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Sex workers and Violence against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

13 January 2012 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 14 comments | print print

The other day, discussing the recommendation that DNA should be taken from men who buy sex, I ended with a question: how can anyone maintain a utopic vision about gender equality that relies on punishing so many people as criminals? That reminded me I had asked the same question in an article published more than ten years ago.

Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its basic ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime? Click for the pdf or keep reading here.

Sexworkers and Violence Against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?

Laura Maria Agustín

Development, 44.3, 107-110 (2001)

Sexual exploitation and prostitution

In the movement to construct a discourse of ‘violence against women’, and thus to raise consciousness about kinds of mistreatment which before were invisible, the stage has been reached where defining crime and achieving punishment appears to be the goal. While it is progressive to raise consciousness about violence and exploitation in an attempt to deter the commitment of crimes, I hope to show that the present emphasis on discipline is very far from a utopic vision and that we should now begin to move toward other suggestions for solutions.

The following argument uses the example of prostitution or ‘sexual exploitation’ as an instance of ‘violence against women’, but the approach can apply to any attempt to deal with not only definitions of gender and sexual violence but with proposals to deal with them. When applied to adult prostitution, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ attempts to change language to make ‘voluntary’ prostitution impossible. For those who wish to ‘abolish’ prostitution, therefore, this change in terms represents progress, for now language itself will not be complicit with the violence involved. For those who may or may not want to ‘abolish’ prostitution but who in the present put the priority on improving the everyday lot of prostitutes, this language change totalizes a variety of situations involving different levels of personal will and makes it more difficult to propose practical solutions. When applied to the prostitution of children, the term ‘sexual exploitation’ represents a project to change perceptions about childhood. For those who believe that the current western model of childhood as a time of innocence should become the ‘right’ of all children in the world, this term is very important.

Criminalization of clients

Efforts to change sexist, racist and other discriminatory forms of language have long been a focus of projects of social justice in western societies, and the push to define ‘violence against women’ clearly forms part of this movement. Along with this, we see a strong move to have actions that fall within these new definitions proclaimed as crimes and their perpetrators punished. If prostitution is globally redefined as sexual exploitation (by ‘globally’ I mean that no distinctions are made according to whether prostitutes say they ‘chose’ sex work to any extent), therefore, all those who purchase sexual services, called usually ‘clients’, become ‘exploiters’. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Conceit of Nicholas Kristof: Rescuing sex slaves as saintliness

22 November 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 35 comments | print print

Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.

Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:

In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.

Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA  label like seventh grader. His next claim was:

In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*

Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.

But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?

Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.

A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:

But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.

There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Sex at the Margins in Vancouver: sex trafficking, migrant sex work and rescue

17 November 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

Grassroots activists have raised money for me to go to Vancouver, British Columbia. If you come to this talk, you get to pass through this beautiful space downtown, on the West Coast of Canada.

Here is the announcement from the organisers:

FIRST is proud to host Laura Agustín, an internationally renowned sex worker rights advocate and an expert on undocumented migration and informal labour markets. She will be giving a talk based on her book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry.

Sunday 27 November 2011
7:00pm – 9:30pm (1900 – 2130)
Vancouver Public Library Central Branch
350 West Georgia Street
Alma VanDusen & Peter Kaye Room (lower level)
Vancouver, British Columbia

Map

Admission by donation – no one turned away
Wheelchair accessible room and washrooms

Other sponsors
The Women’s and Gender Studies Program, UBC
The Naked Truth
PACE
BC Coalition of Experiential Communities
Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women – Canada


–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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The Thrill of Rescue: trafficking, slavery and prestige

16 November 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 9 comments | print print

In chapter four of Sex at the Margins, I look at history, at the period when the bourgeoisie started to define what society should look like and how everybody should live (whilst nobility and monarchy were fading from power). I did this historical research to try to understand what saving prostitutes was about, how it began and why. The result of that research was really revealing, showing how the role of Rescuer depends on the existence of Victims who need Rescue because their ways of life appear to be wrong. If you want the full-strength theoretical version, read Helping Women Who Sell Sex. The Rescuer gains a positive sense of identity, of Doing Good.

I do not mean to sneer at anyone’s feelings about life’s meaning or the desire to diminish injustice. But it is important not to take at face value claims to be Helping, Saving or Rescuing just because people say that is what they are doing. I take note of how the Rescue Industry sustains itself and grows, how the cultural meaning of helping and saving changes over time, and I am interested in who gets involved and what they say about their actions.

In the midst of economic crisis, intransigent armed conflicts, increasing socio-economic inequality and general anomie, anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns flourish, with more people and more money involved all the time. Presumably it just feels good, being able to be part of something Big and also something apparently Simple, in which everyone can agree: Slavery is bad. Look at images of Rescue Operations, with people rushing in to save others they don’t know from fires and earthquakes: some people find these actions to be the height of nobility.

Celebrities jump on bandwagons for the sake of publicity, which we may giggle over (consider Ashton Kutcher, Emma Thompson and Mira Sorvino.) But the following comments, which come from a serious person, struck me. Kristen Lindsey expresses a sense of thrill at getting to be part of the anti-slavery crusade, at having arrived on time to Do Something about a social scourge. Her words actually make me slightly queasy: the presence of suffering makes her glad because it gives her Important Work to do. The construction of her own identity is the point.

None of us are free, Kristen Lindsey, 26 October 2011, The Huffington Post

… Growing up, just after the 1960s, I feared that I had missed my chance to take part in the most important movement in our country. I now know that I have found my place — and that all of us can step up and join a movement that matters. This year, I became CEO of The Global Fund for Children…

…The torch has been passed to us. Putting an end to modern day slavery is our civil rights movement. Now it’s our time to make a difference, and we must continue to work together to ensure that people everywhere are free.

Anyone who still thinks this movement is about women who sell sex: Wake up. It’s gone way, way past that.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Lost Boys and the disclaimer about sex-trafficked ‘foreigners’

12 November 2011 in sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 1 comment | print print

Those who want to save women and children from sex trafficking have a ready-made excuse every time research shows people have taken up selling sex for their own reasons: Whatever methodology was used for the study could have missed the really enslaved people, the ones in chains in a back bedroom or cellar.

This idea is not informed by quantities of research carried out with migrants who sell sex, including my own, and fails to see how difficult it would be to hide people for long who, by definition, are meeting and interacting with members of the public (as clients) every day, and who cannot provide sexual services while chained up or tied down. Moral crusaders promote the idea that all possible customers are monsters who don’t mind violating slaves, but the majority of those buying sex are not demons and are likely to be disturbed by miserable-looking women and sometimes willing to carry distress messages to the world outside.

The Rescue Industry always transfers the conversation to a discussion of the Worst Cases, avoiding the ambiguous, ambivalent, everyday majority who sell sex – which is the large group of people I insist need more attention. It’s not a question of who’s happy or whether life is fair but of what kinds of proposals are useful to those selling sex, or, if Rescuers are not interested in them, what interventions have a chance of ameliorating injustice and social conflict.

The study discussed by the Village Voice last week is not new but was published in 2008; these are the relevant excerpts commenting on the research methodology.

Lost Boys
Kristen Hinman, The Village Voice, 2 November 2011

. . . Finkelhor’s single caveat: While RDS is efficient in circulating through a broad range of social networks, certain scenarios might elude detection—specifically, foreign children who might be held captive and forbidden to socialize.

. . . “It turns out that the boys were the more effective recruiter of pimped girls than anybody else,” Curtis says. “It’s interesting, because this myth that the pimps have such tight control over the girls, that no one can talk to them, is destroyed by the fact that these boys can talk to them and recruit them and bring them to us. Obviously the pimps couldn’t have that much of a stranglehold on them.”

The same, of course, might be true of the elusive foreign-born contingent Finkelhor mentions.

Curtis and Dank believe there is indeed a foreign subpopulation RDS could not reach. But with no data to draw on, it’s impossible to gauge whether it’s statistically significant or yet another overblown stereotype. . .

So, no evidence means the possibility is still open, but how likely is it that this possibility will involve large numbers of people after years and years now of Rescuers and researchers trying diligently to find them? Not very likely, is the answer. The old cliche about hidden populations is abused easily.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le lieu est accessible aux fauteuils roulants par ascenseur.

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

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

Contact: alliancefeministesolidaire[at]gmail.com

***

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

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

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

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

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

Wheelchair-accessible by elevator.

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

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

Contact: alliancefeministesolidaire[at]gmail.com

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Have fun, take a tour to meet victims of sex trafficking, learn to be a saviour

29 September 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 16 comments | print print

People have different opinions about tourism by richer people to look at how poor people live. You can argue that it is better that they see some piece of reality themselves rather than swallow whole what is shown in the media (and optimistically hope they know they are being misled by them). Or be glad they prefer an educational trip to a hedonistic beach holiday, or that they are curious about the world outside their own comfy patch. And obviously the individuals who sign up for these things are all different and many must be well-meaning (awful word) and genuinely eager to learn.

Or you may, like me, view this as Rescue Industry prurience rooted in racism and colonialism (an aspect of helpers’ own identity formation). You may wish to tear your hair out simply at the thought of a tour catalogue displaying different kinds of social problems to feel horrified about and different human beings to feel pity for. But that is what Global Exchange offers in the form of Reality Tours – and human trafficking is a staple item. This tourism is veiled in language that makes tourists advocates. Here’s the description from last year’s week-long trip; new trips are listed for Perú, Uganda, Cambodia. I’ve added boldface as an emotional expression not only about the ideas but the trite language!

Thailand : Not For Sale Advocacy Delegation on Human Trafficking

Accurate statistics are difficult to compile, but it is believed that between 600,00 and 800,000 human beings are trafficked across international borders each year- 80% of them women and children. [blah blah, the usual] . . .The numbers are staggering, and actually confronting them and the shattered lives they represent can be an overwhelming prospect. Yet we are not powerless in the face of this monstrous industry, and the first step towards bringing it to a halt is education. In partnership with the Not for Sale Campaign against human trafficking, Global Exchange Reality Tours is facilitating this delegation to Thailand geared specifically to confronting the realities of the global trade in human beings.

Participants will receive a comprehensive education in the mechanics of human trafficking, as well as an understanding of its underlying causes. Participants will meet with those who have been freed from slavery and learn what it means to rebuild one’s life after having been a victim of trafficking. They, will also engage directly with groups and individuals on the frontlines of the struggle . . . We will visit vulnerable communities targeted by traffickers, learn effective strategies for undermining slave rings, and experience first hand how emancipated slaves rebuild their lives. Upon return, Global Exchange and Not for Sale will integrate the insights of the trip directly into an understanding of the nature of human trafficking in the United States and the meaning of working globally on backyard abolitionist activities.

Cost: $1,000 Includes:
All accommodations in 3-star and above hotels. Price is for shared double room- we can usually pair you up with a roommate.
All in-country transportation
Two meals per day
Tour leaders and guides
All program activities and translation
All entrance fees
Preparatory reading materials
Global Exchange membership
Donation to NFS

Plus airfare, of course. I wonder how large these groups get?

Picture of Nicholas Kristof, who does his own kind of reality tourism, from aidlolz.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

10 September 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 7 comments | print print

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

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

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

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

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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Even sex-trafficked brothel workers reject raids and rescues

21 August 2011 in migration, sex work, trafficking by laura agustin | 10 comments | print print

For campaigners like Ashton Kutcher, sex slavery is an easy-to-recognise phenomenon with a single obvious cure, rescue: first by police and then by social workers. And despite rescuers’ avowed respect for personal stories, they never listen to voices that criticise this cure. The poster below was made by migrant sex workers (they call themselves that) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the EMPOWER centre. I have posted it before but so many people are still unaware of the problems associated with Rescue that I like to re-run 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 even celebrities and then think twice about how you will Fix Their Lives so easily.

• 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. Check the rescue tag to read more, including stories of sex workers resisting arrest and fleeing from rescuers.

During my 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. Here’s another view:

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Marriages called human trafficking whether women want them or not: Egypt and the Gulf

29 July 2011 in trafficking by laura agustin | 3 comments | print print

What is gained by using the one word, trafficking, to describe a wide variety of social phenomena? Campaigners will say that they want to show that everything they have decided is an improper way for women to live or get by must be named and shamed as violence (whether people went along with or initiatied the activities or not, as we know). So we have seen how surrogate motherhood, sex tourism by lgbt people and marriage broking are all glossed as trafficking, with relationships reduced to exploiter and victim. In the article I’m considering here, several kinds of instrumentally motivated marriages are all called trafficking, and I see no benefit in it at all.

When I hear about a phenomenon, I want the details of how it works: who does what and how those involved talk about what they are doing. If some so-called authority with an ngo and an agenda simply tells me here’s another bad thing to condemn and outlaw, give us more support so we can get rid of it I automatically wonder what else is going on. I am not sure the authority-figure is lying, no. But I see the moralising and the personal agenda and want to hear from others, too.

This article uses several terms without defining them (seasonal, transactional and temporary marriages) and also contradicts itself. It is instructive to go through the sequence of ideas; my comments are interspersed:

A summer industry: Egyptian brides for Gulf visitors (24 July 2011, Al-Masry Al-Youm)

As Egypt enters the peak of summer, there is a shadow economy that few dare to discuss: “Seasonal” or “transactional” marriages between Egyptian women and wealthy men from Arab Gulf countries.

Journalism 101 teaches that you need to define such key concepts right away. Do you imagine their meanings are obvious? On the contrary, transactional is associated with a sex-money exchange usually contrasted with marriage. Unless you are alluding to this Christian sort of idea about wives thinking they have to have sex with husbands as part of the contract. And what do you mean by seasonal? Do you just mean summertime?

These marriages, which often involve women below the legal age of 18, are temporary and illegal marriage contracts and one of the most common forms of human trafficking in Egypt. Transactional marriages are considered a form of human trafficking because women are recruited and sold for the purpose of sexual exploitation internally or across borders.

Okay. But

The practice may not necessarily be associated with force, fraud or coercion.

So then in those cases, trafficking isn’t the right word – correct? Read the rest of this entry »

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