The latest on Norway’s sex purchase ban

I happened to notice today that the 2012 annual report by Pro-Sentret, Oslo’s official “help centre” for sex workers, is now online. This is the organisation whose Dangerous Liaisons report was so badly misrepresented by prohibitionists recently, so I thought it would be interesting to see what they’ve had to say in the wake of that report.

Unfortunately it’s only available in Norwegian, so I had to run it through Google Translate. I don’t really have the time to, or think I can, add much to what the report itself says so I’m just going to C&P below some of the report’s more notable findings. Anyone who thinks I’m cherry-picking is welcome to do the same exercise themselves, but one thing I’ll tell you now: in absolutely no way does it provide support for those prohibitionist claims. Not that I think that’ll stop them from trying to twist it to say that it does.

Excerpts below, still in pristine Google Translate state. I did fix a couple words that would have rendered the translation incomprehensible, but I’ve left the grammatical errors intact.

INTRODUCTION

…there is no reason to believe that there has been a reduction in the prostitution market in the past year. On the contrary. Much suggests that the Norwegian prostitution market remains fairly stable in terms of the number of people who sell sex, nationality and how prostitution is organized.

TRONDHEIM

More recently, it revealed new venues for prostitution in Trondheim by bars and restaurants are increasingly being used. Police have had an advisory role in relation to the establishments that have been most affected. In an extended period of supervised police downtown tanning salons. They found that these frequently used as a venue for prostitution. Police went out with warnings to holders and noted that it was put into action to impede prostitution on tanning salons (staffing, warnings monitoring and so on).

Police in Trondheim has marked a change in relation to the nationality of the the prostitute. They reported that several women from economically distressed countries Greece and Spain, and frequent prostitution market in Trondheim. There is also a large increase in terms of Romanian prostitute. Police believe that these activities can be organized.

Nigerian

The Nigerian women prostituting themselves mostly on the streets. In 2009 we had an expectation that the proportion of Nigerians on the streets would reduced when buying sex ban was a reality, as Nigerians basically have few rights in Norway and thus would make it harder. However, we have seen an increase in the Nigerian contingent in total during the last three years, while the number who have availed themselves of outpatient follow-up, decreased. This is still the largest group that uses the outpatient services.

In 2012 there were 80 people from Nigeria who received long-term social care support. We believe that the reason why women do not leave the country depends on the (lack of) opportunities they have elsewhere in Europe. There is rarely an option to return to poor Nigeria, and in Italy and Spain where they have resided for several years, is no other than prostitution due to the financial crisis. And prostitution pays enough more Norway than in the south of the continent.

Norwegian

Many women have found other ways to establish contact with customers after the ban on purchase of sex was introduced as well as due to increased competition from overseas on the street. Many have gained regular customers as they make arrangements with the phone or online instead of establishing contact with them in prostitution district. Some have found it necessary to finance its drug use through crime, such as theft and sale of illegal drugs.

Eastern Europe

Pro Centre still has contact with a large group of women from East European countries. In the early 2000′s, these were the largest foreign deployment Until the Nigerian women took the prostitution market a few years later. Many predicted that the Eastern European women would flood the market when the first EU eastward enlargement was a fact. This did not happen. EU enlargement created opportunities for regular employment for many. When the EU included Bulgaria and Romania we thought the same would happen to the women there. This has not been the same degree, and one of the reasons may be that many of women in prostitution from these two countries is Rom-women who are not in the same degree eligible for our regular labor market.

A large proportion of the Pro Centre users have come to Norway by a third party and pay a backer / pimp / agent to work here. Some of the women have been in Norway while working independently.

Unfortunately, we see great motivation and desire to work does not compensate for the lack of work experience, reading and writing skills and knowledge of Norwegian. It is therefore many become discouraged and end to continue in prostitution when job hunting is not results.

Sexual Health

We still get a lot of feedback from users that condom use declines. We hear that there are many women who perform oral sex on men without a condom, so that it difficult for those who want to use a condom to negotiate this with the customer. The customer is often willing to pay more for sex without, so that in a market that has greater supply than demand, so more and more of our users report that they take “trips” without a condom.

Violence and trauma

We started in 2010 to record separately the cases where violence was the reason for inquiry to the health by Pro Centre. In 2011 we had fourteen women who came to us for help after being exposed to violence and / or rape, compared with six in 2010. In 2012 we had 33 such incidents recorded. There is a strong increase.

The women who have been victims of violence come from nine different countries, but 22 of the 33′s Nigerian women. Four are ethnic Norwegian. Ten of the women have been raped. Some of these must be characterized as very serious as some involving serious violence and several perpetrators. Three of the women have been stabbed so severely that they have had to get immediate medical attention in hospital. Eight of the thirty-three have been hospital / emergency room before they came to us. In eleven of the cases police have been involved, but we have no idea of how many that ends with review and any judgment. Women in prostitution are afraid to report violence and abuse.

In six of the cases, the offender is a woman, whether a “madam” or Another woman in prostitution. Eleven of the women stated that the violence / rape is performed by a prostitution client. Some have been assaulted in prostitution district by a unknown man, some have found that the abuser has penetrated into the apartment they live.

Our message through the report Dangerous Liaisons is that women in prostitution is still very vulnerable to violence. They frequently exposed to crime in the form of violence, intimidation and harassment. The report shows that prostitution has become more individualized and fewer report that they seek relief services after they have been violence. In addition a number of women that they lack legal protection as part of legislation – which basically should cherish and protect women – also entails that they do not contact the police when exposed to criminal acts. They fear that they may lose their apartment (Operation homeless) and / or earnings base their if they call the police attention. Customers must now “protected” from being fined, and his role goes from being “business partner” to an ally parallel to the Police goes from being an ally that women can obtain protection from a party they must protect customers against.

Women in prostitution are reminded constantly of the environment that they act undesirable. Be it through police actions, media coverage of the field or Also passers. When exposed to violence takes in many cases even responsibility. Shame and guilt prevents them from asking for help. Our experience is that the more focus as we help measures on violence and violence against, the more women will share their experiences with us and we will better position to assist them. This recognition we take seriously. It is incumbent upon the support system a great responsibility in adding ensure that vulnerable people receive the care, support and any redress they have entitled. We must be present for women who sell sex on their terms: we must be “here and now”.

Pro Centre would like to focus on the protection of victims of violence rather than a political tug of war or a rematch of the law. The challenge for governments is to provide police guidelines are clear: how should the seller of sexual services position as the “weak” and the individual’s right to protection and protection proportionate to the pursuit of pimps and traffickers? Is the legislator’s intention that the individual prostitute rights should be subordinated to the large market reduction project? How to
police and judicial system could emerge as credible allies when individuals are exposed to violence, whenever any police activity suggests that their situation from day to day is not Important?

The EU report on trafficking in human beings

Last month saw the publication of the EU’s first Trafficking in Human Beings report, which is billed as an attempt to “collect comparable data on trafficking in human beings at the EU level”. The report is (properly) littered with disclaimers, such as this one in screaming bold type on page 30:

More reported cases do not necessarily mean an increase in the actual number of victims. This may indicate an improvement in the reporting rate of the phenomenon or a change in the recording system

Unfortunately, however, when it came to the press release, the European Commission decided to go for the handy soundbite – and so we’ve been deluged with headlines like “Human trafficking increased by 18%” when of course, the report doesn’t show it did any such thing.

For all the faith put into that 18% figure, though, most of the newspaper and NGO reactions don’t evince much interest in the rest of the data. I’m going to put this down to simple laziness – it’s a whole 94 pages they’d have to wade through, poor dears – but it’s also the case that if all the statistics were accepted as readily as the “18% increase” has been, it would be a little bit inconvenient for some of those with an interest in this area. This table on page 31 shows why:

Contrary to what we’re constantly told by the anti-trafficking movement, the most recent figures make it hard to discern any link between trafficking and the legal status of sex work. The Dutch rate is very high, but the Cyprus rate is higher – and Cyprus has much stricter laws than the Netherlands (brothels are illegal, for one thing). Romania, where sex work itself is illegal, is nearly as high. Hungary (legal), Portugal (legal) and Lithuania (illegal) are tied for last. Austria and Germany are also relatively low – in fact, Germany and Sweden are tied, at 0.8 per 100,000.  And the German rate has remained more or less constant over the three years surveyed, while Sweden’s has quadrupled.

Don’t think we’ll be reading that in the next Turn Off the Red Light press release.

I’m being mischievous, of course, because as I’ve already said, the data don’t – and can’t – show the actual number of trafficked persons in each country. So we can’t really say that Germany, Austria and Sweden have more or less the same trafficking rate. But let’s be honest here – had the table shown Germany and Austria to be right up there with the Netherlands, and Sweden way down on its own, is there any doubt we’d have heard all about it from the prohibitionist groups?

But sex workers’ rights advocates shouldn’t leap on those figures, either, because truthfully the whole report is pretty hopelessly undermined by its methodological weaknesses. These include the following:

Different countries provided different sets of data. On page 30 we are told:

Ten EU Member States provided data on identified and presumed victims, 15 EU Member States provided data on identified victims only and two EU Member States provided data on presumed victims only. The participating non-EU countries provided data only on identified victims.

This alone would make it impossible to get a cohesive account of trafficking, or even just of detected trafficking, across Europe. It certainly renders a comprehensive cross-country comparison untenable. (In case you were wondering, though, all the countries I’ve mentioned so far provided data only on “identified victims” – except for the Netherlands, which only gave “presumed victim” data. More about this later.)

Different countries use different definitions. The Commission seems to have attempted to get around this, by reminding countries of the international definition of “trafficking” when sending them the forms to complete, but the methodology problem is unavoidable. An “identified victim” is, according to page 22,

a person who has been formally identified as a victim of trafficking in human beings according to the relevant formal authority in Member States

and that inevitably introduces an element of subjectivity into the data, because not all member states strictly apply the international definition when deciding whom to identify as a victim of trafficking. In fact, I doubt whether any of them do – and they are inconsistent in the manner and degree by which they diverge from the international definition. So when we look at that table and see that Ireland has more than twice the rate of “identified victims” as Greece, for example, we have no way of knowing whether that’s because Irish police genuinely detected twice the rate of people who fit the international definition, or whether the Irish police identified people outside the international definition, or whether the Greek police declined to identify people inside it.

This problem is magnified for those countries that include data for “presumed victims”, that is:

a person who has met the criteria of EU regulations and international Conventions but has not been formally identified by the relevant authorities (police) as a trafficking victim or who has declined to be formally or legally identified as trafficked.

Here, member states are essentially being asked to submit data on people who were trafficked but were not identified as trafficked. To identify unidentified trafficking victims. There’s something a bit Schrödinger’s Cat-like about this category; it just doesn’t seem to lend itself to any real scientific measurement, at all.

If the data had been collected on a forward-looking basis, it might almost be workable. That is, if countries had been told that, for the future, they would be asked to record details of not only the people who they formally identified as victims of trafficking, but also of people who they would have identified as trafficked but for some insurmountable obstacle (such as that the person themselves told them where to stick their “trafficking victim” status). You’d still have the subjectivity problem, but at least you would know that the records were being kept on an ongoing basis, with the member states knowing exactly what they were to look out for.

But that’s not how this was done. Instead, as explained on page 17,

The questionnaire was sent via Eurostat to the National Statistical Offices of the EU Member States, EU Candidate and Potential Candidate countries and to the EFTA/EEA (European Free Trade Association/European Economic Association) countries in September 2011. It included the appropriate tables, a list of common indicators, definitions and guidelines for collecting the statistical data as well as the country codes to be used and a template for providing metadata.

So countries were asked to collate retrospectively their data on people who they had identified as unidentified trafficked persons. And then to pick out of that data only the people who fit the “common indicators, definitions and guidelines”. But who’s to say that the data were initially recorded in such a way as to make that possible? If the authorities weren’t already aware they were going to be asked to provide data on people who they’d declined to identify as “trafficked”, you have to wonder whether they’d be quite so diligent in their record keeping about those people.

Did I say “authorities”? Oh – here’s the next problem:

“Presumed victim” statistics were supplied by a wide variety of sources. According to page 23:

Data on ‘presumed’ victims on trafficking in human beings may be available from national rapporteurs (or equivalent mechanisms which tend to act as national coordinating bodies), victims assistance services, immigration services, labour inspections and border guards.

I don’t think I can really overstate this point: there is no possible way to get anything like a reliable, consistent overview when you throw out to your data collectors that they can get their information from pretty much anywhere they can find it. And as it happens, some of the key data sources are pretty questionable. For example, in the Netherlands the source is CoMensha, a national agency, which according to page 39:

does not have a formal assessment based on specific criteria by which the registered person’s status as a victim can be verified.

In other words – as I discussed in this post – CoMensha simply records the alleged cases that are referred to them, without actually investigating whether there’s any substance to the allegations. The Dutch figures in this report, therefore, are based on little more than rumour. No wonder they’re so high.

Also problematic is the Latvian information, which according to page 38 is

provided by the NGO Resource Centre for Women “Marta”, which provides assistance for presumed victims using alternative financing.

Marta is a prohibitionist organisation, and one that therefore has an interest in finding trafficking victims. In fairness to them, there’s nothing in the data to suggest they’re inflating the numbers; Latvia’s overall rate is the same as Germany’s and Sweden’s and only a minority of these fall into the “presumed victim” category. Nonetheless, their objectivity as a source has to be doubted.

To take a final example, page 39 states that Finland’s number of presumed victims

includes all cases who were directed to reception centers on the basis of suspicion of human trafficking.

Does that sound like a rigorous effort to make sure only the cases that fit the Commission’s specified criteria were reported? Not to me it doesn’t.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made the point. There’s just too much variation across countries, and too loose standards within countries, to consider this a reliable measure of the amount of trafficking in Europe. The report is of (limited) interest for what it reveals about the countries’ data collection processes, but overall you really get the sense of this being a box-ticking exercise for Brussels bureaucrats more than anything else.

I’ll just finish on a couple other matters I found worthy of comment. Firstly, on page 24 it states:

Data is to be collected on the total number of female and male victims

The binary (and I’m guessing cis-centric) approach is unfortunate, as even though the figures aren’t reliable it would still be interesting to see how many trans* persons were recorded. But the only reference I can find within any of the country data is in the British records, on page 39, where it says that one adult trans* woman was identified. Unfortunately, it manages to say this in a grossly offensive way.

There are also figures on “suspected traffickers” and “prosecuted traffickers”. It’s not clear exactly what threshold was required for the first category, but one thing I found interesting was that non-EU citizens accounted for 55% of the former but only 24% of the latter. The reasons for the discrepancy aren’t explained. It could be that non-EU citizens are more likely to go missing before they can be prosecuted, of course, but there could also be a greater tendency to suspect them without any real proof. This is something that merits further research.

And finally, a word about citizenship and labour market status. On page 52 there’s a table (Table 6) that breaks down all the identified and presumed victims, by year and by citizenship. So I did a little numbers exercise. First I counted all the identified victims by country (I didn’t count the presumed victims, because for all the reasons explained above, I think those numbers are too messy to be of any real use). Then I subtracted the internal trafficking victims (as listed on page 53, Table 7). And then I totalled up the remainder, put them into geographical categories and worked out the percentages of each.

The disclaimers first. The numbers don’t quite add up, because I came up with a grand total of 12,261 identified victims in Table 6, whereas the Table 2 combined figure for identified victims is 13,424. I’m not sure where that missing 1,163 went. There also seems to be a minor discrepancy in the Table 7 figures, since I end up with –2 cross-border EU-15 citizen victims in 2009. I couldn’t subtract the child victims, as there’s no breakdown by “identified” and “presumed” nor any indication of how many were working-age children. And of course, all the problems with the data I’ve already discussed still apply. But bearing all that in mind, I still think the results are stark enough to be worth pointing out. Of the identified victims of cross-border trafficking in the three year period:

• 37% were Romanian or Bulgarian
• 58% were from outside the EU/EEA
• 5% were from the 2004 accession countries
• <1% were from the EU-15

Thus, 95% were from countries barred from all or most of the EU labour market during the data collection period – and nearly everyone else was from a country barred from much of the EU labour market during the data collection period. This isn’t quite as dramatic as it seems, because it still only accounts for just over half the identified victims – the internal trafficking rate is surprisingly high, which is something else that merits investigation (though as the number is very high in some countries and negligible in others, I suspect it mainly comes down to definitions). Notwithstanding those limitations, though, I think it’s safe to conclude that cross-border migrants in the EU are far, far, far more likely to experience trafficking if they don’t have labour market access in the country they’re migrating to.

You’d think this would be a no-brainer, wouldn’t you? But EU states just don’t seem to get it. They consistently wring their hands about the trafficking problem, but stubbornly insist they just can’t relax their labour migration policies – without seeming to make the connection between the two. At some point they’re going to have to admit that if they really want to address the issue, they’ll have to stop making it all but impossible for accession state citizens and non-EU citizens to legally work in their countries. Or else admit that they aren’t really that bothered about trafficking after all.

Anti-choice spinning of California’s 1967 abortion law

We’ve heard a lot lately from anti-choice campaigners about California’s 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Act. It’s being cited to support the argument that legislating for the X case – to allow abortion where a pregnant woman’s life is at risk, including by suicide – will inevitably open the floodgates and effectively allow abortion on demand.

One example is this Tweet from the Pro-Life Campaign’s Cora Sherlock:

California legalised abortion for suicide in 1967. 3 yrs later, 98% of all abs in Cali carried out on this ground @reginado @finegaeltoday

— Cora Sherlock (@CoraSherlock) February 10, 2013

Subsequently, an email circulated to Oireachtas members by a group of anti-choice politicians (parts of which were published in this Irish Independent article) claimed that the California law

was enacted in 1967 on the strict grounds of ‘where the mother was a danger to herself’

And then on the Vincent Browne show the other night, Dr Patricia Casey said that under the law, the woman had to be “certifiable”.

Three different claims about the California law. All wrong.

The actual text of the law was found in §25951 of the California Health and Safety Code. It allowed abortion where a committee, established by the hospital performing the abortion and consisting of at least two licensed physicians and surgeons (or at least three after the 13^th week of pregnancy), found that there was

a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother

“Mental health”, meanwhile, was defined in §25954 as

mental illness to the extent that the woman is dangerous to herself or to the person or property of others or is in need of supervision or restraint

Right away, we see that the text is logically problematic – how on earth can “mental health” be defined as “mental illness”? – but we don’t need to spend time on that. The more important thing is what the legislators intended in this requirement. Clearly Cora Sherlock got it wrong, because there’s no need that the woman actually be at risk of suicide, and the Oireachtas group also got it wrong, because the element of danger to herself is only one of the possible criteria under the law.

Dr Casey is closest to the truth, but even she is not quite correct. The text is based on an old standard under which a person could be deemed “certifiable” (a term I find a bit offensive, personally, but we’ll put that aside for now) but there is a crucially important difference. The old standard – which was found in §5550 of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code – allowed for involuntary commitment where a person was

dangerous to themselves or to the person or property of others, and are in need of supervision, treatment, care or restraint

What’s changed there is that the “and” was replaced by “or” for the abortion law. To be committed, a person had to be both dangerous and in need of supervision or restraint; to be allowed an abortion on mental health grounds, either was sufficient. So clearly, a lesser threat to mental health was required than that the woman would need to be institutionalised.

Still, it is a fairly high standard, and the anti-choicers are right when they say it was given a much broader interpretation in practice.  But it still doesn’t follow that the Irish law would do the same thing. For one thing, any way you look at it, “dangerous to herself or to the person or property of others or … in need of supervision or restraint” lends itself to a much looser interpretation than “at real or substantial risk of suicide”. (In fact, the California law was struck down as unconstitutionally vague in 1972 – two months before Roe v Wade – precisely because it had proven impossible for doctors to agree on what these criteria meant.)

For another thing, the California law operated in California. California isn’t Ireland, and it always took a more permissive attitude toward abortion. Even before the 1967 Act, it wasn’t actually difficult to get an abortion there – though the standard of care varied widely depending on the quality of provider the woman could afford. Women didn’t need to travel for abortion as they do in Ireland, where doctors are simply not willing to breach the law. It’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that the flexible interpretation applied by California doctors will be repeated here.

A comparable situation is the way that abortion laws are interpreted in Britain and Poland. On paper, the two countries have a pretty similar regime: both allow abortions in case of fatal foetal abnormality or risk to life or health. In practice, however, they couldn’t be more differently applied: Britain, as we all know, is more or less effectively abortion on demand, while Poland is regularly hauled before the European Court of Human Rights for denying even crystal-clearly legal abortions (and in the most appalling circumstances too; the latest example, P and S v Poland, reads like something Franz Kafka might have written with Margaret Atwood). Cultural views, and the constitutional context, have a huge impact on how liberally abortion laws are interpreted – and Ireland is far closer to Poland than Britain in this respect.

The increasing calls of the Irish pro-choice movement to repeal the 8th Amendment are a reflection of this. If legislating for X really would “open the floodgates” and allow abortion on demand, there’d be no need to amend the Constitution. When the legislation gets through eventually, and it will, we will see how little impact it really has on the abortion rate in Ireland. And then we can get on with campaigning for real change.

On “pimps” and policy

The Godwin’s Law of the sex work debate is that inevitably, someone on one side will call someone on the other side a pimp. Most of the time, the person making the accusation will be a supporter of criminalising the purchase of sex – and at least some of the time, the only ground for the accusation is that the other person disagrees. Sometimes, of course, there’s a bit more to it than that – the accused may have picked up a brothel-keeping charge, for example – but seeing as that’s happened to people on both sides of the debate, it’s a fairly unedifying accusation. Even when it’s true.

Of course, the point of the accusation isn’t to improve the debate from an intellectual standpoint; it’s to discredit the person it’s made against. And when it’s made against a person who wants sex work decriminalised, the point is to discredit their entire argument – by suggesting anyone who puts it forward is a “vested interest”, a person who (quoting RTÉ’s Prime Time) “profits from prostitution”, a person who pretends to have the interest of sex workers at heart but really just seeks to exploit them. In this way, supporters of the Swedish model can not only take the high moral ground themselves, but can also add impetus to their argument by portraying the law as an anti-pimp measure (as they did, for example, in this press release last month).

The irony is that there are plenty of reasons to think the law would actually have the opposite effect, and promote pimps and pimping. In 2003 the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police went to Sweden to investigate the outworking of the law, and this is what they reported:

It has been claimed that prostitutes’ dependence on pimps has increased because street prostitutes cannot work as openly. The police informed us that it is more difficult to investigate cases of pimping and trafficking in human beings because prostitution does not take place so openly on the streets anymore….

Prostitutes’ dependence on pimps has probably increased. Someone is needed in the background to arrange transport and new flats so that the women’s activity is more difficult to discover and so that it will attract the attention of the police.

A few years later, this was echoed in a report by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare:

According to one informant in Göteborg, there are probably more pimps involved in prostitution nowadays. The informant says the law against purchasing sexual services has resulted in a larger role and market for pimps, since prostitution cannot take place as openly.

A woman engaged in indoor prostitution in Göteborg relates that when the law took effect in 1999, about ten women engaged in prostitution from various Eastern European countries approached her business because they wanted to hide indoors. Informants from the Stockholm Prostitution Centre also mention that the law has opened the door to middlemen (pimps), because it has become more difficult for sellers and buyers of sexual services to make direct contact with one another.

Norway, meanwhile, has seen the emergence of what you might call “pimp-like” relationships – relationships of extreme dependency, in which the most vulnerable (drug using street workers) become totally reliant on a particular man or men for survival. According to last year’s City of Oslo report,

Among the women with a drug addiction who still sell sex many have changed methods for finding customers. Most of the support services have experienced that the women enter into more long term relations with men who they refer to as “friends”, “boyfriends”, “uncles”, or acquaintances. These are men they stay in contact with through telephones and that they stay with for longer periods, this could be hours, days, or weeks. They have sex with the men in exchange for the men supplying them with drugs, money, and other necessities. Many of the support services say that they perceive the women as being very vulnerable in the relationships. The women become very dependent on the few customers they have.

So where does the idea come from that pimps would oppose criminalising clients? I think in part, it’s the failure of prohibitionists to understand the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation. Admittedly, there isn’t always a clear line between the two, but an essential element of legalisation is that sex work is only lawful under specified conditions. For indoor workers, this usually means that a premise has to meet strict criteria to be deemed a legal brothel – and that certainly can promote “pimping” as prohibitionists would define it. Few self-employed sex workers have the resources or even the desire to wade through that much red tape, so if they don’t want to work illegally and/or alone (depending on the laws of the jurisdiction), they often have little choice but to work for someone else.

But, and here’s the important thing that always seems to get missed, this is not the model advocated by most supporters of sex workers’ rights. Including many of those who are regularly accused of being pimps. A more favoured model would be something along the lines of New Zealand’s, where up to four sex workers can share a premise as a “small owner operated brothel” (SOOB) without the reams of bureaucracy that a managed brothel is subject to – and where sole operators can take the safety precautions they need without putting themselves at risk of arrest, as happens in many “legalisation” jurisdictions. Does this promote pimping? No, it doesn’t. In fact, according to the 2008 report of NZ’s Prostitution Law Review Committee,

Some brothels have closed down with operators citing the lack of staff and increasing competition for workers because of sole operators/SOOBs as reasons for the failure of their business.

You see? Make it easier for people to work without someone managing them, and they’ll have less need for managers. It isn’t really rocket science. In fact, none of this is counter-intuitive, at least for anyone who doesn’t consider the sex industry to be totally sui generis (which it isn’t). I mean, think about it: most people who call for drugs to be legalised are not actually drug dealers themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard a drug dealer call for drugs to be legalised, for bleeding obvious reasons. Nor does anyone ever argue that criminalising drug dealers’ customers makes a dent in drug dealers’ profits – and fewer and fewer seem to think it really deters the customers, either. Why would criminalising the sex industry have an entirely different effect?

I am fully aware that this post is an exercise in futility. Criminalisation advocates are going to keep throwing the accusation around, keep raising the spectre of the Pimp-Monster lurking behind a multitude of Twitter accounts. It’s an emotive tactic, and thus perfect for what has been a heavily emotive campaign. It’s just ironic that its success will be measured by whether it achieves a policy that real pimps may be the first to benefit from.

Savita, abortion and the right to health in international law

Commentary around the Savita Halappanavar inquest has, understandably, focused on the Irish constitutional law context but I haven’t seen much discussion about the breach of her rights under international law.

This is perhaps unsurprising, as abortion itself has a nebulous standing in international human rights law. As its opponents never tire of pointing out, it isn’t protected per se in most of the world’s major human rights treaties. The only real exception is in the 2003 Maputo Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights – that continent’s counterpart to the European Convention – which sets out in Article 14(2):

States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to:
…
(c) protect the reproductive rights of women by authorising medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus.

None of the human rights treaties to which Ireland is party even mention the word “abortion”, though that doesn’t mean they can’t protect the right in limited circumstances. The obvious example of this is the European Court of Human Rights decision in ABC v Ireland, which held the State in breach of an applicant’s right to her private life for failing to provide a clear mechanism by which she could establish and exercise her right to a legal abortion. This is similar to the way that other treaty monitoring bodies have approached the issue, such as the UN Human Rights Committee in KL v Peru and the CEDAW committee in LC v Peru. In both cases, the decision wasn’t that there was a right to abortion per se in the relevant treaty (respectively, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), but that the particular abortion sought would have been legal under state law and thus various treaty provisions were breached by denying the petitioner access to it.

But what I want to talk about here is a more general right – namely, the right to health, and how it was breached in Savita’s case. The right to health is protected in a number of treaties that Ireland is party to, most importantly under Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Then there’s CEDAW, mentioned above, which has its own Article 12 protections for women’s health, while in the European Social Charter, “The right to protection of health” is set out in Article 11. It’s important to realise that these treaties are all fully binding on Ireland as a matter of international law. There’s often confusion on this point, because Ireland has a “dualist” system which means a treaty isn’t domestically enforceable unless it’s incorporated into national law by the Oireachtas (as with the European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003). You can’t go down to the High Court to sue the State for breaching your ICESCR rights – in fact, at the moment you can’t go anywhere. But it’s still legally obliged to protect them, even though there’s not much you can do if it doesn’t.

In and of itself, the fact that Savita died wholly avoidably in a public hospital proves the State’s failure to protect her right to health. If her death really had been due only to the “system failures” we keep hearing about, then perhaps we could chalk it down to a one-off, individual failure. But the more we hear from the inquest, the more apparent the truth becomes: the breach is in the law itself, not merely the way it was implemented or (mis)understood by her medical team. In fact, even if she had survived – and I know of a few women in similar circumstances who, thankfully, did – her right to health would still have been violated. Ireland’s ban on abortions in all but life-threatening cases will inevitably violate the right to health in those cases that fall short of the “real and substantial risk” threshold set by the Supreme Court. Here’s why.

The most widely-accepted definition of the right to health – the Article 12 ICESCR definition – is the “right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”. The General Comment on this right by the treaty’s monitoring body, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, goes quite a bit further in defining that to include “the right to control one’s health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom”. This is a fairly unambiguous, though legally non-binding, interpretation. But we don’t even have to go there, because on the plain terms of Article 12, you cannot enjoy the highest attainable standard of health if you’re denied an abortion that you need for the sake of your health. Simple as – and there’s no getting around it by hypothesising whether Physical or Mental Condition X would entitle someone to an abortion under this rule. Yes, there may be cases where it’s uncertain if abortion really is indicated for health reasons, but that’s completely beside the point: Irish law doesn’t allow for any of them if you aren’t considered likely to die otherwise. An absolute prohibition on “therapeutic” abortions for non-life threatening cases is not made compatible with the right to health just because it’s not always easy to determine who needs a therapeutic abortion.

“But rights aren’t absolute”, I hear you say. Well no, they aren’t, but when they’re guaranteed in a legally-binding treaty they can only be limited under the terms set out in that treaty. The ICESCR limitations clause, Article 4, states that the rights can be subjected

only to such limitations as are determined by law only in so far as this may be compatible with the nature of these rights and solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society.

Now, admittedly, this is a bit woolly, and a casual reading might well lend itself to a utilitarian interpretation, or suggest that a society which considers abortion a generally bad thing could legitimately consider an abortion ban to promote society’s general welfare. It’s not an absurd argument, on its face.

But it’s also not supported by the aids we have to interpret the meaning of the text. The Convention’s travaux préparatoires – the official records of the negotiation process (not online, but detailed in this book) – don’t exactly explain what the drafters of Article 4 had in mind. They do, however, show the rejection of various proposals to include grounds of public order, public morality and the interests of the community – all things which might suggest a person’s rights could be trumped in the interests of some aspirational “greater good”. The CESCR, for its part, states that Article 4

is primarily intended to protect the rights of individuals rather than to permit the imposition of limitations by States

which would mean that the State has a heavy burden of proof in justifying any such limitations.

In Irish law, of course, this is met by Article 40.3.3′s protection of “the right to life of the unborn”. But that won’t cut it in international law, because there is no right to life of the unborn in international law.  (As with the “right to abortion”, there is one exception, but it’s in a treaty that Ireland isn’t party to – the American Convention on Human Rights). And again, in terms of the treaties we’ve ratified that protect the right to life – the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on Human Rights – there is either travaux or case law leaving the foetus out of this protection. (This nifty fact sheet from the Center for Reproductive Rights has lots more detail about this.) So the balancing exercise that would be required to make the denial of therapeutic abortion compatible with the ICESCR is, in international legal terms, simply a nonsense. There is no legal “individual” to balance the woman’s rights against.

There’s another way in which I think Savita’s right to health was infringed, and that’s in the discriminatory way her health needs were dealt with. Article 2 ICESCR requires that the Covenant’s rights be protected “without discrimination of any kind”. Patently, there was discrimination in her case: she was treated differently because she was pregnant. A non-pregnant person would not have had a medically-indicated course of action refused to them at a time of comparable need. There may also be an issue around the antibiotic she was given, which wasn’t strong enough but was “recommended for use in maternal cases”. I’ve found the newspaper reports on this a bit unclear, and I’m not sure whether she was purposely given a weaker antibiotic because she was pregnant, or whether the staff simply didn’t realise, when they gave her the one they always give the pregnant women, that her infection needed a stronger dose. If it’s the former, then she clearly received discriminatory treatment – especially given that it was already known her foetus wouldn’t survive and anyway, she’d already asked for an abortion. The use of less effective medication in the interests of foetal health may certainly be justified, with the woman’s consent, in a wanted and viable pregnancy. But this wasn’t one of those cases.

I said earlier that there’s no place we can go to complain about a breach of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Well, that could change in the near future. The Covenant’s Optional Protocol, which allows individuals to bring complaints to the treaty’s monitoring body, will come into force on the 5^th of May. Ireland has yet to ratify the Protocol, but it did finally sign it last year and ratification is the next step. Again, since this is international law, the CESCR won’t have enforcement powers – but there’s plenty of potential to shine the world’s spotlight on Ireland, and how it fails to adhere to its international obligations. Abortion rights campaigners should call for the government to ratify the Protocol now.

Expert in Savita inquiry confirms Irish women get lower standard of care with chorioamnionitis

Reblogged from Dr. Jen Gunter:

As the inquest into Savita Halappanavar's death continues we have heard about delays and errors, all of which most likely contributed to her terrible outcome. However, along the way those who have tried to pass off her death as medical negligence and nothing to do with Irish law or Catholic ethos have rested on the assertion that she wasn't sick enough…

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The furious attempts by anti-choicers to portray Savita's death as an issue of negligence rather than Ireland's abortion law overlooks some very simple facts. The law is the reason Savita's request for an abortion was denied. The law is the reason Savita's medical team were forced to assess her illness by reference to whether she met some vague and ill-defined threshold of sick enough before they could accede to her request. The law is the reason preservation of her foetus was given such priority. Here, an OB/GYN with expertise in infectious diseases, practicing in a jurisdiction without such a law, describes how she would have assessed Savita's condition - not being constrained by the threat of prosecution to look for any possible chance, however remote, that a (clearly unviable) foetus could be saved.

Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t listen – Joan Smith on the Swedish sex trade law

Yesterday, the Independent ran this article by Joan Smith about Sweden’s sex trade law. Joan Smith is, in her own words, a “feminist author and columnist” and the essence of her article was that the law criminalising clients is an unqualified success.

This is despite the fact that she seemingly didn’t speak to a single member of the group most affected by the law, by which I mean Swedish sex workers. Her investigative method was to “jump in a squad car with local police” as they tailed working women around the streets of Stockholm, and then to uncritically report what those police told her.

Jem over at It’s Just A Hobby has already passionately conveyed her feelings about sex workers being ignored in this way. Please go and read her post and come back here when you’re done. If you only have time to read hers or mine, read hers. It’s more important.

For those of you who made it back here, I just want to add a couple things. The refusal to listen to sex workers’ voices isn’t only offensive, insulting and pretty much without parallel (would Smith “investigate” the results of a law on domestic violence without speaking to women who’d experienced it? Would she take police at face value that they had improved their handling of rape cases without asking rape victims if they agreed?), it’s also bad policy. It means she isn’t – can’t be – getting the full picture. She isn’t even asking all the relevant questions.

Just to give a few examples from that piece:

“The woman, who hasn’t broken any law, is offered help from social services if she wants to leave prostitution. Otherwise, she’s allowed to go.”

Did she accept the help? If not, why not? Has she accepted the help before? If so, why is she still on the streets? Now that she’s lost the income from that client, how will she compensate for it?

“[The national rapporteur on trafficking in human beings] talks about why women end up in prostitution, citing research that shows a history of childhood sexual abuse, compounded by problems with drugs and alcohol.”

Does that narrative accurately describe you?  Were there different or other factors that brought you where you are [and that Sweden will need to address if it wants to get you out of the sex industry and prevent others like you from entering]?

“Where 70 or 80 women used to sell sex outdoors, these days it’s between five and 10 in winter, 25 in summer.”

What happened to the missing women? Did they just go indoors? Did they leave Sweden (perhaps to work in a country where the clients aren’t as well-behaved as the cop claims the Swedish clients are)? Did they find “straight” jobs, or did they have to turn to other less desirable ways of earning income? Are they all even still alive?

“Before 1999, most women in street prostitution in Stockholm were Swedish. Now they’re from the Baltic states or Africa, and have sold sex in other countries as well.”

Why did they come to Sweden? Was the sex trade law itself the draw, or did they come for different reasons but find themselves unable to get any other work? Why aren’t they availing of that “help from social services”?

“They tell Haggstrom’s officers they’re much more likely to be subjected to violence in countries where prostitution has been legalised.”

Do they really?

“one of the criticisms of the law was that it would make prostitution more dangerous. All the Swedish police officers I spoke to insisted this was a myth”

Is it really a myth? Or are sex workers just less likely to report violence to police officers, now that they depend on income from a criminalised source?

“”If a sex buyer can find a prostituted woman in a hotel or apartment, the police can do it,” Haggstrom observes sardonically.”

Is this really true? Or do the police simply not know when they haven’t found a sex worker whom a buyer has found?

“40 women, mostly from Romania, had sufficient confidence in the Swedish criminal justice system to testify against the men exploiting them”

How many women in the sex trade didn’t have sufficient confidence in the criminal justice system to testify?

“In a brightly lit street, Haggstrom points out a couple of Romanian women who work as prostitutes.”

Once again, why are they selling sex in Sweden? Why haven’t they availed of the social services? Why isn’t the Swedish law “working” for them?

My last question there is a key one. Reading this article, I was struck by the number of references in it to women still in the sex trade. The Baltic and African women. The Romanians on the street. The 40 Romanians who testified in last year’s trafficking trials. The woman of undisclosed nationality whose income source was arrested at the start of the article. Even if you buy the Swedish claims that their numbers have dropped precipitously – and remember, those claims relate only to street prostitution, which was only a tiny part of the industry to begin with – there’s obviously still a Swedish sex trade. And the women (and men) working in it are actual human beings who presumably have views on the law and what its consequences have been for them. One would think that those consequences would be at least as important, to a feminist like Joan Smith, as the crude number count. Which in any case clearly excludes these women from the “success” narrative, a fact I’d expect her to also deem worthy of exploration.

But Smith didn’t just consider it irrelevant to ask these women what the law has meant (and hasn’t meant) to them. She also refused to engage with the many sex workers who tweeted her to point out this omission, the sole exception being her dismissive response to Jem. She allowed police officers – people who see it as their mission to drive sex workers out of business, people who have a long history of using sex workers for their own ends in all sorts of nefarious ways (yes, even in post-criminalisation Sweden) – to define their experiences for them.

I have a few words for that type of reporting. “Feminist” isn’t one of them.

No, new research does NOT show that violence decreases under the Nordic model

[Update: in response to communication from Feminist Current's Meghan Murphy, I am happy to clarify that the article critiqued below is not a "Feminist Current piece" but a Sam Berg piece which Feminist Current merely hosted.]

There’s been a bit of a social media buzz over this article on a radical feminist website, which claims that a recent Pro Sentret report from Norway – which you can read in English here – shows that “violence decreases under the Nordic model”. The author backs up her claims with an impressive array of graphs (and a fair smattering of ad hominems), and unsurprisingly receives glowing praise in her comments from people who were clearly predisposed to believe anything she said on the subject anyway.

I hate to burst their bubble. Well, actually I don’t.

The author kindly linked to one of my own posts on the report, though she seems not to have read it. If she had, she would have noticed that very near the start I referred to “methodological limitations” that made it unsafe to draw cause-and-effect conclusions from the study. At the time I didn’t feel it important to get into those limitations, but I will now. Apart from the health warning that always applies in studying a hidden population, there are two really massively important issues here:

1. Lifetime vs recent experience. The 2007-2008 study asked sex workers if they had ever experienced violence, throughout their “entire career in prostitution (which could be anything from one day to 50 years)”. The newer study asked about violence in the past three years alone. These are two very different questions, which can’t possibly give rise to comparable answers – at least without a detailed examination of the raw data, which we don’t have. We don’t know how long the respondents had been selling sex, in either survey; we don’t know how many in the first study had sold for more than three years nor how many in the second study had sold for less (though 16% of the latter group said they were not selling at the time the survey was carried out). You would expect, of course, that the more actual sex work-years covered by the survey, the more violence would be reported; and if we assume that the first study covered more actual sex work-years then we would expect to see higher rates of violence in it. I’m not even comfortable making that assumption on such flimsy data (which is why I didn’t make it in my initial post). But we certainly cannot make the implicit assumption that the Feminist Current post depends on, ie, that the two studies cover the same number of actual sex work-years.

2. Norwegian vs. foreign experience. Both surveys recorded sex workers’ experience of violence in prostitution wherever it occurred. For the 2012 study, we have a breakdown: 70% of respondents said it only happened in Norway; 12% said Norway and elsewhere; 10% said only elsewhere; 8% didn’t answer. There is also a breakdown of the venues within each country, but that is all. We don’t know, for example, which types of violence occurred in which country, or how many of the specific incidents occurred in which country. This makes it impossible to know how much of the reported violence even took place under the Nordic model. And we don’t have any of this data from the 2007-2008 study, so there’s really nothing for us to compare here at all.

Now, really, that ought to be enough to make it clear that Feminist Current’s claim is totally unsubstantiated. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say we really were comparing like with like. Would that justify their conclusions?

I’ll just address their headline statistic, namely, the claim that rape is down by half in the new study. That comes from here:

And indeed, the drop from 29% to 15% looks impressive. But wait a minute – look over in the left-hand column, halfway down. See that category of “threatened/forced into sex that was not agreed to”? Last I checked, that’s rape. And the number who said it had happened to them in the past three years was not 15%, but 27%.

The Feminist Current author didn’t miss that category of violence – in fact, she commented on it, but totally missed its significance. She also missed what the report’s authors had to say about it, which is as follows:

We have looked at how many checked both answers which could mean that they define both these categories the same way. Only 6 people have done this, which confirms our suspicion that many of the women would not characterize actual rape as rape. This also means that the actual frequency of rape is considerably higher than what is shown in table 10. If we combine the amount that checked these options and then subtract those that checked both we see that as many as 34%(25 people) of those that have experienced violence in the last three years have been raped/threatened into sex that was not agreed to.

So how does the 34% de facto rape rate compare with its 2007-2008 counterpart? To find that out, we’d need the same accounting exercise to be carried out on the earlier data. It could be that in 2007-2008 there was zero overlap between the persons who said they’d experienced rape, and the persons who said they’d been threatened or forced into having sex; this would give us a de facto rape rate of 64%, from which 2012′s 34% would still be an impressive drop. On the other hand, it could be that every person who said in the first study that they’d experienced “rape” also ticked the box for “threatened/forced etc”, which would mean the de facto rate in 2007/2008 was only 35%. In that case, the subsequent drop to 34% would be considerably less impressive, and probably statistically insignificant. The fact is, we simply don’t know.

Finally, since the Feminist Current argument rests entirely on the claim that “serious” violence is down in the 2012 study, I think there’s one other stat in that image worth highlighting:

This of course is subject to the same flaws as everything else in this study, and I’m not pointing it out to suggest that the number of sex workers threatened with a weapon actually has increased under the Nordic model, by 50%, from less than a quarter to approximately a third. I just think it’s kind of…curious that someone who takes the stats at face value, and accuses others of ignoring inconvenient data, doesn’t see any room for this in her analysis of how “serious” violence has changed under the law. But maybe she doesn’t consider “threatened with a weapon” to be serious enough.

There’s a lot more to criticise in that piece if I had more time, not least its contradictions with the radical feminist conception of sex work as inherently violent, inherently rape – and the way it almost mockingly dismisses certain forms of reported violence as not serious enough to be counted as violence for the purpose of this study, while then going on to insist that “any violence inflicted on them matters”. But I’ll let someone else unpack that one. As I said in my first post, we can’t safely draw any conclusion from the stats. The study’s significance lies in its qualitative findings – which are totally inconsistent with the idea of the law as a “success” and which are, unsurprisingly, totally ignored by Feminist Current.

I didn’t have to dig particularly deep into the study to find why the Feminist Current piece is wrong. Pro Sentret are careful to emphasise the lifetime/three years difference. They also highlight the fact that the number of sex workers who report being raped is much higher than the number who call it rape. There’s no reason why anyone who actually read the study wouldn’t be aware of these issues. If they choose not to share them with their audience, that’s a matter for them to explain.

Racism within white feminist spaces

Reblogged from Black Feminists Manchester:

By Mia

When we talk about ‘white feminist spaces’ what we mean is the default mainstream feminism of the UK, (Europe and USA). A feminism that considers itself superior to women’s movement’s throughout the world, using it’s white privilege to cherry pick which women (of colour) and oppressions are worthy of attention or rescue, viewed through a myopic authoritative white lens.

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This piece comes from Britain, but Irish feminists must not see it as irrelevant to feminism in Ireland. One example that jumped out at me immediately was this one: "To involve women of colour as entertainment or free catering service at feminist events whilst failing to involve women of colour in visible lead speaker or panel roles is racist." I can think of a couple recent examples where events were organised to discuss migrant women's experiences, and migrant women did not feature on the panel at all (at least initially, presumably until the exclusion was pointed out to the organisers). I also attended an event not too long ago where a migrant woman spoke powerfully about her negative experiences in Ireland, and when it came to Q&A time a white Irish woman in the audience stood up to express her sympathies...and then addressed a question about this woman's experience to the white Irish NGO worker sitting beside her on the panel.

I'd note also the negative reaction among some Irish feminists to a woman of colour's post on this blog, in which she objected to Islam being used as a bogeyman in the Irish abortion debate (as if Catholicism hasn't been oppressive enough). Among other things, she was told that she should go to a Muslim country and see what things were like there. The assumption by the people who made those comments that they know more about life in her native country than she does - that's also racist.

Any women of colour in Ireland who are reading this - what other examples of racism have you seen within Irish feminism? And what do white Irish feminists need to do better/differently/at all to address this?

Nice guys, the friendzone and sexual entitlement

Reblogged from Another angry woman:

In the wake of the NiceGuysOfOKC tumblr (currently down), the discussion about Nice Guys has flared up again. The Nice Guy is a category of human which can be--and often is--entirely mutually exclusive from "guy who is nice": Nice Guys are men who consider their lack of dating success to be down to the fact that they're "too nice", often bemoaning the fact that they end up in the dreaded "friendzone", wherein women want to be their friend but nothing more.

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