Prof. Joel Quirk of the Political Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa came to the Brown Center for Slavery and Justice to lecture on the problematic nature of the anti-sex worker “abolitionist” efforts and the fictitious nature of its alleged global solidarity. This lecture featured a Q & A afterwards and is approximately 70 minutes.
For several months now, we have been reporting on the efforts of sex workers who are trying to assert their rights despite the efforts of self-described “abolitionists” who describe all consenting sexual activity in exchange for money as a form of human trafficking. At times, we have found value in the work of writers at Reason magazine useful despite the fact that, as a libertarian-capitalist publication, the organization has political goals that might prove to be problematic.
The conclusion that a writer at Reason cannot reach but which I can is a Marxist one. It requires an understanding that first liberalism and now neoliberalism has always functioned as a sort of cultural pressure release mechanism. Throughout history, it has asserted the language and ideological coordinates of coincidental radical politics and domesticated these ideas, making them more palatable for the mainstream.
John Maynard Keynes is such an example, he famously created the political economy of the modern welfare state while maintaining the structures of capitalism that would have otherwise been expropriated by the victorious anti-Fascist Communist partisan governments in the post-World War II period. As a result, the early elements of the European Union were created, the British got a national healthcare plan, and the Soviet Union was besieged for the next four and a half decades despite the fact they were the first country on earth that had tried to create both those systems in 1917.
This sort of pattern is repeated consistently over history. Lenin, himself no friend of sex workers, said of liberalism: As for the development of the independent political thought of the…masses, the development of their initiative as a class, this is something the liberal does not want; more, it constitutes an outright danger to him. The liberals need voters, they need a crowd that would trust and follow them…but they fear the political independence of the crowd. This remains true, liberalism has always created an illusion that it is supportive of the working class while simultaneously protecting capital. This contradiction can be best illustrated by the struggle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Democratic Party, he gave up on electoral politics in disgust and dismay after he saw that, even if Lyndon Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act, the vital and still-necessary radical emancipatory politics of wealth redistribution would never come from the capitalist system.
And so we see such a dynamic in action with sex work. In 2003, Angela Davis, the radical scholar, published Are Prisons Obsolete?, an argument for the abolition of prisons that was just one of many plateaus that has included this type of work throughout her career. Dr. Davis and others like Dr. Michelle Alexander have argued that the racialized nature of the criminal justice system and America as a whole has made the prison system function as a new form of chattel slavery. Liberalism is now just catching up on this trend, just recently NPR featured a story titled Written Behind Bars, This 1850s Memoir Links Prisons To Plantations that is basically saying what Dr. Davis said five decades ago.
Another element of this trend is refocusing public energies elsewhere, hence the occurrence of the rescue industry. This anti-prostitution movement uses the verbiage of the prison abolition movement and refocuses it in a way that would increase the prison population. It is deceptive and wholly advantageous in how it re-writes sexual molestation and trafficking laws so now giving a sex worker a place to sleep one night legally makes one a sex trafficker, among other such legal over-reaches, while failing to stop actual sex trafficking. A 2015 paper by Mechthild Nagel, Trafficking With Abolitionism: An Examination Of Anti-Slavery Discourses, says the following:
I have argued that the term “abolition of prostitution” is a misnomer. What such advocates simply demand is the prohibition of a particular type of work. It has nothing to do with the symbolic claim to the abolition of (chattel) slavery and thus the framework of abolitionism is woefully misplaced and has well disguised its sexist, racist, as well as imperialist framing. Furthermore, it might be helpful to look at dualisms; what are the opposite couples or opposing forces within each discourse? Regarding prostitution, when we look at the opposite spectrum, proponents of sex workers, including feminist advocates, are talking about legalized sex work or decriminalized sex work. By contrast, nobody demands the legalization of slavery—a universal discourse prevails proscribing the mis-recognition of humans as mere objects-bereft of bodily integrity and the like. By contrast, the opponents of penal abolitionists do not have to talk about legalizing prisons. The popular “harsh justice” sentiment is that prisons have been around for some thousands of years and their existence is sacrosanct – just as it was a matter of course to think that some people are destined to be natural slaves. Aristotle gave a defense of that view, which later was mounted as a defense of the great chain of being, where, magically, white men are at the top of the human hierarchy of beings, enslaving those who are closer to non-human status and thus can be treated as chattel, property. Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, had a clear conception of medical penology: Punishment was meant as medicine and effectively cures the offender from wayward practices. So, in the context of penal policies, the defenders of harsh justice are holding up the scepter of moral panic: they marshal an even fiercer defense of the status quo, of instrumentalizing punishment for the putative public good, which often amounts to what is good for big business that profits from locking up poor people, and poor women of color become a likely target the world over. Penal abolitionists are also mindful of the social construction of crime, as it is apparent in the arbitrary criminalization of privatized commercial sex (prostitution); rarely do anti-sex industry advocates (prohibitionists) critique the imprisonment of poor girls and women of color who are street workers (Kempadoo et al., 2005; Dewey, 2008).
It bears mentioning in these contexts that the last time the United States allowed itself to become beholden to a moral panic causing legislative Prohibition, the mafia had a field day while speak-easy gin joints dotted the streets. In simpler terms, Prohibition did not abolish alcohol, it only reduced the amount of safe, consumable alcohol. As a response to demand, home distilleries oftentimes produced concoctions that ended up being poisonous. And so it would be with the reduction of safety for sex workers. The organized crime family loves this prostitution abolition concept because it would enable them to return to the realm of facilitation and allow them to exploit sex workers in a variety of ways.
One example of this type of moral paranoia and rabble rousing can be seen in recent writings by one Melissa Farley. Out of respect for our sources and to hinder police entrapment, I will not direct readers to her newest load of accusations. Nonetheless, in this newest missive she identifies by name several sex workers active in the advocacy efforts taking place across the country and dresses up her Prohibitionist ideology with a lot of faux-Marxist vocabulary to mask her anti-liberation attitudes. This is in violation of the basic tenets of the Hippocratic Oath she took as a clinical psychologist (“first, do no harm”) as well as the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Professional Ethics (“Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness”). What we might equate this behavior with is when newspapers used to list the names of those arrested on the previous night during a raid on a gay bar by homophobic police, the publication of which insured loss of job and community respect. What Farley and other like her is involved with is nothing less than the public shaming described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It bears mentioning that Farley’s writings, not published in peer-reviewed academic journals, have previously been critiqued by other scholars on this topic.
Even a rudimentary interrogation of such slogans as “End The Demand” is laced with galling logical fallacies. Since the service sex workers provide is readily self-evident, the logical conclusion is that we would have to abolish the hypothalamus and pituitary glands to completely end the sex drive that creates demand, a feat I am unaware of being possible yet in science. And because of the aforementioned racial element of the criminal justice system, these folks who borrow the verbiage of the black radical tradition are in fact contributing to the very problem that tradition is now confronting! Nagel says elsewhere in her paper “sex work prohibitionists ignore the racist effects of their carceral ideology. Paradoxically, “freedom from prostitution” condemns sex workers to penal captivity or deportation. Apparently, this is the price to be paid, in the interim, to deal with the scourge of the global prostitution industry. (It also means to pay the price of uneasy alliances with “family values” oriented Conservatives and religious extremists.)” Hence why Donna Hughes can write for a magazine like National Review.
I would personally advise those who feel they have devoted their energies toward the abolition of prostitution for nothing to redirect their efforts toward prison abolition. Radically assert control of the social media elements like #EndTheDemand and recreate these sorts of slogans in a way to end the demand for prisoners to serve the prison-industrial complex. This country was founded on the backs of poor single mothers of color. Making them targets of the vice squad, as the rescue industry does, prevents them from asserting their place at the vanguard of the black radical tradition and building a better society. But by re-purposing this matrix towards a liberation project, we can perhaps see genuine progress towards what Dr. Davis calls “abolition democracy”.
On May 16, 1997, Robert Cadorette went to the law offices of Paul, Frank, and Collins, Inc. in Burlington, Vermont to talk about when he met then-sitting Bishop Robert Gelineau of the Diocese of Providence. He described on the record in detail, under penalty of perjury if he lied, how, when Gelineau was a young Brother in the Green Mountain State, he had tried to molest and then drown a young Cadorette at the Catholic orphanage on the shores of Lake Champlain. Less than one month after the deposition was taken, Gelineau retired and was replaced by Bishop Robert Mulvee, who went on in later years to settle lawsuits and make monetary restitution to victims of Catholic clerical abuse.
Gelineau’s behavior was the infamous gutter-talk of Providence for years. Buddy Cianci allegedly used to joke with people about bailing the Bishop out after he was caught in compromising positions with young men in the Jewelry District, just adjacent to gay men’s clubs and bath houses in Providence. There is the story of how he was once caught in a similar set of circumstances at a rest stop over the line in Massachusetts, an instant where he called in a political favor to Ted Kennedy late in the night which would explain why Bishop Tobin only actively sanctioned his son Patrick for pro-choice votes after the old Lion of the Senate had died.
Yet despite these obvious and well-known cases of what would be called human trafficking, there is very little effort to make any sort of real public reparation by the power structure for the behavior of Bishop Emeritus Gelineau. In fact, a surgical pavilion at Fatima Hospital in North Providence bears his name!
This is important to keep in mind when discussing anti-trafficking efforts in the news. Unless you are dealing with a group that wants to arrest Gelineau and those clergy in the Diocese who covered up for him, these efforts could in fact be deceptively-marketed anti-sex worker efforts.
We have been carrying stories for the last few months about sex workers that are trying to fight back against legal harassment. One element of this harassment is the so-called ‘rescue industry’ that utilizes the problem of human trafficking to justify this harassment, claiming that all sex workers are victims and are incapable of free association and choice in the sex industry, which they offensively equate with antebellum slavery.
One story worth reading comes from our friend Tara Burns, the activist and sex worker who sat for an interview with us several months ago. In a recent story she published called 602 Imaginary Prostitutes Were Arrested in Alaska Three Years Ago she explains how the dubious nature of the rescue industry starts with problems in the statistics issued by law enforcement agencies like the FBI and includes an interview with Maxine Doogan, who analyzes and critiques these statistics.
The other one comes from the Libertarian website Reason.com, who are quite good on issues of drug and sex industry issues even if I disagree with their economic views. In their story The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on Drugs, they write:
The tactics employed to “get tough” on drugs ended up entangling millions in the criminal justice system, sanctioning increasingly intrusive and violent policing practices, worsening tensions between law enforcement and marginalized communities, and degrading the constitutional rights of all Americans. Yet even as the drug war’s failures and costs become more apparent, the Land of the Free is enthusiastically repeating the same mistakes when it comes to sex trafficking. This new “epidemic” inspires the same panicked rhetoric and punitive policies the war on drugs did—often for activity that’s every bit as victimless. Forcing others into sex or any sort of labor is abhorrent, and it deserves to be treated like the serious violation it is. But the activity now targeted under anti-trafficking efforts includes everything from offering or soliciting paid sex, to living with a sex worker, to running a classified advertising website.
The issue is not a strict and near-Manichean bifurcation between arguments that say “trafficking is real” versus “trafficking is not real”, it is the slimy and altogether pro-pedophile use of the legal apparatus to prevent sex crimes for purposes that go after consenting adults. If the police are running around Rhode Island going after people who sell sex in a business transaction with full consent, you miss the sociopaths like Bishop Gelineau who are considered community leaders while inflicting harm on minors.
Consider the actions of Day One, an NGO that is not going after Gelineau. They are soon going to be giving “trainings” around the state that help people “spot human trafficking”, as if some of the most difficult to detect type of sex crimes were a giant game of Where’s Waldo? Bella Robinson, our friend and contributor, is skeptical of this effort and wonders if this is actually about harassing she and her co-workers.
One of the less enjoyable aspects of covering the plight of sex workers is walking into the difficult area wherein the so-called “rescue industry” uses legitimate issues like child abuse and human trafficking as a cover for the harassment of consenting adults engaging in sexual activity in exchange for money. In discussing the behavior of one such individual, we hope to give better nuance to this discussion.
The University of Rhode Island’s Dr. Donna Hughes, currently a member of the Rhode Island Interagency Task Force on Trafficking in Persons and a major lobbyist for the recriminalization of indoor prostitution in Rhode Island, who wrote in the Journal that strip club owners who allow private booths and sex acts on their premises should be prosecuted as felons in the same way human traffickers are, is one such rescue industry figure. Dr. Hughes and immigration attorney Melanie Shapiro have a long history of sex industry prohibition activism that has some eerie parallels with sodomy law efforts of the last century or today’s anti-abortion crusaders. For example, Dr. Hughes was a major participant in the 2010 effort against the opening of The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health in Pawtucket. Tara Hurley, director of the documentary HAPPY ENDINGS?, said on her blog:
Donna Hughes is the perfect example of radicalism, taking over groups and media with scare tactics and propaganda. As the force behind the “close the prostitution loophole” drive, she bullied women out of Rhode Island Coalition Against Human Trafficking, falsely promoted the idea that the Senate did not pass an anti prostitution law (and they did as Senator Jabour and Senator McCaffery stated), she has attacked the 50 academics that support keeping indoor prostitution decriminalized, and she even attacked the women in the massage parlors (these are the women she is trying to help).
Hughes is not simply a misguided academic whose degree in Animal Science and Genetics makes her woefully under-trained for her job, she is in reality a right wing ideologue who has previously contributed to academic consultations held by the Witherspoon Institute, a think tank that has created publications with titles like and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life while posting articles with titles like Europe, Multiculturalism, and Nihilism by Luca Volontè. She has also previously submitted articles to National Review, the right wing tabloid whose founder, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 1957 about African American voters being blocked from franchise “the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” And this lady is funded by tax payers to teach students about Women’s Studies?
Bella Robinson, who has publicly rebuked Dr. Hughes, has been adamant that the plight of sex workers is a First Amendment issue because it attacks people for exercising their right to freely associate with sex workers. In 2009, Dr. Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University’s Sociology Department wrote in an editorial to the Journal:
In a Letter to the Editor of the Providence Journal on June 24, Donna Hughes called the opposition to the Rhode Island bill a “carnival” and made allegations that many would consider unprofessional and embarrassing for a university professor. This is not the first time that Donna Hughes has engaged in character assassination in an attempt to challenge positions that contradict her own. Now, in this Letter, she attacks state legislators, Spread Magazine, and women who work in the sex industry. Like others who share Hughes’ prohibitionist views, Hughes is only willing to give credence to sex workers when they seem to agree with her, and when they don’t she has consistently either downplayed their views or claimed that they are the tools of pimps and traffickers.
Such behavior only helps those who commit actual crimes. If the police are preoccupied running around keeping tabs on whether adults are having sex, they are prevented from paying attention to actual criminals. It also encourages trends that are overwhelmingly shown to target the poor and people of color while failing to adequately target the rich and powerful. If you would like to see what real anti-trafficking work looks like, check out the video below of Rachel West, Bella Robinson, and other activists up in New Hampshire several days ago speaking about their bill to decriminalize sex work, HB-1614.
Several months ago, activist Bella Robinson presented a lecture at Southern Connecticut State University on life as a sex worker. She was invited there by Dr. Alan Brown of the Sociology Department. I recently had the opportunity to sit down for a conversation with Dr. Brown.
A native of Rhode Island, Brown has worked with at-risk populations, including sex workers and HIV/AIDS patients, in the US and Canada. During the conversation, we discussed his own sociological scholarship and views descending from it as well as his thoughts on the so-called rescue industry and the notion of a sex trafficking awareness month.
Following Steve Ahlquist’s coverage of the vigil in memory of murdered sex workers, it seems appropriate to further discuss the nonprofit industrial complex – colloquially called the “rescue industry” – that profits off the stigma of sex workers and the key role played by the police, courts, and elected officials. An instance of this is the ongoing pursuit of sex workers and clients who utilize the website BackPage.
Local sex worker and activist Bella Robinson, who has previously faced police harassment due to advertising on Craigslist, a forum akin to BackPage, told me in the final part of our interview that the various experiences she has had with the civil infrastructure, her own reflections on reforms necessary to improve lives for sex workers, the plight of under-aged persons who turn to sex work when homeless, and blatant flaws in the nonprofits that claim to advocate for sex workers that are called victims of human trafficking.
Last May, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza oversaw 13 arrests of men in a police sting called Operation Backpage, covered by the prohibition-toned Providence Journal:
Mayor Jorge Elorza said the stings aren’t over.
“We are speaking to anyone out there thinking about trafficking or soliciting for sex on BackPage,” Elorza said. “Beware: If you’re coming in to Providence to take advantage or abuse women, watch your back, because we’re going to get you,”
Standing at the Public Safety Complex on Tuesday afternoon with police commanders, the city solicitor, and executive director of Day One, Elorza promised more action to combat sex trafficking crimes. The police will arrest sex buyers. Day One will assist girls and women caught in prostitution.
And Elorza said he is looking at joining a federal lawsuit against Backpage.com that alleges the website is used for sex trafficking. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston by three women who allege they were trafficked on Backpage.com — two of whom were 15 years old when they were first advertised as escorts on the website. The Massachusetts attorney general and the cities of San Francisco and Denver have joined the lawsuit.
This BackPage lawsuit has caused much consternation. By shutting down the websites that allow sex workers to manage their own business with a degree of autonomy, it would close a major revenue stream and give way to a return for those who victimize sex workers, the ranks of which have decreased with the rise of the internet. It is worth emphasizing that the Journal, which has a long-standing anti-labor and anti-sex worker editorial position, is sloppily misconstruing the international crime of human trafficking with a business exchange between consenting adults that was once legal in Rhode Island while simultaneously promoting so-called ‘free-market’ ethos in the business pages. This kind of yellow journalism is akin to when the press used to conflate homosexuality and activity between consenting adults with pedophilia and the rape of minor children. There is a genuine problem with human trafficking in this world but we are seeing the notion invoked to target working adults engaged in consensual activity. Meanwhile, Cardinal Bernard Law continues to not be prosecuted in Boston for one of the most widespread and systemic examples of human trafficking in recent American history. Much like the word socialism, the definition has been so totally abused and misused it has taken on two different meanings. For one group, it means protecting the vulnerable from sexual abuse. For another, it means harassment of laborers who want to remain in their line of work and pay taxes on their wages.
The mayor’s call for more BackPage sting operations is especially disingenuous because, by painting all those who utilize the website as human trafficking victims or human traffickers, it creates no gradation or allowance for variety and exercise of constitutionally-protected rights. If a sex worker is just using the site to offer legal BDSM services that do not involve actual coitus, they still can be charged with human trafficking, as was the case with Frances Franson in 1993 or the experiences of writer Kitty Stryker in 2014. The way police target legal BDSM participants is particularly disgusting. According to the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, BDSM activity, even when totally consensual and legal, can be prosecuted under state criminal laws dealing with assault, aggravated assault, sexual assault or sexual abuse. Police can play cruel games where, if even a man’s breast is touched, that qualifies as contact with genitalia, or if blood or other non-sexual bodily fluids are even accidentally excreted due to chafing or abrasions, the participants can be arrested under prostitution and trafficking statutes. This type of state violence towards honest workers would be unacceptable in any other industry yet, because sexuality is involved in the equation, all existing norms of decency and respectability are ejected in the name of sensationalism.
Robinson points out a September 2015 news story from Oklahoma with the headline Prostitution sting: Police use Backpage.com to make 300-400 arrests since 2012; four arrested Monday and says “When the [legal] escort wouldn’t agree to [engage in a] sex act, they couldn’t arrest her for prostitution so they charged her with trafficking herself. Do we really believe that all 300 women verbally agreed to have sex for cash?” Police have even arrested suspected sex workers for charges of soliciting prostitution because they were carrying condoms! If a sex worker was to give their spouse or child monies gained from their sex work income, that beneficiary could be charged with trafficking, pandering, promoting prostitution, or profiteering based on these 2014 federal definitions and Rhode Island’s 2009 Prostitution and Lewdness law along with definitions provided in the law.
There have been instances where giving a sex worker a ride or shelter has resulted in the provider being charged with pimping or trafficking. In August 2014, Priscilla L. Franz, 31, of Chicago was arrested and booked on prostitution charges because she posted an ad on BackPage. Robinson says of this story “Ironically none of the BP ads are prostitution ads, but the cops tell the media it is so. The articles will always say this but when we pull charging documents we find the [legal] escorts did not allow cops to verbal solicit them for an illegal sex act.” Tara Burns, commenting on the extremely important BackPage v. Dart case where the court ruled in favor of BackPage’s right to host adult ads that were the target of an over-zealous sheriff, told reporter Susan Elizabeth Shepard:
“Several people contacted me and asked if I would post their ads, and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t, because that’s sex trafficking,'” Burns said. “Then once people figured out how to mail in money or use Bitcoin, then they would have other people asking them to post their ads, and I kept telling people, ‘Don’t do it, it’s sex trafficking.'”
This is what prohibition does, it forces sex workers to support the status quo of dissuading co-workers who want to work by any means necessary from doing so. These Kafkaesque laws, much like drug laws, could hypothetically also be used to target landlords who knowingly allow the operation of a sex worker venue without a license.
After a sex worker is handed over to the rescue industry, they oftentimes find themselves forced into low-wage menial labor and subjected to puritanical ethics that prevent them from private access to the internet, sexual activity outside of marriage, and contact with former associates. Or, as in the case in the film SELLING OUR DAUGHTERS, a documentary now in the final days of a crowdfunding drive on KickStarter, the head of the NGO will tell parents one thing about education of young girls in the Thai language while saying another thing about human trafficking of the very same girls in English (see video below).
While the nonprofits gain directly from sex workers, a whole cadre of professional hucksters build careers off hyperbole, ad hominen, and histrionics. They speak before legislatures while collecting handsome compensation for various publications, lectures, professional advisory opinions, speeches, public appearances, and other stops on the academia industrial complex. The war on sex workers is a racket, to paraphrase Smedley Butler. And all this for putting an advertisement on BackPage.
The publishing industry is loaded with both fiction and nonfiction titles about the sex worker who escapes the dastardly denizens of the industry. For example, the recent writings of the otherwise-decent Chris Hedges, who is giving a platform to prohibitionist and con artist Rachel Moran, are fully-loaded with typical hallmarks of the prohibitionist movement and slams those who support decriminalization as monstrous. In an earlier piece, he wrote “If we accept prostitution as legal, as Germany has done, as permissible in a civil society, we will take one more collective step toward the global plantation being built by the powerful.” Hedges may say that sex work is a manifestation of the neoliberal agenda and that ending prohibition is allowing it to take more power over our lives, but it seems clear to most proletarian anti-prohibitionists that in fact his ideas are feeding directly into the neoliberal mass-incarceration project. Anti-sex worker laws have a vicious tendency to target poor people of color. And once they are jailed, low-cost labor provided by the prison generates cheap goods for major manufacturing corporations. And while this goes on, politicians who pursue these BackPage busts are able to use the arrests as campaign talking points while aiming for higher office.
As was said at the outset, it is an industry. In a future, post, we will discuss one particularly nasty instance of a rescue industry profiteer and in another policy moves that need to be taken to make life better for sex workers.
Sex worker readers interested in contributing their voices to this continuing project are invited to contact our publication. Conscientious of the challenges facing laborers, we will offer a variety of options to protect contributors. Interested parties can contact Andrew.James.Stewart.Rhode.Island@gmail.com.