E59:Revolting Prostitutes p12

Join Porcelain Victoria in this episode of Behind the Paddle Podcast as she reads and discusses pages 112-121 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 back to Behind the Paddle Podcast with Porcelain Victoria. We are gonna carry on with our Thursday reading Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. Now this is page 112. Looking the other way. Despite all this, the solidarity shown to sex workers fighting the criminalization of sex work in Britain, from ASBOs, fines, and jail to brothel raids, is at best uneasy. One feminist commentator, for instance, interjected into a debate about sex work policy to claim decriminalised sex work is the status quo in the UK. If that harms sex workers, then how will extending it be better? Sex workers are used to having to argue that criminalization is bad. It is a new and regrettable ideological shift to have to explain that criminalization exists. When the National Police Chiefs Council issued new guidance suggesting that brothel raids and enforcement against street-based sex workers be halted, anti-prostitution feminists were among those who objected. This type of feminist tends to have trouble with the terminology of the debate, regularly seeming to confuse very different legal models, calling the Swedish model decriminalization, treating decriminalization and legalization as interchangeable, and during a tense debate at the UK Amnesty Annual General Meeting, claiming the United States, which has full criminalization, is an example of the Swedish model. Whether they spring from intention or accident, these politics leave criminalized women out in the cold. The feminist movement cannot fight what its activists cannot name. Indeed, many anti-prostitution feminists actively support some form of criminalization. Much of the mainstream feminist movement gave support to the 2014 report from a group of MPs recommending the continued use of ASBOS against women who sell sex, as well as a law proposed by Scottish Labour politician wrote a grant that sought to retain the criminalisation of soliciting. Scottish politician Trish Godman, who proposed to criminalise both the purchase and the sale of sex, is fettered at feminist conferences. Anti-prostitution feminists are so focused on criminalising clients that when the legislative proposal contains this measure, they support it. Seemingly without checking the detail of what the proposal includes for sex workers, the arrests of sex workers as a result of Britain's broad brothel keeping laws may represent collateral damage to some feminists that on some silent level they are genuinely sad to see, I'll bet while believing it necessary for the greater good. For others who feel anger towards sex workers, despite their claims of sympathy, such arrests might scratch the itch to see punitive state action. As one such woman memorably told a sex worker, quote, Frankly, I've got to the point, if it takes a few lives like yours to save one eleven-year-old, I'll deal. They seem unconcerned about their arrest, prosecution, theft of money, and deportation that sex working women may be subject to as a result of their quote guidance. In Glasgow, a feminist aligned support service claims that arrest can be helpful to women in prostitution. Its manager tells a journalist, quote, We don't wait until prostitutes say they want to exit. We share all our info with the police. We try everything to engage with them. That could be a criminal charge, which puts them in a system where they have support. After a 2016 brothel raid in Leeds, an officer told reporters that the purpose of the crackdown was to quote protect the vulnerable, they don't necessarily see they're being taken advantage of, and it's part of our job to make them aware. When the sex workers told the raiding officers that they were in fact migrant workers in possession of their passports and house keys, with freedom to come and go as they pleased, they were evicted, and issued with deportation orders. Despite the obvious injustice of these raids, only sex workers protested. Mainstream feminists and the anti-trafficking movement remained resoundingly silent, as an activist with UK collective sex worker advocacy and resistance movement Swarm commented to us, These raids are violent and abusive. As usual, the support of anti-prostitution feminists is nowhere to be found when migrant sex workers are arrested, evicted, or deported. In the aftermath of their arrests in Swindon, sex workers organized to stop the deportations of the Romanian women. Most anti-prostitution feminists made no comment, but one speculated that maybe the Romanian women were pimps after all. The idea that a workplace might have free managers and no workers, and moreover, that the managers would all be migrant women in their twenties advertising their own sexual services online is patently absurd. Its absurdity speaks as gender studies academic Alison Phipps has noted to just quote how far people will go to avoid extending solidarity to those they disapprove of. Almost everybody with any flavour of feminist politics proclaims not to want those who sell sex to be arrested. However, that sex workers patently are arrested as a result of brothel keeping laws is, for most anti-prostitution feminists, unmentionable because the legal model they are pushing for retains and even strengthens these exact laws. The fundamental awkwardness of this truth, one that ultimately reveals dedication to something other than sex working women's welfare creates a frustrating culture of unseeing and unknowing among the feminist left. They stick their fingers into their ears while sex workers try, with increasing frustration, to make the impact of criminalization clear to them. The situation for sex workers in Scotland, England and Wales is bad and getting worse. Harsh drug laws intensifying poverty and ever grimmer politics. Policies targeting migrants all act in concert with multi-layered and complex forms of criminalization targeting commercial sex. Carceral feminism offers sex working women maragra solidarity. We turn next to the situation for sex workers elsewhere in the world to explore in other contexts how criminal law or its absence shapes the experiences of people who sell sex This is chapter five Ha certain I am not knowing it's chapter five. It says five. Let's let's go with that. Prison nation, the United States, South Africa, and Kenya. Full criminalization a legal model where the sex worker, the client and third parties, such as managers, drivers or landlords, are all criminalized. Also seen in Uganda, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and China. This is a quote from Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer. I picked prostitutes as my victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught. Ideological background You'd think almost everybody would agree that full criminalization where the prostitute, client, and anybody else associated with the transaction can all be arrested is a brutal, clumsy, unjust system. It should be obvious that the act of selling sex is a non-violent survival strategy. Yet, if the sex worker is classed as criminal, their relationship with police becomes automatically adversarial. Selling sex becomes more dangerous. Lives are destroyed by even the shortest jail sentences, and those saddled with criminal records are, paradoxically, trapped in the long-term prostitution when employers won't touch them. New Yorker Sarah Marchando was arrested for prostitution-related offences seven times in two years. I can't get stable if every time I turned around I was in jail again. While the prostitution debate might seem to play out among progressives, criminalizing the prostitute is rooted in disgust and hatred, entangled with misogyny, racism, and fear of the visibility, and fear of the visibly queer or diseased body. These coalesce into the belief that the prostitute is a fret who must be warded off through punishment. It is these reactionary politics doing most of their ideological work that sustains full criminalization. Nonetheless, occasionally someone attempts to put a progressive gloss on such a system. One local paper reports that, quote, Sergeant Coleman of the Prince George's County Vice Squad says his goal is to help, not hurt, the women he arrests. An Arizona police officer speaks of a new era of sympathetic, quote, victim-centered policing, but adds that, quote, some arrests are still required to protect victims from abusive pimps, and an arrest sometimes motivates a victim to re-examine her life. Many anti-prostitution writers barely touch on the topic of full criminalization, clearly considering the case to be closed. Feminist campaigner Julia Bindel opens her recent book, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth by detailing the two legal models, the Nordic model as one versus either legalization or decriminalization as the other. There is no reference to the legal regime that arrests women like Sarah Morchando. This might suggest that the real battle is elsewhere, or perhaps that it goes without saying, full criminalization, however, persists in dominating low globe, Russia, South Africa, the United States, aside from a few Nevada counties, China and Kenya, among others, are fully criminalized. All fully criminalized prostitution. All the harms that flow from other, more subtle forms of criminalization start here. These are harms which do not go without saying, for Machando and for the tens of thousands of sex workers and people profiled as sex workers, arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, deported, or fined in the US every year, it's a conversation that urgently needs to be had. If nobody says anything, it is not going to be dealt with, she says. Alicia Walker and Gigi Thomas are two sex-working women who, in separate instances, have had to defend their own lives, and in Walker's case also the life of a friend, against a violent male aggressor. Each has been brutally punished for desperate, panicked acts of self-defense, for the preservation of their own lives. In a nation where, quote, stand your ground, laws protect the rights of some to use lethal force against perceived threats to their safety. There is a bitterly unfair double standard for such women. It is no coincidence that both are marginalized because of race and gender. Alicia is a black cis woman and Gigi is a black trans woman. The criminalization of prostitution robbed them of their right to safety. And the treatment of black and trans women in the US criminal justice system, a system never built to deliver justice for women like Gigi and Alicia, robbed them of their right to self-defense and their right to freedom. Admid the increasingly visible resurgence of fascism, it is easy for some liberals to position themselves as quote people simply by being to the left of the most ghoulish and uncouth iterations of hard right politics, structural problems become personalized and pathologicalized in figures like Donald Trump. But nothing short of a radical transformation of criminal justice will bring safety to women like Alicia and Gigi. This cannot be left to liberals who, in misdiagnosing the problem, risks strengthening the carceral state. The Obama administration, for example, responded to the outcry over black deaths at the hands of the police by channeling millions of dollars into police departments. Punitive state control snaps shut and unsafety, can we begin to unpick them? Prison Nation. Mainstream feminism too often puts police violence and quote male violence against women into different conceptual categories if indeed it considers police violence to be a topic of feminist concern at all. This is especially the case for the violence that is normalized as part of policing, arrests, most obviously, but also violations such as intimate searches and harassment such as stop and frisk. The result is that police violence gets left out of the mainstream feminist anti-violence work. However, when we think of police violence not only as state violence, but also often as male violence against women, the criminalization of prostitution comes into focus in a new way as a key driver of male violence against women. The infrastructure of criminalization saturates our political consciousness. It is the bobby on the beat, the jail on the monopoly board, the crime drama TV show, with its inevitable murdered prostitute, the car chase footage on the news. In this saturation, such images are rendered mundane, sidelining questions of the legitimacy or purpose of these modes of control. As Angela Davis writes, the prison is one of the most important features of our image environment, yet it functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from with prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs. It relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and increasingly global capitalism. Theorist Beth Ritchie uses the term prison nation to mean a quote broad notion of using the arm of the law to control people, especially disadvantaged people, and people from disadvantaged. disadvantaged communities. Her term encompasses not only the physical infrastructure of prisons and jails, but also surveillance, policing, detention, probation, harsh restrictions on children guardianship, and other strategies of isolation and disposal. Perhaps the key trick of the prison nation is quote, now you see it, now you don't. Prison vanishes people. Criminalization renders those same people hypervisible. The deeply radicalized anti-black figure of the pimp looms large as the perpetrator of quote slavery. While the prison system itself, one of the key material legacies of chattel slavery in the Americas, is filled with ever more black inmates. Through the intensifying militarization of police departments, there is a direct line between the foreign wars at the frontiers of the contemporary American Empire and the hypercarceral state at home. As the New Yorker reports since the 1990s local governments have received approximately $34 billion in grants from the Department of Homeland Security to buy their own military equipment that brings the total spent by American police departments on military equipment to $39 billion, more than the entire defense budget of Germany. The same trend is visible even in the histories of policing. Early 20th century American policing on the US Army's experience imposing brutal colonial rule in the Philippines, just as UK policing explicitly drew on tactics developed by the British Army in subduing colonialized populations. Communities feel the police are an occupying army. The police feel themselves to be an occupying army and the police respond to the people they encounter with the hostility that engenders some of the most powerful photography emerging from the ongoing fight for Black Lives Matter in the US speaks to the visual dimension of this. An ironic photograph taken in Baton Rouge, Louisiana shows Alicia Evans, a young black woman in a summer dress, calmly facing down two oncoming police officers in full body armor. Meanwhile, the overlapping military and prison industrial complexes drain hundreds of billions of dollars from the American public purse, outfitting the police who rushed Leisha in futuristic protective armour alongside the cuts to social security, healthcare and education and catastrophic divestment from black communities, the crime of sex work. Prostitution arrests are racist they have always been racist. In 1866 San Francisco police arrested 137 women virtually all Chinese. The police boasted that they had quote expelled 300 Chinese women. In the 1970s the American Civil Liberties Union found that black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution related offences than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past. Between 2012 and 2015 85% of people charged with loitering for the purpose of prostitution in New York were black or Latin ex groups that only make up 54% of the city's population. Increases in prostitution enforcement mean increases in the arrests of women of colour. Between 2012 and 2016 the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement targeting massage parlors. As journalist Melissa Gia Grant details, during this period the arrests of Asian people in New York charged either with unlicensed massage or prostitution went up by 2700%. Arrests on the street target black and Latina women who may not even be selling sex simply for wearing quote tight jeans or a crop top. The New York police department do not arrest white women in affluent areas of the city for wearing jeans. Racial disparities play out too in terms of who is charged with what. As Andrea Ritchie writes black women are also far more likely than their white counterparts to be charged with a more serious prostitution offence. A relatively high proportion of people incarcerated in the United States for human trafficking offences are black women in their twenties who, at the time of their arrest were selling sex. Such women are prosecuted as sex traffickers simply for sharing a workspace with someone else who is selling sex and who turns out to be 17 rather than 18 Kate Margolesco asks the purpose of our federal human trafficking criminal law to prosecute 20 to 24 year old women of colour involved in the commercial sex industry. Richie details the case of Gloria Lockett a black woman who went to co-lead the sex workers' rights organization Coyote and who was on one occasion arrested for quote felony pimping for holding another woman's money for her. Racism meant Lockett was charged with felony pimp while police charged the white woman with simple misdemeanor prostitution. Through the prison of a fully criminalized legal model the idea that a sex worker should be punished for selling sex is often underscored by a philosophy of deterrence a short shark shop to bring them in line with quote decent values. As one New Yorker politician put it sometimes you have to compel people to help themselves they might need the incentive of quote listen you know you've got to stop this end quote but at the level of material realities sir criminalization is not just a helping hand or a slap on the wrist. Often charges like quote breach of parole continuing to sell sex after having been previously apprehended for it generate much harsher penalties than the crime of prostitution itself, such as time in jail rather than a fine. Jail means that if they have children they will likely lose custody and that upon release they are likely to be made homeless, will struggle to find quote legitimate employment and may be barred from some kinds of social safety net provisions, such as public housing. The criminal status of quote prostitute is thus a trap. Criminalization is often a revolving door of arrest and prosecution. State inflicted vulnerability is transfigured into what looks like quote justified permanent disgrace right that is page 121 and yeah I hope you have enjoyed this episode of Behind the Panel Podcast My name has been Paulson Victoria and again this this book is so revolutionary where it gives you so much information even in 10 pages and I should hope that you just think and go wow that's true that's fair like it makes sense but I hope everybody has a lovely day I was gonna say Thursday then but I don't know but not everybody listens to the podcast on a Thursday but yeah the next episode um of not this one but the usual ones are out on Mondays and Thursdays and you can find us on Dark Fans, many vids YouTube Instagram Twitter everywhere basically and yeah thank you so much for listening. Bye