Hello and welcome to Behind Paddle Podcast with me Porcelain Victoria. Today we are gonna carry on, we're not gonna start in a song. Um you can tell I just had Spotify on, playing Disney. Um we're gonna carry on reading Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights, Molly Smith and Juno Mack. Bye, Molly Smith and Juno Rack Juno Mac Quite tongue-tie today it seems. I'm just a happy turt from the podcast. Right White people in Britain and North America have been very successful at docking any real reckoning with the legacies of slave trade. Historian Nick Draper writes We privilege abolition if you say to somebody tell me about Britain and slavery. The instinctive response of most people in Wilberforce and Abolition Those two hundred years of slavery beforehand have been elided. We just haven't wanted to think about it. By rhetorically interwining modern trafficking with chattel slavery, governments and campaigners have been able to hide punitive policies targeting irregular migration behind seemingly uncomplicated righteous outrage. Men of color become modern enslavers, who deserve prosecution or worse. Their quote human cargo, figured as being transported against their will, are owed nothing more than humanitarian return. And the racist trope of border invasion is given a progressive sheen through collective shared horror at the villainy of the perpetrators. Meanwhile, in crackdowns and deportations, European governments position themselves as reenacting and rewriting the history of anti slavery movements to make themselves both victims and heroes. Of course, these actions by European governments do harm. For example, their policy of confiscating or destroying smuggling boats has not quote rescued anyone, only induced smugglers to send migrants in less valuable and less seaworthy boats, leading to many more deaths. This policy continued for years, despite clear evidence that it was causing deaths. But faced with twenty first century enslavers, there is little need for white reflection. Instead, Renzi later wrote that European nations need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt and reject and reject any notion of a moral duty to welcome arrivals. At the same time arriting the Italian government's solution to the migrant crisis is to pay for migrants to be incarcerated, stranded in dangerous, disease ridden detention centers in Libya. As Robin Maynard writes, by hijacking the terminology of slavery, widely referring to themselves as abolitionists, anti sex work campaigners in pushing for criminalization are often undermining those most harmed by the legacy of slavery. As black persons across the Americas are literally fighting for our lives, it is urgent to examine the actions and goals of any mostly white and conservative movement who claim to be the rightful inheritors of an anti slavery mission which aims to abolish prostitution, but both ignores and indirectly facilitates brutalities waged against black communities. What does the fight to save people from modern slavery look like on the ground? In 2017, police in North Yorkshire told journalists that they were fighting to rescue sex slaves and asked members of the public to call in with tips, adding that the quote sex slaves themselves are prepared to do it sell sex. They believe there is nothing wrong in it. We have just got to educate them that they are victims of human trafficking. It seems fairly obvious that women who are prepared to do it and believe there is nothing wrong with it will not particularly benefit from being quote educated about the fact that they are victims of trafficking, which in England and Wales means a forty five day respite period, frequently disregarded followed by a humanitarian deportation. In twenty twelve, Alaska passed a law which essentially redefined prostitution as quote sex trafficking. The only two people charged in the law's first two years of the law were sex workers caught in ordinary prostitution stings. One was charged with sex trafficking herself when the state alleged that she quote instituted or aided in her own prostitution. In the other case, a woman was charged with multiple counts of felony sex trafficking for sharing space with other sex workers when she booked a duro for herself and another worker with a police officer who was posing as a client. After five years, the Alaskan state had not charged or convicted anyone with coercion, deception or force relating to trafficking. The law had only been used against sex workers, their family members and their landlords. In 2016, Irish police arrested four Romanian sex workers. Police claimed that the women had been trafficked but prosecuted them for brothel keeping regardless a quote crime, which simply entails sharing a flat, as sex workers often do for safety. The women stated in court that they were selling sex in order to send money home to their families in Romania. The police commented that, quote, they are four little girls and they made full admissions that they were providing sexual services to a large number of men. Emphasis on hours. Their ages range from 21 to 30. The police added they were paying 700 rent to a greedy landlord for an apartment that they should have been paying 350 for. So they were being used and abused by a lot of people. The police took 5,000 euros from the women and the court fined them another 200 each. It is hard to see how taking all this money tackles the harm of an overpriced flat, and easy to imagine that these women might have preferred working in their apparently overpriced flat to being raided, being prosecuted, and having their cash taken as an anti-trafficking initiative. Anti-trafficking policing looks like border policing. In Canada, a 2015 human trafficking raid on massage parlors led to 11 women being deported. In Canada, a 2015 human trafficking raid on massage parlors led to 11 women being deported. One migrant sex worker named me spent two months in a Canadian detention centre. They did not allow me to leave. As they said they had to protect me. They thought my friends and clients were bad people and dangerous for me. They did not allow my friends to be a bonds person to get me out of these chains. End quote. After me was deported, Canadian immigrant officials refused to return the $10,000 they'd taken away from her, which included savings she'd brought with her when she moved to Canada. Fanny, another migrant who was detained for eight days, said of her arrest. There were other women working in the same hotel who were white, and the police didn't bother them or even talk to them at all. In October 2016, police raided a series of massage parlours in Soho and Chinatown and arrested 17 women on immigration charges. In the northern UK, town of Bolton, a quote crackdown on human trafficking and modern slavery found two Romanian women who described themselves as sex workers. A local journalist writes that immigration officers served both women with papers, instructing them to get a legitimate job within 30 days or else risk arrest and possible deportation. Meanwhile, the police forced the woman's landlord to evict them. In Northern Ireland, two asylum seekers, both homeless, one seventeen years old, were prosecuted for human trafficking offences for the crime of smuggling themselves into Northern Ireland on false documents. Michael Dottridge, the former head of Anti-Slavery International, writes that on several occasions he had heard UK government ministers suggest that the police should destroy the basic shelters that migrant people are living in at the French-British border of Calais, the site of a large refugee camp, as a way to quote, stop trafficking. Police Scotland put out a press release noting that they had refused entry at the border to more than a hundred people as part of their anti-trafficking work, offering as an example of Romanian women, offering as an example a Romanian woman who quote had previously worked as a prostitute in Glasgow. The BBC reports quote she was refused admission at Glasgow in may 2017, then again in Liverpool in July 2017, and was encountered recently at Belfast Docks attempting to get to Scotland. She was removed to Romania. The same report describes another Romanian woman refused entry at the border because she was known to the police to be a sex worker. The police knew she was a sex worker because of an incredibly traumatic event. When she had previously worked in Scotland, she and another worker were held hostage in a flat in Falkirk by a client with a knife. They were both raped and the other woman, Luciana, was killed. On this basis, immigration police detained her at the border and deported her while claiming a human a humanitarian anti-trafficking mantle. There are more examples of cases like this than could fit into one book. At borders all over the world, sex workers are treated as both villain and victims. Homeland Security officially banned anyone who has sold sex in the previous ten years from entry into the United States along with spies, Nazis, and terrorists. The border to the United States is a no man's land. The people detained at the port entry have few rights, no warrant or even reasonable suspicion. It is legally required for agents to demand passwords and search through electronic devices, like phones or laptops, or even to clone all the data they find. Sex workers attempting entry into the US for any reason can be questioned and detained for hours or days before being sent back. The numbers of people affected by this have risen significantly since the start of Trump's presidency. Many in our community, including personal friends, have spoken to the trauma of being stopped at customs and put through 12 to 48 hour ordeals in which they were denied food, rest or medication. They were often handcuffed or shackled to chairs, including in public areas of airports, where immigration enforcement agents subjected them to humiliation of excessive frisking and invasive bodily searches, and deliberately withheld sanitary products. No filming or recording of border agents is allowed, and many of them use illegal tactics to force sex workers to sign an admission of guilt, banning them from the United States for ten years. In the era of the war on trafficking, the hypocrisy is galing. While their agents taunt sex workers with screenshots of escort sites and naked photos during interrogations, US Customs and Border Prosecution condemn the heinous crime of sex trafficking on their website and advertise job vacancies that smugly proclaim the vitality and magnitude of their quote mission to secure the nation from threats like human trafficking. US lawmakers say equality equally poetic things about the tragedy of sex trafficking and how appalling it is that the human rights of prostituted people are so violated and do nothing to overturn the travel ban that meant current and former sex workers couldn't attend the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington DC to do valuable human rights work. Nor do they act to change these harrowing and traumatizing experiences that sex workers are subjected to at the US border. Instead, they produce the quote Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, known together as foster ancestor, laws which claim to create safety, while in fact documenting the internet spaces that help sex workers protect themselves from rapists or earn what they need to keep a roof over their head. This cruelty is not an accident. The UN protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons is not a human rights document. It is a descendant of the Convention against transnational organized crime. As such it is concerned with criminalization, not healing or even harm reduction for marginalized people. As Doctrine notes, that only measures that are obligatory for all states to uphold are those linked to law enforcement. Protection measures, in contrast, are weak and optional. The protocol merely suggests that states consider adopting measures that permit victims of trafficking in person to remain in its territory temporarily or permanently in appropriate cases. It is much firmer on the repatriation of victims without undue or unreasonable delay, and firmer still on strengthening border control, instructing signatory countries that they shall strengthen such border controls as may be necessary to prevent and detect trafficking in persons. None of this has gone unnoticed by the far right, with tabloid newspapers and white supremacists deploying the language of human trafficking as part of campaigns to quote turn back the boats. One Canadian white nationalist travelled to Italy in 2017 to join a French far right group's direct action against arriving migrants, brandishing a banner reading no way for human trafficking, end quote, British colonialist Katie Hoptigo. Katie Hopkins praised an openly fascist young youth organization for quote shining a light on NGO people traffickers, end quote. Although unsubtly expressed these far right views have a huge amount in common with more mainstream and even feminist conceptions of human trafficking. The head of Frontex, the European Border Agency, has also claimed that NGO rescues in the Middle East. Mediterranean were facilitating traffickers. Indeed, aid workers across Europe and increasingly facing Europe are increasingly facing prosecution under anti-trafficking laws for helping people migrate. Feminist anti-prostitution campaigners sometimes share hard right reportage of sexual violence supposedly committed by refugees in Europe, with one such campaigner commenting that European countries should quote take in the women and children but leave the nasty men home. Alice Schwarzer, a prominent German anti-prostitution feminist, draws extensively on the radicalized figures of quote pimps and traffickers, linking migration men of colour to sexual violence. Schwarzer uncritically recounts a police officer telling her that, quote, 70-80% of all the rapes in Cologne are committed by Turks, end quote. When sex workers are organized against deportations, we are told by those with ostensibly progressive politics that they should be deported if they have no right to be in the country. Such women are being trafficked into the country. Do you support that? Hard right politicians are keen to enact anti-trafficking agendas. US President Donald Trump has described human trafficking as a quote epidemic, while Theresa May is positioning the 2015 Modern Slavery Act passed while she was Home Secretary as central to her image and legacy. Uncritical use of the term trafficking is doing the ideological work required for these contradictions to quote make sense. It hides how anti-immigration policies produce the harm that we call trafficking, enabling anti-slavery politicians to posture as anti-trafficking heroes even as they enact their anti-migrant policies. Where next? It should be no surprise that carceral feminists and sex working feminists have such difficulty even discussing this topic. We disagree not only on the solution, but on the problem. For cosceral feminists, the problem is commercial sex, which produces trafficking. For us, the problem is borders, which produce people who have few to non rights as they travel and work. The solutions we propose are equally divergent. Castral feminists want to tackle commercial sex through criminal law, giving more power to the police. For sex workers, the solution includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarized borders border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice. In other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers. However, we also want to gently criticize the sex workers' rights movement. A common reframe among people who advocate for sex workers' rights is that sex work and trafficking are completely different phenomena that should under no circumstances be conflated. It is easy to understand why. All across the world the total criminalization of prostitution is advocated for or enacted on the basis that it is quote tackling trafficking. Arrests of sex workers, colleagues, partners, landlords and managers are quote justified on the basis that they are perpetrators. Arrests of sex workers are quote justified on the basis that they constitute rescue. Our movement is despite to convince the public and the media that these arrests are not legitimate and rather than problematizing the framework of trafficking which has taken us several thousand words, they reach for the idea of the category error. They say that sex work is not trafficking, meaning these crackdowns are not legitimate. When possible, we need to be pointing more clearly to the border as the problem. Otherwise the effect can be to disavow those working in exploitative or abusive conditions, to say quote, these issues are not our issues. These people are not the concern of our movement. It places them outside the remit of sex workers' rights. It implicitly accepts carceral raid and rescue approaches so long as the target is quote right. To say that sex work is not trafficking mirrors the error of carceral anti-trafficking campaigners by positioning trafficking as an inexplicable evil, shorn of the crucial context of the conditions of migrant and the impact of immigration enforcement on the labour rights and safety migrants, to assert simply that sex work and trafficking are completely different is to defend only documented workers who are not experiencing exploitation, but say nothing about those exploited at the intersection of migration and the sex industry. As a slogan, quote, Sex Work is not trafficking suggests that the current mode of anti-trafficking policy is broadly correct and merely on occasion misfires. In fact, of course, carceral anti-trafficking policy is not misfiring. Like the global prison industrial complex of which it forms a part, it is a system which is working in the way it is supposed to be. As the Migrant Sex Work Project writes, quote, it is an international and effective system, end quote. Immigration and border control are crucial to maintaining the exploitation of workers and resources in the global south, and to maintaining an exploitable pool of undocumented and insecurely documented workers in the global north, while border policing and the incarceration of migrants funnel huge sums back and forth between corporations and governments. Fundamentally, the claim that sex work and trafficking are different operates as a way of refusing to talk about trafficking, since such conversations are often used to attack us. When we organize people reach. When we organize, people reach for any easy way to shut the topic down, but sex workers should start welcoming such discussions. They are an openly they are an opportunity to talk about how border enforcement makes people more vulnerable to exploitation and violence as they seek to immigrate. An analysis which should be centered should be central to sex workers' rights activism. State borders and the architecture of coercion that surrounds them can now seem so natural it is difficult to imagine the world without them. People who migrate without papers are, after all, quote, breaking the law, implying that punitive state action against them, such as incarceration and deportation, is legitimate. This is in part why we hystericised border controls in the introduction. The recount the recent history of borders is to see that they are not natural or inevitable. It is beyond the scope of this book to fully detail a migration policy centered on human rights and safety of all people who seek to migrate. It should be clear, however, that attempts to limit migration are producing horrific harms form from exploitation and abuse in workplaces, to deaths at sea and in desert, the wealth of a handful of the world's richest people would, if fairly redistributed, be more than enough to ensure that everybody who needs to travel and everybody who does not could live in safety and dignity. In the meantime, everybody should be fighting immigration enforcement, which rips families and communities apart and imprisons people for years in detention centers. To defend the migrant prostitute is to defend all migrants. She is the archetype of the stigmatized migrant. Borders were invented to guard against her. There is no migrant solidarity without prostitute solidarity, and there is no prostitute solidarity without migrant solidarity. The two struggles are inextricably bound up with one another. So we are going to end on page 87 and we have Jet Chapter 4 which is called A Victorian Hangover, Great Britain. So yeah, that is today's episode of Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. I am Porson Victoria and I really hope you have enjoyed this episode. The previous episode of Behind the Paddle has been about the Online Safety Act, part one. If you want to go listen to that before part two is out, which is going to be every Monday, then go ahead and listen to that. But yeah, if you want to see the spicier version of this podcast, then you can go on DarkFans and Many Vids and I'm pretty sure Loyal fans now. Please follow us and give us a like and a few stars wherever you're listening. If you want to hear any topics, then do write in. Our fan mail is open and so are our emails. And yeah, thank you so much for listening. This has been Behind the Paddle reading Revolting Prostitutes with Falsen Victoria. Goodbye.