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Recent Articles

• 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. [...]

  

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

  18 January 2012 in sex work

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

  

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

  13 January 2012 in sex work, trafficking

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

  

• Sex at the Margins in Stockholm: Migration & Prevention

  9 January 2012 in migration

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  Tweet I will be giving an hour-long lecture in Stockholm on 26 January 2012, covering general ideas about migration and who ‘migrants’ are thought to be, both documented and undocumented, as well as ideas about health and prevention, including for migrant sex workers. The sponsors are Smittskyddsinstitutet (Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control), a government [...]

  

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

  7 January 2012 in sex work

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