Red Parasols line El Tiradito at SWOP-Tucson’s 2013 International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers Event Photo Credit: C. Elliott
Could you share how you became involved in the sex worker rights movement and why it’s so important to you?
It honestly was Twitter for me. I was a sex worker, but like most isolated by the nature of the work. Whilst I knew the law as it applied to me I was unaware there were people campaigning to change the laws, or that other countries had different systems, many of which were a lot worse than the UK. I started talking to and reading other sex workers writings, and attended a few events. Realising that I was not alone was such a huge moment for me.
The isolation of sex workers, and the way it feeds into our various oppressions, increases stigma, makes it less likely for crimes…
Most people are voiceless because no one is letting them talk or listening to them when they do. There is a lot to be said for quitting being the voice of the voiceless and letting people speak for themselves. But not by those seeking to abolish the sex trade. Words are put into people’s mouths when they can be, and when they can’t, those people are silenced and dismissed.
Amnesty International UK has not accepted such tactics, instead listening to people in the sex industry and voting for decriminalising the consensual sale of sex between adults and rejecting the “end demand” Swedish model at their recent AGM. But in the European Parliament, these underhand tactics, which influenced voting earlier this year, have yet to be condemned.
These are 5 places where lies and silencing tactics need to stop:
1. Fundraising – dishonest activists and making children lie
At the end of May, Somaly Mam, a celebrity anti-sex trafficking activist and fundraiser, resigned from her foundation, following the uncovering of lies in her own story of being sex trafficked and the discovery that she forced children to lie about being sex trafficking victims to raise funds. From the 1990s, young girls including Long Pros and Meas Ratha were made by Mam to tell harrowing stories of being sex trafficked in television interviews. Worryingly, this incident of children being forced to lie to raise funds for an NGO is not an isolated case.
2. UK & European Parliaments – bias and libel
In March, the biased All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade – funded by anti-gay charity CARE – released their biased report attributing quotes to the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) that were in fact said by an NHS Outreach Project Worker and using some of the ECP’s, Professor Phil Hubbard’s and my quotes out of context. The report recommends the “end demand” Swedish model, which does not work to end demand, but does increase danger and stigma.
In February, before the European Parliament voted on MEP Mary Honeyball’s report recommending the Swedish model, Ms Honeyball sent an email to MEPs libelling the 560 NGOs opposing her report as being “comprised of pimps”. The NGOs included anti-human trafficking, women’s rights, HIV/AIDS and human rights organisations, as well as sex worker led organisations – the people she was silencing claiming to care for. A counter-report demonstrating the severe lack of evidence in Ms Honeyball’s report was also signed by 94 academics. The Swedish law does not work and is dangerous. Sex workers deserve a law that ensures their human rights as do sex trafficking victims, not a law that fails them. Mary Honeyball’s defamation of 560 NGOs should make the result of the vote void.
3. Campaigning – ignored and spoken for
The European Women’s Lobby, Equality Now and other groups seeking to “end demand” ignore the danger the Swedish model creates. They selectively choose people formerly in the sex trade who support their approach while dismissing the concerns voiced by sex workers and their call for decriminalisation, which is echoed by the World Health Organization, UN Women, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, and Human Rights Watch among other organisations.
Lori Adorable, a sex worker who I recently interviewed on sex workers’ rights and how negative experiences of the sex trade, like mine, are often used by those seeking to abolish prostitution to argue for the Swedish model, recommends “people explore the websites of the organizations who are members of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects.” Regularly, these people are spoken for “but these women are speaking for themselves, and they’re asking for decriminalisation.”
4. Television – being “unrepresentative” and spoken over
Women currently and formerly in prostitution are used in a tokenising way by anti-prostitution feminists and religious fundamentalists pushing for the Swedish law that will result in dire consequences on lives they cannot even imagine living. When we do not satisfy the requirements of their mouthpiece, we are discounted, shut up and shut down.
Laura Lee, whose experience of sex work is positive and very different to my own, is discounted and told she is not representative on BBC Newsnight.
On BBC1 The Big Questions, I am spoken over by a woman claiming to care for women like me, who have had a traumatic experience in prostitution. Though earlier in the programme, she says I make prostitution sound “warm and cuddly”. For those who know me, they will know how ludicrous this is.
5. Social media – the pimp lobby, dismissing and co-option
Current and former sex workers who disagree with the “end demand” agenda are told they are not representative, they are pimps, they are shills of the sex trade lobby, they are suffering from false-consciousness, and some have received threats of rape and death.
Let's talk about the misogyny behind the constant "pimp lobby" dismissal by antis. Or let's not bother, they ignore everything we say anyway
I am accused of being the “Pro-Prostitution-Lobby’s humane face” who “peddles” misinformation and fights “dirty”…by a former friend. And I am “probably very unhappy”, but then she would know through the hours we spent talking on the phone (which, due to being in different countries, cost me hundreds of pounds I do not have currently).
“Before I spoke English and could use Twitter I was representative of some young Indian sex workers,” writes Molli Desi, a London based sex worker. “[N]ow I have broken through that technological and cultural glass ceiling I am no longer representative and I can be ignored.” She rightly states that this is “a disingenuous argument and disqualifies our attempts to participate. It also allows for the unheard voices of my still “representative” friends to be appropriated and spoken for by others.”
@MeghanEMurphy#twitterfeminism where were you when we had to suck police dick to escape the rescue centre that WW Fems commended ?
Women, men, trans men and women, and nonbinary people in the sex trade are not only and not always someone’s daughter, son, sister, brother, mother or father, but they are always people deserving of their right to be listened to and truly heard.
Stop the criminalisation of sex work – safety first!
26 March 2014, 6.30-8.30pm
Committee Room 12
Host: John McDonnell MP
Chair: English Collective of Prostitutes
International speakers:
Carina Edlund, Rose Alliance, Sweden
Boglárka Fedorkó, SZEXE, Hungary – tbc
Ariane G, sex worker, Germany
Jenny O, Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland
Morgane Merteuil, STRASS, France
Molly Smith, Scotpep, Scotland
Luca Stevenson, International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe
Plus:
Lori Bora, Soho Working Girls
Candy Hutton, won court case against breach of ASBO
Jean Johnson, Hampshire Women’s Institute
Clayton Littlewood, author
Lisa Longstaff, Women Against Rape
Toni Mac, Sex Worker Open University
Nigel Richardson, Hodge, Jones and Allen
Vera Rodriguez, dancer, x:talk
Didi Rossi, Queer Strike
Robert Jappie, Release
Paula Yanev, English Collective of Prostitutes
_____________________________________
An All-Party Parliamentary Group has just recommended changing the prostitution laws to criminalise clients.
Criminalising clients will not stop prostitution, nor will it stop the criminalisation of women. But it will make it more dangerous and stigmatising for sex workers.
There is widespread anger that MPs are promoting increased criminalisation when unemployment, benefit cuts & sanctions, lowering wages, and homelessness are driving more women, particularly mothers, into prostitution. These proposals will further divert police time and resources from investigating rape, trafficking and other violent crimes, to policing consenting sex.
The existing prostitution laws force sex workers to work in isolation and danger. Of the two women murdered in London in the last few months, one was working on the street and one was working indoors alone. Senior police officers recently acknowledged that “operations to tackle the trade are ‘counterproductive’ and likely to put the lives of women at risk”. Despite this mass raids against sex workers in Soho, London, have thrown scores of women out of the relative safety of their flats. Arrests continue against sex workers on the street.
REPORTS FROM: New Zealand which decriminalised sex work 11 years ago. Canada’s Supreme Court which ruled that criminalisation is in breach of sex workers’ human rights.
Red Parasols line El Tiradito at SWOP-Tucson’s 2013 International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers Event
26 March 2014, 6.30-8.30pm
