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Cultural Study of Commercial Sex: Not just sex work, or violence, or prostitution, or women or trafficking

15 September 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

Since I regularly refer to my proposal of a few years ago for the cultural study of commercial sex, here is the original article. A cultural framework is suggested as an alternative to a tradition that has produced the same knowledge over and over, usually about an abstract idea called prostitution that has no stable meaning, rather signifiying all sorts of different things to different people of different social classes and cultures. Commercial sex as a concept takes in everything you might call prostitution and anything else that involves the exchange of sex for money, or sex for presents or benefits – anytime, anywhere (to get away from research that simply does what’s been done before about prostitution but now in a new city! or country! or part of town!).

The follow-up to the framework article came in 2007 when I did a special journal edition with eight articles using the cultural framework. This is all more relevant than ever, because so much research – not to mention campaigning – relies on scanty knowledge of what is actually going on. Click the title to get the pdf.

The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex - Sexualities, 8, 5, 618-631 (2005).

It begins like this:

Why create this framework

Societies’ twin reactions to commercial sex – moral revulsion and resigned tolerance – have paradoxically permitted its uncontrolled development in the underground economy and impeded cultural research on the phenomena involved. Affirmations that the global sex industry is growing and its forms proliferating are conventional in government and non-governmental fora, in the communications media and in scholarly writing. Commercial sex businesses and trafficking for sexual exploitation are blamed for massive violations of human rights, but the supporting information is unreliable, given the lack of agreement on basic definitions, the difficulty of counting clandestine objects and the fact that much of this stigmatized activity forms part of conventional social life.

Little work exists in a sex-industry framework, but if we agree that it refers to all commercial goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind, then a rich field of human activities is involved. And every one of these activities operates in a complex socio-cultural context in which the meaning of buying and selling sex is not always the same. The cultural study of commercial sex would use a cultural-studies, interdisciplinary approach to fill gaps in knowledge about commercial sex and relate the findings to other social and cultural concepts. Recent work has demonstrated how people who sell sex are excluded from studies of migration, of service work and of informal economies, and are instead examined only in terms of ‘prostitution’, a concept that focuses on transactions between individuals, especially their personal motivations (Sanchez, 2003; Agustín, 2004b, 2005). With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed almost exclusively on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored, and this in itself contributes to the intransigent stigmatization of these women. While the sexual cultures of lesbian/gay/ bisexual/ transgender people are being slowly integrated into general concepts of culture, commercial sex is usually disqualified and treated only as a moral issue. This means that a wide range of ways of study are excluded. A cultural-studies approach, on the contrary, would look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex.

The purpose of this article is to point out the scarcity of research in these areas and reveal the kinds of issue that are up for study. Although public debate and academic theory on commercial sex abound, few participants are familiar with the wide variety of forms and sites involved; most are dealing with stereotypes and interested solely in street prostitution. This is an area where more information and images need to be disseminated, a project for which I make a small beginning here with some descriptive material from Spanish sex venues.

Since this is the beginning of what I hope will become a new field, I do not here offer any solutions to what is too often characterized as a ‘social problem’. Rather, I hope to interest others in taking up the call to study not ‘prostitution’ but the sex industry in new ways and to gather much more information on the object of governance before offering blanket solutions. This does not mean that important moral and ethical issues are not at stake nor that there is not widespread injustice in the industry. On the contrary, my proposal takes these injustices very seriously, laments the absence of workable solutions up to now and hopes that with better research these may be found.

Further headings are How study has proceeded so far, Definitions of the sex industry in general, Local particulars: examples from Spain, Elements of culture and researcher positionality and a raft of good References.

Obviously everything is culture, but for more examples of writing on sex-industry cultures outside the well-worn paths see:

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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A Migrant World of Services (or Aren’t Sexual Services Also Services?)

22 March 2011 in migration, sex work by laura agustin | 6 comments | print print

Three people asked me about sex work as a service last week, so I thought I would re-run A Migrant World of Services , my first article published in an academic journal, in 2003. In it I tried to figure out why sexual services are thought to be so different from other kinds of services, why selling sex is disqualified by so many people who say it cannot be a job or a service. I looked critically at traditional economic concepts such as the distinction between productive and unproductive labour and the distinction between  formal and informal employment sectors. These concepts are entirely arbitrary and produce oppression for no good reason. The majority of women’s work in homes is called unproductive (…) and probably the majority of women’s jobs outside the home are called informal, which means they get screwed both ways, to put it bluntly. The article also looks at the idea of emotional and caring work, central to many services.

A Migrant World of Services (pdf)

Social Politics, 10, 3, 377-96 (2003)

Laura Maria Agustín

Abstract: There is a strong demand for women’s domestic, caring and sexual labour in Europe which promotes migrations from many parts of the world. This paper examines the history of concepts that marginalise these as unproductive services (and not really ‘work’) and questions why the west accepts the semi-feudal conditions and lack of regulations pertaining to this sector. The moral panic on ‘trafficking’ and the limited feminist debate on ‘prostitution’ contribute to a climate that ignores the social problems of the majority of women migrants.

In a variety of scenarios in different parts of Europe, non-Europeans are arriving with the intention to work; these are largely migrant women and transgender people from the ‘third world’ or from Central and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. The jobs available to these women in the labour market are overwhelmingly limited to three basic types: domestic work (cleaning, cooking and general housekeeping), ‘caring’ for people in their homes (children, the elderly, the sick and disabled) and providing sexual experiences in a wide range of venues known as the sex industry. All these jobs are generally said to be services.

In the majority of press accounts, migrant women are presented as selling sex in the street, while in public forums and academic writing, they are constructed as ‘victims of trafficking.’ The obsession with ‘trafficking’ obliterates not only all the human agency necessary to undertake migrations but the experiences of migrants who do not engage in sex work. Many thousands of women who more or less chose to sell sex as well as all women working in domestic or caring service are ‘disappeared’ when moralistic and often sensationalistic topics are the only ones discussed. One of the many erased subjects concerns the labour market—the demand—for the services of all these women. The context to which migrants arrive is not less important than the context from which they leave, often carelessly described as ‘poverty’ or ‘violence.’ This article addresses the European context for women migrants’ employment in these occupations. Though domestic and caring work are usually treated as two separate jobs, very often workers do both, and these jobs also often require sexual labour, though this is seldom recognised. All this confusion and ambiguity occurs within a frame that so far has escaped definition.

For the rest, get the pdf.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Once again garbage in, garbage out as a method for counting sex-trafficking victims, from the New York Times

2 December 2010 in trafficking by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

I found myself looking up an old quarrel at Slate, between Jack Shafer and Peter Landesman. Landesman had written a trafficking story for the New York Times Magazine, and Shafer had debunked it at Salon.com. During the back-and-forth about trafficking statistics, Landesman cites Kevin Bales (who founded Free the Slaves) as the source of numbers of ‘sex trafficking victims in the US’. The argument stretched from 2004 to 2005; probably those involved would give different numbers now; what I’m pointing out is the gall of anyone, much less a social scientist, presenting this technique for estimating victims as an algorithm.

a very complex algorithm

Bad enough that Bales begins with an estimate for which no methodology has ever been given, but then the social scientist uses media reports as evidence. Did the scientist check into the sources mentioned by the media reports themselves? Did he distinguish at all between media who just copy and paste each other’s news and those who do any actual research? Did he exercise any scientific judgement at all as to reliability of any given media source? Just how circular can a process get?

… The estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 people being held in forced labor in the United States for purposes of sexual exploitation was arrived at in this way: firstly, we used the State Department’s estimate of 18,000 to 20,000 people being trafficked into the US each year. (Admittedly, the State Department has not explained the methodology by which they arrived at this estimate, so we use it in the hope that they will soon make their research methods clear.) Secondly, we adjusted this estimate according to two surveys we have recently conducted. The first survey was of all media reports of trafficking cases in the US over the past four years. These reports covered 136 separate cases of forced labor, 109 of which noted the number trafficked totaling 5,455 individuals. As with most crimes, the number of known and reported cases is a fraction of the actual number of cases occurring. To the best of our understanding the proportion of known to actual cases for human trafficking is low. In this survey 44.2% of cases involved forced labor in prostitution and 5.4% involved the sexual abuse of children, totaling 49.6%. As this is a rough estimate I rounded this up to 50%. In a second survey of forty-nine service provider agencies in the United States that had worked with trafficked persons, we asked how long each trafficked person they had worked with had been held in forced labor. The minimum reported time was one month, the maximum was 30 years. The majority of cases clustered between three years and five years.

So, if 9,000 to 10,000 of the people trafficked into the US each year will be enslaved for sexual exploitation (50% of 18-20,000), and they are likely to remain in that situation for three to five years, then the number of people enslaved for sexual exploitation at any one time in the US could be between 27,000 and 50,000 people. Since a number of people working in the area of human trafficking have stated that they believe the State Department’s estimate is low, I chose to make our estimate based on the upper end of the State Department figure, thus giving an estimate of 30,000 to 50,000.

Why should Garbage in, garbage out characterise nearly all efforts to estimate the number of trafficking victims? There is no straightforward way to count workers in the informal sector and undocumented migrants, whether they are suffering terribly or not and whether sex is involved or not. Estimating them can be carried out in various ways laced with caveats, but wild guesses are not even estimates. Anyone interested in serious work in this field can check out, for example, a report from the Economic Roundtable, in Los Angeles, entitled Hopeful workers, marginal jobs. No, there are no mentions of sex trafficking victims or, indeed, victims in general. Instead you will find methods not braggingly called algorithms for estimating numbers working in informal jobs in LA. You can also read about this in Harder Times: Undocumented Workers and the U.S. Informal Economy.

The fact that garbage is so prevalent in trafficking rhetoric demonstrates how little actual information proponents have. No one responsible would resist the arguments if there were real substance to back them up! Wake up, oh ye of too much faith!

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Transactional sex and bartered sex: Is there a good reason to distinguish from commercial sex?

15 April 2010 in sex work by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

When we study things, we name them, but when we live things we usually don’t.: I had a weird date the other night, I thought the girl was out to get something from me or We have a great relationship; I love to cook and he fixes my computer. Labels potentially applied include transactional sex, barter, survival sex, girlfriends, sugar daddies and sugar mommies, jaboya, something-for-something love, husband-wife relationships, free love, opportunistic sex, exploitation, enjo kosai – and a lot more, believe me. The other week I used a couple of tags myself whilst commenting on a poster exhorting fishermen not to exchange their fish for sex.

Some wrote to me to say Those women are not sex workers, they are fish traders, but they are poor and can’t pay the fisherman money so they offer him sex in exchange for fish. Well fine, but what’s the motivation for making this distinction? Is it to keep these women free of the whore stigma? Is the idea that to be properly commercial transactions must involve coins and bills? And that everything else is barter? And is barter somehow okay because it doesn’t involve filthy lucre? (note barter’s image in a white person’s context, where it’s called the no-cash economy).

Let’s look at this logically: If the fisherman gets money from these women, the transaction is considered okay. Now what happens if he takes candybars for his fish, is that not okay, because he’s supposed to be getting money? Or is fish for candybars okay but fish for, say, a shoulder massage not okay, again because he’s not getting money? Or is a shoulder massage all right, too, because it’s a service that helps him feel better, but fish for sex isn’t because presumably he doesn’t need sex to feel better? You see the problem? You might think that labels and names clarify different actions, but typical comments about transactional sex from cultures where it’s common refer to the blurry line dividing it from sex work or prostitution. On top of that, one commentator says ‘some women and men who have sex in return for gifts, money and the like would not classify themselves as sex workers although they might be’. So who is deciding which label applies and for what reason?

The main point I want to make is: To attempt to distinguish these human situations with labels contributes to the idea that there is something about sex-money exchanges that is utterly different (perhaps scary or terrible) and that women who do that are set apart from everyone else. That is a very old-fashioned and stigmatising view we should avoid. Unfortunately it’s also misleading to try to distinguish clearly between wholly involuntary, passive transactional women and wholly free, active sex workers. It’s all much more interesting and muddled than that.

Now about the fish transactions:

Recent studies in Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania have shown associations between acute food insecurity and unprotected transactional sex among poor women. Fish for sex deals are also common in Kenya on the shores of Lake Victoria, where women fish traders meet incoming boats and sleep with fishermen for a favorable price. Healthdev.net

This could be interpreted to mean that fish traders do pay with coins and bills in part but supplement them with sex, in order to pay less out in money. Or it could mean that because they have sex with the fishermen they get more fish in exchange than if they hadn’t had sex with them.

A programme in Uganda calls this kind of transaction Something for Something Love, said to be a relationship where sex is given in exchange for favours, money or gifts. I suppose this name was invented to distance the topic from previous labels, but note that now money is explicitly mentioned – this isn’t just barter. The posters used in this campaign depict a young woman whose real love rejects her because she’s had something-for-something-love, a girl who saves her friend from getting into a car with a man holding out a mobile phone, a man whose wife leaves him because he’s bartered something for money with another female  and so on.

Young people are often pressured to do things that they would not normally do, like having unwanted or unprotected sex. These relationships usually cause problems for young people including unplanned pregnancy, dropping out of school, abortions, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Violence is common in Something for Something Love, especially if the young person refuses sex or tries to end the relationship. For adults, Something for Something Love often results in broken marriages or violence if the wife or husband learns about it. Something for Something

Others – not surprisingly USAID amongst them – go to the extreme and label transactional sex exploitation

The first phase of the initiative is now underway and focuses on sexual exploitation, including transactional sex. Transactional sex refers to exploitative relationships where sex is given in exchange for favors, material objects or money. PEPFAR message

Health programmes that want to prevent the spread of hiv tend to link this something-for-something love with Young Empowerment and True Manhood. These are all well-intentioned efforts, but the moralistic messages end up excluding a lot of people who don’t experience all this as oppressive or exploitative.

There is also a confusion about whose point of view we are taking and whom we are trying to protect.

  • The original poster wants the fisherman to get money for his fish, not sex, the protection sub-text being that if he avoids sex he’s less likely to contract venereal diseases or hiv (and have more money to buy things he needs).
  • Others want the girls and women not to exchange sex for fish, for moral and the same health-protection reasons – sometimes assuming that the fishermen are coercing them.

If money is scarce, then people may barter. The fishermen ‘sell’ the fish for sex, and the women sell the fish for money in the marketplace – and it’s quite possible that some customers who want to buy fish from the women traders could offer *them* something other than money, some other object or service the traders want. Money can therefore be seen as the means to cut through the need to find exactly matching offers. It doesn’t have to become so symbolic that we hasten to say which people are *not* prostitutes. Could the subject get more complicated? You bet.

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Eating sandwiches and selling sex in the street: Offending whose sensibilities?

11 February 2010 in migration, sex work by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Activities deemed improper for public space: I’ve published on them several times in Spanish because the trend to formally prohibit particular behaviours is strong across Spain, where selling and buying sex are usually on the list. This is interesting to those who follow ideological debates about prostitution law - which law best ‘controls prostitution’, as the expression usually goes. Such general laws are largely ineffective anyway (ask me for an academic article on that).

Prohibited activities from the other day’s list - see wonderful pictures - are expanded today to include some Italian cities’ prohibitions. Planning policies that favour more regulation of public urban behaviours are frequently described as gentrification, by which middle-class ways of behaving are favoured. Thus drinking seated at an outdoor cafe is seen as all right, but drinking out of a can or cup while standing in the street nearby is not. Indoor activities are clearly favoured, especially when you have to pay to be inside. The behaviours to be prohibited are also often identified as coming from ‘outsiders’, not authentic local natives who know how to live properly. Activities mentioned in news stories like those below mix ways of living with commercial activities.

  • eating sandwiches while walking in the streets
  • eating sandwiches in public
  • eating a hamburger in a piazza
  • wielding sponges on street corners
  • gypsy camps
  • rowdy nightlife
  • arrogant behaviour towards motorists
  • public drug-taking and drinking
  • getting drunk
  • sleeping outdoors
  • going shirtless
  • washing animals in public fountains
  • smoking in playgrounds
  • begging
  • having sex in cars
  • selling pirated cds
  • gathering to mix and imbibe drinks
  • helping drivers find parking spaces
  • bathing in public fountains
  • sleeping on public benches
  • general thuggery
  • selling sex
  • stopping cars near prostitutes
  • littering

    • Some similar occupations are tolerated: rose peddlers to couples in bars, street musicians who aren’t very good, folkoric performers for bored queue-waiters, vendors of umbrellas when it starts to rain. The tolerance suggests that prohibitions are whimsical.  Notice also that some behaviours similar to the ones that get proscribed are idenfied as okay. Residents of Clinton Hill in Brooklyn described changes when mostly black and family residents were replaced by whites to Lance Freeman. The older residents liked to barbecue in the park, whereas the new residents like to sit and get tans or walk their dogs. Newer residents object to cigarette smoke in the street, children riding bikes and scooters and young men congregating for no particular purpose. Freeman said ‘You have on the one hand the more romantic view of public space as a place where people can come together unfettered unrestrained, compared with the view of public space as a place of ordered, controlled recreation. Gentrification is typically associated with the latter, as a place where space is controlled and privatized, with less opportunity for random interaction.’

    Don’t miss the photographs from the other day of prohibited activities.

    Here are excerpts from two Italian stories:

    Roadside window-washers threatened with jail

    Stephen Brown, 29 August 2007, Reuters

    Rome: Illegal immigrants in Italy earning a few coins by washing windscreens at traffic lights could face up to three months in jail after Florence launched a crackdown and other cities said they might follow suit. Many cities are already taking action against what is seen as “imported” behavior such as tourists taking off their shirts or eating hamburgers in the piazza in Venice, or getting drunk in public in Rome — something image-conscious Italians avoid. Foreigners are also blamed for much of the street crime in a relatively safe country. Most people wielding sponges on street corners are Romanian gypsies, often young women and children. . .

    . . . Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni, who has taken action against illegal gypsy camps and now vows to clean up rowdy nightlife and public drug-taking and drinking in popular neighborhoods like Trastevere, said window-washers are so pushy “that people are virtually ravaged at every traffic light and street corner.” “People must realize that behind the window-washers there is exploitation of minors, which is a crime. Like prostitution this is a racket that must be smashed,” Veltroni told reporters.

    In Verona, Mayor Flavio Tosi, who has previously taken action against people eating sandwiches in public, said he would monitor the experiment in Florence: “If the new regulation manages to deter the window-washers, we will adopt it too.” Some civic groups in Florence applauded the rules which city officials said acted on complaints of window-washers “becoming more aggressive, especially to women alone in their cars.” The city’s public safety officer Graziano Cioni stressed that the aim was “not to punish beggars or poor people” but to combat “arrogant and violent” behavior against motorists. However, leftist groups in the city called the new measure excessive and regional Communist party chief Niccolo Pecorini termed it “unworthy of Florence’s hospitable traditions.”

    Verona mayor set on discouraging prostitution

    1 August 2008, Stranitalia

    Mayor Flavio Tosi is the first Italian mayor to take advantage of a public security law voted into law last week by the new Berlusconi government and which gives city administrators greater powers regarding urban safety, including the right to increase pecuniary sanctions for clients of prostitutes even to as high as 500 euros, the equivalent of $780 dollars.

    Mayor Tosi, a member of the separatist Northern League party, has been waging a war against prostitution, by women or transsexuals, for some time now. His first move was to ticket the drivers of cars stopping near prostitutes to negotiate prices by accusing them of interfering with traffic. But that fine amounted to only 36 euros and proved effective only with Veronesi men who wanted to avoid having to identify themselves to police on their home turf. People from other neighboring cities such as Brescia, Padua and Mantova, said the mayor, were not deterred.

    In Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, the critical zone is the neighborhood around the train station, a residential area which every night sees hundreds of scantily clad prostitutes looking for business. So far 42 of the newly high fines have been issued an the mayor says he is eager to see that kind of effect it has. . .

    . . . Mayor Tosi is in the forefront of this battle. But this week, Tosi signed two other controversial ordinances, one against begging in public as has already been done in Venice and Florence and the other to increase fines for the consumption of alcoholic beverages on the street. That ordinance also prohibits littering, sleeping outdoors, going shirtless, bathing or washing animals in public fountains, smoking in playgrounds and – once again as in Rome, the senseless law against eating sandwiches while walking down the street.

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    Sex-work money contributes to ‘Development’

    14 January 2010 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

    The link between ‘development’ (a helping industry I really don’t like) and migration is now both recognised and fashionable. This piece from 2006 shows how informal-sector jobs contribute importantly to economies, even when the workers and their jobs are disrespected. When you go to pick up wire transfers, the money’s just money: no stigma, no dirt, no provenance. Click on the title to get: Contributing to Development: Money Made Selling Sex

    Laura Agustín, Research for Sex Work, 9, 8-11, 2006.

    Earlier this year I was in Ecuador talking with poorer women who sell sex and who might consider travelling to another country to do it. Politicians in wealthier countries talk about ‘economic migrants’ as though their desire to make money were a bad thing, and in many such countries migrants have a better chance of being allowed to stay if they present themselves as victims (refugees, asylum-seekers, ‘trafficked women’) than as people who have just arrived and are willing to do whatever work is on offer.

    This prejudice against economic motives is ridiculous, since we live in a world where individuals are not only expected to make money but where success in life is judged on how much money they make. And economic motives are entirely acceptable when migrants find jobs in the so-called ‘formal’ sector of the economy, which refers to businesses that governments have decided to recognise (and regulate, tax, inspect and so on), even if these businesses pay workers miserably and provide neither decent working conditions nor fair workers’ rights. Only jobs said to be in the ‘informal’ economy are considered unacceptable, despite the fact that nowadays there are probably more jobs available ‘informally’ than formally. Note: No one knows the numbers here, since businesses and people that are not registered anywhere cannot be counted.

    The term informal economy or sector was invented in the early 1970s to describe income-generating activities not protected by labour legislation in poorer countries. Read the rest of this entry »

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    Irregular migration, Informal economies, Sex work: Metropolis Conference

    24 August 2009 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

    It’s become possible to talk about sex work in the same breath as other jobs for migrants, finally – at least occasionally. At a migration conference in Copenhagen called Metropolis, which takes place from 14-18 September, I will give a plenary talk on Friday the 18th for a theme called Irregular Migration and Labour Market Activities. From the programme:

    Irregular migration is often linked to the informal labour market, where on the one hand economic gains at times lead to exploitation of foreign workers and on the other hand facilitates opportunities for socio-economic mobility. This rather paradoxical nature of the informal/irregular labour market will be debated and seen in the context of different trades as for example caretaking, domestic work, construction, agriculture, and the sex industry.   

    I will mention trafficking in the context of irregular migration in general. By the way, these adjectives – irregular, unauthorised, informal, undocumented – keep changing all the time as people try to find words that are both inclusive and neutral.

    David Kyle and Elspeth Guild are the other plenary speakers for this theme.

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    Changing prices for sex work in Sonagachi, a Kolkata red-light district (from the Naked Anthropologist)

    13 July 2009 in sex work by laura agustin | 205 comments | print print

    Photo of Sonagachi by Jon Gresham
    Photo by Jon Gresham

    This story from The Times of India is about Sonagachi, a very large red-light district in Kolkata, India, and home to the Sonagachi sex workers’ cooperative. Like the story from Malaysia the other day, this one gives financial details on how a commercial sex economy works and adapts to a recession. Note the complex structures and the different ways workers may depend on intermediaries. It’s not a simple economy. NB: 1000 rupees = 14.7 euros

    Slowdown bug hits sex workers in city

    Devjyot Ghoshal, 10 July 2009

    Kolkata: The economic slowdown has affected nearly every profession, and the world’s oldest is no exception. Thousands of commercial sex workers in Sonagachi have been singed. A contracting clientele, coupled with spiralling real-estate prices in the area, has driven them to reduce rates and spend more time on the streets.

    The worst affected are the approximately 1000 Category A workers, who charge minimum of Rs 1,500 per hour. Restricted from going on to the streets to lure customers and completely dependent on pimps to get business, these workers are slashing their rates.

    “Till a few years back, we got five customers a day. Now, it is rare to get three. As a result, Category A girls, who charged up to Rs 8,000 per hour earlier, now hardly ask for more than Rs 4,000,” said Rekha, herself a Category A worker.

    For Sonagachhi’s elite, the paucity of patrons is especially difficult to contend with, as most either have to pay a flat 50% to their mistresses or shell out a substantial amount for renting a room.

    With profits plunging, those under mistresses are increasingly moving out of that system, despite room rents having doubled in five years. High-end rooms in Sonagachi can now cost anything between Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 per month.

    “Since Category A girls can’t leave the brothels to get customers and have to give half of whatever they earn to the mistresses, many are moving into Category B, where they pay a fixed amount,” Rekha explained.

    While the services of about 2,000 Category B women in Sonagachi start at Rs 500 per hour, a customer has to pay 25% of the entire charge to the pimp separately. Additionally, the sex worker has to pay the landlord a commission per client on top of a pre-negotiated sum for booking a room.

    Starved of clients and facing incremental hikes in the prices of contract rooms, Category B workers are being forced to charge less and work longer hours.

    “Earlier, few Category B girls used to stand on the streets before 4 pm. But now, you can find us standing from as early as 10 am. We are having to work much harder,” said Shanta, another worker. Some Category B girls are also charging less to build long-term relationships with customers. “We have to depend on our existing customers to come more often. Giving a discount of Rs 100 is hardly uncommon. It hasn’t been this bad since I started over a decade ago,” she adds.

    In recent years, the steady movement of women into the area from the districts and elsewhere has resulted in a space crunch. Consequently, landlords are being able to hike prices at will, while the women must either conform or stop working.

    “Though new girls keep coming here, the space available is limited. Under the contract system, one room can be used by up to three workers. Still, the rents are constantly increasing,” says Kohinoor. “And if the landlord can’t hike the rent, then we are charged for other facilities. Keeping a television costs Rs 700 a month and a mobile phone charger Rs 500,” she added.

    There is little optimism lost, however. “As long as there are men in this city, there will be business for women here. After all, this is Sonagachhi,” declared a sex worker.

    – Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
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    UK police raids to find undocumented workers: expensive overkill

    18 March 2009 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

    Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  – their owners, workers and clientele – is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

    Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

    For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

    Crusade against the undocumented
    By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

    Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

    . . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

    The article gives examples:

    Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

    Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

    A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

    Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

    A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

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    Trafficking, smuggling, chaos: Undocumenteds aiming at UK

    11 March 2009 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

    Below are exceprts from a migration story in the Observer. There’s quite good information here but also note the confusion about the word trafficking: much of what’s described here should be called smuggling, according to UN protocols. Note particularly:

    Though many immigrants travel independently, others use organised criminal traffickers for at least some of the journey

    If migrants ‘use’ people to help them cross borders illegally, these are meant to be described as smugglers. It’s a hard distinction to maintain consistently, but in this story people are clearly travelling because they chose to and sometimes paying for help. The help can end up being abusive, of course.  The word refugee is also used. Some of the people interviewed might have a case for asylum but many do not. Also the word criminal is peppered around unnecessarily.

    Gender note: Everyone mentioned in the story is male, but what’s described applies to women who migrate without documents as well, and illustrates why getting into a ‘protected’ situation can be tempting, why getting into sex work may be a temporary solution, and so on.

    I’ve highlighted in bold some common realities known to those who study or hobnob with undocumented migrants, and removed some material you can read on the original site. Note the immensely pragmatic attitude shown by those interviewed: they are going against legal policy, they know it, they will keep trying, they are not crying about it. It’s not a victimising article.

    Why do I want to get to Britain? It has to be better than everything else

    Jason Burke, Norrent-Fontes, France, 8 March 2009

    The three tents are clustered in a ditch, beside a field, in the middle of nowhere. . . .A tractor bumps past, a crow flaps across the grey sky, the traffic on the A26 Paris-Calais motorway 500 yards behind a small wood is barely audible. It is an unlikely place for a refugee transit camp, the last stop before the UK. The nearest town is two miles away: the grubby two cafes and post office of Norrent-Fontes.

    But the ditch is a temporary home for 26 young Eritreans and Ethiopians trying to get to Britain by hiding in the lorries that stop in the layby every night. And their situation is far from unique. An investigation by the Observer has revealed scores of such makeshift settlements containing an estimated 1,500 people, including women and children, scattered across a huge swath of northern France.

    There are camps as far west as the Normandy port of Cherbourg. . . and as far north as the Belgian ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend. In Paris, an estimated 200 young immigrants who are on their way to the UK sleep in parks every night. . . Read the rest of this entry »

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