The Naked Anthropologist

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What’s Wrong with the Trafficking Crusade? TIP Report Revisited

The new Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) has once again been issued by the US government. I went back to a piece I wrote about this annual shameful phenomenon in 2007, when the Philadelphia Inquirer rang to solicit a piece on the subject. The only thing different now concerns the perceptions of US citizens outside the US: abysmal and worsening then, slightly better now with the election of Obama. It remains to be seen whether this new administration will be able to see and grapple with the imperialism inherent in the TIP, however. Everything else I said two years ago I stand by today. The paper didn’t change my text but did change the title badly (my original appears first below).

What’s Wrong With the ‘Trafficking’ Crusade?
Well-meaning interference?

The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday 1 July 2007
Op-Ed page

Laura Agustín

It’s the season when the United States issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). Having named sexual slavery as a particular evil to be eradicated, the United States grades other countries on how they are doing.

On the one hand, it sounds like an obvious way to do good: Describe the ghastly conditions you as a rich outsider observe in poor countries. Focus on places where sex is sold. Say all women found were kidnapped virgins and are now enslaved; announce to the world that you will liberate them. Organize raids. Denounce anyone who objects – even if their objection is that you are intervening in their country’s internal affairs. Ignore victims who resist rescue. Use lurid language and talk continuously about the most sensational and terrible cases. Justify your actions as a manifestation of faith, as though it exists only for you. Mutter about “organized crime.”

This is also the season when tourists leave the United States en masse to visit the rest of the world, where their country is more disliked all the time. People who used to say: “It’s just the president [or the government], ordinary Americans are all right,” now say it less often. Ignorant, destructive interventions into other countries’ business have been going on too long.

Grading everyone else on moral grounds is highly offensive, particularly when such grades are accompanied by threats of punishment if the line isn’t toed. It’s distressing to witness the deterioration of what good will is left toward this country since the post-2001 wars were initiated and campaigns intensified that presume the United States Always Knows Best.

For crusading politicians and religious leaders, a rhetoric of moral indignation is effective in uniting constituents and diverting the collective gaze away from familiar problems at home. So the culprits, those who get bad grades in the TIP, live far away from U.S. culture, which is assumed to be better. Intransigent local troubles – prisons overflowing with African Americans, millions of children malnourished – are swept aside in the call to clean up other people’s countries.

This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors’ bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.

It is easy to haul out sensationalistic language (sex slavery, child prostitution), but it is much harder to sort out the real victims from the more routinely disadvantaged and trying-to-get-ahead. Those who know intimately the problems of the poor in their own cultures rarely deny that they can decide to leave home and pay others to help them travel and find work, in sex or in any other trade.

“But sex for money is disgusting and degrading; no one should have to do it.” And should anyone have to clean toilets all day? Risk being maimed in unsafe fireworks factories? Should children have to spend their lives in lightless tunnels of mines, or women have to remain married to men who are cruel to them? The world is full of things we wish we could eradicate – but isn’t starvation the first of them? Why is there no equivalent moral furor over hideous poverty? Are we meant to believe that sex without love is worse than military violence? All over the world, selling sex pays better than most jobs readily available to women, and many do not believe it is the worst possible experience they can have.

What’s questionable about the TIP is not the defense of children or anyone else against true violence – it’s one government’s assumption that it has the right to judge everyone else and apply a draconian definition of exploitation that does not ask people whether and how they would like to change their lives. Questionable is the focus on the photogenic, cowboy moment of rushing in to rescue slaves, with no interest in what will follow.

Victims are “protected” rather than granted autonomy. At the Empower Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, signs written by migrant women “rescued from” selling sex include: “We lose our savings and belongings”; We are locked up”; “We are held till deporation”; “We are interrogated by many people”; “Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.”

From the standpoint of social science, the TIP is gravely faulty. It never explains how data were gathered and compared across so many languages and cultures, or who did it exactly under what circumstances. A raft of other research shows enormous diversity among people who sell sex, and a wide variety of experiences in the sex industry among both migrants and people who stay at home. Studies show that the worst kind of trafficking can happen to people doing other kinds of jobs – and to men. Women all over the world, including the poorest, repudiate being characterized as above all sexually vulnerable.

In assuming its creators’ moral values are or should be universal, the TIP ignores local cultures and the complexities of human desires and functions – yet another reason tourists from the United States will be less welcome everywhere this summer.

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.

Don Kulick’s review of Sex at the Margins

As a longtime appreciator of Don Kulick’s Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, I am happy that he appreciated my book, too.

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Vol. 5/4, 95–96 (2008)

Don Kulick

A few years ago, as my colleague Deborah Cameron and I were lamenting how much academic life is spent wrangling over debates fueled by misinformation and polemic, we half-jokingly came up with an idea for a book series we thought would be fun to edit. The series would be titled Let’s Stop Talking Crap About… and would consist of short, no-nonsense texts that explained why debates about some particular topic were misguided and pointless wastes of time.

Debbie and I have not (yet) done anything with that idea. But if we were editing a series like that, Laura María Agustín’s Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry is the kind of text we would be commissioning. The book easily could have been titled Let’s Stop Talking Crap About Prostitution and Trafficking. It offers a sensible, levelheaded, knowledgeable, and accessible overview of why current debates about prostitution and trafficking are so flawed and confused, as well as a careful discussion of why laws and policies resulting from these debates are harmful to precisely the people they supposedly protect.

The author is a well-known scholar and advocate who has worked for many years both among migrants in various countries and among the professionals—social workers, nongovernmental organization (NGO) employees and volunteers, and others in the social sector—who administer and assist those migrants. She summarizes both her own research and a great deal of secondary literature. By highlighting the enormous variation that exists among migrants who sell sexual services, she demonstrates that debates about prostitution and trafficking can proceed as they do only because very few of the social workers, policymakers, government representatives, and others involved in these discussions actually know what they are talking about.

Agustín spells out the basic message of Sex at the Margins on page 5: “This book argues that those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalisation they condemn.” She goes on, several pages later, to explain this message more fully: “Social agents’ current practices in services, education, outreach, publications and policy-making…perpetuate a constructed class—‘prostitute’—which justifies their actions and serves an isolationist immigration policy” (p. 8).

This frank assessment is unlikely to sit particularly well with many of the social agents who work with prostitutes and prostitution. But the author does not blame, lecture, or scold. She acknowledges that social workers and others who work with prostitutes are genuinely interested in helping them. The problem is that most of the policies and interventions concerned with prostitution and trafficking are grounded in (a) statistics pulled out of thin air, (b) ideological posturing devoid of knowledge about how migration actually operates, (c) moral evaluations of sex that regard it as fundamentally incomparable with any other human activity, and (d) patronizing understandings of women that ultimately rely on the idea “that poorer women are better off staying at home than leaving and possibly getting into trouble” (p. 39).

Agustín is a skillful narrator. She draws the reader into the text by presenting the material as a kind of journey of discovery. Continue reading →

Libro Trabajar en la industria del sexo/Book called Working in the Sex Industry

There seems to be some confusion about another book of mine, which was published in Spain at the end of 2004 by Gakoa, in the Basque Country. Its translated title is Working in the Sex Industry, and other clichés about migration and consists of a series of essays plus a report written for Colectivo Ioé in 2000. I did the Ioé field work in Pamplona, talking with migrants, sex workers, social workers, police and other government officials. Sex at the Margins is not a translation of the first book. Below I tell a bit about how the first one came to be. If you are interested in buying the first one write to hiruga01@sarenet.es.

Trabajar en la industria del sexo, y otros tópicos migratorios. Publicado en el Pais Vasco, España, en 2004 por Gakoa. Pedidos: hiruga01@sarenet.es

Gakoa es la editorial que publica la revista Mugak. Peio Aierbe se puso en contacto conmigo cuando querían sacar una edición sobre migrantes que trabajan en la industria del sexo, que salió en 2003.

El sitio de Gakoa dice sobre Mugak que ‘está concebida como una herramienta al servicio de los movimientos de solidaridad frente al racismo y la xenofobia. El camino recorrido desde su aparición, en 1997, nos permite afirmar que es una herramienta consolidada. Hemos podido comprobar que existe una amplia franja de personas que se acercan a estas cuestiones desde una postura solidaria. Sea desde la práctica militante o desde la inquietud intelectual, o incluso, desde quienes tienen que prestar un servicio en el ámbito de la Administración, la sintonía que hemos encontrado con todas nos hace ser optimistas de cara al futuro.

Esta sintonía es la que convierte a la revista Mugak en un actor de primer orden en la labor de construir redes por las que transite el debate, la solidaridad, el contraste, las propuestas y, en definitiva, parte del caudal solidario que existe en nuestra sociedad. Las oportunidades y los retos que plantean las migraciones afectan, de manera transversal, al conjunto de ámbitos en los que se desarrolla nuestra vida diaria. Esta complejidad exige una mirada detenida sobre cada uno de ellos y recurrir a muchos puntos de vista. Ése es el ámbito de trabajo de Mugak.’

Puedes leer sobre El Centro de Estudios y Documentación sobre Inmigración, Racismo y Xenofobia Mugak y sus ideas en euskara.

Subtleties within the trafficking idea: Non-reductionism in news from Moldova

The following story comes from Moldova, a country whose citizens are often said to be more likely to be trafficked or traffickers than others in Europe. Given that stereotype, it is interesting that this news, while brief, is more nuanced than most coming out of richer countries.

Human trafficking cases decline as illegal migration expands
Info-Prim Neo, 16.12.2008

The number of cases involving persons actually being trafficked tends to decline in favor of an increase in the number of illegal migration cases, according to the Board of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Moldova, Info-Prim Neo reports.

The Office said in a press release there have been recorded 510 trafficking-related offenses in 11 months of this year; of them, 209 were cases of trafficking of adults, 28 cases of trafficking of children, 152 cases of sexual exploitation, 106 cases of illegal migration, and 15 cases of child smuggling.

The prosecutors remark an alarming trend of trafficking cases where relatives and acquaintances have complicity. Cases where previously trafficked persons became traffickers represent another alarming trend. These cases are particularly difficult to investigate and examine in court.

According to the prosecutors, an element that facilitates human trafficking is corruption among persons in positions of authority. Trafficking and corruption are mutually reinforcing as they foster bribery and undermine the efforts made to counter these phenomena.

In the course of December the General Prosecutor’s Office is to finalize a series of acts that will make a priority to find criminal links between traffickers and persons in posts of authority.

The first good thing here is the absence of the abhorrent term sex trafficking : This authority is not making the fact of selling sex into a particular evil category. Next, the term illegal migration is used in the same breath as trafficking. Finally, they distinguish between child trafficking and child smuggling. I don’t believe it’s easy to make such distinctions, but I’d rather see them than the usual vast, reductionist statements.

Then these authorities mention, which everyone who studies migration knows very well, that relatives and friends are very often those who facilitate migrants’ journeys and jobs, whether those turn out happily or not. What outsiders decry as exploitation are often family strategies to get ahead. Are families often repressive instruments that punish girls more than boys? Yes. Should we lump all such family members into one messy bag called trafficking? It doesn’t help anyone. Migrants who’ve been selected as the most capable of being able to help the family as a whole do often suffer, but their greatest consolation can be knowing that they are helping their family. So dividing an exploited person from those she identifies with and loves is not kind. I would like to see things change, but not by imposing an idea about gender equality that does not take into account local realities.

The main point the Moldovan authority wants to make is the link between trafficking and corruption. Corruption is another word that can be misused and end up covering way too much, including ordinary local customs. But again, migration scholars know that getting the right papers to allow travel and work depends in many cases on the complicity of officials of all sorts: consider the cases of using false papers described here. And for those interested in some historical perspective, consider what refugees from Germany say about being smuggled in the 1940s, in a book by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Prostituting Women’s Solidarity: Another voice questions the extent of sex trafficking

It’s an uphill, possibly hopeless task to go against the massive tide of uninformed ideas about migration and the sex industry (called in blanket fashion sex trafficking and sex slavery), but a growing number of people are asking questions about images such as this one from the
Salvation Army’s anti-trafficking programme

All too often even a mild analysis or questioning of the current shrill public discourse on this subject is attacked as monstrous and cruel. To the contrary, measured skepticism about such brouhaha is healthy. Nathalie Rothschild is commissioning editor of Spiked. Her reporting on immigration and migration issues include the following analysis of the UK Home Secretary’s proposal to criminalise clients of sex workers ‘controlled for another’s gain’. My own analysis of this legislation appeared in the Guardian as The Shadowy World of Sex Across Borders.

Prostituting women’s solidarity

Spiked, 27 November 2008

The UK government’s call to British women to help combat ‘sex trafficking’ amounts to a crackdown on immigration.

Nathalie Rothschild

Women around Britain have been asked to unite to liberate their prostitute sisters from the shackles of modern-day slavery.

Last week, UK home secretary Jacqui Smith unveiled a proposal to protect women from exploitation by tackling the demand for prostitution – in other words, by punishing punters. Anyone who pays for sex with someone who is ‘controlled for another person’s gain’ could be fined and receive a criminal record. Under the proposal, ignorance of the circumstances would be no defence.

On Tuesday, Harriet Harman, the minister for women, followed up on Smith’s proposal by sending out a rallying call to members of the Women’s Institute (WI), the UK’s largest voluntary women’s organisation. She asked the ladies to help tackle the sex trade by complaining to editors of local papers that run ‘sleazy adverts’ for sexual services.

Harman believes this will help stamp out sex trafficking, which she has described as a ‘modern-day slave trade’. One WI member told the BBC that the ‘sleazy ads’ may be for services that the girls involved are not giving willingly. They may have been tricked and forced into prostitution, she said. Spokeswoman Ira Arundell said the WI’s aim is ‘to raise awareness and spread the message about what is happening with these girls’. Just how complaining to editors about newspaper ads will counteract exploitation of women or reveal what happens behind the doors of massage parlours, brothels and erotic DVD shops is not entirely clear.

The images broadcast this week of middle-aged and elderly British WI members, gathered around tables to scour local papers – scissors and marker pens at hand – and tut-tutting at ads for erotic services, were reminiscent of those old gatherings of women knitting sweaters and collecting toys for starving, black babies. In effect, Harman and the WI view the foreigners who they are so intent on rescuing as childlike, helpless victims; as easily cajoled and loose women in need of the watchful guard of respectable, morally superior British ladies.

This war against international prostitution may be well-intentioned, but it looks like a puritanical ‘white woman’s burden’ mission. Far from engaging in an act of solidarity, the WI members who heed Harman’s call will only help to reinforce the image of migrants as a danger to themselves and to British society.

The numerous charities, non-governmental organisations, official bodies and police that work to root out human trafficking form what some have termed a ‘rescue industry’, whose collective efforts reinforce a dehumanising view of migrants. As writer Laura María Agustín points out it in Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, migrants become reduced to ‘passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved and helpers become saviours’. This, Agustín says, is ‘a colonialist operation’.

Besides, who says migrant workers employed in the sex industry (which includes everything from charging for sex to pole-dancing, providing attentive dinner company and selling erotic lingerie, literature or DVDs) want to be ‘rescued’ in the first place? Continue reading →

‘We live in an age of helping victims’: new review of Sex at the Margins

The author of a new review of my book for a Portugese journal, Lorenzo Bordonaro, wrote to me the other day to tell me about it. At the same time, he sent me a copy of a research report he co-authored with Filipa Alvim at CEAS (Centro de Estudos de Antropologia Social), in Lisbon, entitled Tráfico de Mulheres em Portugal: Análise da construção de um problema social (Women Trafficking in Portugal: Analysis of the construction of a social problem). From the English summary:

Asking why recently we are so concerned with women’s trafficking in Portugal sounds like a dumb question. After all, we are daily informed, trafficking is one of the greatest criminal endeavours of our times, with millions of people trafficked and enslaved every year, and billions of dollars of profit. It is normal therefore that Portugal is eager to stand up against this ‘inhuman form of crime’. Things, we have learned in the research that led to this book, are not so simple.

Without denying the existence of some cases of prototypical ‘women trafficking’, and the actual and daily violence that is perpetrated against women migrating to Portugal, we have come to the conclusion that the contemporary crusade against (women) trafficking in Portugal and Europe is motivated less by the wish to protect migrant’s (women’s) right than by the moral and political concern about prostitution and undocumented migration.

You can see why I’d be glad to hear from Lorenzo, given the overwhelming victimisation of migrants dominating so many cultures nowadays (see my pre-Christmas post on Women Doing Things for an antidote!). Here’s his review of my book. It begins ‘We live in an age of helping victims…’ Please send the link to any readers of Portuguese among your acquaintances.

Análise Social, Vol XLIII, n 4 (2008)

Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, London, Zed Books, 2007, 248 páginas.

Vivemos na época da ajuda e das vítimas: quotidianamente são identificados novos “problemas” e patologias sociais e psicológicas, assim como as respectivas vítimas; são procurados novos trabalhadores sociais e criados novos programas e figuras profissionais. As populações de migrantes não europeus, especialmente, surgiram nas últimas duas décadas, na Europa, como o novo campo da “acção social”, da actividade humanitária e da investigação científica. Financiamentos consideráveis são, por isso, anualmente destinados a programas para estas “populações alvo”: para investigar e melhorar a sua saúde física e mental, pesquisar a sua vida religiosa, as “disfunções” das suas famílias, a sua sexualidade, o sucesso e insucesso escolar dos mais novos, o saneamento das suas casas, a protecção das suas crianças… Todas as formas de intervenção nas vidas e na moralidade destes “novos outros” são legitimadas em nome da ajuda, do seu bem-estar, saúde e segurança.

Quanto às ciências sociais, não deixa de ser inquietante a forma como, na maioria dos casos, têm assumido acriticamente o seu novo papel em relação às finalidades (agenda) sociais e políticas — ciências sociais e “filantropia” parecem estar num processo de simbiose, se não de identificação. Poucos questionaram até agora este desejo de ajudar e de salvar, bem como as evidentes implicações políticas destas acções humanitárias, sendo a sobreposição entre protecção e disciplina uma das dinâmicas fundamentais da intervenção social, como Foucault já tinha salientado.

Em Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, Laura María Agustín analisa este aparato de ajuda reservado aos migrantes, questionando a abordagem, as motivações e a eficácia das intervenções e das políticas, no caso específico das mulheres migrantes trabalhadoras do sexo. O interesse da autora pelo sector “social” deriva da sua experiência profissional, já que trabalhou inicialmente em vários projectos de educação para adultos (inclusive de trabalhadoras e trabalhadores do sexo) na América Latina e nas Caraíbas. Esta experiência despertou-lhe o interesse pela lógica dos financiadores e dos operadores, pelo que passou um ano em várias capitais europeias, falando com operadores de várias ONGs e com migrantes, e começou, depois, um trabalho de campo em Madrid sobre a relação entre projectos de ajuda e migrantes trabalhadores do sexo. Continue reading →

Anti-sex-trafficking Law Causes Police Violence in Cambodia

Cambodia is one of the countries the US has manipulated into passing anti-trafficking legislation.

I write about this because there is a mass blindness going on, like the phenomenon of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone knew he was naked but no one said so. There is now enough evidence – maybe even acceptable in a court of law! – that anti-trafficking laws cause more violence and injustice than they prevent. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way, perhaps there could be good anti-trafficking laws that did not end up punishing loads of people who don’t want to be ‘helped’ or ‘rescued’ in the way the US and other mainstream government voices are now requiring. Everyone wants to help real victims, that isn’t at issue.

At the moment, the USA publishes an annual ranking -a report card – for the Rest of the World, on how well they combat human trafficking. Why does the US government get to do this? Do they know more than anyone else? No. This is political manoeuvering and cultural crusading. The moralistic claim is that US efforts and money are needed in order to save the world from slavery. One important question is how do they know where their efforts and money are needed.

The Trafficking in Persons (known as TIP) reports do not explain what methods they use to evaluate the extent of trafficking in any given place. They use CIA estimates – that’s the Central Intelligence Agency, which is not well known for doing good research – and anecdotal evidence to decide whether a country should get a good grade or a bad one. Anecdotal evidence means whatever their local contacts said, when asked in a conversation or telephone call.

-Hello, CIA and US Embassy here. Is that the local police? It is? Good. Listen, we’re doing research on how much sex trafficking there is in your area. You know, sex trafficking, like when pimps force women and children into being prostitutes against their will.

-Hello, CIA and US Embassy. Of course we want to help you in any way we can. What do you want to know?

-How much sex trafficking have you got around there? Is it bad? Is it increasing? Are there children involved?

-Oh yes, it’s very bad, there are prostitutes everywhere. Lots of them are very young. They stand around in the streets wearing skimpy clothes, there are brothels everywhere, they are shameless.

-So it’s really bad, right? And getting worse?

-Definitely. We can’t keep track of it, it’s so bad. There are children everywhere. Just the other day my aunt told me she was seeing young people in her own street! Not only that, but they were boys dressing like girls!

-We’ll report this right now. There will be a new law, you’ll see, that makes it a very bad crime to traffic anyone. The police will be charged with ending this vile trade. That will fix the problem. Talk to you soon.

-Okay, boss, let us know when it’s ready.

-Right. Secretary, record that one as 100% more cases of trafficking this year than last year and numbers of small children being exploited up 50%. That’s us done, send it to Washington.

Was that single conversation the only source of evidence? No. But what if there are several, or even numerous such conversations? Do we understand these to be ‘proof’ of anything? Come on, no!

High up on the factors that give countries a good grade is their anti-trafficking legislation: to get a good mark, countries must have a Strong Law. Countries that don’t buckle under to US pressure face the possibility of receiving less US aid and support. Cambodia’s law is a mess: take a look at it and see if you can make sense of it. The result is mass police actions to round up people who sell sex (whether they call themselves sex workers or prostitutes) , in the name of rescuing them from exploitation.

This is not a struggle between Good and Evil, or about whether prostitution is good or bad. We all agree that people who are in horrible situations should be helped. The issue is how you help them, and you cannot do it without understanding what they themselves want. It’s hard to understand why this fundamental point should be so difficult to take in. Another recent case in Cambodia illustrates what happens when the police start shooing people to new areas.

Some people prefer selling sex to their other options, even if those options are limited and unappealing. Give folks a break, let them judge for themselves which option they would rather engage in at the moment! Here’s the latest news on the failure of the other approach, which can be called Unwanted Rescues. Don’t forget the poster migrants made about that in Thailand! It isn’t necessary to arrive at a single piece of legislation that applies to everyone: there could be two, or even three! Radical.

New Sex Law Brings Problems

The Straits Times, 26 December 2008

PHNOM PENH (AFP) — Chantha said there was nothing else she could do in Cambodia but become a prostitute.

“If you don’t even have a dollar in your pocket to buy rice, how can you bear looking at your starving relatives?” she said.

“You do whatever to survive, until you start to realize the consequence of your deeds.”

Chanta, in her early twenties, was working in a small red-light district west of the capital Phnom Penh several months ago when she was arrested under Cambodia’s new sex-trafficking law. Continue reading →

對「發展」的貢獻：金錢促使性交易 / Contributing to ‘Development’: Money Made Selling Sex

I just found out that the 9th edition of Research for Sex Work (August 2006) was translated into Chinese by people from COSWAS: Taiwan’s Collective Of Sex Workers And Supporters. Full credits are at the end of this post.

The word development is in scare quotes because too often rich countries impose endless economic and cultural rubbish on poorer ones in the name of ‘developing’ them, – supposedly bringing them up to the level of the rich ones but often messing things up more than anything else. If you’re interested in that idea, see some references at the end of this post.

According to mainstream ‘development’ values, prostitution is always something to be ashamed of and sorry about and to get rid of. Migrants who leave home and end up selling sex abroad may send back lots more money than they would if they were maids or farm workers but are not recognised as making a contribution. Read the original of my own article in English if you don’t read Chinese. If you know people who do read Chinese, please send this link on to them!

Contributing to ‘Development’: Money Made Selling Sex
對「發展」的貢獻：金錢促使性交易

Laura María Agustín

今年年初我在 Ecuador（厄瓜多爾）與比較貧窮的從事性交易的婦女聊天，她們談到也許會考慮旅行到另外一個國家賣淫。富國政客們每每批評到「經濟移民」，就彷彿她們去掙錢的欲望是件壞事。而且，在很多富國中，這類移民如果聲稱他們是受害者（難民、尋求政治庇護者、「被賣的婦女」，往往比那些剛剛到達、且甘願做任何工作的移民，更容易獲得停留核准。 Continue reading →

Glidecreme og gode intentioner: Lubricant and good intentions

Last week I found myself at lunch in the cellar of a very old building at the University of Copenhagen, on the occasion of a prostitution/sex work conference. After carefully navigating a conversation with the man on my left, a city councilman who seemed to have wandered into the wrong event (or perhaps I simply misunderstood him), I turned to the man on my right to introduce myself.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I travelled through Europe this summer talking with migrant sex workers and reading your book.’

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Did you enjoy it?’ (How very disorienting! What is one to say?)

‘Very much. In fact, I am a journalist and an article about it has just come out in a newspaper here, it is on sale now.’

Here it is. The picture shows one social worker, one journalist and one sex worker. No high boots leaning into a car window here.

Glidecreme og gode intentioner (Lubricant and Good Intentions)

Weekendavisen 28.11.2008 4 Sektion IDEER pp 8-9

Foto af Anders Haahr Rasmussen: Hjælpearbejde blandt narkoprostituerede ved en af indfaldsvejene til Bratislava

Teori & praksis. Der kan være mange gode grunde til at hjælpe narkomaner og udsatte sexarbejdere. Men man kommer nemt til at gøre mere skade end gavn, advarer antropologen Laura María Agustín. Vi har besøgt Østeuropas hjælpearbejdere med Agustíns seneste bog i lommen.

Af Anders Haahr Rasmussen og Kristina Nya Glaffey

VI står på en parkeringsplads, bilens bagagerum er fuldt af kanyler og kondomer. Klokken er kvart over ti om aftenen, stedet er Americke Namestie, en plads lidt uden for Bratislavas bycentrum. Vi har parkeret omme bag en lukket benzintank, her er så godt som mennesketomt, da aftenens første besøgende nærmer sig. Den 28-årige socialarbejder Eva Melková fra hjælpeorganisationen Odysseus er med sine to assistenter, 25-årige Jana Banáková og 21-årige Natalya Városiová, der begge studerer socialarbejde på universitetet, er klar til at hjælpe. Continue reading →

Cambodia Ladyboy Rescue Goes Wrong

Here’s an attempt to help young people selling sex that’s put them in more danger. The article employs well-known rescue keywords.

Best Interests: police say they have the best interests of prostitutes in mind
Take care of health: and want to take care of their health
Protect: and protect them from HIV/AIDS

Now compare those stated goals with what the kids say themselves in the article. The hotel employee’s comment at the end about ‘decent society’ is also a giveaway.

Ladyboys face crackdown

Phnom Penh Post, 29 October 2008

Gay male prostitutes have solicited on Pursat Bridge for a decade, but a police crackdown has forced them into more dangerous parts of town

The ladyboys of Pursat – gay male prostitutes dressed as women – have been banned from soliciting on the notorious Pursat Bridge, their haunt for at least a decade, but provincial police enforcing the ban say they have the best interests of the prostitutes in mind.

“Selling sex is illegal in Cambodia. We are not allowing these prostitutes to conduct business on the bridge anymore because it has a negative impact on residents who live close by,” said Lok Sary, chief of the Pursat provincial police force.

“We also want to take care of the ladyboys’ health and protect them from HIV/Aids.”

Since the police crackdown, the ladyboys have moved their business to the shady gardens surrounding Pursat Lake, particularly a stretch between Pursat Bridge and Speanthmor Garden.

Fresh dangers

But the move has been a difficult one for the more than 50 ladyboys who work in Pursat, according to Srey Lin, 25, who has been a prostitute in the town for two years.

“If we are standing on the Pursat Bridge, it is much safer for us. The police are always nearby, but here we face a lot of problems,” she told the Post. “Sometimes young gangsters come by and mistreat us. They try to steal drugs and money, and sometimes they force us to have sex with them for free.”

Srey Lin works as a hairdresser in the daytime but said she turned to prostitution because she did not earn enough to support herself. She added that most of her clients are older Cambodian men, and that ladyboys usually earn about US$20 a night.

“We work from 8pm until midnight, and when we see the police we all split up and pretend to be visitors,” she said.

“We have to do this job secretly because we are looked down on by the wider community, especially the women, but we conduct our business properly: We only go over to a man if he stops his moto near us. We do not sit or stand on the edge of the road and call out to clients.”

Rotana, an employee at the Phnom Pich Hotel, which faces the bridge, says she is pleased the ladyboys have moved on, viewing them as a threat to decent society.

“I think the police made the right decision moving the ladyboys from Pursat Bridge,” she said.

“This province is unsafe today because of the anarchy of these gay groups. They always used to fight with gangsters on the bridge. Even though police banned them from the bridge, I can still hear them calling out from the gardens and I think police should ban them from there too.”

Klem Sokoun, chief of the Pursat provincial health department, said his office is growing increasingly worried about the spread of HIV/Aids through gay brothels. He said it is conducting research into the brothels and that a crackdown is likely to begin soon.

Prostitute, poveri e irregolari – Controlling migrant women, not helping prostitutes (or sex workers)

Un nuovo ordine per le strade: Prostitute, poveri e irregolari nell’Italia dell’ossessione sicuritaria (A new order for the streets: Prostitutes, the poor and irregular migrants in an Italy obsessed with security) by Pietro Saitta

Here’s an article published in terrelibere, in Italian, in an academic style, presenting research with Romanian sex workers/prostitutes in Messina (Sicily). The author is interested in how municipal ordinances to keep streets ‘safe’ lead to repression of street prostitutes who are seen as irregular/unauthorised/undocumented migrants. The author argues that while police and other security-conscious social actors say they want to protect women, their actions do nothing of the kind. The abstract reads:

L’articolo illustra i risultati di una ricerca etnografica realizzata nella città di Messina, avente per oggetto il mondo della prostituzione eterosessuale di origine romena. Impiegando una pluralità di fonti, l’autore mette in relazione i piani locale e nazionale e sostiene che quelle messe in atto non sono politiche di contrasto della prostituzione, ma politiche “d’ordine” e di controllo delle migrazioni clandestine. Con questo si sottolinea il fallimento delle misure di tutela delle persone sfruttate e l’impiego strumentale e paradossale dei diritti umani per condurre una battaglia contro donne, soggetti marginali e poveri.

Meaning, roughly: This article presents the results of ethnographic research on Romanian heterosexual prostitution carried out in the city of Messina. Using different sources of information, the author describes local and national levels and claims that current policies implemented by the Italian authorities do not (really) combat prostitution but rather are policies ‘of order’ aimed at controlling illegal migrations. The paper highlights the failure of measures intended to support exploited people and suggests that we are witnessing the instrumental and paradoxical employment of human rights to conduct a struggle against women, marginal people and the poor.

The author quotes a city ordinance saying that prostitution leads to street distubances that threaten the security of the streets.

Nell’ordinanza del sindaco di Roma Gianni Alemanno contro la prostituzione, si sottolinea che ‘attività di meretricio produce gravi situazioni di turbativa alla sicurezza stradale, a causa di comportamenti gravemente imprudenti, in violazione del Codice della strada, di soggetti che, alla guida dei propri veicoli, sono alla ricerca di prestazioni sessuali […] Nel provvedimento inoltre si sottolinea anche come l’uso da parte delle prostitute “di un abbigliamento indecoroso e indecente’ sia ‘motivo di distrazione per gli utenti della strada e causa di frequenti incidenti stradali’.

Numerous Spanish cities have passed street ordinances, or are discussing doing so, which name prostitution as one of several anti-social activities to be prohibited in their streets. More on those another day.

Read the Italian article here.

What’s Wrong with Helping? Another example from the world of sex work

The word help is very misleading, like rescue and save and rehabilitate. Who decides which people need help and when and how? That’s the basic problem. If you simply look at another person’s situation and think ‘How awful, I wouldn’t want to live like that, it must be intolerable!’ then you might jump to the conclusion that she or he would be happy to have any help you feel like giving. You might assume, as pointed out in the previous post on Knowing Best that everyone sees the world as you do. But it’s not true, as I discuss in Leaving Home for Sex and The Sex in Sex Trafficking.

Today’s example of failed helping comes from Thailand. Empower, whose anti-rescue poster I published a while back, has written to say that they refused to participate in the development of a ‘training package’ aimed at UN employees dealing with sex workers. They were asked to reconsider their decision. Refusing a second time, they sent the following letter to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Nossal Institute of Global Health at Melbourne University, which got the UNFPA contract to develop the material.

Dear Brigitte,

Empower had a second long joint discussion about the proposed training. Empower has decided to be faithful to our original position and not take part in the training in Bangkok. We would like to explain this position to your team as well as UNFPA.

We understand the point of the training is to decrease stigma and break down sterotypes. However, we see the very process of the development and implementation of this training reflects the prejudices held by UNFPA programmers. It is simply not acceptable to hire a team of non-sex workers to create a training module about working with sex workers. The fact that your team at Nossal contacted sex woker groups to participate in the development is perhaps to your credit, but it does not address the original insult. There are many very capable, very credible, sex worker organizations that UNFPA could have and should have hired directly to create and implement the training module. How would it be if a sex worker organization was hired to develop and implement a training module on Nossal Institute…it would be senseless, yes? Why should it make any more sense in the reverse? We know we were certainly not the only sex worker organization to refuse to take part. We also felt our expertise was being undervalued by the small token payment you were able to offer under your funding guidelines. The project is 27 months long, obviously funded at UN rates, yet from memory you could only afford to pay Empower around $AUS800 to act as advisers. We are sure the UNFPA would not accept such small payments for their staff.

However, the money is a small part of the issue. The greater concern is that UNFPA thinks this is an appropriate process! It says to Empower that the UNFPA does not believe that sex workers are intelligent, capable, valuable partners in the fight against HIV. It says to Empower that UNFPA still sees sex workers as people who are only capable of providing colour…telling some stories and acting as sex tour guides on training field trips. It says to Empower that UNFPA still does not understand concepts like “community participation” or “best practice”. For example you said [name] was helping with your project. She came to us as a young intern to learn FROM us…we are the ones who tried to teach her how to be a part of a commuity organization and now she is better placed than us to design this training!?

When will UNFPA and others see us as educators, trainers not just targets, tools or fools?

All this leaves us wondering what kind of impact can a training that is not owned by sex workers have on the attitudes of individual UN agency staff especially while the stigma and prejudice about sex workers is so obvioulsy entrenched in much of the UN system. We note that the UNFPA and other UN agencies,as late as March 2008, are still using offensive terms like “commercial sex worker” and “high risk group” in some publications despite promises made. That such a small detail as this has proven too hard for the UN to address does not bode well for the outcome of the trainings, does it?

We acknowledge that Can Do Bar is public property so we cannot decide for you whether you include whatever the video is that you made or not. You asked us to approve the script but we cannot. We have no idea where the quotes you have came from but they are not accurate. For example we never use words like “girls” Pornpit is a sex worker too and does not use terms like “they and them” – it’s “us and we”! There are about 50,000 Thai sex workers who have been involved with Empower over 20 years. We have had a handful of westerners over the same period in minor support roles. If you quote Liz instead of us, the Thai sex workers of Can Do and Empower, it encourages people to continue to believe we are stupid and can only do something if a foreigner helps us. It also just doesn’t sound like us or Can Do Bar!

Our position is not meant to reflect in any way on those groups who chose to help you… or any other group’s involvement.

Regards
Empower

Translated by Liz Hilton : On a personal note I was horrified to see my name in the acknowledgements in the Handbook. I have not knowingly or willingly contributed to your process in any way at all. Please take my name off all and any materials associated with this project. Thanks.

I might add that the whole idea of material intended to ‘train’ helpers in how to treat sex workers – or anyone else – is patronising, as though they were not human beings or needed some special psychology or sensitivity. Feh! This contract also illustrates the problem with proposing to do research about people you think are fundamentally different from yourself, often just because they live in a poorer country. This is the idea behind ‘Development’, which I won’t get started on today. I discussed the contradictions of research in The (Crying) Need for Different Kinds of Research and Alternate Ethics. Of course, when the research subjects are sex workers, attitudes can be even more egregious.

Knowing Best, Doing Good

The other day I mentioned StuffWhitePeopleLike in a post about Ethnicity and Satire. I wrote Christian Lander to ask if I might reprint in full my favourite of his, #62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People, and he said yes. As some of you know, I’ve written a lot about Knowing Best: how it all came about with The Construction of Benevolent Identities, that thing called Empowerment and how we should Forget Victimisation regarding what Lander’s calling Poor People.

Lander takes off the way ‘helping’ makes people feel good about themselves and how they assume that if everyone were to live the way helpers do – making the Right choices – then the world would be Good.

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

A great way to make white people feel good is to tell them about situations where poor people changed how they were doing things because they were given the ‘whiter’ option. “Back in my old town, people used to shop at Wal*Mart and then this non-profit organization came in and set up a special farmers co-op so that we could buy more local produce, and within two weeks the Wal*Mart shut down and we elected our first Democratic representative in 40 years.” White people will first ask which non-profit and are they hiring? After that, they will be filled with euphoria and will invite you to more parties to tell this story to their friends, so that they can feel great.

But it is ESSENTIAL that you reassert that poor people do not make decisions based on free will. That news could crush white people and their hope for the future.

That ending encapsulates how so many commentators talk about women who sell sex, and young people who express sexualities and almost all migrants who leave home to work at less than wonderful jobs outside their own countries. If you just turn the gaze back onto the commentators you see the assumptions undergirding their concern – that everyone should and must want to live the same way, no matter how impossible that goal is.

Ethnicity and satire

It looks as though at least some jokes about ethnicity and ‘race’ might be becoming acceptable again somewhere off the bad-taste-stand-up-comedy route. The writers of Stuff White People Like and Ask a Mexican produce often good and sometimes brilliant satire on culture and taste.

The whites on Christian Lander’s site are middle-class and educated. In Gustavo Arellano’s column, whites appear as know-nothing gabachos contrasted with mexicanos, chicanos, latinos and hispanics, who are also often know-nothings. Lander’s humour is deadpan, while Arellano jeers, sometimes aggressively. Lander’s remit is narrow and focussed, while Arellano’s is all over the place.

But both show the potential for laughing at ourselves and our sacred cows, particularly those we think belong to our ‘cultures’. In the present era of over-seriousness about migration, I welcome these funny guys.

In Lander’s case, I particularly like his posts on white people’s desire to Do Good for the disadvantaged, while at the same time benefiting themselves, of course. It’s nice to see someone else take a look at ‘helping’ with a clear head.

I like the Mexican because he engages in border thinking, why else? Here’s his answer to a complaint about the inauthenticity of not only margarita mix but margaritas themselves and the claim that Mexicans don’t drink them and don’t eat tortilla chips.

. . . So maybe Mexicans don’t consume margaritas and tortilla chips as much as, say, pan dulce and huitlacoche—who cares? Both gabacho faves have their roots with Mexican entrepreneurs who took authentically Mexican products to create an Americanized hybrid; he should celebrate these feats instead of whining like Lou Dobbs. (2 Sept 2008)

This sort of thinking is unlikely to be Stuff White People Like, however!

Unwanted Rescues: A poster from Thailand

This poster comes from the EMPOWER centre in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where brothel workers gathered to discuss recent raids and rescue operations. On the left they have written a list of reasons why they do not wish to be rescued by police, ngo or charity workers.

• We lose our savings and our belongings.
• We are locked up.
• We are interrogated by many people.
• They force us to be witnesses.
• We are held until the court case.
• We are held till deportation.
• We are forced re-training.
• We are not given compensation by anybody.
• Our family must borrow money to survive while we wait.
• Our family is in a panic.
• We are anxious for our family.
• Strangers visit our village telling people about us.
• The village and the soldiers cause our family problems.
• Our family has to pay ‘fines’ or bribes to the soldiers.
• We are sent home.
• Military abuses and no work continues at home.
• My family has a debt.
• We must find a way back to Thailand to start again.

Only one side of the list is visible in the photo, but we are lucky to have any photo at all. Thanks to people from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers.

Working on ships, travelling by ship

Migrants who sell sex are not the only migrants treated as victims needing to be saved, though they get most of the attention. A few years ago I went to a Seamen’s Mission in Liverpool and talked with people who visit workers on freighters in dock there. They arranged for me to go aboard a couple of ships and talk to seafarers from the Philippines.

Forced or coerced conscription used to be a common way to get labourers for merchant ships – to be shanghaied was to be abducted to work on ships. Great numbers of bodies were needed to keep trading ships going in the 19th century. The British Royal Navy used impressment to man its ships. The long history of these injustices flavour strongly how present-day mission workers talk about their duties, which also rely on principles stated in the ILO’s Seafarers Welfare Convention and related instruments.

At the time I talked to these seamen, I was thinking a lot about parties held aboard ships that weigh anchor some distance from Latin American ports. Because seafarers will not easily get visas to go ashore, it’s common for ways of taking ‘leave’ or recreation to be brought to them on board. I had visited the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, meeting people who make money when ships arrive and seamen want to party. Continue reading →

The Zed Book’s cover

This is my introductory post to the new website. For a few years I had another one, also housed at Nodo50.org, which was just a list of publications available to download. This new site isn’t finished and has a few minor problems, but I understand that blogs allow informality and imperfection, so I’m going quietly public today. I wanted to say something about the cover of the book I published last year. Some people understand right away what this cover is meant to say and some don’t. For me, it expresses mobility, striding actively forward, crossing lines, borders and yellow Danger signs. I also like the first figure’s little purposeful feet and the position of the second figure close behind, carrying a nice bureaucratic sheet of paper. I also like what the picture doesn’t depict: clichés about women leaning into cars, shots of miserable streets at night. The book’s about all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, moving through life, trying to get ahead, or at least catch up. Sometimes we ignore yellow warnings and do what we think we have to do. Julian Hosie of Zed Books found the original image, which showed more people and is ©Christine Gonsalves.

You’ll find a number of my previous publications converted to post format, as well as media and online reviews. I’ll keep making the academic articles available in pdf form and announcing those as posts, but I’m not finished with that task yet.

I write in both Spanish and English, and you’ll find other languages here, too.

On the sidebar you’ll see Subjects on this Site in the form of a tag cloud. The size of the word reflects how often I tagged an article with a given word or phrase.

I don’t plan to write a post every day. If you want to know when I publish something new, you can subscribe to the feed by clicking the orange box in the upper-right or lower-right hand corner of the page.

Australian National Radio: Counterpoint interview

ABC Radio National – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Counterpoint – 5 May 2008 – Sex at the Margins

Monday 4pm repeated Friday 1pm

Presented by Michael Duffy and and Paul Comrie-Thomson

Claims are often made that large numbers of migrants are trafficked around the world for sex. Laura Maria Agustín has looked closely at the evidence for this and concludes that the figures are exaggerated. She says that the West’s obsession with migrant sex workers is a moral panic produced by concerns about immigration in general.

Transcript : This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Michael Duffy: We often hear claims that large numbers of migrants are trafficked around the world for sex. Well, our next guest, Laura Maria Agustin, has looked closely at the evidence for this and she concludes the figures are hugely exaggerated. She says the West’s obsession with migrant sex workers is a sort of moral panic produced by concern about immigration in general. Her new book is called Sex at the Margins, and I spoke to her last week.

Reading some of your work, it strikes me that a very important thing you bring to this issue is your familiarity, your knowledge of the actual people involved, whereas often people who write about migrant sex workers and so on seem not to know a lot about them, they seem to regard them sometimes as symbols for their fears or even their fantasies. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience? How have you come to understand and know these people?

Laura Maria Agustin: Yes, I considered them my friends. I was working in the NGO world in different parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, and people migrating to go work somewhere else, to be maids or do construction or sell sex was quite well known and conventional and we all understood why it was happening. And then I found out that people in Europe particularly at the time (this was the mid 90s, the late 90s) considered this a terrible tragedy and talked about it in a completely different way. That was my original research question; why should they be talking about them in such a different way? And I naively asked; haven’t they spoken to them yet? Continue reading →

Spiked Review of Sex at the Margins

The Spiked Review of Books

Friday 25 April 2008

Exploding the myth of trafficking

Controversial author Laura María Agustín tells spiked that feminists, NGOs and government bodies dedicated to combating the sex industry have ended up criminalising migrant workers.

by Nathalie Rothschild

Laura María Agustín’s provocative new book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, really does what it says on the back cover: ‘[It] explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.’

Agustín warns that ‘what we say about any given subject is always constructed, and there are only partial truths’. But you can disregard the book’s many postmodern caveats: this is an honest, complex and certainly convincing read. Agustín knows what she’s talking about – she has researched and worked with people who sell sex for over 10 years, including in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is precisely the fact that Agustín has complicated the ‘discourse’ around trafficking, migration and sex work that seems to get the backs up of those who volunteer and are employed in what she terms the ‘rescue industry’.

‘I’m considered the devil by people in the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’ (an international NGO), she tells me. ‘They have actually called me a pimp and have said that I associate with traffickers and that I’m in the pay of the sex industry, and any number of vile things.’ Continue reading →

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