Articles by laura agustin

All week people have been sending me a news story whose source is a press release from the Spanish National Police claiming another triumph in the crusade against sex trafficking. In the years I lived in Spain such stories of breaking up gangster networks were published continuously - so often that I wondered why police didn’t soften the claim. The implication was, and is, that endless police actions are necessary against an infinite number of organised trafficking rings. The possibility that police are not actually breaking up rings but rather taking down a few organisers and lots of undocumented migrants is not mentioned. The theory and practice of policing of this social problem is crude and ineffective, like sticking a finger in a leaky dam.

The Policía Nacional, in charge of keeping smuggled migrants and smuggled drugs out of Spain, issue press releases to advertise successful operations. The investigation in question led to picking up both undocumented migrants and people moving them around the country, finding them jobs and making money off them - whether you call them traffickers, entrepreneurs, fixers or pimps. The fixing they do is standard in migration settings and can be done abusively or in a normal, businesslike way, whether the migrants work selling sex or doing some other job and whether they are men, women or transgender. As the police acknowledged, many of the migrants admitted they knew what sort of work they would be doing in Spain.

Of course it’s crap when migrants have been misled about the conditions they’ll have for living and working and feel trapped. The press release referred to the squalid flats some migrants were living in. Look at the police video and judge for yourself ow demonic it looks. The narrator says migrants had to give 50% of their earnings to the people in charge plus pay for food and lodging. It’s a bad deal but it isn’t slavery and it is not unusual amongst undocumented migrants. The debt mentioned, €4 000, is also not a high amount for a trip from Brazil, where most of the migrants were said to come.

This Spanish press release relates how police captured members of a network dealing with (and in) men rather than women. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t such networks before, or that smuggling rings are all gender-specific, or that things are really getting bad when men begin to be treated like women.

It also doesn’t mean something specially demonic is going on because drugs are mentioned -the Policía Nacional are also charged with stopping drug trafficking, remember, so they mention any they find. The presence of viagra makes the scenario sound more titillating and sex-slavey, but I think one can understand that drug in the same way one can understand alcohol, hash and cocaine in these settings - substances some people use to feel better or more capable of performing or enduring unpleasantness or having fun. Without knowing how many of the migrants complained that these drugs were forced on them or that they were not allowed to sleep, we might refrain from getting all het up.

Police interrogations of migrants picked up in raids tend towards fruitlessness and dodgy information. Undocumented people want to avoid being deported at all cost. The police want to find traffickers above all. The atmosphere is conducive to telling a certain kind of story of ignorance and victimisation: interrogations are not moments for the detained to strongly assert agency about buying false documents, selling sex or taking drugs.

This ring-bust might be a significant one, there’s no way to know. The proliferation of the limited, exciting-sounding information from a single press release into all the major media, treating it as Big Terrible Urgent news is about the Internet - not journalism, or not what we used to think of as journalism. An egregious example comes from Diario Vasco: Prostitutos forzosos 24 horas a base de viagra (prostitutes forced 24 hours with viagra), followed by the typical thoughtless cliché Venían con la promesa de ser bailarines o ejercer la prostitución de alto ’standing’, pero vivían hacinados y explotados.

So, could this be a particularly bad trafficking story? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does it deserve all the hullaballoo it’s getting? Definitely not.

All sex shops are alike. True? Most of these pictures show the licensed, legal kind, which means there are rules about what they can and cannot put in the windows as well as sell inside. Those who work in this segment of the sex industry occupy an ambiguous status: are they sex workers? Some say they are, some say they are not and some say if a sales assistant in a sex shop wants to think of himself as a sex worker than he is and if she doesn’t, she isn’t.

Taiwan

New York

Paris

Tampere

Amsterdam

Vancouver

Hong Kong

Dublin

If you didn’t read the comments on my recent post about Important Enemies you really should. Nearly every one is interesting, thoughtful or nutty-entertaining, far from the tedious comments often heard at places like the Guardian. No, this was an authentic conversation with drama. My original idea was to have a section on my cv where important slag-offs would be listed, but the latest characterisation of my work is quite wonderful. In a round-up review of several recent books on the sex industry, Ken Plummer has called me an Intellectual Feminist Maverick after finishing up his take on Jeffreys’s Industrial Vagina:

Of course, I think [Jeffreys] is over the top and lacks some subtlety – but that is often what is needed so that the big issues can be seen. . . she would make a great starting point in a classroom and elsewhere for a debate on these issues.

But then, immediately, one needs to read the work of Laura Agustín as a counterpoint. Laura María Agustín is an intellectual feminist maverick who seeks to deconstruct the entire field and challenge much thinking. In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she draws from years of researching and thinking about the position of women travelling in the global economy, many of whom engage in various forms of ‘selling sex’. Much of what Jeffreys claims, I guess Agustín would dismiss as myth. At the core of her argument is the idea that migrants often make ‘personal choices’ to travel and work in the sex industry. Her specific interests though are not with groups like street workers but with migration and trafficking. She sees them as a part of a dynamic global economy; and one where often the sex control industry makes the situation worse, not better, for them. Indeed the core of this book is an attack upon the ‘rescue industry’, which ostensibly has a long history of ‘saving women’ while in fact it is driven by a ‘feminist fundamentalism’ which frequently and actually harms women. This book is reviewed elsewhere in Sexualities (Vol. 12, no. 6) and her ideas are developed in a special issue of Sexualities in 2007 (Vol 19, no. 4). But it has to be mentioned again here. She problematizes the whole area of those who work to help these women – and who place them ‘in need’. She advocates listening to the voices of the migrant women. Between the work of Agustín and Jeffreys there is a major and long-standing feminist tension at work on many levels.

The only thing I’d take exception to is Plummer’s guess that I’d call Jeffreys’s ideas ‘myth’. Numerous reviewers of my work use this word, but I personally don’t. To me, myth makes it sound as though I think fundamentalist feminist ideas about trafficking are fabrication, which isn’t right. Instead, I see those ideas as gender ideology and a campaign strategy: change the language, reduce complexity to a simple, quickly comprehensible type, hold fast to the line. I don’t think the world is a happy, unsexist place, that globalisation is fair, that no one is ever made miserable by migration or sex work or any other simplistic thing. The long-standing tension Plummer mentions is between a hard-line reductionist (or totalising) view of women as always exploited and a nuanced and doubting view that wants to recognise as much female agency as possible, on principle.

The excerpt is from ‘A Round Up of Some Recent Books on Prostitution and Sex Work’, by Ken Plummer. Sexualities 13(3): 394-400, (2010).

En España están hablando de nuevo de prohibir los anuncios de contacto con trabajadores sexuales - o prostitutas/os (y a veces conocidos como avisos de putas). Un artículo desde Tenerife expone los diversos argumentos pro y contra. El 20 Minutos acusa a los demás periódicos del proxenetismo. Malaprensa deconstuye cuidadosamente las cifras enormes siempre citadas sobre el número de prostitutas en España.

La voz de la libertad de expresión dice Partiendo de la base de que ejercer voluntariamente la prostitución no es delito en España, no veo ningún inconveniente en que una persona, haciendo uso de su libertad, se anuncie en un periódico para prestar ese servicio (Leopoldo Fernández Cabeza de Vaca).

Pero claro que la trata sí es ilegal y los que hacen campaña en contra de los anuncios argumentan que no son las trabajadoras sexuales las que se anuncian sino las mafias. El mismo presidente Zapatero se ha pronunciado en contra: no le conviene nada el hecho de que España es el único país de la Unión Europea que todavía permite que los periódicos dominantes-principales publiquen estos anuncios. Atrás está una feminista estatal, Bibiana Aído, ministra de la Igualdad. Es una historia emblemática de la Europa contemporánea.

Al mismo tiempo algo similar está pasando en Estados Unidos pero que tiene impacto para cualquier sitio con Internet - o sea, para todo el mundo. Craigslist, un enorme sitio web de anuncios clasificados, queda acusado del ‘tráfico’ por personas y fiscales estatales que creen que se está utilizando el servicio para explotar a los niños. Escribí sobre esto ayer.

Running a website with erotic advertisements as sex trafficking: the mind boggles at how anything connected to the sex industry can now be given the scary label trafficking.

In the USA, where Craigslist is headquartered, the website’s advertisements for paid sex are causing a furore amongst moral entrepreneurs who want the ads stopped on the grounds that ‘child sex trafficking’ is going on. Craigslist and the sex trade shows a cnn reporter attempting to make the owner of Craigslist himself personally responsible, pointing at ads, challenging him to explain. Some of this resembles scapegoating, the desire to find a single responsible villain for a Great Social Evil, implying that stopping this advertising would be a significant battle against it.

The fear fueling this campaign is captured in one NGO’s statement that An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This figure is not even an irresponsibly extrapolated number of victims, which we are now used to, but an estimate of how many might be vulnerable. The cnn reporter describes the torso-photo in one ad as young-looking. Such imaginings are not the basis for policy! And note that where there would have been a distinction in terms not long ago (commercial sexual exploitation v trafficking), now there is not. Everything becomes trafficking.

The argument against stopping all commercial sex ads centres on freedom of expression/information, a key principle in human rights law. This principle takes in written, oral and print media, including the Internet, and covers not only the content but the means of expression. Of course there are situations meant to override this freedom, nowadays usually called Hate Speech, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle. One could certainly make a strong argument that sex ads are harmful if one could prove that all those running them were criminals forcing other people to perform sex acts against their will. To do that would require real evidence, not panicky guesses about young victims. Not scare tactics.

Another aspect of this crusade is about something else: the ‘accusation’ that Craigslist is like Wal-Mart. This appears to be hostility both to big profits and a comparison with Wal-Mart’s unadorned, high-volume, warehouse-like style. Or perhaps it refers more to Wal-Mart’s legendary lack of social consciousness, poor community relations, environmental disinterest, use of badly paid foreign labour and so on. The problem is: Wal-Mart is also enormously popular. Would a personalised boutique style make Craigslist more acceptable?

Some of the ads on Craigslist might be the work of bad people. The ways they might be bad range from taking too much of the money a worker earns right through to kidnapping and slavery. But should the possibility that bad things could happen be allowed to justify shutting down all the ads, including those placed by competent adults? See Amanda Brooks on that.

Classified adverts are the subject of a similar crusade in Spain at the moment. In that case, mainstream newspapers are the accused businesses, but the issue is just the same.

When Augusta licensed its prostitutes

by Bill Kirby at The Augusta Chronicle

Augusta was booming in 1941. A military buildup had downtown streets swelling with soldiers from the nearby Army camp. . . ‘The soldiers want girls and are going to get them.’ Regulation, he concluded was the only practical solution. ‘The problem of prostitution in army camp towns cannot be solved by the moral indignation of good citizens. The traffic cannot be eradicated in a city of Augusta’s size even in normal times, let alone when 20,000 or more young men from all walks of life spend their leaves and money within her borders.’

Study suggests ‘hookups’ can turn into meaningful relationships

University of Iowa News Release

We didn’t see much evidence that relationships were lower quality because they started off as hookups. The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.

6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex

by Monica Shores

Casual sex and one-night stands are almost always framed as damaging to women, particularly young women. In recent years, writers like Laura Sessions Stepp and Wendy Shalit have issued dire warnings about the alleged dangers of sex outside of committed relationships. Let’s call this rhetoric what it is: a tired repeat of the sexist double standards that have haunted women for centuries.

The women in this kind of drawing are often described as prostitutes (or loose women, with the same moral value), which would make all the men potential clients. Is that a useful way to think about this sort of socialising? At the time, patriarchy was an overwhelming determining reality in the Europe pictured. But even so, I think it’s wrong to reduce such a social scene to a one-dimensional story: Men Exploit Women. In the following story, an obviously impressive person (described as ‘one of the world’s most respected legal brains’) talks about trafficking in a similarly unuseful way. My comments in italics interlaced with excerpts from the story, with the emphasis on her implausible assumptions.

Inquiry into sex trafficking in Scotland wants to hear from men who use prostitutes

Annie Brown, 30 June 2010, DailyRecord

An inquiry into sex trafficking in Scotland is asking punters who use prostitutes to talk to them - in secret. Baroness Helena Kennedy, who is heading the probe, said men who buy sex can help build a realistic picture of the extent of the trade.

How, exactly? Does Kennedy imagine they will have more than what is called anecdotal evidence? Or is this about guys who surf escort sites, so she thinks clients will be able to provide numbers of how many sites or escorts or what?

Kennedy said: “I want to hear from these men. I need to hear directly from people who have experiences of trafficking. I think if you want to have a proper sense of the problem, it is better to hear from witnesses themselves directly. It might be they are men who have used prostitutes and they have had an experience where they have been with a woman who was clearly coerced into prostitution. We need help to understand the scope of the problem but those who can do that are often the very people who, through shame or fear, don’t want to step forward. We will guarantee them absolute anonymity.”

The inquiry is into ’sex trafficking’, so why does Kennedy want to talk with clients? As someone who understands legal language she must know that sloppy talk like this is confusing. Or does she think that clients meet people who’ve facilitated migrants travel? And why will talking to a few clients give her an idea of ‘the scope’ of the overall problem? On the contrary it will give her some anecdotes, a few new ideas about how it all works, a couple of leads.

She said: “Senior police officers do think that there has been a shift. Perhaps because men are travelling much more, certainly on stag weekends and buying sex abroad. They are experiencing sex in a more exotic way, activities that they don’t participate in with their wives and partners. It becomes something that they want here.”

This is irresponsible claptrap, castles in the air. Everyone is travelling more, yes. What does experiencing sex in a ‘more exotic way’ mean? Having it with foreigners in a foreign country? What ‘activities’ is she imagining they engage in that they never do in Scotland? And she’s totally guessing that then they ‘want it’ at home - there’s no evidence for that. I’m sure she thinks it’s common sense but it’s just imagination.

The demand for so many different nationalities is perpetuating the horrific trade in human beings. Kennedy said: “This is the underbelly of globalisation. The same things that make global markets work, make black markets work too. You get international crime now in a way that we didn’t have before. Everything is marketable and sadly that includes human beings.”

If Kennedy is doing research, why is she telling us the results beforehand? There is no huge body of evidence proving that men are ‘demanding different nationalities’. Liking the idea of having sex with different sorts of people, maybe?

The size of Scotland is one of the reasons for holding the inquiry here. It will be easier to get a country-wide picture because there are fewer police forces, social work departments and agencies which deal with trafficking. Kennedy said that, contrary to speculation, the inquiry wasn’t rooted in Scotland because we have a disproportionate scale of trafficking. . .

She realises a truly accurate picture is virtually impossible because trafficking is a covert criminal business. She said: “This kind of human rights abuse is like a poison. Trafficking leeches into our society as a whole. We want to identify ways in which it is happening and ensure that weaker members of society aren’t abused in this way.” . .

What does it mean for ‘trafficking’ to leach (not leech!) into society? Again, the results seem preordained.

I have never understood how sting operations can be legal in any situation, but when police use them in prostitution contexts they generally pose as clients, with the aim of catching sex workers. In the story below they posed as prostitutes in order to entrap clients. This is justified by referring to vile behaviour, an antiquated phrase for the 21st century. And given so many other, more dangerous urban problems, investing money and time into catching men who buy sex seems silly. [Note: the photo is from a different story, the recent Chinese one that had police parading women prostitutes through the streets. Some people asked why their clients were not subjected to similar shaming; as this picture shows, to some extent they were.]

Another question to consider about this story: How will the 2-year-old be damaged, exactly?

Elgin arrests 11 in reverse prostitution sting

Lenore T. Adkins, 8 August 2010, Daily Herald (suburban Chicago)

Eleven men were arrested Friday night in Elgin during a reverse prostitution sting staged by police officers in the city’s downtown. As part of the three-hour undercover operation in the National Street area, several Elgin officers posed as prostitutes. The men approached them, offering $20 for sex, said Lt. Glenn Theriault.

According to police, one of the men had his 2-year-old son with him. The child’s mother picked the boy up from the police station on Friday night. And officers contacted the Illinois Department of Children of Family Services. “When people think this type of crime is a victimless crime, tell that to the 2-year-old or the mother of the 2-year-old,” Police Chief Jeff Swoboda said.

All 11 alleged offenders were arrested under a local ordinance for soliciting a prostitute, which carries a minimum fine of $1,000. They are [follows a list of names and addresses] . . .

The following men were arrested under the local ordinance and for additional charges [follows another list] . . .

Out of the 11 men arrested on Friday night, 10 had motor vehicles and must pay $1,000 to retrieve them under a separate ordinance, Theriault said. Everyone will have their case heard Aug. 14 before a hearing officer at the Elgin branch court.

“This is certainly a huge number of suspects for such a short period of time and clearly tells me that we’ll be back there again soon,” Theriault said. With Friday’s sting and others like it, Elgin police intend to send the message they will not tolerate this sort of activity in town. They are also determined to reduce the crimes it creates.

“This type of vile behavior is simply unacceptable,” Theriault said. “It’s unfortunate that for such an incredibly vibrant downtown, these incidents that occur in one isolated corner … paint the entire area with the same brush.”

The police department’s patrol, gang, drug and technical investigation units conducted the probe, which marked the second such sting of the summer. Elgin police ran a similar crackdown in July that officers cut short due to the rain and that resulted in one arrest, Theriault said.

An interesting selection of pictures of women dancing: tags could include burlesque, can-can, Korea, bar girls, Thailand, striptease, 1930s, 1950s, cabaret, fan dance, Soho, Anna May Wong, erotic, artistic, exotic, go-go, swing bands and?

Sweden’s The Local invited me to write on the government’s evaluation of the sex-buying law (sexköpslagen). I’m reproducing the article here minus stereotyped photo of woman’s high-booted legs in street at night with red overtones. It is very hard to illustrate these stories, I know, but I do feel the media could resist the worst cliches. These jolly masked men might be sex workers’ clients, as might this ashamed man be.

Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex

Laura Agustín, 23 Jul 10, The Local

A new review of Sweden’s ban on buying sex has provided little hard evidence that the policy of prohibition has worked, writes Laura Agustín, but few politicians have dared to point out its obvious failings.

Every Swede knows that the famed law against buying sex – sexköpslagen – is a hot potato. Few politicians have commented one way or another on the evaluation of the law announced on 2 July, and only one government official claimed it proves the law is a success. Given that the report has been strongly criticised as empty of evidence and methodology but full of ideology in its very remit, debate has been curiously muted, even for the time of year.

At another period in history the sex-purchase law might have been considered a minor piece of legislation on a lesser social problem. Few people die, are maimed for life or lose their homes and jobs because of prostitution here; other threats to national security and happiness might seem more pressing.

But one feminist faction promotes the ideology that prostitutes are always, by definition, victims of violence against women. As victims, they can’t be criminals, so their side of the money-sex exchange is not penalised, whereas those who buy are perpetrators of a serious crime. This ideology, a minority view in other countries, predominates among Swedish State Feminists who claim that the existence of commercial sex is a key impediment to achieving gender equality. Such a dogma is odd, given the very small number of people engaged in selling sex in a welfare state that does not exclude them from its services and benefits. It is not illegal to sell sex in Sweden, just to buy it.

The evaluation leaned heavily on small-scale data about street prostitution, because that was the easiest to find. No one doubts that most street sex workers went somewhere else after the law came into effect, and no one knows where they went. But evaluators bolstered their case by claiming that street prostitution had increased in Denmark, where there is no such law, using information from a Copenhagen NGO whose inflated data was exposed in parliament last year. Street prostitution is known, in any case, to constitute a tiny, diminishing part of the whole of commercial sex.

The report confesses that ‘prostitution on the Internet’ was difficult to research but exhibits a poor understanding of the multiplicity of businesses, jobs and networks that characterise the sex industry. Asking police officials and social workers what they think is going on is no substitute for true research, and no academic studies pretend to know the extent of prostitution here. A government report from 2007 admitted it was difficult to find out much of anything about prostitution in Sweden.

The evaluation gives no account of how the research was actually carried out – its methodology - but is full of background material on Swedish history and why prostitution is bad. Only 14 sex workers were actually canvassed for their opinion of the law, seven of whom had already stopped selling sex. It is a rather pathetic display.

Several media commentators took the occasion to attack the law itself, since, despite regular government affirmations that the majority of Swedes support the law, opposition is fierce. In the blogosphere and other online forums, liberals, libertarians and non-conforming members of the main parties relentlessly resist a reductionist view of sexuality in which vulnerable women are forever threatened by predatory men.

But most politicians undoubtedly feel little good will come from complaining about legislation now symbolic of Mother Sweden. The Swedish Institute has turned the abolition of prostitution into part of the nation’s brand, what they call a ‘multi-faceted package to make Sweden attractive to the outside world.’ The SI, claiming to represent the most ‘socially liberal’ country on the planet, celebrates gender equality and gay love along with Ingmar Bergman, high technology and pine forests.

Sweden indisputably ranks high on several measures of gender equality, such as numbers of women who work outside the home, their salaries and length of parental leave. But other policies considered as part of gender equality are much harder to measure: cultural change, how people feel about sexual difference and, not least, the effect of a ban on buying sex. So it is hardly surprising that the government’s evaluation presents no evidence that relations between men and women have improved in Sweden because of the law. The evaluation’s main recommendation is to stiffen the punishment meted out to men who buy sex.

There was something new in Justice Minister Ask’s positioning of the law to the international media, however - a claim that it has been proved to combat organized crime, particularly the kind called sex trafficking. Citing no evidence, the report maintains there is less trafficking in Sweden because it is now ‘less attractive’ to traffickers.

Such naïve statements argue that without a demand for commercial sex there will be no supply, ignoring the complicated ways sex-money markets work in cultures with different concepts of family and love, reducing a wide range of sexual activities to an abstract notion of violence and brushing aside the many people who confirm that they prefer selling sex to their other livelihood options.

As for combating trafficking, there is no proof. Statistics continue to be a source of conflict in international debates, because different countries, institutions and researchers do not agree on what actually constitutes trafficking. It does not help that fundamentalist feminism refuses to accept the distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration, as enshrined in the UN Convention on Organised Crime.

The Swedish government has proved nothing with this evaluation, and most Swedish politicians are keeping quiet, because they obviously know it.