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The Sex Industry in Spain: Sex clubs, flats, agriculture, tourism

21 April 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 10 comments | print print

During the 20 years I’ve been consciously thinking about migration and prostitution, sex work and the sex industry, I have rarely seen such a bad portrayal of these deep and complex topics as in a New York Times piece on sex slaves I lambasted the other day. I lived a number of years in Spain, and it struck me early on that the endless discussion of prostitution failed to comprehend the variety of kinds of sex for sale within the industry, in all sorts of venues and situations that could be seen as good, bad or indifferent but that ought not to be reduced to any abstract, simplifying, uncontextualised term.

Here are researched descriptions of four types of places where different kinds of sexual services are for sale in Spain: large highway clubs, private flats, small houses associated with agriculture and the international coastal zone. After each description, I highlight the socially interrelated themes that arise from even such a brief glance, in order to point out how a cultural study of commercial sex – not prostitution – might proceed, on the assumption that knowing more about the specifics will help promote justice for more people.

Puticlubes (from puta, whore)

Streams of cars and trucks roar along multi-laned routes that connect Spain with France, Germany and other states east and with Portugal to the west. For long-distance truck drivers, the backbone of European commerce, long stints of solitary driving must be broken up with places offering rest and recreation. The buildings strung along these superhighways, as well as along smaller, provincial roads, are known informally in Spanish society as puticlubes (whoring clubs), but to those that work there they are hoteles de plaza, a term that refers to the employment system used, in which those offering sex for sale pay a daily rate for a place to live and work for three-week stretches. These businesses may house 50 workers or more, and in some areas, such as between Burgos and the Portuguese border, numerous clubs are located close together, forming a veritable erotic shopping area. With multiple floors, luxurious decorations, videos, live shows, jacuzzis and ‘exotic’ music—the latest rock from Moscow, for example—these clubs have come to represent luxurious sites of conspicuous consumption. Here customers pay as much as ten times the ordinary price for drinks, and it is the job of those working there to get them to buy as many as possible, since this is the owner’s major source of income. The array of nationalities living in the club at any one time is a phenomenon surely unique to sexual milieux: a German or Spanish truck driver or businessman may find himself surrounded by Rumanians, Nigerians, Colombians, Ukrainians, Brazilians and Moroccans. Imagine spaces filled with people speaking many languages, spaces where people from very different cultural backgrounds mix: the result may feel extravagantly cosmopolitan to some customers, who use these lavish venues to entertain and impress their own business clients. Other habitués include young men wanting a night out (and perhaps a sexual initiation) and lovelorn bachelors or widowers seeking company, all of whom may spend hours drinking, talking and watching. There is no requirement to purchase sex at all, and if it is, it occupies no more than twenty minutes (rules of the house, which wants workers back promoting drink as soon as possible). A large number of support personnel is needed to keep these high-overhead businesses going, and because they employ many migrants, good public relations are necessary with local police and immigration inspectors. Workers move on after their three-week stints, assuring that novelty will always be on offer.

To consider this venue as only ‘prostitution’ requires focussing exclusively on the 15-20 minutes when customers may retire to a private room with workers. Much feminist polemic has been written about concepts of exploitation, coercion and the lack of choice suffered by women in these jobs, as well as how they have reached this destination. Ignored are the work and lifestyles of long-distance truck drivers; cultures of entertainment among businessmen; multi-ethnic workplace cultures; the performance of masculinity and femininity and the reproduction of gender roles; homosociality (masculine bonding, competition, deal-making); financial advantages of owning such businesses and the extent to which lack of regulation makes it possible; relationships with local communities, employees and management and how sites may be used to accumulate social and cultural capital.

Private Flats

Where clubs specialise in splashiness and publicity, private flats offer discretion. They exist in most towns. Here the client rings up first to make an appointment in the kind of building that suggests tenants are ‘respectable’ middle-class families. The manager of the flat arranges for clients not to run into each other, and the flat itself displays few or no sexual signs; on the contrary, it may have floral-patterned covers and teddy bears on the beds, crucifixes and images of saints on the walls and the smell of home cooking wafting from the kitchen. A chain and cuffs hanging from a hook on one wall may indicate special services offered. If the customer has not requested a worker he already knows, he makes his selection and goes to a bedroom. Again, the mix of nationalities and ethnic groups is notable. These businesses rely on classified advertisements and mobile telephones, the two elements also making possible the boom in independent workers who run their own business from their own flat.

Again, most theory has focussed on the sexual acts that occur in flats and the extent to which women workers have chosen to perform them. Subjects that need researching include the cultural role of privacy and discretion; the possible meanings of domesticity as a sexual setting, including religious and family icons; communications technology’s contribution to the development of businesses.

The Agricultural World

In the southern province of Almería, a large proportion of the tomatoes and other vegetables Europeans eat are grown under plastic in vast plantations operated under semi-feudal conditions. Closeby, various kinds of sex businesses coexist, ranging from luxurious bars with private cubicles to rustic, poor housing where tenants open their doors to clients. The luxurious are located close to the plantations, even directly across from them, and those who enter and pay the prices are Spanish owners and other ‘whites’ from the managerial class, many of them men who were once agricultural labourers themselves. Women who work here come from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The rustic are located farther away, sometimes up inconvenient roads with few public services; here the clients are ‘non-white’, often undocumented, migrants. Here, Nigerian women offer offer sex and other domestic services in their houses (meals, drinks, washing and ironing, music, a place to stay the night). Occasionally tourists wander up from the beaches, seeking something different from the nightlife of the tourist coast.

While ‘prostitution’ is present here, this form of commercial sex attests to a traditional link with migrant sectors such as farming, mining and shipping. Useful research would look at the interrelation of commercial sex with other industries; the intersections of different informal-sector economies and forms of servitude; how the business segments by class, colour and ethnic group. Ethnographic work would consider what kind of relationships are developed among subaltern employees in different expatriate sectors.

The Cosmopolitan Frontier

This is the area of Spain where Spanishness fades and cosmopolitanism, tourism and hybridity reign. Businesses in Torrelinos, Marbella and smaller towns along the coast highway advertise in a brochure called Encuentros (meetings) which categorises its offerings under the terms Gay Bars, Swapping, Private Establishments and Contacts and Sex Shops. A plethora of clubs, bars, party rooms and flats advertise, mentioning as specialities piano-bars, saunas, jacuzzis, turkish baths, dark rooms, go-go shows, striptease, escort services, bilingual misses, private bars, dance floors, a variety of massages, private booths with 96 video channels, gifts for stag and hen parties, latex wear and aphrodisiacs. Apart from the sexual products and services available, other conditions are announced, such as air conditioning, valet or private parking, swimming pools, credit cards, select clientele, television and accessibility for the handicapped. Many adverts play down the commercial aspect by emphasising the ‘non-professionals’ present. Fitting the international environment, businesses are called Milady Palace, Play Boy, Melody d’Amour, Dolly’s, New Crazy, Glam Ur Palace Club and Titanic. Many are located in ordinary shopping strips.

Obviously, ‘prostitution’ occurs in these venues, but further areas for research include the influence of tourism and its correlation with questions of image and class in services; the positioning of gay culture and diverse sexual subcultures with commercial sex; the existence of subcultures within commercial sex; the role of entrepreneurism in the proliferation of sites. It would be interesting to know which kind of customer goes to which kind of place, how entrepreneurs decide what to offer in such a compact area chockful of sex businesses and how long businesses last. Are there sexual cultures here that extend into the rest of Spain or that tourists take home with them?

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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New York Times’s cheesy ersatz reporting on migrant women, sex work and trafficking

15 April 2012 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 5 comments | print print

Aquí no hay puticlub: There’s no sex club here. This sign was erected by a British landowner along a rural route in Spain where customers in search of a commercial sex venue apparently drive in error. There are many sex clubs, bars and brothels of all shapes and sizes in Spain, where selling sex is not illegal, but key activities surrounding it are. I wrote about the different types of venues years ago when arguing for a cultural study of commercial sex.

I wonder if future historians will track how misinformation about migration and sex work was so willfully reproduced during the present period, how news publications with a reputation for actual investigation began to copy chunks of pseudo news and paste them together, were satisfied to quote only society’s most predictable, official and reductionist sources and failed to admit that the police force of any country is not the place to find out about complex social problems.

Any authentic interest in the topic at hand could not be titled In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism – a cartoon-like story full of the most superficial sensationalist cliches, mostly derived from police sources and a few abolitionist advocates. Yet this is the story The New York Times published on its front page the other day, complete with a ludicrous photo of a young woman in high red boots worthy of the cheapest rag. As the story claimed to be about brothels (indoor venues), why did they illustrate the story with a picture of street prostitution – again, on the front page? I know of no serious research that talks about brothel tourism, by the way. On the other hand, men who live in places where no venues are available have always been known to cross borders or travel distances to get to them. There is no news about that.

The issue is failure to investigate and report dysfunctional migration policy and how growing economic inequalities promote the taking of unregulated, unprotected jobs in in underground economies, including in the sex industry. If this article had appeared in the New York Daily News or Britain’s Daily Mail, I wouldn’t even bother to comment, and it would take too long and be too annoying for me to critique the entire article, but here are a few of the most misleading simplifications:

* Young Men Flocking to Spain for Sex With Trafficked Prostitutes: title to a banal set of photos, some taken at a big sex club on the Spanish border near France. Border crossings for all sorts of reasons, sex, wine and rambling among them, have been going on forever in that area not only pottery and leather goods as the article says. How old can these reporters be that they seem to be describing naive tourists from the US in the 1950s?

* Sob story implying migrants’ families are heartless:

The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement.

One police case plucked out of thousands to imply how awful other places are, because there could never be a cruel or desperate family in the US, right? And no mention of the many more family projects that do not involve such melodrama.

* Pretense that something new and different is happening:

…experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities.

When selling sex is not illegal it may occur anywhere without people hiding, if that’s what they mean by public view – that is hardly surprising news.

* The report says one migrant still owed them more than $2,500, as though it were an egregious amount. In fact, that much can often be paid back in a fairly short time – one, two months – by someone working in a busy sex club. And as I have written many times, migrants pay for a series of valuable services, so without knowing a lot more about this particular story we do not know what this sum means.

* Attempt to cause moral panic about the young.

In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel. “The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”

All research for a long time has suggested that young men in groups habitually drop into clubs and drive through streets with sex workers as part of nights out. The same evening easily includes both discos and sex clubs. The word packs makes the men sound predatory, of course.

* Then they try to make it a problem of growing demand for sex services from younger tourists, so ignorant about travel outside the US they don’t know that people in neighbouring countries here rarely refer to each other as tourists. In Europe, everyone moves around all the time, the Schengen agreement meaning no border checks. This is not news. And to claim that Spain has also become a go-to destination for sex services is laughable. Spain has been a major tourist destination for decades. Holidays may always include sex, paid or not, and there is definitely a market for men visiting numerous European cities to enjoy stag parties. Spain is not particularly famous for these, but trends may change.

* Ignorance about migration:

Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.

Women from Latin America travelling to Spain to work in domestic service or sell sex is indeed a decades-long phenomenon, so that different generations in the same family are involved and networks are mature. Networks are illegal because migrants are undocumented, not because they are sinister. This is just yellow-press exaggeration.

I have to stop here; there is just too much irresponsible rubbish in this article. Toward the end a few interesting facts slip in that indicate the subject is far more complex than the cheesy reporting has so far let on – the reporters must not have realised. I also could provide numerous links to my own writings, many based fundamentally on my own years of living and researching in Spain, but the New York Times will never be interested.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Chinese sex workers, in and out of China

19 March 2012 in migration, sex work by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

To those inundated by the same crude message about sex trafficking over and over, two news stories may surprise. In the first, Chinese women who travel to Malaysia are considered interesting not because of any scandal or scourge but because of culture. Not long ago, this story would not have seemed quite so odd – before all women who travel to sell sex were transformed by the Rescue Industry into pathetic victims.

Malaysia just like home for prostitutes from China
28 February 2012, Borneo Post

Kuala Lumpur . . .influx of ‘freelance’ prostitutes from China. . . they liked the climate here which was not far different from China’s. . . They speak Mandarin, which makes it easy for them to mix with the local Chinese community and their food back home is almost similar to the Chinese food here. The availability of budget flights and Internet access are also catalysts for them to come to this country. . . preliminary investigation found that these women who worked through syndicates would return to Malaysia [after being sent home] on student visas and resume working as freelance prostitutes as the earnings were lucrative. . . most of the Chinese nationals interrogated used student visas to enable them to enter the country unimpeded.

. . .Chinese nationals made up the most number of people arrested for prostitution at 653 from January to February 15. This was followed by those from Vietnam (367), Thailand (300), Indonesia (177), the Philippines (55), Uzbekistan (19), Myanmar (14), Cambodia (10), Bangladesh (nine), Mongolia (six), Nigeria and Sri Langka (four each), and India (one). The highest number of arrests involved Chinese nationals at 5,753 in 2009, 6,378 in 2010 and 5,922 in 2011.

That’s a lot of arrests, so it’s not a good story, but notable that the women are not described as trafficking victims. The reference to a syndicate may be to agencies who process visas for students, including students who do not intend to study.

Why would women from China travel to Malaysia to sell sex, given this arrest rate? Consider how they are treated in China.

The oldest profession seeks respect
9 September 2011, The 4th Media

Lin is just 17 . .  Although she knows nothing about cutting hair, she’s employed by a hair salon that can be spotted from the street by a sparkling pink barber pole that glows through the windows at night . . .she has already suffered the humiliation of being handcuffed and detained by police several times.

The salon owner surnamed Wang and an employee surnamed Li get worked up as they rant about the treatment they receive from the police. Li said police have raided her shop twice in the last four months. . . Wang jumps in with angry tales of frequent visits by the police that cost her 600 to 800 yuan in fines to retrieve her employees from the police station. . . A day or two after the raid Wang’s salon is back in business. Wang said she would rather pay for a license, get legal protection and follow required health regulations. “I offer a service that I’m not forcing anyone to take. I’m doing a good thing. It’s not easy making money these days,” she said, adding that one of her four employees was abandoned by her husband, and another has several children to feed. Wang takes a 20 percent commission from the women who average little more than 100 yuan per day [12 euros].

. . .The ubiquitous salons mainly employ women from the countryside, who have little education, few opportunities at home and little chance of doing well in a cosmopolitan city. . . many of the salons operate on the fringe of the law and provide sex services to some of the millions of migrant men who leave home for many months at a time. . .

Young teen Lin resisted becoming a full-time sex worker. She felt disgraced and uncomfortable with her coquettish colleagues. She went home to her village but there was nothing for her to do and soon returned to Yulin and sex work and now supports herself and her family. She moved to another salon that treats her better and says she actually enjoys the job.

. . .A xiaojie, which is a euphemism for sex worker, is treated with disdain by open society. . .the police who often publicly humiliate the xiaojie in hopes of deterring others from entering the profession or in an effort to be seen to be cleaning up a neighborhood. The main targets of the police are the migrant xiaojie who work in small salons or massage parlors. The high-end call girls working out of big nightclubs and luxury hotels are seldom harassed. Prostitution in China is punishable by a maximum 15 days in detention and a fine of 5,000 yuan [600 euros].

For more information see Migrant sex workers in China: massage parlours, hair salons, hotel rooms.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

23 February 2012 in migration, trafficking by laura agustin | 8 comments | print print

Once, after I’d given a talk, an academic feminist geographer became very upset while trying to get me to admit that the poor of this world are victims objectively, by definition, because of ‘global structural inequalities’. I replied that I understood how she, coming from her position of middle-class person identifying as socialist, produced poorer people this way. I went on to say, ‘But if you move over to the poor person’s place and ask them how they see their situation, they may well not produce such an image of themselves.’ I thought the woman was going to go through the roof with outrage at my refusal to accept her point as objectively true.

This planet is rife with terrible differences between the poor and the rich, men mostly have more power and money than everyone else and things are getting worse. But given the injustice, I prefer to listen to how people describe their own realities rather than create static, general categories like Exploited Victims. It is also not smart to claim that poor people only leave their countries because they are forced to, with no possibility for their desires and abilities to think and weigh risks. Most poor people don’t leave their countries.

I published Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants in 2003, but several people have written to me recently about how up-to-date and useful it is. In the mainstream media, two reductionist visions are common: one that blames migrants as grasping criminals, the other that sees them as sad victims. Unfortunately many people with leftist sympathies and visions fall into the trap of victimisation.  Click on the title to get the pdf or read the whole thing below. What I say applies to all migrants, whatever jobs they do, including sex work.

Forget Victimisation: Granting Agency to Migrants

Development, 46.3, 30-36 (2003)

Laura Agustín

There is a growing tendency to victimise poor people, weak people, uneducated people and migrant people. The trend, which began as a way of drawing attention to specific forms of violence committed against women, has now become a way of describing everyone on the lower rungs of power. Routinely, supporters position them as victims in order to claim rights for them, but this move also turns them into victims, and victims need help, need saving—which gives a primary role to supporters. Much rhetoric about migration has fallen into this pattern: migrants, it turns out, are not only vulnerable to exploitation, a patent truth, but they are ‘victims’.

The other choice, according to sensationalist media treatments, is criminal. Since news on migrants is reported only when disasters befall them, or when they are caught in something ‘illegal’, they can only be positioned in one of these two ways: as past victims of poverty or conflict in their home states and present victims of criminal bands, or as criminals who take advantage of such victims. The victims need to be saved, and the criminals to be punished. This reductionism encourages the idea that there is something inherently dangerous about being a migrant. Since migrants are usually seen as people from the third world, the positioning of so many of them as victims—of economic restructuring if not of criminal agents—harks back unsettlingly to the old category of the ‘native’. And since migrants nowadays are so often women, these natives are constituted as backward, developmentally less than first-world women. This is most overt, of course, in ‘trafficking’ discourses (for example, in Barry, 1979) but can now be heard in general talk about ‘illegal’ migrants.

Ratna Kapur shows how this victimising tendency began in the early 1990s with the project to reveal the widespread, routine nature of violence against women:

In the context of law and human rights, it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse (Kapur, 2001: 5).

This strategy has led to many benefits for women. The problem is that the person designated a victim tends to take on an identity as victim that reduces her to being seen as a passive receptacle and ‘encourages some feminists in the international arena to propose strategies which are reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’ (Kapur, 2001: 6).

The category ‘migrant’, awkward and ambiguous to begin with, becomes more so when it is victimised. In this article, I want to look at what we think we mean when we call someone a migrant, and then suggest that there are both class and postcolonial analyses to be made of this constructed identity and the passivity assigned to it. To do this, I will call on my own research with migrating people in various parts of the world. What I recount is widely known, but not often included in formal studies of migrations.

Conventional travellers

On the surface, there seem to be patently different kinds of travellers: tourists, people whose work involves travel, refugees and migrants. Tourists are generally defined as people with time and money to spend on leisure activities who take a trip somewhere to do it: they are ‘travelling for pleasure’. Tourism is defined by an absence (work), and tourists are believed to have left their jobs behind to indulge consciously in not working. In the literature, the tourist is someone from the North (the tourism of Southerners is invisible). Some people oppose a status of ‘traveller’ to that of tourist, saying their trips are unplanned, open-ended, longer and more appreciative of the ‘real culture’ of a place. ‘Interacting with the culture’ is the goal for many of these, and this interaction most likely comes about through getting a job. ‘Working’ does not exclude pleasure, then, for first-world subjects.

People who travel in the course of carrying out their jobs are at first glance also clearly identifiable. Whether sent on trips by companies or undertaking them on their own, business travellers are obliged to be on the road. Their trips may be long or short, involve familiarity with the culture visited and the local language or not and require sociability or not, but they have in common that this is not supposed to be ‘leisure time’. But is this true? Many businesspeople also engage in tourism during their trips, using their ‘expense accounts’ to entertain clients, much of this money going to sites where tourists also go (theatres, cabarets, sex or gambling clubs, restaurants, bars, boat trips, sports events). The trips taken to attend conferences, do field work or provide consultations by academics, ‘development’ and technical consultants, missionaries and social-sector personnel also feature tourism. Sports professionals, singers, musicians, actors, salespeople, sailors, soldiers, airline and train personnel, commercial fishermen, farm-workers, long-distance truck drivers and a variety of others travel as part of their professions. Modern explorers search for oil, minerals, endangered species of animals and plants and ‘lost’ archaeological artefacts. Many of these people spend a long time away from home, and their work life is punctuated by leisure and tourist activities. Some of these people have homes or ‘home bases’ in more than one place. Students who take years abroad or travel to do field work are combining tourism and work. The main goal of a voyage for religious pilgrims is not work, but they may work and engage in tourist activities on the way to and from the pilgrimage. And then there are nomads whose traditional way of gaining a livelihood includes mobility.

The dichotomy working traveller/work-free traveller is misleading, and many forms of travel have aspects of both. So what makes a ‘migrant’ different?

This other kind of traveller

Some people distinguish between all the above types and ‘migrants’, on the grounds that the latter ‘settle’. According to this distinction, migrants move from their home to make another one in someone else’s country. They are not positioned as travellers or tourists, since they are looking not only to spend money but earn it. The word migrant is nearly always used about the working class, not about middle-class professionals and not about people from the first-world, even if they also have left home and moved to another country. Instead, the word rings of a subaltern status. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sex at the Margins available as ebook

4 February 2012 in migration by laura agustin | 7 comments | print print

I receive many queries about getting Sex at the Margins (Zed Books) as an ebook, so am happy to announce that it is now available through various outlets. Not for the dedicated hardware readers yet (kindle, nook, kobo) but available!

The best deal in the US is at Books A Million:  ebook $10.32

In the UK the best deal is at Waterstones: ebook £14.39

In Australia the best price is at Read Without Paper: ebook AUD 22.76

Oddly enough in the UK Tesco say they have the paperback for £12.59 but you have to pay delivery unless you are ordering over £15 at a time.

Thanks to all for encouragement and continuing to keep this book on the market. The original reader of the manuscript for Zed Books predicted it would become a cult classic and I guess that’s about right!

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

 

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Sex at the Margins in Stockholm: Migration & Prevention

9 January 2012 in migration by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

I will be giving an hour-long lecture in Stockholm on 26 January 2012, covering general ideas about migration and who ‘migrants’ are thought to be, both documented and undocumented, as well as ideas about health and prevention, including for migrant sex workers. The sponsors are Smittskyddsinstitutet (Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control), a government agency to monitor the epidemiological situation for communicable diseases in humans and promote protection against them.

It is interesting and progressive that this agency should have me speak at their event: Nuancing of the notion of migrants is taking place. Note that State Feminism is not in charge here.

I have only just heard that pre-registration for this event closes tomorrow, so I supply details quickly now. I would love for some supporters to come to this Stockholm event, and, if you do, please come and introduce yourselves.

Konferens: Migration och prevention

Smittskyddsinstitutet (SMI) och Europeiska flyktingfonden (ERF) i samverkan välkomnar dig som arbetar med frågor inom området hälsa, prevention och migration till en heldagskonferens om migration och prevention. Konferensen vill utifrån ett hälsoperspektiv belysa hälsa och prevention i samband med migrationsprocessen och mottagandet av asylsökande och andra som av skilda skäl söker sig till Sverige.

Forskare från Malmö högskola redovisar nya kunskapssammanställningar på området migration, sexuell hälsa och prevention. Dessutom presenterar SMI med samarbetspartner ett nytt projekt som syftar till förbättrad struktur och samordning kring hälsoundersökningar av asylsökande.

26 januari 2012

Norra Latin, Stockholm
kl. 09.00 – 16.30 (registrering och kaffe från kl. 08.30)

Moderator: Willy Silberstein

Konferensen vänder sig till hälso- och sjukvårdspersonal, tjänstemän, politiker, forskare och ideella organisationer inom området hälsa, prevention och migration.

Konferensen är gratis. SMI bjuder på lunch och kaffe. Antalet platser är begränsat till 200.

OBS! Förlängds anmälningstid: Sista anmälningsdag 10 januari 2012.

Program
09.00 – 09.15 Robert Jonzon, Smi, hälsar välkommen Moderator Willy Silberstein presenterar konferensprogram.
09.15 – 09.45 Inledning av GD J. Carlson, Smi, och tf GD C. Werner, Migrationsverket.
09.45 – 10.15 Migration och sexuell hälsa – Presentation av en kunskapsöversikt från Malmö högskola, Monica Ideström, enhetschef vid Smi.
10.15 – 10.30 Bensträckare.
10.30 – 11.00 Migration och prevention – Presentation av en kunskapsöversikt, Fil.mag. Christina Halling, Malmö högskola.
11.00 – 11.45 Frågor och diskussion under moderators ledning.
11.45 – 13.00 Lunch.
13.00 – 14.00 Migration – Sex at the Margins (föredrag på engelska) – The Naked Anthropologist, Dr Laura Agustín.
14.00 – 14.30 Förbättrad struktur och samordning kring hälsoundersökningar av asylsökande – Presentation av EU-projekt, projektledare Robert Jonzon, Smi.
14.30 – 15.00 Kaffe.
15.00 – 15.20 Förutsättningarna att ge andra än asylsökande m.fl. erbjudande om hälsoundersökning – Presentation av Socialdepartementets utredning, utredningssekreterare Anna Billing.
15.20 – 15.50 Presentation av EU-projektets partners och medarbetare, Robert Jonzon m.fl. Utöver Smittskyddsinstitutet deltar följande partners i projektet: Migrationsverket, Socialstyrelsen, Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting, Stockholm läns landsting, Norrbottens läns landsting, Landstinget i Östergötland och Region Skåne samt Uppsala och Umeå universitet.
15.50 – 16.30 Avslutande diskussion under ledning av moderator

Here is the Migration & Prevention programme as a pdf.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex Work Café in Montréal with Stella, Laura and Carol Leigh

2 November 2011 in sex work by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Next week I will be in Montréal for several events: a book launch, an anthropology conference and a Sex Work Café. English details after the French.

L’Alliance féministe solidaire pour les droits des travailleuses(rs) du sexe et Stella vous convie au SEX WORK CAFÉ!

11 November 2011 – 1830-2030 chez Stella (l’adresse sera envoyée par courriel)

Nous accueillerons deux sommités du mouvement de défense de droits des travailleuses(rs) du sexe, de Malmö-Copenhague et de San Francisco! Joignez-vous à nous pour une discussion sur la question de la migration des femmes et l’anti-traffic.

Laura Agustín, PhD, auteure de Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, connue également comme The Naked Anthropologist, nous présentera le fruit de ses importantes recherches.

Carol Leigh, travailleuse du sexe activiste et réalisatrice, nous présentera des extraits de son film Trafficking in The Media: Sex, Power and Representation (VO sous-titrée en français).

Le lieu est accessible aux fauteuils roulants par ascenseur.

Discussion bilingue mais les présentations de Carol et Laura seront faites en anglais avec traduction simultanée chuchotée – volontaires recherché-es.

Bienvenue aux enfants: il y a un coin de jouets et la surveillance peut être assurée par une rotation de responsabilité – RSVP.

Contact: alliancefeministesolidaire[at]gmail.com

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Friday 11 November 2011 – 1830-2030 at Stella (address sent by email)

The Feminist Alliance in Solidarity for Sex Workers Rights and Stella warmly invite you to the SEX WORK CAFÉ!

We will welcome two international stars from the sex workers rights movement, coming from Malmö-Copenhague and San Francisco. Join us for a Sex Work Cafe that aims to focus on the question of women’s migration and anti-trafficking.

Laura Agustín, PhD, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, also known as The Naked Anthropologist, will discuss her crucial and influential research.

Carol Leigh, sex worker activist and film maker, will present segments from her work-in-progress Trafficking in The Media : Sex, Power and Representation (VO sub. french).

Wheelchair-accessible by elevator.

Bilingual discussion with English presentation by Carol and Laura and whispered translation to French – we need volonteers.

Children welcome: there is a play area where surveillance will be assured by a rotation of responsibility – please contact us to let us know.

Contact: alliancefeministesolidaire[at]gmail.com

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Leaving Home for Sex: Cosmopolitanism or sex trafficking or both?

25 September 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work.

Sex trafficking and human trafficking were not words on everyone’s lips when I wrote the above ten years ago. I was trying to figure out what was special and problematic about migrants who sell sex, believing that migrants are migrants, no matter what jobs they end up getting (including prostitution or sex work). Nowadays, a lot of the social conflict is about statistics: how many are trafficked, how many are illegal migrants. But even more it is about definitions, world views, ideas about sex and money, the insistence that a particular cultural view should be everyone’s.

Most conversations about migrants who sell sex present black-and-white versions of something that is almost entirely grey. For moral crusaders who would rush to legislation or attempt to prove that one sort of law is better than others, my vision is not satisfying. I say Stop, slow down. Until you comprehend the myriad elements present amongst people who leave home to go to another country and sell sex, you shouldn’t be passing laws about them. Of any kind. This is not useless postmodern dithering but the position that until you understand the minimum about how people experience their own lives you cannot responsibly take actions to help them. If you don’t care what they say themselves then don’t talk about helping and admit that control is what you want: the power to make people stop doing what you don’t approve of and start doing something else, whether they want to or not.

Leaving Home for Sex is the first piece I published that defined what my work would be for the next few years. At the time it was unusual not to use the term prostitute, but I also didn’t just substitute the term sex worker. Instead, I tried to describe how selling sex can be an occupation that works out all right for migrant women without their taking on a definite identity based on it. You will see ‘Challenging place’ in the original title because the piece was written for a special journal issue on women and place – the local and the global. I suggested that migrant workers didn’t fit into that framework but could sometimes be viewed as cosmopolitan subjects: that neither poverty nor bad jobs nor lack of complete ‘choice’ over your life prevents you from also becoming cosmopolitan.  Click on the title to get the pdf.

Leaving Home for Sex

Laura Mª Agustín, Development, 45.1, 110-117 (2002).

As soon as people migrate, there is a tendency to sentimentalise their home. Warm images are evoked of close families, simple household objects, rituals, songs, foods.[1] Many religious and national holidays, across cultures, reify such concepts of ‘home’ and ‘family’, usually through images of a folkoric past. In this context, migration is constructed as a last-ditch or desperate move and migrants as deprived of the place they ‘belong to’.Yet for millions of people all over the world, the birth and childhood place is not a feasible or desirable one in which to undertake more adult or ambitious projects, and moving to another place is a conventional—not traumatic—solution.

How does this decision to move take place? Earthquakes, armed conflict, disease, lack of food impel some people in situations that seem to involve little element of choice or any time to ‘process’ options: these people are sometimes called refugees. Single men’s decisions to travel are generally understood to evolve over time, the product of their ‘normal’ masculine ambition to get ahead through work: they are called migrants. Then there is the case of women who attempt to do the same.

Research in a marginal place: Geographies of exclusion

For some time I worked in educación popular in Latin America and the Caribbean and with latino migrants in North America and Europe, in programmes dedicated to literacy, AIDS prevention and health promotion, preparation for migration and concientización (whose exact translation does not exist in English but combines something about consciousness-raising with something about ‘empowerment’). My concern about the vast difference between what first-world social agents (governmental, NGO workers, activists) say about women migrants and what women migrants say about themselves led me to study and testify on these questions. I have deliberately located myself on the border of both groups: the migrants and the social, in Europe, where the only jobs generally available to migrant women are in the domestic, ‘caring’ and sex industries. My work examines both the social and the migrants, so I spend time in brothels, bars, houses, offices, ‘outreach’ vehicles and ‘the street’, in its many versions. Data on what migrant women say come from my own research and others’ in many countries of the European Union; women have also been interviewed before or after migrating in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Data on what social agents say come from my own research with those who work on prostitution issues in those countries, including as evaluator of projects for the International Labour Office and the European Commission.

Although researchers and NGO personnel have been working with migrant prostitutes for nearly twenty years in Europe, publication of their findings remains outside mainstream press and journals. Most of the people who have met and talked with many migrant prostitutes are neither academics nor writers. ‘Outreach’ is conceptualised as distinct from ‘research’ and generally funded as HIV/AIDS prevention. This means that the published products of outreach research are generally limited to information on sexual health and practices; the other many kinds of information collected remain unpublished. Some of those who work in these projects have the chance to meet and exchange such information, but most do not. Recently, a new kind of researcher has entered the field, usually young academic women studying sociology or anthropology and working on migrations. These researchers want to do justice to the reality around them, which they recognise as consisting of as many migrant prostitutes as migrant domestic/‘caring’ workers. Most of these researchers do oral histories and some have begun to publish but it will be some time before such findings are recognised. Stigma works in all kinds of ways, among them the silencing of results that do not fit hegemonic discourses.[2] The mainstream complaint says ‘the data is not systematised’ or ‘there is no data.’ In my research, I seek out such ‘marginalised’ results.

Discourses of leaving home

It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work. Read the rest of this entry »

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Migranten som resenär: Laura Agustín i Arena

13 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | No comments | print print

Migranten som resenär
Laura Maria Agustín

Arena #2 april 2011 – Den nya underklassen Invandraren är tillbaka. Vilka är vi och dom?


På lyxiga semesterorter i Dominikanska republiken solar turister nära stränder där småbåtar frekvent ger sig ut mot Puerto Rico. Mona-kanalens förrädiska strömmar vimlar av hajar och många av båtarna kapsejsar. Men nästan alla dominikaner känner ändå någon som har lyckats klara resan. De som har tagit sig över gränsen måste sedan passera genom Puerto Ricos västra träskmarker, där den amerikanska gränspolisen väntar. De som tar sig förbi dem kan stanna på ön eller fortsätta till Miami, New York eller Europa. Presumtiva migranter försöker hitta erfaret sjöfolk med båtar starka nog att klara stormar och som inte överlastar båtarna med alltför många passagerare.

I boken The Suffering of the Immigrant beskriver sociologen Abdelmalek Sayad hur länder som tar emot migranter uppfattar migration som ett irriterande socialt problem som måste ”hanteras”. Sayad ser de överväldigande hinder som nordafrikaner möter i Frankrike som en tydlig strukturell konsekvens av kolonisering, utan att för den skull offerförklara migranterna. I stället argumenterar han kraftfullt för att erkänna dem som handlande subjekt. Förmågan att se och erkänna den sortens agentskap – att även missgynnade migranter är huvudpersoner i sina egna liv – har sin grund i en förståelse för hur migrationer börjar.

När jag bodde i Dominikanska republiken, var ett av mina uppdrag att besöka samhällen där utflyttning var väletablerat. Jag mötte kvinnor som ville resa till Europa, där de två valmöjligheter som fanns att tillgå var att arbeta som inneboende hembiträde eller att sälja sex. De vägde riskerna och fördelarna mot varandra och diskuterade huruvida de skulle klara anpassningen. De flesta av dem hade inte någon längre formell utbildning, men de var varken naiva eller ointelligenta.  Om de stannade hemma var deras bästa alternativ fortfarande hemhjälp eller att sälja sex, men till långt lägre löner och utan de nya horisonter en resa kan erbjuda.

Potentiella migranter drömmer också om att få se kända platser, träffa nya människor, bli självständiga, lära sig ett nytt yrke, få nya idéer – precis som människor i rika länder gör. Att resa är utvecklande för alla resenärer – inte bara för rika turister, och för många människor är dessa resor deras största chans att ta reda på mer om världen.

När jag reste runt på ön och in i Haiti, hörde jag dussintals människor prata om hur de skulle komma i väg. Européer tar för givet att deras resevisum beviljas av vilket land de än vill besöka. Medborgare i länder som Dominikanska republiken vet att deras ansökningar om turistvisa aldrig kommer att beviljas. Liksom när det gäller att få ett arbete och arbetstillstånd utomlands, utgör de statliga riktlinjerna en begränsning – arbetstillstånden omfattar bara ”kvalificerade” jobb, vilket gör att många migranter väljer att resa utanför det formella regelverket och tar ”okvalificerade” jobb i den svarta ekonomin.

För att få tillgång till de här arbetena kan resenärerna behöva nytt namn och pass, en falsk vigselring, flygbiljetter, pengar att visa upp för gränspoliser och råd om vad man ska säga till dem, någon som möter upp vid flygplatsen och någonstans att bo när de kommer fram. Jag träffade många människor som erbjuder de här tjänsterna till potentiella migranter, inklusive deras egna familjemedlemmar, gamla vänner, bekantskaper bland turister och frilansande entreprenörer. Eftersom den här resemarknaden inte är reglerad, finns det inget bra sätt att veta vem som gör ett bra jobb och vem som behandlar migranterna korrekt, förutom via ryktesvägen: berättelser från kunder som smugglats ut säkert.

Jag pratade med Lucía, en strippdansös som hade väntat på det rätta tillfället att ge sig av i flera månader. Hon ville åka till Paris, men hade inte hittat rätt erbjudande ännu. Miriam, med två års universitetsstudier och erfarenheter av arbete som tandläkarassistent, funderade på ifall statussänkningen att bli hembiträde skulle vägas upp av de pengar hon kunde tjäna i Italien, där hennes syster bodde. Båda kvinnorna visste vilka priser och villkor de önskade och besökte platser där smugglare samlas regelbundet för att höra vad som erbjöds.

En del såg mig som en möjlighet. En kypare började prata med mig efter att ha serverat kaffe, Read the rest of this entry »

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Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the Trafficking Debate

3 September 2011 in migration by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Here is another article that required persistence and patience to get through the academic journal review process and into publication. Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, published in 2005, used testimonies of women selling sex who do not consider themselves coerced, forced, trafficked or enslaved or who, even if they were coerced by economic circumstance, are not searching for Rescue. Click on the title for the pdf.

Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate, by Laura Agustín, Social Politics, Volume 12, Number 1, 96-117 (2005).

I contrasted feminist interpretations like this:

Whatever levels of knowledge and ‘consent’ are involved, however, women are never made aware of the extent to which they will be indebted, intimidated, exploited and controlled. They believe . . . that they can travel to a richer country and earn large amounts of money in a short space of time, which they can then use to move themselves and their families out of poverty and despair. In reality, they are told they owe a huge debt which must be repaid through providing sexual services, and they are able to exercise virtually no control at all over their hours of work, the number of customers they serve, and the kinds of sex they have to provide. (Kelly and Regan 2000, 5)

with migrant testimonies like this:

I arrived in Almería through a friend’s mediation. I began to work as a domestic, I was badly paid and mistreated. Sundays I came to the edge of the sea and cried. One Sunday a Moroccan man saw me crying, I explained my situation to him, he took me to his house. I was a virgin, he promised he was going to marry me . . . he got me a residence card. . . . He found me work in a restaurant and let me stay in his studio, he told me I had to pay rent. I began to sleep with some clients from the restaurant. . . . Now, I would like to go to France, I want to get married. . . . My sister who lives in Bézier says she’s going to find me a Frenchman, to get a residence card. (Moroccan woman; Lahbabi and Rodríguez 2000, 18)

or this:

Once I was talking with a friend and she asked if I wanted to go to Spain. I knew why, so I said: ‘Ah, do you want to?’ . . . and I don’t know where she met this guy, he got the papers for us . . . the money and we left. . . . This guy went to look for work, where are the best places to work, where there are men. . . . Because one place has a lot of men, another doesn’t. . . . I worked in Logroño a month or so . . . then back to Málaga . . . a month or two, then I came here. . . . He talked first with the boss of this place . . . said he was looking for work for us. (Ukrainian woman in Spain; Agustín 2001)

The men in both stories would be called pimps and traffickers by the cited feminists.

In 2005 this was still mainly a feminist quarrel, so those are the arguments I attempted to answer. I called it Migrants in the mistress’s house in reference to working-class servants in rich people’s homes, where they may become subversive members of the family, and, in the female case, have sexual relationships with some of them that may be coerced but may also be manipulative and self-serving. Full references in the paper itself.

The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex was rather directed at migration scholars, to highlight how they were leaving these migrants aside, as a ‘feminist’ issue.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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