The Naked Anthropologist

Tag Archives: Asia-Pacific

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

Migrant sex worker in a Thai brothel: Le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim

I collect well-styled and informative descriptions of sex-industry settings in novels, here John le Carré’s 1990 The Secret Pilgrim. Fiction can transmit far more of the atmosphere and goings-on in sex venues than social-science research, not least because authors get to express their personal feelings. Here the migrant sex worker is Cambodian, girlfriend of a spy being searched for in a Thai brothel called the Sea of Happiness. The voice changes as I’ve cut to include only bits relevant to clients and sex work.

He’d popped up here on a flying visit. One day, that’s all. One day, one night, then back to the missus and a book. Offshore leisure consortium wanted him to buy a hundred acres of prime coastland for them. Did his business, then off they all go to this girlie restaurant, Duffy and a bunch of his traders – Duffy’s not averse to a bit of the other, never has been. Place called The Sea of Happiness, slap in the middle of the red-light quarter. Upmarket sort of establishment, as they go, I’m told. Private rooms, decent food if you like Hunanese, a straight deal and the girls leave you alone unless you tell ‘em not to.

At girlie restaurants, he explained, somehow contriving to suggest he had never personally been to one, young hostesses, dressed or undressed, sat between the guests and fed them food and drink while the men talked high matters of business. In addition, The Sea of Happiness offered a massage parlour, a discotheque and a live theatre on the ground floor.

Duffy clinches the deal with the consortium, a cheque is passed, he’s feeling his oats. So he decides to do himself a favour with one of the girls. Terms agreed, off they go to a cubicle. Girl says she’s thirsty, how about a bottle of champagne to get her going? She’s on commission, naturally…

…First Henry had had a drink at the bar, then he had watched the show. Then he had sent for the Mama San, who hurried over assuming he had a special wish. He had shown the Mama San his translator’s card and said he was writing an article about her establishment – the superb food, the romantic girls, the high standards of sensitivity and hygiene, particularly the hygiene. He said he had a commission from a German travel magazine that recommended only the best places. The Mama San took the bait and offered him the run of the house. She showed him the private dining rooms, the kitchens, cubicles, toilets. She introduced him to the girls and offered him one on the house, which he declined, to the head chef, the doorman and the bouncers.

“But who is your farang who carries the bottles for you?” Henry had cried out with amusement to the Mama San. “Must he stay behind and work because he cannot pay his bill?”

The Mama San laughed also. Against farangs, or Westerners, all Asians feel naturally united. “The farang lives with one of our Cambodian girls,” she replied with contempt, for Cambodians are rated even lower than farangs and Vietnamese in the Thai zoology. “He met her here and fell in love with her, so he tried to buy her and make a lady out of her. But she refused to leave us. So he brings her to work every day and stays until she is free to go home again. She is number nineteen,” said the Mama San, with a shrug. “Her house name is Amanda. Would you like her?”

Henry could not resist taking a look. The girls who were not with clients lounged on plush benches behind a glass wall, wearing numbers round their necks and nothing else, while they chatted to each other or tended their fingernails or stared vacuously at an ill-tuned television set. As Henry watched, number 19 stood up in response to a summons, picked up her little handbag and a wrap and walked from the room. She was very young. Many girls lied about their age in order to defeat the regulations – penniless Cambodians particularly. But this girl, said Henry, had looked no more than fifteen…

…An hour later, I was presenting myself at The Sea of Happiness and buying a ticket for fifty dollars. I removed my shoes, as custom required, and moments later I was standing in a neon-lit cubicle in my stockinged feet, staring into the passive, much painted features of girl number 19.

She wore a cheap silk wrap with tigers on it, but it was open from the neck down. Underneath it she was naked. A heavy Japanese style make-up covered her complexion. She smiled at me and thrust her hand swiftly towards my groin, but I replaced it at her side. She was so slight it seemed a mystery that she was equal to the work. She was longer-legged than most Asian girls and her skin was unusually pale. She threw off her wrap and, before I could stop her, sprang on to the frayed chaise longue, where she arranged herself in what she imagined to be an erotic pose, caressing herself and uttering sighs of desire. She rolled on to her side with her rump thrust out, draping her black hair across her shoulder so that her tiny breasts poked through it. When I did not advance on her, she lay on her back and opened her thighs to me and bucked her pelvis, calling me “darling” and saying “please.

“Sit up,” I said, so she sat up and again waited for me to come to her. “Put on your wrap.”

When she appeared not to understand, I helped her into it. Henry had written the message for me in Khmer. “I want to speak to Hansen,” it read. “I am in a position to obtain Thai papers for yourself and your family.” I handed it to her and watched her study it. Could she read? I had no way of telling. I held out a plain white envelope addressed to Hansen. She took it and opened it. The letter was typed and its tone was not gentle. It contained two thousand baht. — John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim, 1990

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Grid girls and the Presidents Club: Women and sexist jobs

In 1995, my friend’s 17-year-old daughter Ermina was looking for work in Santiago, Chile. The obvious job available to her was posing in a short skirt beside cars or washing machines in public showrooms – standard promotional technique to this day. What made her hesitate? Girls who took those jobs in Santiago were assumed to be loose – no better than they should be. She might ruin her reputation whether she went on to do more than pose or not. There were also jobs in coffee bars, but they carried an even graver stigma. But Ermina didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her mother and aunt, who had both migrated to Madrid to work as live-in maids. This was the kind of story I ran into everywhere in Latin America amongst poorer people back in the 90s, and is why I ended up writing Sex at the Margins.

Recently jobs like these have been in the news in the context of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment but they also appear in long-running campaigns against prostitution and trafficking. All objections are increasingly positioned as evidence of Gender Inequality. I thought about writing this post after an event called the Presidents Club got undercoverage – a Financial Times reporter got a job as hostess. Scandal was provoked by revelations of the conditions of work for hostesses – conditions that have been conventional for aeons and most people know about. For those interested in labour rights, reports of low pay and a requirement to sign non-disclosure contracts stood out. For those who felt scandalised, it was having to wear skimpy frocks and accept being groped.

These jobs are widespread, because sexism is everywhere, because women without a lot of education and training have few options for work and because some women like hostess or modeling-type jobs better than whatever others are available. I understand why successful middle-class women denounce the existence of this work. I know this is objectification of women’s bodies and appearance, you don’t have to tell me. But what does it mean to call for their abolition except fewer jobs for women? And although the denouncers are appalled, many other women like or don’t much mind this way of making money.

The Presidents Club got much publicity because it’s an event for elite men. A class issue, as though those men ought to be better than others? Consider what happened ‘lower down’ the culture hierarchy.

Formula 1 ended its tradition of using grid girls because ‘it was at odds with modern societal norms‘.

The men drive the cars, they make the cars, they fix the cars and the women handed out drinks, refreshed the buffet… The grid girls would be led out, a bit like prize cattle, just before the race and stand on the grid where the cars are, with an umbrella or a number of which position the car was in. They would have their bottoms pinched by the mechanics, there would be photographers sat on the floor behind them, taking pictures of their bums, or up their skirts. They had to giggle and pretend that was OK. – broadcaster Beverley Turner

But grid girls protested.

So the inevitable has happened, F1 gridgirls have been banned. Ridiculous that women who say they are “fighting for women’s rights” are saying what others should and shouldn’t do, stopping us from doing a job we love and are proud to do. PC gone mad 😡 #Gridgirls

— Rebecca Cooper (@rebeccageldard) January 31, 2018

Note the numbers for that tweet – and it wasn’t the only one, and Cooper wasn’t the only tweeter.

In the world of competitive darts, before this trend reports could say ‘stunning walk-on girls provide some much-needed glamour… The lovely ladies have the important job… to provide a key element to the festive entertainment.’

But now the Professional Darts Corporation announced it would end using walk-on girls who accompany players to the stage and hold up score cards. Announcing a protest in Birmingham, the owner of Dream Street Models and Events said, “If they’re banning us at F1 and darts, what’s next? Where’s it going to stop? Will it be boxing, Superbikes, the stands at NEC shows? Most of my models do promotional work, for some it’s a part-time job, but for others it’s their full-time living.”

The Women’s Sport Trust said: “We applaud the Professional Darts Corporation moving with the times and deciding to no longer use walk-on girls. Motor racing, boxing and cycling . . . your move.”

In parts of Asia beer girls (or promotion girls) are paid low wages to jolly male customers into ordering a particular brand of beer. Surviving from tips and working long into the night, they too have been named as improperly exploited by a funder.

The mostly young drink promoters are paid low wages — and work for tips, largely from groups of intoxicated men — to push certain beers in bars. Global Fund announced on Thursday in a statement that it was suspending its partnership with Heineken “based on recent reports of the company’s use of female beer promoters in ways that expose them to sexual exploitation and health risks”.

Exposed by hanging around drinking men and possibly having sex with them possibly for money that lifts them from survival-mode? A lot of women consider this a desirable job. Do you want to add ‘are forced to’ consider it desirable? Ok, but desire counts – don’t tell me you Know Better than they how they should feel and act.

Then there was MIPIM, an annual conference for property people that draws sex workers, an unremarkable fact that contributed to demands for more equality for female delegates at the conference.

Tamsie Thomson, the director of the London festival of architecture, said the Presidents Club scandal had “just scratched the surface of the discrimination and harassment that women and other minorities are routinely subjected to in our industry”. Thomson launched the “the elephant in the room” campaign to encourage women and others to challenge any inappropriate or uncomfortable behaviour and distributed pink elephant badges to raise awareness.

The event and sector are obviously mired in sexist practices, including holding events where only male delegates feel fully welcome. But there’s a disquieting tendency to imply that the fact sex workers might be there somewhere is evidence of Something Being Very Wrong. “What other industry on the face of the earth in 2018 needs to remind businessmen that they can’t bring prostitutes to an industry conference,” asked Jane, a 29-year-old delegate from Manchester. “That alone tells you how backward property is.” Do they imagine that getting rid of sex workers helps fix inequality problems? This leap to pointing at prostitution smacks of scapegoating.

As I lamented in The New Abolitionist Model, banning badly paid jobs because they are objectifying and sexist punishes women in contexts where they haven’t got many options.

Is the proposition still that being a servant for pennies and a scant private life is better because it is more dignified? Or is it superior simply because it is not sex work? Either way, to focus always on the moral aspects of sexual labor means forever sidelining projects to improve working conditions and legal protections.

Surely it’s obvious that more kinds of work for better pay need to exist before jobs women prefer are prohibited, even with the disadvantages they entail. There’s where this kind of feminist needs to put her energy, and that goes for richer and poorer countries alike.

Footnote: Nowadays the Santiago coffee bars are called cafés con piernas, cafes with legs, and (of course) are now named as sites of sex exploitation. The photo at the top shows one example.

And, in case anyone thought this phenomenon is always gender-specific, see this photo by Bill Kobrin of the Art Students League Dream Ball, New York, 1953. Yes – the 1950s.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Xiaojie: no sexworker identity

I know many folks who relate to the idea of sex work as one of their jobs and to sexworker as one of their identities. But I have known many more who sell sex and don’t feel like this. Of course it’s possible to ask questions that appear to prove interviewees always feel it’s a job: many social scientists study occupations and need everyone to have a clear label. Those of us who’ve sat and listened at length to people’s stories know things are a lot muddier than that. But, you might say, hold on, look at what are captioned ‘tools of the trade’ in the photo here: don’t they prove it’s a job for the woman using them?

I think back to most of my own jobs: Did I ever feel secretary was my identity? Or dogwalker? (That could be me in the 1967 photo in Central Park though I don’t ever remember walking so few dogs at once.) Even when I had the title Managing Editor I never felt it was who I was.

In China the word xiaojie means Miss or young lady. Many women who sell sex prefer to be called xiaojie to sex worker (with the result that non-sexworking misses don’t want to be called that anymore). Ding Yu, sociologist, talks about why:

Many academics feel that it’s important to respect this community by using a term that classifies what they do as a profession. But in fact many xiaojie don’t really understand or like this name because they feel the term emphasizes sex. The term “sex worker” reduces all their work to sex, which doesn’t reflect the reality of what they do. It doesn’t accurately represent the diverse forms of emotional work and entertainment that they’re engaged in; rather, it highlights the one part that’s stigmatized.

There’s an important class dimension. As migrants coming from the country to the city, they want to be part of this modern, developed world. They want to shed the kind of coarseness that’s associated with the countryside. Most ‘xiaojie’ are very well-informed about the conditions of factory work, and they know they’re not interested. They know other women from their hometowns who are factory laborers, and there are plenty of media reports that show how it is tedious, repetitive, and arduous, how the worker is treated like a machine. They know you’re stuck in dorm accommodation, far from the city center, producing luxury items you can’t afford to buy yourself. They know you are outside the modernity and development as a handmaiden to it. Other options, such as being a waitress or nanny or shop assistant — these positions generally see lower income and worse working conditions than being a xiaojie, which is thus not a particularly poor option.

In The Three-Headed Dog several migrants are selling sex. Marina lives and works in flats with other women and a manager but decides to go onto the club circuit. Promise sells in the street. Eddy is keeping company with a tourist. Isabel tried prostitution and prefers being a cleaner. The detective, Félix, once worked in spas. None call themselves or the work by a professional word. Of course, some activists think this is a problem, that there’d be more chance of successful organising if more women were willing to stand up and call themselves by the term that now sounds more like a worker title than other options. This is possible. The catch is in the stigma.

-Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex work in fiction: Gorky Park, Moscow prostitution doesn’t exist

Militia detectives are at Kazansky Station in Komsomol Square, in Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park. Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 photo shows the station at the left and surrounding traffic. Moscow prostitution may not have existed officially in 1977, when the story takes place, but sex work certainly did.

At 6 am entire Turkman families lay head to feet on benches. Babies with felt skullcaps nestled on soft bundles. Soldiers leaned slackly against the wall in a sleep so tangibly deep that the heroic mosaics of the ceiling overhead could have been their communal dream. Bronze fixtures glowed fully. At the one refreshment stand open, a girl in a rabbit-skin coat confided in Pasha Pavlovich…

A young soldier took Pasha’s place with the girl. She smiled through a rouge of vaseline and lipstick while the boy read the price chalked on the toe of her shoe; then, hand in hand, they walked out the station’s main door… Komsomol Square was blue before the dawn, the clicking candles of trams the only movement. The lovemakers slipped into a taxi. ‘Five rubles.’ Pasha watched the taxi pull out.

The driver would swing into the nearest side street and get out to watch for militia while the girl and boy went at it in the back seat. Of the five rubles the driver would get half and the chance to sell a congratulatory bottle of vodka to the soldier afterward; the vodka was a lot more expensive than the girl. The girl would get some sips, too. Then a return to the station, a tip to the washroom attendant for a fast douche, and overheated and giddy, she’d start all over. By definition prostitutes did not exist, because prostitution has been eliminated by the Revolution. Charges could be brought against them for spreading venereal disease, performing depraved acts or leading a nonproductive life, but by law there were no whores. – Gorky Park, 1981, p 151

Note there was no street uniform to indicate which women were selling sex: anyone in photos from the period could have been. The shoe marking was new to me. A website purporting to cover ‘sex in the Soviet Union‘ (before 1992) goes on about such identifying marks:

Prostitutes waited on the platforms of large suburban train stations. They sat with their legs stretched out and their prices written on the soles of their shoes, so that any passerby could check it out. There were two price levels for prostitutes in Moscow: either three or five rubles.

The girls usually could be found near the Prospect Mira subway station. They wore rings made of three-ruble or five-ruble bills. One was green, the other was blue, and it was easy to tell the price the girls were asking.

Prostitution politics are symbolic rather than functional: the laws as written do not ever reflect the presence, absence or predominance of commercial sex. This means looking at sex work’s mores (or habitus) can reveal much more. You learn more from good portrayals in fiction than from rote news items. Gorky Park is a perfect example of a book not about prostitution in which sex workers and clients express agency in the face of the law. Another way to think about this is what I call the Cultural Study of Commercial Sex. In this case, a culture of prohibition, secrecy and resistance through codes is shown: perfectly apt for Soviet times.

-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

Rescuing a sex slave/worker in a novel: The Darkest Little Room

Numerous novels tell the story of attempts to rescue sad prostitutes or fallen women unconscious of their own degradation. It is a classic theme that took shape in the 19th century, signalling new beliefs in social reform: the possibility that those at the bottom of the social heap were not doomed to stay there but with help could rise up and better themselves. William Holman Hunt’s 1853 The Awakening Conscience, which depicts a fallen woman‘s moment of epiphany, is unusual in omitting any Rescue person showing the way, lifting her up, teaching her how to live.

One version of the prostitute’s saviour is a confused, melancholic man who ‘loves’ her and aims to remove her from the life. In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a naive meddler in Vietnamese politics also sets out to rescue Phuong, the young mistress of a jaded older journalist. This book from 1955 is recommended reading for those interested in the Rescue Industry, and I bring it up because the review of another book relates it to Greene’s work.The novel is Patrick Holland’s The Darkest Little Room, the setting is also Saigon and the reviewer’s insights into the main character’s Rescue complex are pointed.

The only off-note in the review is the cliché murky in the headline, as if every time sex goes on sale the moral lights have to go out.

Flawed saviour sucked into Saigon’s murky sex trade

Emily Maguire, The Australian 6 October 2012

“The nights I have spent with prostitutes have been some of the saddest nights of my life,” Joseph reveals near the beginning of the book. He goes on to explain that the sadness comes when the sex is done and he must see the “deep unfeeling blankness” on the face of the “pretty young prostitute”. It’s a telling moment; Joseph is terribly sentimental about sex work, and so unable to see the women who do it as anything other than more or less useful accomplices in his project to redeem himself via loving, and thereby saving, a fallen woman. . .

Joseph cannot see sex workers as fully human lest he be forced to admit that some don’t want saving and, thus, he cannot be the hero he so desperately needs to be.

Emily Maguire’s understanding of Joseph tallies with what I concluded much of Rescue is about after a long time wondering why people saying they wanted to help prostitutes did not listen to what they had to say. In Helping Women Who Sell Sex: The Construction of Benevolent Identities I laid out the foundation for theorising about a Rescue Industry.

Real-life characters like Nicholas Kristof and Siddharth Kara belong to the sentimental tradition of men who want to rescue fallen women and thereby construct for themselves an identity as virtuous Knights in Shining Armour – which is also a path to prestige and power.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropology

Wannabe Special Agents act out fantasies about sex slaves

A National Geographic television special called 21st Century Sex Slaves employs the melodramatic voiceover common to all trite police documentaries, but it goes further. The ever-evolving Rescue Industry now has a large media branch, where camera crews film undercover operations and men act out hero fantasies (women get subordinate roles, usually as faceless victims).

The wannabe Special Agent in this story is Steve Galster, head of something called Freeland Foundation, which bizarrely seems to have been dedicated to preventing wildlife trafficking before jumping on the human gravytrain. I wonder if they found it an easy mental shift from pangolins to young women; the rhetoric is the same:

Freeland is dedicated to making the world free of human slavery and wildlife trafficking by increasing law enforcement capacity, supporting vulnerable communities and raising awareness.

Law enforcement is a Man’s game, right? So these men otherwise associated with saving animals and running NGOs now have an excuse not only to hobnob with real cops but also to play cops themselves. The camera spends a lot of time on Galster, whose features recall pretty-man Special Agents Gibbs and DiNozzo in NCIS, but Galster is a weak, non-charismatic character. National Geographic has taken television shows like NCIS as inspiration in all sorts of ways – but the excitement is conspicuously absent.

Notice the technique: the camera records crowded streets where lots of young women mill about. The narration mentions that many have gone into sex work on their own, but as the camera pans past, the voiceover talks about willing and unwilling women in the same breath, implying that everyone you see is a potential slave.

In this attempt at a thriller the Bad Guys are Uzbeks, in just the same way that Law & Order often singles out an ethnic group’s misbehaviour: Russians in Brighton Beach is a popular one. Here a Thai police chief laments how his country is being abused by foreigners (the trafficking Uzbeks). But it’s wildlife-saviour Galster who gets the main role, despite his inability to convey drama. The whole thing is, like the BBC series on Mexican sex slaves, infotainment, a misleading blend of facts, factoids and fantasies.

Unsurprisingly, Pattaya is one of the locations chosen for this cliché-ridden show, where one place offers Only European Girls. I doubt they pick up any of the irony.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Summertime Imperialism: Meet sex-trafficking victims and other sad folk

Last September I wrote about so-called Reality Tours to meet victims of sex trafficking. Now it’s August and several people have written me from Bangkok about the tour taking place there this past week. I remember when I first heard about Global Exchange educational tours, while visiting a little storefront in San Francisco in 1989. I have a memory of puzzling over the brochure amidst shelves and tables piled with ethnic jewellery and objects from Other Cultures. The shop on 24th Street is still there, according to a contemporary description:

Global Exchange offers fair trade crafts produced in over 40 countries. Proceeds go toward improving lives in these villages. They have a vast selection of unique items from all over the world. This is a great place to pick up a gift for the person who is hard to shop for.

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.

The tour to Bangkok is entitled Thailand: Delegation to End Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: Delegation? Delegates are meant to be official or elected representatives. I shudder to think who people on the tour believe they are representing. Why not call themselves what they are – tourists? Those who think themselves sexually liberal may sneer at Christian tourism – aka missions – but there is not so much difference from the point of view of the objects of their solidarity and pity.

My analysis is not purely theoretical. A couple of decades ago, I happened to be working on the Mexico-US border, in a project whose main task was to provide legal advice to migrants who’d crossed the border illegally and wanted to make a claim for asylum in the US. (Yes, another kind of helping). Lots of people wanted to but few could provide the kind of evidence required by immigration authorities. While stories were checked and papers processed, asylum-seekers had to hang around in halfway-houses found for them by the project.

On one occasion, I was at the enormous garbage dump in Matamoros, where hundreds of people live amidst rubbish of all kinds, picking and carting bits to sell outside. A group of Reality Tourists came up to some children to ask them questions. The children, accustomed to flies crawling over their faces, did not move to brush them off. The tourists, horrified by the flies landing on their own eyes, faced an excruciating dilemma: They wanted to express interest in and respect for the garbage-dwellers at the same time they wanted to run away screaming. But if they ran away, what would it say about the humanity they were fleeing?

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

The Age of Women Who Sell Sex: Does Kristof lie? What about the children?

The other day someone asked if I believe what Nicholas Kristof wrote about sex slaves in Half the Sky or do I think he is lying. In the book he tells a story of being taken into Sonagachi, a red-light district in Kolkata, where he saw unhappy young women said to be under the control of exploiters. At least one of the women told him she wanted to get away. Do I believe he visited Sonagachi and talked to a couple of unwilling workers? Yes, because I am sure his guides to this very large area took him specifically to meet them.

Based on that one experience and what his guides said, he characterised the DMSC, an organisation that supports sex-worker rights in Sonagachi, as corrupt promoters of child prostitution. More than 10,000 people work in Sonagachi, so although DMSC try to prevent children and unwilling people working there through Self-Regulatory Boards, it would be impossible to know what is going on all the time.

Many of those worried about trafficking express special horror about children, by which they sometimes mean anyone under 18. You will recall how Kristof’s use of the tag seventh grader annoyed me, when he tweeted about accompanying a Somaly-Mam brothel raid in Cambodia. A campaigner harassing Craig of Craigslist flourished pictures of women in classifieds who are said to look too young.

Recently a scandal erupted in Singapore because some supposedly respectable men paid for sex with a female under 18. Whether she was or not, photos showed her dressing childishly. Kristof might look at the Thai sex worker and researcher who spoke at Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines and think she is too young. Kristof is sentimental about children, romantic about women and comes from a culture where a lot of young people dress up convincingly to look older than they are. He is a total outsider to the sex industry, ignorant of the possibility that workers commonly try to look younger than they are (to attract clients).

Kristof is a colonialist; he imposes his own narrow cultural attitudes on people he looks at and interprets their lives according to his values. A thin body dressed in t-shirt and shorts says child to him. This mindset makes it impossible for him to read what’s going on in a bar he stumbles into – including, probably, in the United States. To see these people while invading a bar with armed police, where events move fast, many are frightened and impressions are fleeting, exacerbates the problem. I wouldn’t believe anyone’s assertion about other people’s age glimpsed in those conditions.

The Singapore situation illustrates another kind of confusion:

While the local age of consent is 16, the age for commercial sexual transactions – prostitution is legal in Singapore — was raised in 2007 by two additional years. The government acknowledged at the time that there was little need for the new law. “Although there is no evidence to suggest that we have a problem with 16- and 17-year-olds engaging in commercial sex in Singapore, we decided to set the age of protection at 18 years so as to protect a higher proportion of minors,” said senior home affairs minister Ho Peng Kee on the floor of Parliament when the bill was introduced. “Young persons, because they are immature and vulnerable and can be exploited, therefore should be protected from providing sexual services.”

Only when they get money for it, however. Sixteen-year olds can ‘provide sexual services’ for free in Singapore with no problem.

After my talks about migration, sex work, gender perspectives, culture and rights, someone in the audience usually brings up age. The format goes like this: What about the 12-year-old girl sold by her parents to a pimp? Lately, I have taken to pointing out that this is a rhetorical ploy (maybe unconscious) aimed at pushing discussion of a complex topic to its extreme edge, to the case we can all deplore, the ‘obvious’ case of misery. The point is to expose the fallacy of the speaker’s (my) ideas.

The other day I said no one should be making decisions about other people’s degree of will or acceptance of their situations and then generalising to huge groups of people. One response was: No one should be making any assumptions about the degree of will for a 10- year-old girl or boy in the sex trades? After pointing out the rhetoric (used by abolitionists and anti-trafficking people all the time), I answered yes, no one should be making assumptions about 10-year-olds either. How do we know what led to her selling sex? What choices was she faced with? What might happen if she were suddenly extracted from her situation? It is easy to take heroic positions at the extreme of a continuum, but the vast majority of cases lie along its middle, whether people are young or old. To make the extreme the case all policy should be based on – as well as all emotion and compassion – is irresponsible, an infantilising Rescue Industry strategy to be avoided whether you like the idea of kids selling sex or not.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

No crime associated with brothels in Sydney

Refreshing news from a Sydney think tank: No increase in crime or drop in property values are associated with the existence of brothels in urban areas. Specifically Urbis found:

There is not a definitive relationship between the opening and expansion of one of Sydney’s major brothels and any increase in crime.
There is no proven correlation between decreases in property value and the location of sex premises in an area.
There is no evidence that anti-social behaviour in inner city areas can be attributed to the clients or staff of sex premises.

In an article published 14 June entitled Brothels – like funeral parlours – are legitimate and permissible land uses when properly located, Urbis describe how applications for expanded premises from sex venues encounter opposition on moral grounds as well as the usual objections (environmental, for example).

Urbis admit that even in Sydney it is difficult to quantify sex premises but offer a figure showing some of the known approved brothels there.

Urbis conclude that

Sex industry premises, much like other contentious uses such as funeral parlours, can cause a level of discomfort for some members of the community. At the same time, the sex industry has a role to play in the social and economic vibrancy of cities and sex premises are a legal and legitimate land use. Sex industry premises need not be relegated to marginal areas of the city where they will be met with the least objection. The potential discomfort and amenity impacts caused by sex industry premises can be minimised and effectively managed through robust and well-implemented management strategies and adequate planning controls on the part of local governments.

This is an argument for rational regulation of sex businesses, which may look like Sydney’s long famous Touch of Class, pictured at the top (and now closed, I believe). Street prostitution is not included here.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Thai government panders to US anti-trafficking policy, ignores changes in Entertainment Industry

It’s June, formerly a month I had pleasant feelings about but now the time when the US government issues its imperialist TIP report card to Rest of World about their anti-trafficking behaviour (see Institutionalised Arrogance). You may remember that Empower recently released a research report on the state of the Thai entertainment industry in which they said Anti-trafficking rescues are our biggest problem. Now, in anticipation of the next TIP report, they have issued an open letter to the prime minister. I asked them for a little clarification of one term that might be unfamiliar to readers: green harvest – see after the letter for that. And for an unusually nice report about Empower see 25 years in Thailand’s sex industry.

Open Letter to The Prime Minister of the Royal Government of Thailand from Empower

On the occasion of 5th June 2012, National Anti-Human Trafficking Day, Empower alleges that successive Thai governments have sacrificed the rule of law, their international human rights obligations and the well-being of migrant sex workers and their families in an attempt to please the US government and satisfy the American anti-trafficking agenda.

We accuse the United States government of using the issue of human trafficking to coerce its allies into tightening border and immigration controls. The US agenda has also created a climate where women crossing borders are all seen as suspect ‘victims’ of trafficking. Recently on the 21st February 2012 Empower released an in-depth research report, Hit & Run, done by sex workers, which clearly identifies how the State is breaching rule of law and police procedure while arresting wrong people.

Even though Thai governments have tried hard to appease the USA, Thailand remains on a ‘Tier 2 watch list’ and risks being further downgraded in the annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), due for release later this month. Empower sees the Trafficking in Persons Report issued by the US State Department as subjective and biased against the Thai Entertainment Industry in particular.

Furthermore Empower says the Thai government has so far failed to recognize the many improvements the Entertainment Industry has undergone in the last decade. The old days of the ‘green harvest’ and locked brothels are over. In the modern context, sex work is similar to other jobs. Exploitation in the industry is an issue of access to identity and work documents, labor rights and occupational health and safety. These are labor and human rights issues, not police or criminal issues.

Society is all too familiar with media images of uniformed police, fully armed, storming Entertainment Places and apprehending young unarmed women. Women desperately try to hide their faces; sometimes the women are naked and not even given time to cover themselves. The women and girls never fight back; most don’t even dare to think about trying to run away and not one woman or girl has ever been found carrying a weapon. These events were commonly shown in the media well before the new human trafficking hysteria. The image of a hero or rescuer has now been added to the scene. . . it’s all very exciting.

However society never sees or hears of what happens after the rescue. Society is not told that the women are put through a range of unnecessary medical tests regardless of consent or their human dignity. They don’t know that women have been detained against their will for over a year in government shelters. No one knows about the pain and suffering brought about by the separation from children and family. Who could imagine that the women, who are the main family providers, are not compensated in any way by the State, and given just 3,000 Baht, (about 200 Baht per month) from private anti trafficking fund when they are eventually forcibly and formally deported?

Under the law there are provisions for social assistance but in reality the focus is on punishment. Little wonder women escape from their rescuers when they can. Police enforcement of the law using raids encourages violence. We suggest that instead of continuing costly, and ultimately useless ‘raids and rescue’ missions, it is time Thailand resisted being bullied by foreign governments and instead worked to ensure migrant sex workers’ access to documentation and fair working conditions in entertainment places.

Today Empower Foundation is calling on the Prime Minister of The Royal Government of Thailand to:

Review the practices of the Anti-Trafficking Act in relation to the protection of human rights and the rule of law.

Stop using sex workers as scapegoats in foreign policy and other political games.

Stop police entrapment which contravenes police policy.

Stop raids on entertainment places which are violent actions usually reserved for apprehending dangerous criminals.

Stop arbitrary detention of sex workers.

Protect the human rights of women arrested or assisted under the Anti trafficking Act and ensure they receive the full entitlements according to the Act – e.g. translation, legal representation, compensation.

Work together to promote accurate information about the modern context of sex work in Thailand to all agencies involved in anti-trafficking.

The letter has been endorsed by:
Sex workers of Krabi, Sex workers of Phuket, Sex workers of Samut Sakon, Sex workers of Nontaburi, Sex workers of Chiang Mai, Sex workers of Mae Sai, Chiang Rai, Sex workers of Mae Sot, Tak, Sex workers of Mukdahan, Sex workers of Ubon Rachatani, Sex workers of Udon Thani, Sex workers of Pattaya, Chonburi, Sex workers of Soi Cowboy, Bangkok, Sex workers of Soi Nana, Bangkok, Sex workers of Patpong, Bangkok.

Copies to:
National Human Rights Commission, Office of the Prime Minister, Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, Department of Special Investigations (AHTD), Office of the Attorney General – Public Prosecutor, Ministry of Justice, United Nations Interagency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP)

On green harvest in brief: After World War II the military (with US support) expanded into rural areas. Some corrupt military personnel began offering to take young girls and women to work in the cities, and families in desperate need accepted money in exchange. These debts carried to the workplace; if that was a brothel it would take about three years to pay back the loan at grossly inflated interest rates in conditions of forced labour (no pay and no freedom of movement.) This practice was the norm until about 1999, affecting especially mountain villages of ethnic minorities and later neighbouring Burma and Lao. The point Empower makes is green harvest is no longer the norm.

I would add that the non-recognition of change – cultural, social, economic – in countries the USA pretends to help constitutes imperialism. Keep the natives down by keeping them ‘primitive’.

A report from 2003 entitled Cultural, Economic and Legal factors Underlying Trafficking in Thailand and their impact on women and girls from Burma, by Christa Crawford, was republished in 2009 in Thailand Law Journal.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines (to rescue me from selling sex): Videos

Two videos from Don’t Talk to Me About Sewing Machines at the AWID conference in Istanbul recently. The slogan comes from a couple of centuries of social work focused on Rescue and Rehabilitation: First remove the woman from prostitution, then give her alternative employment. Historically, sewing – with or without machines – has been the default alternative, despite the fact that many women have gone into sex work having rejected sewing work. As for sewing lessons, a lot of girls on the planet are still taught to sew as part of their traditional gender upbringing, so the idea that Rescue ladies are required to teach this skill is often ridiculous.

First here is Wi, from Empower, with voiceover in English (at the event she spoke Thai and Liz, also from Empower, translated). I’m putting them here in case they are useful for didactic purposes – like in a classroom. Thank you to Dale from APNSW for these.

Then me at the same session, trying to link my ideas with Kthi Win’s plenary speech an hour earlier and with Wi’s presentation, including the showing of the funny film Last Rescue in Siam (sometimes I feel the Rescue Industry’s proper genre is tragi-comedy). I didn’t speak for 23 hours and 40 minutes, don’t worry.

There are now three videos on the Naked Anthropologist’s youtube channel.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Girls who buy sex from beach boys: Sex tourism in Bali

Beach boys and women sex tourists: every journalist’s dream topic. A Swiss television reporter interviewed me about a documentary he was making, incorporating footage from Cowboys in Paradise, a film about Kuta Beach in Bali. I happened to be in Basel, nearly missing Catherine MacKinnon when the reporter contacted me, so he came into the room where I was giving a talk and interviewed me afterwards. Some bits of those are cut into this 11-minute television clip, and although most of the English and Indonesian are overlaid with German, the pictures are good and you can follow the narrative easily. Note especially the testimonies of two women: one is the young wife of a beach boy who feels okay about how he makes his money and the other is a young Swede who asks why she shouldn’t have whatever sex she wants.

[The original embed-code is kaput so here’s a link to the video. Note here the tourists are young women. Reporters want to know if the boys are ‘really’ prostitutes and why the girls are paying; they have trouble figuring out who is exploiting whom. It’s a bias, of course, to insist someone has to be exploiting since money and sex are involved, rather than seeing these as ordinary relationships, the kind that travelling people have been having since human life began. Some want to believe that women are morally better than men and therefore won’t pay for sex just because they have the money and freedom to allow them to fly to places like Bali and do it. I don’t think women have any moral traits as a class, and the fact that some like these breezy holiday situations the same way men do doesn’t surprise me. (That’s why I end up laughing during interviews like this – because to me what I am saying is just common sense not requiring any professorial analysis.) There’s a theory that women are more keen to be romanced than men, which I consider pretty silly since plenty of male tourists have stars in their eyes and are wound around the little fingers of those poorer women they are said to be exploiting.

Then some want to see these largely white-skinned women as racist, an interpretation I also don’t share, for the same reason: travellers like to meet others who seem interesting and different; they like to talk, drink, eat, dance, tour and have sex with them. That’s banal. In such situations, travellers often can and are willing to pay for their fun, and since I don’t see having sex as different from those other activities I’d have to condemn travel itself if I am going to condemn the sex. Unless people are wanting a condemnation of global economic inequalities that mean the beach boys don’t have lots of other great ways to make money: well, fine, I condemn that. But please note that the boys interviewed here find pleasuring tourists a lot easier and more fun than other jobs. And that they don’t see themselves as sex workers or as prostitutes; no professional identity need attach to ambiguous relationships. Is this all the erotic side of imperialism? I guess so. But we are all caught up in it; there is no perfectly clean place to stand; telling people to stay home is no solution, whether they are tourists or migrants.

Other stories about sex tourism here.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Sex workers at AWID reject feminist fundamentalism

I am Kthi Win from Myanmar and I am a sex worker. I manage a national organisation for female, male and transgender sex workers in Burma and I am also the chairperson of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers. Until now, organising anything in Myanmar has been very difficult. People ask, How did you set up a national programme for sex workers? And my answer to them is Our work is illegal. Every night we manage to earn money without getting arrested by the police. We used to work and organise together, so we use this knowledge in order to work out how we can set up the National Network without making the government angry.

This is the opening of Kthi’s plenary speech last Saturday at the AWID conference in Istanbul; at the end Kthi asked those in the hall – 1500-2000 – to stand and repeat with her Sex work is work! Most people did what she asked; no one protested. I presume hard-core abolitionists chose to stay away from this session. You can listen to Kthi’s speech, too.

laura agustin awid 2012

Photo by Debolina Dutta

I was at this event most of last week, part of a group promoting a vision of sex work, migration and feminism that emphasises agency, the state of being in action, taking power, making decisions even when presented with few options. We overtly challenged the reductionist, infantilising ideology that has come to dominate mainstream policy and faux journalism (like The New York Times’s) by attending many sessions and commenting.

I spoke at Don’t Talk to Us About Sewing Machines, moderated by Meena Seshu from SANGRAM in Sangli, India. Wi from Empower spoke first about her research into the state of sex work in Thailand; then she showed the film Last Rescue in Siam, which makes fun of police raids on bars where people are harmlessly singing and drinking. Dale from APNSW then showed a clip from a raid in India that shows sex workers physically resisting police ‘rescue’.

Rebekah Curtis of TrustLaw reported the session in The Word on Women – Anthropologist slams raids “rescuing” sex workers, and I am glad she reproduced these words of mine:

Large amounts of money go into these programmes to rescue people who in many, many, many cases do not want to be rescued, she said, adding that many women choose sex work as a preference to jobs such as domestic work.

We’re talking about the ability to recognise that someone else can make a different decision from your own about her economic or mental or emotional empowerment, she added. That if you want to rescue someone you need to know very well first what it is that they want before you rush in to help them.

I hope our interventions in this very large international women’s event have been worthwhile: one never knows.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Anatomy of sex trafficking funding: How to get money for a Rescue project

By Gloria! Look Who’s Here to Protect Victims with Money and Might reads the giddy headline. It seems that Warren Buffet’s son cannot bear to be left off today’s showiest philanthropy bandwagon: Rescuing women from prostitution. And neither does Ruchira Gupta intend to be left off today’s biggest social-work gravytrain: Funding for sex trafficking victims. And what better way to get attention for the cause than to bring Gloria Steinem in to pose for pictures?

So here’s how to make sex trafficking into your own project, laid out clearly in an article from The Telegraph of Calcutta (a paper Gupta once worked for). Note that it is important to pretend you are the first to take on trafficking, to go look at poor prostitutes in their habitat and to talk with women who hated the life. It’s definitely Reality Tourism. What’s really ridiculous here is bringing in an outsider when India has a long history, both intellectual and activist, in thinking creatively about sex work (consider DMSC’s many initiatives), and consider the comment at India Today: Do we really need Steinem to tell us that prostitution is about ‘an unequal distribution of power’ or that we face an ‘epidemic’ of sex trafficking?

The epidemic is rather of tourists from the US claiming expertise without reading up even a little of the complex literature before they start posing for photo opportunities. Steinem embarrasses herself further by claiming some lifelong connection to Calcutta when she cannot even remember where she stayed 50-some years ago.

Most serious however is to hear Ruchira Gupta calling for a stop to AIDS funding that provides sex workers with condoms; she wants them to get out of prostitution instead. At her and Steinem’s event in Hyderabad the other day, sex workers like these in the photo to the left were ignored. In the story below about Calcutta it is claimed Gupta and Steinem talked with some, but no report on how that went.

The story is full of silly words. Everyone has to be an icon nowadays. But do icons camp in town? Steinem ideates for thought leaders. Gupta pretentiously claims a connection to Gandhi for Apne Aap, a traditional Rescue project that calls all prostitution rape. Classic colonialism all around, with outsiders needed to protect with money and might.

A-team to tackle sex-ploitation
Mohua Das, 9 April 2012, The Telegraph

The day screen icon Shah Rukh Khan and his KKR XI were struggling to make an impact at the Eden Gardens, an 11-member team led by feminist icon Gloria Steinem and including philanthropy icons Peter and Jennifer Buffett, was quietly camping in town to make a difference where it really matters: putting in their money and their might to battle sex trafficking.

A “learning tour” ideated by Steinem, funded by the NoVo Foundation run by the son and daughter-in-law of Warren Buffett, and steered by Ruchira Gupta, founder of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, had brought together 11 thought leaders in a city where hardly anyone of global significance spends any time any more.

The high-profile champions of humanitarian causes from the US and Canada (see chart) arrived hush-hush on Wednesday, spent two days observing the red-light district of Sonagachhi, visiting the Victoria Memorial and interacting with members of Apne Aap.

At a dinner hosted by Harsh and Madhu Neotia on Thursday evening, 78-year-old Steinem, who had briefly lived in Calcutta five decades ago, told Metro: “I came to know of Ruchira’s work and I wanted to support her and be helpful. We wanted other people to see and meet the women of Apne Aap and so I thought if we got a group to come here and understand what’s happening, they too would become attached and become supporters.” The ‘they’ in question included Peter Buffett and his wife Jennifer whose NoVo Foundation, a philanthropic organisation to promote the rights of girls and women worldwide, took the lead in organising the learning tour.

“We got together this group of people interested in learning more about how to end sexual exploitation and to specifically learn from the model of Apne Aap,” said Pamela Shifman, director of initiatives for girls and women at the NoVo Foundation and the first person who Ruchira connected with in the group. Ruchira founded Apne Aap Women Worldwide with 22 women from the red-light districts in Mumbai in 2002 before expanding its offices in Delhi, Calcutta, Bihar and New York.

“It’s a learning tour for the group to understand the Apne Aap approach. We have been travelling around India but we are particularly concerned about the situation in Calcutta because of Sonagachhi and the legitimisation of sexual exploitation there. This group is here to see this problem in Sonagachhi and also to see the solution that Apne Aap has created,” said Ruchira.

A former journalist with The Telegraph, her 1996 documentary The Selling of Innocents had exposed the trafficking of women from Nepal to India and won her an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. In Calcutta, Apne Aap operates in areas like Kidderpore, Munshigunge and Watgunge. Steinem, who lives in New York, is a chair on the advisory board for Apne Aap.

The six-day India tour started on April 2 with a visit to Gandhi Smriti in Delhi, as Apne Aap is modelled on Gandhi’s social justice framework, Ahimsa (non-violence) and Antodaya (power to the last wo/man) being the cornerstones. After a meeting with Apne Aap girls and a speech by Steinem at JNU to mark the 10th anniversary of Apne Aap, the group arrived in Calcutta on Wednesday before leaving for Bihar on Friday.

Day One in Calcutta was spent in a visit to Sonagachhi. “This red-light area is becoming a magnet for traffickers and Murshidabad, the Sunderbans and New Jalpaiguri are becoming high-risk areas. It’s a shame that Calcutta allows Sonagachhi to exist,” said Ruchira.

On Day Two, the group attended a panel discussion with survivors of prostitution followed by interactions with people who want to legalise prostitution and believe sex should be called ‘work’, and meetings with Apne Aap women’s groups.

For Steinem, it was her third visit to India on an Apne Aap project. “India’s been a part of my life since I was 22. First of all, I was a student in India on fellowship, in the Fifties. I came for a year and stayed on for two years. That’s when I also lived in Calcutta for a while but it was so long ago, either in 1957 or 58. I was staying with a friend but I just can’t remember where…. I think somewhere near the Calcutta University,” said the pioneer of the women’s lib movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Steinem even recounted writing a guidebook on India, “trying to persuade people to stay longer in the country”.

Now, for Steinem and Ruchira, sex trafficking is an invisible black hole, and its victims the last frontier of humanity. Apne Aap, while firmly opposing “people trying to glorify prostitution but actually legitimising repeated rape in Sonagachhi”, has been organising women and girls in groups of 10 inside slums and red-light districts to resist traffickers and pimps in Delhi, Bihar and Calcutta.

“There’s something lopsided about the AIDS lobby around the world that tries to protect male buyers from disease rather than protecting the women from them. We need to bring attention to this, that this kind of funding has to stop and investing in funds that give these women more choices other than prostitution has to start,” explained Ruchira.

“That’s when Gloria suggested that we create a group of people and organise an alternative sex tour where they can come and see what is going on in these red-light districts and also understand the Apne Aap approach.” So what would Steinem prescribe to combat trafficking in this part of the country? “I don’t want to arrive for a few days and dictate…. In America too, they tend to arrest the prostituted women and not the traffickers, pimps or brothel owners. We should arrest the criminals and support the victims.”

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Rescue as Scam: Australian charity lies about saving girls from sex slavery

Sex-slave charity head quits amid row was the alternate title to this disgraceful story that reminds us that the United States is not alone in playing Rescue Industry hardball. A claim to have saved very young girls from sexual slavery (supposedly shown in this photo) has been repudiated by police in Thailand. The charity’s name, Grey Man, suggests some sort of paramilitary identity; their mission, according to their website, is the rescue of children from traffickers.

This news story can hardly be counted on for the final facts of this matter, and it may be that the charity is locked in some kind of struggle for power or money with Thai police. But it is creepy enough that an Australian charity should, as they proclaim, promote the use of former Australian soldiers and police in daring missions to rescue victims of sex trafficking in Asia. Daring? Why? If any brothels have become dangerous places, rescue raids are surely the reason. The gall! And anyone who describe himself as daring is already being ridiculous.

Rescue boss out over claims of fake ‘victims’

Lindsay Murdoch, 26 March 2012, smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald)

THE head of an Australian charity that has been accused of faking the rescue of Thai hill tribe children from sexual slavery has resigned. Former Australian army commando Sean McBride stepped down from the Grey Man charity at the weekend following new claims about the organisation and an investigation into the hill tribes children by Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation.

Mr McBride, who also uses the name John Curtis, told The Age the Grey Man’s board decided he should step down because ‘‘personal issues’’ between him and people in Thailand were interfering with the organisation’s operations. Funded by Australian donations, the high-profile charity promotes the use of former Australian soldiers and police in daring missions to rescue victims of sex trafficking in Asia.

Police in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai have cut ties with the charity amid claims and counter-claims about the organisation pending the outcome of the departmental investigation. In a new claim, the Grey Man’s former head of investigations in Thailand said the charity’s website had exaggerated the success of its operations, including changing the ages of victims.

‘‘Sean [Mr McBride] told me younger girls are most interesting for donors,’’ said the Thailand-born man, who asked that his name not be published because of his undercover work. The charity’s website often claimed that victims as young as 12 were rescued.

Responding by email to questions from The Age sent before he stepped down, Mr McBride said he never changed reports ‘‘except to make them more readable and media-orientated’’. He said the charity, which last year had about 25 field operatives and was training 20 more, would not put ‘‘people on the ground in Thailand until we get the all-clear from the DSI’’, although its website continues to appeal for donations to support its main objective of ‘‘assist[ing] the police in Thailand in locating and rescuing children from trafficking and sexual abuse’’. He told The Age that much of the controversy about the charity he founded in 2007 was about ‘‘corruption and vested interests’’.

The charity says it has rescued dozens of children from prostitution in Asia, the youngest aged 10. It also works on prevention measures such as supporting employment and education programs in an attempt to stop children being trafficked for sexual exploitation. But the charity has had acrimonious disputes with its operatives in Thailand, including police provided with costs to support its operations.

Referring to the hill-tribe-children investigation and the Grey Man’s critics, Mr McBride said: ‘‘Did we rescue 22 children and did we scam the Australian public? They know they are about to lose that one, so they are using half-truths now to try and discredit us in other ways and they will keep trying.’’

Police from the Chiang Mai-based transnational crime unit told The Age that 21 hill tribe children from a village in northern Chiang Rai province were not rescued from prostitution as the charity claimed on its website along with appeals for funds. The Department of Special Investigation is investigating claims that the children had never left their homes, had continued to attend school and had suffered as a result of the publicity.

Mr McBride said the Grey Man had provided the department with a comprehensive response to the allegations. ‘‘We are fully co-operating with the inquiry,’’ he said. Police also told The Age the department is investigating the Grey Man’s alleged use of a fake address in Chiang Mai. Mr McBride said the address ‘‘was a temporary address when we first started’’.

In responses to questions from The Age, Mr McBride defended the use of photographs of hill tribe children on its website above references to children being taken to a brothel. ‘‘There don’t seem to be many photos of hill tribe kids. If they were sex trade victims they would have their eyes blacked out,’’ he said. ‘‘I suppose people could make a connection between those kids and brothels but it was not our intention. I will discuss it with our people, but I think people realise a site like ours will have photos of kids on it.’’

The former head of Grey Man’s 10-person Thai investigation unit said Australian volunteers who travelled to Thailand to support operations could provide little assistance because they could not speak Thai and had little knowledge of Thai culture. Mr McBride said the man did not like working with foreigners ‘‘so we had to send our volunteers off to do their own tasks’’.

Operations to rescue sex trade workers in Thailand have become highly contentious. The Empower Foundation, which represents sex workers, said in a report released this month that ‘‘we have now reached a point where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practice than there are women exploited by traffickers’’. [that story here]

The foundation was not referring specifically to the Grey Man, which is based in Brisbane and has been strongly supported by Australia’s legal profession, including judges. The Grey Man board has appointed former Australian Federal Police agent Colin Rowley to replace Mr McBride, who said he will no longer be involved with or comment further on the charity.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Chinese sex workers, in and out of China

To those inundated by the same crude message about sex trafficking over and over, two news stories may surprise. In the first, Chinese women who travel to Malaysia are considered interesting not because of any scandal or scourge but because of culture. Not long ago, this story would not have seemed quite so odd – before all women who travel to sell sex were transformed by the Rescue Industry into pathetic victims.

Malaysia just like home for prostitutes from China
28 February 2012, Borneo Post

Kuala Lumpur . . .influx of ‘freelance’ prostitutes from China. . . they liked the climate here which was not far different from China’s. . . They speak Mandarin, which makes it easy for them to mix with the local Chinese community and their food back home is almost similar to the Chinese food here. The availability of budget flights and Internet access are also catalysts for them to come to this country. . . preliminary investigation found that these women who worked through syndicates would return to Malaysia [after being sent home] on student visas and resume working as freelance prostitutes as the earnings were lucrative. . . most of the Chinese nationals interrogated used student visas to enable them to enter the country unimpeded.

. . .Chinese nationals made up the most number of people arrested for prostitution at 653 from January to February 15. This was followed by those from Vietnam (367), Thailand (300), Indonesia (177), the Philippines (55), Uzbekistan (19), Myanmar (14), Cambodia (10), Bangladesh (nine), Mongolia (six), Nigeria and Sri Langka (four each), and India (one). The highest number of arrests involved Chinese nationals at 5,753 in 2009, 6,378 in 2010 and 5,922 in 2011.

That’s a lot of arrests, so it’s not a good story, but notable that the women are not described as trafficking victims. The reference to a syndicate may be to agencies who process visas for students, including students who do not intend to study.

Why would women from China travel to Malaysia to sell sex, given this arrest rate? Consider how they are treated in China.

The oldest profession seeks respect
9 September 2011, The 4th Media

Lin is just 17 . . Although she knows nothing about cutting hair, she’s employed by a hair salon that can be spotted from the street by a sparkling pink barber pole that glows through the windows at night . . .she has already suffered the humiliation of being handcuffed and detained by police several times.

The salon owner surnamed Wang and an employee surnamed Li get worked up as they rant about the treatment they receive from the police. Li said police have raided her shop twice in the last four months. . . Wang jumps in with angry tales of frequent visits by the police that cost her 600 to 800 yuan in fines to retrieve her employees from the police station. . . A day or two after the raid Wang’s salon is back in business. Wang said she would rather pay for a license, get legal protection and follow required health regulations. “I offer a service that I’m not forcing anyone to take. I’m doing a good thing. It’s not easy making money these days,” she said, adding that one of her four employees was abandoned by her husband, and another has several children to feed. Wang takes a 20 percent commission from the women who average little more than 100 yuan per day [12 euros].

. . .The ubiquitous salons mainly employ women from the countryside, who have little education, few opportunities at home and little chance of doing well in a cosmopolitan city. . . many of the salons operate on the fringe of the law and provide sex services to some of the millions of migrant men who leave home for many months at a time. . .

Young teen Lin resisted becoming a full-time sex worker. She felt disgraced and uncomfortable with her coquettish colleagues. She went home to her village but there was nothing for her to do and soon returned to Yulin and sex work and now supports herself and her family. She moved to another salon that treats her better and says she actually enjoys the job.

. . .A xiaojie, which is a euphemism for sex worker, is treated with disdain by open society. . .the police who often publicly humiliate the xiaojie in hopes of deterring others from entering the profession or in an effort to be seen to be cleaning up a neighborhood. The main targets of the police are the migrant xiaojie who work in small salons or massage parlors. The high-end call girls working out of big nightclubs and luxury hotels are seldom harassed. Prostitution in China is punishable by a maximum 15 days in detention and a fine of 5,000 yuan [600 euros].

For more information see Migrant sex workers in China: massage parlours, hair salons, hotel rooms.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Thai sex workers: Anti-trafficking Rescues are Our Biggest Problem

We have now reached a point in history where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women exploited by traffickers.

This statement comes from the founder of Empower on the occasion of their report Hit and Run: The impact of anti-trafficking policy and practice on Sex Workers’ Human Rights in Thailand. This assessment, carried out by more than 200 sex workers over the course of 12 months in bars, restaurants and brothels across the country and in Burma and Laos, begins:

We travel for days up the mountains, across rivers, through dense forest. We follow the paths that others have taken. Small winding paths of dust or mud depending on the season. I carry my bag of clothes and all the hopes of my family on my back. I carry this with pride; it’s a precious bundle not a burden. As for the border, for the most part, it does not exist. There is no line drawn on the forest floor. There is no line in the swirling river. I simply put my foot where thousands of other women have stepped before me. My step is excited, weary, hopeful, fearful and defiant. Behind me lies the world I know. It’s the world of my grandmothers and their grandmothers. Ahead is the world of my sisters who have gone before me, to build the dreams that keep our families alive. This step is Burma. This step is Thailand. That is the border.

If this was a story of man setting out on an adventure to find a treasure and slay a dragon to make his family rich and safe, he would be the hero. But I am not a man. I am a woman and so the story changes. I cannot be the family provider. I cannot be setting out on an adventure. I am not brave and daring. I am not resourceful and strong. Instead I am called illegal, disease spreader, prostitute, criminal or trafficking victim.

Why is the world so afraid to have young, working class, non-English speaking, and predominantly non-white women moving around? It’s not us that are frequently found to be pedophiles, serial killers or rapists. We have never started a war, directed crimes against humanity or planned and carried out genocide. It’s not us that fill the violent offender’s cells of prisons around the world. Exactly what risk does our freedom of movement pose? Why is keeping us in certain geographical areas so important that governments are willing to spend so much money and political energy? Why do we feel like sheep or cattle, only allowed by the farmer to graze where and when he chooses? Why do other women who have already crossed over into so many other worlds, fight to keep us from following them? Nothing in our experiences provides us with an answer to these questions.

A hundred-page report follows. Excerpts from Sex ‘trade’, not ‘traffic’, a news story on the report include:

The survey determined that more than 50,000 sex workers have been involved with Empower since it started [in 1985] including migrants mainly from Laos, Burma, China and Cambodia…

Migration, it was noted, is part of the “culture” of sex work, and the brokers involved in transporting people are generally seen as helpful. Most don’t charge exorbitant rates for their service…

“We came to build new lives for our families, not to be sent home empty-handed and ashamed,” explained Dang Moo, another Burmese sex worker in Mae Sot…

“Before I was arrested I was working happily, had no debt, and was free to move around the city,” said Nok, a Burmese. “Now I’m in debt, I’m scared most of the time, and it’s not safe to move around. How can they call this ‘help’?”…

For those dropping into this website for the first time and not familiar with the issues except for what you’ve seen on television or in the newspapers, I have put together a list of links to stories about ‘rescues’ not appreciated by those defined as victims. This does not mean the migrants or sex workers or prostitutes were all perfectly happy with everything about their lives; it means they did not want whatever attempt to help was forced on them as part of anti-sex trafficking operations, and in many cases felt their lives had been ruined by Rescue. The Rescue Industry tag on this website includes many more posts with more resources, but here is an array of striking commentaries on what so few people question: the efficacy of Rescue operations.

Women resist rescue by anti-trafficking police, who admit it, July 2011
Saved at last? or Sex Workers Don’t Want Rescue? Stories from India, October 2010
Chinese trafficked sex workers refuse rescue from Congo, January 2011
Even sex-trafficked brothel workers reject raids and rescues, August 2011
Saving prostitutes or chasing out sex workers: Don Benzi, Abruzzo and deforestation, October 2010
Teen prostitutes don’t want to be saved so they must be brainwashed, right?, October 2011
Bangalore sex workers reject rescue by Supreme Court judge, March 2011
Cambodia Ladyboy Rescue Goes Wrong, November 2008
Sex Workers on Sunday: what people say themselves about exchanging money for sex, April 2011

And just to make it clear this problem of imposing victimisation and Rescue on women who sell sex is quite old, consider

Letter from the prostitute that didn’t want saving, 1858

–Laura Agustín, The Naked Anthropologist

Kolkata Sex Worker Collective DMSC Celebrates 20 Years

DMSC's Avinash clinic. Photo: Indranil Bhoumik/Mint

The most popular page on this website is a 2009 story about prices in Sonagachi, a red-light area in Kolkata. It got more than 200 comments, mostly from clients, some from pimps, others from morally outraged folks, mostly in India. I used to work at deleting the nasty ones every day, and then I stopped allowing comments, or there would be heaven knows how many by now. I have more than once been asked to remove the most sexist and deplorable comments, but how would this make sense, given my interest in understanding what’s going on in commercial sex and gender relations? Not to mention that erasure would be a weird form of End Demand.

DMSC, or Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, the sex worker collective described in a story below, operate a project in Sonagachi. Their principles are

Respect and dignity to sex work and towards sex workers
Reliance on the knowledge and wisdom of the community of sex workers
Recognition of sex work as an occupation and preserve and protect their occupational and human rights

Accusations have been made by anti-prostitutionists (among them Nicholas Kristof) that there is something sinister about DMSC. The slurs, which have never been substantiated, probably derive from the collective’s requirement that journalists, academics, philanthropists and other tourists seek permission before swanning in to take photos of people. DMSC consider such behaviour to be theft. For those who want to abolish prostitution and make everything into trafficking and slavery, Durbar’s refusal to play along with gawkers must be annoying, given the collective’s size, but that is no reason to slander the whole project.

In the following birthday story please note how many areas they are active in: culture, health, sports, children and publishing, as well as advocacy, lobbying and other kinds of activism. I especially like the description of a party for the marginalised, in which taboos are taboo.

The New Rhythms of Sonagachi

Kolkata Chromosome/Shamik Bag, 24 February 2012, livemint.com

As the city’s sex workers collective turns 20, we meet members who have found confidence in their enhanced social presence. For what is sometimes referred to as the world’s oldest profession, a mere passage of two decades can seem irrelevant in the life of Sonagachi—the red-light area in Kolkata and among the largest brothel districts in Asia. Yet, in these 20 years, 38-year-old Swapna Roy has seen a change in the way people refer to her—from being sneeringly mentioned in the coarse Bengali equivalent of slut, Roy today is a jouno kormi—a sex worker.

Roy’s daylight hours are busy—every day she is on the field in areas like Ultadanga and Janbazar as the joint coordinator of a project which sensitizes around 3,000 sex workers on safe and hygienic practices. She also keeps a tab on her two schoolgoing children, one of whom got a first division in the Madhyamik examinations last year. There is no unease about the business of her sundown hours. “We have come to realize that sex work is like any other work and I’m like any other worker. In these two decades, we have learnt to appreciate this.”

We are in the office of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a collective of 65,000 sex workers from West Bengal. The organization works for women’s rights and is at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS and related issues. Sex workers are the primary office bearers and stakeholders at DMSC, and in the 20 years of its existence, the organization has been responsible for bringing out into the streets—and into middle-class drawing rooms, through newspaper and television coverage—the issues facing sex workers, including the demand for legal sanction for the profession.

“You will find bank managers trying to woo them for their accounts and senior police officers calling up to seek appointments. Many of them are frequent fliers to Delhi and some travel abroad every three months on official work. There has been a cultural shift in society’s perception of sex workers,” says Shubha Ranjan Sinha, a senior DMSC official, sitting in the spacious front room of Durbar’s Nilmoni Mitra Street office, near Sonagachi. Posters with slogans like “Liberty, Equality, Sexuality” and “Only rights can stop the wrong” adorn the walls.

The three-storey office is abuzz. The next day, 15 February, would mark 20 years since a team of medical professionals, led by Smarajit Jana of Kolkata’s All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, visited Sonagachi on an HIV intervention research study. In due course, Dr Jana realized that for the sex workers, their children’s education, access to financial services and fending of police harassment and torture by local thugs was more important than urging a client to use a condom. So Dr Jana founded DMSC, with sex workers as stakeholders, based on the value of “collective bargaining power”. From 12 members in 1995, DMSC draws its current strength of 65,000 members from 48 branches across the state, each headed by an elected secretary, according to Dr Jana.

The following day, the terrace of the Durbar office, the venue of the anniversary celebrations, is cheerfully decorated with streamers and balloons. With a cake waiting to be cut, speaker after speaker gives short speeches to mark the occasion. There is much to cheer about, it seems. In 1995, Usha, the consumer cooperative society and micro-credit programme under DMSC, convinced the Bengal government to alter the state’s cooperative law to register it as a sex workers cooperative instead of being wrongly labelled a housewives cooperative. With more than 5,000 members putting in their small savings, Usha, as of 2006-07, had an annual turnover of Rs. 9.75 crore and has disbursed Rs. 2.12 crore in loans to members. This came against the monopoly of Sonagachi moneylenders, some of whom charged 300% interest against loans. Some sex workers also have health insurance, while some have got voter identity cards with the Election Commission of India recognizing their Usha membership as valid identity proof. State Bank of India has also begun to recognize sex work as a profession while opening accounts, says Dr Jana. DMSC also runs 17 non-formal schools for children of sex workers, and two hostels at Ultadanga and Baruipur. There are regular teachers who give tuition to boarders (students who are pursuing higher education) in different subjects.

Members of Komol Gandhar, DMSC’s cultural wing dedicated to dance, drama, mime and music and run by the children, get invited regularly for paid shows. Eminent theatre personalities like the late Badal Sircar and Rudraprasad Sengupta have earlier trained its theatre unit. The Durbar football team, largely comprising children of sex workers, has for the first time in the 2011-12 season, participated in the nursery football league conducted by The Indian Football Association, West Bengal. They have won six of the seven games they have played so far, says coach Biswajit Majumdar. Some of the young footballers, says Majumdar, have represented Bengal at national-level junior championships.

Mrinal Kanti Dutta, one of the 12 founding members of Durbar, is the author of three non-fiction books, one of which is based on his experience of living in the Kalighat red-light area with his mother. While the three books have been published by Durbar Prakashani, the in-house publishing wing which has around 25 titles and brings out a popular monthly magazine, Dutta’s forthcoming novel, Pakhi Hijrer Biye, will be launched soon by a well-known College Street publisher. Dutta dropped out of college out of fear of getting ridiculed after his batchmates spotted him in the Kalighat red-light area.

Yet, on various occasions, Durbar has been hauled up for its insistence on legalizing sex work, its inability to eradicate violence and exploitation in red-light areas, and for not disclosing to patients the positive results from HIV tests. As Dr Jana says, HIV+ results are not disclosed only on occasions when Durbar has to follow norms under National AIDS Control Organisation’s (Naco) “unlinked anonymous” testing programme, even while admitting that more needs to be done to stem violence.

The terrace party comes across as a zone that is manifestly liberated from the moral scruples of the greater society that surrounds Sonagachi. Here, taboos are taboo and the fringe of Kolkata life—sex workers, their children, cross-dressers and transgenders —are comfortably cocooned through their commingling. Part of the confidence and inspiration comes from the story of Bharati Dey, secretary, DMSC. Dey is a frequent flier and has already exhausted the pages of two passports. As a sex worker in the mid-1990s, Dey is well-known for the movement she launched in 1997 in the Naihati- Barrackpore industrial belt against the mafia and political extortion. As she speaks, words like attempted murder, lynching, revolver and gang rape flow effortlessly—almost as if she is nonchalant to the indicators of her earlier existence. But, as Dey admits, it is life’s experiences that have shaped her and these days words and phrases like AGM (annual general meeting), Geneva Conference, donor agencies, advocacy and human rights, are uttered as easily.

“We don’t dissuade adult and willing girls from entering the profession. It is easy to say sex work is bad, but most girls come from poverty stricken families and are uneducated,” says Purnima Chatterjee, who sits on a self-regulatory board, which works as a watchdog body in all DMSC branches against trafficking and introduction of minor and unwilling girls into the trade…

It’s close to noon, and outside the clinic, where we meet, Sonagachi is stirring after what must have been yet another late night out in an area that is home to an estimated 11,000 sex workers. Bare-bodied men soap themselves frenetically at a public bath, a juice vendor peels the skin off pineapples, rickshaw-pullers wait for passengers, petticoats and blouses are collected from clotheslines in surrounding brothels. Crows and vultures fly above an overflowing garbage dump next to a black granite-faced building named Night Lovers.

Through this scene, 23-year-old Mita Mondal’s thin voice can be heard. Mondal is the lead vocalist and face of the Durbar band. She was rescued as a minor from the streets of Sonagachi eight years ago. The band practises on the vacant third floor of the building which houses the Avinash clinic, and the strident music filters out of the open windows to the streets below. Mondal occasionally goes off key and the conga player misses a rhythm or two. But everything falls into place when Mondal begins singing the Durbar anthem. It seems well-rehearsed, the dholak player shakes his head like a wound-up toy, and everybody mouths the chorus lines amid a sudden outburst of collective energy.

—Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

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