another false statistic

"90 percent of Irish women in prostitution want to exit trade but lack resources."

"Report finds 90% of sex workers want to leave trade but resources are not there to help them."

I came across this statistic on the Feminist Current site. On this page is a link to an article in The Irish Examiner. The article is about a review done of the effects of the Nordic model in Ireland by Dr Geoffrey Shannon 'The Implementation of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, Part IV – An Interim Review'. In the report it states "According to Ruhama approximately 90% of women want to exit at some point but have a perception that there are not any viable alternatives for them". Dr Shannon just blindly believed Ruhama without bothering to check. This is the complete paragraph:-

"Civic society organisations are critical of the insufficient resources provided by the Irish State for comprehensive exit supports for women affected by prostitution and sex trafficking. According to Ruhama approximately 90% of women want to exit at some point but have a perception that there are not any viable alternatives for them."

The point of this paragraph is to say the Nordic model in Ireland isn't working, sex workers aren't getting help to exit. He thinks that 90% of women - he doesn't say Irish women - want to exit. That is not correct, but his point is that a lot of women are in dire straits. Why aren't the Radical Feminists reporting on this, instead of the false statistic, which they have made more false by saying that it applies to Irish women?

You can't try to take away the customers of sex workers while still arresting them for working together and not giving them help to exit. It has always been said by proponents of the Nordic model that help to exit is a vital aspect of it, it won't work without it.

This is what Ruhama have published on this page.

"The only ones who meaningfully benefit are those organizing, pimping, procuring, trafficking and buying prostitutes. There is always someone who wants to profit of the bodies of those in prostitution and it is a rare event to have anyone truly "independent" in the Irish sex trade. International studies consistently show that 90% of those prostituted want to exit. It is this 90% who should be attended to through recognition by society and the state that prostitution is not a harm free enterprise but one that is inherently dangerous and connected to organized crime. Trafficking for sexual exploitation is intrinsically linked to organized prostitution – they cannot be separated as one will not exist without the other."

The 90% statistic comes from the research done by Melissa Farley 'Prostitution and Trafficking in 9 Countries'. None of these 9 countries was Ireland. So the statistic that begins with '90 percent of Irish women' does not refer to Irish women at all. The report by Dr Shannon did not find that 90 percent of Irish sex workers want to exit. Dr Shannon copied a false statistic from Ruhama (not 'found' as in independent research). It doesn't apply to Ireland.

Melissa Farley is known for working with drug addicted street prostitutes and then pretending that it applies to all sex workers. When Ruhama say that 'international studies consistently show' this statistic, they are referring to this one study by Melissa Farley.

If you look at the Farley study, you can see a table which gives the results of questions put to sex workers.

699 as a proportion of 854 is not 89%. It is 82%. I don't know what's going on here. Later in the study she writes that 89% of 785 sex workers want to exit. I have no idea where the 785 figure comes from, the total number of women in the study is 854. The 785 figure isn't mentioned anywhere else in the study.

The countries chosen are an odd mixture of affluent and poor countries. In the three affluent countries (USA, Canada, Germany) between 70% and 95% of the sex workers used drugs: "Canada, USA, and Germany reported the highest rates of drug use (70% to 95%)". I don't believe that this can be true, that the proportion of sex workers who take drugs in North America and Europe is as high as this. Farley obviously has made no attempt to find a representative sample of sex workers. In the six poor countries less than half were drug takers.

"The German women were from a drop-in shelter for drug addicted women, from a program which offered vocational rehabilitation for those prostituted, and were also referred by peers, and by advertisement in a local newspaper." Not surprising they didn't get a representative sample.

Sex workers who take drugs lead very traumatic lives, as do sex workers in poor countries without social security where levels of criminality tend to be higher. This tells us nothing about the majority of sex workers in Britain and Ireland. When making laws in Britain we should consider the welfare of the majority of sex workers in Britain.

They are not drug addicts, aren't forced into it by pimps or traffickers, and don't want to exit. I'm sure the majority don't intend to do it for the whole of the rest of their lives, but that will be true of waitresses too. 

30% of the funding for one of her studies came from the US Department of State. Is this the same State Department that caused so many problems for Cambodian women that I wrote about in my previous post?

Some people blindly believe what Farley says. Farley says "we calculated the average length of time in prostitution to be 9 years across countries". That sounds about right to me. If you feed that figure into the statistics in the report ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ by Ulla Bjørndahl it is certain that violence against sex workers increased substantially in all categories in Norway since the Nordic model was introduced there.

prostitution in developing nations

I know about prostitution in Britain through experience and research. I know about it in Ireland too through research. I don't know much about prostitution in developing nations. I always assumed that there must be coercion of some sort going on there because you see that in other types of work such as factory work.

I have read two books recently, one about Vietnam and the other partly about Cambodia. The first says that during the Vietnam war sex workers earned much more than other workers. In 1975 when South Vietnam was about to collapse hundreds of Vietnamese sex workers bribed their way onto evacuation flights out of the country. They were the ones who had the money and especially the dollars. It wasn't hundreds of pimps, it was hundreds of sex workers.

The second book says that about 10 years ago the American State Department was 'pressuring the Cambodian government to take a stand against sex work or else lose aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'.

"What happened once the sex workers rounded up in brothel raids were unloaded from the trucks and moved to the so-called rehabilitation centres? They were illegally detained for months at a time without charges, as were others who worked in public parks and had been chased, beaten, and dragged into vans by police. The Cambodian human rights organization LICADHO captured chilling photographs of sex workers caught in sweeps locked together in a cage - thirty or forty people in one cell. Sex workers who had been detained reported being beaten and sexually assaulted by guards in interviews with LICADHO, Women's Network for Unity, and Human Rights Watch. Some living with HIV, who had been illegally held in facilities described by the local NGOs that ran them as "shelters," were denied access to antiretroviral medication. In one facility sex workers were "only able to leave their rooms to bathe twice a day in dirty pond water," Human Rights Watch reported, "or, accompanied by a guard, to go to the toilet.""

The American State Department then upgraded Cambodia's compliance ranking. In Brazil it was a different story: "The groups had been strong-armed by the US into signing loyalty oaths declaring their opposition to prostitution in order to keep their AIDS funds. Rather than sell out sex workers, the entire country of Brazil refused to sign the pledge and gave up $40 million."

The book says about Cambodian women that 'many have also worked in garment factories, and left the factories due to low wages to move into sex work'. So, again, we see that sex workers earn more than other workers. And yet the people who want to 'rescue' sex workers say they want to teach them how to operate sewing machines. Women don't do sex work to avoid starving, they do factory work to avoid starving and when they are fed up scrimping they turn to sex work. As we saw with the biography of the Duke of Westminster, the choice is to stay in your home town and be unemployed, move to a city and work for little money, or become a sex worker and have a better lifestyle.

Who are these influential Americans who are harming women in developing countries? It can only be the Evangelicals and their Radical Feminist supporters. I'm sure they, and especially the Radical Feminists, would say that they never wanted women to be locked up. They would say they support the Nordic model where prostitutes are decriminalized. But in every Nordic model country women who work together are arrested and sex workers get evicted from their homes. When Amnesty International exposed this abuse and hypocrisy they were demonized. It was said that Amnesty International works in the interests of pimps and traffickers, whereas (as I wrote in my last post) they are expressing the views of many (non-Radical) feminists.

Sex workers know what they need to escape from and how to do it. They don't need Evangelicals and Radical Feminists trying to stop fornication/objectification. There is coercion but not so much from pimps and traffickers, more from the police, the State, and neocolonialist America. It's not as if the people of Cambodia haven't suffered enough from the Americans*. It's only going to increase pimping and trafficking.

The first book is Vietnam by Max Hastings. The second book is Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant. If there are any Vietnamese former sex workers who left in 1975 reading this I would like to hear from them. I'm sure they have an interesting story to tell.

This is an interesting article about Cambodia. There is a book called Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia by Heidi Hoefinger. Everything You Think You Know About Cambodian Sex Workers Is Wrong

https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/19/streets/arbitrary-detention-and-other-abuses-against-sex-workers-cambodia

According to this site: "Empower Foundation, the sex worker organisation in Thailand, was represented by Liz Hilton who reported that wages in other industries that commonly employ women, such as agriculture, fisheries and factories, were so low that even the lowest paid sex workers were earning twice the minimum wage."