Julie Bindel took a trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2015 to visit women who were supposedly apart of a popular and well-funded NGO called “Women’s Network For Unity” (WNU). She was not aware beforehand that a board member would actually be at the meeting. She details in this article that the board member consistently interrupted the prostitutes she came to speak with. When asked about the services they provide for women, she said that “If the women are beaten up by the police, they are given legal training on their rights; if they are arrested, the WNU will provide food during the time they cannot work; and if one of the women dies, they will help to buy the coffin.” When asked by Bindel if the organization was planning to raise money to help women out of prostitution, she replied “No.” When Bindel spoke with the women at the WNU meeting, many told her that they needed hundreds of dollars to obtain identification documents that they would need to seek out other, less dangerous work. Many said they had no idea they were apart of any sex workers union or NGO, which WNU claims to be.
The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) is a UK-based union for sex workers, and became a part of GMB, another general workers union and Britain’s third largest union, in 2002 after a vote to become an affiliate. Like @feministclassicist mentioned before me in the thread, Douglas Fox is one of the many donors to the IUSW, and is also a part of Amnesty International, which I’ll address shortly. Fox owns the largest escort service in north-eastern England, and has dedicated a lot of time, money, and resources to lobby for the legalization of pimping, brothel-owning, and sexbuying.
In 2010, Douglas Fox published a post on the official IUSW website, wherein he routinely refers to women who are prostitutes as “whores,” claims that Julie Bindel and other anti-coercive sex industry feminists are not “true feminists”, claims prostitution does “not institutionalise the sexual objectification of women”, and states “the whore challenges social oppression of both men and women by refusing to conform to narrow oppressive role prescriptions.”
These statements are diametrically opposed to the lives and vocalized experiences/desires of the overwhelming majority of so-called “sex workers”, who want to leave these industries and find other sources of labor, but often don’t have the resources to do so. [2] [3]
In 2008, Douglas Fox proposed a motion for blanket decriminalisation of the sex trade at the Amnesty International (AI) Annual General Meeting, a proposal that became international AI policy seven years later.
In October of 2014, Alejandra Gil, the Vice President of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), was arrested for running a massive sex trafficking ring, using APROASE (a proclaimed sex-worker led sex work Union, for whom she was a co-chair member) as a front for her illegal activities. In March of 2015 she was charged. Despite that, the very NSWP article I linked paints Gil out to be a victim, and dismisses her guilt.
“Turn off the blue light” is a primarily European campaign, whose mission is “to raise awareness on the violence, crimes and discrimination against sex workers, a marginalized female group and mobilize public opinion and stakeholders in order to tackle these phenomena” Despite this self-proclaimed mission, the campaign is backed and funded by characters such as Peter McCormick, a convicted pimp who rakes in millions of Euros from his online prostitution service annually. Additionally, his son, who was convicted of running 6 brothels is another advocate for the campaign. TJ Carrol is yet another of these traffickers and pimps who supported the campaign. Carrol ran the largest trafficking/prostitution ring in Ireland, and utilized African gangs to traffick women and sell them into sexual slavery, where oftentimes they were horribly abused and unable to escape. Carrol and his associates used voodoo rituals to terrify African women into staying in the industry, and he also groomed his daughter into the business. Tony Linnane is yet another convicted pimp who backed the campaign. He was also connected to an incident wherein a woman was “threatened with being burned alive after gasoline was thrown on her.” Had enough yet? Mihai Selaru is a brother owner and pimp who plead guilty to beating the prostitutes forced to work for him, and threatened to starve a woman if she did not bring in more business.
Claudia Brizuela, a former leader of Asociacion de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina (Association of Women Prostitutes of Argentina) (AMMAR) and a founder of the Latin American-Caribbean Female Sex Workers Network (LA-CFSWN), was arrested and charged with sex trafficking. The LA-CFSWN was represented by none other than Gil Alejandra.
Julie Bindel, through her fantastic and diligent research, discovered that the #notyourrescueproject hashtag and campaign, which claimed to be a “sex-worker-led” campaign was actually created and sustained by burner accounts of Dr. John Davies by women he had pimped and trafficked. Primarily, he posed as a disenfranchised woman from the Indian sub-continent named “Molli Desi.” All of the pictures of “Molli” were actually pictures of a woman he had trafficked from Bangladesh. Davies was a Visiting Research Fellow with the Centre for Migration Studies Department of Sussex University, where he routinely hid behind his respectability as a doctor in order to promote trafficking denialism. Davies was also involved in an adoption scheme called the King Solomon Foundation, which operated out of Romania, and where he sold the children of prostituted women for up to $20,000.
Liberal feminists and pro-“sex work” advocates, have you asked yourself who is benefiting from the constant platitudes you throw out? When you forego listening to the experiences of actual women who live in these conditions, the women who have been forever harmed and scarred by these immoral industries, and instead parrot talking points made by child predators, traffickers, pimps, and sexbuyers, who do you think is benefiting? I used to be like you. I used to spout the “sex workers deserve rights, and the way to go about that is through legalization” talking points. That stopped once I started dedicating time to researching the endless campaigns, legislative bodies and lobbyists that end up being the ones who are actively hurting women and selling them into sexual slavery. I started reading theory from women who have dedicated their lives to the protection and advocacy for women who don’t have the privilege of seeking these outlets themselves. Almost one million men, women, and children are trafficked every year alone. Have you ever critically addressed why you support legislation that increases this number? Why you claim we’re “sex-worker” exclusive when our feminism seems to be the only kind that seeks to abolish the sexual violence that pervades still? Empowerment is not commodifying women and selling us into sexual slavery. Empowerment is a state of being that requires that we have the conditions to make choices free of economic or otherwise violent coercion, or ultimatums that force women into inescapable circumstances. Wanting to legalize sexbuying, pimping, or brothel-owning is the advocacy of selling women for men’s sexual pleasure no matter the cost, and attempts to codify into law the types of situations that cause women to become prostitutes or trafficked individuals rather than eradicating the sociocultural, economic, political, and legislative plagues that commodify & objectify women, and force them into scenarios where they must submit to the sexual wills of men to survive.
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