This book isn't just about prostitution. There is one chapter on prostitution. The first sub-heading is Forced Prostitution in the West. Kevin Bales writes "The women and girls are commonly tortured if they do not comply". The reference for this statement is for a 2004 paper by Gijsbert Van Liemt. This paper does not mention torture once. It does mention violence and the threat of violence without specifying the nature of this violence. It does not mention girls. So there is no physical torture.
Is there psychological torture? The paper mentions isolation for sex workers and domestic maids. It says that women are moved from brothel to brothel to prevent them from 'establishing relations of trust'.
There are two things wrong with that statement. Firstly women are moved to another brothel because some men don't want to see the same sex worker again and again. Secondly women in brothels often work with other women and are not isolated. If they do work alone then it isn't really a brothel and it will often be because it is illegal for women to work together.
There is no doubt that some women are coerced into prostitution and some forms of coercion are subtle, but it's a bit of a stretch to call that psychological torture. In any case Kevin Bales isn't calling it psychological. Then to tack onto women 'and girls' seems deception to me.
The second sub-heading is Forced Prostitution in Africa and Asia. Kevin Bales writes about Japan as a destination for migrant sex workers.
"But another part of Japan's slavery problem is its euphemistically titled "Entertainment Industry," which includes brothels, strip clubs, bathhouses and street prostitution. The government has a special "entertainer visa," supposedly given to singers and dancers that will be giving performances in theatres and nightclubs. If this were true, then Japan would have more professional entertainers than the rest of the world combined.
In reality, the visa is used to import large numbers of foreign women to meet the demands of Japanese men for sex and "entertainment." Between 1996 and 2003, the number of visas issued each year more than doubled (see table 10).
In 2003, approximately 80,000 "entertainers" came from the Philippines and, over the years, around 40,000 women have come from Latin America on entertainer visas. Under intense pressure from human rights groups and other countries, Japan agreed to better police the entertainment visa system from March 2005, but no figures have been released showing a fall in the number of "entertainers" brought to Japan."
Kevin Bales has got this completely wrong. These entertainers were not prostitutes. Sociologist Rhacel Parreñas worked among them, interviewed them and saw the reality of their lives. She put it all in her book 'Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo'.
70,000 out of 80,000 Filipina women have had their livelihood taken away from them. They were not prostitutes but some of them will now be. These do-gooders have forced women into prostitution. If Japan chooses to classify women who serve drinks and sing karaoke in nightclubs as 'entertainers' that is up to them and that shouldn't be a subject of sarcasm.
Professor Parreñas knows how to help these women. They should be paid during not just at the end of their contract. Middlemen brokers who take much of the profit should be removed from the system.
The third sub-heading is Prostitution. In this section Kevin Bales states that some people believe all prostitution is slavery. For example, CATW. He mentions legalization but not decriminalization. He doesn't mention the Palermo Protocol.
He mentions the Nordic model in Sweden and writes that there is little evidence that it is working. He writes that there is no evidence that prostitution has been pushed underground in Sweden, which is odd because if there is just as much prostitution but it is now illegal then it is underground.
This is an interesting paragraph:-
"Ann Jordan, director of Global Rights' Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons, also points out that while "current federal law enables prosecutions of all enslavers and provides protection for all victims," the broad scope of the law "equates prostitution with trafficking, and is redirecting resources to end prostitution rather than to end trafficking." She suggests that the investigative and prosecutorial arms of the federal government are being diverted from their primary goals of eradicating all types of slavery, in order to pursue a war on prostitution."
This is something I have believed a long time. If we apply it to the case of the Filipina women who have been stopped from working in Japan, not only is there no evidence that they were prostitutes, even if they had all been prostitutes there is no evidence that they were forced into it. "If no one is forcing her to engage is such an activity, then trafficking does not exist." This is what one group of NGOs said in 1999, according to Bales.
This is the clearest case that we're not just talking about the desires of men here, we are also talking about the needs of women. The need for poor women to earn money. Having said that, it must be true that a few of these women might have chosen prostitution while in Japan. A few might even have intended to engage in prostitution before they applied for a visa to Japan.
Modern Slavery is not a good book about the subject. A much better book is The Truth about Modern Slavery by Emily Kenway.
It was John Miller of the American State Department who put pressure on the Japanese government to severely restrict entertainment visas. I have written about him here.
