Better later than never: International Sex Workers Rights Day
Posted by: Jenny Penny in Body and Soul, Crime, Feminism, Human rights, International, Sex and sexuality, Sexual assault, Violence against women, WorkVia Feministe, I learned that Monday March 3rd was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Sex work/prostitution is one issue where I had a somewhat change of heart, mainly after reading the book “Porr, Horor och Feminister” (Porn, whores and feminists) by Petra Östergren.
As Jill of Feministe said, sex work is one of those issues, much like bikini waxes and porn, where any discussion always seem to divert into ugly fighting. But:
That’s not a great reason to avoid talking about it, but it probably is a good reason for me to defer to those who know more about the subject than I do. So I’ll just point out that sex work is as diverse as any other type of labor, and there is no singular sex worker narrative — not all sex workers are exploited girls from developing nations, any more than all sex workers are high-paid call-girls living fabulous and fun urban lives.
A while ago I found Renegade Evolution, a fierce in-your-face sex worker who has a lot to say about the anti-porn/anti-sex work feminist side. This is long, but worth reading. I also direct you to this post, called “Sometimes it’s the little things“. She has a lot of good stuff actually.
If you read Swedish, there’s Isabella Lund. She hasn’t written about the International Sex Workers Rights Day, but it’s interesting nevertheless.
I’m quite busy today, so I use this post from Cara of the Curvature to explain why sex workers’ rights are an important issue (links go to the same place as in her original post):
So. Why sex workers’ rights? Well, it’s pretty simple. Even those sex workers who enjoy their jobs get a hell of a raw deal. All around the world, sex workers are: investigated and arrested for making a living, deported even when there is evidence of non-consent, left without any form of job security, gang-raped and abused by their bosses but left without recourse for fear that they themselves will be arrested, and arrested for mere suspicion of prostitution, including carrying condoms (which only discourages safer sex).
We know that bad things happen to sex workers, that they are very often raped, abused, robbed, kidnapped or even murdered. But that isn’t even the worst of it — sex workers have horrible crimes committed against them but fear arrest to much report, or do report and end up being mocked or further-victimized. Sex workers are raped by police officers. Sex workers are tortured and killed in cold blood, but their murderers may only be sentenced to 9 years in jail. Sex workers are murdered and then have their entire humanity reduced to their profession.
In the off chance that a case involving a crime against a sex worker actually makes it to court, we can expect that their profession will be trotted out and used against them at every possible chance. When there is little or no evidence that a woman is a sex worker, she’ll often be called one anyway (particularly if she’s a woman of color, trans* or low-income) — as an insult, as a way to call victims liars or suggest that they deserved the rape, or as a way to call victims liars and imply that they just might have deserved that attempted murder. In cases where the victim openly says that yes, she sells sex for a living, the gang rape she suffered at gunpoint by five men will be labeled “theft of services.” Not a suggestion that she’s lying — only a flat-out proclamation that a woman who works in the sex industry has given up any and all claims to personal bodily autonomy and the right to live safely and free of violence. Judges declare in courtrooms that sex workers cannot be raped, and then they are allowed to stay on the bench.
And in Canada, a man accused of murdering two prostitutes says:
“Think of it as stolen property,” Svekla told his sister of the body left in her truck in May 2006.
“If you’re caught with stolen property, it doesn’t mean you stole it.
Yup — a dead sex worker’s body is akin to stolen property. This is precisely what I’ve been getting at. The stigma against sex workers not only puts them in danger, forces them to live below the radar and makes reporting a crime next to impossible. The stigma against sex workers causes them to no longer be seen as human. Clearly, this guy is a murderer and a twisted fuck. I can’t say that the words that come out of his mouth are ones I would normally use to make a point about our society. But read the stories above, and then tell me that this is not only a more frank expression of those same attitudes. Because it is.
Sorry about not having anything original to say about this. I hope to compose my thoughts and offer something on the subject soon (with a discussion about the “Swedish model” included, of course), but for now, go read the links!
Added: There is nothing wrong with a little shameless self-promotion, so here you can read a report I did for Amnesty on a debate about Petra Östergren’s book (in Swedish).
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March 5th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Thanks for posting on it Jenny! Also, you would not believe how many Anti-porn types repeatedly write off anything Petra Ostergren says. I’ve read her studies too, yet some folk refuse flat out to believe or even consider anything in any of them.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I know Ren. Here, porn and prostitution is almost always seen in a violence against women context which means that people such as Petra Östergen are written off as pro-violence. But when the sex workers are subjected to real lifeviolence, as in the examples above, then the anti-porn types become eerily silent and don’t have any solutions on how we should deal with it. Instead they prefer to use those examples in their own crusade.