As our self-interests differ, so do our feelings. – Pierre Corneille
It’s interesting how two different organizations doing work that on the surface might seem very similar can nevertheless be extremely different, both morally and practically. This is nowhere more true than in sex worker outreach, where a harm reduction organization working in the same city as a “rescue” organization nearly always has much better results, even if the “rescue” group is better funded. The reason is simple: harm reduction groups treat their clients as human beings who have fallen into a bad situation, but still deserve respect and autonomy; such an organization may offer shelter, services, health care, legal assistance, vocational training and the like, but none of it is compulsory or conditional. “Rescue” groups, on the other hand, look upon their clients as things to be done to (“saved”, “lifted”, “converted”, etc); though they offer the same type of services as harm reduction groups, these are generally conditional upon the women leaving prostitution or even submitting to captivity and/or brainwashing.
Two charities recently came to my attention; both operate in Asian countries and run boarding schools for poor girls with the specific intention of providing them an alternative to sex work…but there the similarity stops. Let’s look first at Chaithanya Happy Home in Hyderabad, India:
…Chaithanya Happy Home is part of Chaithanya Mahila Mandali, India’s first nonprofit organization founded by a former sex worker, Jayamma Bandari…the 35 girls living in the home are all daughters of…sex workers. Even a decade ago, the fate for these girls was to join the same profession as their mothers once they came of age. Today, however, they are living in a safe place and…attending one of the best…schools in Hyderabad, dreaming of becoming schoolteachers, engineers, doctors and revenue collectors. The stigma and discrimination attached to…sex workers in Indian society trickles down to their daughters. To change this, nongovernmental organizations are working to secure basic rights for the girls…but activists say more needs to be done to change age-old societal attitudes stigmatizing sex workers and their daughters…In Hyderabad alone, there are more than 25,000 female sex workers…Bandari’s organization has helped 600 of them to possess valid proof of identity. But thousands of others are still unable to access free health care, to vote or to open a bank account.
More than 60 percent of the total number of sex workers in Hyderabad do not own any property and live in rented apartments…They do not reveal their real profession to their landlords or to their neighbors, fearing that they will be evicted and shunned. A [non sex-working] parent will never allow…her kids to mingle with the kid of a sex worker…[the] exclusion for being sex workers…[thus] trickles down to their children, denying them basic rights in the past such as education…some schools reasoned that parents of other children would oppose, others refused to accept them on the grounds that the children had only one parent…None of these children had a birth certificate, as their mothers delivered at home…[but Chaithanya Mahila Mandali] appealed to the schools to consider this and accept the children without a valid birth certificate…also…the…Right to Education…law, in effect since April 2010, has made elementary education compulsory and free in any government school. This has encouraged more sex workers to enroll their children in local schools…As a result, the number of daughters of sex workers attending school is increasing across India…
The girls in the “Happy Home” were all brought there by their mothers, who wished for them to have a better life; Bandari and the other interviewed activists all place the blame for the situation exactly where it belongs, on bad laws and social stigma which marginalize sex workers and thereby trap their daughters so that sex work is their only option. There is nary a mention of “sex traffickers” in the whole article, which is more than can be said for “House of Grace”:
…House of Grace is a home for tribal girls [in Northern Thailand] at risk of being sold into sexual slavery. House of Grace has rescued hundreds of girls, before the horror of child prostitution became a reality…“the finest children’s home in Thailand”…is a first-rate facility that houses and tenderly raises Akha girls in a loving Christian atmosphere…In most cases we are doing a preventative work — trying to get the girls to safety…before they are sold into prostitution. It is very difficult to rescue a girl who has already been trapped into that lifestyle, so our main focus is to reach little girls before this horror has become a reality for them. As God extends our reach, we will also be able to rescue those who are trapped…[if] a father or stepfather is going to sell his daughter…often there is a kind person in the girl’s life who will try to keep this from happening. Many times a grandmother, aunt, older sister or a good neighbor will bring a young girl to House of Grace to protect her…
Though the last sentence claims that those who bring girls there are “often” relatives, all that talk of “rescuing those who are trapped” and the fact that the Akha are a favorite target of “rescue” groups leads me to believe otherwise. While Chaithanya Mahila Mandali recognizes that young girls are pushed into sex work for social and legal reasons, House of Grace prefers to promote “trafficking” hysteria and “slavery” rhetoric and to demonize male relatives (when poor families sell their daughters into brothels, the mothers are to blame at least as often as the fathers). And while the language of the Indian article is fairly objective even when it’s discussing the awful and often violent conditions under which poor sex workers in Hyderabad live, the second is rife with dysphemisms like “horror”, “slavery” and “lifestyle” (which is always a pejorative term for Christians, evoking the idea of “temptation” into sexual “sin”.) But the most striking difference of all is that while Chaithanya only takes girls whose sex worker mothers voluntarily surrender them, it is clear that House of Grace has no such scruples and is happy to abduct any “heathen” girls they can get their hands on, with the help of whatever confederate they can arrange, using the excuse that somebody said she might end up as a whore.
Thailand should charge the House of Grace with kidnapping and give them a taste of Thai prison.
The irony here is that whatever family member “giving” the girl to the House of Grace is probably demanding money in exchange. Gee, doesn’t that sound like trafficking?
That thought crossed my mind as well, like Nick Kristof’s “trafficking” two girls temporarily out of a brothel.
Your article was again a very good observation and I am glad you didn’t seem to take issue with the passage “the fate for these girls was to join the same profession as their mothers”, which one could criticise for calling being a sex worker a “fate”, a term that often carries a negative connotation. (Though here, the fate is clearly indicated as being caused by bad laws and social stigma, not the profession per se.)
I used to work for a community-based organisation in northern Thailand, founded by a Thai and run by Thais as well as locals from other ethnic groups. Having worked there for about a year and a half, I believe I can vouch for the integrity of their work during that time, which primarily focused on education to provide young people with alternatives to otherwise exploitative labour conditions.
I admit that the phrase “women and children”, used on that organisation’s website, is not one that I took issue with at the time. Later I came to understand that while gender inequality certainly needs to be addressed, and therefore running programmes aimed at young women isn’t wrong, the phrase renders women to be equal to children and thus in need of protection like children (and usually this means protection by men).
So do I think they should use this phrase on their website? No, I don’t. But I do think that their work is more important and that information on websites and other publications are likely to have some inappropriate phrases in them. If I were still working there, I would bring this up, but right now, there’s nothing I can do about it and they wouldn’t consider it a priority anyway, since they haven’t been able to update their website for two years. I can report, however, that the director of the NGO has long since wanted to change the byline of the website that indicates a focus on fighting child prostitution because he understands the diversity of the exploitation faced by children and youth, for example by young Akha women or young Kachin men.
Anyway, in the case of the Christian shelter you described, that’s of course an entirely different story. They didn’t accidentally use one or two unfortunate phrases but intentionally further a particular narrative as you correctly pointed out.
I wished for two things to happen. Firstly, I wished that more people would recognise the harm organisations such as the second one do. And secondly, I also wished that organisations would be judged on a case by case basis and on what they do, not based on whether they occasionally use questionable language (which they might remove if they are kindly made aware of it).
I tend to be pragmatic. Is the trafficking paradigm a big problem and should be rejected due its plethora of interpretations? Very much so, as the case of Californians voting overwhelmingly in favour of Proposition 35 proved yet again. But is the work of NGOs like the Chaithanya Happy Home useless or per se anti-sex work? No, it isn’t.
From my own experience engaging with people trying to fight human trafficking, I can say that it’s not impossible to have them think about what they have accepted as truth and how their work affects sex workers and their families. But it requires a lot of time and patience, considering the enormous resources, financial and otherwise, of anti-prostitution campaigners who have hijacked the fight against exploitative labour conditions.
Highlighting the effects of anti-trafficking measures and campaigns on families and children might be one of the best methods to get people to think about what they’re doing and how their narratives and advocating to criminalise sex work does nothing to to stop trafficking but everything to harm an already marginalised population.
“Anybody who has researched the trafficking issue with a modicum of intellectual honesty, will reach the conclusion that legally enabling environments are the best way to fight trafficking. That sex workers are not the problem, but part of the solution. Abolitionists do not listen though… they presume to know [more] about our lives and our work environments than we do.” Tracey Tully (APNSW)
One couldn’t put it any better.
Many people do use words very clumsily; as I’ve stated before, “I’m the Princess of Paranoia and 99.9% of the human race words its essays with far less caution than I employ in the composition of my grocery list.” So unless the error is repeated and disseminated (as in the case of “vagina” to mean “any female-specific body part” or “homophobia” to mean “any opposition to any homosexual’s ideas or actions”) I tend to turn a blind eye when the phrase is at least partly right. And though I mean no offense to anyone, I would certainly consider the conditions under which low-level Indian sex workers live to be a “fate”. That still doesn’t mean they are without agency or that someone else should force them to change, merely that everyone (including them) agrees it’s not exactly the best life they could hope for.
As for the rest, I’ve often pointed out that a sensible anti-prostitution campaigner, one who was motivated by the welfare of the women rather than a moralistic agenda, would actually have most of the same goals as the sex worker rights movement; the fact that there are so few of those demonstrates the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed “abolitionists”.
(In lieu of a ‘Like’ button) Thank you for your reply. Speaking of groceries, I’ll be off to get some, though I tend to use my memory rather than a grocery list – a method that fails me regularly.
Maggie,
Speaking of sex-trafficking, complicity of both parents, moral panics and the upcoming holiday season with your favorite bell ringing abolitionists, I present the following historical vignette, Although I’m sure that you are already familiar with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Armstrong_case
The line about the aspiring revenue collectors at Chaithanya Happy Home made me chuckle. Having one’s child go into such a line of work sounds like a libertarian whore’s nightmare.
On a more serious note, the language you quoted from House of Grace is a pitch-perfect replication of the language I’ve heard from the flaky, navelgazing evangelical circles frequented by the aunt I refer to as Alien Aunt. As it happens, Alien Aunt once spent several months working at an orphanage in or near Chiang Mai, during which time she managed not to learn a word of conversational Thai. She’s never mentioned sex trafficking as a “burden on her heart” or the hearts of her fellow “heartsongs of God,” but the outfit she joined in Thailand clearly shared House of Grace’s worldview. That bullshit runs deep in the evangelical community, particularly in the “mission field.”
I’ve long suspected that the language barrier is a component of the racist rescue industry fixation on Southeast Asia. If the “rescuers” spoke proficient Thai or Khmer, or if their heathen targets spoke proficient English, the “rescuers” just wouldn’t have such latitude to be studiously ignorant of the wishes of those to whom they were “witnessing.”
The juxtaposition of a creepy, condescending “Christian” charity in Thailand and a much more pragmatic, morally straight counterpart run by locals with skin in the game in India, however, is even more telling. I had never given any thought to the relative absence of that kind of “Christian outreach” in India, even though India is a country with severe endemic poverty and excellent bilateral relations with the US. As a practical matter, the presumptive result is a huge pool of prospective marks, a relatively easy time obtaining visas, and little risk of prosecution or vigilante activity while in country.
The obvious reason that the “rescue” missionaries do so little work in India is that it’s the world’s largest English-speaking country. The missionary who condescends to his audience in India runs a huge risk of being chewed out by one of the locals in impeccable English. There’s no fun in “witnessing” to the swarthy “unreached” in foreign lands if it involves tongue-lashings from in-country NGO contacts who were taught by their Jesuit high school teachers not to use “impact” as a verb.
In a nutshell, India offers missionaries too much equality.
I suspect that a young girl who really is trafficked and managed to escape would be more likely to seek help from Chaithanya Happy Home than from House of Grace. Maybe I’m wrong.
Maggie, I don’t know if you usually post links to Onion articles, but I think you will get a kick out of this one:
Widening Petraeus Scandal Reveals Human Race Has Been Having Sex For 200,000 Years
Isaac Newton!
Never was confident about that old legend anyway.