When we lived in the club we had the owner on top of us taking care of us:‘don’t go with this one’,‘don’t go with the other one’. He was like our father. (Colombian woman in Spain)88
Migrants without permission to work may feel safer if someone else takes charge of finding new venues and arranging jobs. The media, police and helping projects, on the other hand, only hear about the most tragic situations precisely because something has gone wrong.
The debt that migrants contract is often referred to as bondage or slavery, but all debts are not alike and not all require working in a specific place or in oppressive conditions.
People come here that have a debt, for example one girl I have right now. They’ve all come on their own feet, they have a debt they have to pay ... The last girl had to pay a million [pesetas] [C= 6,010] ... After five months she was finished. (Dominican woman running a sex business in Spain)89
You ask the bank for a loan, giving collateral or guarantees, they give you the money and you pay interest every month. I did it with a friend’s guarantee. (Ecuadorian domestic worker in Spain)90
The woman who brought me told me that they gave us everything in the club, food, a place to sleep ... I didn’t know how the debt worked ... After twenty days the woman came to get the money I had made ... She told me what I owed ... it seemed too much to me ... The owner said: I give you your money and you fix it with her. He was different from the woman who brought me ... I had trouble with the woman and finally stopped paying her ... The deceit is in the debt and the payback, not in the work. We pay the debt and we are free. (Colombian working in Spain)91
I never considered it to be a debt. For me it was like a favour that they did for me. (Colombian working in Spain)92
Even when migrants feel deceived, they usually complain of working conditions, not the fact that the work is sexual,93 and they often prefer to remain in the industry. Many migrants’ primary goal is paying off debts in the shortest possible time, so they focus on the future and play down unpleasant stages already behind them.
Yet migrants who sell sex are routinely treated as victims. Altink notes that the word transmits shades of meaning insinuating that these victims are chaste and ignorant, which
ignores the sense of responsibility which leads women to migrate in search of work . . . ‘It hurts, but don’t call me a poor thing,’ one woman .. . said. Victims can also be very tough who will do anything to avenge the damage done to them and make a better life for themselves. Some victims don’t go to the police but start trafficking for themselves, or side with the traffickers to avoid reprisals.94
When someone is shanghaied and forced to work, everyone agrees that it is a crime. But ‘rescue’ raids by police and NGOs often fail because arrested workers refuse to denounce anyone.95 Critics conclude that workers are afraid of reprisals, but it could be that they have nothing to denounce.96 Nonetheless, doubt is always planted about the condition of the sex worker’s state of mind, if not of her soul. Nickie Roberts describes working as a stripper in London’s Soho in the 1960s:
A lot of the girls were Northerners who, like me, had hitched down to London with lots of high hopes, big dreams and fuck-all else. One or two had escaped from children’s homes and crazy fathers who beat or raped them. These were the ones the media and all the ‘experts’ call ‘sick victims’. They were nothing of the sort – they were kids who had the guts to do something about their bad ‘home’ situation: they ran away, and found sanctuary in the sex industry. That may sound absurd, but it isn’t. Those young runaways, some as young as 14, 15, were independent; they had control over their lives, whereas back where they came from they had none.97
None of this nuancing of deceit and coercion lessens the multiple abuses sometimes committed by those facilitating travel, whether against migrants who end up working in sex or against migrants in any other job. What needs examining is why so many people insist that this is criminal by definition, the crime being called ‘trafficking’.
‘Trafficking’: A New Keyword
The enormous interest and concern for trafficking and human smuggling in governmental, inter-governmental and nongovernmental organizations, in the media and popular opinion, is running ahead of theoretical understanding and factual evidence.98
The identification of activities called ‘trafficking’ began to take off in the mid-1990s, carving out new areas of research such as ‘modern forms of slavery’, or expanding older ones, such as transnational crime. Some activists speculate that large-scale criminal organisations are dedicated to enslaving migrants, but research does not prove this, including a study from the UN Crime Commission itself.99 Rather, opportunist and many-branched networks develop in situations where people see travel to work as the solution to their problems.
All attempts to quantify cases of ‘trafficking’ are questionable. An Italian study estimated 18,000–25,000 ‘foreign prostitutes’ in Italy through interviews with 50 women identified as ‘trafficked’, extrapolating to estimate 2,000 such women in Italy.100 However, there was no consensus among sources on the definition of ‘trafficking’ or other terms that attempt to pin down enigmatic issues of will, consent and choice: whether people travelling with false papers ‘chose’ what awaited them, whether they ‘really’ understood their contracts, whether they felt in love with an intermediary, how their parents’ participation affected their judgement or if they understood how being in debt would affect their mobility. If such epistemological questions are difficult for people secure in their homes, they are more so for those who have left home to face cultural disorientation on a grand scale and who might be best thought of as giving their ‘resentful consent’ to those helping them.101
Some projects attempting to quantify victims count all migrants who sell sex, others consider anyone who agrees to denounce a ‘trafficker’ according to local law, others count everyone who gives money to a boyfriend, and yet others include all illegal sex workers. Victims may be tallied only in countries of origin or only in destinations or in both; studies may include transit countries or not.102 Attempts at quantification are made more unreliable, moreover, because most segments of the sex sector are not recognised by governments, which means there can be no proper counting of ‘sex workers’, as a category, either. In 1999, a European AIDS prevention project,Tampep, estimated migrants selling sex as percentages of all sex workers by country. The numbers were entirely schematic, coming from a limited number of projects that did not use the same method for counting, that did not all have the same type of contact with the industry (for example, some only met street workers, others only people using health services), that were not conducted in all languages necessary to communicate with all migrants, or that operated only in big cities.
Other complications to counting victims include irregular migrants’ reluctance to give correct information, and their use of forged documents and nationalities, which means that tallies by country of origin are unreliable. Migrants who do not pay taxes may prefer to avoid being counted. Some studies count transgender workers as women and some do not, while most counts omit men. Some health projects count ‘attended persons’ or ‘medical attentions’, meaning that a person who visits a mobile unit every week, for example, could be counted 52 times a year.103 For 2003–4,Tampep’s figures describe migrant percentages of member projects’ contacts with sex workers. Such countings cannot be considered definitive or dependable.
Outside the Tampep network, projects count migrants who sell sex using a range of criteria. For example, one cannot compare the statistic ‘23% (412) and 14% (117) of women with visas to work as dancers in Switzerland were from the Dominican Republic and Brazil’ with ‘75% of foreign prostitutes in Germany are from Latin America and the Caribbean’.104 Moreover, projects that refer to ‘prostitutes’ do not count migrants working for erotic telephone services, or as dancers, or in other sex jobs. Given the impossibility of counting not only undocumented migrants but all workers in informal economies, there c
an be no trustworthy numbers, so the published statistics are mostly fantasies. Even those who admit this propagate estimates obtained by entities such as the US Central Intelligence Agency:
Because sex trafficking is so far underground, the number of victims in the United States and worldwide is not known, and the statistics vary wildly. The most often cited numbers come from the US State Department, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year – and that 80 percent are women and girls. Most trafficked females, the department says, are exploited in commercial sex outlets ... ‘The number will always be an estimate, because trafficking victims don’t stand in line and raise their hands to be counted, but it’s the best estimate we have,’ said Ambassador John Miller, director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. The CIA won’t divulge its research methods, but based its figures on 1,500 sources, including law enforcement data, government data, academic research, international reports and newspaper stories.105
Many of the sources referred to, when investigated, are simply small local NGOs, local police and embassy officials, extrapolating from their own experience and from reports in the media. Most of the writing and activism on this issue does not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by academics. Many authors lean heavily on media reports and statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity about definitions.106 The ‘evidence’ is often circular, as officials cite news reports which cite officials ... Sweeping generalisations often feature in such writing:
[W]omen are never made aware of the extent to which they will be indebted, intimidated, exploited and controlled. They believe ... that they can travel to a richer country and earn large amounts of money in a short space of time, which they can then use to move themselves and their families out of poverty and despair. In reality, they are told they owe a huge debt which must be repaid through providing sexual services, and they are able to exercise virtually no control at all over their hours of work, the number of customers they serve, and the kinds of sex they have to provide.107
Such passages erase diverse experiences and claim reality for only the worst. The many research projects referred to in Note 60 of this chapter show that many women do achieve the goal of earning a large amount of money in a short time and are glad of it. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an international NGO, agitates for a discursive change that would make ‘prostitution’ by definition a form of violence against women, eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent. CATW also proposes that the word ‘prostitution’ be made to mean the same thing as the word ‘trafficking’, so that
all children and the majority of women in the sex trade would be considered victims of trafficking ... Unless compelled by poverty, past trauma, or substance addictions, few women will voluntarily engage in prostitution. Where the demand for prostitution is high, insufficient numbers of local women can be recruited. Therefore, brothel owners and pimps place orders with traffickers for the number of women and children they need.108
The movement against ‘trafficking’ (and ‘prostitution’) uses the theory of violence against women, conceived as a ‘manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women’.109 The feminist project to reveal the routine nature of violence against women has led to widespread understanding of the insidious workings of patriarchy; the problem comes about when the roles of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ are treated as identities rather than temporary conditions.110 But services that want victims to become ‘survivors’ sometimes reinforce passivity, particularly in therapeutic contexts, diagnosing syndromes and disorders and emphasising damage over coping.111 Ratna Kapur explains that in the legal context
it is invariably the abject victim subject who seeks rights, primarily because she is the one who has had the worst happen to her. The victim subject has allowed women to speak out about abuses that have remained hidden or invisible in human rights discourse.112
Victims become passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers become saviours, a colonialist operation warned against in discussions of western feminism’s treatment of third-world women113 and now common in discussions of migrant women who sell sex.114
The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the notion that poorer women are better off staying at home than leaving and possibly getting into trouble; men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome trouble, but women may be irreparably damaged by it. The lack of a coherent definition of the term ‘trafficking’ has inspired an avalanche of meetings, conferences and reports all over the world. In multiple sessions between 1998 and 2000, the UN Commission for the Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice listened to the arguments of two groups lobbying in different directions, especially over words describing consent (obligation, force, coercion, deceit).115 Agreement was reached on two protocols appended to a UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, and entire documents of footnotes and explanations have been published to reveal the conflicts behind the final words.116 The protocols produced two separate concepts: ‘trafficking’ and smuggling. The ‘trafficking’ protocol expresses women’s presumed greater disposition (along with children) to be deceived, above all into ‘prostitution’, and their lesser disposition to migrate;117 the consent of the woman victim is sidelined. The smuggling protocol positions men as capable of deciding to migrate but also of being handled like contraband, and ‘prostitution’ is not mentioned. The conflation of the ‘trafficking’ discourse with migrations to work in the sex industry has caused enormous confusion:
Does not this trend towards ‘criminalisation’ of individual movements of migrants have the paradoxical consequence of promoting the development of organised trafficking in persons? 118
Unfortunately, efforts to prevent ‘trafficking’ often try to prevent migration itself, and, when researchers find women and girls absent from a village, they tend to list them as ‘missing persons’.119 But despite attempts to distinguish between ‘trafficking’ and ‘sex-work migrations’, 120 public debates focus on criminal abuse, and matters are not helped by some campaigners’ virulent attacks on those who don’t agree with them:
There is an international movement to legitimize, legalize and regulate prostitution, which is referred to as ‘sex work’ ... At every opportunity, they interpret law and policy to support this point of view ... They advocate for the acceptance and legalization of prostitution, and fail to assist victims of trafficking, even when they come in contact with them.121
Everyone wants to prevent abuse, so the waste of energy in such assaults is deplorable. But women who cross borders have long been viewed as deviant,122 so perhaps the present-day panic about the sexuality of travelling women is not surprising. To migrate is to make risky decisions, and only one link in the chain needs to be weak for things to go wrong. But is that a good reason not to treat the people who act within it as real and whole?
[A]utonomous migration means more than unauthorized (‘illegal’) border crossings: it means a community strategy implemented, developed, and sustained with the support of institutions, including formal ones, at the migrants’ points of origin and ... points of destination. Precisely because core institutions (legal, religious, local governmental, etc) support this migratory strategy, undocumented migrants do not perceive its moral significance as deviant. Migrants may see their autonomous migration as extralegal, but not necessarily as criminal.123
The core institutions of many countries accept that people travel in quasi-legal if not outright illegal conditions, and embassies and consulates often grant spurious visas.124 Furthermore, the money that migrants send home not only contributes to individual families but now represents a large proportion of many countries’ Gross Domestic Product.125 So migrants may be forgiven for payi
ng scant attention to the bureaucratic ‘illegality’ that may be involved.
To grant agency to migrating individuals does not mean denying structural conditions, nor does it make them over-responsible for their fate, but it does consider their own perceptions and desires to be crucial. Moments occur during migrations when travellers must choose between doing things legally and doing them so that they might turn out well. The Colombian woman in Bangkok I mentioned in the Introduction felt guilty because she had knowingly bought fake papers. She was a victim, but she had made choices and felt responsible, and I would not want to take this ethical capacity away from her. She was caught in global forces, but she also wanted to be.
Autonomy in a Space of Flows
Manuel Castells’s term a ‘space of flows’ attempts to represent all kinds of movements – not only human but financial and informational.126 According to tradition, migrants ‘settle’, but very many don’t, either because they never mentally or physically relinquish a house, village, city or culture, or because they set themselves up to do business between the old and new country or because they find it unavoidable or impossible not to go back. The last by no means signifies failure of the migration project, which may end up taking the shape of repeated use of tourist visas or repeated attempts to cross borders without getting caught. Many such people come to feel they have more than one home and that they live in both of them.
The concept of flows may seem to mask inequalities that determine their direction. Some see the flow of culture as asymmetrical, stronger from centre to periphery than the other way round.127 But we don’t know how to measure cultural impacts deriving from the periphery and affecting the centre, which may be less concrete and visible than cultural or social. Some authors emphasise mobility’s power relations, with some people initiating movement, others organising it, others receiving it and some apparently imprisoned by it.128 The migration project is mixed up in a vast complex of circumstances, from the national and global to the most local, personal and serendipitous (a meeting in a café, the detection of a false visa). How people move, how necessary knowledge moves toward them, how they move their money, how its value moves them and how they encourage other people to make similar moves: all form part of these flows. Castells describes how the current downsizing of large corporations depends on plans to subcontract work out to individuals afterwards without offering them job security or benefits; he refers to the replacement of ‘the organisation man’ with ‘the flexible woman’.129 Many migrants are flexible women par excellence:
Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry Page 5
