Unequal

Unequal*
Melissa Farley
August 30, 2005

There's a phenomenal piece of investigative
journalism by Robert I Friedman that appeared in
the Nation, April 8, 1996: India's Shame: Sexual
Slavery and Political Corruption are Creating an
AIDS Catastrophe. In this article, Friedman
documents criminal gangs' control of prostitution
in India and describes what one physician calls a
"medical holocaust." That expression refers to
the AIDS crisis among women in prostitution that
is primarily caused by johns' and pimps' rapes of
women in prostitution and johns' refusal to use
condoms while raping women. Friedman described
the business of sexual exploitation in India that
is paradigmatic of the sex industry worldwide,
including the United States.

In another Nation piece about the Thai sex
industry, Lillian S. Robinson's coresearcher Ryan
Bishop says to her, "You have to [visit the Thai
sex industry]. You have to do it. You have to go
there the way you have to visit Dachau."

In these two articles from the 1990s, there was
an articulation of prostitution and trafficking
as slavery and as sexual holocaust. It seemed
like the reawakening of a movement where
prostitution was understood as a dominating
transformation of women into a special type of
commodity where the man who buys her shapes her
into his own physical and psychological
masturbatory entity.

This is how I've also come to understand
prostitution through a decade of research that
includes the accounts of more than 850
prostituted women, men, transgendered people, and
children in 9 countries. The physical violence
of prostitution is not only HIV infection. No
other "employment" has comparable rates of
physical assault, rape, and homicide except for
war combat. One woman explained, "What rape is
to others, is normal to us." The symptoms of
profound emotional distress that result from
prostitution and trafficking are off the charts -
depression, suicidality, anxiety, posttraumatic
stress disorder, dissociation, substance abuse.

Friedman described trafficking of Nepali girls
into India. Today trafficked girls come to Indian
cities from rural areas and from Bangladesh and
other impoverished countries in the region.
These days the sex industry is as global as any
other industry. Sex trafficking is about
marketing. It's globalized prostitution. The
industry advertises young, AIDS-free organs for
rent.

When a john buys a prostitute in the US, he
usually can't tell if she's from across town,
from across the country, or from another country.
A Korean-American survivor of prostitution grew
up in the US but was forced by pimps to fake poor
English because johns liked that. They liked the
vulnerability of foreign girls with nowhere to
run from curious johns who leered, "what's a
sweet thing like you doing in a job like this?"
Johns can't tell where she's from, they simply
ask for "something different." "Something
exotic." Whether she's been trafficked or not,
and whether prostitution is legal or not,
researchers have found that the poorer she is,
and the longer she's been in prostitution, the
more likely she is to experience violence.

Prostitution, described by Friedman in 1993 as
sexual slavery, has been redefined by the Left,
including the Greens, as sex work. In that one
word - work - the sexism and the physical and
psychological violence of prostitution are made
invisible. A battle is being waged by those who
promote prostitution as a good-enough job for
poor women against those of us who consider
prostitution an institution that is so
intrinsically unjust, discriminatory, and violent
that it can't be fixed.

Survivors have described prostitution as
'volunteer slavery' and as 'the choice that is
not a choice' while sex industry apologists on
the Left declare that prostitution is 'sex work,'
unpleasant labor but much like factory work. Do
women consent to prostitution? Do they say to
themselves, hmn, what job should I choose:
computer technician, lawyer, mechanic, restaurant
manager - no, I really want to be a prostitute?
Women who 'choose' prostitution are sexually
abused as kids at much higher rates than other
women. So they get defined as whores when they
are little. That's one way they end up
'choosing' prostitution. Other ways that they
'choose prostitution' include poor or no
education and no job that pays the rent.
Prostitution is a choice based on a lack of
survival options. Sex discrimination, poverty,
and racism are the forces that drive girls into
prostitution. A Left analysis doesn't often
address those structural issues in tandem where
prostitution and trafficking are concerned. All
they see is HIV.

According to sex industry advocates: if you
provide prostitutes with condoms and a union,
their problems will be solved. Of course,
everyone should have unlimited access to condoms
- female condoms as well as male condoms. That's
a harm reduction no-brainer. But the women we've
interviewed in 9 countries want more than condoms
and unions. They want to get out of
prostitution. What do women need in order to
escape prostitution? They need a living wage.
Specifically their list of needs includes
housing, job training, and medical care including
substance abuse treatment.

Violence against women is now established as a
primary risk factor for HIV. In 2005 Osotimehin
recognized that for Nigerian adolescent girls,
AIDS is fueled by sexual violence, by children
being married off to adult men, and by the social
unacceptability of using condoms. This social
climate is harmful to all women, but it makes the
vastly unequal prostitution transaction even more
dangerous. At the Centers for Disease Control,
Aral and Mann in 1998 recognized that most women
enter prostitution as a result of rape, poverty,
or abandonment. They urged public health
programs to address human rights issues in
conjunction with campaigns against HIV. Yet most
public health organizations have utterly failed
to take up the challenge of confronting the
racism, poverty, incest, rape, battering, sex
discrimination in employment, and chronic sexual
harassment that drive women into prostitution.

From the time that HIV was recognized as epidemic
in the 1980s, HIV education programs focused on
safer sex negotiation. These programs assume that
if the prostituted woman is more assertive, she
can persuade the john to use a condom. Health
organizations can be lethally complicit with
pimps and johns when they promote safe sex
negotiation but at the same time fail to see that
when she asks a john to use a condom she can get
killed. A group of Nicaraguan women in
prostitution urged that johns, not prostitutes,
be compelled to use condoms. You don't often
hear that recommendation from pimps and johns and
HIV educators.

One mafia don who controlled prostitution in
Mumbai told Friedman that AIDS was bad for
business. Johns want clean meat, after all. So
how has the industry turned that around and used
the HIV epidemic to its advantage? By funneling
millions of dollars into AIDS prevention programs
that not only distribute condoms but also promote
prostitution as a reasonable job for the world's
poor women.

Government and non-governmental funders have
knowingly or unknowingly supported efforts to
legalize or decriminalize the sex industry.
Deals are made with pimps. For example, the
California Prostitutes' Education Project
(Cal-PEP) received millions of dollars in state
and federal grants to work on AIDS prevention
among prostitutes. Its founder promoted
decriminalization of prostitution while Cal-PEP
was directed by her former pimp, a felon
convicted for interstate prostitution (can we
call it domestic trafficking?). Even when that
fact was made public, Cal-PEP continued to
receive federal HIV prevention funds.

The DMSC collective in India receives millions of
dollars a year for AIDS prevention from Bill
Gates. This group of mostly women pimps promote
legal prostitution while they control a
multibrothel prostitution/trafficking complex
that houses 60,000 women and girls in Kolkata.
Pimping other women is one way to get out of
prostitution. The DMSC and their Sonagachi
project are under the control of the same gangs
that Friedman wrote about in 1996.

Over the years, Debbie Nathan has hung out with
the sexual-violence-denying faction of the Left
who are apologists for pornographers, pedophiles,
incest perps who claim their kids have false
memories, and nice johns who only use prostitutes
indoors. Protesting too-stringent prosecution of
child pornographers and pedophiles along with her
nudist lawyer friend Lawrence Stanley (publisher
of Uncommon Desires, "the voice of the
politically conscious girl-love underground" who
in 2002 was arrested and charged with violating
Brazil's child exploitation laws), Nathan rails
against those of us who state unequivocally that
children are profoundly damaged by sexual
relations with adults. Nathan questions - no,
not the existence, just the scientific prevalence
- of sexual violence against women and children
in this man's world.

Pedophilia and ritual abuse (highly organized
groups of pedophiles who make a religion out of
sexually torturing children yes they really
exist) are described by Nathan as a "sex abuse
panic." Public outcry against adults having sex
with kids and taking pictures of that is penned
by Nathan as "kiddy porn panic." Now she writes
about a "sex-slave panic." She uses our own
discomfort against us. If we're uncomfortable at
witnessing sexual violence, at the renting or
buying of people for sex, our discomfort is
sneered at, labeled "panic." It's fiendishly
effective strategy that colludes with peoples'
stubborn refusal to know about the cruelty of
sexual violence. Most people are relieved to
avoid the painful awareness of one more instance
of suffering in this world. Violence against
women and children is left in place, hidden in
plain sight.

Claiming that Lourdes Portillo's accounts of the
murders of hundreds of women on the Juarez-El
Paso border are exaggerated, Debbie Nathan
worried that some people may think her analysis
sounds "like the nasty arithmetic of Holocaust
deniers." She has a point there. Nathan's modus
operandi is to question the accuracy of numbers,
focusing on the absolutely proven body count
rather than - for example - the existence of the
gas chambers. She questions the accuracy of
numbers as a way of denying the roots of the
problem. She does this in Aug 29 2005 Nation by
noting that accounts of the actual numbers of US
trafficking victims vary from study to study.
Trafficking victims are under extreme duress, and
they hide because they're terrified of pimps,
johns, families, police, and governments all of
whom might once again betray them. Yes there is
difficulty in accurately counting them. It's
great that there are scholars who revise
inaccurate or incomplete numbers whenever they
can.

Nathan even suggests that some women consent to
being trafficked: "I've never met a Thai woman
smuggled in for sex work who didn't know that's
what she'd be coming here to do." That's
pimp-speak. As in "hey girl this is a
dog-eat-dog world and you got gold between your
legs. You already been fucked so why not get
paid for it?" Is Nathan saying that she knows
what's going to happen to her so that means she
deserves what she gets? Is Nathan suggesting that
we stand by and watch as she gives up her human
rights?

It's a cold, mean world for some girls but Nathan
isn't objecting. It's not sex trafficking, it's
'migration for sex work.' Nathan dismisses the
overwhelming damage that comes from sucking 10
strangers' dicks a day, from getting raped
weekly, and from getting the shit beaten out of
you if you don't do whatever pimps or johns want.
Nathan considers "imprisonment in a sweatshop"
just as severe as trafficking for prostitution.
Sweatshops are vicious but they don't involve
invasion of all your body's orifices on a daily
basis for years into the future - or having to
smile and say you like it when some foul-smelling
man your grandfather's age comes on your face.
Ironically, in her dogmatic refusal to notice
sexual abuse anywhere, Nathan also fails to point
out the fact that women and girls imprisoned in
gender-stratified sweatshops are usually sexually
exploited as well as having their labor exploited.

Nathan declares that feminists are tainted with
guilt by association. Evangelicals and
feminists. Feminists and evangelicals. If any
cause is endorsed by the Right - if we agree with
them on anything - then we are "in bed with
them." Object to child pornography? Oops so
does the Christian Right, gotcha. Favor strong
laws against prostitution and trafficking? Oops,
so does George Bush, gotcha. This adolescent
logic trumps carefully articulated politics based
on years of evidence-gathering and analysis.

Prostitution, trafficking, and pornography are
booming internet businesses. Pornographers are
indistinguishable from pimps. Maybe the one is
taking a picture of prostitution, the other is
creating a fantasy, or is it the other way around
- pornography is a real picture but prostitution
is a fantasy. Or is pornography actually
prostitution with a camera? Or is it as one john
explained, "I know porn stars. They enjoy sex on
film more than other prostitutes." Gosh it's
confusing. Pornographers, johns and pimps are
given aid and comfort by the likes of Nathan.

Pornographers don't like laws against
prostitution and they don't like policies that
require antitrafficking organizations to sign
statements that prostitution should not be a job
option for someone who's been trafficked. In
mid-August 2005, pornographer Phil Harvey sued
the United States for its antiprostitution
policy. Pornographers and pimps are in bed
together, tucked in by First Amendment nannies.

The TVPA (Trafficking Victims Protection Act,
2000) is not a sufficiently powerful law to
adequately protect women victimized by sex
traffickers. And law enforcement officers
probably do exploit women's awareness about
illegal immigration, as Nathan suggests. But what
we need is a law that protects victims which at
the same time effectively targets predators, both
domestic and international. Pimps and sex
traffickers are not the only sex predators:
johns are predators too.

Wherever prostitution thrives, sex trafficking
does too. Think about it: if you were a pimp,
where would you try to sell your 'product?'
Would you go to a country like Sweden where
there's a law against buying or selling people
for sex? Or would you instead pimp and traffic
women to countries that lay out a legal welcome
mat: the Netherlands, Germany, Australia and
wherever prostitution is legally tolerated.
Sweden has a genuinely progressive prostitution
law in which buyers and sellers of women are
criminalized but women in prostitution themselves
are not criminalized, since the law recognizes
them as victims with much less power than perps.

Does a pimp's, trafficker's or a john's money
disappear the sexual harassment, rape, and
battering in prostitution? Swedish Minister of
Gender Equality Margareta Winberg asked: "Shall
we accept the fact that certain women and
children, primarily girls, often those who are
most economically and ethnically marginalized,
are treated as a lower class, whose purpose is to
serve men sexually?" The answer is no.


© Melissa Farley August 30, 2005. All Rights Reserved.
OK to distribute if the author is credited and contact information is included:
Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research & Education, San Francisco California
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com
Email <mfarley [at] prostitutionresearch.com> Phone 415-922-4555