Asia-Pacific

I collect images of the sex industry, as part of a project to educate myself and others about the diversity actually involved, rather than staying with an oversimplified, unilluminating idea about prostitution. A lot of my picture collection can be seen here. The silent video below from Satoshi shows streets in a Yokohama red-light district with rows of small shops or cubicles used for sex work. Similar arrangements of sheds or ‘cribs’ were called chon-no-ma, and, until fairly recently, were open and staffed by non-Japanese women. Chon-no-ma were the target of anti-trafficking drives from about five years ago.

A few things strike me about this display. First, the silent, steady, slow movement of the camera. Second, the similarity of the windows and doors we’re taken past, like suburban shopping strips developers impose a style on. Third, the absence of humans, who would ordinarily be the object of our attention (perhaps the video was made in the early dawn). The result is mesmerising.

The sequence of events goes like this:

1. US government issues annual report card threatening to cut off aid from countries that don’t make the right efforts to combat trafficking
2. Threatened countries comply by passing legislation
3. And then instructing local police to carry out raids in order to ‘rescue’ victims
4. Police go to sex businesses, pick up all the workers and claim to have rescued them
5. Police say victims (sex workers) will be ‘rehabilitated’ via detention and forcible participation in an ‘alternative work’ programme, whether rescued people want this or not
6. Threatened national governments point to these actions to show US that they are fighting crime
7. US gives them a better grade on the next report card

Problems? Well yes, several, including the overtly neocolonialist coercion. In the following story which pointedly uses the word rescue, the police try to blame foreign devils for the existence of sex businesses, make sure to point out that some of those rescued were ‘only waitresses’ (which perfectly shows what they think about prostitutes), and, most important, if compliance with US aims to ‘convict’ traffickers is what’s needed, how does detaining and forcibly rehabilitating 200 victims help? What we’ve learned over and over is that some large number of the detained women do not want to be rescued, or not by the police, or not from sex work but possibly from poverty or the fear of disappointing their parents. I have unfortunately had to comment repeatedly on such stories, including recently on Cambodia. There are other ways to help people.

Anti-human trafficking agency rescues 200 women from Malate

Francis Faulve, 18 June 2010, ABS-CBN News

Manila, Philippines - The government’s anti-human trafficking task force on Thursday night rescued at least 200 women from a girlie bar in Malate district in Manila.

Retired military officer Jesus Kabigting of the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking said the raid was conducted in response to the US State Department’s report on human trafficking in the Philippines. The US State Department said the Philippines remains in the Tier 2 list of countries whose governments have failed to show improved efforts to curb human trafficking.

Representatives from the Manila Police District, Department of Social Welfare and Development and Department of Labor of Employment raided the LA Cafe at the corner of M.H. Del Pilar and R. Salas streets in Malate around 10:30 p.m.

Kabigting said majority of the women are being peddled to foreigners in Malate district. He said some of those rescued were only waitresses, but are also considered as victims of forced labor and human trafficking.

He said the women, particularly the prostitutes, will be “rehabilitated” and provided with alternative livelihood.

“Anti-human trafficking operations ito… Iyon ang dahilan kaya nagsagawa tayo ng walang humpay na operation against human trafficking (This ia an anti-human trafficking operation... That is the reason why we are conducting operations against human trafficking),” Kabigting told reporters referring to the US State Department’s report. He said similar raids will also be conducted nationwide.

Kabigting assured that charges will be filed against the owner of the bar. “Whether they have a permit to operate or not, they are committing acts in violation of the anti-human trafficking law. We will investigate them,” he said.

The US State Department was critical of the Philippine performance in all three benchmarks (prevention, protection and prosecution). It said that despite several labor trafficking cases were filed, the Philippine government never convicted any offenders. “Despite overall efforts, the government did not show evidence of significant progress in convicting trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for labor trafficking,” the US State Department said in its report.

I don’t think brothels are a bad thing and I don’t think brothels are a good thing - not per se. Businesses that offer sexual services to customers who drop in to select a sex worker are a kind of shop and a kind of workplace. Some people like to buy in that kind of shop and some people like to work in it, with managers, set shifts and rules. Some rights activists wish all sex workers would be entrepreneurs working independently or organise themselves in small collectives, but many people like being employed and having a boss and colleagues. Like an office or plant, a brothel can function as a reassuringly ordinary place, with its attendant office politics, opportunities for learning, quarrels with managers and struggles for better conditions.

When this form of conventional workplace has been banned, getting brothels back can feel progressive: thus a Swedish parliamentarian’s suggestion and the legislation described below in Western Australia. Australia’s states and territories make up a patchwork of different sorts of sex-industry legislation. In the case of Western Australia (capital city Perth), prostitution has been ‘illegal’, which means ‘criminalised’, but also ‘tolerated’ until recently.

Note, however, that the classic brothel system assumes that sex workers must be obligated to undergo regular, frequent tests to make sure they are free of sexually-transmitted infections - while clients are not. If the interest is in containing disease, everyone ought to be tested equally frequently: There is no defensible reason to make prostitutes more responsible for disease-containment than anyone else who has sex. Unfortunately, this sexist and stigmatising practice is frequently mentioned as an inherent condition of brothels.

WA to legalise prostitution

AAP, 20 June 2010

Western Australia is set to legalise prostitution in a bid to improve health standards and keep brothels out of residential areas. Hundreds of suburban brothels are expected to close when WA Attorney-General Christian Porter ends decades of “turning a blind eye” and starts regulating the sex industry next year.

Prostitution is illegal in WA but police rarely lay charges unless they are related to underage sex or unsafe practices. Under the new legislation, brothels will be licensed and confined to designated commercial and industrial areas, and police will be given powers to investigate and forcibly close those which fail to comply.

Sex businesses will need to follow health and safety standards to obtain and maintain their licences. Individual sex workers will need to register with a central agency and will undergo compulsory health and blood checks.

They may also be required to carry ID cards.

Mr Porter said suburban operators would be given a grace period from next year to either close or move to a licensed area. Applications for brothels would first be put to local councils and then assessed by state regulators. Mr Porter said the new regulations would limit problems in non-residential areas.

WA brothel madams welcomed the move over the weekend but feared the bid to register individual prostitutes would drive some underground. While most agreed the new regulations would improve health and safety in the industry, they said some sex workers would be loath to have their personal records on file. This will lead a lot of workers into going underground,” North Perth brothel owner Donna McGuirk told The West Australian newspaper on Saturday.

“We are quite lucky in WA in that we don’t have girls working with organised crime, but the sensitivity of this information that they want the girls to hand over means that many will try to work outside the system.” Kalgoorlie madam Bruna Meyers told the paper she was opposed to a central register but welcomed plans for a licensing system and health checks. She said it would crack down on operators advertising unsafe sex, which was currently illegal but not widely policed.

Opposition attorney-general spokesman John Quigley said confining brothels to industrial areas would create “sex ghettos”.

Japanese graphic styles in sex-industry advertising. The Sex Information Center in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district shown below explains how the industry works to anyone who steps up to ask.

The shop below makes business cards for hostesses.

If you look closely, you can see the cards themselves.

Another style of name card.

A brothel magazine.

I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of help sex workers are offered. The old-fashioned term still being used around the world is rehabilitation. - surprising, really, since the moralism behind it is so overt. That is, to talk about rehabilitation is to say that one’s present self is a mess, one is living some wrong way, one is self-harming and so on. Within that frame, rehabilitation means We will help you get clean and healthy. That’s good if you feel unhappy about your present lifestyle yourself - morally, I mean. The usage meant to replace rehabilitation talks about Exit Strategies, but media reporters repeat the old clichés with gusto. In a report from Korea, purveyors of rehabilitation admitted no one wants what’s on offer:

. . . Months of harsh police crackdowns on red-light districts in Jangan-dong in northeastern Seoul have succeeded in driving more than half of brothels there out of business. . . But what has been neglected is the rehabilitation of those who were “laid off.”
. . . “More than 110 prostitutes have been summoned and instructed to visit a rehabilitation center to look for a new `legal’ career,” . . . But according to a rehabilitation center run by Dongdaemun Ward Office, no prostitute has submitted to undergo either rehabilitation programs or consultation.

The office runs under an annual budget of 800 million won ($602,000), providing former prostitutes with rehabilitation programs. “We expected the number of consultation-seeking sex workers to increase but it hasn’t,” a ward official said. “We speculate prostitutes whose workplaces were disrupted continue to sell their bodies in secret rather than seek new lives and jobs through rehabilitation programs.” - Rehabilitation Absent in Brothel Crackdown, Korea Times

One would hope this might have made Rescue Industry personnel pause to think, yet one described as a ‘campaigner’ said: “Most prostitutes are forced to borrow money from pimps or private lenders to be employed. At the beginning, they used the money to beautify themselves without realizing it would lead to a self-made, inescapable pitfall. When they realize it, they find themselves in heavy debt. That’s why despite crackdowns, they have no choice but to engage in the sex business to repay their debt.”

This describes a contributing factor, of course, but look what another ‘official’ says next: “The government has asked police to encourage arrested prostitutes to take optional rehabilitation programs. We need to come up with measures mandating the programs.”

Delightful - forced rehabilitation for women who don’t know their own minds.

In 2007, New Zealand’s government published The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) on the Health and Safety Practices of Sex Workers, an official review of its sex-industry legislation. Now the report is out as a book: Taking the Crime Out of Sex Work: New Zealand Sex Workers’ Fight for Decriminalisation, edited by Gillian Abel, Lisa Fitzgerald and Catherine Healy (of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective). For poor students, the research report is available in full online, along with the questionnaires used.

Photo of Catherine Healy by NZPA Stephen Barker

After interviewing 772 sex workers, Otago University’s Gillian Abel found workers are more empowered to insist on safe sex and assert employment rights with both brothel operators and clients. Relationships with police have also improved.

‘When it was criminalised, the negotiations were much more covert to try and enforce condom use, whereas now they’ve got the law behind them. One sex worker in Christchurch has taken a client to court for removing a condom. ‘

Ms Gillian believes more work has to be done though, particularly to protect those under 18 entering sex work and in providing support for trans-gender youth, who are particularly vulnerable to being drawn into the industry.

She fears a negative stigma still prevents some workers from seeking the help they need and many still do not tell people what their real profession is. ‘Whether it’s family, friends, or health professionals, there’s still room for improvement around things like the emotional health which goes with being a stigmatised population.’ 

from Sex Industry Safer since Decriminalisation, NZ City. 13 May 2010

‘This decree brings about gender equality in our criminal justice system.’ - Attorney-General and Justice Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, on Fiji’s new prostitution laws.

So it turns out to be easy to bring about Gender Equality! Just pass a law saying that the buying of sex is a criminal offence and voilá, Women’s Rights are ensured.

Although simple hatred of prostitution is still given as enough reason to institute these laws (see comments in Israel’s Knesset last January), Gender Equality is increasingly given as the argument for legislation aimed at men who buy sex or facilitate its buying and selling (the vague categories pimps and traffickers).

As laws, they are difficult to enforce: it’s too hard to get the evidence to prove most cases and no police force is granted the immense funding that would be necessary to pursue every possible instance of sex-buying, and keep at it over and over, until consumption theoretically ceased. Socially, the laws probably just move transactions to less visible venues. And as possible promoters of cultural change, which is what people really want, these laws are impossibly crude (prohibiting people the fulfillment of their desires rarely works). All of which those in favour of these laws know on some level. But as symbolic moves aimed at performing Gender Equality, anti-demand laws capture the imagination across the globe. 

Now, coming back to Fiji, here is the analysis of an economist there:

‘Prostitution is a social redistribution mechanism, and to try and forcefully stop it can lead to some dire consequences. ‘- Sunil Kumar, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of the South Pacific, Suva

‘While prostitution is looked down on by society, there are some positive outcomes from it that cannot be denied.’ He cites the example of single mothers who do not earn enough from regular work, or those who do not receive state social support. Some of them turn to sex work to feed and educate their children, he says.

The new decree now targets people who hire sex workers and all those who benefit financially from the trade. Even those living with sex workers are now liable under the new law, which took effect on February 1. Section 230 of the law’s prostitution offences says that a person living on sex-work earnings or persistently soliciting faces a jail term of up to six months. ‘Selling or buying’ minors for immoral purposes is now punishable by 12 years’ imprisonment. Brothel keepers face five years of imprisonment as well, or a fine of F$10,000 (US$5,000), or both.

Do Fijians feel more equal now, I wonder?

More at Fiji: Law enforcement approach to sex work falls short, Shailendra Singh, 12 April 2010, InterPressService News

Those concerned about justice for sex workers focus on the law. If you’re interested in culture, however, you find that the sex industry looks and acts quite similar no matter which prostitution law is in place: the scene - the milieux - tend to be similar everywhere, with stylistic local differences. The health problems, the economics, the labour issues also are remarkably alike across cultures and borders, so that what workers experience in Ghana resembles what they experience in Thailand or France, and so on. Not so long ago I published a vague but suggestive story about the diversification of the sex industry in Pakistan,  Now here’s another story from there about how that old favourite ’street prostitution’ has changed with the times, so that mobile phones play a big role. The reporter’s tone is pleasantly neutral, and note that he ends with my point about the law: ‘In a country where commercial sex is officially prohibited, it is usually available just a few minutes’ drive away.’ Note: 100 pkr = 0.89 euro

Business as usual for street prostitutes

Amar Guriro, 16 April 2010, Daily Times

Karachi, Pakistan: In the simmering heat of the afternoon, two ladies, one in her early 20s wearing shalwar kameez and other in a burqa, stood on the pavement under the shadow of a tree. Several cars and motorcycles queued up beside them. A young man on a motorcycle talked to the ladies, the one in shalwar kameez shook her head in refusal and the man left.

Then a man in a car came by, rolled down the window, and spoke to the women. However, he left as well. Then another motorcyclist spoke to them for a while and the girl in the shalwar kameez went with him on his bike. The lady in the burqa stayed back. The queue was over and all of them went their way. This was a typical scene out of the many that take place daily outside the nation’s founder Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s mausoleum, where dozens of street prostitutes stand and wait for customers. Many of them have their own places where they can take their customers to provide their services.

Gone are the days when the famous Napier Road in the downtown area of the city was supposed to be the centre of commercial sex. One can find street prostitutes waiting for customers at different spots while driving around the Mazar-e-Quaid, near the Do Talwar roundabout, on Shahrah-e-Faisal, MA Jinnah Road, Tipu Sultan Road, Main Korangi Road, etc. Their presence also becomes a nuisance for the other ladies taking a walk or waiting for buses, since the people ‘on a hunt’ often mistake them for sex workers and bug them. In recent years, Karachi has become a major market for prostitutes and attracts sex workers from other provinces since they can fetch higher rates for their services in the city.

One can find sex workers of different ages and ethnicity in Karachi. From a 15-year-old girl to a woman as old as 50, they could be of any ethnicity or even foreigners such as Russians and Burmese. The rates start from around Rs 400 and could go up 10 times this amount depending on the time, service, age and features of the sex worker. According to a sex worker, more than 150 street prostitutes roam inside the premises of Mazar-e-Quaid during the day. They usually sit on a bench in the lawn of the mausoleum so their customers can single them out easily.

Usually, they have regular customers, who know which spot they prefer and the sex worker then takes her customer to her home. “It is a risk to go with just anyone, so usually we rent a home and when we find a customer, we take him to our place. We charge extra amount for this service,” a sex worker told this scribe. She said the employees of the mausoleum know about their presence. “Sometimes we find two or three customers in a day, while on some days there are none.”

Convincing a street prostitute to let this scribe visit her house and speak about her business was not an easy job. However, when one finally agreed to it with the help of a politician who is her customer, this scribe drove towards the place thinking that the place would be something out of the movies, situated in a narrow lane, have a long row of rooms and sex workers turning up in odd make-ups, etc. But surprisingly, it was nothing like that and in fact, it was situated in a double-storied building in the Lighthouse area, where a young lady, who only told this scribe her nickname ‘Bindia’, lives with two of her colleagues. Bindia said cell phones had made their business much easier and the role of the ‘middlemen’ was almost finished now. She said that usually they manage to evade police, but if caught, they are asked for bhatta, which is provided in the form of a free-of-cost service. “most of the girls in this business are unaware about sexual diseases,” she said.

In a country where commercial sex is officially prohibited, it is usually available just a few minutes’ drive away.

More evidence of how police raids to save people are unwanted and counter-productive, this time with statements from UNAIDS and a Cambodian sexworker group. Those suffering under the crackdown are not traffickers and arrested sex workers were not trafficked. The rhetorical move to call completely old-fashioned raids anti-trafficking strategies is orwellian double-speak creating confusion amongst those who don’t know what’s going on.

Cambodian sex worker Soeum Rotha is active in Women’s Network for Unity

Cambodia cracks down on the sex industry

Robert Carmichael, 12 April 2010, Deutsche Welle

This poster was made by migrant sex workers (by their own definition) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it twice before but so many people are still ignorant about this point of view that I’m going to keep re-running it. See for yourself the reasons workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for denouncing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on many helpers’ good intentions or the genuine rescue of some individuals. But it shows how rescue agents haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful. The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has drastic consequences for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of myriad nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets, clubs and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them yet, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has lots of details.

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.