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

by Laura María Agustín

  It is winter in a part of Spain known for a harder, darker, more puritanical worldview. The hall where I will give my hour-long lecture is very large, and I am seated on a heavy, high-backed, wooden throne. Soon after I begin, I see tension, shock, anxiety and displeasure on faces in the audience, but it is too late to do anything but go on. At the end, I am asked questions in an acid tone prefaced with references to my supposed opinions: ‘these delightful sex clubs you are so fond of’, ‘those respectful gentlemen you call clients’, ‘such a wonderful job, prostitution’. My responses all begin the same way: ‘I didn’t say that, I said one can make a lot of money in the clubs’ or ‘I didn’t say that, I said that the numbers of men who buy sex mean they can’t all be perverts’ or ‘I didn’t say that, I said some people prefer selling sex to other available jobs.’ A young woman asks, ‘So do you think there are no harmful effects to women from being prostitutes?’

  Why do they hear things I haven’t said? They seem offended that I don’t talk about what the media say every day, even though the organisers particularly told me that they wanted new information. But here, and now, they only want to know why I don’t mention slavery, mafias, child abuse, psychological damage and violence. In fact, I have mentioned them, but I don’t condemn anyone, and they seem dissatisfied at the lack of outraged indignation. Even when I do talk about clients, the audience feel I haven’t, because they want to hear me say terrible things about these men.

  Nevertheless, the organisers are polite, and during the next day and a half they show me around the city. My real hosts turn out to be not the service providers who contacted me but middle- and upper-class women interested in feminist theory and taking positions. They do not refer to the issues they invited me to speak about, but take me on a tour of a local cathedral, and when I say it is one of the most beautiful I have seen in Europe, my guide promises to send me a book about it ‘in spite of everything, to show that we know how to do the right thing’. High-class manners for a despised guest. During the last meal on the way to the train station, I invite them to speak, assuring them that they do not have to agree with me. At that moment, I see how the blood boils and rises up in their leader and am glad I have given her permission to spit out her suppressed feelings. Sputtering and red-faced, she declares that ‘prostitution’ is always, in all situations, abuse and violence. It is imperialism, invasion of women’s bodies. It is the antithesis of love. It ruins good marriages. The men are cruel, egotistical perverts who should be put in prison. No woman ever, ever wants to sell sex, she is only forced to, and if she says differently then she is lying or doesn’t understand her own situation.

  Later, I learn that these feminists have never studied ‘prostitution’. No wonder we have a problem; inviting someone to give a lecture on ‘trafficking’ without thinking about the basic terms beforehand could only lead to confusion. After my visit, the association promoted a regional study project on ‘prostitution’, but members who brought in materials proposing any theoretical framework but violence felt silenced, and several afterward left the association.58

  The woman whose blood boiled specialises in changing sexist language, believing that the words we use are overarchingly important to gender equity. She hates my way of talking and wants me and everyone to change our language, to instead speak in terms of sexual exploitation and abuse, making it impossible to consent to sell sex and making buyers criminals. Efforts to change discriminatory forms of language have long been important to social justice projects, and the push to expand definitions of violence against women is part of this. If ‘prostitution’ can be universally redefined as sexual exploitation, regardless of whether people say they chose to sell sex or not, then all those who purchase sexual services become, by definition, exploiters. For those who believe men are inherently and biologically aggressive and predatory,59 this traditional battle of the sexes feels real.60

  The prostitute’s environment is a very violent environment; its logic is silence and violence. Women detained by the police declared themselves ‘in agreement’; but, in reality, they were not in agreement. From 1902, it was decided that even if the of-age person consented, there was trafficking.61

  A contemporary French rescue project calls women who sell sex slaves who need help in order to become aware of their oppression, slave mentality and false consciousness, after which they will ‘awaken’, ‘be able to protest, not to ask for arrangements or for the official recognition of prostitution’ and ‘discern their own path towards freedom’.62 This belief may be understood as an authoritarian form of liberal government, in which those to be governed are not considered free subjects.63 Mariana Valverde points out how, even for one of the great exponents of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, only evolved social subjects were considered worthy of participation in their own governance:

  Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their actions as against external injury. For the same reasons, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage … Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.64

  This colonialist notion is found today in the kind of helping that disqualifies people who sell sex from self-rule, the justification being that they have been economically forced into it, or have been deceived or sequestered or suffer from false consciousness. Many others give priority to the experiences, and therefore the words, of people actually living the situations at hand. Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith and numerous others advocate for bringing into public discussions ideas excluded from dominant ideologies.65 A great deal has been written about the need to bring out voices that are silenced or marginalised, but there are dangers when, as Gayatri Spivak argues, it is assumed that everyone can ‘speak’ in the same way.66 This came up in debates on one of the classic films about selling sex, in which the filmmaker records the life of a Thai woman whose services he is buying:67

  Many feminist critics of The GoodWoman of Bangkok demanded that the camera be given to the woman, so she could speak – but really this is just another demand from the West that the woman must speak and thus present herself for assessment and evaluation …68

  Believing passionately that people must tell their stories is also a governmental urge.69 But many of the marginalised find the margins easier to live in; their friends are there; or they don’t like the centre. Telling one’s story, going to protests and marches, chatting with outreach workers and a host of other projects are simply not interesting to many people, whether they are maltreated by society or not.

  For some people who want to help the disadvantaged, listening is essential. Homeless children in Brazil told Tobias Hecht that yes, they could return to a house, or that they did return sometimes, but that they preferred to live in the streets.70 In Canada, young people testified to a government committee that they left home to escape from something ‘impossible’ to live with.71 That children say these things, however, is unacceptable to many people who want to save them.

  If one’s goal in writing about street children is to offer ideas on how to eradicate a problem one can hardly view those people seen to embody the problem as autonomous beings in a social world. Reduced to something to be cured, street children become objects in a distant debate among adults.72

  This is not to say that migrants, street children or sex workers will necessarily want to read publications or attend events discussing their problems but that when their own words are not taken into account, helpers (including theorists) become ventriloquists occupying the main stage while the helped sit mutely in the wings.

  Item 6 Publications: Never for Women Who Sell Sex

  Publication A

  It looks like a conventional leaflet on AIDS prevention, like thousands of others that have been created around the world, but it is different.¿Qué es el VIH/SIDA? (What is HIV/AIDS?) is the product of a collaboration of an EU-spon
sored AIDS prevention campaign, Spain’s national health institute and a few NGOs, including West African migrants’ associations.73 The aim, to create a culturally sensitive leaflet directed at this specific group, is not mentioned in the text but is explicit in the drawings, which show brown people with particular facial features. The leaflet consists of two lists, ¿Cómo sí entra en tu cuerpo? (How does it get into your body) and ¿Cómo no entra? (How does it not get in?). Known and suspected methods appear in one or the other list, with one exception: oral sex is absent. While current medical knowledge suggests that it is more difficult for the virus to enter the body through the mouth, safer-sex practices worldwide advocate using a condom for mouth–genital contact. Moreover, oral sex is enormously common and popular, and in some sectors of the sex industry blowjobs are the most requested service.

  Several meetings in a room at a public health institute have been held to decide on the leaflet’s contents; I am present at the review of the mockup before it is sent to the printer. Although I have had nothing to do with the group until now, I feel I have to intervene, so I ask if oral sex has accidentally dropped out of the text. Several sets of eyes avoid mine, but finally the project coordinator explains that this point has been discussed and left out because ‘it appears that it doesn’t form part of the culture of the groups to which the leaflet is directed’ – meaning West Africans, but actually meaning the leaders of formal associations who have attended these meetings. The chair of the meeting looks at the doctor from the association of Ecuatorial Guineans, and I follow her glance. ‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘we don’t do that.’

  The decision to omit an important risk-practice from an education project is cultural relativism and delicacy taken to the extreme of subordinating epidemiological concerns. No doubt various issues of the allegedly homogeneous sexual culture of Ecuatorial Guinea could be analysed, which would question this particular authority figure’s perspective as both man and doctor of western medicine, along with his position in the association and appropriateness to judge what Ecuatorial Guineans do. Possibly, all such questioning would throw doubt on his assertion. But leaving these issues aside, I want to address another aspect of this incident.

  One of the most visible groups selling sex in the street in Spain are women from the western countries of Africa, and while scandalmongers talk as though all are ‘victims of trafficking’, the people gathered for this meeting know better. They know that women who sell sex have other identities, as mothers, sisters, girlfriends and members of the associations participating in this project. They have religious, civic, social and intellectual lives. What will a person who sells oral sex think when she sees this leaflet? That her own life doesn’t count with health educators? That she engages in something unspeakable?

  Though created specifically for a population called ‘immigrants’, the leaflet demonstrates great ignorance about migration. It does not recognise (1) that migrants have sex with people outside their community of origin; (2) that Spanish culture is saturated with positive messages about sexual liberation and experimentation; (3) that some migrants sell sex. The omission could make all people from West Africa who practise oral sex feel that they are somehow betraying their culture, whether they are paid to do it or do it for their own pleasure. Everyone involved in this publication knows that a large number of women from these countries sell sex at some time or another and therefore have probably practised oral sex, but no one mentions it. The implication is that such people no longer belong to their ‘traditional culture’ and therefore are not members of migrant associations. Social agents have managed to create a leaflet that stigmatises a range of people, along with a sexual practice.

  A Cuban study commented that the official pretence after the revolution that ‘prostitution’ had been eradicated removed not only its right to exist but also ‘the right of words to exist to describe it’.74 This little AIDS leaflet does not place oral sex on the side of ‘dangerous’ practices, it places it nowhere – and the result is not innocuous.

  Publication B

  Médicos del Mundo-Madrid produced a book of resources that begins with a preface by the city’s mayor:

  Unfortunately, one of the realities that most worries our society, owing fundamentally to the serious personal and human deterioration that it implies, is the phenomenon of prostitution, which, in the present day, is linked, in most cases, to the existence of international networks of illegal immigration.75

  The book goes on to outline a series of ethnic stereotypes: Latin Americans have a low cultural level, Mediterranean Europeans are usually drug addicts, and Saharans are illiterate. ‘Migrant women coming from Third World countries where extreme poverty or wars . . . force them to migrate . . . are fundamentally trafficked, which implies forced work [and] . . . working conditions in all cases unknown.’76 The text reinforces the largely discredited stereotype of the ‘classic/professional’ who is induced by ‘pimps’ through ‘dark deceit with an affectionate tinge’. No details on how the research was done are provided.

  Publication C

  Guía de Autocuidados para las Mujeres Inmigrantes (Guide to Self-care for Migrant Women), said to be intended for them, was published by the Ministry of Health. Although it is spiral-bound and includes drawings, the dense and semi-technical text assumes readers will be highly literate in Spanish. The book never mentions the sex industry or people who work in it – neither in the sexuality chapter nor in the list of relevant laws nor in the section of resources for migrant women.77

  Publication D

  A government newsletter is distributed before the Beijing + 5 meeting on women’s issues to be held in New York in 2000, supposedly setting out all important items on the agenda. Neither sex work nor ‘prostitution’ appear anywhere in categories including economy and employment, education and culture, health, gender violence, feminisation of poverty, girls, decision making, human rights and armed conflicts.78 For a long time before this, it was known that sex industry issues would be addressed.

  Publication E

  La prevención de la transmisión heterosexual del VIH/SIDA en las mujeres (The Prevention of Heterosexual Transmission of HIV/AIDS in Women), which is detailed and practical, simply omits references to women who sell sex. This book was funded by a national women’s organisation as well as the national AIDS plan.79

  These examples illustrate the different ways stigmatisation operates. All maintain the separation between good and bad/unmentionable women. While the Médicos booklet takes for its subject ‘prostitutes’, directly discrediting them racially and culturally and disqualifying them as protagonists of their own lives, the other publications stigmatise by omitting people who sell sex. In the Médicos text, selling sex fixes identity; for the others, selling sex doesn’t exist.Yet migrants who sell sex are thought to equal numbers of domestic and caring workers, which means there are hundreds of thousands of them.

  A good part of what’s going on in these publications is neocolonialism. Most social agents see women who migrate to Europe from poorer countries as tremendously disadvantaged: poor, oppressed, coming from violent societies, having no choices. They are never described as feminists and rarely as politically active or possessing consciousness of their own situation. Research shows that European employers of migrant women in the home generally believe them to be more submissive, respectful, naturally affectionate, domestic and quiet than western women, and thus willing to accept a lower social status. They are often said to come from cultures where women have fewer rights than in Europe, so that, in a way, employers believe they are helping them progress simply by hiring them.80 Sometimes the act of migrating earns women credit toward modernisation but they are still assumed to be backward in relation to Europeans, as neocolonialism conserves evolutionary notions in which the west represents progress and the rest tradition. But the west’s self-presentation is discursive, not factual, called by Homi Bhabha an ‘apparatus of power’ whose prime function is the creation of a space for subjec
t peoples.81 Consider the refreshing reversal in the title of another epidemiological study: ‘Prostitutes Study Truck Drivers in South Africa, Find High HIV Rate’.82

  Item 7: A Different Morality

  Another conference is held. ‘Seminario Internacional Sobre Prostitución’ is on the printed programme, but the banner tacked to the platform adds ‘y Tráfico’. A highly placed representative of the Ministry of Labour inaugurates the event, followed by a university rector and Spain’s representative at UN hearings on international crime. All condemn ‘prostitution’, but spend most of their time haranguing about ‘trafficking’ in unenlightening terms. When these august figures leave, the real conference begins, and the change of tone and terms is drastic.

  Presentations are good, misleading research is not used to represent ‘facts’, and presenters acknowledge the complexity and variety of experiences among people who sell sex. The speakers, mostly not Spanish, are names associated with human and labour rights for sex workers.83 As with the fundamentalist conference, the scope of discussion is narrow, most speakers making an argument for policy oriented around labour rights. My own presentation discusses the paucity of research material to back up so much theory and presents an array of situations from Latin America that don’t fit into the ‘prostitution’ concept.84

  Early on, in an obviously prepared action, a group of women in the audience loudly and indignantly walk out, and during the rest of the conference the director of a local rescue project paces the hall outside, manifesting disapproval. At one point, she approaches Carla Corso, an activist street worker, saying, ‘You aren’t a prostitute, because you don’t suffer.’85 I am struck by this comment: if the definition of ‘prostitute’ were changed to describe only suffering victims, perhaps the conflict over terms could be resolved. After all, the rescue director would not deny that Corso sold sexual services in the street for several decades, but Corso isn’t like the women she wants to help.