Victims of Trafficking?
Trafficking. The modern slave trade. Sex Slaves. Almost every day there seems to be at least one media story about this ‘blight’ on modern Britain. The Government has mobilised against it, as have numerous NGO. But what exactly is going on here – what is trafficking, and what are these NGO and the Government trying to achieve with trafficking legislation?
Let’s get it out in the open right from the start – overwhelmingly there is no modern UK slave trade. Not like the old one. There are, perhaps at most, a small group of people in slavery in the UK. To be sure, there are people in debt-bondage, or being incredibly exploited, or working in horrendous conditions for little pay, but this is not the same as people being bought and sold. These are work conditions which exist within industries, work conditions which are changeable and set by government policy and law.
People without the ‘right’ sort of papers generally have to pay someone to come to the UK. They pay people who ‘facilitate’ their entry – these are the ‘traffickers’. They charge obscene amounts of money and often exploit those they transport, but it must be clear from the start that people willingly pay for their services because they want to enter and work in a country like the UK. Sex workers are no different. However anti-trafficking campaigns and policies aren’t about the amount of money people pay to voluntarily come to the UK to work. This could be fixed tomorrow by opening the borders, or, say, simplifying the visa requirements for entry to the UK and granting people work visas for any kind of work – including sex work.
Anti-trafficking policy is about controlling migration, in particular controlling women’s migration. Overwhelmingly, the trafficking debate is about women’s migration and work in the sex industry in the UK. It’s about the further criminalisation of prostitution and sex workers, and the reinforcement of UK border controls. It needs to be recognised that for the most part migrants working in the sex industry knowingly decide to come to the UK to engage in sex work. They are however often lied to about the conditions in the industry and about things like the rate of pay.
The problem with anti-trafficking policies is that sex work doesn’t count as work. No matter that wages are paid, people clock on and off, or even that there is a sex workers union in the UK – people don’t see sex work as someone’s job. And this is part of the problem. Sex work is work. It is one of many occupations that exist under capitalism. It is not a privileged moment of ‘male violence’, nor some kind of impure ‘commodification’ of a ‘natural act’. Sex is just one human activity that can become commodified. Sex is not a ‘special’ category of human activity – it can be as much work as anything else. And it is important to recognise when and where it takes place as labour, whether it is waged or unwaged.
The government has recently been undertaking a program of sex work workplace raids and deportations in the UK. When it is clear that the majority of migrant sex workers are here to work, and that sex work is a form of waged labour, we can begin to see what role the ‘trafficking’ debate plays. It is there to control and regulate both the sex industry workers in particular, and migrant labour in general, through criminalisation. This criminalisation has various negative effects – in wage levels, security, cost of migration, health, etc. It marks migrants in general, and sex workers in particular, as less than fully human, less than citizens and less than capable of full agency.
International Union of Sex Workers
x:talk – free English Classes for
sex workers
International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe