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Getting money to prevent sex trafficking even if there isn’t any: London Olympics

10 May 2012 in trafficking by laura agustin | 9 comments | print print

Those who wish evidence were the basis for social policy have been endlessly frustrated and annoyed by the survival of the myth saying sex trafficking – forced prostitution – increases enormously on the occasion of major sporting events. Despite enough evidence to convince most people that there is no such surge (see SIDA’s report on the 2006 World Cup and SWEAT’s on the 2010), it’s obvious that evidence doesn’t matter where the fear of hidden crime is constantly threatened. In other words, if the police haven’t found many women in chains, the victims must be too well hidden, which justifies further money for more intense policing.

Some NGOs against human trafficking do now acknowledge that there’s no proof that trafficking increases around big sporting events.  But they like to argue that their own efforts to prevent trafficking are the reason – Ta Da! There must be a name for this kind of logical fallacy.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)  has set up its own anti-trafficking programme called UN.GIFT, which now gives funds to a lot of the people sustaining this kind of scare-mongering. Stop the Traffik (sic – why have they spelled it like this?) is one, here maintaining that

campaigns countering human trafficking and increased law enforcement, before and during the events, are necessary to prevent the trade. International sporting events can increase human trafficking due to the short-term increased demand for prostitution, construction work, and all other sorts of labour.

So the funding gravytrain tootles along. But now they have a new justification for their activities:

prestigious sporting events can play a central role in attracting attention to the issue of human trafficking, and can function as an opportunity to increase engagement across communities. Most importantly, as there is evidence of continuous human trafficking in London and across the entire UK, we should use this opportunity that the London Olympics presents us with.

So now, whether there was ever going to be any increased trafficking or not, campaigns that worry people that their might be are doing a good job of raising awareness. In NGO-speak this is called prevention. If there is more self-serving silliness I don’t know about it.

With great solemnity, based on this absence of evidence, we find troops of volunteers ready to worry everyone in London about the hidden scourge. Here’s one (with funding from Stop the Traffik) in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s Olympic boroughs (meaning some Olympics activity actually occurs there). Do you wonder what these people will do?

This will involve running outreach sessions with local schools, hotels and faith groups using data gathered from borough-specific research, which volunteers would also be conducting. There will also be the opportunity to organise a local fundraising event to generate additional income and attract more volunteers from the local area.

I’d like to know how that research is being done. Meanwhile, the photo at the top shows a UN.GIFT box that’s going to be unwrapped during the games. (Warning if you click on that link that you are subjected to the soundtrack of a promotional video portraying cruelty.) The purpose is described as

to inspire visitors, both from the UK and abroad, to take action to stop the trade. . . a giant public art installation, which will demonstrate to people how victims of human trafficking can be deceived; beyond the promises of exciting opportunities that will entice people to the box, once inside, the stark reality of human trafficking will be revealed. . .  family-friendly and will inspire people to advocate and end trafficking in their own communities.

This is all what happens when a fear (panic, myth) takes on a life of its own. Evidence that there is cause for such fear is simply irrelevant. Unfortunately, there are unsought side-effects, as police make raids and arrests of sex workers to show they are looking for traffickers and their victims. Thus x:talk’s call for a moratorium on arrests in London.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex Panic and the Punitive State: Where’s prostitution? What happened to sex trafficking?

28 April 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 8 comments | print print

The term moral panic appears constantly in critical discussions of sex trafficking, but trafficking hardly figures in an interesting book about sex panics. In this review requested by H-Net I ask why classic prostitution – women who sell sex to men – is disqualified from the author’s thesis and point out ways that some well-known panics, especially about sex trafficking, don’t fit the author’s argument, not what I expected when I wrote about Lancaster’s piece in The New York Times a while back.

Roger N. Lancaster. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Reviewed by Laura Agustín (The Naked Anthropologist)
Published on H-Histsex (April 2012)
Commissioned by Timothy W. Jones

The Specialness of (Some) Sexual Crimes

In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s familiar opening, a voice intones, In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. This television franchise has since 1999 reified the notion that sexual experiences are different from all others. So long as plots revolve around torture, erotic asphyxiation, gang rape, cannibalism, and slavery, preferably committed by psychotic serial killers, that fundamental notion about sex may seem undeniable. Yet plots that revolve around an otherwise conventional adult’s sexual interest in teenagers causes the unit the same appalled revulsion, censure that now causes men to avoid giving children a friendly hug. A narrative has certainly developed in the United States holding that sex is dangerous, that sexual suffering is unique, that sexual damage is permanent, and that those who commit crimes involving sex are near-monsters.

Roger Lancaster acknowledges that sex panics existed throughout the long Jim Crow period of United States history, including the Progressive Era, into the 1950s. His detailed history of panics since then will be useful to students who have heretofore seen individual outbreaks as separable, from Joseph McCarthy’s demonization of homosexuals to pornography scares, AIDS hysteria, recovered memory syndrome, and the fantasy of satanic ritual abuse. One might conclude that such panic is a constant, its focus shifting from one type of behavior to another but always expressing a sex-related fear, as though a certain quotient must always be present. But Lancaster argues that there has been a sea change since the 1960s, when received ideas about race, age, and sexuality began fundamentally to shift, and that panics of the last few decades are more far-reaching and significant, ultimately leading to a model of governance he calls the punitive state.

Is the term panic the right one to apply every time there is a social uproar about something sexual? How long does a specific occurrence have to last to qualify as a panic? Is a sex scandal different? These questions are legitimate because Lancaster’s arguments sweep a very wide path in social history, constructing a grand narrative on the culture of fear.

On all the important points I am with him. Ever more offenses are named and new, more repressive punishments meted out. Mechanisms like sex-offender lists keep those convicted of sexual crimes doomed to pariah lifestyles. A whiff of misbehavior–like the false claim of a resentful teenager–can lead to drastic police measures. The figure of the innocent child always vulnerable to victimization hovers permanently over every conversation. Government sometimes appears to exist for the purpose of protecting this child figure from all conceivable risk, with the result that middle-class parents are afraid to allow their children to play on their own. While the Right may be blamed for constant paranoia about lower-class criminality and an intransigent focus on law and order, the Left is guilty of promoting grievance as identity marker and celebrating victims of oppression as heroes. Certainly, the nurture of resentment and injury has become a viable path to fame, and the public is invited to identify with traumatized victims–all the better if they appear young and innocent. Empathy with the outraged victim has come to outweigh the presumption of innocence for those accused of crime. Individual stories of injury are valued over analyses of systemic inequality. Most starkly, incarceration rates are higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world, including totalitarian states.

In the contemporary panic about abuse of children, Lancaster shows how the figure of the white man has moved into prime suspect position, and how the pedophile is often glossed as homosexual. One chapter is an ethnographic account of a teenager’s presumably false accusation of touching by a gay schoolteacher, law enforcement’s predisposition to find him guilty, and the teacher’s inability to defend himself despite a lack of actual evidence against him. The deplorable story does a strong job of demonstrating how panic plays out and how close to fascism the law brushes in this field. It is also a great read, strengthened by Lancaster’s own involvement in the story.

Lancaster’s strongest case concerns panic over the figure of the sex offender, a label encompassing an array of offenses, not all of which are actually sexual (peeing in public, for example) and some of which are quite minor. Even more striking than the vague definition of these crimes is the draconian punishment meted out indiscriminately to the criminals: disproportionately long prison sentences followed by placement on public lists that cause their banishment from normal living situations and egregious difficulty in finding employment. The unproven notion that they will inevitably ‘re-offend’ is used to justify permanent surveillance.

The surveillance issue of course leads to how 9/11 intensified all suspicion towards everyone in the United States, with the corollary that everyone is seen as a potential terrorist. Are sexual miscreants viewed more easily as terrorists, however? I did balk at the suggestion that all crime is being infused or conflated with sex and that the manner of talking about terrorists has become sexualized in a new way. Militarism is a form of machismo, after all, and soldiers are called on to prove their virility continually.

For all Lancaster’s broad inclusivity in his thesis and in his construction of a narrative of sexual crime, he fails to account for the single most widespread sexual-crime issue in the United States: the persecution of prostitutes/sex workers, treated as anti-social offenders, in virulently punitive, long-infamous legal policy. Where are the figures on arrests of prostitutes in the panoply of ills Lancaster reveals? Is this egregious injustice deemed somehow different, and if so, why? If a sex crime is so enduring as to seem permanent, almost a natural feature of social life, is it disqualified as a sex panic? That would be odd since the term moral panic has been applied by students of prostitution for donkey’s years, and not only when syphilis and AIDS were the excuse.

In the current anti-trafficking hysteria in the United States, lawmakers and activists alike conflate trafficking with prostitution as a tactic to promote abolitionism. Women who sell sex are divested of will and figured as helpless children in a deliberate attempt to provoke further panic. Does this scenario not fit into Lancaster’s narrative, or how does it fit? The predatory figures accused of menacing women here are not necessarily white men but rather darkly alluded to in statements about security, illegal immigration, and organized crime.

Leaving aside adults, child sex trafficking surely constitutes the most vibrant panic of the last few years, despite a lack of evidence that it actually exists (what does exist are teens who leave home). When the runaway child is a male teenager, the predator usually imagined to be exploiting him is likely the gay white man Lancaster describes. But when the runaway is a female teenager, the predator is likely to be imagined as a black man or youth–the classic pimp figure.

Law enforcement chiefs from numerous states have joined the targeting of online classified advertising services like Craigslist and Backpage, with the justification that minors are being sold there by traffickers. Simultaneously, everyone ignores the palpable harm for adult female sex workers caused by these campaigns; apparently no one is bothered. The absence in Lancaster’s account of the adult woman who sells sex reproduces the social death society inflicts continually on this group, as though prostitution were obviously different, separate, real, or intransigent–having nothing to do with the history of panic at hand.

Could this be because the concept of victim is so ambiguous in prostitution law? In the United States, where both parties to the commercial act are criminalized, neither is legally a victim. The persecution of prostitutes is carried out in the name of a moral society, but while both parties to this crime are technically offenders, only the women are persecuted by law enforcement. How does this fit Lancaster’s narrative of the punitive state? And how does society’s disinterest in the male prostitute fit, the fact that gay men who sell sex are largely pardoned or ignored? Currently, abolitionists are seeking to end demand from men who buy sex, proposing punitive devices such as sex-offender lists and forced taking of their DNA, which would seem to fit Lancaster’s subject to a T. Here are contradictions involving gender, particularly, that deserve inclusion in his theorizing.

On that topic, it is interesting to learn that the birth of the sex-offender register may be found in rape crisis centers that early on posted names and photos of known assailants in order to warn women. To jump from there, as Lancaster does, to a certain contemporary alliance of fundamentalist feminists with conservative lawmakers and police does no justice to the history of a movement to end systemic violence against women. In fact, and this is related to my concern about the absence of an account of prostitution in this book, one might ask why there was never a sex panic about wife-beating? The question of which sexual and gender crimes lead to panic and which do not seems important to address.

Lancaster contrasts the punitive turn in the United States with European states said to have humanitarian assumptions and norms of civility integrated into their social contract. In the American liberal tradition, he says, well-being is a private matter — the pursuit of happiness. If this is happiness, Freud’s wish that patients achieve ordinary unhappiness begins to sound idyllic.

Printable version

Citation: Laura Agustín. Review of Lancaster, Roger N., Sex Panic and the Punitive State. H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews. April, 2012. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33954

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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

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

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

Puticlubes (from puta, whore)

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

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

Private Flats

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

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

The Agricultural World

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

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

The Cosmopolitan Frontier

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

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

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Sob story implying migrants’ families are heartless:

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

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

* Pretense that something new and different is happening:

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

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

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

* Attempt to cause moral panic about the young.

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

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

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

* Ignorance about migration:

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

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

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

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex Slavery Solved by Sleight of Hand: Siddharth Kara

2 March 2012 in trafficking by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

In December of 2010 I met Siddharth Kara at the BBC World Debate on Human Trafficking. In fact, he was there because I gave his name to the producer, who was under pressure to find people without knowing anything about the field. The BBC held the debate programme at a sort of anti-trafficking revival meeting organised by Mrs Mubarak (not yet an international pariah). Just beforehand, panellists met with Zeinab Badawi (the presenter) in a crowded hotel Green Room. When I walked in Kara was in full cry with an Elevator Pitch so out of place I giggled, which seemed to puzzle him. Thus I found out that being poster boy for a movement had protected him from self-awareness. When I accepted the request to review his book, I did not know how inane it would turn out to be.

Siddharth Kara. Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xviii + 298 pp.  (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13960-1;  (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-13961-8.

Reviewed by Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Published on H-LatAm 14 February 2012

A Man of Moral Sentiments

Siddharth Kara’s Sex Trafficking is not a scholarly book. Neither based on methodological research nor reflecting knowledge of literature that could give context to the author’s experience, this reads like the diary of a poverty tourist or the bildungsroman of an unsophisticated man of moral sentiments demonstrating his pain at unfathomable injustices. This places Kara in the tradition of colonial writers who believed that they were called to testify to the suffering of those not lucky enough to be born into comfortable Western society.

Scholarship is virtually absent from his works cited, whether on migration, trafficking, slavery, feminism, sexualities, criminology, gender, informal-sector labor, or the sex industry and prostitution. Apparently unaware of over ten years of difficult debates, hundreds of scholarly articles, and investigative journalism, Kara is an MBA on a mission, using statistical sleight of hand to solve the problem of slavery. Because the book is touted by campaigners as presenting hard data and incisive analysis, H-Net requested this review.

A travelogue in six chapters is bracketed by arguments both high-minded and businesslike. Kara mentions his moral awakening while volunteering at a refugee camp, his business career, and his sporadic travels since 2000, interviewing 150 “victims” (term unexplained) and a variety of other people located by what he calls “word of mouth.” Because many people did not trust him, he could not enter most businesses and found it easier to interview victims in shelters. Chapter headings are regional, but my guess is his stays in most regions were brief (scholars in the field will recognize his contacts as predictable), with India a possible exception. Kara does not acknowledge these inevitable biases given his lack of method.

On the one hand, his freedom sounds heavenly to those planning fieldwork who have grubbed for funding, written and rewritten interview questions, toadied to gatekeepers, pacified ethics committees, and dealt with supervisors who fail to understand what one is trying to do. On the other hand, Kara reads like a bull in a china shop, bumbling into brothels, stressing and sometimes endangering young women, pressing them to provide him with conversation, annoying goons, and throwing money around. For a scholarly review, the salient point is the absence of academic supervision to control his preconceptions about what he would find, critique his lack of methodology, or control the spin he puts on his experiences. At times, he simply claims that informants did not “appear” to be coerced.

For a man setting out to report on sex as business he is priggish. Bothered by old men who ogle young girls, he admits “I felt ashamed to be male” and opines “I also believe that the preponderance of males do not condone these vulgarities” (pp. 71, 33). After escaping violence he declaims: “For so many years I had stepped into the fire pit and emerged unscathed…. That night, I suffered violent food poisoning from mushrooms and vomited thirty-four times. Justice was swift. I accepted my punishment” (p. 58). Exalted sensibility and anachronistic rhetoric further link Kara to nineteenth-century moral crusaders like Josephine Butler, famous for saying if she were a prostitute she would be crying all day.

Kara knows little about present-day migration and mobility. Meeting a Lithuanian woman in Italy and a Nigerian woman in Bangkok cause him to suspect they were trafficked, as though obtaining travel documents and tickets were too difficult for women to manage alone. Not finding slaves in the United States, he concludes there must be less demand and therefore less slavery, but also that the United States is “too far away” (from what?), as though airplanes and multiple technologies had not rendered distance almost irrelevant. Even a cursory check of current migration literature would have saved him such gaffes.

But Kara is not interested in migration (whether voluntary, ambivalent, or coerced) or in smuggling. He also rejects “trafficking” as a core concept, preferring slave trading for the movement of people and slavery for the jobs they get. His pitch is that slavery is back in a big way, but his is a cartoon version of master and slave, free of any social complexity and the ambiguities of human interaction. If he can contemplate this industry coolly for the purposes of financial calculations, then he should be able to consider potential human gains also. Finally forced to recognize that slavery could actually sometimes represent “a better life” (p. 199), he is nonetheless blind to the possibility that people in bad situations may be able to exploit them and seems ignorant of slavery studies far evolved from abolitionist reductionism. Slave narratives, slave archaeology, ethnobiology, and historical research all have illuminated social systems in which slaves were not wholly passive nor owners unidimensionally crushing. Coping, resisting, manipulating, strategizing, and creating culture form part of slaves’ lives.[1] But Kara, intent on discovering tales of sexual exploitation, has no idea how his informants spend most of their time.

He claims that “sex slaves” are the best earners for masters because they are sold “literally thousands of times before they are replaced” (p. 24), conflating an owner’s sale of a slave with a slave’s sale of sexual services to customers. Would he do this if another service were involved, like hairdressing? If a salon owner buys a slave to be a hairdresser who then sees many customers and produces money for her owner, would Kara say the hairdresser is sold thousands of times? Or would he see that her labor is sold, albeit unfairly? Questions to be asked about both cases would include: Is money earned credited toward the payment of a debt? Is the worker able to leave the workplace? Does the worker accept the character of the work but want more autonomy, different working conditions, or a (bigger) percentage of money earned? In the case of sex businesses, workplaces may actually be more comfortable and cleaner than they are in other available jobs, workers may feel safer locked in than on the streets, and they may like wearing pretty clothes and being admired. By reducing the entire world of his informants to the minutes of sex, Kara misses the big picture, whether we call it political economy, culture, or simply everyday life.

Kara proposes abolition through making slave trading and slave owning too costly. The most simplistic version of this thinking is seen in the current End Demand campaign in which complex social interactions and market theories are reduced to a truism: remove demand for commercial sex and supply must disappear. This panacea could apply only if all demand of every kind were eradicated permanently and simultaneously, as demand moves and metamorphoses to find supply. Since the sex industry is large and variegated, and since the supply side (people who sell sex as well as managers and owners of businesses) constantly adapts to new market forces, resists laws, and innovates, the fantasy that supply is 100 percent determined by demand is foolish.

We do not need to read the whole book to know that something fishy is afoot. In the first chapter, extrapolating from only four conversations with customers in one Indian brothel, Kara contends that “demand for sexual services” is highly elastic (p. 35). No responsible economist, academic or not, would dare to make claims on the basis of so little data, easily ascribed to interviewer misunderstanding, informant misinformation, both, and/or random events. But it does not stop there; Kara goes on to suggest that demand must have increased because of the “increased use of slaves” (p. 37). The absence of proof is breathtaking.

At the end of the book he presents tables purporting to show “slavery economics” (apparently unaware that others have reckoned slavery values before).[2] Within a typology of sex businesses that fails even to benefit from a sober International Labour Organization study of the sex sector [3], each table posits general assumptions that must be accepted to believe what is inferred from them. For example, Massage Parlor Economics, Kathmandu, assumes four slaves per parlor, averages ten sex acts per day, one of ten customers buys a condom, one slave is re-trafficked every six months, and 50 percent “tip” per thirty sex acts, going on to give an average price per sale of sex (table B.3). We have no idea where these figures came from, but scholars in the field will doubt Kara has much to base them on–especially since he produces thirteen other such tables, all requiring data that can only be obtained through long, repetitive, methodological research, whether in Queens or Chiang Mai (to mention two of many locations he claims to know). Kara did not do such research.

That Kara uses terms like “exploitation value” and “return on investment” should not distract us from data at best anecdotal and at worst garbage. As a Rescue Industry story, his is emblematic. Struggling to accept that not every woman who sells sex is a slave, he tries to convince a woman in Los Angeles to let him help her but finally sees that “it was not up to me to decide that Sunee’s life was more important than her father’s” (p. 182). The reader heaves a sigh of relief that Sunee was spared. The real message is moral: “The world had indeed degraded into a plague of lust, greed, deceit and violence. Untamed desire ran amok, governing the descent of man” (p. 82). Perhaps Kara reveals his underlying dream when he says “I felt like I was watching myself on a movie screen” (p. 63). Graham Greene would have known how to write about him.

Notes

[1]. John Fair, “The Georgia Slave Narratives: A Historical Conundrum,” Journal of The Historical Society 10, no. 3 (2010): 235-281; Julius Sensat, “Exploitation,” Noûs 18, no. 1 (1984): 21-38; Theresa Singleton, “The Archaeology of Slavery in North America,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 119-140; and Jessica Bowes, “Provisioned, Produced, Procured: Slave Subsistence Strategies and Social Relations at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest,” Journal of Ethnobiology 31, no. 1 (2011): 89-109.

[2]. Jim Marketti, “Black Equity in the Slave Industry,” The Review of Black Political Economy 2, no. 2 (1972): 43-66; and Robert Browne, “The Economic Basis for Reparations to Black America,” The Review of Black Political Economy 21 (1993): 99-110.

[3]. Lin Lean Lim, ed., The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1998).

PS: My title for H-Net, A Man of Moral Sentiments, is a reference to Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, which preceded his Wealth of Nations.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist, below with the friend who came as my entourage, since I told the BBC I didn’t want to go alone. Sitting close to the movie stars in the front row, she overheard one of them accuse me of resembling a holocaust denier and was the only person to applaud my comments, after which she was shunned.

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Guess a way to guess numbers of trafficking victims and win a big prize!

8 February 2012 in trafficking by laura agustin | 18 comments | print print

The Monty Python team have entered the anti-trafficking field. They must have, as who else would draft an initiative as daft as this one from the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking?

As everyone knows, it’s impossible to know how many people are real trafficked victims (they didn’t register with anyone at the border, remember). Year after year institutions claim they have got the right numbers and year after year the figures are debunked. The high-end figure I mentioned the other day – 27 million slaves worldwide – changes the terms of the guessing game to include vast new groups of people.

When the game announcement was sent around my networks yesterday, all sorts of suggestions were made: fill a jar with beans and ask someone to guess the number, count every third person that passes your window over a certain period, make up a fancy algorithm, put a keyboard in your mouth and bite down and so on. I’ve commented on some of the nuttiest lines in orange, which seems an appropriately circus-y colour.

UNIAP announces second round of human trafficking estimates competition

The UNIAP Human Trafficking Estimates Competition is a revolutionary step forward in our tackling of human trafficking and determining the prevalence of human trafficking. Revolutionary? Tackling?

UNIAP is looking for innovative, creative methodologies to estimate the number of trafficking victims, traffickers, or profits in or from Asia that are logical, feasible, and defendable. We are hoping to engage innovative, rigorous thinking find a way to get the numbers that the anti-trafficking community so desperately needs. Desperately? Could that be because so much money is spent on this with so little to show for it?

Despite the underground and clandestine nature of human trafficking, UNIAP believes it IS possible to estimate the magnitude of the crime. Ta-da! Belief is everything.

The Competition Challenges are:

Challenge 1: “Estimate the number of trafficking victims within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.”

Challenge 2: “Estimate the number of traffickers within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” Not only victims, then.

Challenge 3: “Estimate the amount of financial profit made by trafficking-related criminal activities within your chosen geographical area and sector(s) OR supply chain relating to the Mekong region.” These estimates might be the most fantastic of all.

What do you get if you win? The best entries will be short-listed by a panel of independent judges. Who? Maybe Emma Thompson? Ashton Kutcher?

Soon afterward, each short-listed entry will be brought to a final judging competition in Bangkok, to defend their approach in front of a panel of independent judges and audience. (Translation support will be available for Mekong languages). Oh! It’s a Reality Show! The best sales pitch wins! I’ll bet they televise it.

The winners will receive prizes (and glory!), but more importantly: Top entries will be published and disseminated globally, and Funding ($40,000 US) will be provided to pilot the top methodologies in the field.

How To Enter: see the Python website. Go on – put a keypunch machine on your head and see what number appears as you walk around during a six-hour period.

I know – this is impossibly silly. That’s how desperate they are.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

 

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US Trafficking Office wants your help with imperialist anti-trafficking operations

25 January 2012 in trafficking by laura agustin | 4 comments | print print

The US Trafficking in Persons Report has always failed to explain how it gets its information in more than the sketchiest of ways, as I point out in June of every year. For an instrument with so much money and potential interfering impact behind it, the TIP is as untransparent as any CIA operation.

Secrecy is a strategy that wants to make us believe we might endanger some innocent victim or jeopardise some crucial operation if we know too much. This is the excuse governments use when they are at war, when all kinds of transparency and freedom of information are characterised as dangerous, because the enemy may hear it and benefit. Once we have been frightened by the idea that sinister people will benefit if we ask questions, the government classifies the information, so we cannot see it either.

In the case of research done to find out about trafficking, the government not only doesn’t give us the details, it doesn’t give the main ideas, either. So the methodology section of the report, year after year, is a no-methodology section that just says they get information from a number of sources. Undoubtedly the CIA is relied on. The general public is invited to send whatever misgivings and fantasies they have, too, along with more substantiated claims: this invitation is buried where few will see it, like in the Federal Register. The reason I am running this bureaucratic exercise here is that anyone with reports or documents critical of government policy may also respond. Note that although they never give sources, you are expected to. The prose is tedious, but I am not cutting it.

Submissions may include written narratives that answer the questions presented in this Notice, research, studies, statistics, fieldwork, training materials, evaluations, assessments, and other relevant evidence of local, state and federal government efforts. To the extent possible, precise dates should be included. Where applicable, written narratives providing factual information should provide citations to sources and copies of the source material should be provided. If possible, send electronic copies of the entire submission, including source material. If primary sources are utilized, such as research studies, interviews, direct observations, or other sources of quantitative or qualitative data, details on the research or data-gathering methodology should be provided. The Department does not include in the report, and is therefore not seeking, information on prostitution, human smuggling, visa fraud, or child abuse, unless such conduct occurs in the context of human trafficking.

Here comes the list of what they want to know, which I’ve highlighted in places. A lot of it is dull and general, but there are opportunities to give them specific evidence critical of their own policies.

III. Information Sought Relevant to the Minimum Standards

. . . 1. How have trafficking methods changed in the past 12 months? (E.g., are there victims from new countries of origin? Is internal trafficking or child trafficking increasing? Has sex trafficking changed from brothels to private apartments? Is labor trafficking now occurring in additional types of industries or agricultural operations? Is forced begging a problem?) I suppose it won’t be so easy for them to make raids if flats are used.

2. In what ways has the government’s efforts to combat trafficking in persons changed in the past year? What new laws, regulations, policies, and implementation strategies exist (e.g., substantive criminal laws and procedures, mechanisms for civil remedies, and victim-witness security, generally, and in relation to court proceedings)?

3. Please provide observations regarding the implementation of existing laws and procedures. If you have something negative to say about raids, do it here.

4. Is the government equally vigorous in pursuing labor trafficking and sex trafficking? Let them know if they are only interested in sex.

5. Are the anti-trafficking laws and sentences strict enough to reflect the nature of the crime? Are sex trafficking sentences commensurate with rape sentences? Does this comparison make sense?

6. Do government officials understand the nature of trafficking? If not, please provide examples of misconceptions or misunderstandings. Weigh in here, by all means.

7. Do judges appear appropriately knowledgeable and sensitized to trafficking cases? What sentences have courts imposed upon traffickers? How common are suspended sentences and prison time of less than one year for convicted traffickers?

8. Please provide observations regarding the efforts of police and prosecutors to pursue trafficking cases. Tell them.

9. Are government officials (including law enforcement) complicit in human trafficking by, for example, profiting from, taking bribes, or receiving sexual services for allowing it to continue? Are government officials operating trafficking rings or activities? If so, have these government officials been subject to an investigation and/or prosecution? What punishments have been imposed?

10. Has the government vigorously investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced nationals of the country deployed abroad as part of a peacekeeping or other similar mission who engage in or facilitate trafficking?

11. Has the government investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced organized crime groups that are involved in trafficking?

12. Is the country a source of sex tourists and, if so, what are their destination countries? Is the country a destination for sex tourists and, if so, what are their source countries? This is beyond ridiculous. They don’t define sex tourism, and I feel sure they receive bagfuls of silly anecdotal stuff about foreigners, older men seen with young people and heaven knows what else. Shows the tendency to lump everything into one bag, trafficking.

13. Please provide observations regarding government efforts to address the issue of unlawful child soldiering.

14. Does the government make a coordinated, proactive effort to identify victims? Is there any screening conducted before deportation to determine whether individuals were trafficked?

15. What victim services are provided (legal, medical, food, shelter, interpretation, mental health care, health care, repatriation)? Who provides these services? If nongovernment organizations provide the services, does the government support their work either financially or otherwise?

16. How could victim services be improved? As far as I’m concerned this is the most important question we can respond to, with evidence about the inappropriate infantilisation of women placed in rehabilitation projects. Tell them.

17. Are services provided equally and adequately to victims of labor and sex trafficking? Men, women, and children? Citizen and noncitizen? Tell them.

18. Do service organizations and law enforcement work together cooperatively, for instance, to share information about trafficking trends or to plan for services after a raid? What is the level of cooperation, communication, and trust between service organizations and law enforcement?

19. May victims file civil suits or seek legal action against their trafficker? Do victims avail themselves of those remedies?

20. Does the government repatriate victims? Does the government assist with third country resettlement? Does the government engage in any analysis of whether victims may face retribution or hardship upon repatriation to their country of origin? Are victims awaiting repatriation or third country resettlement offered services? Are victims indeed repatriated or are they deported?

21. Does the government inappropriately detain or imprison identified trafficking victims? Tell them.

22. Does the government punish trafficking victims for forgery of documents, illegal immigration, unauthorized employment, or participation in illegal activities directed by the trafficker?

23. What efforts has the government made to prevent human trafficking?

24. Are there efforts to address root causes of trafficking such as poverty; lack of access to education and economic opportunity; and discrimination against women, children, and minorities?

25. Does the government undertake activities that could prevent or reduce vulnerability to trafficking, such as registering births of indigenous populations?

26. Does the government provide financial support to NGOs working to promote public awareness or does the government implement such campaigns itself? Have public awareness campaigns proven to be effective?

27. Please provide additional recommendations to improve the government’s anti-trafficking efforts.

28. Please highlight effective strategies and practices that other governments could consider adopting.

Department of State Public Notice 7744

Here is the introduction to these questions. Note the deadline is obnoxiously soon.

Request for Information for the 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report

Summary: The Department of State (“the Department”) requests written information to assist in reporting on the degree to which the United States and foreign governments comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking in persons (“minimum standards”) that are prescribed by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, (Div. A, Pub. L. 106-386) as amended (“TVPA”). This information will assist in the preparation of the Trafficking in Persons Report (“TIP Report”) that the Department submits annually to appropriate committees in the U.S. Congress on countries’ level of compliance with the minimum standards. Foreign governments that do not comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so may be subject to restrictions on nonhumanitarian, nontrade-related foreign assistance from the United States, as defined by the TVPA. Submissions must be made in writing to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the Department of State by February 13, 2012. Please refer to the Addresses, Scope of Interest and Information Sought sections of this Notice for additional instructions on submission requirements.

DATES: Submissions must be received by the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons by 5 p.m. on February 13, 2012.

ADDRESSES: Written submissions and supporting documentation may be submitted to the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons by the following methods: Read the rest of this entry »

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Clean-cut girls: Something must be wrong if they are selling sex

18 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 2 comments | print print

Jess Stearn began his 1956 Sisters of the Night with the famous question Why do women become prostitutes? During his research in New York to find out, Stearn was introduced to different types of women who sell sex. Actually they were women who used different methods to find clients and varying ways to describe what they were doing, but typecasting was and remains popular with unsubtle investigators.

In the 1950s, prostitutes were considered to be separable women: not born bad but becoming bad through not-yet-understood social processes. The type described in the following excerpt is the B-girl, so called because her job was promoting the sale of alcohol to bar clientele: conversing, flirting, flattering drinkers – anything to make them stay at the bar ordering more drinks. A New York City police inspector wonders how such nice-looking girls could be so – bad.

. . . We picked up two girls in the raid. You should have seen them—a blonde and a brunette. They were knockouts. I’ll bet you never saw two better-looking girls in your life–both about twenty-two, the kind any young fellow would go nuts about. I’ve seen a lot in my forty years in the department, but these kids beat anything yet. You just can’t tell a book by the cover any more. They don’t wear make-up, they stare at you with those wide eyes of theirs, and with their skirts and sweaters and saddle shoes they look as if they had just stepped off a college campus. And do you know what? Some of them have. I had a pair in here the other day and I felt like apologizing to them—they looked so sweet and pure. So I watch the way I talk in front of them, and they talk back to me like prostitutes.

The inspector is shocked that women with a clean-cut appearance should be hanging out in certain bars – perhaps in any bars, if they are not accompanied by a male.

Many of these girls, I had learned myself, had drifted into prostitution from the easy promiscuity of Manhattan’s West Side bars. Touring these honkytonk bars night after night, from eleven oclock, when they begin to crowd up, until three or four in the morning, when they close, I had met the B-girls. Occasionally I was accompanied by an H-man (an investigator from the US Public Health Service), whose job it was to track down carriers of venereal disease. The B-girls (B for bar) converge on Manhattan from all over the nation, but many are native New Yorkers. They boast of their ‘amateur standing’ and prefer servicemen, who usually pay them nothing, to civilians, who are prepared to offer liberal rewards.

This is confusing: The inspector says some B-girls got into prostitution because they were (too) promiscuous, but then he says they prefer servicemen who don’t pay them.

All we can do about those B-girls is keep them moving, and then they find another bar someplace else. A lot of them start at sixteen, and if they don’t make the grade by the time they’re twenty-five they’re out in the streets ready to settle for anybody.

And here the idea is that prostitutes either make it or not, which implies there is a hierarchy they are trying to move up in, kind of in contradiction to the story that they are amateurs. Stearn went out to find B-girls and talk to them:

We don’t take money for ourselves, a teenager told me in a bar near Times Square. I’ve helped out sailors more than they’ve helped me. But if they have money and want to leave it for the rent or a new dress, that’s different. pp 24-25

By the 1990s Lawrence Block could have a nice young woman say (in Eight Million Ways to Die):

I mean, I’m not a hooker. I’m a girlfriend. I don’t get paid. They give me money because I’ve got rent to pay and, you know, I’m a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she’s never going to.

You don’t hear about B-girls in New York anymore, but the term Bar Girl (along with hostess and beer girl) is ubiquitous in Southeast Asia, with the same ambiguity as to whether the job stops with talking or moves on, when the shift is over, to sex work. The clean-cut qualities of bar girls are often mentioned by reporters, as though there were a fundamental contradiction there – as though, after all, it’s a certain type of female that goes into this business – or ought to.

I finished Sisters of the Night and will report on its conclusions forthwith.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sisters of the Night: why prostitution research is the way it is

7 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 15 comments | print print

From where we stand now, it seems obvious: people begin selling sex for a variety of reasons, none of them being they were born destined to do it. As I mentioned the other day discussing research on clients, social scientists and the Rescue Industry alike now disbelieve the notion that a prostitute type exists amongst women.

The book Sisters of the Night: The confidential story of Big-City Prostitution, published in 1956, goes some way toward explaining a question I’ve had, to wit: why has there been such a large quantity of research attempting to find out why women sell sex? When I first started reading this material in 1997, as a complete outsider to academic research, I could not understand why book after book and article after article asked the same questions: why did you start selling sex? when? were you abused as a child? and so on.

Sisters of the Night is based on an investigation by Jess Stearn, a New York journalist and author of many books. He was assigned to research not the what of prostitution but the why - in his words.

‘The more I explore,’ I told Chief Magistrate John Murtagh, head of New York’s famed Women’s Court, ‘the more I realize how little I understand these women.’

The Chief Magistrate smiled sympathetically. ‘They call it the Oldest Profession,’ he said drily, ‘and yet nobody really knows what makes these girls tick. The prostitute has never been understand by our courts. Indeed, she is still an enigma to science itself. Because of this lack of scientific knowledge, the degree of moral responsibility is essentially a matter that must be left to the Lord himself.

There were other official indications of the complexities of prostitution. Dorris Clarke, chief probation officer of the Magistrates Courts, who has interviewed more than ten thousand prostitutes, observed with a shrug:  ”’Psychiatry has been a help, but six different psychiatrists, handling the same case, may still come up with six different answers.’

From our present perspective, two things stand out: 1) the assumption that selling sex means having a terrible life for all women who do it and 2) a confidence that psychology can explain what’s going on – ie, why women start to do it. Stearn continues:

. . . prostitution is one of the damning paradoxes of our time. It is a social problem which cannot be understood apart from other social problems – a postwar deterioration of morality, the alarming increase of dope addiction among teenagers, political corruption and the double standard which makes it a crime for a women to prostitute herself, where her partner in prostitution goes scot-free.

Which seems more or less contemporary: it can’t be extracted from socioeconomic issues. And note in 1956 he already mentions the asymmetrical nature of punishment. Jumping a few lines, though, Stearn says:

The move to control prostitution legally has been losing ground. . . Long experience has shown that legalization is no remedy. The International Venereal Disease Congress, which voted overwhelmingly thirty years ago for legalized prostitution, recently voted just as overwhelmingly against it. It was no safeguard, the group found, against VD, for the simple reason that five minutes after she was examined a girl might be infected again. And the licensing of brothels, the American Social Hygiene Association discovered, makes it easier for girls to begin their careers and forms a convenient center of operations for racketeers and dope pushers. No, legalization was not the answer, and neither were jails, which became practically schools for prostitutes, where young offenders learned about perversion and dope and became further indoctrinated in the tricks of the trade.

Which leaves Stearn where? Somehow he manages to ignore his socioeconomic links a page later when he says:

It became obvious to me . . .that only a real understanding of these women, of their relationships from childhood, and of their outlook on society and on life in general could lead us to a solution. Other scourges of Biblical times have been extirpated by modern science – why not prostitution? But first must come understanding of the girl and her problem.

Back to psychology, then – in the 50s considered more scientific than it is today. Find out which experiences cause which perverse behaviours and you know who becomes a prostitute. Stearn now lists some of the apparent conundrums:

  • What makes a teenage girl say sullenly to a probattion officer who is trying to help her: ‘It’s my body. Why can’t I do with it what I want?’
  • Or why does another observe slyly: ‘If it weren’t for us, no woman would be safe on the streets. We’re the great outlet.’
  • Why does a girl, able to shift for herself, become attached to a procurer, who mistreats her and takes her money?
  • And why does still another pin on the wall of her cell a portrait of a muscled brute in loincloth, a whip in one hand, and kneeling behind him in chains a nude girl, arms raised in adoration?
  • And why does a girl, while bitterly justifying her own prostitution, say with a gleam of hate in her eyes: ‘I’d kill the man who’d make a prostitute of my sister.’
  • Or why does a pretty teenager, given  separate suite by doting parents, convert her flat into a brothel and the, impenitently, view it all as an ironic joke on her parents?
  • Why did Anna Swift, one of the most notorious of madams, boast of her virginity and savagely declare she was seeking revenge?
  • And why does a former prostitute, comfortable married for years, revert to her old trade at the first crisis in her marriage?

Wouldn’t you think he’d realise himself that there isn’t going to be a single determining cause for such a wealth of situations and behaviours? Well, maybe he did realise it perfectly well, but asking the question was his assignment: the why of prostitution. I now turn back to the preface by Peter Terranova, a police inspector in charge of the Narcotics Squad at the time:

Secrecy has a queer way of adding glamor and mystery to a subject. Rip away the Hypocrites’ Curtain surrounding prostitution and the whole community will finally recognize that it’s just another social evil which may be tackled with intelligence and perhaps cut down, if not completely eliminated.

In the 50s possibly only a vice cop would have used the term social evil unselfconsciously. What can be seen here clearly is the justification for the kind of research that has predominated on the subject of commercial sex for all these decades: the focus on why women sell. The idea is find the reason(s) and eradicate them, despite everyone’s realisation that the reasons are going to turn out to be widely diverging, if not downright contradictory. Still, the idea of the bad girl is very much still alive here, with the badness (or evil) seen to be a matter of character, something that psychology can elucidate. For the psychologists amongst my readers, I am not saying that psychological theories are useless, or that Stockholm Syndrome never exists, or brainwashing, or denial, to explain individual cases. As in the past, my critique goes to the wholesale explaining of hundreds of thousands of people as suffering from these syndromes, by default.

So far no interest has been shown in men who sell sex, despite equally well-known scenes like Los Angeles’s cruising as described by John Rechy. I will advise on this and other matters as I advance in the book.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Men who buy sex: a nasty group whose DNA should be on file

4 January 2012 in sex work by laura agustin | 16 comments | print print

A few months ago, Melissa Farley published a story in Newsweek with a lot of dire comments about men who buy sex as the cause of prostitution and violence towards sex workers. The research paper behind that story is more scientific and less irresponsible than her previous work, thank goodness. I don’t believe there is some absolute real scientific vision we can bring to social research, but there are better and worse attempts, and this one is better. For one thing, it used the usually omitted mechanism of the control group, here comparing men who buy sex (her pathologised group) with men who don’t buy sex (belonging to the same demographic).

Farley does not like the oft-heard notion that such large numbers of men buy sex at some point in their life it becomes almost normal, since that might justify fatalistically accepting commercial sex as a timeless aspect of life impossible to eradicate. The research here concludes that men who buy sex are different from men who don’t, associated, for one thing, with other criminal activities. This leads Farley to recommend treating them more like criminals – specifically, like sex offenders. In Creating Monsters I warned that, the way things are going in the End Demand movement, clients could be conceptualised as a new category of sex offender, to be placed on the infamous registers that make living a conventional life nearly impossible for many. It turns out a few US states had already started thinking this way, and so had Farley.

She claims that non-sex-buying men are better men, based on their responses to her questions. But there is something not right in her logic, in how the supposed control group is conceived, so that she makes a point of relating what the non-buyers (the control) think about the buyers.

We asked both groups of men what words they would use to describe sex buyers. All (100%) of the sex buyers described themselves in terms of dominance (player, stud, powerful). There were differences in the descriptors they used, with more non-sex buyers labeling buyers as losers, unethical, or desperate. Fewer non-sex buyers labeled buyers as normal or as studs/players/powerful than did sex buyers (Table 12).

I am not sure why the opinions of one group of men about the other should have any bearing on the research, by the way, but, if it does, then the research needs to be balanced and tell us what the buyers said about the non-buyers. Right? I mean, maybe the buyers would say the non-buyers are losers or scaredy-cats. But the idea of control groups is not to ask one to comment on the other, and it seems to me that this asymmetry will have influenced how people responded and what the results appear to show. She doesn’t supply her questionnaire, so checking isn’t possible.

Another problem with interview technology is that the non-buyers might say nicer things about women, but we don’t know how they actually behave. Just as saying ugly things about women is disagreeable but does not in itself prove that those speaking are going to do anything bad.

Farley, however, aims to promote the idea that there is a particular type of man who buys sex, a sexist-pig type. So if we are dealing with a small, nasty group, it should be easier to wipe out prostitution. The trouble is this very view began to be debunked not so long ago in papers like The Sex Exploiter, which suggest instead that men buy sex opportunistically: not necessarily seeking out underage sex partners, for example, but rather not bothering to investigate their age. This means anyone can become a sex buyer, the way anyone can become a sex seller, given the right circumstances. And, by the way, not pathologising prostitutes as a special group (innately prone to vice) is considered everywhere an advance in our understanding of human behaviour, so why would we not do the same for clients?

In addition to placing clients on sex-offender lists, the report recommends mandatory DNA testing:

Given the criminal history of sex buyers documented in this research, one would anticipate that other criminal activity including sexual violence might occur in the future. Obtaining DNA samples from arrested johns may be useful to consider matches with evidence obtained in past and future crimes. DNA samples would be predicted to serve as a deterrent to buying sex since most people who commit crimes do not want their DNA taken.

They might do something bad later as justification for taking their DNA? Is this kind of policing really part of a utopic plan for equality of the sexes? Her Table 20. List of Esteemed Supporters for Taking DNA Samples From Arrested Sex Buyers does not help. Here we have the now well-known alliance of some feminists with Law and Order, or Discipline and Punishment, if you will.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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