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Fallen women, including the one Charles Dickens didn’t save

11 February 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

Two hundred years ago in Europe, women who misbehaved sexually were referred to as fallen from God’s grace. In mid- and late-19th-century paintings, the fallen woman was portrayed in a physically low position: gazing hopelessly up at the sky, kneeling in shame and sometimes being raised up by a kind person, as in this picture by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

A 1949 photo by Art Shay, also called Fallen Woman, shows the persistence of this iconography: the low, twisted, deviant body.

It is interesting to study the history of a phantom: the phantom of Rescue, of the woman who needs to be Saved, when it turns out she doesn’t want saving because she doesn’t consider what awaits her after being saved to be an improvement.

This week is Charles Dickens’s anniversary, reminding me that he was involved in Urania Cottage, a Rescue home for prostitutes run by an upper-class woman, Angela Burdett-Coutts. I didn’t remember that he once tried to save a woman who didn’t want saving, though (like Nicholas Kristof who bought a girl out of a Cambodian brothel who returned not long after). Here are excerpts from the story of a rescue attempt that was successfully averted.

Do what Dickens didn’t: Price of not reading a letter in full

Ben MacIntyre and Rose Wild, 4 February 2012, The Telegraph (India)

London: A campaign by Charles Dickens to “save” Victorian prostitutes was plunged into embarrassment in 1858 when the novelist became embroiled in the case of a “fallen woman” who did not want to be helped up. . .

In February 1858, The Times ran an article by a self-confessed “Unfortunate” who had taken up prostitution. At that time, there were up to 80,000 sex workers in London and numerous social reformers were campaigning to drive prostitutes from the streets. The article was spotted by the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, who had financed Dickens in setting up a refuge for “fallen women” in Shepherd’s Bush.

Dickens wrote to the editor of The Times, John Thadeus Delane, saying that Burdett-Coutts had asked him to find out the name of the woman who had written the article “with the view of doing good to some one” — presumably encouraging her to give up street-walking and take up residence in the refuge. Delane said he would ask the writer if she was prepared to reveal her identity“. . .

The problem, however, was that neither Dickens nor Burdett-Coutts had bothered to read to the end of the second column. Had they done so, they would have discovered that, far from being a repentant sinner, the writer was perfectly happy being a prostitute, and her letter was a denunciation of do-gooders — such as Dickens — who were trying to take away her livelihood.

Far from expressing penitence, the anonymous prostitute accused the reformers of rank hypocrisy. “You the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves … why stand you on your eminence shouting that we should be ashamed of ourselves? What have we to be ashamed of, we who do not know what shame is?”

The writer described how, as the child of drunken parents, she had become a prostitute at the age of 15, and did not regret it. She wrote that she had made a good living, educated herself, supported her family, put her brothers through apprenticeships, always paid her debts and “been charitable to her fellow-creatures”.

When Dickens belatedly realised he was dealing with a prostitute who was not only content with her lot but extremely articulate, he backtracked fast . . .  “Miss Coutts . . .  is immensely staggered and disconcerted . . . and is even troubled by its being seen by the people in her household. Therefore I think the writer had best remain unknown to her…

Note that the baroness invested in Rescue could not even bear to hear about a prostitute writer that didn’t want help and refused to allow  her writing to be seen by inmates in the home. There is a direct here link to a crazy guessing game to get ‘real’ statistics on how many women are sex-trafficked. It is impossible for most people to accept that large numbers of trafficking victims aren’t discoverable because they don’t exist, at least in big numbers. Now they are called trafficked, then they were called fallen – it’s not a big difference. Here’s a shot of a contemporary staging of Verdi’s La Traviata, about another fallen woman. The clichéd posture is still with us.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Gold digging with gold miners: an old tradition

1 February 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

The only objectionable thing in the story below, which describes one of prostitution’s classic traditions, is the editor’s addition of scare quotes around the word work to describe what the women are doing. He or she slipped in the last paragraph, though, and left the punctuation out. Since selling sex to miners in a position to pay well has always been a draw to mobile workers, there is really no ‘news’ in this story at all. I note that no one felt called to claim these women are being trafficked or enslaved.

I particularly appreciate the matter-of-fact statement from one woman, who finds the work filthy but puts up with it as part of a life plan to get ahead. Will someone say that she is trafficked in the sense of being forced by circumstance? If so, do you mean that no other job available to this woman pays enough for her to make such a plan? That is likely, but won’t it be great for her when she does get to do what she wants? I mean, aren’t you glad for her? If she doesn’t think she’s damaging herself by selling sex, why should you?

Prostitution big business in Suriname gold fields

Stabroek News, 31 January 2012

Paramaribo: The commercial sex industry is also benefiting from high gold prices. A field investigation by de Ware Tijd shows that this industry is attractive to both local and foreign women, whose main motivation is the huge amounts that can be earned in a relatively short time.

“No minors are coming, but the ages vary between 20 and even 45. Many Brazilians, Dominicans, Guyanese and French are coming to ‘work’ in the gold fields, as well as Surinamese women”, says one woman active in the gold fields near Brownsweg in the District of Brokopondo. One Guyanese woman says she is paid two grams of gold for twenty minutes and five for an entire evening, and she can sell one gram for SRD 150 in Paramaribo. In a good month, she can earn at least US$ 2,000.

Another woman says her ‘work’ in the gold fields is very lucrative, but adds immediately that she is not proud of what she does. “This work is filthy and I don’t intend to do this for the rest of my life. I want to buy my own equipment to get started in the gold business”.

The women say they are discreet in order to prevent their close relatives, particularly their children, from finding out about their work. There is growing concern about the social disruption in hinterland communities close to gold fields. Village heads in particular have often sounded the alarm, and the issue has even been discussed in Parliament many times. Especially young girls reportedly cannot resist the temptation of fast and easy money. “The women here are doing it for the money”, it is said.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Clean-cut girls: Something must be wrong if they are selling sex

18 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

Jess Stearn began his 1956 Sisters of the Night with the famous question Why do women become prostitutes? During his research in New York to find out, Stearn was introduced to different types of women who sell sex. Actually they were women who used different methods to find clients and varying ways to describe what they were doing, but typecasting was and remains popular with unsubtle investigators.

In the 1950s, prostitutes were considered to be separable women: not born bad but becoming bad through not-yet-understood social processes. The type described in the following excerpt is the B-girl, so called because her job was promoting the sale of alcohol to bar clientele: conversing, flirting, flattering drinkers – anything to make them stay at the bar ordering more drinks. A New York City police inspector wonders how such nice-looking girls could be so – bad.

. . . We picked up two girls in the raid. You should have seen them—a blonde and a brunette. They were knockouts. I’ll bet you never saw two better-looking girls in your life–both about twenty-two, the kind any young fellow would go nuts about. I’ve seen a lot in my forty years in the department, but these kids beat anything yet. You just can’t tell a book by the cover any more. They don’t wear make-up, they stare at you with those wide eyes of theirs, and with their skirts and sweaters and saddle shoes they look as if they had just stepped off a college campus. And do you know what? Some of them have. I had a pair in here the other day and I felt like apologizing to them—they looked so sweet and pure. So I watch the way I talk in front of them, and they talk back to me like prostitutes.

The inspector is shocked that women with a clean-cut appearance should be hanging out in certain bars – perhaps in any bars, if they are not accompanied by a male.

Many of these girls, I had learned myself, had drifted into prostitution from the easy promiscuity of Manhattan’s West Side bars. Touring these honkytonk bars night after night, from eleven oclock, when they begin to crowd up, until three or four in the morning, when they close, I had met the B-girls. Occasionally I was accompanied by an H-man (an investigator from the US Public Health Service), whose job it was to track down carriers of venereal disease. The B-girls (B for bar) converge on Manhattan from all over the nation, but many are native New Yorkers. They boast of their ‘amateur standing’ and prefer servicemen, who usually pay them nothing, to civilians, who are prepared to offer liberal rewards.

This is confusing: The inspector says some B-girls got into prostitution because they were (too) promiscuous, but then he says they prefer servicemen who don’t pay them.

All we can do about those B-girls is keep them moving, and then they find another bar someplace else. A lot of them start at sixteen, and if they don’t make the grade by the time they’re twenty-five they’re out in the streets ready to settle for anybody.

And here the idea is that prostitutes either make it or not, which implies there is a hierarchy they are trying to move up in, kind of in contradiction to the story that they are amateurs. Stearn went out to find B-girls and talk to them:

We don’t take money for ourselves, a teenager told me in a bar near Times Square. I’ve helped out sailors more than they’ve helped me. But if they have money and want to leave it for the rent or a new dress, that’s different. pp 24-25

By the 1990s Lawrence Block could have a nice young woman say (in Eight Million Ways to Die):

I mean, I’m not a hooker. I’m a girlfriend. I don’t get paid. They give me money because I’ve got rent to pay and, you know, I’m a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she’s never going to.

You don’t hear about B-girls in New York anymore, but the term Bar Girl (along with hostess and beer girl) is ubiquitous in Southeast Asia, with the same ambiguity as to whether the job stops with talking or moves on, when the shift is over, to sex work. The clean-cut qualities of bar girls are often mentioned by reporters, as though there were a fundamental contradiction there – as though, after all, it’s a certain type of female that goes into this business – or ought to.

I finished Sisters of the Night and will report on its conclusions forthwith.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

13 January 2012 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 13 comments | print print

The other day, discussing the recommendation that DNA should be taken from men who buy sex, I ended with a question: how can anyone maintain a utopic vision about gender equality that relies on punishing so many people as criminals? That reminded me I had asked the same question in an article published more than ten years ago.

Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its basic ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime? Click for the pdf or keep reading here.

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

Laura Maria Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

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

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

Criminalization of clients

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

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Sisters of the Night: why prostitution research is the way it is

7 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 15 comments | print print

From where we stand now, it seems obvious: people begin selling sex for a variety of reasons, none of them being they were born destined to do it. As I mentioned the other day discussing research on clients, social scientists and the Rescue Industry alike now disbelieve the notion that a prostitute type exists amongst women.

The book Sisters of the Night: The confidential story of Big-City Prostitution, published in 1956, goes some way toward explaining a question I’ve had, to wit: why has there been such a large quantity of research attempting to find out why women sell sex? When I first started reading this material in 1997, as a complete outsider to academic research, I could not understand why book after book and article after article asked the same questions: why did you start selling sex? when? were you abused as a child? and so on.

Sisters of the Night is based on an investigation by Jess Stearn, a New York journalist and author of many books. He was assigned to research not the what of prostitution but the why - in his words.

‘The more I explore,’ I told Chief Magistrate John Murtagh, head of New York’s famed Women’s Court, ‘the more I realize how little I understand these women.’

The Chief Magistrate smiled sympathetically. ‘They call it the Oldest Profession,’ he said drily, ‘and yet nobody really knows what makes these girls tick. The prostitute has never been understand by our courts. Indeed, she is still an enigma to science itself. Because of this lack of scientific knowledge, the degree of moral responsibility is essentially a matter that must be left to the Lord himself.

There were other official indications of the complexities of prostitution. Dorris Clarke, chief probation officer of the Magistrates Courts, who has interviewed more than ten thousand prostitutes, observed with a shrug:  ”’Psychiatry has been a help, but six different psychiatrists, handling the same case, may still come up with six different answers.’

From our present perspective, two things stand out: 1) the assumption that selling sex means having a terrible life for all women who do it and 2) a confidence that psychology can explain what’s going on – ie, why women start to do it. Stearn continues:

. . . prostitution is one of the damning paradoxes of our time. It is a social problem which cannot be understood apart from other social problems – a postwar deterioration of morality, the alarming increase of dope addiction among teenagers, political corruption and the double standard which makes it a crime for a women to prostitute herself, where her partner in prostitution goes scot-free.

Which seems more or less contemporary: it can’t be extracted from socioeconomic issues. And note in 1956 he already mentions the asymmetrical nature of punishment. Jumping a few lines, though, Stearn says:

The move to control prostitution legally has been losing ground. . . Long experience has shown that legalization is no remedy. The International Venereal Disease Congress, which voted overwhelmingly thirty years ago for legalized prostitution, recently voted just as overwhelmingly against it. It was no safeguard, the group found, against VD, for the simple reason that five minutes after she was examined a girl might be infected again. And the licensing of brothels, the American Social Hygiene Association discovered, makes it easier for girls to begin their careers and forms a convenient center of operations for racketeers and dope pushers. No, legalization was not the answer, and neither were jails, which became practically schools for prostitutes, where young offenders learned about perversion and dope and became further indoctrinated in the tricks of the trade.

Which leaves Stearn where? Somehow he manages to ignore his socioeconomic links a page later when he says:

It became obvious to me . . .that only a real understanding of these women, of their relationships from childhood, and of their outlook on society and on life in general could lead us to a solution. Other scourges of Biblical times have been extirpated by modern science – why not prostitution? But first must come understanding of the girl and her problem.

Back to psychology, then – in the 50s considered more scientific than it is today. Find out which experiences cause which perverse behaviours and you know who becomes a prostitute. Stearn now lists some of the apparent conundrums:

  • What makes a teenage girl say sullenly to a probattion officer who is trying to help her: ‘It’s my body. Why can’t I do with it what I want?’
  • Or why does another observe slyly: ‘If it weren’t for us, no woman would be safe on the streets. We’re the great outlet.’
  • Why does a girl, able to shift for herself, become attached to a procurer, who mistreats her and takes her money?
  • And why does still another pin on the wall of her cell a portrait of a muscled brute in loincloth, a whip in one hand, and kneeling behind him in chains a nude girl, arms raised in adoration?
  • And why does a girl, while bitterly justifying her own prostitution, say with a gleam of hate in her eyes: ‘I’d kill the man who’d make a prostitute of my sister.’
  • Or why does a pretty teenager, given  separate suite by doting parents, convert her flat into a brothel and the, impenitently, view it all as an ironic joke on her parents?
  • Why did Anna Swift, one of the most notorious of madams, boast of her virginity and savagely declare she was seeking revenge?
  • And why does a former prostitute, comfortable married for years, revert to her old trade at the first crisis in her marriage?

Wouldn’t you think he’d realise himself that there isn’t going to be a single determining cause for such a wealth of situations and behaviours? Well, maybe he did realise it perfectly well, but asking the question was his assignment: the why of prostitution. I now turn back to the preface by Peter Terranova, a police inspector in charge of the Narcotics Squad at the time:

Secrecy has a queer way of adding glamor and mystery to a subject. Rip away the Hypocrites’ Curtain surrounding prostitution and the whole community will finally recognize that it’s just another social evil which may be tackled with intelligence and perhaps cut down, if not completely eliminated.

In the 50s possibly only a vice cop would have used the term social evil unselfconsciously. What can be seen here clearly is the justification for the kind of research that has predominated on the subject of commercial sex for all these decades: the focus on why women sell. The idea is find the reason(s) and eradicate them, despite everyone’s realisation that the reasons are going to turn out to be widely diverging, if not downright contradictory. Still, the idea of the bad girl is very much still alive here, with the badness (or evil) seen to be a matter of character, something that psychology can elucidate. For the psychologists amongst my readers, I am not saying that psychological theories are useless, or that Stockholm Syndrome never exists, or brainwashing, or denial, to explain individual cases. As in the past, my critique goes to the wholesale explaining of hundreds of thousands of people as suffering from these syndromes, by default.

So far no interest has been shown in men who sell sex, despite equally well-known scenes like Los Angeles’s cruising as described by John Rechy. I will advise on this and other matters as I advance in the book.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Men who buy sex: a nasty group whose DNA should be on file

4 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 16 comments | print print

A few months ago, Melissa Farley published a story in Newsweek with a lot of dire comments about men who buy sex as the cause of prostitution and violence towards sex workers. The research paper behind that story is more scientific and less irresponsible than her previous work, thank goodness. I don’t believe there is some absolute real scientific vision we can bring to social research, but there are better and worse attempts, and this one is better. For one thing, it used the usually omitted mechanism of the control group, here comparing men who buy sex (her pathologised group) with men who don’t buy sex (belonging to the same demographic).

Farley does not like the oft-heard notion that such large numbers of men buy sex at some point in their life it becomes almost normal, since that might justify fatalistically accepting commercial sex as a timeless aspect of life impossible to eradicate. The research here concludes that men who buy sex are different from men who don’t, associated, for one thing, with other criminal activities. This leads Farley to recommend treating them more like criminals – specifically, like sex offenders. In Creating Monsters I warned that, the way things are going in the End Demand movement, clients could be conceptualised as a new category of sex offender, to be placed on the infamous registers that make living a conventional life nearly impossible for many. It turns out a few US states had already started thinking this way, and so had Farley.

She claims that non-sex-buying men are better men, based on their responses to her questions. But there is something not right in her logic, in how the supposed control group is conceived, so that she makes a point of relating what the non-buyers (the control) think about the buyers.

We asked both groups of men what words they would use to describe sex buyers. All (100%) of the sex buyers described themselves in terms of dominance (player, stud, powerful). There were differences in the descriptors they used, with more non-sex buyers labeling buyers as losers, unethical, or desperate. Fewer non-sex buyers labeled buyers as normal or as studs/players/powerful than did sex buyers (Table 12).

I am not sure why the opinions of one group of men about the other should have any bearing on the research, by the way, but, if it does, then the research needs to be balanced and tell us what the buyers said about the non-buyers. Right? I mean, maybe the buyers would say the non-buyers are losers or scaredy-cats. But the idea of control groups is not to ask one to comment on the other, and it seems to me that this asymmetry will have influenced how people responded and what the results appear to show. She doesn’t supply her questionnaire, so checking isn’t possible.

Another problem with interview technology is that the non-buyers might say nicer things about women, but we don’t know how they actually behave. Just as saying ugly things about women is disagreeable but does not in itself prove that those speaking are going to do anything bad.

Farley, however, aims to promote the idea that there is a particular type of man who buys sex, a sexist-pig type. So if we are dealing with a small, nasty group, it should be easier to wipe out prostitution. The trouble is this very view began to be debunked not so long ago in papers like The Sex Exploiter, which suggest instead that men buy sex opportunistically: not necessarily seeking out underage sex partners, for example, but rather not bothering to investigate their age. This means anyone can become a sex buyer, the way anyone can become a sex seller, given the right circumstances. And, by the way, not pathologising prostitutes as a special group (innately prone to vice) is considered everywhere an advance in our understanding of human behaviour, so why would we not do the same for clients?

In addition to placing clients on sex-offender lists, the report recommends mandatory DNA testing:

Given the criminal history of sex buyers documented in this research, one would anticipate that other criminal activity including sexual violence might occur in the future. Obtaining DNA samples from arrested johns may be useful to consider matches with evidence obtained in past and future crimes. DNA samples would be predicted to serve as a deterrent to buying sex since most people who commit crimes do not want their DNA taken.

They might do something bad later as justification for taking their DNA? Is this kind of policing really part of a utopic plan for equality of the sexes? Her Table 20. List of Esteemed Supporters for Taking DNA Samples From Arrested Sex Buyers does not help. Here we have the now well-known alliance of some feminists with Law and Order, or Discipline and Punishment, if you will.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex on Sunday: Call Girls, good and bad

1 January 2012 in sex work, sundaysex by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and savvy sex workers. Here are some  images and a video version of Butterfield 8 that pretends the protagonist was just a slut. The imagery dates from recent enough times, when sexual liberation was a term masking gender inequality and sexism. A typical device was to grant bad women agency - a ruse we now see through but in some ways preferable to current victim imagery. This is interesting if one likes thinking about all aspects of culture change in reference to commercial sex, not just politicians’ and feminists’ statements (which provide only a narrow understanding of what’s going on).

Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria in Butterfield 8

In John O’Hara’s original novel of Butterfield 8, there was no doubt that Gloria was a call girl.

In Yugoslavia they were not confused about the film, either – note the explanatory subtitle.

Many of these images come from Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books. Feliz año nuevo.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Women Doing Things: Not waiting to be saved

29 December 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 12 comments | print print

A few years ago I was feeling discouraged by the volume of public discourse representing migrant women and poorer women and prostitutes and sex workers and a lot of other women as overwhelmingly passive, exploited and prone to victimhood, especially sexually. In that post, I lamented the morbid interest in showing women and children as abused and helpless, leaving aside the abundance of images of powerful politician-women and celebrities since I’m talking about regular folk. I feel pretty much the same three years later, so here is an updated group of Women Doing Things to celebrate the end of the year. Drinking Woman comes first, given the season.

Maquiladora women

Rice paddy woman

Aircraft industry women

Seducing woman

Heavy equipment driving woman

Migrating woman

Protesting women

Doctoring woman

Street-trading women

Reading woman

Rock-splitting woman

Writing woman

Performing woman

Inspiring woman

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Alternate Ethics: Why it is okay to lie to researchers, as a sex worker, drug user or anybody else

18 December 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 9 comments | print print

Furry Girl recently ran a quote from a piece I wrote some years ago, suggesting that it can be perfectly ethical for sex workers, drug users or anyone else to avoid answering researchers’ questions or lie to them, if participating in the research seems necessary for some reason. Those worried about traffickers and pimps coercing women to sell sex might like to know that a lot of other coercion goes on, not least from organisations that make people feel they should cooperate when institutional or individual researchers come round asking questions. Research is not holy, there are interests involved, and, incidentally, it doesn’t make things automatically all right if the researcher says she or he is a sex worker.

Alternate Ethics, or: Telling Lies to Researchers (click here for the pdf or keep reading below)

Laura Maria Agustín, Research for Sex Work, June 2004, 6-7.

On the subject of ethics in sex work research, we usually think of the insensitivity and careerism of researchers whose interest is in obtaining information they will take credit for. I want to point to another problematic angle: the issue of whether those being researched are honest with researchers. Why, after all, should people who are being treated as objects of curiosity tell the truth?

We are all so surrounded by research projects that they seem to be a natural part of life, but what is research for? While often presented as pure advancement of knowledge, research is often integral to people’s jobs, whether they work in government, NGOs or universities, and the audience for whatever they find out is first and foremost whoever paid for the research.

Institutional research projects are required to explain the investigator’s ethical responsibility to the people researched. But the assumption is that once research begins, researchees will cooperate, freely telling researchers what they want to know. Since this side of the research relationship has not usually been given any choice about participating, it has also not been required to agree to an ethical standard of behaviour. Since no universal ethics exists, it is no criticism to say that research subjects simply may not tell (all) the truth to researchers.

Sad stories, omissions and outright lies

When a person working in an ‘irregular’ trade is approached by a professional-looking person from the straight world, and is not a paying customer, he or she is naturally viewed with suspicion. In the worst case, the visitor may be working for the police; in the best case, be someone giving out free condoms or needles. Of course, researchers have to find a way to ‘gain access’ to their subjects, making friends with the head of an NGO or a bar or convincing a doctor of their good intentions, and thus may be introduced as an ‘ally’. This goes for those conducting any kind of research using any kind of methodology. But even if the person comes with a good introduction, how does it feel to have him or her move toward you with the intention of asking personal questions? In most cultures, such a situation does not occur naturally. A Nigerian sex worker in a Spanish park once commented on outsiders asking questions:

I don’t understand what they’re doing, they don’t have anything to offer. The others that come are doctors, they give us medicine, exams. But these want to talk, and I don’t have any reason to talk to them.

It has long been recognised that people who are considered ‘victims’ or ‘deviants’ are likely to tell members of the mainstream what they believe they want to hear. Given that so much research with sex workers has focused on their personal motivations (wanting to know why they got into sex work, which is assumed to be bad), it’s not surprising that many make their present circumstances appear to be the fatal or desperate result of a past event. After all, if we were forced to be what we are now, we cannot be blamed for it. One Dominican woman told me:

All those social worker types feel sorry for me. They don’t want to hear that I prefer to do this work, so I tell them I have no choice. They want to hear that I was forced to do this, so that’s what I tell them. Anyway, I was, because my family was poor.

Ethics or self-protection? There are other reasons to tell sad stories. When behind the research project sex workers know that a certain health-care service may be at stake, or that only if they can present convincingly as victims will they get help, it is not surprising if they tell stories that serve their own interests. Or, in the case of research for health promotion, workers may not want to talk about their own failures to use condoms or their own getting drunk—who does, after all? Or, in the case of research on ‘trafficking’, sex workers may not want to admit they thought boyfriends really cared about them, when it turned out they were only using them, or admit they paid people to concoct false travel documents for them. It really doesn’t matter whether their answers will be treated ‘confidentially’, because they simply may not want to talk about such intimate matters. To put it another way, keeping secrets may help sex workers gain independence or control over projects to help them. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ovanlig panel om prostitution i Stockholm

17 December 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Livesändningar från NMT Sverige

Här livesänds den nationella konferensen om prostitution och människohandel för sexuella ändamål, som pågått på Citykonferensen i Stockholm, den 14 december 2011, 15.15 – 16.30.

Frivilligt ell er ej? Paneldebatt

  • Jenny Westerstrand, forskare vid Juridiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet
  • Claes Borgström, advokat och f.d. Jämo
  • Lisen Lindström, samtalsbehandlare vid Prostitutionsenheten i Stockholm
  • Lise Tamm, Vice chefsåklagare, Internationella åklagarkammaren Stockholm
  • Hanna Wagenius, förbundsordförande Centerpartiets ungdomsförbund
  • Jonas Jonsson, handläggare hiv och hälsa samt utbildare, RFSL
  • Petra Östergren, forskare och författare

    • OCH en Rose Alliance medlem pratate två gånger från publiken.

    Det behövs lite talamod i början men då blir debatten ganska intressant.

    –Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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