Forced labour in supply chains: Rolling back the debate on gender, migration and sexual commerce

Andrijasevic, Rutvica. (2021). Forced labour in supply chains: Rolling back the debate on gender, migration and sexual commerce. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13505068211020792. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211020791

Abstract

This article makes a conceptual contribution to the broader literature on unfree labour by challenging the separate treatment of sexual and industrial labour exploitation both by researchers and in law and policy. This article argues that the prevailing focus of the supply chain literature on industrial labour has inadvertently posited sexual labour as the ‘other’ of industrial labour thus obfuscating how the legal blurring of boundaries between industrial and service labour is engendering new modalities of the erosion of workers’ rights that are increasingly resembling those typical of sex work. This article advances the debate on unfree labour both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it highlights the relevance of social reproduction in understanding forms of labour unfreedom. Empirically, it demonstrates the similarities in forms of control and exploitation between sex work and industrial work by illustrating how debt and housing operate in both settings.

Police Enforcement of Sex Work Criminalization Laws in an “End Demand” City: The Persistence of Quality-of-Life Policing and Seller Arrests

Rosentel, Kris, Charlie M. Fuller, Shannon M. E. Bowers, Amy L. Moore, and Brandon J. Hill. ‘Police Enforcement of Sex Work Criminalization Laws in an “End Demand” City: The Persistence of Quality-of-Life Policing and Seller Arrests’. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 26 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01910-9.

Abstract

The purported goals of commercial sex work criminalization policies in the United States have shifted over the past two decades as local jurisdictions have adopted End Demand reforms. These reforms aim to refocus arrest from individuals who sell sexual services to buyers and facilitators, representing a departure from the quality-of-life, nuisance-focused approach of the late twentieth century. This article presents a case study examining enforcement of commercial sex laws in Chicago, a city that has been heralded as a leader in End Demand reforms. Our case study utilized annualized arrest statistics from 1998 to 2017 and individual arrest reports (n = 575) from 2015 to 2017. Commercial sex arrests by the Chicago Police Department have declined substantially over the past two decades, falling 98.4% from its peak. However, our analysis suggests that sellers of sexual services continue to face the heaviest burden of arrest (80.5%) and officers generally continue to approach commercial sex as a quality-of-life issue. We argue that this divergence between the goals and implementation of End Demand are the result of three institutional factors: street-level bureaucracy, logics of spatial governmentality, and participatory security. Our results suggest that the ideals of End Demand may be incompatible with the institutional realties of urban policing.

Will the end of prostitution eradicate human trafficking? Four fallacies in the abolitionist approach

Anglí, Mariona Llobet. ‘Will the End of Prostitution Eradicate Human Trafficking? Four Fallacies in the Abolitionist Approach’. EuCLR European Criminal Law Review 9, no. 1 (2019): 99–119. (Link)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ‘war of data’ on prostitution brought on by scholars, politicians, NGOs and the media. The paper also tackles the misleading wordings and realities in place, which significantly shake the empirical and conceptual foundations of abolitionism, thereby challenging abolitionist claims. As will be shown below, the abolitionist approach is flawed by four fallacies: the statistical, the phenomenological, the deductive and the deterrence fallacy. Therefore, we can conclude that there is no empirical evidence that abolishing prostitution would eradicate, or at least decrease, human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

“Framing Figures” and the Campaign for Sex Purchase Criminalisation in Ireland: A Lakoffian Analysis

Ward, Eilís. ‘“Framing Figures” and the Campaign for Sex Purchase Criminalisation in Ireland: A Lakoffian Analysis:’ Irish Journal of Sociology, 1 December 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0791603520951754.

Abstract

If the concept of social justice posits equality and fairness between subjects in the social order, then the presence of those subjects within that order must first and foremost be acknowledged. In Ireland’s recent reform of prostitution law contained in the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, the presence of the sex worker as a rights-bearing subject or citizen, with access to justice in that capacity, was denied. In this article I focus on the use of data by the neo-abolitionist ‘Turn off the Red Light’ campaign to ‘flatten out’ the complexity of sex workers lives and present the figure of the ‘vulnerable prostituted woman’ and the ‘trafficking victim’: tragic, abject, a necessarily violated person and in need of ‘protection’ from the state. I argue that this data, entering public and political discourse as uncontestable truth, constituted what I call, ‘framing figures’, framing an inevitable outcome and precluding certain subjects from the status of equality and fairness. The data allowed campaigners for the Sex Purchase Ban (SPB), and, in turn the state, to eclipse a social justice approach to sex work, such as proposed by the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland and other actors.

Revisiting the Yorkshire Ripper Murders: Interrogating Gender Violence, Sex Work, and Justice

Wattis, Louise. ‘Revisiting the Yorkshire Ripper Murders: Interrogating Gender Violence, Sex Work, and Justice’. Feminist Criminology 12, no. 1 (1 January 2017): 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085115602960.

Abstract

Between 1975 and 1980, 13 women, 7 of whom were sex workers, were murdered in the North of England. Aside from the femicide itself, the case was infamous for police failings, misogyny, and victim blaming. The article begins with a discussion of the serial murder of women as a gendered structural phenomenon within the wider context of violence, gender, and arbitrary justice. In support of this, the article revisits the above case to interrogate police reform in England and Wales in the wake of the murders, arguing that despite procedural reform, gendered cultural practices continue to shape justice outcomes for victims of gender violence. In addition, changes to prostitution policy are assessed to highlight how the historical and ongoing Othering and criminalization of street sex workers perpetuates the victimization of this marginalized group of women.

Editorial note: Peter Sutcliffe aka “the Yorkshire Ripper” died (allegendly from Covid-19) last week.
See the report in the Guardian and a historical statement by the English Collective of Prostitutes (1981) “Prostitutes are innocent ok!“

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An Ethnographic Analysis of Escort Services in Poland: An Interactionist Approach

Ślęzak, Izabela. 2020. “An Ethnographic Analysis of Escort Services in Poland: An Interactionist Approach.” Qualitative Sociology Review 16(4):122-144. Retrieved 11/2020 (URL: http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/archive_eng.php). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.16.4.08

Abstract

Abstract: In the Polish literature on the subject, prostitution is analyzed from various theoretical perspectives, but, first of all, from the perspective of social pathology. This approach makes the researchers focus mainly on the social maladjustment of women providing sex services and the reasons for their violation of the normative order. In my ethnographic research conducted in escort agencies in Poland, I was willing to go beyond this narrow outlook. I have adapted an interactionist perspective to analyze the escort agencies as organizations where intense interactions between employees, as well as employees and clients, take place, the sex work process is organized, and the meanings of prostitution are negotiated. I conducted the analysis according to the procedures of the grounded theory methodology. It allowed me to see and describe such processes as: (re)defining the situation of providing sex services from vice to work, sex work as a collective action, performing sex work, secondary socialization for sex work. The adaption of an interactionist perspective opens some new directions for analysis, which could help to understand the phenomenon of women getting involved in and continuing to provide sex services for a long time.

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Honesty and economy on a highway: Entanglements of gift, money, and affection in the narratives of Ukrainian sex workers

Rachok, Dafna. ‘Honesty and Economy on a Highway: Entanglements of Gift, Money, and Affection in the Narratives of Ukrainian Sex Workers’. Economic Anthropology, Early View. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12187.

Abstract

Sex work provides a particularly good example to consider the relationships of money, authenticity, and intimacy. Many scholars who research intimacy point to the fact that seeing sex work as an exchange of money (or goods) for sex is a simplistic and reductive approach. Building on the existing research that complicates the idea of sex work as an emotionally detached sex‐for‐money transaction, this article looks at the coexistence of references to gift exchange, informal economy, and service economy in the narratives of street sex workers from the cities of Kropyvnyts’kyi and Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine. Focusing on sex workers’ attempts at discursive legitimization of sex work and on the narratives of their relationships with clients, I argue that the market rhetoric and the gift economy are not incommensurable for my participants. I show that though sex workers’ local “workplace ethic” is permeated with references to competition and productivity, they still don’t see sex work as qualitatively different from other forms of intimacy and don’t treat their clients as mere customers because of multiple emotional and affectionate attachments that exist between them. I conclude by considering the coexistence of various economic narratives in relation to the economic self.

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On the Sensory Policing of Vices: Morality at Work in a German Vice Squad

Leser, Julia. ‘On the Sensory Policing of Vices:  Morality at Work in a German Vice Squad’. Journal of Extreme Anthropology 4, no. 1 (7 March 2020): 22–44. https://doi.org/10.5617/jea.7358.

Abstract

This paper explores the policing of vices and offers a critical inquiry into the affective politics of policing practices seen through police and state ethnography, political anthropology, and the ‘affective turn’ in social and cultural theory. It shows how the moral worlds of policing sex work and performing raids in the red-light ‘milieu’ are constituted in the making of boundaries through visual, olfactory, somatosensory, and auditory sensations, which can be understood as normative performances in the realm of morality. Police officers do not engage in a neutral gaze but transform the sensuous into sensations that enact these normative distinctions between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ – the morally questionable red-light ‘milieu.’ These practices can be read in regard to a morality that is conveyed in and through the officers’ sensational performances in an observingly affective and somatic manner. Morality not simply is but is being done—and performing affects and sensations plays a significant role in the making of moral worlds in the realm of policing. Raiding the red-light ‘milieu’ is a performance on disorder and order, on what is normal and what is not, and thus a deeply political practice that reveals how order- and boundary-making operates through basic sensations and feelings, of the sensuous, the aesthetic, and the somatic.

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Where The Trans Men and Enbies At?: Cissexism, Sexual Threat, and the Study of Sex Work

Jones, Angela. ‘Where The Trans Men and Enbies At?: Cissexism, Sexual Threat, and the Study of Sex Work’. Sociology Compass 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12750.

Abstract
In this article, I examine the existing research on transgender sex workers and explore how cissexism and sexism overlap and shape this work. Overall, researchers assume that all trans sex workers are women, and all male sex workers are assumed to be cisgender. Transmasculine and other gender non‐conforming sex workers are absent from studies of sex work. Researchers in public health and criminology dominate the literature and this research is limited because it focuses only on trans women and because it focuses primarily on disease and trauma, and almost exclusively on HIV. The literature I examined treats transgender women as a public health “problem” to be solved, rather than addressing their experiences and needs as workers and as people in our society. I argue that in order to have useful applied and policy implications aimed at harm reduction, researchers must use a sociological lens to document what structural conditions push and pull people of various genders into sex markets in the first place. Finally, I advocate for the use of queer, intersectional, and transnational frameworks in future lines of inquiries as a way to push the sociological and public health literature on sex work forward in a way that will benefit all sex workers, their advocates, and service providers.

Mobilizing shame and disgust: abolitionist affective frames in Austrian and German anti-sex-work movements

Birgit Sauer (2019). Mobilizing shame and disgust: abolitionist affective frames in Austrian and German anti-sex-work movements, Journal of Political Power, 12:3, 318-338, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2019.1669262

This article analyses anti-sex-work mobilization in Austria and Germany since 2014. An affective perspective on the websites of these groups shows how their framings run the risk of establishing a disciplinary regime of governing people, of a restrictive, heterosexist norm of sexuality, and of gender inequality. Abolitionist strategies in the two countries thus produce an affective governmentality excluding those who should not belong to the affective community, i.e. those who do not submit to limiting their sexuality to the private realm of monogamous relationships. Finally, the article suggests that the abolitionist affective mobilisation feeds into the self-affirmation of traditional branches of women’s movements in the two countries.