Sex In The Public Square - trafficking - Comments

A lapse and an apology to Amanda Brooks!

Elizabeth — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:05:58 -0800

I realized this morning that I left Amanda Brooks off of the list of participants. Amanda, I'm so sorry! I've inserted the following bio into the summary statement:

Amanda Brooks is author of the Internet Escort's Handbook and is a frequent contributor at Bound, Not Gagged.

I can only blame it on having too many good things to do. Summing up the forum last night with Chris while preparing for some out of town family visitors and starting to get ready for SXSW. If I left anyone else out, please let me know and I'll fix that ASAP.

thanks for running it, y'all!

RenegadeEvolution — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:36:38 -0800

thanks for running it, y'all!

Thank you!

kerwynk — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:21:53 -0800

Huge thanks and kudos to Elizabeth and Chris! I am most appreciative, despite allowing myself to get a bit ruffled (I must learn more of Obama's lingusitic jujitsu!). Ciao out! :) k

Awesome week

Amber Rhea — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:32:23 -0800

Thank you so much for pulling this together, Elizabeth and Chris! It has been wonderful.

I'll try to get a list of resources together, but I might not get time today.

I have LOVED this forum, and I happen to know there are some Very Important People lurking around reading as well... :)

Thank you Elizabeth and Chris!

Stacey Swimme — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:07:12 -0800

This was a great idea. So many great thoughts were shared here, I hope there will be opportunities to collaborate again.

Desiree Alliance upcoming:

Conference in July

We're supporting efforts to send a sex worker contingent to the Int'l Harm Reduction conference in May.

I know there's other stuff, but I'm so consumed with the conference I'm not thinking as clearly as I should be about future projects!!!

A few of us have been bouncing around the idea of holding another Sex Worker Leadership Institute that will focus on tech skills. We haven't done any of the work to secure funding and begin planning yet, so it's on the horizon. The first one was last fall in DC hosted by Different Avenues and other groups in DC. It was a huge success and turned out many new enthusiastic volunteers who've taken their skills to a bunch of different sw organizations. A tech/communications intensive seems to be a natural next step.

We do all of our projects in collaboration with other groups like Best Practices Policy Project , SWOP-USA , and lots of other groups (see the conference link above!) So if you are involved with an organization that is working in areas that intersect with our mission, we'd be interested in finding projects to collaborate on or having your organization become a partner. Individuals who are interested in getting involved are also welcome.

See our website!

Happy International Sex Workers Rights Day!

Thank you Kerwink these are important points to note...

Stacey Swimme — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:44:52 -0800

I'm curious about similar statistics related to sex work and migration such as how many people who migrate to do sex work were already doing sex work in whatever country they're from? Did sex work in that country give them access to the services that make migration possible? Did sex work provide them with a network that they were able to tap into for safety and resources once they arrived at their destination? Are these motivating factors in the global 'rescue' industry? Controlling people's movement in order to control markets? Among other motivating factors...

And if the people who travel to do sex work are not primarily the poorest of a nation, would that suggest that the poorest would be subject to black-market labor within that country?

I'm wondering about these things in relation to popular feminist arguments about trafficking and child sexual slavery in particular related to 'sex tours' and cheap airfare making easier access for westerners to countries such as Thailand or Cambodia where under-aged and enslaved prostitutes are available at a fraction of the cost of those in western countries.

Observing the systems of poverty and oppression within the US makes me think that poverty is a serious topic of concern in terms of sex worker health and well-being in general. But especially conditions for the workers and whether they're paid surviving wages- in any country. I think an informal survey of exotic dancers working in legal clubs throughout the US would reflect these issues ie: varied experience of stage fees, dressing room conditions, hygeine and safety resources available on-site, and more.

I think these patterns of class oppression are visible in other industries as well. The more I think about these issues the more I see how intricately woven together it all is. It's really pretty overwhelming and terribly unfortunate.

Julie Bindel's articles in UK are even worse

RonWeitzer — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:27:35 -0800

If you haven't seen the series of op-eds and apparent "news" articles written by Julie Bindel, in The Guardian (UK), her writings are much worse than Bob Herberts.

World Cup and sex trafficking

kerwynk — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:56:33 -0800

Thanks Anotonia, for bringing up this example as well. The hype around 40,000 sex trafficking victims surrounding the World Cup in Germany is an excellent example of NGO-fueled media hype around this issue. In the end, despite police raids on several brothels, zero victims were found, and only five incidents of possible sex trafficking related to the World Cup were reported to the police (no reports I saw mentioned what happened to the people working at the clubs that were raided).

A report prepared by the International Organization for Migration cites the 40,000 figure as "unfounded and unrealistic" (an interesting discussion can be found at <http://gaatw.wordpress.com/2006/07/25/memories-of-world-cup-2006/> and the full IOM report can be downloaded at <http://iom.ramdisk.net/iom/artikel.php?menu_id=73> - look toward the bottom). A third report notes that:

"Munich was the only city to register an increase in prostitutes (300 to the city's 500 prostitutes),

and no assertions were made that any of those 300 were trafficked into the country"

(See http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/jihr/v6/n1/8/).

The IOM report offers the following history of the 40,000 figure:

In autumn 2005....[a] figure of 40,000 foreign prostitutes or even 40,000 forced prostitutes who

were expected to come to Germany for the World Cup quickly resounded throughout Germany

and beyond. Law enforcement and many NGOs were quickly disassociating themselves from this

figure as there was apparently no basis for this estimate. However, the media were timely to pick up

on the figure and it persistently re-appeared. In the end, few seemed to know where it had originated

from. One of the experts interviewed for this study, together with co-authors, attributed the

first public mention of an estimate to the German Womens’ Council (Deutscher

Frauenrat), who used the figure of more than 30,000 prostituted that were to be

smuggled into Germany for the World Cup with reference to the women’s representative

of the German Association of Cities and Towns (Deutscher Städtetag). The German

newspaper “taz” then quoted the British Guardian’s “up to 40,000”. And subsequently,

in the German women’s magazine “Emma”, the quote became 40,000 forced prostitutes.

By this time the German Association of Cities and Towns had already disclaimed the figure.

Despite the fact that there are indeed occasional people in horrid situations, there simply does not seem to be a great many situations that could be described as approaching "slavery", at least in the West. It does indeed happen - just take a look through some of the cases that the US Justice Department has filed - but the overwhelming majority of this seems to be pure hype, and indeed, in the case of the World Cup, the 40,000 figure was simply manufactured out of thin air.

Apologies!

Elizabeth — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:29:19 -0800

Stacey, I am so sorry that this post got lost in the forums list for so many days. Thank you for your patience and a big thank you to Chris for figuring out how to solve the problem and get the post to show up in the forum topics list! I hope that it will now get the attention that it deserves!

example from the old world

antonia — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:14:53 -0800

Thank you for all these interesting facts, Kerwynk! They are helpful and enlightening when talking about such a complex issue...

Here is another recent example for the conflation of anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution discourses...

Last year, I did some research into news reports on increased sex trafficking surrounding the Soccer World Cup 2006 in Germany. As many of you know, alongside the decriminalization of prostitution in Germany and legal/political efforts for greater social equality of prostitutes, there exist growing concerns about the expansion of human sex trafficking within Europe – a phenomenon also known as the "Natasha trade" in which Germany has become one of the major receiving Western countries. The ongoing "moral panic" surrounding sex trafficking found its culmination in the anxiety over the anticipated increased demand for prostitutes during the Soccer World Cup in Germany. In the weeks preceding the event, newspapers were filled with reports talking about how 40'000 women and children from Eastern Europe would be smuggled into Germany to serve the expected three million fans attending the games – leading to an international outcry and allegations from American politicians of the German government acting as a "state pimp"!
In the end, it was never confirmed where the (incredibly high) number of 40'000 originated from. it just popped up and was repeated over and over again, without any reference to its source. There was hardly any notable increase in the number of prostitutes working during the games. There was no sex trafficking victim to be found -- and they looked! And ironically, there were not nearly as many customers as expected (by brothels and independent prostitues, not by anti-prostitution activists); i.e. sex workers actually complained about not earning as much money as anticipated...
Nonetheless, the outcry served as a crucial occasion for anti-trafficking activists to point to the moral abjection of sex trafficking (e.g. there were huge ads against sex trafficking, paid for by religious charity organizations, all over Germany...) without pointing to the advantages/possibilities of legal prostitution in Germany -- thereby drawing public attention to just one side of the story, and implicitly reproducing the moral stigmatization of sex work in general.

race/ethnicity in trafficking

Amanda Brooks — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:09:30 -0800

"she was describing an anecdote that made her realize that the best group to help identify trafficked women were immigrant men, but that immigrant men in the US, because large numbers are here without documentation, are not likely to be willing to go to authorities to report women they've encountered who they suspect are being held or made to work against their will"

This rubs up against something I've noticed in my news reading over the last few months. Sexual trafficking is generally within the same ethnic group. When we're talking about importing humans into another country for commerical sex, the traffickers and victims are almost always the same race/ethincity or from the same country. Even with domsetic child sexual trafficking, the traffickers and victims are very often the same ethnic background.

The hysteria around trafficking (as far as I can tell) often tries to make it into a "white slavery" issue when it really isn't.

The customers of sexual traffickers, if we're talking about importing other humans into another country for commerical sex, are also often the same race/ethnicity of the victim and trafficker. I've read stories of Mexican and Latin American girls being trafficked. Most of their customers were also Mexicans/Latin Americans. By the same token, domestic child trafficking of white American children usually have white American customers as well.

I don't know where I'm going with this, it's just something interesting to me that does not seem to be part of the debate of those concerned with trafficking. In this context, Debbie's comment makes more sense than most people might realize.

migration for sex work

kerwynk — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:08:07 -0800

Just to add another thought:

Most of the people who migrate are not the poorest people in the so-called third world. People who are absolutely destitute are generally unable to afford the costs associated with migration to the West (and, for whatever reason, the stories I have heard about organized crime groups paying for people's way have not mitigated this factor - most of the stories involve people who are already somewhat better off). In the case of nannies and domestic workers, for example, many people with lower-end "middle class" jobs such as teachers come to the US to do child-care/domestic work (often hiring someone worse off to take care of kids and home and thus forming a chain of domestic/child-care workers). Rhacel Parrenas talks about this phenomenon in Servants of Globalization.

Without being able to offer any exact statistics, it seems that the situation is the same for sex workers - it is usually sex workers who are at least somewhat better off who migrate to the US. While we should always remain aware that some people will be more vulnerable than others (for a variety of reasons), this fact perhaps gives us a slightly different perspective on why people are migrating and what their needs and vulnerabilities are.

Not sure what concrete difference this might make, but just thought I'd put it out there...

Thank you again, Kerwynk

JanieBelle — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:23:18 -0800

I appreciate your taking the time for such a comprehensive reply. As I grimly suspected, there seems to be a large amount of confirmation bias in "official statistics" and commonly used rhetoric on the subject. I'll endeavor to get that piece back on the front burner, as I really feel that it's a vitally important topic that doesn't seem to be addressed in any objectively meaningful or scientifically accurate manner in the MSM.

Great post!

kerwynk — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:49:23 -0800

Just wanted to thank Stacey for such a great post! Kudos! :)

Statistics

kerwynk — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:28:16 -0800

The idea that street-based workers constitute only 15-20% of the total has a number of sources:

Alexander, Priscilla. 1987. “Prostitution: A Difficult Issue For Feminists,” in Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (eds). San Francisco: Cleis Press.

Allman, Dan. 1999. M is for Mutual, A is for Acts: Male sex work and AIDS in Canada. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Public Health Association/Health Canada.

Leigh, Carol. (1994). “Prostitution in the United States: The statistics,” Gauntlet: Exploring the Limits of Free Expression, 1, 17-19.

Matthews, Roger. 1997. Prostitution in London. Middlesex, England: Middlesex University.

O’Leary, Claudine and Olivia Howard. 2001. The Prostitution of Women and Girls in Metropolitan Chicago. Chicago: Center for Impact Research.

Whelehan, Patricia. 2001. An Anthropological Perspective on Prostitution: The World’s Oldest Profession. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press.

Ron Wietzer also provides useful summaries of much of the statistical research on prostitution:

Weitzer, Ron. 2005. “New directions in research on prostitution,” Crime, Law & Social Change, 43: 211-35.

The idea that approximately 20% of sex workers have middle-class backgrounds and at least some college education is a guesstimate based on my own research and discussion with colleagues.

The idea that there are perhaps some 250 people within prostitution who are being held in truly slave-like conditions is a complete guess. Nevertheless, there are a number of factors that lead me to that figure:

The US State Department has had to downwardly revise and then re-revise their estimates as to the numbers of people who are people trafficked into this country. Their original estimate of 50,000 people each year now stands at 12,500-14,500 each year. This figure includes trafficking for all types of labor; they now say that sex trafficking is the dominant form of trafficking (though they used to say otherwise), so this leaves perhaps 60-70% of the total, meaning 8000-10,000 people who meet the legal definition of trafficking each year.

Even finding this number of victims has proven very challenging for the US (hence, they have revised their numbers downward), and many researchers suspect that the figures given today are still too high. Over the past seven years (since the passage of the TVPA), the US has certified 1175 people as being victims of trafficking (168 per year), a figure that includes all types of trafficking, including some rather large cases concerned with people who worked in sweat shops making clothing. Basically, they have only been able to find a very small number of cases that could viably be described as slavery within prostitution. Many cases that are first presented as such in the media turn out not to be like that at all as the information is made public (such as Operation Gilded Cage in California, in which many Korean sex workers were originally identified as trafficking victims but later deported as mere migrant sex workers). People should also know that the Justice Department includes migrant domestic workers who are sexually abused by their employers as victims of "sex trafficking" in order to inflate the statistic. Based on a police training I attended on the subject of sex trafficking, many police officers who investigate these cases are themselves unsure if the sex workers themselves are "victims" of a crime or "perpetrators" - this drives CATW advocates nuts, and makes them suggest that the police are biased, but I believe that the police are realistically seeing that most of the people they pick-up as potential victims are, in fact, acting in largely voluntary ways.

While trafficking is bad, it includes many things that I believe should not be identified as "slavery." The legal definition follows:

The TVPA defines "severe forms of trafficking," as:

a. Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age; or

b. The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

"Coercion" here may be as little as the brothel owner holding onto one's passport in order to ensure that a worker pays back the debt incurred for coming to the US. I certainly do not support that practice, but I would not call it "slavery." Based on the costs that a typical sex worker incurs for coming to the US, and on the amount that police investigations have revealed that they are able to earn, I calculate that it would take about one month for the average migrant sex worker to pay of her (his?) fine, yet most workers stay on to work for a year or more, earning perhaps $100k in a year (money which they then take back with them to a 3rd world country, making that money go all the farther). Under these conditions, the reasons people would volunteer for such work, even with whatever risks are actually involved, seem clear enough. And just a side note, it seems so odd to me that a "slave" would earn anything at all for their labor, or that they would "not recognize" at first - until they talk with a social worker - that they had actually been victims....of slavery! (The latter claim often surfaces in CATW discussions about the difficulties of working with victims).

Based on the very small number of cases which have been identified showing actual slave-like conditions (all of these have been small scale operations, and no large-scale organized crime scenarios), and presuming that not all such people are identified (of course), I am guessing that some 250 migrants in the US face slave-like conditions at any given time.

An additional statistic that may be of interest:

Most women who meet the legal definition for being “trafficked” for sex work were aware of the nature of their future work, though they were often unaware as to the exact working conditions they would confront

Europol. 2002. “Crime Assessment - Trafficking of Human Beings into the European Union.” Document available online at: <www.europol.eu.int/index.asp?page=publ_crimeassessmentTHB>.

McAleer, Phelim. 2003. “Happy hookers of Eastern Europe: Phelim McAleer reveals the truth behind the myth of sex-slave trafficking,” The Spectator, (April 5).

Wijers, Marjan and and Lin Lap-Chew. 1999. Trafficking in Women, Forced Labor, and Slavery-like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour, and Prostitution. Utrecht: Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women. (see pgs. 112-3, 235).