Tag Archives: Africa

Naked Anthropologist News for Radio Ava: Jan 2020

Since last spring I’ve been providing Naked Anthropologist News to Radio Ava, a sexworker project in London. Something between tweeting and blogging, these news-bits are meant to be brief and critical, if not downright cutting. I choose a few things that struck or angered me most from the previous month’s online news. I link to an original news story and then quote sex workers as opinionators whenever possible as well as saying what I think. The latest edition was for 9 January. Note on the photos at the end.

In France

250 sex workers in France appeal to the European Court of Human Rights

Two hundred fifty sex workers in France have taken the 2016 law criminalising their clients to the European Court of Human Rights. Reasons given include:

‘We’ve exhausted the legal possibilities in France…
‘We reproach the French state for not assuring the fundamental liberties of sex workers…
‘Voices of sex workers are systematically ignored.’

To make a human-rights case, plaintiffs must show systematic discrimination, as when a governmental structure fails over time to take specific testimonies into account, not because of momentary bias or apparent coincidence. And not because of whore-hating writings by fanatics!

In China

China Scraps Extra-Judicial Forced Labor for Sex Workers

China banned prostitution after the Communist revolution in 1949, sending women into ‘custody and education’ programmes: Rehabilitation via forced labour, in other words.

The government wants us to believe Communism succeeded in abolishing prostitution and now claim prostitution ‘returned with a vengeance after landmark economic reforms began in the late 1970s.’ Since abolition rhetoric doesn’t suit China’s current public image, they’ve announced the ‘system’s historical role has been completed.’

Meaning what? Do they think all sex workers have been cured of the impulse to sell sex? No, because if they were then why does prostitution remain illegal, with punishments of both detention and fines?

The usual police ‘crackdowns’, as China routinely calls them, are sure to continue as usual.

In Nigeria

Nigerian judge declares sex work is not a crime

The judge said it’s not a crime to sell sex ‘since there is no law that forbids it’ and awarded damages to 16 women arrested for prostitution in 2017 when police raided private homes. The item goes on to mention more than 60 women arrested for prostitution in the capital city, Abuja. The women said they were harassed, extorted and publicly shamed.

Although the judgement sounds like good news, it will be open to different interpretations. In Spain, for example, where there is no law defining prostitution as either legal or illegal, sex workers’ rights campaigners have long protested police behaviour and confusing policy. They want a statement in law.

Let’s see what happens next in Nigeria, where police are sure to be very annoyed.

In London

Police make 14 arrests in modern slavery raids on south London nail bars

It was International Migrants Day when police carried out anti-trafficking raids on nail salons in Southwark. The 5-month multi-agency investigation claimed to be motivated by ‘concern for the safety and wellbeing of the women, children and other vulnerable adults caught up in this despicable trade.’

Familiar rhetoric.

Vietnamese migrants often work in UK nail salons, as we well know from recent deaths in a smuggling cock-up in Essex. Numerous researches and the sms-texts of migrants themselves show that they look hopefully forward to working in nail salons, and their travel-projects are supported and paid for by their families.

Reports like this from Southwark function as public-relations rhetoric for the Rescue Industry, as when arrest and detention are said to be followed by ‘support’. They want us to believe that sad young foreigners are being comforted by special employees, but you know what? The state will deport all these nail-workers as soon as they can, because that’s the legal solution to undocumented migration.

It’s the worst hypocrisy, pretending migrants want to be arrested and sent back where they started.

Naked Anthropologist News has a theme-song: Ten Cents a Dance, a taxi-dancer’s lament about her job, sung by Nebraska-born Ruth Etting in 1930. Taxi-dancing is one of those jobs that is or isn’t sex work, depending on your point of view: ‘All that you need is a ticket, Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.’

About the photos: ‘Miroslav Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials… Of his technical methods, Tichy said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”‘
Right up my street. More photos at Michael Hoppen Gallery. And isn’t his camera glorious?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Nigerian migrant women as subjects: Sex work in fiction

Anti-trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of what they call sex trafficking. I first wrote about this years ago and note that, despite critiques and debunkings, the trend holds. In stories about Nigerian migrant women, ‘rituals’ are usually cited that are supposed to have bound them in a specially sinister way to smugglers. It’s straight-up racist colonialism, the inability and unwillingness to conceive of even the most superficial aspects of a non-western culture. Lurid conclusions are jumped to immediately according to which juju ceremonies are not comparable to Roman Catholic ones, for one example – though promises, petitions and talismans are found in both. As though one sort of prayer for help or success were inherently irrational and the other not.

That’s not to say that conditions are not pretty dire for many women and men in western Africa, politically, economically, on the gender front – which means people can be willing to take big risks and assume onerous debts when they travel to work abroad. Early in my studies I learned about how some migrants think about that in Lucciole neri – Le prostitute nigeriane si raccontano (Iyamu Kennedy and Pino Nicotri, editors, 1999), one of my sources of ethnographic research with migrants who sell sex in Europe, for what eventually became Sex at the Margins. These Nigerians were working in Italy. [NB: It’s never clear whether the label Nigerian actually means born in and identified with that country. In the world of migration national identities are shifty.]

On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, came out in 2009. I was prompted to read it by This is Africa’s mention of it along with Sex at the Margins. It’s a novel telling the stories of four women’s migrations from Nigeria to Belgium where they work in windows in the red-light district. None of them has had an easy life and none of them sees herself as a victim, despite the presence of a powerful smuggler in Lagos and a controlling madam in Antwerp. They are, the author says, willing to play the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs. Unigwe has said:

If your parents can’t help you out and your government has failed you, these pimps and traffickers have at least given you a chance to leave and make a living. He’s your saviour. It takes someone outside the situation to see these pimps and traffickers as the bad guys.

At the end of the book we are told how three of the women fare in the future. After nine years in Antwerp, Efe became a madam herself.

It would take eighteen months to get her first of two girls whom she would indeed buy at an auction presided by a tall, good-looking Nigerian man in sunglasses and a beret. It would be in a house in Brussels, with lots to drink and soft music playing in the background. The women would enter the country with a musical band billed to perform at the Lokerenfeest. The man in the sunglasses was the manager of the band and as usual had, in addition to genuine members of the band, added the names of the women who had paid him to the list he submitted at the embassy in Abuja. The women would be called into the room one at a time for the buyers to see and admire. They would all have numbers, for names were not important. Their names would be chosen by whoever bought them. Names that would be easy for white clients to pronounce… Efe would buy numbers five and seven. Number five because she smiled easily. Number seven because she looked docile and eager to please, the sort of girl who was grateful for little. Like Madam, Efe would have some police officers on her payroll to ensure the security of her girls and of her business. She would do well in the business, buying more girls to add to her fleet. pp 278-9

Yes, this is an auction where employers bid on women who will sell sex, but beware glossing all nuances and calling it slave-trading. The women in question want to migrate and accept they’ll be selling sex and paying off a debt. Which doesn’t mean they know everything that may happen to them and how constrained life will be in another country. The Three-Headed Dog, my own recent novel, is about the same dynamics, with Latin Americans in Spain but also a strong Nigerian character – Promise.

I first published this post only slightly changed on 22 September 2011 and publish it again now as part of a series on sex work in fiction.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Cry with trafficked women: Colonial prurience and 3-star hotels

I’ve been ill a great deal this year and for the past month bowed down by a death, but the imminence of August cranked me up sufficiently to vent my now annual disgust at tours from the US that take well-paying travellers to gawk at and pity poorer people in Other Countries (who always smile in the photos taken, of course). If there is anything I hate it’s this. In 2011 I wrote Have fun, take a tour to meet victims of sex trafficking, learn to be a saviour, illustrating it with the egregious Kristof, who has not a jot of shame about looking like a Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider. Given the sexual aspect, the word prurience came to mind: socially-sanctioned permission to be a voyeur, to go to bars abroad you wouldn’t set foot in at home as part of a do-gooding ‘social justice’ trip. To my mind, this is sex tourism.

This year’s tour to Thailand Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking is aimed at aspiring individuals. What might they mean by that? And why do they call this a delegation to end trafficking rather than, if not pure tourism, a first step towards understanding trafficking? The pretension is obviously meant to provide something to add to CVs, the way internships in impressive-sounding organisations do, though at least those last some months, whereas this tour takes a week (5 -12 August). Look at the rhetoric:

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 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, and will also engage directly with groups and individuals on the frontlines of the struggle to expose and ultimately end the trade in human lives.

This is B-movie-type public-relations prose: facilitating – delegation – geared – confronting – realities – global trade – human beings – comprehensive education – mechanics – human trafficking – participants – comprehensive education – mechanics – underlying causes – freed from slavery – rebuild one’s life – frontlines of the struggle – expose – end the trade – human lives. Nothing concrete, nothing real.

For those who aren’t clear as to why I call this colonialism, note the clear differentiation between Subject (tourist) and Object (exotic other). I believe this is the first time they claim tourists will talk with people who have been freed from slavery – an obvious pitch to the cheapest of sentiments. I am appalled that Global Exchange maintains any credibility. Last year I wrote the following in Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk, because online sales of folkloric and supposedly authentic third-worldish objects is how GE started:

Gift-buying and helping projects wrapped together: One can see how the founders leapt to the idea of taking people on tours. Global Exchange says We are an international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world. Easily said. A list of current tours includes Caring for Cuba’s Cats and New Journey of a Lifetime to India with Vandana Shiva. Sound harmless?

I had doubts back then and still do, but those in favour argue the tours are a way for folks who know something is wrong with what they read in the media to see the truth. That’s in theory; the question is how easy is it to provide the truth with anything called a tour? Who decides where to go, what the focus of tours will be and which natives will provide entertainment? Is the idea that all middle-class people have to do is arrive in a poor country and set their eyes upon poverty and suffering in order to experience enlightenment? It’s a short jump from that lack of politics to becoming an Expert who knows What To Do about other people’s lives. Imperialist projects to interfere follow quickly.

Although individual tourists may learn good things from conscientious tour guides, a tour is a holiday, a vacation, whether you set out to see the temples of Bangkok or the bargirls or the trafficking victims. You take a tour for your own benefit and pleasure, even if your pleasure consists in feeling angry and sorry and guilty about what your own government does to people in poorer countries. You go to look at exotic others, and you can’t help drawing conclusions about whole cultures based on what you see – just as tourists and business travellers do. If you happen to talk with someone not on the tour agenda – on a bus, in a bar – then you probably feel chuffed that you saw real people and experienced authentic culture. This is all relatively harmless unless you happen to add this experience to your CV, claiming temples, bar girls or sex trafficking are subjects you are expert in.

This year they provide an itinerary, which includes:

In the morning drive to Chiang Mai: Check into Guesthouse
Visit local project
At night visit nightclubs and bars to observe night activities

It’s been made clear to me that ordinary people in the US have no understanding of what colonialism means and how they themselves perpetuate it. That needs work. Perhaps having broken the spell of not writing I’ll begin again now, even if it is August.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

African women in Europe willing to play the trump card God has wedged between their legs – or sex trafficking, if you prefer

Sex trafficking campaigners often single out Nigerian women as the worst case of sex trafficking, because of debts that sound the largest and the sometime presence of so-called rituals that are supposed to have bound these migrants in a specially sinister way to their traffickers. It’s old-fashioned racist colonialism – an unwillingness to imagine even the most superficial aspects of a non-western culture, jumping to lurid conclusions instead, in which juju ceremonies are somehow not comparable to Roman Catholic ones, for example – though promises, talismen and emotion are found in both. As though one sort of prayer for help or success were inherently irrational and the other not.

That’s not to say that conditions are not pretty dire for many women and men in western Africa, politically and economically – which means people can be willing to take big risks and assume onerous debts when they travel to work abroad. I learned about how some migrants think about that in Lucciole neri – Le prostitute nigeriane si raccontano (Iyamu Kennedy and Pino Nicotri, editors, 1999), one of my sources of ethnographic research with migrants who sell sex in Europe, for what eventually became Sex at the Margins. These Nigerians were working in Italy.

On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, came out in 2009, but I have only just read it (prompted by This is Africa’s mention of it along with my book recently). It’s a novel telling the stories of four women’s migrations from Nigeria to Belgium where they work in windows in the red-light district. None of them has had an easy life and none of them sees herself as a victim, despite the presence of a powerful smuggler in Lagos and a controlling madam in Antwerp. They are, the author says, willing to play the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs. Unigwe has said:

If your parents can’t help you out and your government has failed you, these pimps and traffickers have at least given you a chance to leave and make a living. He’s your saviour. It takes someone outside the situation to see these pimps and traffickers as the bad guys.

At the end of the book we are told how three of the women fare in the future. After nine years in Antwerp, Efe became a madam herself.

It would take eighteen months to get her first of two girls whom she would indeed buy at an auction presided by a tall, good-looking Nigerian man in sunglasses and a beret. It would be in a house in Brussels, with lots to drink and soft music playing in the background. The women would enter the country with a musical band billed to perform at the Lokerenfeest. The man in the sunglasses was the manager of the band and as usual had, in addition to genuine members of the band, added the names of the women who had paid him to the list he submitted at the embassy in Abuja. The women would be called into the room one at a time for the buyers to see and admire. They would all have numbers, for names were not important. Their names would be chosen by whoever bought them. Names that would be easy for white clients to pronounce… Efe would buy numbers five and seven. Number five because she smiled easily. Number seven because she looked docile and eager to please, the sort of girl who was grateful for little. Like Madam, Efe would have some police officers on her payroll to ensure the security of her girls and of her business. She would do well in the business, buying more girls to add to her fleet. pp 278-9

Yes, this is an auction where employers bid on women who will sell sex. It is not slave-trading, however.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex at the Margins in a Pleasantly Surprising African Europe

Sex At The Margins of Surprising Europe was the title given to an interesting piece mentioning my book from This is Africa last week. The occasion was a new episode of Al Jazeera‘s Surprising Europe series entitled Under Pressure, on the experiences of African migrants who sell drugs or sex in Europe.

I have to say I wish these money-making activities had not been separated off from others, reinforcing the stigma about them. In a different episode I watched from the series, a woman living in Holland without money to pay rent is told to go to the red-light district and work. She says she would rather die than do that – which fair enough – and so she had a different kind of very hard time. I could also have done without one typically moralistic condemnation of prostitution as not the way for Africans to get ahead – when the programme actually contradicts her from a practical standpoint – but in general I enjoyed and recommend Under Pressure.

I often say that the so-called illegality of sex jobs is a moot point when workers have no right to be where they are in the first place: you are already breaking the law so why not earn more money while you are at it? Sex At The Margins of Surprising Europe says

Imagine trying to survive without the permission to do any kind of work. You’ve got to eat, which isn’t free, and you’ve got to sleep somewhere, so you need money for this, too. What would you do? This is the problem faced by undocumented African immigrants in Europe. There are only so many cash-in-hand positions for cleaners, fruit-pickers and building-site workers, so many find themselves having to turn to the more ‘illegal’ professions, such as prostitution or selling drugs. Your existence in the country is already seen as ‘illegal’, so what difference does it make?

On the topic of Sex at the Margins (the book) and selling sex they say

The women also possess agency, the capacity to make their own choices, even if these choices undermine the picture of the world that others choose to hold. The remittances, however, can make a huge difference back home, not just for the immediate family but for an entire community.

In this photo, migrant Africans in Italy can be seen possessing agency with Don Benzi, who spent his life trying to convince them to leave prostitution but only succeeded with some. One reason has to do with those remittances. It’s rarely acknowledged, but sex work is undoubtedly responsible for a large proportion of money sent back home, given the fact that it pays so much better than other jobs available to migrants. Read Contributing to Development: Money Made Selling Sex.

Here is the trailer for Under Pressure. Enjoy how it focuses on life for undocumented Africans not from the point of view of horrified or angry white people but from Africans themselves.

See the whole episode and others at Al Jazeera’s Surprising Europe website.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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

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? Continue reading

Moving to Africa to save trafficking victims?

AP Photo/Anthony Devlin

Have media reports caused people to believe that there are countless trafficking victims wandering around looking for places to be sheltered? Or if it is potential victims of trafficking they want to help, do people think they will be easy to identify and want to live in a shelter? Have things come to this? No organisation or church is mentioned in relation to the people described in the below story, who presumably moved to Lesotho. Where is the money coming from? Have they friends in Lesotho? What will their migration status be there? I hope this project is less naive than it sounds in this report. The desire to ‘make a difference’ is nice, it’s how to be helpful that is so complicated. Neocolonialism doesn’t begin to explain this story. Although, in searching for photos, I found lots of non-Lesotho folk holding children and of Prince Harry playing with them.

South Texans Move To Africa To Stop Human Trafficking

28 December 2010, Spencer Lubitz, KZTV

Corpus Christi – Tears filled the Corpus Christi Airport Tuesday evening, as family and friends gathered at the airport to bid farewell to a group of local residents moving to South Africa to combat human trafficking. “I just can’t believe it’s finally here,” said Sonya Martinez, the group leader. Excitement exuded from those about to take the 10,000 mile journey to Lesotho. “We’re so anxious and excited just to get on the plane,” said Charles Martinez. “Just to be in Lesotho, I can’t get my mind off of that. It’s exciting.”

The group will be housing and caring for the countless victims of the human trafficking industry, a multi-billion dollar business that revolves around buying and selling people as slaves.

“I am a little excited to go to Africa and help the people where help is needed,” said Maya Martinez, who, at age 13, will join her parents and become the youngest person to make the move. Sonya, who has visited the area in the past, said the children are in dire need of assistance. “They’re just very oppressed, and they’re very unfortunate, and they’re in need. They’re in danger,” said Sonya.

The society’s oppressive nature isn’t enough to deter Sonya’s husband Charles from counting down the days. “I will kiss the ground when I get there, and take a very long nap,” he said. “I’ve been so excited; I haven’t been able to sleep very well.”

This group is just the first wave. Next year, they will be joined by a second group of South Texans who will follow them in making the journey to Southern Africa. Their work will already be cut out for them once they arrive, but they say South Africa is only the first stop, and it’s due to end right back here at home.

“Corpus represents freedom to me,” Sonya said. “I’m just looking forward to going to many different places, but starting with South Africa to help make that dream a reality in other places as well.” In two years, the group will return to establish a similar care center in South Texas. “I am from South Texas, I was born and raised in South Texas,” Sonya said, on the importance of returning to build a local facility. They say they hope to come back with the knowledge to make changes in our own community. “Hopefully make a difference,” Charles said. “That’s all we want to do, is make a difference.” With their suitcase filled with wishes and dreams, they were gone.

Technology as a check on migration (I mean trafficking): good luck, Nigeria

The faith in technology is touching. Not that they shouldn’t try, not that there are not bad people abusing the absence of technology. But without understanding why people want to get out of Nigeria, why they want to go abroad to work, and send money back, and see the world and be able to come back and then leave again, this technology will be a very partial solution. And that’s after they get it all working correctly; anyone stuck in a rich country’s border-control queue when a new machine fails knows about that. As quickly as the state installs clever new machinery for detecting fraud, fraudulent-document producers come up with a way around it. Which is what migrants look for in entrepreneurs (here called middlemen) who will smuggle them out of one country and into another.

However, let’s say these machines do present significant obstacles to people wanting to get on airplanes. In that case, arrangements to leave via the wide-open other borders will become more popular, getting rides to other places, other airports. To prevent that, Nigeria is going to build fences with check-points: just like in the olden days, just like on the US and Israeli and Melillan borders, where surveillance would have to be 100% efficient (and 100% non-corrupt) to prevent everyone who wants to make a hole in or dig under the fence or wall. Not to mention Nigeria’s sea border.

Immigration installs IT equipment to check human trafficking

28 February 2011, Vanguard

Abuja -The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has installed Document Fraud Readers, scanners and other passenger registration equipment at the various international airports to check human trafficking. NIS Comptroller-General, Mrs Rose Uzoma, on Sunday in Abuja, said that the equipment would also check movement of people in and out of the country.

At the international airports, we have taken necessary steps to install IT equipment, the Document Fraud Readers and the Scanners. We have installed the Passenger Registration Equipment that enables us take stock of whoever is leaving or coming into this country. I could tell when last and if you have ever travelled through our international airports in the recent times, I will tell you the time and hour and the immigration officer that cleared you. The facilities we have had enabled us to a very great extent to be able to ensure that people don’t travel with forged documents.

Uzoma said that the era when people used their relatives’ passports to travel was over as the immigration service had installed machines that could identify every individual and detect look-alike photographs on passports. She noted that officers had been trained and sensitised to be able to tackle the challenges of human trafficking to help to reduce the bad image it had given the country. Uzoma said that the service had been collaborating with the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) to tackle the menace of human trafficking. She said that the NIS had also established human trafficking units at its areas of operations in the states and at its headquarters in Abuja as a complement to the efforts of NAPTIP.

If anyone has travelled and sees the peril under which our sisters operate, nobody will wish it on his or her worst enemy. So our officers are living up to their responsibilities.

The immigration service boss said that the absence of notable physical structures on Nigeria’s borders in many places was a challenge as it was difficult to identify the border route in many instances.

If you have had the opportunity of travelling through any of the borders in the northern part of the country, you can see how extensive and expansive they are and many of them don’t even have what could pass as international border control structure.

Uzoma said that the service would soon put in place passport control plazas and necessary structures to enable officers to effectively patrol all the border areas. She added that trans-border criminality also remained an ongoing battle between the law enforcement agencies and criminals. She added also that the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) has issued about three million electronic passports to Nigerians between 2007, when the new passport was introduced, and February 2011.

I know we have issued a little less than three million electronic passports from 2007 to date. As we speak we are also giving permits to foreigners. Recently we have started registration of Africans and ECOWAS nationals. We didn’t have their data, but they are also foreigners. We had to borrow the equipment from INEC that they used in the previous voter registration; re-programmed them and we gave them to all our local government area officers for them to take biometric data of all those Africans in our midst. At the last count we had about 400,000 non-Africans residing legally in Nigeria.

The NIS Comptroller-General said that one of the major challenges confronting the service was the attitude of some Nigerians as regards the processing of the passports. She said that the challenge derived from the fact that most Nigerians didn’t like to fill forms either for their passports, or for other necessary documents. Many prefer to use middlemen to do something as simple as filling a form and in a lot of cases the middlemen fill the forms incorrectly, missing out some details. Uzoma added that Nigerians also didn’t like to take responsibility for processing their travel documents and preferred to use middlemen, which often times, led to the problem of visa refusals at embassies. She advised that Nigerians should be sensitised to understand that they had to conform with international best practices, especially when they planned to be travel to other parts of the world.

Uzoma also said that the NIS had acquired the best technology to detect falsified age declaration and some other details, including the change of names when a dishonest applicant applied for a passport while claiming that he or she never took one in the past. She said that when the immigration service took fingerprints in its machines, the computer would bring out the name of the original owner of those fingerprints and when they matched those of the applicant, such person would be revealed as having once obtained a passport.

Mrs Mubarak’s Anti-Trafficking Project Endangered: Imelda Marcos, anyone?

Although the media gushed predictably over Suzanne Mubarak’s EndHumanTrafficking shebang in Luxor last December, they will probably now choose to forget their enthusiasm. I have not even begun to relate the many disturbing elements of those few days I spent at a trafficking believers’ meeting, and one of the worst concerned Mrs Mubarak.

The revival tent was set up in the gardens of the Winter Palace Hotel, the sort of place known as a colonial gem, with interiors popular for shooting Miss Marple episodes. The enormous white tent held hundreds of people, sophisticated media equipment and a dozen air-conditioners.

Access to the tent was guarded clumsily by a battalion of thugs wearing ill-fitting civilian suits with guns poking out. They lined the paths, hovered round the metal detector and blocked access to anyplace they pleased, including the Temple of Karnak, next to which a reception was held (one thought so that guests could take a peek at it). They closed down restaurants and shoved spectators to the side whenever Mrs M was scheduled to pass by, making goons the memorable symbol of a dictator’s wife’s symbolic benevolence. She read fulsome speeches that praised her own good works and nearly gave herself one of the awards at the final dinner.

All this will be familiar to those attending the prestigious variety of international ‘development’ events where poverty and misery are commented onstage, followed rapidly by excesses of food and drink. You need a strong stomach for hypocrisy to attend many such affairs – that and an absence of conscience. When I left the lavish final dinner, the movie stars were dancing with the fake-folkloric musicians that banged in, hopping up and down having the time of their lives. No problems of conscience there.

It is not surprising that the rescue of enslaved women and children should be the subject of such indulgences. More disturbing was the seeming unawareness that the security was considered necessary to protect the president’s wife, that the event was being held in the kind of dictatorship where it is better to leave your laptop at home, in case they don’t like the pictures in it. A businessman referred onstage to disreputable women, and none of the so-called gender-equality experts said a thing.

When I was sitting on that stage freezing, facing a wall of repudiation from the audience, I thought of all those guards, dotted between the temple columns, lingering in the shadows, each and every one holding a gun.

That was the first time I had been in Egypt since 1973. The first time was October 1970, shortly after President Gamal Abdel Nasser had died, when huge numbers of people were also in the streets. The most shocking thing I can say about what I felt after 40 years away is this: In its essence, it didn’t feel different. I am not talking about modern buildings but about how men acted. Suzanne was a wife, that’s about the extent of it.

In Luxor, I thought about Imelda Marcos. In the following short piece on Swiss radio, someone else has the same idea. I suggest the word NGO is not appropriate for a Mubarak project: this is a neocolonialist charitable enterprise, though I do not know exactly what they do:

Events in Egypt cast shadow over Suzanne Mubarak’s NGO

Ripples from unrest in Egypt may be felt among the international NGOs in Geneva. One of them is chaired by Suzanne Mubarak, wife of beleaguered Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. She opened the Suzanne Mubarak Women’s International Peace Movement office in Geneva to much fanfare seven years ago. Now, events in Egypt are casting a cloud over the organization’s campaign on human trafficking.

LISTEN HERE at World Radio Switzerland

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Chinese trafficked sex workers refuse rescue from Congo

Like the Bangladeshi women who had been working at an Indian brothel and were reportedly rescued by police but later rioted at the shelter where they had been sent, some Chinese migrants in Congo have resisted rescue. It is good to hear that they were not forced to be deported or put in a shelter and interesting that a mainstream media source like Time should find sex worker resistance newsworthy, perhaps because of the public monies spent to carry out the raid. Chinese police flew all the way from Sichuan to Congo to go to a karaoke bar . . .

Note that the migrants are said to have wanted to go to Paris but have made do successfully with Kinshasa.

Chinese prostitutes resist effort to rescue them from Africa

1 Jan 2011,  Sapa-dpa, Time.com

Eleven Chinese women lured into prostitution in Africa have refused to be rescued after being tracked down by police from their home country, a news report said Saturday. Police from China flew to the Democratic Republic of Congo in November in the country’s first operation to rescue women trafficked to Africa, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. They found 11 Chinese women who had been promised decent jobs in Paris by traffickers but ended up working in a Chinese-owned karaoke bar in the country’s capital Kinshasa, the newspaper said.

After a joint raid by Chinese and Congolese police on the karaoke bar, however, the women decided to stay in the country, saying it was easier to make good money there than in China. Chinese police official Yin Guohai told the newspaper, “They make 100 US dollars for receiving one guest – half of the money goes to their boss and they keep the other half.” As well as prostitution, the women, mostly from China’s underdeveloped Sichuan province, were able to take cheap goods from China to Africa after visits home and sell them for big profits, Yin said.

An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Chinese people, many of them traders or businessmen involved in the mining industries, live in the Congolese capital Kinshasa.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Naked Anthropologist attends a UN event to end human trafficking

Today I fly to Egypt to a UN event on trafficking, something I certainly never expected to do. Organised by UN GIFT (Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking) and numerous other entities, the event will last two days, include the premiere of a film called Not My Life and launch a campaign to get business leaders involved in anti-trafficking. As part of the event, the BBC World Service (24-hour international news seen around the world) will hold one of their World Debates, provisionally called Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped? The question is a bit like Does God Exist? but never mind. Anyway, in the British tradition debate means dissent and disagreement, and guess who will be providing that? Interpol’s Secretary-General will also be on the panel, along with Siddharth Kara – known for rescuing sex slaves in Asia and promoting End Demand. Is it hard to see me in this company? To mark the occasion, I am now calling myself

The Naked Anthropologist.

The nakedness I refer to means without addition, exaggeration or excuses; not concealed or disguised; open to view; manifest; plain. But it’s nice there’s a pun involved, too.

The debate will be filmed on Sunday 12 December, then edited and broadcast the following weekend. Perhaps some of you will see it then, but eventually it will go onto the BBC website. And where will this be taking place? In the Temple of Luxor, of course. Wish me luck.

— Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Middlemen: between truck-driving clients and women who sell sex, Uganda

No figure is feared and misrepresented more than a man who facilitates the sale of sex for other people. Massive anti-prostitution generalisations about exploitation too often shut down attempts to understand how sexual cultures work by accusing all facilitators of being exploitative pimps and traffickers and ignoring different contexts and different meanings of the acts for those involved. Whether you want to regulate the sex industry or get rid of it, you have to understand how its many manifestations work. I advocate a cultural study of commercial sex, which you can read about here and here (with links to academic articles, too). Note also that talking about the variety of experience and subtlety of meaning within sex-money exchanges does not imply that everyone involved is happy, satisfied, unexploited or anything else. That middlemen are sometimes fair does not mean all of them always are.

Here are excerpts from an academic study* of one small place, a truck-stop in southwest Uganda. The authors situate what some might see as a conventional prostitution economy within general sexual culture that involves third parties.

Mediation customarily plays a central role in regulating sexual relations in local Kiganda culture. In selecting a suitable spouse, introductions, the process of betrothal through to the hand-over ceremony, the senga, or paternal aunt, played (and still plays) a pivotal role as mediator .  .  .

They then show how the middleman is seen as useful by both buyers and sellers in the commercial sex market of the truck stop.

Passing truck drivers usually do not have the time to Žfind themselves a suitable woman for the night because most must leave early the next morning, so they turn to a middleman to get them a woman quickly.

The driver pays the middleman according to a variety of factors, depending, for example, on who took the initiative, and how satisfied the driver is with the woman.

When the driver and the middleman know each other, or get along well, no payment is expected, but a gift may be offered, or they might share beer together. The middleman accompanies the driver and personally introduces him to the woman.

The most important reason women gave for using an intermediary is discretion. Although everybody knows that serving beer and food and cleaning are not the only work the women in bars and restaurants do, it is still necessary to keep up a certain degree of formal decency in such small communities. . .  Decency is maintained by outward appearance: it does not matter how many partners a woman may have, as long as people cannot see her actually recruiting them.

The driver spends the night with her and gives her an amount of money which usually exceeds the amount which she would get from men she contacted herself. Afterwards she gives a small part of what she earned to the middleman to show her gratitude and in the hope that he will send more men to her in the future.

The women also mentioned that when middlemen are involved, they can expect to receive more money than from the men who approach them directly. In this way, they meet men who are better off, who can afford to spend something on mediation.

The women saw mediation as providing insurance when establishing contact with a customer, as the clients are seen as being socially indebted to the middlemen. The transaction is also clearer from the start: frequently the clients tell the middlemen to inform the women that ‘money is not a problem’.

*Gysels, M. , Pool, R. and Bwanika, K.(2001) ‘Truck drivers, middlemen and commercial sex workers: AIDS and the mediation of sex in south west Uganda’, AIDS Care, 13, 3, 373-385.

South African trafficking report with no methodology: is this an epidemic?

More and more people who understand that research requires methodology are examining reports on trafficking. This critique comes from Marlise Richter in South Africa.

South African research report on trafficking flawed

South Africa’s premier social science institute, the Human Sciences Research Council, released a report in March 2010 on human trafficking in South Africa.  A consortium of researchers and academics compiled the report, Tsireledzani: understanding the dimensions of human trafficking in Southern Africa, claiming it to be ‘the first comprehensive assessment of human trafficking in South Africa’. A recent article by me (Marlise Richter) and Chandré Gould* discusses problems with the HSRC report, including unrealistic and unreasonable terms of reference, problematic research methods and unsubstantiated claims.

Specifically:

  • Very little information is provided about methods used,
  • No clear presentation of the data,
  • No indication of whether information has been verified for accuracy.

It is therefore difficult to know what one can trust in the report and what is mere scare-mongering. Through over-generalised claims that support popular and often xenophobic perceptions, the report provides the illusion that the researchers have uncovered a clear and comprehensive picture of the situation of trafficking in South Africa. This was misleading and dangerous at a time when people were worried about trafficking to the 2010 FIFA World Cup – an opportunity to shape meaningful legislation for victims of trafficking.

We called on the HSRC to retract the report and its findings but have had no response.

Marlise Richter is PhD Candidate, International Centre for Reproductive Health, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ghent University, Belgium and Visiting Researcher: Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

* ‘Of Nigerians, albinos, satanists and anecdotes: A critical review of the HSRC report on human trafficking.’ Chandré Gould, Marlise Richter and Ingrid Palmary. SA Crime Quarterly , No 32, June 2010, pp 27-45.

Agency and prostitution: Sex workers target rich male victims

Agency: what is it? Simply put it describes the condition of acting, exerting power, being in action. What helps us know the extent to which people do things because they intend to? How do we know whether they are passive victims? A lot of our ideas come through other people’s descriptions. So the principal narrative about prostitutes says they aren’t in a position to elect sex work over other jobs because they are too disadvantaged by poverty, don’t understand how bad selling sex is or do it because they have been damaged by abuse or are coerced or hijacked into it. As I’ve pointed out in a story about sex-hungry babes in Angola, news sources in Africa sometimes use the opposite sort of language. Here, women who sell sex are described as definitely being in action, targeting their rich tobacco-farmer victims. My point in publishing such against-the-current commentaries is to illustrate that what the West says isn’t the only way to talk, and since I don’t believe that Europe is always ‘ahead’ of Rest of World, I don’t say that this characterisation is by definition  wrong or unprogressive. There are some tough, man-eating hussies out there . . .

Sex workers target tobacco farmers

Fungi Kwaramba, The Zimbabwean, 31 May 2010

Harare: Commercial sex workers are making a killing by targeting tobacco farmers at the Boka Tobacco Auction floors, with some travelling from as far as South Africa, says the Population Service International (PSI). Speaking at a media briefing in Harare last week, PSI Interpersonal Communications Manager, Patience Kunaka, said that prices of sex per act have gone up to US$25 a session from US$5 due to the recent targeting of rich tobacco farmers. . .

Debunking the 40 000 prostitutes story again: South Africa World Cup

When the media contact me I am always wary: how will they distort my words this time? The other day I talked with a Yahoo journalist who has reported a small part of our long conversation faithfully, on the topic of the mythic 40 000 women who will either be trafficked to the World Cup or arrive under their own steam. The funny part of this article is what a sex worker said to him when he asked her about the invasion: I think it’s so unfair. There are lots and lots of beautiful girls in South Africa. Why do they have to come here? Marvellous touch, that.

Debunking World Cup’s biggest myth

Les Carpenter, 10 June 2010, Yahoo News

Johannesburg: Of all the wild, fantastic stories that blossomed in the months before the World Cup, there was the rumor that South Africa would soon be flooded with 40,000 prostitutes. They would come streaming across the border from places like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, all of them ready to satisfy the demands of a half-million soccer fans in an endless futbol orgy.

HIV warnings were sounded. Churches shouted their scorn. And a wary country braced for the impending onslaught of sex-hungry soccer pilgrims. Now, with the World Cup starting on Friday, the fans have poured in on airplanes. There are lines at restaurants and traffic jams on the freeways.

The only thing there aren’t many of is prostitutes.

“We laughed at that [40,000] number,” said a government security source who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly. “There was no evidence there would ever be 40,000 prostitutes.”

The government has been watching, the source said, monitoring ads in sex newspapers, websites on the internet and listening to chatter in the world of human trafficking. It has determined that a few women have arrived in recent days. Investigators have noticed a small spike in ads. Some of these sex workers have come from neighboring countries, usually smuggled in because they believe they can make more money during the World Cup.

But the only evidence of any organized prostitution rings – the kind of movement that would generate great numbers – is that there appear to be more women from Thailand. Yet even then, the source suspects, there are hundreds of them. Not thousands.

“Where are they going to get accommodation?” the source asked. “They have to advertise too and there is no evidence that they are.” More likely, the source continued, are that large groups of fans might bring along one or two women who will be paid to have sex with the men.

Still, the fascination of a sudden arrival of sex workers on an unsuspecting South Africa remains. Especially among the women who stand to be most affected by an onslaught of foreign competition.

“Is it true? Are they really coming?” a prostitute who gave the name “Polly” said as she sat outside the restaurant Tivoli next to the Balalaika Hotel in the upper-class suburb of Sandton one night last week. “I’ve heard there are 40,000 women coming to South Africa for World Cup. But is it true?”

She said she saw an interview on television with a high-ranking government official a few weeks ago – she can’t remember who – and he was asked the question: Were there really 40,000 prostitutes heading to South Africa? He stared at the camera, she said. He said nothing. It was the end of the show, the last question. And slowly the broadcast faded into a commercial.

She took this to mean the rumors were true. “I think it’s so unfair,” she added. “There are lots and lots of beautiful girls in South Africa. Why do they have to come here?”

Apparently they aren’t. It’s just the myth of 40,000.

No one is quite sure where the number originated. But in the past few years, whenever a place holds a great sporting event the rumor of a flood of prostitutes soon blossoms. And for some reason that number is 40,000.

Laura Agustin, a sociologist who studies and blogs about migrant sex workers, calls it “a fantasy number. It has no basis,” she said.

There have never been studies on prostitution and large events, she continued. No reasonable data exists. Rather, people become obsessed with the idea that groups of men traveling for sporting gatherings like the Olympics and World Cup are going to be so desperate for sex that they will demand prostitutes. And therefore truckloads of women have to be brought in.

Officials expected similar problems when the World Cup festivities came to Germany in 2006, but there fears were generally unfounded. Back in 2006, when the World Cup was held in Germany – where prostitution was legal – there was talk that the country would be buried by 40,000 sex workers. Interest in them was said to be great. Yet they mostly wound up sitting around brothels waiting for the parade of willing men that never happened. Later, a study commissioned by the European Union and uncovered by the British internet magazine Spiked found only 33 cases of human trafficking at that time. And just five of those cases turned out to be related to the World Cup.

“I don’t think [soccer] fans should be targeted like this,” Agustin said. And yet they apparently are. “It’s muddled thinking, however,” she wrote on a recent blog post. “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.”

The latest rumor was repeated last month in a story by the Christian Science Monitor, which quoted the magic 40,000 figure and even spoke to a handful of prostitutes from Zimbabwe, one of which suggested she might be able to use her newfound World Cup earnings to buy a car.

“I don’t think there will be that much business,” the government security source said. Thus destroying the myth of a World Cup that was going to be all about sex.

Instead, it will be all about soccer.

Decriminalisation of sex work/prostitution: argument from SWEAT

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.

Sex workers travel on their own to the World Cup, and elsewhere

How about this reasonable, common-sense story about sex workers from African countries north of South Africa who plan to travel there for possible commercial opportunities? I am told that travellers from richer continents may feel nervous about going to a blacker, poorer country with a high rate of hiv and a history of a certain kind of violence. But this is a relative view, since travellers from poorer countries with different perceptions of violence and hiv may easily see South Africa as a good place to work. Not to mention that many big cities in richer countries offer high levels of scary violence in certain neighbourhoods, so it’s meaningless to generalise about whole countries or continents.

The reporter didn’t have to say ‘feverishly’ in the first line, a typical effort to sensationalise a perfectly ordinary activity: travel. Not ‘trafficking’, unless you start worrying about Melvis’s friends in Johannesburg and the truck drivers that will drive Mwale there. Note the Gender Minister’s fear that the workers may get in under the guise of doing something else and then go into sex work.

Malawi: Prostitutes gear up for WC 2010

Mabvuto Kambuwe, AfricaNews, 18 May 2010

Sex workers in Malawi are feverishly saving towards the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. They are not going to support their teams but to warm the beds of soccer fans who want to quench their sexual desires. One said: “I think time has come for African sex workers to make money through the World Cup.”

The global football showpiece has generally become a common ground for prostitutes to rake in millions from thousands of tourists. This reporter spoke with some commercial sex workers in Malawi about their plans ahead of the World Cup.

Melvis, who stays in the commercial city Lilongwe, said she has arranged with a Johannesburg-based friend to pitch camp with her until the tournament is over. She said: “Although South Africa is very far from here, I am prepared to get there before the kickoff. It will be easy for me to stay in South Africa for more than 20 days because I have a friend who stays in Johannesburg and I am expecting to return home with more money to start another business so that my life will improve”.

Her colleague Febbie Mwale said she cannot allow the money making opportunity during the FIFA main event to slip out of her fingers. She said she is hoping to quadruple her average daily income of US$34 (R250) when she lands in South Africa. Mwale said going to South Africa is no big deal for her. She has been there several times with truck drivers who happened to be her clients.

19-year-old Chrisy said: “If I fail to go to South Africa during the World Cup I hope our business will still improve here at home because some of the fans will be coming to Africa for the first time and they will be interested to visit countries like Malawi. I hope this World Cup is going to work to our advantage because I have been interested to have more clients like whites so I believe during this period I may get some.”

Malawian Minister of Gender and Children Development Patricia Kaliati expressed fears that some of these prostitutes would be in South Africa under the pretext of going for genuine business but would later go into prostitution. . .

Men and football: a recipe for sexual violence?

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.

Bisexual men have wives, tourist boyfriends and also sell sex in Kenya

Those who work in outreach know the fluid, category-resistant sexual behaviour common amongst so many people. So-called sexual orientation, ideas about family and a distinction between sex-with-money and sex-without-money cease to be very useful, as this story shows. Note that homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, as an earlier story about MSM relationship explained.

Kenya: Bisexual male sex workers run big risks

20 April 2010, Irin/PlusNews 


Photo: Jimmy Kamude/IRIN
 

At a nightclub in Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast, Tito Bakari a local man, and Leonard Smithberger, a tourist, make out in a dark corner before the bouncer asks them to leave. Hand in hand they walk to another bar nearby, where they party through the night. “My love from Germany has been here since Easter – the party has just begun,” Bakari told IRIN/PlusNews. Smithberger visits Kenya a few times every year and showers gifts and money on Bakari, who moves out of the house he shares with his wife and child and into his lover’s hotel.

Up to 60 percent of male sex workers in Mombasa also have female sexual partners, according to a recent study presented at the 17th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco. “Although most sex partners of MSM-SW [men who have sex with men sex workers] are men, sex with local women is also common, usually transactional, and often unprotected,” the study noted. . .

My wife knows that I am bisexual, but I provide her needs and equally satisfy her sexually. I even have two children with her, so she never complains,” said Ben Maina*, a male sex worker in Mombasa who doesn’t always use condoms with his clients, and never with his wife. In 2007, another study in Mombasa found that the high prevalence of HIV in Kenyan MSM was probably due to unprotected receptive anal sex and low condom use. Despite the risks and the lack of acceptance by society, Maina makes too much money to consider leaving the trade – in a country where half the population lives on less than US$1 per day, he can earn up to $365 per week. “The cash assists me in providing for my family,” he said. . .

Dr Mary Mwangombe, a researcher at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), in the coastal town of Kilifi, said HIV programming for men who have sex with men and their partners – both male and female – was difficult because of the illegal nature of homosexuality and the public’s intolerance of it. “Most male commercial sex workers live and go about their business secretively to avoid being victimized, either by the council officials, the police or the public at large”. . .

Transactional sex and bartered sex: Is there a good reason to distinguish from commercial sex?

When we study things, we name them, but when we live things we usually don’t. I had a weird date the other night, I thought the girl was out to get something from me or We have a great relationship; I love to cook and he fixes my computer. Labels potentially applied include transactional sex, barter, survival sex, girlfriends, sugar daddies and sugar mommies, jaboya, something-for-something love, husband-wife relationships, free love, opportunistic sex, exploitation, enjo kosai – and a lot more, believe me. The other week I used a couple of tags myself whilst commenting on a poster exhorting fishermen not to exchange their fish for sex.

Some wrote to me to say Those women are not sex workers, they are fish traders, but they are poor and can’t pay the fisherman money so they offer him sex in exchange for fish. Well fine, but what’s the motivation for making this distinction? Is it to keep these women free of the whore stigma? Is the idea that to be properly commercial transactions must involve coins and bills? And that everything else is barter? And is barter somehow okay because it doesn’t involve filthy lucre? (note barter’s image in a white person’s context, where it’s called the no-cash economy).

Let’s look at this logically: If the fisherman gets money from these women, the transaction is considered okay. Now what happens if he takes candybars for his fish, is that not okay, because he’s supposed to be getting money? Or is fish for candybars okay but fish for, say, a shoulder massage not okay, again because he’s not getting money? Or is a shoulder massage all right, too, because it’s a service that helps him feel better, but fish for sex isn’t because presumably he doesn’t need sex to feel better? You see the problem? You might think that labels and names clarify different actions, but typical comments about transactional sex from cultures where it’s common refer to the blurry line dividing it from sex work or prostitution. On top of that, one commentator says ‘some women and men who have sex in return for gifts, money and the like would not classify themselves as sex workers although they might be’. So who is deciding which label applies and for what reason?

The main point I want to make is: To attempt to distinguish these human situations with labels contributes to the idea that there is something about sex-money exchanges that is utterly different (perhaps scary or terrible) and that women who do that are set apart from everyone else. That is a very old-fashioned and stigmatising view we should avoid. Unfortunately it’s also misleading to try to distinguish clearly between wholly involuntary, passive transactional women and wholly free, active sex workers. It’s all much more interesting and muddled than that.

Now about the fish transactions:

Recent studies in Botswana, Swaziland, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania have shown associations between acute food insecurity and unprotected transactional sex among poor women. Fish for sex deals are also common in Kenya on the shores of Lake Victoria, where women fish traders meet incoming boats and sleep with fishermen for a favorable price. Healthdev.net

This could be interpreted to mean that fish traders do pay with coins and bills in part but supplement them with sex, in order to pay less out in money. Or it could mean that because they have sex with the fishermen they get more fish in exchange than if they hadn’t had sex with them.

A programme in Uganda calls this kind of transaction Something for Something Love, said to be a relationship where sex is given in exchange for favours, money or gifts. I suppose this name was invented to distance the topic from previous labels, but note that now money is explicitly mentioned – this isn’t just barter. The posters used in this campaign depict a young woman whose real love rejects her because she’s had something-for-something-love, a girl who saves her friend from getting into a car with a man holding out a mobile phone, a man whose wife leaves him because he’s bartered something for money with another female  and so on.

Young people are often pressured to do things that they would not normally do, like having unwanted or unprotected sex. These relationships usually cause problems for young people including unplanned pregnancy, dropping out of school, abortions, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Violence is common in Something for Something Love, especially if the young person refuses sex or tries to end the relationship. For adults, Something for Something Love often results in broken marriages or violence if the wife or husband learns about it. Something for Something

Others – not surprisingly USAID amongst them – go to the extreme and label transactional sex exploitation

The first phase of the initiative is now underway and focuses on sexual exploitation, including transactional sex. Transactional sex refers to exploitative relationships where sex is given in exchange for favors, material objects or money. PEPFAR message

Health programmes that want to prevent the spread of hiv tend to link this something-for-something love with Young Empowerment and True Manhood. These are all well-intentioned efforts, but the moralistic messages end up excluding a lot of people who don’t experience all this as oppressive or exploitative.

There is also a confusion about whose point of view we are taking and whom we are trying to protect.

  • The original poster wants the fisherman to get money for his fish, not sex, the protection sub-text being that if he avoids sex he’s less likely to contract venereal diseases or hiv (and have more money to buy things he needs).
  • Others want the girls and women not to exchange sex for fish, for moral and the same health-protection reasons – sometimes assuming that the fishermen are coercing them.

If money is scarce, then people may barter. The fishermen ‘sell’ the fish for sex, and the women sell the fish for money in the marketplace – and it’s quite possible that some customers who want to buy fish from the women traders could offer *them* something other than money, some other object or service the traders want. Money can therefore be seen as the means to cut through the need to find exactly matching offers. It doesn’t have to become so symbolic that we hasten to say which people are *not* prostitutes. Could the subject get more complicated? You bet.

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist