I wonder if my stamina will hold out to the end of a very demanding schedule. Last week, talks on different subjects in Neuchatel and Fribourg, then a flight to London to participate in the Battle of Ideas, then a flight back and the next day a talk in the Swiss capital of Bern, followed by a 3-day intensive course for MA students called Migration and Globalisation: phew! Tomorrow is the last day of that and then I plan to remain prone all weekend before leaving Monday to give a talk in Lausanne followed by a talk in Basel on Wednesday! I feel like a wind-up toy lecturer at times and suddenly think: oh god, am I repeating myself? Have I already told this story?
Details of my schedule as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration are at the Swiss Gender Website.
The 3-day workshop is terrific, by the way – combining ideas about globalisation with different theories and experiences of all sorts of migration and, especially, how the need for low-wage labour and informal-sector work is a positive element in everyone’s economic development. I’ll soon be selling it and not just to students.
“The real action is in the Emirates, Dubai or Antalya,” says Masha, a stick-thin 19-year-old who teeters a little on her heels. “Don’t be confused,” she says. “Nobody takes us by the hair and drags us onto the ships.” She gestures over at the mouth of the port. “Those are like the gates to freedom for a lot of us,” she says. “Yeah, like the Statue of Liberty,” adds another girl, and the group of them erupts into laughter.
This is not better or happier news, but it adds to our understanding of how some women migrate out of bad situations. The fact that they don’t need to be kidnapped, coerced, lied to and forced doesn’t make their choices any nicer. The point is, given very few options, these women prefer to get into sex work. The figure of the prostitute who’s made it financially and goes – or is sent – back home to show the trappings is a classic one – I have met her myself in more than one country. The story she tells is true – it’s possible to make much more money selling sex – though it is hardly worth it if you can’t figure out how to do it without suffering too much.
This excerpt comes from Time, which means the reporter had better resources and a bit more time to do a decent investigation. I can’t say whether he passed up or missed opportunities to find out about less miserable situations. The thing to understand about all such stories is that the investigator or reporter goes into the field with only one or two contacts (aka gatekeepers) and may never run into people who would tell a completely different story. To talk with all sorts of potential migrants takes a real commitment of time and money, wherever you try to do it.
But the prostitutes who pass through Odessa these days do not harbor the naive dreams of their predecessors from the ’90s. And so the sex trade through Odessa has hardened in the past few years into something more jaded and much more difficult to stop. “Reporters always come here demanding to see the victims,” says Olga Kostyuk, deputy head of the charity Faith, Hope, Love, which provides assistance to Odessa’s sex workers. “They want to see the men, the pimps, the manipulators behind all of this. But things are not so simple now.”
For one thing, there aren’t many pimps left in this city of one million people, at least not the men who engaged in the most vicious forms of sex trafficking. As recently as 2006, their most common method of recruitment was to send scouts into the nearby towns to lure girls back to the port with false promises of work abroad — as a dancer in Paris or a waitress in Dubai — and then force them into prostitution. But most of these modern-day slaves traders are gone — these days, few of the prostitutes who pass through Odessa have been tricked into joining the trade. “Now the typical situation is that an experienced girl gets off the plane from Turkey covered in gold, diamonds and furs, and goes back to her home village,” says Svetlana Chernolutskaya, a psychologist who has counseled prostitutes in Odessa for years. “She finds the girls who are in a tough spot, and tells them how much money they can make turning tricks in a foreign country.”
The poverty and general hopelessness in many villages of eastern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania now run so deep — especially in the wake of the financial crisis — that the promise of a job as a prostitute abroad is enough to get the vast majority of trafficked women to sign up voluntarily. They follow the Mamachki to foreign resorts or big cities in western Europe. . .
Warning: Both these come from the Global Post and should be looked at critically, as both reveal certain problematic attitudes. On the other hand they are not vastly victimising and provide pictures, and most news services simply avoid sex-industry material.
. . . gay men want to see straight guys but imagine them as gay, which is partly why 90 percent of the Czech men he uses in his films are heterosexuals, or at least “that’s what they like to call themselves.” . . . likes to recruit men who have typically never done porn or had sex with men before and market their inexperience as an asset, not a drawback. To this day, he enjoys filming the first-timers, especially if they don’t really like it. He zooms in on their faces clenched in pain. It makes it real, Higgins says. . .
Near one of the busiest streets in Istanbul, a row of nondescript houses holds a secret unknown to most foreigners here. The houses are the work place of some of Istanbul’s transgender and transsexual sex workers.
I vividly remember my visit to the Bonifica del Tronto road. It happened during a brief gig I had evaluating projects funded by the European Commission’s Daphne Programme (to combat violence against women); I was visiting a helping project on the coast nearby, accompanying people called cultural mediators in their outreach trips to see people selling sex along this road. We parked, got out of the van and approached a tall black woman who said, before the mediator could even speak: I don’t want to go to any house. Don’t talk to me about going to any house.
In this area of Italy a well-known roman catholic priest, Don Benzi, used to come to talk to prostitutes and take them to one of his safe houses. An obituary from 2007 says:
Above all, he was known for his confrontation with pimps and the prostitutes who can be seen touting for custom at Italy’s roadsides. Benzi was no liberal — he regarded homosexuality as deviancy — but he was a passionate crusader against prostitution, which he regarded as a form of violence against women perpetrated by their clients. If there was no demand, he would say, there would be no supply.
The second sentence is strange – surely it should read he was no liberal AND was a passionate crusader against prostitution? Anyway, note that he was an early propagator of the simplistic idea of supply and demand in prostitution markets: take away one and the other disappears. In 2001 Don Benzi claimed to have saved 3000 girls over a ten-year period. I don’t want to make fun of someone who dedicated his life to helping others, specially unhappy teenagers. I only point out that not everyone wants to be saved his way, and a lot of people in Rescue jobs cannot understand that.
In the story below, ecological activists are outraged because local authorities plan to chop down hundreds of trees along this same road, in another simplistic formula: take away the trees and the sex workers disappear. Maybe, but where’s the next bunch of trees?
. . . For decades, local law enforcement and politicians have struggled to police the Bonifica del Tronto road, a haven for the sex trade that runs inland for more than 10 miles from the Adriatic coast alongside the river Tronto. Over the years, cameras have been installed, raids mounted, 24-hour patrols implemented and the mayors of towns near the road have signed bylaws imposing fines on prostitutes’ clients. All to no avail.
At the end of last month, the regional government’s public works chief . . . said he had agreed with provincial and municipal representatives to cut down all the vegetation “around and along the banks [of the river Tronto]”, in which the prostitutes ply their trade. . .
A census this month by an NGO found almost 600 prostitutes at work on the Bonifica del Tronto. Most were Nigerians, but they included Romanians, Brazilians, Albanians and Chinese. . .
Here is the programme of Laura Agustín’s lectures in Switzerland, as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration, from now until the end of November (Geneva has already taken place):
26 October 12:15 – 13:45 University of Neuchâtel
28 October 1315-1500 University of Fribourg
2 November 1815-2000 University of Bern
8 November 1730-1900 University of Lausanne
10 November 1415-1800 University of Basel
24 November 1815-1945 University of Zürich
All details are on the Swiss gender network website. The lectures will also appear on the Agenda page of the website as their dates approach.
With the academic, media and ‘helping’ gaze fixed on women who sell sex, the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry are ignored. People who sell sex tend to be examined in terms of ‘prostitution’, focussing on transactions between individuals and personal motivations. A cultural-studies approach looks at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, migration, ethics, service work, consumption, family life, entertainment, sport, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism, informal economies and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity and citizenship. The object is to study the everyday practices involved, to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively ‘social’ and activities denounced as criminally and morally wrong and to look for ways out of a seemingly intransigent social conflict.
Because YOU pay, prostitution exists. This campaign, financed by Madrid’s Equal Opportunity programme some years back, takes a bottom-line, you-are-guilty approach.
Are you worth so little you have to pay?
These two come from Sevilla’s anti-demand campaign, also from a few years ago. The men’s clothes apparently show that different types of men buy sex, and the idea is to dissuade them by saying buying sex is the sign of a worthless person.
Do professional psychologists advise how to word these messages? There is no way to know whether anyone is discouraged by them, but as with so many anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking campaigns, one goal is to demonstrate the correct gender-equal values. Taking away the source of income from women depending on these clients, and further consequences, are completely ignored. Before setting up such projects to end demand, abolitionists should be forced to come up with more, wonderful, available, good-paying jobs for women.
No claim of 40 000 victims of trafficking for this big race held annually in Cheltenham. But it is interesting to see how the police describe the actual crimes that concern them in connexion with the sex industry – here, lap dancing clubs. Although there is some stuff about indecency and the reporter mentions sex trafficking, police concern seems to be about violent competition between people taking advantage of temporary licences for lap dancing.
The report illustrates something I’ve believed for some time: that women and sex are actually not the core issue. This is a struggle between the men in the centre – men in suits – and the men they fear, who live in alternative arenas of power and under different laws. This police report brings that out without the usual trappings of horror over the fate of women.
Fears of organised gang crime and sex trafficking have prompted police to call for tough new laws on lap dancing in Cheltenham. Officers say the flurry of temporary strip clubs which spring up in the town during Gold Cup week sparks turf wars between agents and nightclub owners.
The borough council will consider today whether to adopt new government legislation, which would tighten controls – and police have urged councillors to rubber-stamp the move. Licensing officer Andy Cook said:
We support the adoption of this legislation as it will assist further in controlling such activity and help minimise associated incidents of disorder. Each year, during race week, the constabulary receives a few complaints from members of the public about such activity and the marketing which surrounds it. Regular checks are made on all licensed venues to ensure they are upholding the conditions of their licence.
According to police records, disputes between lap dancing agents and club owners in Cheltenham have led to a petrol bomb being thrown at a nightclub window. A bouncer was also hospitalised when an agent’s minders tried to attack a club manager who had employed girls without his approval.
Officers said lap dancers could earn up to £5,000 a week – making the industry an attractive prospect for criminal gangs and international traffickers. Police believe there are direct links between lap dancing and prostitution, drugs, pornography and illegal immigrants.
The council has also received complaints of “scantily-clad women” patrolling the town centre to attract business from racing fans. A report for today’s meeting said council officers found handbills providing “adult entertainment” all over the town in March. It also said there had been complaints of “indecent flyers being distributed and being left on the ground for children to find the next day”.
At the moment, licensed venues can transform into strip clubs if owners serve the council with a temporary event notice. During Gold Cup this year, six businesses served the borough with a notice, which meant they could hold events for up to a maximum of 96 hours as long as they informed the council and police.
The new powers under Section 27 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 not only outlaw the temporary notices, but also give local authorities the power to impose tighter rules on lap dancing clubs by forcing them to apply for a sex establishment licence rather than a public entertainment licence.
Currently, the Blue Room in St Margaret’s Road is Cheltenham’s only licensed lap dancing club. If it is adopted, the new legislation will mainly be used to give the borough council more control over whether new clubs should be allowed to set up in the town. At the moment, councillors can only turn down applications for a lap dancing club on the grounds of crime, public safety and the protection of children. Today’s full council meeting will be held in the Municipal Offices at 2.30pm.
On 31 October I’ll be participating in the Battle of Ideas, an annual event in London. The panel is called Trafficking: new slave trade or moral panic? and takes place from 1345 till 1515 at the Student Union Provocation Zone at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London. Tickets required. Panelists speak for only a few minutes each at the outset, and the discussion opens up to the public quickly. Also on the panel: Julie Bindel.
This is the description from the website:
Human trafficking has been labelled a ‘modern-day slave trade’ and is seen as one of the most pressing human rights issues today: 117 countries have signed the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking. The International Labor Organization has concluded that trafficking is a multibillion dollar industry, with millions of people being transported within and across borders through coercive and violent means. Yet there is little hard evidence out there. The trafficking and prostitution bonanza predicted to take place in South Africa during the World Cup this year simply failed to materialise. Meanwhile, Operation Pentameter Two, the UK’s largest ever crackdown on trafficking, failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution, despite hundreds of raids on sex workers over a period of six months. Campaigners say this is because trafficking is a hidden crime, with victims working in the shadow economy and scared to approach the authorities. Critics say it’s because trafficking is a misleading label, which, in actual fact, refers to diverse forms of migration and employment.
Campaigners for freedom of movement argue the best way to help migrants avoid taking clandestine and dangerous routes across the world is to ease up stringent migration laws. Anti-trafficking campaigners counter that whereas trafficked persons were often dismissed as illegal migrants in the past, now they have recourse to new claims in the asylum process. Critics believe ‘rescuers’ dehumanise migrants, compelling them to present themselves as victims lacking agency. A majority of anti-trafficking campaigns focus on rescuing people working in the sex industry, leading sex workers’ rights activists to claim trafficking has become a powerful, emotive tool for prostitution abolitionists to win wider support for their clampdowns on the sex industry as a whole.
When it comes to trafficking, how important are definitions and statistics – shouldn’t the focus be on ending abuse, wherever it occurs? Do anti-trafficking campaigns combat migrant exploitation or do they aid crackdowns on free movement? Is the trafficking industry even real, or is it a moral panic?
I am in Switzerland for three months, where prostitution is legal at the national level. At the same time, Switzerland is a (con)federation of 26 states, which means that each state has a certain autonomy over its internal affairs. There are also three general language areas (Italian, German, French) coexisting and complicating things. Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, but a Free Movement of Persons Agreement now exists (for EU legal residents). In the clearly written explanation below, from a government website, both positive and negative aspects of the law are made apparent. On the whole, the situation is better – less hypocritical, less moralistic – than in most countries I know, the best aspect being that selling sex is considered an economic activity. At the same time, there are familiar problems.
Prostitution is a lawful profession but you have to do it on your own – no businesses allowed supposedly
But there are, of course, massage parlours and brothels, the technicality being that workers are not ’employed’ but independent contractors
Prostitution is not to be confused with human trafficking
Procurement and passive solicitation are allowed
Only legal residents are allowed to sell sex (although there’s a 90-day visa for Other Europeans)
Trafficking is a criminal offence
Minors over 16 may sell sex (but this conflicts with other European statutes)
Police ‘inspect’ prostitutes and red-light areas
Prostitution: Information from the Swiss Coordination Unit against the Trafficking of Persons and Smuggling of Migrants KSMM, which follows the topic of prostitution insofar as it is linked to human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The following observations are intended to provide a sharper distinction between the two areas.
Prostitution is legal
Prostitution in Switzerland is legal and considered a form of economic activity. Any person wishing to work in the sex trade in Switzerland must be of the age of sexual maturity and adhere to cantonal and municipal regulations relating to the pursuance of prostitution as a trade. Income derived from prostitution is subject to taxation and social insurance contributions. Foreign nationals must also fulfil residence and employment regulations.
Federal legislation and cantonal regulations relating to prostitution
Prostitution has been regulated throughout Switzerland since the enactment of the Swiss Criminal Code in 1942 (SCC, SR 311.0). Under Article 199 SCC, whoever violates cantonal regulations relating to the exercising of prostitution shall be liable to a fine. Thus, prostitution in Switzerland is legal and falls under cantonal jurisdiction. Some cantons such as Ticino, Geneva, Vaud, Fribourg, Neuchatel and Jura have adopted separate legislation on prostitution. In other cantons provisions on prostitution are incorporated into other pieces of legislation or regulated in municipal statutes.
Regulating prostitution has the aim of curtailing the negative side effects of the trade on the surrounding areas and of improving the general conditions for sex workers for their own protection. A special unit of the cantonal police force ─ often the vice squad ─ is responsible for carrying out inspections of prostitutes in red light areas. Inspections of establishments or businesses are carried out by the local police responsible for trade and industry controls. Unfortunately, national statistics are not available because regulations and controls fall in cantonal jurisdiction, and the characteristics of the sex trade and controls vary so greatly between cantons that there is no common basis for comparison.
Prostitution does not imply human trafficking
Prostitution should not be equated with human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Although sexual exploitation does, indeed, frequently occur in prostitution circles, it would be incorrect to conclude that all prostitutes are victims of human trafficking.
For many foreign and Swiss nationals, prostitution is their lawful profession. The reasons for earning one’s livelihood in the sex trade can be many-faceted. The world of prostitution is attractive for people who want to draw a profit from human trafficking and the exploitation of human beings, however, because the danger of conviction is small and profits are large.
Increase in prostitution since the revision of criminal law relating to sexual offences
Criminal law relating to sexual offences was revised in Switzerland in 1992. Since then, procuring and passive solicitation are no longer punishable offences. Instead, the infringement of sexual or bodily autonomy, for example through forced prostitution is the decisive factor in determining the question of culpability.
Following the revision of criminal law relating to sexual offences, prostitution rose sharply in Switzerland. This led to a situation of increasing competition and of driving out competitors from the market. There has been a further increase in prostitution since the Free Movement of Persons Agreement between Switzerland and the EU has come into effect. At the same time, it should be noted that many sex workers – especially from Eastern Europe – who were previously working as prostitutes in Switzerland illegally, can now exercise their trade legally under the new agreement. Nationals from those member states to whom the Free Movement of Persons Agreement applies are granted work (with) a 90-day permit for self-employment.
Protection against abusive practices relating to prostitution
To protect prostitutes from abuse, the federal legislator has passed a series of penal provisions. Prohibiting human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation (Art. 182 SCC), for example, is an important provision against excesses in the prostitution trade. Also, Article 195 SCC (inducing prostitution) places a ban on inducing a person into prostitution, or preventing a person from quitting the trade, thereby restricting their freedom to act. A person is restricted in their freedom to act if, as a result of an imbalance of power:
their dependency is exploited or they are forced into prostitution for financial gain, i.e. as a source of income
their activity is supervised or controlled, or they are not free to determine the time, place, volume or other aspects of their work as a prostitute, or
they are forced to remain a prostitute against their will.
Article 195 makes merely inducing a minor into prostitution a criminal offence. Since a minor is often not yet fully capable of bodily autonomy, an older person or a person who is superior in some other way makes himself liable to prosecution merely by suggesting or persuading a minor into prostitution. Also, under Article 188 SCC whoever commits a sexual act with a minor by exploiting their relationship, or encourages a minor to commit a sexual act by exploiting such a relationship, is liable to punishment.
Prostitution by minors
Under current legislation minors over 16 may engage in the sex trade. However, prostitution in younger years can affect a person in their sexual development, and can traumatise and destabilise them both psychologically and socially. Under Article 302 of the Swiss Civil Code (SR 210) parents are responsible for the welfare of their children. If their welfare is at risk, it is the duty of the guardianship office under Article 307 to adopt suitable measures.
On 4 June 2010, the Federal Council voted to sign the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse. The Convention places member states under the obligation to outlaw the use of sexual services of minor prostitutes for money or other emoluments. This provision goes beyond the scope of existing Swiss criminal legislation, which means that national law will have to be adapted on ratification of the Convention.
Self-employed prostitutes
Sex workers can practice their trade only in a self-employed capacity because employment contracts contain employee obligations and employers’ rights of authority that are not compatible with the principle of bodily autonomy. The more sex workers are prescribed how to work and supervised by a proprietor or pimp, the more a criminal offence for force prostitution under Article 195 of the Swiss Criminal Code is likely to exist.
The city of Prague is once again talking about legalising brothels and requiring prostitutes to register if they want to work independently I gave an interview to The Prague Post the other day that is reported in Wednesday’s story. This sort of proposal dates from the 19th century; belongs to a thoroughly patriarchal and sexist impulse and fails to address the enormous range of sex work and businesses that nowadays flourish everywhere. Brothels don’t have to be bad but they can’t be good if they are conceived of this way. My comments are in bold within the article.
City Council seeks to regulate, license and tax sex workers
Benjamin Cunningham, 15 September 2010, The Prague Post
The Prague City Council will consider a bill to legalize prostitution at its Sept. 16 meeting. Since the fall of communism, prostitution has existed in a legal gray area, and changes proposed by Deputy Mayor Rudolf Blažek will seek, among other things, to legalize and license prostitution but contain it to brothels or private homes.
“It’s a possibility to step out of the black market and [for prostitutes] to include themselves in the standard business regime,” Blažek told The Prague Post. “Regulating prostitution and embedding it in the legal system would give more effective tools so the scene would not be as uncontrolled as it is now.”
This is not the first time government officials have considered similar steps. In fact, Blažek himself proposed comparable changes as early as 2001. In 2003, City Hall and the Interior Ministry again sought such changes, but among the deal-breakers was the requirement that the Czech Republic withdraw its signature from the 1950 UN Convention for the Suppression in the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. Such a move requires parliamentary approval, which was not forthcoming at the time. The City Council will formally request that Parliament take such a step now.
The debate about how to legislate the world’s so-called oldest profession sparks passions across the political spectrum, and Blažek is finding both allies and opponents.
“We think it would really help this field,” said “Honza,” a manager at the K5 brothel near náměstí Míru, where the average per-hour rate is 3,900 Kč and between 18 and 25 women work each evening.
Hana Malínová, director of Bliss Without Risk (Rozkoš bez rizika), an NGO that works with female sex workers, has some misgivings about the proposal. “Although it represents a certain shift from repression toward business regulation, the proposal still contains excessively repressive elements reflecting the negative attitude toward persons providing paid sexual services,” she said. “Whether we call these women prostitutes or female sex workers, the work in this business is still stigmatizing. Most women will continue to prevent their names from being published, which is what this official registration represents.“
There are an estimated 70 active brothels in Prague, more than 30 of which are in the immediate vicinity of Wenceslas and Old Town squares, but authorities admit they have little grasp on the big picture. “We have no data available, not even approximate data, despite considerable efforts in the past to map the prostitution scene,” said Interior Ministry spokesman . . .
“None of the systems are effective,” said Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. “Vast numbers of people who have the right to register with governments don’t, and undocumented migrants are always excluded from these programs. In Europe, at least half of those working in prostitution are migrants.”Male sex workers are almost completely ignored in policies related to prostitution, she added.
Malínová said that “nowhere, not even in Austria or Holland, has the number of women registered exceeded 10 percent.”
Agustín finds it impossible to deal with prostitution without dealing with larger issues of migration. She shuns the popular term “human trafficking” and what she says are the inflated statistics that accompany it.
“I don’t find it useful to use those big, loaded terms. The word ‘trafficking’ is up there with ‘terrorism,’ ” she said. “The idea that anyone selling sex is being exploited is an ideological point of view. Enormous numbers of migrants knew they would be doing something like that when they migrated; now, that doesn’t mean they knew how it was going to feel.”
. . . Blažek’s proposal is predicated on containing prostitution in so-called public houses or brothels, an idea Agustín considers a nonstarter. “A brothel is a 19th-century concept,” she said. “It’s a large place with some sort of manager. The concept discounts prostitutes working in a postmodern entrepreneurial sort of way, which is the reality.” . .
The proposal from City Hall
Prostitution will become a legal business based on licensed trade certificates
Anyone older than 18 can get a license with a health examination, and it is issued by the municipality on a yearly basis
The license includes a photograph and name and can be renewed with regular health screenings
Prostitution without a license would be considered a misdemeanor
Prostitution can only take place in brothels or private homes
Street prostitution is banned, but municipalities are empowered to grant exceptions
Loverboys are in the news again in the Netherlands these days, usually in pretty silly media stories. This term is meant to describe men who use ‘love’ to get women to feel attached to them and who then get the women to sell sex and hand over the money: so these are a variant on the pimp. The term is used by academic researchers in the following excerpts to describe one sort of trafficking situation. Some of those described here are women seduced by loverboys, others are sold by their families and some are kidnapped, but the majority have responded to job offers The dossiers mentioned refer to court cases the researchers analysed, who use a framework for analysing business and financial practices – a nice change from the usual personal and emotional focus on ‘the women’.
From Johan Leman and Stef Janssens, European Journal of Criminology, 5 (4): 433–45 (2008):
In several Albanian networks the trafficked women are girls within a loverboy network (18 dossiers) where they were first seduced. In other cases the girls were also bought: in two cases an Albanian girl was sold by her own family and in two dossiers Albanian girls claim to have been kidnapped. But the majority of trafficked women in our 62 cases were recruited through job offers (40 dossiers). This means that the majority of the trafficked women in our files are former potential migrants.
There were constant promises that they would earn a lot of money. For instance, one girl was promised a monthly wage of €3000 for a job as a stripper. In other dossiers, jobs as dancers were offered with promises of wages between €2000 and €6000 per month or daily wages of €450. In a number of cases there was also an explicit mention of prostitution. In a dossier involving a Russian network, a girl who had consciously chosen prostitution made an agreement with her recruiter on departure that she owed €2000 and that she would have to pay this back later through prostitution. Eventually, the woman had to buy her release in Belgium for €5000 or had to work as a prostitute for free for six months, which made her a victim.
Is there any subsequent space for agency? In 40 of the 62 court files there obviously was agency in the mind of the women at the very beginning of their contacts with the trafficking entrepreneurs. They wanted to start a new life as a migrant. In 38 dossiers it is apparent that no real agreements were made about subsequent employment, which is of course a weakness in the plans of the women, who nevertheless decided to embark on their migration project.
What happened later, between their departure and their employment as a sex worker, is not clear from our files. Occasionally the girls were forced to give their money directly to the bar operator or pimp, irrespective of whether or not they were recruited for the job. This situation occurs frequently in closed ethnic networks, as well as in various business networks. Another situation, however, is where women have made agreements with the traffickers but these have not been honoured. This is evident in 22 dossiers, where women became victims in this sense, a situation that one finds largely in the business and international networks.
I have objected to the use of the word myth to describe how trafficking is talked about nowadays. Myth implies fabrication, whereas I describe what’s going on as exaggeration, reductionism, over-simplification, stubborn refusal to recognise diversity and victimisation.
Here is a piece of trafficking news in which victims of the crime spoke up and got themselves rescued. Authentic victims who simultaneously acted to take control of their own lives:
Before the raid, one of the seven women had managed to contact the Thai Embassy in Spain and complained that herself and the others were forced into working as prostitutes at the club.
I am not saying this is always possible, but it illustrates how victims can and do act to help themselves. In the terrifying versions of the story told so often nowadays, traffickers exercise total control over sex slaves’ lives. But most sex jobs cannot involve guards remaining beside victims full-time, since the work they are meant to do involves private sex with customers. This Thai-Spanish story illustrates that Great White Rescuers are not always required and that third-world women are not so helpless and ignorant as the rescuers usually imply. Note that the women have also filed complaints against the trafficker back in Thailand.
The Anti-Human Trafficking Division (AHTD) police have arrested a Thai man who is accused of luring seven Thai women into prostitution in Spain. . . allegedly sending seven women to work as sex workers at a night club in Spain’s northern city of Burgos.
The Thai Embassy in Madrid had alerted Spanish police to the suspected forced prostitution at La Boheme, the club, where 20 people, including the seven Thai women, were later rescued in a police raid earlier this year, said Pol Lt Gen Thangai. A Thai woman identified as Jinda Khetwat, who owned the club, fled before police arrived, he said.
Before the raid, one of the seven women had managed to contact the Thai Embassy in Spain and complained that herself and the others were forced into working as prostitutes at the club.
The AHTD investigation showed Mr Noppadon had lured the women to work at the club by telling them they would work as traditional Thai massage therapists. He had arranged their trips to Spain, including finding Thai men to be registered as their husbands to convince officials at Spain’s embassy in Bangkok they were newly married couples on a honeymoon trip to Spain.
Four victims have lodged complaints against Mr Noppadon, and his wife has been arrested in Spain, said the police.
A Spanish newspaper confirmed this story last November, by the way:
Ellas denunciaron: Al parecer, fueron las propias víctimas las que lograron hacer llegar la denuncia de estos hechos hasta la Policía, que desarticuló la parte ‘burgalesa’ de la trama. . . Estos hechos fueron puestos en conocimiento de la embajada del país de procedencia de las mujeres y posteriormente se procedió a la inspección del local. Diario de Burgos, noviembre 2009
My name is not spelled Laura Agustino or Agustine or Augustino or Augustine or Agostino or Augustin or Augustine. Correct is Laura Agustín
All week people have been sending me a news story whose source is a press release from the Spanish National Police claiming another triumph in the crusade against sex trafficking. In the years I lived in Spain such stories of breaking up gangster networks were published continuously – so often that I wondered why police didn’t soften the claim. The implication was, and is, that endless police actions are necessary against an infinite number of organised trafficking rings. The possibility that police are not actually breaking up rings but rather taking down a few organisers and lots of undocumented migrants is not mentioned. The theory and practice of policing of this social problem is crude and ineffective, like sticking a finger in a leaky dam.
The Policía Nacional, in charge of keeping smuggled migrants and smuggled drugs out of Spain, issue press releases to advertise successful operations. The investigation in question led to picking up both undocumented migrants and people moving them around the country, finding them jobs and making money off them – whether you call them traffickers, entrepreneurs, fixers or pimps. The fixing they do is standard in migration settings and can be done abusively or in a normal, businesslike way, whether the migrants work selling sex or doing some other job and whether they are men, women or transgender. As the police acknowledged, many of the migrants admitted they knew what sort of work they would be doing in Spain.
Of course it’s crap when migrants have been misled about the conditions they’ll have for living and working and feel trapped. The press release referred to the squalid flats some migrants were living in. Look at the police video and judge for yourself how demonic it looks. The narrator says migrants had to give 50% of their earnings to the people in charge plus pay for food and lodging. It’s a bad deal but it isn’t slavery and it is not unusual amongst undocumented migrants. The debt mentioned, €4 000, is also not a high amount for a trip from Brazil, where most of the migrants were said to come.
This Spanish press release relates how police captured members of a network dealing with (and in) men rather than women. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t such networks before, or that smuggling rings are all gender-specific, or that things are really getting bad when men begin to be treated like women.
It also doesn’t mean something specially demonic is going on because drugs are mentioned -the Policía Nacional are also charged with stopping drug trafficking, remember, so they mention any they find. The presence of viagra makes the scenario sound more titillating and sex-slavey, but I think one can understand that drug in the same way one can understand alcohol, hash and cocaine in these settings – substances some people use to feel better or more capable of performing or enduring unpleasantness or having fun. Without knowing how many of the migrants complained that these drugs were forced on them or that they were not allowed to sleep, we might refrain from getting all het up.
Police interrogations of migrants picked up in raids tend towards fruitlessness and dodgy information. Undocumented people want to avoid being deported at all cost. The police want to find traffickers above all. The atmosphere is conducive to telling a certain kind of story of ignorance and victimisation: interrogations are not moments for the detained to strongly assert agency about buying false documents, selling sex or taking drugs.
This ring-bust might be a significant one, there’s no way to know. The proliferation of the limited, exciting-sounding information from a single press release into all the major media, treating it as Big Terrible Urgent news is about the Internet – not journalism, or not what we used to think of as journalism. An egregious example comes from Diario Vasco: Prostitutos forzosos 24 horas a base de viagra (prostitutes forced 24 hours with viagra), followed by the typical thoughtless cliché Venían con la promesa de ser bailarines o ejercer la prostitución de alto ‘standing’, pero vivían hacinados y explotados.
So, could this be a particularly bad trafficking story? Maybe, but I doubt it. Does it deserve all the hullaballoo it’s getting? Definitely not.
En España están hablando de nuevo de prohibir los anuncios de contacto con trabajadores sexuales – o prostitutas/os (y a veces conocidos como avisos de putas). Un artículo desde Tenerife expone los diversos argumentos pro y contra. El 20 Minutos acusa a los demás periódicos del proxenetismo. Malaprensa deconstuye cuidadosamente las cifras enormes siempre citadas sobre el número de prostitutas en España.
La voz de la libertad de expresión dice Partiendo de la base de que ejercer voluntariamente la prostitución no es delito en España, no veo ningún inconveniente en que una persona, haciendo uso de su libertad, se anuncie en un periódico para prestar ese servicio (Leopoldo Fernández Cabeza de Vaca).
Pero claro que la trata sí es ilegal y los que hacen campaña en contra de los anuncios argumentan que no son las trabajadoras sexuales las que se anuncian sino las mafias. El mismo presidente Zapatero se ha pronunciado en contra: no le conviene nada el hecho de que España es el único país de la Unión Europea que todavía permite que los periódicos dominantes-principales publiquen estos anuncios. Atrás está una feminista estatal, Bibiana Aído, ministra de la Igualdad. Es una historia emblemática de la Europa contemporánea.
Al mismo tiempo algo similar está pasando en Estados Unidos pero que tiene impacto para cualquier sitio con Internet – o sea, para todo el mundo. Craigslist, un enorme sitio web de anuncios clasificados, queda acusado del ‘tráfico’ por personas y fiscales estatales que creen que se está utilizando el servicio para explotar a los niños. Escribí sobre esto ayer.
The women in this kind of drawing are often described as prostitutes (or loose women, with the same moral value), which would make all the men potential clients. Is that a useful way to think about this sort of socialising? At the time, patriarchy was an overwhelming determining reality in the Europe pictured. But even so, I think it’s wrong to reduce such a social scene to a one-dimensional story: Men Exploit Women. In the following story, an obviously impressive person (described as ‘one of the world’s most respected legal brains’) talks about trafficking in a similarly unuseful way. My comments in italics interlaced with excerpts from the story, with the emphasis on her implausible assumptions.
An inquiry into sex trafficking in Scotland is asking punters who use prostitutes to talk to them – in secret. Baroness Helena Kennedy, who is heading the probe, said men who buy sex can help build a realistic picture of the extent of the trade.
How, exactly? Does Kennedy imagine they will have more than what is called anecdotal evidence? Or is this about guys who surf escort sites, so she thinks clients will be able to provide numbers of how many sites or escorts or what?
Kennedy said: “I want to hear from these men. I need to hear directly from people who have experiences of trafficking. I think if you want to have a proper sense of the problem, it is better to hear from witnesses themselves directly. It might be they are men who have used prostitutes and they have had an experience where they have been with a woman who was clearly coerced into prostitution. We need help to understand the scope of the problem but those who can do that are often the very people who, through shame or fear, don’t want to step forward. We will guarantee them absolute anonymity.”
The inquiry is into ‘sex trafficking’, so why does Kennedy want to talk with clients? As someone who understands legal language she must know that sloppy talk like this is confusing. Or does she think that clients meet people who’ve facilitated migrants travel? And why will talking to a few clients give her an idea of ‘the scope’ of the overall problem? On the contrary it will give her some anecdotes, a few new ideas about how it all works, a couple of leads.
She said: “Senior police officers do think that there has been a shift. Perhaps because men are travelling much more, certainly on stag weekends and buying sex abroad. They are experiencing sex in a more exotic way, activities that they don’t participate in with their wives and partners. It becomes something that they want here.”
This is irresponsible claptrap, castles in the air. Everyone is travelling more, yes. What does experiencing sex in a ‘more exotic way’ mean? Having it with foreigners in a foreign country? What ‘activities’ is she imagining they engage in that they never do in Scotland? And she’s totally guessing that then they ‘want it’ at home – there’s no evidence for that. I’m sure she thinks it’s common sense but it’s just imagination.
The demand for so many different nationalities is perpetuating the horrific trade in human beings. Kennedy said: “This is the underbelly of globalisation. The same things that make global markets work, make black markets work too. You get international crime now in a way that we didn’t have before. Everything is marketable and sadly that includes human beings.”
If Kennedy is doing research, why is she telling us the results beforehand? There is no huge body of evidence proving that men are ‘demanding different nationalities’. Liking the idea of having sex with different sorts of people, maybe?
The size of Scotland is one of the reasons for holding the inquiry here. It will be easier to get a country-wide picture because there are fewer police forces, social work departments and agencies which deal with trafficking. Kennedy said that, contrary to speculation, the inquiry wasn’t rooted in Scotland because we have a disproportionate scale of trafficking. . .
She realises a truly accurate picture is virtually impossible because trafficking is a covert criminal business. She said: “This kind of human rights abuse is like a poison. Trafficking leeches into our society as a whole. We want to identify ways in which it is happening and ensure that weaker members of society aren’t abused in this way.” . .
What does it mean for ‘trafficking’ to leach (not leech!) into society? Again, the results seem preordained.
Different police authorities compete about whose unscientific methods are better – well, why not? It is a Rescue Industry, after all. But many people think, if the numbers were produced by policemen or – gasp, wow – some entity of the UN, they must be better, more scientific, maybe having access to amazing inside information. I have news for everyone, the methodological problems are just as hard to surmount for people working at big institutions as for anyone else (I know lots of these folk, and I myself did some ILO research once). Big money does not mean better methods but even more important does not mean the problems of definition and the inaccessibility of undocumented and stigmatised people go away. There are ethnographic studies of police work, too, that show just how arbitrary and subjective a lot of it is.
The subject here is a report on how many trafficking victims there are in the UK. Both estimates derive from ridiculously crude, subjective and evidence-free methods. Will 10 000 victims in the UK be the new figure to be cited here and yon because a reporter wrote it in a newspaper?
The first estimate is described like this (try not to laugh at the ‘codename’, please):
The study, codenamed Project Acumen, relied on interviews with 254 women in London brothels and extrapolated the remaining national figure using newspaper reports and patchy existing data. It estimates that 17,000 foreign women work in the off-street sex industry but does not give data for the number of women who might be trafficked into street prostitution – or the number of British women that might be trafficked.
Note here that even the police cannot decide whether ‘national’ subjects qualify as ‘trafficked’ or not.
The second estimate goes like this:
The former Conservative MP Anthony Steen, chairman of the Human Trafficking Centre, said he had spoken to senior police officers who know of 2,300 brothels in London alone. “They reckoned that 80 per cent of those working there were from abroad, and they estimated that 4,000 were trafficked. And that was just in London. My view is that the national figure is probably in excess of 10,000.”
Tiresome man, mentioning that oft-debunked 80% figure from a Poppy Project telephone survey. The pretend-clients rang numbers in classified adverts and asked whether sex workers of different nationalities were available. They were told yes, indeed, different nationalities were available. By receptionists seeking to bring the callers in as customers. Poppy researchers then said if they are foreign, chances are they were trafficked. Well, honestly, you wouldn’t want to put that sort of ‘data’ in a number-crunching machine, would you?
It takes all kinds in the gravy train of trafficking research, so I shouldn’t be surprised that newcomers to prostitution and sex-industry issues jump on with a statistical model attempting to prove that the Swedish anti-prostitution law works. They made this thing known after the government published its methodology-and-evidence-free evaluation of the law criminalising the buying of sex.
Niklas Jakobsson and Andreas Kotsadam, of the University of Gothenburg, did it on a blog, with ‘The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery’, a working paper – a term academics use when they haven’t published an article yet in an academic journal. Journals send contributors’ submissions out to be reviewed by people in the same field; the process, called peer review, is usually double-blind, which means neither writer nor reviewer know the other’s name. This is not always required with a university-published ‘working paper’ (I don’t know whether it was carried out with this paper or not).
The authors engaged briefly with me, Louise Persson and others on Niklas Dougherty‘s blog, shortly after Louise and I published an article critiquing the government’s evaluation on Svenska Dagbladet. Niklas queried some of the information claimed by the authors, pointing out the egregious error they committed when accepting erroneous Danish figures on street prostitution – data that was debunked in the Danish parliament last year as well as in the media more recently. I find it inconceivably irresponsible that researchers desiring to present themselves as ‘scientific’ would use known false data.
On Niklas’s blog (see comments), I confronted the authors for failing to recognise that the ‘data’ they claim to be using is inherently faulty and therefore unusable. I said
It’s a fantasy to think you can talk about ‘data’ when there is not agreement about who is to be counted. Some counting projects call all women migrants who sell sex trafficked. Others call all undocumented migrants trafficked. some call all women who sell sex trafficked. The numbers come from small ngos and police departments who use different definitions and often admit to being confused.
I also take exception to being given evidence from tiny, super-homogeneous places like Bergen (Norway). Nordic research is about very small places with recent, short histories of in-migration, undocumented migration being even smaller. It is misleading and silly to compare ‘data’ from such sites with whole large countries with long and varied migration histories.
The defensive (and inexperienced) response was to accuse me of being anti-science. This is nonsense. The principle here is known everywhere as Garbage In, Garbage Out: it doesn’t matter how pretty your statistical model looks or what a fancy machine you have to crunch the numbers in if the original information you put in is rubbish, and I am far from the only one to think so. The ‘science’ we want to see is honest.
Here is the peer review the authors would have received had their working paper been sent to Paula Thomas, mathematician and statistics analyst in the UK (and if you are cowed by the language, look at the final paragraph).
Comments on The Law and Economics of International Sex Slavery
1. The vector X_i
Only indicative information is given as to what this is. We are told (p12) that it includes population, GDP, migration share (is this immigration only?), heroin seizures and a measure of the rule of law. It would appear that there were other things in the vector but we are not told what they are.
But the main weaknesses here are threefold:-
(a) The use of categorical data
Categorical data is, in my view, dangerous, because:-
(I) It imposes value judgements.
(II) More seriously it obscures the extent of a problem whilst appearing to clarify it.
(II) Is best illustrated using crime figures. London’s Metropolitan Police Service has an excellent crime mapping system. However it does have some weaknesses, and the one that is relevant here is its use of categorical data (fortunately this is mitigated by the use of actual figures as well). My own area went from above average for residential burglary in May 2010 to low for June 2010 on the basis that there were 3 fewer crimes! Do I need to say more?
(b) The lack of any attempt to model (Delta Trafficking), that is the change in trafficking over time.
(c) The lack of any clarity regarding how the weighting variables beta_0 and beta_1 were chosen. In particular doubt must surround beta_1 as it is a single weighting for a whole vector and the elements of the vector have different units, so some dimensional analyses should have been performed.
It would be most helpful if there was a proper ‘methodology’ section explaining the processes used to get the results quoted.
2. The model used
The model is a Logistic regression model the normal formula for which is:-
z=beta_0+sum(from i=1 to n)(beta_{i} x_{i})
Normally this model only applies where the the data are modelled by a binomial distribution.
One question then must be is the data here binomially distributed? This is for the originators of the report to justify.
I also notice the use of a ‘normally distributed error term.’ What error is this term expressing? And how?
Another point is that the variable ‘z’ is not used directly. The probability calculation is:-
P(event=yes)=1/(1-e^-z)
Which indicates the blindingly obvious point that trafficking is not an appropriate z.
The event the variable z gives the probability of must be a yes or no event. Since trafficking is only yes/no on an individual basis (ie the level of trafficking is not yes or no), the model is suspect.
Reviewer’s probable advice to journal: Article not publishable without major revisions.
Media writers are to blame for spreading at least half the misconceptions about trafficking and the sex industry. The London Olympics are two years away but they loom. Prostitutes will flood Essex. Where does the reported ‘information’ come from? Not from any official or researcher but from a social-work campaigner. It’s irresponsible journalism. (I also find the term rape charity unpleasant.)
The other half of the blame goes to people like the campaigner quoted, head of a local rape crisis centre, who appears to want funding to take trips to foreign lands to do ‘research’ where none is necessary. We’ve just had ample and repeated research-based debunkings from South Africa about the threat of trafficking during the World Cup, and nothing happened in Vancouver, either – which this spokesperson admits, but then she cunningly claims the credit goes to people like herself who planned correctly. What nonsense.
Prostitutes are expected to flood south Essex during the 2012 Olympics, a rape charity has warned. With the opening ceremony of the Games now less than two years away, experts at the South Essex Rape and Crisis Centre have already begun investigating what can be done to discourage an influx of prostitutes and protect women from being trafficked into the area. Hundreds of athletes and spectators are expected to descend on the county to train and stay for the duration of the Games.
Sheila Coates, director of the centre, based in Thurrock, said: “Research has shown that during large sporting events, sex crime actually increases because of the large number of participants and a lot of people travelling from country to country. Sadly, pimps see that as a way of increasing their income and we will see women trafficked to the area. . . The centre is preparing to research the possible impact and take the necessary steps to mitigate the impact of any increase in sex trafficking and prostitution in the area. We are going to start looking at research available from the winter Olympics in Canada and the World Cup in South Africa to see what the impact may or may not be. In Vancouver it looks like it wasn’t as big a problem as anticipated because they planned for it and planned it out.”
A spokeswoman for Essex Police said the force had not been made aware of any expected problems.
And speaking of panicking-planning early, campaigners in Glasgow have already begun in regard to 2014’s Commonwealth Games.
What are we to make of this photograph? Who is saying HELP ME? Is this a men’s toilet or a women’s? Is the victim hidden behind the wall? There’s something fundamentally wrong with the grammar of this warning. And then Emma Thompson – is she identifying with the person crying help? or perhaps a bit nonplussed, or distracted by the dirtiness of the sink.
Here Emma is on surer ground: the correct response is dismay and disapproval that sexual acts could be written on a list with prices next to them. Unless it’s the prices that bother her – or the amounts of time. Do the men beside the movie star not look slightly uncomfortable? Of course the menu-price list is a fit-up invented by some intern who didn’t know how these things work.
Emma with Mr Costa of UNODC. Is that an anti-trafficking mural painted on the wavy metal wall? It turns out to be part of a giant installation. The fake bathroom and price list must be inside.
The big letters on top spell JOURNEY.
Here’s that picture from the front. Now it’s clearer that the viewer is being asked Is this sexy to you? At least I think so. But who is meant to answer? And what if some viewers’ response is Yes, in fact, I find it sexy ? Awkward.
My point is not to claim that trafficking is a joke or efforts to stop it always ridiculous but to suggest that many attempts at campaigning (these included) are confusing, non-educational and belittling to real victims. Or is the whole exercise simply meant to demonstrate a set of values for people who already share them?
Louise Persson and I have published a piece in Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s major national newspapers. The topic was the government’s report evaluating the law against buying sex, sexköpslagen, issued recently and unsettlingly uncommented and uncritiqued in the mainstream media. There were ‘news’ stories, of course, reproducing the government’s line – publicity claiming the law has been proved successful. Given the very lively culture of debate in these same media on every other topic, the silence is noticeable. And given the unquestionable existence of a liberal/libertarian movement that hates the law and its ideas about sexuality and gender equality, one wonders what’s at work here: A genuine taboo? Gender equality such a sacred cow that everyone chooses to keep quiet about the report’s mediocrity? Sweden isn’t a police state and surveillance is low compared with the UK, for example. Critical blogging has been brisk, so what makes mainstream media commentators avoid criticising this evaluation, not on ideological grounds but because it is so badly done that it proves nothing at all?
That’s what we wrote about, the embarrassing lack of evidence to prove the law has had any impact at all on the buying and selling of sex. This is not an ideological argument; it doesn’t prove that the law is no good; it proves that the evaluation is no good. Significant because the world’s peabrained media have picked up the claim – Swedish Law Giant Success – without reading even the English summary of points that make it crystal-clear that evaluators couldn’t find any evidence of anything. That’s the story, and it’s one any researcher will appreciate!
The original is Tvivelaktig rapport om sexköp,Laura Agustín och Louise Persson, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 July 2010. Our own title was better, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when editors don’t think they can improve titles. Here’s the English translation Given a very small word limit, we could only mention key issues in a barebones fashion.
Doubtful report on sex-purchase law
Laura Agustín and Louise Persson, 15 July 2010, Svenska Dagbladet
Sex crimes go down in Sweden: The new evaluation of the law against buying sex is spreading the message round the world, but the report suffers from too many scientific errors to justify any such claim.
The report was delayed. It is hard to find evidence to explain why one can’t see sex workers where one saw them before: Have they stopped selling sex, or are they doing it somewhere else? Stigmatised and criminalised people avoid contact with police, social workers and researchers.
Street prostitution receives exaggerated attention in the inquiry, despite the fact that it represents a small, diminishing type of commercial sex that cannot be extrapolated to all. The inquiry mentions the difficulty of researching ‘prostitution on the internet’ but appears not to know that the sex industry comes in many different shapes being researched in depth elsewhere (escorts without websites, sex parties, strip clubs, massage parlours, students who sell sex, among others).
The report’s conclusion that the law has decreased prostitution is based on police reports, government-funded groups working on prostitution in three cities, a few small academic studies and comparisons with other Nordic countries. But police only encounter sex workers in the context of criminal inquiries, the funded groups mostly meet sex workers seeking help, small studies can only indicate possible trends and the Danish statistics on the number of ‘active’ street workers – used to show that Sweden’s prostitution is less – were publicly shown to be very wrong eight months ago.
The law is claimed to have a dampening effect on sex trafficking, but no proof is offered. Trafficking statistics have long been disputed outside Sweden, because of definitional confusion and refusals to accept the UN Convention on Organised Crime’s distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration. The report claims the law diminishes ‘organised crime’ without analysing how crimes were identified and resolved or how they are related to the sex-purchase law.
All social research must explain its methodology. An evaluation like this one needs to provide details on the sample of people consulted, since even in a field as small as Sweden’s no study can pretend to speak to everyone. Methodological research norms require explaining how informants were consulted, under what conditions, what questions they were asked and how, what ethical apparatus was in place to help guarantee they gave their true opinions, how a balance of different stakeholders was achieved, how many people refused to participate, and so on. In this report, however, the methodology section is practically non-existent. We know nothing about how it the evaluation was actually carried out.
On the other hand, the report brims with irrelevant material: background on how the law came about, Sweden’s history with gender equality, why prostitution is bad, why international audiences are interested in the evaluation and how many Swedes are said to currently support the law. One single sex worker’s sad personal story takes up three pages, while the account of sex workers’ opinions is limited to the results of a survey of only 14 people of which only seven were current sex workers.
Research must try for some kind of objectivity, but the government’s remit to the evaluation team said that ‘the buying of sexual services shall continue to be criminalised’ no matter what the evaluators found. The bias was inherent.
The Swedish government understands that the law is of interest internationally as a form of crime prevention. What they don’t realise is how, when the report is translated and reviewed, the methodological errors and crude bias will cause researchers in the field to dismiss this evaluation.
The international trafficking debate has moved beyond the simplistic position presented in this report. More humility is needed from a small country with little experience of, and research about, undocumented migration and the sex industry. If one wants to present oneself as occupying a higher moral ground than other countries, one needs to do better work to understand complex questions. This evalution tells us nothing about the effects of the sex-purchase law.
We offered sources on the topic of flawed research not supporting extravagant claims in this field, but editors omitted them.
Socialstyrelsen. 2007. Kännedom om Prostitution. Another Swedish government report from just a few years ago that concludes little can be known about prostitution in Sweden:
Folketingets Socialudvalg, 20 november 2009. Socialministerens endelige svar påspørgsmål nr. 37 (SOU Alm. del). Question in Danish parliament about incorrect figures claimed for street prostitution.
United States Government Accountability Office. July 2006. Human Trafficking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. Antitrafficking Efforts Abroad.
Laura Agustín och Louise Persson, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 July 2010
Den nysläppta utvärderingen av sexköpslagen sprider budskapet att sexbrotten minskar, men utredningen är behäftad med alltför allvarliga vetenskapliga fel för att man ska kunna hävda att lagen är framgångsrik.
Rapporten om sexköpslagen försenades. Det var svårt att hitta bevis som demonstrerar anledningarna bakom varför man inte ser sexarbetare där man sett dem förut: har de slutat sälja, eller har de flyttat någon annanstans? Stigmatiserade och kriminaliserade aktörer undviker kontakt med polis, socialarbetare och forskare.
. . . En grundprincip för forskning är att sträva efter objektivitet, men regeringens direktiv var: ”En utgångspunkt för vårt arbete har varit att köp av sexuell tjänst fortfarande ska vara kriminaliserat.” Det skapar läge för en partisk inlaga. . .
Vill man presentera sig med en högre moralisk nivå på den internationella arenan, krävs bättre underlag och förståelse för komplexa frågor. Den här utvärderingen säger oss ingenting om lagens effekter.
I wonder if my stamina will hold out to the end of a very demanding schedule. Last week, talks on different subjects in Neuchatel and Fribourg, then a flight to London to participate in the Battle of Ideas, then a flight back and the next day a talk in the Swiss capital of Bern, followed by a 3-day intensive course for MA students called Migration and Globalisation: phew! Tomorrow is the last day of that and then I plan to remain prone all weekend before leaving Monday to give a talk in Lausanne followed by a talk in Basel on Wednesday! I feel like a wind-up toy lecturer at times and suddenly think: oh god, am I repeating myself? Have I already told this story?
