Sex Trafficking Rant
Tonight’s episode of 4corners (ABC, 8.30pm) is about sex slavery. sigh. This is from the preview/description:
’Around Australia there are hundreds of legal brothels. Thousands of women sell their bodies for profit. Now, in a joint Four Corners/The Age special investigation, reporter Sally Neighbour exposes the brutal illegal off-shoot of the sex industry: sex slavery. In a report that exposes the worst excesses of human trafficking she reveals how networks of criminal gangs are luring women to Australia, where they are forced to work as sex slaves. If they refuse they are beaten and their families are threatened.
“What happened to us was a nightmare. We worked from 11am to 3 or 4am the next morning, and slept only three or four hours. They treated us like animals. We were sexually abused, we were dragged, we were hit.“ Former sex slave, from Melbourne
Like any business, the trade in flesh thrives on consumer demand. Sex trafficking and sexual slavery exists because customers want Asian women who are reputed to be more compliant to their needs. Many of the Asian sex workers in Australia are here willingly. However some are trapped, humiliated, placed in debt bondage and forced to put their lives in danger by having unprotected sex with hundreds of men.’
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First of all- ‘thousands of women sell their bodies for profit’- so do millions of australians of all genders, or at least they sell the labour, like sex workers, that is they have paid jobs so they can buy things to survive and gain capital. thats how our society works right? also cut out this ‘trade in flesh’ stuff and blaming customers for sex trafficking for wanting ‘Asian women who are reputed to be more complaint’
You know how you could help fix this? You could interrogate the racism in this statement and then you could interview some migrant Asian sex workers and smash your pre-existing racist stereotypes about Asian women and Asian women who are sex workers.
Oh, but actually like talking to Asian migrant sex workers from a sex-worker organizations like Scarlet Alliance wouldn’t really work for your shock tactics would it? You want to see the tortured trafficking victims so you can get your props for exposing it all and helping to rescue them. You wouldn’t want to show sex worker organizing, especially migrant sex worker organizing, because that would add nuance and contradict your image of these victimized passive women.
Maybe you could discuss how Australia’s trafficking laws operate- how they brand anyone who is deemed to working under ‘trafficking conditions’ as ‘trafficking victims’ and how this denies any agency to migrant workers who may actually choose to work under these conditions. I mean choose in the way that any of us living in this society choose to do work so we can make money or obtain food and shelter to survive. It may come to a shock to you, because you haven’t actually bothered to speak to any other migrant workers other than those who perform the script you want, but people actually knowingly come to Australia and work under ‘trafficking’ conditions. That is, they mightn’t have enough money to pay for their flight upfront, they mightn’t be able to fill in paperwork for visas (because information mightn’t be available in their language) and they may actually want to enter a scheme where they work for their first month to pay off the costs of getting them to Australia and then be free to work for themselves for a few months after that and return home with more money, or have a chance to go traveling.
But if their workplace is raided and they are found to be working under ‘trafficking conditions’ migrant sex workers working illegally (due to visa restrictions etc) are forced to either say they were a victim and being forced to work against their will, to testify against their ‘traffickers’ (and potentially get bridging visas for doing so) or to say that they knowingly and willingly came her to work and face deportment for not following their visa requirements.
The way this how is framed is just going to result in people demanding tighter immigration laws, and more surveillance of asian women coming to Australia or crossing other borders. It will also probably be used to add pressure for more policing powers of sex industry work places, especially those with Asian women working at them or run by people of colour. (Already happening in Victoria) People will be claiming that we need to abolish sex work or criminalize clients or that we need more laws and regulations, which will just push even more people into the illegal sector. (Because laws are not written with how sex workers might want to work in mind. Rather they are written based on the interests of big business brothels, of home owners in areas such as st kilda, and with the idea that sex workers are vectors of disease that need to be controlled not for their own health, but for the health of the community. And that we all have pimps! lol. Much of the legislation in Victoria was written under the ‘Prositution Control Act’ it has now been changed to sex work control act, but the whorephobic laws still exist, just in slightly more PC language)
This whole show just perpetuates whorephobia and racism when it is produced by white non-migrant worker and non-sex worker people who have decided that they are going to be the heros, they are going to find the real victims with their pitying white non-sex worker gaze. I can hear the soundtrack already.
