The Naked Anthropologist

Tag Archives: Asia-Pacific

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

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 work, as sex work is more remunerative.

Rehabilitation cannot be on moral grounds alone. Recommendations made by the court or the panel should have a long-term financial benefit as well as ways to involve the family and other members of the society to give prostitutes social security.

Someone else says some women have been glad to work at MacDonalds instead. This is of course considered morally superior to prostitution, but what about dancing?

Girls who danced in the bars of Mumbai . . . found a means of earning a livelihood that was more paying than sex work… But even this was banned on moral grounds whereas what was needed was to make these places more safe for women.

And Dignity for All

Saheli Mitra, 1 February 2012, The Telegraph (India)

In September 1999 a sex worker in Calcutta was murdered by a prospective client after she refused to have sex with him. When the case (Budhadev Karmaskar vs the State of West Bengal) went to the Supreme Court, the latter passed a landmark judgment, stressing that Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the right to live with dignity, includes a prostitute’s right to lead a life of dignity as well. To ensure that right, last July the Supreme Court set up a five-member panel to work towards providing sex workers with alternative means of livelihood. It was supposed to come up with a list of impoverished sex workers who wished to be rehabilitated as the apex court did not wish to coerce them into changing their profession. Initially, the panel was supposed to concentrate on the four metros and was to involve the local NGOs in this effort.

However, since then little progress seems to have been made in this regard. So much so that last week a bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and Gyan Sudha Mishra of the Supreme Court asked senior advocate Pradeep Ghosh, who heads the panel, to submit another report on the work done so far. The bench said it would like to monitor the rehabilitation process by the Centre and the states so as to ensure that the exercise was not just an eyewash. “We routinely have conferences and seminars on these issues and the matter ends there. No concrete measures are taken to end the malaise. We want to make sure that something is done that satisfies our conscience. It should not be a mere eyewash,” the bench said. . .

The Centre has already paid Rs 10 lakh to the panel to kickstart the work. But though the state governments too have been directed to pay amounts ranging from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 10 lakh, depending on the number of sex workers in their states, very few have made the payment so far. In fact, reacting to the panel’s complaint that state governments were sitting on the money to be paid, the Supreme Court has directed all of them to pay up and submit a list of the number of prostitutes they want to rehabilitate.

But though the Supreme Court’s initiative is a noble one, many feel that it may finally come to nought as attempts to rehabilitate prostitutes through vocational training have failed in most cases.

As Mumbai-based lawyer and human rights activist Flavia Agnes points out, “It has been amply proved that vocational training has not solved the issue of sex work or trafficking. In fact, in many cases, women get into prostitution after trying out other options like domestic work as sex work is more remunerative. Would any of us work at a job which pays one tenth of our current earnings? Then how can we expect a sex worker to be happy with this choice,” she asks.

Women’s activist Saswati Ghosh believes the whole approach to the rehabilitation of sex workers is wrong-headed and paternalistic. “Rehabilitation cannot be on moral grounds alone. Recommendations made by the court or the panel should have a long-term financial benefit as well as ways to involve the family and other members of the society to give prostitutes social security,” she says.

Agnes gives the example of girls who danced in the bars of Mumbai. Many of them had found a means of earning a livelihood that was more paying than sex work. “This was a viable alternative that women had found for themselves. But even this was banned on moral grounds whereas what was needed was to make these places more safe for women.”

However, human rights lawyer Tapas Kumar Bhanja points out that the apex court judgment does take into account the need for giving sex workers a financially viable alternative livelihood. “It says governments should make arrangements to provide a market for the trade in which the women are trained. So the panel’s work will not be over with merely training the woman. It has to ensure that she earns enough to support herself and her family.” And there are instances where this approach has worked, he says. A recent survey revealed that prostitutes placed in MacDonalds, Dominos, food courts, etc. by Mumbai-based NGO Prerana have not returned to the flesh trade. “Some of them are in touch with Prerana and are doing well,” he says. . .

So one solution does not fit all, but the requirement that alternative jobs be financially viable is a bit vague. Wages and working conditions in fast-food outlets are not going to interest a great number of people, whatever their present jobs are. The failure to figure out what sex workers actually want is reflected in numerous stories of rejected Rescues.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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 border, remember). Year after year institutions claim they have got the right numbers and year after year the figures are debunked. The high-end figure I mentioned the other day – 27 million slaves worldwide – changes the terms of the guessing game to include vast new groups of people.

When the game announcement was sent around my networks yesterday, all sorts of suggestions were made: fill a jar with beans and ask someone to guess the number, count every third person that passes your window over a certain period, make up a fancy algorithm, put a keyboard in your mouth and bite down and so on. I’ve commented on some of the nuttiest lines in orange, which seems an appropriately circus-y colour.

UNIAP announces second round of human trafficking estimates competition

The UNIAP Human Trafficking Estimates Competition is a revolutionary step forward in our tackling of human trafficking and determining the prevalence of human trafficking. Revolutionary? Tackling?

UNIAP is looking for innovative, creative methodologies to estimate the number of trafficking victims, traffickers, or profits in or from Asia that are logical, feasible, and defendable. We are hoping to engage innovative, rigorous thinking find a way to get the numbers that the anti-trafficking community so desperately needs. Desperately? Could that be because so much money is spent on this with so little to show for it?

Despite the underground and clandestine nature of human trafficking, UNIAP believes it IS possible to estimate the magnitude of the crime. Ta-da! Belief is everything.

The Competition Challenges are:

Challenge 1: “Estimate the number of trafficking victims within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.”

Challenge 2: “Estimate the number of traffickers within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” Not only victims, then.

Challenge 3: “Estimate the amount of financial profit made by trafficking-related criminal activities within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” These estimates might be the most fantastic of all.

What do you get if you win? The best entries will be short-listed by a panel of independent judges. Who? Maybe Emma Thompson? Ashton Kutcher?

Soon afterward, each short-listed entry will be brought to a final judging competition in Bangkok, to defend their approach in front of a panel of independent judges and audience. (Translation support will be available for Mekong languages). Oh! It’s a Reality Show! The best sales pitch wins! I’ll bet they televise it.

The winners will receive prizes (and glory!), but more importantly: Top entries will be published and disseminated globally, and Funding ($40,000 US) will be provided to pilot the top methodologies in the field.

How To Enter: see the Python website. Go on – put a keypunch machine on your head and see what number appears as you walk around during a six-hour period.

I know – this is impossibly silly. That’s how desperate they are.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Kristof’s seventh-grade sex slave, censorship and colonialism

Writing on Nicholas Kristof’s tweets about saving sex slaves, I said that the important point to criticise is his boast to have caused the closure of six brothels. Whether you believe that brothels are workplaces or slavery dens, you need to ask what the result will be for those working inside when those sites are suddenly closed down (some answers to that are described in this video).

Someone at In These Times wrote about that article of mine, apparently agreeing with my main points, but the post was taken down the same day, making me wonder if the site owners will not allow any criticism of Kristof. Is he such a sacred cow for liberal-leaning news-site managers? Even if they claim to be independent, as it says on their website? It seems absurd, what harm did their blogger do?

The writer had called her article ‘Seventh Grader’ is not an insult: The Naked Anthropologist vs. Nicholas Kristof, in reference to my comment that it is offensive he would ‘refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader‘. She thought it was silly of me because Kristof writes for a US audience who understand that 12-year-olds belong in seventh grade. But many people understood what was annoying about Kristof’s comment, and my guess is he himself likes to think of his work as international, since he at least sometimes lives in Cambodia and writes for the New York Times.

The issue here is colonialism, the imposition not just of the words seventh grader but of the whole world view behind them, a world in which people who are 12 are said to be school children and nothing else because 12-year-olds are claimed to have the right to absolute innocence, lives in which neither work nor sex have a part. Such a claim is questionable in the USA itself, but to transport it wholesale onto a young stranger in Cambodia, a girl glimpsed in a brothel, is to impose an outside interpretation on that girl and the cultural context she’s found in. You may say, based on your belief of what’s right in your culture, that she’s a seventh grader, but you thereby maintain control of someone not in a position to resist, you exploit and victimise her without knowing anything real about her. Kristof says she’s a slave, therefore she is one: is that right?

The writer’s note that the World Food Program labels the world’s children according to the same system of school grades only underscores that we are dealing with colonialism. I write about the Rescue Industry, but many before me have written about the counter-productive thing that is Aid, particularly the version that sends bags of food to hungry places. There are hundreds of resources for such critiques online, or you can read Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing Aid or Graham Hancock’s The Lords of Poverty, if you want it in a more popular style. These out-of-date concepts of Helping are oppressive and haven’t actually stopped structural hunger yet, but they provide hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs for folks from richer countries who assume that their way of life is the best, most successful one despite the presence of many grave social problems and conflicts. Again, the issue is the control the coloniser exercises over the colonised.

This is not cant against the USA. Chinua Achebe commented famously in a critique of Heart of Darkness that Joseph Conrad used Africa

as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. . . The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. Things Fall Apart

As we say nowadays, it’s all about Kristof: his experience, terror, angst, confusion, guilt, desire. Those found in the jungle or brothel are objects in a theatrical drama in which he plays the central role. Did anyone saved in those recent brothel raids want to be rescued as they were, with the results that came about, whatever they were? That is what we do not know, and as far as I can see, we are not going to find out from Kristof or In These Times.

I’ll talk about the idea of whiteness on another occasion.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Conceit of Nicholas Kristof: Rescuing sex slaves as saintliness

Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.

Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:

In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.

Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader. His next claim was:

In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*

Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.

But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?

Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.

A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:

But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.

There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

If this were about men, they would be seen as empowered: sex selection, sex trafficking and girls

In order to draw only dire conclusions about the now famous disparity in numbers between males and females in Asia, you need to view girls and women as inferior yourself. If the data showed there to be fewer males, you can be sure they would be seen to be in an advantageous position: able to pick and choose amongst prospective spouses, enjoying gender power. Instead, a surfeit of men is imagined to cause sex trafficking and bride-buying, the assumption being that when women become required, men will traffick them. Why not think women will migrate to places where they are lacking, take on traditionally female jobs and enjoy an advantage in the local marriage market or selling sex? Not the most progressive outcomes possibly but aren’t they better than being expected to wait to be victimised?

Bring Your Questions for Mara Hvistendahl

27 October 2011, Freakonomics

Her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, looks at how advancements in prenatal technology have led to extreme cases of gender selection across much of Asia. As economic development spurs people in developing countries to have fewer children and gives them access to technologies such as ultrasound, parents are making sure that at least one of their children is a boy. As a result, sex-selective abortion has left more than 160 million females “missing” from Asia’s population. It’s estimated that by 2020, 15 percent of men in China and northwest India will have no female counterpart. The consequences of that imbalance are far-reaching and include rises in sex-trafficking, bride-buying and a spike in crime as well.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex on Sunday: Sex work and sex workers in new film on Mexico, Bangladesh, Thailand

Most people don’t know what any sex-industry venue looks like apart from the street or someone’s bedroom viewed through a web camera. But even people who do know how some places look – where they themselves work, or where they themselves are customers – have little idea of what other sorts of places look like. Since I am a proponent of the cultural study of commercial sex, I like to disseminate things that show lesser-known kinds of people and places, so here are some clips from a new film directed by Michael Glawogger called Whores’ Glory (which I have not seen). The venues shown – in Mexico, Bangladesh and Thailand – are neither the most horrible nor the most comfortable. Try not to fall into generalising from these to whole countries or cultures, they are just random venues chosen for whatever reasons by the director.

We men are a commodity here – we supply the money, says one client here in Thailand. Observe how both sets of people are objectified in this venue.

They pay me and I enjoy it – A Mexican woman describes why she likes working.

Love requires money– A madam explains her career in a crowded Bangladeshi venue.

I wish we could hear more background sound and I wish we could smell the air, but I am glad at least that we can see and hear something of these places. And I don’t intend to launch into any reductionist ‘analysis’ of what are just small captured moments about whose origin we know nothing: how the director found these places, what he told participants, whether he compensated them in any way. And so on.

Oh, and the photo at the beginning is meant to depict a sex club located near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn – possibly now closed.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute? asks a Shanghai sign

Rerun because I am on the road and because this is a favourite. Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute is the question raised by a sign seen at Zapata’s Mexican Cantina in Shanghai.Most of the heat in conversations about commercial sex goes to the idea of prostitution – whether it can ever be a normalised profession called sex work or whether it is by definition violence against women. Some people think marriage is prostitution; others think all paid work is. For myself, I wonder how people imagine there to be a clear line between commercial and non-commercial sexual transactions, since all of life seems saturated with both.

My curiosity was piqued when I saw the above photo from Zapata’s, a middle-class bar-restaurant located in Tongren Lu, a popular Shanghai nightlife area. It’s not the kind of place where I expected to see a sign about prostitution. Trying to figure this one out led me into the expat world, where only insiders— most of the vocal ones men— understand what’s going on. I hung around Internet forums where this sign made the rounds and explanations ranged from it was the bar manager’s private joke to the place is filthy with prostitutes; decent girls won’t go there.

There are discussions of the many types of predatory women loose in the city. ISpyShanghai mentions entertainers,Tiger girls, bar girls, butterflies, hostesses, chickens, and those girls on Tongren Lu who will literally jump into the taxi with you if you don’t shut the door quickly enough.

Discussants at forums like Shanghaiexpat say too many pros (professionals) get past bar bouncers and warn each other about falling into the clutches of girls who try to get you inside talk-talk bars, where they will only flirt and promote your buying of drinks.

Some call such bars fronts for prostitution. Others make a class distinction between talk-talk bars and hostess bars, the latter being more upscale. There are also warnings about ladyboys, transvestites and other non-real women, who are even said to form the majority of female-looking customers in some places.

Could Zapata’s managers be trying to keep single women out? Certainly not; Ladies’ Nights are common in Shanghai, where each time the door opens, hundreds of eyes fix on the arriving guests, hoping that they have breasts.

So, what have we got? A commercial bar scene where men with money want females to be available to them for picking up, flirting, and perhaps going somewhere to have sex. Those women may accept gifts of drinks, food, taxis and flowers without losing their shine. In another popular, mainstream, local example, KTV (karaoke television) venues invite men to come in groups and hire the services of women to drink and sing with them in small private rooms.

The taint comes when women do exactly the same things with the addition of asking for cash.

It’s subtle and confusing, isn’t it? When is it legitimate for women to take money or accept drinks? What about the customers— why is there no distinction amongst them? They take out their wallets in all kinds of situations— and that’s considered fine— except when they position themselves as victims of predators. On the other hand, they discuss which KTV place has the hottest/most fun girls.

Zapata’s managers and bouncers are male, so maybe it makes sense that they would put up such a blunt, sexist sign telling prostitutes to keep out. But what does it mean to say If you are unsure whether or not you’re a prostitute, please ask one of our friendly security guards to sort it out for you?

Presumably a professional knows that the sign refers to her or him-self and has no need to consult anyone about it. Which leaves whom?

What if I go to Shanghai alone, get dressed up, and appear alone at Zapata’s bar? Is it okay as long as I don’t talk to any men or am seen to be paying for my own drinks? What happens if the barman brings me a parasol-decorated margarita on behalf of the guy across the bar, who’s already paid for it? Should I now feel worried about being bounced? In case anyone thinks this is unlikely, one of the expat discussions involved a woman who was asked to leave Zapata’s although she was there with girlfriends.

She was said to be Taiwanese. Some of the participants in expat forums specify that they are Chinese. Bouncers might or might not understand different kinds of regional Chinese languages. Someone said prostitutes don’t have to look Asian. Since ho-style is in fashion, clothes aren’t the key to this conundrum. I think I’m better off not going out, or sticking to an old-fashioned hotel bar where I’m allowed to accept a drink from a stranger— or offer one to someone else.

Originally published at Susie Bright’s Journal .

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Even sex-trafficked brothel workers reject raids and rescues

For campaigners like Ashton Kutcher, sex slavery is an easy-to-recognise phenomenon with a single obvious cure, rescue: first by police and then by social workers. And despite rescuers’ avowed respect for personal stories, they never listen to voices that criticise this cure. The poster below was made by migrant sex workers (they call themselves that) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it before but so many people are still unaware of the problems associated with Rescue that I like to re-run 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 even celebrities and then think twice about how you will Fix Their Lives so easily.

• 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. Check the rescue tag to read more, including stories of sex workers resisting arrest and fleeing from rescuers.

During my 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. Here’s another view:

Women resist rescue by anti-trafficking police, who admit it

Headlines read Hookers rescued against their will and Rescued cybersex girls bolt DSWD office. The stories are from the Philippines, but they are not the first of their kind to reach mainstream news outlets. And they are not amazing exceptions to the rule, as everyone who works in helping projects knows.

The argument against raiding sex venues is not that all the workers are happy because sex work and free markets are just grand. The argument is that US policy, which threatens countries with losing aid if they don’t do enough to stop trafficking, promotes ham-fisted policing – cowboy raids that rush to pick up women selling sex and arrest their exploiters. Threatened countries use well-publicised raids to say to the US, See? We are doing what you want. We are stopping human trafficking and rescuing victims, so don’t cut off our aid. Which works, if you look at how the Philippines’ ranking improved in this year’s lame TIP Report.

So why aren’t more campaigners against prostitution and slavery concerned when women resist rescue? Is it so hard to understand that resistance doesn’t mean they love their jobs or are not being exploited by anyone or were not treated badly by their parents? All we really know it means is that they don’t want to be rescued like this. Over and over, researchers have documented how such women simply prefer their present situations in these brothels to other options – forceable internment in rescue homes being at the top of the list. Similar stories have come from other countries: Chinese women in the Congo, Bangladeshis in India.

Details of the cybersex-girls’ escape include:

Fifteen girls, rescued by police and National Bureau of Agency men from a cybersex den operated by two Swedish nationals have escaped from the Department of Social Welfare Development office in Cagayan de Oro City. . . after mauling the duty security guard. The girls then flagged down a passenger jeepney and forced its driver to bring them away from the DSWD office. . . – ABS.CBNnews.com, the Philippines, 5 July 2011

Details from hookers rescued against their will include:

A hundred female sex workers . . . and five foreigners were arrested in raids on three night clubs in Angeles City Tuesday night. . . “The women don’t really consider it a rescue,” said CIDG Women and Children’s Protection Desk head . . . “They kept cursing us, and tried their best to escape.” . . . Chief Supt. Samuel Pagdilao Jr., said the successive raids in Angeles City’s red light district bolstered the US government’s recognition of the Philippines’ commitment to combating human trafficking. The Philippines has been taken off a watch list of the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report and elevated to Tier 2, a category of countries that do not fully comply with anti-trafficking standards but are making efforts to do so. Philippine Daily Inquirer, 29 June 2011

That should be a clear enough cause-and-effect relationship for anyone to understand!

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research: Not all is trafficking and AIDS

I first published this piece in 2002, but its message is truer than ever as rescue operations presently receive large amounts of funding in many parts of the world. I am republishing it here since so many new people have entered a research field and joined social movements to save people without understanding how it all started – in conversations about women and travel. Note: Since all brothels are ‘legal’ in Sydney I shouldn’t have used the word, which implies there are also ‘illegal’ brothels. Thanks to Scarlet Alliance for the correction.

The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research

Laura Agustín, June 2002, Research for Sex Work 5, 30-32. pdf

In October 2001, while on a trip to Australia and Thailand, I met five Latin American women with some connection to the sex industry: the owner of a (legal) brothel and two migrants working for her in Sydney, and two women in a detention centre for illegal immigrants in Bangkok. These five women were from Peru, Colombia and Venezuela; they were from different strata of society; they were very different ages. They also all had quite different stories to tell.

The brothel owner now had permanent residence in Australia. Her migrant workers had come on visas to study English which gave them the right to work, but getting the visa had required paying for the entire eight-month course in advance, which meant acquiring large debts. The Madam was very affectionate with them but also very controlling; they lived in her house and travelled with her to work. She was teaching them the business; the outreach workers from a local project did not speak Spanish.

Of the two women detained in Bangkok, one had been stopped in the Tokyo airport with a false visa for Japan. She had been invited by her sister, who had been an illegal sex worker but now was an illegal vendor within the milieux. The woman had been deported to the last stage of her journey, Bangkok; there she had been in jail for a year before being sent to the detention centre. The second detained woman had been caught on-camera in a robbery being carried out by her boyfriend and others in Bangkok, after travelling around with them in Hong Kong and Singapore; she had just completed a three-year jail sentence before being sent to the centre (and she also had completely false papers, including a change of nationality).

Both detained women were waiting for someone to pay their plane fare home, but no one was offering to do this, since their degree of complicity in their situations disqualified them from aid to victims of trafficking, and not all Latin American countries maintain embassies in Thailand. Only one person from local NGOs visiting the detention centre spoke Spanish.

How can we understand these stories?

Given the very different stories these women have to tell, labelling them either ‘migrant sex workers’ or ‘victims of trafficking’ is incorrect and unhelpful to an understanding of why and how they have arrived at their present situations. The placing of labels is largely a subjective judgement dependent on the researcher of the moment and is not the way women talk about themselves, something like the attempt to make complicated subjects fit into a pre-printed form. The following descriptions illustrate this complexity.

While the two new migrants in Sydney seemed accepting of the work they had just begun doing, there was clearly ambiguity about the significance of the language course on which their visas were based, and their debts did not leave them much choice about what jobs to do.

The migrant to Japan believed she would not have to sell sex, but her own family had been involved in getting her the false papers, and she was suffering considerable guilt and anguish. The woman caught in the robbery seemed to have sold sex during her travels, but without any particular intention or destination being involved, nor did she give the matter much importance. The total number of outsiders implicated in their journeys and their jobs was large; nationalities mentioned were Pakistani, Turkish and Mexican. The need for research to understand how all these connections happen is urgent, but funders are unlikely to finance research that does not fit into one of the currently acceptable theoretical frameworks: ‘AIDS prevention’, ‘violence against women’ or ‘trafficking’.

These frameworks reflect particular political concerns arising in the context of ‘globalisation’, and they are understandable. Elements of the stories of people such as those I have described may share features with typical discourses on ‘trafficking’, ‘violence against women’ and ‘AIDS’, but these are prejudiced, moralistic frameworks that begin from a political position and are not open to results that do not fit (for example, a woman who admits that she knew she would be doing sex work abroad and willingly paid someone to falsify papers for her).

The desires of young people to travel, see the world, make a lot of money and not pay much attention to the kind of jobs they do along the way are not acceptable to researchers that begin from moral positions; neither are the statements by professional sex workers that they choose and prefer the work they do. Yet ethical research simply may not depart from the claim that the subjects investigated do not know their own minds.

Why do we do research, anyway?

A theoretical framework refers to the overall idea that motivates services or research projects. For service projects with sex workers this framework might be a religious mission to help people in danger, a medical concept of reducing harm or a vision of solidarity or social justice. Most projects with sex workers focus on providing services, not doing research, though often the line between them is not easy to draw.

Service projects accumulate a lot of information over time, but it seems as though the only thing governments want to know about is people’s nationalities, how old they are, when they first had sex and whether they know what a condom is. Many NGO and outreach workers would like to publish other kinds of information, research other kinds of things. But where, how? If their research proposal does not reflect one of the existing research frameworks regarding migrant prostitution – ‘AIDS prevention’, ‘trafficking’ or ‘violence against women’ – it will be hard if not impossible to find funding.

Some of my own research concerns people who work with sex workers, like the people who read this publication. Continue reading →

New Zealand fails to exclude migrants from its sex industry

For many interested in normalising the sex industry, New Zealand’s legislation seems the best. A couple of years ago I pointed out how this good legislation was instituted at the expense of migrants, with a clause prohibiting their legal employment thrown in as a sop to anti-trafficking zealots. This aspect of the law has failed, unsurprisingly to those who know that prohibitionist laws have no successful track record when sexual practices are concerned.

The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective estimates a third of sex workers in the country are now migrants. That is a lot. Many are Chinese. In 2008 a man jumped out a Chinese brothel window (photo) and died, apparently panicking at the police’s Gestapo tactics during an immigration raid. The following story does not explain whether brothels referred to are licensed but employing undocumented migrants or illegal themselves. Either way, it is clear that the decriminalisation of prostitution law excluding migrant sex workers has made their situation as risky and raid-ridden as is it in countries with other kinds of legislation – and in the name of anti-trafficking. Note: CBD means Central Business District in Auckland.

Chinese prostitutes worry sex industry

By Lincoln Tan, 11 April 2011, New Zealand Herald

Candice, a petite Chinese girl, fusses over a customer as she pours him a cup of oolong tea wearing nothing more than a see-through blood-red coloured camisole and knee-high fake leather boots. But behind her smile and calm appearance, the 21-year-old sex worker on Auckland’s North Shore confesses to be living on the edge. “I have to look happy, but I worry all the time if there is an immigration check or even if my client is an undercover immigration officer,” she said.

Candice is one of the many illegal prostitutes who arrive in New Zealand either on a visitor or student visa to work in the sex industry. The arrival of illegal Chinese sex workers have driven an industry that has been decriminalised back underground, says the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective. “We’re now looking at two industries – an industry which is supported by decriminalisation, and an industry which is having to be underground again,” said Catherine Healey, the collective’s national co-ordinator, when asked how Chinese sex workers have influenced the sex industry here. “Predominantly, the illegal part of the industry is Chinese,” she said.

Although prostitution was decriminalised in 2003, it is illegal for those on a temporary visa, such as students and tourists, to work in the sex industry. The collective does not record if a prostitute is working illegally, but Miss Healey said Chinese now make up nearly a third of the 1700 sex workers in Auckland – outnumbering Maori and Pacific Islanders, and behind only Pakeha.

Last year Immigration New Zealand, which only investigates when a complaint is received, found at least eight foreign sex workers working illegally. A client, who frequents a Chinese “massage centre” in Takapuna, says the $40-per-hour charge was the draw. “Even with everything included, it rarely goes beyond $80 with one of these Chinese girls,” he said.

NZPC Auckland Manager Annah Pickering said other sex workers charged upwards of $100 per hour, and her organisation has produced a Chinese leaflet urging sex workers to “value themselves” and charge higher rates. Miss Pickering said because of the large number of Chinese sex workers here, it was now an “integral part” of its operations to have many of its information and education brochures translated into Chinese. A Chinese-speaking staff member had been employed by the collective, but she died suddenly from an illness earlier this year, and a replacement was being sought. Miss Pickering said about a third of the brothels and massage parlours in Auckland are run by Chinese operators.

One of them told the Herald it was common to let sex workers “freelance” at his brothel in the CBD. “They are just like customers renting a room from us. We do not employ them or pay them a commission, their customers are their paymasters,” explained one central city operator. “We don’t know and we don’t ask about their personal details, including their immigration status.”

Chinese sex workers, who spoke to the Herald on the basis of anonymity, said money was the main reason they came here and none had plans to settle here. “Even when I charge $80, it is more than I ever earn back in China,” said a 21-year-old from Hunan, here on a student visa. Despite her illegal immigration status, she felt “safe” working here because the only offence she was committing is with immigration and not the police.

A 19-year-old said she found New Zealand “boring” and believed she could do more with the money she earned here back in China.

Sweatshop jobs or sex work in Cambodia: Rescue Industry fails to understand

Is buying sex a better way to help Cambodian women than buying a T-shirt? reads the subtitle of an article in Slate. I don’t think we need to generalise about all sex jobs or all jobs in clothing factories/sweatshops, but given the Rescue Industry’s obsession with getting people out of sex and into other work, it is always good to see information showing it’s not that simple. By which I mean that finding alternative jobs that are actually satisfactory to people is not easy and neither is helping them. Helping people is not only difficult but meaningless unless there is an understanding of what people want themselves.

Moral crusaders intent on saving people from sex work rarely engage with the enormous subject of what activity will provide income instead and how. The present worldwide craze assumes that any job will be better – meaning more dignified, fulfilling, heartwarming – than any sex job. Alternative occupations offered, however, are universally gender-stereotyped for women who are assumed to be traditionally feminine and domestic. Aid organisations and rescue projects relentlessly treat women in poorer countries like backward children and still call attempts to help them out of selling sex rehabilitation. The photo at the top illustrates a nearly universal association of sewing with obedient, meek women, but organised sex workers have specifically addressed the sewing-machine cliché in protests, as shown below.

It is true that a lot of people who sell sex wish they could do something else instead, the way probably most of the planet does. We fall into jobs by chance, or because someone told us they would be good for us, or because we studied some skill and then felt we had to use it even if we don’t enjoy it much. We stay in jobs because we don’t find another better one, and nowadays we are afraid to lose even the worst of jobs. Note how the concepts of precarious labour and the new precariat apply to sex work.

These excerpts from the conclusion of Ken Silverstein’s A Brief Tour of the Cambodian Sex Industry (Slate, 19 May 2011) demonstrate the problem of assuming a job making clothing is always better than sex work. Note: apparel means clothing in the US.

. . . 20 percent of Cambodian sex workers interviewed for the 2009 U.N. report said they took their jobs because of good working conditions or relatively high pay. (Fifty-five percent did so due to “difficult family circumstances.” About 3.5 percent were lured, cheated, or sold into sex work.)

Are sex workers exploited? Absolutely. But so are textile workers. When I was in Cambodia in 2009 to report on the apparel industry, I obtained the “company profile” of a firm that produced T-shirts, trousers, and skirts for companies like Aeropostale and JCPenney. It said the plant’s 1,000 workers produced 7.8 million pieces annually. Taking a rough estimate of $25 per piece retail, each employee generated approximately $195,000 in retail sales annually, for which she received about $750 in pay, factoring in typical overtime rates.

“A lot of women no longer want apparel jobs,” Tola Moeun, a labor-rights activist with a group called the Community Legal Education Center, told me. “When prostitution offers a better life, our factory owners need to think about more than their profit margins.” 19 May 2011, Slate

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Bangalore sex workers reject rescue by Supreme Court judge

In the hierarchy of the Rescue Industry a Supreme Court judge must rank very high. Here is one in India who surpassed himself whilst deciding on a murderer’s appeal. Not only should the murderer go to prison for life but all sex workers should be given vocational training so they can change occupations. Is this not truly daft? Ideology aside, I mean: there simply are not alternate jobs for everyone in the world who doesn’t have a super-nice one, particularly if you care about money. How does this 19th-century ‘alternate’ idea manage to hold on in today’s world? Sex workers in Bangalore, whose union is affiliated with the New Trade Union Initiative, explained succinctly why rescue and rehabilitation are not what they want: see below in red under Collective Power.

Rehabilitation cuts no ice with India’s sex workers

By Astrid Zweynert, 28 March 2011, TrustLaw

It was a noble sentiment when India’s highest court proclaimed that sex workers had a right to life and dignity, just like anybody else under the country’s constitution. Dismissing an appeal by a man sentenced to life for murdering a sex worker, the Supreme Court also directed the government to provide vocational training to sex workers to help rehabilitate them. “A woman is compelled to indulge in prostitution not for pleasure but because of abject poverty,” the court said last month. “If such woman is granted opportunity to avail some technical or vocational training, she would be able to earn her livelihood by such vocational training and skill instead of selling her body.”

Sex workers were not impressed. “This is feeble sympathy,” Veena, a transgender sex worker, told TrustLaw. Veena represents Karnataka Sex Workers Union in the southern city of Bangalore.

What many sex workers want more than anything is to have their work decriminalised. In India, selling sex is not illegal but activities around sex work, such as soliciting or running a brothel, are punishable with fines and even imprisonment. “If we can’t solicit clients without getting arrested, we will naturally rely on pimps to carry on our trade,” Veena said. “What we need are practical measures that free us from exploitation created by the law itself.”

The government has until May 4 to detail the steps it is taking to implement vocational training. But one thing is for sure among sex workers – forced rehabilitations carried out by the state in the name of “rescuing them from their plight” is not the way forward.

Collective Power

The idea that sex workers should be rehabilitated may be almost as old as the profession itself. It comes from a belief that every sex worker wants to get out of sex work. To be sure, many sex workers in India enter the trade against their will. Levels of violence against sex workers are high and they grapple with other problems, such as access to health care and high HIV infection rates. But campaigners argue that this does not necessarily mean they want to change their way of life and enter rehabilitation schemes that are based on the moralistic premise that sex work is immoral.

They also say such thinking does a great disservice to the collective struggles by the sex workers’ movement in India, which for nearly a decade has been demanding rights, not sympathy. . .

Surrogate mothers now said to be victims of trafficking

Surrogacy was the other target of the Swedish author of an extremely bad book called Varat och varan: Prostitution, surrogatmödraskap och den delade människan (very hard title in any language but something like Being and being a thing: prostitution, surrogate motherhood and the divided person). Other more reliable commentators on the idea of commodification worry about surrogate motherhood, including Arlie Hochschild. For extremists in this area (which Hochschild is not), women should not allow themselves to ‘be used’ to incubate other people’s babies, and they find it specially enraging that richer whiter people should be the ones paying for these babies. In line with the anti-prostitution argument, anti-surrogacy activists feel that sexual and reproductive organs should be employed only for personal pleasure and fulfillment. The presence of money in the childbirth process offends them monumentally, even if the women involved say that they want to earn money having other people’s babies – an argument familiar from the prostitution field.

Here the suspicion is raised that women from Viet Nam were trafficked to Thailand and forced into surrogacy. The person from Human Rights Watch interviewed below makes it clear, however, that at least some of the women involved knew what they were doing. Now the authorities have to try to separate the true knowers from the pseudo-knowers, just as happens after brothel raids. To me it sounds very difficult to ‘force’ people 24 hours a day for 9 months to do what they are told if they don’t want to: if the babies are to be born healthy the mothers can’t be allowed to suffer, after all.

Thai police bust Asian surrogacy ring

28 February 2011. ABC Radio Australia

Thai authorities are trying to decide what to do with the offspring of Vietnamese women freed from an illegal surrogacy ring in Bangkok. A total of 14 women, half of them pregnant, were freed on Wednesday. The baby-sales operation used the women as surrogates for wealthy childless couples overseas who placed orders for newborns online. Thai police have arrested four Taiwanese, one Chinese and three Burmese nationals in connection with the operation. But the babies have been born into a legal grey area, with Thailand still mulling the ramifications of the case.

Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Phil Robertson, deputy director, Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, Bangkok

LAM: Phil, first of all tell us about this ring, were the women forced into surrogacy, or were they willing participants?

ROBERTSON: Well, it’s still a bit unclear at this time. The police and social workers from the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security are still interviewing them. A lot of information hasn’t come out yet. It looks like there was probably a mix here of some people who may have known what they were getting into and some people who were forced, but there’s clearly a number of cases where we believe human trafficking was taking place.

LAM: And I understand the surrogacy is illegal in Thailand, so the owners of this company seem to be pretty bold in offering their services so openly. Do you think that’s largely due to government inaction?

ROBERTSON: Well, I think that many people know there is some sort of laxness in enforcement of laws in Thailand. I think that they probably thought they could get away with it. They had on their web site very clearly that there were no Thai women involved. Perhaps they thought because of that they would not come under scrutiny of authorities, but it’s still unclear like many things in this case exactly what they thought, because of course the people have been arrested have not been bought to court. There’s been very little information coming from the authorities beyond some of the general statements from the public health minister that you’ve referred to.

LAM: And do you have any news of the Vietnamese women who now face being sent back to Vietnam after having had their babies?

ROBERTSON: Well, the important thing here is that the authorities treat them in a very – in a way that is supportive of the human rights of the women themselves. There should be a victim-centric approach and I expect that there will be some period of time where they are assisted to understand what’s going on and then we hope asked what they want to do. Many of them may be sent back to Vietnam eventually. However, there has to be a period of time where they are taken care of, because they are in fact victims of this ring and of this trafficking enterprise.

LAM: What about the new parents, the adoptees, the people who bought the babies. Do you think they’re equally culpable?

ROBERTSON: Well, they’re certainly culpable if they knew what they were getting into. They may have also been lied to as well, it’s unclear. But we think that there has to be a thorough investigation in all four countries and there are four countries involved here, Vietnam, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where we believe that they were probably brought through Taiwan, of course where many of the people who were perhaps buying these babies were in Thailand. So far, we haven’t seen a level of cooperation between the four governments that we would like to really smash this ring and indicate this kind of criminal enterprise will not countenanced in the future.

LAM: And Phil, what is the attitude of Human Rights Watch towards surrogacy? If it’s properly regulated, do you have a problem with it?

ROBERTSON: We have not set a specific policy on that issue. In this case, we’re focused really just on the issue of the human trafficking element, the fact that women in some cases were truly forced in this, duped, brought to Thailand where they were probably going to be doing some other sort of work and then forced into this surrogacy. So right now, our focus is on the human trafficking elements of it.

LAM: How serious do you think this problem of baby selling in the Asia-Pacific region?

ROBERTSON: Well, I mean frankly when it first came up, I think everybody was shocked. It’s unclear now. This is something that many people didn’t believe could actually occur. I think now people are going to be very much more watching for this kind of ring. I think many of these companies will come under greater scrutiny to make sure that in fact if there is such surrogacy taking place, that it is voluntary.

LAM: Just very quickly Phil, just very briefly, what would you like governments to do, particularly the government in Thailand now?

ROBERTSON: Well, I think they really need to get to the bottom of this, this specific case. It’s very worrisome that some reporters went back out to the housing estate and found a number of employees of that company still working there. So it’s clear that there has to be a much more significant and strenuous effort made to investigate this case and bring out very clearly all the international elements to it and there should be again that investigation involving all four governments that we believe were probably touched by this criminal enterprise.

Sex tourism at guesthouses by older lgbt people? Bring in the anti-trafficking police immediately

Sex tourism, gays, western perversion – what is this story, and these arrests, actually about? No mention is made of any trafficking accusation in this report of a police raid on a brothel in Cambodia – just the cop’s satisfaction at having spent a month investigating a place where people pay for sex. The rather ridiculous salacious slant would have us believe that this brothel is different because gays, lesbians, old ladies and foreigners use it. Well! Presumably the most special customer is a non-young non-Cambodian woman who likes women? Is this a category the police are afraid of? Are we meant to read between the lines that anyone employed in this brothel must have been trafficked and forced (are old-fashioned heterosexist brothels better, then?

It is old news that the US imperialist Trafficking in Persons report has caused Cambodia to institute legislation that has police persecuting sex businesses on principle. This is merely an early stage of the movement that now has a new name: End Demand, which can be followed by several phrases: sometimes we hear End Demand for Sex Trafficking, and sometimes End Demand for Commercial Sex Exploitation, and then there is End Demand for Modern-Day Slavery. All are semantically strange, since the demand these campaigners don’t like is a demand to pay for sex. The demand isn’t for the process – traffiicking, slavery or exploitation. I wonder why the whiz-kid business consultants didn’t make sure the slogan was clearer.

Perhaps there was a special frisson in the fact that a guesthouse has become a brothel, although the report also doesn’t explain what the evidence for that is, either. Presence of sex workers in the building? Manager shows guests an album with pictures of possible escorts? Or is there something noteworthy in the fact that the business is the type associated with alternative-style travel, less luxe, more home-like, cheaper?

Note that all this surveillance for a whole month netted them 14 people, only 3 of whom can be charged with anything – the clients and workers they don’t know what to do with.

Raid closes specialty brothel

Buth Reaksmey Kongkea, 27 February 2011, Phnom Penh Post

Anti-human trafficking officials last week cracked down on a guesthouse in Phnom Penh’s Prampi Makara district that offered sexual services for a select clientele. Keo Thea, director of the municipal Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Office at the Ministry of Interior, said a raid of the guesthouse-turned-brothel in Veal Vong commune netted a total of 14 arrests, including the guesthouse owner, two accomplices and 11 sex workers, on Saturday. “We have been investigating this house for about a month before we took superb action in cracking down on it,” he said. Keo Thea added that the guesthouse offered specific sexual services.

This place is hidden and illegal and provides sexual services for [gay] men, lesbians, old ladies and foreign people in Phnom Penh.

He said police research had uncovered that the guesthouse had been a popular destination for people seeking its specific services for many years. The detained were being held at the Phnom Penh Municipal Police Department for questioning prior to being sent to provincial court today to face charges, Keo Thea said, though he expressed doubts about the fate of some of the people arrested during Saturday’s raid.

We are now waiting for the order from our superiors about what we should do with these 11 people, who are sexual service providers and those who had come for sex. But for the house owner and the two accomplices, we will send them to court for charges.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex on Sunday: Foreign brides in Taiwan, Celebrity (not Julian Assange) accused of rape in Mexico, Asexuality and romance

What the cats of Houtong say about the population of Taiwan

demography matters

One major theme of my Taiwan posts here has been the very low fertility rate, for the main the standard combination of patriarchal cultural norms with the substantial emancipation of women. Another theme has been the sex ratio strongly biased towards men, producing a deficit of marriageable women. Just as in South Korea, this has led to substantial marriage-driven immigration to Taiwan . . . with women from mainland China and Southeast Asia–particularly but certainly not only Vietnamese women–contributing a notable, if declining number and proportion of newborns. . . Foreign brides mainly refer to women from mainland China and Southeast Asian countries who marry Taiwanese men. Taiwanese men used to be a priority husband target for women from Southeast Asian countries during the years of Taiwan’s economic prosperity. But their willingness to marry Taiwanese men has been undermined by Taiwan’s economic shrinkage in recent years.

Celebrity rape case grips Mexico

Ioan Grillo, GlobalPost

The case itself revolves around 17-year-old escort Daiana Gomez — sent to accompany Kalimba and his entourage at the nightclub where they played the concert on Dec. 18. Gomez said in a TV interview that she and another escort aged 16 indeed were invited back to the hotel expecting a party. Back in the hotel, Gomez says she saw the fellow escort go into a room with three naked men and the door being closed. Kalimba then hit her, told her to shut up and raped her, she claims. In his own interview, Kalimba on the verge of tears said Gomez is lying. “I didn’t rape anyone. I didn’t abuse anyone. It was a small hotel. Someone would have heard if I attacked her. How come I have no marks on me?” he said. “I have many women in my family. I would never abuse women.” However, Kalimba did not confirm or deny whether he had sex with the underage girl. He also said that both girls went to see him off at the airport, remarking that would have been strange if Gomez had been raped. State prosecutor Francisco Alor took declarations from both Kalimba and Gomez and ruled there was enough evidence to file preliminary rape charges against the pop singer.

Sexual Attraction vs. Romantic Attraction

Good Vibrations

There exists a small but significant portion of the population that identifies as asexual. This, for those not up on their terminology, refers to those who don’t experience sexual attraction. But within that group, there are further subdivisions—notably, those who are romantically inclined and those who are not. There are heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, and panromantic asexuals out there who experience non-sexual forms of attraction toward potential partners. The practical upshot of this distinction is that some asexuals, despite not feeling sexual attraction to their partners, nevertheless do want to have satisfying romantic relationships which function the same as anybody else’s . . . that is, everywhere but the bedroom.

Becoming Miss America by rescuing trafficking victims on the India-Nepal border?

It’s been a long time since good looks and a song could get anyone elected as Miss America. Special consultants help celebrities choose their social causes carefully, so would-be celebrities must, as well. I have the feeling that no cause seems so foolproof these days as trafficking, especially rescue projects. From a story about Katie LaRoche soliciting votes in this month’s Miss America Pageant, I learned that she overtly presents her charitable work as reason to be elected (she is Miss Michigan). She founded One World One Future ‘dedicated to raising awareness of and actively combating human trafficking in the United States and around the world’.

The main goal is to provide money to another organisation, Maiti Nepal, for the purpose of building one or more shelters on the border between Nepal and India. Note that return to their villages is one result.

This shelter is estimated to rescue approximately 250 girls from being sold into a life of slavery each year. The cost of a single shelter is $25,000 meaning that we have the ability to save a life for $100! Not only does $100 save a life and provide a safe home, the transit homes are also engaged in counseling, facilitating medical check-ups to determine health status, motivating survivors to identify traffickers, and building networks and pressure groups.

Transit homes are located at major Nepal India border towns through which many of the children and women are trafficked into India. These border towns are potential points where a little vigilance can have significant payoffs.

Objectives of transit home:

1. To work with police and concerned agencies to intercept potential victims, and apprehend traffickers.

2. To provide a safe transit shelter home for short stays for intercepted and released women and children.

3. To ensure safe passage to their respective villages.

4. To provide information on safe migration.

Transit homes serve as a safe shelter to survivors rescued from India and also to those who have been intercepted at borders while in the process of being trafficked. As per standard operating procedures the girls stay in the transit home for some time and then move to Maiti Nepal`s other establishments for further assistance.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Police streetwalking in Pattaya: Will it prevent human trafficking?

Could a visible police presence help to prevent trafficking? Some people say that every bit helps, but it’s hard to believe that handing out leaflets and stickers will discourage any real bad guys. Put some punters off? Possibly. Cause a lot of young women to hide indoors while the police are walking by? Definitely. Note that the big catch described in the operation shown below was a 16-year-old who police suspected of being a prostitute, who said she was sightseeing and whom they forced to go home to her parents. It is hardly a trafficking story, and the cop’s swaggering, gum-chewing imitation of John Wayne doesn’t help. I do think outreach can be useful in raising awareness about some social problems, but the police need some advice in thinking this one through.

Walking street visited by police to prevent human trafficking, Pattaya People Weekly

On Thursday night, a team of 20 police under the supervision of Pol. Col. Worawong Tongpaiboob –the Superintendent of Human Trade Suppression, Region 2, and Pol. Maj. Nipon Jarernpon –a Deputy Superintendent, visited Walking Street to distribute leaflets, stickers and information regarding the Human Trade Crime Suppression Plan to local people and tourists. The police need help from all of Pattaya’s communities to solve the problems of Human Trafficking Crimes, such as Prostitution, Child Labor, Child Beggars and Child Prostitution more effectively. As Pattaya is a World Class tourist attraction, the number and variety of tourists here draws many criminals to the city.

Human Trafficking statistics in Pattaya are very high, as the city is full of bars, discos and many other adult entertainment venues. Communities must realize that Human Trafficking is one of the worst crimes one person can commit against another, causing great pain to those who are enslaved.

While visiting Walking St., the police found a 16 year old girl sitting with a foreigner in a bar, behaving suspiciously like a prostitute. She was detained and questioned, but claimed that she was only visiting Walking Street for a night of sightseeing. The police warned her about the outcome of the path that the police deemed she was walking on, and contacted her parents to take her home.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Saved at last? or Sex Workers Don’t Want Rescue? Stories from India

Photo Jignesh Mistry

Saved at last: CSWs were sent to the Rescue Foundation at Hadapsar was the original caption on this photo. It went with a story the other day that recounted a rescue operation in Budhwar Peth, an area of Pune (Maharashtra, India) known for electronics shops and sex workers. The report said the workers were saved but recorded a couple of oddities: 1) the police got a translator but the women gave a fictitious address (there is more than one reason they might have done that) and 2) the police claim ‘medical tests’ will determine the women’s exact age (I don’t believe such a test exists yet).

Two days later, the sex workers are reported to have rioted at the rescue home. The person in charge there is not worried, because it has happened before and because she believes the girls are programmed to lie. True Rescue Ideology. It is quite possible, of course, that the women don’t want to do sex work, just as it is likely that they don’t want to be placed in a ‘home’.

Note: The redundant label CSW-commercial sex worker appears sometimes, though it is difficult to see what the word commercial adds to the meaning. If you call people workers, you imply they are doing a job in exchange for money, no?

Sex workers don’t want rescue, 23 October 2010, Mid-Day.com

21 sent to Pune shelter clamour to return to brothel, manhandle staff

More than a score commercial sex workers rescued on Wednesday and sent to a shelter in the city began a violent clamour last morning for a return ticket to brothel life. The demands began barely 24 hours since they were brought to the shelter, said Shaini Padiyare, in-charge of the Rescue Foundation home in Hadapsar that sheltered the 21 sex workers. At 9 am, all 21 sex workers stomped out and created a ruckus. They broke off the grill and engaged in a fight with the management. “The rescued sex workers began insisting on going back to Budhwar Peth,” she said.

Budhwar Peth is the red light district of the city and the sex workers were found at a brothel there. Nine of the rescued sex workers are believed to be minors, and all of them Bangladeshis.

In yesterday’s drama a member of the management suffered a minor injury on the arm. No sex worker was hurt. A case was registered at the Vanudi police station. “In major raids, initially such things happen,” said Padiyare. “In an earlier raid, when 46 girls were brought, the same thing had happened.”

The police suspect the sex workers were illegally brought into the country and forced into prostitution, though this could not be established from their statements taken after Wednesday’s raid as these were found to be misleading. “They are programmed to lie, so we don’t have correct information about them,” said Padiyare. “They even lie about their origin.” Padiyare said they were sure six of the sex workers were minors and these were produced before the Child Welfare Community.

Here is the original story:

Rescued sex workers confuse cops, 21 October 2010, Mid-Day.com

9 minors among 21 sex workers rescued; cops need Bengali translator’s services to take their statements

The police employed the services of a Bengali translator after they rescued 21 commercial sex workers (CSWs), nine of them minors, from a Budhwar Peth brothel yesterday evening.

Late in the night, the translator eventually found out that the information provided by the girls had many problems. PSI Sharmila Sutar, the investigating officer, said, “It was difficult to comprehend the address given by these girls. Many of them claimed to be from Khigirpur village in Autganj district of West Bengal. But this place is not in existence.” The brothel owners and the CSWs were later sent to the Rescue Foundation at Hadapsar.

“Medical test to know their exact age will be made after these girls will be brought before the court tomorrow,” said Sutar.

The police also arrested brothel owners Gauri Tamang and Reshma Tamang. Cases against Gauri Tamang (40) and Reshma Tamang (50) were filed under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1986 (PITA). Filing of charges continued even after the midnight at Faraskhana police station.

Acting on tip-off from anti-immoral trafficking activist Shyam Kamble from Marian Trust, ACP Ranjeet Dhure along with police inspector Rajendra Kadam of Khadak police station, PSI Sutar and others raided the ground floor of Sagar building in Budhwar Peth, the place where the brothel functioned.

According to police sources, most of the CSWs were brought to the city from Bangladesh illegally. Brothel keeper Gauri Tamang has been arrested before under similar charges. Of the rescued 21 sex workers, 10 of them seemed less than 16 years old.

Debi Walker, a women’s rights activist, said, “The brothel ‘madams’ had warned these girls not to approach the police. By creating horror stories about the police machinery, they wanted to prevent the girls from approaching the police station for any help.”

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Migrant sex workers in China: massage parlours, hair salons, hotel rooms

A reporter from the US, Laura Ling, investigates prostitution in China, finding many of the sex workers have migrated to cities for work. Whilst filming from a taxi, the group are stopped and threatened by local men, presumably because since the sex venues are not legal. I am always a little suprised at reporters who do these ‘covert’ investigations into illegal prostitution settings. Do they feel daring and brave when people running illegal businesses get upset? The confrontation with guys she calls ‘thugs’ provides melodrama that wasn’t there when women are being questioned about their motivation to sell sex. Because of the illegality, they creep around and try to guess what they are looking at in doorways and windows. It’s not uninteresting but it isn’t real reporting.

China Sex Workers, Vanguard TV, 2007

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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