Tag Archives: naked anthropologist

The Witches of Manningtree: A Walk on the River Stour

PUBLIC NOTICE: I’ve become a qualified tour guide. Not because I want to take tourists to see the changing of the guard or other typical tourist delights but because I’ve been an inveterate walker all my life and I like talking about pieces of the past other folks might not know about – while walking. You can see me doing it in this photo from my first paid walk, and you can read more about it on the page called London Walks. My fists are out because I was demonstrating a method for ‘swimming’ women accused of witchcraft.

This walk was led along with Rob Smith, a longtime guide and friend. In the past year we have become enamoured with estuaries in the county of Essex – sprawling tidal rivers that end at the North Sea. The landscape can be spectacularly bleak when the tide is out and all is mud.

The co-leading project started last year when we were walking in Manningtree and Mistley, two small towns on the south bank of the River Stour. Various signs portrayed a man named Matthew Hopkins, who had a brief but nasty career identifying witches in East Anglia in the 17th century. You may remember him as the villain played by Vincent Price in the 1968 horror film Witchfinder-General. Price was nearly 60 when he played the actually only 24-year-old Hopkins, but Never mind, villains who cruelly misuse innocent women are a classic trope, and good fun was had by all watching the movie.

What happened was Rob began making comments about Hopkins and witches, and I kept saying Er, not really, it was more like this or that, and suchlike. Because in my decades of studying the victimising of women I must have thought as much about witches as about prostitutes. The walk proceeded to other things, but towards the end Hopkins reappeared as one-time landlord of a pub with a misleading plaque about him on the wall. I objected, and we discussed it some more, and eventually Rob suggested we do a walk on it.

My stops, as they’re called in the trade, addressed the witch craze. But instead of centring Hopkins I focused on three women accused of witchcraft: Anne and Rebecca West of Lawford and Elizabeth Clarke of Manningtree. We know a few facts about these women because they were accused, charged and tried, and two of them were hanged.

The backdrop to this witch craze was the English Civil War, which for the Parliamentary side (Roundheads) was a moral crusade. For them the Reformation had not gone far enough; war was required to establish true religion and halt the roman catholic back-sliding of Charles I.

The two-guide walk began on a recent Saturday in the village of Lawford, whose church bears the scars of iconoclasm: sculpture with heads smashed in by Roundhead troops or locals offended by objects associated with old bad ways (click on the picture to see the smashes).

By the mid-17th century numerous Protestant groups had disassociated themselves from the established church of England; they are often grouped together as Dissenters or Non-conformists. But there was one group more passionately attached to this war than others: the Puritans. In East Anglia and Essex, Puritans were numerous and powerful. Their goal was to purify England’s religion; it was a struggle against the anti-Christ that entailed finding and rooting out those in league with the devil.

In the atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust that reigns in civil-war societies, paranoia about the neighbours easily comes to seem normal. This is the context in which a wave of witchcraft accusations swept through the Manningtree area. Witchcraft had always been considered a fact of life: that some people have the ability to damage others by wishing them evil. Demonology was a popular topic; James I had written one of his own.

Many able and intelligent men had left their villages to fight in the war. Women left behind were viewed according to marital status: Wives enjoyed the legal protection of their husbands; widows had rights. But singlewomen, the term used for the never-married, were thought to be morally weak, uncontrolled and unreliable, making them quite vulnerable to exploitation.

There is also a sexual component: Puritans wanted to suppress activities previously seen as acceptable, like theatre, dancing and sex outside marriage. They saw these behaviours as evidence of ‘witches’ sabbaths’: carousing and sex with the devil. Young women like Rebecca were easily viewed as dangerously lustful.

The witch-finding described here took place between 1644 and 1647 within a legal framework. Three acts had been passed in the previous century: in 1542, 1562 and 1604. But for the law to proceed against anyone, someone had to make an accusation against them, citing a specific harm done.

Anne and Rebecca West had a history of tiffs with their close neighbours, the Harts, and now Prudence Hart said she suffered a painful miscarriage and paralysis at the hands of Rebecca. Thomas Hart said their son had died crying Rebecca’s name, and Anne was accused of causing a boy’s death some years earlier.

In Manningtree, just to the east of Lawford, a man named John Rivet accused 80-yr-old Elizabeth Clarke of bewitching his wife. Elizabeth said she was a witch and knew other witches, but she wouldn’t name them. Remember that the word witch could connote good powers as well as bad, and a woman who knew herbs and felt spiritual, clairvoyant or intuitive did not have to be ashamed of it. Some folks were called white witches, good witches, blessers, wizards, sorcerers and cunning or wise folk. But the news of Clarke’s confession was taken to a local landowner, John Stearne, who took it to magistrates. They gave him permission to investigate Clarke. Matthew Hopkins, son of a Suffolk minister, had moved to Manningtree and volunteered to help Stearne. Both men had read the many treatises against witchcraft and believed in the evil.

In her confession Clarke implicated other women including Anne and Rebecca West. All three women were accused of entertaining demons in the shape of small animals called familiars, or imps. Cats, dogs, rabbits, frogs, ferrets, owls appear in pictures of the time. Stearne and Hopkins watched Clarke for three nights and said they saw her familiars. Under the 1604 Act Against Witchcraft, the keeping of familiars was punishable by death.

Investigations consisted largely in interrogating women to get them to confess to pacts with the devil. They were walked up and down night after night to prevent their sleeping. Respected women of the town were given the job of searching the accuseds’ bodies looking for ‘devil’s marks’ or ‘teats’ their familiars were thought to suck blood from. The marks were searched for and found between women’s legs, using a metal pricking device. The test was said to be that if women didn’t scream in pain when pricked on a teat then they must be witches. But the tool was spring-loaded so the pricker could be retracted into the handle, meaning women didn’t scream – which constituted evidence of being a witch. [This device is on display in Colchester Castle.]

A number of local women became expert searchers. Mary Phillips was a Manningtree midwife who accompanied Hopkins and Stearne when they began travelling. The focus on marks was a hallmark of English trials.

Accused women were also tested by ‘swimming’ in a pond, tied crossways (opposite thumbs to big toes) and held by a rope under their armpits so they could be dragged in and out of the water. Since it was believed the pure element of water would reject evil, floating was believed to be a sign of guilt. But the men wielding the rope would have had good control over this test, and it is this specific practice that provoked most opposition to the witch-finders. Parliament eventually forbade the use of swimming in these investigations.

Hopkins called himself Witchfinder-General and had local support, but he had no mandate from parliament. It’s useful to remember that at this period there was no institution of police, so individuals’ taking it upon themselves to catch criminals was normal. In the legal framework, however, neither he nor Stearne could decide to investigate on their own initiative: there had to be an accusation from an ordinary citizen. What the two men did is awful, but neither of them has struck me as particularly fiendish or even interesting. By offering to investigate they gained power and status and some money, but the amounts weren’t enough to make them rich.

Word of the investigations spread, and Hopkins and Stearne were invited to other towns: to so many places over a short period that it merits being called a witch craze, the term usually used about the phenomenon in European countries. Amounts are recorded in the towns of Aldeburgh and Stowmarket in Suffolk and Kings Lynn in Norfolk that were paid to the men to clear the towns of witches.

There were doubters, and in some East Anglian places opposition nipped witch-finding in the bud. For this to happen there had to be male authority-figures present who dared to scoff. A minister named John Gaule of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire objected that parishioners were talking more about witch trials than about God and made it clear that witchfinders were not welcome. Hopkins was questioned at the Norfolk Assizes about his methods and about how was it that he was able to detect witches: was he something special? This led to his publishing a defence, The Discovery of Witches, where he answered criticisms point by point. The bible was quoted: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Exodus 22:18).

But his chief defence was that he and Stearne only went where they were invited. Even in Manningtree Hopkins and Stearne couldn’t have succeeded without support: at least 100 witnesses testified against accused women. Eventually 36 women from the Manningtree area (the Tendring Hundred) were arrested on charges of witchcraft and imprisoned in ghastly conditions in Colchester Castle. Four died of plague. Hopkins travelled there to get Rebecca West to tell him about witches’ sabbaths attended by the group: This would be proof they were in league with each other. Rebecca gave him what he wanted.

The women were taken to Chelmsford Assizes to be tried. Elizabeth Clarke and 31 others were convicted and hanged there. Four of the convicted were brought to the village green in Manningtree and hanged: Anne West was one of them. Rebecca was spared, having testified against her mother. Did Anne advise Rebecca to save herself? Did Hopkins offer her a deal?

To me the fundamental question is how could it become common and acceptable to accuse your neighbours of witchcraft knowing death was the penalty? The county of Essex accounted for 59% of witchcraft prosecutions, and another large per cent occurred nearby. During the Hopkins-Stearne trials some 250 witches were accused and at least 100 were hanged.

Hopkins’s death at age 26 in August 1647 is recorded in the Mistley parish register; Stearne said he died of consumption. He was buried in a churchyard now decrepit, and his ghost is said to haunt a nearby pond. In the face of growing opposition Stearne found he had other things to do, though he also published a treaty on witchfinding. He then retired, and the craze fizzled out.

Novels written by historians can often illuminate sketchy history, bringing unknown persons from the past to life. I can recommend A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches, in which Rebecca is the principal character. After the hangings she leaves town and travels to London, surely a likely outcome after what she’d been through. Blakemore then has her getting a ship to the New World. Since the destination could well have been Massachusetts, already settled by many Essex Puritans, word of who she was would follow her, making this quite a charged proposition. She could easily have become a prostitute, though.

What I’ve recounted here took place on a walk through rolling countryside on the eastern edge of Dedham Vale (Constable country), on paths Rebecca and Anne would have trodden, then along the River Stour at high tide with a classic beach-scene in progress, and on streets where 16th- and 17th-century houses are masked by Georgian facades. Rob talked about other periods, including Richard Rigby’s failed attempt to make Mistley a spa in the 18th century. We saw Robert Adam-designed towers and late 19th-century factory buildings and pubs where Hopkins and Stearne could have met with locals to gossip. We all stopped for a drink in one that’s next to the green where Anne West was hanged: the darkest moment in the walk, but somehow more meaningful because you are actually there. We stopped at the kind of pond where ‘swimming’ would have been carried out, which you see me describing in the photo at the start.

Many dismiss the events I’ve described as being nowadays unthinkable superstitious hooey. Hangings aside, I can personally think of several similar crazes that have happened in my lifetime that punish innocent-enough individuals, which you can read about in posts on this blog going back to 2008.

Note about sources: I’ve been able to see assize-court records, as well as mass-printed news pamphlets, which is where ordinary people would have become familiar with names, accusations and hangings and seen wood-cuts depicting witches’ activities. Those were the popular media of the time. I read many scholarly works giving statistics and interpreting events in various ways. As for focusing on the accused women, I’m far from the first person to do it. In the course of my research I was given two walking brochures by Alison Rowlands at the University of Essex that centre victims, created by a number of local Essex women. One is called Walking with WitchesAlison also gave me the name of a former student, James Cundick, who made maps of Hopkins and Stearne’s travels, as well of those of William Dowsing, the Iconoclast-General in charge of smashing down popishness in churches. In the screen-capture above, taken from James’s map, you see the area I’ve been talking about. All these sources helped me put together my own ideas. Thank you James and Alison.

I took the photo in Lawford church, Rob took the other photos, and I believe the various woodcuts and early printings are in the public domain. If they’re not, please let me know.

Yes we’ll offer the walk again, and we’re getting another estuary walk ready now. Yes my own walks will be in London; I’m working on those. Subscribe to this blog and you’ll find out. Leave any questions or comments below and I’ll respond.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Snake Oil: A Memoir on the Rise of ‘Trafficking’

­When future historians try to understand what ‘trafficking’ meant in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I hope this memoir gives them pause. Recording how my questions about migration from 25 years ago coincided with the rise of a thing called trafficking as major social issue, this piece is both personal and political.*

­Snake Oil

Swindle, chicanery, skullduggery, con. There’s no one perfect word to describe how trafficking came to be hailed as one of the great problems of our time. Excess in rhetoric has known no bounds, with campaigners saying theirs is the new civil-rights movement and claiming there are more people in slavery today than at any time in human history, amongst ever-intensifying hyperbole.

And there was me thinking it was about folks wanting to leave home
to see if things might be better elsewhere.

The outcry had begun in insider-circles when I stumbled onto the scene in the mid-1990s, but I didn’t know the lingo or even what ideology was. Novels were my reading, not social theory. I hadn’t ‘studied’ feminism but felt myself to be part of a women’s movement since the early 1960s. I believed I was asking reasonable questions about a puzzling social phenomenon and refused to be fobbed off with explanations that made no sense. My trajectory as a thinker happened to coincide with a piece of governmental legerdemain that switched the topic of conversation from human mobility and migration to organised crime, like peas in a shell game.

At the time I was thinking about how so many, when faced with adversity, decide to try life in new places. I was not specially disrespectful of laws, but, like most migrants, didn’t feel that crossing borders without paper permission was a criminal act. I had no preconceived notions about prostitution; the women I knew who sold sex, poor and less poor, understood what they were doing.

For a while I had a job in an AIDS-prevention project in the Caribbean and was sent to visit parts of the island known for women’s migrations to Europe, where they would work as live-in maids or prostitutes. I visited small rural houses where daughters living abroad were money-sending heroes. At a film showing migrant women being beaten up by Amsterdam police, campesina audiences scoffed: their friends and relations in the Netherlands told the opposite story. A funding proposal I worked up for improving the experiences of migrants was returned with everything crossed out except ‘psychological help for returned traumatised victims’, an element I’d never included in the first place.

At a daylong event in Santo Domingo that was organised by black bargirls who called themselves sex workers, I sat in the last row. After a series of testimonies by the women and expositions by local legal experts, a speaker appeared who was said to have flown in from Venezuela. Addressing herself to the women in the first row she said ‘You have been deceived. You are not sex workers; you are prostituted women’.

I was horrified: How could she be so rude to her hosts? Someone said she was a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, but I didn’t know what that meant. From my place at the back I couldn’t see the bargirls’ reaction, but no angry words or protest ensued, perhaps because at that somewhat formal event a certain middle-class respect held sway.

A couple of years later, working in Miami as a secretary, I got on the Internet. When I finally learned how to search properly, I connected to a forum of escorts and activists who seemed to be on my wavelength about selling sex. Advocates of rights, they spoke about their personal experiences, and while they didn’t share the migration context, their feelings about this livelihood were the same as those of migrant women.

So now I was really puzzled: Where did the disparity of ideas about prostitution come from? What was the uproar about? What about the women I knew? No one was talking about migrants. When I set out to read about them, I found nothing at the public library.

To cut the story short, I ended up in a Master’s programme in something called International Education, which led to my first visit to a university library, call-number for prostitution in hand. Books with this number stretched from the top shelf to the bottom and up and down again into the distance. Beginning at the first book I began to read, but it didn’t take long for the books to seem indistinguishable. I began to riffle though tables of contents and key chapters, looking for discussions of my common-sense questions. When I found nothing, I wondered how there could be so many books so short on actual information. No one like my friends was ever mentioned, migrant or not. Something strange was going on.

For fieldwork purposes I proposed a short ethnographic stint in Spain, where I’ve often lived, amongst migrant women selling sex. One application for funding got me onto a shortlist, but at the interview by a committee, a political science professor slapped my proposal impatiently. ‘These women’, he jeered. ‘How do they get there?’ ‘In airplanes’, I replied.

My limited but grounded experience was whole discourses away from how such academics had begun to talk. Later I was told he was acquainted with Kathleen Barry, whose books hating prostitution had figured in my reading.

This was my first experience of bias based on my having framed the subject wrong: rather than Migrant Women Selling Sex, my proposal should have been titled Trafficked Women. I know this now, but at the time I was only mystified.

@rigels, Unsplash

Soon after, I was invited to speak at an event for International Women’s Day to be held in the community centre of a small New England town. Someone had to drive me hours through heavy snow to get there, but upon arrival we were told my name had been removed from the agenda. Some influential person, probably an academic, had been outraged that I’d been invited, but I never met them, knew their name or received an apology. This was my second experience of bias against my way of thinking.

After that, I lost count.

In 1998, I was invited to join the Human Rights Caucus at meetings to draft protocols to the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime. My ideas were welcome to this group, but I said no, because I still believed there was a misunderstanding. I thought there must be women I hadn’t met who could be understood through this concept of trafficking, and since I wasn’t studying them I saw no reason to get involved.

But as time went on and I presented my work here and there, I realised we were all talking about the same thing: women who leave home and make a living selling sex, in a variety of circumstances. But where I was describing how they try to take control of their lives, others were denying them any part in their fate. In the process of defining women who sell sex as victims, all differences in experience were being erased. I considered the result to be the antithesis of interesting and meaningful intellectual work.

I had set out to understand the disconnect between what I saw around me, amongst my friends and increasing numbers of acquaintances who were selling sex and how they were discussed by outsiders. At the end of the Master’s degree I had inklings of what was going on but hadn’t answered my original question: Why were women who opted to sell sex such a source of discord? And the corollary: Why were so many vowing to save women from prostitution?

Rather reluctantly, I pursued these as a doctoral student in Cultural Studies in England, but I spent several years in Spain doing the field work. My research topic was not migrant women, since there was no mystery to me about what they were doing. Instead, my subject was those social actors who professed to help migrants and sex workers, in governmental, NGO and activist projects. They were my mystery. When I started in 1999, none of them were talking about trafficking, but polemic about prostitution was ubiquitous.

In 2000, the editor of a migration-oriented journal in Madrid invited me to write about migrants who sold sex, sin polémica (without polemic), because by now outraged ranting was the only tone heard in public. By this point I was observing in a consciously anthropological fashion, so her requirement suited me. The resulting article, Trabajar en la industria del sexo (Working in the sex industry), led to a high official’s infiltrating me into an event held by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, to spite an abolitionist rival. Although I had no intention of making my presence known, I did attend, and for one long day listened to the ravings of some of the world’s most well-known anti-prostitutionists.

I won’t forget how Janice Raymond narrowed her eyes and dropped her voice when denouncing those who disagree with her fanatical abolitionism: ‘There might even be some of them in this room’, she said.

I backed against the wall where I was standing, wondering if she knew I was there. Later they trooped into a luxurious salon for smug feasting on elegant canapés and wines, inside the hyper-bourgeois Círculo de Bellas Artes.

When the Palermo Protocols were published I saw the human-rights group had managed to limit the damage, but I was glad I had decided to stay away from meetings to draft them. While trying to understand the humanitarian impulse to ‘help’ the poor I had appreciated Cynthia Enloe’s work showing how ‘womenandchildren’ are treated as an indistinguishable mass of helpless objects. Now here these objects were, enshrined in a trafficking protocol that scarcely acknowledged women as migrants, while migrant men exercised agency in the smuggling protocol.

It was soon obvious to insiders that the situating of migration- and sexwork-issues within the ‘organised crime’ framework was a fatal event that would determine the nature of all conversation afterwards. Many who believed distinctions between smuggling and trafficking could be maintained and the trafficking concept kept within bounds soon threw up their hands. Ever more activities were said to be trafficking, causing numbers of presumed victims to skyrocket.

My counter-narrative formed part of a calm and conventional report on migrant women’s jobs in Spain carried out by a collective of Madrid sociologists glad to have someone to do the sex-work section (2001). A few years later Gakoa published my various writings so far in a book called Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios (2001, Working in the sex industry, and other migration topics). I was reaching an audience skeptical of the news they were being fed in mainstream media about migrant women.

Trafficking became a big-time crime issue not because of its truth but because it served governments’ purposes. The interminably warlike USA loved a reason to go after bad men of the world on the excuse of saving innocent women. European states got justification to tighten borders against unwanted migrants. The UK could pretend it was going to be the new leader of anti-slavery campaigning just as their empire comes to an end. The UN was authorized to set up numerous new programs and initiatives. A range of other governmental entities benefited; Interpol and many police services were able to expand to new areas of ill-informed expertise.

And then the NGO sector began to sign up to this infantilisation of women, just as if we were living hundreds of years ago, when East End social workers set out to raise the fallen women of London. Even Hollywood actors jumped on the bandwagon as ambassadors claiming to be ‘voices for the voiceless’. The urge to Rescue was mainstreamed.

Meanwhile, I finished the PhD and put the thesis away. For several years I ignored a contract I had signed with Zed Books to publish, because I’d answered my own questions and didn’t imagine others would be interested. Eventually I changed my mind and edited the thesis to become accessible to more readers. When Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry came out in 2007, it spoke to a growing social controversy and, rather than die the usual quick death of even quasi-academic volumes, has continued to sell, as relevant now as it was 13 years ago – alas. This was the birth of the term Rescue Industry. Mainstream media were interested; I wrote for some established news sources.

By 2010, when the BBC World Service invited me to speak at a televised debate on trafficking at an event sponsored by Madame Mubarak in Egypt, anti-trafficking had taken over the airwaves. But 50 minutes called ‘debate’ needed drama, and so far the panel was composed of guests all singing the same Rescue tune. I demurred: Why would I subject myself to such nonsense? Everyone would hate me – No. Then they said I could bring a friend, and I gave in, ending up on a stage in the Temple of Karnak. I managed to keep a straight face at the piffle flowing forth until Siddharth Kara’s pretence of expertise made me laugh out loud, causing Hollywood actors Mira Sorvino and Ashton Kutcher to rise from their seats in the audience to deplore me and deplore the BBC for having me. The meaning of the word ‘debate’ had escaped them. Symbolic, really.

Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind about the Protocols. A complex situation was deliberately obscured by governmental actors who set up a straw man so frightening scads of educated liberal folks were bamboozled, and through heavy financing and institutionalisation of programmes the fraud continues. I do not refer here to what is called moral panic, though that helps explain how the general public got caught up in the frenzy. I’m referring to the cynical selection of a fake tragic and terrifying cause as governmental policy.

Mechanisms to frame policy based on lies are not uncommon: a similarly egregious recent case involved ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that didn’t exist. And just as hardcore war was waged based on that lie, softcore belligerence has been endlessly launched at migrants and women who sell sex, via the claim that everyone who facilitates a trip is a criminal, everyone who buys a trip is a victim and every prostitute must be rescued. Embarrassing mainstream pundits like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof elide all kinds of commercial sex with trafficking, in an undisguised campaign against prostitution that allows them to take imperialistic jaunts such as live-tweeting brothel raids in Cambodia (2012), shenanigans moral entrepreneurs carry out in an effort to look like heroes.

The actual earthly problems behind all this derive from poor economies and job markets that spur people to go on the move in search of new places to work. Sometimes home-conditions are direr than usual; sometimes there is gang conflict, war or natural disaster. At times societies are so unjust that those persecuted for beliefs or personal characteristics feel compelled to abandon them. In all these cases, when they illegally move into other countries, anti-foreigner sentiment, underground economies and social conflict flourish.

Which alternative policy-frameworks might have described this complexity, and which policy responses could have ensued, had honesty prevailed? In countries of origin, better distribution of wealth via economies that provide jobs with wages that can be lived on. In destination countries, an overhaul of government accounting so that more jobs are included in the formal sector, coupled with migration policy that allows more work-permits allotted for jobs not defined as ‘highly skilled’.

There are challenges here, but the ideas stick to the ground where ordinary people pay other ordinary people to help them travel, get across borders without visas and get paid jobs without holding residence or work permits. This includes women who opt to at least try selling sex.

Which mountebanks sold the snake oil first? Who suggested laws against trafficking were the way to solve migration problems? Moral entrepreneurs who cry about wicked foreigners are never scarce in times of stress. By the 1990s, scare-tactics increasingly turned to bogus estimations about illegal migration. Statisticians, tech-personnel and macroeconomists professed to provide data on how many criminals move how many victims around, with fancy new graphics and obfuscating equations.

None could have any real idea how many undocumented migrants work in informal-sector employment; they are extrapolating and estimating, often based on crude and random police reports. More recently, projects of surveillance using algorithms claim to tell us how many females are snapped up by sex-predators on the web. This disinformation was and continues to be promoted by a variety of opportunists for their own ends. The nonsense appears to have no end, as even certain emojis used in social media are banned as prurient.

It is not difficult to understand why politicians and government employees decided to buy the miracle product of trafficking: they stood to gain money and power. Trafficking narratives present a struggle between Good and Evil in which masculine men are protagonists, and a women’s auxiliary takes up the veil of Rescue. As time goes on, terrorism and war are mentioned more often, with victims a kind of collateral damage that justifies more programming and more police.

Ten years into the skullduggery I had a request for an interview from a young woman studying journalism and wanting to support sex workers’ rights. We met in a small old pub in Islington where, after the usual niceties, she put her question in a pleading tone. ‘Are you sure it’s not true?’ ‘What?’ ‘There aren’t millions of women trafficked into sex-slavery?’

I pointed towards the busy City Road. ‘Do I think lots of women are chained to radiators in flats out there? No. But I’m sure there are women who considered that coming to London to sell sex was a feasible way to solve their problems, and some will have paid a lot of money for help getting here’.

I have since 2008 done public education from a blog and other social media. By 2013 the disconnect between what mainstream news was feeding the public and what I was saying led to so many requests for clarification that I published Dear Students of Sex Work & Trafficking. I deconstruct Rescue-Industry claims, debunk research methods and statistics and track the progress of Law-and-Order projects to surveil sex workers and other undocumented folk.

In the 17th year after the Protocols I published a novel, hoping for a better way to tell the truths underneath bamboozling policy. Set in Spain amongst migrants and smugglers, many undocumented and selling sex, The Three-Headed Dog is a fiction version of Sex at the Margins, to be enjoyed as story and glimpse of reality.

In the 20 years since the Protocols were published, nothing has improved for migrants, sex workers or teen runaways. Things have picked up greatly for smugglers, though.

­

Sometimes Yoko went down to the port to watch the ships sail off to places she only wished she could go, 1964, Michael Rougier, Life Pictures/Getty Images

­

Works cited

Agustín, L. (2000). Trabajar en la industria del sexoOfrim suplementos, Número 6, dedicado a Mercado laboral e inmigración.

Agustín, L. (2001). Mujeres migrantes ocupadas en servicios sexuales. In Colectivo IOÉ (Ed.), Mujer, inmigración y trabajo (pp. 647–716). Madrid: IMSERSO.

Agustín, L. (2005). Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. San Sebastián: Gakoa.

Agustín, L. (2007a). Sex at the margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books.

Agustín, L. (2007b). What’s Wrong with the Trafficking Crusade? The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Agustín, L. 2012a. A man of moral sentiments. Review of Siddharth Kara, Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, H-Net, February.

Agustín, L. 2012b. The soft side of imperialismCounterpunch, 25 January.

Agustín, L. 2013. Dear students of sex work & trafficking. 25 March.

Agustín, L. 2017. The three-headed dog. Amazon, ASIN: B01N2V79UC.

BBC World Trafficking Debate, Luxor, Egypt. 2010. The full videos have been removed, probably because of the Mubaraks’ disgrace, but the event and line-up are visible.

Highlights of the debate are available, thanks to Carol Leigh.

Many of my other publications, including those published in Spain when I was living in Madrid and Granada, can be got from the top menu of this website.

A somewhat different version of this piece appeared in a specal issue of the Journal of Human TraffickingPalermo at 20, written at the invitation of Elzbieta Goździak. The present version was also published by Public Anthropologist.

*Photo: David Clode, Unsplash

­

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Naked Anthropologist News for Radio Ava: Jan 2020

Since last spring I’ve been providing Naked Anthropologist News to Radio Ava, a sexworker project in London. Something between tweeting and blogging, these news-bits are meant to be brief and critical, if not downright cutting. I choose a few things that struck or angered me most from the previous month’s online news. I link to an original news story and then quote sex workers as opinionators whenever possible as well as saying what I think. The latest edition was for 9 January. Note on the photos at the end.

In France

250 sex workers in France appeal to the European Court of Human Rights

Two hundred fifty sex workers in France have taken the 2016 law criminalising their clients to the European Court of Human Rights. Reasons given include:

‘We’ve exhausted the legal possibilities in France…
‘We reproach the French state for not assuring the fundamental liberties of sex workers…
‘Voices of sex workers are systematically ignored.’

To make a human-rights case, plaintiffs must show systematic discrimination, as when a governmental structure fails over time to take specific testimonies into account, not because of momentary bias or apparent coincidence. And not because of whore-hating writings by fanatics!

In China

China Scraps Extra-Judicial Forced Labor for Sex Workers

China banned prostitution after the Communist revolution in 1949, sending women into ‘custody and education’ programmes: Rehabilitation via forced labour, in other words.

The government wants us to believe Communism succeeded in abolishing prostitution and now claim prostitution ‘returned with a vengeance after landmark economic reforms began in the late 1970s.’ Since abolition rhetoric doesn’t suit China’s current public image, they’ve announced the ‘system’s historical role has been completed.’

Meaning what? Do they think all sex workers have been cured of the impulse to sell sex? No, because if they were then why does prostitution remain illegal, with punishments of both detention and fines?

The usual police ‘crackdowns’, as China routinely calls them, are sure to continue as usual.

In Nigeria

Nigerian judge declares sex work is not a crime

The judge said it’s not a crime to sell sex ‘since there is no law that forbids it’ and awarded damages to 16 women arrested for prostitution in 2017 when police raided private homes. The item goes on to mention more than 60 women arrested for prostitution in the capital city, Abuja. The women said they were harassed, extorted and publicly shamed.

Although the judgement sounds like good news, it will be open to different interpretations. In Spain, for example, where there is no law defining prostitution as either legal or illegal, sex workers’ rights campaigners have long protested police behaviour and confusing policy. They want a statement in law.

Let’s see what happens next in Nigeria, where police are sure to be very annoyed.

In London

Police make 14 arrests in modern slavery raids on south London nail bars

It was International Migrants Day when police carried out anti-trafficking raids on nail salons in Southwark. The 5-month multi-agency investigation claimed to be motivated by ‘concern for the safety and wellbeing of the women, children and other vulnerable adults caught up in this despicable trade.’

Familiar rhetoric.

Vietnamese migrants often work in UK nail salons, as we well know from recent deaths in a smuggling cock-up in Essex. Numerous researches and the sms-texts of migrants themselves show that they look hopefully forward to working in nail salons, and their travel-projects are supported and paid for by their families.

Reports like this from Southwark function as public-relations rhetoric for the Rescue Industry, as when arrest and detention are said to be followed by ‘support’. They want us to believe that sad young foreigners are being comforted by special employees, but you know what? The state will deport all these nail-workers as soon as they can, because that’s the legal solution to undocumented migration.

It’s the worst hypocrisy, pretending migrants want to be arrested and sent back where they started.

Naked Anthropologist News has a theme-song: Ten Cents a Dance, a taxi-dancer’s lament about her job, sung by Nebraska-born Ruth Etting in 1930. Taxi-dancing is one of those jobs that is or isn’t sex work, depending on your point of view: ‘All that you need is a ticket, Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.’

About the photos: ‘Miroslav Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials… Of his technical methods, Tichy said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”‘
Right up my street. More photos at Michael Hoppen Gallery. And isn’t his camera glorious?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Video of Sex Work as Work: some ideas on labour policy and organising

Last month I spoke at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair, held in Liberty Tower on the Liffey. There was some resistance to my insistence on sticking to the programme from a couple of audience members during the Q&A, but I was firm. I had been invited to talk about sex work as work for 30 minutes, which isn’t long, and it isn’t a definitive presentation. But in my experience these conversations rarely get further than the affirmation sex work is work, and I was glad to have the opportunity to begin to talk about practical issues of different sorts, not feminist or moralist issues and not trafficking! This video comes from the Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland) and includes the Q&A session at the end.

A few people have complained the sound is bad. This must be an unfortunate conflict of softwares combined with Internet connections, because most people can’t hear any problem. Sorry if you are unlucky.

Other videos of me talking are on my Youtube channel.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Naked musings on borders, illegality and personal identity

Last week at Gatwick airport, after asking me several apparently random questions presumably intended to trip me up, the official wagged my passport at me frustratedly. I knew what he wanted to ask but couldn’t: Damn it, who are you? These poor foot-soldiers in the war of the borders are required, whilst maintaining a calm and polite facade, to bully border-crossers in the hope of finding someone with nefarious purposes. I’m so accustomed to it that I scarcely notice, at the same time I’m aware that, if they want, they can keep me out, so it is always a moment of heightened attention lived in a zone of border thinking.

My Purpose was given as visiting friends, so he’d asked What nationality are your friends? Lots of different nationalities, I said. Oh, so you’re visiting more than one friend? You see why I call these questions random, and they also border on ethnic profiling, but never mind. They are probably sent lists of Annoying Questions of the Week. They hadn’t gotten him anywhere in his quest, anyway, which is why he flapped the passport at me and asked What do you do, anyway? I write, I replied. Now we were back on a more well-trodden track but still with stumbling-points. Have I read anything you’ve written? he challenged. I said I had no idea and and doubted it, but of course while he is having a hard go of figuring out who I am I haven’t a clue about him. Maybe he’s a No-Borders activist in his time off. Finally he gave up and waved me through.

Yesterday I was interviewed by a London politician on my views and proposals relating to trafficking. At one point I was explaining how underground economies mostly tootle along without disturbing anyone, replete with opportunism and abuse but flexible and tending to solve problems internally. To illustrate, I mentioned an incident during my own five years of illegal status (not in the UK). Who are you? I could almost hear him think. At another point I referred to my own experience of being oppressed by the work-permit system, where leaving a job one has a permit for means instant expiration of one’s legal status in the country. He has been told about the live-in maids who cannot leave because their passports are stamped for that single specific employment, even if they are being abused. To find out that supposedly ‘highly-skilled’ permits are just the same and that a researcher might feel abused and want to quit the job but stay and find another had never occurred to him. These are the nuts-and-bolts workings of a dysfunctional migration system, and they are rarely addressed in the abstract debating that goes on about migrants.

At one point, attempting to pin me down, he said, Philosophically you could be called a libertarian -and I cut him off right there. No, I said, I am not a libertarian, I rarely talk about rights and freedoms. I also am not a neoliberal proponent of the happiness of making money in a free marketplace. What I am is a believer in human agency. I believe that disadvantaged persons with limited options of how to proceed in life have, until they are actually put in chains, some space to move, negotiate, prefer one option to another. This position hardly seems philosophical to me, and I am not going to get credit for inventing a new theory with it. Yet time and again it turns conversations upside down.

Similarly, I handle the endlessly tedious conversation about whether selling sex can ever ‘be work’ like this: If one person tells me they experience it as rape and exploitation, I believe them. If another person tells me they experience it as a profession, I believe them. The other day sex workers in Santo Domingo, faced with a government proposing to criminalise their clients, reminded the state attorney that muchas de ellas mantienen a sus familias de este trabajo – many of them maintain their families with this work. (You’d think that would be punto final, wouldn’t you, especially in a poor country where any jobs at all are scarce – but it never is). Why this difference of perception and emotion should lead to such a hullaballoo is really beyond explanation.

Maybe these views make me a philosopher of the cracker barrel, doling out obvious common sense. But the politician explained his grimaces of embarrassed delight: You say things that occur to me in the back of my mind but I tell myself I must not allow them. Because they are taboo? I replied. Or, what do you think, because they are outside the box, revolutionary or downright criminal? Which lines are being crossed, exactly, with this naked talk?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

I am not Michael O’Leary, and other meditations on public performance

Photo of Laura Agustín by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Doing public gigs exposes one to all sorts of comment, some nice and some not so nice. At University College Dublin I sketched out the ideas in Sex at the Margins – a book that began in the early 90s with me listening to Dominican villagers, ten years later became a doctorate on the Rescue Industry and three years after a published book. At the Anarchist Bookfair I talked about Sex Work as Work (a video of the talk will be online soon).

This talk was only 30 minutes long so I had warned I didn’t intend to get bogged down in arguments about the meaning of prostitution. Nevertheless, the first person called on after my talk began to lay out an argument that prostitution is oppression of women and so on, so after not long I interrupted her from the stage to ask Do you have a question? No, she said, she wanted to debate. I said, This time is for questions about my talk. She quickly framed one, which was

Will you condemn the sex industry as patriarchy?

I said no, because that question is too broad and general to have meaning for me. It’s a bottom-line question, and by saying no without explaining all the ins and outs of my thinking I will have sounded like an anti-feminist to some. But if I travel so far to speak without pay I really do want to hear audience reaction to what I do say, not to what I don’t say.

All other questions asked were interesting, but at the end there was

How can we move toward a society in which sex is not commodified?

Photo by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland)

Anarchism takes in a wide variety of ways of thinking. I accept that talking about revolution and how things would be afterwards is really interesting and important to many, but my talk had been about feet-on-the-ground ways to better the lives of people who sell sex through employment policy and organising. So I replied

I don’t know. Everything else is commodified, why should sex be different?

This provoked a tweeter to say

Michael O’Leary, the million or billionaire owner of Ryanair, is widely hated in Ireland. I can’t find a single significant thing he and I have in common. When I have more time to talk about commodification I discuss the odd point that even mother love is accepted by most of the same objectors as being ok to buy and sell in the form of nannying and caring for children and older and sick people. The same tweeter said

Although an interest in revolution and utopia are only one of many possible topics subsumed by feminism or anarchism or any other ism, those wanting to discuss them always assume the moral high ground. Practical, pragmatic arguments about the here and now would seem to occupy a lower place in the hierarchy according to some. But not according to me, and I also dislike being challenged to show I am a good or righteous person publicly, merely as an exercise to label me – really to show I’ve failed some ethical test.

People ask me how I deal with being disliked or vilified. I accept that appearing in public exposes me, and I don’t always express myself perfectly. I don’t read prepared papers and I avoid standing behind protective podiums. I’m not a trained performer. But beyond those reasons, in order to talk about the formal-informal sector divide in government accounting and how it affects employment policy, the ILO’s conclusions in its report The Sex Sector and what the term ‘sex industry’ comprises, in 30 minutes, one has to omit the disclaimers. I could begin every point by condemning inequality, sexism, racism, imperialism, the oppression of women and poor people, but then I would lose a big chunk of the time I’ve got for the talk, and I’m not willing to do that. So I regret when I am misinterpreted badly, but I accept that it comes with the territory.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Coda

Nordic Network: Sex workers and social workers meet

Nordic Network for Social and Health Organisations, Sex Workers and Researchers Working in the Field of Prostitution is the full name of a group that holds annual meetings where social workers – and some sex workers – meet. Members come from Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland. This year’s meeting is in Oslo, and I am invited to talk about the Rescue Industry. I am always glad when social workers want to hear about and discuss (or dispute!) this topic.

If you are interested in attending, details follow the programme.

31 May-1 June 2012

Organised by Prosentret (Tollbugata 24, 0157 Oslo)

Meeting held at Røde Kors Konferansesenter, Hausmannsgate 7, Oslo

Thursday 31 May – Social Work from Many Angles

1000-1045  May-Len Skilbrei, Researcher, FAFO
How can we understand the relationship between the criminal justice approach and social work?

1045-1100 Break

1100-1130 Jeanett Bjønness, Anthropologist
Between emotional politics and biased practices in Denmark: Prostitution policies, social work and women selling sexual services

1130-1150 Break

1150-1210 Sarah Warpe, Criminologist
There is no such thing as a support service: Experiences from Norwegian women involved with drugs and prostitution

1210-1230 Pye Jakobsson, Rose Alliance and Project Manager of HIV-Sweden
Exit – from what, why and how?

1230-1330 Lunch

1330-1400 Mogens Holm Sørensen, Socialstyrelsen København
Leaving Prostitution

1400-1430 Laura Agustín,  The Naked Anthropologist
Why do I call it the Rescue Industry?

1430-1445 Break

1445-1600 Plenary discussion

1700-2000 Boat trip

Friday 1 June – Manyfold Work

0900-0945 Olav Lægdene, Manager Nadheim
Advantages and disadvantages with the law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services

0945-1000 Break

1000-1045 Astrid Renland, Administrator PION and Susanne Møller, SIO Danmark
Possibilities and limitations in organizing of sex workers

1045-1100 Break

1100-1400 Workshops with lunch (1200-1245)

A Multicultural Health Work for Sex Workers: Nurses Ann Kirstine Kirk and Radostina Angelova, Pro Sentret
B Empowerment: How to shape and share a Shelter for the Future
Knut Isachsen and Dagfrid Fosen, Natthjemmet
C Outreach on the Internet:
Nurse Camilla Johannessen, Pro Sentret
Social worker Morten Sortodden, PION: Male Sex Workers
Social worker Lena Hanssen, Nadheim: Female Sex Workers
D The Connection between Trafficking and Migration? Director Bjørg Norli, Pro Sentret
E Workshop in Thai for Thai

1400-1500 Responses from the workshops

The conference fee is 1000 NOK (or 500 NOK for one day) including lunch. For more information: contact Liv Jessen or Arne Randers-Pehrson at Pro Sentret. The conference language will be English.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Real media coverage for critique of anti-trafficking Rescue Industry

It is rare for critical commentary on the anti-trafficking movement to get real media coverage, so this story from Vancouver seems significant. I don’t like the title, because it narrows a broader argument, but titles are written by editors with other priorities.

Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín claims antislavery movement harms sex workers

Charlie Smith, The Georgia Straight, 24 November 2011

An author and scholar who likes to refer to herself as the Naked Anthropologist has compared the current climate against human trafficking to the panic over white slavery in the late 19th century. Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books, 2007), told the Georgia Straight by phone that in the earlier case, there was an uproar over whether Caucasian and Jewish women moving to New York or Buenos Aires, Argentina, were being traded as slaves.

While she won’t use the word “panic” to describe the current situation (“I try to avoid these labels,” she said), Agustín suggested that there is a widespread “rescue movement”, led by governments and the United Nations, which is trying to characterize a range of issues—migrant sex workers, child labourers overseas, and people who pay huge fees to immigrate—as “slavery”. Using this terminology gives a growing “antislavery” movement, largely based in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, the moral justification to launch interdiction programs as part of an international justice movement.

“I don’t think anyone cares about the women or about sex,” Agustín claimed from a hotel room in Toronto. “This is some kind of enormously funded thing about organized crime…men in government, feeling threatened by other men who aren’t participating and are having parallel societies. It’s up in the cultural stratosphere with terrorism.”

Agustín, an advocate for sex workers’ rights based in Sweden, has a PhD from The Open University in the United Kingdom. She said that the words “human trafficking” started entering the lexicon in a serious way around 2003 and 2004. Now, she maintained that the language is shifting to emphasize slavery. She bluntly described this movement as a colonial initiative.

“The protagonists to end slavery are the same Anglo-Saxon people that were in the 19th century, so you get the trafficking ambassador for the U.S. government invoking [British antislavery crusader] William Wilberforce and arguing that the U.S. and the U.K. have a special mission to go out to other people’s countries and save people,” Agustín said.

Most people don’t have an issue with this. Agustín, on the other hand, said the problem with the rescue industry, which involves many nongovernmental organizations, is that it doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to the choices that people are making to improve their lives. While researching migration in the 1990s, she spent time on a Caribbean island where there was a tradition of large numbers of women moving to Europe, where they would work in one of two jobs: as a maid or selling sex.

“People tried to decide which they wanted to do, and they weighed their options,” she said.

Later in Madrid, Agustín spent time studying people who helped these migrants and who felt sorry for them. She said these rescuers didn’t weigh the downside for women who are forced out of prostitution against their will. “I asked the question: why is selling sex not considered a service?”

The answer, which arose out of her anthropological research, was that there was no rescue industry until the rise of the European bourgeoisie. “They positioned themselves as the ones who knew best about how to live and designated a number of people to be victims,” she said. “And prostitutes were high on the list. They had not been considered victims before that.”

Agustín accused Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times of indulging in a similar attitude by cheering the closure of brothels in the developing world without asking what happens to these workers. “He’s an egregious example of a white person who assumes that he’s doing good, who assumes that he knows how other people should live,” she alleged.

Laura Agustin will speak at 7 p.m. on Sunday (November 27) at the Vancouver Public Library central branch. Admission is by donation.

BBC Human Trafficking Debate now in UK: Mira Sorvino’s Moral Outrage

Mira Sorvino was not wearing her Mighty Aphrodite clothes when she attacked me at the BBC World Debate programme on Human Trafficking. Her dress was a demure tartan instead, though with high transparent platform heels.

The programme has become accessible online in the UK, which it was not originally, so if you couldn’t see it before try again – it may now be watchable wherever you are. I wrote about the background to this show before I was flown to Luxor for it and afterwards when it went online in January.

Editors cut and re-arranged the debate from its original sequence, softening Mira Sorvino’s personal attack on me by placing it quite late, when in reality she freaked out only a few minutes after we began – after I had answered a question only twice, I think. She was backed by an audience composed of non-critical anti-trafficking campaigners brought in by the UN and Mrs Mubarak, now fallen from prestige but acting like a queen at the time (December 2010). There’s more about the Sorvino experience at the Huffington Post, but I can’t explain whether or not she knows how to reconcile her earlier sex-worker role with her moral outrage now.

If you have time to click here, I’d be grateful to know if it is not available wherever you are – that is, if you get a message saying Not available in your area. Even if you don’t have the time or will to watch the whole thing. If you want to see La Sorvino, she comes a few minutes into Part 4.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’: about sex acts and nationality

This article addressing the idea of ‘sex’ in sex trafficking was published a few years back in American Sexuality. I wonder if they would invite me to say such things again? Everything having become so extremely moralistic now, an anthropological view like this is seen as the work of the devil. It is still on their website, though and is now available in French courtesy of Thierry Schaffauser.

The Sex in ‘Sex Trafficking’, American Sexuality, Autumn 2007

Why do we think migrant sex workers need rescuing?

By Laura Agustín

The title of this publication notwithstanding, I don’t believe there are national sexualities. But our language reflects vague impressions of how people in other cultures do sex—a tongue-kiss, ‘French’; anal penetration, ‘Greek’; penis-between-the-breasts, ‘Cuban’. They are stereotypes most of us don’t take seriously, and the national tags vary according to what country we’re standing in. But everywhere we have notions that out there somewhere are strange, wonderful, and exotic kinds of sex waiting for us to try.

But what about sex trafficking, denounced in the media as a rampant crime linked to global gangs and insecurity at borders? The U.S. government, claiming to be the world’s moral arbiter, spends millions issuing an annual report card rating other countries’ efforts to combat this crime and trying to rescue victims around the world. The implication is clear: ‘American’ ideas about sex and morality are the right ones for the planet. In other words, if the ideal of ‘American’ sexual relationships is accepted everywhere, the enslavement of women and children will end.

In the West, in the present, many people believe that sex should express love. This ‘good’ sex is also said to provide a key way to discover personal identity—who we really are, our innermost selves. It is assumed that feelings of love increase pleasure (quantitatively) and intensify it (qualitatively), resulting in meaningful passion that is expressed through long term, emotionally committed relationships. Other sexual relations then seem wrong, among them anonymous, public, and ‘promiscuous’ sex. Above all, ‘real’ love and sex are said to be incompatible with rationality and work—at least that is the way many wish it to be.

At the same time, people wonder: Is there a boom underway in the buying and selling of sex, part of a general sexualization of contemporary culture? Since objective data is impossible to gather when businesses operate outside the law, we cannot know whether sex-and-money transactions are going on more than ever, but we certainly know we see and hear about them more. So although we tell a powerful story about sex and love belonging together, we also understand that people want other kinds of sex. We hear about people who buy and sell sex from our friends, acquaintances, the media, and sometimes through reporting on migration—which is where ‘sex trafficking’ comes in.

In a context of increasing hostility toward migrants, it grates on people’s nerves to think that many might prefer to use sex to earn money instead of washing dishes, babysitting, working in a sweatshop, or picking fruit—for much less money. But migrants—who come in all sizes, shapes and colors, and from infinitely varying backgrounds—are just trying to get by as best they can on what can be a very rocky path. Migrants who cross borders to work need to be flexible and adaptable to succeed. They often do not know beforehand how they will be living, and they may not know the language. They may not find the food, music, or films they like, or the mosque, temple, or church. Everything looks different; they feel lonely. They may feel enormous pressure to pay back debts contracted to undertake their journey, and they may fear being picked up by the police. But they have arrived with a plan, some names and addresses, and some amount of money.

When migration policy is tightened at the same time that low-status jobs are abundantly available, a market opens up to help migrants cross borders. Some of this looks just like legal travel, but much of it involves bigger risks and higher costs, and some entails egregious exploitation—whether migrants are destined to work in mines, private homes, sweatshops, agriculture, or the sex industry.

Some migrants prefer to do anything rather than sell sex—for instance, ‘mules’ who take on the job of carrying drugs inside their bodies. Once across a border, past work experience and diplomas, whether white-collar or blue, are usually not recognized. Migrant schoolteachers, engineers, nurses, hairdressers and a range of others find only low-status, low-paying jobs open to them. Many of them, from everywhere on the social spectrum, would rather work in the sex industry—in one or the other of a huge variety of jobs.

Bars, restaurants, cabarets, private clubs, brothels, discotheques, saunas, massage parlors, sex shops, peep shows, hotel rooms, homes, bookshops, strip and lap-dance venues, dungeons, Internet sites, beauty parlors, clubhouses, cinemas, public toilets, phone lines, shipboard festivities, as well as modelling, swinging, stag and fetish parties—sex is sold practically everywhere. Where these are businesses operating without licences, undocumented workers can easily be employed: the paradox of prohibition. For migrants who are already working without official permission, these jobs may well seem no riskier than any other.

To understand why headlines insist that all migrant women who sell sex are ‘trafficked’, we need to go back to the popular idea that the proper place of sex is at home, between ‘committed’ lovers and family. When only this kind of relationship is imagined to be equitable and valid, it becomes easier to think that women from other cultures are poor, backward, vulnerable objects passively waiting for exploitation by rapacious men. With these notions, from the point of view of the comfortably sheltered, no one would opt to sell sex and migrants must be forced to do it.

What can we know about the actual sex involved in this moral conflict? We know all ‘sex acts’ are not the same in the context of loving relationships, and they are not all the same just because money is exchanged for them. Migrant workers sell millions of sexual experiences every day around the world to customers from different cultures, learning and teaching through experience how physicality mixes with skill, sophistication, hostility, tenderness, insecurity, respect.

When we have sex with others we influence each other, and although a single interaction may not have a lasting impact, many sexual agreements are complex or often repeated. Occasionally, a single experience can change the course of a life. In a commercial relationship, on one side are people flexible about how they make money, on the other are people wanting to fulfill a desire or experiment. These relationships take place in actual social contexts—indeed, sex itself is often subsidiary to the conspicuous consumption of alcohol or entertainment, to cruising or just to men being men together. Since everywhere men are granted more permission to experiment with sex and have more money to spend, their tastes help determine what’s offered and with whom, whether they be women, men, or transsexuals.

These millions of relationships, which take place every day, cannot be reduced to undifferentiated sex acts or eliminated from cultural consideration just because they entail money. Both client and sex worker may be acting seduction, flirtation, and affection when they are together, but camaraderie, friendship, love, and marriage also occur. And both sides are fascinated by sexual differences, imagined to be ‘national’, exotic, and real.

How we perform sex, what we feel when we do particular things, depends on our cultural (not national) contexts: how we were taught to do them and by whom, what we were permitted to try out, whether we talked to others about what we were doing and what we wanted. When we engage sexually with others, we learn and teach, we influence each other and change how we do things—often without knowing it. Because people are poor, or have left their countries to work abroad, or take money in exchange for sex does not change their humanity, their capacity to feel, respond, learn, or teach, whether sex is at issue or not.

Sex trafficking headlines claim that all migrant women who sell sex are invariably being abused, without regard to their diverse backgrounds and without asking them how they feel. But many reject being defined as sexually vulnerable and in need of ‘rescuing’ and protection. Everyone does not feel the same way about sex—in rich countries like the United States, or in any other country. Nationality is a poor way to understand human beings and their sexualities.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex at the Margins a Roma e Messina: Laura Agustín on migration and the sex industry

Come say hello if you are around, please!

First in Rome, 31 May 2011, at an event sponsored by: Suigeneris collettivo TransLesboGayBisexIntersexQueer

Verso L’Europride di Roma

Not Bad Whores, Just Bad Laws Giornata di discussione sul lavoro sessuale

31 maggio 2011

Facoltà di Giurisprudenza- aula Calasso (piano terra) Sapienza (P.le Aldo Moro 5)
piantina

I sessione- ore 14

Intervengono:

Anna Simone (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli): “Punire il sesso. Dal DDl Carfagna alle ordinanze anti-prostituzione”

Pietro Saitta (Università di Messina): “Politiche del decoro e della moralità nella città neoliberista: traffico, lavoro sessuale e discorso pubblico”

Laura Maria Agustín (the Naked Anthropologist): “Sex at the Margins: Cosa dicono le/i migranti che svolgono sex work sul proprio viaggio”

II sessione- ore 17 e 30


Intervengono:

Thierry Schaffauser (sex worker, attivista, autore di “Fiere di essere puttane”: “Perché è importante sindacalizzarsi e come”

Giulia Garofalo (attivista, ricercatrice su genere, minoranze sessuali e sex work): “Orgogliose/i di cosa? Capire chi parla di resistenza e sovversione nel sesso commerciale”

verso la Notte Bianca dei Desideri

1 giugno 2011  Città Universitaria, P.le Aldo Moro 5, per l’autofinanziamento verso Roma Europride 2011

Then in Messina, Sicily, 6 June 2011

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Discutono: Laura Maria Agustín, antropologa, e Pietro Saitta, sociologo, Università di Messina

Lunedì 6 giugno 2011 – h. 15:00

Aula Buccisano di Scienze Politiche, Via Malpighi (vicino Orto Botanico) – Messina – Sicilia
piantina

Evento organizzato in collaborazione col Dottorato in Pedagogia e Sociologia interculturale dell’Università degli Studi di Messina

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Review of Sex at the Margins in American Ethnologist

Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork tent in the Trobriand Islands during Europe’s First World War

Lorraine Nencel, of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, published a review of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry last August in American Ethnologist. There are now reviews of this book in 23 academic journals that I know about. (You can read Don Kulick’s, Dan Allman’s, Ken Plummer’s, Elizabeth Bernstein’s, Meena Poudel’s and a few others on this website).

One of the unspoken requirements for writing a review is to find defects in the book, and these can be the most interesting comments. (I do chuckle sometimes at the fact that reviewers rarely criticise the same defects, however – there are always new and different things to complain about.) In this case, Lorraine asserts that I ‘lost my balance’ as researcher when I included my own reactions to situations where I was participant observer. To me, and I still think this, including my own reactions was a requirement for doing reflexive research: that is, I don’t believe any of us does research without having emotions, prejudices and other responses based on our own histories.

Reflexivity, broadly defined, means a turning back on oneself, a process of self-reference (Aull Davies 1999)

Referring to my own reactions was, to me, a requirement, and I am pretty sure my thesis adviser agreed. I said this to Lorraine in an email, and her reply was that I needed to make this all more explicit.

Maybe so. When I was editing the thesis to make it into a Zed Book, I had to cut the original, and great swathes of repetitive or tedious discussion (required for academic work) were done away with. Perhaps the original made my thinking on the researcher’s effect on her research more overt. Anyway, Lorraine ends by saying after reading this book the reader will not be able to think, hear, or talk about migrant sex work and trafficking the same way again. Thank you, Lorraine.

Laura Agustín’s book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and NGO workers who have ventured into the domain of working or researching “human trafficking.” By simplifying her language and omitting internal text references, the author aims to make this book accessible for experts, academics, and extension workers. Academically, its merits can be sung for the way she managed to debunk existing myths about migration and sex work; identifying the problems, gaps, and silences in contemporary theories and by doing so, unclosing the fuzzy nature of migration for sex work in its diversity. Agustín argues and illustrates that sex work is one of the different but limited alternatives available for illegal migrants in Europe. She analyzes sex work within the group of service activities such as domestic help and personal care—showing that all these activities share similarities in regard to their exploitive and insecure nature. She sustains that sex work must be analyzed within the broader frame of migration theory to understand its complexity. This is one of the objectives of the book. Despite the similarities shared by these different activities, the multitude of studies published on migration and “human trafficking” have isolated sex work from other migration options constructing a separate category of victims that lack agency and autonomy. Agustín wants to understand how and why this occurs. The search for the answer to these questions guides her throughout the book. Finally, a personal motivation led her to this study, namely, being a sex work researcher and activist and previously working in NGOs working with sex workers and migrants, she wants to understand why the life of people who sell sex has not improved, in spite of organizations’ efforts and the many studies dedicated to this goal.

The book opens with a short introduction presenting various vignettes that immediately contrasts sensationalist media representations of migrant sex workers with the actual motives for women choosing to migrate. These include economic motivations but places them side by side with migrants’ desires for other things such as adventure and travel. From that moment on, the reader becomes aware that migrant women’s motivations and experiences are diverse and cannot be represented homogenously. The second chapter initiates the development of Agustín’s theoretical argument. She defines a migrant as a traveler sharing a common process rather than identity with others. The chapter examines definitions such as labor migration and “feminization of migration,” to show, for example, that female migration is not a new phenomenon, criticizing studies that conceptualize the “feminization of migration” as a recent development. It zooms in on migrant sex workers and explains how “trafficking discourses” and the “rescue industry” define migrant sex workers as (trafficked) victims because of the way they leave their home countries and arrive to Europe, that is, through debt bonding. The chapter counteracts these theories of “trafficking” and highlights women’s agency. Using empirical quotes, a picture is painted that portrays migrant women generally to be aware of the consequences of debt bonding. A distinction is made between being aware of the consequences of debt bonding and finding oneself on arriving in Europe in exploitative and violent work conditions— this distinction is generally not recognized in the trafficking literature. In the third chapter, she follows the same road of analysis criticizing the use of concepts such as informal sector, the types of work that migrants do, and the position of sex work therein. She successfully analyzes sex work as a supply and demand relationship. Sex workers are depicted as individuals consciously offering services. The quotes used to illustrate clients’ motivations reveal that far from being deviant, clients perceive buying sex as a demand for a service.

Chapters 4 and 6 should be read together. By tracing in chapter 4 the historical development of “the “rise of the social” in the 19th century, Agustín attempts to understand how the development of the philanthropic discourse that targeted the poor and particularly prostitutes in need of help is reflected in contemporary discourses and initiatives of the “rescue industry.” The chapter illustrates that it was in this period that the “prostitute” as a stigmatized, victimized, morally weak identity was constructed. Chapter 6, based almost entirely on ethnographic fieldwork, dives into the world of governmental and nongovernmental organizations’ activities and documents and shows that even projects that distance themselves from antiquated labels such as the “prostitute,” replacing them with more neutral terms like sex work, do not escape from the 19th century notions of prostitution and help.

Critical analyses of the “rescue industry” are few and hard to find. Agustín should be applauded for her originality and her willingness to put herself in a vulnerable position as researcher and activist. Still it is here, where certain weaknesses can be found. While the link between the 19th-century socially invented object “the prostitute” and the contemporary category of the prostitute or sex worker is analytically strong, the same does not hold true in relation to the development of 19th-century philanthropy and its connection to the contemporary “rescue  industry.” Agustín expects the reader to accept this assertion, but the analysis would benefit by illustrating this link more explicitly. Perhaps this can be partially attributed to the fact that in chapter 6 the author loses her balance between herself as a researcher and as an activist. Agustín’s report of her research findings expresses the irritation and annoyance she felt in the field while accompanying outreach workers. Although she rightfully concludes the chapter expressing the need for help organizations to be reflexive about their work, this conclusion is also applicable to the author. The researcher’s lack of reflexivity concerning her own reactions and position makes her theoretical claim concerning the relationship between 19th-century philanthropy and the contemporary situation less convincing. Nonetheless, after reading this book the reader will not be able to think, hear, or talk about migrant sex work and trafficking the same way again.

Lorraine Nencel, American Ethnologist, Volume 37, Number 3, pp 601-602.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Naked Anthropologist emailings and facebook: how to get Laura Agustín’s news

laura agustin lipsI sympathise with people who don’t want to subscribe to blogs, either via email or rss feeds. Occasionally I do a big emailing to those in my address book, and yesterday was one of those occasions. If you would like to be on my list for these very occasional mailings, write to me via the contact form (located to the right). One snag is that some systems, including a spam machine called Vade Retro and those controlling spam for mindspring, earthlink, wanadoo and ya, have put my own isp (nodo50) on a blacklist. Emails from me never get through to people with those addresses, so if you want to be on the list, give me an alternate address. Nodo50 have tried to get it fixed to no avail, and various tests people have done from their own individual ends are no use, and these tightening up of spam filters will always be changing.  I don’t want to migrate my address book anywhere else, thank you – know that advice is coming.

On another communications front, you can be my facebook friend and subscribe to my blog via fb’s Networked Blog system. On fb I also post interesting Internet news, and sometimes quite good conversations come about as a result.

I don’t myself use twitter because I am told it only makes sense if one is willing to be attentive, original and responsive there, which I can’t be. Feel welcome to tweet anything useful from here to your heart’s delight.

laura agustin backview

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Desiring different others, different colours, and even paying them

At the time of the World Cup, a reporter asked me, a bit nervously, about the possibility that white football-fan tourists in South Africa might have plans or desire to have sex with black people. I think it’s quite possible, I replied. Silence. Is there anything wrong with that, do you mean? His continuing silence confirmed that yes, that was what he meant.

No, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with that, I think everyone desires others for something we see or imagine we see in others, which can be their eyes, voice, hair, style, breasts, chest hair, skin colour and many other attributes. We may be imagining things behind this superficial trait, of course. We may imagine they are wilder or more interesting than people we usually meet, or that they are better at sex, or that we are safer with them or that it will be easier to tell them what we like. But whether our partners look like us or different, we are doing that imagining and desiring. I wrote about this for American Sexuality a few years ago.

Does this change completely because there is a money transaction between the partners? Why should it? If you say it does then you grant money a determining status you probably don’t grant it in any other sphere. I know the argument about control and domination backwards and forwards, the one that says that the person who pays has the power to command. I would put it differently: the person who pays has the power to say I want x and will pay for it and if you accept the money I expect you to do it. A notion that the ‘power relation’ will always be skewed towards the white person is too simplistic for me, both too racially oriented and too fetishising of money.

The idea that a richer person will always have more power than a poorer one grants money a singular status I refuse to give it. The idea that money trumps every other type of power crushes the idea of human agency, the space to negotiate other sorts of power. Of course I understand the critique of exoticisation. I understand Frantz Fanon and don’t doubt that poor colonies were in some sense the ‘brothels of Europe’. But such an analysis comes from today, from contemporary perspectives on imperialism and colonisation, and they omit to understand what particular people were doing within their own cultural logics at the time. Every instance of a lighter or richer person wanting to be with a darker or poorer one does not have the same meaning.

I wrote about prices and ethnicities in the sex industry here some time ago.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

BBC World Debate on Trafficking Online: Sex, lies and videotaping

Bollywood eye makeupThe BBC World Debate programme on Human Trafficking is now online.

I described why I was going to Luxor to do this debate, which took place 12 December 2010,  I made a short report when it was televised the weekend of 18-19 December and I was interviewed about it in the Huffington Post not long ago.

It has been edited heavily, so that all the audience interaction is cut in at random new points. One result is that Mira Sorvino’s UN Ambassador attack on me, which took place very early on, has been shortened, softened and moved closer to the end. Alas, the comment made that I am like a holocaust denier isn’t heard here.

Media mavens may notice how often they cut back to my reactions. There is no drama in four panellists agreeing about everything, and 50 minutes is a long time to expect television viewers to stay tuned. Now you understand why the BBC invited me and why the editors keep cutting back to me.

Some people who saw this on television criticised me for frowning, which leads me to reveal that those are not my own eyebrows but a Bollywood version added by a makeup artist at the last moment. I am far more likely to laugh than frown – which can also be criticised of course.

You can’t tell but the temperature had sunk to five above zero and we on the panel could not wear coats, so the whole time I was pressing my hands on my leg to avoid shivering and shaking.

The debate is in five parts, with the following description on the BBC site:

Human trafficking exists in almost every country on earth. As many as 27 million people are estimated to live in modern slavery. Can this problem be stopped?

Zeinab Badawi presents this World Debate from the Luxor Temple in Egypt.

The panel consists of:

Laura Agustin, Author, Sex at the Margins
Sophie Flak, Executive Vice-President, Accor
Rani Hong, Trafficking Survivor
Siddharth Kara, Author, Sex Trafficking
Ronald Noble, Secretary General, Interpol

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Breakthrough: anti-trafficking activist says I have the right to speak

Mira Sorvino was not worried about stating, in front of rolling tv cameras, that I should not be allowed to speak at the BBC debate in Luxor. Why are you doing this? she asked me, as though having a different point of view made me some kind of enemy. After the debate was over, several people from the audience came up to me to say You were very brave. This all reminds me of 1984 and Brave New World more than anything else, dystopic visions of societies where not agreeing with the state renders people dangerous and in need of silencing, surveillance and sedation.

Imagine my happy surprise, then, when I was advised of the following blog post from the Freedom Center in Ohio, in a description of David Henry Sterry’s interview with me in the Huffington Post:

While the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.

What a relief to hear a reasonable voice from the so-called Other Side. How much better all our efforts would be if there were more collaboration and listening. Here is Upsetting the Human Trafficking Apple Cart, by Paul Bernish, Director of Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiatives at the Freedom Center.

Anyone engaged in the anti-human trafficking cause today is bound to notice a certain sameness to the ongoing discussions about the issue. It’s no surprise that people are passionately against modern forms of slavery, abuse and exploitation, and it is certainly good that they communicate that passion at local meetings, regional and national conferences and especially by posting their outrage at traffickers and concern for victims in the social media world. I know, because I often do this myself.

Yet cumulatively, I feel a growing sense that modern-day abolitionists (again, myself included) are existing in an echo chamber where our thoughts, ideas and suggestions are repeated in a continuous loop, with very little that is new or insightful about the issue and what to do about it.

There’s a lot of conventional wisdom, as a consequence, that may actually be preventing us from seeing the issue clearly and objectively. This point came home to me rather abruptly in an early December during a meeting with three visitors to the Freedom Center from Thailand. One runs an anti-trafficking NGO; the other two are police officers who deal with the reality of trafficking every day.

I asked about efforts in Thailand to raise public awareness about sex trafficking, which, as most everyone asserts, is virtually endemic in this south Asian country. All three, through their interpreters, gave me an insight about the situation in their homeland that I had not heard, or considered before. Yes, they said, sex trafficking is a major issue in Thailand. But forced labor was the the much broader and difficult trafficking issue. Thousands of men, women and children from Cambodia, Myanmar, Viet Nam, as well as Thai citizens, were working as virtual slaves in back alley sweatshops and isolated manufacturing plants throughout the country. This, they said, was Thailand’s trafficking nightmare.

What they said called into question my assumptions about Thailand. More broadly, their comments about what’s the real problem in their country was a reminder that it’s always helpful to question long-held assumptions about the nature and extent of trafficking in the world.

A similar reminder came from an article on Huffington Post about a person who’s engaged in the trafficking issue, but is an iconoclast who has no problem challenging conventional thinking about the problem. Laura Agustín, who describes herself as the Naked Anthropologist, delights in going against the grain of the anti-trafficking establishment on her website and in her controversial book, Sex at the Margins.

Agustín recently took part in a “debate” at a well-publicized anti-trafficking conference in, of all places, Luxor, Egypt. The conference attracted the usual coterie of celebrity abolitionists, government officials and anti-trafficking leaders, but Agustin was apparently not on the guest list until the BBC asked her to participate in a debate on trafficking trends. Her presence set sparks flying, as recounted in the Huffington Post interview.

The point of all this is to say that while the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.

There’s much about trafficking and forced labor that we don’t know (because the data is so suspect and many of its victims remain invisible) and much that we don’t know we don’t know. Outliers like Laura Agustin provide a valuable check on reality. If we want to abolish slavery and trafficking — and we’re all agreed on that — let’s keep an open mind, and regularly tip over our apple carts of assumptions.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Naked Anthropologist interviewed about sex trafficking, the BBC and run-in with movie star

Back in December I wrote briefly about my dramatic – no, melodramatic – experience at a UN event called EndHumanTrafficking, held in the Temple of Luxor. I went at the request of the BBC to be the only dissenting voice in a panel called Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped?, a television programme which showed a few weeks ago. Someday it will be put online – I will advise. David Henry Sterry, author of Chicken, amongst other books, wanted to talk to me about my run-in with Mira Sorvino, and this interview in the Huffington Post is the result.

A Conversation with the Naked Anthropologist about Sex Trafficking

David Henry Sterry, 5 January 2011, The Huffington Post

When I first came out as an ex-sex worker, I started getting invited to prostitute and sex worker conferences. There are two distinct groups who inhabit this world: decriminalizationists and abolitionists. Decriminalizationist conferences are populated by academics, policy wonks and activists, plus a few current and former hos, hookers, call girls and rent boys. Abolitionist conferences are populated by much the same, plus politicians and law-enforcement. Both groups are evangelical, rhetorical and theoretical. Statistics are bandied about, dogma is flung and resolutions are passed. The decriminalizationists keep screaming “Decriminalize sex work!” The abolitionists keep screaming “Sex work is slavery!” and want human traffickers to be hunted down like dogs.

I first met Laura Agustín at a conference in Brussels and was immediately struck by how different she was from all the people I met on either side of the decriminalization/abolitionist divide. First of all, she had a sense of humor. This alone was shocking in either world. But she also had a calm reasonableness about her. She wanted to hear what other people have to say, basically unheard of in either camp. On top of that, the things she had to say were so smart and counterintuitive. And they all made sense. What she had to say explained so much about why so much money is so foolishly wasted when it comes to actually pursuing traffickers. And why human beings with very few resources continuously get the short end of the stick when it comes to choosing where they live and work, and determining their own destiny.

At these conferences, there are certain people you connect with in deep meaningful ways. Laura and I made just such a connection, and it has remained fertile. I read her book, Sex at the Margins, which challenged all the conventional ideas continuously trotted out about migration, sex work and trafficking. She’s one of the few people talking about this subject who will acknowledge the mind-boggling complexity of these issues, which everyone else seems to want to simplify to suit their own needs and grind their own axes. This book led to Laura Agustín — now known as The Naked Anthropologist — becoming an international expert in this emotionally charged arena. Her blog is now one of the go-to resources for well-researched, well-reasoned, sane debate about selling sex for money, crossing borders to work and the reality of what is and is not trafficking.

When she told me she had been invited by the BBC to participate in a debate at the EndHumanTrafficking event in Egypt, I just knew that the fur was going to fly. Sure enough, with her patented calm, unflappable, intellectual yet accessible style, she managed to invoke the wrath of many present and become the target of the wrath of an Academy Award winner in high hooker heels.

DHS: So, Laura, how did you come to be invited to this event?

LAURA: BBC Television was holding one of their World Debates there and invited me. The event itself was limited to particular UN agencies, business leaders and guests of the Egyptian president’s wife – plus several movie actors. It was the kind of event to which you only invite those who agree with you. But the BBC wanted to do a debate, which means they had to get in at least one person who would disagree.

DHS: Yes, those British have some crazy ideas about presenting different sides of an issue don’t they? Haven’t they learned anything from Fox News?

LAURA: Apparently not.

DHS: I saw who the other panelists were: the head of Interpol, an ex-victim of trafficking and a guy who personally saves sex slaves. Didn’t they all see trafficking as it’s traditionally and hysterically presented by the media?

LAURA: It was an incredibly stacked deck, four against one, so it was never going to be a real debate. But I went for the chance to reach the television audience. The BBC World Service is a 24-hour international news channel watched all over the planet, so in my head I was reaching people interested in trafficking issues anywhere who might have doubts about the way trafficking is usually talked about.

DHS: Doubts about what? Don’t we know human trafficking is the greatest scourge of the 21st century? Aren’t millions of people being trafficked as we speak?

LAURA: I try to break down these huge generalisations. Some people are working in conditions that look like traditional slavery, but a lot are undocumented migrants with debts to pay, workers under the age of 18 and people who would rather sell sex than do any of the other jobs open to them. People who say there are 30 million slaves in the world are including all those and many more.

DHS: Wait a minute, I thought we were talking about trafficking. Where does slavery come in?

LAURA: Originally the term trafficking referred to certain kinds of illegal moving of people across borders, but that has changed. Anti-prostitutionists have defined prostitution as violence, rape and now trafficking, but the new word is slavery. I realise some think this is a way to raise consciousness about injustice, but it is confusing to call everyone slaves and erases whatever ability to maneuver lots of people have.

DHS: The setting sounds unbelievable — the Temple of Luxor — how did you feel getting up on that stage?

LAURA: It felt surreal. Not that ong ago I was an NGO worker in Latin America – I didn’t seek out this kind of gig! But something about Sex at the Margins has struck a chord, I have been invited to talk all over the place to different kinds of audiences and I just finished three months as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration in Switzerland. I had certainly never been in a situation where every single other person in the room was hostile, however. And I have never been attacked by a film actress before.

DHS: Okay, let’s talk about Mira Sorvino, now Goodwill Ambassador for Trafficking for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Was she wearing those hooker heels she loves?

LAURA: She was, but I am not sure she understands that she’s allied with abolitionists. I had only spoken a few times when she began waving her hand to get the moderator’s attention. She demanded to know what I was doing there, why I was being allowed to speak. She seemed to think she could over-ride the BBC. I don’t mind people having different ideas from mine but implying I don’t have the right to speak?

DHS: You mean she tried to stop you from talking? What did the BBC moderator do?

LAURA: She asked me if I wanted to respond, so I said in the British tradition debate means dissent, and the BBC invited me because I have a different point of view. Sorvino came across as wanting to censor me, which is shocking in a ‘goodwill ambassador’, isn’t it? I don’t know quite what they are supposed to do, but acting outraged every time I spoke, keeping up a running commentary to people near her (including Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore), is certainly not ambassadorial.

DHS: Was there any consequence for her breach of etiquette?

LAURA: People applauded, as though attacking me were a heroic act. Someone heard her use the term ‘holocaust denier’, too.

DHS: Wow, comparing trafficking to the holocaust! What do you think was going on?

LAURA: I think the event participants did not understand what the BBC was doing there and thought the panel should be just stating conclusions. Maybe they thought the BBC was there to cover the event! But that would be weird, since such go on all the time — they are hardly newsworthy. Someone had not explained, and they took it out on me just because I questioned some of the statements made.

DHS: What was the take-away for you, from the event?

LAURA: Beware movie stars who see themselves as crusaders.

DHS: I think lots of people misunderstand this whole issue and want to know what they can do to help. Do you agree?

LAURA: Anti-trafficking campaigns are now a popular form of social action, but many don’t know what kinds of abuses take place in the name of saving people. That information doesn’t get discussed at events like the Egyptian one — if it were, maybe things could improve.

DHS: Thanks, Laura, I’m glad you survived your attack from Hollywood.

Note: Many people have written to ask me how to protest Sorvino’s behaviour. The best I can find online is:

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Goodwill Ambassadors

Coordinators:
Ms. Norha Restrepo, Public Information Officer (Vienna)
norha.restrepo [at] unodc.org
Ms. Simone Monasebian, Chief of New York Office
monasebian [at] un.org

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

BBC World Debate on Trafficking televised this weekend, with the Naked Anthropologist

I had one of the oddest experiences of my life last Sunday night providing ‘dissent’ on trafficking for a BBC television world debate held at the kind of end-trafficking campaign event best compared to a religious revival meeting. Everyone else seemed happy to meld trafficking with sex trafficking with prostitution with slavery – at least they did not object to others who did it. We heard about disreputable women and sleazy motels without a peep from Gender Experts attending.

At the BBC debate, held outdoors in the Temple of Luxor, a sandstorm was just abating, it was freezing, armed security men abounded. One movie actress challenged my right to speak  – I hope editors left that bit in, and my reply to her, which politely explained what the word debate means. She is UN goodwill ambassador for trafficking, Mira Sorvino (needs the word goodwill explained to her as well).

I went because it will be televised this weekend and eventually uploaded to the BBC World Debates website, about which I will advise. Meanwhile:

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist, on BBC World Debate: Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped?
held in the Temple of Luxor, Egypt, 12 December 2010, will be televised on the BBC World Service this weekend:

Times are GMT, although blocked from the UK (…) Available in rest-of-world for people whose cable television provides it; check programme guide for your country.

09:10 Sat 18 Dec 2010

22:10 Sat 18 Dec 2010

02:10 Sun 19 Dec 2010

15:10 Sun 19 Dec 2010

If anyone happens to see it, do let me know – I have not. Will be writing more about the experience anon. Here’s that wonderful setting again:

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Naked Anthropologist attends a UN event to end human trafficking

Today I fly to Egypt to a UN event on trafficking, something I certainly never expected to do. Organised by UN GIFT (Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking) and numerous other entities, the event will last two days, include the premiere of a film called Not My Life and launch a campaign to get business leaders involved in anti-trafficking. As part of the event, the BBC World Service (24-hour international news seen around the world) will hold one of their World Debates, provisionally called Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped? The question is a bit like Does God Exist? but never mind. Anyway, in the British tradition debate means dissent and disagreement, and guess who will be providing that? Interpol’s Secretary-General will also be on the panel, along with Siddharth Kara – known for rescuing sex slaves in Asia and promoting End Demand. Is it hard to see me in this company? To mark the occasion, I am now calling myself

The Naked Anthropologist.

The nakedness I refer to means without addition, exaggeration or excuses; not concealed or disguised; open to view; manifest; plain. But it’s nice there’s a pun involved, too.

The debate will be filmed on Sunday 12 December, then edited and broadcast the following weekend. Perhaps some of you will see it then, but eventually it will go onto the BBC website. And where will this be taking place? In the Temple of Luxor, of course. Wish me luck.

— Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden? Re Assange and Wikileaks

Given the considerable confusion about Julian Assange’s sex with a couple of women in Sweden, perhaps what I wrote last year about Swedish rape law can be clarifying.

As regular readers know, I’m trying to figure out how the lovely utopian goal of Gender Equality landed us in a future I never expected, where ‘progressive’ and ‘feminist’ could be associated with policies that position women as innately passive victims. Activists interested in sex-industry legislation usually cite Swedish prostitution law as the fount of all evil, with its criminalisation of the buying of sexual services. This law is a cornerstone of an overall Swedish policy to foment Gender Equality, and so is rape legislation that has led to bizarre statistics commented on in this story published in Sweden’s English-language daily The Local.

The Local, 11 May 2009

Is rape rampant in gender-equal Sweden?

Laura Agustín

from okejsex.nu

Rape is a complicated crime. A research project funded by the European Commission’s Daphne programme reveals that Sweden leads Europe in reports of rape. At 46.5 per 100,000 members of the population, Sweden far surpasses Iceland, which comes next with 36, and England and Wales after that with 26. At the same time, Sweden’s 10 percent conviction rate of rape suspects is one of Europe’s lowest.

The report’s comparative dimension should probably be ignored. Instead of assuming that there are four times as many rapes in Sweden as in neighbouring Denmark or Finland, as the figures suggest, to understand we would have to compare all the definitional and procedural differences between their legal systems. It is significant that Sweden counts every event between the same two people separately where other countries count them as one. Most of Sweden’s rapes involve people who know each other, in domestic settings (Sweden report here).

The countries reporting highest rates of rape are northern European with histories of social programming to end violence against women. In Sweden, Gender Equality is taught in schools and reinforced in public-service announcements. Should we believe that such education has no effect, or, much worse, an opposite effect? Raging anti-feminist men think so, and raging anti-immigrant Swedes blame foreigners. Amnesty International says patriarchal norms are intransigent in Swedish family life. Everyone faults the criminal justice system.

In contemporary Sweden, women and girls are encouraged to speak up assertively about gender bias and demand their rights. Public discussions have revolved around how to achieve equal sex: Gender Equality in the bedroom. We can consult okejsex.nu, an official campaign whose homepage shows pedestrians obliviously passing buildings full of scenes of violence, suggesting it is ubiquitous behind closed doors. Okejsex defines rape as any situation where sex occurs after someone has said no.

In many countries, and in many people’s minds, rape means penetration, usually by a penis, into a mouth, vagina or anus. In Swedish rape law, the word can be used for acts called assault or bodily harm in other countries.

That may be progressive, but it’s also confusing. You don’t have to be sexist or racist to imagine the misunderstandings that may arise. If younger people (or older, for that matter) have been out drinking and dancing and end up in a flat relaxing late at night, we are not surprised that the possibility of sex is raised. The process of getting turned on – and being seduced – is often vague and strange, involving looks and feelings rather than clear intentions. It is easy to go along and actively enjoy this process until some point when it becomes unenjoyable. We resist, but feebly. Sometimes we give in against our true wishes.

Sweden is also proud of its generous policy towards asylum-seekers and other migrants who may not instantly comprehend what Gender Equality means here, or that not explicitly violent or penetrative sex acts are understood as rape. That doesn’t mean that non-Swedes are rapists but that a large area exists where crossed signals are likely, for instance, amongst people out on the town drinking.

Discussions of rape nowadays use examples of women who are asleep, or have taken drugs or drunk too much alcohol, in order to argue that they cannot properly consent to sex. If they feel taken advantage of the next day, they may call what happened rape. The Daphne project’s Sweden researchers propose that those accused of rape ought to have to ‘prove consent’, but attempts to legislate and document seduction and desire are unlikely to succeed.

What isn’t questioned, in most public discussions, is the idea that the problem must be addressed by more laws, ever more explicit and strict. Contemporary society insists that punishment is the way to stop sexual violence, despite evidence suggesting that criminal law has little impact on sexual behaviour.

We want to think that if laws were perfectly written and police, prosecutors and judges were perfectly fair, then rapes would decrease because a) all rapists would go to jail and b) all potential rapists would be deterred from committing crime. Unfortunately, little evidence corroborates this idea. Debates crystallise in black-and-white simplifications that supposedly pit politically correct arguments against the common sense of regular folk. Subtleties and complications are buried under masses of rhetoric, and commentaries turn cynical: ‘Nothing will change’, ‘the police are pigs’, immigrants are terrorists, girls are liars.

Is it realistic or kind to teach that life in Sweden can always be safe, comfortable and impervious to outside influences? That, in the sexual sphere, everything disagreeable should be called rape and abuse? Although the ‘right’ to Gender Equality exists, we cannot expect daily life to change overnight because it does.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist