Will nobody listen to the sex workers?

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/15/will-nobody-listen-to-the-sex-workers-prostitution

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The sex work debate, no matter how sedate and sympathetic its interlocutors claim it to be, is a spectacle. It attracts an audience with the lure of a crisis – prostitution sweeping the nation! – and a promise of doing good by feeling terrible. Sad stories about sex work are offered like sequins, displayed to be admired and then swept off the stage when the number is done. As a treat, the organisers may even decide to invite a token whore to perform. Here come the questions for her:

■ Is prostitution violence against women?■ Are prostitutes "exploited" or are they "empowered"?■ What are the factors that lead women (and it's always women) to enter into or be forced to enter into prostitution?■ What about "the men"/"the johns"/"the demand side"?■ How can we help women "escape"/"exit from"/"leave" prostitution?■ How can we "raise awareness" about "this issue"?

Then there are the questions rarely up for debate, the ones she is left to raise alone:■ How do we define "prostitution"?■ How do people who sell sex describe it?■ What are some of the factors that lead women to not sell sex?■ What are some of the factors that lead women to oppose prostitution?■ How can we help women (and anyone else) better understand what selling sex is really like?■ How can we ensure that sex workers are leading any public debates on "this issue" – that is, about their own lives?

We should, in fact, refuse to debate. Sex work itself and, inseparable from it, the lives of sex workers are not up for debate – or they shouldn't be. I don't imagine that those in the anti-prostitution camp who favour these kinds of debates actually believe that they are weighing the humanity, the value of the people who do sex work. Their production of the debate rests on the assumption that they themselves comprise the group that really cares for prostitutes. They may consider the purpose of the prostitution debate to be the challenging of myths and assumptions, to demonstrate their own expertise, perhaps to "raise awareness".

What constitutes the nature of this awareness, particularly concerning the enduring and ubiquitous nature of prostitution, pornography, and other kinds of commercial sex? Awareness-raisers can still count on a social hunger for lurid and detailed accounts, as well as a social order that restricts sex workers' own opportunities to speak out about the realities of their lives. These factors in combination promote demand for the debaters' own productions.

To fuel and stoke it, awareness-raisers erect billboards on the sides of highways, with black-and-white photos of girls looking fearful and red letters crying "not for sale". They hire Hollywood bros like Ashton Kutcher and Sean Penn to make clicky little public service announcements for YouTube in which they tell their fans, "Real men don't buy girls". They occupy column inches in the New York Times with those such as Nicholas Kristof, who regales his readers with stories of his heroic missions into brothels and slums in Cambodia and in India "rescuing" sex workers.

The rescue industry, as anthropologist Laura Agustín terms such efforts, derives value from the production of awareness: It gives the producers jobs, the effectiveness of which is measured by a subjective accounting of how much they are being talked about. Raising awareness serves to build value for the raisers, not for those who are the subjects of the awareness.

Awareness-raising about prostitution is not a value-neutral activity. Sex workers see a straight line between foundation dollars earmarked for advertisements such as those that appeared on Chicago buses – "Get Rich. Work In Prostitution. Pimps Keep The Profits, And Prostituted Women Often Pay With Their Lives" – and the allocation of resources to the Chicago police to arrest pimps in order to save women whom they call "prostituted". Inevitably, all of these women face arrest, no matter what they call them, a demonstration of the harm produced by awareness raising despite any good intentions. "On paper, sex workers are still not as likely to face felony charges as their patrons," according to the Chicago Reporter, "who can be charged with a felony on their first offence under the Illinois Safe Children's Act, which was enacted in 2010." But when the paper examined felony arrest statistics they found, [the] data shows that prostitution-related felonies are being levied almost exclusively against sex workers. During the past four years, they made up 97% of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in Cook County. And the number only grew: felony convictions among sex workers increased by 68% between 2008 and 2011.

This was when anti-prostitution groups such as the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation became active in the city, demanding johns pay.

With awareness-raising as a goal, the debate circles back on itself. The problem at hand is not How do we improve the lives of sex workers?, but How should we continue to think and talk about the lives of sex workers, to carry on our discourse on prostitution regardless of how little sex workers are involved in it? Perhaps those fixated on debating ought to confine the scope of their solution to how best to bring about debates and leave those involved in the sex trade to themselves.

And on which side of this debate are sex workers presumed to sit?

Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work in order to have the right to do it free from harm. For many, if not the majority, of people who work for a living, our attitudes toward our work change over the course of our working lives, even over the course of each day on the job. The experiences of sex workers cannot be captured by corralling them onto either the exploited or the empowered side of the stage. Likewise there must be room for them to identify, publicly and collectively, what they wish to change about how they are treated as workers without being told that the only solution is for them to exit the industry. Their complaints about sex work shouldn't be construed, as they often are, as evidence of sex workers' desire to exit sex work. These complaints are common to all workers and shouldn't be exceptional when they are made about sex work. As labour journalist Sarah Jaffe said of the struggles at her former job as a waitress, "No one ever wanted to save me from the restaurant industry."

The contemporary prostitution debate might appear to have moved on from the kinds of concerns moral reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries expressed, but it has only slightly restated the question from, What do we do about prostitution? to, What do we do about prostitutes? According to the 21st-century heirs to the battle for moral hygiene, this is to be understood as a way of focusing on the prostitute as victim, not criminal. Forgive sex workers if they do not want the attention of those who refuse to listen to them.

Far from concerning the lives of people who do sex work, these debates are an opportunity for prostitution opponents to stake out their own intellectual, political, and moral contributions to "this issue". When feminist prostitute and Coyote [Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics] founder Margo St James sought to debate anti-prostitution activist Kathleen Barry at one of the first world conferences on trafficking in 1983, she was told by Barry that it would be "inappropriate to discuss sexual slavery with prostitute women".

This continues to this day, with anti-prostitution groups alleging that sex workers who want to participate in the same forums they do are "not representative", are members of a "sex industry lobby", or are working on behalf of – or are themselves – "pimps and traffickers". For my reporting on anti-sex work campaigners, I've been told I must be getting published only because I've been paid off by pimps. Barry went on to found the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which introduced the vague offence of ''sexual exploitation'' into United Nations and United States anti-trafficking policy, used by some to mean all commercial sex, whether or not force, fraud, or coercion are present.

Sweden's famed prostitution law – often described as a feminist victory for criminalising men who buy sex, and which Barry and her anti–sex work allies in Equality Now and the European Women's Lobby push as model legislation – was undertaken without any meaningful consultation with women who sell sex. By contrast, New Zealand's model of decriminalised prostitution was advanced by sex workers, and has since been evaluated with their participation (and largely to their satisfaction). Rather than evolving toward more sex worker involvement in policy, however, the backlash is nearly constant. Canada's supreme court agreed to hear a case that could result in removing laws against prostitution, and now in appeals, the same body declined to hear testimony from advocacy organisations run by sex workers themselves.

We must redraw the lines of the prostitution debate. Either prostitutes are in the debate or they are not. Sex workers are tired of being invited to publicly investigate the politics of their own lives only if they're also willing to serve as a prop for someone else's politics. As editor of the influential anthology Whores and Other Feminists, Jill Nagle writes, "One could argue that the production of feminist discourse around prostitution by non-prostitutes alienates the labourer herself from the process of her own representation." Not only are sex workers in the abstract used to aid feminists in "giving voice to the voiceless," those same feminists then remain free to ignore the content of sex workers' actual speech.

When sex workers are cast in this role, as mute icon or service instrument, it's the anti-prostitution camp at work, decrying sex workers' situation yet abandoning them to the fundamentally passive role they insist sex workers occupy in prostitution. The parallel becomes even more damning when sex workers are paid comparatively little for their participation behind the debate podiums.

Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work is published by Verso. Melissa Gira Grant will be speaking at Foyles, London on 27 March and Bristol festival of ideas on 28 March