Sex Work

by Frédérique Delacoste

  Before the U.S. closed its Army and Air Force bases in the Philippines in 1992, some women’s rights advocates estimated that there were approximately 300,000 prostitutes in that country, a large majority of whom worked in the vicinity of the bases. Some of the women made an active decision and migrated, on their own, to the bases to do so, but some worked under duress, including being sold into prostitution and/or being recruited under false pretenses. Some women who left the Philippines after the base closures to look for other work or to be married, often to American G.I.s, found themselves essentially trapped in prostitution in the receiving country. Others deliberately migrated to richer countries using prostitution to pay for their migration, and attempting to continue to work as prostitutes once they got there. However, once they migrate, whether they agree to perform sex work or not, their position is often vulnerable if they do not have legal immigration papers. At the Second World Whores Congress, held in Brussels in 1986, a Filipina woman told of being offered a job in a European hotel by a high government official at home. After much indecision, she decided to go. She was not a prostitute at the time, and no mention was made of sex work. When she arrived, she found that the job was in fact prostitution, and that she had no choice in the matter. She eventually escaped with the help of a concerned customer, and at the time of the conference, was attempting to get the Philippine official prosecuted, although without much hope of success, because even after Ferdinand Marcos’ downfall, the official remained in power (Pheterson, 1989).

  However, although on the surface it would appear that women who migrate through illegal networks are victims of brokers who deceive them about the nature of the work and/or use violence and intimidation to force them to go along with their demands, the reality is far less simple. Programs that assist migrant sex workers who face deportation in receiving countries often find that the women have consciously used prostitution to facilitate their migration from their own countries, where their earning power is extremely low, to rich countries, such as Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. EMPOWER, a project that works with women in Thailand’s sex tourism industry, often discusses the risk of getting trapped in dangerous gang-run situations with women who want to migrate to Japan, only to have the women say that the potential for earning money makes the risks worthwhile.

  The prohibition of prostitution, which is as common in countries with a lot of forced prostitution as it is in countries with very little, does not begin to address the problem. Indeed, the laws against trafficking and prostitution often make the situation worse. That is, laws designed to prevent the forced movement of women and girls across national or state boundaries for the purposes of prostitution are, instead, used to keep women from some countries from traveling. The United States bars any woman who has been a prostitute within the previous ten years from entering the country, and U.S. consular officials often use that restriction to make it difficult for women to come here, even for a short visit. For example, in 1993, a Kenyan nurse who applied for a visa to go to graduate school in the U.S. had to convince the U.S. consular officials that she was not a prostitute. In 1989, a Thai woman who was not a prostitute, but wanted to come to San Francisco to attend a sex workers’ rights conference, was at first denied a visa because she was single and Thai. The law has also been used to prevent prostitutes from organizing on their own behalf, as in 1997, when several women who applied for U.S. visas to attend the International Conference on Prostitution (ICOP), organized by California State University/Northridge and Los Angeles COYOTE, were denied visas because U.S. immigration officials assumed, despite their promises, they would work as prostitutes if they came, and/or that they would stay here after the conference. A few months later, two women who applied for visas to attend a Canadian conference organized by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), in Victoria, British Columbia, were also denied entry because they were prostitutes, one of whom was one of the women who had been denied a visa to attend ICOP. Although Canada does not have the same kind of antiprostitution immigration law, and indeed engaging in prostitution is legal in Canada, the Canadian official denied her a visa on the basis that the U.S. had denied her one because of her status as a prostitute.

  There is often no way for prostitutes to legally travel to a country and obtain work as a prostitute, nor is there any legal way for brokers to arrange for their papers, transportation, and employment in the receiving country. There are no regulations controlling such things as the amount of interest, or commissions, that can be charged for making those arrangements, as there are for credit cards, for example, or other kinds of employment agencies. There are no regulations governing working conditions, including hours of work, pay scales, access to health and disability insurance, or workers’ compensation. Such regulations cover other work in most countries in order to control the actions of employers, who naturally want to obtain the most work for the least capital investment. Countries refuse to regulate conditions in the prostitution workplace on the basis that such businesses are illegal, under the almost universal laws against pimping, pandering, and various aspects of promoting prostitution. However, those laws are rarely enforced, and in the absence of workplace regulations, the businesses that employ prostitutes are essentially free to exploit them as much as they choose to.

  Current prostitution laws in this country and elsewhere also fail to distinguish between adult and juvenile prostitutes, treating juveniles as criminals. In 1995, 1,043 prostitution arrests involved someone under the age of eighteen, representing 1.3% of prostitution arrests. However, another 304,692 persons under the age of eighteen, 46.9% of them female, were arrested for loitering, curfew violations, or being a runaway, and some of them are likely to have been looking for customers (U.S. Department of Justice, 1996). Arresting an adolescent for standing on a street corner does little to change the conditions of that adolescent’s life, or to reduce her or his dependence on prostitution to survive. In fact, the process of being arrested often serves to concretize what was a casual interaction (survival sex, or sex for favors) into formal, labeled prostitution. The police could focus, instead, on the pimps and customers of juvenile prostitutes, who are clearly guilty of child abuse, but john stings are carried out by adult decoy officers, so would-be clients of adolescents are unlikely to be arrested. Despite pious pronouncements on the issue, including some countries’ adoption of new laws to penalize men who travel to foreign countries and have sex with minors there, in fact the customers of children and adolescents are essentially ignored. These customers, like the customers of adult prostitutes, tend to be middle-aged, middle-class, married white businessmen. From the adolescent sex worker’s point of view, the alternatives to prostitution—being sent back home to their parents or returned to foster care—seem far worse than their lives around prostitution, where they feel they have more choice and control. A comprehensive look at adolescent prostitution, either in this country or worldwide, is beyond the scope of this essay. However, my point in this brief mention is to say that the issue is more complicated than the simple child abuse which some campaigners against sexual exploitation of children claim, involving economic and social needs on the part of the underage worker as well as the desires of the adult client.

  The Law

  In 1949, the United Nations adopted a convention calling for the decriminalization of prostitution, per se, and the enforcement of laws against those who exploit women and children in prostitution, and this convention has been ratified by more than fifty countries, not including the United States. Most European countries “decriminalized” prostitution by removing laws which prohibit “engaging” in an act of prostitution, although most have also retained the laws against “soliciting,” “pimping,” “pandering,” “running a disorderly house,” and “transporting a woman across national boundaries for the purposes of prostitution.” Most of the United States, on the other hand, prohibits all aspects of prostitution, as does Japan and many Asian countries, including those in whi
ch sex tourism is a major industry. It was decriminalized in the former Soviet Union, and many of the countries in the Soviet sphere, but women who worked as prostitutes there were arrested for being parasites (i.e., not having a legally recognized job). Many of those countries are now trying to decide whether they should enact a U.S.-type prohibition or a European abolitionist law, particularly in the light of large-scale sex work migration of Russian and Eastern European women to Western Europe and other rich countries, or reintroduce regulatory systems along the lines of the one in place in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution (Bernstein, 1995).

  In some legal or quasi-legal systems, all prostitution is restricted to districts. In countries with legal or tolerated brothel systems, the brothel district is sometimes completely separated from the rest of the city and women who work in the districts need a permit to leave, even for a doctor’s appointment; prostitutes who work (or even walk) outside of the defined districts are subject to arrest and imprisonment. Even where overt prostitution is illegal, some jurisdictions have used zoning laws to congregate sex-related businesses, such as strip clubs and erotic theaters, into certain districts, or, alternatively, to keep them from being grouped into dense areas. New York City is currently in the throes of a court debate on the legality of such a zoning system, in this case restricting sex businesses to nonresidential areas and requiring that they be 500 feet from schools, churches, and each other.

  Some countries, and Nevada in the U.S., have opted to institute a kind of licensing or registration system. First formalized in France in the seventeenth century, such systems require women (rarely men) who work as prostitutes to obtain a license or permit, and/or to register with the local police department, morals unit, or department of the health ministry. In order to obtain and keep a permit, the prostitute must remain “disease-free,” and either present herself to a specified clinic on a regular basis or provide evidence of a successful examination by a physician of her own choosing. The first systems were developed by governments anxious to control syphilis, the only recognized STD at the time, among military recruits and other men. There was no concern about the health of the women themselves, who Parent-Duchatelet, creator of the French regulatory system, compared to a sewer (Harsin, 1985). In England, Parliament enacted the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1860, because of a high incidence of syphilis among military recruits and sailors home on leave. At first the system was imposed in a small number of port cities, but when the incidence of syphilis did not decline, it was twice extended to several other cities, still with little effect. It was finally repealed in 1866, largely because of feminist resistance led by Josephine Butler (Walkowitz, 1980). Many countries in Europe developed similar systems, also with little impact on the incidence or prevalence of disease (Flexner, 1914), as did some colonial powers in the countries they colonized (Hyam, 1992; Levine, 1994). Although these systems remained in effect for many years, with substantial police power to enforce the provisions, in all countries the majority of prostitutes voted with their feet, refusing to register and refusing to submit to the regular examinations. It was probably fortunate for them, since at least before doctors realized the importance of washing their hands and sterilizing instruments between patients, a woman without an STD was likely to become infected during the examination because the same speculum and/or syringes used to draw blood were (and in some cases still are) used for many patients in succession with no serious attempt to sterilize them. The system in Russia ended with the Russian Revolution (Bernstein, 1995), while the systems in France and Italy were dismantled in the middle of this century (Harsin, 1985; Gibson, 1986). Germany still has a registration system, although most sex workers do not register, and a number of countries outside of Europe also operate regulatory systems, including Singapore, Uruguay, Thailand, the Philippines, and Senegal, with participation ranging from two to fifty percent. The worst hypocrisy of such systems exists in such countries as Thailand where even prostitutes who obey the regulations are subject to arrest because prostitution remains a crime.

  On the face of it, it would seem that the laws are designed to prevent prostitution. The hypocritical ordinance regulating massage parlors and escort services in San Francisco, however, suggests another agenda. According to police testimony at the time San Francisco enacted the escort service regulation, despite the wording aimed at preventing prostitution, the police actually admitted they wanted to “regulate and control” prostitution, but without giving the prostitutes any rights. In reality, the law’s denial of a license to anyone convicted within the previous three years, or after getting a license, guarantees a turnover of new employees when the police periodically raid parlors and services, and revoke the workers’ permits. Although the ordinance requires conviction on prostitution charges to revoke a permit, the Board of Permit Appeals usually upholds the revocation even when the charges have been dropped or dismissed for lack of evidence (i.e., no conviction). Indeed, when the police raid parlors and services, they may not even charge the employees with prostitution, but rather with minor infractions of the licensing code, such as failing to wear an ID badge on the outside of their clothes. In the early 1980s, and again in 1998, women were arrested during sweeps on such bogus charges, and lost both their licenses and their jobs, in the absence of any convictions. After the earlier raid, I noticed an ad for a massage parlor that promised, “all new staff.”

  There is much hypocrisy in this country in the way prostitution laws are enacted and enforced. For example, although hotel owners are often prime movers in efforts to get police to crack down on prostitution, they also depend on the availability of prostitutes for their business clients. This is especially true in large urban areas which, because of a decline in blue-collar industry, have become dependent on tourism as a major source of tax revenue and jobs. The convention industry is huge in this country and, because of the continued discrimination against women in employment, particularly at the management level, convention attendees are overwhelmingly male, traveling without their families. A significant number feel that a visit to a strange city is not complete without a visit to a prostitute. It was partly in response to this that the massage parlor and escort service industry developed in this country, and the “sex tourism” industry developed internationally. Hotels often require security staff to screen prostitutes, and to keep out those deemed unacceptable. According to a former security guard for a major San Francisco hotel, prostitutes who plan to visit a client are expected to check in at the main desk to announce their intention to “give the client a massage,” or some other service. If the woman has a massage or escort license, she shows it to the desk clerk. Once she is on an upper floor, she is likely to be stopped by hotel security, who calls down to the main desk to see if she has checked in. If not, security will take her to a room in the hotel, often in the basement, where she will be photographed, warned not to come back to the hotel, and told that her photograph will be circulated to other area hotels. She is more likely to be stopped if she is Black, dressed in a way that violates the hotel’s sense of decorum, or “too noisy” or drunk, than if she is white, sedately dressed, and quiet. Several years ago, an African-American woman sued the San Francisco Hilton, after the hotel security stopped her in the hall while she was attending a feminist conference, and the hotel settled out of court for fifty thousand dollars. Although any woman walking alone down the hall of a major hotel can be stopped, the risk is obviously greater if she is Black. However, a white friend of mine, dressed in a suit jacket and pants, was once stopped and hassled by security guards in that same hotel when she was visiting a client there on perfectly legal business.

  A man checking into a hotel who wishes to find a prostitute has only to ask the bell captain for referrals. He can also ask most taxi drivers. Should he be diffident about asking directly, he can check the ads in the yellow pages or the classified ads in the newspaper, under the headings of massage, escorts, introductions, dating services, and/or personals. Occasionally, the fre
e handout magazines in hotels carry ads for escort services and massage parlors, as was the case when I attended a meeting of the National Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women at the Hotel Statler in New York some years ago.

  The countries with the most restrictive legal systems, including the United States and many countries in Southeast Asia, have the most problems with violence against prostitutes (and women perceived to be like prostitutes), thefts associated with prostitution, pimping (especially brutal pimping), and the involvement of juveniles. Conversely, the countries with the least restrictive measures, including the Netherlands, West Germany, Sweden and Denmark, have the least problems. No country, however, is totally safe for sex workers. The stigma still isolates them, and the remaining laws perpetuate that stigma, rather than dispel it and truly legitimize the women who work as prostitutes.

  Discriminatory Enforcement of the U.S. Law

  In 1983, 126,500 people were arrested for prostitution in the United States, one and a half times the number arrested in 1973, the year the prostitutes’ rights movement began with the founding of COYOTE. In comparison, over the same period arrests for all crimes increased only 35.6%. 1983 was also one year after President Reagan introduced several economic changes that triggered a recession and a sharp increase in unemployment. Although the number of arrests declined to 112,200 in 1984, the first decline since COYOTE began keeping track, the total has risen and fallen several times since then, and in 1995, 97,700 arrests were reported to the federal government (U.S. Department of Justice, 1985, 1996). Although the law makes no distinction between men and women and, in most states, prohibits both sides of the transaction, and though police conduct well-publicized sting operations to arrest “johns,” more than 61% of those arrested in 1995 were women. This is despite the probability that as many as a third of sex workers in urban centers, where most arrests are made, are men. Federal prostitution arrest statistics aggregate arrests for soliciting, engaging in, or agreeing to engage in prostitution, with ancillary offenses such as running a brothel, pimping, pandering, etc., although those represent a very small minority of arrests. Before the anti-john campaigns, about 10% of those arrested were customers (usually arrested in a series of raids over a period of a couple of weeks, and then ignored for the rest of the year), and although it is possible that in some years as many as 20% of those arrested were charged as customers, even now the disparity remains great. On any given day, there are an estimated five to eight times as many clients as prostitutes on the street, where the overwhelming majority of arrests take place. Further compounding the disparity is the fact that street prostitutes are not only arrested on charges directly related to prostitution.