A favorite photo of mine from when I was in Buenos Aires.  That city has sex work ad cards all over the place, like you would see in Las Vegas.

Yesterday, Argentina's president Cristina Fernandez banned sex work ads in print, supposedly to combat sex trafficking.  Fernandez is Argentina's former first lady who succeeded her husband to the presidency, and is the country's first elected female president.  She drew criticism as a senator for having unfair influence through her husband's office as the president, and her most commonly mentioned personality traits are her love of fashion and being unable to handle criticism.

With an election coming up in October, people are asking questions about whether her true motive on banning the adult ads is simply to take advertising dollars away from newspapers who don't favor her.  This could be another sad case of sex workers getting caught in the middle, and bearing the dangerous fallout, of other people's political ambitions.

Highlights from the Rueter's article for those of you short on time:

Argentina's government is banning prostitution ads in newspapers and other mass media as of Friday, saying it is combatting violence against women.

[...]

But some of the president's opponents fear it may be used to punish opposition media this election year by removing an independent source of revenue for an industry that in many cases depends on official advertising, a flow of revenue that press freedom groups say has been unequally directed toward the government's supporters.

[...]

Fernandez specifically took aim at the newspaper Clarin, a frequent antagonist. She cited the opposition paper's Area 59 section as particularly unethical. Area 59 has included columns of ads for escorts, "gym teachers" ''massage therapists" and "underwear models" offering "pleasures without limits." Until now.

[...]

In Argentina, most media organizations are aligned either with the Fernandez government or its opposition. Many on both sides have run solicitations for sexual encounters. But Grupo Clarin's conglomerate of newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, internet providers and web sites may have the most to lose.

Marketing director Emiliano Szlaien of the LectorGlobal media research firm estimated the ban could cost the Grupo Clarin $5 million.

It's somewhat strange for me to be talking about forced trafficking so much lately, because while I do care about how anti-trafficking organizations hurt consensual adult sex workers and ignore genuine victims, and have read much more on the subject that most other people, I will be the first to tell you that I am no forced trafficking expert.  My only real blog post about trafficking is advocating that people seek out better sources for information.  After a couple of weeks of peeking at the Twitter feed of Ashton Kutcher's fans talking about trafficking, it's very clear that most people lobbing opinions on the subject (and angrily contacting their elected officials) know nothing beyond sensationalist crusades led by celebrities, covered by media outlets who gussy up the story to be as dramatic and upsetting as possible.  I might not be an expert, but I certainly have a more informed opinion than most other people publicly blathering about the subject.

I need help in creating an important resource that does not seem to exist yet.  Unlike the mainstream anti-trafficking and anti-sex work groups that view all males as probably drooling for a chance to rape a child sex slave, I want SWAAY to show real consideration and appreciation of clients who strive to be ethical.  I think the American sex workers' rights movement is missing out by neglecting to court clients as allies or consider them potential supporters.

For one, I am still still seeking short pieces of advice from current and former sex workers on how clients can be respectful and ethical towards us.  I am hugely disappointed that after a month of the site being live, not a single sex worker has submitted a suggestion for how clients can treat them better.  (Admittedly, I am limiting my scope to sex workers who have worked in the US and are willing to post a photo of themselves.  But I personally know oodles of sex workers who show their face online, and they've not shown any interest in reaching out to clients through this part of the site, despite my mentioning it regularly.)  We all tweet and blog gripes when clients do something that pisses us off or violates our boundaries, but there's almost nothing written about how to not be that douchebag who gets ranted about.  Let's do something positive and help people understand how we do want to be treated.  What seems like common sense to us can be a confusing and vague world to others.

Secondly, since I have not seen such a resource anywhere yet, I'd like to add information specifically for clients of sex workers who might be concerned about seeing an underage prostitute or someone who is being abused.  Clients are in a better position than celebrities, NGOs, and even sex workers to locate and report potential victims of exploitation.  Yet, I don't believe I've ever seen anything from the sex workers' rights movement targeted at clients to give them information about how they might attempt to identify and report suspected forced trafficking, abuse, or underage victims.  The short answer is "call the police from a payphone in an area without security cameras," but that's not good enough.

The DNA Foundation, as well as other anti-sex work anti-trafficking organizations, have their own hotline for people to call to report abuse.  (I sincerely wonder what kinds of calls those numbers get if the organizations running them train people to consider all sex workers as victims who need saving.  "Hello, Mr Kutcher!  This is Bob in San Franciso.  I wanted to report a strip club I saw, which no doubt filled with trafficked slaves.  Am I hero now?")  Does anyone on "our team" have a phone number people can call?

I do hesitate to tell people to phone the police.  What if a well-meaning client triggers a raid on an area of prostitution (like an hourly motel) and ends up just getting a lot of hard-up people arrested who are not victims?  What if the police do indeed find a 16-year-old engaging in prostitution, arrest them, and ship them back to an abusive family from which they escaped and are desperate to never see again?  There's no easy solution, especially since "rescue" means arrest first, ask questions later, and can mean sending people into more abusive situations.  (As someone who was kicked out shortly before turning 16, yet never engaged in sex work at the time, I know that I would have been fucking livid if someone had tried to "help" me by involving the police.  I might not have had a stable address and enough to eat at all times, but I vastly preferred that lifestyle to other options.)

But where do we start?  How can we genuinely work to include clients in the fight against both forced trafficking and serious abuses, as well as the inadvertent mistreatment of consensual sex workers?  What are answers that don't involve arrests and involvement of the state, which can make things worse on already disadvantaged people?  Would clients carry a business card-sized list of non-governmental shelters and support services to give to anyone they think might want to seek help?  These are the tough questions I'd like to see the sex workers' rights movement addressing.

Edited to add: a commenter pointed out this awesome-looking UK resource: Redline.  It seems to be exactly what I wish we had here in the states.

Until they notice and modify it, any tweet with the word "trafficking" is posted on the front page of demiandashton.org, a celebrity foundation that conflates child sex slavery and consensual adult sex work.  They will no doubt start screening featured tweets soon, so jump on it now.  This bug/feature has been used by sex workers' rights supporters since about noon on Wednesday, and is still in effect, please use it to post real information about trafficking and sex work, such as:

Video: SEX WORKERS WANT TO STOP TRAFFICKING http://bit.ly/goDVC7

Videos from sex workers in developing world often cover how anti-trafficking orgs harm them http://sexworkerspresent.blip.tv

Learn about real trafficking issues from researcher Laura Agustín: http://www.lauraagustin.com

Want to help trafficking victims? Don't give your money to celebs, give it to shelters like Youthcare: http://bit.ly/qlW5eJ

The clients of sex workers are not boogeymen hoping to rape children. They don't deserve to be lumped in with trafficking.

Sex workers support the fight against trafficking. See a list of our own orgs here: http://www.swaay.org/groups.html

Guerilla warfare is about small groups going up against a strong, larger enemy, and using that large enemy's own resources against them.  Come participate in some electronic guerilla warfare that uses these celeb's fame to tell the world what's actually going on about sex work and human trafficking.  Hat tip to @iamcuriousblue for pointing out the Twitter widget on Kutcher's site, which was ripe for re-purposing once I figured out that it posts anything mentioning the T-word.

The long-term question is, after the site gets modified to exclude criticism, how can sex workers' rights supporters use Kutcher's fame campaign against him to publicize truths about sex work and how to really help trafficking victims?

Update: Belle de Jour suggested buying up misspellings of the domain and pointing them at better resources.  I bought DemiNAshton.org/.com, which are now forwarding to SWAAY.org.  Viviane suggested keeping an eye on these charity event calendars if we're looking for DNA events to protest: CharityHappenings.org and Eventful.com.  If anyone knows of an upcoming event/appearance for Kutcher/Moore/the DNA Foundation, please share the info so it can be met with a sex worker-led protest!

 

It's vanishingly rare for a large media outlet to cut through the knee-jerk emotional hysteria surrounding sexual trafficking, but The Village Voice knocks it out of the park this week.  Make sure to read Real Men Get Their Facts Straight: Ashton and Demi and Sex Trafficking.  This is probably going to end up being of my my top favorite articles of the year.  After completely destroying the bogus "there are 100,000-300,000 child sex slaves in America" myth, it goes on to look at the celebrity philanthropy industry behind the hype:

The actors were watching TV in bed when they saw a horrifying documentary about sex slavery in some faraway foreign land and decided they needed to get involved.

But how to help?

Sex trafficking is a grim problem, and not one actors know a lot about—even if Moore played a stripper in a movie and has alluded to how she was "manipulated and taken advantage of" by a 28-year-old boyfriend when she was 15 years old.

So Kutcher and Moore did what any savvy Hollywood couple would do, which is call Trevor Neilson. Neilson isn't a household name, but he's quickly establishing his Santa Monica, California-based Global Philanthropy Group as the premier charity consultant to the entertainment industry's biggest and brightest. Neilson is a former Hillary Clinton staffer and Gates Foundation director who has been the subject of glowing profiles in Details and the New York Times.

"The king of Hollywood philanthropy" and his wife and business partner, Maggie, can charge up to $200,000 a year for their services because they're the best in a new and growing industry. The concept of a celebrity charity consultant is relatively new, but it makes sense, as Hollywood grows ever more concerned about image management. Neilson is the guy Madonna called to help her save face in the debacle surrounding her failed Malawi schools.

The Neilsons cooked up a 140-point "secret sauce" plan of attack for the Demi and Ashton Foundation (known as DNA).

[...]

Getting data about sex slavery was not easy, she says: "Versus most social issues I've worked on, there is actually a dearth of data—so it was absolutely cobbled together."

Accuracy is not a major concern for Maggie Neilson.

"All of the core data we use gets attacked all the time," she says. "The challenge is, it's that or nothing, right? And I don't frankly care if the number is 200,000, 500,000, or a million, or 100,000—it needs to be addressed. While I absolutely agree there's a need for better data, the people who want to spend all day bitching about the methodologies used I'm not very interested in."

Really, go read the whole thing.  I promise you'll love it.

Oh, violent forced sex trafficking - how you give liberals a raging concern boner!  Since nothing excites a do-gooder quite like the chance to blare their uninformed "down with bad stuff!" opinion on a topic as exciting as forced sex trafficking, the latest Craigslist restrictions have prompted a month-long circle jerk for the self-righteous.

I haven't read all of what's been in the press in the last few weeks, but it's the same script that gets dusted off every few months when there's a "new" sex trafficking panic.  And, because anti-sex worker activists aim to turn all issues into a sex trafficking panic, those types are lined up to regurgitate their morbid sound bites about how all exchanges of sexual energy for cash are basicallythesamething as raping trafficked underage sex slaves.  (And, my side is plenty practiced with our less-heard replies, such as, "Do you have any evidence of any of your claims and statistics?", or "How is it that imprisoning/deporting abused sex workers makes their lives magically all better?", or "Have you ever actually asked these communities of people you claim to be saving what they want?")

Whether it's a conservative news source or a feminist/lefty one, the same cliches and hysteria get repeated without fact-check.  In a year when people on my end of the political spectrum are talking a whole lot about the importance of citing primary source materials in journalism, where's the outcry when the media just completely makes shit up about sex work?

I haven't really written about trafficking and "rescue", and it's not because I'm lazy or trying to avoid unpleasant subjects.  I have the sense to know that if something isn't my area of expertise, I ought to hush and listen to people who are in the know.  I know a bit on the subject, but other people are better teachers.

If you would like to educate yourself about trafficking, I have two homework assignments for you, which can be completed in a weekend.

First, read Laura Agustín's Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry.  We all have our golden books about a given topic that we recommend on a regular basis, and there's nothing that cuts through the bullshit with a sober, researched, post-colonialist mentality like Sex at the Margins.  I'll let the book's back cover summarize its contents:

This groundbreaking book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.

Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' disempowers them.  Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radical analysis.  Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry.  Although they are treated as a marginalised group, they form part of the dynamic of the global economy.

Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire of social justice.

You can read this book over the course of one day - it's weighty subject material, but it's not a huge volume at 194 pages (plus citations/sources/index).  It's worth buying, as you'll probably want to lend it out to your friends.

Secondly, the people impacted by the rescue industry are not lawn chairs - they actually can and do speak out for themselves.  A fair bit of video material has been produced by the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (primarily about sex workers in Cambodia), and is available for free on the Sex Workers Present Blip.tv station.  Spend a day watching those videos.  Most are not specifically about trafficking, but they will give you a dose of reality with the struggles faced by aggrieved sex workers in the developing world, including protesting being "rescued" and sent to what are tacitly prisons where they may face violence and rape at the hands of those who are supposedly rehabilitating them.  Most of these videos are not light watching, but it's material worth seeing.

If anyone has links to independent accounts (not quotes from anti-sex worker/anti-trafficking groups' own donation-soliciting literature) from people "rescued" while working in the United States, please post them.  I'd appreciate hearing their experiences and learning about what happens when migrant sex workers get "saved" in my country.

Agustín's academic work gives you a good foundation of research and informed theory, and the videos in the Sex Workers Present collection give you real first hand accounts directly from sex workers from developing countries who've faced the brutal end of "rescue" and meddling from outside organizations who claim to be "helping" them.  I consider this to be the your homework if you'd like to have a decent grasp of the issue.

One of the gems I've taken from Mistress Matisse's blog over the years has been her repeated admonishment (though not said in the context of politics) to be wary of how often the word help is just a nice way of saying control.  I think there's no more applicable place than in the world of anti-sex worker activists.  Sure, the line is, "We want to help women escape the sex industry", but what's really being said (and done) is, "We want to control other people's choices about their own bodies and dictate politically correct employment options to people whose complex situations we don't care to understand."

We already have too many do-gooders who presume to know what's best for sex workers, especially poor sex workers, migrant sex workers, and those in developing countries. What sex workers need are allies capable of listening.  So, go read up on the research, and then listen to what sex workers are actually agitating for on their own behalf.  I assure you, it's not that they wish more liberals, NGOs, and celebrities would barge into their lives and dictate how they ought to live.

"See, the problem with raids is that you have the people who want to rescue women and children who are in prostitution, using the oppressive arms of the state - the most oppressive arm of the state, which is the police - to conduct this 'rescue operation' through a raid.  [...]  The community is never ever going to respond to anybody who is bringing in the police to rescue them, because they do not view that as a 'rescue'.  They view that as another oppressive thing that's done to them."

-- Meena Seshu, founder of SANGRAM in India, in Caught between the tiger and the crocodile on sexworkerspresent.blip.tv

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