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

29 January 2012 in trafficking by laura agustin | 16 comments | print print

Male Call was Milton Caniff’s comic strip for soldiers duing WWII. The main character was a woman back home, Miss Lace.

Now Mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella has long been a staunch member of the movement to abolish prostitution. Wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (Partido Popular, conservative), she promotes measures that discourage men from paying for sex, whether that means making it criminal or changing masculine culture - or mentality, as she put it recently. Botella suggests that this could come about if men who buy were to understand that women selling are not totally free. She means that they may be trafficked, but she also refers to many prostitutes’ general situation of debility and defends the idea that protection is the correct way to care for them.

Of course there are people selling sex who are in bad straits and would like some kind of help; the question is: What kind of help can they find? What is offered to them? I am tired of abolitionists speaking as though they had a monopoly on caring and the rest of us were cold and cruel. I would hardly spend my time writing about these issues if I thought there were no problems for the people involved. I am not paid by the sex industry, as silly attacks often allege.

The critical question is: Would penalising (criminalising) men who buy sex actually help women who sell, even if they are unhappy and want to get out? The answer to that depends on what else changes in sex workers’ lives, what new options they have in terms of economy and lifestyle. If the only alternative is moralistic rehabilitation, then many women who once had a way to make money now will not. So abolitionists need to show that they have had real conversations, uncoerced, with women they think should be rescued – not make ideological pronouncements about all of them – it is actually very rude to generalise like that.

Note that Botella’s mentality-changing proposal fits the End Demand mould, the one that is not simply about passing a law against buying sex. The End Demand movement under that name originated in the US, where both selling and buying are already illegal, so instituting the so-called Nordic model would actually be progressive there, since immediately women who sell sex would be decriminalised. Changing masculine culture – unfortunately construed here as monolithic, as though all men were alike, too – is obviously a much more ambitious project. This is what poor Ashton Kutcher was trying with his ill-fated Real Men Don’t Buy Sex videos.

Botella aboga por cambiar la mentalidad a los clientes de prostitución antes que multarlos

18 enero 2012, ABC.es

La regidora de la capital apuesta por hacer saber al cliente que posiblemente esas mujeres «no son totalmente libres»

La alcaldesa de Madrid, Ana Botella, ha abogado este miércoles por “cambiar la mentalidad” de los clientes de la prostitución antes que sancionarlos añadiendo, no obstante, que el modelo sueco, en el que los clientes son penalizados, “es adecuado y está teniendo resultado”, como ha expuesto en una entrevista en Telemadrid.

“No hace falta penalizar sino pensar que las mentalidades cambian, por lo que hay que hacer saber al cliente que posiblemente esas mujeres no son totalmente libres”, ha afirmado la primera edil, que cree que así podría darse un cambio de actitud para que no se empleasen esos servicios.

También ha defendido que las administraciones deben “proteger” a las víctimas, en este caso las mujeres que, por regla general, han caído en las redes de bandas dedicadas al tráfico de personas. La prostitución, como ha señalado, atenta “contra la dignidad del ser humano, en este caso de la mujer, que normalmente se encuentra en una situación de debilidad”.

Insiders in the sex worker rights movement may find it amusing that Botella was carrying a red umbrella the other day.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

13 January 2012 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 13 comments | print print

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

Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its basic ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime? Click for the pdf or keep reading here.

Sexworkers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

Laura Maria Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

In the movement to construct a discourse of ‘violence against women’, and thus to raise consciousness about kinds of mistreatment which before were invisible, the stage has been reached where defining crime and achieving punishment appears to be the goal. While it is progressive to raise consciousness about violence and exploitation in an attempt to deter the commitment of crimes, I hope to show that the present emphasis on discipline is very far from a utopic vision and that we should now begin to move toward other suggestions for solutions.

The following argument uses the example of prostitution or ‘sexual exploitation’ as an instance of ‘violence against women’, but the approach can apply to any attempt to deal with not only definitions of gender and sexual violence but with proposals to deal with them. When applied to adult prostitution, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ attempts to change language to make ‘voluntary’ prostitution impossible. For those who wish to ‘abolish’ prostitution, therefore, this change in terms represents progress, for now language itself will not be complicit with the violence involved. For those who may or may not want to ‘abolish’ prostitution but who in the present put the priority on improving the everyday lot of prostitutes, this language change totalizes a variety of situations involving different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose practical solutions. When applied to the prostitution of children, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ represents a project to change perceptions about childhood. For those who believe that the current western model of childhood as a time of innocence should become the ‘right’ of all children in the world, this term is very important.

Criminalization of clients

Efforts to change sexist, racist and other discriminatory forms of language have long been a focus of projects of social justice in western societies, and the push to define ‘violence against women’ clearly forms part of this movement. Along with this, we see a strong move to have actions that fall within these new definitions proclaimed as crimes and their perpetrators punished. If prostitution is globally redefined as sexual exploitation (by ‘globally’ I mean that no distinctions are made according to whether prostitutes say they ‘chose’ sex work to any extent), therefore, all those who purchase sexual services, called usually ‘clients’, become ‘exploiters’. Read the rest of this entry »

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Men who buy sex: a nasty group whose DNA should be on file

4 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 16 comments | print print

A few months ago, Melissa Farley published a story in Newsweek with a lot of dire comments about men who buy sex as the cause of prostitution and violence towards sex workers. The research paper behind that story is more scientific and less irresponsible than her previous work, thank goodness. I don’t believe there is some absolute real scientific vision we can bring to social research, but there are better and worse attempts, and this one is better. For one thing, it used the usually omitted mechanism of the control group, here comparing men who buy sex (her pathologised group) with men who don’t buy sex (belonging to the same demographic).

Farley does not like the oft-heard notion that such large numbers of men buy sex at some point in their life it becomes almost normal, since that might justify fatalistically accepting commercial sex as a timeless aspect of life impossible to eradicate. The research here concludes that men who buy sex are different from men who don’t, associated, for one thing, with other criminal activities. This leads Farley to recommend treating them more like criminals – specifically, like sex offenders. In Creating Monsters I warned that, the way things are going in the End Demand movement, clients could be conceptualised as a new category of sex offender, to be placed on the infamous registers that make living a conventional life nearly impossible for many. It turns out a few US states had already started thinking this way, and so had Farley.

She claims that non-sex-buying men are better men, based on their responses to her questions. But there is something not right in her logic, in how the supposed control group is conceived, so that she makes a point of relating what the non-buyers (the control) think about the buyers.

We asked both groups of men what words they would use to describe sex buyers. All (100%) of the sex buyers described themselves in terms of dominance (player, stud, powerful). There were differences in the descriptors they used, with more non-sex buyers labeling buyers as losers, unethical, or desperate. Fewer non-sex buyers labeled buyers as normal or as studs/players/powerful than did sex buyers (Table 12).

I am not sure why the opinions of one group of men about the other should have any bearing on the research, by the way, but, if it does, then the research needs to be balanced and tell us what the buyers said about the non-buyers. Right? I mean, maybe the buyers would say the non-buyers are losers or scaredy-cats. But the idea of control groups is not to ask one to comment on the other, and it seems to me that this asymmetry will have influenced how people responded and what the results appear to show. She doesn’t supply her questionnaire, so checking isn’t possible.

Another problem with interview technology is that the non-buyers might say nicer things about women, but we don’t know how they actually behave. Just as saying ugly things about women is disagreeable but does not in itself prove that those speaking are going to do anything bad.

Farley, however, aims to promote the idea that there is a particular type of man who buys sex, a sexist-pig type. So if we are dealing with a small, nasty group, it should be easier to wipe out prostitution. The trouble is this very view began to be debunked not so long ago in papers like The Sex Exploiter, which suggest instead that men buy sex opportunistically: not necessarily seeking out underage sex partners, for example, but rather not bothering to investigate their age. This means anyone can become a sex buyer, the way anyone can become a sex seller, given the right circumstances. And, by the way, not pathologising prostitutes as a special group (innately prone to vice) is considered everywhere an advance in our understanding of human behaviour, so why would we not do the same for clients?

In addition to placing clients on sex-offender lists, the report recommends mandatory DNA testing:

Given the criminal history of sex buyers documented in this research, one would anticipate that other criminal activity including sexual violence might occur in the future. Obtaining DNA samples from arrested johns may be useful to consider matches with evidence obtained in past and future crimes. DNA samples would be predicted to serve as a deterrent to buying sex since most people who commit crimes do not want their DNA taken.

They might do something bad later as justification for taking their DNA? Is this kind of policing really part of a utopic plan for equality of the sexes? Her Table 20. List of Esteemed Supporters for Taking DNA Samples From Arrested Sex Buyers does not help. Here we have the now well-known alliance of some feminists with Law and Order, or Discipline and Punishment, if you will.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Irish government uses my writing on Swedish anti-prostitution law without mentioning my name: theft or taboo?

27 October 2011 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

On sex trafficking, sex work and the Swedish claim that their evaluation of the anti-prostitution law is evidence of anything at all, I am one of few public critics. Is what I say so taboo that it cannot be credited, though? Usually my ideas are simply excluded from mention -  obviously the easiest way to deal with criticism. But a report issued recently by the Irish government presents pages of my published work, chopped up into separate bits, without mentioning my name or giving any other reference. The Report of Visit of Dignity Project* Partners to Stockholm 14-16 September 2010 says

Some comment since publication of the evaluation has been sharply critical. Examples of comment in the print media (much of it not mainstream) give an indication of negative reactions. These are summarised at Appendix 2.

But they didn’t summarise at all.  The appendix consists of 966 words of quoted material taken entirely from two articles I wrote – which means they have reproduced a large part of both pieces of writing. This is irresponsible, unethical and possibly illegal and needs to be fixed to acknowledge my work.

The Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, Mr. Alan Shatter T.D., today (17/10/11) announced publication of a report of the Department of Justice and Equality on Sweden’s legislation criminalising the purchase of sexual services – often referred to as the “Swedish Model”.

APPENDIX 2 (pages 13-15 in the report) (*see end for more on the Dignity Project)

Examples of negative comment in the print media

“mediocrity”

“Critical blogging has been brisk, so what makes mainstream media commentators avoid criticising this evaluation, not on ideological grounds but because it is so badly done that it proves nothing at all?”

“….the embarrassing lack of evidence to prove that the law has had any impact at all on the buying and selling of sex. This is not a ideological argument; it doesn’t prove that the law is no good; it proves that the evaluation is no good.”

” …. crystal clear that the evaluators couldn’t find evidence of anything.”

“Sex crimes go down in Sweden: the new evaluation of the law against buying sex is spreading the message round the world, but the report suffers from too many scientific errors to justify any such claim.”

“Stigmatised and criminalised people avoid contact with police, social workers and researchers.”

“Street prostitution receives exaggerated attention in the inquiry, despite the fact that it represents a small diminishing type of commercial sex that cannot be extrapolated to all. The inquiry mentions the difficulty of researching ‘prostitution on the internet’ but appears not to know that the sex industry comes in many different shapes being researched in depth elsewhere (escorts without websites, sex parties, strip clubs, massage parlours, students who sell sex, among others).”

All the above comes from my Smoke gets in your eyes: Evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law offers ideology, not methodology.

“The evaluation leaned heavily on small-scale data about street prostitution, because that was the easiest to find………evaluators bolstered their case by claiming that street prostitution had increased in Denmark, where there is no such law, using information from a Copenhagen NGO whose inflated data was exposed in parliament last year. Street prostitution is known, in any case, to constitute a tiny, diminishing part of the whole of commercial sex.”

From my Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex (The Local, presumably counting as a mainstream publication)

“… police only encounter sex workers in the context of criminal inquiries, the funded groups mostly meet sex workers seeking help, small studies can only indicate possible trends and the Danish statistics on the number of ‘active’ street workers – used to show that Sweden’s prostitution is less – were publicly shown to be very wrong eight months ago.”

“The law is claimed to have had a dampening effect on sex trafficking, but no proof is offered. Trafficking statistics have long been disputed outside Sweden, because of definitional confusion and refusals to accept the UN Convention on Organised Crime’s distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration. The report claims the law diminishes ‘organised crime’ without analysing how crimes were identified and resolved or how they are related to the sex-purchase law.”

“In this report .. the methodology section is practically non-existent. We know nothing about how .. the evaluation was actually carried out.”

Again all the above comes from my Smoke gets in your eyes: Evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law offers ideology, not methodology.

“The evaluation gives no account of how the research was actually carried out – its methodology – but is full of background material on Swedish history and why prostitution is bad.”

Again from my Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex

“One single sex worker’s sad personal story takes up three pages, while the account of sex workers’ opinions is limited to the results of a survey of only 14 people of which only seven were current sex workers.”

“Research must try for some kind of objectivity, but the Government’s remit to the evaluation team said that ‘the buying of sexual services shall continue to be criminalised’ no matter what the  evaluators found. The bias was inherent.”

“This evaluation tells us nothing about the effects of the sex-purchase law.”

Again all the above comes from my Smoke gets in your eyes: Evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law offers ideology, not methodology.

” …one feminist faction promotes the ideology that prostitutes are always, by definition, victims of violence against women. As victims, they can’t be criminals, so their side of the money-sex exchange is not penalised, whereas those who buy are perpetrators of a serious crime. This ideology, a minority view in other countries, predominates among Swedish State Feminists who claim that the existence of commercial sex is a key impediment to achieving gender equality. Such a dogma is odd, given the very small number of people engaged in selling sex in a welfare state that does not exclude them from its services and benefits.”

“A Government report from 2007 admitted it was difficult to find out much of anything about prostitution in Sweden.”

“Several media commentators took the occasion to attack the law itself, since despite regular Government affirmations that the majority of Swedes support the law, opposition is fierce. In the blogosphere and other online forums ……… nonconforming members of the main parties relentlessly resist a reductionist view of sexuality in which vulnerable women are forever threatened by predatory men.”

“.. most politicians undoubtedly feel little good will come from complaining about legislation now symbolic of Mother Sweden. The Swedish Institute has turned the abolition of prostitution into part of the nation’s brand, what they call a ‘multi-faceted package to make Sweden attractive to the outside world’.”

“Sweden indisputably ranks high on several measures of gender equality …. But other policies considered as part of gender equality are much harder to measure …. It is hardly surprising that the Government’s evaluation presents no evidence that relations between men and women have improved in Sweden because of the law. The evaluation’s main recommendation is to stiffen the punishment meted out to men who buy sex.”

“….citing no evidence, the report maintains there is less trafficking in Sweden because it is now ‘less attractive’ to traffickers … Such naive statements argue that without demand there will be no supply…….reducing a wide range of sexual activities to an abstract notion of violence and brushing aside the many people who confirm that they prefer selling sex to their other livelihood options.”

“As for combating trafficking, there is no proof…..different countries, institutions and researchers do not agree on what actually constitutes trafficking. It does not help that fundamentalist feminism refuses to accept the distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration, as enshrined in the UN Convention on Organised Crime.”

Again all the above from my Big claims, little evidence: Sweden’s law against buying sex

I am writing to the Minister’s private secretary and the Ministry’s press office right now.

* So what is the Dignity Project? From the report itself:

Dignity is an EU funded (Daphne Programme) research project examining services provided for victims of human trafficking, with a view to replicating best practice models in partner countries, and is led by the Dublin Employment Pact and the Immigrant Council of Ireland. It is an inter-agency and inter-jurisdictional initiative with partners in Scotland, Spain and Lithuania and works to identify what steps can be taken to end the exploitation of women and children who are trafficked for sexual exploitation.

The Irish partners are Ruhama, Sonas Housing, the Legal Aid Board, the HSE Women’s Health Project, the Immigrant Council of Ireland and the Dublin Employment Pact. In addition, the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit of the Department of Justice and Law Reform and the Garda National Immigration Bureau are partners with observer status.
.
Dignity has been lobbying the Minister to follow the lead of Sweden, Norway and Iceland and bring forward legislation to criminalise the purchase of sex and decriminalise the sale of sex in Ireland in order to target the demand side of the sex industry.

Dignity’s website describes their extensive junkets to meet predictably like-minded people in different countries. The size of their grant brings the word boondoggle to mind. In days of Occupy movements this sort of Rescue Industry activity deserve to be cut.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex offenders and clients of sex workers: creating monsters

25 October 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

What do sex offenders and clients of sex workers have in common? To understand why my answer is a great deal, you need to look at how outsider sexualities are constructed so that some sex is deemed to be Good, everything else to be Bad and transgressors become monsters.

I read Roger Lancaster’s 1994 book Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua ten years ago when I was looking for ethnographic accounts of non-mainstream sexualities and gender identities. Lancaster has a new book, Sex Panic and the Punitive State, which I have not read, but I was struck by his ideas in the following essay about sex offenders. Men who buy sex occupy an increasingly similar social position nowadays: considered either monsters or perverts. This year’s TIP report and the End Demand campaign insist that these men’s desires and bodies are simply wrong. Clients are not yet placed on Sex Offender Registers, but schemes to name and shame them in the media approach that idea and I will not be surprised if calling them sex offenders is proposed.

Note in an example from the other day’s Vancouver Sun: Make human traffickers’ names public: law professor. Perrin opposes Judge Susan Himel’s decision last year to remove from Ontario Law significant barriers to safe sex work (he was on Melissa Farley’s side). Perrin is a law academic who loves the police.

And don’t imagine that men called sex offenders are really bad in a way that men who buy sex are not: it’s the process of demonisation you want to keep your eye on, and how society handles those demonised.

The essay is long, so I have cut it. About halfway through I highlight with bold techniques being used and suggestions being made for further stigmatisation of a wide range of people.

Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs
Roger N. Lancaster, New York Times, 21 August 2011

. . . most criminal justice advocates have been reluctant to talk about sex offender laws, much less reform them. The reluctance has deep roots. Sex crimes are seen as uniquely horrific. During the Colonial, antebellum and Jim Crow eras, white Americans were preoccupied with tales of sexual dangers to white women and children McCarthy-era paranoia, stories of Satanic ritual abuse and other sex panics stirred pervasive anxieties about lurking strangers. Sexual predators play a lead role in the production of a modern culture of fear.

. . . The most intense dread, fueled by shows like “America’s Most Wanted” and “To Catch a Predator,” is directed at the lurking stranger, the anonymous repeat offender. But most perpetrators of sexual abuse are family members, close relatives, or friends or acquaintances of the victim’s family. . .

. . .Advocates for laws to register, publicize and monitor sex offenders after their release from custody typically assert that those convicted of sex crimes pose a high risk of sex crime recidivism. But studies by the Justice Department and other organizations show that recidivism rates are significantly lower for convicted sex offenders than for burglars, robbers, thieves, drug offenders and other convicts. Only a tiny proportion of sex crimes are committed by repeat offenders, which suggests that current laws are misdirected and ineffective. . .

Contrary to the common belief that burgeoning registries provide lists of child molesters, the victim need not have been a child and the perpetrator need not have been an adult. Child abusers may be minors themselves. Statutory rapists – a loose category that includes some offenses involving neither coercion nor violence - are covered in some states. Some states require exhibitionists and “peeping Toms” to register; Louisiana compelled some prostitutes to do so. Two-thirds of the North Carolina registrants sampled in a 2007 study by Human Rights Watch had been convicted of the nonviolent crime of “indecent liberties with a minor,” which does not necessarily involve physical contact.

. . . Newer laws go even further. At last count, 44 states have passed or are considering laws that would require some sex offenders to be monitored for life with electronic bracelets and global positioning devices. A 2006 federal law, the Adam Walsh Act, named for a Florida boy who was abducted and killed, allows prosecutors to apply tougher registration rules retroactively. New civil commitment procedures allow for the indefinite detention of sex offenders after the completion of their sentences. Such procedures suggest a catch-22: the accused is deemed mentally fit for trial and sentencing, but mentally unfit for release. Laws in more than 20 states and hundreds of municipalities restrict where a sex offender can live, work or walk. California’s Proposition 83 prohibits all registered sex offenders (felony and misdemeanor alike) from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park, effectively evicting them from the state’s cities and scattering them to isolated rural areas.

Digital scarlet letters, electronic tethering and practices of banishment have relegated a growing number of people to the logic of “social death,” a term introduced by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, in the context of slavery, to describe permanent dishonor and exclusion from the wider moral community. The creation of a pariah class of unemployable, uprooted criminal outcasts has drawn attention from human rights activists . . . Several states currently publish online listings of methamphetamine offenders, and other states are considering public registries for assorted crimes. Mimicking Megan’s Law, Florida maintains a website that gives the personal details (including photo, name, age, address, offenses and periods of incarceration) of all prisoners released from custody. Some other states post similar public listings of paroled or recently released ex-convicts. It goes without saying that such procedures cut against rehabilitation and reintegration.

Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective – guided by panic, not reason. It is time to change the conversation: to promote child welfare based on sound data rather than statistically anomalous horror stories, and in some cases to revisit outdated laws that do little to protect children. Little will have been gained if we trade a bloated prison system for sprawling forms of electronic surveillance that offload the costs of imprisonment onto offenders, their families and their communities.

This is the context in which End Demand campaigns are occurring. Writing on the wall.

On the panic point, I will be talking on a panel about sex scandals at the AAA in Montreal next month. Offenders, clients, scandals, panics: all related in ways I am trying to figure out.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Melissa Farley and the US government Want You to Stop Buying Sex: End Demand

22 July 2011 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 7 comments | print print

This piece was originally published in Good Vibrations Magazine 19 July 2011.

Newsweek has released a report on Melissa Farley’s nasty new study on men who buy sex of all kinds, which was financed by the Hunt Alternatives Fund as part of their 10-year plan to End Demand for buying sex. Now the latest Trafficking in Persons Report reveals that End Demand is also part of US government policy, which means that some of the big spending - $109 million last year – on anti-trafficking programmes is going to anti-client projects. US Trafficking magnate Luis CdeBaca attended the Hunt planning meetings, so this development is hardly a big surprise. I recently wrote about a World Gender War in the form of campaigns against male sexuality: desire, penetration and the penis itself: an international trend, but money from a rich philanthropist certainly puts the US in charge.

The theory that if men stopped buying sex no one would offer it anymore is a breath-taking over-simplification of the many different services and desires involving money and sex and the multitude of social and cultural conditions involved. How people now selling sex as a livelihood would earn their living if clients disappear is never mentioned – which is disturbing. I appreciate that campaigners are talking long-term and utopically, but to never address economic and employment issues seriously? I hope they do not feel that preventing women from selling sex means saving them from a fate worse than death.

This notion of demand fails to square with some well-known client types, such as the one Thomas Rowlandson portrayed here around 1800, described by the Wellcome Library as A prostitute leading an old man into the bedroom and taking money from him, implying that her services will act like a tonic and preserve his state of health. I guess Farley didn’t manage to find any men like this to talk to.

Here is the End Demand statement from this year’s TIP, ridiculously called a Fact Sheet, when it is only a moral aside revealing the government’s wish that culture would change. Yes, they wrote the phrase new innovations.

Prevention : Fighting Sex Trafficking by Curbing Demand for Prostitution

A growing understanding of the nature of trafficking in persons has led to new innovations in addressing demand. Corporate standards for monitoring supply chains and government policies for eliminating trafficking from procurement practices are making new inroads in the fight against modern slavery. But the fact remains: if there were no demand for commercial sex, trafficking in persons for commercial sexual exploitation would not exist in the form it does today. This reality underscores the need for continued strong efforts to reduce demand for sex trafficking by enacting policies and promoting cultural attitudes that reject the idea of paying for sex.

Policies to Address Demand for Commercial Sex

Governments can lead both in practice and by example by implementing zero-tolerance policies for employees, uniformed servicemembers, and contractors paying for sex. If paying for sex is prohibited for those who work for, or do business with, a government, the ripple effects could be farreaching. Through their massive procurement, governments have an impact on a wide range of private-sector actors, and policies banning the purchase of sex could in turn reach a significant part of the private sector as well. At the same time, governments have the capacity to raise awareness of the subtle and brutal nature of this crime by requiring training of employees, contractors, and subcontractors about how individuals subjected to sex trafficking are victimized through coercion. Too often, trafficking victims are wrongly discounted as “consenting” adults. The use of violence to enslave trafficking victims is pervasive, but there are other more subtle forms of fraud and coercion that also prevent a person from escaping compelled servitude. A prostituted person may have initially consented, may believe that she or he is in love with her or his trafficker, may not self-identify as a victim, may not be operating in the vicinity of the pimp, or may have been away from the pimp’s physical control with what seemed to be ample opportunity to ask for help or flee. None of these factors, taken alone or in sum, means that she or he is not a victim of a severe form of trafficking. Ensuring that these facts are part of the required training for every government employee and everyone who does business with or on behalf of a government is an important step in shifting attitudes about commercial sex.

Moral Leadership in the Future of this Struggle

Strong policies are critical for ridding countries of all forms of modern slavery, but ultimately for encouraging a broader cultural shift in order to make meaningful progress in reducing demand for sex trafficking. This can only be achieved by rejecting long-held notions that regard commercial sex as a “boys will be boys” phenomenon, and instead sending the clear message that buying sex is wrong. Lawmakers have the power to craft effective antitrafficking legislation, but they also have a responsibility to represent values that do not tolerate abuses of commercial sex. Business leaders need to cultivate a corporate culture that leaves behind outdated thinking that turns a blind eye to the sex trade, including the adoption of codes of conduct that prohibit purchasing sex. And leaders in civil society – from teachers to parents to ministers – must foster the belief that it is everyone’s responsibility to reduce the demand for sex trafficking. It is especially important to reach young men with a strong message of demand reduction to help them understand the exploitation involved with commercial sex and combat the glamorization of pimp culture. It is every person’s individual responsibility to think about their contributions to trafficking. Laws and policies, partnerships and activism will continue to be critical to the struggle against modern slavery, but it will also be the day-to-day decisions of individual men and women that will bring an end to sex trafficking and carry forth a message of freedom for all.

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
Washington DC June 2011

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist


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Conviction and punishment in Sweden for buying sex, 1999-2009

1 June 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 7 comments | print print

Back in March people in Canada contacted me to ask about Gunilla Ekberg’s claim, in talks given there, that there have been 3500 men found guilty under the Swedish law against buying sex (sexköpslagen) since it was passed in 1999. Why would Ekberg make a mistake about something that can be verified on the website of the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ)? The total is 757 over eleven years.

Until recently, the maximum penalty for those convicted of buying sex was six months in jail or a rather small fine. No one was ever jailed, as far as I can tell; jail-time is not mandated when penalties are minor. Therefore, the nearly unanimous vote in the Swedish parliament last month was about making it possible for a convicted person to go to jail, as a year-penalty pushes the crime upwards in importance. Perhaps one could say, then, that this apparently fierce vote was more about making the original 1999 law more coherent: if you seriously believe something is a crime, then you don’t want it to be never punished. If you see what I mean.

Numbers of convictions for buying sex in Sweden by year, 1999-2009

Source: BRÅ

Is this a large or small number of convictions? How many men were detained by the police but the case dropped? That information isn’t available. Activists and scholars tend to focus on the law’s rhetoric and presumptions, but it is never easy to put such a law into practice. Consider the document BRÅ published in 1999 on the subject of these difficulties from a policing point of view:

Evidential difficulties are the most common reason for the discontinuation of police investigations into suspected offences of this type. The most difficult thing to prove has been that the parties have entered into an agreement that sexual services will be provided in exchange for payment. It is an offence without a complainant and even though the prostitutes are obliged to give evidence, this obligation is limited since they are not obliged to reveal that they have themselves participated in an act of prostitution. Even if the prostitutes might consider giving evidence about the incident, it has been deemed difficult to reach them to obtain their co-operation in investigations since they often have no fixed address or telephone number.

So although the Swedish parliament recently raised the maximum penalty from six months’ incarceration to a year, the difficulty of getting convictions remains.

Thanks to Louise Persson for help with the numbers.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Europe’s anti-prostitution initiatives multiply: EU itself and now France

15 April 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 12 comments | print print

Anyone with romantic ideas about Europe’s sophisticated tolerance of all matters sexual is due for disenchantment. A Europe free from prostitution is the name of the European Women’s Lobby’s campaign, which I find questionable because they receive public funding from the EU yet several member states permit and regulate at least some forms of selling sex. But the EWL have always had a political commitment ‘to work towards a Europe free from prostitution, by supporting key abolitionist principles which state that the prostitution of women and girls constitutes a fundamental violation of women’s human rights, a serious form of male violence against women, and a key obstacle to gender equality in our societies.‘

Then last December the European Parliament passed new rules against trafficking that included the recommendation ‘to discourage demand, Member States should also consider taking measures to establish as a criminal offence the use of services of a victim, with the knowledge that he/she has been trafficked.’ This is a perfect example of the slide between anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution.

However, France has responded positively to the idea and is now the latest country to put criminalising clients of sex workers on the mainstream political agenda. Note that sponsorship of the law comes from both left- and right-wing parties (this is usual). And that France has prohibited indoor prostitution (maisons closes/brothels) for 65 years and persecutes migrant sex workers regularly outdoors. Forget the romantic cliché.

France considers making prostitution illegal – Excerpts from The Telegraph, 14 April 2011

A parliamentary commission of French MPs on Wednesday recommended treating the clients of prostitutes as criminals who should face fines of up to £2,500 or prison. The Socialist Danielle Bousquet and Guy Geoffroy of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP said that 80 per cent of the estimated 20,000 sex-workers in France were foreigners and victims of slavery or trafficking. [Note from LA: this claim from a UN report in 2009 has never been and cannot be substantiated.]

“To penalise clients is to make them understand that they are participating in a form of exploitation of the vulnerability of others,” said their report. Roselyne Bachelot, the social affairs minister, said she supported the proposals. “There is no such thing as freely chosen and consenting prostitution. The sale of sexual acts means women’s bodies are made available for men, independently of the wishes of those women.”

While proposals for a law could be drawn up this month, it is unlikely to reach parliament before next year. In France brothels have been illegal since 1946 and pimping is against the law as is paying for sex with a minor. But prostitution is not outlawed. Mr Sarkozy toughened prostitution rules in 2003 while interior minister in a controversial law forbidding women to loiter in prostitution hang outs in revealing clothes. Sex-workers’ groups in France regularly stage demonstrations demanding a proper legal status. A recent survey found six out of ten French men and women wanted brothels to be legalised. . .

Les deux cotés du debat, de Libération

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Truckers, truck stops, lot lizards and sex trafficking victims: what confusion

11 April 2011 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

The incredible double-messaging of US prostitution law finds perfect expression in two recent stories from the state of Oklahoma. In one, everyone agrees that prostitutes are a nuisance and a judge forces the owners of a rest stop to post signs, fix a fence, provide cctv and hire guards to arrest sex workers. (The name lot lizards presumably refers to how baking-hot people get hanging around on black asphalt in the sun.) In the second, truckers are admonished to understand that sex workers are victims of trafficking who are passively transported and need rescuing, the focus being, of course, on adolescents (who, we learned the other day, are mostly running away from home.)

One would almost think these stories are describing two separate groups, one that’s bad and one that’s good, but that’s not true, of course. All the people involved are selling sex in truckers’ rest stops. Some truckers are buying sex. Some owners of truck stops are willing for this trade to go on. For people who don’t want it to go on, however, there are two choices: blame the sex workers or rescue the victims. Very confusing.

Truck stop ordered to clean up prostitute problems

Jesse Wells, 8 April 2011, KFOR

Oklahoma City — An Oklahoma County judge forces a metro truck stop to clean up it’s act. . . “The Five Star was symbolic of the worst problem of prostitution in the city,” video vigilante Brian Bates said. For a long time, Oklahoma City police negotiated with the truck stop owners to curtail the illegal activity but got no results. That’s when they took the issue to court. “Prostitution had been running rampant at that business and the owner wasn’t doing anything to stop it,” explains Oklahoma City Police MSgt. Gary Knight.

The court order will now force the business to post additional “no trespassing” and “no soliciting” signs, repair and enhance the fencing, provide continuous video surveillance and hire security guards who can arrest prostitutes day or night. . .

Oklahoma truckers learn how to stop human trafficking

By Kristi Eaton, 25 March 2011, Associated Press/TheTrucker.com

Oklahoma City — It’s been nearly 30 years, but Mark Brown still remembers the face of the teenage girl who approached him at a truck stop in California. He’d just finished a long day of driving across the country when the girl, who wasn’t more than 15 or 16 years old, knocked on his window and asked if he wanted a date. He said he ignored her and let her proceed down the row of trucks, knocking on windows trying to sell her body for money. “I still regret that decision to this day,” he said. “I should have helped her.”

Brown now uses his position as assistant director of Driving Instruction at Central Tech in Drumright to teach new drivers about what they can do combat the industry’s hidden secret. He passes out wallet cards with tips and information to students and is going to distribute a training video to other schools across the country about human trafficking. And it’s all because of a partnership with Truckers Against Trafficking, an initiative that hopes to educate and raise awareness about domestic sex trafficking along the nation’s highways. The program by the anti-human trafficking organization Chapter 61 Ministries specifically targets young girls and boys who it says are transported across the country to prostitute at truck stops and plazas.

Lyn Thompson, who started Chapter 61 Ministries in 2007 with her four daughters and a family friend, said she developed the idea for Truckers Against Trafficking after learning the important role gas station attendants play in identifying victims of human trafficking. Taking it one step further, she began focusing on truck drivers. “Traffickers have to transport their victims, whether by plane, train, ship, bus, car or truck,” said Thompson, a Tulsa resident who acts as a national coordinator for the initiative. “So, all the transportation industries are first-line defenders against this crime.”

The girls and boys who work the trucks stops and plazas are called “lot lizards,” said Kendis Paris, a national coordinator for TAT based in Denver. She said the group is focusing on kids under the age of 18 because by law, they are victims of human trafficking if forced into the sex trade. “I honestly don’t think anybody wakes up and says, ‘I want to sell my body,’ but the kids really have no choice,” she said, adding that many are runaways who have been coerced into prostitution. By attending trucking industry events and meetings, Paris hopes to get the wallet cards in to the hands of every trucker in America. Trucker drivers can call a hotline number listed to report a crime or ask questions if they are unsure something illegal is taking place.

“The issue is difficult to police or get control of, so that’s why TAT’s effort is so important, because we feel like if we can educate the professional truck driver, nine out of 10 of them are going to want to get these people arrested who are doing this stuff,” said truck stop plaza owner Sam Smith, who has hung up TAT posters and distributed wallet cards to drivers at his Nashville, Tenn., store.

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International marriage broking called trafficking, of course

28 February 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 10 comments | print print

There must be a sociological principle to describe the tendency for a wide variety of phenomena to be subsumed into a single reductionist label. Start a conversation about trafficking nowadays and ensuing comments will relate to rape, sex tourism, child abuse, organ sales, surrogate motherhood, egg donation and prostitution. At the Battle of Ideas, someone brought up ethnic cleansing, too: Everything becomes trafficking.

Marriages between older white men and younger less-white women, or richer men and poorer women, have long been condemned as trafficking, although research abounds on how the businesses work, even before the Internet made websites possible. The condemnation of this sort of relationship rests on the belief that there is a universal right way to meet and become a couple that is violated here, and the history of humankind, in which matchmaking may be an even older profession than selling sex, is forgotten. As is the fact that all marriages are financial arrangements. A lot of critics must also be forgetting that some of their own ancestors’ marriages were arranged by intermediaries, and sometimes brides travelled to another country to marry men they had not met before. The following report from a financial publication focuses on the male point of view about the prices involved, and there is no doubt that comments are sexist and women’s points of view lacking. Does it make sense for someone from NOW to call it all trafficking, however?

The Mail-Order-Bride Trade Is Flourishing

Teddy Wayne, Bloomberg Business Week, 6 January 2011

Times are good for Joseph Weiner. The former investment banker and Wharton [Bachelor of Science in Economics] lives with his wife of 27 years in a three-bedroom London townhouse. When he isn’t lounging in his private garden, Weiner spends his free time playing tennis at the exclusive Hurlingham Club and gliding around town in his Lexus. Though he doesn’t claim to be a philosopher, Weiner’s insight into the human heart has led to a lucrative second career as a matchmaker and packager of amorous adventures. “Every guy wants a beautiful younger woman,” he explains. “It’s the nature of us.”

Fourteen years ago, Weiner, 73, founded Hand-In-Hand, a London-based matchmaking agency that charges male customers up to $2,000 for a “supervised courtship”—a process that matches them with younger Eastern European women. Hand-In-Hand has since grown into a multinational operation with 30 satellite offices from the U.S. to Abu Dhabi. “We’re still opening up franchises, and business is booming,” says Weiner in his thick New York accent. “Financial problems are the biggest cause of divorce. There are more financial problems now. There are more people available!”

In the age of globalization, the international matchmaking industry—still known in many circles as the mail-order bride trade—is thriving like never before. The Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit organization in Falls Church, Va., that protects immigrant women, estimates that the number of mail-order marriages in the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2007, when up to 16,500 such unions were sealed.

International matchmakers are now a growing segment of the U.S. online dating industry, which, according to market research firm IBISWorld, racked up more than $2 billion in 2010 revenue. Since the recession began, “we’ve seen more men sign up,” says John Adams, the co-founder of Phoenix-based A Foreign Affair, which charges $4,000 for the right to attend champagne-soaked “socials” in various Eastern European cities. The company estimates it sparked nearly 1,000 engagements this year. “Men evaluate their lives a little more closely when the economy becomes more difficult. They look at what’s really important to them and try to find that one person they want to spend the rest of their lives with.” Adams would know. He met his wife, Tanya, at a 1997 St. Petersburg social sponsored by his own company.

Amid the proliferation of dating websites and matchmaking reality shows, venturing abroad for love has taken on a more acceptable mien. International matchmakers have succeeded, in part, by targeting middle-aged men who find dating troublesome—men who, according to Weiner, “don’t have the money to go out on dates and go on weekends to Vegas and Atlantic City. They want someone to take care of them.” While they might not have the means to secure a more conveniently located trophy wife, they must have enough money to travel to Eastern Europe and spend thousands for a shot at eternal bliss. Though love may be priceless, notes Weiner, “$2,000 to get a beautiful woman—it’s a bargain!” According to David L. Knabel, the owner and president of Louisville-based matchmaker A Volga Girl, “It’s no different than a dating site in the U.S.—except it’s international marriage.”

In 2007, Ben Baligad hit a dry spell. The divorced 53-year-old eschewed the San Diego dating scene after discovering Ukraine’s favorable gender ratio—0.92 males for every female between ages 15 and 64, according to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine. After enlisting companies such as Global Ladies and Army of Brides, the insurance salesman made three trips to Ukraine. The third time was the charm: Baligad met his potential future wife, Natalya Chuprina, 18 years his junior. “I’m planning on bringing her to the U.S. as soon as I get my finances straight,” he says.

By pulling on the heartstrings of single men, the mail-order bride industry has at its disposal untold financial opportunities. In addition to membership fees—which run $29.95 per month at A Foreign Affair—and “romance tours” that can cost suitors thousands, many sites charge between $6 and $8 to translate each e-mail exchanged between interlocutors, and even more for phone and instant message translation. Some companies, like Hand-In-Hand, have also expanded into same-sex international matchmaking. “We’ve been doing gay business for about a year and a half,” boasts Weiner.

Though every site claims to police its users, scams are common. Les Vancil, the founder of Easy Ukraine, an Ohio-based site targeting men traveling abroad for matchmaking opportunities, says the problems lie with the Eastern European agencies contracted to recruit women. Vancil asserts these companies post fake profiles, ratchet up prices for translation, and sometimes impersonate women to ask for money.

When customers complain, matchmakers “wipe their hands clean,” says Steve Ewald, a Detroit accountant who stopped using such sites after several unsatisfying experiences. They blame the agencies, he claims, who blame the women. Ben Baligad says the agency that helped him communicate with his girlfriend skimmed 10 percent off the money he sent her for train fare and phone bills. He also suspects it posed as her in e-mails demanding he pay for a pricey apartment rental for his visit. He hasn’t brought it up with his girlfriend, though. “I think she thinks I will get angry,” he says.

The arrangement can be far worse for the women involved. After a few highly publicized murders of women brought to America through international matchmakers, the U.S. passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA). The statute requires background checks on U.S. citizens before communication via the matchmakers. Those who fail to comply cannot obtain a Form I-129F, Petition for Alien Fiancé(e).

However, couples can get around this obstacle by claiming they met through other avenues. There also tends to be little enforcement of IMBRA when the agencies are based outside the U.S. (Hand-In-Hand, for example, is registered in St. Kitts.) “The mail-order bride industry is a softer version of human trafficking,” says Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. Ossorio also acknowledges that some relationships work out—but perhaps not in a way that would please Betty Friedan. “A lot of people who are attracted to it are just looking for a woman who’s docile and obedient,” she says.

For some companies, such submissiveness is a selling point. Hand-In-Hand’s website trumpets the fact that its females are “unspoiled by feminism.” Company founder Weiner argues this form of chauvinism—like the mail-order bride business itself—is economically motivated. “You take a beautiful woman from the Czech Republic and you bring her into your home, she does all your cooking and cleaning and ironing,” he says. “At the end of the day, the service is free.” Hand-In-Hand estimates the potential savings of a homemaking wife at $150 per week.

Women from economically troubled regions also take part in order to secure an American visa. “People around the world still view the U.S. as a highly favorable place to live,” says A Foreign Affair’s Adams. His wife agrees. “I worked a lot before, but then I was waking up at nine in the morning and was like, ‘Whoa, what do I have to do now?’ ” says Tanya Adams, who remains a supporter of the company. “I even recommended it to my niece.”

Perhaps love can always find a way. Most sites claim a 75 percent or greater success rate, and this boundless quest for passion—one inflamed by hard times—continues to benefit matchmaking entrepreneurs. “Wonderful times for me,” Weiner says. “I can’t complain.”

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