Much ado about a small segment of the global sex industry

Michael Duffy
June 14, 2008

http://www.smh.com.au/news/michael-duffy/much-ado-about-a-small-segment-of-the-global-sex-industry/2008/06/13/1213321616701.html

A problem that has captured the imagination of our time is the international trafficking of women for sex. It's on the increase because of globalisation, and has become a presence in popular culture. Often the theme of books and television drama, it was the subject of last year's good Australian film The Jammed.

But while trafficking, which involves force and deception, does occur and is a terrible crime, its extent has been hugely exaggerated. This is because the so-called rescue industry often deliberately confuses it with another and far more common activity: voluntary travel by women who want to work in another country's sex industry.

We've seen this linguistic subterfuge before. In the days when the Howard government wanted public support for its efforts to deport boat people, we often heard that this was necessary in order to deter evil "people-traffickers". In fact, most of the boat people had not been trafficked but smuggled, which means they were happy to pay someone who could get them to Australia. Those providing this service were breaking the law but (with the exception of men who provided unseaworthy vessels) they were not in the same moral category as those who trick Thai girls into coming to Australia and then imprison them in brothels.

But there aren't many people doing that, although you wouldn't know it from the publicity the Government's anti-trafficking effort gets, assisted by media-friendly raids on brothels by the Immigration Department. Australia is hardly unique in this regard, and it's time to realise that the world, prompted by the current American administration, has exaggerated the extent of this sort of activity. The victims are often legally employed sex workers.

The Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women has published a report called "Collateral Damage: the impact of anti-trafficking measures on human rights around the world". In the Australian chapter, by the Alliance staffer Elaine Pearson, one learns that "government attention to trafficking, as far as sex workers are concerned, has meant increased immigration raids on brothels, harassment of Asian sex workers in particular and disruption of their work. Three sex-worker organisations providing outreach to migrant sex workers stated that non-trafficked migrant sex workers working legally in Australia have been wrongly detained in raids at workplaces … Sex workers who are Australian citizens of Asian descent have also been subjected to increased harassment."

Someone who has looked closely at sex and migration internationally is Laura Maria Agustin, who has spent years talking to migrant sex workers and those who are paid to "rescue" them in America and Europe. She's just published a book called Sex At The Margins (Zed Books), and I spoke to her about it recently on Radio National.

Agustin says many migrants who sell sex choose to do so not because it's a matter of survival or because they're forced to, but because it's a way of bettering themselves.

In Agustin's view, many Westerners get very upset about this because they believe "people who are poor in the Third World are, almost by definition, not able to make any choices, are forced to do things, have been deceived, cannot possibly know what's going to happen to them and therefore are in need of the help of people who understand the world better. And when the situation involves women who sell sex, this is exaggerated by the belief on many people's part that any woman who is selling sex must have been misled, could not possibly want to do that."

But, based on the many women she's talked to, she says they do want to do that. They've decided working in the sex industry is better than the alternatives, a decision no one but they can make.

One might argue it would be better if they had other options, but they don't. And they have to live the lives they've got, not some fantasy alternative imagined by well-intentioned Westerners.
Agustin is struck by the way the linking of sex and migration exercises such a hold on the Western imagination. Every First World city is full of locally born sex workers, yet rarely is any concern expressed about this. Those cities are also full of migrants being exploited in non-sexual occupations, yet once again, public concern is rare. But when the two are placed together, it creates a sort of moral brain snap.

This is the case in Australia, where, the Global Alliance report notes, the government has been relatively uninterested in migrants trafficked for non-sex work. "From 1999 until the end of June 2005," it says, "159 individuals were identified as suspected victims of trafficking by [the Immigration Department] and/or the Australian Federal Police.

"Of this number, only 7.5 per cent of the victims were in sectors other than the sex industry. This is despite the fact that irregular workers are far more commonly found in sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, manufacturing, retail trade and construction than in the sex industry."

Elena Jeffreys, president of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian Sex Workers Association, told the Herald: "The Australian Federal Government has spent more money on anti-trafficking measures targeting the sex industry than has been spent in the entire history of the regulation of our industry …

"Although the raids on brothels and so on are targeted at Asian women, in a bid to locate those who have been trafficked, they affect everyone else who works there. No other legal industry in Sydney suffers this level of disruption by government officials."

Religious condemnation of homosexuals denies human rights

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/religious-condemnation-of-homosexuals-denies-human-rights-20080629-2ytn.html?page=-1

Michael Kirby
June 30, 2008

A THOUSAND conservative Anglican leaders met in Jerusalem last week, among them Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria who was reported as saying that Anglicans who preach the inclusion of homosexuals in God's church were guilty of apostasy. He is not alone in this view. In Zimbabwe, the former bishop of Harare, an ardent supporter of President Robert Mugabe, withdrew from the Anglican province in May saying he could not co-exist with so many gays and lesbians in the church.

Many of us know the passage from the Old Testament book of Leviticus that declares homosexuals an "abomination". It is one of a long list of denunciations that has profoundly affected the way three great world religions — the "People of the Book": Jews, Christians and Muslims — have responded to sexual minorities. Only in a few countries is there a strict separation of church and state, so what they teach about morality influences secular laws by which most people on the planet are governed.

The problem is that those who believe in the inerrancy of religious texts find it difficult, or impossible, to tolerate those who deny or doubt their truth. Often the reaction against apostates is explained as being for the benefit of those affected. And it is ascribed to a command from God himself.

No doubt there are some in modern Jewish society who still adhere to views such as those in Deuteronomy that advocate the stoning of apostates, but generally speaking, few Jews would take them seriously as a command for contemporary civilian law. Christians have a similar tradition. In the 1250s, in one of the first descriptions of traditional English law, Henry Bracton declared that apostates should be burnt to death. Then, in the 1770s, William Blackstone declared Christianity to be "part of the laws of England", enforceable as such. Such laws have long since ceased to be observed, although occasionally the law of blasphemy is invoked to protect an Anglican concept of God.

It is 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations on the recommendation of a committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt. It gave effect to one of the Allied war aims in the Second World War, upholding the right of everyone to "worship God in one's own way anywhere in the world".

For most Jews and Christians today, the thought of punishing people because they abandon or deny their old religion, is unthinkable. Increasing numbers of Australians declare on the census that they have "no religion". So even hardline believers tend to skip over the passages in Deuteronomy. Much easier to single out those of Leviticus and to denounce sexual minorities.
Still, in some countries apostasy is very much a live issue, especially in some Islamic countries. The Holy Koran does not prescribe compulsory adherence to Islamic beliefs. On the contrary, it states that "there is no compulsion in religion". God alone has the right to punish those who do not adhere to Islam or who turn their backs on its beliefs.

On the other hand, the Hadith, a secondary source of Islamic law, records the prophet as saying that whoever rejects Islam must be killed. This has become a source for civilian laws and stern punishments in some Islamic countries. Occasionally, as in Sudan, those laws appear to be used as political tools for removing outspoken opposition personalities.

In Malaysia, the constitution contains standard guarantees of freedom of religion. However, in 2007, a decision of that country's highest court, in the Lina Joy case, by majority, denied the applicant the right to record a change of her religion from Islam to Christianity on her identity papers so that she could marry her Christian fiance.

One of the foremost critics of the Malaysian court decision on apostasy was Dr Thio Li-ann, a professor of law and a nominated member of Singapore's Parliament, a Christian who took a leading part in persuading the Singapore Parliament to reject proposals to repeal the old British laws against homosexuals, based on the teachings in Leviticus. For her, refusing to permit Lina Joy to have freedom of religious conscience was an abomination, notwithstanding Deuteronomy. But the abomination in Leviticus had still to be enforced. Like most non-Western countries in the former British Empire, Singapore maintains its criminal laws against gays.

On the 60th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt's Declaration, we need to promote tolerance and acceptance of diversity among all the People of the Book. For the sake of the planet and survival of the species we must embrace the universal principles of human rights. It is no accident that they were promised as a foundation stone for the New World Order created by the United Nations. Without respect for such basic rights, peace and security will always be at risk.

Most of the world's great religions are founded, ultimately, on simple principles of loving God and one another. It is from those principles that religious tolerance derives.

The Nobel laureate and religious leader Desmond Tutu recently wrote a foreword to the life story of Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church. Tutu declared his acceptance of the authority of Scripture as the word of God. But he has not forgotten that the Bible had been used to justify racism, slavery and the humiliation of women. He declared: "I could not stand by whilst people were being penalised again for something about which they could do nothing — their sexual orientation."

The big challenge before us is to telescope centuries of experience, law, culture and tolerance in the West into a few decades in the rest of the world. Unless we do so, the mixture of religious intolerance and weapons of mass destruction will be a great threat to the world and everyone in it.

Michael Kirby is a judge of the High Court of Australia. This is an edited version of a speech he will give tonight, at the invitation of the La Trobe University Centre for Dialogue, at the Asia Centre, Melbourne University. He will speak at 7pm and the lecture is open to the public

Moving On

I’ve had some time away from blogging as I’ve moved to Melbourne and not been online much. Through the three and a bit years I spent in Sydney, some part of me was always somewhat critical, somewhat held back, as the cultural differences between Adelaide, where I grew up and Sydney were often too stark. Although being a very out, extremely visible sex worker in a small place like Adelaide was eventually draining and the smallness of the queer scene meant fringe groups and minority queers were isolated; moving to Sydney made me appreciate so many things about the city-of-white-picket-fences-and-a-scarily-large-amount-of-churches-without-even-archetural-justification that I had left.

While I loved so many things about Sydney – Gurlesque and SLIT Magazine, that femme dykes were visible and that in some queer community spaces, being a whore was no big deal, the persistent lack of etiquette of the too-large-too-fast-and-too-easily-distracted-big city never stopped rankling with me. From the first few months when I was constantly blown away by people repeatedly bumping into others on footpaths, and never apologising, through to people’s crap behaviour within queer and alterna networks, including bullying and harassment, general online crap behaviour and high school mean girls behaviours in venues. For me, this was neatly summed up in a story I heard from a friend a few weeks before I left town, of a woman in the punk scene who broke up with her girlfriend, only to find that the ex had dealt with her post-break up feelings by producing a zine that spewed hatred and negativity at the woman, and distributed it at every gig she went to. The second aspect of this story is that no one ever seemed to challenge the embittered ex on her crap behaviour, and were happy to get their copy of the zine, for all the juicy details. I don’t pretend that this kind of behaviour is an exclusively Sydney phenomena, but that it can be easier to get away with things in a bigger city. I guess even though I hated that everyone always knows your business in a smaller city, that because in Adelaide everyone pretty much knows everyone, or at least only one degree of separation, that I felt that people didn’t try to fuck each other over quite so overtly.

Either way, I’m hoping that Melbourne will be a happy medium. So far I’ve been overjoyed at seeing manners displayed on a daily basis in my travels, but with the things I enjoy about bigger cities: butch-femme, trans and gender queer communities happening and putting on events, large ethnic and cultural communities coexisting and doing their own thing, and lots and lots of options for places to go and things to see.

My time so far has been spent getting lost, then finding my way back to somewhere I know (my technique for learning about new cities and new computer programs alike), learning about the local public transport quirks and finding my way in a new sex industry, governed by different laws.

The other day on the train I put together the reason I think I have experienced more weirdness from random strangers than usual. The person I am involved with is a transman and is at that stage of transition where he is passing a significant amount of the time, but passing as a teenage guy. So while I’ve long been used to getting filthy looks by elderly women, it’s usually when I have tattoos on display, or when I’m wearing something low cut or short, lately I’ve been dressed for a Melbourne winter, with nothing but my face and hands visible. The penny finally dropped, and I became aware that he is occasionally mistaken for a 16 year old, whereas I am far from looking like a teenager – so when we are behaving in amorous ways, it can confront some social mores, to say the least. As someone who is used to being involved with significantly older partners, it was an odd feeling to be pegged as a dirty old woman preying on a teenage boy…. Good thing I have a sense of humour, a healthy ego and that I celebrate each year further away from the tumultuousness and instability of my 20s. I just hope no one reports me to DOCS!

Truth and visas will set Asian sex workers free

Elena Jeffreys
April 4, 2008


The stereotype of the Asian sex slave captures the Australian imagination. When Puangthong Simaplee died in immigration detention in 2001, a story emerged of a girl trafficked to Australia at the age of 12 and forced to have sex as a slave. Her story was given under duress, after the Department of Immigration had taken her into detention, during the first phases of the pneumonia that eventually killed her.

Even when the federal police uncovered the Thai woman's high school diploma, proudly displayed in her family home, and discovered she did not arrive in Australia until aged 21, the image endured of pre-pubescent Asian girls chained to beds in back rooms with barred windows.

Media reports of a thousand sex slaves working in Australia have proved unfounded. But even when the coroner found no evidence that Simaplee was trafficked, the sex industry, not the detention system, continued to be the focus of coverage of her death.

The sensationalism surrounding the sex slave issue has created a government-funded rescue industry. This has diverted the focus from actual cases of trafficking in Australia and prevented an evidence-based response to the problem.

The federal police's transnational sexual exploitation and trafficking team, with the Immigration Department, has swept through the Asian brothels of Australia's capital cities, aided by an anti-trafficking package of tens of millions of dollars since 2003. The Australian Tax Office joined in and media were invited to the raids.

Non-English-speaking sex workers became the most overscrutinised sector of the sex industry. But the "sex slaves" remained elusive and trafficking was difficult to prosecute.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission chimed in with the suggestion to make "consent" irrelevant, but even that could not create victims that did not exist.

The time has come for a new kind of response to trafficking, grounded in labour rights rather than moral hysteria.

While pictures of brothel raids make big news, labour rights for migrants, a less glamorous issue, are ignored. As the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women noted last year, Australian figures on trafficking "do not seem to take into account cases of labour exploitation".

If the Federal Government wants to improve the conditions of migrant sex workers, it needs to protect their rights as workers.

Introducing a visa to allow migrant sex workers to work in Australia legally for short periods of time would pull the carpet from under the trafficking nexus by allowing women to travel here independently to work. Greater access to generic working holiday visas for sex workers from our region would enable travel for work, without having to resort to a third party or "agent".

Treating migrant sex workers as a legitimate class of worker will get to the core of the trafficking issue. Decriminalising the sex industry in all states, and protecting workers from discrimination, would improve conditions in the long term.

Punitive approaches have been unsuccessful. The health, safety and human rights of the migrant sex workers in Australia must be prioritised.

Elena Jeffreys is the president of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian sex workers' association. She will participate in the "Security and future prosperity" stream of the 2020 summit.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/04/03/1206851098330.html

Exciting times, but more changes needed.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd declared Australian Workplace Agreements "dead and buried" as Parliament today passed legislation dismantling the Work Choices laws.

Mr Rudd has told MPs that today was a landmark day for struggling families across the country and the first step to restoring fairness in the workplace.

The Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill was rubber-stamped by the lower house this morning after passing the Senate last night. The Bill needs the assent of the Governor-General to become law.

Mr Rudd said the Bill's passage marked a major day for working families across Australia and honoured a commitment Labor gave to the people before last year's federal election.

"Today we declare this shameful chapter in the history of Australia's workplace relations to be dead and buried," Mr Rudd told parliament with the rousing support of Labor MPs in the chamber.

"Today with this legislation we begin the process of buying the rest of that Work Choices omnibus once and for all.

At this rate, I could get to approve of this Federal Government!

However, there is a Get Up! campaign going on - possibly the easiest activism you will be a part of:

Dear friends,

Saying sorry was an extraordinary first step on the road to reconciliation. But now is the time for real action - starting with closing the 17 year life expectancy gap that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

That is why Indigenous health professionals from across the nation are descending on Canberra to meet with the Government this week - our one chance to send a clear message we want a national partnership to end this preventable crisis. What happens this week will help determine the health equality for an entire generation to come - that's why we'll be there with our close the gap petition.

Can you add your name to it to close the shocking 17-year life expectancy gap, before another Australian generation is condemned to third-world health conditions?

< align="justify">www.getup.org.au/campaign/CloseTheGap

When we joined Oxfam, ANTaR, HREOC and NACCHO in this campaign in April last year we laid out the challenge before us: "we want to give politicians an unflinching new mandate, backed by tens of thousands: to extend the fundamental rights to life and health to every citizen of our wealthy country." Together we rose to that challenge, and saw Kevin Rudd make a commitment to close the gap - but now we need the Government to match their commitment with real action. This week is our opportunity to make that a reality - and that will take bold political will.You have the power to create that will - add your name to the 40,000 GetUp members who have already signed the petition, and we'll take it straight to Canberra with the message that Australia demands real health equality for all citizens:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/CloseTheGap

Thanks for being a part of the solution.

The GetUp team

After more than a decade of feeling very ashamed of the government - and those that voted for them, I've started to feel a bit of hope for Australia moving into a time of compassion and social justice again.

Interesting quote, that picks up some of the themes of this blog

The modern fairy tale ending is the reverse of the traditional one: A woman does not wait for Prince Charming to bring her happiness; she lives happily ever after only by refusing to wait for him -- or by actually rejecting him. It is those who persist in hoping for a Prince Charming who are setting themselves up for disillusionment and unhappiness. (Susan Faludi, Writer)

Check out this article on Migrant Sex Workers...

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/78499/

Why Do Migrant Sex Workers Need Saving?


In the West, in the present, many people believe that sex should express love. This “good” sex is also said to provide a key way to discover personal identity -- who we really are, our innermost selves. It is assumed that feelings of love increase pleasure (quantitatively) and intensify it (qualitatively), resulting in meaningful passion that is expressed through long term, emotionally committed relationships. Other sexual relations then seem wrong, among them anonymous, public, and “promiscuous” sex. Above all, “real” love and sex are said to be incompatible with rationality and work -- at least that is the way many wish it to be.
At the same time, people wonder: Is there a boom underway in the buying and selling of sex, part of a general sexualization of contemporary culture? Since objective data is impossible to gather when businesses operate outside the law, we cannot know whether sex-and-money transactions are going on more than ever, but we certainly know we see and hear about them more. So although we tell a powerful story about sex and love belonging together, we also understand that people want other kinds of sex. We hear about people who buy and sell sex from our friends, acquaintances, the media, and sometimes through reporting on migration -- which is where “sex trafficking” comes in.


Laura Agustín has been studying migration’s links with the sex industry since 1994. Her new book is Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books) and other publications are available on her website.

The issue of migration in relation to sex work is a huge one for the sex worker rights movement - as abolishionists often try to get anti-sex work legislation and policies through in guise of 'stopping trafficking', in the same way that anti-fornication Christians will target homosexuality rather than saying publically that they wish to outlaw all sex outside of marriage. I myself find so much of the rhetoric of the anti-trafficking movement so obviously racist - oh, it's ok for white, western, university educated women in North countries to talk about choice - but if you are a person of colour, working class, poor, young, female - well, you just have to be a victim of exploitation....