Category Archives: Sex work

On Rush Limbaugh, slut-shaming and whorephobia

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

I imagine that most readers by now have heard of the latest outburst by the right-wing American egomaniac Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show he referred to a Georgetown University student who had testified before Congress on the need for contraception to be included in health care coverage. Misidentifying the woman (whose first name is Sandra), he said:

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.

Limbaugh’s comments understandably (and correctly) led to outrage, and he was eventually forced to apologise after his advertisers started doing wobblies. It’s rare enough that he apologises for any of the garbage he spews, so it has to be seen as at least a small victory that sufficient pressure was brought to bear on him for this one.

Nonetheless, some of the reaction has made me a bit uneasy. Limbaugh is one of those people who can’t understand why a woman would want to be anything other than barefoot and pregnant, so his ignorance of the importance we place on access to contraception is hardly surprising. That’s not what prompted the almost unprecedented level of condemnation. Nor did the anger focus in on what I think is the real issue, namely, his attempt to silence her by making her into an object of sexual ridicule – with the implication that any other woman who dares speak her mind on this subject will meet the same fate.

While some of the criticism got this point, too much of it centred on the idea that Limbaugh had defamed Sandra Fluke by use of the terms “slut” and “prostitute”. A good example was this petition I was asked to sign:

Pull your advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s radio program immediately and permanently. He called a Georgetown Law School student testifying before Congress about women’s access to birth control a “slut” and a “prostitute.” His reprehensible remarks are an attack on all women, including women who are your customers.

The blurb accompanying the petition underscores the point by saying

We will not let Republicans brand women who assert their right to health care as “sluts” and “prostitutes.”

There’s a clear subtext here – and it’s a rather nasty one, reinforcing the same old good girl/bad girl dichotomy that I always thought feminism stood against. Sandra Fluke is just a woman who needs birth control (for her long-term monogamous relationship, no doubt), not because she sleeps around for fun or to earn her living. And how dare you “brand” her, Rush, by suggesting the latter?

The irony is that this has taken place after nearly a year of “slutwalks”, in which many women of the same demographic as Fluke appears to be – white, middle-class, educated, soft-left – have marched to “reclaim” the word “slut”, to work toward, according to the Slutwalk movement’s founders, “reappropriating the word ‘slut’ to mean someone who is confident in their sexuality…and not ashamed of enjoying consensual sex.” Does that petition sound like it was written by someone who thinks being a slut is nothing to be ashamed of?

Throw “prostitute” in with that and you get some good old-fashioned whorephobia which is, unfortunately, something white western feminism isn’t exactly unknown for. The bile that the likes of Melissa Farley has thrown at sex workers is out of fashion these days, with anti-sex-work feminists preferring a “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach. But it’s hard to see anything but a deep contempt for women who do sell sex, where the accusation of selling sex is deemed an unpardonable affront.

And lest anyone try to argue that those who have responded in this fashion are not offended by what Sandra Fluke was called, but merely by the fact that (seemingly) false and irrelevant allegations were made, let’s consider what would have happened if Limbaugh had used a different term. Say, “lesbian”. This is also a word that has been used to describe women who stand up for their rights, in a manner aimed at discrediting and silencing them. It is, however, a word that 21st century feminism would never consider an insult in its own right. If that was the word Limbaugh had used, I think it’s highly unlikely it would have aroused the same kind of outrage – and if it did, any petition would be very sensitively worded and would make absolutely clear that the objection was contextual and not to the suggestion of lesbianism per se. Because nowadays feminists (generally) don’t stigmatise women for the who of their sexuality – but some, it seems, are still happy to stigmatise women for the how many and the why. The women in question are stigmatised enough by society, sometimes with deadly consequences, without us adding to the hate.

Just as a postscript: I emailed the petition authors with my views on the matter, and received back a standard “thank you for your comments which we shall consider” reply. I then went ahead and signed the petition anyway because, as I said, there is a genuine issue around Limbaugh’s attempt to silence. But I added a comment to my signature stressing that that is the real issue – and that if Sandra Fluke did happen to be a slut or a prostitute, there would be nothing wrong with her anyway.

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Posted in Sex work, Sexuality and tagged feminism, Rush Limbaugh, slut-shaming, Slutwalk. Bookmark the permalink.

Thoughts on last night’s Prime Time

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

RTÉ’s Prime Time did a special last night on “Profiting from Prostitution”. It focused on the organised brothel sector, which mainly involves migrant women from non-EU countries, and as you might expect the situations of the women depicted in it ranged from dodgy to horrifying. It’ll no doubt be a major topic of discussion in the country today, so here are my two cents about it.

First, it’s worth recalling that what the programme depicted is already illegal. It’s illegal to run a brothel in Ireland. It’s illegal to knowingly profit from another person’s prostitution in Ireland. It’s illegal to advertise commercial sex in Ireland. So the kneejerk reaction that what we need are more criminal laws doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps if the police did not spend so much time targetting sex workers who flat-share they would be in a better position to go after these genuine abuse cases.

Secondly, there was a complete lack of any contextualisation of migrant women’s options in Ireland. Absolutely nothing was said about the fact that these are, by and large, women with nowhere else to go because they cannot legally work in Ireland. At one point the journalist asked “Why don’t they try to escape?” and I thought, surely now, it will be pointed out that “escaping” for them means a one-way ticket back to their country of origin – but no, not a word. The answer that was given instead focused entirely on fear of the person(s) controlling them, and while I have no doubt many of them are in such fear, it is hardly likely that is the whole story. New York’s Urban Justice Center published a report on the use of raids to fight trafficking, and interviewed many of the women “rescued”; they found that even those who appreciated the law enforcement intervention (which many didn’t) said that they would have left their situation voluntarily if only they knew where they could go. This is likely to be the case also for many of the women in Ireland, and it’s a major hole in the programme that it did not even consider it.

The programme also played to an anti-immigrant agenda, which unfortunately was reflected in some of the comments posted about it on Twitter. Here’s just one example:

Fantastic programme by Paul Maguire for #rtept but the worse thing we ever did was allow Eastern Europeans come & go in this Country#crims

— Browns Cows (@BrownsCows) February 7, 2012

While there was no explicit mention of the Swedish model, the programme concluded with the cliché that “none of this would exist if there wasn’t demand by Irish men”. The implication of this, clearly, is support for end-demand policies along the lines of those in Sweden. It’s worth highlighting what those policies have actually meant, in the context of “profiting from prostitution”:

According to one informant in Göteborg, there are probably more pimps involved in prostitution nowadays. The informant says the law against purchasing sexual services has resulted in a larger role and market for pimps, since prostitution cannot take place as openly.

A woman engaged in indoor prostitution in Göteborg relates that when the law took effect in 1999, about ten women engaged in prostitution from various Eastern European countries approached her business because they wanted to hide indoors. Informants from the Stockholm Prostitution Centre also mention that the law has opened the door to middlemen (pimps), because it has become more difficult for sellers and buyers of sexual services to make direct contact with one another. – Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, Prostitution in Sweden 2007, pp 47-48.

Now contrast this with the situation in New Zealand, which largely decriminalised its sex industry in 2003 and now allows up to four sex workers to share premises without becoming subject to brothel licensing laws:

Some brothel operators report difficulty attracting staff to work in brothels…Some brothels have closed down with operators citing the lack of staff and increasing competition for workers because of sole operators/SOOBs [Small Owner-Operated Brothels], as reasons for the failure of their business. – Report of the Prostitution Law Review Committee on the Operation of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 , p 38

It is also worth pointing out that the facile reduction of the economics of commercial sex to “no demand = no prostitution = no trafficking” has been questioned by a number of studies, one of the most important of which is Bridget Anderson and Julia O’Connell Davidson’s Trafficking – a Demand led Problem? Of course, artificial demand can be created in any market, and it would be foolish to expect the sex industry to be any different – but then, I’m regularly amazed at how often sex work is considered to be immune from ordinary economics principles.

One final note. While the faces of the women in this programme were blurred, I have absolutely no doubt that most of them could be easily identified by the people who know them, and unquestionably by those they are working for. I would have real fears that the people controlling some of these women could decide to punish them for the things that they said. I don’t know what, if anything, RTÉ is doing to try to avert this possibility but it has a responsibility to ensure that the innocent subjects of its investigations do not suffer harm as a consequence – and if it does not live up to that responsibility, it must be held to account.

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Saying it better than I could ever say it myself

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

There are times when I, as a non-sex worker, feel that I nonetheless have something to contribute to the debate with my legal education and research abilities. And then there are times when I feel that I can make the biggest contribution by shutting up and linking to something else. This is one of the latter occasions. Read this. Just do it. I couldn’t possibly add anything more to what it says.

And if you can’t read the whole article – but please, please, you really should – at the very least have a look at the Melissa Farley piece it links to. Never have her vicious hatred and contempt for sex workers, beneath a facade of concern, been so clearly exposed.

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Posted in Sex work and tagged Concern trolls, Melissa Farley, radical feminism. Bookmark the permalink.

UNAIDS Advisory Group condemns Swedish sex purchase ban

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Last month saw the publication of the long-awaited Report of the UNAIDS Advisory Group on HIV and Sex Work. The Advisory Group was established in 2009 by the Executive Director of UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, to provide clarification and advice around certain matters addressed in the most recent (2009) UNAIDS Guidance Note on HIV and Sex Work.

I finally had a chance to read the document this week, and there’s a lot of really good stuff in it. One of its most significant aspects is that it pulls no punches on the question of criminalising clients – not merely subsuming this issue, as many previous UN-associated statements have done, under a general opposition to laws against consensual commercial sex, but addressing it head-on and in some detail. On pages 5-6, it includes the Swedish sex-purchase ban in a section called “Laws, enforcement and policies that impede effective HIV responses for sex workers: Criminal prohibitions against sex work or aspects of it” and says:

The approach of criminalising the client has been shown to backfire on sex workers. In Sweden, sex workers who were unable to work indoors were left on the street with the most dangerous clients and little choice but to accept them.

In its “Conclusion and recommendations” on legal regimes, on page 8, it says:

States can take many actions to establish legal and policy environments that are conducive to universal access to HIV services for sex workers. Among these are the following: States should move away from criminalising sex work or activities associated with it. Decriminalisation of sex work should include removing criminal penalties for purchase and sale of sex…

Also significant is its criticism of the “end demand” strategy in general. In the introduction, on page 4, it says:

Policies and programmes to reduce the demand for sex work, designed ignoring the voices of sex workers, often result in unintended harms including increased HIV risk and vulnerability
for sex workers and their clients

On page 6, it points out:

There is very little evidence to suggest that any criminal laws related to sex work reduce demand for sex or the number of sex workers. Rather, all of them create an environment of fear and marginalisation for sex workers, who often have to work in remote and unsafe locations to avoid arrest of themselves or their clients. These laws can undermine sex workers’ ability to work together to identify potentially violent clients and their capacity to demand condom use of clients.

On pages 10-11, it notes that

well-meaning but ill-informed service and healthcare providers and policy actors from community-based organisations, nongovernmental organisations, donors, international organisations and government agencies believe that they are helping sex workers by calling for criminalisation of clients. However, there is no evidence that these “end demand” initiatives reduce sex work or HIV transmission, or improve the quality of life for sex workers…These laws do not reduce the scale of sex work, but they do make sex workers more vulnerable.

It calls instead for a shift of emphasis to ending demand for unprotected paid sex – and states on page 11:

Empowering sex workers to have greater control over their working conditions, rather than “end demand” approaches, should be the focus of HIV prevention efforts…When sex workers can successfully ensure that their customers use condoms, sex workers are less likely to become infected by HIV.

Of course, since it’s (usually) the clients who have to wear the condoms, convincing them that it’s in their interest to do so would go a long way toward reducing the demand for unprotected paid sex. The report describes working with clients in this way as the more effective strategy for HIV prevention, noting on page 14 that

demonising and marginalising clients are approaches that create major barriers to effective HIV programming with sex workers

On page 13 it gives a real-life example, from China, of how greater condom use has been achieved through a programme that treats clients not as irredeemable villains but rather as partners in the battle against HIV and other STIs:

Men working in industrial sectors that require them to work away from their families often engage in risky behaviours such as unprotected paid and casual sex…To address this, the International Labour Organization is working with large and medium-scale mining companies in southern China to promote responsible sexual behaviours among mine workers, including proper treatment of STIs, consistent condom use and elimination of violence against women, including sex workers. Preliminary results, assessed through qualitative and quantitative surveys, show significant increases in condom use and health-seeking behaviours, and increased reported condom use in paid and casual sex.

The report goes on to address the issue of trafficking. Here, I have a small difficulty with it, as it divides the sex industry into two distinct categories of voluntary/not trafficked and involuntary/trafficked:

A woman deciding to sell sexual services in order to support herself or her family is not a trafficked person. (page 17)

This is not strictly accurate as a matter of law, as the international definition of “trafficking” is broad enough to encompass some forms of “voluntary” sexual labour, such as debt bondage. It also ignores the fact that for most working people, not just sex workers, consent and coercion exist along a continuum, rather than being a binary.

Nonetheless, it’s absolutely true that sex work abolitionists tend to draw the line on that continuum in such a way as to strip the agency from most sex workers, especially migrants – and the Advisory Group is correct to highlight the problems this causes for HIV programmes. On page 18 it states:

Anti-trafficking measures often concentrate on getting people out of sex work, without considering whether they are trafficked, or whether the efforts will disrupt the access sex workers have to services that safeguard their health and well-being, and that create opportunities for them to share information and seek assistance for individuals they are concerned may have been trafficked. Many projects that focus on rescuing trafficked persons interrupt and undermine efforts to provide sex workers with access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.

The next page continues:

Forced rescue and rehabilitation practices lower sex workers’ control over where and under what conditions they sell sexual services and to whom, exposing them to greater violence and exploitation.

It goes on to say that when sex workers’ livelihoods are disrupted in this way,

this leads to social disintegration and a loss of solidarity and cohesion (social capital) among sex workers, including reducing their ability to access health care, legal and social services. Low social capital is known to increase vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections among sex workers and therefore has a detrimental impact on HIV prevention efforts.

Not surprisingly, therefore, it states on page 7 that

From the perspective of universal access to HIV services, undermining sex worker organisations is one of the most important negative effects of law enforcement practices.

Furthermore – and this is incredibly important for the migrant sex workers whom abolitionists are always fretting about:

The conflation of sex work and trafficking directly limits the ability of migrant sex workers to protect themselves from HIV, since they are often assumed to be trafficked. Migrant sex workers often live with the constant threat of being reported, arrested and deported which creates a real barrier to accessing health and welfare services.(page 19)

Of course, this is an immigration issue which would exist even if there was no question of trafficking. But the moral panic around trafficking has unquestionably created a greater impetus for raids on sex industry venues, which frequently lead to deportations of the people alleged to have been “trafficked”. (I think perhaps the report could have made this clearer.)

As with the battle against HIV, the battle against trafficking also needs sex workers’ participation if it is to have any real effect. On page 18, the report notes that

anti-trafficking efforts typically ignore the possibility of engaging sex workers as partners in identifying, preventing and resolving situations that do involve trafficked people. Sex workers themselves are often best placed to know who is being trafficked into commercial sex and by whom, and are particularly motivated to work to stop such odious practices.

To this end, it promotes the establishment of sex worker organisations, saying on page 20:

Organised groups of sex workers are also best placed to establish safe working norms within the sex industry, and influence other actors in the industry to ensure that trafficked adults and children are not retained in sex work…self-regulatory mechanisms, which are established, implemented and overseen by sex workers’ organisations can limit trafficking into the sex industry as well as the sexual exploitation of children. They also form a platform for addressing labour exploitation of sex workers.

The last major issue addressed in the report is the need for sex workers to be economically empowered. The main point here is that such programmes shouldn’t seek only to remove people from sex work, or be made conditional on their willingness/ability to leave the industry, but should aim to also improve the economic circumstances of those who remain in it:

By increasing economic options, sex workers can achieve greater financial security, which makes it easier for them to make important decisions that affect their lives…Improving economic options also helps sex workers to reduce the likelihood of having to accept clients’ requests for unprotected sex or that they will be put in situations that inhibit their ability to negotiate with clients and reduce the risk of violence or abuse. (pages 22-23)

Some interesting examples are provided of successful programmes around the world, such as one in Andhra Pradesh, India, where

Among the 803 sex workers interviewed, involvement in economic independence programmes was positively associated with control over both the type and cost of sexual services provided and with consistent condom use. (page 24)

I can predict a couple criticisms of the report. The make-up of the Advisory Group will probably discredit it in some eyes, since it includes affiliates of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (along with “independent experts from academia and civil society organisations, representatives of UNAIDS Co-Sponsors and the [UNAIDS] Secretariat”). My response to that is to ask whether it would be reasonable for a UNAIDS Advisory Group on HIV and Men Who Have Sex With Men to not include any organisations comprising or working with MSMs. Of course it would not. They would rightly be seen as experts on the subject, and any “advisory group” without them would be seen as lacking in credibility.

It may also be argued that this is merely a report of the Advisory Group and not a UNAIDS policy document as such. This is true. However, its conclusions are entirely consistent with things UNAIDS has been saying all along, even if takes them a bit further. It justifies its positions by reference to earlier UNAIDS publications, such as on page 5 where it says:

The UNAIDS Strategy 2011-2015: Getting to Zero identifies as one of its 10 goals that the number of “countries with punitive laws and practices around HIV transmission, sex work, drug use or homosexuality will be reduced by half”

and on page 9 where it states that the 2006 International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights by the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights/UNAIDS note that

states have a responsibility to ensure that criminal law is reviewed with the aim of removing criminal sanctions on sex work and ensuring that any non-criminal regulations support safe sex in sex work and ready access of sex workers to comprehensive HIV services.

The fact of the matter is that UNAIDS, and many other global health and human rights organisations, have been saying for a long time that criminalisation of sex work is a barrier to effective HIV prevention and treatment. They have focused on criminalisation of the seller because that is how criminalisation manifests itself in most of the world; the Nordic model may look pretty significant from where I’m sitting in the north west corner of Europe but globally, it’s little more than a footnote. So the fact that it hasn’t specifically been addressed by UNAIDS (or the other international health and human rights groups who oppose criminalisation generally) should in no way be taken to indicate that they approve of it. Given all that we’re learning about how it actually works in practice, in fact, it’s pretty inconceivable that they would.

Of course, abolitionists won’t care what UNAIDS thinks about it anyway, since their view is that sex work would be bad and wrong even if it cured HIV. But most people are not abolitionists, and I think they would appreciate the significance of UNAIDS publishing this document. It is a valuable addition to the growing catalogue of material showing the health and human rights failures of criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, anti-trafficking policy and the fixation on ending demand.

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Norwegian Directorate of Health, HIV groups criticise sex purchase ban

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

I’ve been meaning to blog about this since I ran across it last month, but other things kept getting in the way.

What follows are excerpts from Norway’s 2010 Progress Report to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. This is an official Norwegian government report, published by the Norwegian Directorate of Health, which is described on its website as “an executive agency and competent authority subordinate to the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services”. The UNAIDS website states that “Each report is presented exactly as submitted by the country, without editing or other alteration.” It was presented in English, and therefore there can be no suggestion of any mistranslation on my part, as some readers of this post might have hoped for. I think the broad thrust of my Google Translations in that post can now be safely seen as confirmed, because the UNAIDS report backs up several of the key points I cited.

In the section on National response to the AIDS epidemic – Prevention (page 36), it states that since the sex purchase ban was introduced:

Experience shows that it has become more difficult to have a good overview of and gain admittance to prostitution circles. In addition, it is reported that individual sex workers no longer want to carry condoms and lubricants out of fear that they will be used by the police as indicators of sale of sexual services. The support and health services for sex workers in Norway, describe increased vulnerability for sex workers. They argue that due to increased competition and greater stress on the market, sex workers are forced to offer clients e.g. unprotected sex. In addition, sex workers in escort services are forced to sell sex at the customer’s arena, which makes them more vulnerable to violence and abuse.

While much of this is simply quoting what others have “reported”, no attempt is made to challenge or counter these reports, which suggests that the Directorate considers them credible.

More detail appears in the appended National Composite Policy Index, a Q&A survey for UNAIDS with data compiled by the Norwegian Directorate of Health in conjunction with other government departments and NGOs. The NCPI submission was overseen by two Senior Advisors in the Directorate, and carries the Directorate’s imprimatur.

Part A of the survey, which was replied to solely by Norwegian government officials (i.e., not NGOs), contains the following very interesting Q&A:

Does the country have laws, regulations or policies that present obstacles to effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support for most-at-risk populations or other vulnerable subpopulations?

Yes

IF YES, for which subpopulations?

…Sex Workers – Yes…

The survey then asks for the description of any such laws, and the first law cited is the sex purchase ban. This is, however, qualified to some degree, as it is stated that

The potential negative consequences the new law against buying sex presents for the HIV preventive work, is unclear.

Later, in Question 79 about HIV prevention, one of the “remaining challenges in this area” is cited as

Possible weakening of preventive measures targeting sex workers as a result of the ban on purchase of sexual services

So the government officials who compiled this report are clearly hedging their bets about the actual negative impact of the law – which is entirely reasonable and appropriate given the lack of firm research data. Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored that the Directorate of Health is sufficiently concerned about the implications of the sex purchase ban to identify it as one of the policies that “present obstacles to effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support”.

Part B of the survey was answered by six NGOs, five of which appear to be exclusively HIV/AIDS-focused (the sixth is the sex worker organisation PION). As you might expect, their replies are a bit harder hitting than those from the government officials. On the issue of obstacles, the NGOs state:

The effects of police enforcement has affected the sex workers’ relation to other services, such as harm reduction services, as many refuse to associate with anything or anyone that may give the police a suspicion of sex work. Condoms are used as evidence, hence the sex workers position for negotiation with the client about safe sex as [sic] been weakened. (Question 128)

And asked about “remaining challenges” in the area of HIV prevention (Question 186), the NGOS say that the sex purchase ban

makes it increasingly difficult to reach sex workers with prevention work and information

But has the ban achieved its aim of reducing the amount of prostitution and trafficking? I’ll go back to the main body of the report for this one. Bearing in mind that the law only came into effect around 15 months earlier, the Directorate is equivocal on this subject too:

it is difficult to judge whether there has been a reduction in the number of women being trafficked into Norway, due to shortcomings in the methods for counting trafficking victims… The main social and health oriented services in Norway, report a reduction in the number of sex workers in street prostitution in Oslo by 58% from 2008 to 2009 (from 1200 to 500 persons), in Bergen by 7 % (from 125 to 116) and in Stavanger by 49% (from 61 to 31). In 2009, Pro-centre (low threshold harm reduction centre for men and women selling sex and national resource centre for prostitution) estimated that the number of sex workers on the indoor marked in Oslo is reduced by 16 % from 2008 (in total 900 persons in 2009). However, these estimates of persons in prostitution are based on those who have had contact with support services or placed advertisements, researchers maintain that these data are unreliable because not all prostitutes get counted and some might be counted twice. In addition, essential information about men selling sex is lacking. Knowledge on whether the ban has led to a reduction of the total sale of sex or if there are fewer clients, is not available. (pages 50-51)

It goes on to say, in relation to migrant sex workers,

Since the ban on purchase of sex was introduced there has been a significant reduction in registered sex workers from Nigeria and Central and Eastern Europe residing temporarily in Norway. It is not believed that these women have started in new professions in the Norwegian labour force. Reports from Denmark and Luxembourg indicated the e.g. many Nigerians have moved their business to this part of Europe. The number of registered Thai sex workers on the other hand, has increased. This can partly be explained by the fact that many Thai female, male and transpersons selling sex in Norway have permanent residence permit or Norwegian citizenship due to family reunification and are therefore less mobile.

I’m unclear as to why the number (as opposed to the proportion) of Thai sex workers should have increased since the ban, but this otherwise seems to validate a few points that I’ve made a couple times on this blog: first, that criminal laws are a poor method for getting people out of prostitution; second, that the effect of prostitution laws cannot be viewed in isolation from the effect of migration policies; and third, that what may seem to be a “reduction” in prostitution is all too often merely a diversion – which might look favourable to the jurisdiction that recorded the “decline” but does fuck all to actually protect anyone. If those Nigerians and CEE sex workers had been trafficked or otherwise exploited in Norway, and undoubtedly some of them were, they’re still being exploited in Denmark or Luxembourg or wherever. Norway’s law hasn’t done a thing to help them, it just made them someone else’s problem.

So, to summarise the report: Norwegian NGOs in the HIV/AIDS sector are very clear that the sex purchase ban poses an obstacle to effective HIV prevention. The Norwegian Directorate of Health is more circumspect on the issue – not surprising when its website states that “The political frameworks to which the Directorate is subject are the political platform of the government in office at any time and resolutions of the government and of Parliament” – but it certainly seems to be a lot more skeptical about the claims for positive impacts of the law than it is about the claims for negative impacts.

All too often, the law’s supporters are portrayed as if their view was shared across Norwegian and Swedish society, with only irrelevant people like sex workers themselves dissenting. That isn’t true in Sweden, where criticism has come from such sources as the Discrimination Ombudsman, the National Board of Health and Welfare and the Federation for LGBT Rights (citations in this post), and clearly it isn’t true in Norway, either. It is essential that these opposing views be included in any honest and informed debate over the adoption of the law in other countries.

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Swedish government official sacked for running brothels

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Interesting follow-up to the story I posted about here, in which it was shown that, contrary to the claims of advocates of the Swedish model, brothels continue to thrive under the sex purchase ban. Now, it seems that they’ve had a little bit of help from friends in high places:

A high-ranking civil servant in Sweden’s defence ministry has been sacked after it was revealed he was involved in running several Thai massage parlours on the side…

The raids revealed that the wife of the defence ministry official operated three massage parlours in the Stockholm area and that he served as an alternate board member of the company that ran the operation.

And according to the Swedish Tax Agency,

“We have clear indications both in the trafficking of girls and that many deal with unreported wages and pay unreasonably low payroll taxes”.

This isn’t the first time a high-ranking official has been found to be personally involved in undermining Sweden’s claims to have all but eliminated trafficking and sex work. Last year, the chief of police in Uppsala, Sweden’s fourth largest city, was convicted on numerous charges including rape, purchasing sex, and “procuring” (translation: he was running a prostitution ring, involving underage girls). And regular Swedish press reports prove that thay have as many examples as any other country of police and government officers being (literally) caught with their pants down.

Sweden’s defenders would probably argue that any country can have its bad apples and that Sweden is doing more than most to try to stop them. And that’s fair enough. What gets my goat is the deliberate deception of those Swedish officials who come to other countries and tell us that they don’t have these problems since they enacted the sex purchase ban. The claim that it’s “impossible to run a brothel in Sweden” when your own fucking government official is running several of them – and when their tax non-compliance seems to be the main source of your interest in them.

We should be able to have an honest debate about the actual effects of the sex purchase ban. But that requires Swedish officials to be honest about the sex trade that has continued in their country even after the ban was enacted, and to stop pretending that they have solved their trafficking problem with the stroke of a legislative pen.

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On Sheila Farmer and the curious abolitionist approach to “decriminalisation”

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Some good news from England last week as charges were dropped against Sheila Farmer, who had been accused the offence of “brothel-keeping” for sharing a flat with another sex worker. You can read about it in her own words here.

Earlier, when she was still facing charges, she had addressed the London Slutwalk and called for this law to be changed in the interests of sex workers’ safety. A video of her speech (as well as that of an English Collective of Prostitutes representative, Niki Adams) can be watched here.

I found that video intriguing, mainly because of the support that Farmer and Adams appear to be getting from the Slutwalk attendees. This makes perfect sense as a logical matter, of course; Slutwalk is all about trying to change the mindset that rape victims “ask for it”, and no one bears the brunt of that mindset more than sex workers. I am also aware that the march’s organisers specifically invited sex workers to take part, and that the “official” Slutwalk London group has continued to support Sheila Farmer and to call for a change in the brothel-keeping laws.

It’s quite a contrast with the way these issues have been dealt with here in Ireland. The only Slutwalk that has taken place here, in Galway, made no attempt to include sex workers and indeed they faced hostility and indifference when they asked if they were invited. More important is the fact that there have been a number of Sheila Farmers here over the past few years, and the silence about them from the feminist movement has been deafening. Mainstream Irish feminism is pretty much lined up behind the Swedish model and so you hear plenty from them when, for example, men are arrested for trying to buy sex. Cases like this one and this one, however, in which women are arrested for trying to sell it under safer conditions, don’t seem to attract their interest.

In fact, Irish sex work abolitionists appear to oppose any attempt to protect sex workers’ safety by allowing them to share premises. Several years ago the issue was raised in the context of a British reform proposal (which could have applied to the North of Ireland); the response by leading abolitionist group Ruhama was to oppose this as a form of “legalising prostitution”. And when the sex worker organisation Turn Off The Blue Light (TOBL) published a study showing that women like Sheila Farmer account for the vast majority of “brothel-keeping” convictions in Ireland, the response of these groups was to ignore the substantive issue entirely and instead try to discredit TOBL. Not once, to my knowledge, have any of these groups ever said that sex workers who share premises for safety should not face charges of brothel-keeping.

And this isn’t only an Irish thing. In the US, Donna Hughes of the University of Rhode Island has endorsed the Swedish model, yet she described as a “legislative victory” the 2009 state law which made selling sex illegal (previously only street solicitation was). In Canada, none other than Melissa Farley herself testified for the Crown in the Bedford case, which concerns two laws used mostly or entirely against sex workers: one essentially a soliciting clause, and one that prohibits indoor prostitution on all but an outcall basis.

The bizarre thing is that many of those who take these positions describe themselves as supporting “decriminalisation” of the women in sex work. They say that they want the men who buy sex to be criminalised instead. Yet here they are supporting laws that criminalise the seller. This is a glaring contradiction, and one they must be called to account for.

Of course, not all sex work abolitionists take the Hughes/Farley/Ruhama line on this; there are some who do not believe that sex workers should be prosecuted for working indoors or in pairs or whatever. I wish they would be as vocal about these matters as they are in calling for more penalties against sex purchasers. But I also take issue with those who use the terminology of “decriminalisation” when they only want one party to the transaction to escape penalties.

In the radfem theory that sex work abolitionism is based on, prostitution is conceptualised as a form of violence against women, analogous to (or perhaps even indistinguishable from) rape. And just as women who have been raped are the victims of a criminal act, so are sex workers (“prostituted women”). It makes little sense to talk about “decriminalising” people for an act committed against them rather than by them. As far as I’m aware, campaigners against Saudi Arabia’s rape laws don’t go around saying they want “decriminalisation” when they mean they don’t want women to be prosecuted for being raped.

Of course, I’m not the tsar of the English language (unfortunately), and so I can’t stop people from saying they support decriminalisation of selling sex when what they really mean is that they want commercial sex to remain illegal but its nature redefined (really, what they want is the actus reus of the crime of prostitution to be buying rather than selling sex). But if they don’t support the Sheila Farmers of this world, they have no basis for using the d-word at all. If, like Ruhama, you are so horrified by the idea of “legalising prostitution” in any way that you would rather see some sex workers continue to risk prosecution – or take unnecessary chances with their safety in order to avoid it – you do not support decriminalising them, full stop, and it is well past time for the journalists who give you reams of media space to call you out on it.

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Radio-debating the Swedish sex purchase ban

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

Yesterday I took part in a radio discussion with a representative of the Turn Off The Red Light campaign, which seeks the introduction of the Swedish sex trade law in Ireland. We only had seven minutes between us, and unfortunately the time did not end up being divided evenly: we each got to make a brief introductory statement, but in the second round, I was left with only a very short time to respond to quite a lengthy (and obviously well-rehearsed) defence of the Swedish law. And I was asked by the hosts to spend that short time answering a different question entirely, so I didn’t get a chance to respond at all to the points raised in that defence.

On the chance that anyone who listened to the “debate” is reading this blog wondering how I would have responded, I will briefly summarise the points that were made and what I would have said to them if I had had the opportunity. I’m keeping my answers short as if I was actually saying them on the air, but I’m happy to expand on the points if anyone wants me to (though I won’t have the opportunity until after Christmas).

I know the Swedish law is working because I travelled to Sweden last year and saw it for myself.

The speaker is referring to a trip in which anti-sex work advocates were accompanied by Department of Justice officials. I did a Freedom of Information request on that trip and learned that they did not meet with a single sex worker or representative organisation, and only met with supporters of the law. How can you measure whether a law is working if you don’t talk to anyone affected by it?

The law has been very successful at reducing prostitution and trafficking…

Great claims have been made about the Swedish law but there is little evidence to back them up. The Swedish government admitted in its report to UNAIDS last year that they have no idea how much prostitution there is in the country because it is such a hidden phenomenon. Swedish police reports indicate that the trafficking problem has grown significantly over the period since the law was brought in.

… compared to neighbouring countries where the amount is exploding.

Sweden was estimated to have less prostitution than neighbouring countries before the law was ever introduced. It is not surprising that commercial sex would be more visible now in those countries, where it has not been criminalised, than in Sweden where it has. However, the statistics that are being used for those countries are unreliable. In Denmark they derive from a figure that actually represents an estimate of female tourists. In Finland a figure that was specifically stated to be voluntary migrant sex workers has been misreported as “trafficking victims”.

The Swedish people support the law.

The same poll that showed Swedish people are largely in favour of the law also showed that only around 20% think it is actually working. Furthermore, about half of them think that sex workers should also be criminalised under the law.

Young people’s attitudes are changing.

A study carried out by the Swedish youth board only a couple years ago showed that young people have become more, not less, accepting of commercial sex.

We need this law in Ireland where migrants make up more than 90% of the sex industry.

That figure is derived from an audit of the women posting on one particular day on an escort ads website. It doesn’t take into account other sectors of the sex industry, sex workers not advertising on that day or on that site, the possibility of duplicate ads or the possibility of faked “foreign” nationalities. Many of those “migrants” are from Britain or other Global North countries where their nationality does not carry any implication of trafficking – and even those from less well-off countries cannot be assumed to have been trafficked.

[The final point was stated to be in response to my opening comment that there had been no consultation with the people who earn their living by selling sex:]

We have a coalition of one million people.

That is an extraordinary number for an island of only six million; I would be interested to see the evidence for it. But getting other people to support your cause is no substitute for consulting with those whose lives will be affected by the policies you advocate.

It’s fair to say that even if our time had actually been split evenly, I would have needed more time to respond to her points than she needed to make them. But that’s because the issue is more complicated than the simple soundbites that anti-sex work advocates put forward. The fact that they can boil things down to unsupportable claims and dodgy statistics probably goes some way toward explaining why their position is more widely reflected than mine, so in that respect it’s certainly an effective media strategy. It isn’t one I’d be proud of, though, as someone who prefers to deal in facts.

My thanks to DIT Radio for having me on, anyway.

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The intersectionality of irregular migration and violence against sex workers

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

Note: I’m very pressed for time so I won’t be able to include a lot of links in this post. If there’s anything you’d like me to back up, leave a comment and I will do so when I get back to the blog after Christmas.

Tomorrow afternoon, the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland is holding a march in Dublin, in solidarity with the undocumented.

This is a march that I heartily endorse. Irish immigration policy promotes irregular migration/residency in a lot of ways: we have the lowest refugee recognition rate in the EU; we don’t grant a statutory right to family reunification to anyone except refugees and EU citizens; we have work permit rules that make it easy for people to become undocumented without even knowing it, or that can force them to remain in an unbearable situation (such as with an abusive spouse or employer) if they want to retain their status. It is, quite frankly, a shocking way for a country that has exported so many of its own people to treat those who come here.

It is also ironic that successive governments have refused to consider a regularisation scheme, even after they’ve made pests of themselves to the US authorities demanding the same for the thousands of undocumented Irish. Although I support that too, as a matter of kneejerk anti-border principle, I have to say I find it difficult to get more worked up about the people at risk of being deported back to Ireland than about the people in Ireland at risk of being deported to, say, the DRC. (It’s called “perspective”.) As a practical matter, too, I think it must be pretty hard for American politicians to take these demands seriously, knowing that the Irish government making them wouldn’t bring in the same laws itself.

So I hope a lot of people turn out for this march. And most of all, I hope it’s a step toward the adoption of a sensible and compassionate immigration policy (though in all honesty, I can’t say I’ll be holding my breath).

Tomorrow is also, of course, the International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers. Events will be held around the globe to commemorate this – but not, as far as I know, here in Ireland.

In the absence of such an event, the march in solidarity with the undocumented would be an ideal place to highlight the subject of violence against sex workers, because there is a clear intersection between the two issues. Undocumented migrants in the sex industry can be at particular risk of violence, for a number of reasons:

The inability to migrate legally leaves them reliant on smugglers and traffickers, who may carry out violent acts against them.
In addition to any ordinary criminal penalties around selling sex, they also face the threat of deportation. This may make them particularly likely to turn to pimps to hide them from police. While not all pimps are violent, it’s obviously a pretty big risk. The threat of deportation also means they may be less likely to report violent acts against them, whether at the hands of pimps, clients, people posing as clients, disgruntled neighbourhood residents or ordinary arseholes who feel entitled to abuse the sex workers unfortunate enough to encounter them.
Police officers may compel undocumented migrants to grant them sexual favours in exchange for not reporting their unlawful presence.
Undocumented migrants are generally prohibited from working in legal sex sectors; the health and safety protections that legal workers have in some countries generally do not apply to the undocumented.
Brothel raids tend to target those establishments where the presence of undocumented workers is suspected. These raids often result in physical and/or sexual abuse of the people “rescued”. Since the raids don’t address the reason for entry into sex work in the first place, often the “rescued” persons just return to the industry; if they are in debt bondage, they may sink further into debt as a result of the income lost from the raid, thereby heightening their vulnerability to whomever the debt is owed to. Retrafficking is also a risk in some of these cases.
Undocumented migrants do not have the option that many resident sex workers have to find another source of income if their income from sex work declines. This may make it more difficult for them to refuse clients who are known to be “bad dates”, or whom their instincts tell them they should avoid.

This is just a handful of examples. I could probably think of more if had more time, but hopefully the point has come across. It is worth highlighting again Nick Mai’s recent study of migrant sex workers in Britain, which found that overwhelmingly, they considered regularisation of their status to be the single thing they needed most to protect themselves from abuse and exploitation. In that, I’m sure they would find common ground with the non-sex-working migrants whom the organisers of tomorrow’s march probably had in mind.

Regrettably, I won’t be at the march tomorrow. I’ll be taking a holiday from my own work, which is in an office where I’ve little risk of violence (barring a colleague going postal). I’ll be travelling between two different countries in which I have an absolute right to enter, remain and work. But my thoughts will be with those who aren’t so lucky – for either reason or, especially, for both.

Thoughts on “Muff March”

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

Hot on the heels of the Slutwalk phenomenon comes this really interesting protest yesterday by UK Feminista against the “designer vagina” trend. According to their press release, they were marching

against a ‘pornified’ culture driving increasing numbers of women to seek vaginal cosmetic surgery, and to protest against the cosmetic surgeons profiting from it.

UK Feminista were accompanied by feminist performance artists the Muffia, pictured below on a previous outing, and by the Solent Feminist Network who stated that they would be marching between cosmetic surgery clinics

wearing our ‘hairy muffs’ proudly and celebrating female genitalia with its natural variety

Now first of all, I have to say that I love the basic idea of this protest. It’s bold and clever and addresses a very real issue affecting women’s bodily image. While I absolutely believe in a woman’s right to do what she wants with every part of her body, I also think that those who don’t want to do anything to the appearance of their genitalia are being increasingly made to feel awkward or ashamed for that choice. I know that some women feel that removing all their pubic hair has benefits beyond the cosmetic, and that’s fine for them, but as a trend I think it has been mostly negative for women because it just gives us another part of our bodies to be insecure about. And we didn’t need that, thanks.

I think it would be great to get to the point where a decision on whether or not to remove your body hair (any of it) was no different from a decision on whether or not to get your ears pierced, which, in western culture anyway, truly is a simple matter of personal taste and not in any way something that women are pressured about. So I’m totally in favour, in principle, of anything that promotes the legitimacy of leaving your body hair intact. (The link to surgery, if it isn’t obvious, is that labiaplasty was nearly unheard of before the hair-removal craze. Nobody, well at least almost nobody, cared what their labia looked like back in the days when you couldn’t really see them anyway.)

But where UK Feminista lose me is where they turn this demonstration from what it should be, a celebration of women’s natural bodies, into a protest against porn. Porn is to blame for the rise in designer vaginas, they insist, stating that

Researchers at Kings College London carrying out a study into demand for labiaplasty have suggested this increase stems from the increasing ‘pornification’ of culture.

A citation is helpfully provided, and so I looked it up and while it is true that this is “suggested” by the Kings College researchers, what the researchers actually say is that

We haven’t completed the research, but there is suspicion that this is related to much greater access to porn, so it is easier for women to compare themselves to actresses who may have had it done.

Now that’s a pretty ambiguous statement, I think. Does “there is suspicion” mean “the evidence so far suggests”? Or does it mean “Our research hypothesis is”, and they haven’t actually yet found the evidence to prove it?

The “access to porn” part is problematic, too. Just because somebody has access to porn doesn’t mean they actually do access it. I’m sure UK Feminista would make the same point in regard to studies showing lower rape rates in places where there is more access to internet porn. And it might be “easier for women to compare themselves” to women in porn, but that doesn’t mean that they are comparing themselves to women in porn. Maybe they are, and this study actually is about finding a direct link between porn-watching, vagina-comparing and labiaplasty – but that’s not made clear in the article that UK Feminista cite as a source for their claims.

I have always felt that porn is too easy a target for a lot of the societal ills that it’s blamed for. And I’m particularly dubious about the idea that it can be blamed for women’s insecurity about our bodies. In part, this is based on my own experiences. I was a teenage girl and young woman in the pre-internet days and while it was possible to access porn if you went looking for it, most of us didn’t, plenty of us hardly if ever saw it, it was nowhere near as readily accessible as it is now and yet we were still beset by bodily insecurities. So clearly something else was at work there.

The “pornification of culture” idea is, I guess, based on the notion that porn infiltrates mainstream media, which then does the damage that porn itself couldn’t do directly. But even here I think this is far from clear, because the images projected in porn aren’t necessarily the ones promoted in the mainstream media. Look at the issue of super-skinny fashion models. This is totally a mainstream media (in particular, magazines aimed at women) thing – you almost never see stick-figured women in mainstream porn, because that’s not the body shape that is thought to appeal to the major consumers of porn, i.e., men. So why do so many women buy into the preference for a rail-thin body over curves? They’re not getting this from porn – not even indirectly. Why isn’t the fashion industry, which promotes this ideal (along with the beauty industry, which has a multitude of things to answer for) subject to the same feminist opprobrium as the porn industry? Is it because many feminists like fashion and beauty?

To be fair, I’m not claiming that those industries have escaped feminist criticism. But I have been at far too many feminist events where participants spent significant amount of time railing against the evils of porn while saying little or nothing about the evils of the fashion and beauty industries, which I am pretty sure you would find have a much greater impact on women’s self-image.

In a similar vein, I’m not convinced by the argument that porn itself is to blame for the trend toward female pubic hairlessness. Again, I return to the fact that the women in mainstream porn tend to look the way that the porn industry thinks will appeal to men. This is pretty logical; the main purpose of mainstream porn is to get men off, and it best achieves that purpose by featuring women that men are attracted to. But a lot of men old enough to remember when pubic hair was the norm say they were more freaked out than attracted the first time they encountered a woman without it. So it seems unlikely to me that this trend would have appeared in mainstream porn until there was already a market for it, and thus porn was probably reflecting rather than starting the trend. I’ve tried without success to find actual studies on this; if anyone knows of any, please let me know.

I do accept that porn could reinforce this trend, and that it may have shaped the expectations of a younger generation who had never encountered women’s natural bodies. But if boys are learning what they know about women’s bodies from porn, is that really the fault of the porn industry? Is it not the fault of a society that tries to hide even the most basic sexuality information from children for as long as possible, virtually ensuring that porn is the first place they do get it?

And finally, if porn really does have the influence that some feminists attribute to it, why not turn that to our advantage? Why not support those porn artists who do promote women’s bodies in their natural beauty? I’m thinking of people like Sasha Grey, who apparently confused the hell out of emotional 12-year-olds all over the internet when she appeared on HBO sporting a full bush, and Furry Girl who, for all her self-proclaimed anti-feminism (and occasionally dodgy politics) has done plenty to promote the idea that a sexually attractive woman doesn’t have to be a hairless one. There are also plenty of women out there making amateur porn who simply aren’t bothered to conform to current trends. Why not celebrate these efforts, instead of lumping them all into this great untouchable category of awfulness that is how many feminists indiscriminately see “porn”?

I know the answer to these questions already, of course. I’ve been involved in feminist activism for too long to think that my resolutely anti-porn comrades can be persuaded to drop that crusade and instead frame the battle as one for better, more inclusive porn. But as long as porn isn’t going away, and we all know it isn’t, I still think it’s an argument worth making.

In any case, to the extent that it did promote the idea that women shouldn’t feel compelled to conform to this trend, I hope the Muff March went well. Future marches might go even better if they drop the unnecessarily alienating anti-porn rhetoric and welcome all women who want to demonstrate in support of women’s natural bodies – including those who make a living by showing off theirs.

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