Scarlet Alliance believes :

• a distinction is required between human rights abuses arising from being forced to work in the sex industry (or any other industry) and the perspective that all migrating sex workers are forced or coerced per se.
• Further criminalisation of the sex industry only jeopardizes sex workers’ health and allows the human rights of sex workers to be undermined.

Related Articles

Prostitution and Migration: Issues and Approaches Lin Chew, March 1998 This is a summary of a paper presented to the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers in Calcutta in 1998. It presents in point form some of the main arguments in support of sex workers having the right of migration in relation to sex work. In conclusion it proposes a method to critique policy.

An interview with Jo Doezema; Does attention to trafficking adversely affect sex workers’ rights? This interview by Elaine Murphy and Karin Ringheim exposes the conflicts between anti-trafficking groups and sex worker rights groups. In particular Jo talks about the experience of the Network of Sex Work Projects in trying to combat the myth that all people who migrate to work in the sex industry are ‘trafficked’.

Briefing Paper re: Amendments to the Federal Criminal Code (Sex Slavery), Scarlet Alliance There almost no legal opportunities for international migration for the purposes of sex work in Australia and people from other countries who are detected working in the sex work industry are dealt with harshly under Australian Law. The Australian Government does not consider working in the sex industry legitimate work for working visa applications and paid work is not generally permitted with other types of visas. The opportunities for international migration for the purposes of sex work are further complicated by sex work activities being criminalised in many jurisdictions. This seminal Scarlet Alliance discussion paper was released when the Commonwealth Government was developing the ‘Slavery & Sexual Servitude’ legislation (1998) and sought to respond to the both the motivation for the legislative changes and the narrow and misguided focus of Governments that continues to view migration for the purposes of sex work as trafficking and sex slavery. Clear arguments navigate through the complex terrain of moralistic, colonialist, sexist and racist judgments that our current Federal laws are based upon. A must read.

Identifying core rights of concern to migrants Background Paper, International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Perruchoud and Vohra This is an excellent paper that explains the cross-over between issues that migrant workers face, and the human rights we should all have access to. Not written with sex work in mind, it does admit that trafficking is a huge challenge, but that people are reliant on traffickers due to the inaccessibility of legal migration.

Loose Women or Lost Women The re-emergence of the myth of ‘white slavery’ in contemporary discourses of ‘trafficking in women’ by Jo Doezema Jo compares the ‘white slavery’ myth with current debates about ‘trafficking’. The anti-trafficking lobbyists have won ground by stereotyping women who migrate to work in the sex industry as ‘victims’ and ‘forced’, and adopting many of the tactics first employed by the ‘white slavery’ myth; “innocence deceived, youthful virginity despoiled, the motifs of disease and death, the depraved black/Jewish/foreign trafficker…” (pg 25)

Who gets to choose? Coercion, consent and the UN Trafficking Protocol by Jo Doezema During the writing of the UN ‘Trafficking Protocol’, lobby groups were split into two camps; the Human Rights Caucus saw sex work as legitimate labour and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women saw all sex work as a violation of women’s human rights. Against this backdrop Jo describes the lobbying and interactions between these two groups.

International News on Migration

Hong Kong Police Force hold suspected migrant sex workers in cage more info