Jesus and the
sex workers

Dear Sasha, I ’ve read a couple of your responses to questions regarding sex trafficking in Asia. You seem to side with the arguments of organizations like Chez Stella, in defending prostitution and denouncing “help” campaigns that sometimes mess with people’s livelihoods. Though some of these programs might be misled, there are others, such as Night Light Bangkok, which seem to be receiving people who choose to come off the streets for the sake of their safety, health and survival. I understand that you believe it is a woman’s choice how she uses her body, but what do you think about these cases?

—Jeremy

Dear Jeremy,

In my view coerced labour is unacceptable no matter what it is, but how that relates to sex industry exit programs run by faith-based organizations like Night Light Bangkok is more complicated. One thing cannot be stressed enough: no organization that supports sex workers’ rights is in favour of human trafficking. Jenn Clamen from Stella affirms this sentiment and adds, “Sex workers the world over believe that by ameliorating working conditions and recognizing sex work as real employment, cases like these would be greatly reduced or easier to recognize.” Prostitutes also believe they are most suited to this task. “Sex workers could help fellow sex workers get out of situations that do not respect their dignity and perhaps help them find working conditions that do,” Clamen continues. “The reason this is different to what most exit programs suggest is that these programs are trying to take women out of the industry entirely, assuming that it’s the industry itself, and not the particular bad working conditions, that we need to change.”

My contacts at Empower (a sex worker rights organization in Thailand that opened its own bar with fair labour practices last year) say they have not run into Night Light on the streets of Bangkok while doing their own outreach. Empower does take an aggressive stance on exit programs though, and who can blame them? They’ve seen their economy saturated by the same beading programs Night Light offers as an alternative, while their chosen profession remains illegal and dangerous. They’ve seen friends and colleagues arrested and sent back to military regimes like Myanmar (formerly Burma) by the Thai police working in conjunction with meddling organizations.

That said, it doesn’t look like Night Light participates in rescue and repatriation campaigns (unlike other faith-based organizations like the International Justice Mission funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) which involve raiding brothels and marching women out in a violent and humiliating fashion whether they’re being trafficked or not. “This,” says the Network of Sex Works Project Web site, “is counter to the wisdom of experience: it is well documented that the people caught up in raids typically lose all their savings and possessions, and most return to sex work quickly but less their hard-won savings and possessions.” Still, Night Light takes Sweden’s stance on prostitution, viewing it as slavery, thereby treating the worker as victims and criminalizing the pimp or client. Aside from being paternalistic and totally offensive to non-violent clients, this model appears not to have reduced the number of prostitutes in Sweden—numbers have dropped in major cities, but national averages remain the same—but merely pushed them to remote and thereby dangerous locations.

Jeremy, the women who work at Night Light are nice. Really, they are. They try to ensure that their beads are purchased from ethical companies rather than sweatshops. They say they do not press their religious agenda but hope that women will come to Jesus through example. Their hearts are in a good place and it’s lovely that they are providing fellowship to distressed women. But simply put, I don’t believe religious folks should be interfering in sex industry affairs, just as I don’t think they make suitable politicians (and many of them are proving this to be the case), because they are often deliberately powerless to see anything but a very specific vision of sexuality as legitimate. Everyone has an agenda when it comes to sex work, but faith-based campaigns are, at their crux, insulting because they push a moral agenda onto what is, for many people, an issue of labour. You can certainly argue that prostitution is a difficult business based on hard facts but the bottom line is that a conflict of interest steeped in unsubstantiated religious ideologies is an illogical and discriminatory filter by which to judge any profession.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM