police

All week people have been sending me a news story whose source is a press release from the Spanish National Police claiming another triumph in the crusade against sex trafficking. In the years I lived in Spain such stories of breaking up gangster networks were published continuously - so often that I wondered why police didn’t soften the claim. The implication was, and is, that endless police actions are necessary against an infinite number of organised trafficking rings. The possibility that police are not actually breaking up rings but rather taking down a few organisers and lots of undocumented migrants is not mentioned. The theory and practice of policing of this social problem is crude and ineffective, like sticking a finger in a leaky dam.

The Policía Nacional, in charge of keeping smuggled migrants and smuggled drugs out of Spain, issue press releases to advertise successful operations. The investigation in question led to picking up both undocumented migrants and people moving them around the country, finding them jobs and making money off them - whether you call them traffickers, entrepreneurs, fixers or pimps. The fixing they do is standard in migration settings and can be done abusively or in a normal, businesslike way, whether the migrants work selling sex or doing some other job and whether they are men, women or transgender. As the police acknowledged, many of the migrants admitted they knew what sort of work they would be doing in Spain.

Of course it’s crap when migrants have been misled about the conditions they’ll have for living and working and feel trapped. The press release referred to the squalid flats some migrants were living in. Look at the police video and judge for yourself ow demonic it looks. The narrator says migrants had to give 50% of their earnings to the people in charge plus pay for food and lodging. It’s a bad deal but it isn’t slavery and it is not unusual amongst undocumented migrants. The debt mentioned, €4 000, is also not a high amount for a trip from Brazil, where most of the migrants were said to come.

This Spanish press release relates how police captured members of a network dealing with (and in) men rather than women. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t such networks before, or that smuggling rings are all gender-specific, or that things are really getting bad when men begin to be treated like women.

It also doesn’t mean something specially demonic is going on because drugs are mentioned -the Policía Nacional are also charged with stopping drug trafficking, remember, so they mention any they find. The presence of viagra makes the scenario sound more titillating and sex-slavey, but I think one can understand that drug in the same way one can understand alcohol, hash and cocaine in these settings - substances some people use to feel better or more capable of performing or enduring unpleasantness or having fun. Without knowing how many of the migrants complained that these drugs were forced on them or that they were not allowed to sleep, we might refrain from getting all het up.

Police interrogations of migrants picked up in raids tend towards fruitlessness and dodgy information. Undocumented people want to avoid being deported at all cost. The police want to find traffickers above all. The atmosphere is conducive to telling a certain kind of story of ignorance and victimisation: interrogations are not moments for the detained to strongly assert agency about buying false documents, selling sex or taking drugs.

This ring-bust might be a significant one, there’s no way to know. The proliferation of the limited, exciting-sounding information from a single press release into all the major media, treating it as Big Terrible Urgent news is about the Internet - not journalism, or not what we used to think of as journalism. An egregious example comes from Diario Vasco: Prostitutos forzosos 24 horas a base de viagra (prostitutes forced 24 hours with viagra), followed by the typical thoughtless cliché Venían con la promesa de ser bailarines o ejercer la prostitución de alto ’standing’, pero vivían hacinados y explotados.

So, could this be a particularly bad trafficking story? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does it deserve all the hullaballoo it’s getting? Definitely not.

I have never understood how sting operations can be legal in any situation, but when police use them in prostitution contexts they generally pose as clients, with the aim of catching sex workers. In the story below they posed as prostitutes in order to entrap clients. This is justified by referring to vile behaviour, an antiquated phrase for the 21st century. And given so many other, more dangerous urban problems, investing money and time into catching men who buy sex seems silly. [Note: the photo is from a different story, the recent Chinese one that had police parading women prostitutes through the streets. Some people asked why their clients were not subjected to similar shaming; as this picture shows, to some extent they were.]

Another question to consider about this story: How will the 2-year-old be damaged, exactly?

Elgin arrests 11 in reverse prostitution sting

Lenore T. Adkins, 8 August 2010, Daily Herald (suburban Chicago)

Eleven men were arrested Friday night in Elgin during a reverse prostitution sting staged by police officers in the city’s downtown. As part of the three-hour undercover operation in the National Street area, several Elgin officers posed as prostitutes. The men approached them, offering $20 for sex, said Lt. Glenn Theriault.

According to police, one of the men had his 2-year-old son with him. The child’s mother picked the boy up from the police station on Friday night. And officers contacted the Illinois Department of Children of Family Services. “When people think this type of crime is a victimless crime, tell that to the 2-year-old or the mother of the 2-year-old,” Police Chief Jeff Swoboda said.

All 11 alleged offenders were arrested under a local ordinance for soliciting a prostitute, which carries a minimum fine of $1,000. They are [follows a list of names and addresses] . . .

The following men were arrested under the local ordinance and for additional charges [follows another list] . . .

Out of the 11 men arrested on Friday night, 10 had motor vehicles and must pay $1,000 to retrieve them under a separate ordinance, Theriault said. Everyone will have their case heard Aug. 14 before a hearing officer at the Elgin branch court.

“This is certainly a huge number of suspects for such a short period of time and clearly tells me that we’ll be back there again soon,” Theriault said. With Friday’s sting and others like it, Elgin police intend to send the message they will not tolerate this sort of activity in town. They are also determined to reduce the crimes it creates.

“This type of vile behavior is simply unacceptable,” Theriault said. “It’s unfortunate that for such an incredibly vibrant downtown, these incidents that occur in one isolated corner … paint the entire area with the same brush.”

The police department’s patrol, gang, drug and technical investigation units conducted the probe, which marked the second such sting of the summer. Elgin police ran a similar crackdown in July that officers cut short due to the rain and that resulted in one arrest, Theriault said.

Different police authorities compete about whose unscientific methods are better - well, why not? It is a Rescue Industry, after all. But many people think, if the numbers were produced by policemen or - gasp, wow - some entity of the UN, they must be better, more scientific, maybe having access to amazing inside information. I have news for everyone, the methodological problems are just as hard to surmount for people working at big institutions as for anyone else (I know lots of these folk, and I myself did some ILO research once). Big money does not mean better methods but even more important does not mean the problems of definition and the inaccessibility of undocumented and stigmatised people go away. There are ethnographic studies of police work, too, that show just how arbitrary and subjective a lot of it is.

The subject here is a report on how many trafficking victims there are in the UK. Both estimates derive from ridiculously crude, subjective and evidence-free methods. Will 10 000 victims in the UK be the new figure to be cited here and yon because a reporter wrote it in a newspaper?

The first estimate is described like this (try not to laugh at the ‘codename’, please):

The study, codenamed Project Acumen, relied on interviews with 254 women in London brothels and extrapolated the remaining national figure using newspaper reports and patchy existing data. It estimates that 17,000 foreign women work in the off-street sex industry but does not give data for the number of women who might be trafficked into street prostitution – or the number of British women that might be trafficked.

Note here that even the police cannot decide whether ‘national’ subjects qualify as ‘trafficked’ or not.

The second estimate goes like this:

The former Conservative MP Anthony Steen, chairman of the Human Trafficking Centre, said he had spoken to senior police officers who know of 2,300 brothels in London alone. “They reckoned that 80 per cent of those working there were from abroad, and they estimated that 4,000 were trafficked. And that was just in London. My view is that the national figure is probably in excess of 10,000.”

Tiresome man, mentioning that oft-debunked 80% figure from a Poppy Project telephone survey. The pretend-clients rang numbers in classified adverts and asked whether sex workers of different nationalities were available. They were told yes, indeed, different nationalities were available. By receptionists seeking to bring the callers in as customers. Poppy researchers then said if they are foreign, chances are they were trafficked. Well, honestly, you wouldn’t want to put that sort of ‘data’ in a number-crunching machine, would you?

From Police report into brothels dismissed as ‘amateurish’ by other amateurs!

The sequence of events goes like this:

1. US government issues annual report card threatening to cut off aid from countries that don’t make the right efforts to combat trafficking
2. Threatened countries comply by passing legislation
3. And then instructing local police to carry out raids in order to ‘rescue’ victims
4. Police go to sex businesses, pick up all the workers and claim to have rescued them
5. Police say victims (sex workers) will be ‘rehabilitated’ via detention and forcible participation in an ‘alternative work’ programme, whether rescued people want this or not
6. Threatened national governments point to these actions to show US that they are fighting crime
7. US gives them a better grade on the next report card

Problems? Well yes, several, including the overtly neocolonialist coercion. In the following story which pointedly uses the word rescue, the police try to blame foreign devils for the existence of sex businesses, make sure to point out that some of those rescued were ‘only waitresses’ (which perfectly shows what they think about prostitutes), and, most important, if compliance with US aims to ‘convict’ traffickers is what’s needed, how does detaining and forcibly rehabilitating 200 victims help? What we’ve learned over and over is that some large number of the detained women do not want to be rescued, or not by the police, or not from sex work but possibly from poverty or the fear of disappointing their parents. I have unfortunately had to comment repeatedly on such stories, including recently on Cambodia. There are other ways to help people.

Anti-human trafficking agency rescues 200 women from Malate

Francis Faulve, 18 June 2010, ABS-CBN News

Manila, Philippines - The government’s anti-human trafficking task force on Thursday night rescued at least 200 women from a girlie bar in Malate district in Manila.

Retired military officer Jesus Kabigting of the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking said the raid was conducted in response to the US State Department’s report on human trafficking in the Philippines. The US State Department said the Philippines remains in the Tier 2 list of countries whose governments have failed to show improved efforts to curb human trafficking.

Representatives from the Manila Police District, Department of Social Welfare and Development and Department of Labor of Employment raided the LA Cafe at the corner of M.H. Del Pilar and R. Salas streets in Malate around 10:30 p.m.

Kabigting said majority of the women are being peddled to foreigners in Malate district. He said some of those rescued were only waitresses, but are also considered as victims of forced labor and human trafficking.

He said the women, particularly the prostitutes, will be “rehabilitated” and provided with alternative livelihood.

“Anti-human trafficking operations ito… Iyon ang dahilan kaya nagsagawa tayo ng walang humpay na operation against human trafficking (This ia an anti-human trafficking operation... That is the reason why we are conducting operations against human trafficking),” Kabigting told reporters referring to the US State Department’s report. He said similar raids will also be conducted nationwide.

Kabigting assured that charges will be filed against the owner of the bar. “Whether they have a permit to operate or not, they are committing acts in violation of the anti-human trafficking law. We will investigate them,” he said.

The US State Department was critical of the Philippine performance in all three benchmarks (prevention, protection and prosecution). It said that despite several labor trafficking cases were filed, the Philippine government never convicted any offenders. “Despite overall efforts, the government did not show evidence of significant progress in convicting trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for labor trafficking,” the US State Department said in its report.

The other day, in a story about typical ‘police crackdowns’ on prostitution, this time in Montreal, a local policeman said ‘It’s businessmen and people going or coming from work and sometimes they have baby seats or car seats in the car.’ This led to a discussion amongst people I know about what baby seats might represent.

The first comment was

I would really like to say that I am hearing this ‘baby seats in the back of the car’ all the time as another way of making sex work and customers more scary and deviant sounding. Seems to be the logic is ‘baby seats’ stand in for ‘children seeing sex/being exposed to sex’ but would love to yell, ‘Hey you conservatives/police even if the customer has an empty baby seat in the car… it’s an empty baby seat! There is no baby in it!’

I answered that I have always heard this babyseat detail to stand for He is married, has a family, is betraying his wife.

To which the reply was

It makes sense to me that it would also be about ‘betraying the relationship’, but they harp on about the baby seats so much that it makes me wonder if it’s about children somehow.

So then I said one might say the client is Betraying the Family: his own and the whole institution. The babyseat means he’s not just a couple now but an institution himself.

Another commenter added

I also heard an economical argument to it. It is ‘wrong’ to use the ‘family money’ to buy yourself sex services, if you are are part of a middle class or poor family.

And yet another said

I take it to mean He’s just a schlub. He’s just another ordinary guy, could be anyone.

I wonder if it seems better or worse to people if the car - and thus the baby seat - are more costly and prestigious, as with this Mercedes Benz.

Is it way scarier because the seat is located right next to the driver??

Then came a new angle

My experience is cops use babyseats as a prop when soliciting/ communicating for purpose of prostitution to put girls/women at ease so she will think this guy is married so he will be safe, quick, and has a lot to lose so he will behave.

Baby seats as part of a sting - now that is abuse of family. Then the original commenter remembered a book where baby seats and sex workers figure in a story about

a Saudi prince in New York City, who enjoys driving around at night and picking up prostitutes while his 2-year-old son is sitting in a car seat in the back, so that the kid can learn from his father what women are really like in his eyes and how they should be treated by those in power. Basically, what it comes down to is that the prince hates women and wants his son to grow up hating them, too, so that he treats them all as objects and with no respect. - Wayne C. Rogers, The Book Nook

Here is the original story, complete with Rescue Industry tracts on the evils of buying sex.

Montreal police target prostitution

14 June 2010

Montreal police say they will hand out pamphlets explaining the dangers of hiring prostitutes. Montreal police have announced an action plan to crack down on prostitution in the city’s east end. The plan involves targeting potential clients, officials said on Monday. Six additional police cadets have been hired to patrol Ste-Catherine Street East, said police.

Officers will also set up roadblocks to hand out pamphlets, warning about the consequences of hiring prostitutes. Most of the prostitutes’ clients are not people who live in the neighbourhood, said Montreal police Cmdr. François Cayer. “In general, it’s common people,” said Cayer. “It’s businessmen and people going or coming from work and sometimes they have baby seats or car seats in the car.”

The problem in the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough has worsened recently due to construction projects in the city’s new entertainment district, said local officials. “You will find a lot of prostitutes, probably those prostitutes worked usually in the Quartier des spectacles and they are now in Hochelaga and we cannot accept that,” said Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough Mayor Réal Ménard. So far this year, police said they have arrested 74 clients.

Dopamine, a local group that works with prostitutes, said it is not fully on board with the project. The organization would prefer sex workers be given access to additional services, a spokesperson said. The borough said it wants to open a drop-in centre for prostitutes in the coming years.

SWEAT (Sex Worker and Advocacy Task Force, in South Africa), give a good, clear argument for removing laws that criminalise the sale or purchase of sex.

World Cup and HIV: Decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa

Leading up to the 2010 soccer World Cup, sex work has come under intense public scrutiny in South Africa. Concerns about sex work, HIV and the increase in visitors to the country during the mega-event have come at the same time as a review of the country’s laws on prostitution. In the light of this, several civil society groups are pushing for greater protection of sex workers’ human rights during the World Cup, and ultimately for the complete decriminalisation of sex work.

In the short term, the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Task Force and its allies are demanding that sex workers have the right to work for the period of the World Cup. They are seeking guarantees for sex workers’ personal safety, including freedom from police harassment, and access to free, quality and respectful health care.

In the longer term, a campaign is being put together to push for the decriminalisation of sex work, based on several arguments:

• sex work will not go away;
• there are many harms associated with sex work, but these can best be dealt with by other areas of criminal law or by non-legal interventions;
• anything short of decriminalisation makes those harms worse, particularly to sex workers themselves; and
• enforcing a sense of morality through the law is likely to generate all sorts of other harmful immoralities.

Sex workers are often marginalised and face multiple barriers to accessing health and social services, a situation exacerbated by criminalisation. Criminalisation also prevents sex workers from reporting abuse to the police or seeking legal recourse after rape or sexual assault. Decriminalisation offers the most effective means of addressing HIV and ensuring that human rights are respected.

So what is decriminalisation of sex work? It means that consensual sexual contact between two adults in private is legal. Any other arrangement of the law around sex work – be it criminalisation of the sex worker and/or the client, regulation of sex work, or something in between – leaves some consensual money-based arrangements between sex worker and client outside the law. And these are the contacts most likely to be non-consensual, violent, abusive, and unsafe.

Many international bodies already recognise the value of decriminalization. A number of countries have moved away from total criminalisation of sex work. Only one – New Zealand – has explicitly decriminalised sex work, choosing instead to adopt a human rights and public health framework.

The New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act was passed in 2003, after a campaign driven by sex workers, the public health community, many women’s’ groups and human rights organisations. It was promoted on various grounds – gender justice, pragmatic law, and the preference of the people most damaged by criminalisation, i.e. sex workers themselves.

The effects of the legislative change were measured five years later. Contrary to public fears, no increase was found in the number of people entering sex work during this period. Sex workers reported improved working conditions and wellbeing, feeling safer under the new legal framework, and being able to negotiate safer sex and report abuse to police.

As South Africa prepares for the culmination of its debate on the best legal framework for sex work, we can only hope that reality, research and rigorous debate dominate the process, and that policy processes will approach sex work pragmatically, placing public health benefits above ideological interests. In that case, decriminalisation will be the only rational outcome.

More evidence of how police raids to save people are unwanted and counter-productive, this time with statements from UNAIDS and a Cambodian sexworker group. Those suffering under the crackdown are not traffickers and arrested sex workers were not trafficked. The rhetorical move to call completely old-fashioned raids anti-trafficking strategies is orwellian double-speak creating confusion amongst those who don’t know what’s going on.

Cambodian sex worker Soeum Rotha is active in Women’s Network for Unity

Cambodia cracks down on the sex industry

Robert Carmichael, 12 April 2010, Deutsche Welle