Border Thinking on Migration, Trafficking and Commercial Sex

I collect images of the sex industry, as part of a project to educate myself and others about the diversity actually involved, rather than staying with an oversimplified, unilluminating idea about prostitution. A lot of my picture collection can be seen here. The silent video below from Satoshi shows streets in a Yokohama red-light district with rows of small shops or cubicles used for sex work. Similar arrangements of sheds or ‘cribs’ were called chon-no-ma, and, until fairly recently, were open and staffed by non-Japanese women. Chon-no-ma were the target of anti-trafficking drives from about five years ago.

A few things strike me about this display. First, the silent, steady, slow movement of the camera. Second, the similarity of the windows and doors we’re taken past, like suburban shopping strips developers impose a style on. Third, the absence of humans, who would ordinarily be the object of our attention (perhaps the video was made in the early dawn). The result is mesmerising.

As in the strange exhibition with Emma Thompson we saw the other day, anti-trafficking campaign material is often incoherent. This one comes from a bus shelter on Emmons Avenue and East 26th Street, Sheepshead Bay, New York

Notice how the victim is treated here like an object even though the words appear to come from her. Is she meant to be able to read this poster? Probably not, or even to see it. Rather, the message is meant for the eyes of English-reading citizens, presumably to alert them that she might be around somewhere nearby. I do see the point but the poster belongs to a now long tradition that reproduce thoroughly objectifying images in order to complain about objectification. I have met victims of trafficking but no one who liked this kind of advertisement.

diagram by Peppermint

Border Wars: Swinging and Polyamory, by Peppermint

On the one hand, sexual identity is judged in our culture based on behavior. It is sleeping with the same sex that makes you gay, lesbian, or bisexual. It is enjoying BDSM play that makes you kinky. It is having or wanting multiple relationships that makes you poly, and so on. On the other hand, identity is supposed to represent an immutable truth about the person that comes from within, and has all sorts of implications for the person’s past, future, and personality. The result is that people in sexual minority identity categories are forced into a constant struggle to maintain that their behavior places them in their identity, or that their identity actually matches their behavior. And this is not some sort of abstract struggle, but a question that strikes to the core of their being.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century, by Sheila Rowbotham, discussed by Max Dunbar of3:AM

Towards the end of the nineteenth century working class feminists would sit in New York cafes debating politics into the night. To avoid the wrong kind of attention they wore plain and shapeless clothing. An acerbic bystander coined the stereotype that has haunted Western feminists to this day: ‘pallid, tired, thin-lipped, flat-chested and angular’ women, living in an ‘atmosphere of tea-steam and cigarette smoke’. . .

Warped Women: Strange Love Stripped Them of all Decency! Once over the line they could not stop!

Patient note: my surname is spelled Agustín, not Agustine, Augustine or Augustin

What are we to make of this photograph? Who is saying HELP ME? Is this a men’s toilet or a women’s? Is the victim hidden behind the wall? There’s something fundamentally wrong with the grammar of this warning. And then Emma Thompson - is she identifying with the person crying help? or perhaps a bit nonplussed, or distracted by the dirtiness of the sink.

Here Emma is on surer ground: the correct response is dismay and disapproval that sexual acts could be written on a list with prices next to them. Unless it’s the prices that bother her - or the amounts of time. Do the men beside the movie star not look slightly uncomfortable? Of course the menu-price list is a fit-up invented by some intern who didn’t know how these things work.

Emma with Mr Costa of UNODC. Is that an anti-trafficking mural painted on the wavy metal wall? It turns out to be part of a giant installation. The fake bathroom and price list must be inside.

The big letters on top spell JOURNEY.

Here’s that picture from the front. Now it’s clearer that the viewer is being asked Is this sexy to you? At least I think so. But who is meant to answer? And what if some viewers’ response is Yes, in fact, I find it sexy ? Awkward.

My point is not to claim that trafficking is a joke or efforts to stop it always ridiculous but to suggest that many attempts at campaigning (these included) are confusing, non-educational and belittling to real victims. Or is the whole exercise simply meant to demonstrate a set of values for people who already share them?

The sequence of events goes like this:

1. US government issues annual report card threatening to cut off aid from countries that don’t make the right efforts to combat trafficking
2. Threatened countries comply by passing legislation
3. And then instructing local police to carry out raids in order to ‘rescue’ victims
4. Police go to sex businesses, pick up all the workers and claim to have rescued them
5. Police say victims (sex workers) will be ‘rehabilitated’ via detention and forcible participation in an ‘alternative work’ programme, whether rescued people want this or not
6. Threatened national governments point to these actions to show US that they are fighting crime
7. US gives them a better grade on the next report card

Problems? Well yes, several, including the overtly neocolonialist coercion. In the following story which pointedly uses the word rescue, the police try to blame foreign devils for the existence of sex businesses, make sure to point out that some of those rescued were ‘only waitresses’ (which perfectly shows what they think about prostitutes), and, most important, if compliance with US aims to ‘convict’ traffickers is what’s needed, how does detaining and forcibly rehabilitating 200 victims help? What we’ve learned over and over is that some large number of the detained women do not want to be rescued, or not by the police, or not from sex work but possibly from poverty or the fear of disappointing their parents. I have unfortunately had to comment repeatedly on such stories, including recently on Cambodia. There are other ways to help people.

Anti-human trafficking agency rescues 200 women from Malate

Francis Faulve, 18 June 2010, ABS-CBN News

Manila, Philippines - The government’s anti-human trafficking task force on Thursday night rescued at least 200 women from a girlie bar in Malate district in Manila.

Retired military officer Jesus Kabigting of the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking said the raid was conducted in response to the US State Department’s report on human trafficking in the Philippines. The US State Department said the Philippines remains in the Tier 2 list of countries whose governments have failed to show improved efforts to curb human trafficking.

Representatives from the Manila Police District, Department of Social Welfare and Development and Department of Labor of Employment raided the LA Cafe at the corner of M.H. Del Pilar and R. Salas streets in Malate around 10:30 p.m.

Kabigting said majority of the women are being peddled to foreigners in Malate district. He said some of those rescued were only waitresses, but are also considered as victims of forced labor and human trafficking.

He said the women, particularly the prostitutes, will be “rehabilitated” and provided with alternative livelihood.

“Anti-human trafficking operations ito… Iyon ang dahilan kaya nagsagawa tayo ng walang humpay na operation against human trafficking (This ia an anti-human trafficking operation... That is the reason why we are conducting operations against human trafficking),” Kabigting told reporters referring to the US State Department’s report. He said similar raids will also be conducted nationwide.

Kabigting assured that charges will be filed against the owner of the bar. “Whether they have a permit to operate or not, they are committing acts in violation of the anti-human trafficking law. We will investigate them,” he said.

The US State Department was critical of the Philippine performance in all three benchmarks (prevention, protection and prosecution). It said that despite several labor trafficking cases were filed, the Philippine government never convicted any offenders. “Despite overall efforts, the government did not show evidence of significant progress in convicting trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for labor trafficking,” the US State Department said in its report.

Reginald Marsh’s Voluptuous Shopper , from The “New Woman” Revised by Ellen Wiley Todd

Marsh’s voluptuous shopper so dominated his 1930s imagery that she came to be called the Marsh girl. How are we to read this figure of hyper-glamorized working-class femininity? . . . she embodied a conservative ideal of post-franchise new womanhood; this New Woman had abandoned collective activism to express her independence, sexuality, and self-conscious femininity by applying mass-produced beauty products. . . Where she towers above helpless admirers, she can be read as a figure of sexual danger, a threat to masculinity already compromised by unemployment.

Women and their Maids, Lugar Común, from Sociological Images

Photos of pairs of identically dressed women - one the employer, one the employee - that confuse which is which. The original photographic project from 3 Latin American countries can be downloaded.

¿A qué llama ‘familia’ la Iglesia?, from Página 12

A partir de la cuestión del matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo, el autor advierte sobre la intervención de la Iglesia Católica: “Que una forma histórica sea presentada como natural exige uniformar, homogeneizar, y ésta es una razón por la cual las jerarquías eclesiásticas se adaptaron mejor al orden de las dictaduras que al desorden democrático”.

Here’s the English translation of Tvivelaktig rapport om sexköp published 15 July 2010 in a major Swedish newspaper (not only online - this piece occupies half a page in the paper edition). I described the background in yesterday’s Smoke gets in your eyes. Given a very small word limit, we could only mention key issues in a barebones fashion.

Doubtful report on sex-purchase law

Laura Agustín and Louise Persson, 15 July 2010, Svenska Dagbladet

Sex crimes go down in Sweden: The new evaluation of the law against buying sex is spreading the message round the world, but the report suffers from too many scientific errors to justify any such claim.

The report was delayed. It is hard to find evidence to explain why one can’t see sex workers where one saw them before: Have they stopped selling sex, or are they doing it somewhere else? Stigmatised and criminalised people avoid contact with police, social workers and researchers.

Street prostitution receives exaggerated attention in the inquiry, despite the fact that it represents a small, diminishing type of commercial sex that cannot be extrapolated to all. The inquiry mentions the difficulty of researching ‘prostitution on the internet’ but appears not to know that the sex industry comes in many different shapes being researched in depth elsewhere (escorts without websites, sex parties, strip clubs, massage parlours, students who sell sex, among others).

The report’s conclusion that the law has decreased prostitution is based on police reports, government-funded groups working on prostitution in three cities, a few small academic studies and comparisons with other Nordic countries. But police only encounter sex workers in the context of criminal inquiries, the funded groups mostly meet sex workers seeking help, small studies can only indicate possible trends and the Danish statistics on the number of ‘active’ street workers – used to show that Sweden’s prostitution is less - were publicly shown to be very wrong eight months ago.

The law is claimed to have a dampening effect on sex trafficking, but no proof is offered. Trafficking statistics have long been disputed outside Sweden, because of definitional confusion and refusals to accept the UN Convention on Organised Crime’s distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration. The report claims the law diminishes ‘organised crime’ without analysing how crimes were identified and resolved or how they are related to the sex-purchase law.

All social research must explain its methodology. An evaluation like this one needs to provide details on the sample of people consulted, since even in a field as small as Sweden’s no study can pretend to speak to everyone. Methodological research norms require explaining how informants were consulted, under what conditions, what questions they were asked and how, what ethical apparatus was in place to help guarantee they gave their true opinions, how a balance of different stakeholders was achieved, how many people refused to participate, and so on. In this report, however, the methodology section is practically non-existent. We know nothing about how it the evaluation was actually carried out.

On the other hand, the report brims with irrelevant material: background on how the law came about, Sweden’s history with gender equality, why prostitution is bad, why international audiences are interested in the evaluation and how many Swedes are said to currently support the law. One single sex worker’s sad personal story takes up three pages, while the account of sex workers’ opinions is limited to the results of a survey of only 14 people of which only seven were current sex workers.

Research must try for some kind of objectivity, but the government’s remit to the evaluation team said that ‘the buying of sexual services shall continue to be criminalised’ no matter what the evaluators found. The bias was inherent.

The Swedish government understands that the law is of interest internationally as a form of crime prevention. What they don’t realise is how, when the report is translated and reviewed, the methodological errors and crude bias will cause researchers in the field to dismiss this evaluation.

The international trafficking debate has moved beyond the simplistic position presented in this report. More humility is needed from a small country with little experience of, and research about, undocumented migration and the sex industry. If one wants to present oneself as occupying a higher moral ground than other countries, one needs to do better work to understand complex questions. This evalution tells us nothing about the effects of the sex-purchase law.

We offered sources on the topic of flawed research not supporting extravagant claims in this field, but editors omitted them.

Socialstyrelsen. 2007. Kännedom om Prostitution. Another Swedish government report from just a few years ago that concludes little can be known about prostitution in Sweden:

Folketingets Socialudvalg, 20 november 2009. Socialministerens endelige svar påspørgsmål nr. 37 (SOU Alm. del). Question in Danish parliament about incorrect figures claimed for street prostitution.

IOM-SIDA. 2006. Trafficking in Human Beings and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Swedish-funded research finding trafficking claims unsubstantiated.

BBC News Magazine. Is the number of trafficked call girls a myth? 9 January 2009.

United States Government Accountability Office. July 2006. Human Trafficking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. Antitrafficking Efforts Abroad.

Les Carpenter. 2010. Debunking World Cup’s biggest myth. Yahoo News, 10 June.

Louise Persson and I have published a piece in Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s major national newspapers. The topic was the government’s report evaluating the law against buying sex, sexköpslagen, issued recently and unsettlingly uncommented and uncritiqued in the mainstream media. There were ‘news’ stories, of course, reproducing the government’s line - publicity claiming the law has been proved successful. Given the very lively culture of debate in these same media on every other topic, the silence is noticeable. And given the unquestionable existence of a liberal/libertarian movement that hates the law and its ideas about sexuality and gender equality, one wonders what’s at work here: A genuine taboo? Gender equality such a sacred cow that everyone chooses to keep quiet about the report’s mediocrity? Sweden isn’t a police state and surveillance is low compared with the UK, for example. Critical blogging has been brisk, so what makes mainstream media commentators avoid criticising this evaluation, not on ideological grounds but because it is so badly done that it proves nothing at all?

That’s what we wrote about, the embarrassing lack of evidence to prove the law has had any impact at all on the buying and selling of sex. This is not an ideological argument; it doesn’t prove that the law is no good; it proves that the evaluation is no good. Significant because the world’s peabrained media have picked up the claim - Swedish Law Giant Success - without reading even the English summary of points that make it crystal-clear that evaluators couldn’t find any evidence of anything. That’s the story, and it’s one any researcher will appreciate!

The original is Tvivelaktig rapport om sexköp, Laura Agustín och Louise Persson, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 July 2010. Our own title was better, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when editors don’t think they can improve titles. Here’s the English translation Given a very small word limit, we could only mention key issues in a barebones fashion.

Doubtful report on sex-purchase law

Laura Agustín and Louise Persson, 15 July 2010, Svenska Dagbladet

Sex crimes go down in Sweden: The new evaluation of the law against buying sex is spreading the message round the world, but the report suffers from too many scientific errors to justify any such claim.

The report was delayed. It is hard to find evidence to explain why one can’t see sex workers where one saw them before: Have they stopped selling sex, or are they doing it somewhere else? Stigmatised and criminalised people avoid contact with police, social workers and researchers.

Street prostitution receives exaggerated attention in the inquiry, despite the fact that it represents a small, diminishing type of commercial sex that cannot be extrapolated to all. The inquiry mentions the difficulty of researching ‘prostitution on the internet’ but appears not to know that the sex industry comes in many different shapes being researched in depth elsewhere (escorts without websites, sex parties, strip clubs, massage parlours, students who sell sex, among others).

The report’s conclusion that the law has decreased prostitution is based on police reports, government-funded groups working on prostitution in three cities, a few small academic studies and comparisons with other Nordic countries. But police only encounter sex workers in the context of criminal inquiries, the funded groups mostly meet sex workers seeking help, small studies can only indicate possible trends and the Danish statistics on the number of ‘active’ street workers – used to show that Sweden’s prostitution is less - were publicly shown to be very wrong eight months ago.

The law is claimed to have a dampening effect on sex trafficking, but no proof is offered. Trafficking statistics have long been disputed outside Sweden, because of definitional confusion and refusals to accept the UN Convention on Organised Crime’s distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration. The report claims the law diminishes ‘organised crime’ without analysing how crimes were identified and resolved or how they are related to the sex-purchase law.

All social research must explain its methodology. An evaluation like this one needs to provide details on the sample of people consulted, since even in a field as small as Sweden’s no study can pretend to speak to everyone. Methodological research norms require explaining how informants were consulted, under what conditions, what questions they were asked and how, what ethical apparatus was in place to help guarantee they gave their true opinions, how a balance of different stakeholders was achieved, how many people refused to participate, and so on. In this report, however, the methodology section is practically non-existent. We know nothing about how it the evaluation was actually carried out.

On the other hand, the report brims with irrelevant material: background on how the law came about, Sweden’s history with gender equality, why prostitution is bad, why international audiences are interested in the evaluation and how many Swedes are said to currently support the law. One single sex worker’s sad personal story takes up three pages, while the account of sex workers’ opinions is limited to the results of a survey of only 14 people of which only seven were current sex workers.

Research must try for some kind of objectivity, but the government’s remit to the evaluation team said that ‘the buying of sexual services shall continue to be criminalised’ no matter what the evaluators found. The bias was inherent.

The Swedish government understands that the law is of interest internationally as a form of crime prevention. What they don’t realise is how, when the report is translated and reviewed, the methodological errors and crude bias will cause researchers in the field to dismiss this evaluation.

The international trafficking debate has moved beyond the simplistic position presented in this report. More humility is needed from a small country with little experience of, and research about, undocumented migration and the sex industry. If one wants to present oneself as occupying a higher moral ground than other countries, one needs to do better work to understand complex questions. This evalution tells us nothing about the effects of the sex-purchase law.

We offered sources on the topic of flawed research not supporting extravagant claims in this field, but editors omitted them.

Socialstyrelsen. 2007. Kännedom om Prostitution. Another Swedish government report from just a few years ago that concludes little can be known about prostitution in Sweden:

Folketingets Socialudvalg, 20 november 2009. Socialministerens endelige svar påspørgsmål nr. 37 (SOU Alm. del). Question in Danish parliament about incorrect figures claimed for street prostitution.

IOM-SIDA. 2006. Trafficking in Human Beings and the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Swedish-funded research finding trafficking claims unsubstantiated.

BBC News Magazine. Is the number of trafficked call girls a myth? 9 January 2009.

United States Government Accountability Office. July 2006. Human Trafficking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. Antitrafficking Efforts Abroad.

Les Carpenter. 2010. Debunking World Cup’s biggest myth. Yahoo News, 10 June.

Svenska utdrag från Tvivelaktig rapport om sexköp

Laura Agustín och Louise Persson, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 July 2010

Den nysläppta utvärderingen av sexköpslagen sprider budskapet att sexbrotten minskar, men utredningen är behäftad med alltför allvarliga vetenskapliga fel för att man ska kunna hävda att lagen är framgångsrik.

Rapporten om sexköpslagen försenades. Det var svårt att hitta bevis som demonstrerar anledningarna bakom varför man inte ser sexarbetare där man sett dem förut: har de slutat sälja, eller har de flyttat någon annanstans? Stigmatiserade och kriminaliserade aktörer undviker kontakt med polis, socialarbetare och forskare.

. . . En grundprincip för forskning är att sträva efter objektivitet, men regeringens direktiv var: ”En utgångspunkt för vårt arbete har varit att köp av sexuell tjänst fortfarande ska vara kriminaliserat.” Det skapar läge för en partisk inlaga. . .

Vill man presentera sig med en högre moralisk nivå på den internationella arenan, krävs bättre underlag och förståelse för komplexa frågor. Den här utvärderingen säger oss ingenting om lagens effekter.

I don’t think brothels are a bad thing and I don’t think brothels are a good thing - not per se. Businesses that offer sexual services to customers who drop in to select a sex worker are a kind of shop and a kind of workplace. Some people like to buy in that kind of shop and some people like to work in it, with managers, set shifts and rules. Some rights activists wish all sex workers would be entrepreneurs working independently or organise themselves in small collectives, but many people like being employed and having a boss and colleagues. Like an office or plant, a brothel can function as a reassuringly ordinary place, with its attendant office politics, opportunities for learning, quarrels with managers and struggles for better conditions.

When this form of conventional workplace has been banned, getting brothels back can feel progressive: thus a Swedish parliamentarian’s suggestion and the legislation described below in Western Australia. Australia’s states and territories make up a patchwork of different sorts of sex-industry legislation. In the case of Western Australia (capital city Perth), prostitution has been ‘illegal’, which means ‘criminalised’, but also ‘tolerated’ until recently.

Note, however, that the classic brothel system assumes that sex workers must be obligated to undergo regular, frequent tests to make sure they are free of sexually-transmitted infections - while clients are not. If the interest is in containing disease, everyone ought to be tested equally frequently: There is no defensible reason to make prostitutes more responsible for disease-containment than anyone else who has sex. Unfortunately, this sexist and stigmatising practice is frequently mentioned as an inherent condition of brothels.

WA to legalise prostitution

AAP, 20 June 2010

Western Australia is set to legalise prostitution in a bid to improve health standards and keep brothels out of residential areas. Hundreds of suburban brothels are expected to close when WA Attorney-General Christian Porter ends decades of “turning a blind eye” and starts regulating the sex industry next year.

Prostitution is illegal in WA but police rarely lay charges unless they are related to underage sex or unsafe practices. Under the new legislation, brothels will be licensed and confined to designated commercial and industrial areas, and police will be given powers to investigate and forcibly close those which fail to comply.

Sex businesses will need to follow health and safety standards to obtain and maintain their licences. Individual sex workers will need to register with a central agency and will undergo compulsory health and blood checks.

They may also be required to carry ID cards.

Mr Porter said suburban operators would be given a grace period from next year to either close or move to a licensed area. Applications for brothels would first be put to local councils and then assessed by state regulators. Mr Porter said the new regulations would limit problems in non-residential areas.

WA brothel madams welcomed the move over the weekend but feared the bid to register individual prostitutes would drive some underground. While most agreed the new regulations would improve health and safety in the industry, they said some sex workers would be loath to have their personal records on file. This will lead a lot of workers into going underground,” North Perth brothel owner Donna McGuirk told The West Australian newspaper on Saturday.

“We are quite lucky in WA in that we don’t have girls working with organised crime, but the sensitivity of this information that they want the girls to hand over means that many will try to work outside the system.” Kalgoorlie madam Bruna Meyers told the paper she was opposed to a central register but welcomed plans for a licensing system and health checks. She said it would crack down on operators advertising unsafe sex, which was currently illegal but not widely policed.

Opposition attorney-general spokesman John Quigley said confining brothels to industrial areas would create “sex ghettos”.

Word Games by Kat

So a stripper, an exotic dancer, an entertainer, a nude performance artist and an ecdysiast all walk into a bar… and the bartender only mixes one drink BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL THE SAME THING PEOPLE! Chart showing stripper thinking about not being sex workers

A café for the Paris sewing crowd, Global Post

It’s called Sweat Shop, but there are no poor children working on factory assembly lines in this Paris establishment. Instead, patrons of the “sewing bar” pay a fee to stitch and darn, and hone age-old skills like knitting and crocheting, for pure pleasure.

More deadly than the male by Kathy at The Edge of the American West

Our spy narratives have changed very little in sixty years, especially for women. There always has to be a dead drop, a furtive exchange of bags in a subway station, and a femme fatale, preferably with red hair and a Russian accent.