60 Comments

1. Stan:

   A note before the rumors begin to circulate that I am censoring opposition.

   I just received three consecutive flames from a previous commentator, none of which dealt with the issues raised by this post — which I did not compose. I posted it for discussion.

   One of the posts, just as an example, read: “You are nothing but a john. You think like one and always will.” Not only does it make no sense in the context of this piece, which also makes johns the heavies, but it is a pure flame… a personal attack. While it’s no big deal for me to be called names, the rules are clear. I will not allow this blog to become a flamethrower range.

   This post was placed up after the preceding one by Richard Poulin, which mentioned the Swedish program… which does NOT criminalize the women.

   Disgree as you wish on this site, but if you want to shout epithets, go elsewhere.

   16 April 2005, 7:34 pm

2. sw:

   Going elsewhere after this post.

   No Stan, what you are doing is excercising power. You don’t HAVE to listen to what actual sex-workders say. You don’t have to look at our sites or read material by our organisations. You CAN dismiss organising and you CAN put forward the view that prostitution should be driven underground because it doesn’t actually matter to you. You know as well as I do that people listen to you because of what YOU ARE and they don’t listen to me because of what I am.

   You can suddenly jump in on an issue that you have not been involved in and have more credibility than people who have been dealing with it, and thinking about it, for years. Then you claim that WE are somehow excersising “hegemony” over some abstract real sex-workers in the third world (not counting the organised ones who can actually speak for themselves of course - I spose they’re just the same as us here) who you supposedly speak for.

   Why don’t you put up articles presenting the opposing view? Why don’t you even put up any articles by sex-workers groups? Why not so much as even a link so people can hear about it from those of us on the ground?

   I’m sorry for the name calling but you have not adressed a single point I have brought up during this whole discussion. It makes me feel invisible, which is exactly how sex-workers are made to feel all the time. That is what legislation like what you have promoted here does. It silences us. Sweeps us under the carpet. While everyone feels good about themselves pretending the problem no longer exists.

   Being organised gives you a voice and power. That is something that something that is infinately valuable. We NEED the support of the left to get and keep that right. It is just infinately frustrating and demoralising when you not only wont help, but even oppose it and then won’t even give us a hearing.

   Goodbye.

   17 April 2005, 3:31 am

3. sw:

   And as I said in the post you deleted… The Swedish program is a copout because it drives the industry underground. It means we have to work on the streets or through pimps instead of in safe environments like agencies and brothels. It means clients and others are more likely to use violence against. It means that we have no health and safety standards. The Norwegian government rejected it for all these reasons and also because it hasn’t done shit to reduce prostitution anyway.

   I’m talking about reality here. You are not - because you don’t have to.

   17 April 2005, 3:56 am

4. Stan:

   The last post was partially edited at the sender’s request.

   I would simply point out that the study posted prior to the Sweden piece demonstrates clearly that ‘decriminalization’ has not had the effects claimed by its advocates, but that it has given cover for the massive expansion of trafficking as well as strengthenerd the hold of organized crime over the industry. And in fact, it HAS reduced prostitution, by helping tyhe oemn out of it, and criminalizing the pimps and johns.

   This creation of ’space’ for the captains of this industry and the deep involvement of international organized criminals is precisely the reason I am so skeptical of unionization ‘panaceas.’

   Do you really feel that the majority of women in prostitution (who are in or from underdeveloped nations) are abstractions? I have spent considerable time in many of these countries, and I can assure you they are anything but abstract.

   17 April 2005, 7:46 am

5. sw:

   No, I feel that you are talking about them like abstractions by refusing to read any of the stuff from their organisations. Also, you can keep grandstanding about people in the third world but it’s not going to work on me because I have relatives who worked in similar circumstances in Mexico and none of them feel the way you do about it. It’s just not a political argument. It’s a guilt trip and one which doesn’t work on sex-workers or people who know anything about the industry. Also, I don’t know how you can lecture everyone else about their arguing techniques when you continually resort to straw-mans of my arguments. I have already had a long argument about this issue with Sam, on this site. I don’t want to keep going over the same points when you don’t even read them. You are just using them to swamp the opposition, and that is NOT dialogue - just point scoring.

   17 April 2005, 6:57 pm

6. sw:

   Also, the time you spent in these countries is hardly going to give you a very accurate picture of these women. (to use a rather tacky industrial example) It’s the equivalent of a factory owner saying that based on their experience, worker’s can’t be organised because they are too opressed. Also, clients often see workers in a certain light… Which tends to be as a bit dumb. They feel intimidated if they think that they are fucking someone who is their equal and prostitutes play up to that because it gets them clients.

   Now why have you not read any of the material from sex-workers organisations (in either first or third world)?

   17 April 2005, 7:16 pm

7. Stan:

   You are making my argument here. And I didn’t only work in those countries as a john (this was occasional and a long time ago). You are way off base about me in almost everything you’ve said, and in focusing on me, you have done nothing but point out why this is oppressive in more ways than merely economically.

   17 April 2005, 7:27 pm

8. sw:

   I have never said that it is just ecconomically opressive. I am talking about the way to make conditions better and eventually get rid of it completely. Are you TRYING to argue like a child?

   17 April 2005, 7:34 pm

9. sw:

   What I am saying is that the approach you are taking actually makes it EASIER for people to view sex-workers as stupid. Who can look at a union organiser and simply view them as a bimbo or object, who “loves it”? Self-organising and bringing sex-work into the open undermines the basis of it.

   17 April 2005, 7:36 pm

10. sw:

    Ok, I did start off arguing (several weeks ago now) that prostitution was “normal work”. I have since recognised that this is an idealist approach that tries to change the nature of something by thinking about it differently. I said this in the previous thread. However, I still think you’re approach to the issue is wrong.

    17 April 2005, 7:40 pm

11. sw:

    I’ve been coming here in good faith and have been listening to your arguments. The fact that I have actually totally changed my analysis on certain aspects of this subject should prove that. But I don’t think that you have granted me the same respect. No, you haven’t called me names, but you have continually either completely ignored or painted straw-mans of my arguments or picked out bits which are easy to tear down but not the main argument. It is extremely frustrating because it is also typical of how discussions on this issue always go.

    17 April 2005, 8:40 pm

12. oz feminista:

    I am more in agreement with Stan I think on this issue, but SW does raise the very relevant point that there is alot of work being done through Sex worker organisations - and to be real any critique absolutely must engage this work. This is one contribution which caused me to sit up and think a lot - the arguments are actually very persuasive - I’m interested in responses to this….

    Jo Doezema
    Institute of Development Studies
    University of Sussex
    Brighton BN1 9RE
    May 2000

    ——————————————————————————–

    Ouch! Western feminists’ ‘wounded attachment’ to the ‘third world prostitute’
    May 2000. (A later version of this paper appears in Feminist Review, No. 67, Spring 2001 pp. 16-38)

    Introduction
    The subject of ‘trafficking in women’ has, since the mid 1980s, received increased international attention. Currently, negotiations are underway at the UN Crimes Commission in Vienna around a new international agreement on trafficking in women (Draft Protocol To Combat International Trafficking In Women And Children Supplementary To The Draft Convention On Transnational Organized Crime A/AC.254/4/add.3). This new agreement has been the subject of lobbying by feminist anti-trafficking NGOs. The lobby efforts are split into two ‘camps’. One, the Human Rights Caucus, sees prostitution as legitimate labour. The other, represented by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), sees all prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights. While there are some similarities in their representations of the ‘third world trafficking victim’, CATW in particular views ‘third world prostitutes’ as helpless victims in need of rescue. This paper analyses CATW’s position and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW’s construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as the main justification for its own interventionist impulses.

    The central argument of this paper is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. The term ‘injured body’ is drawn from Wendy Brown’s States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). In this work, Brown argues that modern identity politics are based on a feeling of ‘injury’ caused by exclusion from the presumed ‘goods’ of the modern liberal state.

    This is not the first time that the ‘injured third world prostitute’ has figured in international feminist campaigns. Antoinette Burton has examined, in Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (1994), the manner in which Victorian feminists utilized the position of the prostitute in Britain and in colonial India as part of their campaign to prove that English women were fit subjects of political enfranchisement. In so doing, they deployed an image of Indian prostitutes, and Indian women in general, in keeping with the orientalism of Empire: that of Indian women as backward, helpless and subject to barbaric tradition. In a more recent paper, Burton (1998) applies Brown’s theorizing to the question of Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire. This paper draws on all three works to frame its inquiry into the ways in which colonial feminist discourses around prostitution influence contemporary feminist constructions of the ‘injured body’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’.

    Firstly, I briefly highlight the implications of Wendy Brown’s theories of identity formation for an analysis of CATW’s discourse on trafficking. Secondly, I turn to Antoinette Burton’s application of Brown’s theory for the light it sheds on the historical use of colonial ’suffering bodies’ in the construction of modern feminist identities. I then return to Wendy Brown to examine the ways in which the ‘injury’ at the heart of Barry’s analysis of women’s subjugation combines with the colonial legacy to fix the ‘third world trafficking victim’ as victimized ‘other’. Finally, I examine CATW’s demands on the UN in light of Brown’s arguments about the possible repressive consequences of the identity/injury nexus.

    It is important to register two related sets of issues that are beyond the scope of this paper to address. Firstly, CATW feminists are not alone in their attachment to third world prostitutes ’suffering bodies’. Feminist anti-trafficking organizations that nominally support sex worker rights can slip into orientalist representations of third world sex workers. Too often, these organizations set up a dichotomy between ‘voluntary’ western sex workers and ‘victimized’ third world sex workers. This distinction carries its own political dangers, which have been explored by Alison Murray (1998) and in my own earlier work (Doezema 1998).

    Secondly, the campaign against trafficking in women is not conducted solely by western feminists, and third world women’s organizations participate in CATW. The orientalist use of the ’suffering body’ of prostitutes by western feminists is fairly easy to read off. Where do third world feminists fit in? A full answer to this question is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is important to register that the ’suffering body’ is not a one dimensional image whose sole function is to reassure western feminists of their moral rightness and superiority. She figures in non-western feminist (and other) discourses as a metaphor for a number of fears, anxieties, and relations of domination (Tyner 1996, Cabezas 1998, Pike 1999, Doezema 2000). For example, the figure of the ’suffering third world prostitute’ serves well to symbolize the excesses of the global march of capital, and its negative effects on women. To view the campaign against trafficking in women as an example of imposed ‘western feminism’ ignores the national/cultural context in which these campaigns are formed. Writing on Nepal, for example, Pike (1999) demonstrates how deeply current anti-trafficking campaigns are embedded in culture and national history. Of course, many third world feminists reject the image of ‘the third world women as helpless victims of either patriarchy or a “crude, undifferentiated capitalism”‘ (Sangera 1998: 1). A number of third world feminists and sex workers are at the forefront of political efforts to resignify the place of the prostitute in feminist politics (Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).

    ‘States of Injury’
    The essays collected in Brown’s States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995) explore issues of ‘political power and opposition’ (1995: 3), drawing on the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and Weber. This paper does not attempt to engage fully with Brown’s challenging and complex arguments, nor does it attempt to evaluate them in their entirety. My reading of Brown is thus necessarily partial. Rather, I apply some of Brown’s arguments to generate insights about the relationship between certain types of western feminism and the ‘injuries’ of third world trafficking victims.

    The emergence of ‘injured identity’
    Central to Brown’s analysis of political power and opposition is the emergence of ‘politicized identities’, such those based on gender, sexuality, or race, as oppositional political groupings. She sets herself the task of finding out how politicized identity can effectively challenge structures of domination. In so doing, she does not attempt to argue ‘for’ or ‘against’ identity politics as such. Rather, she brings a genealogical approach to the question of identity politics. That is, she considers both the historical circumstances that led to politicized identity’s emergence and the ways in which these shape politicized identity’s demands on the state. In her words: ‘Given what produced it, given what shapes and suffuses it, what does politicized identity want?’ (1995: 62).

    It is Brown’s contention that politicized identity ‘wants’ protection rather than power. This desire all too often risks shoring up structures of domination, rather than undermining them. Why is this so? Brown agrees with (among others) Foucault and Marx that oppositional movements arise out of already existing structures, to redress wrongs that are perpetrated by those structures. As such, these movements are reactionary, and configure their arguments in already existing terms. Brown argues that politicized identity was both a product of and a reaction to the manifest failure of liberalism to deliver on promises of universal justice for all: to the exclusion of certain ‘marked groups’, such as women or gays, from the liberal goods of freedom and equality. Politicized identity’s demand to be included in these goods, however, does not question the fact that these goods arise out of structures that led to the ‘injuries’ of marginalization in the first place.

    Brown suggests that politicized identity’s potential for transforming structures of domination is severely limited because of its own investment in a history of ‘pain’ (1995: 55). The ‘pain’ or ‘injury’ at the heart of politicized identity is social subordination and exclusion from universal equality and justice promised by the liberal state (1995: 7). This historical pain becomes the foundation for identity, as well as, paradoxically, that which identity politics strives to bring to an end. In other words, identity based on injury cannot let go of that injury without ceasing to exist. This paradox results in a politics that seeks protection from the state rather than power and freedom for itself. In seeking protection from the same structures that cause injury, this politics risks reaffirming, rather than subverting, structures of domination, and risks reinscribing injured identity in law and policy through its demands for state protection against injury.

    Foucault’s analysis of what he called disciplinary power is an important element in Brown’s understanding of the paradox of identity politics: that identity politics may actually reinforce the structures of domination they emerge to oppose. In the History of Sexuality (1980) and Discipline and Punish (1979), Foucault postulated that individuals are not simply constrained by external structures, but that ’subjects’ are produced and regulated by disciplinary structures and discourses. (For Foucault, this did not mean that overcoming domination was impossible: rather he suggested that wherever power operated, so did resistance). Foucault thus accounts for how disciplined subjects both consent to and construct their own discipline. However, Brown goes further than Foucault, asking how it can be that that a subject not only stops desiring freedom, but actually begins to desire its opposite (1995: 64). To answer this question, she turns to Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, developed in On the Genealogy of Morals (1969).

    Feminism and Ressentiment
    According to Brown, politicized identity, including feminism, displays many of the ‘attributes of…. ressentiment’ (1995: 27): the tendency on the part of the powerless to reproach power with moral arguments rather than to seek out power for itself. The turn to Nietzsche accounts for Brown’s use of terms like ‘pain’ and ‘injury’ to indicate the effects of marginalisation and subordination. Nietzsche postulates that the cause of ressentiment is ’suffering’: this suffering causes the individual to look for a sight of blame for the hurt, as well as to revenge itself upon the ‘hurter’. Brown describes the ‘politics of ressentiment’ as follows:
    Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it [’the politics of ressentiment’] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social subordination. It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning…the effort to “outlaw” social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors (1995: 27).

    Ressentiment’s investment in powerlessness means that it prefers moral posturing over political argument:

    His [Nietzsche’s] thought is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of political argument, and to understand the codification of injury and powerlessness… that this kind of moralizing politics entails (Brown 1995: 27).

    Brown’s opposition between ‘morals’ and ‘politics’ seems at first difficult to accept, especially for feminists. What are we to base our politics on, after all, if not some notion of what is right, what is just, what is good, for women — all moral notions? However, in encouraging politics rather than morality, Brown does not suggest that we get rid of, or can do without, the ‘right’, the ‘just’ and the ‘good’. What she does say is that ideas of what is right, just, or good that are based on moral notions of what we think we are lead to a politics of ressentiment, of ‘reproach, rancor, moralism and guilt’ (1995: 26). She argues that we need to develop new spaces in which to decide politically, collectively, what is good, just and right, derived not from identity-based notions of ‘who I am’ but from a new ethics of ‘what I want for us’ (1995:75).

    The tendency to turn towards the state for protection, rather than questioning state power to regulate and discipline, is one that Brown sees as especially problematic for feminism. She notes women have particular cause for greeting such politics with caution. Historically, the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical in legitimating women’s exclusion from some spheres of human endeavor and confinement within others. Operating simultaneously to link “femininity” to privileged races and classes… protection codes are also markers and vehicles of such divisions among women. Protection codes are thus key technologies in regulating privileged women as well as intensifying the vulnerability and degradation of those on the unprotected side of the constructed divide between light and dark, wives and prostitutes, good girls and bad ones (1995: 165).

    The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how and why CATW feminists are positioning the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. Brown’s examination of the historical formation of late modern politicized identities places the problematic of ‘logics of pain in the subject formation processes’(1995: 55) central. This has immediate resonance: CATW’s campaign against trafficking in women constantly reiterates the literal, physical pain undergone by ‘third world prostitute’ bodies. If ‘politicized identity’s investment… in its own history of suffering’ (Brown 1995: 55) is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ’suffering’ of third world trafficking victims in their discourses of women’s subjugation. It also raises questions about CATW’s efforts to seek protection for trafficking victims through ‘protective’ legislation.

    Wounded history
    The possibility of applying Brown’s work to examine the role of the ’suffering prostitute body’ in the construction of certain feminist identities was suggested to me by Burton’s (1998) application of Brown’s analysis. Burton uses Brown’s work to analyse a particular production of Victorian feminism: Josephine Butler’s Native Races and the War (1900). In this tract, Butler appealed to the sufferings of Black African men under Afrikaner rule in order to justify British involvement in the Boer War. In her analysis, Burton extends Brown’s theory, arguing that

    What remains underexplored in Brown’s theoretical framework is the extent to which ostensibly autonomous political communities and actors have historically relied on the injuries of “others” to (re)-focus the attention of the state on their own desire for inclusion in the body politic (1998: 339).

    Burton suggests this is because Brown’s ‘genealogy of western liberalism and its affiliates is only implicitly, rather than explicitly, colonial’ (1998: 339).

    Burton’s application of Brown’s theory is highly suggestive for an analysis of uses of the ’suffering bodies’ of ‘third world prostitutes’ by contemporary feminists. In Burton’s analysis, two aspects of ’suffering bodies’ of ‘others’ as used by Victorian feminists stand out. First was the highly gendered use of this body. Many of the ’suffering bodies’ deployed by Victorian feminists were female: female slaves in the Caribbean, women, especially prostitutes, in India and prostitutes and poor women in England. But this was not always so, as the analysis of Native Races and the War demonstrates. The most significantly gendered aspect, however, was not the gender of the ’suffering body’, but rather women’s supposed ability, based on essential feminine characteristics, to identify with the ’suffering bodies’, and therefore, to represent them politically. The second aspect of the ’suffering body’ was the distinct class/colonial position of the ’suffering body’ in relation to the ’saving body’: ’saving bodies’ were middle class and white; the ’suffering bodies’ working class or black and colonial (Burton 1998: 341).

    In the following section, I revisit Burton’s (1994) work on Victorian women’s campaigns against prostitution in India in the light of Burton’s own later application of Brown’s theory. This opens up wider possibilities for exploring the construction of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in CATW’s discourse. It allows us to examine in what way the Victorian feminist reliance on ’suffering others’ might impact on contemporary discourses. It can also help shed light on the relations of domination and subordination that are hidden in the production of feminist narratives about the ‘third world trafficking victim’.

    Victorian feminists and prostitutes’ ’suffering bodies’
    Victorian feminists’ arguments around prostitution were grounded in discourses of slavery (Irwin 1996). According to Burton (1998), the extension of anti-slavery discourses by Victorian feminists’ beyond their original political context in the early anti-slavery movement points to the importance of ’suffering others’ for Victorian feminists in establishing their claim to be included in the body politic. The use of ’slavery’ by feminist and non-feminist campaigners was extremely powerful: as a site of ‘irrefutable injury’ it served to demonstrate the need for women’s involvement: first in public philanthropy, and later directly in politics (Burton 1998).

    The campaign that marked the expressly political, rather than philanthropic, use of the ’suffering body’ of the prostitute by Victorian feminists was known as abolitionism (Bland 1992). Abolitionism was directed against the Contagious Diseases Acts enacted in Britain in 1867. These acts, intended to reduce venereal disease among troops, set up a system whereby prostitutes were subjected to fortnightly internal examinations, and could be detained in ‘lock hospitals’ if found infected. The campaign, led by Josephine Butler, and consisting of unions, socialists, and other reformers along with feminists, objected to the acts for the ‘double standard’ of morality they encoded. The purification of the state, these feminists argued, could only be achieved through women’s suffrage (Walkowitz 1980).

    While early campaigns against prostitution made metaphorical use of the slavery trope, with the advent of the anti-white slavery campaigns it became a literal description of the condition of prostitution. WT Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’, published in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885), galvanized public opposition to ‘the white slave trade’(see Walkowitz 1992). In this fantastically sensational series, he claimed to provide investigative evidence of hundreds of young English girls deceived, coerced and/or drugged into prostitution and accused poor parents of selling their daughters to ‘white slave traders’ (Stead cited in Fisher 1997: 132). In an earlier paper (Doezema 2000), I traced the narrative elements of ‘white slavery’: innocence, established as youth and sexual purity, helplessness, degradation and death. The rhetorically explosive combination of sex and slavery served to whip up public support for the abolitionist cause (Walkowitz 1980, Grittner 1990, Guy 1991, Irwin 1996).

    Allegations of ‘white slavery’ from Britain to the East meant an increased focus on prostitution in the colonies (Chatterjee 1990). However, British feminists were more concerned with the regulation of Indian prostitutes through the Contagious Diseases Acts than with the fate of British ‘white slaves’ in India. The Contagious Diseases Acts in India were enacted shortly after those in England and were meant to serve the same purpose: to protect the health of British soldiers. As in England, this was to be achieved by compulsory examination and detainment of prostitutes for venereal disease. After the successful campaign for repeal of the acts in England and Wales, feminist abolitionists, led by Josephine Butler, turned their attention to India (Burton 1994). After a sustained campaign, the acts were rescinded in 1888. However, repeal of the acts did not mean the end of regulation, which continued in many areas, and abolitionists continued their efforts (Ballhatchet 1980, Burton 1994, Chatterjee 1990, Chatterjee 1992).

    The ways in which Indian prostitutes were portrayed by Victorian feminists had many similarities with the portrayal of working class prostitutes ‘at home’. As ’suffering bodies’ of prostitutes at home (in England, America and elsewhere) served to provide Victorian feminists a way of arguing the necessity of their political participation in domestic government, so the ‘enslaved’ Indian prostitute served to demonstrate the need for women’s involvement in the politics of empire in order to purify it and stop the suffering caused by men (Burton 1994). As Liddle and Rai argue

    The subject Indian woman in a decaying colonized society was the model of everything they [Victorian feminists] were struggling against and was thus the measure of Western feminists’ own progress. British feminists saw Britain as the centre of both democracy and feminism, and when they claimed political rights they also claimed the right to participate in the empire (1998: 499).

    In adapting discourses of prostitution to the colonial situation, feminist abolitionists drew on dominant colonial discourses of India. In these orientalist discourses, the position of women became a key marker of ‘civilization’ (Midgley 1998). In contrast to British women, the condition of ‘Indian women’ in general was seen as one of helpless subjection to backward traditionalism (Liddle and Rai 1998). The ‘child bride’, the ‘burnt widow’ the ‘captive of the zenana’ and the prostitute all served as signifiers for Indian womanhood in its entirety (Liddle and Rai 1998). In the implicit equation set up by feminist abolitionists, the ’suffering body’ of the Indian prostitute became that of all Indian women and stood for the condition of India as a whole (Burton 1994, Liddle and Rai 1998). The ’suffering body’ as metaphor for India established it unequivocally as backward and in need of rule: the gendered nature of this body staked out British feminist terrain in Empire.

    There is a further contrast between campaigns against prostitution in Britain and in India. Anti-white slavery campaigns in England managed to garner much public support because of the image of ‘their’ women, white women, being sexually used by ‘dark’ foreigners (Guy 1991). There was little concern for the fate of ‘native’ prostitutes in most anti white slavery campaigns (Guy 1991, Grittner 1990). While there were a number of European prostitutes working in India (Ballhatchet 1980) it was the Indian prostitute, rather than the European ‘white slave’, that took the lion’s share of abolitionists’ attention. One explanation for this is India’s position in Empire. As Burton (1994) argues, India was seen as an extension of ‘home ground’ for feminist abolitionists.

    More significant though was the context of international domination and subordination that configured Victorian feminist arguments against Indian prostitution. Victorian feminists theoretically considered Indian women to be ‘equal’ to British women. However, this was more an example of Christian rhetoric than actual belief (Burton 1994). Discourses of ‘civilization’ and of orientalism placed western and ‘oriental’ women at opposite ends of the civilization spectrum (Midgley 1998, Liddle and Rai 1998). British women’s claims for inclusion necessitated the inequality of British and Indian women: Indian women served as the perfect ‘foil’ to indicate the ‘advanced’ situation of middle-class Victorian feminists. The international, imperial nature of the feminist campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in India homogenized the condition of British women as advanced, strong and civilized at the same time as it homogenized Indian women as backward, helpless, and inferior (Burton 1994).

    A modern form of imperialism?
    Feminist scholars of empire argue that contemporary feminist discourses cannot be considered out of their historical context (Midgley 1998, Liddle and Rai 1998, Burton 1992). The campaign against trafficking must be seen in the light of the history of Imperialism, colonialism, and decolonization: campaigning efforts by feminists in the first, the third, and the former communist world are shaped by this history. While, as Liddle and Rai (1998) point out, the third world of today is not the ‘Orient’ of colonial times, colonial discourses still ‘retain a hold on the Western imagination as expressed in certain contemporary women’s studies writings’ (1998: 497). It is not an accident of history, but the legacy of empire, that ‘third world prostitutes’ suffering bodies’ are at the forefront of certain feminist campaigns today. Yet, as Kempadoo notes, the work on examining the impact of the imperial legacy on contemporary feminist conceptions of prostitution has barely begun:

    Nevertheless the need for feminist theory to engage with racialized sexual subjectivities in tandem with the historical weight of imperialism, colonialism and racist constructions of power has only been raised recently in the context of this feminist theorizing on prostitution (1998: 13).

    This section will address two questions. Firstly, it will look at the ways in which the ‘injuries’ of the prostitute are central to the construction of the identity ‘women’ in the political theories of Kathleen Barry and the activism of CATW. Secondly, it will look at the ways in which the colonial legacy of imperial feminism impacts on how the ’sufferings’ of the ‘third world prostitute/trafficking victim’ are incorporated into this identity.

    The ‘injury’ of prostitution
    Wendy Brown examines the genealogy of late-modern political identity formation in North America in terms of the ways in which identities such as those of gender, race, or homosexuality are constructed on the basis of perceived historical ‘injuries’. Barry’s analysis, in The Prostitution of Sexuality: The Global Exploitation of Women (1995) of the role of prostitution in women’s oppression proceeds along the same ‘injury/identity’ nexus analysed by Brown. In Barry’s analysis, women’s subordination is the result of sex. Sex is defined as ‘the condition of subordination of women that is both bodied in femaleness and enacted in sexual experience’ (1995: 278). Women’s subordination is seen as analogous to that of class subordination, that is, women’s ‘class position’ is one of sexual subordination to the dominant ‘class’ of men. The ‘injury’ of sex is thus that which constitutes the ‘class’ of women. For Barry, as well as other feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Sheila Jeffries, and Catherine MacKinnon, sex is power: male power over women.

    Barry sees prostitution as the ultimate expression of male dominance.

    My study of sex as power… inevitably, continually, unrelentingly returns me to prostitution. …one cannot mobilize against a class condition of oppression unless one knows its fullest dimensions. Thus my work has been to study and expose sexual power in its most severe, global, institutionalized, and crystallized forms… Prostitution — the cornerstone of all sexual exploitation (1995: 9).

    The harms of prostitution are expressed in highly graphic terms which ironically echo traditional, religious/patriarchal moralizing against prostitutes. Hoigard and Finstad, (1992) whose work is held up as exemplary by Barry, refer to sex workers’ vaginas as ‘garbage can[s] for hordes of anonymous men’s ejaculations’ (quoted in Chapkis 1997: 51). Barry herself says that prostitutes become ‘interchangeable’ with plastic blow-up sex dolls ‘complete with orifices for penetration and ejaculation’ (1995: 35). A member of CATW recently characterized prostitutes as ‘empty holes surrounded by flesh, waiting for a masculine deposit of sperm.’ Seen in this way, prostitutes ‘pain’ becomes the foundation of the identity ‘woman’. ‘Prostitution makes all women vulnerable, exposed to danger, open to attack. To be vulnerable is, by definition, to be “able to be hurt or wounded or injured”‘ (Barry 1995: 317). ‘Woman’ thus becomes an ‘identity’ solely constituted through the ‘injury’ of male sexual power; as the most ‘injured’, the prostitute is most fully identified as ‘woman’.

    I am taking prostitution as the model, the most extreme and most crystallized form of all sexual exploitation. Sexual exploitation is a political condition, the foundation of women’s subordination and the base from which discrimination against women is constructed and enacted (1995: 11).

    Kathleen Barry and CATW claim to base their analysis on the ‘true’ experiences of prostitutes. In Barry’s theory, sex in prostitution ‘reduces women to a body’ and is therefore necessarily harmful, whether there is consent or not (1995: 23). Consequently, prostitutes’ ‘true’ stories of pain and injury serve both to demonstrate the rightness of her theory and are claimed as the empirical basis for that theory. The testimonies of prostitutes thus assume the status of absolute truth. However, only certain versions of prostitutes’ experience are considered ‘true’. Barry constructs the ‘injury’ of sex in prostitution in a circular manner. Prostitution is considered always injurious because the sex in it is dehumanizing. However, the sex takes on this dehumanizing character because it takes place within prostitution. In this neat, sealed construction, there is no place for the experiences of sex workers who claim their work is not harmful or alienating. For Barry and CATW, the notion of a prostitute who is unharmed by her experience is an ontological impossibility: that which cannot be.

    This appeal to the essentially invariable nature of prostitutes’ experience is at odds with Barry’s interpretation of the constructed nature of sexuality as a ‘political product of gender hierarchy’(1995: 22). Barry’s analysis of women as a sexual ‘class’ completely constructed by men is very similar to that formulated by Catherine MacKinnon (1987,1989). Brown’s critique of MacKinnon is highly useful for this paper because of the similarities between MacKinnon and Kathleen Barry. Brown cites MacKinnon as an example of feminist theorizing that contains ‘the sharp but frequently elided tensions between adhering to social construction theory on one hand, and epistemologically privileging women’s accounts of social life on the other’(1995: 41). Brown elaborates on these ’symptomatically modernist paradoxes’ (1995: 42) in MacKinnon’s work:

    while women [in MacKinnon’s work] are socially constructed to the core, women’s words about their experience… are anointed as Truth, and constitute the foundations of feminist knowledge… even when social construction is adopted as method for explaining the making of gender, “feelings” and “experiences” acquire a status that is politically if not ontologically essentialist (1995: 42).

    This is not simply an arcane academic debate about the status of knowledge in feminist theory. Like MacKinnon, Barry claims that women’s experience, in this case, the experience of prostitution, bears out the ‘truth’ of sexual subordination. Not only does this result in the constructionist/essentialist paradox described above, it also requires ’suspending recognition that women’s “experience” is thoroughly constructed, historically and culturally varied, and interpreted without end’ (Brown 1995: 40). Brown suggests that the urge to reify ‘women’s experience’ stems from a reluctance to leave behind the moral certainties of ‘truth’ for political power struggles: in others words, from an inability to renounce a politics of ressentiment.

    In claiming the ‘injured prostitute’ as the ontological and epistemological basis of feminist truth, Barry forecloses the possibility of political confrontation with sex workers who claim a different experience. It is this move — the insistence that there is one ‘truth’ about sex workers experience, and that this truth must be the basis of feminist political action, that Barry reveals her essentially moral stance and thus her investment in ressentiment. This moralism serves to obscure the operations of power in her own constructions of prostitute experience. I now turn to an examination of the nature of this power.

    Power, identity, and imperialism
    How is power exercised in Barry’s writing about ‘third world prostitutes’? Liddle and Rai’s (1998) recent paper on orientalism in feminist discourse is a useful place to begin exploring this question. Liddle and Rai identify three ways in which ‘discursive [authorial] power takes on the character of orientalism [and] …power of an orientalist character is exercised’ (1998: 512). Two of these will be discussed below. Firstly, Liddle and Rai argue that orientalist power is exercised discursively when ‘the author denies the subject the opportunity for self-representation’ (1998: 512). A second discursive operation of orientalist power occurs when patriarchal oppression or women’s resistance to it is represented in such a way that western cultures, and western feminism, come out as ‘more advance on the scale of civilization’ (1998: 512).

    In Barry’s work, the subject of the prostitute is constructed partially through the lens of orientalism: in Liddle and Rai’s words, she ‘denies the subject the opportunity for self-representation’ (1998: 512). First world sex workers are both pitied and blamed for adopting a politics of sex worker rights. While pitied for having to ‘actively incorporate dehumanization into [their] identity’ (1995: 70), first world sex worker activists are at the same time held responsible for women’s oppression: ‘to “embrace” prostitution sex as one’s self-chosen identity is to be actively engaged in promoting women’s oppression in behalf of oneself’ (1995: 71). Third world sex workers, however, are not even credited with knowing what sex worker rights are all about. Referring to third world sex workers, Barry writes:

    “Sex work” language has been adopted out of despair, not because these women promote prostitution but because it seems impossible to conceive of any other way to treat prostitute women with dignity and respect than through normalizing their exploitation (1995: 296).

    As with Victorian feminists and their campaign to rescue Indian women, third world sex workers are seen as so ‘enslaved’ that their only hope is rescue by others. The helpless of Indian prostitutes was central to Victorian feminists arguments, and the slavery trope served to demonstrate the need for intervention: ‘Ideologies of slavery, whether pro-or anti-, were premised on the notion that the slave, even when capable of resistance, was most often helpless in the face of either natural incapacity or culturally sanctioned constraint’ (Burton 1998: 341). The helplessness of the Indian prostitute served as an effective foil to the saving capabilities of British feminists (Burton 1994). The same holds true now: ‘In true colonial fashion, Barry’s mission is to rescue those whom she considers to be incapable of self-determination’(Kempadoo 1998: 11).

    Third world sex workers’ organizations reject this racist portrayal of themselves as deluded and despairing (see Kempadoo and Doezema 1998). Neither is ’sex work language’, as Barry implies, a western concept picked up by ignorant third world sex workers who are incapable of understanding its ramifications. While the term ’sex work’ was coined by Carol Leigh, a western sex worker (Leigh 1998), its rapid and wide-spread adoption by sex workers the world over reflects not stupidity, but rather a shared political vision. As Kempadoo (1998) documents, sex workers in the third world have a centuries-old history of organizing to demand an end to discriminatory laws and practices. Building on this history, sex worker rights organizations are today flourishing all over the third world: ‘Sex workers’ struggles are thus neither a creation of a western prostitutes’ rights movement or the privilege of the past three decades’ (Kempadoo 1998: 21).

    Third world sex workers have seen through the patronizing attitude of those like Barry who would save them for their own good. It is worth quoting at length from the ‘Sex Workers’ Manifesto’ (1997), produced at the First National Conference of Sex Workers in Calcutta (attended by over 3,000 sex workers).

    Like many other occupations, sex work is also an occupation… we systematically find ourselves to be targets of moralizing impulses of dominant social groups, through missions of cleansing and sanitising, both materially and symbolically. If and when we figure in political or developmental agendas, we are enmeshed in discursive practices and practical projects which aim to rescue, rehabilitate, improve, discipline, control or police us. Charity organizations are prone to rescue us and put us in ’safe’ homes, developmental organizations are likely to ‘rehabilitate’ us through meagre income generation activities, and the police seem bent upon to regularly raid our quarters in the name of controlling ‘immoral’ trafficking. Even when we are inscribed less negatively or even sympathetically within dominant discourses we are not exempt from stigmatisation or social exclusion. As powerless, abused victims with no resources, we are seen as objects of pity (Durban Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) 1997: 2-3).

    The ‘hierarchy of civilization’
    I now turn to the second of Liddle and Rai’s contentions about the workings of orientalist power in feminist discourse: that orientalist power is invoked discursively when male oppression and female resistance are characterized in such as way to reinforce a ‘hierarchy of civilization’. Barry’s work, and the campaign rhetoric of CATW, clearly locate trafficking within ‘backward’, traditional societies (see Kempadoo 1998). As in Victorian feminists’ Indian campaign, ‘traditional and religious practices’ are seen as the root of the problem of trafficking:

    Trafficking focuses particularly on indigenous and aboriginal women who are from remote tribal communities where traditional family and religious practices either devalue girl children or reduce girls to sex service, which enables and encourages parents to sell their daughters (Barry 1995: 178).

    Referring to a remark by a Pakistani women’s rights leader that Bengali girls trafficked into Pakistan don’t know what country they are from, Barry comes close to calling these women sub-human: ‘Illiteracy and rural village patriarchal feudalism abnegate human identity for many of these women’ (1995: 171). Concerning Thai women, she remarks ‘In Thailand, religious ideology and patriarchal feudalism reduce the value of women’s lives to that of sexual and economic property, which in turn validate prostitution’(1995: 182) Her analysis is based on that of Troung (1990), whose work, though of immense value, is not free from ‘a sense that non-modern cultures live in a different, backward, or eternal time’ (Lyons 1999: 3).

    This attitude-that third world women, and prostitutes in particular — are victims of their (backward, barbaric) cultures is pervasive in the rhetoric of CATW and in those western feminist organizations that have joined their CATW’s campaign around the Vienna Protocol against trafficking. According to Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt,

    In the U.S., we tend to see the issue of trafficking and forced prostitution through the lens of our affluent democratic society. In many cultures, women and girls have no power and very limited rights so that their vulnerability to sex trafficking is high (quoted in Soriano 2000: 3).

    The co-director of CATW stated recently

    In the global South and East, victims of the sex trade are often young women and girls who are desperately poor in cultures where females are expected to sacrifice themselves for the well being of their families and communities (Leidhold 1999: 4).

    In CATW inspired feminist discourses, the ‘third world’ sex worker is presented as backward, innocent, and above all helpless — in need of rescue (Murray 1998, Doezema 1998, 2000). Through her, the superiority of the saving western body is marked and maintained.

    Protection or Discipline
    According to Wendy Brown, the result of strategies that are based on ressentiment, that is, demands to the state for redress of injured identity, can end up re-inscribing, rather than neutralizing, the injured identity itself. As examined in the first section, the ‘politics of protection’ are particularly dangerous for women because of the way they have been used to control and divide women. Brown suggests that we should be even more cautious about attempts to protect women sexually:

    if the politics of protection are generically problematic for women and for feminism, still more so are the specific politics of sexual protections, such as those inherent in feminist antipornography legislation and criminalization of prostitution… such appeals for protection… involve seeking protection from masculinist institution against men, a move more in keeping with the politics of feudalism than freedom. Indeed, to be “protected” by the same power whose violation one fears perpetuates the very modality of dependence and powerlessness marking much of women’s experience across widely diverse cultures and epochs (p.165).

    Barry and CATW configure their demands for an end to ‘injury’ in terms of an appeal to the universal ideal of human rights. Yet their political goals betray the extent to which demands for protection mesh with attempts to discipline the very ’suffering bodies’ whose ‘injuries’ are seen as the very stuff of the identity ‘woman’.

    At the Vienna negotiations, CATW’s lobby group back a definition of ‘trafficking in women’ that would severely restrict women’s ability to migrate both within a country and between countries. They call for all those who assist a woman to migrate, when at the end of the migration the woman works in prostitution, to be charged as ‘traffickers’ (CATW 1999). This means that a relative who drives a potential sex worker from one city to the next, or even an airline on which a potential sex worker flies, could be charged with ‘trafficking’ (Jordan in Soriano 2000). It is not difficult to see how these restrictions fit in with notions prevalent in much of the world about keeping women close to home and hearth (Guy 1992, Yuval-Davis 1997, Wijers 1999, Doezema 2000). In another example, Barry cites as a model a 1993 policy adopted by the Vietnamese Government to eradicate prostitution. Prostitutes who were ‘willing to lead a normal life’ were offered an unspecified amount of money to do so (Quy quoted in Barry 1995: 300). However, ‘unwilling’ prostitutes were ‘gathered in special centres for reformation for at least a minimum of six months’ (Quy quoted in Barry 1995: 301). Barry champions the imprisonment of sex workers in the guise of ‘protection’ — this is indeed a chilling illustration of the politics of ressentiment at work.

    Conclusion
    Let us be clear: empire is no longer. Contemporary forms of international domination (’development’ ‘globalization’) are heavy with a colonial past but their mechanisms of power are not those of empire. Decolonization, independence movements, new social movements, grassroots organizations and NGOs have brought new actors to the international political stage, and power cannot be read simply off geographical lines. Thus contemporary utilizations of prostitutes ’suffering bodies’ by western feminists cannot be analysed as a perfect analogue to utilizations by Victorian feminists. Nonetheless, if power is not the sole preserve of former imperial nations, they still have the lion’s share of economic might and political power, and feminists’ ambivalent reaction to contemporary international relations of domination in some ways mirrors that of their Victorian counterparts.

    In Burton’s analysis, the construction of Victorian feminist identity through the body of enslaved Indian prostitute proceeded via an interaction between the opposites of identification and opposition: identity was affirmed through, on the one hand, feminine ability to identify with suffering, and on the other, through establishing the superiority of English women to colonized women. For CATW feminists, the ’suffering body’ of the ‘third world prostitute’ serves the function of marking the contrast between herself and ‘emancipated’ women as well as symbolizing the ultimate ‘injury’ of the identity ‘women’. Through her, abolitionist feminists both western and non-western argue for women’s inclusion in international human rights: the kidnapped, raped, beaten, ill ‘third world prostitute’ stands as a powerful symbol for the exclusion of women from ‘universal’ human rights due to their sexual subordination. The ‘third world prostitute’, oppressed by tradition and religion, exploited by western patriarchal capitalism, carrying the baggage of the colonial legacy of presumed backwardness and sexual innocence, is the perfect figure to hold up to the world as the image of sexually subordinated womanhood. Her victimhood, established by over a century of feminist, abolitionist, and colonialist discourse, is indisputable.

    In Brown’s analysis, the desire for protection of injured identities leads to collusion with and intensification of disciplinary regimes of power. The process of identity formation in the work of Barry and CATW is a complicated one. It is constituted out of both identification with the ’suffering body’ of the prostitute — ‘woman as whore’ — and through the neo-imperial opposition to the ‘backward’ third world prostitute. Through CATW’s complicated process of identification/’othering’, however, it is the discipline of certain bodies that is being sought in the name of protecting all women. CATW’s strategy at the Crimes Commission betrays ressentiment’s desire to identify victims, apportion blame, and support repressive measures in the name of protecting women. It is small wonder that many governments delegations sympathize with their position. While the negotiations are still ongoing, and the outcome is uncertain, there are indications that the Crimes Commission will opt for an approach that aims to ‘protect’ women from prostitution by limiting their freedom. CATW should not be surprised when sex workers the world over appear less than grateful for these efforts on their behalf.

    References

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    BURTON, Antoinette (1994) Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

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    CHAPKIS, Wendy (1997) Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor, London: Cassell

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    SANGERA, Jyoti (1998) ‘In the Belly of the Beast’, reprinted in Re/productions, Issue No. 2, Spring 1999 at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/SAsia/repro2

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    WALKOWITZ, Judith (1980) Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

    WIJERS, Marjan (1999) ‘European Union policies on trafficking in women’ in Mariagrazia Rossilli, editor, Gender Policies in the European Union, Peter Lang Publishing

    WIJERS, Marjan and LAP-CHEW Lin (1997) Trafficking in Women, Forced Labour and Slavery-Like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour and Prostitution, Utrecht and Bangkok: The Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV)/The Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW)

    YUVAL-DAVIES, Nira (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage Publications

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    Created: October 9, 2002
    Last modified: October 9, 2002 Commercial Sex Information Service
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    17 April 2005, 8:49 pm

13. Stan:

    No time to digest the last long one yet, but I am familiar with Wendy Brown, who I specifically critique in my upcoming book. She is a postmodern idealist, but that’s shorthand and I will need time to explain myself later on this, but for those familiar with this orientation, the Foucaultian idiom stands out in this. PM has become a dominant academic orthodoxy and is often stood (unsuccessfully, in my view) against the materialist conception of history. Note the strong substitution of ‘identity’ for position in a system of structured material power… the PM retreat from the ‘metanarrative.’

    17 April 2005, 9:04 pm

14. sw:

    And Stan, why don’t you tell me then… If prostitution is criminalised (even like in Sweden), what will the vast majority of sex-workers who are doing it for ecconomic reasons do? How will they survive? What will drug addicts do? What will people who don’t get welfare do? What will illegal migrants do? What will people with no qualifications do? How will the people you “save” in the third world actually survive?

    I can tell you that ALL of them will continue to do sex-work. But they wont do it in brothels or through agencies. They’ll do it on the streets or through pimps. The “good” people of Sweden dont have to look at prostitutes standing in shop windows anymore because they’re hiding in dark alleyways instead now.

    Violence will increase and prostitution wont go away because the basis - womens opression, alienation, ecconomic dependance and poverty - will still be there. But just like in Sweden the official figures will fall and everyone (including “radical feminists”) will be happy because they don’t see or have to deal with the problem any more.

    18 April 2005, 4:25 am

15. Stan:

    A quick note… I have not “refused” to engage any debate. It may be a year before I can point out everything that’s wrong with the maddeningly detached PM chattering in the paper above, for the same reason as my “failure” to engage every aspect of this debate. Time.

    There is a certain irony in the accusation that I have gang-tackled anyone on this issue, when I permit the VAST majority of posts in opposition (the ONLY exceptions are name-calling and flaming) to go up, and they outnumber me overwhelmingly.

    It is completely unfair and untrue (if that matters) that I have ever given short shrift to anyone bsed on their social position — specifically that I have failed ot agree with SW based on some prejudgment of her as a person , or based on how she survives. This is just scurrulous, and I’ll not have much more of it. There is not a single instance of me taking that approach here, and you’ll be hard pressed to find it anywhere else either. I don’t deserve that accusation here, and it is an unfounded and unprincipled one.

    Shame on you.

    I’ll also challenge this notion of orientalism, another sly and unprincipled strike by the word-spinners who constructed that ghastly essay. The piece on the Swedish model was posted by an organization that is run, staffed, and organized by so-called third-world women. I didn’t write it; they did. The reason the issue of women in under-developed countries is important… now listen very closely, because this is a very subtle point… is that the vast majority of women live in underdeveloped countries. Pointing to the circumstances of real power exercised over them (this does not in any remote way imply that people have no agency, but that every human ‘agent’ is circumscribed by her conditions) is not an ‘injured-body metaphor’ (speaking of dismissals!!!); it is making the valid point that one cannot generalize from the positions or points of view of a handful of metropolitan (first world) prostitutes and porn actresses. Now let me clarify the last point… I did NOT say that being a metropolitan prostitute nullifies any argument that one makes. On the contrary, I am saying that the flip side of this fallacy is that simply being in that position automatically confers validity on one’s arguments. It does not.

    That’s all I have time for. Not dismissing. I am looking for a job, and there are several other people who have something at stake in that. Yesterday, I was watching a two-and-a-half year old grandson, which is a 24-7 deal, because he will leap off a building or stick a paperclip in a light socket if you let him. I am working in two active political campaigns, and trying to finish a book.

    I am NOT ignoring anyone. Make your argument and quit blaming me for not making it for you, SW. I am not your enemy, and the transference of your anger at me is inappropriate. Disagreeing with you is not a personal affront.

    18 April 2005, 12:13 pm

16. eeatingkimcheee:

    ultimately the commodification of any service is exploitative…to the seller as well as the buyer

    any person who denies this is a fool

    18 April 2005, 5:27 pm

17. SW:

    Why did you delete my post Stan? It WAS making my argument. You deleted it then went and argued against a whole lot of other stuff. That is the LOWEST kind of arguing possible.

    For any readers, in my last post I simply pointed out that if the Swedish model is imposed it does nothing for the VAST MAJORITY of women in the 3rd or 1st world who are in prostitution for ecconomic reasons. They will have to continue sex-work, just in far more dangerous and underground conditions. It is already illegal to kidnapp and rape women. That doesn’t stop it from happening. If you take away their right to work in brothels and through agencies you FORCE them to work on the streets and through pimps.

    Also, don’t confuse me with other posters please. Oz Feminista is not me and she clearly posted that for discussion. Maybe you could try DISCUSSING these issues instead of throwing around insults.

    Also, the problem I have with you is that you are not ADRESSING any of the issues I have brought up. You aren’t arguing against them. You are just ignoring them or twisting them around because it is EASIER FOR YOU to have the same qliched arguments with sex-radicals.

    And you can keep talking shit about women in the third world but untill you actually adress the SPECIFIC issues which affect them and that THEY have brought up, as far as I can see you are just using them.

    Your arguments are typicall of white men trying to play down women’s opression. Our issues are not important because there is always some group who is worse off. SORRY, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE SERIOUSLY ANY WHITE MALE WHO TELLS WOMEN HOW TO LIBERATE THEMSELVES AND THEN TELLS THEM THEIR OPINION DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT “OPRESSED ENOUGH”. WHICH WOMEN ARE QUALIFIED TO SPEAK ABOUT WOMEN’S LIBERATION? OBVIOUSLY NOT THIRD WORLD WOMEN BECAUSE YOU WONT EVEN READ STUFF FROM THEIR ORGANISATIONS.

    IT IS THE ULTIMATE EXCERSISE IN WHITE MALE POWER TO SHOW UP AND TELL THE OPRESSED THAT THEY CAN PLAY NO ROLE IN THEIR OWN LIBERATION - THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING TO SEX-WORKERS.

    18 April 2005, 8:30 pm

18. Stan:

    Here is the post I deleted, for the record:

    “You JERK stan. Why not promote ANY sex-workers organisations? Why not do your goddam research? The Swedish solution is a BIG FAT COP OUT. Why have you refused to answer ANY of the points I have brought up in any of these discussions? Why have you refused to take up ANY of the issues raised by even anti-prostitution groups like Global Womens Strike who don’t support this shit? I am really fucking angry and really dissapointed. So much for not pushing a frameword for OUR liberation. You call for the STATE to drive prostitution underground making it MORE DANGEROUS and working environments worse because you can’t be bothered adressing the real issues and you cant handle reality. You are like every other fucking CLIENT who thinks prostitutes are STUPID.”

    I have repeatedly warned you about name calling, and this last post, which I have approved for the record simply repeats the same stuff you have already said, all of it putting words in my mouth that were never stated, and as in the other deleted post, comparing me to a john. I told you I will have none of this, and I will not.

    I explained that I haven’t had time to comment on everything that has come up, and that hasn’t changed. I have been extremely patient and open with you, deleting only two posts that were almost pure venom, both saying I am no better than a john, but you have continually misrepresented me in order to display what is becoming imo an irrational anger that is inappropriately directed.

    This is the last warning. Change the tenor, and stop the personalization of the issues, including personal attacks , or you will not post on this list. You are perfectly free to set up your own blog and shout in capital letters and insult people who fail to re-state your own positions. You will not do it again here.

    18 April 2005, 8:52 pm

19. Stan:

    SW just sent another rant, this one stating that she was glad Andrea Dworkin is dead. She will not be posting on this blog again.

    18 April 2005, 8:58 pm

20. oz feminista:

    SW -

    I just saw the note from Stan re the comment from SW being glad that Dworkin has died. That’s a strange/incongruous thing to say, from a women who presents herself as the archetypal angry woman. I reckon SW you might have a fair bit in common with Andrea Dworkin yourself. And I suggest you check out the website about the myths spread about her - check Stan’s post of obituary by MacKinnon and my response. As I said there, there’s alot I don’t agree with her conslusions.

    Anyway this was to be my post SW before I read what you’d said. I send it anyway.

    SW- on a personal note can I say I think it’s a shame you have decided not to continue to discuss these things (or at least to keep hurling insults at Stan is not helpful as I think he is facilitating our discussion in a sense which i appreciate - and acknowledge that he is a busy person like the rest of us…..). I too have many other things happening so haven’t really had time to even check back until now, let alone time to post much. And while thinking and acting on this is my passion I too have committments & my kids to run around with/after (!!!) and tonnes of stuff to do…

    But I am however in agreement here with Stan re your posts SW. I am trying to follow your arguments - as i do think you have alot to contribute and I am sure I read earlier posts where you mentioned engaging in left debates and campaigns, contributions to GLW etcetera here in Oz, along with your passion and commitment to sex workers issues. Perhaps Stan is right and there is some gap that can’t be bridged between you two, what you post does seem very personal towards criticising Stan - I haven’t actually seen him say anything on line to warrant that.

    The article Stan posted for discussion is about the swedish model of criminalising the purchaser in sexual transactions - rather than the seller. It’s a fair proposition if you understand where it came from and a fair thing to ask could it work elsewhere. Some women sex workers are posing questions about that too. I for one am very interested in that. I met some swedish lefties at a socialist stall in the city where I live (they stopped to say hello and buy material) who had an interesting conversation with me about the GLW article of that current issue of that paper on german prostitution laws and unemployment issues. It was a very interesting exchange, which highlighted that they felt some women were worse off as SW has pointed out. pushed underground. more marginalised. more dangerous. But they also saw benefits - on a social level, in a sociaty they viewed as sexually open.
    Since then i have looked for some research - which doesn’t have the pro- or anti- spin on it, but really tries to look at the realities for working and other women.

    I had also intended to add some more detailed comments on the paper i added earlier, which Stan correctly pointed out is an academic contribution in the “post-modernist/foucault” idealist orientation, and i had hoped you’d engage in this SW. Can you post again to let me know if you do set up your own blog or discussion list - if you have the time. I would be very interested to participate - or if you want to continue it through the scarlet alliance chat facility perhaps? though i prefer not to monitor too many sites….no time;-(

    I think for us to have solid and materialist, marxist anaylsis on this aspect of women’s oppression - which to me sexuality on the one hand and our reproductive capacity on another are even more basic a division in our society than class - so we need to engage this stuff and we point out where and why the idealist, the post-modernist analysis is not helpful, how in fact it obsfucates, it misleads….and often in very persuasive ways. And why this is so.

    This is an extract from from the website:Prostitution seen as Violence Against Women - a supportive or oppressive view?
    by Liv Jessen - a Norwegian, and the head of the Pro Centre, a national centre for prostitutes in Norway

    I’ll leave this with you for thinking about because it seems to me to be what you SW are on about. But can I say that even if we agree on and accept this analysis of the circumstances we live in relating to sale of and purchase of sex, and the links to how sexuality per se is constructed,the social constructivist view presented which links very well to the materialist explanation of the origins of sexual division of labour - the meanings attached to - in development of class society. But the links still need to be spelt out, developed, demonstarted. It doesn’t follow for one case to be shown and therefor the other is done. Accepting that then, one can chose to approach addressing this is many ways with many differing politics attached to this. That we live under a male dominate society will be true regardless of prostitution. I think Jensen is right to put at the end of the article that we need to be aware to also “distinguish between understanding prostitution at a structural level and understanding it at an individual level.” I’m waffling. here’s the extract. full article is on the site: http://www.bayswan.org/swed/livjessen.html and there are a range of material here on this topic of the swedish laws too. http://www.bayswan.org/swed/swed_index.html

    Oz feminista.

    ___________________________________________________________

    (Liv Jessen received the first ever Human Rights Award from Amnesty International for Prostitutes’ Rights work.)
    towards the middle of the article:
    “The sex trade is not a phenomenon outside of society; on the contrary, it is constructed by society. It reflects the gender and power structure we have and is thus not abnormal. Thus, it is important not to attach importance to what distinguishes prostitutes from other women, but to focus on the fact that women in general have a great deal in common, such as our work on the reproduction front, the fact that we are largely financially inferior to and dependent on men, the female role in the sex game, commercialisation of the female body, the disciplining of women’s sexuality, and so on. She calls her view a socio-constructionist view and she says it is not very constructive to explain a prostitute’s participation in prostitution by her background, upbringing or similar, or by the detrimental effects prostitution is claimed to have. She uses some controversial questions to support her view. For example:

    Can prostitution be seen as an option, or is it always a situation where there is no choice?
    Are women prostitutes deviants or normal people?
    Is the purchase itself an expression of power or of powerlessness?
    Should prostitution be criminalized or not?
    I would like to consider some of these questions.
    Does prostitution always have to be linked with a no-choice situation?

    We agreed that women are generally in an inferior social position. Some women also find themselves in a no-choice situation where they feel that prostitution is the only solution. The more traumatic a woman’s background is, the easier it is for us to understand her. It is easy to confuse the structural view of women as victims and objects of men’s abusive power with the picture of individual wretchedness in some street prostitutes. We naturally have no difficulty in understanding that her wretched life quality ‘forces’ her to prostitute herself.

    Like other radical feminists, H¿igard and Finstad, two norwegian scientists, are unable to accept voluntary prostitution because they do not believe that anyone could ever choose to take part in such activity: “no-one wants to rent out her vagina as a garbage can for hordes of anonymous men’s ejaculations”. Nevertheless, to apply the social victim-object view to individuals in prostitution can at best arouse our sympathy, but at worst can result in her no longer seeing herself as a person, a subject with a choice. If there is anything women in prostitution need to do, then it is to mobilize all their willpower and strength to make a choice - and perhaps chose something other than prostitution. But to do that she must be ascribed humanness, subjectivity and identity. And then we also run the risk that she will not make the choice we want her to; she may choose prostitution. As the wise Hans Skjervheim has said: “The first thing you have to choose, is to make the choice yourself”.

    The sex trade today covers many different degrees of volition and exploitation. That is why it is fruitless to take a general victim view of prostitution. Free will and force vary in different cultures in the past and in the present, within any one country and perhaps also in any one individual.

    What about prostitutes as deviants or normal people?
    We have mentioned above that prostitution has traditionally been regarded as socially deviant, and that this was something the feminists objected to. They would not agree that her participation in prostitution could be explained by individual characteristics and pathologization. But what happens if we explain her participation solely by background factors such as a difficult childhood, drug abuse in the home, psychological problems, sexual abuse, etc. Or if we analyse the social and psychological deviations and harmful effects caused by prostitution, such as split personality, loss of self-respect, sexual problems, social isolation etc.? What then? We are getting dangerously close to defining her as a social deviant. She is certainly not like us. She is still the Other Woman, with whom we do not have to identify. We are careful not show our contempt. Instead she becomes the object of our pity.

    If she is in a situation where she has no choice, is he always in a position of power?
    In 1979, Taksdal and Prieur, also norwegian scientists, launched their book,  sette pris pÅ’ kvinner - menn som kj¿per sex (Putting a Price on Women - Men Who Buy Sex). This book has unfortunately not been translated. At last, the focus shifts for a brief moment. Since then both the Swedes and the Danes have written books and reports on the purchaser. Research shows that the customer is no different from ordinary men as regards age, marital status or occupation, although there is an overrepresentation among men who travel a great deal. The customers’ reasons for purchasing vary. However, the feminist interpretation of men as the subject, active and power-wielding does not fit in very well with the motives given by the interviewees. Their statements can be interpreted as powerlessness as easily as anything else. In some ways, the women even believe that they are the ones with power in prostitution, not the customers. Since power and the exercise of power vary so much between the different forms of prostitution and in different cultures, it is not easy to paint an unambiguous picture. I think that many of us who busy ourselves with these questions agree that far more social effort must be directed at the customers in the years ahead, both in the form of more research into the market and into the buyers’ motives for buying, and we should perhaps implement some social measures for certain groups of customers.

    Then there is the criminalization aspect
    For many years it was (and still is) generally agreed that we did not want to criminalize women in prostitution. The situation for street prostitutes was already wretched; no-one wanted to make it any worse. Some political voices advocated this criminalization, but it does not look as if the suggestion has much support among the people of Scandinavia. However, there are many people who, out of sympathy for women in street prostitution and on a feministic basis, advocate criminalizing the customers. Sweden passed a law in 1999 prohibiting the sale of sexual services. One good thing about the Swedish law is that, unlike earlier legislation, it has brought the customer’s role into the debate on prostitution.

    However, my main argument against criminalization of the customer is that it would most likely send the activity under ground and away from public supervision and control. Furthermore, any kind of criminalization will hurt the weakest party, the women. In 1985, changes were made in the penal code in Canada, prohibiting the sale of sexual services in public places. They tried to adapt the law in a gender-equal way, but more sellers than buyers were caught. Many of the street prostitutes I have spoken to in Oslo do not see criminalization of the customers as supportive of them. They say that they do not make any distinction between criminalising prostitution as such and criminalizing the purchase alone. They already feel that they are doing something illegal, so if the purchase alone is criminalised in Norway too, they know that in practice it will be bad for them.

    Off-street prostitution will always be very difficult to prosecute. For that reason, the Swedish police have concentrated their efforts on street prostitution. The women in street prostitution are already very vulnerable to abuse; the situation will become worse. Confidence in social workers and in the police will dwindle, and the market will be wide open for procurers and other profiteers. The best means of preventing the situation from becoming worse is openness and dialogue.

    We must be capable of finding other ways of doing something about prostitution. Believing that criminalization will ‘resolve’ this difficult dilemma for us is not the way to go. A society with our humanistic traditions must make an effort to find better solutions. I do not know of any restrictive society where legislation has abolished prostitution - it has only made the situation more difficult for those who sell sex. Since 1999 when they introduced the new law in Sweden, 160 cases were reported. Out of these, 67 cases were withdrawn. Of the rest, 43 were charged for the crime. 25 persons were fined, 11 submitted fine without trial and 7 not guilty. 50 cases are still under investigation. These figures are from February 2001. There, they have focused on street prostitution and ‘got rid of’ half of the street prostitutes. What has happened to them, no-one knows. Very little is known about off-street prostitution.

    At all events, there is a scarlet thread running from the view that prostitutes are victims and social losers through the idea that purchasing sex is ‘violence against women’ to the suggestion that the activity of customers should be criminalized. Seen from this point of view, criminalization will recognize that prostitutes have no choice and apportion the blame where it belongs, namely with the customer. ” end extract.

    18 April 2005, 11:35 pm

21. Bardamu:

    Thank you, Stan, for your obit on Andrea Dworkin.

    This has been a very interesting thread to follow and the comments, particularly Oz Feminista’s, have been excellent. It is true that it is too easy to see prostitutes as abstractions of a social system, not as human beings, and to oversimplify the complexity of this issue and the possibilities of individual choice.

    But we don’t live in that perfect world of free choice, do we?

    There is a disturbing trend that I saw in SW’s comments and that I have encountered in discussions on this subject, namely to discount what we men say on this subject on the basis of our gender. I have been the freind and lover of women who worked in the ’sex industry’ in differing capacities (in the first world), and cared for their children. It is from these personal experience being part of the lives of these women that I have formed the view of sex work is a serious evil, and that it is oppression, often internalized.

    Feminists, sex workers, I ask you: do we men who care enough to be involved in this debate not have a right to have an opinion and to advocate stances on the oppression that we see?

    Viva Andrea Dworkin.

    22 April 2005, 5:25 am

22. Andreas Fogeby:

    Hi everyone.

    As a native Swedish citizen sitting in a Stockholm suburb writing this I have some strong objections to the facts presented in Stans original article.

    First of all, prostitution has NOT been legal in Sweden “during the last three decades” and for the so called “renowned Swedish brothels and massage parlors” I have never heard of them since to the extent they exist they’re underground and hidden as in most other countries where prostitution is illegal. This is elementary facts that are easy to check and their inclusion in the article raises a lot of questions about the general competence of the author.

    Secondly, while it is true that the new law, named “sexköpslagen” in swedish, that transfered the criminal act from the seller to the buyer, has had the effect of drastically reducing the open street prostitution, effects on total prostitution are harder to assess because of most of it having been driven underground where it is much more difficult to observe and research. The general consensus, to the extent one exists, seem to be that total prostitution may have been slightly reduced at the cost of the prostitutes beeing more insecure and more in the hands of organized crime.

    22 April 2005, 11:30 am

23. libertarias:

    Address by Rosinha Sambo to the
    Taipei Sex Worker Conference 2001
    on the Situation of Sex Workers in Sweden

    To be a sex worker in Sweden, is dangerous. It’s a hell- mostly dangerous. We don’t know anymore, what, or how to do it. What we have in Sweden, it’s a law who doesn’t make us any good, and doesn’t give us any choice. Government in Sweden wants to rehabilitate us, to rehabilitate the sex worker, just like we are victims of some kind of dangerous sickness. Rehabilitate us as we could spread around this sickness.

    I have, in vain, tried to explain, for politics, feminists, and other ignorant intellectuals, that this is a work, and that’s why this is also a choice. I have tried to explain that we should instead, have classes, on sex work. To do it more safe, and better- especially for the younger generation of sex workers in this country now.

    All the Swedish Government does is abstract our work of trying to make it easier for the younger ones. It’s very difficult in Sweden right now. Very, very, difficult. Specially the health question. The health question, it’s in the air and nobody seems to care about it. The sex workers are victims of everyone’s dangerous.

    She have to protect her customers in order to keep them. She’s exposed to all sorts of criminals, psychos, sadists, because she must protect the customer. Well, the problem is that Sweden lives on the looks- how does it looks like for the rest of the world. That’s the most important for the Swedish, ah, Government. They wanna look good, but they don’t really care, how are we do it. Well, the polity, the politicians, they know very well that sex work continues, and that they have completely failed in their ridiculous try, to get rid of us. This is how we know that. Only because they don’t see us, it doesn’t mean we don’t exist. They know that.

    But of course, Sweden is very far away from most of the rest of this planet, so not everybody go to Sweden every month to see how the hookers are doing. .

    Well, one of the worse consequences with this law, is that there comes a lot of underage prostitution in Sweden. The Mafia come inside- the Russian Mafia that has nothing to do with Sweden at all, should be the Swedish Mafia, okay, but, the Russian Mafia come into Sweden with a lot of kidnapped young girls, older womens, all ages. A lot of Swedish hookers get killed because they can’t call the Police any more. Because if they call the Police, the word goes around that they put a call to the cops, come by that they got problems, and they lose all their customers. So a lot of, um, women have got killed, and men. Prostitutes, sex workers. Just like me. Just like many of us. Others have moved. Others have, ah, start, to drink too much, lost their children, and so on, and so on.

    Okay, for me, three years ago, before this law came, I was living with my two children. And now, I’m not. I have to put my children in Portugal, and be more careful before the Welfare comes and take them away, it’s a little excuse. It’s very easy for a prostitute to lose her children now in Sweden. If they know you are prostitute, they have their eyes on you. If you get some problem, they take your children away immediately. As I didn’t want to have that risk, I’d rather have my children living with my father’s family in Portugal, than with me.

    So this law is splitting up families too, because I am not the only one who is separated from their children right now, with this law.

    So another consequence of this law is that many Swedish sex workers now go to Norway, the neighbour country, it’s only some hours from Sweden when you go there through the train, and work there. But of course, if I live 6 or 5 hours, 7 hours, away from, ah, Norway, I can’t go back home every day. And that means that I have to have a baby-sitter. And that means that I have to trust that baby-sitter very much. Because I can only go home in the weekends, and not every weekend. And that is very difficult. Not only is embarrassing, that’s not the problem, but is difficult to leave your children with a stranger for a week, or for two weeks because you have to go to another country to work. And also it overloads the Norwegian sex market. The Norwegian hookers are getting crazy. Because they have (?),they have, ah, ah, um, over, they’re over, um, sex. So their prices in Norway have caved down, because of the Swedish law.

    The hookers run away to the countries right beside- Denmark and Norway. But in Denmark the prices are lower, so they teach the Danish hookers to also go to Norway. So, suddenly, Norway finds itself, with Danish and Swedish hooker. And they don’t know what to do anymore, in Norway, so getting in the (?). It’s a problem, it’s a big problem. Say, the Swedish have the grace to give the problems to their neighbours. They’re famous in Scandinavia for that.

    Then we have, the former, the ex, high standard’s Scandinavian hooker, not having, ah, anymore that the high standards, and ah, ah, faring for the future. All Scandinavian hookers are in panic, from the south to the north of Scandinavia, because of the Swedish law. So all the neighbour countries, Denmark, ah, Finland, Norway, they want the Swedish to change this law, but it’s so very difficult. Very, very difficult. Because the Swedish, they are happy because they win money on, ah, public transports to Norway, and Denmark. Always full of hookers. And customers. Because the customers takes the boat over to Denmark, or to Finland, to fuck sometimes. The ones that are more paranoid about the police, they go, and this is the usual, regular, customer that doesn’t want to get caught. This is a big problem.

    And the law, is that, the Swedish Government is being very selfish here. Because, ah, as long as they look good, out to the other, ah, their, with their fellow conservative idiots of the rest of the world, they’re happy. They don’t care about putting the problems in the neighbour’s garden. Is like for example, if I don’t want to have this big tree in my garden, I just in the night go dig it up from the ground and next day, my, my, ah, neighbour will wake up and have a shadow in the window. It very (?). No, I’m laughing but it true, but it very (?). We all in Scandinavia agreed on the hookers, and no hookers are angry about the Swedish, ah, ah, law, because they are putting the problems, giving away their problems. I’m very afraid that it could happen the same thing in other countries that are trying to copy this model.

    So, ah, it’s, um, necessary, ah, (? ?), and ah, especially the neighbour countries, to the countries that go to copy this model, pay very good attention, so you don’t get, um, market like we have in Norway now. Its panic, the um, the organisation for Norway, the Prostitute Interests Organisation of Norway, called PION, which are my good friends, are helping all the hookers that are coming over the border, and trying to get down rooms cheap and everything, even down, like first help, politic asylum. But, ah, the normal sex worker, who has children in Norway, and bills to pay, is resenting very much because, she doesn’t get enough money any more to pay her bills because there comes a lot of other people that was not there before and ah, make the market much cheaper, and ah, customers disappear, is tough. Complete tough. And it will happen the same in all countries that are neighbours to countries who copy the Swedish model. It’s a dangerous model, for the neighbours. For us is very terrible, for us, the sex workers, that live in these countries, with these laws, like Sweden have right now. For us it’s terrible. But, for the neighbours, it gets much worse, because then they will have to get rid, not only of the outside hookers, but also their own hookers if they want to do something about the situation, and so on, and so on. And then finally I don’t know where they will do that. I don’t know. Will they kill us? Will they, um, exterminate us? Will they invent gas caverns? To put us inside so it is as if one for long time? I don’t know. It’s very dangerous, politic, this law. Nobody thought about that before, but it is very, very, very, very dangerous.

    I went to, high school, but I still feel like I graduate. I graduate in prostitution. I know more about prostitution. I could say, I’m a doctor of prostitution. And that’s why I’m sitting here, talking to you today. And that’s also why, I wanna call a very huge SOS to Sweden, because all countries, trying to copy Sweden in this obviously terrible, and worthless, and fruitless law. I want to call your attention, because Sweden, it’s, a very strong example, where that position can bring us to. Where the law, so-called law and order can bring us to. Well, if they won’t step back, we shouldn’t step back either. If they are a model now, and they want to continue to be a model, we will let them be a model, and make sure that they will fail internationally. And, that they will recognise their mistake, because, as a model they are being watched, and everybody will see them fail. Well, every country that have learned of Sweden, and is trying to hound us away from the face of the earth, they should only need to see that it doesn’t work like this, and that, we can only do from Sweden.

    All countries have their eyes on Sweden, in this issue, and that’s why I’m here, for one more time to appeal to all my colleagues, from all over the world.

    From: http://www.bayswan.org/swed/rosswed.html

    24 April 2005, 2:49 am

24. michael:

    stan: I would simply point out that the study posted prior to the Sweden piece demonstrates clearly that ‘decriminalization’ has not had the effects claimed by its advocates, but that it has given cover for the massive expansion of trafficking as well as strengthenerd the hold of organized crime over the industry.

    michael: Seems to me, Stan, that the study posted by Californian women claiming to be authorities on the Swedish and Victorian (Aus) experience of the sex industry mostly demonstrates the degree of misrepresentation some people are prepared to deploy to prop up their ideological positions.

    The Rosinha Sambo address and Andreas Fogeby’s post already addresses some of the problems the with the depiction of the Swedish sex industy in the article, but it also grossly misrepresents the situation in Victoria since decriminalisation (which, by the way, was seen as such a successful model in Australia that it has since been emulated in other states).

    There have been some problems with the way decriminalisation has proceeded in Aus, there’s no denying that, but the idea that it has led to an increase in overall levels of prostitution is certainly debatable and the suggestion that it has *increased* the involvement of organised crime in the sex trade is the exact opposite of the truth.

    Ironically, the biggest problem decriminalisation has caused in Australia is a side-effect of the *reduction* of corruption and organised crime that decriminalisation brought about.

    In the early 1980s the sex industry in the Kings Cross/Darlinghurst red light area (where I then shared a house with between four and six sex workers) was ‘regulated’ by a combination of violent organised crime enforcers and corrupt police. Most of the parlours in the area were owned by a handful of ‘prominent Sydney businessmen’ who paid off the local cops to turn a blind eye to their operations and to ruthlessly prevent the emergence of any significant competition. The lower end of the market - mainly street workers - was ‘tolerated’ so as to take some of the heat off the more discrete parlours run by the crooks and to provide the required arrest quotas during ‘crackdowns’ (although the big crims weren’t beneath tossing some of their own girls to the cops from time to time either).

    I’m not sure if the cop-crim cartel actually reduced the number of workers in the industry (one of the first things you learn in criminology is that you can’t trust ‘victimless crime’ figures as they are a direct function of enforcement activity, not offending activity) but it sure reduced the number of ‘employers’ and kept the margins high for operators and returns low for sex workers.

    These days, there is still organised crime involvement (especially the trafficker-pimps) and police corruption, but there is far more scope for independents and sex worker co-ops to start up without getting their knees broken and faces cigarette-burned or forking over large proportions of their take to their ’silent partners’ in blue uniforms.

    But the ‘regulation’ previously carried out by bent cops for fun and profit has now been passed to local councils who do not have the resources or legal power to even check the parlours in their districts properly, much less enforce legal standards. So while the workers who self-organise enjoy much higher levels of personal safety, control over working conditions and proportion of the profits, the most seriously abused ones are basically left nowhere to turn. I don’t know if that abuse is worse than it was in the bad old days (at least far fewer are ending up in prison) but I’ve heard the opinion expressed that the bent cops used to do a better job of curbing the worst excesses than the councils do (though a sex working former aquaintance of mine would probably have begged to differ if she hadn’t been drowned in a pond at the instigation of bent police).

    Regarding the Swedish stuff, it reminds me of so many other ’solutions’ to Swedish social problems, which serve to drive the problem across borders and underground. People living in Norway, Finland and (especially) Denmark can tell you what restrictions on alcohol sales in Sweden have meant for them (i.e. a lot of blind drunk Swedish day trippers).

    When I attended a NSW Drug Summit in 2000 we were addressed by a Swedish Green parliamentarian who was flogging their draconian drug policies to local Tories (the Salvation Army brought her to Sydney - there was no love lost between her and local Green politicians). She repeatedly asserted that there was now virtually zero drug use by Swedish young people as a result of their ‘zero tolerance’ enforced treatment programs for even