As church-going citizens rise and don their Sunday best to celebrate Easter, women, girls, (and some men and boys) in brothels, flat-back houses, after-hours joints, and on street corners are ending the night shift on a day that is like all the rest in their lives—bleak, and perhaps battered, the hopelessness of it all alleviated briefly by communion with a needle, a pill bottle, or another drink. Stigma, victimization, incarceration, and often violent death by predator or procurer are all in the collection plate.
The candy-coated myths about prostitution spun by Broadway and Hollywood like "Never on Sunday," "Klute," "Pretty Woman," "Best Little Whore House in Texas," are tropes dished up for public consumption. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing about "Happy Hookers", as is the woman who wrote the linked piece.
The reality is something quite different. I wrote about it briefly in Street Life, race and prostitution, but the subject of prostitution, and related sex-trafficking as an industry that garners billions of dollars worldwide each year is one that has multiple facets, and is currently a matter of acrimonious debate, between and among feminists, public health officials, criminal justice agencies, and governments. Globally, it falls into a wide range of judicial categories: prostitution legal and regulated, selling sexual services legal, but not regulated; brothels are illegal; and prostitution illegal. The United States falls into the latter category, with the exception of the state of Nevada.
In recent years, the term sex worker has been applied to cover those who work in the sex industry as a whole. Organizations, including UN Women, have adopted programs supporting sex workers, and have delineated a position that essentially states that sex trafficking isn't sex work. However, other voices, particularly those representing indigenous women and poor women of color around the world reject the term sex worker and use "prostituted women and girls" instead.
Follow below the fold for more.
For a look at the numbers, take a look at the map in the article, this article, which explains, "Global prostitution may be a bigger industry than you think":
There are 40 to 42 million prostitutes in the world, according to a report from Fondation Scelles (via Le Figaro). Three quarters of them are between the ages of 13 and 25, and 80% of them are female.
An estimated 1 million prostitutes live in the U.S., even though it's legal only in Nevada.
I am very familiar with the social hierarchy of prostitution here in the United States. I have worked with women, girls, and young gay men who walk the "strolls" of New York City. As part of an HIV/AIDS intervention project, I've analyzed ethnographic data on the women in the brothels of the Bronx and in the Jackson Heights area of Queens, most of whom are from Colombia and the Dominican Republic. In earlier years I became acquainted with "high-class" and all-white "call girls" or "escorts" who also have entree into the city's big hotels. My job as a bartender in a mob-owned topless club in midtown and in a downtown after-hours introduced me to more "working girls" as well as pimps, players, and madams. Traveling across the country, I made similar contacts in big urban cities like Detroit and Cleveland, and in more isolated areas near reservations. I've also met two women who spent time in the legal "ranch" in Nevada (they both had pimps, so the ranch took a cut, the government gets a cut, and the pimp gets the rest of their earnings).
As part of my work as an ethnographer, I also spent time with some of the white feminist women who founded early organizations supporting and organizing sex-workers. I realized early on, that privilege and social class, as well as race and ethnicity, play key roles in just where women and young girls wind up—in an escort service, a brothel, or on the streets. This is complicated by the criminal justice system, which targets street workers, whose problems are also exacerbated by the war on drugs, the weight of which falls heaviest on women of color and poor white women.
So when examining the positions currently being debated around prostitution and "sex work," I admit to having a bias toward abolition. When you spend time with young women who have been cut, stabbed, beaten, shot, burned with cigarettes, and disposed of in a dumpster, it tends to lessen one's enthusiasm for the proposition that sex work is anything other than a system that is about violence against women.
A brief summary of the positions around the debate:
Newman and White in Women, Politics and Public Policy argue that feminist perspectives on prostitution agree on three main points: “First, they condemn the current legal policy enforcing criminal sanctions against women who offer sex in exchange for money. Second, they agree that authentic consent is the sine quo non of legitimate sex, whether in commercial or non-commercial form. Third, all feminists recognize that commercial sex workers are subject to economic coercion and are often victims of violence, and that little is done to address these problems.”
They go on to identify three main feminist views on the issue of prostitution. The sex work perspective, the abolitionist perspective and the outlaw perspective. The sex work perspective maintains that prostitution is a legitimate form of work for women faced with the option of other bad jobs, therefore women ought to have the right to work in the sex trade free of prosecution or the fear of it. The sex work perspective also argues that governments should eliminate laws that criminalize voluntary prostitution. This, the sex work perspective asserts, will allow prostitution to be regulated by governments and business codes, protect sex trade workers, and improve the ability prosecute people who hurt them. The Abolitionist perspective holds that governments should work towards the elimination of prostitution. The Outlaw Perspective views work in the sex trade as a “stepping stone to a better career or an expression of sexual freedom”.
It seems some of my First Nations sisters in Canada are also abolitionists, according to this article,
In prostitution, ‘race, class, and sex intersect in the worst of ways to subjugate Native women’:
Last month CTV News aired a short documentary as part of their “First Story” series, called “Stepping from the Shadows,” which looks at indigenous women and prostitution, the Bedford decision, and how the future of Canada’s prostitution laws could impact indigenous women and girls in Canada. The documentary features women such as Jackie Lynne, Cherry Smiley, Summer-Rain Bentham and Mona Woodward, who describe the ways poverty, racism, sexism, and violence lead indigenous women into prostitution and keep them there. “Race, class, and sex intersect in the worst ways to subjugate Native women — and in the act of prostitution it’s the most racist, the most sexist… And the man holds all of the economic power in that,” Lynne says.
Indigenous women and girls are overrepresented in street prostitution and are, according to Cherry Smiley, the most affected, yet she says in the documentary that the recent judgement on Bedford vs. Canada left them out of the decision. “There was no mention of colonialism in the judgement, there was no mention of aboriginal women and girls in the judgement,” she said. Smiley says the voices, experiences, knowledge and traditions of indigenous women have been silenced and ignored in this case. This, of course, speaks to a larger pattern we see wherein certain voices are privileged in conversations around prostitution, as well as to Canadian society’s general treatment and view of indigenous people.
Woodward says that when her sister died just outside of Calgary, the police didn’t even bother to do an investigation. “Society, as a whole, does not care about aboriginal women,” she says. “And they certainly don’t care about sex trade workers, if you’re aboriginal and you’re poor.”
Last month,
Rachira Gupta spoke at New York's Apollo Theater, discussed in
Prostitution: A Word That UN Women Does Not Want to Hear:
On the eve of a speech Ruchira Gupta was to give on International Women’s Day in New York as the recipient of a Woman of Distinction award, she got a strange email. Gupta, who has collected numerous awards for her work against sex slavery in India — including an Emmy for her 1996 documentary, “The Selling of Innocents” — was asked in the message not to speak on prostitution “or put UN Women on the spot.” The email came from the organization that had chosen Gupta for its highest award, the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, NY (NGO CSW/NY), which supports the work of UN Women and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, whose annual session was about to begin on March 9. The NGO Committee had itself used the word prostitution in its announcement of the award in January. “I was surprised that the UN was trying to censor an NGO, and that they should tell me not to speak on prostitution, when my work was with victims of prostitution,” Gupta said in an email interview to PassBlue. She is the founder of Apne Aap (meaning “self empowerment” in Hindi), a multifaceted support group for women trafficked into sex slavery in Mumbai and other South Asian cities. Apne Aap now has international reach.
In her speech at New York’s iconic Apollo Theater, where UN Women’s executive director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka of South Africa, was also on the program, Gupta ignored the request and chose to speak forcefully “to represent the voices of victims and survivors of prostitution” in her own organization and others around the world. In late 2013, UN Women, in a note on the issue of terminology, had said it would use the terms “sex work” and “sex workers” and “recognize the right of all sex workers to choose their work or leave it and to have access to other employment opportunities.”
UN Women’s decision and recommendation not to “conflate sex work, sexual exploitation and trafficking” sounds outrageous if not ludicrous to people like Gupta, who work in the squalid brothel quarters of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and other cities, to which young girls from around South Asia are lured by traffickers — or sold by poor families — into a life of miserable bondage, with no chance to make choices. In her speech on International Women’s Day on March 8, Gupta said the youngest girl trafficked into bonded labor she has met was just 7 years old. “The pimps would hand over these little girls to the brothel keepers . . . and these girls were locked up for the next five years,” she said. “Raped repeatedly by eight or ten customers every night.” By their 20s, Gupta said, their youth is gone and bodies are broken, and they are “thrown out on the sidewalk to die a very difficult death because they were no longer commercially viable.”
A transcript of Gupta at the Apollo can be found
here. Because the video of the Apollo speech is of poor quality, I'm including her TedTalk and a clip from her film:
One of the ironic things about helping women get out of the life is that one of the better known programs is in place in the the Cook County jail in Illinois:
Minnesota is home to a community-based program called Breaking Free:
Their mission is to educate and provide services to women and girls who have been victims of abuse and commercial sexual exploitation (prostitution/sex trafficking) and need assistance escaping the violence in their lives.
And here is a film being made about Breaking Free's efforts:
Breaking Free from "The Life" from Sue Lawson on Vimeo.
From my perspective, legalizing prostitution isn't going to stop the violence. Decriminalization of the women in prostitution is the approach I would take, along with increasing the number of support services available for those who want to get out of the life.