violence

Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  - their owners, workers and clientele - is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

Crusade against the undocumented
By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

. . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

The article gives examples:

Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

Below are exceprts from a migration story in the Observer. There’s quite good information here but also note the confusion about the word trafficking: much of what’s described here should be called smuggling, according to UN protocols. Note particularly:

Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey

If migrants ‘use’ people to help them cross borders illegally, these are meant to be described as smugglers. It’s a hard distinction to maintain consistently, but in this story people are clearly travelling because they chose to and sometimes paying for help. The help can end up being abusive, of course.  The word refugee is also used. Some of the people interviewed might have a case for asylum but many do not. Also the word criminal is peppered around unnecessarily.

Gender note: Everyone mentioned in the story is male, but what’s described applies to women who migrate without documents as well, and illustrates why getting into a ‘protected’ situation can be tempting, why getting into sex work may be a temporary solution, and so on.

I’ve highlighted in bold some common realities known to those who study or hobnob with undocumented migrants, and removed some material you can read on the original site. Note the immensely pragmatic attitude shown by those interviewed: they are going against legal policy, they know it, they will keep trying, they are not crying about it. It’s not a victimising article.

Why do I want to get to Britain? It has to be better than everything else

Jason Burke, Norrent-Fontes, France, 8 March 2009

The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. . . .A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

There are camps as far west as the Normandy port of Cherbourg. . . and as far north as the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. In Paris, an estimated 200 young immigrants who are on their way to the UK sleep in parks every night. . . Read the rest of this entry »

I like to forward stories that give a subtler, more complicated view of the world of sex work, prostitution, migration and trafficking. In the case of the following, the news is very bad and not unfamiliar: the murder of women who sell sex. But here the police are not screaming about victims of trafficking, and local leaders are not asking migration law to be tightened and the fact that the women were sex workers is not made to be the cause of their deaths.

Which doesn’t mean that being prostitutes didn’t have anything to do with it. The report says that the news of what these women were doing reached China, where stigma against them would be enormous, and implies this might have caused someone to murder them. But it’s not clear, because they don’t know, and what’s better here is how the reader is asked to consider a lot of disparate information and make up her or his own mind. I’ve highlighted some particularly interesting lines in bold.

The Sydney Morning Herald - 24 January 2009

The murky world of sex for survival  - Ruth Pollard

Australian brothel

“WE WANT to recruit ladies, we guarantee a minimum pay of $1000 per week,” the advertisement in a Chinese-language newspaper reads.

It is likely “Jenny” and “Susan”, the two Chinese women murdered in Auburn late last year, saw these ads and found their way to one of the many brothels in southwestern Sydney, the money too good to refuse and the security it bought their families far greater than anything they could earn back home.

Like most migrant sex workers in Sydney, it is understood they were here on valid temporary visas that allowed them to work a certain number of hours each week without breaching their conditions. And they would have come from a culture that criminalises prostitution, where corruption of police and public officials is rife.

As NSW police continued to appeal for information that could lead them to the killer of the women - discovered on November 13 in a flat in Queen Street, Auburn - they appear to have faced a wall of silence from other sex workers unused to trusting authorities to properly investigate crimes. What they have learnt is that the women worked in the sex industry - a report in a Chinese-language newspaper indicated the two were employed by brothel in Bankstown - and were sending money to their families in China.

“These are people who had come from a very, very hard life,” said Detective Inspector Jim Stewart, who heads the strike force investigating the murders. “So far we have learned that Susan, a widow whose husband died many years ago, was supporting her daughter who is being looked after by relatives in China.” Preliminary autopsy results indicate whoever killed them was a “strong, powerful person” given the extent of their injuries, Detective Inspector Stewart said. “This was an absolutely brutal murder, and there is now an eight-year-old child back in China without her mother.”

The women had left a holiday tour early to work. Detective Inspector Stewart confirmed they had sought protection visas to stay in Australia and that these were being considered at the time of the murders. There was “nothing to suggest the women were involved in trafficking,” he said - indeed a recent study of Asian sex workers revealed most had made their own arrangements for travel and work in Australia and retained their passports.

The study examined data from more than 1800 Asian sex workers who visited the Sydney Sexual Health Clinic from 1992 to 2006, and found the women had a very low prevalence of sexually transmitted infections, rarely had serious drug or alcohol problems and were more likely to be married and have children than comparable Australian sex workers, its author, Chris Harcourt, said yesterday.

At the time, neighbours said they believed the women were students as they were often seen carrying backpacks, although those who work in services that support sex workers say it is not surprising the women were discreet about their jobs. “Confidentiality is obviously a primary concern for sex workers, but for migrant sex workers it is even more important because you are talking women who are living in small communities in Sydney, and they are women that have children and families back home in China,” said Jo Holden, the manager of the Sex Workers Outreach Project.

“Culturally, there is a high level of stigma and shame attached to sex working so they are very, very careful about what they disclose and to whom they talk.” Many were often reluctant to report domestic violence, assault or other criminal activity to police, Ms Holden said.

It is often the language barrier that leads these women to sex work - it prevents them from finding employment for reasonable pay in other industries and leaves them with little alternative. And once they see the newspaper advertisements seeking women for work in brothels and do the figures, it is seen as the best way to earn a decent living. “It is all about securing a better future for their family in China,” Ms Holden said.

Cambodia is one of the countries the US has manipulated into passing anti-trafficking legislation.

I write about this because there is a mass blindness going on, like the phenomenon of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone knew he was naked but no one said so. There is now enough evidence - maybe even acceptable in a court of law! - that anti-trafficking laws cause more violence and injustice than they prevent. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way, perhaps there could be good anti-trafficking laws that did not end up punishing loads of people who don’t want to be ‘helped’ or ‘rescued’ in the way the US and other mainstream government voices are now requiring.  Everyone wants to help real victims, that isn’t at issue.

At the moment, the USA publishes an annual ranking -a report card - for the Rest of the World, on how well they combat human trafficking. Why does the US government get to do this? Do they know more than anyone else? No. This is political manoeuvering and cultural crusading. The moralistic claim is that US efforts and money are needed in order to save the world from slavery. One important question is how do they know where their efforts and money are needed.

The Trafficking in Persons (known as TIP) reports do not explain what methods they use to evaluate the extent of trafficking in any given place. They use CIA estimates - that’s the Central Intelligence Agency, which is not well known for doing good research - and anecdotal evidence to decide whether a country should get a good grade or a bad one. Anecdotal evidence means whatever their local contacts said, when asked in a conversation or telephone call.

-Hello, CIA and US Embassy here. Is that the local police? It is? Good. Listen, we’re doing research on how much sex trafficking there is in your area. You know, sex trafficking, like when pimps force women and children into being prostitutes against their will.

-Hello, CIA and US Embassy. Of course we want to help you in any way we can. What do you want to know?

-How much sex trafficking have you got around there? Is it bad? Is it increasing? Are there children involved?

-Oh yes, it’s very bad, there are prostitutes everywhere. Lots of them are very young. They stand around in the streets wearing skimpy clothes, there are brothels everywhere, they are shameless.

-So it’s really bad, right? And getting worse?

-Definitely. We can’t keep track of it, it’s so bad. There are children everywhere. Just the other day my aunt told me she was seeing young people in her own street! Not only that, but they were boys dressing like girls!

-We’ll report this right now. There will be a new law, you’ll see, that makes it a very bad crime to traffic anyone. The police will be charged with ending this vile trade. That will fix the problem. Talk to you soon.

-Okay, boss, let us know when it’s ready.

-Right. Secretary, record that one as 100% more cases of trafficking this year than last year and numbers of small children being exploited up 50%. That’s us done, send it to Washington. 

Was that single conversation the only source of evidence? No. But what if there are several, or even numerous such conversations? Do we understand these to be ‘proof’ of anything? Come on, no!

High up on the factors that give countries a good grade is their anti-trafficking legislation: to get a good mark, countries must have a Strong Law.  Countries that don’t buckle under to US pressure face the possibility of receiving less US aid and support. Cambodia’s law is a mess: take a look at it and see if you can make sense of it. The result is mass police actions to round up people who sell sex (whether they call themselves sex workers or prostitutes) , in the name of rescuing them from exploitation.

This is not a struggle between Good and Evil, or about whether prostitution is good or bad. We all agree that people who are in horrible situations should be helped. The issue is how you help them, and you cannot do it without understanding what they themselves want. It’s hard to understand why this fundamental point should be so difficult to take in. Another recent case in Cambodia illustrates what happens when the police start shooing people to new areas.

Some people prefer selling sex to their other options, even if those options are limited and unappealing. Give folks a break, let them judge for themselves which option they would rather engage in at the moment! Here’s the latest news on the failure of the other approach, which can be called Unwanted Rescues. Don’t forget the poster migrants made about that in Thailand! It isn’t necessary to arrive at a single piece of legislation that applies to everyone: there could be two, or even three! Radical.

New Sex Law Brings Problems

The Straits Times, 26 December 2008

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Chantha said there was nothing else she could do in Cambodia but become a prostitute.

“If you don’t even have a dollar in your pocket to buy rice, how can you bear looking at your starving relatives?” she said.

“You do whatever to survive, until you start to realize the consequence of your deeds.”

Chanta, in her early twenties, was working in a small red-light district west of the capital Phnom Penh several months ago when she was arrested under Cambodia’s new sex-trafficking law. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an attempt to help young people selling sex that’s put them in more danger.

Note the rescue keywords:

• Best Interests: police say they have the best interests of prostitutes in mind
• Take care of health: and want to take care of their health
• Protect: and protect them from HIV/AIDS

Now compare those stated goals with what the kids say themselves. The hotel employee’s comment at the end about ‘decent society’ is also a giveaway to what’s really going on.

Ladyboys face crackdown - Phnom Penh Post, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

29 October 2008

Gay male prostitutes have solicited on Pursat Bridge for a decade, but a police crackdown has forced them into more dangerous parts of town

Photo by Rick Valenzuela: Srey Lim, a hairdresser by day and a crossdressing male prostitute at night, hangs out at one of her former streetwalking spots in Pursat town last week.

The ladyboys of Pursat - gay male prostitutes dressed as women - have been banned from soliciting on the notorious Pursat Bridge, their haunt for at least a decade, but provincial police enforcing the ban say they have the best interests of the prostitutes in mind.

“Selling sex is illegal in Cambodia. We are not allowing these prostitutes to conduct business on the bridge anymore because it has a negative impact on residents who live close by,” said Lok Sary, chief of the Pursat provincial police force.

“We also want to take care of the ladyboys’ health and protect them from HIV/Aids.”

Since the police crackdown, the ladyboys have moved their business to the shady gardens surrounding Pursat Lake, particularly a stretch between Pursat Bridge and Speanthmor Garden.

Fresh dangers

But the move has been a difficult one for the more than 50 ladyboys who work in Pursat, according to Srey Lin, 25, who has been a prostitute in the town for two years.

“If we are standing on the Pursat Bridge, it is much safer for us. The police are always nearby, Read the rest of this entry »

Published in 2001, this article - and I - got a lot of flak from anti-prostitutionists. It probably won’t go down any better today, when governments all over the world are considering passing laws to make to make paying for sex a criminal act.

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

Laura Mª Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

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

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

Criminalization of clients

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