Complexities of Short-Term Mobility for Sex Work and Migration among Sex Workers: Violence and Sexual Risks, Barriers to Care, and Enhanced Social and Economic Opportunities

This article traces the development of popular forms of anti-trafficking activism in the United States through a social network and discourse analysis that focuses on NGO websites, celebrity advocacy, merchandising, social media campaigns, and policy interventions. This “branded activism,” as we describe it, plays an important role in legitimizing an emerging anti-trafficking consensus that increasingly shapes both US foreign policy and domestic policing, and is frequently driven by an anti-sex work politics. Popular anti-trafficking discourses, we find, build on melodramatic narratives of victims and (white) saviors, depoliticize the complex labor and migration issues at stake, reinforce capitalist logics, and enable policy interventions that produce harm for migrants, sex workers, and others ostensibly being “rescued.” Celebrity and marketing-driven branded activism relies especially strongly on parallels drawn between histories of chattel slavery and what anti-trafficking campaigns call “modern-day slavery.” We challenge these parallels, particularly as they encourage participants to see themselves as abolitionist saviors in ways that reinforce neo-liberal notions of empowerment rooted in communicative capitalist networks.

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Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Sex Work. By Kimberly Kay Hoang. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City. By Christine B. N. Chin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai. By Svati P. Shah. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Signs ◽

10.1086/686759 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 281-284

Author(s):

Aziza Ahmed

Keyword(s):

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Global City ◽

University Of California ◽

Oxford University ◽

Duke University ◽

Street Corner ◽

And Migration ◽

The City ◽

Oxford University Press

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Short-term interruptions to sex work among a prospective cohort of street-based cisgender female sex workers in Baltimore

International Journal of Drug Policy ◽

10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102858 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 84 ◽

pp. 102858

Author(s):

Rebecca Hamilton White ◽

Ju Nyeong Park ◽

Noya Galai ◽

Michele R. Decker ◽

Sean T. Allen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Prospective Cohort ◽

Female Sex Workers ◽

Short Term ◽

Female Sex

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Prostitution Proliferates

Discriminating Sex ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252041785.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Amy Sueyoshi

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

San Francisco ◽

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

White Women ◽

Chinese Women ◽

Sex Industry ◽

Sexual Freedom ◽

Public Displays ◽

Economic Opportunities

This chapter links growing sexual freedom for whites to the rise of depictions of Chinese prostitutes in the late 1890s. White sex workers flocked to San Francisco for economic opportunities. Middle-class white women additionally defied earlier conventions of sexuality, by going out on dates, wearing more revealing clothes, and engaging in public displays of affection. As images of Chinese prostitutes mounted, Chinese women involved in sex work remained at an all-time low. American-born whites in fact dominated the sex industry. Depictions of Chinese women as morally bankrupt more accurately reflected white women’s modernizing sexuality as it simultaneously bolstered and justified the policing of Chinese women’s presence in San Francisco.

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Community-Based Responses to Negative Health Impacts of Sexual Humanitarian Anti-Trafficking Policies and the Criminalization of Sex Work and Migration in the US

Social Sciences ◽

10.3390/socsci9010001 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 1 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Heidi Hoefinger ◽

Jennifer Musto ◽

P. G. Macioti ◽

Anne E. Fehrenbacher ◽

Nicola Mai ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Health Outcomes ◽

Social Services ◽

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Health Impacts ◽

Community Based ◽

The Us ◽

And Migration ◽

Negative Health Outcomes

System-involvement resulting from anti-trafficking interventions and the criminalization of sex work and migration results in negative health impacts on sex workers, migrants, and people with trafficking experiences. Due to their stigmatized status, sex workers and people with trafficking experiences often struggle to access affordable, unbiased, and supportive health care. This paper will use thematic analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with 50 migrant sex workers and trafficked persons, as well as 20 key informants from legal and social services, in New York and Los Angeles. It will highlight the work of trans-specific and sex worker–led initiatives that are internally addressing gaps in health care and the negative health consequences that result from sexual humanitarian anti-trafficking interventions that include policing, arrest, court-involvement, court-mandated social services, incarceration, and immigration detention. Our analysis focuses on the impact of criminalization on sex workers and their experiences with sexual humanitarian efforts intended to protect and control them. We argue that these grassroots community-based efforts are a survival-oriented reaction to the harms of criminalization and a response to vulnerabilities left unattended by mainstream sexual humanitarian approaches to protection and service provision that frame sex work itself as the problem. Peer-to-peer interventions such as these create solidarity and resiliency within marginalized communities, which act as protective buffers against institutionalized systemic violence and the resulting negative health outcomes. Our results suggest that broader public health support and funding for community-led health initiatives are needed to reduce barriers to health care resulting from stigma, criminalization, and ineffective anti-trafficking and humanitarian efforts. We conclude that the decriminalization of sex work and the reform of institutional practices in the US are urgently needed to reduce the overall negative health outcomes of system-involvement.

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Migration and Sex Work through a Gender Perspective

Contexto Internacional ◽

10.1590/s0102-8529.2018400300005 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 501-524

Author(s):

Charlotte Valadier

Keyword(s):

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Sex Trafficking ◽

Special Focus ◽

Post Colonial ◽

Sex And Sexuality ◽

Feminist Theories ◽

Feminist Perspectives ◽

And Migration ◽

Sexual Trafficking

Abstract The trajectories of migration and prostitution are embedded in representations of body, gender, sex and sexuality. This article seeks to understand the articulation between migration and sex work through the lens of gender. To this end, this article relies on a typological approach that aims to clear some ground in the ongoing debate on the issues of prostitution, sex trafficking and migration of sex workers. It explores the theoretical cross-contribution as well as the conceptual limitations of radical, liberal, post-colonial, critical and postmodern feminist perspectives on the issues of prostitution, sex workers’ mobility and sex trafficking. It gives special focus to the contributions of the postmodern feminist reading, especially by highlighting how it has challenged conventional feminist theories, hitherto grounded in dualistic structures. In fact, the postmodern feminist approach makes a stand against the simplistic dichotomies such as First/Third World, passivity/agency, vulnerability/empowerment, innocence/conscience, sexual trafficking/voluntary prostitution or ‘trafficked victim’/‘autonomous sex worker.’ As such, postmodern feminism disrupts all fixed demarcations and homogeneous forms of categorisation on which the dominant feminist theories were based, allowing thus for the emergence of new practices of subjectivity as well as new forms of flexible identities.

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Sex Work, Migration, and Human Trafficking in South Africa: From polarised arguments to potential partnerships

Anti-Trafficking Review ◽

10.14197/atr.201219125 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 74-90

Author(s):

Ntokozo Yingwana ◽

Dr Rebecca Walker ◽

Alex Etchart

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Human Trafficking ◽

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Trade Unions ◽

Well Being ◽

Mobility Model ◽

Sex Industry ◽

Sex Worker ◽

And Migration

In South Africa, the conflation of sex work with human trafficking means that migrant/mobile sex workers are often framed as victims of trafficking while arguments for the decriminalisation of sex work are discounted due to claims about the risks of increased trafficking. This is despite the lack of clear evidence that trafficking, including in the sex industry, is a widespread problem. Sex worker organisations have called for an evidence-based approach whereby migration, sex work, and trafficking are distinguished and the debate moves beyond the polarised divisions over sex work. This paper takes up this argument by drawing on research with sex workers and a sex worker organisation in South Africa, as well as reflections shared at two Sex Workers’ Anti-trafficking Research Symposiums. In so doing, the authors propose the further development of a Sex Work, Exploitation, and Migration/Mobility Model that takes into consideration the complexities of the quotidian experiences of migration and selling sex. This, we suggest, could enable a more effective and productive partnership between sex worker organisations and other stakeholder groups, including anti-trafficking and labour rights organisations, trade unions, and others to protect the rights and well-being of all those involved in sex work.

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Book Reviews

Transfers ◽

10.3167/trans.2014.040313 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 4 (3) ◽

pp. 131-149

Keyword(s):

Sex Workers ◽

Global City ◽

Viet Nam ◽

Community Culture ◽

The Past ◽

Transnational Mobility ◽

Yellow Peril ◽

David Walker ◽

And Migration

Yogesh Sharma, ed., Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-Modern India Debojyoti DasJason Lim, A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore 1942–1983 Margaret MasonXiang Biao, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Mika Toyota, eds., Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia Gopalan BalachandranAjaya Kumar Sahoo and Johannes G. de Kruijf, eds., Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora Anouck CarsignolKieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora Yuk Wah ChanChristine B.N. Chin, Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City Lilly Yu and Kimberly Kay HoangDavid Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, eds., Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century Daniel OakmanValeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 Vincent LagendijkBieke Cattoor and Bruno De Meulder, Figures Infrastructures: An Atlas of Roads and Railways Maik HoemkeKlaus Benesch, ed., Culture and Mobility Rudi Volti

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The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: COVID-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America

Social Sciences ◽

10.3390/socsci10050157 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (5) ◽

pp. 157

Author(s):

Elene Lam ◽

Elena Shih ◽

Katherine Chin ◽

Kate Zen

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Social Welfare ◽

Human Trafficking ◽

Sex Work ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Interpersonal Violence ◽

Sex Trafficking ◽

The State ◽

Emergency Relief ◽

Sexual Services

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.

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HIV and STI positivity rates among transgender people attending two large STI clinics in the Netherlands

Sexually Transmitted Infections ◽

10.1136/sextrans-2020-054875 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. sextrans-2020-054875

Author(s):

Susanne Drückler ◽

Ceranza Daans ◽

Elske Hoornenborg ◽

Henry De Vries ◽

Martin den Heijer ◽

...

Keyword(s):

The Netherlands ◽

Gender Identity ◽

Sex Work ◽

Sexual Behaviour ◽

Sex Workers ◽

Hiv Prevalence ◽

Hiv Positive ◽

Gender Identities ◽

Transgender People ◽

Sexually Transmitted

BackgroundGlobal data show that transgender people (TGP) are disproportionally affected by HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs); however, data are scarce for Western European countries. We assessed gender identities, sexual behaviour, HIV prevalence and STI positivity rates, and compared these outcomes between TGP who reported sex work and those who did not.MethodsWe retrospectively retrieved data from all TGP who were tested at the STI clinics of Amsterdam and The Hague, the Netherlands in 2017–2018. To identify one’s gender identity, a ‘two-step’ methodology was used assessing, first, the assigned gender at birth (assigned male at birth (AMAB)) or assigned female at birth), and second, clients were asked to select one gender identity that currently applies: (1) transgender man/transgender woman, (2) man and woman, (3) neither man nor woman, (4) other and (5) not known yet. HIV prevalence, bacterial STI (chlamydia, gonorrhoea and/or infectious syphilis) positivity rates and sexual behaviour were studied using descriptive statistics.ResultsTGP reported all five categories of gender identities. In total 273 transgender people assigned male at birth (TGP-AMAB) (83.0%) and 56 transgender people assigned female at birth (TGP-AFAB) (17.0%) attended the STI clinics. Of TGP-AMAB, 14,6% (39/267, 95% CI 10.6% to 19.4%) were HIV-positive, including two new diagnoses and bacterial STI positivity was 15.0% (40/267, 95% CI 10.9% to 19.8%). Among TGP-AFAB, bacterial STI positivity was 5.6% (3/54, 95% CI 1.2% to 15.4%) and none were HIV-positive. Sex work in the past 6 months was reported by 53.3% (137/257, 95% CI 47.0% to 59.5%) of TGP-AMAB and 6.1% (3/49, 95% CI 1.3% to 16.9%) of TGP-AFAB. HIV prevalence did not differ between sex workers and non-sex workers.ConclusionOf all TGP, the majority were TGP-AMAB of whom more than half engaged in sex work. HIV prevalence and STI positivity rates were substantial among TGP-AMAB and much lower among TGP-AFAB. Studies should be performed to provide insight into whether the larger population of TGP-AMAB and TGP-AFAB are at risk of HIV and STI.

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