Alison Mau has just launched a #MeTooNZ investigation – “a planned, organised outlet for survivors of sexual harrassment to come forward... and help stop
repeat predatory behaviour”. There is one industry we know will barely be touched by this campaign, and certainly not in
proportion to the extent of violence taking place there. It's the industry where women suffer more sexual assault than any other: prostitution.
Mau is right to start her campaign: New Zealand has some of the highest rates of violence against women in the OECD.
Prostitution too, takes place in this context, and it would seem that this is the reason that New Zealand's Ministry of
Health funds the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective (NZPC) to the tune of $1 million per annum: for “harm reduction”.
So why do we never hear women talking about assault in prostitution, if nationwide campaigns are calling for women's
testimony and there is public funding earmarked to support them? Why are we not hearing from the thousands of women in
New Zealand who experience some of the worst and most routine sexual assault in the country?
This is in no small part due to the “sex work” ideology that underpins our prostitution laws, which decriminalise not only women but pimps and punters. “Sex work” is a phrase
designed to sanitise and legitimise prostitution as a “job like any other”, in the interests of pimps. The phrase was
coined by the global sex trade lobby: the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). According to NSWP, “sex workers”
can include “employers”, or pimps – meaning that the ideology is designed to drown out the unresourced voices of
prostitution survivors implicitly, by intimidation, and through the false attribution of violence in prostitution as
stemming from so-called “stigma” and not punters and sex trade Weinstein equivalents.
NSWP is also the lobby behind the red umbrella logo – NZPC often adopts it, since NZPC is our local NSWP branch. The lobby as a whole favours the “New Zealand model” of prostitution policy. The sex trade lobby loves what we're
doing here.
New Zealand media is saturated with “sex work” ideology. It has now become the go-to framework for journalists and university academics discussing prostitution in our country, and it contributes to a “grooming” culture that is not only sanitising but
promotional. It encourages the wider public to turn a blind eye to murder and rape in the sex industry, as well as child
prostitution, sex trafficking, post-traumatic stress, the victim-blaming inherent in “safe sex” regulations and fines,
and the need for exit services. It also sees widespread promotion of prostitution as a desirable career option in which
women can be paid to have flexible work hours and orgasms.
Anna Paquin recently called Hollywood a “grooming industry”. She is listened to. So it is interesting that when a prostitution survivor calls prostitution a “grooming industry”
she tends to be viciously silenced as “unprogressive”. Chelsea* has been speaking, powerfully and eloquently, about
violence in New Zealand's sex trade since 2009. She calls the manual Stepping Forward that NZPC distributes to women in prostitution “grooming literature”. This Ministry of Health funded booklet, among other things, instructs women on how to tolerate anal penetration.
“Using chemical assistance to help relax is not advised,” NZPC advises, “as it seldom means the body is actually relaxed
but that you are less inclined to register the pain or trauma.”
If your anal/rectal muscles are relaxed and entry is on the right angle there should be no pain. It is not uncommon for
it to take 20 minutes or longer for the anus and rectal passage to expand and embrace the length of the girth of a penis
or object... The anal/rectal relaxation process involves getting the sphincters to work in-sync with each other… This
has to do with body memory and the more your body becomes familiar with something going in and learns to relax with the
sensation, the easier it will become.
It's no surprise that Paquin is heard while Chelsea speaks into an abyss – Paquin has money, and so does the sex trade
lobby.
To keep the New Zealand model in place, the idea that “sex work is work” needs to be insisted on and sustained, and
though that is hard to do, the sex trade lobby can afford it. This is where their notion that “stigma causes violence” also comes in handy: it takes the spotlight off pimps and punters, prevents Weinstein-style exposés, and encourages
the ever further normalisation – expansion – of prostitution.
There is one particularly clear illustration of how the logic that “stigma causes violence” silences women. In 2010,
NZPC programmes coordinator Calum Bennachie wrote an article called Their words are killing us for the NSWP newsletter. The article lays blame on women who write critically on prostitution for violence in the sex
trade – claiming that we are
no different from the client who does not want to pay, the corrupt police officer who rapes, or the members of the
public who throw bottles and rotten eggs at street workers. In fact they are worse, because they justify their violence
as an act of caring.
This is a sure fire way to suppress dissent among women. Bennachie claims that it is the critical descriptions of prostitution written by women (including Andrea Dworkin, a prostitution survivor) that are objectifying, and not
prostitution itself. This supposed “objectification” then gives license to perpetrators somehow, subliminally, since
johns don't tend to read feminism.
At the time Bennachie published this little number, the NSWP's vice president was Alejandra Gil, a now-convicted sex trafficker. On the NSWP website, Gil continues to encourage women in prostitution to “call ourselves whores”. It's unsurprising, and also unsurprising that Victoria University's student magazine Salient featured an article in 2017 subtitled The taboo of the unrepentant whore, written under a pseudonym by an author who claimed to be a 'sex worker'. The suggested narratives have taken hold,
especially on university campuses, where NZPC has made itself comfortable and sex trade academics are a dime a dozen.
Is this pro-prostitution stuff really helpful? At least five prostituted women have been murdered in New Zealand since
2003 through being strangled, run over, beaten, and stabbed. There was no outcry, no rallies or protests or social media
campaigns to mourn any of these women, or to demand better protections or reassessment of the laws that enabled their
lives to be taken so brutally. The advice NZPC offers women in terms of “dealing with violent clients” is completely
blasé. “Make as much noise as possible to attract attention,” they suggest in Stepping Forward. “Try calling FIRE, a passerby will probably pay more attention. If you wear a whistle around your neck, blow it in his
ear.”
The reframing of violence is an inevitable part of the promotion of prostitution decriminalisation. While murder is said
to result from “stigma” supposedly created by women's critical writing, and the need for exit services is downplayed –
rape is seen as mere theft. Child prostitution too, is adamantly separated from the sex trade itself by organisations
like NZPC. This in spite of the injustice the false distinction does to the stories of women like Ngatai Manning, whose
life, sexual abuse from childhood, difficulty exiting prostitution, and murder in the trade demands that we examine the
inextricable correlations between child abuse and prostitution. Each Trafficking in Persons report that names New
Zealand as a source country for child prostitution also demands that we do not ignore connections.
Prostitution is in fact inherently paedophilic: it is based on the paternalistic eroticisation of dominance and
submission. To eroticise the submission and infantalisation of women is, by extension, to sexualise children. This is why so many women enter prostitution at such a young age, and why, in
2010, the police identified at least thirteen girls between twelve and fifteen years old being prostituted in downtown
Auckland – in the course of only six weeks, on one main street. It is why in 2017, an Auckland couple were charged with
child sex trafficking; and why researcher Natalie Thorburn has exposed widespread child prostitution in New Zealand.
This is the nature of demand, and the nature of the industry. Yet NZPC and sympathisers continue to undermine these
important connections, though they do so only by remaining wilfully blind to a mountain of testimony and to the lives of
women like Ngatai Manning, and Jade.
In the same way as the paedophilic nature of prostitution is collectively ignored, sex trafficking is ignored – both
anecdotally, and as part and parcel of the sex trade. Trafficking is reframed as “migrant sex work”, “working holidays”,
or simply “not happening”, even when it is reported to include bribery, coercion and threats of deportation, debt
bondage, passport confiscation, overcrowding, and 16-hour shifts. Yes, in New Zealand.
In the year ending April 2015, Immigration New Zealand reported 42 cases of sex trafficking. Naengnoi Sriphet was
sentenced for sex trafficking that year, and The Trafficking in Persons Report has named New Zealand a source and
destination country for sex trafficking consistently. These reports, alongside work by Lincoln Tan and Christina
Stringer show that women are being trafficked to New Zealand from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan,
Korea, Latin America and Eastern Europe. There are also reports of the domestic and international trafficking of Pacific
islanders. Chinese women constitute the largest number of trafficked persons in New Zealand. In the words of one
survivor, “there is a hell of an operation the Chinese have got going on in New Zealand”.
Lincoln Tan has reported how one Korean woman “had 196 customers, including 58 customers that she gave unprotected oral
sex and six who paid extra to ejaculate in her mouth” over a 20-day period, at a Hobson St apartment. This issue does
not receive the “#metoo” scale public attention it deserves because, in the words of Pimp State author Kat Banyard, “As the euphemism that is 'sex work' takes root in everyday speech, its power to lobotomise
listeners grows”.
NZPC's suppression of conversation on sex trafficking becomes especially ironic when one considers the extent to which
lobbyists for decriminalisation rely on suggesting that criminalising pimping only drives prostitution “underground”.
NZPC's denial of sex trafficking certainly helps to protect pimps by keeping them out of the spotlight and in the
shadows of New Zealand's sex trade.
Evidence of trafficking barely needs to be found, though, for it to be understood that decriminalisation makes it
likely. As one survivor, Kimmy, told the New Zealand Herald, New Zealand's prostitution policy makes it a “popular choice” for traffickers because it is “low risk” and the laws are
more “relaxed”. One only need understand how global capitalism works to expect this: capitalists, in any industry, are
driven toward risk and cost reduction – including labour cost reduction – to maximise profits. This makes sex
trafficking one of the most lucrative international trades, as anti-trafficking author and activist Siddharth Kara
points out. “Drug trafficking generates greater dollar revenues, but trafficked women are more profitable. Unlike a
drug, a human female can be used by the customer again and again.”
If NZPC believes that prostitution is a 'job like any other', it cannot deny that any pimp is motivated to traffic women
to save costs and maximise profits, as in any other industry. And if johns are merely 'clients' or 'buyers', then at the
very least, they bring the “more for less” consumer mentality with them to the brothel, and apply it to women. Suzie, a
Korean woman prostituted in New Zealand testifies to the racist implications of this: “her clientele were mainly
Pakeha... who told her they preferred Asian women because they were cheaper and “prepared to do more””.
The sex trade lobby deals with these inconvenient truths with denial and language sanitising. Bennachie is currently
involved with a Kingston University so-called “Sexual Humanitarianism” project, which states on its website that “Its
main aim is to produce new emic (subject internal) concepts and data needed to develop innovative theorisations of
migrant agency”. Innovative theorisations of migrant agency: this means we are about to see even more elaborate sanitisation of sex trafficking from the sex trade lobby. Kara makes
the motivations for this all too clear.
The model of prostitution policy that feminists advocate is the abolition model: the criminalisation of pimps and
punters, who are fined to pay for exit services for women. Decriminalisation supporters like to suggest that instituting
this model would lead to an outbreak of police brutality. It's bizarre to think that those who are aware of and appalled
by police brutality would not realise that a legitimised sex industry makes it far easier for aggressive males,
policemen or not, to abuse with impunity. We don't see “police brutality” as such under full decriminalisation, because
it just amounts to more transactions.
In a context where violence is persistently reframed by NZPC – and the culture on which it bears remarkable influence –
we cannot reasonably believe that police are somehow, independently of this context, becoming more and more sympathetic
to victims and highly responsive to reports of violence coming from women in prostitution. We cannot reasonably believe
that the legal system, which secured convictions for only thirteen percent of reported sexual assaults in 2015, is
nevertheless increasingly on the victims' side specifically when they are prostituted – and then still also believe as
sex trade lobbyists like to suggest, that if we criminalised the pimping and purchase of women, we would suddenly face
an irreversible outbreak of police brutality targeting women.
Our legal system is complicit in the rape culture that #metoo acknowledges, and it certainly does not serve women in
prostitution better than the rest of us. This is part of the post-traumatic stress so often reported by women in the sex
trade: perhaps it would be possible to recover from the experience of sexual violence in prostitution through genuine
assistance by, for instance, lawyers, judges and counsellors – but not only does this not typically happen in this
culture, most public institutions are sold on the notion that women “choose” prostitution. This intensifies
victim-blaming.
NZPC barely acknowledges trauma or cultural complicity. The organisation instead refers euphemistically in Stepping Forward, to “sex worker burnout”. You are your business’s best asset,” NZPC advises, and without maintenance you can become a
liability. This does not mean you should spend more on superficial trappings like clothes, but quality investments like
getting a massage, eating good quality food, using good quality products from shampoo and skin care to linen on your bed
and even the bed itself. Join a gym, take Yoga or Pilates classes… the options are endless… all you need is a pair of
comfortable shoes.
This culture, which responds to violence against women by condoning it and lodging it deeper, is the same culture in
which every girl is socialised. It is what Gail Dines calls a “perp culture”, and it grooms women for susceptibility to
pimp tactics. Because of the power of the sex trade lobby, it is these tactics that we have come to see employed
society-wide as prostitution, pornography and objectification are sold to us using a language of “empowerment” and
“liberation” that appeals to women as an oppressed class. It is these tactics too, that are used by traffickers to lure
women into countries where they are vulnerable to exploitation, only to have reporters believe that “it's not
trafficking” because “she consented”.
Rape culture is a cycle we all live in, where misogynist cultural norms lead to escalating violence, which is in turn
normalised, further entrenching misogyny. It is time to break this cycle, and to do this one thing we require more than
anything is to rethink our prostitution legislation and attendant, sanitising “sex work” myths through critical
discussion.
We owe this to every woman who has lost years of her life in the sex trade since 2003; we owe it to Ngatai Manning and
every woman who has lost her life in the trade since 2003. We owe it to every woman in the sex trade who has watched others say it, but has not