I’m passionately against sex-trafficking, and on the whole I do not support sex work. If the existence of the sex industry hides trafficked victims, which it does, then I’d rather there’s no sex industry at all, because while the willing sex worker is able to do other work, the trafficked victim has no such choice. I was an advocate of the Swedish model until a Swedish friend of mine sent me a blog post that explained how it’s making life worse for sex workers (even coerced ones), contrary to what the Swedes and well-meaning Christian community might have us believe. I’ve also keenly noticed that in all the sex trafficking discussions and films I’ve seen, nobody – absolutely NOBODY – asked the prostitutes, the very people who know what it is they need, and what the situation is really like on the ground. So I’m interested knowing what, in your opinion, do sex workers need? What kind of system, law, or facility should be in place to better protect and help sex workers? Is it possible to help and rescue trafficked victims, whilst not interfering with willing sex workers? What would actually help rescuers identify and free trafficked victims in the sex trade? Finally, why have YOU chosen to be a sex worker? I’m asking not to judge you or to preach or change your mind. I just want to hear the other side.
I’ll try as best I can to answer all your questions; if I miss anything, please reply and ask it again. You may not like everything I’m going to say, but you seem like someone who’s genuinely trying to understand so I hope you won’t reject uncomfortable truths out of hand merely because they do indeed make you uncomfortable.
The first question you need to ask yourself is, what is it about sex work you don’t “support”? If you merely mean that you can’t envision yourself as ever being in a position to either sell or buy sex, the statement makes perfect sense; I could say that “I don’t support the rap industry” because I don’t like rap and therefore contribute no money to that segment of the music business. However, my powerful dislike for rap does not give me the right to deny that it undoubtedly gives pleasure to those who do like it, and provides a creative outlet for people who nonetheless could do “other work” under far less satisfying conditions and for vastly less money. Nor would it be right for me to demonize rap and blame it for things that derive from the nastier portions of human nature; these problems would still exist even if rap could somehow be eliminated by establishing a totalitarian state whose police had the power to violate people’s rights at will in order to further the War on Rap. It is never right, moral, justifiable or even possible to stop people from pursuing peaceful, consensual, private activity, whether that activity involves music, books, sex or drugs. You mention the prohibitionist myth that the sex industry “hides” the existence of coerced workers, but this is no more true than saying the agricultural industry “hides” the existence of coerced farm workers or the domestic service industry “hides” the existence of coerced domestics. The sad fact is that some human beings are willing to directly subject their fellow creatures to coercion, and most human beings are willing to allow others with fancy titles and interesting costumes to inflict coercion as long as that violence achieves results they like, whether those results be enlarging their country’s territory, filling the state’s coffers, inflicting their moral agenda on strangers or producing cheap food and consumer electronics. Most people who position themselves as enemies of “sex trafficking”, yet seem relatively unconcerned with other forms of coerced labor, do so for two reasons: first, that they do not themselves buy or sell sexual services; and second, that they wish to stop others whom they do not even know from doing so. If these same people were constantly calling for the abolition of other industries in which some degree of coercion occurs (such as agriculture, domestic service, textiles, electronics and the prison industry), their position would at least be logically consistent (if naively Utopian). But that is not the case: they are perfectly willing to accept exploitative and coercive, even quasi-slave-like, treatment of agricultural laborers, domestics, sweatshop workers and those arrested under prohibitionist laws; it is somehow only sexual exchange, coerced or otherwise, which inflames their ire.
I am really pleased that you recognize the necessity of listening to sex workers; that is the major point of my essay “Let Me Help”, which I think would answer most of your questions. It contains links to other essays of mine (and to resources outside this blog) which will help you to understand not only that very few sex workers are coerced in any meaningful sense of the word, but that most of the people “authorities” label “trafficked” are not the helpless victims in need of “rescue” that they are painted as being in exploitation films and prohibitionist propaganda. These people themselves say this over and over again, but as you pointed out nobody wants to listen because the truth conflicts with the narrative they prefer to impose upon it. And one thing upon which virtually all sex workers agree is that decriminalization – the removal of all laws which treat sex work as somehow magically different from all other forms of work – is absolutely the best way of dramatically reducing the harms which plague the industry under criminalized, semi-criminalized or quasi-criminalized regimes. My recent essay “Treating Sex Work As Work” sets out the case in exhaustive and thoroughly-cited detail, explaining how every attempt to control sex work by criminal law results in causing far more harm than it prevents.
If you want a longish answer to your last question, you should probably read my three-part “Genesis of a Harlot”; however, I can give you a much shorter answer which is at the same time more universal. I chose sex work for the same reason about 98.5% of all sex workers do: it was the best fit for my needs at the time. Sex work is both more lucrative and more flexible than any other kind of work available to most people; in its most basic form it requires no special equipment, starting capital, intensive training, licenses or tests. And though those characteristics are attractive to many people, they are especially attractive to members of certain marginalized populations – including, ironically, women with prior prostitution arrest records – who find it difficult or impossible to secure or maintain conventional employment. In other words, the more laws, rules and regulations a society allows government to inflict upon it, the larger the fraction of people who will be driven into underground economies by their inability to get other work. The more a government tries to control people’s work, movement and lives – including their sex lives – the larger the sex industry will become; prohibitionists are therefore their own worst enemies, because the more they crack down, the more people they push into conditions under which sex work is the best available means of support.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
Who is the hot redhead in the poster? Fuck me she’s hot!
Is the writer female? I’m assuming so.
Well she seems to be saying that she may not have a problem with some women choosing harlotry – but if a few are going to be coerced (or trafficked) – then that entire “shop” needs to be closed down.
First – you’ll never get rid of prostitution and it’s complete arrogance to even think we can. It’s existed since the dawn of mankind and will until we are exterminated.
Second – if you decriminalize it eventually it becomes de-stigmatized also. The police will be forced to concentrate on finding all these “child prostitutes” that everyone is angry about. AND – because the profession is decriminalized – women in the industry can come forward to law enforcement and PARTICIPATE in the process of rounding the bastards up.
Nobody gets MORE angry about women, and especially little girls, being forced to do this. I’ve said it before – you don’t have to pay me – find these bad guys – put me on a helo with a 240 machine gun with 5 or 6 other big guys and let us go waste the assholes responsible. But nobody wants to do that – they just want us to throw money at the problem. They don’t even know where these “bad” guys are because by including willing sex workers into the equation – they’ve created a whole universe where the problems of the coerced and the underaged can be buried – impossible to find.
People who advocate this trafficking nonsense DO NOT WANT to find these trafficked individuals. They just want the money. If they wanted to find these tortured women they would enlist, and make allies of the willing women who work in the industry – yet they want to torture those women. That’s really their goal and it is as transparent as clear glass and it ought to anger EVERYBODY.
Would it not be a big change for the better if 2 or 3 women were allowed to work together for safety? There are 2 ways they could do that, either say that brothels are legal or to say that when women work together it’s not a brothel.
Treating sex workers the same as any other workers would allow them to denounce unacceptable working conditions. See the sexual harassment case in New Zealand (you’ll find a link in last Saturday’s post). As long as sex work is criminalized, this will be impossible.
In Denmark, one of the more common ways for girls to do this is to rent an apartment between 3-4 girls. There’s a special name for these kinds of “apartments” and it’s lost to me at the moment in the fog of all the European jitter clogged in my head. Due to the popularity though – it seems to work for them. I’ve never visited one myself though. In Denmark – prostitution is legal (though they were talking about banning it and the conservatives had allied with some other party to do exactly that if they ever formed a government). The rule there was that you could engage in prostitution as long as it wasn’t your only means of earning money.
“Is it possible to help and rescue trafficked victims”
What trafficked victims? That’s the whole issue – there are barely any of them, for the most obvious of reasons. It doesn’t make sense as a business model. Trafficking sex workers is like smuggling oxygen or sunlight. Anywhere you go, a certain number of people will be prepared to go into sex work, and there’s more than enough to fill demand.
The only reason that that’s not true for agricultural and domestic labour is that a) the pay is so poor; and b) the agricultural industry is controlled by a few big players that are in bed with the government. But mainly, it’s the pay. Sex work, on the other hand, pays ok. There’s more than enough local people ready to do it.
Exactly. It’s claimed that there are 30 million “slaves” worldwide. More than chattel slavery (when it was perfectly legal). If you rounded up all these “slaves” and put them in the Antarctic – the Antarctic would then rank around 40th on the list of nations by population (there are at least 200 nations on this planet right now). Now, let’s say that there are no “slave cartels” moving these slaves around. Let’s say that for every slave trafficked – there’s one “bad guy” trafficking that slave . Throw all those guys in the Antarctic with the slaves – and it becomes the 20th most populous nation in the world (on par with Great Britain and France).
But we know this is impossible … 30,000,000 bad guys who are trafficking slaves? Soooo … there must be “cartels” that recruit and move them around … right?
Okay – well, where are they? Where are all the news stories of the “slave cartels”? We have plenty of information on drug cartels. We know who leads them – how many men they have – and how they’re armed. We have shootouts and people get killed regularly. Where’s all this “action” with regards to human trafficking?
You can only conclude – that (a) the stories of all this trafficking are bullshit or (b) that the police (INTERNATIONALLY) are doing an extremely poor job in solving this “problem”. For those who believe in trafficking stories – why aren’t you out there beating up on these police to PRODUCE the leaders of these “cartels” in court so they can be convicted? Or, at least – demanding they release the names of these cartel leaders (just like they do with the drug cartels).
Why are you giving money to the police to solve this problem – yet NOT demanding results?
So there’s 30,000,000 slaves out there and the cops intend to solve that problem by setting up individual dates with babes who put up BackPage ads and then busting them one at a time? LOL – they’ll never finish. They don’t fight the war on drugs that way so why are they fighting this problem that way?
Now, interestingly – I DID find an article that identifies a “human trafficking” cartel – and how convenient it is for the police …
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/mexican-cartels-move-into-human-trafficking/2011/07/22/gIQArmPVcI_story.html
Why … it’s the DRUG CARTELS! LOL – brilliant! These guys are on the loose and uncatchable (pretty much) – and they’re already demonized so why not accuse them of trafficking too?! No one has to prove it … can’t prove it … can’t get to them … and you can’t “smear” their names without worrying about them coming back on you for slandering them (their names are already “shit”). We can blame ANYTHING on these guys! AND …
WHAT A SELF-LICKING ICE CREAM CONE … because now … not only can you fight the war on drugs using money set specifically aside for drug interdiction …
You can now fight these drug cartels using money set aside for interdicting human trafficking! May as well, huh? Since you’re not gonna catch any REAL human traffickers with that money!
In Europe – most of the hookers I’ve seen have been Eastern European. Go into any German FKK and you’ll find HUNDREDS of East European gals in each one – particularly Romanians. The sheer numbers of these women surely mean they all wanted to come – or were FORCED to come by some ominously evil slave cartel. Romania is no longer behind the iron curtain – they’re a member of NATO and the EU – very easy to get in there and check things out.
So why haven’t the Eastern European human trafficking cartels been caught? Or at least identified? Why don’t we know how these cartels move their slaves around but more importantly …
Why do these Romanian “slaves” leave Germany frequently to go home to visit relatives? Why do so many of them live alone in apartments out in town – or on the grounds of the FKK (which is routinely visited by German police?). And lastly – if they’re forced to fuck – then why do a few of them go out of their way to make me absolutely miserable when I say “No” to them? A woman can fake happiness – but anger … no woman can fake me on that and I have seen spit and vinegar in a few eyes simply for turning them down (with a smile).
And there’s a whole ‘nother issue. How unprofessional is it to get pissy at a knock-back? As if doing that will make the client change his mind! As if it isn’t an ordinary part of the job!
@ the Questioner; most questions Maggie gets are much less revealing about the nature of the concern of the questioner. Your question(s) gives a lot of information to ensure you are understood. Often her in responses to you, Maggie checks her understanding of your meaning. When she checked with you, “Was that what you wanted her to hear?”
Also @ the Questioner would you reflect on the essence of the meaning of what Maggie said? I wanted to check to see if you heard the same things I did and then check with Maggie to see if that is what she wanted you (us) known. Note! this question is not what did you ‘think of’ Maggie’s answer. Or what is ‘your response to’ Maggie’s answer, but simply what was the essence of the meaning you heard from Maggie, Maggie’s meaning to you?
So there are two parts, 1) Were you understood? and 2) How did you understand her (Maggie)? What I an interested in checking is the quality of information transfer and connection, not whether words were being typed, spoken or lips moving.
This may seem one-sided “@ the questioner” But when you actually say how you understood Maggie’s meaning, of course we what to know if that was the way Maggie wanted to be heard and therefore afford Maggie the same opportunity to be understood as 1 above gives you, the questioner.
Every person who supports criminalization should be forced to read this post, so they can see what criminalization really does.
It seems like if the questioner can just understand how little trafficking actually exists she could become another ally as that seems to be her main sticking point.
While I understand the sentiment, you cannot force insight or even willingness to try to gain insight.
I am hoping as much for reinforcement as a moment of epiphany. Based on the idea that if someone reads something enough they may come to believe it. In much the same way as North Koreans believe that the Kims are in fact the only thing saving them from being overrun by the imperialist Americans because that is what their newspapers and radios have been saying for the last 50 years.
@alphapig: Let me see if I understand what you’re saying here. It sounds like you’re saying that mindless conformity induced by North Korean-style propaganda is the way to bring people to understand that sex work should be decriminalized. Really?
Maybe it is just my opposition to authoritarianism, whether it supports my own belief systems or not, that leads me to think this is not the way to making sex work both legally and societally acceptable. I would think reason, incessantly applied and propagated, compelling argument, and factual support of good and sensible public policy are more effective ways to the desired end in a free society.
I may have erred by bringing up DPRK. sometimes my typing gets ahead of my thinking. But it is true that some people do need to be hit over the head repeatedly for the truth to break down the walls of lies that have been put up by people who could become allies. The walls are usually created by false propaganda such as that put forth by the trafficking fetishists. We need to be just as forceful and compelling.
Paul’s point is a good one. It’s funny … the same sort of thinking that goes into thinking that prostitutes MUST be coerced by gangs is the same sort that goes into all the thinking in a lot of movies where wealthy people have shadowy agencies that kidnap women and force them to be their sexual playthings. As I’ve noted in my reviews of such movies, it just makes no sense. Really wealthy have so much money that the cost of a prostitute to play at being their sexual plaything is just pocket change to them, why would they want to incur the substantial risk of jail involved in kidnapping and repeated rape if they can just offer someone some money and get the exact same experience, voluntarily? Makes no sense at all, but it keeps showing up in B-movies and softcore porn (Passion Network, Vicious Circles, Caged Fury, to name a few). it probably comes from the same place in the id that produces the notices of shadowy trafficking organizations coercing prostitutes by the thousands. People should recognize it for the low-grade sexual fantasy it is.
The concerns, questions, and misconceptions posed by the questioner are probably pretty close to those held by many people, though I suspect most people are a lot less understanding and willing to be open than she is.
I love Maggie’s response (although I think you’re being far to accepting of rap, Maggie, and if someone wants to be concerned about “trafficking” it is the trafficking of people’s ears and minds listening to most of this stuff that they should be concerned about — this expressed only half-facetiously), and it directly and honestly responds to all the questions posed.
@Paul Murray: “It doesn’t make sense as a business model. Trafficking sex workers is like smuggling oxygen or sunlight.”
Well, not to over-blow the whole trafficking issue, but in fact sex trafficking does make sense as a business model, just as trafficking and exploitation does for agricultural, domestic, and sweat-shop workers. It is the marginalized with few, if any, rights or avenues of recourse, taken out of their usual support networks and often far from home in a strange country, that traffickers of whatever ilk prey upon. They know they can control and exploit their human chattel, and there is virtually nothing the trafficked can do about it, or think they can.
Keeping sex work criminalized and/or stigmatized only works to the traffickers’ benefit since it enables them to maintain their control over their chattel. It also encourages their more extreme enforcement techniques, including killing a troublesome “employee,” since they are already operating in the outlaw sphere. It is not unlike the dynamic in the illegal drug trade. So, as Maggie posits in saying that the prohibitionists are their own worse enemies if they want to attack whatever real trafficking does go on, keeping sex work illegal or at the margins only provides the traffickers with cover and serves as their most effective tool.
Along with money, other things — things like power, control, sadism, cultural imperatives — also motivate people. Legalization doesn’t address these other motivations, but it makes them harder to implement to the end of controlling people. The first instinct of most societies and governments is to attack the symptom, real or imagined, simply because it is easier and perhaps politically salable, than whatever is the real problem. So they attack sex work in general instead of legalizing or decriminalizing it — certainly as it should be in any society that calls itself free — and focusing on sex work in general rather than whatever trafficking, and those implementing it, that actually exists. To use a phrase booted around in another sphere, bringing sex work “out of the shadows” takes away the best cover and tool of traffickers, regardless of their motivations.
People who don’t know any better believe that trafficking exists more or less by default, because nobody can prove a negative. But it seems to me there’s a very good argument against believing in it, namely, “Where are they?”
If there were as many as a thousand women enslaved as sex workers in the US, common sense tells us that law-enforcement busts, which are more or less random, would liberate 10 or 20 of them a month, at least. We’d see them on Geraldo and Maury Povich, they’d publish articles and books, and they’d start rescue organizations that actually have the almost unanimous support of the people they’re rescuing.
Instead, as far as I’ve seen, every single supposedly “rescued” sex worker who does these things turns out to be a phony, like that pair (Ruhama and Reilly) Maggie talked about in yesterday’s column — and every single rescue group turns out to be “rescuing” people who didn’t need or want to be rescued.
Ultimately any person or group who genuinely wishes someone else good must accept the beneficiary’s own view of what is good for him/her. If the letter writer will not do this, s/he is simply being irrationally selfish.
“Is it possible to help and rescue trafficked victims, whilst not interfering with willing sex workers?” An analogy to this would be “is it possible to help and rescue women who are victims of domestic violence/ spousal abuse (which impacts one out of three women world wide according to the World Health Organization) without interfering with wives and girlfriends who are NOT victims of domestic violence/ spousal abuse?
As well as this: is it possible to help the 346,830 (2012) victims of violent rape and sexual assault who REPORTED the crime, without interfering with women who like to have lots of casual sex with strangers? BTW- in 2012, the cops managed to arrest only 4.5% of the alleged rapists – or 15,591 (from the FBI Bureau of Justice Statistics, table #69).
A good way to start helping real victims is to stop arresting consenting adult sex workers who have NOT asked for help and do not consider themselves victims. Imagine if we could reduce the number of untested rape kits nationwide by using the money that it costs the government to arrest the 47,491 adults engaged in commercial sex (in 2012) – at the rate of (according to the 1987 law journal study by Julie Pearl that each arrest costs the city $2,000 per arrest, using the inflation calculator to deduce the cost in 2012 to be roughly) $4,084.56 x 47,491 = $193,953,244. Testing rape kits varies from lab to lab, but some reports say that it costs $1,500 per rape kit. Cops could actually solve real crimes by catching the rapist predators out there!
[…] do sex workers […]
The questioner wrote, “If the existence of the sex industry hides trafficked victims, which it does…” Then, the person doesn’t elaborate on this point about the existence of the sex industry hiding trafficking victims. If the person is going to make this claim, then there’s no reason to just single out the sex industry since trafficking happens in various industries. Using this logic, we could say that domestic housekeeping, agriculture, factory work, etc. also hide trafficking victims since trafficking also happens in these industries. We could even say that choirs hide trafficking using this logic since there was a case of choir kids being trafficked from Zambia into Texas: https://www.verite.org/es/node/167 . Also, don’t forget about the sex workers who are being forcibly handcuffed and legally trafficked into jail cages where they are held captive against their will by the criminal justice (or in this context injustice) system.
@Vegan Vixen: You got it exactly right, on all points. Bravo!
[…] answered this reader’s question on my own blog a year ago, but since it addresses issues that arise periodically I felt it would be worthwhile to revisit it […]
[…] What would actually help rescuers identify and free trafficked victims in the sex trade?” Nobody Asked (Maggie […]
Great piece, maggie!
When you look into the reliable statistics on trafficking (there arent many) you find that the actual incidence of trafficking is three orders of magnitude less than the wild propaganda claims.
For every real case, the claim is 1000 cases. The trafficking “industry” is a paid solution in need of a problem, not the other way round. That makes it no better than any other greedy corporation; and arguably worse for hiding behind lies, damned lies and statistics.
And the same estimates (hundreds of thousands per annum) keep being regurgitated in the tabloids (sells papers, dunnit guv!) without any sign of critical thought; thus the mythology keeps goign.
Maggie is confident that this will explode itself, though thusfar it’s still running, hotter than ever. Governments are willing to listen to arguments that support their agendas, and those agendas are too often informed by corporate, religious and special interest groups that lobby them.
Issues like “criminalised vices” such as sex work and so on are always going to be a political football.
It’s time that such lobbying efforts were systematically removed from the mechanisms of government; political office should become shorn of the need for seperate financial sponsorship and be funded out of the state. That would effectively end lobbying influence via funding.
Secondly, lobbying should be put into the hands of the electorate in a direct manner, and only to inform the areas of government debate on policy, rather than determine outcome. That puts the onus on the individual, not on groups, to lobby parliaments for themselves.
That would go a long way to unscrewing the mess things are in right now.