10 October 2005
Letter to the
Conference Organisers European
Conference
on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration 2005
Dear
Petra Timmerman, Marieke van Doorninck and everyone in the Organisation
Committee of the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and
Migration 2005,
Thank
you for your letter. Yes, we
have been getting information about the conference.
Did you receive the contributions to the manifesto that we sent
earlier this year? We enclose
them again just in case.
We
appreciate that you want sex workers to be able to meet to discuss
concerns and demands in our own name, and we of course want to be part of
the discussions on the Manifesto, the Declaration of the Rights of Sex
Workers and the forming of a network, all of which is taking place on the
first day and which will frame the rest of the conference.
However, we want to raise again that there is a serious problem
with the personal and work details you are asking sex workers to reveal,
even though confidentially, in order to attend the conference.
Please take what we are raising into account not only in relation
to us but as a matter of principle for the protection of everyone’s
anonymity and safety.
On
28 September, two of us went to a conference organised by the Scottish
Drugs Forum. Jinty Kerr spoke
as co-chair of SCOTPEP in place of Ruth Morgan Thomas, SCOTPEP’s other
chair who is also the chair of your board.
We were astonished to learn that Ms Kerr was a police officer for
over 30 years and was head of Glasgow’s drugs squad.
Is
it widely known that an organisation which purports to speak for sex
workers has a police officer in such a central position?
The close relationship between the police and projects which work
with sex workers and are often run by ex-sex workers is not new to us.
We have raised long ago that such projects could not speak for sex
workers since they are often funded by the Home Office and/or have
government people on their boards and are therefore not independent.
But it seems to have reached the point where the police are not
only involved, they are the spokespeople!
Do
the sex workers who have registered for the first day of the conference
know of this close police association?
How can you expect sex workers coming from the UK, or indeed from
anywhere else, to give detailed information about ourselves when the chair
of your conference is connected to the police in this way?
How can you allow this, especially at a time when criminalisation
is increasing rather than lessening?
We refer not only to anti-trafficking deportations and anti-client
laws but to the laws against street workers which have just been
introduced in Italy.
Once
again, the attendance and views of the few women who are able to be public
is prioritized over the rest of us, and those organisations which have
‘police protection’ are prioritized over those which are truly
independent. Some ex-sex
workers are now employed as academics or project workers, and are
therefore protected from being targeted by the authorities and
criminalised. But most sex
workers don’t have that protection.
We
also wondered what measures you are taking to ensure that women aren’t
identified as sex workers just by going in and out of the venue on day
one?
The
information we have received doesn’t specify who is speaking in each
session. There are a number
of urgent issues which we want to speak to.
We list them here.
1.
We know
from your literature that you are aware of how anti-trafficking
legislation is being used to deport immigrant women, prevent migration and
intimidate sex workers generally. You
probably saw that the police raided a massage parlour in Birmingham last
week, claiming they were saving 19 women from being forced by traffickers
to work in the sex industry. When
the media asked us to comment, we spelt out how similar this raid was to
the 2002 raids in Soho, London, that our Collective fought with some
success. As soon as the Birmingham women were able to speak, they
denied having been trafficked but, like Soho, a number of women have been
held pending deportation. Only
protest from Anti-Slavery International and ourselves (we don’t know if
there were others) and the intervention of a lawyer prevented their
immediate deportation. Yet
no-one is spelling out publicly that what was essentially an immigration
raid was presented to the public as a heroic effort to free victims of
trafficking, and how support for anti-trafficking legislation from
academics and feminists has allowed immigrant sex workers to be targeted
while violent men go free. We want to speak about the concrete experience of immigrant
women in our network who have been unjustly targeted as well as the
experience of genuine victims of trafficking we have been helping who have
been denied resources, refused asylum, criminalised and imprisoned.
2.
The other key issue we want to speak about is the devastating
impact of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). Many of the sex worker projects in the UK know first-hand how
ASBOs have resulted in an increase in violence and how many women are now
being imprisoned – losing their homes, kids, etc.
Yet they do not speak publicly and do not defend women when they
have ASBOs slapped on them. Again
the close association of the sex worker projects with the police and Home
Office has ensured that the true horror of the situation does not emerge
and that most women are undefended. The
impact of ASBOs on women working on the street is similar to the impact of
criminalizing clients, introduced in Sweden.
ASBOs do not only affect sex workers but children and people on low
incomes. They are part of a
parallel criminal system which is supposed to be based on evidence, but
openly on prejudice, hearsay and the rule of the executive over the courts
– they are part of a general attack on human rights and the introduction
of dictatorial powers which extend to imprisonment without trial and the
police shoot-to-kill policy. We
hope to be able to gather support from sex worker groups and supporters at
the conference for the abolition of ASBOs.
3.
Poverty and economic need are not even mentioned in your programme.
Yet women are the poorer sex everywhere, which is why the majority
of sex workers are women. Women’s
increasing poverty in the Global South as well as cuts in benefits in many
European countries, including the loss of the welfare State in the Eastern
European countries, are forcing increasing numbers of women, girls and
boys into emigration and prostitution, many of whom are then rounded up
and deported. Those of us who
are single mothers face the additional burden of having children to
support – male sex workers are rarely in this position.
While all sex work should be decriminalised, regardless of how any
of us has entered the sex industry, we must also demand access to benefits
and resources so that no one is institutionalised in this or any other
industry by lack of economic alternatives.
Alternatives can only help all of us, whether we want to work in
the sex industry or not, to combat violence and discrimination.
We do not need to glamourise sex work to get recognition for the
rights and skills of the workers who do it.
Most other work is not glamourous and workers don’t have to claim
to love their jobs in order to get recognition as workers.
Let’s not lower our working class standards.
4.
Finally, while we are aware that some police officers do not agree
with criminalisation, decriminalisation cannot be achieved without sex
workers organising independently from the Home Office and the police.
Again, this is not mentioned in your programme.
To ignore the difference between independent sex worker collectives
and Home Office projects is to allow the Home Office, the police and
political parties to set the agenda and control the sex workers’
movement from the top. As
with other movements for social change, it results in good paying jobs and
notoriety for a few while the rest continue to go to prison, and face
violence and discrimination. This
was clear at the Scottish conference we referred to earlier: while all the
speakers agreed that prostitution should be decriminalised, when another
police woman later spoke justifying why they were continuing to arrest
women, not a single project opposed them.
It was left to us, the only independent voice of sex workers’
present, to do it.
Also, there is a move in
the UK to promote toleration zones, yet the much trumpeted ‘managed
zones’ in Edinburgh included regulations that only 12 women could work
there – the 13th woman got arrested!
Those who promote the zones, even those who claim to be defending
sex workers’ rights, never tell anyone this.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Power to the sisters,
Niki Adams and Cari Mitchell
English
Collective of Prostitutes
Crossroads Women’s Centre PO
Box 287 London NW6 5QU
Ph/minicom 020 7482 2496 Fax
020 7209 4761
ecp@allwomencount.net
www.prostitutescollective.net
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