Helping Hookers Who Don't Want Help

Do third-world prostitutes need to be "rescued"? That is, do they need to be forcibly taken from brothels by western aid workers and local police officers, and then required to pledge they'll never sell their bodies again?

This article in yesterday's New York Times reminds us of women in Cambodia who, after being thus rescued by pure-hearted Americans (who were using U.S. tax dollars, by the way),

...protested in front of the U.S. Embassy, claiming they had not wanted to be rescued at all. The protest appeared to have been stage-managed by the [brothel's] owners, but it illustrated how hard it is to determine whether sex workers are in brothels by choice or under duress.

And that is the question. Are these women given freedom by their so-called rescuers, or are they being deprived of it? Are they prostitutes because violent thugs force them, or because prostitution, however unattractive, is the life they've chosen after finding other options even less appealing?

The lily-white perspective of American do-gooders never seems to allow for the latter. They just can't fathom that any woman would choose to "degrade" and "humiliate" herself to make a living. But inevitably, those words mean different things to different people. It's not hard to understand why, to some, making two bucks a day working as a toilet scrubber or a factory automaton is less attractive than making ten, twenty times that amount servicing overly libidinous men.

To her credit, the subject of the Times piece, Australian aid worker Rosanna Barbero, is more pragmatic about such matters than her American counterparts.

Barbero supports freeing children and women held forcibly, but finds most other rescue operations futile: ''You're rescuing somebody and putting them back into the same situation'' that drove them to sex work in the first place. The Cambodian Women's Crisis Center acknowledges that of 48 trafficking victims it helped return to their homes in 2004, some 40 percent have already gone back to sex work. As for vocational training, Barbero says, sex workers ''are all pretty damn sick of 'We'll put you in front of sewing machines 14 hours a day and make you a better woman.' ''

She sounds pretty level-headed. But even Barbero gets it wrong, I think, when she begins railing against what she sees as the root cause of prostitution — poverty. The Times reports that

[Barbero] hopes to see the Cambodian sex industry disappear, but she holds that this will be impossible until the country's overall welfare improves.

The sex industry won't vanish — not in Cambodia and not anywhere else. And it has nothing to do with how poor or rich a nation's citizens are. After all, if poverty causes prostitution, why do rich countries have prostitutes? What accounts for women like Xaviera Hollander and Sydney Biddle Barrows and Heidi Fleiss? According to Barbero's views, shouldn't prostitution have disappeared in much of the West by now, especially in places with a relatively solid, generous welfare system like, oh I dunno, the Netherlands?

I know a woman who was a call girl for 12 years. She has no regrets. She socked away enough money to retire at 31. If she's frugal, she told me, she'll never have to work again.

Should she have been "rescued" at 19 instead, and forced into a 40-plus-year career as a filing clerk?

To be sure, a lot of prostitution is pimp-sanctioned rape, and no one deserves to be subjected to slavery and violent coercion. But neither should women who choose to enter the sex trade be subjected to forced conversion by self-righteous church ladies.

On a related note, does it strike anyone else as a tad neo-colonial that the practice is exclusively applied to prostitutes in poor countries, and not to sex workers in, say, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States?

Comments

[Phil]

But you're forgetting, God thinks prostitutes are evil.

[rosanna barbero]

dear phil

its rosanna here. i actually agree with you regarding poverty = prostitution. i have always said that prostitution will never disappear therefore it is important that those involved in sex work have control human and labour rights. i do not understand how that comment was mis interpreted. my usual line is - if an industry is exploitative you do not abolish it you eliminate the exploitative elements, for example the carpet industry in india which users child labour, remove the child labour not the making of carpets. can you tell me the location of that thought from me, often journalist just pick up half of what i say. in solidarity phil, from someone who agrees with you. rosanna