, I flew into Stansted Airport, in the southeast of England, where the disembarking traveller is met by an enormous black structure looming high above the large passport-control area. UK BORDER it reads, in giant letters. In fact, at this point one is geographically well inside the country, the coast having been crossed while still in the air. But the message is clear and ominous: you aren’t In until you’ve got past the police.

As usual, waiting in the queue for Others – non-Europeans – is nerve-wracking. As I wait, I worry. Do I still look enough like my passport photo? Do I look like a drug dealer, terrorist, prostitute or
harmless tourist? Are my clothes wrong, is my hair okay? What will they think about how I speak English? Should I smile or rather demonstrate I understand the gravity of the situation? Which official will I get, the younger woman or the older man and which is better? And so on.

Holding my passport, I look down at the little white UK Landing Card and wonder, for the millionth time, why I am asked to tick one of two boxes, Male or Female. Apart from the pain this causes people who don’t definitely identify with one or the other, why do they ask this? Why do they ask for birth date and nationality, when all passports carry this information? I wonder where these cards wind up, in storage or dumped in the rubbish.

When it’s my turn, the official asks me for information she is already reading on my Landing Card, or on my visa. I answer, and then she repeats the questions, in the skeptical tone I have come to know so well. Finally she lets me through, and I have the sensation of having got away with something, even as I know I am not doing anything ‘wrong’. And every time I go through this it gets harder, as though they think that my continuing desire to be here were a crime.

No borders?

It is easy to complain about all this. It is easy to make border policy seem like a clear right-left choice between control and freedom, an oppressive device set up by our fathers, the men in business suits and military uniforms. From the border-keepers’ point of view, classifying and scrutinising travellers before they enter and while they are inside is essential to reducing risk and chaos for their own citizens. The project to make a European ‘union’ tries to celebrate diverse local nationalities, ethnicities and cultures while simultaneously identifying true pan-European values: enlightenment, humanism, rationality, progress. Inevitably this means that cultural systems arriving from outside may be viewed as inferior, backward or suspect – a repellent idea to many.

But to say ‘Let there be no borders’ is like saying let’s do away with traffic regulations, allowing unlicensed drivers to go as fast or slow as they want on streets with no stoplights, lanes or marked exits. Read the rest of this entry »

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 was originally published on Susie Bright’s Journal .

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute is the question raised by a sign seen at Zapata’s Mexican Cantina in Shanghai.

I’ve been worrying about prostitution qua prostitution only since the early 1990s. Before that I didn’t read books about it— I didn’t go to conferences, I had no academic acquaintances of any description— and I didn’t know it to be a big issue,” either in Latin America, the US, or Europe. You could say I was uncontaminated by ideology; any opinions I had were casual and uninformed.

On the other hand, I have had people in my life who sell sex going back to the 1960s, way before I began to think about prostitution.
My friend Mona had sex with a lot of men and took money from them to help with her rent. But she didn’t call herself prostitute, hooker or call girl, and I doubt she’d call herself a sex worker now that the term is available. Mona had special talents that suited her to a certain kind of prostitution, but she never earned much money— and, many will point out, she scarcely had a professional attitude. Her tenement studio was tiny and dingy, so the rent she got guys to help her with was low.

Another of my friends of that era, Scotty, played the piano in joints all over town, changing his appearance and repertoire to get more gigs. I admit that once, after running into him looking like Count Dracula with purple hair on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway, the thought that he was prostituting his talent crossed my mind. Not fair, but then I didn’t think prostitution was anything bad, either.

Years later, I suspect I must have read everything ever written about the sex industry. I published a book about migration and trafficking (Susie’s interview with me is a great introduction).

I invented a new field of study called the cultural study of commercial sex, in which any type of exchange involving sex and money (or benefits, gifts, etc.) can be examined without moralizing and without  calling and condemning everything as “prostitution.” My idea is that we need a lot more information about what goes on in sex-money exchanges before we rush to pass laws and regulate everyone involved in all of them. A special edition of the journal Sexualities is full of examples written within this liberating framework.

Most of the heat in conversations about commercial sex goes to the idea of prostitution – whether it can ever be a normalised profession called “sex work” or whether it is by definition “violence against women.” Some people think marriage is prostitution; others think all paid work is.

For myself, I wonder how people imagine there to be a clear line between commercial and non-commercial sexual transactions, since all of life seems saturated with both.

My curiosity was piqued when I saw the above photo from Zapata’s, a middle-class bar-restaurant located in Tongren Lu, a popular Shanghai nightlife area. It’s not the kind of place where I’d expect to see a sign about prostitution. Trying to figure this one out led me into the expat world, where only insiders— most of the vocal ones men—  understand what’s going on. I hung around Internet forums where this sign made the rounds and explanations ranged from “it was the bar manager’s private joke” to “the place is filthy with prostitutes; decent girls won’t go there.” 

There are discussions of the many types of predatory women loose in the city. ISpyShanghai mentions “entertainers,Tiger girls, bar girls, butterflies, hostesses, chickens, and those girls on Tongren Lu who will literally jump into the taxi with you if you don’t shut the door quickly enough.”

Discussants at forums like Shanghaiexpat say too many “pros” get past bar bouncers and warn each other about falling into the clutches of girls who try to get you inside talk-talk bars, where they will only flirt and promote your buying of drinks.

Some call such bars fronts for prostitution. Others make a class distinction between talk-talk bars and hostess bars, the latter being more upscale. There are also warnings about ladyboys, transvestites and other “non-real” women, who are even said to form the majority of female-looking customers in some places. 

Could Zapata’s managers be trying to keep single women out? Certainly not; Ladies’ Nights are common in Shanghai, where each time the door opens, hundreds of eyes fix on the arriving guests, hoping that they have breasts.

So, what have we got? A commercial bar scene where men with money want females to be available to them for picking up, flirting, and perhaps going somewhere to have sex. Yes? Those women may accept gifts of drinks, food, taxis, and flowers without losing their shine. In another popular, mainstream, local example, KTV (karaoke television) venues invite men to come in groups and hire the services of women to drink and sing with them in small private rooms.

The taint comes when women do exactly the same things with the addition of asking for cash.

It’s subtle and confusing, isn’t it? When is it legitimate for women to take money or accept drinks? What about the customers— why is there no distinction amongst them? They take out their wallets in all kinds of situations— and that’s considered fine— except when they position themselves as victims of predators. On the other hand, they discuss which KTV place has the “hottest/most fun girls.”

Zapata’s managers and bouncers are male, so maybe it makes sense that they would put up such a blunt, sexist sign telling prostitutes to keep out. But what does it mean to say If you are unsure whether or not you’re a prostitute, please ask one of our friendly security guards to sort it out for you?

Presumably a professional knows that the sign refers to her or him-self and has no need to consult anyone about it. Which leaves whom?

What if I go to Shanghai alone, get dressed up, and appear alone at Zapata’s bar? Is it okay as long as I don’t talk to any men or am seen to be paying for my own drinks? What happens if the barman brings me a parasol-decorated margarita on behalf of the guy across the bar, who’s already paid for it? Should I now feel worried about being bounced? In case anyone thinks this is unlikely, one of the expat discussions involved a woman who was asked to leave Zapata’s although she was there with girlfriends. 

She was said to be “Taiwanese.” Some of the participants in expat forums specify that they are Chinese. Bouncers might or might not understand different kinds of regional Chinese. Someone said prostitutes don’t have to look Asian. Since ho-style is in fashion, clothes aren’t the key to this conundrum. I think I’m better off not going out, or sticking to an old-fashioned hotel bar where I’m allowed to accept a drink from a stranger— or offer one to someone else.

P.S. Zapata’s is still supposed to be the place to be on Wednesdays – there are free martinis for girls.

This post reproduces a recent paper from one of the big immigration think-tanks. In a clear fashion the authors show how the meaning of ‘illegal’ changes with the times, and each generation’s particular ideas about which migrants should be let in and which kept out.

Yehuda Bauer believes that the term ‘illegal migration’ was first applied by the British in the 1930s to describe undesired Jewish migration to Palestine. Other terms are sometimes used: clandestine migration, undocumented migration, irregular migration and unauthorised migration. All posit a clean, correct, unambiguous opposite which is always ‘legal’.

The context of the following paper is the USA, where most people’s ancestors came from somewhere else. Resistance to new migrants nowadays often claims that past forms of migration were better, more orderly and respectful, more English-learning, more adapting and, therefore, less obnoxious and trouble-causing. This article explains why that’s a romantic view not supported by historical evidence. 

[Images of Ellis Island and Angel Island, immigrant entry points in New York and San Francisco, added by me.]

De-Romanticizing Our Immigrant Past: Why Claiming “My Family Came Legally” Is Often a Myth

from Immigration Policy Center, Washington DC, 25 November 2008

Many people assume that their family immigrated to the U.S. legally, or did it “the right way.” In most cases, this statement does not reflect the fact that the U.S. immigration system was very different when their families arrived, and that their families might not have been allowed to enter had today’s laws been in effect. In some cases, claiming that a family came “legally” is simply inaccurate—undocumented immigration has been a reality for generations.

Whether one immigrated “legally” or “illegally” depends on the laws in effect at the time. When many families arrived in the U.S., there were no numerical limitations on immigration, no requirements to have an existing family or employment relationship with someone in the U.S., and no requirement to obtain a visa prior to arriving. As numerical limitations were instituted and certain immigrants were restricted from entering the U.S., illegal immigration increased. The definition of who was “legal” and who was “illegal” changed with the evolution of immigration laws.

Many of our ancestors would not have qualified under today’s immigration laws. Today’s requirements that potential immigrants have close family ties to qualified U.S. citizens or permanent residents, or have employment offers in particular fields, would have effectively restricted many of our families from coming legally to the U.S.

Until the late 19th century, there was very little federal regulation of immigration—there were virtually no laws to break. The new nation needed workers, and immigration was “encouraged and virtually unfettered.”[1] There was no border surveillance to allow only those with proper documents to enter the U.S. Potential immigrants did not have to obtain visas at U.S. consulates before entering the country. Rather, immigrants would simply arrive at ports of entry (such as Ellis Island and other seaports), be inspected, and be allowed in if they didn’t fall into any of the excluded categories.

Before the 20th century, there was virtually no bureaucracy responsible for enforcing immigration laws. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this as the UK’s Home Secretary launched her legislative proposal to criminalise the purchase of sex from those ‘controlled for another person’s gain’. An earlier attempt to criminalise all purchases of sex, always, was shouted down. This version of the abolitionist urge is totally unworkable, as well as silly and patronising towards men and women in general. Not only foreign, brown Others would be targeted - ordinary white Brits seen as insufficiently independent could be accused of being  ’controlled’ by others. Only in this line of work are people required to work alone and possibly lonely - no workplaces, no managers, no colleagues allowed!

The Guardian - Comment is Free

The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders

The government’s latest proposals for sex workers do little to tackle the problem of human trafficking

Laura Agustín

19 November 2008

Today the government proposes that paying for sex with those “controlled for another person’s gain” be a criminal offence. High on the list are victims of trafficking, and punters’ defence that they didn’t know women were trafficked is declared inadmissible. But clients may still have an out. How, they will ask, can the police prove that sex workers were trafficked?

The police will have to identify the real trafficked victims in order to identify customers at fault – a notoriously difficult enterprise. In a few high-profile cases, self-identified victims name and help find their exploiters, and sometimes these traffickers are successfully prosecuted. But these cases are few and far between. More often it is difficult to point to migrants who knew nothing about their future jobs, who agreed to nothing about their illicit travels and who are willing to denounce perpetrators who may be family or former friends and lovers.

More than a decade ago, while working in a Caribbean Aids-prevention organisation, I visited a small town famous as a market for informal migration. In one cafe, a waiter offered me anything I asked for in return for helping him reach anywhere in Europe. Later, I met a woman determined to travel to Paris to work. Highly informed about prices, she steered clear of brokers promising to “take care of everything”.

I visited a village where most families spoke proudly of daughters who maintained them by selling sex abroad. And I met many people who arranged papers and transport for travellers, some charging fees and others as a family obligation. Scholars understand these as social networks and community strategies used to get migrations underway. Where few jobs are available at home, local institutions rarely try to prevent such trips. To those involved, this travel may feel irregular but not criminal, given the market for migrant labour abroad.

The rub is that most jobs available are not recognised by national immigration regimes that only value highly educated professionals and formal-sector employment. Work permits are not granted for low-prestige jobs in kitchens, sweatshops, night clubs or agriculture. The strict regulation of labour markets can fairly be said to promote an increase in unauthorised workers. Read the rest of this entry »

This came out last year, but I have been urged to republish as ideas about trafficking get more and more reductionist and simplistic.

The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’

Why do we think migrant sex workers need rescuing?

American Sexuality, Autumn 2007

By Laura Agustín

The title of this publication notwithstanding, I don’t believe there are national sexualities. But our language reflects vague impressions of how people in other cultures do sex—a tongue-kiss, ‘French’; anal penetration, ‘Greek’; penis-between-the-breasts, ‘Cuban’. They are stereotypes most of us don’t take seriously, and the national tags vary according to what country we’re standing in. But everywhere we have notions that out there somewhere are strange, wonderful, and exotic kinds of sex waiting for us to try.

But what about ’sex trafficking’, denounced in the media as a rampant crime linked to global gangs and insecurity at borders? The U.S. government, claiming to be the world’s moral arbiter, spends millions issuing an annual report card rating other countries’ efforts to combat this crime and trying to rescue victims around the world. The implication is clear: ‘American’ ideas about sex and morality are the right ones for the planet. In other words, if the ideal of ‘American’ sexual relationships is accepted everywhere, the enslavement of women and children will end.

In the West, in the present, many people believe that sex should express love. This ‘good’ sex is also said to provide a key way to discover personal identity—who we really are, our innermost selves. It is assumed that feelings of love increase pleasure (quantitatively) and intensify it (qualitatively), resulting in meaningful passion that is expressed through long term, emotionally committed relationships. Other sexual relations then seem wrong, among them anonymous, public, and ‘promiscuous’ sex. Above all, ‘real’ love and sex are said to be incompatible with rationality and work—at least that is the way many wish it to be.

At the same time, people wonder: Is there a boom underway in the buying and selling of sex, part of a general sexualization of contemporary culture? Since objective data is impossible to gather when businesses operate outside the law, we cannot know whether sex-and-money transactions are going on more than ever, but we certainly know we see and hear about them more. So although we tell a powerful story about sex and love belonging together, we also understand that people want other kinds of sex. We hear about people who buy and sell sex from our friends, acquaintances, the media, and sometimes through reporting on migration—which is where ’sex trafficking’ comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

Prostituées d’Europe
Un autre regard sur la prostitution

Mathilde Bouvard

La Maison du Livre
24-28, rue de Rome 1060 Bruxelles

EXPOSITION
du samedi 29 novembre 2008 au mercredi 7 janvier 2009

VERNISSAGE
samedi 29 novembre 2008 à partir de 18h00

« Prostituées d’Europe » est un projet socio-artistique à dimension européenne. Mathilde Bouvard a parcouru l’Europe à la rencontre de travailleur(e)s du sexe. Elle s’est rendu à Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, Budapest, Hambourg, Amsterdam, Genève, Londres, Berne et Marseille. De ces rencontres sont restés des témoignages, des photographies, et parfois de simples moments de partage, que l´on ne trouvera sur aucun mur.

De ce photoreportage découle une sélection de 45 photographies en noir et blanc, accompagnées de 3 peintures sur étoffes et de témoignages écrits. Les photographies reflètent un regard différent sur la prostitution, loin des stéréotypes habituels qui évoluent entre le misérabilisme et l’image du « pied de grue ». Car la prostitution, comme le disait Pascale, ancienne du Bois de Boulogne, « c’est loin d’être un bout de trottoir. C’est toute une vie. Un art de vie. » Suivant les traces de feu Grisélidis Réal, les travailleurs du sexe rencontrés ont partagé avec Mathilde Bouvard un petit bout de cette vie. Read the rest of this entry »

I published this five years ago but it feels as relevant as ever. In those years, the assumption among certain groups that migrating people are pathetic victims has solidified into a simple ‘fact’. Another group sees all migrants as predatory scroungers, an equally exaggerated position.

Once at a seminar where I’d spoken, an academic got quite 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. ‘What I’m saying is that, 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 the facts!

Of course I believe that the world is a place of terrible differences between the poor and the rich, where 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!

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. Read the rest of this entry »

My comments the other day about the attempt to warn off migrant women, whether they call themselves sex workers or prostitutes, with fake euro banknotes made me think about the following piece that I wrote ten years ago, in which I speculate about educational activities that might work among migrants. Even then I thought the problem about migrant sex workers was not that ‘they have no voice’ but that no one listens to them!

They Speak, But Who Listens?

Laura María Agustín

In Women@Internet: Creating Cultures in Cyberspace, ed. W. Harcourt. London: Zed Books, 1999, pp 149-161.

A Parable of Connexion

Scene: A small room with a bed and a washbasin.
Characters: A man and a woman.

It’s the third time this man has paid to spend time with this woman. She only speaks a few words of his language, but he seems kind and she decides to take the risk. She tells him she is being held prisoner and wants to get out. Will he help her?
The man is sympathetic but he doesn’t want to get too involved, certainly not to take charge of this woman. So he takes out his cellular phone and says: “Make any call you want.”
The woman hasn’t used a telephone in months. The only number she knows by memory is her sister’s, back in the Ukraine (…or Paraguay….or Burma). She has trouble dialling, doesn’t know any of the codes, but the man helps her. They have to hurry, because he’s only paid for a short time, and they have to whisper, because there are people in rooms on both sides of them.
The call goes through! Her sister answers. The woman can only say, “Help! Get me out of here! I’m being held prisoner!”
“Where are you?” asks her sister.
“In Israel (…or Holland…or Thailand)”.
“But where exactly?”
“I don’t know.”

Stories like this have made headlines all over the world. In the usual version, the faraway recipient of the call begins a long, arduous search for help through hotlines to embassies and international police. In the end, there is a raid and the woman who made the call is liberated. The police, who knew about the brothel all along, are not the heroes of the story. Neither is the client, who took no risks. In fact, the hero of the story is the small cellular phone that enabled the prisoner to connect to the world and be heard. The story does not end perfectly, however, because the woman is deported, and this is not what she wanted.

When I consider the possible uses of new technology for migrant women, I begin with stories like this one. Here, people are enabled to communicate vital pieces of information. Here, there are processes and chains of events and people help each other. Before we can move to the question ‘How will the Internet benefit migrant workers?’, other questions must be considered, for these are not simple or straightforward situations.

Geographical double-think

Although commercial sex is now recognised as a global, multi-billion dollar industry, its workers–in their millions–are only referred to as ‘illegals’, as victims of ‘trafficking’ and as potential ‘vectors’ of HIV/AIDS–when they are referred to at all. The same London newspaper that runs the story of ‘liberated sex slaves’ in Malaysia never mentions the problems migrant Chinese women have finding childcare (or fish sauce) in London. It is the age-old technique of ‘disappearing’ people simply by not acknowledging them. Read the rest of this entry »