E51:Revolting Prostitutes p8

Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 67-77 of Revolting Prostitutes, a groundbreaking work that challenges societal views on sex work. Delve into the critical themes of agency, labor, and the intersections of identity and exploitation. In this intimate reading, Porcelain brings her unique perspective to the text, offering insights and reflections on the issues that shape the lives of sex workers worldwide. Tune in for a thought-provoking and unapologetic exploration of a world often misunderstood. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Behind the Paddle Podcast with me, Porcelain Victoria. This is my second time recording this episode because I've forgotten to press play. So today's episode we are continuing on with Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. Every Thursday, I read a about 10 minutes of this book. 10 minutes of this book? Wow. Ten pages of this book. And yeah, we are currently on page 67. And if anybody is watching on Dark Fans or Many Vids, if they see me shuffling round or in a weird position, it's because I've just had my back tattooed. If anybody doesn't know, my whole back basically is sort of covered now in lovely black and white tattoos. And it is it hurts right now. So yeah, let's carry on. And I'm very much going to enjoy rereading all of this. Hopefully that means I don't need um Google Translate to help my dyslexic ass out, but we shall see. People living in places like England and Canada who can access free abortion services do not tend to pay people to perform dangerous back alley procedures. Why would they? In the same way people who can cross borders legally do not pay someone to smuggle them across. Like the people who perform illegal abortions, smugglers are not inexplicable villains. Instead, the criminalization of undocumented migration has directly created the market for people smuggling. Many people engaging in undocumented migration agree to repay the debt that they take on to pay a smuggler through work in their destination country. This is common sense. People who are driven to migrate to escape poverty or war cannot normally produce large sums of money up front. Again, criminalization directly creates conditions where harm can flourish. As a smuggler is by definition acting outside the law, and the migration is already breaking laws in crossing the border, there is no legal recourse when the smuggler breaks the agreement or changes the terms. Often this happens midway through the journey or upon arrival in the destination country. Points in the process where the person has little way of backing out, and has to accept these new conditions however unfair. Even in the best case scenario when an undocumented person finds work that is completely independent from the smuggling networks they used to cross the border, their lack of legal immigration status means they are intensely vulnerable to exploitation or other forms of abuse at the hands of their employer. They have little to no recourse to employment law, making themselves visible to state authorities as part of attempting to access justice or redress for workplace abuse will simply lead to their deportation. The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants PICUM, an NGO network which defends undocumented people in Europe rights As undocumented migrants are limited to the informal sector, they often work without an employment contract, meaning they have significant difficulties to prove labour relations in a court of law. Even when a contract has been signed, it is usually considered invalid due to the irregular status of the worker and thus unenforceable. Further, if an undocumented worker reports violence of or criminal labour exploitation to the police, they face arrest and deportation rather than protection and justice. Focus on labour exploitation Flex An NGO that tackles the exploitation of migrant workers in Europe notes that fear of immigration authorities is a major barrier to reporting for undocumented workers. The threat of reporting to police or immigration authorities is routinely used by unscrupulous employers to hold workers in abusive situations. Flex cites an example of two undocumented men who were forced to work without pay in a laundromat. Their employer claimed that their pay was going towards their residence permits. However, the employer never arranged the promised residence permit and instead threatened the men with reporting them to the police if they complained. The two men were too afraid to disclose their situation to the labor inspectors. Carolina Gottardo of the Latin American Women's Rights Service points out that when women are undocumented and employees know about it, they are very easy prey for very serious manners of labour exploitation. To talk about this is not to digress from sex trafficking. It is to understand the broader state led systems which produce exploitation for undocumented people. Let's look at another example of this dynamic, a situation where an employer controls a migrant worker's visa. Abdul Azad took a debt to took on debt to come to the UK on the promise of a well paid job in a restaurant. Upon arrival he discovered he would be working for no pay in conditions of absolute squalor in an isolated hotel in the remote countryside. He had not entered the country illegally, but his visa was dependent upon his employer, and Azad had feared he and the other men trapped at the hotel would be deported with their debts unpaid if they contacted the police. His employer, he says, would show us copies of our visas show us copies of our visa on his computer and say here is your name, I will cancel your sponsorship anytime. This is my power. Abdul was not wrong to fear this. When his case came to the attention of the police, his employer was jailed. But Abdul was deported. Both the US and UK typically tied domestic workers' visas to specific employers visas to a specific employer. As a result, a staggering 80% of migrant domestic workers entering the US find that they have been deceived about their contract, and 78% have had employers threaten them with deportation if they complained. In the UK, these tide visas were only introduced by Prime Minister Theresa May, who was Home Secretary at the time. In 2012, so it is possible to see their effect very clearly. Migrant domestic workers who entered the UK after 2012 on a tied visa are twice as likely to be physically abused by their employers as those who arrived on a visa that gave them the right to change employers. Compared to migrant domestic workers on the previous, more flexible form of visa, those untied visas are substantially more likely to be underpaid, assaulted, and overworked, to be expected to sleep on the floor, and to have their passports confiscated by their employers. Punitive immigration law produces harm. However, much mainstream trafficking discourse characterizes the abuse of migrants and people selling sex as the work of individual bad actors, external to and independent of state actions and political choices. Sometimes this discourse works not only to obscure the role of the state, but to absolve it. One feminist commentator, for example, writes of the sex trait that criminalization doesn't rape and beat women, men do. From this we might conclude that changing the law is pointless because what makes women vulnerable is simply men. This may feel true for women who do not have to contend with immigration law, police or the constant fear of deportation, but we can see from the results of Tide Visas that the legal context, including migration law, is heavily implicated in producing vulnerability and harm. For undocumented migrant workers looking to challenge bad workplace conditions, penalties do not stop at deportation. Instead, these workers face criminalization if they are discovered. In the UK, someone convicted of illegal working can face up to fifty one weeks in prison, an unlimited fine, and the prospect of their earnings being confiscated as the quote proceeds of crime. This increases undocumented people's justified fear of state authorities and makes them even less able to report labour abuses. Such laws therefore heighten their vulnerability and directly push them into exploitative working environments, thereby creating a supply of highly vulnerable ripe for abuse workers. Increasingly, border enforcement is infiltrating new areas of civic life. Landlords are now expected to check tenants' immigration status before renting to them. Proposals have been floated to freeze or close the bank accounts of undocumented people. And a documentation check was introduced in England when accessing both healthcare and education as part of an exploitative or explicit hostile environment policy, although both have been challenged by migrant rights organizers including in court. The UK devotes far more resources to policing migration than it does to preventing the exploitation of workers. Researcher Bridget Anderson notes that the national minimum wage had ninety three compliance officers in two thousand nine and the gangmasters licensing authority, which works to protect vulnerable and exploited workers had twenty five inspectors. Inspectors and the proposed number of UK border agency staff for local immigration teams is seven thousand five hundred. This is the context in which commercial sex freely occurs. Undocumented or insecurely documented people are enmeshed within a punitive, state enforced infrastructure of deportability, deposability and precarity. Any work they do whether it is at a restaurant, construction site, cannabis farm, nail bar or brothel, carries a risk of being detained, jailed or deported. In any work they do, they will be unable to assert labour rights. Even renting a home or accessing health care can be difficult. All this makes undocumented people more dependent on those who can help them, such as the people they paid to help them cross the border, or an unscrupulous employer. It should therefore be no surprise that some undocumented migrants are pushed into sex work by those they rely on, or that some center into it even if the working conditions are exploitative or abusive. The experiences of a Thai woman working in the UK illustrate some of these complexities. She speaks of her high debt to get into the country and the bad working conditions and the low pay she encountered in restaurant work, but also the higher pay she gets from sex work now that she has no debt to repay. I come to work in England because there is no money in Thailand to come here, so I made a contract with people, I had to give them back twenty two thousand pounds, I used to work and live in the same flat, a brothel, twenty four hours a day with three other Thai girls. We used to give her, the smuggler, all the money except two hundred pounds to send to our families, but she did not take care of us. We only had one egg per day to eat, and she put washing up liquid in the shampoo bottles. I paid up in eight months and was set free. I work here in a brothel and in a restaurant now. The restaurant is better because it's got good reputation, whereas here it's good money but bad reputation. Now I'm okay, but I am only scared that immigration could come here and make me go back to Thailand. A Brazilian woman explains to the same researchers that if she had legal immigration status, she would do a different job than sex work. I decided to come to the UK because a girl I was working with in Spain took me here. She was Brazilian as well. She had told me that the UK was better for work and I needed money. If I was legal I would look for another job. Another migrant worker who had also previously worked in Spain notes that even decriminalizing sex work could not make undocumented workers safe from the state. I guess the only way would be to make it legal to work in brothels, but then that would not be enough because I could not be working there as I have no papers. The constraints of immigration law have come up again and again. One woman tells researchers it is so difficult for Thai people to get a visa for the UK. Why? If you want to come here to work you need to use these systems and people and it is very dangerous, end quote. Another adds It is very bad. The girls want to go abroad and have a better life, but these people make money out of them. And on the other hand it's the only way to come. The home office should give more visas. It's difficult here if you are illegal. Nick Mai, who conducted the research writes there is a direct correlation between the degree of difficulty in obtaining and maintaining documentation and the vulnerability of interviewees to exploitation, whether they work in the sex or in other industries. Immigration status is the most important single factor engendering migrant workers vulnerability to exploitation in the UK's sex industry. Emphasis ours. However, the way trafficking is discussed allows exploitation to be presented As unrelated to this system. For example, in 2018, news agencies reported that German police had quote smashed an organization that was trafficking Thai women into German brothels. In response, one anti prostitution feminist in the UK noted, this is the problem with legalizing prostitution. Demand outstrips willing supply, and so you get trafficking. The Time Media reported that the woman in question had been intending to migrate and had been aware that they were going to be selling sex upon arrival. They had paid to be smuggled into Germany and had been deceived as to their remuneration and the conditions in which they would be working. In the aftermath of the raid, the German authorities were weighing up the possibility of prosecuting these exploited undocumented people for working without the correct visa. To locate the problem in the existence of prostitution as the UK feminist commentator seems to renders invisible the material things that made them vulnerable to harm. Europe's broader regime meant they had to pay exploitative people huge sums of money in order to be smuggled in, and that once in, they had zero access to labour rights as their discovery by the state risked them being prosecuted. These two factors combine to produce a situation wherein they could be horribly exploited by their employers. None of this is to downplay what happened to them. Instead it is to highlight the inadequacy of carceral anti trafficking response to their situation. Such an approach actively obscures the role of the border in producing the harms they suffered and compounds these harms by rendering it prosaic that they face deportation and potential prosecution. Indeed it is striking that although the spectra of commercial sex attracted attention to this case among the UK commentariat, the idea that this was an anti trafficking raid and therefore simply a good thing foreclosed any interest in what happened to these people after their discovery by the state. Their potential prosecution and inevitable deportation because unremarkable and unremarked upon become unremarkable and unremarked upon. As Nadita Sharma writes, anti trafficking policies do a great disservice to migrating people, especially the most vulnerable. By diverting our attention away from the practices of nation states, they channel our energies to support a law and order agenda of getting tough with traffickers. In this way, anti-trafficking measures are ideological. They render the plethora of immigration and border controls as unproblematic and place them outside of the bounds of politics. Instead of locating exploitation within the state systems, push migrants into debt and force them to work in the grey economy with no workplace protections. Anti trafficking ideology locates exploitation in the figure of the villain. In Houston, Texas, one anti trafficking organization set up a museum of modern day slavery. In it they displayed a shackle dating from chattel slavery in North America next to a high heeled shoe. The shoe was titled a modern day shackle and the caption reads This shoe was found after a cantina known as Las Palmas was raided by law enforcement. Women are forced to wear clothing like this shoe to attract business. This type of clothing marks them as business property and is considered a modern day shackle. This shoe is an ordinary high heeled shoe of the sort that you can buy on any high street. For anybody to claim that it is considered a modern day shackle is an absurdity is an absurdly overheated fantasy. Comparing it to an actual shackle trivializes the real history of chattel slavery, a history which, as racial justice organizer Robin Maynard, remains a living breathing horror for anybody with black skin in Americas with black skin in their Americas. This fantasy also obscures something real, which is that a woman kicked these shoes off in order to run from the corps. As to captain notes, these shoes were found after Acantina was raided by law enforcement. In choosing to see an ordinary shoe as a shackle rather than identifying the key problem as criminalization, and the police, anti trafficking activists misdirect attention away from the structures of the state and onto a fictional shackle wielding monster. The next little chapter is White Guilt and the New Slave Trade. Trafficking anxieties have always been deeply tied to white nationalism. White women's bodies, threatened by prostitution, come to stand in for the body politic of the nation. Threatened by immigration, this is clearly illegible in late nineteenth century concerns over white slavery, a panic that overtook Britain and the US in which campaigners fought that young white women were being lured into forced prostitution by black and Jewish men. This panic was driven by the rapid growth of cities, women's increasing migration to cities as workers outside the home, and fears around women's economic independence, which combines with white supremacist fears over race mixing to create the conditions for a racist panic. Academic Joe Dezember writes that the image of the white slave, quote, in her ruined innocence represented the real and imagined loss of American rural innocence. Writing in 1909, the social worker and activist Jane Adams declared that never before in civilization have such numbers of girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs. Historians note that journalists' breathless reportage of white slavery provided virtually pornographic entertainment to the reading audience. It was amid this obviously racist freakout over swampy men luring white innocents to their ruin that one of the first recognizably modern US anti trafficking laws, the nineteen oh five Man Act passed. The bill which was ostensibly against forced prostitution criminalized black men in romance relationships with white women. In the UK, white slavery legislation passed between eighteen eighty five and nineteen twelve created provisions to monitor and restrict the migration of women. Little surprise then given these origins that anti traffic policies are primarily either anti migration policies or anti prostitution policies, neither helps undocumented people and both harm migrant sex workers who are doubtedly in the crosshairs and disproportionately criminalized and deported. Aburjeep Doskupta of Action Aid Asia remarks that anti trafficking measures were being used internally to prevent the migration of people, especially women who are driven by poverty and globalization to move country. Governments claim that millions of women are being affected by being trafficked by a billion dollar sex industry, but the UNHCR, United Nations High Commission on Refugees and others have pointed out that because of tightening immigration controls, paying an agent is often the only way to migrate. Although racist panic about migration is never far from the surface of politics. In countries that perpetrated and continue to benefit from conialization, the twenty five years have seen an uptick in these anxieties. Campaigners often deliberately heighten this racism. For example, dictations of hordes at the border featured prominently in the twenty sixteen Brexit referendum on Britain leaving the European Union. In twenty seventeen a conservative election strategist tweeted I was in the two thousand five Tory campaign. We worked assiduously to ramp up anti-immigration feeling, and from then Labour Party leader Gordon Brown on Nobody challenged lies that immigrants took jobs were here on benefits. That same year, Sasha championed the Labour Party's then Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities wrote Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There, I said it. Does that make me a racist or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is? Indeed, it is possible to trace these growing xenophobic and racist anxieties not just in phrases, tabloid headlines, and election strategies, but in concrete and barved wire. As geographicer Reese Jones writes as late as nineteen ninety, only fifteen countries had walls or fences on their borders at the beginning of twenty sixteen almost seventy did. The history of the translantic slave trade and chattel slavery looms large in contemporary trafficking conversations, often in the form of claims subtle or not, that modern trafficking is worse than chattel slavery. Politicians and police officers meet to tell each other that there are more slaves now than at any previous point in human history. A UK former government minister insists that we are facing a new slave trade, whose victims of torture terrified Eastern European girls rather than Africans. Matteo Renzi, then Prime Minister of Italy wrote in twenty fifteen that human traffickers are the slave traders of the twenty first century. The Vatican claimed that quote modern slavery, specifically prostitution, is quote worse than the slavery of those who were taken from Africa. A senior British police officer remarked that the cotton plantations and sugar plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century wouldn't be as bad as what some victims today go through. A 2012 anti-trafficking documentary that was screened for politicians and policy makers around the world, including in Washington, London, Edinburgh, and at the UN buildings in New York, proclaims In eighteen oh nine the cost of a slave was thirty thousand dollars. In two thousand nine, the cost of a slave is ninety dollars. White people co-opting the history of chattel slavery as rhetoric is grim, not least because the term slavery means a specific legal institution created, enforced and protected by the state, which is nowhere near synonymous with contemporary ideas of trafficking. Indeed, the direct modern descendant of Chateau slavery in the US is not prostitution, but the prison system. Slavery was not abolished but explicitly retained in the US Constitution as punishment for crime in the thirteenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction. The thirteenth Amendment isn't just vestigial hangover. In twenty sixteen the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee released a statement condemning inmates' treatment in the prison work system. Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes, and investigating our bodies as though we are animals. There are more black men in the US prison system now than were enslaved in eighteen fifty, seeking to end slavery through increased policing and incarceration is a bitterly ironic proposition. White people in Britain and North America have been very successful at ducking any real reckoning with the legacies of the slave trade. Historian Nick Draper writes We privilege abolition. If you say to somebody tell me about Britain and slavery, the instinctive response of most people is will be force and abolition. Those two hundred years of slavery beforehand have been elided. We just haven't wanted to think about it. By rhetorically interwining modern trafficking with chattel slavery, governments and campaigners have been able to hide prunitive policies targeting irregular migration behind seemingly uncomplicated righteous outrage. Right, this is where we are going to leave the book for today. This is page 77. And wow, what a what what a little read, huh? I absolutely I I love how I really do agree with this book. And it is beautiful to read that other people do agree with how I see certain systems and sex work and immigration because at the end of the day, um people want a better life. And if they think coming to I don't even want to say my country, because that sounds gross. Coming to the destination that I'm at, then so be it. Like I say it to people all the time. It should be seen as a compliment when somebody wants to live where you live. Yeah, like just be nice. There's so much going on in the world right now. And I know I'm preaching. But we just need to be nicer to each other in so many different ways. And I absolutely agree with the prison system. It makes no sense at all. Um I personally know what the prison system is like. Not that I've been in prison. I there is um for family members and such. And it is disgusting the conditions they're in. Like I've had um somebody who I know go there to prison and there's been rats and cockroaches and the food's disgusting. And it was on like it was honestly really sad um Christmas Day where they barely it was slop and like prison's meant to be rehabilitation. Why aren't we giving that? Why are we just humiliating and degrading people for what they've done depending on what they've done? That's very debatable, very debatable depending on what people have done. Um when it comes down to the poverty choices people make and the choices which they potentially didn't they they they could like the choices that people didn't have a choice in doing it was either like steal some food or starve or my baby needs formula or they're gonna die. Like what like make it make sense and that goes for a lot of um reasons why people are in prison apart from certain reasons which I think again other people agree with. Um but sticking with the book is really refreshing to see that people do want the world to be just so peaceful and for us to live in unity and to be free. I I can only dream about that world, I really can, and it's really sad. But yeah, this has been Behind the Battle Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. Please give a like and a follow. Um what else is that? If you want to see the spicy versions or if you just want to see me talking, then you can go on DarkFans or Many Vids and see the videos there. Um yeah, please leave a review. If you have any topics you would like to hear, please give a listen. Our previous topic was a lovely man called John Brown, who in the 1800s um helped with the decrease in slavery, I want to say. And it's really cool, it's a really cool topic. I really enjoyed it. But yeah, hopefully everybody has a lovely week and I hope you enjoyed this episode. Bye!