Sex work CAN be sex trafficking and vice versa

workingitinportland:

Not IS.  But CAN be.

“Sex work doesn’t equal sex trafficking!!1″ is a popular cry among sex workers who are trying to gain legitimacy by distancing themselves (ourselves?) from those evil sex traffickers we hear so much about.  It’s a normal response to having your rights and safety removed, after all, right? to draw a distinction between yourself and the ostensible reason that you’ve lost rights and security. “You don’t mean me. Surely not me!” Especially when the popular understanding of the reason given (”sex trafficking”) is popularly understood as wicked men in white vans kidnapping innocent young white women and children. 

It’s more than a useless slogan tho, it’s outright damaging. In the same way that actual survivors of sexual exploitation are obscured when I’m thrown in there with them because I “traffic myself”, actual survivors of sexual exploitation who are doing consensual sex work find themselves made invisible and their needs unmet when we insist that they must not be doing sex work if they’re also experiencing labour exploitation. “That’s rape.”

Well… sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing: whether or not it’s rape depends on how the sex worker in the situation sees it. Many sex workers who’ve experienced sexual labour exploitation while selling at sexual labour draw a difference between the two states of sexual labour exploitation and sexual assault.  Many don’t. 

Many sex workers migrate to do sex work and only after they’ve arrived do they find out that their papers are confiscated and they have to work off an imaginary or inflated debt to the people who helped them move; that some sex workers consent to do sex work and don’t know until later that they’ll be doing it under coercive circumstances; some sex workers have partners who become abusive and demand or forcibly take a sex worker’s earnings, and while the worker is doing the work willingly, they’re not seeing all or maybe any of the profit (and we know financial abuse is a very common abuse tactic even in nonswer dv relationships).

I want to discuss it more because coerced and exploited farm and domestic workers are still understood as workers, and if we’re trying to get sexual labour understood as labour, can it still be labour under coercive or exploitative circumstances?  if we’re trying to get sexual labour understood as labour, and we’re trying to normalize replacement of the word “trafficking” for more specific descriptions like “forced labour” “exploited labour” “coerced labour”, then is there not also room for “exploited sexual labour that isn’t rape”? 

I think there is–I’m thinking of the women Agustin interviewed, for example, sex workers who migrated to do sex work, were fine with sex work, but had their papers confiscated until they worked off a fake debt imposed by some of the people who helped them migrate. The specific sexual labour they perform is consented to and acceptable, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being exploited:  the money or a large cut of the money is being kept from them. The person doing the exploiting is not NECESSARILY the person or people they’re having sex with, although there’s always room for more exploitation in sex work like when clients try to haggle you down &c.  

In the case of the workers I know who lived thru abusive relationships with partners who took their money, the people they had sex with for money weren’t raping them.  The workers gave their consent.  The exploitation happened in a different space and manner entirely. 

Clearly, sex work and sex trafficking can and do overlap often, altho not all or even most of the time. 

The conditions that allow sexual exploitation to happen and flourish are the same, regardless of whether the person being exploited is a sex worker or not.  

The conditions are: state sanctioned cultural and societal disregard for women’s and children’s bodily autonomy and safety

prioritising white male access to the bodies and labour of other people, particularly marginalised people (women, children, lgbt people of all ages and genders) over these people’s safety

these are the driving forces behind sexual exploitation and labour exploitation of all kinds, they’re at the root of the blatant lack of attention the government is paying to the assaults and deaths endemic to our child welfare systems across the country, which is where most underage sexually exploited people both EXPERIENCE exploitation for the first time and run from to trade sexual exploitation for slightly more autonomy and even safety on the streets. 

This is what’s behind funding law enforcement for stings rather than shelters for vulnerable kids and adults so they don’t have to trade sex, this is behind SESTA, behind Brock Turner’s freedom, the new banking act, the loss of reproductive rights in Iowa, behind RHYA’s inability to pass since 2014, defunding shelters, weakening laws against domestic violence and workers rights, empowering law enforcement and men in general with access to guns and the everything else.  

sexual exploitation ends when all other exploitation ends, not before.