rescue

Running a website with erotic advertisements as sex trafficking: the mind boggles at how anything connected to the sex industry can now be given the scary label trafficking.

In the USA, where Craigslist is headquartered, the website’s advertisements for paid sex are causing a furore amongst moral entrepreneurs who want the ads stopped on the grounds that ‘child sex trafficking’ is going on. Craigslist and the sex trade shows a cnn reporter attempting to make the owner of Craigslist himself personally responsible, pointing at ads, challenging him to explain. Some of this resembles scapegoating, the desire to find a single responsible villain for a Great Social Evil, implying that stopping this advertising would be a significant battle against it.

The fear fueling this campaign is captured in one NGO’s statement that An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This figure is not even an irresponsibly extrapolated number of victims, which we are now used to, but an estimate of how many might be vulnerable. The cnn reporter describes the torso-photo in one ad as young-looking. Such imaginings are not the basis for policy! And note that where there would have been a distinction in terms not long ago (commercial sexual exploitation v trafficking), now there is not. Everything becomes trafficking.

The argument against stopping all commercial sex ads centres on freedom of expression/information, a key principle in human rights law. This principle takes in written, oral and print media, including the Internet, and covers not only the content but the means of expression. Of course there are situations meant to override this freedom, nowadays usually called Hate Speech, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle. One could certainly make a strong argument that sex ads are harmful if one could prove that all those running them were criminals forcing other people to perform sex acts against their will. To do that would require real evidence, not panicky guesses about young victims. Not scare tactics.

Another aspect of this crusade is about something else: the ‘accusation’ that Craigslist is like Wal-Mart. This appears to be hostility both to big profits and a comparison with Wal-Mart’s unadorned, high-volume, warehouse-like style. Or perhaps it refers more to Wal-Mart’s legendary lack of social consciousness, poor community relations, environmental disinterest, use of badly paid foreign labour and so on. The problem is: Wal-Mart is also enormously popular. Would a personalised boutique style make Craigslist more acceptable?

Some of the ads on Craigslist might be the work of bad people. The ways they might be bad range from taking too much of the money a worker earns right through to kidnapping and slavery. But should the possibility that bad things could happen be allowed to justify shutting down all the ads, including those placed by competent adults? See Amanda Brooks on that.

Classified adverts are the subject of a similar crusade in Spain at the moment. In that case, mainstream newspapers are the accused businesses, but the issue is just the same.

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.

I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of help sex workers are offered. The old-fashioned term still being used around the world is rehabilitation. - surprising, really, since the moralism behind it is so overt. That is, to talk about rehabilitation is to say that one’s present self is a mess, one is living some wrong way, one is self-harming and so on. Within that frame, rehabilitation means We will help you get clean and healthy. That’s good if you feel unhappy about your present lifestyle yourself - morally, I mean. The usage meant to replace rehabilitation talks about Exit Strategies, but media reporters repeat the old clichés with gusto. In a report from Korea, purveyors of rehabilitation admitted no one wants what’s on offer:

. . . Months of harsh police crackdowns on red-light districts in Jangan-dong in northeastern Seoul have succeeded in driving more than half of brothels there out of business. . . But what has been neglected is the rehabilitation of those who were “laid off.”
. . . “More than 110 prostitutes have been summoned and instructed to visit a rehabilitation center to look for a new `legal’ career,” . . . But according to a rehabilitation center run by Dongdaemun Ward Office, no prostitute has submitted to undergo either rehabilitation programs or consultation.

The office runs under an annual budget of 800 million won ($602,000), providing former prostitutes with rehabilitation programs. “We expected the number of consultation-seeking sex workers to increase but it hasn’t,” a ward official said. “We speculate prostitutes whose workplaces were disrupted continue to sell their bodies in secret rather than seek new lives and jobs through rehabilitation programs.” - Rehabilitation Absent in Brothel Crackdown, Korea Times

One would hope this might have made Rescue Industry personnel pause to think, yet one described as a ‘campaigner’ said: “Most prostitutes are forced to borrow money from pimps or private lenders to be employed. At the beginning, they used the money to beautify themselves without realizing it would lead to a self-made, inescapable pitfall. When they realize it, they find themselves in heavy debt. That’s why despite crackdowns, they have no choice but to engage in the sex business to repay their debt.”

This describes a contributing factor, of course, but look what another ‘official’ says next: “The government has asked police to encourage arrested prostitutes to take optional rehabilitation programs. We need to come up with measures mandating the programs.”

Delightful - forced rehabilitation for women who don’t know their own minds.

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

No es solo en España que se plantea botar la prostitución de las calles dando la excusa de que se trata de eliminar la explotación, la esclavitud y un largo et cetera: noticias mexicanas confirman la tendencia.

Denuncian trabajadoras sexuales del DF ‘limpieza social’ en su contra

1 febrero 2010, Vanguardia/Agencia Noti-Calle

Plantones policíacos ‘disfrazados de recorridos de concientización de víctimas’ tiene por objeto ‘limpiar las calles para las celebraciones del bicentenario’.

Las trabajadoras sexuales del DF protestaron

Elementos de la Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal (PGJDF), recorrerán a partir de este mes los puntos de trabajo sexual en la vía pública de la Ciudad de México, “con el objeto de concientizar a las sexoservidoras de que son víctimas del delito de trata y convencerlas de que cambien de vida”, según manifestó Dilcya Samanta García, Subprocuradora de Atención a Víctimas del delito de la Procuraduría capitalina, en lo que las asociaciones de derechos humanos y de trabajadoras sexuales organizadas denuncian como una “nueva fase de la limpieza social” de las principales vialidades de la ciudad para las celebraciones del bicentenario y centenario de la independencia y revolución mexicana, respectivamente.

Al respecto, trabajadoras sexuales que marcharon la semana pasada exigiendo respeto a su oficio, señalaron que el objetivo de los recorridos no es convencer a ninguna víctima, sino amedrentarlas para que se vayan de las calles que actualmente ocupan espantando a su clientela, ya de por sí baja por el temor a verse involucrados en operativos policíacos, como el que se llevó a cabo el 13 de enero en el hotel Palacio; así como establecer “quiénes son los nuevos dueños de la prostitución en la ciudad de México y cuánto les tendremos qué pagar para seguir ocupando la calle”, expresaron Rubí, Azucena y Sonia, trabajadoras de esta zona de la capital.

Estos “recorridos”, se harán en coordinación con el Instituto de las Mujeres del Distrito Federal, DIF – DF y organizaciones de la sociedad, “que reciben financiamiento del Gobierno de Marcelo Ebrard, para realizar una limpia de las calles donde están comprometidos proyectos inmobiliarios, turísticos y comerciales a gran escala de multimillonarios como Carlos Slim”, señaló Kryzna por parte de la Red Mexicana de Trabajo Sexual.

Dichos recorridos de “concientización”, no son otra cosa que plantones policíacos disfrazados de atención a víctimas del delito, en los cuales se pretende inhibir la oferta y la demanda del trabajo sexual, afirmó Elvira Madrid Romero, presidenta de la Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer “Elisa Martínez” A.C., organización dedicada a la defensa de las mujeres, gays, travestis, transexuales, transgénero y vestidas, que se ganan la vida trabajando en el sexo.

“Ahora, pretender que cambiemos de vida, por obra y gracia de atención a víctimas del delito de la procu, es otra manera de discriminarnos y seguir tratándonos como basura”, apuntó Raquel, “después de que nos hicieron firmar actas informativas y declaraciones ante el ministerio público, sin que pudiéramos leerlas y sin bajarnos de pinches putas en el operativo del hotel Palacio, donde varias compañeras de la Cooperativa por Mejores Condiciones de Trabajo y Salud, fueron detenidas en venganza por haberse negado a la reubicación”.

“Somos trabajadoras sexuales, no víctimas ni esclavas de nuestras decisiones”, reza una de las pancartas que recorrió las calles de la Merced hasta el zócalo capitalino y luego se plantó a un costado del bunker de la procuraduría capitalina, en tanto una comisión de Brigada Callejera y trabajadoras sexuales de la Merced y Tlalpan, pasaban a una reunión con el subprocurador de averiguaciones previas centrales, Javier Cerón Martínez, el pasado viernes 29 de enero.

This poster was made by migrant sex workers (by their own definition) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it twice before but so many people are still ignorant about this point of view that I’m going to keep re-running it. See for yourself the reasons workers at Barn Su Funn Brothel gave for denouncing raids and rescue operations intended to liberate them, whether rescuers are police officers, ngo employees or charity workers:

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

The poster brings us close to a situation many people doubt: that poorer migrants selling sex often prefer to continue what they’re doing to being forcibly rescued by people on anti-trafficking crusades. This is not to cast doubt on many helpers’ good intentions or the genuine rescue of some individuals. But it shows how rescue agents haven’t consulted the prostitutes they want to save first, to find out whether they want to be helped and, if they do, what kind of help would actually be helpful. The poster makes it clear that cutting migrant women off from their source of income has drastic consequences for themselves and their families.

This does not mean that they or I deny the existence of abusive practices inflicted during smuggling and trafficking operations. It means that an ideological stance that claims all migrants doing sex work have been victims of such practices is wrong.

During my 15 years of researching this subject, I have met migrants of myriad nationalities, in many countries, in bars, brothels, shelters, ngo offices, streets, clubs and houses. Some had had bad experiences, some had not recovered from them yet, some were getting on with the next stage of their lives, some enjoyed doing sex work, many had adapted to it as the best option of the moment. For those who want to read more about it, my book Sex at the Margins has lots of details.

Thanks once more to the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers for sending this photo.

Open to the public

Managing vulnerability: The rescue industry and the struggles of female migrants

Danish Institute for International Studies - DIIS
Strandgade 56, 1401 Copenhagen

5 May 2010
1430 - 1700

Seminar with Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, Jo Doezema, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and Sine Plambech, The New School for Social Research, New York.

Earlier this month Calabrians and itinerant African farm workers came to blows. One politician said ‘We have to go to the root of the problem: mafia, exploitation, xenophobia and racism, which are too many roots. Also it is implied that migrants are found in southern Italy only because trafficking rings and mafiosi have forced them to be there. There are indeed controlling gangs in Calabria: There’s no doubt but that men from the ‘Ndrangheta shot at the immigrants, just to remind everyone that they control the territory: Alberto Cisterna of the National Anti-Mafia Squad. But another interpretation of the conflict was For all these years clandestine immigration has been tolerated, which feeds crime: Interior Minister Roberto Maroni. Crime - always a politician’s safe fall-back position.

Unaddressed is a typical contemporary dysfunctional migration policy that doesn’t want these migrants at the same time that native farmers need them. These farm workers, like their more famous counterparts from Mexico in the US, move from one area to another as harvests are ready: tomatoes in Campania, grapes in Sicily, olives in Puglia and Calabria for oranges.

It is also unclear what ‘evacuation’ meant in this case, whether the workers might be deported or what their status will be.

Below this story follows some background from Médecins Sans Frontières.

Migrants evacuated from southern Italian town 

9 January 2010, BBC

Italian authorities have evacuated hundreds of migrants from a southern town and brought in extra police after violent protests broke out. Some 320 African migrants, many of whom work as fruit-pickers in Calabria, were taken by bus to an emergency centre.

Extra police were deployed after two days of riots, during which 37 people were injured and cars were set alight. The violence broke out after two migrants were shot at with pellet guns by a group of local youths. Italy’s Interior Minister Roberto Maroni prompted a storm of criticism from the leftist opposition by suggesting that the violence was the result of not addressing the issue of illegal workers in the country. “There’s a difficult situation in Rosarno, like in other places, because for years illegal immigration - which feeds criminal activities - has been tolerated and nothing effective has ever been done about it,” he said according to Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper.

Opposition leader Pierluigi Bersani said: “Maroni is passing the buck … We have to go to the root of the problem: mafia, exploitation, xenophobia and racism.”

Some 320 African migrants - mainly from Ghana and Nigeria - were taken by bus from the southern town of Rosarno to a reception centre at Crotone, some 170km (105 miles) away. Local residents applauded as the eight buses carrying the migrant workers left the town, AFP reports.

Police said reinforcements had been called in at intersections and squares in the town to keep order on Saturday. Many of the migrants, most of whom work as fruit-pickers in the region’s citrus farms, live in difficult conditions - camped in abandoned factories and buildings with no running water or electricity, and were paid as little as 20 euros per day.

Italy: MSF Assists Migrant Workers Living in Appalling Conditions

29 September 2009, Médecins Sans Frontières 

For the sixth consecutive year, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is providing health care to undocumented seasonal migrant workers in southern Italy. Once again, poor living and working conditions pose a serious threat to their mental and physical health.

Since mid-August, thousands of migrants have been flocking to the southern Italian region of Puglia for the annual tomato-picking season. The majority are from sub-Saharan Africa, living in Italy undocumented and in appalling sanitary conditions in abandoned houses and cardboard shacks without electricity or gas. Since last year, following MSF’s requests, regional authorities have taken some measures to improve living conditions for migrants, such as providing water tanks and latrines,” said Antonio Virgilio, MSF’s head of mission in Italy. “However, this is still far from enough to meet their basic needs.”

Limited access to health care, inadequate shelter and exploitation at work are some of the difficulties faced by the seasonal migrants. The consequences are seen during MSF medical consultations. Gastrointestinal complaints and general body pain are common. “These migrants are getting sick as a consequence of the conditions they are subjected to,” said Alvise Benelli, an MSF doctor in Puglia. The MSF team in Puglia provides free medical and psychological care to the undocumented migrant workers. They also facilitate access to public health facilities.

Sexo y marginalidad: Emigración, mercado de trabajo e industria de rescate es la traducción (no mía) al castellano de Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. 

Sexo y marginalidad demuestra con elegancia que lo que les sucede a las inmigrantes trabajadoras pobres del Sur Global cuando abandonan su hogar para trabajar en la industria del sexo. No es ni una tragedia ni la panacea de hallar la tierra prometida. Por encima de todo, Agustín muestra que la tendencia moralizante de la mayoría de los programas gubernamentales y de las ONGs tiene poco que hacer frente a las experiencias y anhelos de estas mujeres. Este libro cuestiona algunas de nuestras suposiciones modernas más preciadas y muestra que es posible una ética de interés distinta. - Arturo Escobar, autor de La invención del tercer mundo: Construcción y Deconstrucción del Desarrollo

Editorial Popular es una editorial independiente en Madrid, España, que comenzó en 1973. Tiene como objetivos: reflejar las problemáticas que existen en la sociedad, defender la diversidad, cuestionar los métodos de enseñanza existentes, ofrecer pedagogías alternativas, acercar a los lectores otras realidades del mundo. Se puede pedir Sexo y marginalidad en las librerías o desde aquí.

Personalmente añoro mucho la portada de la edición original, que no reproduce ningún cliché sino evoca la idea del movimiento.

Editorial Popular
Doctor Esquerdo, 173 6º Izda
Telf : 91 409 35 73 Fax: 91 573 41 73
email: popular[a]editorialpopular.com
28007 Madrid
España

Sometimes the Rescue Industry reverts to farce. Take the recent history of Brazil with its efforts to appear ‘modern’ and world-powerful through militaristic social-control operations. Before I even got to the part of this article that mentions carnaval, I had thought ‘circus’ to describe what I was reading. These are excerpts from Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking’, Strengthening Worker Citizenship, and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil, by Paul Amar, in Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 513.

. . . Operation Princess and its sister campaigns were launched by the police in seeming disregard for the fact that prostitution is legal in Brazil. The Pentecostal evangelical leaders of Rio  . . . gave biblical legitimacy to the campaign, brushing aside questions of legality or sex workers’ resistance to being ‘rescued’. . . .

. . . proclaimed he would purge corruption and promote moral rectitude . . . by bringing back the spirit of the Vice Police stations (Delegacias de Costumes), which had been closed for the most part in the 1940s when prostitution was legalized. Simultaneously, President Lula declared a nationwide war against sex trafficking . . .

. . . ‘Operation Princess’ resonated perfectly with the 19th-century iconography of missionarism, child rescue, and abolition in Brazil. . . Avenida Princesa Isabel is the grand boulevard that brings travelers . . . into Copacabana Beach, a mixed-class and mixed-race coastal community that also serves as a center of sex tourism and international diplomatic conferences. Copacabana was a focal point of the new vice-policing operations. . . the statue of Princess Isabel, with her arms outstretched, blessing those she liberated from slavery and radiating a spirit of tolerance and welcome at the gateway to the topless dance clubs and all-night saunas of the Lido.  . .

. . . [the] Black Movement in Brazil ha[s] rigorously critiqued the ‘Princess Isabel Syndrome’, or the commemoration of this child monarch as the agent of abolition. . . it takes credit away from the centuries of sacrifice and mobilization among Brazil’s Afro-descendants and their efforts . . . Thus, the princess metaphor in Rio de Janeiro . . . resonates vibrantly with the politics of social ‘whitening’ (embrancamento), infantilization of black slave agency, and religious moralization.

. . . By the time Lula assumed power in 2003, a massive child-rescue initiative was deemed essential to Brazil’s plans to legitimize and empower itself on the world stage, as well as to address social-justice concerns at home. For Brazil to assume leadership of the democratic global south and make a claim to the proposed new seat on the Security Council, it wanted to change the image of Brazilian law enforcement from death squad to rescue mission, authoritarian to humanitarian. The national landscape had to be cleared of lawless, victimized children.

‘Operation Carnival’ became the first test of this revived vice-police campaign. As if to mock the new police operations, a ‘Group A’ Samba School . . .  celebrated ‘Prostitution in Copacabana’ as their theme that year; their 4,000 sequined dancers, the ‘Lions of Nova Iguaçu’, marched through the downtown Sambadrome, singing a samba about the joys of the sex trade. In its debut, the police’s anti-sex-trafficking campaign netted a total of one arrest . . .

During ‘Operation Shangrilá’, the Federal Police raided a showboat in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. Forty Brazilian prostitutes and twenty-nine American tourists were arrested for having committed the crime of ‘sex tourism’. This incident was immediately trumpeted as a major bust of a ‘human trafficking’ operation. . . . But . . no Brazilian law had been violated. None of the prostitutes were underage, nor had they violated any pimping or brothel laws. The only way this situation could be imagined as ‘trafficking’ was because the tourists had crossed international frontiers, although without breaking any laws or visa restrictions. Furthermore, ‘sex tourism’ is not against any Brazilian law, unless one assumes that sex tourism is the same thing as forced sex trafficking.