Someone sent me a link to this podcast a while ago and I’ve been meaning to share it here. Victor Malarek is an award winning journalist and the author of The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade, and more recently The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men who Buy it.
Victor was another of the guest speakers at the launch of Demand Change back in June, where he talked about his latest book and men who use prostitutes, or men who, in Victor’s words, “never look at these women with dignity, they look at them as, you know, orifices, for their use and abuse.”
Anyway, here’s the podcast. It’s long at 35 minutes, but well worth a listen.
Victor Malarek on Johns and Prostitution | rabble.ca
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Too Much To Say For Myself 
Given existing attitudes shown in Victor Malarek’s research and Donna Hughes’ research (see below)…. How can prostitution and related activities possibly help men and women respect each other and foster equality? I just don’t see how this can be possible.
Academic research papers worth a browse here:
Donna M. Hughes, Ph.D.
Women’s Studies Program
University of Rhode Island
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/
It is possible for prostituted children, to never encounter a ‘punter’ who declines their ‘services’.
And none of the exotic dancer permit schemes, in Britain, Ireland, or Canada was even close to being child free.
In Northumbria a teacher using services related to ‘young girls’ gets an endorsement from a leading local Tory!
Oh, and as you’d expect, he is still working in a school.
He was using this web-site whilst he was in the school.
‘Teen sex or teensex means sexual activity, perfomed by teens, where visitors can interact in realtime with teenage performers. The difference with adult sex, like sex videos or adult photos, is that teensex is made for people who like to watch younger girls (camcandy.com)’
http://news.google.com/news/search?um=1&ned=uk&hl=en&q=Darren+Adamson++
So is it any surprise Dougie Fox & Co. are in the age role biz?
Gregory
Darren Adamson has been given a job at Berwick High School in Northumberland, despite having been sacked from a previous job after admitting accessing porn on school computers and phoning sex lines from work.
Funnily enough, if I had been sacked from my last job for doing that, I think I’d find it really hard to get another job, but hey I’m not a teacher.
Those who are seriously interested in the sex trafficking discourse should read John Davies’ My Name is Not Natasha.
For some, however, removing their blinkered views of trafficked women as naïve victims may come as something of a shock.
The book is the result of a very lengthy study of women trafficked from Albania into Lyon. The trafficking consisted of two distinct phases, it seems. In the first phase, Albanian woman were trafficked by their husbands for sex work in the west. The husbands were members of a network but the women were under the impression they were doing it ‘for their families’. Attempts by individual women to escape were relayed by wives to ‘husbands‘, who networked it at their end, and this formed a very effective control mechanism of the women by their ‘husbands’.
However, there was then a second phase, which undermined the first phase. Divorced women are apparently highly stigmatised in Albania. While aware of the implications, they utilised the trafficking network to migrate to the west as their own social networks were too weak to achieve the migration. These divorced women, carrying on sex work in Lyon, were first very much looked down upon by the wives of the first phase, who regarded them as ’whores’ etc. Eventually, however, the divorced second phase women’s message got through to those in the first phase, and the control mechanism was destroyed.
http://www.eukn.org/eukn/themes/Urban_Policy/Security_and_crime_prevention/Sense_of_insecurity/Vulnerable_groups/Women/albania-france-trafficking_1049.html
Definitely recommended. Especially for librarians.
Do I know this John Davies? Do I recall (correctly?) a threatened lawsuit or something re: Donna Hughes?
http://www.friends-partners.org/lists/stop-traffic/1999/0065.html
Also, what was that about, and was it the same John Davies?
So your philosophy in a nutshell Stephen is that we ought to “help” oppressed poor women by getting them jobs as sex workers? As opposed to maybe liberating them in other ways?
Have you ever thought of working for jobcentre plus?
Ah there you are, Polly, I’ve missed you!
My philosophy regarding trafficking is that it is best approached by considering lowering barriers to those seeking to migrate. This is unlikely to be popular with the BNP, which is something else it has going for it.
A great deal of the traffickers’ power hails from the advancement of the costs of transport, the evasion of immigration controls, and the perception of the trafficked persons of their criminalisation for their collusion in the latter and in other ‘crimes’.
For an interesting view on reducing sex trafficking, have a read of Australian Elena Jeffrey’s comments in the transcript here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2008/2241462.htm
Rather than read pro-prostitution apologist Elena Jeffrey’s propaganda read The Industrial Vagina by Sheila Jeffreys. Ms. Jeffreys is not a tool of the pornography and sex industry which is determined to enforce pseudo male sex right to women and girls. Ergo – prostitution is supposedly just a ‘job’ like any other.
My philosophy regarding trafficking is that it is best approached by considering lowering barriers to those seeking to migrate.
I don’t disagree, which is why any trafficked woman in the UK should be guaranteed immunity from prosecution or deportation.
However I have difficulty with the idea that a course pursued out of lack of a viable socioeconomic alternative, in which relatively rich westerners, (and I’m immmensely wealthy compared to a lot of the world’s population, even though I’m worse off than most English people I know) exploit poorer people is somehow liberating. Otherwise sweatshops would be a good idea.
“Otherwise sweatshops would be a good idea”
They are to Nicholas Kristof: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html?_r=2&hp
Polly: However I have difficulty with the idea that a course pursued out of lack of a viable socioeconomic alternative, in which relatively rich westerners…exploit poorer people is somehow liberating. Otherwise sweatshops would be a good idea.
Quite so. And were you to visit most UK food processing factories you would find very high percentages of migrants working for the minimum working wage or thereabouts processing much of what will be the contents of our supermarkets. John Redwood would deny them even that.
The largest haul of trafficking victims found in the UK were not in the sex industry, but were discovered picking leeks in Lincolnshire fields. But, of course, picking leeks isn’t very sexy, so the media and the politicians are less attracted to it as an issue, unless of course there’s deaths, as in the Chinese muscle pickers of Morecombe Bay.
There are probably far more trafficked persons outside the sex industry – after all, only about one in ten adult men in the UK (towards the upper end of estimates) have ever used the services of a sex worker, whereas we all eat and wear clothes. Even Anthony Steen, who has done more than anyone to champion the cause of sex trafficking victims, describes estimates of them being in their thousands here as “pure sensationalism” and says the numbers are almost certainly in the hundreds, though of course one is one too many and the stats are unimportant if you have the misfortune to be a victim.
earwiega is right to draw attention to Kristof’s article, in that a sensible appraisal of each migration trajectory can only be made comparing where somebody is to where they’ve been. There’s now research available showing the great majority of migrant sex workers in the UK being just that, and happier doing what they’re doing for what they’re receiving than they would be in eg our food processing industry, for what that offers.
Back home, they would be in many cases (and were in many cases) doing the same thing for much less reward. The Government still refuses to state the numbers of sex trafficking victims it has deported or, astonishingly, even the number it has found.
Anthony Steen MP, has made many observations, which are profound.
http://www.anthonysteen.org.uk/record.jsp?ID=720&type=hansardEntry
Three major sex trafficking trials are in trouble because of moi, it is really quite simple, if a pimp can’t have a fair trial, then the cause of abolition will not prevail and that is the thing that counts.
In relation to WP-UK Sheffield fraud, racketeering, I am not aware of anybody else prepared to grapple with the specific detail or cases.
Time after time the Brit govt. offered inclusion, grants, acceptance, patronage, if we would just blind-eye labor abuses, and sa it is slavery, the answer had to be no.
“so the media and the politicians are less attracted to it as an issue, unless of course there’s deaths, as in the Chinese muscle pickers of Morecombe Bay.”
It was closed to protect the shellfish, they had their priorities.
Sigh. Refreshing intelligence compared with most forums I come across on the net. I just watched the movie “Taken” so I was doing some research to see why the movie “employed” Albania as the country where the sex traffickers were from. I then considered what motive there might be for giving Albania a black eye other than what is predominantly presented. Nice to see such a broad perspective and a diverse group contributing to a forum so articulately with references even! Thank you all for helping me with my education.