violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men and football: the assumption that these make a super-volatile combination that will lead to violence against women is everywhere, yet there is no real research backing it up. It feels intuitive, something like Oh my god, they get so worked up and nationalistic at those matches, they scream and take off their shirts, and look at how some hooligans bash each other, and they get so drunk they don’t know what they’re doing. Okay, but the connexion with sex is? Some think that these activities involve a rise in testosterone, which could mean fans become rapacious about wanting to have sex, and in their blind fervour go racing off to fuck anything in sight. Or, correlations have been made between drinking alcohol in heavy quantities and becoming aggressive - for some people, not all - but the aggression usually comes in the form of fighting amongst other drinking men. Or is the idea that some general amoral, violent side rises up via the enthusiasm for sport in a way that makes fans want to grab women? Sometimes the assumption is just that when bunches of guys get together they are liable to run amok. The World Cup is feared to bring out the worst in its fans.

It’s muddled thinking, however. Stag parties, in which groups of men ritualistically drink and whoop it up together, often have a sexual element, but that usually consists of paying dancers or sex workers to come perform. That’s a contract in a party setting, not the rape of the Sabine women. It’s certainly true that drinking men in celebrating groups like to flirt at or harrass women, talk about sex to them and tell each other about their sexual exploits. All that can be annoying or threatening but cannot be taken as evidence that these men are more likely to visit sex workers or behave badly with them if they do. And, of course, if they drink enough there is definite evidence that both the ability and desire to have sex diminish.

It seems some are also afraid that fans will contract hiv during the World Cup. Is the assumption that they will lose their heads completely and forget to use condoms, in the general havoc? This stuff gets pretty loony, fitting in with the false claim of 40 000 trafficked prostitutes in 2006.

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

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

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

Below this story follows some background from Médecins Sans Frontières.

Migrants evacuated from southern Italian town 

9 January 2010, BBC

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

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

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

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

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

Italy: MSF Assists Migrant Workers Living in Appalling Conditions

29 September 2009, Médecins Sans Frontières 

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

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

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

Sex worker Susan Davis advocates the decriminalization of prostitution

Clients as monsters and misfits, exploiters and rapists, dysfunctional or weird: that’s how many who hate prostitution and the sex industry generalise all men who buy sex (they skim over women who buy sex because that’s not the gender-equality road they want to follow.) If you attend meetings where sex workers are present, you will hear another story, in which all sorts of guys buy sex for all sorts of reasons, most of them quite ordinary. In these excerpts a researcher amongst clients also speaks up.

Sex workers defend buyers

Shadi Elien, Straight.com, 26 November 2009

Veteran sex worker Susan Davis wants people to know that her “clients aren’t the bogeymen they are made out to be. I love what I do,” Davis told the Georgia Straight in an interview at the Vancouver Public Library’s central branch. “I think the guys are the best; a lot of them are my friends. Some I’ve known for 18 years. How do you not become emotionally attached?”

Davis, who has been in the business for 23 years, insisted that stability and security for sex workers can only come with decriminalization of prostitution. FIRST, a national coalition of feminists who support sex workers’ rights, hosted a lively forum on the subject at the library on November 23. Davis, who was on the panel, suggested that men who buy sex can actually help enhance the safety of those in the trade. “I think that clients are our biggest resource in trying to combat exploitation, trafficking, and exploitation of youth within the sex industry,” declared Davis, a member of the West Coast Cooperative of Sex Industry Professionals, in the interview.

Another panellist, SFU sociology instructor and researcher Chris Atchison, echoed Davis’s sentiments. He revealed the results of an extensive three-year study—called “Johns’ Voice”—that documents the relationship between buyers and sellers of sex in Canada. “I wanted to understand how these men engage in purchasing behaviour and what their relationships with sex-trade workers are about,” Atchison told the audience. “I wanted to know whether social and legal intervention such as the Swedish model is warranted by any empirical evidence.”. .

. . . The men he spoke to were seeking companionship and a connection with the sex workers they patronized, he said, adding that they wanted to engage in a safe and respectful relationship. He also reported that many customers saw the same sex worker for months or years, and that 79 percent said they wished to see prostitution decriminalized and regulated.

“I’m not here to present a picture of the sex buyer as some wonderful guy or say that they are all great, salt-of-the-earth people,” he said. The “Johns’ Voice” project showed that between one and two percent of clients have been brutally violent toward a sex worker. Those are the people the law must address, according to Atchison. . .

At the end of this piece published the other day I talk about a step I’ve long considered to be part of a partial solution for the myriad problems associated with undocumented migration. Often, in the victim narratives that surround irregular migrants, it’s assumed that all find employment only because they can be brutally exploited and underpaid. The employment scene is more diverse than that, and often people might be employed - chosen for a job, that is - but employers aren’t allowed to hire them. The work permit system allows migrants to work only in the place and manner specified in the first application: no job-switching is possible. And those who’ve got into a country illegally cannot apply for a work permit for a legal job. The inflexibility does no good for anyone’s economy.

The Ease of Righteous Causes: What to feel about undocumented migration

London Progressive Journal, Issue 98, 27 November 2009

It was easier when one could talk about asylum as a benevolent offering to virtuous people downtrodden in their own countries. It was easier when the category of refugee seemed transparent, when we knew about fewer armed conflicts and less, perhaps, about who was Right and who was Wrong. It was easier to be a country that could openly say Come here. We care. We are a civilised people and will help you.

Now that there are too many people asking for asylum and calling themselves refugees – ‘too many’ being an unquantifiable number – it is not so easy. One can still try to limit the talk to the most egregious armed conflicts, the biggest ones, or the ones where the good guys can more easily be distinguished from the bad. But one has the sense of the ground slipping away beneath the conversation.

The other day I saw Welcome, Philippe Lioret’s film about the miserable situation in and near Calais, where French police tear down wretched shelters whilst young men cry. It’s a good film but takes the easy path as far as the protagonist’s reason for wanting to reach Britain: he is in love with a girl in London. This romance allows anyone who watches the film to identify with his quest and root for him as he swims the Channel. But what if the romantic motive were missing?

Anti-immigration voices use the term ‘economic migrants’ as a pejorative, an accusation against people who don’t qualify as refugees from officially (and arbitrarily) designated conflicts. In the current climate, a migrant is actually more likely to be sympathised with if he or she presents as a victim than as an able-bodied person willing to take almost any sort of paid job available. Or, in the case of Welcome, if he is in love.

Many looking at the images of smashed camps around Calais would like to know why those sad young men insist, against every obstacle, on remaining there and continuing to try to get into Britain. One said, in response to a reporter’s question, that there is respect for human rights in the UK. He may really believe that, but the same sort of ‘respect’, for what it’s worth, exists in other European countries. Given the extreme difficulty now of getting through the Channel Tunnel and into non-Schengen Britain, it’s logical to wonder why they don’t turn left to Spain or right to Belgium or almost anywhere else in Europe.

Rather than believe that the UK is a human-rights paradise, we should understand that such migrants are trying to get here simply because that’s where their networks led them. When these men were thinking about leaving home they talked to everyone they could about the possibilities. If family, friends or paid smugglers had led them to another European capital, that’s where they would be. And that’s where they’d now be facing different problems, less interesting to media cameras than those in Calais. But their networks brought them to the north of France, and the same networks cannot now provide an alternate plan – particularly not from far away, back in Afghanistan or Iran.

At this point – the point experienced by Welcome’s hero – to find that it’s near impossible to get across the Channel is staggering. One got this far on information that was paid for. Now the last few stages turn out to be much harder than promised. Those unable to swim for ten hours in cold water face options of paying an unknown local smuggler, hanging on in place, despite French police actions, or changing life-plans drastically without good advice. Even an environment as hostile as Calais can seem better than a complete unknown.

The story is similar for many women migrants described as trafficked in the mainstream media. When thinking about leaving home, they, too, talked to everyone they could about the possible options. They also followed routes known to family, friends and smugglers. If they passed the Schengen barrier and the water surrounding the UK, it helped that their methods were different – they didn’t try to hitch a ride through the tunnel. Now, of course, they can also be described as economic migrants, and, as such, be deported if caught – unless they can prove egregious enough treatment to qualify as victims of trafficking. But the prospects for being allowed to stay with a normal residence permit are slim.

Migration is now a phenomenon that governments want to manage. A 2002 White Paper describes five techniques used to combat illegal immigration: ‘strategic enforcement measures, identity management, increasing employer compliance, greater policy co-ordination both within and between governments and regularisation.’ Other proposals refer to ‘earned regularisation’, by which illegals able to prove their social worthiness would be granted amnesty, and ‘open borders’, which would focus on getting people jobs and integrating them socially.

All are more complicated and less easy to understand than No Borders, the dream of many that has no chance of success in a Europe combining more united and centralised policies with intensified nationalisms. In this climate, things are unlikely to improve for migrants who only want to come, work and be left alone. But many on the left resist taking a pragmatic stance that would accept the current political climate. There is also a tendency to hold onto the victim-categories – the ones that show the men’s tears in Calais and talk about sexual slavery for women.

It’s harder to face up to the fact that many migrants are complicit with the dodgy enterprises that help them get new lives. Why? Because they know that there are opportunities for getting paid jobs, even if they are in the ill-named informal economy, which means they cannot be used to get work permits and visas. The jobs are there, in construction and agriculture, or as a nanny, sex worker or restaurant employee. The fact that one’s status will be illegal once one arrives recedes in importance; the fact that one will be unable to convert from illegality to legality without leaving the country can’t be expected to sink in beforehand. The object is to arrive.

In the harder context we see today, whether in London or Calais or Copenhagen or Amsterdam, the question is whether the availability of paid jobs couldn’t mean, in and of itself, that migrants can be employed legally. Forget governmental concepts like formal-informal economies for a moment. If a legal employer offers paid employment to a migrant, should that employment not allow him legal status? Why not? If he or she is paid a normal amount and taxes are paid by all, what’s the problem?

This report comes in China Labour Bulletin, a publication interested in work: jobs. The tone supposes that selling sex is not desirable but does not make a big thing of it. Instead, the unprotected status of workers as workers is highlighted. Abuses are committed by clients, police and employers, but there is no rhetoric about sex work as violence per se or about trafficking. The women discussed are migrants; the best job they could find upon arriving in the city was selling sex. But the research shows that after three years, all but a few had moved on to another job. That means that sex work was a stepping-stone to other things they had no access to immediately on arrival., which is the normal situation for migrants of all kinds. The report says they worked ‘irregular hours’, which is often interpreted to mean something negative, but which many people prefer. Note: 1000 yuan = 100 euros

Sex workers in Wuhan vulnerable and exploited

China Labour Bulletin, 23 September 2009

Young, poorly educated sex workers in the central Chinese city of Wuhan are routinely abused by clients but have little or no recourse to justice. Most do not trust the police and the vast majority (about 80 percent) have no knowledge of their legal or civil rights, according to a recently published survey

Researchers from Wuhan University interviewed 300 low-end sex workers, mainly employed in small-scale hair salons and saunas in the city’s red light district, and found that around half had been the victims of crime, with clients usually stealing money or mobile phones. Most “leisure” (休闲) establishments in Wuhan had a “pay first” policy but, nevertheless, 37 percent of the interviewees said they had been cheated by their clients. Over half the respondents said they had been verbally abused by clients, while 20 percent had been beaten or physically abused, and small number were even raped or abducted while working.

For the majority of sex workers, their only recourse in these situations was to go to their boss or their boyfriend for help, but in the majority of cases there was little the boss could do. Only 26 percent of respondents said they would definitely report an abusive client to the police, 37 percent said they would not go to the police, while the remaining 37 percent were ambivalent. Two thirds (64 percent) of the respondents said they’d never had any dealings with the police, and over half thought the police were of no help, while 16 percent considered the police to be a hindrance. Only one third (31 percent) thought the police could provide any help.

The majority (56 percent) of the 300 interviewees were aged between 18 and 25 years, 12 percent were younger than 18-years-old, while 15 percent were over 30 years of age. Most (62 percent) only had a middle school education at best, 21 percent had been to high school, and 16 percent had attended technical high school, while only one interviewee had been to university.

The survey indicated that many sex workers were driven by poverty in rural areas in Hubei and neighbouring provinces to come to Wuhan in search of work. However, their lack of education meant they could not find any better jobs in the city. About half (51.8 percent) had been working the sex industry for less than a year, and the vast majority regularly moved from salon to salon in search of better conditions. Only three percent of those interviewed had been in the industry for more than three years.

The vast majority worked irregular hours, between eight and ten hours a day, and earned up to 3,000 yuan a month. Nearly half (44 percent) earned less than 1,000 yuan a month, while only 16 percent could earn more than 3,000 yuan. The plight of Wuhan’s sex workers is largely representative of China as a whole, and is indicative of the many dangers that young women from the countryside face when they travel to the city in search of work.

How is it feminist, if the goal is improving society and achieving more equality amongst human beings, to focus on crime and punishment? Published in 2001, this article provoked horror in some sectors. Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its 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?

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

Laura Mª 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 »

Aquí va un video de la ponencia de Ángela Villón Bustamante, presidenta de la asociación Miluska Vida y Dignidad, Asociación Civil de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Lima, Perú. Rosario Sasieta, miembro del Congreso Nacional del Perú, presenta a Villón.

Propuestas desde el Movimiento de Trabajadoras Sexuales del Perú

La ponencia de Villón sigue en dos partes mas: 2da y 3ra.  

Otra ponencia de la misma ocasión habla de un estudio con trabajadoras sexuales transgéneras. La ponente es Ximena Salazar de la unidad de salud, sexualidad y desarrollo humano de la Universidad Cayetano Heredia.

Conclusiones y Recomendaciones por parte de Sasieta.  

Gulnara Kurmanova sent me this text, which I have edited minimally for clarity. It takes you through the series of obstacles and contradictions that migrants who are sex workers may face, and not only in Central Asia.

Documented by: Gulnara Kurmanova, Tais Plus NGO, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic
With kind assistance from: Selbi Jumayeva

Presented at: 24th Program Coordinating Board (UNAIDS) Meeting, Thematic Segment People on the Move, June 2009

About me: My name is Gulnara Kurmanova. I have worked in HIV programs in partnership with sex workers in Kyrgyz Republic, Central Asia, since 1997. We actively support sex workers’ empowerment and self-organization. I would like to present a story documented by me in my own country.

About my country: My country is very poor. Recently it became the poorest country in Central Asia which is the poorest region of the post-soviet world. My country is corrupt. Many people in my country have no stable source of income and must think every day about food and a roof. The majority of those who think about them are young women and men who have no education or needed skills but have families who need their support.

About people who sell sex. For these women and men, sex work becomes an income-generating activity and way of surviving. Many of them seek an opportunity to sell sex to earn a lot of money (in their dreams) and at least some money for bread for their children and a place to sleep (in their reality). Many sex workers I know personally are braver and more enterprising (in order to become financially independent, self-sufficient and to survive) than their peers who are housewives and suffer their husbands and mothers-in-law in villages. But women, men and transgendered people who sell sex are often poorer, not well educated and deprived of family support. Their first motivation for sex work is to earn money. Sex work is work; this is an income-generating activity. But to earn money they must leave their town or village.

Activists from Tais Plus

Case of Venera, a 31-year-old transgender woman who is a sex worker. Five years ago she came to Bishkek from a small village in the north of the country. Her mother died giving birth to her younger sister. She lost her father because of tuberculosis when she was still a kid. She had changed schools and been placed in an orphanage in the village near the bigger town of Talass. Venera didn’t receive her secondary school diploma; like many others, she is embarrassed to say she is barely literate. She has no chance to get a good job in a nice place. At the same time she has dignity; Venera wants to be the woman she sees herself to be. Unfortunately, street sex work is the only space where she can come close to being herself. She is ok with earning money by selling sex. As a sex worker, she cannot work in her village because neighbors know her and judge her. She cannot work in Talass because she cannot wear women’s clothes there, a city with old Muslim traditions. Venera came to the capital city, Bishkek, to do sex work.

Currently Venera lives and works in Bishkek. She has problems with the police often, once or even two times a month and recently every week. The police arrest and detain her ‘because she has no passport.’ She prefers to say that she lost her passport, because her passport is a man’s passport, and her appearance is a woman’s appearance. For these reasons, she is currently an undocumented migrant. The police tell her that she is arrested for doing sex work and that she is not a human being anymore since she is a prostitute. She cannot argue that sex work is itself decriminalized in Kyrgyz Republic, because she is nobody to the police: she has no passport. The police ask her about money. They use her vulnerability to extort as much money as they can. She feeds the police, not herself, because they extort almost all the money she earns. Maybe the passport and resident permit could make her life better, but it is too expensive to pay for trip to Talass where she originally got her passport, and it would take months to collect all the necessary documents.

Her clients and street hooligans beat Venera often because of her feminine appearance. They think that she is not a human being anymore if she neglects ‘men’s honor’. Last October she faced a life-threatening situation when young men dragged her to their fancy black Mercedes without plates and took her to the outskirts of the city. They beat her severely, her face, her chest, her genitals; they raped her, burned her eyelashes, nipples and genitalia and threatened her with a gun. They said they would kill her if she told anyone. She wanted to file a report with the police, but they insulted her for being transgender and for sodomy and did not accept her complaint. Now she trusts the police even less.

Venera learned about a health problem three years ago but didn’t believe those who tested her. She didn’t receive proper pre-testing counseling. A doctor just told her that she should be tested when her friend convinced her to visit a clinic to ensure that she had no STIs. The doctor didn’t speak Kyrgyz, and Venera doesn’t speak Russian well. She didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Venera doesn’t discuss her health status with her friends. She does not trust medical services that treat her behavior, not her needs. In order to identify whether she needs treatment or not, she has to visit a doctor. She doesn’t visit a doctor because she doesn’t believe in any governmental institutions and tries to avoid contact with them. She knows from her experience that there is no confidentiality in governmental clinics and her secret could be revealed. She is afraid they might inform the police about her health status. She thinks that in this case she will be not able to work any more and lose her only source of income. She knows that other sex workers prefer to move to another city to be tested there. She is going to do the same later when she earns enough money. But if it is revealed that she needs expensive treatment, how will she pay for it?

Tais Plus works in collaboration with Labrys, a local LGBT NGO. Contact: taisplus at gmail.com.

Here are excerpts from a report published by the Institute of Race Relations in the UK. You could say it is a catalogue of proper applications of the law in cases where people knowingly infringe it. But are these sorts of draconian raids and labour-intensive, costly efforts to catch small-time infringers really worth it? People are beginning to realise just how much public money they require. Granted that there might be some connexions between illegal migration and state security, is an overall policy to conduct searches for undocumented workers like high-risk terrorist operations justified? I think we all know it is not. Targeting ethnic restaurants  - their owners, workers and clientele - is an easy way for immigration personnel to demonstrate that the government is Taking Things Seriously. When undocumented migrants manage, as in the cases described below, to find a way to work for low wages and begin to integrate marginally into society, why come down on them so bloody hard?

Because the Law is the Law? But what of all the white-collar infringements that are not handled like these operations, which resemble cop- and spook-style raids on terrorists and gangsters? No such stormings are seen on office buildings and other (white)’ sites. Do people imagine there are no undocumented workers there?

For details, more examples and documentary notes, see the report itself.

Crusade against the undocumented
By Frances Webber, 5 February 2009

Every day, somewhere in the UK, immigration officers, often with police, frequently wearing stab-proof vests, surround High Street restaurants, takeaways and convenience stores, seal exits and storm in. . .. . . generally at the busiest time, to demand that workers prove their right to be working there. Sometimes they carry hand-held fingerprint terminals to perform instant identity checks on those they find working there.  .  .

. . . The raids frequently involve large numbers of police and immigration officials and sometimes resemble military operations. 

The article gives examples:

Seventeen UKBA officers and three police officers descended on Makbros, a cash and carry warehouse in Stanmore, Middlesex, and detained and questioned five men, all of whom turned out to be lawfully employed. An eye-witness said that it was ‘quite scary with all these people running up’.[2]

Thirteen immigration officers raided the Unique Spice restaurant in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to arrest two Bangladeshi men.[3]

A convoy of five vehicles descended on the Waverley Hotel, Yarmouth in a raid in which two Mauritian men and a Brazilian woman were arrested.[4]

Shabul Muhth’s two restaurants in Kent were raided by around eighteen uniformed officers and the restaurants closed at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. No arrests were made. ‘Come in like gentlemen’, he said. ‘We’re not drug dealing, we’re selling curry.’[5]

A full-scale search with dogs and a police helicopter were deployed to hunt for two men who ran out of the kitchen at Thariks Indian restaurant in Paignton during a raid. An immigration officer fell through the roofof a building in the chase, in which the two men got away.[6] Read the rest of this entry »

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