The Naked Anthropologist

Tag Archives: gender equality

Sex industry adapts to anti-trafficking laws, Korea

This story shows how laws aimed at suppressing the sex industry are met with creative resistance. Businesspeople invent new ways to put workers and clients together without drawing so much police attention. The police know this will happen but are anyway under-funded to make more than a minimum effort. The report provides some historical background that links present-day commercial-sex forms to earlier colonisation of Korea by Japan and the USA. I’ve drawn attention to interesting details in bold. Note the presence of a Minister of Gender Equality and the photo of thousands of sex workers protesting the anti-sex trafficking law.

Joong Ang Daily, Seoul

Commercial sex survives despite crackdown

A man walks down an alley in Mia-ri Texas, Seoul, where sex workers still operate.

By Brian Lee, 16 March 2009

“Oppa, wanna have some fun?” A middle-aged woman throws a questioning look at a male passerby who shakes his head and goes about his business. She’s standing at an intersection in Yeongdeungpo, western Seoul, which used to be one of the better known red-light districts in the capital. Most of the storefronts are shuttered during the daytime and come alive at sundown.

But business is slower than usual, partly because of the bad economy but also, according to government officials, due to the success of the Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, which was enacted five years ago amid great fanfare to beef up existing anti-prostitution laws. However, except for cosmetic changes, the lucrative sex trade is still very much around, experts say. The only difference is that since the law was enforced, the sex trade has evolved.

More visible outlets such as the one in Yeongdeungpo have taken the brunt of the law as have the once notorious neighborhoods of northern Seoul’s Cheongnyangni and Mia-ri Texas, which are both scheduled for urban redevelopment. But it is still possible to buy sex in these areas, like Cheongnyangni, for as little as 70,000 won ($47.50).

Business as usual

A tell-tale sign that business was, if not booming, reasonably healthy came earlier this month when the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced it would transfer hundreds of police officers in the southern Seoul districts of Gangnam, Seocho and Suseo. The move has been widely interpreted as an effort to sever ties between the police and entertainment establishments offering sex services. The decision to transfer the officers, all from a range of departments, came after it was discovered that police officers had inappropriate relationships with massage parlors in those areas. The current going rate for massage parlors is 170,000 won in cash and 190,000 with a credit card. As credit card records are easy to trace, customers and owners tend to prefer cash.

3000 Seoul sex workers protest Anti-Sex Trafficking Law, 2007

Nowadays, adding to the sex-for-cash businesses, hyugae-tel (resting rooms), where customers can call up sex workers and then later join them at another venue, are expanding rapidly, while commercial sex offered online, which is harder to track, is also growing. Still, government officials say the implementation of the law from five years ago has helped significantly reduce the scale of the sex industry. Continue reading →

No more sex-industry jobs via UK Jobcentres?

Not long ago I wrote about advertisements for sex-industry jobs in UK government-funded (un)employment offices called Jobcentre Plus. The other day, a government consultation on their presence came to an end.

Patrons were not forced to take the jobs or even look at the listings, and presumably some job-seekers were grateful to come upon them. One would think otherwise, however, by protestors’ language at a demonstration held against these adverts. Sometimes I think their vision of Woman’s Place looks more like this:

Jobcentre picketed by anti-sex industry protestors

Louisa Peacock, 27 March 2009. This article first appeared in Personnel Today magazine

Anti-sex industry campaigners have branded Jobcentre Plus ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ for continuing to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry.

As the government’s consultation ‘Accepting and advertising employer vacancies from within the adult entertainment industry by Jobcentre Plus’ draws to a close today, human rights organisations and women’s rights campaigners have urged the government to stamp out any escort or masseuse services as those jobs are “euphemisms for prostitution”.

Members ofthe campaign group Object and the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution stood outside Brixton Jobcentre with ‘Pimpcentre Plus’ placards in protest.

Anna van Heeswijk, grassroots co-ordinator at Object, said: “It is not acceptable for a government agency to be promoting jobs to women which often involve violence and abuse and which send out the message that women are sexual objects to be bought and sold.”

The Department for Work and Pensions began to advertise jobs in the adult entertainment industry after a 2003 legal ruling that Ann Summers should be allowed to advertise through Jobcentre Plus.

But van Heeswijk said: “It is nonsensical for the government to extend a decision applicable to retail premises to virtually the entire sex industry. It is well known that ‘escort’ and ‘masseuse’ are euphemisms for prostitution. Working in Ann Summers is very different from providing direct sexual services in prostitution or lap dancing.”

The DWP consultation, which aims to investigate whether more can be done to strengthen the safeguards in place for the safety of jobseekers, ends today, 27 March.

Women as people-smugglers and traffickers

The UN recently released yet another report on trafficking which says:

a disproportionate number of women are involved in human trafficking, not only as victims (which we knew), but also as traffickers (first documented here). Female offenders have a more prominent role in present-day slavery than in most other forms of crime.

Sillies . . . if they only had listened to what some of us were saying from the beginning, they wouldn’t find themselves so surprised now. By which I mean that those who help move people around in informal networks are very often friends and relations of the people doing the moving, so why shouldn’t they be women as often as men? If you take away Crime as the framing of this sort of movement, then you don’t have to expect the criminals to be men. The work of smuggling does not require particular physical strength. As an article about coyotes on the Mexico-US border shows, women can be highly adept at people smuggling and trafficking.

Note in the following excerpts that the words trafficking and smuggling are used interchangeably. The original story was published in Spanish, where what English-speakers are calling trafficking is often called la trata and smuggling el tráfico or el contrabando. The article is not about that dread term sex trafficking, and as you’ll see, those trafficked are not seen as victims. I’ve highlighted some suggestive quotations in bold.

Women Are the New Coyotes

La Opinión, Claudia Núñez, 23 December 2007

Gaviota has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

“The old story of the man who runs the ‘coyotaje’ business is now just a myth. It’s finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border,” explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women – most of them single mothers – to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

“A real ‘coyote’ organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the ‘goats’ across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant’s family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert – those bastards are just sleazebags . . . says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer’s budget.

“The business is a real money-maker,” says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. “These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. . . . Continue reading →

Host bars and Gender Equality: Men who serve women

Because the prostitution controversy is about women who sell sex to men, most of male sex work passes unnoticed. And people who do talk about it often slip into the assumption that it’s a phenomenon happening between men, whether you call them gay or MSM. Consider host bars, which welcome female clients to be treated as men are in Japan’s numerous hostess bars.

The basic work is providing company whilst customers sit in the venue: good conversation, graceful flirting, lighting cigarettes and making sure drinks are correctly poured and always full. The relationship takes place in public but has an intimate quality. Venues differ, and sometimes employees are obliged to meet customers outside the clubs. Wages are low, and employees depend on the commissions they earn on promoting the sale of drinks, whose prices can be very high indeed.

I have read good research about Japanese hostess clubs but not about host clubs. You can find a lot of media reports that all say the same thing about how they work. They say that even professional Japanese women are supposed to be passive and submissive. They correlate the rise of host clubs with such women’s desires to have a place where they can be assertive and uninhibited. It is often said that a lot of the customers at host bars are hostesses who arrive after their own wearing shifts.

I’ve been studying the sex industry for 15 years, and I understand that the conflict about prostitution – and therefore about trafficking – derives from the belief that biological women are innately vulnerable to sexual violence. Therefore, information about men who sell sex (or are exploited) is usually marginalised, unless the men are technically boys.

But what about women who buy sex from men? Evidence about that is usually dismissed, too, by those who want to abolish commercial sex. When it’s not dismissed, the women are denounced as ‘acting like men’ – exploitative, objectifying, dominating, selfish. This critique comes up most in treatments of middle-class women tourists in poorer countries, where it’s common for local men to act as guides, advisers, drivers, cultural mediators and lovers. More everyday situations of women paying men are said to be few and exceptional, except for cheerful accounts of places like Chippendales.

: Photo by Yevgeny Kondakov

At the end of last year I said I want to begin to think more purposefully about where the idea of Gender Equity has taken us. This will not take the form of a statistic war, because, as I always have to explain, there can’t be meaningful statistics where activities are stigmatised, illegal or simply occur in the informal sector of the economy. We don’t know how many of any sort of person buys what kind of sex from whom. What we have is a patchwork of information, a lot of it unreliable. Some of it, like the piece about a Kenyan man I posted the other day, is what’s called anecdotal. So is this piece from Der Spiegel about Bobby, who entertains women in Moscow.

Why aren’t women like those above seen as realising their desires? Why aren’t they seen as victims? Why isn’t this equity? What’s going on?

Sometimes satire is the best revenge: Anti-trafficking news from Norway

Dag Stenvoll works on the PROGEMI project at the Stein Rokkan Senter for Flerfaglige Samfunnsstudierin in Oslo, Norway. For all you who thought things couldn’t get worse than the ‘Swedish Model’, welcome to the Norwegian. The British are currently debating the Finnish. For anyone who drops by this website and thought Scandinavian models were tall, leggy women in fancy clothes, around here they are types of prostitution law that criminalise the buying of sex – the punter, the client, the customer. Dag writes:

Since January 1st, paying for sex (or attempting to) has been illegal in this wonderful oasis of gender equality and social democratic sex. Exactly ten years after our blond neighbours, Norway has installed an abolitionist law that reaches further than the Swedish one: Also buying sex abroad is made criminal. In principle, then (disregarding the obvious difficulties of enforcement), a Norwegian citizen can be fined or sent to jail for having made the deal anywhere in the world. No need even to be caught with your trousers down. Selling sex is, as before, not illegal, but all forms of organising are.

On Jan 4th, the first “whore client” (the charming Norwegian expression most commonly used for men who buy sex) was caught in Oslo. According to newspapers, the 44-year old man made a deal with a Norwegian street worker, who, when the car they were driving was stopped by the police, confirmed that they had agreed on a price (no action had still taken place, thank God!!). The man’s photo is shown in the tabloids; his face blurred but he must be easily recognizable for those who know him. He will be fined about €1000 for his crime, in addition to a life in shame. Not more than he deserves, the pig.

As this case indicates, convictions under the new law will depend heavily on either confessions by clients, or on sex workers’ willingness to admit that they’ve sold sex to, or, as in this case, made the deal with someone. Since most won’t admit this, for obvious reasons, a spokeswoman for the Oslo police says that prostitutes (sex worker is not a PC word in Norway) will be informed about their “duty to act as witness”. Reassuring indeed, for those who feared that the new law could turn out to be ineffective.

Whereas the Swedish sex-purchase prohibition was largely defended in terms of women’s equality, the Norwegian one has been framed as a measure against sex trafficking: If there is no demand, then there is no money to make dealing in supply. In this way, Norway confirms its self-congratulatory image as a human rights superpower. Yesterday, the Oslo police anti-trafficking squad announced that eight female Nigerian sex workers had been taken in for lacking legal residency, during an anti-trafficking operation directed at the indoor market. As none of them qualified as victims of trafficking (fortunately, or unfortunately?), they will be expelled, probably to a nice place called “home”, where, according to Norwegian folklore, foreigners are much better off than here.

In short: No reason not to open the champagne bottles and celebrate! Our peaceful streets and glorious consciousnesses will become cleaner than ever, tourists and good citizens will no longer be offended by visible and offensive whoring, and Norway will undoubtedly get an excellent grading in the next TIP report. I have never been so proud as in this very moment of being Norwegian. Let’s only hope that this wonderful policy will continue to spread, so that more and more oppressed women will come to enjoy the unmatched benefits of the Scandinavian model for sex: Always free, always equal, and always mutually enjoying.

Dag Stenvoll

Late last year I put up some positive pictures of Women Doing Things and promised I would be following up on this idea called Gender Equality. Dag’s comment on the different motivation for the Norwegian versus the Swedish legislation is important, so listen up: Sweden’s law is not about prudishness on the subject of sex – this is a widespread misunderstanding. If you’re not that old, you remember when Sweden was considered a sexual-liberation paradise. No, the goal of many Swedish policies is Gender Equality, and the prostitution law is a centrepiece. Now it’s ten years later, and the Norwegian government uses another justification for its law: to stop sex trafficking. Is the idea of Gender Equality changing?

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