We have collected a number of articles which question many of the beliefs behind sex work by leading doctors and specialists in this field. Feel free to comment about them (or recommend other articles) in the forum section if you would like.
Sex work articles
Men who buy sex: a nasty group whose DNA should be on file
A few months ago, Melissa Farley published a story in Newsweek with a lot of dire comments about men who buy sex as the cause of prostitution and violence towards sex workers. The research paper behind that story is more scientific and less irresponsible than her previous work, thank goodness. I don’t believe there is some absolute real scientific vision we can bring to social research, but there are better and worse attempts, and this one is better. For one thing, it used the usually omitted mechanism of the control group, here comparing men who buy sex (her pathologised group) with men who don’t buy sex (belonging to the same demographic).
Farley does not like the oft-heard notion that such large numbers of men buy sex at some point in their life it becomes almost normal, since that might justify fatalistically accepting commercial sex as a timeless aspect of life impossible to eradicate. The research here concludes that men who buy sex are different from men who don’t, associated, for one thing, with other criminal activities. This leads Farley to recommend treating them more like criminals – specifically, like sex offenders. In Creating Monsters I warned that, the way things are going in the End Demand movement, clients could be conceptualised as a new category of sex offender, to be placed on the infamous registers that make living a conventional life nearly impossible for many. It turns out a few US states had already started thinking this way, and so had Farley.
The dangers of sex work in Canada
by Andrea Houston, Xtra! 12 December 2011:
Every night Lexi Tronic risks her life at work. If she gets beaten or raped, she feels she can’t call police to report the attack because – at least for now – Tronic is also a criminal. “What happens when you’re trapped in someone’s car with the doors locked? You don’t have any options. It’s fight or flight,” she says. Tronic is a 10-year veteran in the sex trade who has worked both on the streets and from her home, as many sex workers have, she says.
On Dec 17, the transgender and sex-workers-rights activist will join others to mark the ninth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Such violence is a pervasive problem that is largely preventable and often ignored, she says, noting that most violent crimes against sex workers go underreported, unaddressed and unpunished. Tronic started as a sex worker in Winnipeg at Higgins Ave and Waterfront Dr, a notorious spot known for transgender sex trade workers, she says. “One of those hardcore areas where girls turn up dead or missing.”
Vocational training as Rescue so far mostly useless: sex workers in India
India mandated the rehabilitation of sex workers last year – in case they want to be rehabilitated. The story below tells how the concept has become a subject of dispute. Two activist authorities give reasons why vocational training is problematic:
In many cases, women get into prostitution after trying out other options like domestic work, as sex work is more remunerative.
Rehabilitation cannot be on moral grounds alone. Recommendations made by the court or the panel should have a long-term financial benefit as well as ways to involve the family and other members of the society to give prostitutes social security.
Someone else says some women have been glad to work at MacDonalds instead. This is of course considered morally superior to prostitution, but what about dancing?
Girls who danced in the bars of Mumbai . . . found a means of earning a livelihood that was more paying than sex work… But even this was banned on moral grounds whereas what was needed was to make these places more safe for women.
There are proud sex workers in Sweden (which some have known all along)
There are people who believe that all the values expressed and rhetoric declaimed in places like the building to the left – the Swedish parliament in Stockholm – represent the reality of the country itself. There are Swedish government spokespeople who claim there are no voluntary sex workers, and no clients, and no sex venues or prostitution or trafficking in all of Sweden. But do you really believe that a law banning the purchase of sex could achieve all of that? It is just highly improbable, as it is when other governments claim there is no homosexuality here (sometimes said about Somalia, Zimbabwe, Uganda) or the veil has no place in our country (said by some about France, Belgium). Of course there are gay people and women wearing headscarves in those places – but it is convenient for mainstream politicians to pretend otherwise.
Sweden is one of the big-time gay-rights-friendly spots in the world: RFSL (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter – Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) dates back to 1950 and receives government funding. So it is significant that RFSL supported and encouraged Sweden’s sex worker organisation Rose Alliance to participate in Stockholm’s Pride Parade this year. The argument is: Just as other sexual identities and orientations are marginalised and deprived of rights, so are sex workers. Obvious: sexual autonomy, the right to do what you want with your own body. Money is not a defining element.
Sex workers and Violence against Women: Utopic Visions or Battle of the Sexes?
The other day, discussing the recommendation that DNA should be taken from men who buy sex, I ended with a question: how can anyone maintain a utopic vision about gender equality that relies on punishing so many people as criminals? That reminded me I had asked the same question in an article published more than ten years ago.
Although I wouldn’t write it exactly the same way now, I stand by its basic ideas. If Gender Equality is one of feminism’s goals, how can we imagine it without reducing everything to black and white, perpetrator and victim, crime, crime, crime?
Fallen women, including the one Charles Dickens didn’t save
Two hundred years ago in Europe, women who misbehaved sexually were referred to as fallen from God’s grace. In mid- and late-19th-century paintings, the fallen woman was portrayed in a physically low position: gazing hopelessly up at the sky, kneeling in shame and sometimes being raised up by a kind person, as in this picture by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.
A 1949 photo by Art Shay, also called Fallen Woman, shows the persistence of this iconography: the low, twisted, deviant body.
It is interesting to study the history of a phantom: the phantom of Rescue, of the woman who needs to be Saved, when it turns out she doesn’t want saving because she doesn’t consider what awaits her after being saved to be an improvement.
This week is Charles Dickens’s anniversary, reminding me that he was involved in Urania Cottage, a Rescue home for prostitutes run by an upper-class woman, Angela Burdett-Coutts. I didn’t remember that he once tried to save a woman who didn’t want saving, though (like Nicholas Kristof who bought a girl out of a Cambodian brothel who returned not long after). Here are excerpts from the story of a rescue attempt that was successfully averted.
Gold digging with gold miners: an old tradition
The only objectionable thing in the story below, which describes one of prostitution’s classic traditions, is the editor’s addition of scare quotes around the word work to describe what the women are doing. He or she slipped in the last paragraph, though, and left the punctuation out. Since selling sex to miners in a position to pay well has always been a draw to mobile workers, there is really no ‘news’ in this story at all. I note that no one felt called to claim these women are being trafficked or enslaved.
I particularly appreciate the matter-of-fact statement from one woman, who finds the work filthy but puts up with it as part of a life plan to get ahead. Will someone say that she is trafficked in the sense of being forced by circumstance? If so, do you mean that no other job available to this woman pays enough for her to make such a plan? That is likely, but won’t it be great for her when she does get to do what she wants? I mean, aren’t you glad for her? If she doesn’t think she’s damaging herself by selling sex, why should you?
Letter from the prostitute that didn’t want saving, 1858
Prostitution, referred to under headings like The Great Social Evil or A Delicate Question, was a common topic of comment in The Times of London in the mid-19th century. The different points of view expressed have always seemed to me very similar to what we hear today, except for rhetorical style. Some anonymous letters purported to come from prostitutes themselves, and opinions differed as to whether they were genuine or written by campaigners.
One letter, from 24 February and referred to the other day vis-a-vis Charles Dickens’s Rescue fantasy, feels very genuine to me because I recognise its tone and the points made from writings by and conversations with contemporary sex workers. Dickens thought it was genuine as well but appears not to have clocked that the writer condemns the Rescuers (I can hear her saying fuck off quite clearly).
She distinguishes herself from complainers like a previous letter-writer prostitute, and from the seduced-and-abandoned sort of woman, acknowledging that both exist but not in the enormous numbers moralists were claiming. She despises lazy women who think prostitution will be easy, as well as married women who take up the trade. She is anti-foreigner, recommending the police deport non-English prostitutes, and she thinks removing a lot of prostitutes from the street is not a bad idea. She scoffs at the exaggerated statistics thrown about (at the time, the unfounded number was 80,000 prostitutes in London). She suggests that the term victim be applied to the horrendously paid workers who carry out more respectable occupations available to women at the time (such as those in these posed photos) and defends those who also sell sex from the label prostitute.
Study on New York sex workers reveals surprising results
SF Weekly on the cold shoulder received by researchers discovering New York City teen sex workers are not predominantly girls and not predominantly controlled by pimps.
Through interviews and analysis of public records, Village Voice Media has found that the federal government spends about $20 million a year on public awareness, victims' services and police work related to domestic human trafficking, with a considerable focus on combating the pimping of children. An additional $50 million-plus is spent annually on youth homeless shelters, and since 1996 taxpayers have contributed a total of $186 million to fund a separate program that provides street outreach to kids who may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.