The workshop we held at the Forum for Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations End of Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, last July, attended by over three hundred women and a few men from all over the world, confirmed the importance of economics. Third World women present, and especially women from India, made it clear to reluctant social workers who didn’t want to listen (as usual) that for many women and children the only alternative to prostitution is starvation. Rising unemployment and cuts in wages, benefits and social services have shown the poverty there is in metropolitan countries also (and this is increasing daily), where millions of women and children live below the so-called poverty line.*
No Bad Women Just Bad Laws
When we began, the fight for prostitute women to be acknowledged as part of the women’s movement for financial independence and control over our own bodies, and part of the working class movement for more money and less work, was completely new. It is still controversial. Most of women’s liberation was hostile to prostitute women on the grounds that exchanging sex for money was uniquely degrading. They said it encouraged rape by leading men to believe that all women are available, conveniently forgetting that men already thought that. The sex industry is not the only industry which is male-dominated and degrades women, but it is the industry where the workers are illegal and can least defend publicly our right to our jobs. We argued that for some women to get paid for what all women are expected to do for free is a source of power for all women to refuse any free sex.
The prostitution laws aim to divide women between those of us who are “respectable,” “good” women and those of us who are “loose,” “bad” women for refusing poverty by working in the sex industry. Money, in the eyes of the Establishment, makes good (working class) women bad. We recently protested against the way a murdered woman was put on trial by the media which implied that her parents were more distressed to find out their daughter was on the game than that she had been murdered. This is not unusual. In 1981 we picketed the High Court throughout the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial murderer who killed thirteen women and attacked many others. As in the similar cases of the Green River and Los Angeles murders, the police used the prostitution laws as an excuse to do nothing, labeling the victims as prostitutes, who were in any case black and/or too poor to matter. They only took the murders seriously after a relatively better off “respectable” woman was killed. Many more women died as a result, prostitute and non-prostitute alike.
The split in the women’s movement on the issue of women working as prostitutes has always led to so-called feminists strengthening the hand of the police against everyone. A modern instance is the legislation against kerb crawling (men soliciting women for prostitution) introduced by the Thatcher government in 1985 with the support of anti-porn/pro-censorship feminists. The kerb crawling law was supposed to bring equality to prostitute women by arresting clients, and bring protection from harassment by kerb crawlers to other women. In fact, the law further increased police powers against prostitute women and black and other working class women and men. Prostitute women are always the first to be arrested, and now any man police choose can be arrested and convicted for kerb crawling on police evidence alone. This was one of the many moves to turn Britain into a police state. In January 1986, the new Police and Criminal Evidence Act came into operation, legalizing many acts of police violence. Within the same year, a new Public Order Act was passed to stop pickets, demonstrations and any other forms of public protest.
Determined not to allow the policing of prostitution to segregate prostitute women from other working class people, we launched the Campaign Against Kerb Crawling Legislation (CAKCL) which rallied many individuals and organizations concerned with civil rights. Although we were not able to defeat the coalition of right, left, feminist and “respectable” residents aiming for gentrification and a rise in property values, who together provided the Thatcher government with excuses for the kerb crawling law, CAKCL has so far prevented the police from making wider use of their new powers.
Grassroots Organizing Against Police Illegality and Racism
The network of the International Prostitutes Collective, which includes Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States, is autonomous from men, social workers, lawyers, academics, politicians, government agencies and other pimps and clients. Police violence, illegality and racism have of course been major focuses of our campaign.
All prostitute women are affected by the prostitution laws in varying degrees according to their country, race, nationality, age, place of work, whether they are mothers, etc. Our experience is that prostitutes’ organizations which try to hide these differences make deals with the police to promote and protect one sector of prostitute women, usually the tiny minority of mostly white metropolitan women who can afford to be public, at the expense of the majority — black, Third World or immigrant, single mothers and other working class women and children, who can’t afford to come out, who continue to be hounded by the police. Having attended the 1985 Whores Congress, organized by the ICPR, we boycotted the Second Congress. Our statement was published in the press:
. Last year the police and media were invited. We protested: “Forcing women to identify themselves as prostitutes is to help the police to control prostitutes.” We have fought to prevent non-prostitute professionals — police, media, academics, social workers, lawyers and politicians — from controlling the prostitutes’ rights movement. The Whores Congress is planned with them.
We later learned that women attending were asked to surrender* their passports at the door. Only one woman from Belgium, where the Congress was held, attended — the rest were not about to come out to their local police.
We are not interested in legitimizing prostitution, but in legitimizing all prostitute women. We see prostitute women’s interests in connection not with the police, the media, politicians, academics and clients, but with all others who share poverty and repression with us. And since black people are the first to suffer at the hands of the police, ignoring, or even soft- pedaling, the role of police illegality in any of our lives, assists and supports every racist effort to segregate and muffle black self-defense and protest.
In Money for Prostitutes Is Money for Black Women (1975), Wilmette Brown, co-founder of International Black Women for Wages for Housework, spells it out:
Who among us, as Black women is above prostitution? Racism — our being forced as Black women always to have the least money, the least possibility of getting a job, the least access to school, the worst housing, and the first “opportunity” to be fired, fined, or jailed — already means that all Black women are suspected of being or expected to be prostitutes anyway! In a sweep arrest — when women who are just walking down the street can be arrested as prostitutes — who gets swept up first? It’s always open season on Black women.
The sex industry, like any other, keeps black women at the bottom of the hierarchy. Many madams, escort agencies, massage parlors and clubs do not employ black women and those who do keep a restrictive minimum quota. As a result, black prostitute women have less choice about where to work and are forced onto the street where working conditions are harder and more dangerous.
In April 1982, we initiated Legal Action for Women (LAW), a grassroots legal service for all women, in response to prostitute women’s needs for advice and support. LAW, and our rights sheet, Guide to the Rules of the Game — A-Z for Working Girls, which was distributed in red-light areas all over the country, launched a movement of women pleading not guilty to prostitution offenses in court.
In November 1982, with the support of Black Women for Housework and Women Against Rape, we occupied the Church of the Holy Cross in King’s Cross, London. Rephrasing our French sisters in 1975, we said, “Mothers need money. End police illegality and racism in King’s Cross.” The police had been arresting women who were not working, picking on black women in particular, refusing to catch pimps who were reported to them, a
rresting boyfriends of women who pleaded not guilty in court, and threatening to put their children in care. The twelve-day occupation was a major success:
1) It put prostitute women on the political agenda. We were on major national television news almost every day, and got an enormous amount of press coverage nationally and abroad. We all wore masks during the Occupation to prevent police and media from finding out which of us were on the game. Our masked faces have been an inspiration for prostitute women in several countries who have since used the protection of masks during actions.
2) It started to break down the barriers between prostitute women and other working class people. We gathered support from a wide range of individuals and organizations, including members of Parliament, councilors, political activists, and especially from black women and gay men. In Hookers in the House of the Lord (1983), Selma James writes:
One Black woman. . . spelled out that the prostitution laws are to young Black women what the “sus” laws are to young Black men.* This was a real breakthrough for us. After years of work, we could begin to see the illegality and racism of the police against hookers being lifted out of the exotic, even the erotic, where it could be dismissed and ridiculed; and onto the deadly serious terrain we share with others who are up against the law.
United We Stand, Divided We Die
The Occupation sent a message of support to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp which was celebrating its first anniversary: the “military-industrial-complex” (President Eisenhower’s phrase) that brought cruise missiles to Greenham is putting women and children on the game by robbing us of money and resources, and we are demanding back our share of the military budget. Some days later three Greenham women came to join our peace camp in the Church. Through our connections with Greenham we made visible how much prostitute women have in common with peace activists; some of us were the same women, but even when we were not, we shared a common experience of police brutality, arrest, illegality and prison.
The same “respectable” residents who attack us accuse Greenham women of being sexual deviants. Under the guise of “morality” and the defense of the nuclear family, monetarism is forcing women back into subservience through welfare cuts, higher unemployment, increased police powers and repressive legislation. Any woman struggling for an independent life, whether at Greenham, on the game, or by refusing marriage can be labeled loose or promiscuous. The latest attack has come through governments using AIDS to scapegoat gay communities, undermine prostitute women’s livelihood, tighten immigration controls against Black and Third World people, and control everyone’s sex lives. In a recent letter to the press written jointly with Wages Due Lesbians, we protested against AIDS terrorism:
In the climate of AIDS hysteria which the government is creating, the call for legalized brothels, isolation hospitals, etc., to “safeguard” the rest of the community is little short of demanding concentration camps to lock people away and keep us all isolated and divided from other people by the fear of “contamination” by association. . . Prostitution is one of the few ways for women to support themselves, their children and often whole families and communities. This is even more true in Third World countries where there is no “safety net” of the Welfare State. Women are caught between the danger of AIDS and the danger of starvation. The figures show that AIDS is not about attitudes — to sex or anything else — but about money, and about how poor people always pay most and are the most expendable. When AIDS or any other health crisis is disconnected from poverty, the way is opened for reinforcing racism — which can be deadly. (December 6, 1986)
Whether to defeat AIDS, to support women who want to get off the game, or to prevent women being forced onto the game by poverty, resources are the crucial question. Together with millions of other women all over the world, we are reclaiming the wealth that our unwaged and low waged work have helped produce. “Because,” as Wilmette Brown says in Black Women and the Peace Movement, “together we can win.”
*Letter to Annemiek Onstenk, Women’s Bureau of the Green-Alternative European Link in the Rainbow, European Parliament.
*Ed. Note: At the European Parliament, it is the normal procedure to surrender one’s passport upon entering. Because of the sensitive status of the women attending the 2nd World Whores’ Congress, the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights (ICPR) arranged for the European Parliament not to collect the passports. Participants in the Congress were issued special cards so that they would not have to go through the standard procedures. All list were turned over to the ICPR at the close of the congress.
*Many young people, in particular young black people, were arrested on police evidence alone, under the “suspicion” that they were thinking of committing a crime. This law was repealed after many years of protest.
U.S. PROStitutes Collective
Rachel West
The United States Prostitutes Collective (U.S. PROS) is a national network of women who work in the sex industry as well as other women who support our goals. We are part of the International Prostitutes Collective (IPC) and a sister organization of the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP). U.S. PROS is an independent network that is part of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Women in our network are working or have worked in all levels of the sex industry: women who work the streets, massage parlors, escort services, hotels, clubs, houses, strippers, dancers, mistresses, models, etc., full-time and part-time, black, Latino and white women.
We are campaigning for the abolition of the laws against prostitute women — not legalization or decriminalization — so that women can work as independent business women, controlling our own working conditions. Legalization in Nevada, in the United States, and in the Eros Centers of West Germany are basically the new sex assembly lines. The women have no control over working conditions, hours worked, the number of clients they see, tips they receive, etc. Women, when working, have to register with the police and therefore are registered as “known prostitute women.” They are also subject to health checks and are restricted in their movements outside the brothels. Decriminalization in some countries has come to mean the same as legalization. Therefore the IPC is very careful to make the distinction between legalization/decriminalization and abolition of the laws. It is a dangerous game to go along with the “program” of some state planners for legalization that in no way would end the vulnerability that prostitute women face. We are not building a movement to carry out our oppression under the guise of legalization or decriminalization.
We are also campaigning for economic independence for women, so that none of us will be forced into prostitution for economic reasons: safe houses for juvenile runaways, increases in all income transfer payments such as welfare (a study in San Francisco has shown that when welfare is cut, the numbers of AFDC mothers picked up for prostitution increases) and against immigration controls so that women and children can move freely from one country to another.
How We Began
U.S. PROS is an expansion of the New York Prostitutes Collective (NYP) that began in 1979 as a group of black sex industry workers and other black women who supported our goals. From the start we were a sister group of the ECP and used the organizing experience of the ECP to help us start out and to help in our on-going organization. NYP organized pickets, public meetings, and helped to support other organizations working on behalf of prostitute women’s rights, such as Prostitutes of New York (PONY), whose spokeswoman was Iris de la Cruz. PONY concentrated its efforts on working with street walkers and was an important part of the history of the movement for prostitute women’s rights. Although PONY no longer exists, it is important that their work be recognized and recorded.
We also organized within the City University campus for increased student grants, the right to get both welfare and student grants and for campus childcare. By 1980 we had both become multi-racial and grown into U.S. PROS. Nineteen eighty was also the year of the Democratic Convention in New York City and Mayor Koch h
ad gotten an additional sixty-nine thousand dollars to crack down on prostitute women during the convention. U.S. PROS organized our first police watch teams, consisting of volunteer lawyers, students, members of PONY and ourselves. Street walkers had a particularly hard time during the Convention. There was increased police harassment and police illegality; one woman was so desperate to get away from New York City police that when they pursued her she jumped into the East River.
U.N. Mid-Decade Conference on Women
Until 1980, the New York Prostitutes Collective had done quite a bit of support work for Margo St. James’ COYOTE, including raising money to help bring her to New York City. We parted ways with COYOTE in Copenhagen in 1980 at the U.N. Mid-Decade Conference on Women when we found ourselves opposing the feminist moralists and COYOTE. The latter were actively supporting a U.N. resolution on trafficking for the purposes of prostitution. The resolution, if passed as written, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, for a woman with a record of prostitution to cross an international border. Non-white women from Third World countries would have suffered the brunt of its implementation. U.S. PROS and other groups in the IPC opposed the resolution and made it clear that if we couldn’t get rid of it altogether, we would organize to get it modified to include some protection for prostitute women and children. We wanted a clause that said prostitute women and children should not be treated as criminals.*
Much to our surprise, COYOTE not only did not support our efforts, but publicly opposed us by issuing press releases stating that we were “dressed like whores but weren’t really prostitute women,” and by attacking the right of prostitute women to remain anonymous. This was especially dangerous at a conference crawling with Interpol officers. To expect prostitute women to come out in this environment, especially if they are black and/or immigrant women actively organizing against the establishment, amounts to nothing less than wanting to turn women over to the police. Despite efforts to undermine us, we did manage — through a consensus vote — to get the clause we wanted included in the official U.N. resolution. That experience, and others following, made it clear that the differences in the organized movement for prostitute women’s rights were no different from those that have emerged in other movements with those with the least social power struggling not to be undermined by those with more power. We, however, were not to be deterred by the scabbing and continued our work minus a political relationship with COYOTE.
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