My own work is about the majority, those who are not only being ignored but actually disappeared inside these other policies. I feel my job is to work on this, and I don’t have much company! But I’ve been researching this for nearly 15 years and constantly find proof of the worsening situation for migrants who (happen to) sell sex.

Other answers to your question about ‘what to do’ include fixing poverty, inequality, informal v formal economy constructions. Etc. Huge changes.

Finally, readers might find useful The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders in the Guardian last week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/19/humantrafficking-prostitution

Laura

Your essays on migration and sex work resonate for me because of my own experiences with counter-culture homelessness back when I was a very young man. We weren’t exactly “undocumented” and the people I traveled with were almost entirely citizens, but our cultural status (draft-avoiding, long haired, “hippie” clothes before such clothes had retro chic) meant we had to be very wary of police, citizen vigilantes, and often of conventional employers.

And your descriptions of the experience of arriving somewhere new, with just a name or address, often no money, and having to take what work was available, often at the convenience of our local “hosts” or people who were willing to work with “you people” sounds very familiar to — including the paradox of unlicensed employers often being the least safe and most exploitative.

Same with your point that the vast majority preferred to do anything other than sex work (and, ironically, take a “straight” job… assuming in the depths of the Nixon-era oil embargoes such work could be found.) Most preferred to do something else, including day labor, informal agricultural labor, and even being drug “mules,” but others, ranging from very reluctant to almost enthusiastic, would agree. And as you say in those circumstances you wouldn’t say any of us were outright *trafficked* either for labor or sex. And if any of us were we certainly didn’t see it that way.

But living as we did, as on or close to the street as we did, we were also aware that there were others almost like us, sometimes in factories or on farms but mostly in sex work, who *didn’t* have a choice. And often even they weren’t really *that* different from the rest of us, not mindless, not thralls, and sometimes very nearly as locally independent… and sometimes even with warmer clothes or more spending money… as we were. But they were the ones who had to “get back” to someone, “have arrangements” with a guy they couldn’t “cross” or mess with. It was all really vague but sometimes they’d be pretty stressed or even desperate not to be found.

Anyway, when I hear people say “all ‘X’ are trafficked” I think that’s wrong, and wrong the way you document in your work. Instead when I hear the word “trafficked” I think about that small subset who really didn’t have the same choices we did, who had more than law enforcement to worry about, and who sometimes suffered much more dire consequences.

It wasn’t all of us, as maybe an outsider might have concluded, and it wasn’t even one percent of us, but they were there. More complicated, sure, and *way* less common, but there. I know my experiences were only somewhat analogous to the undocumented/migrant communities you work in, but I can’t imagine it’s so different that there isn’t the same kind of small subset of people who need… maybe not so much “rescue” the way “anti-trafficking” people mean it but… still in their circumstances need a lot more than relaxed document requirements or more open borders or more local tolerance to regain their autonomy.

Anyway, if any of that sounds similar to some of the people in the populations you study I’d appreciate hearing your insights into their conditions and what might best help them out of *their* circumstances.

Thanks,

figleaf

note: It occurs to me as I’m about to press “submit” that at least in my former subculture the people most likely to be “trafficked” or “pimped” were, perhaps ironically, the least likely to be transients — often there when we arrived, almost never able to “head west” or “head back east” when invited to migrate to check out rumors of new possibilities. And so to that extent I wonder if they really even show up in genuinely migrant communities.

also note: I appreciated your subtle dig about drug mules and the commercial, dangerous, and intimate use of *their* bodies… which somehow is never counted as “use of their bodies.”