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| Written by OTTILIA ANNA MAUNGANIDZE |
| Thursday, 16 December 2010 12:37 |
 At Pretoria-based Tshwane Home of Hope, the jubilant young faces of the girls who live there hide the truth of the horrors they have encountered. (Pictured: South Africa is the main destination for trafficking victims in the southern Africa region, with women and children coming from neighbouring countries including Zimbabwe) On the premises is a trauma centre – aptly dubbed by one of the residents as “the hope sanctuary” – here the girls meet with a resident social worker and psychologist to share their stories, stories that will never leave the four walls of the room.The Home receives new girls often – most are walk-ins, while the police bring others in from the street corners on which they would have been working. The youngest girl is seven and the oldest is 21; they hail from South Africa, as well as places further afield like Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their reasons for coming to the centre are as diverse as their backgrounds. However, they all have one thing in common – they want to be safe. While not all these girls have been trafficked or once worked in the sex industry, they are all at the Home because they have run away from violence. Protection Tendai Joe, director of the centre and also a former street child, works tirelessly to ensure the girls receive adequate protection, go to school and live a life they deserve. Human trafficking and modern-day slavery continues to gnaw at the moral fabric of our society. Globally, according to research conducted by the United States State Department, more than one million people are trafficked annually. How many of those are in Southern Africa is not known. Human trafficking by its very nature is a form of gender-based violence, not least because the majority of those trafficked are female, but also because physical and sexual violence are its bedfellows. While there are many forms of human trafficking, the most common is sex trafficking of women and children. Though some of the women trafficked willingly participate in sex work to escape poverty, a 2005 International Organisation for Migration (IOM) study found that most are led into sex work because they are lied to, told they will be able to pursue an education, get married or get the job that will help them out of poverty. In the sub-region, South Africa is the main destination for trafficking victims, with women and children coming from neighbouring countries and conflict zones further afield. Poverty and desperation coupled with a culture of patriarchy means that women are doubly vulnerable not only to trafficking, but to the violence that comes with it. Xenophobia Most disconcerting are the findings of a 2008/9 Wits University Law Clinic study on access to gender-based violence services in South Africa by migrant women. It found that two thirds of South African organisations that provide services to gender-based violence survivors offer their services exclusively to South African citizens. Therefore the plight of immigrants is compounded by the institutionalised xenophobia they face. Yet, reports abound of rapes and other forms of gender-based violence, especially at the country’s borders. The South African 1 in 9 campaign advocates for women to speak out if they are raped, this is based on the fact that only 1 out of every 9 South African women who has been raped reports the crime. When it comes to victims of trafficking, it is difficult to collect data because of the underground nature of sex trafficking and the fear on the part of most sex workers that if they speak out they will be arrested, deported or abused or raped by police. Organisations like the Sex Worker Education and Advisory Taskforce (SWEAT), which advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work, contend that until sex work is decriminalised it is unlikely that efforts to counter human trafficking will yield results. The victimisation of sex workers stems primarily from the fact that their profession is not afforded any protection. “Moral” arguments against sex work notwithstanding, if human trafficking is to be curbed, the inherent contradictions that exist between attempting to counter human trafficking and the continued criminalisation of sex work need to be resolved. Meeting In February this year, sex workers from ten African countries assembled in Hillbrow, Johannesburg to share their experiences and discuss their needs. This was the first ever meeting of this kind on the African continent. At the conference a Ugandan sex worker voiced her concern over the way in which sex workers are treated “like dogs” by the police. Many indicated that the abuse did not only come from police, but also from health service providers, clients and the pimps they work for. The irony of the criminalisation of sex work in Africa is that it is the woman who offers the service who is stigmatised and abused, while those who pay for her illegal services go scot-free. It is one of society’s entrenched patriarchal paradoxes. According to Cape Town based NGO Anex-CDW, which works closely with the IOM in its human trafficking project, most of the cases are reported by third parties and often the victims deny the allegation or refuse to talk about it. The wall of silence is almost impenetrable. While the girls of Tshwane Home of Hope did not share the horrors of their lives, their presence at the Home speaks of an untold story of violence and fear. The Home is one of several sanctuaries for girls scattered across South Africa. In an ideal world homes such as this would not have to exist, everyone would be free from fear and want; everyone would be safe. The reality is we are not. Ottilia Anna Maunganidze is a consultant for the International Crime in Africa Programme at the Institute for Security Studies. This article is part of a special series on the 16 Days of Activism for the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service. Source: thezimbabwean.co.uk |
Published: November 18, 2010 15:32 by dissident chickpea
dissident island radioListen to the recording of the launch of the x:talk report on Human Rights, sex work and the challenge of trafficking.
X:talk
On Wednesday 17 November 2010 the x:talk project launched it's report entitled 'Human Rights, sex work and the challenge of trafficking: A human rights impact assessment of anti-trafficking laws in the UK' [PDF] at the Centre for Possible Studies with a panel discussion on anti-trafficking policies.
This report was produced by the x:talk project and is the first study of anti-trafficking policies that reflects the experiences and views of people working in the sex industry in London. The report examines the anti-trafficking agenda in the UK and finds that it has been manipulated by abolitionists who have used anti-trafficking law and policies as a justification for increasing the surveillance and criminalisation of the legal indoor sex industry on an unprecedented scale. The existing focus in anti-trafficking policy on irregular migration, law enforcement and on the sex industry does not address the needs, choices and agency of trafficked people, whether they work in the sex industry or elsewhere, and prevents migrants and non-migrant people working in the sex industry from asserting fundamental rights.
The audio file below is a recording of the panel discussion and audience comments that followed.
Contact email: dissidentisland [at] riseup [dot] net
By Megan Rivers-Moore
Latin America and the Caribbean are characterised by a long history of migration into, out of, and within the region. The Caribbean diaspora is surely one of the most significant in the world, marked by complex ties across nations and within families.
This is the case of those who would be included under the ‘free movement of skilled nationals’ provisions, as well as the working class and poor men, women, and children who move in search of survival and improved life chances. It is within this context of migration and diaspora that we must place discussions of trafficking, a much talked about but often poorly understood topic that is at the forefront of concerns about migration, labour, and sexuality.A key problem in so many discussions of trafficking was reproduced in an October 15th article in the Stabroek News, titled ‘Sex tourism growing in favoured destinations in Caribbean’, namely, that sex tourism and trafficking are conflated, as if they were one and the same.
The Organisation of American States (OAS) co-ordinator of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit in the Department of Public Security, Fernando Garcia-Robles, reportedly noted that several tourist destination countries in the Caribbean have a growing sex tourism industry, and acknowledged “concerns that the Free Movement of Skilled Nationals in Caricom could result in increased human trafficking.”
Tourists travel to the Caribbean for many reasons, including in search of sexual experiences with local people, sometimes explicitly commercial, sometimes a much more ambiguous exchange of gifts, affection, and sex.
This complex phenomenon is made possible by a variety of factors, including tourism dependent economies, global inequalities of wealth and mobility, and problematic ideas about the race and sexuality of people in the Caribbean.
Sex tourism is not, however, the same as trafficking. Trafficking refers to the use of violence, coercion and exploitation to recruit and transport workers across borders to carry out various kinds of work.
Most crucially, trafficking does not just include sex work, but rather all kinds of labour, including domestic and agricultural, for example. Yet trafficking is often simplistically equated with commercial sex and sexual ‘slavery.’ The use of the term ‘slavery’ so loosely should give us pause, as it is a concept fraught with history and emotion, especially in the Caribbean and Latin America, where it calls to mind the brutalities of the middle passage, plantation economies, and the outright ownership of human beings.
In fact, the little reliable research that has been done suggests that trafficking more often resembles debt bondage, and unfair and exploitative contact labour. There is of course a long history of these kinds of labour practices in the Caribbean as well, but this is an important distinction in terms of how this work takes place within labour markets and their relationships to the global economy.
As last week’s article attests, men, women, boys and girls are all trafficked for many ends to, through, and from the Caribbean region and around the world. Significant numbers of women are indeed coerced into the sex industry, but the conditions of their lives are similar in many ways to the lives of other migrant women who struggle to get by in a world where racialized and gendered inequalities help to structure a lack of viable options and opportunities.
Because of the ways in which trafficking is often mistakenly assumed to mean sexual slavery across border, it is crucial to acknowledge that not all migrant sex workers are trafficking victims.
Sex work is often one of many strategies that women engage in for economic survival and advancement. Because few countries classify sex work as work, women tend to migrate in other immigration categories (for example, on tourist or domestic work visas) and then make their way into the sex industry. Others pay smugglers, often agreeing to or finding themselves in situations of debt bondage or indentureship.
One of the consequences of seeing migrant women who work in the sex industry as trafficking victims is that concerns about trafficking can be used for immigration control. By conflating trafficking with sexual slavery, women can be ‘saved’ by deporting them. This allows governments to appear benevolent, it deals with xenophobic fears about immigration, but it also conveniently ignores the massive violations of the human and labour rights of sex workers that take place with impunity throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. One wonders, then, about the wisdom of the OAS focusing on strengthening the capacity of law enforcement officials, immigration officers, judges, and prosecutors. The relationship between sex workers and police has been notoriously difficult in much of the world, and indeed, a great deal of the violence that sex workers face comes from the state. Because of their experiences with state violence, sex workers are not likely to report abuse from clients or management, and most importantly in terms of trafficking, sex workers’ are cautious about voicing their concerns about the use of force or coercion against migrants in the sex industry. This is especially the case when migrant sex workers face deportation upon discovery. These women are unlikely to testify against those who transport undocumented workers, as many trafficking victims who have been ‘saved’ go on to use these same networks in order to cross borders undetected once again.
We must pay attention to the broader conditions that make men, women and children vulnerable to smuggling, deception, and coercion in migrating, including the ever increasing demand for cheap, exploitable labour and the dire economic contexts that make precarious and dangerous choices for survival attractive or unavoidable. By defining sex work as a form of labour, alongside other kinds of labour like domestic and agricultural work in which workers potentially face unjust and unsafe working conditions, we can begin to explore ways of addressing these issues without resorting to fear mongering, alarmist and largely unsubstantiated claims about sexual slavery.
Sex Tourism and Trafficking: Not one and the same - Stabroek News - Guyana
At 14, Kate*, ran from her abusive home in a New York suburb. With nowhere to live, it was only a matter of time before Kate found herself forced to engage in survival sex: sleeping with men for a place to stay. Soon after, she was recruited and forced to work for a pimp who confiscated her cell phone and cut her off from the outside world. For two years this violent older man forced Kate to do prostitution in New York and nearby states. She suffered multiple rapes, including once at gunpoint. Shy of her 17th birthday, Kate sought help from a program for sexually exploited minors, and bravely testified against her pimp - sending him to prison for 12 years.
Originally from Central America, Maria* moved to New York in the nineties to be with her husband - a man who later trafficked her into commercial sex. In 12 years of marriage he physically, sexually, and psychologically abused her. He also forced her to do prostitution, which she found humiliating and debasing, especially as a devout Christian. She always had to turn over her earnings to him. After her husband disappeared in 2005, Maria finally spoke out about the abuses she had endured over the years and began working with a social worker. With help from a lawyer, she was granted a T-visa (a special Visa given to survivors of human trafficking) so she could stay safely in the U.S.
But a deeper look at the seemingly happy endings to these tragic stories wears off some of that sheen. In a span of two years the police arrested Kate for prostitution six times. Maria was arrested over eight times. Both women were afraid, confused, and unable to tell law enforcement what was really happening. Now in her 20's, Kate has put her past behind her to pursue her education and dreams of a career in finance. But her criminal record has threatened to stand in her way. To get a job at a bank, she was required to submit to a background check and disclose her prostitution record. Maria found a job as a home health attendant, but five years later, her employer ran her fingerprints, discovered her criminal record, and fired her.
Saturday, August 13, 2010, marked a victory for survivors like Maria and Kate, when New York's Governor David Paterson signed a bill allowing survivors of commercial sex trafficking to clear their records of prostitution-related crimes by vacating their convictions. The bill, sponsored by Assembly Member Gottfried and Senator Duane and co-authored by the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, is the first law in the nation providing this remedy to survivors of trafficking.
The need for this law reveals a deep flaw in law enforcement. Some of our clients at the Sex Workers Project have been arrested more than 10 times before they were able to escape their coercive circumstances. Many could not reach out to police for help for fear of deportation or arrest, or of retribution from their abusers. And law enforcement too often does not look deeper. These victims are simply processed through the revolving door of the criminal justice system like any other "prostitute," convicted and released, often back into the hands of their traffickers.
Criminal records make it more difficult for individuals, especially those already marginalized by their immigration status and abuse history, to gain and maintain economic and familial stability. A record of prostitution can make someone "inadmissible" to the United States - preventing survivors from getting immigration status. It can come up in an application for public housing, and is especially harmful when survivors try to get a job. Some of the best living wage jobs in the health care, education, or financial fields also come with a background check. In addition to the crippling professional barrier, the experience of recounting the past remains psychologically traumatizing for people like Kate and Maria.
Until now, there were very few options for survivors of trafficking with criminal records. In New York, only violations can be sealed, not misdemeanor crimes like prostitution. While New York's "Safe Harbor Act" was intended to prevent exploited youth from suffering the consequences of prostitution convictions, 90% of youth arrested for prostitution are still charged in Criminal Court where they can end up with a criminal record, according to a 2008 study by John Jay School of Criminal Justice and the Center for Court Innovation. Many more uncounted minors tell the court they are 18 or older at the insistence of their traffickers, or to avoid the longer process in Family Court. Because the criminal courts have such high volume, the system does not often hear the real stories behind the endless stream of misdemeanor cases.
This New York law will help survivors of trafficking in New York State to find economic and personal security and escape being victimized and penalized again. We hope it will also inspire police, judges, prosecutors and defenders to question our current approach to prostitution, sex workers, and victims of trafficking. Law enforcement should be trained to understand signs of trafficking and should refer to victims' advocates when they encounter individuals who appear to be in coercive situations. But beyond these small changes, we need a serious re-examination of our punitive approach to prostitution. We need to rethink our use of government dollars to prosecute members of our community, some of whom are just trying to make a living, and some of whom are victims of abhorrent violence. We are just at the beginning of reforming a legal system that treats these members of our community as the lowest of the low.
SWP encourages survivors and advocates to come forward to obtain relief provided by New York's new legislation. Founded in 2001, SWP provides legal services to people who are in the sex trade by choice, coercion, or circumstance. Clients of SWP include sex workers and survivors of trafficking from within and outside of the United States. If you think you may benefit from this bill, or need legal or social services relating to being a sex worker or survivor of trafficking, please call our helpline at 646-602-5617 or email us at swp@urbanjustice.org.
* Clients consented to have their stories used, but not their real names
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