Category Archives: trafficking

smuggling refers to moving people without official permission across borders; trafficking is an over-used term that should mean abusive smuggling of undocumented migrants

Does banning prostitution make women safer? The perils of interviews

Months ago I was interviewed by NewScientist, a mainstream UK magazine. I don’t accept all requests for interviews so did a little research, finding the publication reaches an audience probably different from whatever I usually reach. I asked what kind of questions the interviewer wanted to ask and found them well-informed and interesting. The initial interview, by phone, took more than an hour and was fine.

After some delay I was sent a first draft that required a lot of my time to correct and included an editor’s requests for data (How many prostitutes are there in the UK? What proportion work in the street? What is the correct figure for victims of trafficking?) I had explained during the interview why data on undocumented migrants and sex workers where so many aspects of prostitution are illegal cannot exist except in very partial bits, but I took time to explain again. There was then a back-and-forth in which I resisted the number-trap but tried to provide solutions we could all live with. At that time, the piece was 800 words, already drastically less than the interview transcript’s 9070. Months after the interview had taken place, I received a version to be published shortly. At 300 words it bore no resemblance to the original interview. Statements I had made had been culled from all over the article and then cobbled together in a new order that fit questions I had never exactly been asked (including the title question). I corrected a couple of points and let the thing go, at that point only hoping to prevent any egregious errors getting out. That was 8 July, and after the awful events of the 11th I forgot to write about it here.

I do think the title question is a smart way to interest readers new to the whole dense, messy field, and Banning is a much more honest word to use than Abolishing.

Does banning prostitution make women safer?

08 July 2013, by Clare Wilson, NewScientist issue 2924 (also in print)

Most of what we think we know about sex trafficking is wrong, says Laura Agustín, who has spent 20 years investigating the sex industry

There is a proposal in the UK to clamp down on prostitution by criminalising the purchase of sex. Why do you object?
Millions of people around the world make a living selling sex, for many different reasons. What are they expected to do? This would take away their livelihoods. Selling sex may be their preference out of a limited range of options. In the UK, migrants may have paid thousands of pounds to get here. This debt has to be paid off somehow, whether it is by working in the back of a restaurant or selling sex. Migrants who sell sex can pay off the debt much faster.

But prostitution is dangerous, especially for those who work on the street…
Women who work on the street are a small proportion of all the people who sell sex. Many more work through escort agencies, brothels or independently from home. It is disrespectful to treat them all like victims who have been duped into what they are doing. In the UK, there are thousands of articulate sex workers who say, “Leave me alone, I did know what I was getting into and I’m okay doing it.”

Isn’t the “happy hooker” a myth? Doesn’t research show it is a miserable existence?
Given the millions of people selling sex in the world, generalisations are impossible. Much research has been done at medical clinics or shelters for victims. If you go to a trauma centre, you meet traumatised people. When people tell me they have never met anyone who wanted to be selling sex, I ask where they did their research.

Why do you think anti-prostitution laws can make life more dangerous for sex workers?
If you think what sex workers do is dangerous, why insist they do it alone? It is legal in the UK for individuals to sell sex, but they may not work with companions or employ security guards. Brothels are illegal. If you prohibit businesses but people run them anyway – which they do – then workers must please bosses no matter what they ask. That is why this is a labour issue. Also, targeting kerb-crawlers makes things more dangerous since sex workers may have to jump in cars without getting a good sense of the driver.

What about trafficking of unwilling victims?
The numbers of trafficking victims reproduced by the media have no basis in fact. There is no way to count undocumented people working in underground economies. Investigations showed that one big UK police operation failed to find any traffickers who had forced people into prostitution. Most migrants who sell sex know a good deal about what they are getting into.

If there is no proof it is common, why is there widespread belief in sex-slave trafficking?
Why do moral panics take off? Focusing on trafficking gives governments excuses to keep borders closed. Perhaps it is easier to campaign moralistically against prostitution than to deal with the real problems: dysfunctional migration and labour policies that keep large numbers of people in precarious situations.

This article appeared in print under the headline “One minute with… Laura Agustín”

Profile
Laura Agustín studies gender, migration and trafficking. She is the author of Sex at the Margins (Zed Books, 2007) and blogs as The Naked Anthropologist.

The initial reactions I saw from NewScientist readers were angry: this was not ‘science’ and should not be in the magazine at all. One commenter said I was an idiot since he knew ‘missonaries in Sri Lanka’ who had rescued thousands of prostitutes. I stopped looking at the comments. The piece was picked up by some other sites, but I did not keep track.

It is hard for me to recognise myself at all in the piece, and it’s a shame the editor decided finally to shorten it so drastically. But many have told me that to get even this much of the non-mainstream story into a mainstream magazine is significant. So if you know anyone who usually cannot begin to think about these topics, send them this brief primer – maybe they will read it.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Judge dismisses academic claim to sex-trafficking expertise

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterward.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

In the world of anti-prostitution campaigning, the Queen’s upside-down thinking is commonplace.
– Sentence first – Verdict afterward
– Verdict first – Skip the evidence
– Sentence first in case anyone is guilty, which we cannot prove but that does not mean they didn’t Do It.
Self-defined experts abound who profess to know everything important about prostitution and sex trafficking, especially who should be shamed and imprisoned.

Admirers will recall Judge Susan Himel’s assessment of expert witnesses at 2009 trial of Bedford v Canada.

I was struck by the fact that many of those proffered as experts to provide international evidence to this court had entered the realm of advocacy and had given evidence in a manner that was designed to persuade rather than assist the court.

Other details on why Judge Himel dismissed the ‘evidence’ of Melissa Farley, Janice Raymond and Richard Poulin can be read here.

In December 2011, Judge D F Baltman of the Ontario Superior Court refused to allow one expert witness to give testimony in sex-trafficking case R v McPherson. The Crown had requested that Benjamin Perrin, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, be allowed to testify as an expert. Here is Baltman’s decision.

HELD: Application dismissed. The Crown failed to establish the necessity of the proposed evidence. The proposed evidence was not unique or difficult for a jury to understand. The themes and dynamics associated with the world of prostitution, living off the avails thereof, and human trafficking were common human experiences. Juries did not need experts to understand them. Pimping had been a longstanding offence under the Criminal Code and juries had been deciding such cases for decades without the assistance of expert evidence or the assertion that it was required. Even if the proposed evidence satisfied all criteria for admission, it should be excluded because its probative value was outweighed by the ensuing prejudice. Much of the professor’s observations were one sided and second hand. The professor was career advocate, and did not provide the appearance of objectivity. The proposed evidence had the obvious potential, in placing the accused in the framework suggested by the professor, of generating moral disgust and anger within the jury, which might in turn result in considerable moral prejudice to the complainant.

My heart is warmed and some faith restored by such rational thinking. The perils of expert-witnessing are routinely discussed in law-and-order television shows in which experts brought by prosecution and defence simply contradict each other. But I am interested in the proliferation of people, with academic qualifications or not, who claim expertise gives them the right to speak in grand universal terms on subjects they observe and abhor but have not lived themselves. Even worse, they claim to be able to speak for those others, implying that the people in question are not able to. When sexworkers speak for themselves, moral entrepreneurs often dismiss them, engaging in the disqualification I addressed recently. This mechanism of disqualifying people’s own words offends me as much as anything else in anti-prostitution/anti-trafficking campaigns.

For those interested in Judge Baltman’s decision here are some excerpts from background provided.

6 Professor Perrin has no expertise or formal training in the fields of criminology, psychology or sociology. However, he has involved himself in the issue of human trafficking since 2000, in a number of capacities. This includes volunteer work with a charitable organization that assists victims and advocates to improve Canada’s response to human trafficking; work as a senior policy advisor to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration where he counselled on human trafficking issues; and the research he has conducted on this topic as a faculty member at UBC. His primary output in that regard is his published book entitled “Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking”, which he describes as an “empirical study” on the nature and extent of Canada’s involvement in the area.

7 The findings from his study have been presented at conferences and published in various journals. Neither that study nor any of his publications on domestic sex trafficking have been peer reviewed before publication.

9 Professor Perrin openly advocates a more aggressive approach to the prosecution and sentencing of those who live off the avails of prostitution, and takes a very sharp view of those who think otherwise; in his recent article, published in the Globe and Mail, he stated that Himel J.’s decision declaring federal prostitution laws unconstitutional “is a striking example of judicial activism run amok.”

11 The Crown seeks to qualify Professor Perrin as an expert in human trafficking, so as to permit him to testify on the following areas:
(i) Patterns of interaction between traffickers and their prey; and
(ii) Methods of recruitment and retention used by traffickers against their victims;
In order to assess the necessity of the proposed evidence, one must first discern the trial issues upon which the evidence will bear. Based on the submissions from the Crown, these are:
(a) Methods used by traffickers to identify and recruit young women to work for them;
(b) Methods used by traffickers to control their young women and ensure their compliance; and
(c) The dynamics and conditions of sex trafficking which prevent the young women from leaving the relationship.

19 The Crown notes that the credibility of the complainants will come under sharp scrutiny, and in particular their reluctance to leave the relationship with the Respondent despite the alleged abuse. For the jury to properly understand this dynamic, argues the Crown, Professor Perrin should be permitted to explain the methodologies used by sex traffickers, and how those methodologies would have prevented the complainants from leaving the relationship.

20 Based on Professor Perrin’s report, those methodologies and his conclusions about them can be summarized as follows:
A. Sex traffickers seek out women who are young and vulnerable; many of the women are poor, prone to substance abuse, and either homeless or coming from a dysfunctional home;
B. Traffickers prey on the desire of these young women for love, money, shelter, and acceptance;
C. Traffickers may use threats, violence, the imposition of rules, economic control, drugs, guilt, manipulation or social isolation to lower the women’s self esteem and cause them to remain dependent upon their traffickers;
D. Women who are subjected to this treatment may not leave the relationship when given the chance because they fear reprisals or violence; or because they suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, low self esteem, anxiety, or depression, or because they lack the economic resources to leave; or because they may blame themselves for their treatment or see no better alternatives.

22 In my view, the proposed evidence is not unique or difficult for a jury to understand, for several reasons. First, although the subject matter of this case – prostitution, living off the avails thereof, and human trafficking – may not be personally familiar to the jury, it is clear from Professor Perrin’s report that the themes and dynamics associated with this world are common human experiences . The tendency of men to prey on young women who are vulnerable or needy; the use of violence by men against women in a domestic relationship; and the reasons why many women cannot easily extricate themselves from abusive relationships are not complicated technical issues but themes which juries and judges encounter on a daily basis in Canadian courts. In Professor Perrin’s own words, “Poverty, the desire for love, and the desire for money, in that order, are the key vulnerabilities that permit domestic sex traffickers to recruit and control victims,” These motivations are not rare, and juries do not need experts to understand them.

23 Second, it is anticipated in this case that each complainant will testify about her treatment during her relationship with the Respondent. This will include how they met, how he persuaded her to enter the sex trade, and why she stayed in it as long as she did. There is no suggestion that any of the women are intellectually or emotionally unable to articulate their experience. Each complainant provides an explanation for why she stayed in the relationship. The explanations are based on common motivations: the belief that the Respondent loved her; fear of reprisals; and not having the means to leave. Again, these are all basic human emotions that a jury can understand.

31 Further, Professor Perrin is a career advocate, and does not provide the appearance of objectivity. While his efforts to end human trafficking and raise consciousness about this issue are doubtless laudable, his professional life is anchored in his role as advocate for the victims of sex trafficking and lobbyist for policy change in government. He has publicly stated that in his view sex work should not be decriminalized. His testimony would not be that of an objective academic but rather a dedicated lobbyist. Even if, as the Crown proposes, his evidence could be edited to exclude his personal opinions, it will nonetheless be guided by his highly prosecutorial perspective.

32 Moreover, and as already noted, the evidence does not add much to what jurors already know about human behaviour. As Professor Perrin is not a psychologist and has minimal if any contact with women directly involved in the sex trade, he is no more qualified than the average person to explain the psychology which may lead them to remain in abusive relationships.

33 On the other side of the coin, considerable prejudice could result from this testimony. Expert evidence about the means or methods that other sex traffickers use to lure young women into slave labour in the sex trade, and the force used to prevent them from leaving, may well cast the Respondent as part of an epidemic of human trafficking hidden in the underbelly of Canadian society. The Respondent will then need to diffuse not only with the allegations of the individual complainants, but also the acts of all other sex traffickers described by Professor Perrin in his research.

34 The idea of sexual victimization of young people is understandably repellent to many people; the proposed evidence has the obvious potential, in placing the Respondent in the framework suggested by Professor Perrin, of generating moral disgust and anger within the jury, which may in turn result in considerable moral prejudice to the complainant.

35 That sex trafficking is a nasty business is not in question. But the time to factor that in is on sentencing, should there be a conviction. The sordidness of that world should not, on its own, be a reason for the jury to hear all of its Ills at the same time that it is deciding whether the Respondent committed a crime in the first place.

38 For those reasons I dismissed the application.

D.F. BALTMAN J.

A friend passed me this document; I cannot find it online. If you want the whole thing, consult a legal library/database.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Cry with trafficked women: Colonial prurience and 3-star hotels

I’ve been ill a great deal this year and for the past month bowed down by a death, but the imminence of August cranked me up sufficiently to vent my now annual disgust at tours from the US that take well-paying travellers to gawk at and pity poorer people in Other Countries (who always smile in the photos taken, of course). If there is anything I hate it’s this. In 2011 I wrote Have fun, take a tour to meet victims of sex trafficking, learn to be a saviour, illustrating it with the egregious Kristof, who has not a jot of shame about looking like a Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider. Given the sexual aspect, the word prurience came to mind: socially-sanctioned permission to be a voyeur, to go to bars abroad you wouldn’t set foot in at home as part of a do-gooding ‘social justice’ trip. To my mind, this is sex tourism.

This year’s tour to Thailand Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking is aimed at aspiring individuals. What might they mean by that? And why do they call this a delegation to end trafficking rather than, if not pure tourism, a first step towards understanding trafficking? The pretension is obviously meant to provide something to add to CVs, the way internships in impressive-sounding organisations do, though at least those last some months, whereas this tour takes a week (5 -12 August). Look at the rhetoric:

Global Exchange Reality Tours is facilitating this delegation to Thailand geared specifically to confronting the realities of the global trade in human beings. Participants will receive a comprehensive education in the mechanics of human trafficking, as well an understanding of its underlying causes. Participants will meet with those who have been freed from slavery and learn what it means to rebuild one’s life after having been a victim of trafficking, and will also engage directly with groups and individuals on the frontlines of the struggle to expose and ultimately end the trade in human lives.

This is B-movie-type public-relations prose: facilitating – delegation – geared – confronting – realities – global trade – human beings – comprehensive education – mechanics – human trafficking – participants – comprehensive education – mechanics – underlying causes – freed from slavery – rebuild one’s life – frontlines of the struggle – expose – end the trade – human lives. Nothing concrete, nothing real.

For those who aren’t clear as to why I call this colonialism, note the clear differentiation between Subject (tourist) and Object (exotic other). I believe this is the first time they claim tourists will talk with people who have been freed from slavery – an obvious pitch to the cheapest of sentiments. I am appalled that Global Exchange maintains any credibility. Last year I wrote the following in Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk, because online sales of folkloric and supposedly authentic third-worldish objects is how GE started:

Gift-buying and helping projects wrapped together: One can see how the founders leapt to the idea of taking people on tours. Global Exchange says We are an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Easily said. A list of current tours includes Caring for Cuba’s Cats and New Journey of a Lifetime to India with Vandana Shiva. Sound harmless?

I had doubts back then and still do, but those in favour argue the tours are a way for folks who know something is wrong with what they read in the media to see the truth. That’s in theory; the question is how easy is it to provide the truth with anything called a tour? Who decides where to go, what the focus of tours will be and which natives will provide entertainment? Is the idea that all middle-class people have to do is arrive in a poor country and set their eyes upon poverty and suffering in order to experience enlightenment? It’s a short jump from that lack of politics to becoming an Expert who knows What To Do about other people’s lives. Imperialist projects to interfere follow quickly.

Although individual tourists may learn good things from conscientious tour guides, a tour is a holiday, a vacation, whether you set out to see the temples of Bangkok or the bargirls or the trafficking victims. You take a tour for your own benefit and pleasure, even if your pleasure consists in feeling angry and sorry and guilty about what your own government does to people in poorer countries. You go to look at exotic others, and you can’t help drawing conclusions about whole cultures based on what you see – just as tourists and business travellers do. If you happen to talk with someone not on the tour agenda – on a bus, in a bar – then you probably feel chuffed that you saw real people and experienced authentic culture. This is all relatively harmless unless you happen to add this experience to your CV, claiming temples, bar girls or sex trafficking are subjects you are expert in.

This year they provide an itinerary, which includes:

In the morning drive to Chiang Mai: Check into Guesthouse
Visit local project
At night visit nightclubs and bars to observe night activities

It’s been made clear to me that ordinary people in the US have no understanding of what colonialism means and how they themselves perpetuate it. That needs work. Perhaps having broken the spell of not writing I’ll begin again now, even if it is August.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex at the Margins: The book that named the Rescue Industry

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry was published by Zed Books in London in 2007 and is distributed in the US through Palgrave Macmillan. I blog often about issues covered in the book, and many of my published articles are available on this website, but to get the full picture, to see how the different topics join up, you need to read the book. As I said recently in Dear Students of Sex Work and Trafficking, my ideas can’t easily be boiled down to bullet points or a FAQ.

Although the book sells steadily despite getting no real promotion and is on many university reading lists, you are unlikely to find it in bookstores. But it is easily available to buy online in several formats:

  • Sex at the Margins as a hardback and paperback on Amazon.
  • Sex at the Margins at Audible.com, where you can listen to a sample. The whole book occupies 6 hours and 45 minutes.
  • Sex at the Margins on the Kindle.
  • Sex at the Margins on the Nook.
  • Sex at the Margins on the Kobo.

Audible Editor-at-Large Susie Bright entitled her announcement

The Rescue Industry is Built on Migrant Sex Workers’ Backs:
Laura Agustín’s Rip Roaring Exposé – by Susie Bright

Laura Agustín has almost singlehandedly changed the international debate about the definition and exploitation of the “sex trafficking” world as it is manipulated and exploited by NGOs, the Rescue Industry and major political players.

The corruption and dissembling that is going in the name of “saving victims” is truly shocking, and that’s why Sex at the Margins has been on every feminist, public policy, and migrant rights desk since its first appearance.

“This groundbreaking book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work; that migrants who sell sex are passive victims; and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.”

The fact that Agustín is an international multi-lingual genius [ Susie a bit over the top here], who can appear in Sweden or Italy or Nairobi at a moment’s notice to speak truth to power, has turned the world on its ear when the usual liars come out to press their sanctimonious case on “fallen women.” She will not suffer fools gladly and she WILL demand evidence.  (Check out her debate with Mira Sorvino at the UN!)

Whatever Laura does next, Margins will remain as the classic that started the fireworks. As far as I’m concerned, this book is the vanguard of feminism and the bleeding edge of migration consciousness.

You can of course also order it in any bookstore.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Dear Students of Sex Work and Trafficking

I receive ever more messages from students doing advanced degrees. Almost invariably they request that I answer their personal questions – usually fundamental, 101-level questions I have written about many times and that one could probably find the answer to by googling (including my name if the question is what would I say). The messages sent me also tell where writers have been on my website before arriving at the contact form, and most often they haven’t been anywhere at all.

I used to reply by pointing them to the various kinds of resources on my website:

But I have grown tired of sending such obvious messages; this website is clear and easy to navigate. Someone suggested I write a FAQ, and I was once asked for a list of bullet points summarising my knowledge. I will never provide either of those. Not on principle, no, but because pretty much the whole thrust of what I do is refuse to reduce complex questions to easy summaries or snappy slogans. What would bullet points say, anyway?

  • The average age of entry into prostitution is not 13.
  • There are not 30 million slaves in the world.
  • Some people like selling sex, some dislike it and some don’t mind much.
  • Poorer people are also capable of deciding what to do with their own lives.

You see? Ridiculous. I’ve heard numerous theories about what this need for spoon-feeding means: the Internet makes it too easy to write and ask, these are elitist kids with a huge sense of entitlement, people think it’s part of an academic’s job to help all students, reading is dead, helicopter-parenting teaches students to expect continual mentoring, people think women are born to serve, kids are just arrogant or impolite, it’s a type of intellectual exploitation or plagiarism, they think answering questions is part of every activist’s job. Since I’m not an academic and work freelance, I’m specially bothered when it’s assumed I should take time to do unpaid work on their behalf (for example, and I’m not kidding, act as their supervisor during their phd).

Suggestions of how to handle these queries include delete instantly, send a standard reply, give a price for the consultation. Here is the delightful form-letter author Robert Heinlein sent out 35 years ago. Like Heinlein, I do engage with people who show they have been reading me, who express gratitude and who offer an interesting insight – even one in question-form. In an attempt to fend off the usual ‘Talk with me about trafficking’ messages, I placed this notice for contacting me on this website:

Laura Agustín regrets that she cannot help students with papers or theses or act as a sounding-board for ideas and doubts, no matter how interesting they may be. If your enquiry relates to migration, labour markets, trafficking or sex work then use this website and you’ll find answers.

That was before I went to bed; when I awoke and opened my mail the next day alas, there was a fresh message someone had just written directly underneath the disclaimer.

l am a graduate student at… I am studying trafficking and the sex industry. I realize you are busy, but would you answer my questions about sex work? I could really use some help in making sense of it.

Conclusion? Some people don’t read. This would be banal except that they are supposed to be reading for a living, as (post)graduate students, teaching assistants, would-be professors. I suppose a lot of them have no sense of vocation but hope doing a degree will facilitate getting a good job (. . . ). The contradiction here is that if I do send an answer they have to read it. Perhaps they are more willing to if they have been spoon-fed.

Anyway I’ve decided: I won’t worry about and will now delete questions of this kind. Thanks to all others, including students, who write to me with interesting tit-bits, suggestions, encouragement and even the occasional job. I love getting mail.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Chink in the Evangelical wall: Sex trafficking, colonialism and Christian ethics

In Are Evangelicals Monopolizing, Misleading US Anti-Trafficking Efforts? Yvonne Zimmerman, author of Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, is asked if US anti-trafficking crusades could be called colonialist. She replies, ‘It’s an argument waiting to be made’. Since I’ve been making it for ten years, I had to write to her. It’s certainly true that the critique of colonialism is not often heard, despite the term Rescue Industry‘s spread.

Evangelical bloggers did not like hearing the word. John Mark Reynolds reacted scathingly in Surprise! Evangelical Efforts Against Sex-Trafficking are ‘Colonialist’! followed by Derek Rishmawy in Sex-Trafficking, Evangelical ‘Colonialism’ and the Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. He gets prize for the most ignorant sarcastic crack: If that’s ‘colonialism’, then it’s the holy colonialism of God at work through his people. Welcome to the White Man’s Burden, shamelessly justified all over again, where the idea of colonialism is treated like a joke – or ‘joke’.

To make things worse, Reynolds used a flagrantly racist image to bias his own piece, showing a dark-skinned and/or dirty man handling an innocent white child. The shot is one of several someone created for campaigning purposes – whether they understood the inherent racism I don’t know.

I asked Yvonne to tell me what Other Dreams of Freedom is about and why she wrote it.

It is very popular for American Christians to be involved in anti-trafficking activism. Although some American Christians are interested in a broad understanding of trafficking that includes exploitative labor, usually they mean sex trafficking. And usually by sex trafficking they mean commercial sex – any exchange of sex or sexual services for money. They think that if people no longer sell sexual services they will be free from trafficking, so they favor programs that ‘fight trafficking’ by trying to get people to leave the sex industry. Means to this end vary from educational scholarships to job-training programs to brothel raids. In terms of law and policy, many American Christians support the abolitionist agenda to criminalize all sex-money exchanges.

I am a scholar of religious studies and ethics. I wrote Other Dreams of Freedom to examine why this anti-trafficking perspective feels so appealing and ‘right’ to many American Christians. When I was doing the research between 2005 and 2008, George W. Bush was president and his administration was constructing an international anti-trafficking agenda, often referring to God, God’s intent for human life and Good and Evil. I focused on anti-trafficking legislation (TVPA), the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, public policy statements and press releases. These were not trying to be religious, but I saw how they expressed a very particular religious and moral sensibility.

But Other Dreams of Freedom is about more than Bush. The understanding of human trafficking that his administration endorsed is wildly popular in the US; Americans who identify with a wide variety of other religious traditions defend this view. My book shows how Christian theology rooted in Reformed Protestantism infuses and shapes much American culture and moral sensibility, including the connections between sex, freedom and morality. My analysis of the theological sources clarifies why Americans are so quick to see commercial sex to be inherently degrading and immoral. The book discusses the unintended consequences of using a single religious perspective to build foreign policy in a multi-religious world.

Morgan Guyton at Mercy not Sacrifice also wrote about the original interview, and Yvonne left a comment that mentioned me, so I left something, too. Guyton replied:

What I have carried with me from my first job at a little NGO in DC called the Nicaragua Network is that any kind of real support we offer to people in disadvantaged situations anywhere must always have its terms dictated to us by the people we’re supposedly helping. We called it the solidarity model. In Christianese, I would call it ‘servanthood’ rather than ‘service’. It’ s great that young evangelicals are interested in social justice, but it seems like the way it’s often packaged makes it more like a form of tourism than anything else. I’m interested in reading more.

Yvonne Zimmerman is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Methodist Theological School in Ohio.

Note that Christian Evangelism exists outside the US and behaves similarly when it comes to trafficking: here is a recent note about CARE in the UK.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex at the Margins now on Kindle: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry has made into Ebook big-time.

Kindle for the USA at Amazon-US

Kindle for the UK at Amazon-UK

And it’s on the Nook at Barnes & Noble and on the Kobo.

Susie Bright’s reaction to the ebook news was

Laura Agustín’s revolutionary book Sex at the Margins which has changed the discussion of ‘trafficking’ and the Rescue industry forever… is now on Kindle! Finally!

The book was published five years ago but is not out of date – a testimony, I’m afraid, to the intransigence of the trafficking framework and the refusal everywhere to address migration policy. I can confidently say, unfortunately, that the situation is worse than ever no matter where you are – there’s real globalisation for you. Early reviews said

It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. Laura María Agustín’s trenchant and controversial critique of the anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter – in this case, ‘human trafficking – on the operating table, dissects it, unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a capital W. It’s a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years. – The New Statesman, Brendan O’Neill

Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality. – Lisa Adkins, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Sex at the Margins elegantly demonstrates that what happens to poor immigrant working women from the Global South when they ‘leave home for sex’* is neither a tragedy nor the panacea of finding the promised land. Above all, Agustín shows that the moralizing bent of most government and NGO programs have little to do with these women’s experiences and wishes. This book questions some of our most cherished modern assumptions, and shows that a different ethics of concern is possible. – Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina

Nineteen of the 20-some reviews in academic journals are available to read on this website, along with other articles and interviews about it: Reviews/Interviews. Most of the academic reviews are very positive; a few dismiss the book completely for reasons less than serious!

Sex at the Margins – Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1. Sexual Commotion
2. Working to Travel, Travelling to Work
3. A World of Services
4. The Rise of the Social – and of ‘Prostitution’
5. Grasping the Thing Itself: Methodology
6. From Charity to Solidarity: In the Field with Helpers
7. Partial Truths
Works Cited
Primary Sources

I hope that the availability as a mainstream ebook will make it possible for more people thinking of becoming Rescuers to pause and reconsider. Give it to them!

*The book’s original title was Leaving Home for Sex, thus Escobar’s reference.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Does legalised prostitution increase trafficking? Who knows, without real data?

Long ago I was Managing Editor for the Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in New York. I know what econometrics are and am not scared to death of mathematical modelling or formulae, and I don’t think everything quantitative is bad – which some might conclude given my consistently harsh critique of the statistics batted around in anti-trafficking campaigns.

Now, I’ve been asked several times to comment on a recently published article, Does Legalized Prostitution Increase Human Trafficking? in the journal World Development. This study belongs to a trend to use econometric concepts and techniques in a (vain) attempt to prove this or that about prostitution. The popular Freakonomics guys have long liked using prostitution to make their counter-intuitive points, for example in What Do Prostitutes and Rice Have in Common?

For those who don’t know, econometrics is the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to economics to study problems and analyse data. Given the conflict about trafficking statistics amongst social-justice activists and mainstream policymakers, it is understandable that more ‘scientific’ types should wish to bring order to chaos. I wouldn’t mind if someone figured out how to use econometrics to lighten the muddy waters of trafficking policy, if there were any reliable data for them to feed into their models, spinning ‘more than two million regressions with all possible combinations of variables for up to 180 countries during the period of 1995-2010’, as one of the authors said about another version of this research. The problem is, fancy modelling and sophisticated analysis cannot help when the data being analysed is next to useless. The summary of this article reads:

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows.

Any critique of this work has to begin by asking how the authors define human trafficking, inflows, legalised prostitution, the prostitution market, trafficked women and legal prostitutes. None of these terms is self-explaining. After more than 15 years, we do not even have agreement about what the fundamental terms mean, so anyone writing in the field has to tell us which definitions they are using and they have to make sure they compare and contrast categories using the same definitions. It is not sufficient for the authors to say at the beginning that they know the terms are not agreed on and then proceed to do their fancy modelling anyway!

The best way to understand this work is Garbage in, garbage out, the tag I gave to the previous study in this series, which the present authors are trying to trump (for that analysis I got a mathematician to do the debunking). The problem of rubbish statistics goes back a long time: look at this story about supposed expert Kevin Bales, who admitted to using media reports to cook up his data. Media reports.

On top of that, the authors fail to use the statistics for Germany available from the federal police criminal institute BKA in Wiesbaden.

The number of trafficking cases before trial or sentencing

2002 — 811 victims (German prostitution law introduced)
2003 – 1235 victims
2004 — 972 victims
2005 — 642 victims
2006 — 775 victims
2007 — 689 victims
2008 — 676 victims
2009 — 710 victims
2010 — 610 victims
2011 — 640 victims

Source: BKA (the above list was compiled from the separate years’ reports available under Lagebilder Menschenhandel)

By ignoring the correct figures and using strange large estimates instead, the authors conclude that ‘legalised prostitution’ promotes ‘trafficking’. What balderdash. The article has had attention from the media, I suppose because one of the authors works at the LSE. Reporters do not, of course, understand the authors’ methodology (an example) but they might be expected to have something to say about the notorious slipperiness of trafficking data.

As the anti-trafficking movement becomes institutionalised, more people join who do not realise there are serious disagreements about definitions and how to count crimes and victims. Articles like this one just contribute to the mediocrity.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Border Crossing: Looking for sex-victims and sex workers

I spend about half my time in London; this year I have flown in and out six or seven times. Although the geographical border is obviously not located at any airport, the state says travellers are not in until they pass the legal border – now clearly marked at airports. In the photo to the right, queues to talk to border officials appear straightforward and rational, but in fact ever more often they look like the next picture.

In the foreground is the unnecessarily large and glowering sign marking entrance to UK Border Controls; at that point the sheep and the goats are separated into two queues (EU citizens and everyone else). Far away to the left is the actual borderline. What looks like one huge crowd above is instead two crowds, in queues so long they use a hairpin system that collapses people into a small space.

The UK did not sign the Schengen Agreement allowing free passage across European national borders to EU citizens and legal residents, which is why other EU citizens have to go through a control to get into Britain. At other EU borders there is sometimes a symbolic checkpoint, but often there is nothing at all. This is what Schengen was about, and frequent travellers celebrate it. In the UK it is different.

It used to be that those in the EU queue sauntered pretty quickly through a benign and passive control post, holding up their passports to officials in a genial manner. But the UK has gone through several crises and an unending battle about how ‘tight’ border controls should be, with the current result that those in the EU queue also have to hand their passport to an official who scans it into the machine. The other day the wait between scannings in that queue varied between 8 and 18 seconds, which might sound fast but means, if a lot of people arrive at once, that the queue is usually moving but sometimes rather slowly.

I carried out this counting and other mind-games from my place in the queue for Others – Rest of World – Outsiders, where the wait the other day was nearly an hour. A couple of hundred people were before me in that queue at Gatwick, and the observed time for some of those border-conversations was many minutes. Not for all, some get through in under a minute, and I am certain, if racial and ethnic and national profiling were not illegal, that the Others queue would be separated into several, and then all those whose characteristics provoke knee-jerk, detailed questioning would be together in a pariah queue. As it is, we are all together. This queue does not move steadily or even slowly but in stops and starts.

One game I played was trying to guess which travellers border officials might suspect – or profile as – victims of trafficking. Numerous pamphlets and guidelines – most of them fantasies – have been produced on this subject; most are quite ridiculous. I gazed around me: Would police worry about the brown-skinned woman travelling with the lighter-skinned man? Both of them looked awfully relaxed to me. What about the three high-cheekboned women travelling together, would officials suspect the oldest of being a madam-trafficker? I doubted they would worry about the young men joking together – not as victims, anyway. Everyone looked extremely bored; most played with their phones or read a book.

If anyone had been coerced or duped into that queue, there was no obvious way to know it. The questions officials ask are very schematic and repetitive, presumably to catch liars out in a contradiction, but liars getting as far as these queues have generally got good-looking documents and smart advice about how to handle the interviews, maybe including rehearsals. I would like to know what proportion of these border talks lead to identifying smuggled and trafficked people.

I’ve been quieter lately here. More people now write critically about trafficking policy, though a lot of them – particularly those new to the field and indoctrinated by the rubbishy stuff produced by the US government’s TIP reports – do not question the idea of trafficking itself. The way it all began was about mobility: the completely ordinary phenomenon everywhere in which people hear about a job in a place they don’t live themselves and travel to get to it. Selling sex is one of the paid occupations available. Some people talked about migrant prostitutes, others about migrant sex workers. In the sex workers’ rights movement, one still hears this idea, and migration policy used to be at least nodded to in conversations about trafficking. But now even the word migration has – almost – been disappeared. I say that because I believe policymakers have done and do this deliberately.

My Border Thinking was first published on the Greek site Re-public in June 2008. There are things I have changed my thinking on since that year, but the necessity to adjust one’s thinking in border zones isn’t one of them. Trafficking is definitely a border concept – full of indefinables, confusions and ambiguities. That it should be spoken of now as if it were a known and countable object, like a stone, is all wrong.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Kristof’s asinine smarm: the Soft Side of Imperialism redux

For everyone now suffering from Mr Smarm’s documentary – which I’ve only heard about – here’s The Soft Side of Imperialism again. When being irritated or outraged in a way that feels visceral and personal it is useful to be reminded of the structural issues propping up liberalism, and Kristof is an egregious example of apologist for US imperialism.

Numerous people have written to express particular outrage that Kristof’s Facebook game should be like FarmVille, with women taking the place of farm animals, to be looked after. Others wrote to say the word smarmy was just right to describe him. Rescue Industry magnate supreme, fond of bragging about his multiple Pulitzer Prizes – which are circulated amongst members of the same old white-boys’ club eternally – this unattractive man is also a mediocre writer. Is the movie version any good?

Kristof and the Rescue Industry:
The Soft Side of Imperialism

by LAURA AGUSTÍN, 25 January 2012, Counterpunch

Reasons abound to be turned off by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He is too pleased with himself and demonstrates no capacity for self-reflection. He is too earnest. He claims to be in the vanguard of journalism because he tweets. He is said to be Doing Something about human suffering while the rest of us don’t care; he is smarmy. He doesn’t write particularly well. But most important, he is an apologist for a soft form of imperialism.

He poses for photos with the wretched of the earth and Hollywood celebrities in the same breath, and they are a perfect fit. Here he is squatting and grinning at black children, or trying to balance a basket on his head, and there he is with his arm over Mia Farrow’s shoulder in the desert. Here he is beaming down at obedient-looking Cambodian girls, or smiling broadly beside a dour, unclothed black man with a spear, whilst there he is with Ashton and Demi, Brad and Angelina, George Clooney. He professes humility, but his approach to journalistic advocacy makes himself a celebrity. He is the news story: Kristof is visiting, Kristof is doing something.

In interviews, he refers to the need to protect his humanitarian image, and he got one Pulitzer Prize because he “gave voice to the voiceless”. Can there be a more presumptuous claim? Educated at both Harvard and Oxford, he nevertheless appears ignorant of critiques of Empire and grassroots women’s movements alike. Instead, Kristof purports to speak for girls and women and then shows us how grateful they are. His Wikipedia entry reads like hagiography.

Keen to imply that he’s down with youth and hep to the jive, he lamely told one interviewer that “All of us in the news business are wondering what the future is going to be.” He is now venturing into the world of online games, the ones with a so-called moral conscience, like Darfur is Dying, in which players are invited to “Help stop the crisis in Darfur” by identifying with refugee characters and seeing how difficult their lives are. This experience, it is presumed, will teach players about suffering, but it could just as well make refugees seem like small brown toys for people to play with and then close that tab when they get bored. Moral conscience is a flexible term anyway: One click away from Darfur is Dying is a game aimed at helping the Pentagon improve their weapons.

Kristof says his game will be a Facebook app like FarmVille: “You’ll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you’ll have to look after the women and girls in the village.” The paternalism couldn’t be clearer, and to show it’s all not just a game (because there’s actual money involved), schools and refugee camps get funds if you play well. A nice philanthropic touch.

Welcome to the Rescue Industry, where characters like Kristof get a free pass to act out fun imperialist interventions masked as humanitarianism. No longer claiming openly to carry the White Man’s Burden, rescuers nonetheless embrace the spectacle of themselves rushing in to save miserable victims, whether from famine, flood or the wrong kind of sex. Hollywood westerns lived off the image of white Europeans as civilizing force for decades, depicting the slaughter of redskins in the name of freedom. Their own freedom, that is, in the foundational American myth that settlers were courageous, ingenious, hard-working white men who risked everything and fought a revolution in the name of religious and political liberty.

Odd then, that so many Americans are blind when it comes to what they call humanitarianism, blissfully conscience-free about interfering in other countries’ affairs in order to impose their own way of life and moral standards. The Rescue Industry that has grown up in the past decade around US policy on human trafficking shows how imperialism can work in softer, more palatable ways than military intervention. Relying on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as objective truths, contemporary rescuers, like John Stuart Mill 150 years ago, consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more backward ones. (Mill required benevolence, but imperialists always claim to have the interests of the conquered at heart.) Here begins colonialism, the day-to-day imposition of value systems from outside, the permanent maintenance of the upper hand. Here is where the Rescue Industry finds its niche; here is where Kristof ingenuously refers to “changing culture”, smugly certain that his own is superior.

In the formation of the 21st-century anti-trafficking movement, a morally convenient exception is made, as it was made for military actions in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. The exception says This Time It’s Different. This time we have to go in. We have to step up and take the lead, show what real democracy is. In the name of freedom, of course. In the case of trafficking the exception says: We have achieved Equality. We abolished slavery, we had a civil-rights movement and a women’s liberation movement too and now everything is fine here.

With justification firmly in place, the US Rescue Industry imposes itself on the rest of the world through policies against prostitution, on the one hand, and against trafficking, on the other. In their book Half the Sky, Kristof and co-author Sheryl WuDunn liken the emancipation of women to the abolition of slavery, but his own actions –brothel raids, a game teaching players to protect village women – reflect only paternalism.

It may be easier to get away with this approach now than it was when W.T. Stead of London’s Pall Mall Gazette bought a young girl in 1885 to prove the existence of child prostitution. This event set off a panic that evil traders were systematically snatching young girls and carrying them to the continent – a fear that was disproved, although Stead was prosecuted and imprisoned for abduction.

In contrast, in 2004 when Kristof bought two young Cambodians out of a brothel, he took his cameraman to catch one girl’s weepy homecoming. A year later, revisiting the brothel and finding her back, Kristof again filmed a heartwarming reunion, this time between him and the girl. Presuming that being bought out by him was the best chance she could ever get, Kristof now reverted to a journalistic tone, citing hiv-infection rates and this girl’s probable death within a decade. She was not hiv-positive, but he felt fine about stigmatizing her anyway.

Then last November, Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid in the company of ex-slave Somaly Mam. In “One Brothel Raid at a Time” he describes the excitement:

Riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West. (New York Times)

There’s the cavalry moment again. A few days later Kristof boasted that six more brothels had closed as a result of the tweeted raid. Focused on out-of-work pimps, he failed to ask the most fundamental question: Where did the women inside those brothels go? The closures made them instantly vulnerable to trafficking, the very scenario Kristof would save them from.

Some Rescuers evoke the Christian mission directly, like Gary Haugen of the International Justice Mission, which accompanies police in raids on brothels. Or like Luis CdeBaca, the US Ambassador-at-Large for Trafficking, who unselfconsciously aligns himself with William Wilberforce, the evangelical Christian rescuers claim ended slavery – as though slaves and freed and escaped slaves had nothing to do with it. CdeBaca talks about the contemporary mission to save slaves as a responsibility uniquely belonging to Britain and the US.

Kristof positions himself as liberal Everyman, middle-class husband and father, rational journalist, transparent advocate for the underdog. But he likes what he calls the law-enforcement model to end slavery, showing no curiosity about police behavior toward victims during frightening raids. Ignoring reports of the negative effects these operations have on women, and the 19th-century model of moral regeneration forced on them after being rescued, he concentrates on a single well-funded program for his photo-opps, the one showing obedient-looking girls.

Kristof also fails to criticize US blackmail tactics. Issuing an annual report card to the world, the US Office on Trafficking presumes to judge, on evidence produced during investigations whose methodology has never been explained, each country according to its efforts to combat human trafficking. Reprisals follow – loss of aid – for countries not toeing the line. Kristof is an apologist for this manipulative policy.

To criticize the Rescue Industry is not to say that slavery, undocumented migration, human smuggling, trafficking and labor exploitation do not exist or involve egregious injustices. Yet Kristof supporters object to any critique with At least he is Doing Something. What are you doing to stop child rape? and so on. This sort of attempt to deflect all criticism is a hallmark of colonialism, which invokes class and race as reasons for clubbing together against savagery and terrorism. The Rescue Industry, like the war on terrorism, relies on an image of the barbaric Other.

It is important not to take at face value claims to be Helping, Saving or Rescuing just because people say that is what they are doing and feel emotional about it. Like many unreflective father figures, Kristof sees himself as fully benevolent. Claiming to give voice to the voiceless, he does not actually let them speak.

Instead, as we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience, terror, angst, confusion, desire. Did anyone rescued in his recent brothel raid want to be saved like that, with the consequences that came afterwards, whatever they were? That is what we do not know and will not find out from Kristof.

Discussing Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe said Conrad used Africa

as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril… The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. (Things Fall Apart)

The latest sahib in colonialism’s dismal parade, Kristof is the Rescue Industry at its well-intentioned worst.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Second-wave feminism: Revolution, not Rescue

In some country far away, in a box I left in someone’s attic or garage decades ago, there is a copy of this newsletter, which I bought in June 1968. I can see myself holding it, in a tiny apartment on Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, when it was not the hyper-chic area it is now. The single-burner hotplate sits on a shelf, the bathroom sink is cluttered with dirty dishes, and it is all for me alone.

In Notes from the First Year Shulamith Firestone asked:

What does the word ‘feminism’ bring to mind? A granite faced spinster obsessed with a vote? Or a George Sand in cigar and bloomers, a woman against nature? Chances are that whatever image you have, it is a negative one. To be called a feminist has become an insult, so much so that a young woman intellectual, often radical in every other area, will deny vehemently that she is a feminist, will be ashamed to identify in any way with the early women’s movement, calling it cop-out or reformist or demeaning it politically without knowing even the little that is circulated about it. . . Notes from the First Year. The New York Radical Women, 1968.

Are you surprised anyone would say that in 1968? I discovered Firestone and I were the same age when she died the other day. We also looked superficially alike: granny glasses assured that, though my own hair would never lie down Rapunzel-like (no extant photos of me, though). I met her once briefly but never attended the meetings where her particular feminist theory was made.

Nowadays people talk as though all women interested in liberation in the 1960s were thinking the same thing, but it wasn’t like that. It was a movement of women, with all sorts of ideas being bandied around simultaneously. There weren’t any leaders. The material in Notes from the First Year was exciting, but I did not think that I was outside the cool centre because I did not sit in rooms with serious theorists calling themselves radical. My ideas were ill-formed, and I couldn’t have written a book about them, but I wouldn’t have wanted to, either – I was too busy living.

Some people cannot abide anything about what’s now called second-wave feminism because of how some of its ideas have panned out all these decades later. Maybe it’s easier for me to distinguish all the variety because I was there at that particular beginning. Most feminist ideas from that period are now accepted as obvious; few people would argue with them. But some were provocative and mind-bending, such as Firestone’s idea that women were a class – an underclass subordinated to men because of biology. But it was also only one of a lot of ideas flying around.

When I nearly ran into Catherine MacKinnon a couple of years ago in Basel, I commented that we are more or less the same age, too. Her ideas have not changed over all these decades; she goes on saying the same thing over and over, in the case of prostitution still citing a study from 1976 that proves all prostitutes were abused as children. It is very annoying that a few fanatics claim to speak for everyone interested in women’s movements in the 60s and 70s, as I wrote in Extremist Feminism: Something Dark.

At New Slave Trade or Moral Panic?, a panel on trafficking at London’s Battle of Ideas in 2010, I said contemporary ideas about women’s innate sexual vulnerability are a big step backward. Firestone thought biology was key and so do today’s victimising fundamentalists. But Firestone and friends advocated revolution: women seizing power, achieving autonomy, throwing off their chains, taking responsibility, taking risks. The Rescue Industry, in contrast, has infantilised women by inserting itself between them and the forces oppressing them, supposedly in order to protect them.


The full panel and some audience interventions are on the Battle of Ideas’s website. Thanks to Carol Leigh for putting together this Naked Anthropologist clip.

I still cannot get over how a gender expert hearing me speak at the International Development Institute in Sussex exclaimed, in some distress, that it is irresponsible for me to talk like this. I’m supposed to have betrayed original, fundamental tenets of feminism. Sigh – the ideas flying around during this era certainly don’t thrill me, that’s for sure.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk

Last September I wrote about so-called Reality Tours to meet victims of sex trafficking. Now it’s August and several people have written me from Bangkok about the tour taking place there this past week. I remember when I first heard about Global Exchange educational tours, while visiting a little storefront in San Francisco in 1989. I have a memory of puzzling over the brochure amidst shelves and tables piled with ethnic jewellery and objects from Other Cultures. The shop on 24th Street is still there, according to a contemporary description:

Global Exchange offers fair trade crafts produced in over 40 countries. Proceeds go toward improving lives in these villages. They have a vast selection of unique items from all over the world. This is a great place to pick up a gift for the person who is hard to shop for.

Gift-buying and helping projects wrapped together: One can see how the founders leapt to the idea of taking people on tours. Global Exchange says We are an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Easily said. A list of current tours includes Caring for Cuba’s Cats and New Journey of a Lifetime to India with Vandana Shiva. Sound harmless?

I had doubts back then and still do, but those in favour argue the tours are a way for folks who know something is wrong with what they read in the media to see the truth. That’s in theory; the question is how easy is it to provide the truth with anything called a tour? Who decides where to go, what the focus of tours will be and which natives will provide entertainment? Is the idea that all middle-class people have to do is arrive in a poor country and set their eyes upon poverty and suffering in order to experience enlightenment? It’s a short jump from that lack of politics to becoming an Expert who knows What To Do about other people’s lives. Imperialist projects to interfere follow quickly.

Although individual tourists may learn good things from conscientious tour guides, a tour is a holiday, a vacation, whether you set out to see the temples of Bangkok or the bargirls or the trafficking victims. You take a tour for your own benefit and pleasure, even if your pleasure consists in feeling angry and sorry and guilty about what your own government does to people in poorer countries. You go to look at exotic others, and you can’t help drawing conclusions about whole cultures based on what you see – just as tourists and business travellers do. If you happen to talk with someone not on the tour agenda – on a bus, in a bar – then you probably feel chuffed that you saw real people and experienced authentic culture. This is all relatively harmless unless you happen to add this experience to your CV, claiming temples, bar girls or sex trafficking are subjects you are expert in.

The tour to Bangkok is entitled Thailand: Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: Delegation? Delegates are meant to be official or elected representatives. I shudder to think who people on the tour believe they are representing. Why not call themselves what they are – tourists? Those who think themselves sexually liberal may sneer at Christian tourism – aka missions – but there is not so much difference from the point of view of the objects of their solidarity and pity.

My analysis is not purely theoretical. A couple of decades ago, I happened to be working on the Mexico-US border, in a project whose main task was to provide legal advice to migrants who’d crossed the border illegally and wanted to make a claim for asylum in the US. (Yes, another kind of helping). Lots of people wanted to but few could provide the kind of evidence required by immigration authorities. While stories were checked and papers processed, asylum-seekers had to hang around in halfway-houses found for them by the project.

On one occasion, I was at the enormous garbage dump in Matamoros, where hundreds of people live amidst rubbish of all kinds, picking and carting bits to sell outside.  A group of Reality Tourists came up to some children to ask them questions. The children, accustomed to flies crawling over their faces, did not move to brush them off. The tourists, horrified by the flies landing on their own eyes, faced an excruciating dilemma: They wanted to express interest in and respect for the garbage-dwellers at the same time they wanted to run away screaming. But if they ran away, what would it say about the humanity they were fleeing?

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Age of Women Who Sell Sex: Does Kristof lie? What about the children?

The other day someone asked if I believe what Nicholas Kristof wrote about sex slaves in Half the Sky or do I think he is lying. In the book he tells a story of being taken into Sonagachi, a red-light district in Kolkata, where he saw unhappy young women said to be under the control of exploiters. At least one of the women told him she wanted to get away. Do I believe he visited Sonagachi and talked to a couple of unwilling workers? Yes, because I am sure his guides to this very large area took him specifically to meet them.

Based on that one experience and what his guides said, he characterised the DMSC, an organisation that supports sex-worker rights in Sonagachi, as corrupt promoters of child prostitution. More than 10,000 people work in Sonagachi, so although DMSC try to prevent children and unwilling people working there through Self-Regulatory Boards, it would be impossible to know what is going on all the time.

Many of those worried about trafficking express special horror about children, by which they sometimes mean anyone under 18. You will recall how Kristof’s use of the tag seventh grader annoyed me, when he tweeted about accompanying a Somaly-Mam brothel raid in Cambodia. A campaigner harassing Craig of Craigslist flourished pictures of women in classifieds who are said to look too young.

Recently a scandal erupted in Singapore because some supposedly respectable men paid for sex with a female under 18. Whether she was or not, photos showed her dressing childishly. Kristof might look at the Thai sex worker and researcher who spoke at Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines and think she is too young. Kristof is sentimental about children, romantic about women and comes from a culture where a lot of young people dress up convincingly to look older than they are. He is a total outsider to the sex industry, ignorant of the possibility that workers commonly try to look younger than they are (to attract clients).

Kristof is a colonialist; he imposes his own narrow cultural attitudes on people he looks at and interprets their lives according to his values. A thin body dressed in t-shirt and shorts says child to him. This mindset makes it impossible for him to read what’s going on in a bar he stumbles into – including, probably, in the United States. To see these people while invading a bar with armed police, where events move fast, many are frightened and impressions are fleeting, exacerbates the problem. I wouldn’t believe anyone’s assertion about other people’s age glimpsed in those conditions.

The Singapore situation illustrates another kind of confusion:

While the local age of consent is 16, the age for commercial sexual transactions – prostitution is legal in Singapore — was raised in 2007 by two additional years. The government acknowledged at the time that there was little need for the new law. “Although there is no evidence to suggest that we have a problem with 16- and 17-year-olds engaging in commercial sex in Singapore, we decided to set the age of protection at 18 years so as to protect a higher proportion of minors,” said senior home affairs minister Ho Peng Kee on the floor of Parliament when the bill was introduced. “Young persons, because they are immature and vulnerable and can be exploited, therefore should be protected from providing sexual services.”

Only when they get money for it, however. Sixteen-year olds can ‘provide sexual services’ for free in Singapore with no problem.

After my talks about migration, sex work, gender perspectives, culture and rights, someone in the audience usually brings up age. The  format goes like this: What about the 12-year-old girl sold by her parents to a pimp? Lately, I have taken to pointing out that this is a rhetorical ploy (maybe unconscious) aimed at pushing discussion of a complex topic to its extreme edge, to the case we can all deplore, the ‘obvious’ case of misery. The point is to expose the fallacy of the speaker’s (my) ideas.

The other day I said no one should be making decisions about other people’s degree of will or acceptance of their situations and then generalising to huge groups of people. One response was: No one should be making any assumptions about the degree of will for a 10- year-old girl or boy in the sex trades? After pointing out the rhetoric (used by abolitionists and anti-trafficking people all the time), I answered yes, no one should be making assumptions about 10-year-olds either. How do we know what led to her selling sex? What choices was she faced with? What might happen if she were suddenly extracted from her situation? It is easy to take heroic positions at the extreme of a continuum, but the vast majority of cases lie along its middle, whether people are young or old. To make the extreme the case all policy should be based on – as well as all emotion and compassion – is irresponsible, an infantilising Rescue Industry strategy to be avoided whether you like the idea of kids selling sex or not.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Stop the Arrests (of sex workers): Campaign launches in London 18 June

If you are in London next Monday, come to the launch of the Stop the Arrests campaign. The event will be short and sweet and it would be good to see a lot of people not only turn up but also join the resistance to yet more policing and repression of sexual practices involving money. It’s also a good central location with numerous pubs nearby for socialising afterwards.

It’s not to late to put your signature on the list of supporters.

I will be speaking about the lack of evidence linking sporting events with trafficking. I wrote about the background to this initiative a while back.

INVITATION: Stop the Arrests Campaign Launch

WHEN: 1830 Monday 18 June 2012

WHERE: Centre for Possible Studies, 21 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8HR (nearest tube: Marble Arch)

Campaign group Stop the Arrests will hold a public launch in central London this Monday to outline its call for a moratorium on sex worker arrests during the London 2012 Olympic Games. The panel includes Laura Agustín, trafficking expert and author of Sex at the Margins, Georgina Perry, manager of Open Doors, a sex worker health project operating in Hackney and a video link up with Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour and author of The Sex Myth. Stop the Arrests is concerned that the policing of sex work and sex establishments in the lead-up to the Olympics threatens to compromise the safety and autonomy of sex workers.

The launch will also feature voices from workers in the sex industry.

The Met have recently been in touch with Stop the Arrests to inform that they have developed ”an alternative system of dealing with sex workers during the Olympic period”. This protocol, which will be made public on Monday 18 June,  has been developed without any input from sex worker organisations or other specialist services working with sex workers, such as health and harm minimisation organisations.

Ava Caradonna, Spokesperson for x:talk said: Stop the Arrests has tried for months to get an audience with the Met to discuss policing protocol during the Olympics. A senior Met officer has assured us that that the relevant department is aware of xtalk and the proposal for a Moratorium and yet we have not been consulted. The current laws and policing around sex work have been criticised from many different quarters for the lack of consultation with sex workers and sex worker-led organisations, and the failure of these policies to take into account the realities of the sex industry. It is deeply worrying that the Met continues to develop policies that ignore these criticisms and the views of those affected.

Media Enquires:

Xanthe Whittaker: 07901335613
Katie Cruz: 07917732990

NOTES

1. Campaign group Stop the Arrests issued the Mayor of London with a letter on June 6 calling upon him to use his powers, in co-operation with the police and UK Border Agency, to stop the arrest, detention and deportation of sex workers during the Olympics. Signatories to the letter, which was initiated by the xtalk project, include John McDonnell MP and chair of the Green Party, Jenny Jones, author Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour), Jane Ayres, manager of The Praed Street Project – a sex worker health project operating in London, and the UK Harm Reduction Alliance. Full details of campaign and list of signatories here.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Thai government panders to US anti-trafficking policy, ignores changes in Entertainment Industry

It’s June, formerly a month I had pleasant feelings about but now the time when the US government issues its imperialist TIP report card to Rest of World about their anti-trafficking behaviour (see Institutionalised Arrogance). You may remember that Empower recently released a research report on the state of the Thai entertainment industry in which they said Anti-trafficking rescues are our biggest problem. Now, in anticipation of the next TIP report, they have issued an open letter to the prime minister. I asked them for a little clarification of one term that might be unfamiliar to readers: green harvest – see after the letter for that. And for an unusually nice report about Empower see 25 years in Thailand’s sex industry.

Open Letter to The Prime Minister of the Royal Government of Thailand from Empower

On the occasion of 5th June 2012, National Anti-Human Trafficking Day, Empower alleges that successive Thai governments have sacrificed the rule of law, their international human rights obligations and the well-being of migrant sex workers and their families in an attempt to please the US government and satisfy the American anti-trafficking agenda.

We accuse the United States government of using the issue of human trafficking to coerce its allies into tightening border and immigration controls. The US agenda has also created a climate where women crossing borders are all seen as suspect ‘victims’ of trafficking. Recently on the 21st February 2012 Empower released an in-depth research report, Hit & Run, done by sex workers, which clearly identifies how the State is breaching rule of law and police procedure while arresting wrong people.

Even though Thai governments have tried hard to appease the USA, Thailand remains on a ‘Tier 2 watch list’ and risks being further downgraded in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), due for release later this month. Empower sees the Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the US State Department as subjective and biased against the Thai Entertainment Industry in particular.

Furthermore Empower says the Thai government has so far failed to recognize the many improvements the Entertainment Industry has undergone in the last decade. The old days of the ‘green harvest’ and locked brothels are over. In the modern context, sex work is similar to other jobs. Exploitation in the industry is an issue of access to identity and work documents, labor rights and occupational health and safety. These are labor and human rights issues, not police or criminal issues.

Society is all too familiar with media images of uniformed police, fully armed, storming Entertainment Places and apprehending young unarmed women. Women desperately try to hide their faces; sometimes the women are naked and not even given time to cover themselves. The women and girls never fight back; most don’t even dare to think about trying to run away and not one woman or girl has ever been found carrying a weapon. These events were commonly shown in the media well before the new human trafficking hysteria. The image of a hero or rescuer has now been added to the scene. . . it’s all very exciting.

However society never sees or hears of what happens after the rescue. Society is not told that the women are put through a range of unnecessary medical tests regardless of consent or their human dignity. They don’t know that women have been detained against their will for over a year in government shelters. No one knows about the pain and suffering brought about by the separation from children and family. Who could imagine that the women, who are the main family providers, are not compensated in any way by the State, and given just 3,000 Baht, (about 200 Baht per month) from private anti trafficking fund when they are eventually forcibly and formally deported?

Under the law there are provisions for social assistance but in reality the focus is on punishment. Little wonder women escape from their rescuers when they can. Police enforcement of the law using raids encourages violence. We suggest that instead of continuing costly, and ultimately useless ‘raids and rescue’ missions, it is time Thailand resisted being bullied by foreign governments and instead worked to ensure migrant sex workers’ access to documentation and fair working conditions in entertainment places.

Today Empower Foundation is calling on the Prime Minister of The Royal Government of Thailand to:

  • Review the practices of the Anti-Trafficking Act in relation to the protection of human rights and the rule of law.
  • Stop using sex workers as scapegoats in foreign policy and other political games.
  • Stop police entrapment which contravenes police policy.
  • Stop raids on entertainment places which are violent actions usually reserved for apprehending dangerous criminals.
  • Stop arbitrary detention of sex workers.
  • Protect the human rights of women arrested or assisted under the Anti trafficking Act and ensure they receive the full entitlements according to the Act – e.g. translation, legal representation, compensation.
  • Work together to promote accurate information about the modern context of sex work in Thailand to all agencies involved in anti-trafficking.

The letter has been endorsed by:
Sex workers of Krabi, Sex workers of Phuket, Sex workers of Samut Sakon, Sex workers of Nontaburi, Sex workers of Chiang Mai, Sex workers of Mae Sai, Chiang Rai, Sex workers of Mae Sot, Tak, Sex workers of Mukdahan, Sex workers of Ubon Rachatani, Sex workers of Udon Thani, Sex workers of Pattaya, Chonburi, Sex workers of Soi Cowboy, Bangkok, Sex workers of Soi Nana,  Bangkok, Sex workers of Patpong, Bangkok.

Copies to:
National Human Rights Commission, Office of the Prime Minister, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, Department of Special Investigations (AHTD), Office of the Attorney General – Public Prosecutor, Ministry of Justice, United Nations Interagency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP)

On green harvest in brief: After World War II the military (with US support) expanded into rural areas. Some corrupt military personnel began offering to take young girls and women to work in the cities, and families in desperate need accepted money in exchange. These debts carried to the workplace; if that was a brothel it would take about three years to pay back the loan at grossly inflated interest rates in conditions of forced labour (no pay and no freedom of movement.) This practice was the norm until about 1999, affecting especially mountain villages of ethnic minorities and later neighbouring Burma and Lao. The point Empower makes is green harvest is no longer the norm.

I would add that the non-recognition of change – cultural, social, economic – in countries the USA pretends to help constitutes imperialism. Keep the natives down by keeping them ‘primitive’.

A report from 2003 entitled Cultural, Economic and Legal factors Underlying Trafficking in Thailand and their impact on women and girls from Burma, by Christa Crawford, was republished in 2009 in Thailand Law Journal.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

European Women’s Lobby lies about sex trafficking, prostitution and sporting events

The European Women’s Lobby – which should not be allowed to call themselves that – continue to use public money to further a campaign that contradicts the laws of several European states that allow people to sell and buy sexual services. This red-card nonsense is part of Together for a Europe Free From Prostitution, which overtly spreads what they themselves call abolition: true missionary endeavour, even if these missionaries look like so-called liberated western women. How do they get away with this? Is there no oversight for funding to such groups? I suppose the Germans, Dutch, Czechs et al just ignore it all, but in times of purse-tightening it is annoying that zealots are allowed to throw public money around like this. I wonder what happened to the question that was put in the European Parliament about this?

Money is the key: It has become easy to get funding nowadays to campaign against trafficking; no thinking is required; just flash your ideology like a red card. Funders then get to tick the box showing they care about trafficking, which in turn makes them look good. Never mind that the message is a lie, since there is no evidence that sex trafficking increases when big sporting events take place. Evidence is irrelevant to ideological fanatics, of course, but it shouldn’t be to Brussels technocrats. Two mega-events are cited, the London Olympics, which begin in late July, and the UEFA European Football Championship, which begins any minute now.

The text accompanying this message deliberately misinterprets that evidence, provided by relatively sound investigation and staid sources.

This year, thousands of young girls and women are at risk of trafficking and sexual exploitation to satisfy the demand for prostitution on the sidelines of the Olympic Games in London and the UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine.

The number of human trafficking victims in Greece increased by 95% during the 2004 Olympic Games. Ahead of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, predictions were for more than 40,000 women and children to be trafficked into the country to meet the prostitution demands of millions of football fans. During the 2011 World Cup, South African authorities noted a ‘huge’ increase in the sex trade, with the number of women and girls involved in prostitution, as well as the number of brothels, doubling.

The European Women’s Lobby has called on Members of the European Parliament to take a stand against prostitution at sporting events. Nineteen MEPs supporting the EWL campaign have been invited to gather for a group photo with the EWL red card ‘Be a sport. Keep it fair… Say NO to prostitution’.

On the sidelines of this visual event, the EWL will present an awareness-raising video clip ‘Sport, sex and fun’, as well as issue a press release and briefing about prostitution at sporting events.

The evidence, once again, is:

Germany: 2006 World Cup

  • SIDA/IOM report: The first significant attempt to assess whether women were trafficked (forced) to sell sex at a major sporting event was financed by the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA) and published by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Despite predictions that 40 000 women would be trafficked, only 5 cases of trafficking were found to be linked to the World Cup. Report published in 2006.
  • German government report: Subsequently, the German Federal Government produced a report for the Council of the European Union, finding no increase in cases of trafficking related to the World Cup. Report published in 2007.

South Africa: 2010 World Cup

Research was carried out by the Sex Work Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and the African Centre for for Migration & Society, commissioned by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This investigation included a survey of local sex workers; no cases of trafficking were found associated with the World Cup. Report published in 2010.

Note at the end of the EWL disinformation: More infotainment on the way! Forget the facts, show a naff video! The EWL can scarcely surpass their video of a male made miserable by licking the pussies of his clients, though: surely that ought to win some award.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Slick misleading infotainment on sex trafficking from the BBC: No one’s immune, then

brothels_on_wheelsIn Trafficked: Sex slaves seduced and sold (BBC News, 22 May 2012), reader/viewers are presented with a series of short documentary videos. Cheesy ersatz reporting from The New York Times is now surpassed by the BBC, in one of those formats that makes you ask: Is this for children? Is it a video game? It resembles a trafficking theme park or carnival more than a serious report. If they did spend real money on investigative reporting they want us to take seriously, how did they miss running into anyone who knows about migration and sex work? Did they deliberately avoid talking to anyone who deviates from this party line? Real journalists ought to be intrigued by the realities of how people migrate and work in underground economies. The Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center is not difficult to locate, if you are a BBC journalist. I wonder whether they are avoiding anything with the term sex worker in it because they think such sources don’t deal with trafficking? Does the BBC not even consult its own archives to see that one of their World Debates addressed this problem of pretending the trafficking situation is black-and-white clear?

The video I draw attention to here is called Brothels on Wheels, whose punchy blurb reads:

Many trafficking victims are taken to New York, where they often work gruelling shifts of 10 hours or more. Some women live and work in a brothel, only leaving the building when their pimp moves them to a new location. Other women are advertised on “chica cards”, distributed in the street. Customers call the number on the card and women are delivered by car to a customer’s house or hotel room. The women live in fear, frequently assaulted by their pimps and customers.

  • Are ten-hour shifts gruelling by definition or only if sex is involved?
  • Sometimes people live in brothels to save money on rent – this is not a proof of trafficking.
  • Do Rescuers think it’s helpful to use language like women are delivered? Who’s doing the victimising here? Are they unaware that escort agencies may employ drivers without this meaning workers are trafficked?
  • Women who sell sex live in fear of the police, as much as of anyone else. This also doesn’t prove trafficking.

A politician who accompanies the BBC reporter along the street says Times Square has been cleaned up. Every illegal activity that used to be in Times Square has come over to Roosevelt Avenue. Really? Everything has moved directly to one place? How convenient, simple and unlikely, and what a good way for him to draw attention to his own constituency (the area of Queens where Roosevelt Avenue is located). Sounds as if he is emulating Kristof wandering around Times Square with a young black woman as if that were still the world’s most terrible sex-place.

Years ago I worked in Corona (Spanish literacy), and during my few weeks’ stay in Jackson Heights last winter, I walked Roosevelt Avenue again. If you start at the more international end, at the Jackson Heights/74th Street subway stop, the sensation of being in Latin America grows as you walk east. The elevated train clanks above you, and street level is a riot of small shops and other commercial action. There are many sexy-looking establishments with guys outside handing out cards to entice paying customers inside. I don’t think we have to use the word seedy in a moralistic way to characterise the kind of sex venues where photos of scantily-clad women adorn the windows and you can’t see inside without actually going in. I mean by this that the look of a business in an atmosphere of legal prohibition and repression of sexuality does not constitute evidence that what is inside is unclean, dangerous or inherently unjust. Everyone who works in seedy-looking places is not a victim of trafficking, for goodness’ sake.

The documentary makes fairly conventional-sounding agency work appear demonic (the existence of cards with telephone numbers, clients’ phone calls and rides for workers to meet clients). In other branches of business, these techniques would be viewed as ordinary. Without extensive research into how workers feel about these situations, reporters have no way to know whether something genuinely coerced or exploitative is going on.

The report also says someone’s put mattresses and workers in trucks that pick up clients who get services inside and then are dropped off – implying something particularly sleazy in this. This anecdote is related over the image of a ratty-looking truck, but no actual research into it is presented: talking to the person who runs this business and/or the workers (coerced or not) involved. Vans are used elsewhere in the world, one example being France, where brothels are forbidden: see this report from Lyons, in which Paola Tabet recounts:

I have been in the van when they were working, it was rather funny and sometimes even brilliant. There I actually had the illustration of what [sex workers] mean when they say ‘We give nothing to the client.’ Then at one point an habitual client, a man of a certain age, arrives. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello, how are you?’ He gets in the van. I was seated in the front, I could hear everything. At the beginning, the girl says to him ‘Have you sold your old car?’ He replies ‘yes’. She asks him to lower or open his trousers and she gives him the condom, you could feel the truck move for a moment, then she continues ‘and how much did they give you for the car?’ They were practically the only words exchanged.

I asked the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center about the BBC video, and they replied:

Roosevelt Avenue is a place where human trafficking exists, but it is also is a site of extremely high numbers of arrests for prostitution. In particular, transgender immigrant women are often rounded up and arrested 4, 8, 12 at a time. So, while journalists, law enforcement and even city officials are talking about human trafficking on Roosevelt, people are being arrested in high numbers, some of whom may actually be victims of trafficking. Clearly we have a disconnect about who is a “victim” and who is a “prostitute.” Transgender women are almost always labeled as “prostitutes” even when they are not. No one is interested in their stories, the reasons they are here, or the extreme danger they face if arrested and deported.

When reporters go into the field without any desire to learn about the complications and base a documentary on conversations with a politician, a victims’ rights attorney and the police, it isn’t surprising they obliterate the realities of large numbers of people. The question is not Should we not care about victims of trafficking? but Should we not care about everyone being victimised in the sex industry, everyone being denied their rights, in all different sorts of ways? The second question is what the BBC showed cheesiness in ignoring.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Have you signed the letter to stop arrests of sex workers during the Olympics?

Olympics Sex Workers

Now you can sign up by clicking a button on the website for Stop the Arrests, either as a group (best, if you can do it) or as an individual. Here’s the list of those who’ve signed so far. You can be located anywhere in the world, but if you are a UK group it’s really important your name is there! The letter will go to Mayor Boris Johnson soon. I discussed this campaign a while back, including a list of all the laws that criminalise sex workers in England and Wales.

One menu tab on the site is called Evidence, and it says:

No research has proved an increase in human trafficking caused by large sporting events.

Three research projects have been conducted specifically to assess cases of trafficking associated with major sporting events after those events were over.

Germany: 2006 World Cup

  • SIDA/IOM report: The first significant attempt to assess whether women were trafficked (forced) to sell sex at a major sporting event was financed by the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA) and published by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Despite predictions that 40 000 women would be trafficked, only 5 cases of trafficking were found to be linked to the World Cup. Report published in 2006.
  • German government report: Subsequently, the German Federal Government produced a report for the Council of the European Union, finding no increase in cases of trafficking related to the World Cup. Report published in 2007.

South Africa: 2010 World Cup

Research was carried out by the Sex Work Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and the African Centre for for Migration & Society, commissioned by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This investigation included a survey of local sex workers; no cases of trafficking were found associated with the World Cup. Report published in 2010.

Other major sporting events have been speculated about: the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and several US Super Bowls. A report from GAATW (the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women) gathers together existing data. Many other reports deconstruct and debunk the idea that trafficking increases when major sporting events take place, but only the two on Germany and one on South Africa contain data gathered in the relevant places, after the events.

This campaign was initiated by x:talk (I am a member).

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Getting money to prevent sex trafficking even if there isn’t any: London Olympics

Those who wish evidence were the basis for social policy have been endlessly frustrated and annoyed by the survival of the myth saying sex trafficking – forced prostitution – increases enormously on the occasion of major sporting events. Despite enough evidence to convince most people that there is no such surge (see SIDA’s report on the 2006 World Cup and SWEAT’s on the 2010), it’s obvious that evidence doesn’t matter where the fear of hidden crime is constantly threatened. In other words, if the police haven’t found many women in chains, the victims must be too well hidden, which justifies further money for more intense policing.

Some NGOs against human trafficking do now acknowledge that there’s no proof that trafficking increases around big sporting events.  But they like to argue that their own efforts to prevent trafficking are the reason – Ta Da! There must be a name for this kind of logical fallacy.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)  has set up its own anti-trafficking programme called UN.GIFT, which now gives funds to a lot of the people sustaining this kind of scare-mongering. Stop the Traffik (sic – why have they spelled it like this?) is one, here maintaining that

campaigns countering human trafficking and increased law enforcement, before and during the events, are necessary to prevent the trade. International sporting events can increase human trafficking due to the short-term increased demand for prostitution, construction work, and all other sorts of labour.

So the funding gravytrain tootles along. But now they have a new justification for their activities:

prestigious sporting events can play a central role in attracting attention to the issue of human trafficking, and can function as an opportunity to increase engagement across communities. Most importantly, as there is evidence of continuous human trafficking in London and across the entire UK, we should use this opportunity that the London Olympics presents us with.

So now, whether there was ever going to be any increased trafficking or not, campaigns that worry people that their might be are doing a good job of raising awareness. In NGO-speak this is called prevention. If there is more self-serving silliness I don’t know about it.

With great solemnity, based on this absence of evidence, we find troops of volunteers ready to worry everyone in London about the hidden scourge. Here’s one (with funding from Stop the Traffik) in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s Olympic boroughs (meaning some Olympics activity actually occurs there). Do you wonder what these people will do?

This will involve running outreach sessions with local schools, hotels and faith groups using data gathered from borough-specific research, which volunteers would also be conducting. There will also be the opportunity to organise a local fundraising event to generate additional income and attract more volunteers from the local area.

I’d like to know how that research is being done. Meanwhile, the photo at the top shows a UN.GIFT box that’s going to be unwrapped during the games. (Warning if you click on that link that you are subjected to the soundtrack of a promotional video portraying cruelty.) The purpose is described as

to inspire visitors, both from the UK and abroad, to take action to stop the trade. . . a giant public art installation, which will demonstrate to people how victims of human trafficking can be deceived; beyond the promises of exciting opportunities that will entice people to the box, once inside, the stark reality of human trafficking will be revealed. . .  family-friendly and will inspire people to advocate and end trafficking in their own communities.

This is all what happens when a fear (panic, myth) takes on a life of its own. Evidence that there is cause for such fear is simply irrelevant. Unfortunately, there are unsought side-effects, as police make raids and arrests of sex workers to show they are looking for traffickers and their victims. Thus x:talk’s call for a moratorium on arrests in London.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

New York Times’s cheesy ersatz reporting on migrant women, sex work and trafficking

Aquí no hay puticlub: There’s no sex club here. This sign was erected by a British landowner along a rural route in Spain where customers in search of a commercial sex venue apparently drive in error. There are many sex clubs, bars and brothels of all shapes and sizes in Spain, where selling sex is not illegal, but key activities surrounding it are. I wrote about the different types of venues years ago when arguing for a cultural study of commercial sex.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry. If this article had appeared in the New York Daily News or Britain’s Daily Mail, I wouldn’t even bother to comment, and it would take too long and be too annoying for me to critique the entire article, but here are a few of the most misleading simplifications:

* Young Men Flocking to Spain for Sex With Trafficked Prostitutes: title to a banal set of photos, some taken at a big sex club on the Spanish border near France. Border crossings for all sorts of reasons, sex, wine and rambling among them, have been going on forever in that area not only pottery and leather goods as the article says. How old can these reporters be that they seem to be describing naive tourists from the US in the 1950s?

* Sob story implying migrants’ families are heartless:

The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

One police case plucked out of thousands to imply how awful other places are, because there could never be a cruel or desperate family in the US, right? And no mention of the many more family projects that do not involve such melodrama.

* Pretense that something new and different is happening:

…experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities.

When selling sex is not illegal it may occur anywhere without people hiding, if that’s what they mean by public view – that is hardly surprising news.

* The report says one migrant still owed them more than $2,500, as though it were an egregious amount. In fact, that much can often be paid back in a fairly short time – one, two months – by someone working in a busy sex club. And as I have written many times, migrants pay for a series of valuable services, so without knowing a lot more about this particular story we do not know what this sum means.

* Attempt to cause moral panic about the young.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel. “The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”

All research for a long time has suggested that young men in groups habitually drop into clubs and drive through streets with sex workers as part of nights out. The same evening easily includes both discos and sex clubs. The word packs makes the men sound predatory, of course.

* Then they try to make it a problem of growing demand for sex services from younger tourists, so ignorant about travel outside the US they don’t know that people in neighbouring countries here rarely refer to each other as tourists. In Europe, everyone moves around all the time, the Schengen agreement meaning no border checks. This is not news. And to claim that Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services is laughable. Spain has been a major tourist destination for decades. Holidays may always include sex, paid or not, and there is definitely a market for men visiting numerous European cities to enjoy stag parties. Spain is not particularly famous for these, but trends may change.

* Ignorance about migration:

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.

Women from Latin America travelling to Spain to work in domestic service or sell sex is indeed a decades-long phenomenon, so that different generations in the same family are involved and networks are mature. Networks are illegal because migrants are undocumented, not because they are sinister. This is just yellow-press exaggeration.

I have to stop here; there is just too much irresponsible rubbish in this article. Toward the end a few interesting facts slip in that indicate the subject is far more complex than the cheesy reporting has so far let on – the reporters must not have realised. I also could provide numerous links to my own writings, many based fundamentally on my own years of living and researching in Spain, but the New York Times will never be interested.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist