Be heard on the issues that matter most to you!
I originally posted this in response to Audacia's interview on WNYC, but (upon request) am also posting a modified version as a new topic. To wit:
One of the main concerns I have with the anti-trafficking legislation is that it encourages policing activities that are actually counter-productive for the overwhelming majority of sex workers. But understanding why this is true requires that one have a realistic understanding as to the diversity of working conditions within the sex biz.
In her interview on WNYC, Sonia Ossario from NYC-NOW claims that only an extreme few (those "jet set call girls") have control over with whom and where they have paid sex. She states that "the vast majority of women and girls who are in the sex industry...don't have that luxury. [They] are trafficked here [or] work in brothels." There's a lot wrong with this picture, not the least of which is that it fails to include males (something I hope we chat about more within the forum this week). The equation of trafficking with literal "slavery" serves to further escalate both the rhetoric and the legislative proposals required to engage with what is understood to exist, and also further divorces the NYC-NOW analysis from reality.
At one time, and to some extent again today, the focus in prostitution policy was on street-based workers. Most researchers agree that street-based workers now make up only about 15% of the total of sex work. Street-based workers are themselves divided in their conditions, with many "classes" of strolls and of workers on the streets, and with only a subset facing stereotyped conditions of miserable homelessness with lots of drug use. Another group of people (mostly female, but also including some men) does not do sex "work" exactly, but trades sex for drugs rather than for cash. In terms of sex worker activism, I'd argue that people living in extreme forms of poverty and/or with intense drug involvement should in many ways be a higher priority than middle-class folks who are doing well. How Ossario thinks that increased criminalization will help the most destitute of the poor - especially when most people in this group cannot afford so-called "pimps" (and are therefore not "trafficked") - is beyond me.
There are indeed some people who might benefit from increased criminalization, namely people who are indeed held directly against their will in actual slave-like conditions. To me, however, this is where the numbers seem to be awfully thin. What realistically happens with anti-trafficking legislation is that lots of brothels where migrants work are busted, and no one is "rescued" because so very few are victims of the sort imagined by Ossario. So while such raids might indeed get lucky and actually help someone, they harm many others along the way (by arresting them and potentially rendering them subject to deportation) - is this an effective use of the police in a fight against "slavery"?
Even people who genuinely need the police may suffer because the anti-trafficking approach as currently constituted stigmatizes and punishes the group that would be most able to see if someone was in trouble and most able to tell the police: clients. Even if one thought that prostitution were a negative, one could still reach out to clients in order to solicit their aid in monitoring the brothels. The approach of NYC-NOW takes the opposite tack, and instead works to make it more difficult for sex workers to work (e.g. by trying to convince newspapers to end all advertising), thus making it more difficult for people to work independently and making people more vulnerable, not less.
One basic problem is that so many people are ready to believe that "the overwhelming majority" of sex workers live in slave-like conditions. People don't think of the approximately 20% of sex workers who have middle-class backgrounds (even if they're not exactly part of the "jet set"), and that the overwhelming majority of people who are more working-class and yet work independently or in underground brothels are not in any way "enslaved," even if the work might kind-of suck. Anti-trafficking approaches as currently constituted make conditions worse for this vast majority, not better, and only offers dubious benefits for - at a guess - 250 people in the US today.
I guess I could go on and on here, and I've already written a lengthy thread, but I'll just end with one final point. The difficulty with the NYC-NOW position - a.k.a. the CATW position - is that they are using the issue of trafficking to fight against the entire sex industry, or rather to get the police to wage their fight. As Ossario states, "it's hard to separate" trafficking from the general sex business. Send the police against all of it, I suppose! Well, it seems to me that it is usually pretty easy to distinguish slavery from other forms of exploited wage labor. Migrant workers on farms sometimes face literal slave-like conditions (being held against their will and forced to work at gunpoint, for example), and when they do, the police should help them. The vast majority of these workers, however, face something horrid, but not slavery. Raiding every single farm with migrant workers in order to find a few who are being held at gunpoint is not only an inefficient waste of one's police force, it is a tactic that harms many other workers by putting them at risk for deportation. A truly better plan for this majority who suffer from extreme economic exploitation, but not "slavery," would be to legalize their entry into the US and enforce a good labor standard (not that this is likely right now, but one can dream......). Such an approach would additionally strengthen the position of migrant workers and make it more possible for them to rely upon the police, thereby making slavery-like scenarios less possible. This is the basic logic of decriminalization (a complex topic that might benefit from further discussion, but the basics are clear). In what world is it impossible to tell the difference between the two types of oppression? Only in a world in which sex work is already such a degraded and un-thought-through possibility that it becomes impossible to imagine that someone might rationally choose it.
If people are concerned that bad economics forces people into prostitution, then "anti-trafficking" is a terrible means to address that possibility. If people are concerned with direct coercion and outright slavery, then I suggest they adjust their tactics to create a policing system that does not punish hundreds and hundreds of other people in order to help a rare individual (shall we raid every home in the US in hopes of finding a kidnapping victim?). And if what we're actually talking about concerns pimping and underage prostitution, then that opens up an entirely new discussion, but again, I don't think increased penalties for pimps will help many kids, and it will harm many whose "pimps" are actually supportive (friendly madams, for example, are "pimps," legally speaking). If, on the other hand, NYC-NOW is merely interested in confusing people and pushing their own anti-sex work agenda in the muddle, then they are doing a very good job of it. As I see it, we need to figure out how to do better in challenging the misinformation that's out there, and in developing and promoting our own alternative vision. We need to see and address the emotional and social pulls that make this misinformation so appealing, and deactivate them (or something like that!).
Thanks very much to Elizabeth and the other fab folks who helped make this happen (Chris, who else?). Thank you!
Thank you Kerwynk. This posts mirrors much of my own thinking on the subject.
About a year ago I started to do a piece on human trafficking, only to find that the overwhelming majority of published sources inexplicably conflated the trafficking issue and sex work of all types and in all contexts without supporting justification or even much mention. It seemed to be an a priori assumption everywhere I looked. I expect that sort of thing from the lay public, I seriously expect that sort of thing from the far right political wing, I most certainly do not expect that sort of thing in published research. (Elizabeth provided me with some helpful links when I mentioned it to her, but by that time I was frustrated and wound up shelving the piece.)
You give some very interesting statistics in your article, Kerwynk. Would you happen to have some links to your sources handy? I for one would greatly appreciate those, and perhaps I'll pick up my piece sometime, and have another go at it.
Kisses,
JanieBelle
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; orb. 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).
Kisses,
JanieBelle
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.
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.
