web analytics

migration

You are currently browsing the archive for the migration category.

Irresponsible talk on sex work, gender equality, sex tourism and state feminism

31 October 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

I gave a talk the other day that mentioned sex trafficking, sex work, surrogate motherhood, child sexuality, sex tourism and international marriage broking. Held at the Institute for Development Studies in Brighton, (UK, where the University of Sussex is), it was a lunchtime seminar, which are often small affairs, but 50 people crowded together for this one. My title was Five Steps Backward: How women become second-class citizens of globalisation, so people came who were interested in gender policy, sexualities, globalisation, migration, development and queerness.

As soon as I finished talking, a hand shot up from a woman who said it was irresponsible of me to talk that way. I had made the argument that Gender Equality policy, promoted by State Feminists (professionally employed to set policy affecting women), now tends to recreate women as always already unempowered victims rather than protagonists of their own lives who opt for one or another of the limited alternatives available – in the context of inflexible patriarchy and a globalisation that promotes precarious workers and their migrations – regardless of their sex or gender identity.

It is hardly news that a state-oriented feminist disagreed with me. Someone I ran into at the National Film Theatre bar in London said You have that effect on people. But the suggestion that I should shut up is comment-worthy. The belief in Free Speech is claimed as a fundamental characteristic of western democracies and sometimes seems like a fetish in anglo countries. At protests in the US, whether they are students on campuses or Occupy Wall Street, First Amendment rights are continually cited, and the UK is similarly insistent about free speech. Yet the objector to my talk the other day seemed to be saying that dissent is dangerous – like Mira Sorvino, who suggested I not be allowed to speak on the BBC world debate on human trafficking held  in Luxor. As though I might undermine the war on trafficking, as wartime posters warned against careless talk lest enemies benefit.

Highlights from the exchange with an apparently senior academic who did not introduce herself begin with her comment to me that

As an academic, you should – which I interrupted to say

I am not an academic.

All right, she said, as a researcher, as a person invited to talk in this space, you should not talk this way because Where do you draw the line? What about clitoridectomy? she demanded.

I stated at the beginning of my talk that I am not constructing another big all-inclusive meta-narrative that will Explain Everything once and for all.

But where do you draw the line? she insisted.

I am not in the line-drawing business. Also I have not researched clitoridectomy myself so I would not presume to pronounce about it.

This cultural relativism, she sputtered.

Cultural relativism is an anthropological tool. It means trying to understand the logic and meaning in situations from the standpoint of people inside them. It is not about defining universal Goods and Bads. Some people want to write laws that will apply to everyone all over the world in all situations. I am not doing that.

You don’t take power relations into account, she said, clearly meaning a view of power reduced to Male-Female in the abstract. I wrote recently about this in The Bad Vibrations of Fundamentalist Feminism, where I referred to World Gender War.

I take power relations into account, all right, but not the simplified one you are referring to.

From a human-rights perspective –

I don’t personally use a human-rights argument, though many others do. In debates on trafficking, everyone claims to be fighting for human rights even when their arguments are diametrically opposed.

You talk about personal choice –

I did not use that term. I said that even people with few and poor alternatives can and do prefer one of them to the others.

In the neoliberal discourse, the idea of choice is very problematic –

I didn’t talk about choice, don’t put words in my mouth.

You cannot have true choice without equality.

Hm, so what are women supposed to do until absolute full and true equality is achieved?

Many are not able to articulate for themselves [what they want or need], she said.

I deeply disagree with you about that. I have complete confidence that everyone in this room can judge for themselves whether my ideas are rubbish or not.

I finally cut her off so that others in the audience could ask questions, and funnily enough one young woman returned to this point, asking the objector:

Are you saying that I am not capable of listening and figuring out for myself how I feel about what Laura is saying?

And there, alas, she backed down rather than defending her belief that people like herself Know Better than other people what the right way is to live and think about men, women, sex, money, power and many other things. She may not have meant to imply that about that woman, just about a lot of other women too poor and pathetic to make it to a room like that in Sussex. If I had invited her to come and perform this stuff I couldn’t have had a better didactic tool.

PS: She said she would be writing to me but has not, and I still don’t know her name.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Poster from American Merchant Marine at War

Originally published in Good Vibrations Magazine.

Share

Tags: , ,

Sex in the street, and other prohibitions: a photo gallery

10 October 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

A new photo gallery called The Street is here. Sex work and buying sex are not alone in being under siege by moral regulators: More and more activities are subjected to rules if you want to do them in parks, in the street, at fairs, on staircases, in plazas, outside buildings, on buses and trains, along highways. Regulations seek to obliterate messiness and unpredictability in public spaces; civility is a middle-class concept in which walking directly from your house to wherever you are going to earn or spend money is the desired behaviour. Simply expressing oneself outdoors is problematic: hanging out, goofing around. Everything pictured in this gallery has been prohibited somewhere in recent memory and the collection is hardly complete. For blog posts relevant to street concerns see the urban space tag.

The Street photo gallery is one of three here: Sex Industry and Sex worker activism are the others. They are frequently updated, so if you have browsed before and want to see anything new, go to the last page of each gallery.

If you have any information to add about any of the pictures or want to contribute others or get credit, please get in touch with me. You can comment on pictures individually.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Share

Tags:

Civilised loans versus debt bondage and slavery

3 October 2011 in migration by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Recently I wrote about how the term debt bondage is often used to imply there is something peculiarly primitive and unjust about migrants’ agreeing to pay off smugglers by doing jobs not of their choosing for which they receive little pay until debts are paid off. The example was Vietnamese nail salons. But in a non-migrant example, students often comment on the horrendous loans they are forced to take in order to get degrees; a report from late last year said about the US: Seniors who graduated last year carried an average of $24,000 in student loan debt. . . an approximately 6 percent rise in debt over the previous year. Many in the mainstream lament this debt without talking about it as demonic or enslaving.

Other discussions of debt bondage are typically illustrated with sadder pictures than this one of children at work as another way to demonise debt as an institution, as though a debt-free existence were the normal enlightened way to live. As though the parents that put their children into these jobs in order to make money were monsters – and so on.

So it is refreshing to read anthropologist David Graeber problematising conventional ideas about debt in an interview at The New Left Project, particularly the way some debts are seen as enslaving while others are not.

In America, for instance, pretty much everybody is in debt. The great social evil in antiquity, the thing that Sharia law and medieval canon law were trying to ensure never happened again, was the scenario in which a family gets so deep in debt that they are forced to sell themselves, or sell their children, into slavery. What do you have here today? You have a population all of whom are in debt, and who are essentially renting themselves to employers to do jobs that they almost certainly wouldn’t want to do otherwise, to be able to pay those debts. If Aristotle were magically transported to the U.S. he would conclude that most of the American population is enslaved, because for him the distinction between selling yourself and renting yourself is at best a legalism. This, again, is why I say that our definitions of freedom are bizarre – we’ve managed to take a situation which most people in the ancient world would have recognised as a form of slavery and turned it into the definition of freedom (your ability to contract debts, your ability to sell your labour on the market, and so on). In the process we have created the very thing that all that old legislation and all of those old political practices were designed to avoid.

Also created: a phantom, the Return of the Slave, conveniently found in far-away non-western nations and amongst indistinguishable masses of women and children. The point isn’t that debt is all good or all bad but that it exists everywhere, and its bondage is often seen as lamentable, yes, but as acceptable – something people are meant to struggle to pay off as part of normal life. Which is what most migrants think about the debts they incur to travel and work abroad.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Share

Tags: , ,

Leaving Home for Sex: Cosmopolitanism or sex trafficking or both?

25 September 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work.

Sex trafficking and human trafficking were not words on everyone’s lips when I wrote the above ten years ago. I was trying to figure out what was special and problematic about migrants who sell sex, believing that migrants are migrants, no matter what jobs they end up getting (including prostitution or sex work). Nowadays, a lot of the social conflict is about statistics: how many are trafficked, how many are illegal migrants. But even more it is about definitions, world views, ideas about sex and money, the insistence that a particular cultural view should be everyone’s.

Most conversations about migrants who sell sex present black-and-white versions of something that is almost entirely grey. For moral crusaders who would rush to legislation or attempt to prove that one sort of law is better than others, my vision is not satisfying. I say Stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind. This is not useless postmodern dithering but the position that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives you cannot responsibly take actions to help them. If you don’t care what they say themselves then don’t talk about helping and admit that control is what you want: the power to make people stop doing what you don’t approve of and start doing something else, whether they want to or not.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual not to use the term prostitute, but I also didn’t just substitute the term sex worker. Instead, I tried to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out all right for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. You will see ‘Challenging place’ in the original title because the piece was written for a special journal issue on women and place – the local and the global. I suggested that migrant workers didn’t fit into that framework but could sometimes be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects: that neither poverty nor bad jobs nor lack of complete ‘choice’ over your life prevents you from also becoming cosmopolitan.  Click on the title to get the pdf.

Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín, Development, 45.1, 110-117 (2002).

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For some time I worked in educación popular in Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,

African women in Europe willing to play the trump card God has wedged between their legs – or sex trafficking, if you prefer

22 September 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 11 comments | print print

Sex trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of sex trafficking, because of debts that sound the largest and the sometime presence of so-called rituals that are supposed to have bound these migrants in a specially sinister way to their traffickers. It’s old-fashioned racist colonialism – an unwillingness to imagine even the most superficial aspects of a non-western culture, jumping to lurid conclusions instead, in which juju ceremonies are somehow not comparable to Roman Catholic ones, for example – though promises, talismen and emotion are found in both. As though one sort of prayer for help or success were inherently irrational and the other not.

That’s not to say that conditions are not pretty dire for many women and men in western Africa, politically and economically – which means people can be willing to take big risks and assume onerous debts when they travel to work abroad. I learned about how some migrants think about that in Lucciole neri – Le prostitute nigeriane si raccontano (Iyamu Kennedy and Pino Nicotri, editors, 1999), one of my sources of ethnographic research with migrants who sell sex in Europe, for what eventually became Sex at the Margins. These Nigerians were working in Italy.

On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, came out in 2009, but I have only just read it (prompted by This is Africa’s mention of it along with my book recently). It’s a novel telling the stories of four women’s migrations from Nigeria to Belgium where they work in windows in the red-light district. None of them has had an easy life and none of them sees herself as a victim, despite the presence of a powerful smuggler in Lagos and a controlling madam in Antwerp. They are, the author says, willing to play the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs. Unigwe has said:

If your parents can’t help you out and your government has failed you, these pimps and traffickers have at least given you a chance to leave and make a living. He’s your saviour. It takes someone outside the situation to see these pimps and traffickers as the bad guys.

At the end of the book we are told how three of the women fare in the future. After nine years in Antwerp, Efe became a madam herself.

It would take eighteen months to get her first of two girls whom she would indeed buy at an auction presided by a tall, good-looking Nigerian man in sunglasses and a beret. It would be in a house in Brussels, with lots to drink and soft music playing in the background. The women would enter the country with a musical band billed to perform at the Lokerenfeest. The man in the sunglasses was the manager of the band and as usual had, in addition to genuine members of the band, added the names of the women who had paid him to the list he submitted at the embassy in Abuja. The women would be called into the room one at a time for the buyers to see and admire. They would all have numbers, for names were not important. Their names would be chosen by whoever bought them. Names that would be easy for white clients to pronounce… Efe would buy numbers five and seven. Number five because she smiled easily. Number seven because she looked docile and eager to please, the sort of girl who was grateful for little. Like Madam, Efe would have some police officers on her payroll to ensure the security of her girls and of her business. She would do well in the business, buying more girls to add to her fleet. pp 278-9

Yes, this is an auction where employers bid on women who will sell sex. It is not slave-trading, however.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

 

 

Share

Tags: , , ,

Women as second-rate citizens of globalisation, 6 October, Brighton, talk by Laura Agustín

13 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Five Steps Backward: How women become second-rate citizens of globalisation

Talk by Laura Agustín

6 October 2011
13.00 to 14.30

Institute of Development Studies, Knots Meeting Area
University of Sussex
Library Rd, Falmer, Brighton
East Sussex BN1 9RE
See area map and campus map.
Trains and buses go to the campus from Brighton centre

Whether the subject is migration, surrogate motherhood, international matchmaking, tourism and expatriatism or plain old commercial sex, women are consistently assigned the passive role. They cannot make their own decisions, men pursue them relentlessly for evil ends and their sexual bodies are innately vulnerable. A Rescue Industry from the enlightened middle class is required to save women from themselves everywhere. How did we get here after 50 years of women’s liberation, affirmative action programmes and both state and UN policies to instate Gender Equality?


–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Share

Tags: ,

Migranten som resenär: Laura Agustín i Arena

13 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Migranten som resenär
Laura Maria Agustín

Arena #2 april 2011 – Den nya underklassen Invandraren är tillbaka. Vilka är vi och dom?


På lyxiga semesterorter i Dominikanska republiken solar turister nära stränder där småbåtar frekvent ger sig ut mot Puerto Rico. Mona-kanalens förrädiska strömmar vimlar av hajar och många av båtarna kapsejsar. Men nästan alla dominikaner känner ändå någon som har lyckats klara resan. De som har tagit sig över gränsen måste sedan passera genom Puerto Ricos västra träskmarker, där den amerikanska gränspolisen väntar. De som tar sig förbi dem kan stanna på ön eller fortsätta till Miami, New York eller Europa. Presumtiva migranter försöker hitta erfaret sjöfolk med båtar starka nog att klara stormar och som inte överlastar båtarna med alltför många passagerare.

I boken The Suffering of the Immigrant beskriver sociologen Abdelmalek Sayad hur länder som tar emot migranter uppfattar migration som ett irriterande socialt problem som måste ”hanteras”. Sayad ser de överväldigande hinder som nordafrikaner möter i Frankrike som en tydlig strukturell konsekvens av kolonisering, utan att för den skull offerförklara migranterna. I stället argumenterar han kraftfullt för att erkänna dem som handlande subjekt. Förmågan att se och erkänna den sortens agentskap – att även missgynnade migranter är huvudpersoner i sina egna liv – har sin grund i en förståelse för hur migrationer börjar.

När jag bodde i Dominikanska republiken, var ett av mina uppdrag att besöka samhällen där utflyttning var väletablerat. Jag mötte kvinnor som ville resa till Europa, där de två valmöjligheter som fanns att tillgå var att arbeta som inneboende hembiträde eller att sälja sex. De vägde riskerna och fördelarna mot varandra och diskuterade huruvida de skulle klara anpassningen. De flesta av dem hade inte någon längre formell utbildning, men de var varken naiva eller ointelligenta.  Om de stannade hemma var deras bästa alternativ fortfarande hemhjälp eller att sälja sex, men till långt lägre löner och utan de nya horisonter en resa kan erbjuda.

Potentiella migranter drömmer också om att få se kända platser, träffa nya människor, bli självständiga, lära sig ett nytt yrke, få nya idéer – precis som människor i rika länder gör. Att resa är utvecklande för alla resenärer – inte bara för rika turister, och för många människor är dessa resor deras största chans att ta reda på mer om världen.

När jag reste runt på ön och in i Haiti, hörde jag dussintals människor prata om hur de skulle komma i väg. Européer tar för givet att deras resevisum beviljas av vilket land de än vill besöka. Medborgare i länder som Dominikanska republiken vet att deras ansökningar om turistvisa aldrig kommer att beviljas. Liksom när det gäller att få ett arbete och arbetstillstånd utomlands, utgör de statliga riktlinjerna en begränsning – arbetstillstånden omfattar bara ”kvalificerade” jobb, vilket gör att många migranter väljer att resa utanför det formella regelverket och tar ”okvalificerade” jobb i den svarta ekonomin.

För att få tillgång till de här arbetena kan resenärerna behöva nytt namn och pass, en falsk vigselring, flygbiljetter, pengar att visa upp för gränspoliser och råd om vad man ska säga till dem, någon som möter upp vid flygplatsen och någonstans att bo när de kommer fram. Jag träffade många människor som erbjuder de här tjänsterna till potentiella migranter, inklusive deras egna familjemedlemmar, gamla vänner, bekantskaper bland turister och frilansande entreprenörer. Eftersom den här resemarknaden inte är reglerad, finns det inget bra sätt att veta vem som gör ett bra jobb och vem som behandlar migranterna korrekt, förutom via ryktesvägen: berättelser från kunder som smugglats ut säkert.

Jag pratade med Lucía, en strippdansös som hade väntat på det rätta tillfället att ge sig av i flera månader. Hon ville åka till Paris, men hade inte hittat rätt erbjudande ännu. Miriam, med två års universitetsstudier och erfarenheter av arbete som tandläkarassistent, funderade på ifall statussänkningen att bli hembiträde skulle vägas upp av de pengar hon kunde tjäna i Italien, där hennes syster bodde. Båda kvinnorna visste vilka priser och villkor de önskade och besökte platser där smugglare samlas regelbundet för att höra vad som erbjöds.

En del såg mig som en möjlighet. En kypare började prata med mig efter att ha serverat kaffe, Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: , , ,

Sex at the Margins in a Pleasantly Surprising African Europe

6 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Sex At The Margins of Surprising Europe was the title given to an interesting piece mentioning my book from This is Africa last week. The occasion was a new episode of Al Jazeera‘s Surprising Europe series entitled Under Pressure, on the experiences of African migrants who sell drugs or sex in Europe.

I have to say I wish these money-making activities had not been separated off from others, reinforcing the stigma about them. In a different episode I watched from the series, a woman living in Holland without money to pay rent is told to go to the red-light district and work. She says she would rather die than do that – which fair enough – and so she had a different kind of very hard time. I could also have done without one typically moralistic condemnation of prostitution as not the way for Africans to get ahead – when the programme actually contradicts her from a practical standpoint – but in general I enjoyed and recommend Under Pressure.

I often say that the so-called illegality of sex jobs is a moot point when workers have no right to be where they are in the first place: you are already breaking the law so why not earn more money while you are at it? Sex At The Margins of Surprising Europe says

Imagine trying to survive without the permission to do any kind of work. You’ve got to eat, which isn’t free, and you’ve got to sleep somewhere, so you need money for this, too. What would you do? This is the problem faced by undocumented African immigrants in Europe. There are only so many cash-in-hand positions for cleaners, fruit-pickers and building-site workers, so many find themselves having to turn to the more ‘illegal’ professions, such as prostitution or selling drugs. Your existence in the country is already seen as ‘illegal’, so what difference does it make?

On the topic of Sex at the Margins (the book) and selling sex they say

The women also possess agency, the capacity to make their own choices, even if these choices undermine the picture of the world that others choose to hold. The remittances, however, can make a huge difference back home, not just for the immediate family but for an entire community.

In this photo, migrant Africans in Italy can be seen possessing agency with Don Benzi, who spent his life trying to convince them to leave prostitution but only succeeded with some. One reason has to do with those remittances. It’s rarely acknowledged, but sex work is undoubtedly responsible for a large proportion of money sent back home, given the fact that it pays so much better than other jobs available to migrants. Read Contributing to Development: Money Made Selling Sex.

Here is the trailer for Under Pressure. Enjoy how it focuses on life for undocumented Africans not from the point of view of horrified or angry white people but from Africans themselves.

See the whole episode and others at Al Jazeera’s Surprising Europe website.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Share

Tags: , ,

Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the Trafficking Debate

3 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Here is another article that required persistence and patience to get through the academic journal review process and into publication. Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, published in 2005, used testimonies of women selling sex who do not consider themselves coerced, forced, trafficked or enslaved or who, even if they were coerced by economic circumstance, are not searching for Rescue. Click on the title for the pdf.

Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, by Laura Agustín, Social Politics, Volume 12, Number 1, 96-117 (2005).

I contrasted feminist interpretations like this:

Whatever levels of knowledge and ‘consent’ are involved, however, women are never made aware of the extent to which they will be indebted, intimidated, exploited and controlled. They believe . . . that they can travel to a richer country and earn large amounts of money in a short space of time, which they can then use to move themselves and their families out of poverty and despair. In reality, they are told they owe a huge debt which must be repaid through providing sexual services, and they are able to exercise virtually no control at all over their hours of work, the number of customers they serve, and the kinds of sex they have to provide. (Kelly and Regan 2000, 5)

with migrant testimonies like this:

I arrived in Almería through a friend’s mediation. I began to work as a domestic, I was badly paid and mistreated. Sundays I came to the edge of the sea and cried. One Sunday a Moroccan man saw me crying, I explained my situation to him, he took me to his house. I was a virgin, he promised he was going to marry me . . . he got me a residence card. . . . He found me work in a restaurant and let me stay in his studio, he told me I had to pay rent. I began to sleep with some clients from the restaurant. . . . Now, I would like to go to France, I want to get married. . . . My sister who lives in Bézier says she’s going to find me a Frenchman, to get a residence card. (Moroccan woman; Lahbabi and Rodríguez 2000, 18)

or this:

Once I was talking with a friend and she asked if I wanted to go to Spain. I knew why, so I said: ‘Ah, do you want to?’ . . . and I don’t know where she met this guy, he got the papers for us . . . the money and we left. . . . This guy went to look for work, where are the best places to work, where there are men. . . . Because one place has a lot of men, another doesn’t. . . . I worked in Logroño a month or so . . . then back to Málaga . . . a month or two, then I came here. . . . He talked first with the boss of this place . . . said he was looking for work for us. (Ukrainian woman in Spain; Agustín 2001)

The men in both stories would be called pimps and traffickers by the cited feminists.

In 2005 this was still mainly a feminist quarrel, so those are the arguments I attempted to answer. I called it Migrants in the mistress’s house in reference to working-class servants in rich people’s homes, where they may become subversive members of the family, and, in the female case, have sexual relationships with some of them that may be coerced but may also be manipulative and self-serving. Full references in the paper itself.

The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex was rather directed at migration scholars, to highlight how they were leaving these migrants aside, as a ‘feminist’ issue.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Share

Tags: , , , ,

Even sex-trafficked brothel workers reject raids and rescues

21 August 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 10 comments | print print

For campaigners like Ashton Kutcher, sex slavery is an easy-to-recognise phenomenon with a single obvious cure, rescue: first by police and then by social workers. And despite rescuers’ avowed respect for personal stories, they never listen to voices that criticise this cure. The poster below was made by migrant sex workers (they call themselves that) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it before but so many people are still unaware of the problems associated with Rescue that I like to re-run it. See for yourself the reasons workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for denouncing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or even celebrities and then think twice about how you will Fix Their Lives so easily.

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on many helpers’ good intentions or the genuine rescue of some individuals. But it shows how rescue agents haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful. The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has drastic consequences for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong. Check the rescue tag to read more, including stories of sex workers resisting arrest and fleeing from rescuers.

During my years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of myriad nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets, clubs and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them yet, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has lots of details. Here’s another view:

Share

Tags: , , , , , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »