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Were Sex Workers Caught Up in Recent Seattle Raid Really Being Trafficked?
01/27/2016 06:47 pm ET | Updated 4 days ago
Alison Bass
Award-winning journalist, author and journalism professor
ARIUSZ NAWROCKI
In early January, law enforcement in the Seattle area shut down a popular website used by sex workers to advertise their services and by customers to review sex workers. Police also raided a number of luxury apartments in Bellevue where women were allegedly selling sex and arrested a dozen men and two women for arranging the liaisons and moderating The Review Board (TRB) website.
In a recent interview, Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett told me that his men, working with the King County Sheriff's office and the FBI, had broken up a "well-organized ring promoting sex slavery." He called the shuttered website an "anti-list of the underworld sex trafficking industry."
There's just one hitch. The women whom law enforcement said they "rescued" in this raid may not actually have been trafficked. U.S. law defines trafficking as "the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion." It's worth noting that King County's prosecutor did not charge any of the people arrested with trafficking, only with promoting prostitution. The women rounded up in the January 6 raid were all from South Korea, and while police say that some of them may have been doing sex work to pay off debts their families owed back home, the question remains: were these women being coerced or forced into sex work?
I'll get to that in a moment, but a larger question looms: is shutting down websites and arresting customers the most effective approach to curbing sexual exploitation and helping sex workers who may or may not want to get out of the life? Sex work advocates certainly don't think so.
"The overwhelming majority of sex workers who advertised on TRB were white cisgendered [straight] women who were not being coerced into a damn thing," says Savannah Sly, a Seattle sex worker and president of Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), a national advocacy group. "Now these women have one less safe advertising venue."
As I discovered in researching my book, Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, being able to advertise on online sites like TRB allows sex workers to more carefully screen potential customers and work indoors. Research shows that when sex workers can't advertise online, they are often forced onto the street, where it is more difficult to screen out violent clients and negotiate safe sex (i.e. sex with condoms). They are also more likely to have to depend on exploitative pimps to find customers for them.
Shutting down such websites make sex work more dangerous in other ways as well. "What the removal of these advertising sites do is remove low-risk clients who have a lot to lose from the client pool," Sly says. "That leaves high-risk or violent predators who don't respond to increased law enforcement. And because you have reduced demand, you're more likely to agree to see the guy who is more dangerous."
That's exactly what happened in Sweden, when that country began making the purchase of sex illegal in 2000, studies show. Sex workers there were exposed to more violent clients and less able to negotiate safe sex (i.e. sex with condoms). Yet the criminalization of buyers did not reduce trafficking in the region or the overall number of people selling sex in Sweden, according to the Swedish government's own reports.
Criminalizing prostitution, whether from the demand or supply end, is not going to curb trafficking or make significant inroads into the soaring global demand for commercial sex. Indeed, one recent study found that in countries where sex work is illegal, trafficking increased to meet the demand. What this New York University study found was that when voluntary sex workers leave the business because they fear being penalized, traffickers step in to the fill the vacuum with women who aren't doing the work by choice.
If such findings are true, then spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a ten-month undercover investigation (as Seattle law enforcement did) makes no sense. It will only make it more dangerous for sex workers and allow violent clients (who prey on non-prostitutes as well) to operate with impunity. Sex workers are like canaries in the coal mine when it comes to violent predators: they are often the first to spot such men but they can't raise an alarm for fear of being arrested themselves. That's one reason why Amnesty International and the World Health Organization, among other groups, call for the decriminalization of sex work.
Now back to the issue of whether we're really dealing with trafficking in this case. The court documents include no affidavits or victim statements from the women themselves. According to sex work advocates, law enforcement did mention one woman who said her family in South Korea was in debt bondage and that if she didn't do sex work and pay off their debt, her family might be hurt. If that's true, such coercion shouldn't be permitted, here or in South Korea. But I can't help but wonder about the element of coercion involved in obtaining the statement of an illegal immigrant who knows she may be jailed or deported unless she depicts herself as a trafficking victim.
According to the court documents, the South Korean women who sold sex in the Seattle area paid their own way to travel there "on their own volition." That doesn't sound like they were being transported against their will. There is also no evidence that these women were being forced to stay in the apartments or forced to sell sex. Indeed, the instructions on the TRB site says explicitly that "No means NO. Regardless of your particular expectations, what is offered is completely up to the provider." The website goes on to say, "Providers are encourage to report continued boundary testing by any client."
Sex work advocates acknowledge that some of the South Korean sex workers might have been exploited. "These women are trying to keep a low profile and they're isolated," Sly says. "Those are ripe instances of abuse."
She adds that in a world in which Seattle-area sex workers felt safe to go to law enforcement (without fear of being arrested themselves), they might have approached local police about their concerns. And that brings up yet another argument for decriminalizing sex work. In countries where prostitution is legal (such as the Netherlands and New Zealand), sex work advocates feel comfortable working with law enforcement to target traffickers and abusive clients. As a result, working conditions for sex workers are much safer and there are lower levels of violence against all women.
If the American public wants to spend scarce taxpayer dollars to entrap and arrest people for promoting adult prostitution, that's one thing. But it's disingenuous for law enforcement to wrap what they're doing in the guise of sex slavery when that may not be what's going on here at all.
This week, journalist and author of the recent book Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work Melissa Gira Grant joins us to discuss the labor politics of sex work, and how the movement for sex worker's rights has intersected with gay liberation and the broader feminist movement.
identity » 19 Jan 2016 21:50 wrote:
Oh noes, another sword-wielding, justice-seeking Militant descending upon RI with an Agenda, quick to dismiss any considerations/viewpoints and even simple, reasonable questions that might impede or interfere with the progress of her urgent, all-important Campaign of Action.
Be nice if it stated somewhere here that in addition to RI being an anti-fascist board, it is also an anti-militant board (let the American Dreamer add that to his tiresome refrain...).
I'm afraid that I will not be joining any campaign of action in the foreseeable future, neither yours nor anyone else's. And I find those who come here exclusively driven by an urge to educate others about their pet cause (rather than to explore the multitude of issues that interest or concern those of us drawn here) irksome and boring, and eminently worthy of being ignored.
Heaven Swan » 23 Jan 2016 23:11 wrote:Parel wrote:So now I do full time activism, which pays badly but is more rewarding because it is helping to build a movement and assisting sex workers who are not as privileged as I ever was. even at my lowest.
Who pays for your pro-prostitution activism Parel? And you're located in Thailand no less, one of the main hubs of sex trafficking and sex tourism.
Do these struggling and extremely poor girls, boys, women and men really need help in defending their right to prostitute themselves, or might they better benefit with and improved economy, dignified jobs that don't involve selling access to internal organs and exposing theirselves to AIDS, etc, trauma therapy and support?
I'd also like some proof or a citation for your accusations that Rachel Moran (BTW thanks for posting that video PW it was incredibly moving) and Rebecca Mott are being paid by so and so. I mean are we just supposed to believe wild accusations and insults that you seem to invent on the spot?
You say that Rachel Moran claims to have been 'high class'. If you watch the video you'll see that she began at age 15 as a street prostitute in Ireland and later worked in indoor prostitution as well. She also says that if she were forced in some way to prostitute herself again she would easily choose street prostitution over indoors, because on the street you can use your senses to assess the sex buyer, and if you get maniac psycho killer vibes you can walk away, whereas if a rich psycho pays a lot of money for you through an intermediary, there isn't the space to vibe him out for danger and reject him.
My first exposure to Rachel Moran was the above video but I know that Rebecca Mott is scraping by on donations to her blog and the like, which BTW I have donated to. Rachel Moran obviously has income from her book and if she is paid by some legit NGO I have no problem with that, but I do have a big problem with sex industry barons funding 'sex worker activism.'
Five Book Plan: Sex Work and Reproductive Labour
By Melissa Gira Grant / 03 March 2016
Melissa Gira Grant, journalist, sexual politics columnist at Pacific Standard and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, picks her essential reads for Verso's latest Five Book Plan. On International Sex Workers Rights Day, this edition places sex work and social reproduction at the centre of feminist discussions about gendered labour.
1. Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry by Siobhan Brooks (State University of New York Press, 2010)
Where you want to start investigating erotic capital. It’s also one of very few book on the American sex industry with a Black focus. Brooks is a sociologist, and was also one of the organizers behind the Lusty Lady peep show’s union drive in San Francisco in 1997. This was driven in part driven by Black dancers who got management to admit they had been denying more lucrative shifts in favor of non-Black dancers. Using interviews with dancers and club patrons she conducted in the Bronx, Manhattan and Oakland, Brooks examines erotic capital on both institutional and symbolic levels, with a focus on constructions of whiteness, pay equity, and safety issues related to zoning and labor practices. She theorizes “desire industries,” containing both commercial sex and “various forms of media and industries which operate on ideas of desire and attractiveness,” a useful bridge for positioning sex work as both like and unlike other work without judgment or rank.
2. The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the New American Heartland by Barbara G. Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn Hausbeck (Routledge, 2010)
“But what about Vegas?” Here is an answer. Prostitution isn’t actually legal in Las Vegas, but just in a few rural counties. The history behind that is told here, but more critically, it’s a portrait of what work in Nevada’s legal brothels is like, who the workers are, and how they understand their work. The authors changed how I think about “sexualization” and the supposed mainstreaming of sex work. They argue for quite a different way of thinking about how sex work impacts culture and economics, of interdependence and co-existence. What brothels offer isn’t always (or even often) a sinful or licentious escape from traditional monogamy, but also a commercialized experience of femininity and domestic comfort, in some ways much more conventional than the state’s Sin City image. This, all while the service, leisure, and pleasure economies of the state depend upon sex to attract business to technically non-sexual services and experiences.
3. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks (Duke University Press, 2011)
After reading Weeks, I felt I could entirely reasonably to turn to people who asked me if sex work should be abolished and press them to imagine a world where all work was abolished. What I keep coming back to here concerns the campaign for Wages for Housework, and seeing their demands as a way to expand our political imaginations. Rather than debate whether or not sex should ever be made work, I want to know, what exists outside of work? With Weeks, this isn’t a shrug about how we can’t escape from “commodifying” everything, but to call the system of waged labour into question, to get to a bolder and more human vision of how we care for ourselves and one another, and to carve out space for what life after work looks like.
4. Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry by Laura María Agustín (Zed Books, 2007)
Now a classic, this is the book that gave us “the rescue industry,” a framework for understanding how value is extracted through the work of “saving” women – women migrants, women sex workers, women in the informal economy. Agustín remains controversial for her insistence that most of what the world wants to know about “sex trafficking” is limited by a flawed premise from the start, and is kept so confused through myths and media narratives about agency, travel, work, and sex. She also definitely locates sex work alongside and within other kinds of stigmatized or devalued work done by women, including domestic work.
5. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany (New York University Press, 1999)
Delany’s book is a double-LP tribute to the end of the American red light district, Jane Jacobs but drenched in red neon light. Disc one is a lyric essay, his excursions in porn theaters, his document of what mixed-use street life in New York once looked like, a story about criminalizing space as a way to exile bodies and identities. The second half shifts tone, is less an elegy and more a confrontation. He’s the first I read on the subject of the gentrification of sex, how “family values” shore up and feed “public safety,” and what we all stand to lose when we are denied public space for cross-class contact. And all along the way, through accounts of street vendors and hustlers, he illustrates the red light districts’ role in social reproduction.
And two more, some new and vital reading on the sex workers’ rights movement:
To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker Activism in Africa by Chi Adanna Mgbako (New York University Press, 2016)
Based on interviews with sex worker activists in seven African countries, Mgbako’s book shows how they build their movements, including their alliances with feminist and LGBT movements. Her breakdown of how sex workers challenge institutional whore stigma – from anti-prostitution campaigners, religious groups and politicians alike – and criminalization highlight two of the most common issues sex workers’ rights activists fight around the world. Mgbako also reflects on the exclusion of sex workers from political participation, and the unique ways African sex workers have fought back against silencing. Their movement work is a form of care.
Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk by Melinda Chateauvert (Beacon Press, 2014)
A survey of how the sex workers’ rights movement came to be in the United States. Chateauvert roots it in both sexual liberation and labour rights’ movements, and tells its story through sex workers’ responses to police violence, to HIV/AIDS, and to criminalization. Each decade could easily be its own book. The 70s is a period of international solidarity among sex workers’ groups, and foreshadows the anti-porn/anti-prostitution backlash of the 80s. Chatueavert highlights the role of sex workers in other rights’ struggles, with a particular emphasis on LGBT rights. The indelible takeaway is: sex workers have always been part of left and liberation movements, whether or not they were known, or if their work was recognized or remembered. Let this book be the beginning of restoring that history.
A Closed Loop: Sex Work, Violence and Criminalisation
Molly Smith (@pastachips) responds to the tensions between policing and protection of sex workers following the release of video footage of sex workers being escorted from their Belfast home into a police van, while a hate mob jeers at them. She argues that criminalisation and policing, often racialised, create the conditions for violence against sex workers to thrive, which is then used to justify further policing and criminalisation.
Last Friday, on the afternoon of the 29th July, a large, angry crowd gathered in Belfast outside an unremarkable semi-detached house. In shaky mobile phone footage, since uploaded to YouTube, perhaps a hundred people are visible – men, women, small children. They are shouting and jeering, and the jeers grow markedly louder as women appear from a side door of the house and are hustled by the waiting police into the militarised police van used in Northern Ireland. You can hear people in the crowd shout “nasty fucking whores”. The women are suspected to be sex workers.
There is a lot to unpack in this scene. The footage is hard to watch. Unlike videos where the person capturing the scene is aware that they are documenting something horrifying, this clip seems to have been filmed by a participant: a cheerful memento of a summer day. The presence of small children reinforces the troubling sense that this is both an act of community violence and an event attendees considered a family day out.
In Playing the Whore, Melissa Gira Grant writes about vigilantes who post videos of suspected sex workers online, noting that for those who film and post these videos, “the camera isn’t just a tool for producing evidence: it’s his cover for harassing women he believes are selling sex, pinning a record on them online even when the law will not”.
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Impoverished Filipina prostitutes have it easy, MGTOW explains
MGTOW dudes, I don’t know if you know this, but men do sex work too. I recommend you take it up for a week and see how “easy” it is.
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