Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

by Laura María Agustín

  These days the majority of women in the house are from eastern Europe, the Ukraine, Russia. Participation in the project means women get help with regularising their migration status in Spain, if they want to stay, or returning to their home country. The sisters offer classes in Spanish language and culture, psychological and legal aid and help with finding work. Rules for living in the house mix discipline with culture. Take the value the nuns place on ‘sharing’. Everyone, nuns and guests alike, lives in the same kind of room, and everyone eats together. The sisters want to get to know the women, and one of the mechanisms is informal mealtime conversation. Meals are often leisurely affairs in Spain, and talking during them and afterwards is assumed to be enjoyable. Nevertheless, some of the women eat without speaking and quickly leave the table when they are finished. The nuns admit to being disoriented: how will they get to know the women?

  They are aware that culture infuses their work, and recount for me, as an example, how they explain the act of saying grace before meals. ‘We say we are Spanish nuns and we have a custom of saying a few words before beginning to eat. In our case, we are talking to God. You may talk to whomever you like at the same time, but we ask that you accompany us in these moments.’ The guest residents may be atheist, Protestant, Muslim or anything else. Once, a woman escaped during the night, which upset the sisters, since it implied that she felt like a prisoner. They were worried and afraid she had left unprepared. Since then, they stress to guests that if they are not happy they just need to say so and are free to go at any time. I say, ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to have that conversation with you? The conversation in which she would have to explain what she didn’t like about the house, the project, you . . .’ They agree this could be the case. The nuns do not present themselves as sacrificial lambs; on the contrary, they are looking for personal and spiritual fulfilment.

  I have visited a project in Italy where women’s mobile phones are taken from them in order to interrupt ties with traffickers, so I ask whether the sisters do this as well. No, they say, ‘but sometimes we would like to smash the mobiles against the wall.’ Participation in their project means starting a new life, and keeping up prior relationships gets in the way (and is also dangerous).

  Their project is directed at ‘trafficked’ women, so I ask how they define the term. They are very clear: the women themselves must say they have been forced, obligated, coerced or deceived and want to get out. I ask the nuns what would happen if a woman decided she wanted to go back to selling sex. Puzzled, they say, ‘Well, she’d have to go back, then, if that’s what she wanted.’

  This is the definition of ‘trafficking’ accepted by the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW),34 which believes that sex work and migration can be plausible projects for autonomous women. This position has little support or history in Spain, where most discourse has been polemical.35 These same nuns have also marched in demonstrations for sex worker rights. The founder of another rescue project, upon hearing this, declared:‘You’re not nuns if you do that.’

  I ask these women about various papal decrees, since the Vatican condemns sex outside marriage, abortion, birth control devices, homosexuality and ‘prostitution’. They want to know why the Pope is so important to me. I am bemused: to outsiders, nuns represent the Roman Catholic Church and are assumed to agree with the Vatican. They enlighten me: not only do they not agree with these papal opinions, they don’t have to. Nuns are not ordained as are priests, they do not belong to the church hierarchy, and within individual orders they have considerable freedom to decide their own policies. In fact, their beliefs and practices are much more tolerant or liberal than those of many secular groups, and not only in Spain. These sisters emphasise the rights and choices of individual women, including their own. They have evolved their own feminist project, in which they realise themselves during the process of helping women who have requested help. Their stated mission is the liberation and promotion of marginalised women; they are not in the business of moral judgements.36 One sister laments, ‘When I see the Pope on television I am appalled to think what kind of image we send to the rest of the world.’ So there is a We, after all.

  The order was founded by a wealthy noblewoman, who during her charitable work in a hospital encountered women suffering from venereal diseases. One of these, deceived by a man pretending to want to marry her, had lost her virtue and taken to selling sex. Though the noblewoman managed to return this woman to her family, she was unable so to help the majority and therefore opened a home where they could be isolated, learn a trade, become Christians and regenerate. The home was opened in the mid-nineteenth century. For some time, the noblewoman lived in other European cities; she came to know Paris’s rue de la Madeleine, famous for prostitution. The nuns place much emphasis on the story of this woman, who faced constant opposition, impoverished herself and died in order to accomplish her goal of helping.37

  I have found a direct link to the historical phenomena described earlier: a privileged woman who doesn’t need to work but wants to be useful focuses her love and energy on lower-class women who sell sex. The helper starts her project in Spain but lives in Paris several times in the years immediately following the publication of Parent-Duchâtelet’s landmark study of ‘prostitutes’ in 1836. Homes for needy women had a long tradition in Spain, but the number of initiatives multiplied during the nineteenth century,38 along with the number of ‘prostitutes’, although, as Francisco Vázquez García points out, it is not clear who was counted and why.39 Social projects in general proliferated, with the Church a strong force,40 but it is not until late in the century that ‘social Catholicism’ came into being, a new idea of pastoral care.41

  While the Rise of the Social played out differently in Spain than in France and Britain, several key developments are familiar: an upsurge in social projects, increased preoccupation with women who sold sex, confusion about who to call ‘prostitutes’ and the creation of numerous projects dedicated to rescuing them. While the increase in secular, educated women needing and wanting paid work did not occur at the same time in Spain, it would not be correct to exclude religious women from feeling similar desires and needs. Accounts of all kinds of charity are incomplete if they fail to consider the spiritual and material interests of those dispensing it.42

  Mary Nash reveals how in Spain, too, gender ideology required educated women to be devoted, domestic and maternal angels while men were public and political providers. Women working outside the home and participating in social movements provoked hostility and had to deal with extremely unfavourable work conditions and remuneration.

  Women who transgressed the norms and invaded the public sphere were likened to public women, that is, to prostitutes. The public woman, with this double connotation of prostitute and woman occupying the public space traditionally reserved for males, was subject to a specific gender repression.43

  At the end of the nineteenth century, a gradual shift began in attitudes and efforts to overturn discriminatory laws, as in other European countries. In the picture-book story of the noblewoman helping women who sold sex, society constantly rejects her, and, at some point while being set upon by enemy forces, she changes into a black habit. The act is not explained, but we may think of it as a change to a working uniform, as well as an expression of religious devotion.

  Item 4: Culture Clash

  Anti-AIDS do outreach with street workers in a middle-class neighbourhood, parking at the edge of a major intersection surrounded by traffic lights, hotels, apartment buildings and shops. The large van pulls up at scheduled times, and clients for condoms begin queueing up immediately. The first time they attend, they are asked to show a document with name, nationality and birth date and are asked a few basic questions; responses are recorded on cards. From then on, attendees identify themselves by birth date (migrants change names more often than dates, it seems). The system is minimal and crude, and all the data recorded can easily be falsified, but these are the sources for pu
blished statistics. When I first tried to go out with Anti-AIDS years before, they refused, despite their proclaimed dependence on volunteers; now their policy has changed.

  It’s a pleasant, late summer night. Most of the medical work is over, and some of us are sitting on the edges of big planters on the sidewalk near where the mobile unit is parked. A kind of microcosm of street life has formed around the line-up of West African women and Latin American transgenders waiting to reach the big window. Vendors and one aggressive street person are bickering, and sex workers accost passing men with varying degrees of insistence, but in general there is tolerance among those occupying the street. Inside the mobile unit a woman from Sierra Leone is doing an extended interview with one of the black workers.

  A busful of Japanese tourists pulls up at the traffic light next to where I am sitting, and a tourist inside points his camera through the window at a black woman resting on the kerb. Instantly the woman reaches down, picks up a large chunk of broken pavement and hurls it straight at him, hitting the window. She throws another, and another, at which point the bus driver opens the door and steps out, yelling at her. But he does not shut the door behind him, and a small figure zooms out of the bus like a tornado. It is the photographer, who throws himself screaming at the woman, pelting her with blows although she is twice his size and weight. Other black women hurry from all directions to reach the scene, and in a matter of seconds a free-for-all is under way. Among those who intercede is the young but senior Anti-AIDS employee on the unit, with seven years’ experience in the job. Finally she manages to separate the parties, who are wielding weapons, pulling hair, punching and screaming. By the time the police arrive, the bus has pulled away and the brick-throwing woman has been persuaded to get out of sight. Business carries on as usual: after all, this kind of fracas is not that uncommon on the street (while it feels apocalyptic to tourists inside a bus). The outreach workers agree that ‘African’ women react rapidly and aggressively compared with other people, opinions diverging as to whether this is a cultural trait or the product of abuse.

  Anti-AIDS did not claim to do mediation, but outreach educators, exposed to unpredictable situations, need to be flexible. Over many years and after visiting dozens of projects in many countries and cultures, I conclude that there is a type of person who makes a successful outreach worker: frank, open, proud of a nonjudgemental attitude, easy with sexual matters and gender ambiguity, not afraid to try speaking other languages, calm in emergencies, decisive, responsible. This is not a profile of social agents in general or of most Anti-AIDS bureaucrats, who rarely leave their offices, have ventured onto the mobile unit only once and who do not include outreach workers in their decision making, conferences or network meetings. The office employees would probably disapprove of the intervention described, if they were to find out about it. Their dealings with people who sell sex are limited to analysing statistics: number of women seen, country of origin, age, reproductive status, attitudes to condom use and little else. Anti-AIDS promotional material is all about extending the benefits of the welfare state to those who have been excluded, so here, too, is a discourse of social solidarity, of an ethics that draws people to give of themselves to, and care for, those who are less fortunate.

  In Madrid, a school dedicated to mediation in migration contexts was founded during this period, offering basic and specialised courses in sociocultural mediation, socioeducational mediation and in immigration itself.44 Whatever the mediation is called, it has become popular among people working with migrants and is intended to intervene when people have conflicting values. Theorists of these phenomena talk about interculturalism: Julia Kristeva writes on Europeans’ behaviour toward foreigners throughout history; Will Kymlicka and Javier de Lucas examine democratic systems’ ability to integrate minorities, extend human rights and maintain ‘cultural pluralism’.45 The Spanish Labour Ministry has financed research analysing Spaniards’ attitudes toward migrants, and publications on interculturalism are now routine, focusing on schools, religions, neighbourhoods. Ideas such as mediation and interculturality provide the motivation for social agents to improve themselves, attend training courses, visit other countries and apply new techniques to their work of helping.46

  In the area of outreach to migrants selling sex, the European Tampep network promotes the use of cultural mediators, individuals familiar with more than one culture and language who can facilitate relationships between people unable to imagine each other’s realities. Tampep also uses ‘peer educators’, who may be any nationality but must have sold sex themselves, to pass on information and ‘increase empowerment’ among their peers.47 When first introduced to the national Spanish network of projects, both techniques seemed unfeasible, but several years later they began to take hold.

  Although the incident between sex worker and tourist illustrates how spontaneous mediation can prevent violence, the mobile van’s presence can be said to have caused the conflict in the first place. Anti-AIDS’s tolerant, harm-reduction approach and excellent facility means that large numbers of foreign, black, outlandishly dressed women gather at the intersection of busy, brightly lit streets. On the night in question, two hundred women visited the van over several hours; at any one time there were always a dozen waiting to reach the condom distribution window; many worked nearby. Anti-AIDS’s reaching out is aimed at preventing HIV transmission but has unacknowledged side effects, as migrants become stigmatised characters in a spectacle that underscores the difference between them and everyone else. The rage of the woman who attacked the tourist was associated with being objectified by his camera’s eye, but her hostility did not arise from nowhere.

  Epidemiology is the reason for Anti-AIDS’s being, not outreach or condom distribution. In close collaboration with and funded by Spain’s national AIDS plan, Anti-AIDS publishes information on ‘prostitutes’ whose major purpose seems to be classification. Statistics presented in pie and bar charts correlate ‘social characteristics’ and risk conduct (primarily seen as sex without condoms). A review of Spanish epidemiological research demonstrates that the social characteristics thought to matter are: nationality, gender, age, level of education, drug use, reproductive status, housing, and work and incarceration histories,48 banal information of little use to anyone. Learning to evaluate epidemiological data, I came to understand that the articles Anti-AIDS doctors publish in medical journals recycle the same sets of statistics over and over, tweaking the emphasis over time. In Ian Hacking’s view, this kind of production takes shape ‘without anyone’s wittingly knowing what they add up to’.

  If we turn to the practice of collecting information about populations, each new classification, and each new counting within that classification, is devised by a person or a committee with a straightforward, limited goal in mind. Then the population itself is increasingly classified, rearranged, and administered by principles each one of which is innocently put forward by this or that technocrat.49

  Such reports can be called ‘inscription devices’, whose point is to produce objects that can be evaluated, calculated, debated and diagnosed.50 Even when these reports actually try to understand the risk of disease transmission, the results are uninformative, since interviewees’ feelings, states of mind and calculations about the future are omitted: How do I decide if I am safe with someone or if someone is safe for me? Under what circumstances might I choose not being safe now to achieve safeness later?51 The literature on sexual risk demonstrates that it cannot be reduced to a set of factors disassociated from culture.52 Yet Anti-AIDS epidemiologists continuously reproduce the same profiles, separating active citizens, who are seen as capable of managing their own risk, from those who require intervention and help.53 The Anti-AIDS organisation gets much of its prestige and financing from the existence of groups not labelled pools of contagion, as in the nineteenth century, but construed as high-risk. In this sense, epidemiological research and programming belong to the machinery of security, protecting real citizens from ‘disad
vantaged’ foreign contagion without reaching out to natives who buy sex. The result is instrumental care such as that offered by Anti-AIDS.

  Another kind of research sets out to discover whether higher-risk groups use social and health services. Migrant women and transgenders who sell sex are interviewed to find out whether they use public health services and, if not, why not. Disseminated internally and in social networks, these studies focus on ethnic and cultural ideas about health, sexual and reproductive habits and taboos in private and professional life, including body modifications. 54 The incessant asking of intimate questions and the routine assumption that Spanish culture and education are better than migrants’ own is neocolonialistic; invasive questions are made to seem normal when the report is distributed under a government seal, a standard for what knowledge social agents should seek.55 Women who sell sex are no longer likened to sewers, but AIDS’s intransigent association with dark people, dark habits and the Dark Continent places a similarly heavy burden on them.56

  Spain, like other European countries, wants to keep undocumented migrants out, but it also wants to make sure their unsafe practices do not infect real citizens and therefore sponsors research on their use of health services. Such softer studies also aim to pin down knowledge about migrants, providing an ‘intellectual machinery for government’ that can then be used to make decisions about them.57

  Item 5: The Bitterness of Betrayal

  I am contacted by an association for abused women in a provincial capital about giving a speech on ‘trafficking’ at a public seminar on sexual violence. I ask them whether they are familiar with my work, send them one of my articles on migrant women in the sex industry, and tell them I can talk about migration. They assure me that I have been recommended by someone we both know, so I accept. The lecture is announced as ‘Migration and trafficking: myths, truths and a lot of ambiguities’.