Do punks denounce anti-prostitution, anti-pimping and anti-trafficking policies invariably used to repress women?

[Zenaan Harkness]

A new and compelling perspective for me...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/sws/gail-pheterson/at-long-last-listen-to-women

 At long last, listen to the women!
Gail Pheterson 2 March 2016

State entrapment, extortion, imprisonment and slander sharpen the
consciousness of sex workers who denounce anti-prostitution,
anti-pimping and anti-trafficking policies invariably used to repress
women and undermine feminist liberation struggles.

'Proud to be whores'. Prostitutes demonstrate in Paris in 2008.
philippe leroyer/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)

---
Gail Pheterson began organising with the sex workers of COYOTE in San
Francisco in 1984 during a sabbatical year at the Institute for the
Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley. While in
San Francisco she designed an alliance project of whores, wives and
dykes that transformed into a network of Bad Girl Rap Groups.
Co-facilitated with Margo St. James, Scarlot Harlot/Carol Leigh,
Priscilla Alexander, Sharon Kaiser, E. Kitch Childs, Gloria Locket and
others, the Bad Girl Rap Groups were open to "any woman who had ever
been stigmatised as bad by her work, colour, class, sexuality, history
of abuse, or just plain gender".

Upon her return to Europe, she co-founded the Red Thread and Pink
Thread, two interwoven Dutch organisations of sex workers and allies,
with Margot Alvarez, Ans van der Drift, Martine Groen, Violet and
others. She also co-organised with Margo St. James the First World
Whores’ Congress in Amsterdam and the Second World Whores’ Congress at
the European Parliament in Brussels, and co-founded the International
Committee for Prostitutes' Rights.

Gail Pheterson edited the transcripts of the Whores' Congresses for
publication in A Vindication of the Rights of Whores (released in
Spanish under the title Nosotras Las Putas) and published a series of
essays titled The Prostitution Prism (also in Spanish and French),
including her most known and widely translated essay, ‘The Whore
Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male Unworthiness’.
---

Women mobilised a grassroots liberation movement fifty years ago in
defiant resistance against oppression. Those feminists knew their
struggle was dangerous but they were unrelenting in claiming rights
for women as autonomous persons. Where are we now in this crusade for
freedom?

The idea of equality between the sexes has moved into the global
limelight over the past decades, but women's liberation is still a far
cry from home. Government authorities, world organisations, and social
reformers continue to undermine radical analysis of pervasive sexism
with emotionally-charged rhetoric of individual female misfortune and
male misconduct. Exposés of criminal and perverse men capturing
helpless women ignite public outrage while leaving intact
institutional obstacles to women’s mobility, work, and bodily
self-determination. This rhetoric sabotages liberation strategies by
taking women-on-the-run into protective custody of the status quo.
Anti-violence discourse then serves to reinforce state repression of
women. Knowingly or unknowingly, the establishment has succeeded in
wrenching the feminist agenda from its subversive fibre. The result is
effective camouflage of the political cause for women's flight and
disregard for women's material needs, social choices and, most
insidiously, agency in thinking and shaping their destinies.

All women have reason to seek liberty, but all do not face the same
life conditions. The contemporary foot soldiers of our movement are
rightless migrant women disallowed from leaving home, crossing
borders, earning money, or living independently. Without rights, they
are forced to bargain their survival with abusive profiteers inside
and outside the law. In legislation, popular media, police records, UN
conventions, and even ill-founded feminist tracts, they are branded
trafficked women, trapped in the nexus of global power relations, and
categorised as this or that kind of victim or tramp.
Savvy feminists

Sex worker activists are savvy feminist analysts of these
machinations, their consciousness undoubtedly sharpened by daily
trials of (escaping) state entrapment, extortion, imprisonment, and
slander. As intimates of both backroom and front stage men,
prostitutes are solicited by government officials to serve as
undercover agents and informants. Their advantage over socially
reputable women is their exclusion from polite society and direct
experience of institutional vice. Mainstream feminists would do well
to listen to their word in public as male authorities do in private.
Their first demand is decriminalisation of sex work. This implies
repealing prohibitions against negotiations and services attached to
the sex industry, including the hiring of third parties to facilitate
management of businesses and travel to foreign markets. In other
words, sex workers demand the abolition of anti-prostitution,
anti-pimping and anti-trafficking laws. They know that such laws
invariably translate into discriminatory surveillance, fines, arrest,
detention, and expulsion of migrant women.

Since popular opinion equates pimping and trafficking with the vile
use and abuse of women, well-intentioned reformers persist in
promoting restrictive legislation that curtails women's sexual
negotiations and geographic displacements. Most existing criminal laws
against pimping and trafficking are about sex, money, and travel – not
about violence. Some countries do require evidence of force to proceed
with prosecution, but women are nonetheless subject to discriminatory
surveillance rationalised as preventive measures ‘for their own good’.

Violence, coercion, and deceit do, of course, occur in prostitution,
as elsewhere in the sex class system. Certainly sex workers should
have the same recourse to laws against those crimes as any legitimate
plaintiff would have in cases of battery, rape, fraud, kidnapping, or
other offense against their person. But equal juridical treatment is
incompatible with prejudicial classification as prostitute or
trafficked woman. Sex workers demand generic, gender-neutral
consideration undifferentiated from other workers, citizens, or human
beings. Crimes against women are not crimes against incapacitated
dependents, property, or morality; they are crimes against
individuals.
Criminalise marriage?

Women have ample cause for class action to claim compensation for a
host of injustices, whether unpaid labour, insult, assault, or
discrimination. Reparation could be a feminist collective demand.
Matrimony and maternity are clearly the key historical sites of
subjugation for women in terms of toil and sacrifice. But feminists
have never called for prohibition of marriage or pregnancy, regardless
of the risks and documented damages. Feminists have fought to give
women alternatives or escapes from heterosexual coercions with divorce
rights, battered women shelters and lesbians legitimacy. And they have
fought to give women escapes from forced pregnancy or forced
sterilisation by demanding reproductive choice and by facilitating
access to contraception and abortion. But surely they would not deny
women the right to decide for themselves whether to marry or bear a
child or even whether to remain with an abusive husband.  And they
would not deny the rewards and satisfactions some women experience as
wives or mothers. Why do sex workers not receive the same respect?

There could also be a feminist class action to claim compensation for
injustices in the sex industry. And clearly, alternatives and escape
channels depend upon feminist struggles for migrant rights, labour
rights, and residency permits for independent women. But there is no
justification for denying the right to negotiate payment for sexual
services. Individually we are each in the grip of specific realities,
each a unique person, and each entitled to our own thought processes
and life choices. Collectively we can shape visions and common
liberatory goals without judging any individual woman for her
meanderings in the sex class system.
This article is published as part of the 'Sex workers speak: who
listens?' series on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery, generously
sponsored by COST Action IS1209 ‘Comparing European Prostitution
Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance' (ProsPol).
ProsPol is funded by COST. The University of Essex is its Grant Holder
Institution.


About the author

Gail Pheterson is currently Associate Professor [Maître de
conférences] of social psychology, Université de Picardie Jules Verne,
Amiens, France, and Researcher at the Centre de recherches
sociologiques et politiques de Paris, CNRS/University Paris 8. In
alliance with sex workers, she organised the International Committee
for Prostitutes' Rights and the World Whores' Congresses in 1985-86.
She is editor of A Vindication of the Rights of Whores, and author of
The Prostitution Prism and Femmes en flagrant délit d'indépendance.
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