What ever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called. – John Stuart Mill
Imagine this scenario: you’re at work one day; maybe it’s a job you really like, maybe it’s one you just tolerate because it’s better than the alternatives, and maybe it’s one you hate but keep working at because the money is good and you’ve got bills to pay. So you’re just minding your own business, dealing with customers or whatever, when suddenly a bunch of armed police thugs smash the door down, start pointing guns at everybody, arrest your customers and boss, handcuff you and your fellow co-workers and shove you into a van. While this is going on you notice that there are some people with the police who are dressed in plain clothes and appear to be foreign. The police eventually lock you and your co-workers in a cell and one of the foreigners then tells you all that you’ve been “rescued” from your job because the business owner was “exploiting” you. Now, if you hate your job in the first place you might even agree about the exploitation bit, but you’d probably still be pretty angry about being arrested and scared half to death by the goon squad’s commando tactics. And even if you did hate the job, how do you think you’d feel when the foreigner told you that they didn’t have any comparable work lined up for you, but that you would soon be transferred to a “rescue home” for an indefinite period of time and while you were there you would be taught to sew so you can be forced to work in a sweatshop at less than a tenth of your previous salary?
Don’t answer yet; now imagine that some of your coworkers who liked the job begin to protest, and are told that they don’t know what they’re talking about, that you’ve all been “programmed” to think you were working voluntarily but you “really” weren’t no matter what you remember. You are informed that your “exploiters”, meaning every customer and member of management (including the cool manager who buys pizza for everyone on Fridays and the nice old man who always tells you about his grandchildren) are evil monsters who are going to prison for decades and that you are expected to testify against them in a kangaroo court; if you refuse you will be sent to a “deprogramming” facility where you will be psychologically tortured until you agree to say whatever your “rescuers” want. In the meantime, nobody is allowed to call friends or family to let them know where you are, because the “rescuers” have no way of knowing which of you are “brainwashed” and you might call gangsters or something. Finally, sometime in the next few days, you find out the whole thing was cooked up as a publicity stunt to please a foreign government (the one the foreign “rescuers” came from) in order to seal some kind of political deal. How do you think you’d react? Obviously you’d be angry, probably furious. You’d probably join with the others in demanding a lawyer, transportation back to work and an apology, and if a reporter or social worker was sent in to talk to you you’d probably give her an earful in hopes of raising a public outcry. You might even join in a riot to overpower your guards and escape.
Well, for many women in a number of countries (including The Philippines, India, the Republic of the Congo and the United Kingdom) this isn’t just a theoretical question because it’s happening quite often, and as you might suspect these women are pretty angry about it – often angry enough to become violent, just as you or I might be in their situation. I’ve mentioned before that the rescue industry has become a major social problem in many developing countries, especially in the Far East; if you think I’m exaggerating with the above scenario take a look at this protest video from the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers, then read on to the following examples which, as happens so often, came to my attention through Laura Agustín’s blog of July 12th.
The first of the cases is from the Philippines, May of 2009 and is unusual in that the “rescued” women were not actually prostitutes but operators for a paid “cybersex” service; apparently the reporter thought this sounded a bit too benign, so he referred to it as a “cybersex den”:
Fifteen girls, rescued by police and National Bureau of Agency (NBI) men [on April 23rd] from a cybersex den operated by two Swedish nationals, have escaped from the Department of Social Welfare Development office in Cagayan de Oro City…after mauling the duty security guard. The girls then flagged down a passenger jeepney and forced its driver to bring them away from the DSWD office…Senior Superintendent Noel Armilla…of the…Police Office, said the girls would not be charged or arrested because they are not facing any charges. Armilla, however, said they would have to locate the girls because they would need them to testify against two Swedish nationals and four Filipinos, who have been arrested for allegedly operating the cybersex den…
It takes some serious doublethink to be able to use the word “rescued” in conjunction with arresting and confining non-criminal adult women against their will. Nor is their violent reaction unusual, as we can see in this story from India, last October:
…sex workers rescued on Wednesday and sent to a shelter in the city began a violent clamour last morning…At 9 am, all 21 sex workers stomped out and created a ruckus. They broke off the grill and engaged in a fight with the management. “The rescued sex workers began insisting on going back…” [the shelter manager] said…”In major raids, initially such things happen…In an earlier raid, when 46 girls were brought, the same thing had happened…They are programmed to lie, so we don’t have correct information about them…They even lie about their origin.”
“Lie” in this context obviously means “tell us things we don’t want to hear.” Then there was this report from January 1st of this year:
Police from China flew to the Democratic Republic of Congo in November…They found 11 Chinese women who had been promised decent jobs in Paris by traffickers but ended up working in a Chinese-owned karaoke bar in…Kinshasa…After a joint raid by Chinese and Congolese police…the women decided to stay…saying it was easier to make good money there than in China…”They make 100 US dollars for receiving one guest – half of the money goes to their boss and they keep the other half”…the women…were [also] able to take cheap goods from China to Africa after visits home and sell them for big profits…
Yes, you read that correctly: the “trafficked sex slaves” made more per client than German brothel girls, could go home at will and were allowed to conduct side-business as well. The horror! The most recent episode was again from the Philippines, reported June 29th:
A hundred female sex workers…and five foreigners were arrested, in raids on three night clubs in Angeles City Tuesday night…“The women don’t really consider it a rescue,” said [the NGO manager] who led the raids. “They kept cursing us, and tried their best to escape”…She said she assumed that some of the rescued women were below 18. “Or they were taught to say they’re 18,” she said…the successive raids in Angeles City’s red light district bolstered the US government’s recognition of the Philippines’ commitment to combating human trafficking. The Philippines has been taken off a watch list of the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report and elevated to Tier 2, a category of countries that do not fully comply with anti-trafficking standards but are making efforts to do so…
The total disregard for these women’s autonomy is deplorable; the few underage ones (if there were any) are said to be so stupid that they can’t even think of passing themselves off for 18 without being “taught” to say it, even though every teenager in the West can think that up all by himself. This story is at least honest about the real motives of the Filipinos, though; these women were “trafficked” from their workplaces into jail due to U.S. pressure; their wishes were ignored and they were treated like commodities, handed over as gifts to the U.S. State Department like slave-girls given by a local king to the Roman governor.
One Year Ago Today
“The Numbers Game” is a column about why women in general and escorts in particular lie about our ages and weights, and the effect this has on both the business and the male brain.
Awesome post. And scary. I am reading a book about the history of female sex work in Australia. It seems back 200 odd years ago, the panic was all about the ‘white slave trade’ and ‘vulnerable young girls’ were rescued from brothels or from the grips of their rich foriegner boyfriends and forced to work for the salvation army in their washrooms. nice to know the times they are a changing. i mean.. just revolving. or not. ughh *facepalm*
Thank you, sweetie! I agree about it being very scary; any time a government (or an agency sponsored by a government) has the power to define people as incompetent and to determine what adults “really” want despite what they say, the door is wide open for tyranny. In Ireland, “rescued” prostitutes were enslaved as washerwomen, and the last of these “Magdalene laundries” was only closed down in 1996; the Irish government agreed only yesterday to investigate the mountain of abuse complaints against them, yet here we are starting the cycle all over again before the human rights disaster resulting from the last one has even been cleaned up. 🙁
On down days, I wonder how the world can avoid sinking into complete despotism, when people can commit the atrocities you describe without provoking a roar of outrage from every quarter. One thing is certain, though: without protest, the world will go that route. Thanks for your consistent, articulate voice!
Thanks, JdL!
Another great post, Maggie. We simply don’t hear this perspective elsewhere. All MSM stories about rescue operations are positive.
Incidentally, one thing I like about your posts is your focus on verbiage and how media language reflects a (perhaps unconscious) bias. As you say, “den” is a great word for scandalizing just about anything: a den of nursing, a den of manufacturing, a den of astrophysics, …
Thank you, Mike; I really rely on my readers and correspondents to call these things to my attention, and I canvass websites every day looking for stories about prostitution; sometimes the implications are obvious (as with these), but sometimes they need to be teased a bit to yield their full meanings.
I’ve always loved words, and my undergraduate degree is in English, so really ever since I was a teenager I’ve been very conscious of the way people pick words to carry an emotional weight along with their semantic weight. Some words are semantically null; they have no actual firm meaning whatsoever, only an emotional weight, and you’ll notice politicians and the media are particularly fond of such words (such as “human trafficking”, “family values” or “fairness”) because they can use them to stand for a broad range of concepts. But administrative cops, lawheads and badge-lickers are very good at this as well; they use dysphemisms like “ring”, “den”, “commit”, “abet”, “perpetrate”, “conspire”, etc against people they want to paint as villains while using more semantically neutral terms for others. Radley Balko pointed out recently that when cops shoot someone’s dog they are described as “forced to shoot” because the animal was “attacking”, and the incident is “unfortunate”. But when the thugs breaking into the house lack badges, they “cold-bloodedly gun down” an animal “defending” his family, and the incident is “tragic”.
At least we whores have attitudes, think for ourselves and get stroppy when other try to decide what’s good for us. It’s always been thus- Look at the settling of the American west. First women in were almost always the hookers and saloon girls. Then, once the area was “settled”, the churchy and law-licker types wanted to move them on.
The US government is truly a disgusting organization. Once you are outside the US it is easy to understand why everyone hates the US, and with good reason. Americans mind your own business and stop trying to fuck up other countries. We don’t want to be like your joke of a country.
“Prostitutes over the next few decades would increasingly be seen not as public nuisances but as victims of poor economic conditions and male lust. Better opportunities for women seeking employment would be one goal of the men and women trying to eradicate prostitution.” – circa 1800’s
History repetition and we learned what? Apparently not a dam thing.
From: http://www.englisharticles.info/2011/07/23/the-origins-of-prostitution/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-origins-of-prostitution
Do you ever feel physically ill reading these news stories? I know I do.
It’s shocking how the reporters say some of these things with a straight face.
I honestly don’t think I could report most of these things “straight”; I’d have to put snide remarks in after cop statements and the like, which would almost certainly result in my being fired.
I also suspect that if these women, these “trafficked prostitutes” didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them. It’s a great way to distract the public attention and outrage from real issues, like class and power and the distribution of wealth. The stories have it all- Sex, a whiff of domination, the shadowy underworld, and the valiant knights in uniform “rescuing” the young women. It sells paper, and boosts telly ratings. It’s a never fail.
And no one ever asks the questions as to why the economy is so bad in some of these places that the women choose prostitution (other than the ones who would choose it regardless), and who profits and who controls the money. The stories never go that far.
My partner and I have been studying and documenting the lives of bar girls who work in Angeles City, Philippines. We are familiar with the raids that are occurring in the Philippines. Excerpts from our interviews and essays appear on our website, flameblue.net.
We initially began our investigation because we saw glaring discrepancies between what the western media presented as facts concerning the bar girls, and what we were discovering through our interviews and observations. At that time (two years ago) the only raids taking place were mostly conducted by rogue local law enforcement personnel looking for bribes from bar owners.
On September 15, 2010, all that changed. The NBI (similar to our FBI) conducted a huge raid on five clubs. They detained 268 bar personnel, including mamasans, papasans, cashiers, dancers, and waitresses. They loaded them into trucks and took them to a nearby training facility for the Philippine National Police, and there incarcerated them for one week in barracks.
The Philippine newspapers ran headlines similar to this one from the Philippine Daily Inquirer: 268 Rescued In Anti-Trafficking Drive – De Lima. The article quoted Leila de Lima (Philippine Justice Secretary) as saying, “This is a breakthrough in our anti-human trafficking efforts. The owners and managers of these establishments will face charges.” In the very next paragraph the Inquirer wrote: “The US State Department’s 2010 report on human trafficking has retained the Philippines in its Tier 2 watch list rank. The Philippines may lose some $250 million in aid from the US if it fails to improve its conviction rate against human traffickers.” ABS-CBN News wrote: “Some relatives of the bar girls complained that the women were illegally arrested. An official from the raiding team, however, clarified that the raids were part of a ‘rescue operation.’ ”
In the 10 months since that raid all the detainees have been released, except for one mamasan who indeed did have an underage girl working under her (the girl had been duly vetted and licensed by the City of Angeles). But the intended result of the raid was achieved. A couple of months ago Hillary Clinton lauded the Philippines’ efforts to combat human trafficking and rewarded the Philippines by taking the country off the Tier 2 watch list and giving the Philippines its aid money.
So, what is the real story here?
The rescue operation could only succeed if the bar girls were presented as trafficking victims. But in our many interviews with bar girls we found exactly zero girls who were coerced, duped, or otherwise manipulated into working in the bars. Additionally, none of the girls we talked with even knew of a girl who was deceived. They all came to Angeles City on recommendations by family members or friends. The girls themselves would find it ludicrous that they are being presented as trafficking victims. They are free to come and go as they please, and they often do.
To obtain employment in the bars, the girls must be licensed by the City of Angeles. During the licensing procedure they must present valid identification that states their age. No girl under the age of 18 is allowed to work in the bars and clubs, but under-age girls do try to sneak through the examination process by presenting fraudulent identification. This is probably what happened in the case of the under-age girl mentioned above, because she did have a valid license. No matter that she had obtained her license from a government entity. The authorities are still trying to prosecute the girl’s mamasan for having an under-age girl under her care.
One may find it illogical and confusing that these very girls who are labelled as trafficking victims by the national police all held valid bar licenses issued by the city government. We find it illogical also. The mayor of Angeles City finds it illogical (see his quotes on our website). One can easily (and correctly) conclude that the Philippine government is so anxious to prosecute traffickers and save trafficking victims in order to get US aid money that it is willing to engage in human trafficking itself by detaining, transporting, and incarcerating without charges and against their will, a couple of hundred bar girls for monetary gain, all under the pretense of “rescue.” Is there a more blatant example of human trafficking as defined by the United Nations and our Department of State?
A bigger issue here is the estimate of the number of trafficking victims in the Philippines. Huge numbers are bandied about by the news media, hysterical NGOs, and the US State Department (which gets its estimates from hysterical NGOs). The State Department is judging the Philippines’ anti-trafficking efforts based on these large and insupportable numbers. It believes that the Philippines has been remiss in its efforts because so few traffickers have been convicted. But the Philippine government has difficulty finding bona fide traffickers because it can’t find the tens of thousands of alleged trafficking victims that are said to exist. Thus, the Philippine government is caught between a rock and a hard place. The Philippines is in danger of losing aid money if it doesn’t show a rise in conviction rates of traffickers. What to do? Target a bunch of high-profile bar girls who are doing their best to earn a living and support their families, pretend they are trafficking victims, incarcerate them for a week under the guise of “rescue”, issue misleading press releases, and then crow about the progress that is being made by the Republic of the Philippines in eradicating the scourge of human trafficking.
Hillary Clinton and the US State Department bought the whole ruse.
WOW William. Just wow. I am not surprised, all this trafficking hysteria is not reflected in any of the people i know within the sex industry. Thankyou so much for the work you are doing and the brave analysis you are presenting. Have you been called a pimp or a rapist yet? One your views get some airtime, the smear campaign will start. There are many who are willing to dig below the trafficking surface. I look forward to having a good explore of your website.
This is disgusting. Utterly disgusting. This is ruining lives, making innocent countries like the Philippines look bad, and making the USA look bad (with good reason) all over the world.
Also, any real trafficked sex slaves aren’t being rescued. There aren’t enough of them to make good TV, so they’re ignored.
What kind of slave-master lets his slaves go back home to another country and just expects that they’ll come back? I saw Roots; nobody told Toby Waller, “You know what, it’s OK if you want to use the name Kunta Kinte. In fact, why don’t you go back to Juffure and visit the family? We’ll wait for you to get back.”
[…] video on this topic from the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers. Take a look at the photos. Also: this post from The Honest Courtesan) Even though many of our most pressing concerns could be ameliorated through decriminalization and […]
[…] My column from one year ago today: ”You’re at work one day…when suddenly a bunch of armed police thugs smash the door down, start pointing guns at everybody, arrest your customers and boss, handcuff you and your fellow co-workers and shove you into a van…” […]
Reblogged this on Writings from a woman of pleasure.
yeah… the police always think and assume right away that these women are working against their wills… they always had these idea that they are playing the hero role when doing this raids, without realizing that these women might actually be there by choice… then when these women tell them the truth, they dismiss it as a lie because it’s not what they want to hear…
[…] decisions; “authorities” who try are often confused and surprised when those they “rescue” use the first available opportunity to escape from the kennels in which their “saviors” have confined them. Being picked up, caged and done to without […]
[…] decisions; “authorities” who try are often confused and surprised when those they “rescue” use the first available opportunity to escape from the kennels in which their “saviors” have confined them. Being picked up, caged and done to without […]
Chilling. Just … chilling.
“It’s all about the cheddar, me hearties.” – Pompey the Pirate.
“Trafficking” Laws + “Asset seizure” Laws = “Banking for Pigs”. 👮👀
Maggie, at what point does the second American Revolution start?
When the rozzers arrest the three perps (girls) on the lemonade stand for Trafficking / Exploitation of their siblings, and kick in the door of the house, or den of vice, on suspicion of smuggled contraband (lemons) “because they smelled ganja, and the minor children (girls) were clearly victims of self prostitution abetted by the Capitalist Dream”?
Bloody apalling.
At least in 17th century Great Britain, the Highway Robbers had the decency to wear a black mask and yell “Stand and Deliver” like proper criminals, instead of masquerading under the guise of “Protect and Serve”.
The key question there, of course, is: to protect and serve *whom* precisely?