Kevin Baldeosingh
The Counter-Trafficking Unit of the T&T Police Service in a recent statement said it had rescued over 20 women involved in prostitution in T&T in the past four years. But, in this book about sex work, rights activist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant argues that such "rescues" are merely a strategy to overlook the real needs of sex workers and to stamp out prostitution under the guise of fighting a modern type of slavery.
Grant notes that feminists in developed nations have essentially joined hands with moral lobby groups who oppose sex work on grounds that have nothing to do with what the women and men involved actually want. Religious groups oppose the sale of sex on moral grounds, while feminists argue that prostitution is always exploitation of women and even sex workers who argue otherwise have a "false consciousness" or are traitors to the feminist cause.
Grant quotes feminist Julie Burchill who in her 1989 book Damaged Goods wrote that, "When the sex war is won, prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women."
Grant writes that, "Sex work is not simply sex, it is a performance, it is playing a role, demonstrating a skill, developing empathy within a set of professional boundaries". However, she notes that sex workers actually don't apply this label to themselves in a narrow political context, preferring to use terms like escorts, working girls, masseuses, domes, subs or rent boys.
By focusing on the image, literally, of sex workers, anti-prostitution activists are treating with symptoms rather than causes rooted in the economy and social mores and prejudices.
Grant also argues that the crackdown on prostitution under the guise of fighting human trafficking has actually worsened the situation for many of the women. First, these crackdowns more often lead to the imprisonment of the supposed victims rather than their clientele or the "traffickers". Secondly, the police rather than clients more frequently commit violent acts against the women, and prostitutes arrested in crackdowns in Cambodia, for example, are kept in overcrowded cells with no toilet facilities and, in one instance, three women were beaten to death by prison guards.
Yet the US State Department in its 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report upgraded Cambodian's compliance rating and only noted that "raids against immoral activities were not conducted in a manner sensitive to trafficking victims." Grant also notes that USAID, which naturally supports American policies in this regard, found that 88 per cent of 20,000 sex workers surveyed had not been forced in prostitution.
Nonetheless, the lobby to give proper rights to sex workers has been growing in the 21st century, with calls from the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, the International Labour Organisation and the World Health Organization to decriminalise prostitution.
Sex workers' needs, Grant writes, are the standard ones: legal recognition, no discrimination in the provision of housing, health care, education and work, and to move freely in the world. But this will not happen as long as these women and men are judged by the moral standards of persons who feel they know what is best for everyone else.
