Dear Friends:
The debate about the extent of sexual trafficking in the UK continues. Remember the recent fervor was created by an article appearing last week, written by Nick Davies, in which he claims that efforts to fight sex trafficking are nothing but a big bugaboo. I provided extensive commentary on that article last week; please read it if you haven't already.
Supporting my point of view that Davies is acting as Advocate-in-Chief for those who want to normalize the sex trade, is this commentary by Catherine Bennett (see the below), who with scathing sarcasm points out some of the flaws and hypocrisy in Davies (and his sex industry cronies) arguments.
Also, please keep in mind that all this debate is going on against a backdrop of potential legal reform. There is a measure being debated in the British Parliament that would criminalize men who buy sex from trafficked women. Perceiving this as a threat to their profit margins (and indeed it is), apologists for the sex industry have come out kicking and screaming. Their fall back tactic is always to claim that fears about sexual trafficking are an overblown "moral panic." This shouldn't surprise us; it is a tactic from an old play book. Read any history of the campaigns to fight sexual trafficking (or "White Slavery" as is was called at the time) from the late 19th and early 20th Century and you'll see that sexual industry supporters of today are merely recycling old strategies.
And in a preview of the Bennet's commentary I leave you with the following excerpt which may get my vote for favorite quote of the week:
Lisa
The debate about the extent of sexual trafficking in the UK continues. Remember the recent fervor was created by an article appearing last week, written by Nick Davies, in which he claims that efforts to fight sex trafficking are nothing but a big bugaboo. I provided extensive commentary on that article last week; please read it if you haven't already.
Supporting my point of view that Davies is acting as Advocate-in-Chief for those who want to normalize the sex trade, is this commentary by Catherine Bennett (see the below), who with scathing sarcasm points out some of the flaws and hypocrisy in Davies (and his sex industry cronies) arguments.
Also, please keep in mind that all this debate is going on against a backdrop of potential legal reform. There is a measure being debated in the British Parliament that would criminalize men who buy sex from trafficked women. Perceiving this as a threat to their profit margins (and indeed it is), apologists for the sex industry have come out kicking and screaming. Their fall back tactic is always to claim that fears about sexual trafficking are an overblown "moral panic." This shouldn't surprise us; it is a tactic from an old play book. Read any history of the campaigns to fight sexual trafficking (or "White Slavery" as is was called at the time) from the late 19th and early 20th Century and you'll see that sexual industry supporters of today are merely recycling old strategies.
And in a preview of the Bennet's commentary I leave you with the following excerpt which may get my vote for favorite quote of the week:
Any non-prostitute propositioned by a kerb crawler knows that, in the mind ofAbolition!
your punter [the terms "kerb crawler" and "punter" are British-English slang for
"john" or as I usually call them "sex buyers" -- Lisa], all women have their
price. The legalisation of all aspects of prostitution, in defiance of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights on "degrading treatment", would confirm
this. If this sounds too prohibitionist, perhaps it's for non-practising
advocates of fully legal and normalised "sex work" to explain why selling a
woman's body to a potentially diseased or violent stranger should be no bigger a
deal than her selling a cup of coffee.
Lisa
No trafficking? Well, there's a hell of a lot of women suffering
Beware those who argue that prostitution is just another job. If it is, why do so many women die in this sordid trade?
Catherine Bennett
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
If the sex business, like so many other trades, awarded prizes to its favourite journalists, there is no doubt who would come first in the Services to Prostitution Awards 2009. Since his article last week, which likened the government's fictions about the extent of trafficking to its lies about Saddam's non-existent WMDs, reporter Nick Davies has been lionised by prostitutes up and down the land.
"Nick Davies's report vindicates what we have been saying for many years," declared the English Collective of Prostitutes, after Davies showed that the Pentameter Two police operation had not caught one trafficker in a country-wide, six-month hunt for offenders. "Most sex workers have not been trafficked but are working to support families."
Clearly, if they want to find trafficked women, the police should start looking somewhere else. Universities? Or will it turn out that these, no less than Britain's backstreets, walk-ups and brothels, are workplaces characterised by harmonious and dignified endeavour? Certainly, most of the female academics I have met insist they were not "coerced" into this ill-paid and exhausting work, even when they had the looks and opportunities to have chosen a far more rewarding career as a call girl.
Evidently, there is some sympathy between the two trades. In his compelling account of the way that politicians, such as Denis MacShane, appear to have simply invented trafficking figures, Davies quotes an academic from London Metropolitan University, Dr Nick Mai. We learn from Dr Mai that, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". Maybe this is one of those moments when we can even feel proud to be British? Being described, for instance, as "meat" on a prostitution websites may well be preferable to the certainty of poverty, food shortage and an early death. As for Mai, he worries that government plans to criminalise clients will "discourage migrants and UK citizens working in the sex industry".
The academic adds that, for most of migrants he interviewed, "working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs". So it's better than cleaning, too, if you leave aside the fact that prostitutes are more likely than cleaners to be attacked or murdered.
Davies's articles did not merely expose the police, Home Office and government to well-deserved criticism and ridicule. As with the government's lies about WMDs, he wrote, the cycle of trafficking misinformation was "driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda".
Leaving aside the question of who represents the heroic late Dr Kelly in this parallel story, he continued: "In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution." In yet another similarity between the fabrications that led to 100,000 deaths and those that facilitated a piece of shoddy (though reversible) Labour legislation, the views of "feminist campaigners", like those of Iraqi exiles before them, are now being discounted as manifestly mistaken.
Intentionally or not, Davies's story does more than further embarrass already ludicrous figures such as Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith. In the same way that the government's fabrications about trafficking have been used, shamefully, to prop up its policy on prostitution in general, the good news about the limited extent of trafficking is now supporting the contention that non-trafficked prostitution should be accounted a job like any other.
In the latter project, extraordinary progress has been made within the last week. Mai repeats that the occupation is "dignified". A representative of the Engish Collective of Prostitutes is barely challenged on the nature of her "industry" when she appears to immense advantage on Newsnight, alongside a floundering Denis MacShane. A letter signed by various academics, endorsing the Davies revelations, has added force to the suggestion that "prohibitionists", like feminist campaigners, only add to the "stigmatising of sex workers".
At this rate, no matter what happens to Harman's plan, it cannot be long before prostitute becomes an unsayable P-word, those uneasy about prostitution are dismissed as interfering authoritarians, and the government sets about regulating this occupation into a shape more appropriate to the 21st century. Zones, perhaps? An ombudsman, to ensure consistency of service? A lot of men complain that prostitutes looked more attractive in the pictures. Should all participants be tested for STDs, or – as is normal – just the women? Should any limits be imposed? That series of The Wire in which drugs are legalised within a few blocks of Baltimore, showed just how tricky it can be when, with the best of intentions, the authorities attempt to organise human squalor. Inevitably, these health and safety considerations, probably requiring some sort of trained inspectorate and thorough police checks, will delay the longed for day when a young job seeker loses benefit if she turns down a perfectly respectable place in the sex industry (though evidence from countries where prostitution has been legalised, suggests that the stigma never completely disappears).
Not that these developments would affect many of those now debating the matter in public. There can be a flavour of Borges's two bald men fighting over a comb about the spectacle of academics, journalists and campaigners getting excited about an activity in which, even more than drug dependency or alcoholism, they pray never to have a personal interest. But more than either of those semi-criminalised forms of behaviour, the status of prostitution, its buyers and sellers, affects everyone. Or all women, anyway.
Any non-prostitute propositioned by a kerb crawler knows that, in the mind of your punter, all women have their price. The legalisation of all aspects of prostitution, in defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on "degrading treatment", would confirm this. If this sounds too prohibitionist, perhaps it's for non-practising advocates of fully legal and normalised "sex work" to explain why selling a woman's body to a potentially diseased or violent stranger should be no bigger a deal than her selling a cup of coffee.
Objections to neutralised prostitution should not be discarded merely because Pentameter Two convicted nobody of trafficking. As others have pointed out, the police are not much good at prosecuting those responsible for forced marriages and genital mutilation either. To say nothing of bankers and MPs responsible for fraud. But perhaps those stories are, themselves, nothing more than mischievous moral panics?
Beware those who argue that prostitution is just another job. If it is, why do so many women die in this sordid trade?
Catherine Bennett
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
If the sex business, like so many other trades, awarded prizes to its favourite journalists, there is no doubt who would come first in the Services to Prostitution Awards 2009. Since his article last week, which likened the government's fictions about the extent of trafficking to its lies about Saddam's non-existent WMDs, reporter Nick Davies has been lionised by prostitutes up and down the land.
"Nick Davies's report vindicates what we have been saying for many years," declared the English Collective of Prostitutes, after Davies showed that the Pentameter Two police operation had not caught one trafficker in a country-wide, six-month hunt for offenders. "Most sex workers have not been trafficked but are working to support families."
Clearly, if they want to find trafficked women, the police should start looking somewhere else. Universities? Or will it turn out that these, no less than Britain's backstreets, walk-ups and brothels, are workplaces characterised by harmonious and dignified endeavour? Certainly, most of the female academics I have met insist they were not "coerced" into this ill-paid and exhausting work, even when they had the looks and opportunities to have chosen a far more rewarding career as a call girl.
Evidently, there is some sympathy between the two trades. In his compelling account of the way that politicians, such as Denis MacShane, appear to have simply invented trafficking figures, Davies quotes an academic from London Metropolitan University, Dr Nick Mai. We learn from Dr Mai that, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". Maybe this is one of those moments when we can even feel proud to be British? Being described, for instance, as "meat" on a prostitution websites may well be preferable to the certainty of poverty, food shortage and an early death. As for Mai, he worries that government plans to criminalise clients will "discourage migrants and UK citizens working in the sex industry".
The academic adds that, for most of migrants he interviewed, "working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs". So it's better than cleaning, too, if you leave aside the fact that prostitutes are more likely than cleaners to be attacked or murdered.
Davies's articles did not merely expose the police, Home Office and government to well-deserved criticism and ridicule. As with the government's lies about WMDs, he wrote, the cycle of trafficking misinformation was "driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda".
Leaving aside the question of who represents the heroic late Dr Kelly in this parallel story, he continued: "In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution." In yet another similarity between the fabrications that led to 100,000 deaths and those that facilitated a piece of shoddy (though reversible) Labour legislation, the views of "feminist campaigners", like those of Iraqi exiles before them, are now being discounted as manifestly mistaken.
Intentionally or not, Davies's story does more than further embarrass already ludicrous figures such as Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith. In the same way that the government's fabrications about trafficking have been used, shamefully, to prop up its policy on prostitution in general, the good news about the limited extent of trafficking is now supporting the contention that non-trafficked prostitution should be accounted a job like any other.
In the latter project, extraordinary progress has been made within the last week. Mai repeats that the occupation is "dignified". A representative of the Engish Collective of Prostitutes is barely challenged on the nature of her "industry" when she appears to immense advantage on Newsnight, alongside a floundering Denis MacShane. A letter signed by various academics, endorsing the Davies revelations, has added force to the suggestion that "prohibitionists", like feminist campaigners, only add to the "stigmatising of sex workers".
At this rate, no matter what happens to Harman's plan, it cannot be long before prostitute becomes an unsayable P-word, those uneasy about prostitution are dismissed as interfering authoritarians, and the government sets about regulating this occupation into a shape more appropriate to the 21st century. Zones, perhaps? An ombudsman, to ensure consistency of service? A lot of men complain that prostitutes looked more attractive in the pictures. Should all participants be tested for STDs, or – as is normal – just the women? Should any limits be imposed? That series of The Wire in which drugs are legalised within a few blocks of Baltimore, showed just how tricky it can be when, with the best of intentions, the authorities attempt to organise human squalor. Inevitably, these health and safety considerations, probably requiring some sort of trained inspectorate and thorough police checks, will delay the longed for day when a young job seeker loses benefit if she turns down a perfectly respectable place in the sex industry (though evidence from countries where prostitution has been legalised, suggests that the stigma never completely disappears).
Not that these developments would affect many of those now debating the matter in public. There can be a flavour of Borges's two bald men fighting over a comb about the spectacle of academics, journalists and campaigners getting excited about an activity in which, even more than drug dependency or alcoholism, they pray never to have a personal interest. But more than either of those semi-criminalised forms of behaviour, the status of prostitution, its buyers and sellers, affects everyone. Or all women, anyway.
Any non-prostitute propositioned by a kerb crawler knows that, in the mind of your punter, all women have their price. The legalisation of all aspects of prostitution, in defiance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on "degrading treatment", would confirm this. If this sounds too prohibitionist, perhaps it's for non-practising advocates of fully legal and normalised "sex work" to explain why selling a woman's body to a potentially diseased or violent stranger should be no bigger a deal than her selling a cup of coffee.
Objections to neutralised prostitution should not be discarded merely because Pentameter Two convicted nobody of trafficking. As others have pointed out, the police are not much good at prosecuting those responsible for forced marriages and genital mutilation either. To say nothing of bankers and MPs responsible for fraud. But perhaps those stories are, themselves, nothing more than mischievous moral panics?
1 comment:
The UKHTC campaign was a fraud.
Virtually every last penny of govt. money was given to a tiny circle of friends.
"This was part of a UK-wide operation which uncovered 167 victims of sex trafficking and led to the arrest of over 500 suspected traffickers."
So that was complete nonsense, the category of convicted sex trafficker, virtually non-existent or non-existent according to the (secret) internal reporting.
Ordinary prostituted women were arrested in hundreds to make reality Tv policing videos.
It was mostly a scam.
Gregory Carlin
Irish Anti-Trafficking Coalition
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