Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 23, 2017 11:18 pm

Melissa Gira Grant: 'I got into sex work to afford to be a writer'

Melissa Gira Grant was one of the first webcam girls, before becoming a journalist. She talks to Liz Hoggard about the proposed changes to the UK's prostitution laws

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What do you think of the results of a year-long UK parliamentary inquiry into sex work where MPs have called for the introduction of the "Nordic" or "Scandinavian" model of prostitution, whereby clients and pimps are criminalised rather than the women themselves?
First, I think people need to be very clear what they're talking about – we call it the Nordic/Scandinavian model – but there's one law in Sweden, there's a law in Norway and one in Iceland, and they differ from one another..

In Norway, where the buyer of sex is considered criminal, there are reports of sex workers facing increased violence on the streets, and reports that sex workers have less ability to choose which customers they see and which they don't because when the customer is fearful of arrest they're not necessarily going to adhere to the safety protocols that sex workers have developed. So it still puts sex workers in an adversarial relationship with the police. And as long as their work is considered criminal, it can't actually be considered real work. I think the bottom line for me is: sex workers aren't supporting these proposals that are currently in front of the UK, or those in front of the European Parliament – in fact they stand quite opposed to these measures.

The people who are most likely to experience harm from them are the people standing up and saying: "We don't want this."

You think that part of the problem is the way we conflate prostitution with "sex trafficking"…
We know from experts in labour exploitation that forced labour in the sex industry is just one part of all of the kinds of forced labour that people experience. There are other industries such as domestic work and agricultural work where there are greater instances of forced labour. However, the lion's share of the conversation about trafficking is about what's referred to as "sex trafficking". And I think that's because the proponents of that view don't actually believe that sex work can be considered work. They assume it must be devoid of choice and consent and therefore all sex work is equivalent to trafficking. It's only been in the last 15 years that we've talked about trafficking in this way, and in particular we use these very sensational narratives that employ images of women in sex work to tell the story of everybody involved in trafficking. Even survivors of sex trafficking say that sort of imagery doesn't speak to their experience, that it feels objectifying and dehumanising. And I think that could make it much harder to support and identify people who are trafficked and who do need help.

Who were your role models growing up?
I feel I was very lucky as a young person to have images of women playing with their sexuality like the riot grrrls. It was a powerful thing.




Will nobody listen to the sex workers?

Melissa Gira Grant

The prostitution debate will get nowhere as long as women who sell sex are seen as victims to be 'rescued', their views ignored, argues a former sex worker in this extract from her new book

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A protest in Soho, London, by sex workers and representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes.

The rescue industry, as anthropologist Laura Agustín terms such efforts, derives value from the production of awareness: It gives the producers jobs, the effectiveness of which is measured by a subjective accounting of how much they are being talked about. Raising awareness serves to build value for the raisers, not for those who are the subjects of the awareness.

Awareness-raising about prostitution is not a value-neutral activity. Sex workers see a straight line between foundation dollars earmarked for advertisements such as those that appeared on Chicago buses – "Get Rich. Work In Prostitution. Pimps Keep The Profits, And Prostituted Women Often Pay With Their Lives" – and the allocation of resources to the Chicago police to arrest pimps in order to save women whom they call "prostituted".

Inevitably, all of these women face arrest, no matter what they call them, a demonstration of the harm produced by awareness raising despite any good intentions. "On paper, sex workers are still not as likely to face felony charges as their patrons," according to the Chicago Reporter, "who can be charged with a felony on their first offence under the Illinois Safe Children's Act, which was enacted in 2010." But when the paper examined felony arrest statistics they found, [the] data shows that prostitution-related felonies are being levied almost exclusively against sex workers. During the past four years, they made up 97% of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in Cook County. And the number only grew: felony convictions among sex workers increased by 68% between 2008 and 2011.

This was when anti-prostitution groups such as the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation became active in the city, demanding johns pay.

With awareness-raising as a goal, the debate circles back on itself. The problem at hand is not How do we improve the lives of sex workers?, but How should we continue to think and talk about the lives of sex workers, to carry on our discourse on prostitution regardless of how little sex workers are involved in it? Perhaps those fixated on debating ought to confine the scope of their solution to how best to bring about debates and leave those involved in the sex trade to themselves.

And on which side of this debate are sex workers presumed to sit?

Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work in order to have the right to do it free from harm. For many, if not the majority, of people who work for a living, our attitudes toward our work change over the course of our working lives, even over the course of each day on the job. The experiences of sex workers cannot be captured by corralling them onto either the exploited or the empowered side of the stage. Likewise there must be room for them to identify, publicly and collectively, what they wish to change about how they are treated as workers without being told that the only solution is for them to exit the industry. Their complaints about sex work shouldn't be construed, as they often are, as evidence of sex workers' desire to exit sex work. These complaints are common to all workers and shouldn't be exceptional when they are made about sex work. As labour journalist Sarah Jaffe said of the struggles at her former job as a waitress, "No one ever wanted to save me from the restaurant industry."


The contemporary prostitution debate might appear to have moved on from the kinds of concerns moral reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries expressed, but it has only slightly restated the question from, What do we do about prostitution? to, What do we do about prostitutes? According to the 21st-century heirs to the battle for moral hygiene, this is to be understood as a way of focusing on the prostitute as victim, not criminal. Forgive sex workers if they do not want the attention of those who refuse to listen to them.

Far from concerning the lives of people who do sex work, these debates are an opportunity for prostitution opponents to stake out their own intellectual, political, and moral contributions to "this issue". When feminist prostitute and Coyote [Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics] founder Margo St James sought to debate anti-prostitution activist Kathleen Barry at one of the first world conferences on trafficking in 1983, she was told by Barry that it would be "inappropriate to discuss sexual slavery with prostitute women".

This continues to this day, with anti-prostitution groups alleging that sex workers who want to participate in the same forums they do are "not representative", are members of a "sex industry lobby", or are working on behalf of – or are themselves – "pimps and traffickers". For my reporting on anti-sex work campaigners, I've been told I must be getting published only because I've been paid off by pimps. Barry went on to found the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which introduced the vague offence of ''sexual exploitation'' into United Nations and United States anti-trafficking policy, used by some to mean all commercial sex, whether or not force, fraud, or coercion are present.

Sweden's famed prostitution law – often described as a feminist victory for criminalising men who buy sex, and which Barry and her anti–sex work allies in Equality Now and the European Women's Lobby push as model legislation – was undertaken without any meaningful consultation with women who sell sex. By contrast, New Zealand's model of decriminalised prostitution was advanced by sex workers, and has since been evaluated with their participation (and largely to their satisfaction). Rather than evolving toward more sex worker involvement in policy, however, the backlash is nearly constant. Canada's supreme court agreed to hear a case that could result in removing laws against prostitution, and now in appeals, the same body declined to hear testimony from advocacy organisations run by sex workers themselves.

We must redraw the lines of the prostitution debate. Either prostitutes are in the debate or they are not. Sex workers are tired of being invited to publicly investigate the politics of their own lives only if they're also willing to serve as a prop for someone else's politics. As editor of the influential anthology Whores and Other Feminists, Jill Nagle writes, "One could argue that the production of feminist discourse around prostitution by non-prostitutes alienates the labourer herself from the process of her own representation." Not only are sex workers in the abstract used to aid feminists in "giving voice to the voiceless," those same feminists then remain free to ignore the content of sex workers' actual speech.

When sex workers are cast in this role, as mute icon or service instrument, it's the anti-prostitution camp at work, decrying sex workers' situation yet abandoning them to the fundamentally passive role they insist sex workers occupy in prostitution.
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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 06, 2017 3:15 pm

A Roundtable on Sex Work Politics and Prison Abolition : with Elene Lam, Chanelle Gallant, Robyn Maynard and Monica Forrester

Niloofar Golkar

The Bedford decision was announced on December 20, 2013 saw the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously strike down Canada’s three anti-sex work laws including laws prohibiting brothels, living on the avails of prostitution, and communicating in public with clients. Sex worker advocates argued that Canada’s anti-sex work laws were unconstitutional, in conflict with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and put the lives of sex workers in great danger. In June 2014, the Conservative government introduced Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, which criminalizes clients, advertising for sex work, and whoever helps or works with sex workers. While some feminists have applauded these harsher laws against prostitution, sex workers and their allies continue to struggle for justice. In this roundtable, we go beyond legal arguments to see who is benefiting from these laws. We also link sex workers’ issues to race and sexuality, police brutality, and prison abolition, bringing different movements together and discussing what should be done.

Robyn Maynard is a Black feminist writer and activist who works full time at Stella, a community-based social justice organization established and run “by and for” sex workers in Montréal, where she does outreach with indoor and street-based workers. She is also a co-founder of Montréal Noir; a Montréal-based network of Black activists committed to fighting anti-Black racism in Montréal. Over the last ten years, she has been actively organizing with youth and adults around anti-Black racism and racial profiling in Montréal and Canada. She is currently completing her first book called Policing Black Bodies: State Violence and Black Lives, for Fernwood Publishing, 2017.

Elene Lam has been in the sex workers’ movement for more than 15 years in Asia. She is founder of Butterfly ( Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and co-founder of Migrant Sex Workers Project. Butterfly does outreach work with and provides support to migrant sex workers, translating information about the sex worker movement, while bringing in their voices to the movement.

Chanelle Gallant has been organizing with the sex workers’ movement for over a decade. Elene Lam and Chanelle co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project, a group of sex workers, migrants, and allies working on transforming the conditions of work for migrant sex workers in Canada to reduce harm for all sex workers regardless of their immigration status. She also works with Monica in STRUT, an organization that works to center the voices of sex workers from criminalized communities who face state violence. She also co-edits a police and prison abolition blog called EverydayAbolition.com. Chanelle and Robyn are beginning to compile an anthology of radical sex workers justice politics.

Monica Forrester is a trans woman of colour, sex worker, and advocate. She is a program coordinator and does outreach at Maggie’s Toronto, an organization run by and for sex workers. She facilitates drop-ins for people involved in various forms of sex work including street-based sex workers and for people of different genders and sexualities. She also incorporated the non-profit organization Trans Pride Toronto which has been active since 2004. Trans Pride Toronto focuses on advocacy work and awareness raising within the transwomen community with a focus on trans people of colour. Monica and Chanelle Gallant will also be working with STRUT in a storytelling and media training event for sex workers.


Why are sex workers criminalized and who benefits from this criminalization?

Robyn: Historically the criminalization of sex work in Canada has been about exercising control over women’s bodies and sexuality through law enforcement. In 1867, the Contagious Diseases Act was passed, enabling the police to arrest women who they thought were sex workers, detain them for up to three months, and send them into forced treatments. This was all done in the name of protecting Canadian soldiers and the Canadian state. The work of Naomi Sayers has shown us how some of Canada’s earliest laws explicitly targeted Indigenous women. If you look at the arrest records in the 19th and early 20th centuries, you will see that a disproportionate amount of Black women were arrested on prostitution charges in Vancouver, Halifax, and other Canadian cities. At the same time, the Canadian government was actively keeping Black people from the Caribbean and the United States out of the country. They used stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality to justify their deportations, claiming that Black women were more likely to be prostitutes. Black women’s sexuality has always been criminalized. We have been stereotyped as ‘jezebels’ since the era of chattel slavery because they see us as threatening to the dominant social order. The laws were racialized from the beginning, and continue to be today. As well, criminalization of drugs and sex work were justified as protecting white women from the harms of migrant and racialized men. This racism and xenophobia is part of a larger context of asserting control over women’s bodies, especially Indigenous and Black women, dating back to the era of colonization and slavery.

Elene: Criminalization happens in two areas. First, it relates to capitalism. The government criminalizes sex work to keep people in exploitative situations and jobs. Sex work is unique, and here I specifically talk about women. If women can work anytime, anywhere, and in different ways, it is difficult for the market to maintain control. Because so many women are forced to work in hyper-exploitative industries such as farming and the food industry, sex work is a very powerful industry. Through sex work, women can increase their power by refusing more conventionally exploitative work. For example, many people of colour are pushed out from other industries, so they enter sex work. Also, many raids against places of sex work target East Asian people. By criminalizing sex work, those in power maintain their control and keep people in exploitative situations by eliminating other potential alternatives.

Second, a major justification for criminalizing sex work is the moral aspect. People in power, politicians, and religious groups organize in terms of morality and refer to violence against women. In many countries, sex work was not initially criminalized or illegal, but became criminalized through colonialism and its imposed morality, which the elite use to justify the oppression of racialized and colonized people.

Chanelle: I’d also like to discuss reproductive labour and capitalism as well. Sex workers control access to sexual labour and reproductive labour, and I think that one of the reasons sex workers face criminalization is because they disobey the cultural demand to provide free sexual, emotional, and reproductive labour. The penalization of sex workers is critical in the coercion of free sexual and reproductive labour from non-sex workers, which is why the punishment of sex workers is so visible. It provides this scare; a terrifying potential alternative should women refuse those terms and demand compensation or even recognition for sex as a form of labour. So if a woman asks, “Why should I sleep with you or bear and raise your baby? What would you do for me?” they’ll say, “She is a whore!” And with that comes forms of cultural, social, and economic sanctions because capitalism requires free labour from women. It can’t exist without reproductive labour from women, and men control and exploit that labour through the creation of the ‘bad woman,’ the ‘whore’ who asks for something that she’s not entitled to. Part of this critique comes from the roots of radical feminism. But of course, radical feminism has been ruined by racist transmisogyny, so I identify more as a revolutionary feminist, but I see the oppression of women as depending, in part, on the oppression of sex workers.

Monica: Laws that try to abolish sex work say that women need saving, and that they can’t make decisions on their own. This takes away rights from women and doesn’t look at the diversity of sex work, which includes trans women, trans men, and gender fluid people. At the municipal level in Toronto for instance, laws affect everyone in different ways in the sex industry. And they especially impact more visible street-based sex workers, people of colour, and Aboriginal people. They are policed more and are pushed out from their communities, and they face more reactions from their clients. This pushes sex workers into more dangerous areas, where there is no communication to keep them safe. So these laws put sex workers at higher risk than the previous laws. There are different reasons for why people do sex work; it could be poverty or some people just enjoy it. These laws target everyone, and many people are criminalized not only for sex work, but also because of the colour of their skin, their culture, or their citizenship status, etc.

What are the methods of decriminalizing sex work? And how do you connect this to the struggle for prison abolition?

Robyn: When we talk about the history of abolitionist movements, it comes from Black organizing against slavery. If we look at modern incarnations of abolitionist movements against the prison industrial complex (PIC), we also see that they continue to be led by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people. For example, the work of Angela Davis links incarceration to historical forms of racism to prisons today. When we are talking about fighting racial profiling and incarceration of targeted communities, especially Black communities, we should put forward prison abolition as our goal. So to me, when we talk about abolition, we mean removing the power that law enforcement has to control and harm our bodies. Pushing to criminalize sex work does just the opposite.

So-called sex work abolitionists who push for criminalization are actually opposed to this view, and call for the reinforcement of law, prisons, and policing. We need to reclaim what abolition means. If we want to be intersectional on this issue, we should ask, “Who actually are sex workers?” Many of them are women of colour, Indigenous, and Black racialized bodies already subject to criminalization, and sometimes deportation. When we talk about prison abolition, we talk about stopping the criminalization of racialized bodies. When we advocate for the decriminalization of sex work, we must also address how the state has historically criminalized people of colour. Also any form of rescue industry that talks about abolition, but undermines these broader issues, misses the point. In my experience as an outreach worker at Stella, the police continue to harass and intimidate sex workers, especially Black and Inuit sex workers who sell or trade sex in Montréal. I talked to many sex workers who have been physically or sexually abused by police officers. Regardless of how the laws are framed, the police still go to sex workers’ places of work (often the street) and intimidate them. And research from the US shows that one of the most common forms of violence toward sex workers comes from the police.

Elene: Prison is a place of human rights violations, a place that takes away peoples’ freedom and supports torture. The whole PIC is being justified to isolate and oppress people of colour, sexual minorities and non-conforming white people while the rest of society thinks it keeps them safe. The ideology behind prison is to separate these different groups of people from mainstream people and generate fear in society. When I came to Canada I saw that many jobs needed criminal background checks! Why do we need that many background checks? So that when a criminalized and imprisoned person is released, they will be kept out and isolated.

In the past, people saw sex work as totally evil, but now it has changed and they use the word victim. The term victim is being used against sex workers. Sex workers are being targeted under the guise of protection. For example, when a corporation sells stuff on the street you don’t complain to the city to come and arrest them. So why when sex workers are selling their service on the streets everybody calls it a social nuisance? These two things work together: if you are not the victim then you are the worst thing in society, and this is how they justify criminalization and regulation.

Chanelle: I relate prison abolition to sex work from what Robyn and Elene already touched on, which is that an intersectional sex workers movement has to consider how the PIC oppresses many sex workers. So radical intersectional sex work organizing must be both prison and police abolitionist, and I include child protection services – its role in oppression and colonialism – within the PIC. But that system is not reformable for many sex workers because it has been designed as a tool and a weapon of oppression.

On its own, a sole focus on decriminalizing sex work is not enough. Especially because a lot of sex work activists will also support the enforcement of other laws. I understand where it is coming from. Sex workers are a targeted group, because our society has criminalized their forms of safety, pushed them into unsafe conditions, and then abandoned them to the predators. Of course that group of people will say, “We deserve protection, we deserve our lives, we deserve to be able to protect our own lives,” and many people will push to criminalize those who harm sex workers. To assure the people that decriminalization will not lead to some sort of chaos, they will say, “We are going to decriminalize sex work, but don’t worry we won’t decriminalize all other sorts of things and other forms of abuse.” Again I understand that because we share the same goal, which is safety for sex workers. However, when we look at the sex workers that are the most marginalized, they may benefit from decriminalization of sex work, but it may not have the impact we want it to because they will still be subjected to other forms of criminalization based on who they are. I know this is complex and controversial but I do support the abolition of all forms of prison, policing, and child welfare services.

In its place, sex workers can implement their own very effective, low cost, tried and true strategies of protection from intimate partner violence, client violence, and stranger violence. Sex workers are very knowledgeable and skillful at that, and have a lot to share with the prison abolition movement because the big boogie man in the prison abolition movement is, “What about the rapists and murderers?” Well, sex workers know about the rapists and murderers, and have all kinds of strategies to protect themselves. Many prison abolitionists say that in order to have abolition we need to have a society where people have the resources they need and that will prevent the vast bulk of harm. If people have the housing, food, and health care (including mental healthcare and substance abuse treatment) that they need, we will reduce lots of harm. We need to decriminalize sex workers’ methods of self-protection.

Monica: With these new laws, we see more police presence in the places that sex workers used to be. This pushes sex workers out of their safe areas, particularly trans women. The police force called TAVIS (Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy), in their words, tries to keep streets safe and target criminal activity, which means targeting sex workers and people who live in impoverished areas. Toronto’s east end has lots of low-income housing that many sex workers used to work at and still do, but we see so many of them being pushed out of those areas by new condo developments.

We also should look at how different police divisions act on sex workers differently. For example, 51 division has always been very hardcore in targeting marginalized and impoverished people and sex workers. In the last 30 years as a sex worker, my worst violent experience has been with law enforcement, and I know a lot of sex workers would say the same. I had only two incidents with clients, and I handled them on my own without the help of police. I know many women in the trans community who are migrant workers that have been arrested and waiting to be deported but still sitting in a Canadian jail for two years.

Criminalization has a specific effect on Indigenous women. We see that colonial sexuality has been internalized for many Aboriginal women and men. It reaffirms how our bodies can be criminalized and sexualized at the same time by law enforcement. They think they can do what they want with our bodies. In our cultures, we respected our bodies, our bodies were beautiful, sex was beautiful. The state thinks it can control our bodies through poverty, discrimination, the appropriation of our lands, and that is why a lot of two-spirited and Indigenous women are criminalized. The government responds by blaming peoples’ lifestyles, as if we are at fault for being murdered or sexually assaulted, and this is where the government clearly shows its racism against Indigenous women. In response, Idle No More has extended beyond pipelines, reserves, and impoverishment to include sex workers’ issues, our bodies, and our choices. It’s so important because Indigenous people and people of colour have the highest rates of incarceration, and premature death, so something has to be done.

Did Bill C-36 change anything? How has it affected resistance?

Monica: The laws before were the bawdy house ban, material benefits ban, and a ban on communicating in public for prostitution. These laws were brought down, but the new laws bring these back indirectly and further criminalize those who work with sex workers, while targeting johns and advertising. We are vulnerable because these laws don’t allow us to inform people when we are working, or don’t allow us to have a spouse or a friend around for safety when we are working because they can be charged as traffickers. Many women now are working outdoors instead of indoors; many come to our drop-ins for different issues, such as counselling because of the stress that came with new laws, financial and safety issues, and/or to talk about next steps. Because of increased police presence, many sex workers have shifted their ways of working.

Personally, I think one way to challenge Bill C-36 and to show that the problem is systemic racism and not about the type of work, would be the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Harper claimed that the crisis was all about lifestyle and he argued that these laws would help women to stay safe, but since these laws, women are still being murdered or have gone missing.
These laws are new, so it will take a bit of time to collect data and present a case, but at Maggie’s we are gathering info on how C-36 is affecting the lives and working conditions of sex workers. We have also been engaging with different communities, like Sistering, in the west end, and Regent Park, in the south end, to keep the communication and flow of information of who has been criminalized or assaulted. We aim to accumulate that data and bring it forward when the time is right to say that these laws are putting sex workers more at risk.

Chanelle: The legal environment for sex workers has not improved at all. That’s clear to everyone. It is not just clear to the sex working community across this country, but globally it was also obvious to hundreds of lawyers who supported us, and to global health organizations such as UN AIDS, all of whom have argued that the criminalization of sex work is against human rights, public safety, and public health. But there has been a difference since the Bedford decision: sex work organizing has become super-powered. Do you agree Robyn?

Robyn: Yeah! It has created a sense of connectedness and community within the sex worker’s movement; it brought the sense that we won together.

Chanelle: It did! Although it was essentially overturned by Bill C-36, the Bedford decision still give this sense of possibility and power to sex work organizers, and sex workers generally, that I haven’t seen in the last 10 years. It was an enormous and decisive win. None of the long-time sex work organizers like myself expected that the entire Supreme Court would unanimously rule against all of the provisions that were challenged! Once people start to get the sense of themselves as being capable of that kind of change, it produces an overall sense of power, and although the new legislation came in, the resistance is stronger. Sex workers were brought into conversations and policy decisions like never before. And sex workers have gained more voice in the media too. I spent 10 years reading e-media on sex work issues; reporters never consulted anyone in the sex work community on stories about sex work. Similarly, it is not just that sex workers have been invited into policy decisions or are more effective at elbowing our way in, but I’m seeing sex workers involved at a policy level in a way that they have not been before. An example of that would be Maggie’s, the Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, being a part of a provincial roundtable on sexual harassment and violence against women. That would not have happened five years ago. Sex workers are a community that has been impacted by sexual harassment and sexual violence, but they would have been left out of that conversation entirely in the past.

Regarding working conditions of sex workers, I don’t believe anything has changed for the better. In fact, it has become even worse; we see increasing criminalization of those who carry sex workers advertising, and those sex workers who had previously used those forms of advertising are being pushed onto the streets, which is bad news for sex workers who are not familiar with that form of working.
Also, the federal government recently introduced a new regulation that bans migrants on student visas from participating in the sex industry, including legal forms of the sex industry. So at the policy level, we’re seeing rollbacks, but at the movement level, we’re getting stronger.

Robyn: Answering the phones at Stella, I heard firsthand how excited the sex workers were after the Bedford decision, while the outcome after C-36 was the opposite. C-36 is a nightmare for many sex workers. At the time it was passed I was working our ‘ligne ‘d’écoute,’ a phone line for sex workers, and we received 10 times more calls than usual from sex workers who were stressed about the new laws. The callers were worried about their income and how they would be able to work. They were especially worried about how to place ads on the internet and in newspapers because suddenly all the print media in Montréal stopped printing sex workers’ ads. For many people who were unfamiliar with the internet, particularly older sex workers without formal education, print ads were how they worked for decades; so overnight they lost their primary source of income and were suddenly facing poverty.

This is a huge difference from prohibitionist feminists who were publicly celebrating the passage of the new law. Bill C-36 did not decriminalize sex work. That’s why it is still possible for Ottawa police to deport 11 migrant sex workers after raiding their workplaces. Each year, we see feminist groups like the Collabouration of Struggles Against Sexual Exploitation (La CLES) pushing the Montréal police to enter sex workers’ workplaces during the Grand Prix, resulting in police harassment of sex workers. I have also heard of many cases in which police enter sex workers’ workplaces to check to see if people are on welfare or not, so even if they’re not arrested for being sex workers they may lose their social assistance. These laws have increased surveillance of sex workers and made it harder to access safer sex materials. For example, having condoms on site is now more discouraged than before.

Elene: I was so happy when I first came to Canada, and then this law passed. It was significant for the sex workers’ movement across the world. Although there is lots of dialogue and discussion about how we see sex work as legitimate work, in the judgment and in society, that part is not there. Instead you hear the same rhetoric that sex workers are victims, and the purpose is very clear: they want to abolish sex work. In many countries you cannot challenge the law, but in Canada you can lobby with politicians to change it. But when there is a challenge to the law it makes the government very smart. They find a gap in the law and use it to abolish sex work by imposing laws and regulation, and by restricting resources. They want to fill in the gap and make it even harder to survive. Why do we have so many forms of sex work? Because when laws change, sex workers change their ways to do business in order to survive.

I feel empowered that sex workers are so organized not just in the sex work sector, but now sex workers are going to many different segments of society. We see academics and lawyers who are supporting the cause, so the question is, “How can we mobilize more people to support sex work as legitimate work?” We should also change the dialogue and stigma that sex work is victimizing, and emphasize that sex work is not harmful to society. For instance, when I travel, I like to stay in a place that has lots of street-based sex workers, because their presence makes it a safer place in the city. But people usually have this illusion that there are so many sex workers on the street so it must be dangerous, but they are wrong!

Chanelle: Yes, smart, savvy women on the street at 3 am, who else would you rather have around you? As a woman, I would like to see smart women with experience on the street around, that is my community watch. And that is why I think the prison abolition movement should bang on the door of the the sex worker’s movement, because its skills and experiences like this that will create an actual community safety watch.

Elene: When I go to different cities, to the areas that sex workers are at, you see all sorts of different industries active there. Restaurants, bars, taxi drivers, etc. But, this side is not discussed by the society. Instead, sex work is always treated as a nuisance, and the nuisance is always based on moral judgements.

Chanelle: Yeah, and the tricky thing about the construction of sex workers as victims is that it produces the epidemic of violence against sex workers. The criminal legal system produces the ‘problem’ of sex workers as victims and then sends in the police, social workers, Canada Border Services Agency, and other agents of oppression who conveniently become so-called ‘rescuers.’

Elene: Now the public thinks that the client is the fundamental problem and should be criminalized, but they are wrong. For example, when you see the statistics of how many sex workers have been murdered by a client and compare it with the number of wives murdered by their husbands, you see that the latter is higher. So if you apply the same logic to domestic violence, you would need to criminalize the family and marriage, as well as punish all the husbands.

Robyn: Another issue with Bill C-36 is that they argue that because women are victims then they should do something else. For example, they say Black women are overrepresented in the sex industry, but they can’t see that the only other jobs available to many Black women are in the service sector, or domestic work and taking care of white peoples’ kids. There are structural elements of race and class that go unaddressed by anti-prostitution ‘exit’ programs.


Continues at: http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/18-sexworker/
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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 08, 2017 1:52 pm

The prostitute is imagined as an invisible woman, a voiceless woman, a woman concealed even in public, in her nudity—in all her presumed availability.

-Melissa Gira Grant
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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby Heaven Swan » Sun Apr 16, 2017 8:23 pm

Good news from France.

One year into the passage of the Nordic approach and newly recognized rights for victims of prostitution and trafficking are being implemented by assisting them with residency permits, financial assistance, emergency and social housing, exit programs...



What’s Current: 937 johns, zero prostituted women arrested in France since adoption of Nordic model


April 13, 2017 by Susan Cox
http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/04/ ... dic-model/

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France has arrested 937 johns since implementing the Nordic Model one year ago. The law has also reduced the number of prostituted persons arrested each year — from 1,500 to zero. Ninety per cent of prostituted persons in France are trafficked, mainly from Bulgaria, Romania, China, and Nigeria; so one of the aims of the legislation and its enforcement is to make France less attractive to pimps and traffickers.


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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby Heaven Swan » Sat Apr 22, 2017 8:17 am

Left Unity Talk

Posted on April 21, 2017 by rmott62
https://rebeccamott.net/2017/04/21/left-unity-talk/

Thanks for inviting me to speak to you. I am speaking as an exited woman who fights for abortion.

I only did indoors prostitution – such as inside clubs, escorting and girlfriend experience. All this is portrayed by the sex work as safe – or at least safe enough to be in the public gaze.

I was prostituted between the ages of 14 to 27. I speak to my truths, and my many connections on international level with exited women.

To understand what it is to be prostituted, we must look at the concept of choice with a clear eye. The sex work lobby want only speak to prostituted women when speaking to choice.

They purposely make invisible the choice of punters and sex trade profiteers, and therefore make all male violence to the prostituted invisible.

The prostituted are stripped of all access to free and full choice.

The average age that a female enters the sex trade – usually after or during sexual, mental and or physical abuse.

Many women who enter the sex trade do so out poverty or lack of access to education or employment.

Most women inside prostitution have multiple vulnerabilities and pushes into the sex trade – none of which can be framed as free choices.

On the other hand, punters can and do freely choose whether or not to buy another human for his sexual greed and entitlement. Punters have the free choice to be as violence as his porn dreams make him.

For in the punter’s mind, he is not buying a full human being with rights to safety and dignity – he is buying sexual goods to own, to control and to throw away.

Punters are paying to rape, punters are paying to torture, and punters can pay to make the prostituted disappear.

This is why no aspect of prostitution can made safe, and why exited fight so passionately for abolition not harm reduction, not decriminalisation or other ways of keeping the status quo for sex trade profiteers.

All punters have the knowledge that they owned and controlled the prostituted, and in that environment he can as violence as he wishes with no consequence.

The sex trade as an institution is highly skilled at making all damages done to the prostituted vanish.

It is the norm in the sex trade, for the prostituted women and girls to just disappear. Many are murdered, and their bodies thrown away.

Many are forced into other aspects of the sex trade, often porn – usually more threatening and violent as a punishment or a way to break her down.

I, and all the exited women I know, live inside extreme violence. We are know of prostituted women and girls or were made to disappear. Every time we speak out, we hold these Sisters in our hearts, as we promise them to stop other females going through that hell.

This is an invisible genocide. It is made invisible for as many prostituted women and girls disappear, they are replace with yet more vulnerable females.

This is a human rights emergency, not a labour issue.

What saddened many exited women, is how too many of the Left have fallen for the propaganda of the sex work lobby.

Prostitution is capitalism in its rawest form. The purpose of prostitution is to make a huge profit by making mainly women and girls into sub-human sexual goods.

These goods are sold to punters who have the entitlement to own, control and damage them as much as they can afford. There no interest in the physical and mental welfare of the prostituted.

How can say you against capitalism and back the sex work lobby?

That is a deep betrayal of the prostituted.

Exited women see the Nordic Model as the first step to getting full human rights and dignity for all the prostituted.

We must hold punters and sex trade profiteers accountable for the destruction of the prostituted..

We must decriminalise the prostituted, whilst setting up long-term holistic exiting programmes for the prostituted who want to leave.

It would be good if we fined punters at least 10% of their wages or benefits. If he can afford to pay for sex, he can afford that fine. Punters who repeated offenders or use extreme violence should be imprisoned, as should all sex trade profiteers.

It would be good if the fines were used to fund all exiting programmes, and used for reparations for all the mental and physical damages done to the prostituted.

All exiting programmes should informed and hopefully run by exited women.

They should provide more than just economic help and advice, more than harm reduction advice, more than just access to safe housing, jobs or access to education. All these are vital, but without long specialist therapy for complex trauma, we are just patching the prostituted not giving them back their full humanity.

We must fight to build a society and culture that cannot imagine why we thought prostitution was ever a good idea.

Listen to exited women, and think more radically.
"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: Victory for Survivors--Ireland passes the Nordic Model

Postby Heaven Swan » Thu Dec 07, 2017 9:19 am

About our Trafficking coverage
We shine a light on human trafficking, forced labour and modern-day slavery

How One Family Became Sex Traffickers

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"I was never taught to value women. I saw my mother being hit by my stepfathers. She'd go back to them again and again. So women became worthless."

By Anastasia Moloney

MEXICO CITY, Nov 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Mario Garfias never thought twice when he pulled out his baseball bat, nicknamed Panchito, to beat the women and teenage girls that he used as prostitutes in Mexico City's red light district of La Merced.

Together with his younger brother Enrique and mother Esperanza, Garfias was a sex trafficker. For nearly eight years, the trio inflicted terror over young women and girls - who the brothers referred to as "merchandise".

If the girls, some as young as 16, did not earn their daily quota or disobeyed rules, they faced Panchito.

"I'd say it was time to see Panchito. I'd hit them with it," said Mario Garfias, who headed the sex trafficking ring.

"Obviously never in the face because I'd send them to work. But I'd hit them across the back, legs and buttocks," said Garfias, who like his brother and mother, spent nearly 12 years in prison for his crimes.

Dart pistols were also used against women, while one woman was once tied to a chair with fireworks placed around her genitals, the brothers said.

Two years after the family's release from prison, their stories offer a rare insight into the methods of sex traffickers - how they lure their victims and the violence they use to control them.

They also reveal a cycle of violence that usually starts in childhood - an experience traffickers and their victims often share - blurring the lines between the abused and the abuser.


CHILDHOOD ABUSE

Garfias and his five brothers grew up hungry, in a home where domestic violence was everyday.

Their mother, Esperanza, said a neighbour in Mexico City sexually abused her when she was five, while her own mother would beat her.

To escape the abuse, she ran away from home aged 12. Homeless and later pregnant, she then turned to alcohol and prostitution to survive.

The brothers say growing up in such an environment shaped their attitudes towards women and skewed their moral compass.

"Obviously I'm not justifying myself but I grew up thinking violence was normal. That's how I was raised," Garfias said.

"I was never taught to value women. I saw my mother being hit by my stepfathers. She'd go back to them again and again. So women became worthless."

As a teenager, Garfias found work as a cleaner in a brothel for a big-time pimp in La Merced.

There he convinced a girl to work for him instead. He poached more women working for other pimps along La Merced's warren of rubbish-strewn colonial alleyways.

Within a year Garfias was running a lucrative business employing his brothers and mother. He earnt up to $1,000 a day from about 10 women and girls serving about 20 clients a day.

In Mexico, the most common form of human trafficking is women and girls forced into sex work.

Nearly 380,000 people are trapped in modern slavery in Mexico, including forced prostitution, according to rights group, the Walk Free Foundation.

Across Mexico, sex trafficking is often a family-run business. Victims usually know their traffickers and live in the same community.

It would take Garfias, now 39, and his brother Enrique just a few weeks to lure a woman in with false promises of a better future. They would shower them with "romantic gestures" - a bunch of roses, a teddy bear, or a box of chocolates.

"Honestly it was so easy. For me the best way was to make her believe that I was in love with her," the younger brother, Enrique, said. "We'd pass a nice house and I'd say: 'That will be ours soon where we'll get married and have children'."

The brothers preyed on women who came from poor and troubled homes where domestic and or sexual violence was rife.

"They were vulnerable. They lacked love. We took advantage of that," said Mario Garfias, whose neck bears a tattoo of a scorpion and his lower arm one of a chained naked woman.

"There's nothing easier than tricking a woman who doesn't love herself, whose self-esteem is rock bottom.

First I'd raise her self-esteem, and then once they were with me, I'd lower it to the ground."

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Mario Garfias, a former convicted sex trafficker, during an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Mexico City, Mexico on October 10, 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Theo Hessing

TOTAL CONTROL

The brothers also exerted psychological control over their victims, threatening to harm their family if they refused or tried to escape.

As Mario Garfias courted his victims, they would share details about their family, such as their parents' names and where they lived.

"I've a good memory. The information the girls told me I'd later use against them," he said.

The brothers played a good cop–bad cop routine. Enrique was considered the 'consoler', the more gentle and dashing brother, while Mario was the violent one.

Their mother would cook for her sons and their victims, while telling the women to work harder.

"I didn't say anything about my sons' work with the girls because for me it was normal. I didn't think it was bad because I'd lived it," said the softly-spoken woman.

Mario Garfias said he enjoyed the money and power. With his victims' earnings, he bought cars, designer clothes, mobile phones and furnished apartments.

The brothers didn't feel they were doing anything wrong.

"I'd seen my mother work as a prostitute. I thought it was normal," said Enrique Garfias. "We didn't see them as human beings but as our workers. I saw them as merchandise that gave me money, that sustained my family."

The brothers controlled almost every step their victims took - when they could eat and sleep, whom they could talk to, and on which street corner to stand.

"They had to ask permission for everything. They were never alone," said Mario Garfias.

Inside La Merced's grimy houses and hotels were brothels with bare rooms separated by sheets.

The brothers paid bribes to the police to receive tip-offs about brothel raids, while street watchmen were employed to spot anyone who tried to run away.

"I'd tell the girls: 'Watch this, I'll whistle and see how many people raise their hands.' Just in one block, two or three hands would go up," said Enrique Garfias. "'You see it's impossible for you to escape,'" he would tell the women.



https://www.freedomunited.org/news/one- ... t_12032017
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