forced prostitution & trafficking propaganda in news reporting
Because of the amount of debate about forced prostitution in this Barcelona section, I am, with her permission, reproducing the response I received from Rubber Nursey after I wrote to her asking if she'd ever met a woman who was trafficked and/or forced to work as a prostitute. She asked me to mention she was referring only to Australia and isn't familiar with what's happening in Spain, but as I have indicated in previous reports, my own observations make me confident it's the same everywhere I've been, including Spain:
[Quote]Hi Param :)
No, I have NEVER met a sex worker who was kidnapped and forced into an Australian brothel. (I have met, and was close friends with, a sex worker from Bulgaria who went through that ordeal in her home country, but she came to Australia by choice). I have met a few migrant workers who were tricked into thinking they would be doing waitressing, etc in Australia and when they got here, they were told they had to work in a brothel. HOWEVER...they were not FORCED to work in the brothels, with violence. They were just told that if they didn't agree to the work, they would be sent back home. Sure, it was a tough choice for those women, but it WAS a choice.
What I do meet, all the time, is migrant sex workers who came to Australia on contract (or "debt bondage"). This happens because our Govt treats all international sex workers as 'sex slaves' and makes it hard for them to come here independently, even though it is lawful for them to work in our sex industry. Instead of finding their own work and applying for their own visas, they are forced to employ agents (traffickers) to do it, who charge them thousands of dollars for the service, which they have to work off. People often confuse these contracts with people 'buying and selling' kidnapped and abused women. That is not the case. These contracts, while horrible, are freely entered into by sex workers...usually they are already working as sex workers in their own countries, and contracts are the only way they can get into my country to work.
I am NOT saying that forced prostitution doesn't exist. I'm just saying it isn't as common as people think it is. As you may know from my posts, I am part of an Australian sex worker association that runs large-scale projects in the Asia/Pacific region, working closely with international sex worker groups. We also run a trafficking prevention project in Australia. All our migration projects are staffed by international sex workers with personal experience and I have met thousands of sex workers in the twelve years I've been involved with this stuff.
RN[/Quote]
So gentlemen, while we should, of course, take appropriate action in defense of women by reporting the facts to appropriate authorities if it appears to us a woman has been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, we should at the same time not be made to feel guilty by misleading news reporting suggesting any man who spends money on prostitution is supporting violence against women, because that is rarely the case.