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• Vocational training as Rescue so far mostly useless: sex workers in India

  18 February 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet India mandated the rehabilitation of sex workers last year – in case they want to be rehabilitated. The story below tells how the concept has become a subject of dispute. Two activist authorities give reasons why vocational training is problematic: In many cases, women get into prostitution after trying out other options like domestic [...]

  

• Letter from the prostitute that didn’t want saving, 1858

  14 February 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet Prostitution, referred to under headings like The Great Social Evil or A Delicate Question, was a common topic of comment in The Times of London in the mid-19th century. The different points of view expressed have always seemed to me very similar to what we hear today, except for rhetorical style. Some anonymous letters [...]

  

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

  11 February 2012 in sex work

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

  

• Guess a way to guess numbers of trafficking victims and win a big prize!

  8 February 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet The Monty Python team have entered the anti-trafficking field. They must have, as who else would draft an initiative as daft as this one from the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking? As everyone knows, it’s impossible to know how many people are real trafficked victims (they didn’t register with anyone at the [...]

  

• Could abolitionists stop mixing up chattel slavery with sex slavery?

  6 February 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet People in the United States who want to lead a new anti-slavery movement should know better than anyone what chattel slavery is: The institution that allows one person to legally buy another and do whatever they want with them. Legally is the keyword: that is, the sale and purchase of human beings is permitted [...]

  

• Sex at the Margins available as ebook

  4 February 2012 in migration

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  Tweet I receive many queries about getting Sex at the Margins (Zed Books) as an ebook, so am happy to announce that it is now available through various outlets. Not for the dedicated hardware readers yet (kindle, nook, kobo) but available! The best deal in the US is at Books A Million:  ebook $10.32 In [...]

  

• Kristof and the Rescue Industry: the Soft Side of Imperialism

  3 February 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet During a prolonged stay in New York recently I realised that Nicholas Kristof looms very large to many people, while to me he is only one of many annoying members of the Rescue Industry, albeit an egregious one. In the article I published last week about imperialism for Counterpunch Kristof was the obvious choice [...]

  

• Gold digging with gold miners: an old tradition

  1 February 2012 in sex work

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  Tweet The only objectionable thing in the story below, which describes one of prostitution’s classic traditions, is the editor’s addition of scare quotes around the word work to describe what the women are doing. He or she slipped in the last paragraph, though, and left the punctuation out. Since selling sex to miners in a [...]

  

• Changing the mentality of men who buy sex: here’s Madrid

  29 January 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet Male Call was Milton Caniff’s comic strip for soldiers duing WWII. The main character was a woman back home, Miss Lace. Now Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella has long been a staunch member of the movement to abolish prostitution. Wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (Partido Popular, conservative), she promotes measures that discourage men [...]

  

• US Trafficking Office wants your help with imperialist anti-trafficking operations

  25 January 2012 in trafficking

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  Tweet The US Trafficking in Persons Report has always failed to explain how it gets its information in more than the sketchiest of ways, as I point out in June of every year. For an instrument with so much money and potential interfering impact behind it, the TIP is as untransparent as any CIA operation. [...]