Photo Seattle’s fishing fleet memorial by Flickr user kuow949. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Y’know, it’s not like I’m a prostitute, it’s not as though I’m a customer. I’ve known a couple of people who’ve been (out, non-closet) prostitutes at least once in their lives, and I’ve become friends or acquaintances with a handful more online, but not that many. Thanks perhaps to the internet, and persistent police patrols and neighborhood watches, and maybe the rise of “escort” the old urban highway sidewalks a mile from my home is no longer athwart with “hitchhikers” in too-short skirts with too-long sleeves and too much makeup covering too many bruises nor are there as many single-occupancy, older American cars slowing and stopping to “offer rides.” I’m not tremendously libertarian. While I don’t specifically object to prostitution I strongly believe they’re not a solution to any known problem including all the standard “problems” they’re supposed to be solutions to.

So why do I care? This paragraph might seem like a digression. It’s not. The photo accompanying this post is of the Fisherman’s Memorial at Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle, for generations the home port for the main body of the Alaskan fishing fleet. (In a lot of ways, going back to the days of the Alaska Gold Rush, Seattle’s lower-48 proximity has made it the mercantile capital of Alaska.) The memorial lists the names of all the many fishermen and women who’ve been lost at sea in what’s widely considered one of the most dangerous professions in the nation. It’s a sobering list… so many lives lost, so many of them young, and each the beloved of so many surviving parents, friends, partners, children. And yet…

And yet in the last 30 years or so more prostitutes in the Northwest have died at the hands of serial murderers, casual murderers, pimps, customers, and occasionally the random passer by than are listed on the Fisherman’s Memorial.

More street prostitutes have died in America than loggers (they’re not “lumberjacks” here.) More prostitutes have died than coal miners. More have died in the modern era than have construction workers, steel workers, perhaps even police. Certainly more than have firefighters.

Even more have been robbed, beaten, raped, mutilated, left for dead but survived. And most of them too have been young, and each of them were beloved by surviving parents, friends, partners, and children.

And yet there is no memorial to prostitutes.

Not surprising. Not surprising because prostitutes aren’t seen as people. Not surprising because the condition of their labor is the condition that makes them vulnerable — forced to the margins, to darkened streets, to warehouse districts, to docs and warves, to airport rows, to gaslight districts. Not surprising because when police cruise by they must melt away… not just for fear of arrest but for fear as well of shakedowns for “complementary” “services” in order to avoid arrest.

It’s not just in the Northwest that prostitutes are the victim of choice. Today I read from Renee of Feministe that another murderer, or murderers (though it scarcely matters how many) has been stalking shadowed-from-the-law prostitutes in the Niagara Falls area of New York.

When you think of the Niagara region immediately the mind turns to the majestic falls. Some who have spent more than an afternoon here will think of places like the Welland Canal, The Skylon Tower, Fallsview Casino, Clifton Hill, and maybe even the dearth of reasonably priced hotels, and restaurants. The aforementioned sites are the Niagara region you are supposed to think about. It is what you will find printed in all of those handy little pamphlets, that the tour guides like to give out. Yes the safe family destination, where everything is bright and sunny. What you will not hear about are the women that have been killed here since 1996. What if I were to whisper these names in your ear?

31-year-old Dawn Stewart – her skeletal remains and those of her six-month old fetus were discovered in March 1996 in a wooded are of Pelham six months after her disappearance.

26-year-old Nadene Gurczenski – her body was discovered in a Vineland ditch in May 1999. She had a two year old child. Cause of death undeclared.

32-year-old Diane Dimitri – her body was discovered in a ditch outside of Welland in August 2003. She had four children. Beaten to death.

26-year-old Margaret Jeanette Jigaru – her body was discovered in the parking lot of Princess Margaret Elementary school in Niagara Falls in July 2004. She had a four year old son. Shot in the back of the throat, execution-style.

22-year-old Cassey Chicocki – her body was found in a wooded area off of Whirlpool Rd. in Niagara Falls in December 2005. She had suffered the loss of her 3 month old child and the suicide of her brother in the few years just prior to her murder. Beaten to death, her teeth were in her stomach.

29-year-old Stephine Beck – her body was discovered in a Vineland ditch , one concession south of where Nadene’s body was discovered 8 years earlier, in march of 2007. Stephine was 14 weeks pregnant. She died of strangulation.

36-year-old Shari Bacon – found beaten to death in Sean Paul Christie’s apartment in April, 2008. She had to be identified by her tattoos.

Do they resonate with a kind of familiarity in your memory? How about if I said the name Kristen French? The difference between Kristen French, and the aforementioned women, is that French was a young school girl brutally murdered and raped by the serial killer Paul Bernardo, and the other women were all sex trade workers who were brutally raped, and murdered. French is memorable for her innocence and potential, while these women are forgotten for their occupation, and addictions; yet were they not all women, all worthy of justice?

These are just the women whose bodies have been found.

Read the rest of Renee’s post here.

I care about prostitution because what ever else you care to say about them, or the job the do, or the “legitimate” customers they service, nor how you feel about how they should or shouldn’t work…because they do work, or how their customers should or shouldn’t seek them… because they do seek them, nobody deserves working conditions so desperate that they have to fear a police car more than they must fear the cars of the men they hope seek only the service of their bodies and not the use of their lives.

At least in America, at least since the “sexual revolution” (and really since well before), at least since the economic and social value of women has increased beyond the utility of their bodies, the profession of prostitution has been dwindling. Some estimates say up to a 90% decline since the dawn of the 20th Century. One can imagine that for all the scandal and fuss and fulminations of “family values” politicians, and religious and moral activists, that in time their trade will die away… or if not die away then transform into a profession that’s almost unrecognizable by today’s standards and inconceivable even 50 years ago.

And while we wait for that eventuality the remaining sex workers — still mostly women though there are many men and many transsexuals as well — work in conditions women of 100 years ago would find little changed.

I think prostitution should be legal, legal not so they could be “regulated” or “inspected” or (as in Singapore, evidently) forced to take penicillin every three weeks, but so they could form associations, so they could network, so they could come far enough out of the shadows to be seen and protected rather than preyed upon by police, so they could call the police when they felt threatened, robbed, beaten, or preyed upon, enough that they can safely join crusades to eliminate the (competing-for-their-business-if-nothing-else!) scourges trafficking, of pimping, of prostituting of the unwilling, the unwary, the unwell, the undocumented, and the underaged and all others for whom the work is thrust upon instead of undertaken with a will.

As I’ve said I don’t think prostitutes solve any problems, including the problems they, their customers, and society since antiquity imagine they solve. And as I’ve said I believe that as society progresses the services they offer, under the conditions they’re sought today, will grow ever less demanded of them.

But I don’t think their interests nor the interests of their moral, ethical, gender, or social antagonists are served by keeping them shadowed and preyed upon.

And that’s why I care. I’ve never known any of the victims who’ve been murdered, or robbed, or raped, or beaten. But ya know what? I don’t know any of the fishermen listed on the memorial at Fisherman’s Terminal either. But I care deeply about their well being as well. Enough so that I’d oppose efforts to decertify their unions, associations, and benevolent societies, or to outlaw their profession. Why should I, or anyone else, oppose similar treatment for an even more dangerous profession. You want to eliminate prostitution? So did Gary Ridgeway. He eliminated somewhere between sixty and eighty. Someone in Niagara Falls is eliminating them, possibly, as I write. Your way, no matter what, is better than theirs. Why not make it so that while you do your work the Ridgeways, and Pictons, and Niagara’s Michael Durant were less able to as well.

It’s not just the Northwest, it’s not just the Niagara area. Chances are it’s your area too. And if it’s not your area? It’s not because it’s not happening, or hasn’t, or won’t. It’s because, as Renee says

One of the things that angers me the most about the sparse reporting that has taken place on these brutal homicides, is the fact that these women are constantly only referred to as sex trade workers. Yes, that was their occupation but does anyone’s job make up the totality of their identity. It is a way of devaluing their humanity. To the world at large they don’t constitute a loss because they are represented as dirty, foul, carnivorous vaginas seeking to profit through dirty acts. “Good girls” don’t sell sex, and “good girls” don’t become addicted. Yet there was a time when they must have danced in the rain, built snowmen, or even just enjoyed the warmth of the suns rays as it kissed their bodies. As long as we continue to see them as what they did rather than who they were, there will never be a push to achieve justice for them.

I care because like Renee I stopped being able to look away.

Translation: “This is not a pipe” — René Magritte. Photo by Flickr user Ceci n’est pas. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So. About trafficking. Who to believe? Anti-prostitution groups claim that 80% of all human trafficking worldwide is sex-trafficking. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says more like 50%. Anti-slavery groups say it’s more like 80% are non-sex laborers. WTF?

Having spent (too) much of yesterday chasing the issue around (and around, and around) it… looks like they could all be right because there’s a great deal of ambiguity between the words or phrases

- trafficking – smuggling – sex-trafficking – aggravated sex-trafficking – labor trafficking – slavery – sex work – sexual slavery

Neither the text of the 2007 Wilberforce/TVPA bill itself, nor its proponents, nor its opponents put much effort to resolving the equivocal nature of the terms.

Because there’s so much ambiguity, from so many sources, I’m pretty sure nobody will agree 100% on anything, but based on a close reading of multiple sources here’s my own (admittedly exasperated but good faith) set of definitions.

• Smuggling is what happens when person A in location X arranges with person B to be transported to location Y and after person A arrives in location Y person B has no hold over them.

• Trafficking is what happens when person A in location X is taken in by person B by means of guile, threats, or violence and transported to location Y and after transportation then either 1) person B retains a hold over person B or else 2) person B sells or assigns person A to be held by someone else. Peculiarly, whereas many, many trafficked persons are (in the words of a Darfuri slave named Aluat** quoted in E. Benjamin Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery) used in a “sex way” they don’t count as “sex-trafficked” under the existing or proposed law unless they’re being “prostituted” to third parties. (Go figure.) Because…

• Sex-trafficking as the law stands now is ordinary trafficking where the labor the victim will be forced to perform involves commercial sex. Currently sex-trafficking is treated as a civil-rights crime under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Under the proposed amendment “sex-trafficking” will be any and all prostitution. If the amendment remains when the bill comes out of conference sex-trafficking, a.k.a. prostitution, will be deleted from 13th Amendment protection (where all other forms of human trafficking and coerced labor reside) and plugged under the jurisdiction of the Mann Act, which deals exclusively with commercial sex. Peculiarly, once removed from 13th Amendment coverage the specific crime of sex-trafficking, unlike other human trafficking, will no longer legally be considered a human rights violation. (But no worries because…)

• The new crime of “Aggravated Sex-Trafficking“ will replace the old crime of “sex-trafficking” under the amended TVPA.

• Labor Trafficking is any kind of trafficking that’s not sex trafficking. Should the TVPA amendments pass labor trafficking will be even less like sex-trafficking in the sense that it will still only be labor trafficking if an international boundary is crossed, whereas prostitution will be defined as sex trafficking even if the prostitute works from home.

• Slavery. Most slaves aren’t technically trafficked. They’re generally agricultural, industrial, and domestic slaves, and very, very often children. Slaves can (and are) be found (and occasionally rescued) today in India, China, Africa including especially Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Somalia, in Southeast Asia (where they’re generally sex slaves, about which more in a moment), in Haiti they’re often children and almost always household slaves, in South America they’re most often enslaved for use in agriculture.

• A sex slave is a slave who’s held captive for the sexual gratification of her or his owners and/or their friends, family, business partners, and/or employees. Sex slavery is tricky under the amended TVPA. Huge, huge numbers of trafficked, smuggled, and/or mere slaves are sexually assaulted and exploited for the gratification of their employers. However unless they’re exploited for commercial sex by 3rd parties (i.e. really prostituted) and not just assaulted by their owners and friends and associates of their owners they’re just considered particularly unfortunate but neither trafficked unless they’re actually trafficked across borders, and not sex-trafficked unless cash changes hands.

• Sex work is commercial work of a sexual nature that technically covers everyone from prostitutes to dommes/dominatrixes to strippers to porn performers to phone-sex operators. Sex work may be willingly undertaken, reluctantly but willingly undertaken under contingencies, and unwillingly extracted through guile, threats, or violence.

• Prostitution is a specific form of sex work that involves physical, generally genital contact with customers. Unlike all other forms of sex work prostitution is currently counted as “sex-trafficking” when it’s coerced and, under the amended TVPA, unlike all other forms of sex work, prostitution will be counted as “sex-trafficking” even when it’s not coerced.

Yes, my editorial point of view shows up in some of those definitions but I repeat that very few hands are clean when it comes to agreement. And, as logicians, rhetoriticians, and mediators have been saying since, oh, say, Plato, without agreement on terms there can be plenty of fighting, name calling, and exercise of raw power but neither real dialogue nor debate nor resolution.

Photo “no pressure” by Flickr user rhlinuxguy. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Following up on the question of what would happen to pimps if prostitution was meaningfully legalized.

One of the key things is that if pimps no conceivable privilege to extort a sex-worker’s income via violence committed outside the law (as they have now) and if they can offer no conceivable “protection” benefit from customers, other pimps, and corrupt law enforcement officials that couldn’t better be provided by legal access to police response cooperation, and by associational access to what I termed “911 on camera-phone speed dial,” (not to mention the plain benefit of getting to operate sanctioned rather than marginal venues), then pimps have no obvious source of income.

And with no source of sex-trafficking-related income they’re not likely to have much incentive to recruit and/or enslave new sex workers. Which means… what?

I dunno, I could be wrong, but it seems like the supply of coerced/trafficked sex workers would tend to go down, leaving only sex workers who actually really chose the work actually doing the work, which would probably be a very large drop in the supply of sex-workers, with the result that the price per contact would tend to go up, perhaps considerably, which in turn might be expected to have the following consequences:

- in a legal, seller’s market sex workers wouldn’t be obliged to take the risks they’re sometimes obliged to take to meet their (often pimp-imposed) “quotas.”

- in a legal, seller’s market customers might even find themselves obliged to register, license, and bill-of-health certify themselves a la Genderberg’s idea.

- in a legal, seller’s market customers would have to be a damn sight more professionally courteous and responsible lest they get blacklisted by sex-worker’s “customer rating” sites!

- in a legal, seller’s market where sex workers were just nowhere near as economical an alternative the average customer might, um, reassess all his stupid madonna/whore-centric assumptions about his ordinary partner’s or potential partner’s disinterest and/or desirability.

Yes there’s the “risk” that with the prospect of much higher pay and much better working conditions more people might choose to become sex workers who otherwise wouldn’t. But without the downward pressure of pimp-forced recruitment, pimp-violence-enforced working conditions, and artificially pimp-lowered prices any equilibrium that emerged would be more acceptable to potential commercial sex providers.

Remember also that if the anti-prostitution fan-waiver is right that all women are virtuous, decent, and inclined to engage in “the most awful, filthy thing on earth only with someone they love” then without pimps there’d be no, zero, none prostitutes at all period. And so by that logic legalizing prostitution in a manner that cut recruiter/trafficker pimps out of the picture would actually eliminate prostitution! Ok, so even though they’re wrong about that it’s certainly true that without pimps and with legal, self-interested sex-providers able to intervene in the face of being undercut by involuntary competition** the number of involuntarily prostituted sex workers would tend to go way down.

[** Seriously! If you were a legal prostitute and you saw a pimp-mobile drop off the stereotypical trafficked 13-year-old in heels and hotpants on the opposite corner, or anywhere else in the world what possible incentive would you have to just let that happen instead of snapping a camera-phone photo and speed-dialing 911? What possible motivation would you have to let the Ukranian or Cambodian girl a block down just stand there shivering instead of checking in and saying “I’m on the line with our volunteer anti-trafficking alliance representative, you can be on your way to a safe-house shelter in five minutes… and otherwise I’m going to need to call the police.” You wouldn’t even need a heart (of gold or otherwise) to do that, just a self-interested brain. —fl]

After blogging seemingly non-stop about prostitution last week I said I was going to take a break from it here. And I was going to stick to my resolution against severe temptation. But I just gott a say that Holly over at Feministe has the most intelligent, wide-ranging interview I think I could imagine with Sienna Baskin, of The Sex Worker’s Project an organization that provides legal services to criminalized sex workers and victims of trafficking.

Go here.

Read it yourself.

What’s so great about the interview is, first of all that it’s an interview — not unheard of but still pretty unusual for the blogging format. Secondly it’s a brilliant interview! Holly asks hard question. Baskin provides hard answers. Holly provides hard follow-up questions. Baskin provides more hard information. I haven’t been in journalism since my first quarter of college (I took lots of classes in high-school) but if I was writing a textbook I’m pretty sure I’d want to use hers as an example of the amazing benefits of doing your homework first, preparing questions everyone wants to know about, digging right into the heart of controversies instead of skirting or fluffing around them, following up when you’re not sure you got the expected answer but also following your interviewee’s ambulations instead of trying to stay on (your, personal) script.

That’s all just cool! What else is cool, though, is how clearly the two dissect the complexities of different legalization strategies, of the problems with trafficking, (You bet there’s trafficking and yes it’s it’s a huge, dehumanizing, and tragic problem — but it’s not, evidently, a simple problem since, for example, once rescued from pimps and traffickers trafficked women often return to sex work on their own terms! ) It’s cool how they dissect the benefits and costs of different approaches to coping with prostitution locally, globally, philosophically, and pragmatically. Baskin even provides a persuasive definition of what does or would constitute an ethical john, although she also slips on the unfortunate “maybe some people just can’t get laid” meme.

And oh please don’t get me started quoting either questions or answers or I could be here all day. Instead?

Go here.

Read it yourself.