Tag Archives: police

Note to researchers: Forget trips to view no sex trafficking in Sweden

Note to visitors to Sweden who want to see, examine, document, research or otherwise report on the effects of the law to criminalise buying sex: Cancel your trips, there is nothing to see.

How can you see ‘less’ sex trafficking’, ‘less’ sex work? How does one interpret emptiness? What does the absence of people on this bus mean? Does no one ride buses anymore? Is this one out of service? Is it on display in a museum? Has the route been cancelled? Who knows the answer?

I receive messages continually from people planning trips to Sweden: journalists, filmmakers, researchers, students, fellowship-applicants. They have all had the same idea to visit a country where a law prohibiting the purchase of sex is claimed to have reduced its sale and reduced sex trafficking. If these visitors write to me, I suppose they have read what I (and others) have written on the failure of the government evaluation to prove anything about the law and the difficulty that any such evaluation faces. Yet people assume they will somehow be able to observe the effects of the law. The whole idea of effects is questionable, but in the case of prohibitionist laws even more so. The most obvious first effect of prohibition is to discourage people from being seen doing whatever has been prohibited. Some people might really stop (or might never start) doing whatever has been made illegal, and some people might find different ways to do it that will be harder to discover. A typical visit is proposed like this Irish one:

Mr Shatter said representatives from the Department of Justice and the Garda travelled to the Swedish capital, Stockholm, recently to observe the impact of legislation introduced there in 1999 to criminalise the purchase of sexual services.

And reported like this:

Presentations in Sweden included discussions with the Swedish Department of Justice and evaluators of the Swedish legislation (Supreme Court Judge Anna Skarhed, Mrs Gunilla Berglund from the Ministry of Justice, the National Rapporteur on Trafficking Ms Kasja Wahlberg, and the Co-ordinator of Stockholm Prostitution Unit Mr Patrick Cederlof). There were also presentations from ROKS (a Swedish NGO which provides refuge for battered women), Jenny Westerstrand (Researcher on Prostitution regimes) and Ulrika Rosvall Levin, (The Swedish Institute). [some typos corrected by me]

I don’t understand myself why they spend money and time interviewing government spokespeople, politicians, the heads of government-funded projects and moral entrepreneurs all of whom only re-state what they have said before but not proven: that the law has reduced prostitution and sex trafficking. Those statements are widely available on the Internet, including in television clips and videos. All of the above interviewees receive government money to do their jobs and all are known to fiercely favour the criminalisation of buying sex and wish for the disappearance of all forms of selling it. They give meaning to the term stakeholder.

Many visitors also interview police officials, who are only permitted to confirm government policy and mostly just point to a drop in the number of sex workers in the street (since they have no idea how to measure all other forms of commercial sex). The police also engage in speculation that shows they are doing their jobs well, since there is so little sex trafficking to see. This absence is also tricky to interpret, since there was never any baseline evidence on trafficking before the law so they have nothing to compare to now when they do (or do not) find any.

But, you say, some of the visitors want to talk to you or ask you to introduce them to real live sex workers who could balance what they hear from the government. About talking to me, ok I will sound different, but I can’t demonstrate that government claims are wrong – the same problem of researching an absence holds. (Another snag is that visitors begin by assuming that anyone they want to talk to lives in the capital, when Sweden’s a big country [for Europe] and all relevant and interesting folks do not live in Stockholm.) About my introducing visitors to sex workers: I consider it unethical. If I did introduce anyone, though, what would the personal testimony of one or two individuals mean? Little.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe I have deterred anyone determined to come see what the prohibition looks like. All I can do is ask folks to consider what they think they will be able to see. Take this view of a single person sitting in a bar – how many reasons can you think of to explain why he is alone?

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Women resist rescue by anti-trafficking police, who admit it

Headlines read Hookers rescued against their will and Rescued cybersex girls bolt DSWD office. The stories are from the Philippines, but they are not the first of their kind to reach mainstream news outlets. And they are not amazing exceptions to the rule, as everyone who works in helping projects knows.

The argument against raiding sex venues is not that all the workers are happy because sex work and free markets are just grand. The argument is that US policy, which threatens countries with losing aid if they don’t do enough to stop trafficking, promotes ham-fisted policing – cowboy raids that rush to pick up women selling sex and arrest their exploiters. Threatened countries use well-publicised raids to say to the US, See? We are doing what you want. We are stopping human trafficking and rescuing victims, so don’t cut off our aid. Which works, if you look at how the Philippines’ ranking improved in this year’s lame TIP Report.

So why aren’t more campaigners against prostitution and slavery concerned when women resist rescue? Is it so hard to understand that resistance doesn’t mean they love their jobs or are not being exploited by anyone or were not treated badly by their parents? All we really know it means is that they don’t want to be rescued like this. Over and over, researchers have documented how such women simply prefer their present situations in these brothels to other optionsforceable internment in rescue homes being at the top of the list. Similar stories have come from other countries: Chinese women in the Congo, Bangladeshis in India.

Details of the cybersex-girls’ escape include:

Fifteen girls, rescued by police and National Bureau of Agency men from a cybersex den operated by two Swedish nationals have escaped from the Department of Social Welfare Development office in Cagayan de Oro City. . .  after mauling the duty security guard. The girls then flagged down a passenger jeepney and forced its driver to bring them away from the DSWD office. . . – ABS.CBNnews.com, the Philippines, 5 July 2011

Details from hookers rescued against their will include:

A hundred female sex workers . . . and five foreigners were arrested in raids on three night clubs in Angeles City Tuesday night. . . “The women don’t really consider it a rescue,” said CIDG Women and Children’s Protection Desk head . . .  “They kept cursing us, and tried their best to escape.” . . . Chief Supt. Samuel Pagdilao Jr., said the successive raids in Angeles City’s red light district bolstered the US government’s recognition of the Philippines’ commitment to combating human trafficking. The Philippines has been taken off a watch list of the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report and elevated to Tier 2, a category of countries that do not fully comply with anti-trafficking standards but are making efforts to do so. Philippine Daily Inquirer, 29 June 2011

That should be a clear enough cause-and-effect relationship for anyone to understand!

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

London Olympics and the spectre of trafficking: police already repressing sex work

A lot of people never wanted the Olympics to come to London and are unhappy about what all the ‘development’ means in easterm areas of the city – thus the negative graffiti on a countdown meter in the photo. The boroughs most directly affected by the games know by now that there is no need to panic about 40 000 prostitutes or victims of trafficking descending: there have been too many debunkings, on this website and numerous others. People do wonder if they ought to be Doing Something though. One of these boroughs, Waltham Forest, has invited me as an expert witness to a community meeting to be held next week, on the 27th – perhaps I will see some readers there?

A report called The 2012 Games and human trafficking: Identifying possible risks and relevant good practice from other cities came out not long ago, and seems to say that everything is possible but nothing is actually known about trafficking to events like the Olympics. Just to be on the safe side, though, a special unit of the police have begun raiding flats in the Olympics’s boroughs.

London 2012 Olympics: Crackdown on brothels ‘puts sex workers at risk’

Jamie Doward, 10 April 2011, The Observer

Scotland Yard has been accused of endangering sex workers after it emerged that officers were targeting brothels in London’s Olympic boroughs as part of a coordinated clean-up operation ahead of the 2012 games. The Yard’s human exploitation and organised crime command (SCD9) was launched in April last year, bringing together expertise in the fields of clubs and vice, human trafficking and immigration crime. The command incorporates a team dedicated to tackling vice-related crime in the five Olympic host boroughs: Waltham Forest, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Greenwich.

Figures recently released to parliament by the Home Office show SCD9 carried out 80 brothel raids between January to August 2010 in the five boroughs. There were a further 20 raids in Westminster and 13 in Camden – the two boroughs expected to play host to the majority of tourists who come to the capital for the games. In contrast, in the remaining 25 London boroughs, there were just 29 raids over the same period.

Similar vice crackdowns have taken place in other countries hosting major sporting events. The London initiative comes amid disputed claims that increased numbers of sex workers will try to work in the capital during the Olympics. But the probation union, Napo, claimed the crackdown would have unintended consequences. “Attempts to remove sex workers from the Olympic boroughs will be only a partial success,” said Harry Fletcher, Napo’s assistant general secretary. “The strategy will drive the trade underground and prohibition merely distorts the laws of supply and demand. As a consequence, the trade will be more dangerous for women. Policy initiatives should address real problems, such as housing, health and safety, and not be based on flawed ideology which distorts the market and endangers the women.” Figures from the Open Door agency, a health clinic based in East London, appear to partially confirm Napo’s claim. The agency reported that there has already been a significant displacement of sex workers throughout Newham, with a decline of 25% in referrals to health clinics since the previous year. Napo said it appeared the women had not stopped working, but were moving to other areas where they could be more at risk of rape, robbery and assault.

The decision by police to target brothels has been controversial. SCD9 specialises in helping people being held against their will or who have been trafficked to work in the sex industry. But critics say it is driven by a mistaken belief that this applies to many women in the brothels. Two high-profile Metropolitan police operations, Pentameter 1 and 2, resulted in 1,337 premises being raided. This led to 232 arrests under Pentameter 1 and 528 under Pentameter 2. More than 250 women were removed and 37 took up services from support projects.

“Research shows no increase in trafficking of women during international sports events,” said a spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes. “Figures on the numbers of women trafficked into the UK have been exposed as false, yet they are still used as an excuse to hound sex workers. Prohibition has never done anything but drive sex workers underground and into more danger. Is the government prepared for further tragedies like Ipswich and Bradford?”

The Met said so far it had not seen any evidence of an increase in trafficking of sex workers in the five Olympic boroughs, but pledged that its officers would continue to try to assist victims and seek the prosecution of those responsible. “We do not believe that tackling vice drives prostitution underground and have not seen evidence of this,” a spokesman said. “Brothels will always need to advertise, which assists us in developing our intelligence picture in this area.”

Sex tourism at guesthouses by older lgbt people? Bring in the anti-trafficking police immediately

Sex tourism, gays, western perversion – what is this story, and these arrests, actually about? No mention is made of any trafficking accusation in this report of a police raid on a brothel in Cambodia – just the cop’s satisfaction at having spent a month investigating a place where people pay for sex. The rather ridiculous salacious slant would have us believe that this brothel is different because gays, lesbians, old ladies and foreigners use it. Well! Presumably the most special customer is a non-young non-Cambodian woman who likes women? Is this a category the police are afraid of? Are we meant to read between the lines that anyone employed in this brothel must have been trafficked and forced (are old-fashioned heterosexist brothels better, then?

It is old news that the US imperialist Trafficking in Persons report has caused Cambodia to institute legislation that has police persecuting sex businesses on principle. This is merely an early stage of the movement that now has a new name: End Demand, which can be followed by several phrases: sometimes we hear End Demand for Sex Trafficking, and sometimes End Demand for Commercial Sex Exploitation, and then there is End Demand for Modern-Day Slavery. All are semantically strange, since the demand these campaigners don’t like is a demand to pay for sex. The demand isn’t for the process – traffiicking, slavery or exploitation. I wonder why the whiz-kid business consultants didn’t make sure the slogan was clearer.

Perhaps there was a special frisson in the fact that a guesthouse has become a brothel, although the report also doesn’t explain what the evidence for that is, either. Presence of sex workers in the building? Manager shows guests an album with pictures of possible escorts? Or is there something noteworthy in the fact that the business is the type associated with alternative-style travel, less luxe, more home-like, cheaper?

Note that all this surveillance for a whole month netted them 14 people, only 3 of whom can be charged with anything – the clients and workers they don’t know what to do with.

Raid closes specialty brothel

Buth Reaksmey Kongkea, 27 February 2011, Phnom Penh Post

Anti-human trafficking officials last week cracked down on a guesthouse in Phnom Penh’s Prampi Makara district that offered sexual services for a select clientele. Keo Thea, director of the municipal Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Office at the Ministry of Interior, said a raid of the guesthouse-turned-brothel in Veal Vong commune netted a total of 14 arrests, including the guesthouse owner, two accomplices and 11 sex workers, on Saturday. “We have been investigating this house for about a month before we took superb action in cracking down on it,” he said. Keo Thea added that the guesthouse offered specific sexual services.

This place is hidden and illegal and provides sexual services for [gay] men, lesbians, old ladies and foreign people in Phnom Penh.

He said police research had uncovered that the guesthouse had been a popular destination for people seeking its specific services for many years. The detained were being held at the Phnom Penh Municipal Police Department for questioning prior to being sent to provincial court today to face charges, Keo Thea said, though he expressed doubts about the fate of some of the people arrested during Saturday’s raid.

We are now waiting for the order from our superiors about what we should do with these 11 people, who are sexual service providers and those who had come for sex. But for the house owner and the two accomplices, we will send them to court for charges.

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Chinese trafficked sex workers refuse rescue from Congo

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

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

Chinese prostitutes resist effort to rescue them from Africa

1 Jan 2011,  Sapa-dpa, Time.com

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

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

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

–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Campaigns against kerb-crawling are part of End Demand, an anti-prostitution strategy that does not support sex workers!

You would scarcely know that selling sex on your own is legal in England from reading this story about a town in the Midlands. Residents get annoyed by the sight and sound of interactions between street workers and punters, and contradictory laws make pleasing everyone impossible. But note how this particular ‘prostitution campaign’ is aimed at stopping it, at moving prostitutes on – to where? To nowhere.

How is this possible if it is legal to sell sex? Because a lot of other activities are not legal, including kerb-crawling, owning a brothel, working in a brothel and a range of promotional activities, including soliciting, loitering and putting up cards with contact information in public places. The result is that the person standing in the street looking for customers gets moved on, over and over.

Campaigns against kerb-crawling belong to the now-common End Demand strategy, which, in its most pretentious form aspires to stop everyone on the planet from ever buying sex from other people. Other techniques include attempting to shame world-be clients about their masculinity, as Spanish billboards illustrate. Kerb-crawling is a far more modest police target which only wants to stop cars from stopping to discuss sexual transactions with people in the street. Tactics include signs like these, closed-circuit television cameras, threats to post names publicly and the occasional street operation to arrest drivers, to which the media are invited so pictures will show how active the police are. Meanwhile, the sex workers are moved on. Here is the story from Luton.

Prostitution campaign is ‘successful’

24 December 2010, Luton Today

Police are hailing a four month long operation to combat prostitution in High Town as a resounding success. The number of complaints made to officers regarding sex workers and anti-social behaviour in the area have fallen dramatically say police, after an operation involving several other local authorities including Luton Borough Council, began in August. The three phased campaign was launched after mounting anger from residents.

It included an observation stage where officers talked to sex workers followed by high profile police action and publicity aimed at deterring kerb crawlers. The latest phase of the campaign, which lasted eight weeks, came to an end last week with the metal lamp post signs and billboard at Dudley Street being removed.

Regular patrols aimed at deterring and arresting kerb crawlers has seen the number of vehicles fall and far fewer people loitering on street corners. . .

. . . we think the three phase approach has really worked to deter the problem and at the last High Town meeting, residents said that they were keen to see the signs and billboard used elsewhere should it be necessary. Obviously, the sex trade has been and will continue to be, a longer term problem so the partnership is still actively responding to residents’ concerns. Where we’ve heard of sex workers loitering at new locations we’ve visited the affected residents, started observations and redeployed street cleaning services to remove litter and needles.

The Luton News exclusively revealed in September how Operation Turtle had seen police step up patrols in High Town asking sex workers to move on, issuing warning letters to kerb-crawlers and adding their details to the police Automatic Number Plate Recognition database so they could be easily identified if they reoffended. . .

Operation Turtle?

Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Police streetwalking in Pattaya: Will it prevent human trafficking?

Could a visible police presence help to prevent trafficking? Some people say that every bit helps, but it’s hard to believe that handing out leaflets and stickers will discourage any real bad guys. Put some punters off? Possibly. Cause a lot of young women to hide indoors while the police are walking by? Definitely. Note that the big catch described in the operation shown below was a 16-year-old who police suspected of being a prostitute, who said she was sightseeing and whom they forced to go home to her parents. It is hardly a trafficking story, and the cop’s swaggering, gum-chewing imitation of John Wayne doesn’t help. I do think outreach can be useful in raising awareness about some social problems, but the police need some advice in thinking this one through.

Walking street visited by police to prevent human trafficking, Pattaya People Weekly

On Thursday night, a team of 20 police under the supervision of Pol. Col. Worawong Tongpaiboob –the Superintendent of Human Trade Suppression, Region 2, and Pol. Maj. Nipon Jarernpon –a Deputy Superintendent, visited Walking Street to distribute leaflets, stickers and information regarding the Human Trade Crime Suppression Plan to local people and tourists. The police need help from all of Pattaya’s communities to solve the problems of Human Trafficking Crimes, such as Prostitution, Child Labor, Child Beggars and Child Prostitution more effectively. As Pattaya is a World Class tourist attraction, the number and variety of tourists here draws many criminals to the city.

Human Trafficking statistics in Pattaya are very high, as the city is full of bars, discos and many other adult entertainment venues. Communities must realize that Human Trafficking is one of the worst crimes one person can commit against another, causing great pain to those who are enslaved.

While visiting Walking St., the police found a 16 year old girl sitting with a foreigner in a bar, behaving suspiciously like a prostitute. She was detained and questioned, but claimed that she was only visiting Walking Street for a night of sightseeing. The police warned her about the outcome of the path that the police deemed she was walking on, and contacted her parents to take her home.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Child trafficking, or kids who leave home, and their pimps and their friends, in Las Vegas

I accepted an invitation to talk about the much-publicised US child-trafficking sweep last week that resulted in lots of arrests of adults and rescues of a small number of people under 18. I wrote about this FBI-led event the other day, and I was initially reluctant to speak on a public-radio show from Las Vegas, Nevada, that seemed to be composed exclusively of crime- and rescue-oriented people. But the producer asked me for suggestions for other speakers, and I was able to get a couple of names to her fast enough, with the result that the panel became reasonably balanced.

Child Prostitution in Nevada, an audio link to the hour-long programme, illustrates four points of view: a court defender of young people caught selling sex, a psychologist who tries to help them feel better, a harm-reduction project for teenagers in New York (Safe Horizons) and me on childhood, migration and sex.

I find the format of such programmes repressive, the taking turns and inability to converse normally with other participants. The public defender seemed to say the word pimp a dozen times, expressing frustration that the girls refuse to denounce any. How can I help them if they won’t give up their exploiters? she wails. How do you know they actually have pimps? I wanted to ask. There could be some classic pimp figures involved, but it is very possible that she is generalising lots of boyfriends, girlfriends, family members and other folk who live with or share the girls’ earnings as pimps whom the girls themselves do not see that way. I doubt that many of them look like the picture above.

A local paper’s news story about the raids illustrates clearly the police focus. Most of those picked up were adults, and they can’t all be traffickers, which makes it obvious that consenting adults carrying out sex-money exchanges are those suffering most from such operations. The article’s title even admits the operation was a sting, and the gallery of arrested faces, one crying, is enough to make one sick: National prostitution sting nets 20 locally.

There are other ways to think about young people who don’t want to stay home, or who can’t, than trafficking, prostitution and pimps: the children tag on this blog provides a few.

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Children and sex: prostitution, rescues, statistics, money and the FBI

Teenager said to be vulnerable sitting on a bench

Press Release, 8 November 2010: Over the past 72 hours, the FBI, its local and state law enforcement partners, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children concluded Operation Cross Country V, a three-day national enforcement action as part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative. The operation included enforcement actions in 40 cities across 34 FBI divisions around the country and led to the recovery of 69 children who were being victimized through prostitution. Additionally, nearly 885 others, including 99 pimps, were arrested on state and local charges.

There is a very long history of alarms about children and their sexual activities, and numerous researchers have had insightful things to say about the contemporary fear of childrenandsex, which is not my area of specialisation. But.

It turns out that the US-government-funded Federal Bureau of Investigation has a human-trafficking programme. Well, they would, of course, and, in fact, given the framework of catching perpetrators of border-crossing crimes they make more sense as criminal-hunters than local or state police.

We’re working hard to stop human trafficking—not only because of the personal and psychological toll it takes on society, but also because it facilitates the illegal movement of immigrants across borders and provides a ready source of income for organized crime groups and even terrorists.

I actually prefer this sort of clarity to the hypocrisy of so many Rescue Industry projects: Here, we know where we are. According to the general description, sex-related trafficking is not the FBI’s only interest. But they have a sub-project on ‘missing children’ called Innocence Lost, where the sex link is overt, their achievements since 2003 described as working

to rescue more than 1,200 children. Investigations have successfully led to the conviction of over 600 pimps, madams, and their associates who exploit children through prostitution. These convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences, including multiple 25-year-to-life sentences and the seizure of real property, vehicles, and monetary assets.

I find that last line disturbing – bragging about how long the sentences are as well as the stuff taken from those involved, but those are the kind of indicators police use to show they are doing something – rescue being, after all, a pretty vague concept (and they know it).

But Innocence Lost turns out to be more than an FBI project; it is a National Initiative (this link takes you to a site on Missing and Exploited Children), composed of no fewer than

37 dedicated task forces and working groups throughout the United States involving federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies working in tandem with U.S. Attorney’s Offices.

Their fear is the growing problem of domestic child sex slavery in the form of child prostitution in the United States.

I would like to see evidence that the number of children taking money for sex is growing, since research has for a long time addressed young people who leave home and then survive by selling sex. Calling it child sex slavery is exciting, but the issue is the same. Leaving home is not always a bad thing, anyway.

But the question has to be: The 37 dedicated task forces and working groups get $26.1 million to do this work. If they have rescued 1200 children since 2003, each rescued child costs more than $20 000.

IF there is an immense and growing number of enslaved children worth investing huge amounts of money in, then some effort should be made to figure out how to find and save more of them. What is the money being spent on?

NCMEC has trained more than 1,000 members of law enforcement on the issue of child victims of prostitution. These specialized courses, developed and conducted in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have trained multi-disciplinary teams, with membership drawn from state, local, and federal law-enforcement agencies and local social-service providers from cities all over the country.

All that training and so few children rescued?

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Saved at last? or Sex Workers Don’t Want Rescue? Stories from India

Photo Jignesh Mistry

Saved at last: CSWs were sent to the Rescue Foundation at Hadapsar was the original caption on this photo. It went with a story the other day that recounted a rescue operation in Budhwar Peth, an area of Pune (Maharashtra, India) known for electronics shops and sex workers. The report said the workers were saved but recorded a couple of oddities: 1) the police got a translator but the women gave a fictitious address (there is more than one reason they might have done that) and 2) the police claim ‘medical tests’ will determine the women’s exact age (I don’t believe such a test exists yet).

Two days later, the sex workers are reported to have rioted at the rescue home. The person in charge there is not worried, because it has happened before and because she believes the girls are programmed to lie. True Rescue Ideology. It is quite possible, of course, that the women don’t want to do sex work, just as it is likely that they don’t want to be placed in a ‘home’.

Note: The redundant label CSW-commercial sex worker appears sometimes, though it is difficult to see what the word commercial adds to the meaning. If you call people workers, you imply they are doing a job in exchange for money, no?

Sex workers don’t want rescue, 23 October 2010, Mid-Day.com

21 sent to Pune shelter clamour to return to brothel, manhandle staff

More than a score commercial sex workers rescued on Wednesday and sent to a shelter in the city began a violent clamour last morning for a return ticket to brothel life. The demands began barely 24 hours since they were brought to the shelter, said Shaini Padiyare, in-charge of the Rescue Foundation home in Hadapsar that sheltered the 21 sex workers. At 9 am, all 21 sex workers stomped out and created a ruckus. They broke off the grill and engaged in a fight with the management. “The rescued sex workers began insisting on going back to Budhwar Peth,” she said.

Budhwar Peth is the red light district of the city and the sex workers were found at a brothel there. Nine of the rescued sex workers are believed to be minors, and all of them Bangladeshis.

In yesterday’s drama a member of the management suffered a minor injury on the arm. No sex worker was hurt. A case was registered at the Vanudi police station. “In major raids, initially such things happen,” said Padiyare. “In an earlier raid, when 46 girls were brought, the same thing had happened.”

The police suspect the sex workers were illegally brought into the country and forced into prostitution, though this could not be established from their statements taken after Wednesday’s raid as these were found to be misleading. “They are programmed to lie, so we don’t have correct information about them,” said Padiyare. “They even lie about their origin.” Padiyare said they were sure six of the sex workers were minors and these were produced before the Child Welfare Community.

Here is the original story:

Rescued sex workers confuse cops, 21 October 2010, Mid-Day.com

9 minors among 21 sex workers rescued; cops need Bengali translator’s services to take their statements

The police employed the services of a Bengali translator after they rescued 21 commercial sex workers (CSWs), nine of them minors, from a Budhwar Peth brothel yesterday evening.

Late in the night, the translator eventually found out that the information provided by the girls had many problems. PSI Sharmila Sutar, the investigating officer, said, “It was difficult to comprehend the address given by these girls. Many of them claimed to be from Khigirpur village in Autganj district of West Bengal. But this place is not in existence.” The brothel owners and the CSWs were later sent to the Rescue Foundation at Hadapsar.

Medical test to know their exact age will be made after these girls will be brought before the court tomorrow,” said Sutar.

The police also arrested brothel owners Gauri Tamang and Reshma Tamang. Cases against Gauri Tamang (40) and Reshma Tamang (50) were filed under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1986 (PITA). Filing of charges continued even after the midnight at Faraskhana police station.

Acting on tip-off from anti-immoral trafficking activist Shyam Kamble from Marian Trust, ACP Ranjeet Dhure along with police inspector Rajendra Kadam of Khadak police station, PSI Sutar and others raided the ground floor of Sagar building in Budhwar Peth, the place where the brothel functioned.

According to police sources, most of the CSWs were brought to the city from Bangladesh illegally. Brothel keeper Gauri Tamang has been arrested before under similar charges. Of the rescued 21 sex workers, 10 of them seemed less than 16 years old.

Debi Walker, a women’s rights activist, said, “The brothel ‘madams’ had warned these girls not to approach the police. By creating horror stories about the police machinery, they wanted to prevent the girls from approaching the police station for any help.”

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Saving prostitutes or chasing out sex workers: Don Benzi, Abruzzo and deforestation

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?

Italy to combat prostitution by cutting trees

John Hooper, guardian.co.uk, 12 October 2010

. . . 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. . .

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Turf wars associated with lap dancing: It’s all about men

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 over Gold Cup week lap dancing turf wars in Cheltenham

11 October 2010, This is Gloucestershire

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.

Trafficked men forced to take viagra and sell sex 24 hours a day: Hang on

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.

Sting operations: clients charged US$1000-2000 for making deals with cop-prostitutes

I have never understood how sting operations can be legal in any situation, but when police use them in prostitution contexts they generally pose as clients, with the aim of catching sex workers. In the story below they posed as prostitutes in order to entrap clients. This is justified by referring to vile behaviour, an antiquated phrase for the 21st century. And given so many other, more dangerous urban problems, investing money and time into catching men who buy sex seems silly. [Note: the photo is from a different story, the recent Chinese one that had police parading women prostitutes through the streets. Some people asked why their clients were not subjected to similar shaming; as this picture shows, to some extent they were.]

Another question to consider about this story: How will the 2-year-old be damaged, exactly?

Elgin arrests 11 in reverse prostitution sting

Lenore T. Adkins, 8 August 2010, Daily Herald (suburban Chicago)

Eleven men were arrested Friday night in Elgin during a reverse prostitution sting staged by police officers in the city’s downtown. As part of the three-hour undercover operation in the National Street area, several Elgin officers posed as prostitutes. The men approached them, offering $20 for sex, said Lt. Glenn Theriault.

According to police, one of the men had his 2-year-old son with him. The child’s mother picked the boy up from the police station on Friday night. And officers contacted the Illinois Department of Children of Family Services. “When people think this type of crime is a victimless crime, tell that to the 2-year-old or the mother of the 2-year-old,” Police Chief Jeff Swoboda said.

All 11 alleged offenders were arrested under a local ordinance for soliciting a prostitute, which carries a minimum fine of $1,000. They are [follows a list of names and addresses] . . .

The following men were arrested under the local ordinance and for additional charges [follows another list] . . .

Out of the 11 men arrested on Friday night, 10 had motor vehicles and must pay $1,000 to retrieve them under a separate ordinance, Theriault said. Everyone will have their case heard Aug. 14 before a hearing officer at the Elgin branch court.

This is certainly a huge number of suspects for such a short period of time and clearly tells me that we’ll be back there again soon,” Theriault said. With Friday’s sting and others like it, Elgin police intend to send the message they will not tolerate this sort of activity in town. They are also determined to reduce the crimes it creates.

This type of vile behavior is simply unacceptable,” Theriault said. “It’s unfortunate that for such an incredibly vibrant downtown, these incidents that occur in one isolated corner … paint the entire area with the same brush.”

The police department’s patrol, gang, drug and technical investigation units conducted the probe, which marked the second such sting of the summer. Elgin police ran a similar crackdown in July that officers cut short due to the rain and that resulted in one arrest, Theriault said.

Police quarrel about which bad method to use to estimate trafficking victims, UK

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?

From Police report into brothels dismissed as ‘amateurish’ by other amateurs!

How ‘Rescue’ from trafficking yet again means police detention and rehabilitation: this time in the Philippines

The sequence of events goes like this:

  1. US government issues annual report card threatening to cut off aid from countries that don’t make the right efforts to combat trafficking
  2. Threatened countries comply by passing legislation
  3. And then instructing local police to carry out raids in order to ‘rescue’ victims
  4. Police go to sex businesses, pick up all the workers and claim to have rescued them
  5. Police say victims (sex workers) will be ‘rehabilitated’ via detention and forcible participation in an ‘alternative work’ programme, whether rescued people want this or not
  6. Threatened national governments point to these actions to show US that they are fighting crime
  7. US gives them a better grade on the next report card

Problems? Well yes, several, including the overtly neocolonialist coercion. In the following story which pointedly uses the word rescue, the police try to blame foreign devils for the existence of sex businesses, make sure to point out that some of those rescued were ‘only waitresses’ (which perfectly shows what they think about prostitutes), and, most important, if compliance with US aims to ‘convict’ traffickers is what’s needed, how does detaining and forcibly rehabilitating 200 victims help? What we’ve learned over and over is that some large number of the detained women do not want to be rescued, or not by the police, or not from sex work but possibly from poverty or the fear of disappointing their parents. I have unfortunately had to comment repeatedly on such stories, including recently on Cambodia. There are other ways to help people.

Anti-human trafficking agency rescues 200 women from Malate

Francis Faulve, 18 June 2010, ABS-CBN News

Manila, Philippines – The government’s anti-human trafficking task force on Thursday night rescued at least 200 women from a girlie bar in Malate district in Manila.

Retired military officer Jesus Kabigting of the government’s Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking said the raid was conducted in response to the US State Department’s report on human trafficking in the Philippines. The US State Department said the Philippines remains in the Tier 2 list of countries whose governments have failed to show improved efforts to curb human trafficking.

Representatives from the Manila Police District, Department of Social Welfare and Development and Department of Labor of Employment raided the LA Cafe at the corner of M.H. Del Pilar and R. Salas streets in Malate around 10:30 p.m.

Kabigting said majority of the women are being peddled to foreigners in Malate district. He said some of those rescued were only waitresses, but are also considered as victims of forced labor and human trafficking.

He said the women, particularly the prostitutes, will be “rehabilitated” and provided with alternative livelihood.

“Anti-human trafficking operations ito… Iyon ang dahilan kaya nagsagawa tayo ng walang humpay na operation against human trafficking (This ia an anti-human trafficking operation... That is the reason why we are conducting operations against human trafficking),” Kabigting told reporters referring to the US State Department’s report. He said similar raids will also be conducted nationwide.

Kabigting assured that charges will be filed against the owner of the bar. “Whether they have a permit to operate or not, they are committing acts in violation of the anti-human trafficking law. We will investigate them,” he said.

The US State Department was critical of the Philippine performance in all three benchmarks (prevention, protection and prosecution). It said that despite several labor trafficking cases were filed, the Philippine government never convicted any offenders. “Despite overall efforts, the government did not show evidence of significant progress in convicting trafficking offenders, particularly those responsible for labor trafficking,” the US State Department said in its report.

Baby seats in the cars of clients of sex workers: betrayal of Family?

The other day, in a story about typical ‘police crackdowns’ on prostitution, this time in Montreal, a local policeman said ‘It’s businessmen and people going or coming from work and sometimes they have baby seats or car seats in the car.’ This led to a discussion amongst people I know about what baby seats might represent.

The first comment was

I would really like to say that I am hearing this ‘baby seats in the back of the car’ all the time as another way of making sex work and customers more scary and deviant sounding. Seems to be the logic is ‘baby seats’ stand in for ‘children seeing sex/being exposed to sex’ but would love to yell, ‘Hey you conservatives/police even if the customer has an empty baby seat in the car… it’s an empty baby seat! There is no baby in it!’

I answered that I have always heard this babyseat detail to stand for He is married, has a family, is betraying his wife.

To which the reply was

It makes sense to me that it would also be about ‘betraying the relationship’, but they harp on about the baby seats so much that it makes me wonder if it’s about children somehow.

So then I said one might say the client is Betraying the Family: his own and the whole institution. The babyseat means he’s not just a couple now but an institution himself.

Another commenter added

I also heard an economical argument to it. It is ‘wrong’ to use the ‘family money’ to buy yourself sex services, if you are are part of a middle class or poor family.

And yet another said

I take it to mean He’s just a schlub. He’s just another ordinary guy, could be anyone.

I wonder if it seems better or worse to people if the car – and thus the baby seat – are more costly and prestigious, as with this Mercedes Benz.

Is it way scarier because the seat is located right next to the driver??

Then came a new angle

My experience is cops use babyseats as a prop when soliciting/ communicating for purpose of prostitution to put girls/women at ease so she will think this guy is married so he will be safe, quick, and has a lot to lose so he will behave.

Baby seats as part of a sting – now that is abuse of family. Then the original commenter remembered a book where baby seats and sex workers figure in a story about

a Saudi prince in New York City, who enjoys driving around at night and picking up prostitutes while his 2-year-old son is sitting in a car seat in the back, so that the kid can learn from his father what women are really like in his eyes and how they should be treated by those in power. Basically, what it comes down to is that the prince hates women and wants his son to grow up hating them, too, so that he treats them all as objects and with no respect. – Wayne C. Rogers, The Book Nook

Here is the original story, complete with Rescue Industry tracts on the evils of buying sex.

Montreal police target prostitution

14 June 2010

Montreal police say they will hand out pamphlets explaining the dangers of hiring prostitutes. Montreal police have announced an action plan to crack down on prostitution in the city’s east end. The plan involves targeting potential clients, officials said on Monday. Six additional police cadets have been hired to patrol Ste-Catherine Street East, said police.

Officers will also set up roadblocks to hand out pamphlets, warning about the consequences of hiring prostitutes. Most of the prostitutes’ clients are not people who live in the neighbourhood, said Montreal police Cmdr. François Cayer. “In general, it’s common people,” said Cayer. “It’s businessmen and people going or coming from work and sometimes they have baby seats or car seats in the car.”

The problem in the Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough has worsened recently due to construction projects in the city’s new entertainment district, said local officials. “You will find a lot of prostitutes, probably those prostitutes worked usually in the Quartier des spectacles and they are now in Hochelaga and we cannot accept that,” said Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough Mayor Réal Ménard. So far this year, police said they have arrested 74 clients.

Dopamine, a local group that works with prostitutes, said it is not fully on board with the project. The organization would prefer sex workers be given access to additional services, a spokesperson said. The borough said it wants to open a drop-in centre for prostitutes in the coming years.

Decriminalisation of sex work/prostitution: argument from SWEAT

SWEAT (Sex Worker and Advocacy Task Force, in South Africa), give a good, clear argument for removing laws that criminalise the sale or purchase of sex.

World Cup and HIV: Decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa

Leading up to the 2010 soccer World Cup, sex work has come under intense public scrutiny in South Africa. Concerns about sex work, HIV and the increase in visitors to the country during the mega-event have come at the same time as a review of the country’s laws on prostitution. In the light of this, several civil society groups are pushing for greater protection of sex workers’ human rights during the World Cup, and ultimately for the complete decriminalisation of sex work.

In the short term, the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Task Force and its allies are demanding that sex workers have the right to work for the period of the World Cup. They are seeking guarantees for sex workers’ personal safety, including freedom from police harassment, and access to free, quality and respectful health care.

In the longer term, a campaign is being put together to push for the decriminalisation of sex work, based on several arguments:

  • sex work will not go away;
  • there are many harms associated with sex work, but these can best be dealt with by other areas of criminal law or by non-legal interventions;
  • anything short of decriminalisation makes those harms worse, particularly to sex workers themselves; and
  • enforcing a sense of morality through the law is likely to generate all sorts of other harmful immoralities.

Sex workers are often marginalised and face multiple barriers to accessing health and social services, a situation exacerbated by criminalisation. Criminalisation also prevents sex workers from reporting abuse to the police or seeking legal recourse after rape or sexual assault. Decriminalisation offers the most effective means of addressing HIV and ensuring that human rights are respected.

So what is decriminalisation of sex work? It means that consensual sexual contact between two adults in private is legal. Any other arrangement of the law around sex work – be it criminalisation of the sex worker and/or the client, regulation of sex work, or something in between – leaves some consensual money-based arrangements between sex worker and client outside the law. And these are the contacts most likely to be non-consensual, violent, abusive, and unsafe.

Many international bodies already recognise the value of decriminalization. A number of countries have moved away from total criminalisation of sex work. Only one – New Zealand – has explicitly decriminalised sex work, choosing instead to adopt a human rights and public health framework.

The New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act was passed in 2003, after a campaign driven by sex workers, the public health community, many women’s’ groups and human rights organisations. It was promoted on various grounds – gender justice, pragmatic law, and the preference of the people most damaged by criminalisation, i.e. sex workers themselves.

The effects of the legislative change were measured five years later. Contrary to public fears, no increase was found in the number of people entering sex work during this period. Sex workers reported improved working conditions and wellbeing, feeling safer under the new legal framework, and being able to negotiate safer sex and report abuse to police.

As South Africa prepares for the culmination of its debate on the best legal framework for sex work, we can only hope that reality, research and rigorous debate dominate the process, and that policy processes will approach sex work pragmatically, placing public health benefits above ideological interests. In that case, decriminalisation will be the only rational outcome.

Rescues that punish those they’re meant to save: Cambodia again

More evidence of how police raids to save people are unwanted and counter-productive, this time with statements from UNAIDS and a Cambodian sexworker group. Those suffering under the crackdown are not traffickers and arrested sex workers were not trafficked. The rhetorical move to call completely old-fashioned raids anti-trafficking strategies is orwellian double-speak creating confusion amongst those who don’t know what’s going on.

Cambodian sex worker Soeum Rotha is active in Women’s Network for Unity

Cambodia cracks down on the sex industry

Robert Carmichael, 12 April 2010, Deutsche Welle

. . . In Cambodia, the government recently decided to target the sex industry in a move it thinks will combat the trafficking of women.  60 brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlors have been raided in Phnom Penh and across the country in the past month alone. Some 300 sex workers are thought to have lost their jobs since the crackdown began in early March. . .

Organizations that help sex workers worry it is driving them away from established venues, and limiting their access to sexual health services. Tony Lisle, the country head of UNAIDS says the crackdown is the latest in a series of similar moves by the authorities in recent years, which do not have very positive effects. “From the perspective of UNAIDS, the crackdowns create significant difficulties for organizations working in HIV prevention to reach those who are most at risk from HIV infection effectively, particularly sex workers and women working in the entertainment industry.”

Important to separate prostitution and trafficking

Moreover, although the authorities say this drive is part of an anti-trafficking campaign, so far no traffickers have been arrested – only sex workers. Lisle says it is important to separate the issues of prostitution and human trafficking. A survey last year found that no more than 7 percent of sex workers had been trafficked into the trade. “However, they are often the victims of the crackdown,” says Lisle.

Sex workers are losing out

Ly Pisey is a technical assistant at the Women’s Network for Unity, a collective that advocates rights and sexual health for sex workers that holds meetings for sex workers so that they can pass on information on sexual health and rights. She says that “the situation is very difficult” right now and it is hard to access sex workers. “We are like thieves. If we want to send out a message on safe sex, we have to call some of the sex workers whom we know and who trust us to come to our drop-in centre. Sometimes we meet one and ask them to share the information and tell them to continue to have hope,” she explains.It seems highly unlikely that the government’s move will fulfill its stated goal of eliminating prostitution – not least since one in three Cambodian men are thought to pay for sex. However, the wave of arrests is certainly driving sex workers underground and away from the assistance they and their clients need. It seems very likely that if the crackdown continues it will result in a higher rate of sexually-transmitted diseases.