By the early 1990s, Médicos used outreach vehicles. But the original project was complicated by a dramatic increase in migrants with cultural differences making standard procedures problematic: patients who would not attend clinics, who didn’t subscribe to western ideas of hygiene, who were accustomed to herbal remedies or injecting themselves with cures bought in pharmacies, who didn’t want to deal with doctors and who had been taught different theories of AIDS and sexually transmitted disease.34 Migrants in Europe speak many different languages, as well, often unfamiliar to Europeans.
Several other NGOs did AIDS outreach to people who sell sex in Madrid: Fundación Triángulo with chaperos (male sex workers); Univer-sida in clubs in noncentral neighbourhoods; Grupo Fénix with young people. Some groups’ health activity was limited to condom distribution: Hetaira, with female and transsexual street workers in two central areas; Transexualia, with transsexuals; APRAMP, with women street workers in two central zones. Three projects did outreach in a park known as the Casa de Campo, but without coordinating amongst themselves, with the result that one could encounter multiple outreach vehicles in the same place on one day and the next day find none.
A few public clinics catered to people selling sex. The Centro Montesa had a clinic attended by a venerodermatologist who had been seeing both sex workers and their clients for twenty years, while a colleague across the hall saw HIV/AIDS patients. These and another publicly funded clinic near the Plaza de Callao did not advertise as catering to undocumented migrants or sex workers, but they were known to treat both. This tacit acceptance comes from municipalities’ knowledge that if migrants and sex workers have no access to condoms and services they may agree to have unprotected sex or remain untreated. Many migrants fear that outreach and clinics will refuse them service or report them to the police, so the knowledge that clinics will accept them is important.
In many countries, health projects distribute their messages in the form of leaflets, booklets or stickers, in the hope that these will not only be kept and examined but passed on to others. An entire study could be made of the wealth of such materials provided by projects attempting to reduce harm among those having a lot of sex (the commercial aspect is not key). Printed material is less common in Spain. In 2000, the European network Tampep began to offer free a wide range of leaflets covering sexually transmitted infections, AIDS and hepatitis, pregnancy and contraception, sex change, the immune system, condom breakage and self-care, in numerous languages.35 Other AIDS prevention materials, distributed by SOA-Bestrijding of Holland, rely on a story-board format with colours, clear photos of genital diseases, and graphic representations of sexual acts.
Two European networks collaborated to publish a guide, Hustling for Health: Developing Services for Sex Workers in Europe, about how to set up a health project for migrants. Translated to Spanish as Trabajando por la salud, the guide sat in piles in Médicos’s Madrid office long after it had first been delivered in 1999, but finally copies of the guide were distributed to a few Spanish projects in 2001. In contrast, Spanish medical projects distributed a great deal of material with general descriptions of ‘prostitution’, migration and existing services.36 Studies were repeatedly done on the relationship between HIV/AIDS and sex work and on access to social services.37
Research on AIDS is a major medical industry, many thousands attending frequent international conferences, which now include dozens of presentations related to commercial sex. Spain itself holds frequent national AIDS conferences where this theme is dominated by Médicos-Madrid and by the national AIDS plan. Funding and concern to prevent HIV transmission among those selling sex is massive, while concern over clients and other sexual partners is minimal.
Rescue projects
The best-known rescue project in Madrid was APRAMP (Association for the Prevention, Reinsertion and Rehabilitation of Prostituted Women), with offices in the Plaza de Ángel, next to a traditional red-light area. The programme included mobile outreach, crafts workshops, a recycling project, and outreach with managers of the small hotels where many women live and work. To participate, women and transsexuals must promise to stop selling sex, since APRAMP’s mission is to save them. The director appeared often in public to argue that all women who sell sex are victims and all migrants are ‘trafficked’, but she probably also knew that craft making does not tempt many to give up selling sex. IPSSE (Institute for the Promotion of Specialized Social Services), a very small project similar to APRAMP, operated in another part of Madrid. Both entities concentrated on women in the street, whom they consider to be the most vulnerable.
Many religious organisations in Madrid had contact with, if not projects dedicated to, marginalised women. Some try to help women from falling into selling sex; for the Oblata nuns this means seeking out poor women in old city centres and marginal neighbourhoods, single mothers, victims of abuse, and young people considered at risk. The Adoratrice nuns had changed to focus on women who identify as ‘trafficked’ and want to escape commercial sex. Individual nuns supported sex worker rights, participating in public demonstrations.
Rights projects
The Madrid group dedicated to defending women’s right to sell sex without being harassed or rescued was the feminist Colectivo en Defensa de los Derechos de las Prostitutas Hetaira (Collective in Defence of the Rights of Prostitutes Hetaira). Beginning with a donation in the mid-1990s, they bought a long-term lease on a large flat in an old red-light district (Calle de la Luna, Calle Desengaño, Calle Ballesteros), an area with both street work and small bars and clubs. Hetaira did outreach in the Casa de Campo, approaching women and transsexuals with free condoms and a discourse of rights and selling sex as work. When they began, the only migrants they saw were Latin Americans, so that basic communication was easy; later, language became a major stumbling block. Transexualia, a Madrid association, also focused on rights, since the marginalisation that transgenders suffer means that sex work is one of the few job options open to them. Transexualia worked on raising awareness about sexuality, gender and gender identity.
Undocumented migrants could also take advantage of social pro-grammes and products aimed at migrants in general, such as emergency housing, food, help with bureaucratic paperwork and legal advice. When migrants need advice, they are often sent to associations of immigrant nationalities or culture groups, but migrants who sell sex may not want to show themselves, or, if they do, associations may not accept them. Of the migrant groups in Madrid that could be expected to take rights-oriented stands on migrants selling sex, none did; instead, they condemned ‘trafficking’ and victimisation. Migrants theoretically had access to classes in domestic work and caring for the elderly and children, but such classes were not free, and it was not clear whether taking them would increase chances of legal employment.
The preceding description of social programming related to commercial sex might sound ordinary, neutral or praiseworthy, if not examined more closely. It is this surface, which appears benevolent and constructive, that worried me ten years ago, when I worked in such programmes, and that led me to do the field work described in Chapter 6. 38
NOTES
1 Mitchell 1989: 232
2 Weeks 1981: 98
3 Benedict 1934;Womack 1995
4 Willis 1969 on Wright in White Man, Listen! (1957)
5 Wolf 1969: 261
6 Nader 1969: 471
7 Quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 187, my emphasis
8 Agustín 1999a
9 Haraway 1988
10 Harding 1987
11 Smith 1974
12 hooks 1984; Collins 1990; Reynolds 2002
13 For example, Mullings 1999
14 See Hart 1999 on the difficulty of discussing her research with academics.
15 Agustín 2000b
16 See Primary Sources.
17 In 1996 I introduced myself to an academic interested in legal and postcolonial issues related to commercial sex. She took a step backward, using this very phrase, which
at the time I couldn’t comprehend.
18 Geertz 1968: 154
19 Forsythe 1999: 8
20 Marcus 1995: 96
21 Callaway 1987: 10
22 Marrodán et al on third-world women migrants (1991); Rivas Niña (1992), Oso and Machín (1993), Herranz Gómez (1992, 1996, 1997) and Gallardo (1995) all on Dominican women; Sánchez Hernández on women migrants (1994); Embarak López on migrant Moroccan women (1994);Tornos et al on Peruvian migrants (1997); Criado on migrants’ life histories (1997); and Rivas Niña on social problems related to migrations (1997). The many articles on migration issues but not specifically touching women are not mentioned here.
23 Gregorio 1996
24 Fundación Solidaridad Democrática 1988; Osborne 1991
25 Negre i Rigol 1988
26 Gabinet 1992
27 Sequeiros 1996; De Paula Medeiros 2000
28 Jiménez and Vallejo 1999
29 Núñez Roldán 1995
30 Varela 1995;Vázquez García 1998; Guereña 1999
31 Calvo Ocampo 2001
32 Relevant funded networks of the period with Spanish members include Tampep (Transnational AIDS/STD Prevention among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe), ENMP (European Network on Male Prostitution), Europap (European Intervention Projects AIDS Prevention for Prostitutes), European Network for AIDS Prevention Among the Subsaharan Population and Aids & Mobility. All were AIDS prevention programmes.
33 Comas and Reyero 1985: 63–4
34 Comas and Reyero 1985; Cuadros Riobó 1997; Colomo 2000
35 Tampep n/d; by 2006 the leaflets were available in Russian, French, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Albanian, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Thai.
36 Castillo 2000; Instituto de Salud Carlos III 1999; Castillo and Mazarrasa 1999
37 Cuanter 1998; Mardomingo 1999; Bueno 1999; Urcelai 2001; Sigma Dos 2001–2
38 It also led me to continue publishing in Spain: Agustín 2001a, 2003c, 2004b, 2004d and 2005c.
6
FROM CHARITY TO SOLIDARITY: IN THE FIELD WITH HELPERS
In Chapter 4 I questioned benevolent nineteenth-century discourses of philanthropy that allowed people wanting to work to take controlling roles with women who sold sex. In France, social agents mostly belonged to municipal bureaucracies regulating ‘dangerous’ activities. In Britain, some social agents agreed with the French model and succeeded in passing legislation attempting to control poor women directly, but the majority proposed to rescue and rehabilitate them. Both systems assigned offending women to particular places (brothels, hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges) where they would be watched, corrected and persuaded to behave respectably. Competing ideas about how best to care and control were continuously debated and disputed.
Much of what was conceived in the nineteenth century is now part of state and local government programming, considered conventional management of the health and welfare of populations.1 Knowledge is central:
Government is intrinsically linked to the activities of expertise, whose role is not one of weaving an all-pervasive web of ‘social control’, but of enacting assorted attempts at the calculated administration of diverse aspects of conduct through countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement.2
The modern state consists of a vast web of devices including bureau cratic routines; techniques of notation, recording, measuring and compiling; theories and expertise; and programmes created by different agencies.3 All evolve over time, creating new necessities. What is ‘officially’ governmental mixes with the ‘non’governmental to such an extent that they cannot be disentangled, which is why I talk about the social sector in general, rather than the state or private sector or civil society. Some of the projects discussed in the field work belong nominally to municipal or national governments but are delegated to NGOs, while others were created by private groups who receive funds from governments to carry them out. The field work examines how social agents treat people who sell sex, migrant and non-migrant. Contradictions and diversity exist, but all the projects I studied work inside the ‘prostitution’ concept, whether they call it that or sex work.
I use ethnographic narratives as a technique for presenting events, actions and objects. After each narrative, I draw on other situations and ideas to elaborate my analysis. By telling stories (in a sans serif font), I also produce texts that can be analysed (in the main text font). My role as writer is pivotal in these productions, which have been called ‘writing culture’.4 However, there are places where the line between narrative and analysis is not clear, because the two are intertwined in my memories and thoughts. Quoted words were actually spoken. The narratives are also meant to bring to life some small part of the feelings evoked by the experiences. Throughout, I have changed the identifying characteristics of locations, individuals and organisations, except when references come from published material. Cases come from several sites in Spain.
A list of Primary Sources at the end of this book includes a selection of the great quantity of published material I analysed, and also suggests the breadth of projects I visited. In the narratives, I focus on a very few of the total number. The selection does not aim to create a portrait of helping culture but to reveal how social agents continuously recreate the ‘prostitution’ discourse. Some effects are subtler than others, but nothing described is atypical. I concentrate on public or semi-public phenomena rather than bureaucratic paperwork, accounting or interviews with individuals.
Item 1: Imposing Solidarity
For several months I had accompanied the Progresistas on their weekly rounds in a large urban park. Their aim is to let sex workers know that they accept sex work as legitimate work deserving rights and that other services and professionals are available to give advice. It’s after dark when they drive up offering condoms.
Along several roads, hundreds of women and transgenders stand, alone and in ethnic, national and continental groups. There are Latin Americans (with a sizeable trans subgroup), eastern Europeans and West Africans. Men are in another part of town. Women from Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone work with big smiles on their faces and go after business forcefully, stepping out in front of cars to stop them. The Latinas, in contrast, are practically nude but only wave and smile from the side of the road, waiting for customers to approach. The Progresistas call the Latinas ‘sweet’ (which is what clients say, too), and remark that it must be great for the ‘Africans’ to be in the liberated, democratic west with money to spend. A couple of times I have objected to this stereotyping and suggested that the Progresistas are missing something about migration, but when asked what I mean I say it is too big a subject to explain in a few minutes in the car.
The West Africans tend to dress alike for work, which to outsider eyes exaggerates their similarity: they are very black, very young, very tall and very strong. Nearly all are wearing shiny, skimpy bodysuits decorated with lace, in a white so white it looks blue against their black skin; many breasts are scarified; the commonest hairdo consists of hundreds of long plaits piled on top of the head like a crown. These women tend to work in large groups.
This evening, the usual scene occurs when the car pulls up at an intersection, women running up at once for their sacks of free condoms, and soon more than twenty jostle for attention. After a few minutes, I hear one of the Progresistas say ‘No, I’ve already given to you, we can’t give more than one sack to each person.’ The black woman says it’s not true, she hasn’t received any yet and wants her fair share. The Progresista refuses and launches into an explanation about sharing, solidarity and cooperation. The black woman insists stridently, leaning on the front passenger door to stop the car driving off. The Progresista continues explaining that if they give out more than one sack now, there will be women later in the evening who receive nothing. The woman on the car is adamant she’s received nothing. The Progresista
asks to look inside her purse, which the woman opens to reveal many condoms but none of the Progresistas’ brand. Undeterred, the Progresista accuses the woman of arriving early, getting her condoms, hiding them in the trees and then returning for more. The argument gets hotter.
I am so uncomfortable I cross the street to put distance between me and the scene. The Progresista, with her unkempt, rather jolly white person’s look, repeats over and over the arguments of solidarity, in complicated Spanish. I observe how the black woman directs a hard gaze and a strong presence at the now large audience of other black sex workers.
Suddenly, the tension breaks, the woman relaxes, the Progresistas get in their car and swing around to pick me up. Everyone is talking at once. Almost immediately, we stop beside another group of black women, and the same scene is poised to begin again. When the Progresista begins her explanation of the principles of solidarity and cooperation, I lose my cool. ‘Get in the car,’ I say, and, to myself, ‘I’ll never give out condoms again.’
For the rest of the evening, while further contacts are made without incident among other West Africans, Spaniards, Ecuadorian transsexuals and thin eastern Europeans, there is confusion among the outreach workers. One is so embarrassed she wants to quit, another wants to understand what happened, while the protagonist continues to defend the politics of convincing people of the value of solidarity. She believes it’s the only hope for getting them more rights and better working conditions, but also talking that way is necessary to her, it’s her work. She decides the problem is language – she doesn’t speak English and the Africans don’t speak Spanish. When I point out that they don’t ‘hear’ me, either, if I try to explain her position in English, she has no reply.
After the Progresistas have left, I stay on with a group of women who say they are Nigerian. They point at the Progresistas’ car and ask, ‘What are they doing here? They don’t have anything to offer us except a few condoms. The others that come here are doctors, they can do tests, give us medicine. What good are these women?’ I don’t find it easy to explain what they want to know, that the Progresistas are dedicated to what they call solidarity, on behalf of which they won’t give out extra condoms. The Nigerians have another question: ‘Why don’t the Spanish speak any other languages? Everyone speaks English. What’s wrong with them?’ It’s hard for those who travel and learn new languages to comprehend those who don’t. One of the women is hostile, feels offended by these white people coming round to help her. Pushing a flyer for a friend’s grocery into my hand, she says ‘There, I’m just doing the same as they are.’
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 18