18.10.2006

Victims or workers?

At its October 7-8 conference, the Scottish Socialist Party opposed the unionisation of sex workers and agreed to support legislation for the sex industry only if it is "designed to eradicate prostitution". For the SSP, the liberation of sex workers must be delivered from above. Ana Lopes of the International Sex Workers Union believes differently

I came to this country in order to study anthropology at the University of East London (UEL). There, I learned a very interesting and controversial theory about the origins of culture - that the relation between sex and economics is very old, that it led to the first human revolution and to human culture.

I learned how menstruation used to be a woman's best advertisement of fertility, and how, in order to prevent males simply picking the most attractive females, women synchronised their cycles so they would appear to be menstruating at the same time - conducting a sex strike and forcing men to go out and hunt. When the food was brought back they would all share it.

Of course, women were not actually all menstruating at the same time, but they could fake the signals of menstruation, in order to attract men. They meant the women were old enough to get pregnant but they were not pregnant at that particular time. According to this theory, there was a collective appropriation of sexual signals and it was this that produced the human revolution.

My background, then, is in anthropology. But when I finished my degree I felt very lost. I did not know how this theory could be linked with current practice - is there an equivalent in our time? I was actually just about to give up anthropology altogether when I was introduced to Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group, who showed me an article by Camilla Power. In it she argued that there is a modern equivalent of this network of women who do not attempt to 'hide the menstrual blood'. They too say, 'We are all bleeding, we are all menstruating, we are all sexual'. She was referring to the sex industry.

This was a great revelation for me. This revolution led by women actually worked and made us human. I am a revolutionary - I want to have a revolution because I am not happy with the system and the way we live today. In order to test Camilla Power's theory I decided to look at the sex industry. Instead of giving up anthropology, I returned to my studies with renewed enthusiasm, this time concentrating on the sex industry.

Sex industry

The sex industry is much, much bigger than simply prostitution. It is a huge, global industry that all of us have encountered in one way or another. We are talking not only about prostitution and pornography, but also the whole modelling industry, the whole music video industry. They all use sexual signals.

Obviously enormous profits are made, which are in the hands of a few people, rather than those who actually do the work - the people who actually produce the sexual signals. We usually think of it as an industry employing women, but both men and women work in the sex industry.

The sex industry varies from country to country, and so does the legislation that controls it. But everywhere there is always at least a part which is clandestine and underground. This brings problems for those who work in it. It means that they are not covered by the same mechanisms of protection that other workers and citizens enjoy.

We also have to remember that the status of the sex industry and the status of those who sell sexual favours has changed over time and from society to society. Today workers in the sex industry usually have a low status in society - they are marginalised and stigmatised. But it was not always like that - think about the sacred prostitutes of Babylonia and so on.

In my opinion until feminism made gains for women in the 20th century, sex workers had more rights than other women. Most women went from being the property of their fathers to the property of their husbands. They had no economic independence, no access to education, including sexual education - they were not supposed to have a libido in the first place. But sex workers had all those things: they were economically independent and had access, through practice, to sexual education that other women did not have.

What should be the attitude of revolutionaries towards this huge industry? Should we campaign to shut it down? This is what many feminists and others have been trying to do for a long time. But it has not worked. The sex industry is thriving everywhere: it is bigger than ever and looks like it will continue growing. Not only that, but the actions of people who try to shut the sex industry down have actually been very detrimental to the rights of sex workers. For me it is obvious that this strategy has not worked and another is needed. People who work in the sex industry - whether we like what they do or not - must have rights and be able to work without threat of violence, infection and so on.

Action research

Clearly the sex industry was going to be the object of my research. But what kind of research was I going to do? For me all true researchers - if their work is to be of use, if it is to make sense - have a responsibility to give something back to the people upon whom they base their study. Given the controversy of this topic, there is no way to be objective and I was not even going to try. I did not start with a theoretical question: I started with a practical problem - sex workers did not have rights - and I wanted to do something to change that.

I was to use a method called 'action research', aimed at solving a particular problem, and would work alongside a group of people rather than just study them. They were not to be informants - in my approach, they were participants. This is a much more egalitarian way to do research than that carried out at a distance. I was a resource person - I was there to help people solve their own problems.

I began working in the sex industry myself - it is what anthropologists call 'participant observation'. I worked for five years on and off on a chat line, and eventually tried just about everything it is possible to try in the sex industry. Usually I did not stay very long in a particular field because the conditions were absolutely dreadful. It was not so much the work itself, but the conditions under which I was forced to work - and in which most people in the sex industry are forced to work.

At the same time I was engaged in a pilot study in which I interviewed sex workers from different areas in London and - through a snowball process of asking them to put me in touch with others - I got to speak to a large group of people. And I realised that, like myself, most of the people I was talking to did not have a problem with the work they were doing - they did not think it was wrong, bad or immoral to sell sexual services for money, whether it was prostitution, striptease or whatever. But they had a problem with the conditions: why didn't they have a contract, or a pension, or those things that other workers enjoy?

They also thought that the general public had a very much distorted view of reality. People get their ideas about what it means to be a sex worker through the media, which tend to sell sensational stories and portray one of two extremes. They depict either empowered women who make lots of money or poor victims who are in terrible circumstances akin to slavery. The sex workers I spoke to felt they needed a collective, organised voice that could tell the public what the reality was - that there were many different situations between those two extremes.

International Sex Workers Union

I invited those I had interviewed to a meeting, which was also attended by people from the UEL anthropology department and sympathetic organisations, such as the Sexual Freedom Coalition. We posed the question: Are you serious about this? Do you really want to create the collective that you say you lack? And the answer was, 'Yes, let's go for it.' So a new movement was born. We created a very informal organisation and called it the International Union of Sex Workers.

Why 'international'? Because the industry is global, so the problems are global as well. For example, the problems related to trafficking cannot be solved on a national basis: you have to organise on a global level. Why 'union'? Because the most important message we wanted to put across was that we were workers. Whether people like what we do or not, that is what we are. People who choose to work in the sex industry do so because they have to make a living. There may be many other factors that lead people to enter a particular section, but nobody does it for pleasure. As with any other industry, people work to pay the bills at the end of the month. Why 'sex workers'? Because it is a general term that includes all the types of jobs it is possible to do.

Our first action was in March 2000. We went out on the streets of Soho. In various places around the world sex workers were taking part in a global women's strike. We wanted to add positive energy to this action, and the friends and allies of the sex workers were all in Soho that evening giving support.

Because we attracted media attention we began to think we could actually keep the organisation going and develop it. We also started creating our own media, to deal with the things people in our organisation complained about - like the way their lives and their work were portrayed in wider society, which was not realistic at all.

We published a magazine called Respect. This was really useful in building the energy of the organisation, because sex workers would write the articles and the magazine would be distributed among sex workers. We no longer publish Respect because at the moment we are concentrating on our website, internet forum, etc, but I think probably in the future we will go back to the printed form.

The internet forum is a means of empowerment and people from all over the world use it. So if a sex worker is thinking of migrating to another country, for example, they will write to the forum and ask what the situation is there. They then get information from sex workers in that country and are not so easily exploited when they get there: they know where to go to get help, they are in touch with colleagues from the forum, and so on.

During this time, we wanted to show we were citizens with opinions on different issues - we went on anti-war demonstrations, for example. By doing this we were also aiming to develop a sense of pride, because if you are not proud of yourself you are not going to stand up for your rights. It was important for us to take part in such actions in order to say, 'We are sex workers: we are not ashamed of our bodies, we are not ashamed of what we do and we are here. We want our rights.' In this way people were encouraged and empowered. They felt able to organise, to mobilise; they were no longer prepared to accept their conditions.

GMB branch

During this period our aim was to win recognition for our union from the TUC. However, although we called ourselves a union, we were nothing more than an informal association of a few people. But then in 2002 something absolutely great happened, something that we did not expect to happen for another maybe 10 or 15 years: we were accepted by an existing, very well established union - the GMB.

We had approached some unions before, but they did not seem very interested. By chance, however, I met a representative of the GMB and I just walked up to him and said: "I'm a sex worker - can I join your union?" Perhaps he thought he was on Candid camera, but his attitude was extremely professional and we set up a meeting and started talking about the possibility of setting up a GMB branch. We invited sex workers and other people involved in the industry to a forum and everybody thought it was a good idea. This resulted in the sex workers branch of the GMB - a pioneering move in this country.

Because we were part of the GMB we were also recognised by the TUC. It was a great achievement to be in an official union because we had established that sex work is work, and that any sex worker in this country has the very basic right of being represented by an official union.

Apart from this very basic labour right, what type of benefit did we get from being in the GMB? There were many advantages that we were not able to provide to sex workers as a small, separate organisation. Legal representation is probably one of the most important resources that sex workers look for in the union. Legislation covering the various activities in the industry is quite ambiguous: often people do not know whether what they are doing is legal or not and may get into trouble as a result, so free legal representation makes a huge difference.

The union also helps provide moral and practical support. The very fact that once a month there is a meeting of workers like yourself, of people who face more or less the same problems, where you can go and talk about your work without being judged, is an important part of giving people a sense of empowerment.

Training is another important factor and there are two types that people can access through the union. One is training for those who want to leave the industry. It is very ironic that people are condemned, are criticised for the work they do, but once they want to get out they find all the doors are closed and they are stuck in the sex industry. This makes no sense. The union gives practical support - how to write a CV, how to find a different job and so on.

But there is also training for those who want to stay in the industry, who just want to do their work in a better or safer way. There are courses on self-defence, for example. At the moment we have a very broad course that equips people with the knowledge of how to avoid violence, how to manage difficult clients. There is also a course concerning the management of accounts, taxes and so on.

However, probably the most popular is the striptease course. It was aimed particularly at prostitutes who might want to do something else, while still remaining within the industry. But what we found is that women who are already professional strippers come to do the course for the recognition, for the diploma that they get. Probably all of us have moments in our lives when we win recognition, whether by getting a degree, a diploma or just a job. Sex workers are entitled to that kind of recognition too.

Sex workers have amazing skills. In striptease, for example, it is not just about taking off your clothes and dancing: you have to deal with a lot of different people - some of them are drunk, etc - and you have to deal with the stigma of your profession. But they very rarely have these moments of being recognised for what they are good at and what they know. So the training, the diplomas, are all part of developing people's self-esteem. Again, without self-esteem you are not going to stand up for your rights.

The union has also been recognised in a couple of table-dancing clubs, where it can act as in any other workplace. So workers have meetings, they elect a union rep - the kind of basic achievements that have long been taken as read in most other kinds of work, but have not previously been won in the sex industry. Working conditions in those clubs started to improve - unionisation brings results in other industries and the sex industry is no different.

This naturally leads on to the argument for decriminalising prostitution. What we are doing in these clubs we cannot do in a brothel because prostitution, although not technically illegal, is in reality criminalised. If prostitution were to be decriminalised, then the union could have a positive impact on the conditions of prostitutes.

The success of these initiatives has inspired sex workers in other countries to follow the same route or develop forms of collective action other than unionisation, which is absolutely fantastic. But in those countries where unionisation has been the specific strategy adopted, we have been able to develop a network of unions. In March 2007 there will be an international meeting of unions representing sex workers in India.

The prostitute as worker

There is a big argument about sex work that has been fought within feminism especially. Partly this is because there are different ways of interpreting what socialist thinkers, particularly Marx and Engels, said about prostitution. Engels is not very consistent. He says that prostitution degrades only the unfortunate ones who become its victims, and even these by no means to the extent commonly believed. Kollontai definitely tried to abolish prostitution, although she noted that within capitalism everything is for sale.

Marx, however, said that "prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the worker". The way I read this is that Marx is saying that sex workers are no different from other workers. If you are not happy with the system, let's get rid of the system. Don't pick on sex workers for selling their labour in this way. We are all selling our labour, whatever we are doing.

It is often said that sex work is different and more shocking because people 'sell their bodies'. But no-one sells their bodies. Sex workers sell a service - maybe time, or a particular sexual service - but at the end of a transaction the body is still there; it is not sold.

If Marx is read in this way, then the whole notion of unionisation makes a lot more sense. The approach that results from this perspective - that is it is work like any other, that sex workers should be given full rights and so on - is reaping results, in a way that the feminist perspective, for instance, has not been able to do.

What has the feminist debate actually done for sex workers themselves? Whether people fought for the abolition of prostitution or said that they had a right to choose to engage in it, what was actually achieved for the wellbeing of the sex workers themselves? There is a huge industry, whether we like it or not, so for me the important thing is that the people who work in it have the same rights as other workers - and are empowered enough to leave it if they choose.

My vision, and the reason why I have been involved in the unionisation process, is for sex workers to gain control over their own industry. This is particularly important where the worker's main tool is their own body. Nobody has the right to tell you what to do with that: it is your business and the workers must have control of their own bodies. I think this is pretty obvious.

If we manage to organise workers in an industry that is underground, where it is in the interests of those in control to have isolated workers in competition with each other and unable to claim their rights; if we did create a unionised, collective organisation within this industry, then there is no industry that we cannot organise.

If sex workers are able to understand that they must have control over their own industry, then all workers can gain that understanding.

If sex workers have this revolution and sex workers establish their rights, I will be out of a job - I will be just a bureaucratic leftover from the bad times. But in the world I envisage there will be no distinction between 'good women' and 'bad women'. The problems of stigmatisation of sex workers is not just a problem for us - it is a problem for all women. If I can be called a whore, then any woman can be called a whore - all women can be subject to that stigma.

That is why it is in every woman's interest to support the fight of sex workers to claim their rights.