Exiting in the opposite direction: from maids to sex workers in Ethiopia

Pious commentary on prostitution often revolves around the concept of Exit Strategies: getting out of the sex industry. Everyone agrees that anyone who doesn’t want to sell sex shouldn’t feel forced to and should be helped to get out. Quite right. And what about people who’d like exit strategies to get out of other unpleasing jobs? Many assume that prostitution is particularly difficult to get out of, especially ensnaring and fraught with obstacles, even when there are no exploiters stopping people from changing occupations (pimps or traffickers). Obviously when people are too poor, not only in terms of money but also in terms of social capital – contacts, information, resources, ideas – it is misleading to talk about ‘choice’, as though a lot of easy alternatives were lying about. I usually talk about preference, instead: the fact that those with limited options nevertheless can prefer one to another.

In this story from Ethiopia, maids in a rotten situation sometimes prefer sex work, possibly another rotten situation but in a different way they might tolerate better. Those so worried about prostitutes being locked in to brothels often don’t notice that the job of live-in maid usually involves being available to employer-families around the clock, having tiny unprivate spaces for themselves with no use of telephone or internet, being loaned out to employers’ friends and getting a single day off a week, or maybe one day and another afternoon. There are better situations and worse ones, so it is possible that switching to sex work, even if people don’t like it, can bring advantages like more flexible time in which to figure out what to do next. As the person from DKT-Ethiopia says, the beginning, when people know least, is when they are most vulnerable.

ETHIOPIA: Maids, condoms and kerosene

africanpress, 3 October 2009

Addis Ababa – The life of a domestic worker in Ethiopia is rarely an easy one. Often escaping a deeply impoverished existence in the rural areas, these women find themselves in employment hundreds of miles away from their hometowns as maids – or serategnas in the national language, Amharic.

A lack of education, minimal opportunity for normal interaction with society and anecdotal evidence of sexual activity and abuse have led health workers to classify domestic workers as a high-risk group for the contraction of HIV.

  • “Many are coming from rural areas and they do not have awareness; many are sexually active with guards and are also frequently raped by their masters or their master’s children”
  • “They go to night school and they might have affairs with their classmates,”
  • ”The anecdotal evidence is that many domestic workers become sex workers”

Another potential pitfall for domestic workers is commercial sex work, which they frequently enter into if they run into problems with their employers. While sometimes preferable, the terms of employment are nevertheless incredibly harsh, with a working day of 18 hours, a paltry monthly salary of between US$9 and $15, and one day off per month.

“The anecdotal evidence is that many domestic workers become sex workers… this is one of the exit paths for them,” said Ken Divelbess, project coordinator of DKT-Ethiopia. “There is very limited evidence about domestic workers in general; it could be 5 percent who become sex workers, it could be 90 percent.

“It is critical [to reach them] as we believe that the first month as a sex worker is the most dangerous, as that is when people can take advantage.”

11 thoughts on “Exiting in the opposite direction: from maids to sex workers in Ethiopia

  1. Matt

    Just to add… sex (work?) is also more or less a part of many maids job descriptions… and I daresay it is engaged in with less agency & for less money than your average street worker. I once saw a presentation, in Ethiopia, on what this means for HIV prevention, and the recommendations were what you might call “making rape safe”. For instance : 1) we need to get permission from the employers of domestic workers to educate the workers on AIDS and condoms; 2) to HIV test the workers before they start domestic work (to protect their employers from HIV).

    Reply
  2. Marc of Frankfurt

    pingback: http://sexworker.at/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=67385#67385

    Matt, the same goes with compulsory sex worker STI-testing as patriarchal punter protection.

    The power of wording and definition regarding choice for me is outcome of controlling the power of sexuality as archaic life force and secondly the controlling of dependent vs. independent people, of worker vs. boss and later of work vs. capital. The split called capitalism is culturally more accepted or entrenched than the split of sex and love with sex for money aka prostitution.

    Reply
  3. Thaddeus Blanchette

    Laura,

    Here in Brazil we have recently published an article on the economics of prostitution which confirms what you say here.

    In Rio de Janeiro, a huge number of our prostitute informants report leaving straight jobs – maid, beautician, check-out girl – to work in the sex industry. Not a single woman we`ve interviewed so far – even among the older (40+) and cheaper (1 real per minute) workers – reports wanting to leave sex work to work as a maid. Many of these women make a specific point of this. As Matt points out, many of them also report having sexual relations with bosses as maids or check-out girls as well.

    Reply
  4. Matt

    Out of the blue, I have just found another reference to the same phenomenon which suggests that people move from house work to sex work when they “fail” at house work..?!

    Reply
  5. Cheryl Overs

    The DMSC did a study of the same. See below.

    A word of warning – our reading of the Ethiopian study may be very different than how it is read/used in Ethiopia. I worked in the Wise Up project in 2007 and 2008 and I know it’s a struggle for the sex workers there to deal with resources being shifted from rights based work to prevention of sex work.

    Dubar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC). “A survey of the various types of social, physical and occupational oppression heaped upon our sex workers before and after their entry into sex work.”

    http://www.chezstella.org/stella/dmsc20071018.pdf?PHPSESSID=5ade61ab4179080b588ab1ff7747ffe6

    This survey has been conducted by the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a forum representing the interest of more than 60,000 sex workers of West Bengal, India. DMSC is active in promoting the Rights and Development of sex workers and their children. It runs various projects and, works in coordination with a few associate organizations. An important component of DMSC’s activities is its attempt to devise various ways and means of resisting and neutralizing the various forms of social, physical and occupational oppressions heaped upon our sex workers. For these activities DMSC needs data on these oppressions. The objective of the present survey is to collect and analyse such data. (Author Abstract)

    Reply
  6. Thaddeus Blanchette

    Dear Chery,

    It went out to Sexual Policies Watch at the end of September and should be up on their website and available to all, soon.

    The SPW people have kindly agreed to revise its Portuguese (which is something I generally have to pay for) in return for a free English translation by myself. The current version has legible – but very rough – Portuguese. If you’d still like to give it a go, mail me at Macunaima30@yahoo.com.br and I’ll send you the unrevised Portuguese version.

    Matt, I don’t know if it’s so much failing as housework, exactly…

    We have a couple of informants who are prostitutes precisely because it allows them to continue with housework. It’s the only job that gets them enough money that, with two days of work a week, they can meet their families’ financial needs AND take on the role of housewife-mom.

    Reply
  7. Thaddeus Blanchette

    By the way, I just translated an excellent article by Adriana Piscitelli dealing with some of these same issues with Brazilian sex worker immigrant women in Spain.

    You folks might want to keep an eye out for it.

    Reply
  8. Matt

    Hi Thaddeus – yes, I totally agree with you, I was just reporting what I read, and which left me very bemused.

    It’s just another example of people with their heads in the clouds – they would rather believe that sex workers are “failed” housemaids than accept that sex work might be a more attractive option.

    Reply
  9. Laura Agustin

    thad, not by coincidence my next post will include some quotations from adriana’s latest.

    when i was studying women who went to spain from the caribbean, back ages ago, the problems of domestic and sex work seemed very similar and people moved back and forth.

    failing at housework usually meant just that spanish employers were dissatisfied with some aspect of their employee, including her attractiveness to husband or son.

    Reply

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