#traffickers

For me, prostitution is a human rights violation against women and girls. Not everyone shares this understanding. We are now at a crossroads, with a number of countries around the world under pressure to either remove all laws pertaining to the sex trade (including those governing pimping and brothel owning), or to criminalize the purchase of sex (known as the Nordic model). However, the polarized debate on the sex trade, being played out within academia, media, feminist circles and human rights organizations has reached a critical point. No other human rights violation towards women and girls is so grossly misunderstood. While domestic violence has often been, and sometimes still is, assumed to be the fault of the victim (‘She was nagging him’, ‘She failed to understand his moods’), there has been a significant improvement in the way that those experiencing it are supported and the perpetrators called to task thanks to feminist campaigning and interventions. Rapists are often seen as men who ‘couldn’t help themselves’, or who were coerced into committing such crimes by the behavior and dress sense of the victims. But increasingly, again as a result of feminism, rape is viewed as an expression of misogyny rather than one of uncontrollable sexual desire. Not so prostitution. In recent years, despite the increasing numbers of women with direct experience of being prostituted coming out as ‘survivors’ of the sex trade, the dominant discourse is one of prostitution being about ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ for the women involved. The human rights abuse involved in the sex trade, according to the liberals, libertarians and many of those who profit from selling sex, is when men are deterred from purchasing sex, and not when they rent the orifices of a woman for sexual release. The women selling sex, according to this logic, are the victims of pearl-clutching moralists who wish to take away their right to earn a living. Indeed, supporting women to exit prostitution has been described as ‘an affront to human dignity’ in one academic paper, authored by four academics, three of whom have been campaigning for total decriminalization of the sex trade for a number of years. The war that rages between feminists such as myself who seek to abolish the sex trade, and those who see prostitution as a valid choice, is fueled by the widely held belief that feminist abolitionists wish to ‘rescue’ ‘fallen women’ and ‘demonize’ the men who pay for sex. The redoubtable feminist writer Andrea Dworkin once described herself as a ‘radical feminist: not the fun kind’. I use this phrase to distinguish myself from those neoliberal ‘choice’ feminists who have absorbed the argument about ‘sex work’ being empowering. These fun feminists ensure that they never upset men, and appear to be happier tearing down tried and tested theories of patriarchy and male power being the driver for the sex trade than they are asking how prostitution can be sexual liberation for the prostituted. I and other abolitionists are accused by the fun feminists of being ‘whorephobic’, since they claim we hate the women in the sex trade instead of the pimps, buyers and brothel keepers. I became an active feminist partly in response to the police investigation and media coverage of a serial killer who operated in the North of England during the 1970s. Peter Sutcliffe, named ‘the Yorkshire Ripper’ by the tabloid press, turned out to be an ordinary, married man living in a suburb of Bradford. The Sutcliffe case brought attitudes about women in general, and prostituted women in particular, out into the open, which in turn led me to join forces with some of the most passionate and committed antimale violence activists in the country. The public was led to believe, thanks to the police leading the case and the media reporting of the murders, that Sutcliffe hated prostitutes, when in fact only a minority of his victims were involved in the sex trade. The mythology that built up around the killer meant that police excluded a number of cases of women found murdered in England because they did not fit the profile. It also served to perpetuate the notion that women in prostitution somehow deserved their fate, and that rape and murder were merely occupational hazards. During the 1970s and into 1980, Sutcliffe killed at least 13 women and left seven others for dead. The body of his first murder victim—28-year-old Wilma McCann—was discovered in 1975 and, from the beginning, the West Yorkshire Police were guilty of dragging their feet and bungling the investigation. Complacent police officers overlooked vital clues, and inadequate technology was used to collate the thousands of interviews and intelligence reports they gathered. Amid all this, Sutcliffe just kept killing— with hammers, screwdrivers and knives—and police were no further forward by the time the body of his fifth murder victim, Jayne MacDonald, was discovered in June 1977. MacDonald’s killing was described by police and press as a ‘tragic mistake’. The previous victims had all been labelled as prostitutes and therefore, in the eyes of many, complicit in their own demise. But MacDonald was 16 and described by police as ‘respectable and innocent’. Victims were duly divided into deserving and undeserving women. Officers made a plea to the women of West Yorkshire to look out for strange behavior in their sons and husbands. But they failed to listen to one of Sutcliffe’s surviving victims: a 14-year-old girl who had had a good look at the man who chatted to her about the weather before striking her about the head several times with a hammer. When the girl reported the attack, she saw the photo-fits compiled by other survivors and told police it was the same man. They dismissed her because she was not in prostitution, and it was assumed the Ripper was only interested in prostituted women.

ALL SW’S/ADDICTS/WOMEN IM GENERAL MUST WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY IN ITS ENTIRETY!!!!

I feel like I'm going insane with the gaslighting.

In the early 70s, Hugh Hefner, the captain of the thriving Playboy empire, saw an opportunity for increased respectability in the women's movement.  Already years into writing monthly essays he said would constitute "the Emancipation Proclamation of the sexual revolution," he started pouring significant money and resources into the fight for abortion rights and full birth control legalization.  He hired lawyers to write amicus briefs in support of the two abortion rights cases that would essentially combine to become Roe v. Wade.  He hosted a fundraiser for the Equal Rights Amendment at the Playboy Mansion.  And as he wrapped himself in feminism, he also managed to wrap himself around it, co-opting and branding the movement to liberate women's bodies and selling it back to men at a markup.

Because access to women after a battle has been a traditional reward of war, it is impossible to discuss rape in warfare without touching also on prostitution, since the two have been linked in history.  Not that if prostitutes are not readily available men will turn to rape 'to satisfy their needs,' but that the two acts - raping an unwilling woman and buying the body and services of a more or less cooperating woman - go hand in hand with a soldier's concept of his rights and pleasures.