genderberg.com

published at Feminist Current January 22, 2013

You probably haven’t heard about the newest prostitution research from Norway. It has been available in Norwegian since last summer when a tiny handful of pro-prostitution peeps wrote about it, but almost no one has noted the report’s English release. Now that I’ve read it I understand the silence from pro-sex work lobbyists and the liberal media that usually loves press releases that hate on anti-pornstitution activists. “Dangerous Liaisons: A report on the violence women in prostitution are exposed to” was presented to me as proof that criminalizing johns has increased violence against prostitutes in Oslo. Norwegian newspaper The Local reported on the research and dutifully presented the results highlighted by the harm reduction researchers at ProSentret.

“Anniken Hauglie (Conservative Party) called for the law to be scrapped after the city’s official help centre for prostitutes, ProSentret, released a report on Friday detailing deteriorating conditions for sex workers in the capital. ‘The reality is that the law has made it more difficult for women in prostitution,’ Hauglie said.”

The 2012 research is compared to 2008 research and the conclusion drawn is that in 2008 52% of prostitutes in Oslo said they had experienced violence compared to 59% in 2012. An increase of 7% isn’t a huge jump but any increase in violence against women should be taken seriously. Fortunately, the increase in violence against prostituted women is a lie. LIARS! Several obfuscations and omissions were employed to concoct the lie, but the primary manipulation was accepting a definition of violence that equated each act of verbal abuse (up 17% from 2008) and hair pulling (up 167%) the same as being struck with a fist (down 38%) and rape (down 48%). Did I just write that since the Nordic model rapes of prostituted women were down BY HALF in Oslo? Oh yes I did. ProSentret did not consider the halving of rape to be worth pointing out, but I think that’s terrific news. I also think that pimp violence being down BY HALF since 2008 should be shouted from the rooftops along with violence from regular clients going down 65% and violence from an unfamiliar man in a car declining 60%.

Visible injury has decreased from a third of the sample to a fourth. One thing that has changed is that the number that experienced violence from someone unfamiliar in a car has declined from 27% to 11%. We also see a decline in violence from regular clients from 20% to 7%, and 14% to 7% from boss/pimp.

With the dramatic reductions in serious violence within the research you might be wondering from whence came the claimed 7% rise. The answer is mostly verbal harassment and minor physical assaults because no distinction is made between nasty words and being punched. Harm reductionists love to thump about how indoor prostitution is safer than streetwalking, and in some aspects it is, but the research paints a contrary picture about indoor violence. Feminists have been on a long mission to raise awareness that women are more often attacked in their homes by men they know than in public by strange men. Why would being in a brothel with a john suddenly become a place to expect less rape when inside is never safer for women? The research supports the known feminist truth of how women are harmed when trapped indoors with men engorged on their perceived right to control women. The most violent men are “unfamiliar clients” and the women they inflict the worst sexual violence on are the indoor Thai women, also the only group to report violence from pimps (11%).

In this group we find the largest amount of respondents who say they have been threatened/forced into sex that was not agreed to. While 27% of the entire sample said they had been exposed to this form of violence, as many as 45% of this group have experienced it. In this group we also see the highest amount of robbery (30%) and threats with weapons (40%) Additionally 20% of this group said they had been raped.

Indoor prostitutes are being sexually assaulted by their clients more than streetwalkers, who are ultimately abused more frequently but not raped or robbed more. The information about indoor versus outdoor violence also disproves the common refrain that because it’s now a “buyer’s market” prostituted women are harmed by the lack of negotiation time. Streetwalkers mostly suffer verbal abuse and minor physical assaults that aren’t violations of sex act negotiations, whereas indoor prostitutes with the supposed luxuries of pre-screening and unlimited time to negotiate are much less capable of keeping their johns from robbing, raping, and threatening/forcing them into sex that was not agreed upon. Placing all the focus on how prostituted women negotiate distracts us from questioning the varying motivations of negotiation-inducing men. It is common sense that a man who wants a quick blowjob from a streetwalker would be less invested financially and emotionally in his sexual entitlement to a prostitute than a man who pre-arranges to pay for an hour alone with a prostitute and brings a sixty minute gameplan of fantasy fulfillment with him. BITERS! Allow me to turn your attention to some freaky shit you might have missed in the statistics tsumani above: Biting nearly tripled (6% to 15%)
Hair pulling nearly tripled (12% to 32%) I’ve lived in New York City and San Jose, Costa Rica, which is to say I’ve been verbally harassed and suffered unwanted touching from unfamiliar male passerby more times than I can count. Never have I been bitten or had my hair pulled. That’s not passerby harasser behavior, it’s john behavior. Information originally reported in the 2008 study but repeated in the 2012 report provides a clue to why minor, sex act-specific violence jumped.

“Most of the women who said they would seek help to protect against violence said that they called or threatened to call the police when they found themselves in a dangerous or threatening situation. This would often scare the customers, or others, who were acting threatening/violent away.”

Pro-prostitution lobbyists say men are paying for the right to sex and not the right to abuse women. Johns don’t exhibit an understanding of that difference, which is why letting men pay for sex and then trying to draw a line at abuse is doomed to failure. Men paying for the right to abuse women have crossed that line, no takesees-backsees halfway through the series of abuses paid for, especially not when BDSM inflicted on women is culturally approved as sex and not abuse. Radical feminists know prostitution is coerced sex, aka rape. We notice that most rape victims are teenage girls abused by older men and recognize the same demographic patterns in prostitution. As with rape, the sexual aspect of the crime triggers so many cultural prejudices that the core of the crime being male violence is often left on the cutting room floor. Oslo’s reduction in severe violence combined with the increase in more personal boundary violence like biting and hair pulling is a reminder that, as with other kinds of rape, sex is the preferred tool of violation but violation itself is the main point. Prostituted women in Oslo are effectively altering violent johns’ behaviors by threatening to call police, and johns are responding by lowering their violence to under the threshold that would trigger that response. Instead of rape and aggravated assault, johns have moved to getting more of their violation kicks though biting and hair pulling knowing these won’t result in a call to the cops. On that note, let’s segue into what the report tells us about police and prostitutes. COPPERS! Police abuse of prostituted women is a problem. Some studies have found that as much as 30% of violence against prostituted women can come from police officers. Police abusiveness is frequently cited by harm reductioners as a reason to legalize men’s prostitution use. ProSentret makes a big deal of the fact that prostituted women are reporting less violence because they claim it as a consequence of prostitutes trusting police less, but it’s more accurately attributed to the large drop in severe violence.

“If we look at assistance from police, emergency care, Pro Sentret, and Nadheim, we see approximately half the number that have received support in the 2012 study compared with the 2007/08 study.”

Approximately half the number receiving support matches up quite well with rape being down by half and pimp violence being down by half. According to their own numbers, since adoption of the Nordic model prostitutes are 41% less likely to seek help from police, but they are 54% less likely to seek help from ProSentret! And apparently prostituted women are suddenly terrified of emergency care personnel because seeking help from them is down a whopping 79%. If you don’t acknowledge the enormous reductions in severe violence then these changes are as alarming as ProSentret makes them out to be. Combined with street prostitution going down at least 50% from 2008 to 2009 and indoor prostitution going down by 16% in the same year, the sharp drop in prostituted women reporting violence is actually something to celebrate. ProSentret’s ideological constipation won’t allow them to admit the enormous reduction in severe violence their data shows.

“Many of the women’s actions are probably due to a fear of prejudice from the police, the justice system, and health services. The double stigma as both victim of violence and prostitute can be a heavy burden to bear. Other reasons could be among other things a lack of knowledge of the police and reporting violence in Norway, fear that the police will enforce other laws against the prostitute, a lack of trust in the police, or that the women for some other reason does not wish to press charges.”

Persons who make police abuse of sex workers their bailiwick may find it instructional that none of the violence reported by the 123 prostituted women was pinned on Norwegian police, not so much as one instance of verbal abuse. Score yet another point for the Nordic model. Rarely does a group of pro-prostitution activists make their choice to be ignorant so evident as to ignore the data from their own research. Mind you, it’s not unheard of; New Zealand research collected by the prostitution lobby claimed no changes to street prostitution in their official summary but buried in Section 8 one finds the truth that street prostitutes in Auckland more than doubled since legalization. It is a bald lie to take the information presented in “Dangerous Liaisons” and come to this conclusion:

“Nothing in the studies we have conducted among the women and the support services suggests that the criminalization of the customers have protected the women from violence from their customers, rather the women are protecting the customers from the police.”

ENDERS!

The final words of the report declare:

This will be done by the Pro Sentret: • Organize drop-in courses about violence in prostitution and violence in close relations with a focus on knowledge about violence, practical tips and information about offers of aid. The courses will be organized in cooperation with Oslo Crisis Center and a provider of self-defense courses. • Work out and distribute information material adapted to the users of Pro Sentret about violence, rights, and tips about maintaining their own safety.

In other words, ProSentret’s goal is to build better hookers. I prefer other solutions. The Nordic model works and should keep on keeping on. If ProSentret and other sex worker rights groups refuse to get on board the abolition of sex-based slavery they’re fools, but they’re fools who can still be doing more for prostituted women from within their belief system. The first thing they can do is actively track prostitution clients more effectively. Unfamiliar clients commit the most violence and passively relying on bad date reports from survivors of john violence is not enough. There’s room for both police and nonprofits to be collecting information about unfamiliar johns in their own way. Next they can work to achieve reliable amnesty for foreign victims. I am unfamiliar with how Norway treats trafficked immigrants but I have no trouble believing more can be done to protect them from discrimination and deportation. My third and final suggestion is for harm reduction organizations to teach prostituted women that any violence inflicted on them matters. Biting and hair pulling have almost tripled but reporting them hasn’t. Johns will be as violent as they can get away with so we need to keep pushing back the bar of acceptability. Credit where due, the researchers sincerely attempted to honor prostituted women’s psychological defenses by distinguishing the categories of “rape” and “threatened/forced into sex that was not agreed upon” in recognition that many don’t call it rape if there’s no assault accompanying the sexual violence. They include this comment about cultural differences in defining violence.

“Pro Sentret have experienced that in general many foreign women express both physical and psychological pain differently than Norwegian women. It is possible that some did not recognize their way to express pain in the options in the study.”

It’s obvious the researchers at ProSentret care about the women they serve, I just wish they could project that concern to the millions of women they will never see and the generations of prostitutes that will come after the current one if we don’t take a stand now. Like I said in the beginning, the Oslo research has barely made a blip in pro-prostitution media channels. The usual loudmouthed prostitution lobbyists have seen it and kept their lips zipped. You better believe if the report contained solid proof that the Nordic model leads to more violence then it would be as popularized as that bunk study purporting career pornstitutes are happier than the average woman. Now you know about it, and now you know why the prostitution lobby prefers to pretend it doesn’t exist. It exists and it proves abolitionists right. Now don’t let them forget it.

Prostitution, the abolition of the victim, and post-modernism's defence of the status quo
Posted by Stuart at Scottish Socialist Youth on September 25, 2010

http://ssy.org.uk/2010/09/prostitution-the-abolition-of-the-victim-and-post-modernisms-defence-of-the-status-quo/#comments

I’ve just finished reading a book by the Swedish socialist, anarchist and feminist Kajsa Ekis Ekman which she primarily devotes to debunking the arguments used to justify prostitution and the surrogate-mothering industry. Her book was written as a response to the media’s misrepresentation of prostitution as some sort of smart and glamorous career choice for young women to make and at the increasing number of post-modernist academics and ‘queer-theorists’ who have been questioning Sweden’s prostitution laws by, among other things, ludicrously trying to frame prostitution as something ‘transgressive’ and which ‘challenges gender norms’. The abolition of the victim Ekis Ekman highlights at length the tactics which the supporters of prostitution have adopted in recent years and exposes how false, absurd and damaging their arguments really are. Particularly interesting I think is when she writes about the attempts that have been made to abolish the term ‘victim’ from the debate around prostitution. To be a victim has come to be seen as something shameful and to refer to someone as a victim is, according to the post-modernists, to deny them their ‘agency’. Ekman exposes why this lie has come about and what wider political consequences it has. Her point here is summed up in a review of the book in Dagens Nyheter:

“To be able to defend that women sell their bodies (and that men buy them) one must first abolish the victim and instead redefine the prostitute as a sex worker, a strong woman who knows what she wants, a businesswoman. The sex worker becomes a sort of new version of the ‘happy hooker’. “Ekis Ekman shows in a convincing way how this happens through a rhetoric which portrays the victim position as a trait of character instead of using the correct definition of a victim: someone who is affected by something. In such a way the terrible reality in which women in prostitution find themselves is concealed. The fear of the ‘victim’ in the prostitution debate … is something which mirrors neo-liberalism’s general victim hate – since all talk of the vulnerable person immediately reveals an unjust society. Through making the victim taboo can one legitimise class inequalities and gender discrimination, for if there is no victim there is no perpetrator.”

Those who defend prostitution, as Ekis Ekman points out in an interview in the socialist newspaper Flamman, “have a contempt for weakness, a cold and cynical view of humanity, which has the consequence that you only have yourself to blame”. To see evidence of this we need look no further than the works of ‘academics’ such as Laura Agustin, someone who has gone as far as to deny the existence of human trafficking. Victims of pimps and human traffickers are referred to, in her language, as “migrant sex workers” who actively choose their situation. Discussing women brought into western countries by criminal gangs and locked into flats and prostituted for months at a time, Agustin writes:

“These circumstances where women live in sex establishments and seldom leave them before, without being asked, moved elsewhere receive great attention in the media and it’s taken as a given that this involves a complete denial of freedom. But in many cases migrant workers prefer this arrangement for a number of reasons. If they don’t leave the area they don’t waste any money and, if they have no work permit, they feel safer in a controlled environment. If someone else finds the meeting places for them and books their appointments it means they don’t have to do it themselves. If they have come on a 3 month tourist visa they want to devote as much time as possible to making money”.

Another sickening example from Ekman’s book is that in Australia, a country which has long championed legalised prostitution, victims of child abuse have came to be referred to as “child sex workers”. An official report there talks about a 9 year old abuse victim having been “offered a warm bed and a nice meal” by his abusers and of “thinking it was fantastic” when the men who raped him gave him $50. Any details of the crime he was subjected to are on the other hand almost completely absent, apart from the words: “sex took place”. What these examples all have in common is that they remove the focus from the perpetrator. They make it sound like the abused, prostitutes, children, the victims of poverty, drug abuse and economic exploitation, have themselves chosen the situation in which they find themselves. By changing the definition of the victim so as to turn it into a personal trait, by turning ‘victim’ and ’subject’ into the opposite of each other, the post-modernists lift away all talk of the deeper structures and power differences which affect people’s lives, something which of course suits perfectly the interests of the rich and powerful by masking the oppressive and unjust nature of the society in which we live.Transgression of divisions as opposed to their abolition In another section of the book she talks about what she describes as ‘the cult of the whore’, about the district of Raval in Barcelona, the people there who wear T-shirts with the slogan ‘Yo també soc puta’ (‘I am also a whore’). The cultural admiration of the prostitute is, in Ekman’s view, just contempt from another perspective: “It is still not a recognition of women’s humanity, rather a love of all that is nasty and low which the prostitute is associated with.” Those who wear the T-shirts in Barcelona think they’re being radical, that they’re transgressing norms. But “what they don’t understand is that the whore is not a whore, she is a person”. As Ekman writes:

“White ‘wiggers’ absorb hip-hop, backpackers and travellers absorb third-world cultures, male transvestites and drag-queens absorb the female and the femme absorbs the prostitute. The ‘transgressing’ of divisions anticipates that the divisions remain. When the white play black or when academics declare themselves whores and drug addicts, they are mocking those people who are black, who are prostitutes and who are drug addicts”.

They are, she points out, acting from a position of power and have a complete lack of understanding for what life is actually like for those whom they imitate and shower with false admiration. The difference couldn’t be starker between, on the one hand, the post-modernist’s ‘transgression’ of norms and divisions between people and, on the other, the revolutionary’s desire to abolish them. As Ekman concludes:

“In the absolute meaning there are no whores. There are people in prostitution for a longer or shorter period of time. There are no ‘types’ of people, no characters. They are people who have ended up in a certain situation. The fetishised ‘transgressing’ of divisions separates itself from the the revolutionary ‘abolition’ of them. The abolition of divisions arises from seeing the human being, the humanity in everyone, everyone’s equal needs … It is an objective solidarity which is built on a subjective understanding. One puts themselves in another’s place and imagines themselves under different circumstances. It is to look into someone else’s eyes and see yourself. And with this insight comes also an insight into the cruelty of the system which has made her into a ‘type’.”

Fiction of unions for ’sex workers’ I also liked the section where Ekis Ekman highlighted the fiction of so-called ’sex worker’ unions. The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW), for example, which is affiliated to the GMB and has spoken at conferences of the Labour Party and the Green Party, is run by a man called Douglas Fox. Fox claims to be a ’sex worker’ and accuses radical feminists of being big meanies out to silence him. Yet on closer inspection it becomes clear that Mr Fox is a liar. Sex worker he most certainly is not, rather he is a pimp who runs one of the UK’s largest escort firms. The IUSW’s membership, you see, is open to anyone, to pimps, to men who buy sex, to sympathetic academics. Of its minute membership of 150 (which compares to the 100,000 plus women and men who work in the UK’s sex industry) only a tiny minority are actual prostitutes. It’s the same all over Europe where similar organisations exist (such as ‘de Rode Draad’ in the Netherlands) – their membership is tiny, most aren’t even prostitutes, and they have never succeeded in pushing any independent union demands. Those who support prostitution though have of course never been ones for the facts. We see this idea of ‘unions’ coming from both the left and the right because it’s convenient, it gives prostitution a certain false legitimacy. It doesn’t work and it never will work, but it successfully diverts attention away from the deeper questions around prostitution and why it exists in our society. Related to this is the growth of the so-called ‘harm reduction’ lobby who have gained influence in recent years within a number of governments and international institutions. Ekman shows how this influence grew particularly around the time of the HIV/Aids epidemic of the 80s and 90s when the lobby was asked in by a number of organisations to determine policy on the issue. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) and World Health Organisation (WHO) have, for example, both come out in favour of legalising prostitution on the grounds that it will increase state revenues and make it easier to fight the spread of Aids. Both organisations, Ekman writes, have started using phrases such as “she is not a victim, but a subject” and have called prostitution “a women’s job which should be recognised”. The effect of this lobby gaining strength has of course been to further legitimise prostitution and make it harder to fight. When Ekman visited the offices of the organisation TAMPEP in Amsterdam, a group for HIV prevention among ‘migrant sex workers’, and asked if they couldn’t do anything to help women leave prostitution the reply she got was “But why would we do that? Our goal is to teach women to be better prostitutes” (ie. using condoms so as to protect the men who abuse them from infection). This aim (of teaching women to be better prostitutes) is supported with millions of euros of EU Commission money each year. Similarly an official pamphlet produced with the backing of the Australian government instructs prostituted women to “look like you’re enjoying it all the time” and tells the women how to turn down a violent man’s demands without “making him lose his lust”. In addition the pamphlet points out that it might be a good idea to try to avoid bruises because it “can force you to take time off work and as a result lose more money”.
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