Copenhagen seminar: Rescue industry and migrant struggles

Recent Articles

• Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines (to rescue me from selling sex): Videos

  16 May 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet Two videos from Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines at the AWID conference in Istanbul recently. The slogan comes from a couple of centuries of social work focused on Rescue and Rehabilitation: First remove the woman from prostitution, then give her alternative employment. Historically, sewing – with or without machines – has been the [...]

  

• Nordic Network: Sex workers and social workers meet

  12 May 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet Nordic Network for Social and Health Organisations, Sex Workers and Researchers Working in the Field of Prostitution is the full name of a group that holds annual meetings where social workers – and some sex workers – meet. Members come from Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland. This year’s meeting is in Oslo, and [...]

  

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

  10 May 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet 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 [...]

  

• One London borough wants to End Demand: Clients of sex workers beware

  5 May 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet A friend took these photos of a parked van while having a drink in Brixton, in the London borough of Lambeth (where Waterloo Station is). Buy Sex – Pay the Price is the message, with a man’s silhouette as a sort of parody of the cliché prostitute silhouette. Notice that this bad boy is [...]

  

• Girls who buy sex from beach boys: Sex tourism in Bali

  2 May 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet Beach boys and women sex tourists: every journalist’s dream topic. A Swiss television reporter interviewed me about a documentary he was making, incorporating footage from Cowboys in Paradise, a film about Kuta Beach in Bali. I happened to be in Basel, nearly missing Catherine MacKinnon when the reporter contacted me, so he came into [...]

  

• Sex Panic and the Punitive State: Where’s prostitution? What happened to sex trafficking?

  28 April 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet The term moral panic appears constantly in critical discussions of sex trafficking, but trafficking hardly figures in an interesting book about sex panics. In this review requested by H-Net I ask why classic prostitution – women who sell sex to men – is disqualified from the author’s thesis and point out ways that some [...]

  

• Sex workers at AWID reject feminist fundamentalism

  25 April 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet I am Kthi Win from Myanmar and I am a sex worker. I manage a national organisation for female, male and transgender sex workers in Burma and I am also the chairperson of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers. Until now, organising anything in Myanmar has been very difficult. People ask, How did [...]

  

• The Sex Industry in Spain: Sex clubs, flats, agriculture, tourism

  21 April 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet During the 20 years I’ve been consciously thinking about migration and prostitution, sex work and the sex industry, I have rarely seen such a bad portrayal of these deep and complex topics as in a New York Times piece on sex slaves I lambasted the other day. I lived a number of years in Spain, [...]

  

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

  15 April 2012 in migration, sex work, trafficking

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  Tweet 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 [...]

  

• Anatomy of sex trafficking funding: How to get money for a Rescue project

  9 April 2012 in sex work, trafficking

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  Tweet By Gloria! Look Who’s Here to Protect Victims with Money and Might reads the giddy headline. It seems that Warren Buffet’s son cannot bear to be left off today’s showiest philanthropy bandwagon: Rescuing women from prostitution. And neither does Ruchira Gupta intend to be left off today’s biggest social-work gravytrain: Funding for sex trafficking victims. [...]