Laura Agustín’s calendar in Switzerland: Migration, trafficking and commercial sex

Recent Articles

• Callgirls are more honest than anti-male campaigners says Lambeth protester

  20 May 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet ANTI-MALE RUBBISH! PROS & CALLGIRLS ARE MORE HONEST. POLICE SHOULD GET REAL CRIME. Click twice on the photo to read the protest message stuck to a poster I wrote about last week as One London borough wants to End Demand: Clients of sex workers beware. I wonder how many posters got a sticker? This [...]

  

• 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. At first I thought this bad [...]

  

• 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 [...]