All That Is Bitter and Sweet (74 page)

1
At last, here was an explanation:
For those interested in more information on recognizing and treating depression, there are several indispensable resources: Andrew Solomon’s
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
(New York: Scribner, 2001); Kay Redfield Jamison,
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
(New York: Vintage, 2000); William Styron,
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
(New York: Vintage, 1990); and the websites
www.webmd.com/depression/guide/depression-resources
and
www.suicidehotlines.com
.

2
The spectacular organization:
Bobby Shriver supports many essential organizations, but the Special Olympics—founded by his late mother and now directed by his brother Timothy Shriver—is still closest to his heart. For more information, please see
www.specialolympics.org
.

Chapter 5

1
Most efficient and effective nongovernmental organizations:
Since 1987, PSI has saved 98,675,548 healthy years of life for people worldwide, for a cost of approximately $30 per person reached according to the latest 2009 figures. In 2009 alone, PSI helped couples prevent 3.5 million unintended pregnancies. In 2010, PSI delivered its one hundred millionth long-lasting, insecticide-treated antimalaria net. For more information, please see
www.psi.org
.

2
Female condoms for exploited prostitutes:
Female condoms are also for any woman whose partner refuses to wear male condoms; in this way, a married woman especially can discreetly protect herself from her husband’s HIV and other STIs, as well as unintended pregnancy, reducing the risk of violence that often occurs if a woman asks her husband to wear a condom.

3
DATA eventually became the revolutionary:
The ONE Campaign to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease in the Global South continues, with more than two million members. In 2010, ONE successfully pushed for passage of an additional $450 million in debt relief for earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Please see
www.one.org
.

4
A Ugandan nurse:
Agnes Nyamayarwo continues to help others who are infected with HIV/AIDS in Uganda through the indigenous grassroots group the AIDS Support Organization, or TASO,
www.tasouganda.org
.

Chapter 6

1
PSI found partners:
Population Services International Cambodia,
Annual Report
, 2004.

2
They showered the brothels with condoms:
Although successful in this particular context, and while making condoms available is obviously important for multiple reasons, this showering brothels with condoms would later be revealed as an inadequate strategy for specifically containing HIV among this heterosexual risk group. Some sex slavery abolitionists even express concerns based on their first-person work that the flooding of condoms into brothels in India actually had the unintended consequence of increasing sex slavery.

3
As many as twenty thousand prisoners:
There are many authoritative accounts of the Cambodian genocide. For information on the Tuol Sleng prison, please see
www.tuolsleng.com
and David Chandler,
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison
, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

4
Cambodia was scarred:
Dr. Kaethe Weingarten, Harvard Medical School, pioneered vicarious trauma research. For example: “Witnessing the Effects of Political Violence in Families: Mechanisms of Intergenerational Transmission and Clinical Intervention,”
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
30, no. 1 (2004): 45–59. An unforgettable first-person account can be found in
First They Killed My Father
by Loung Ung (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

5
We are making amends:
Some of our good work, however, is being grossly undone by U.S. immigration policies that forcibly send Cambodian Americans back to a country and culture they never knew, if their parents, when they were given political asylum, did not realize that their children were not automatically made citizens and that some paperwork had to be done. Additionally, that lack of judicial review in our bizarre policy that deports anyone for a felony, even if that felony was committed before the law was passed, is abusively “sentencing home” Cambodian Americans. This outrage is exposed in the documentary
Sentenced Home
,
www.pbs.org/independentlens/sentencedhome/film.html
.

6
Our guide into Phnom Penh’s netherworld:
To learn more about the amazing Mu Sochua, please see her website,
http://musochua.org/
. For an American news story on Svay Pak, see
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4038249/ns/dateline_nbc/
.

7
She founded Khemara:
Please see
www.khemaracambodia.org
.

8
Younger and younger prostituted women:
In recent years, it has been standard to call prostituted people “commercial sex workers.” The term, which is used by the UN, WHO, and other agencies, was introduced in an attempt to find nonpejorative language to describe prostitutes. It was also hoped that use of “CSW” might help de-stigmatize prostitutes. Initially I used this phrase, but after extended exposure to prostituted women, I stopped. The term is inadequate, misleading, a hollow euphemism, and it sanitizes horrific realities while helping some users of the term to feel distanced or even absolved (because, after all, it’s just “work” they are talking about). Instead, with the guidance and input of prostituted people worldwide and their advocates, I now use expressions such as “exploitive paid sex,” “women trapped in prostitution,” and “economically forced prostitution,” among others. The reasons are many, the debate about language interesting, and unfortunately, most of it falls outside the scope of this book. Because it is very important, I include a brief overview here and hope readers will pursue this subject in their own hearts and minds.

Three points must be made immediately: One, the preferred terminology in no way diminishes or discounts women trapped in prostitution who seek to find and use their voices, develop agency and self-efficacy, and regard themselves as economic actors. Indeed, such a bold and difficult interpretation of and response to one’s context is often the meaningful basis for improvements that make the difference between life and death and can help protest gross human rights violations, such as forced HIV testing (see, for example,
http://plri.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/ugandan-sex-workers-petition-parliament-over-hiv-bill/
). Two, of course, every individual has the right to self-name and designate his or her work, and I honor and respect the usage of “CSW” when it is a prostituted woman herself who prefers to be called such and not a label applied to her by a supranational agency, however well-intentioned (this includes PSI, which still uses the expression, to my disappointment, although we are seeking terms that “bridge the language of our funders with the dignity of our beneficiaries” [Karl Hofmann, PSI president]). Three, the term
CSW
can be appropriate for the tiny minority of people for whom a full spectrum of economic options, job training, and education is available, who genuinely, of their own empowered free will, with a full understanding of the nature of paid sex, wish to sell their bodies. This group, however, is indeed very small and exists largely in the imagination of the patriarchy. See, for example, Helen Benedict,
Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes
, especially “Rape Myths, Language, and the Portrayal of Women in the Media” (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Stephen J. Schulhofer,
Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

My reasoning includes, and is not limited to, the fact that prostitution is inherently violent, sexist, and often classist and racist. For example, it cannot meet the Four Pillars of Decent Work, as identified and articulated by labor experts such as the International Labor Organization (
www.ilo.org
). (In this context, the word
decent
means “not poor, scant, questionable, or marginal.” Synonyms of “decent” include “adequate, sufficient, satisfactory.” It does
not
include in this usage a reference to morality or character.)

“Decent work” includes the opportunity to earn a larger salary with accrued experience and expertise, whereas women in sex earn less as they accrue experience, and as they age, they are disposable and pushed out of the marketplace. Additionally, occupational and workplace safety is included in the Pillars of Decent Work and is minimal to nonexistent for most prostitutes. Standard workplace perils include risk of unintended pregnancy, exposure to lethal diseases, extremely high rates of violence, torture, and murder, and a lower rate of pay for attempting to avert such hazards. There is swift punishment from “management” for attempting to self-advocate and squalid living and working conditions devoid of basic services such as safe drinking water and sanitation. Furthermore, the vast majority of prostitutes lack the ability to bargain collectively and to create social dialogue that advances their rights, security, and dignity, all constructs that help define what decent work is and means. Additionally, trauma, racism, and mental illness are known to inhere in prostitution, and therefore once more such “work” cannot fit the international criteria of “decent.” Please see
http://fap.sagepub.com/content/8/4/405.abstract
;
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/faq/000008.html
; and “Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” (Melissa Farley, 2003).

(For a discussion of how the Four Pillars of Decent Work relates to public health and achieving the Millennium Development Goals, see
http://www.ilo.org//files/07/f07/public/english/bureau/pardev/
download/mdg/2010/mdg-dw-1-2010.pdf.
)

Many advocates have adopted (with regard to women who “choose” prostitution) more accurate terms such as “economically forced prostitution,” which underscores the choiceless choice nature of the decision as made by men and women who resort to abdicating their sexual autonomy and physical integrity in order to survive. Another term that is more honest than “commercial sex worker” for millions is “exploitative prostitution,” which underscores that the nature of the interaction with a client is intrinsically exploitative, given, inter alia, the asymmetry of the power between the person demanding sex and the person who is unable both to decline and to find an alternative means of generating income for herself (and her children).

Evidence that exploitative sex is not work by all reasonable definitions of work is abundant. Perhaps no research is more compelling, however, than a nine-country survey of prostitutes in which more than 90 percent said they desire to exit prostitution immediately (Farley, 2003). Women and men are in paid sex as a sequel to abuse (
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/factsheet.html
;
http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102206974.html
; and
http://www.prevent-abuse-now.com/stats.htmcite
), out of desperation to survive, and/or because a person more powerful than they are has forced them. This, simply put, is not work; it is abuse. Therefore, calling a woman who endures abuse to survive a commercial sex worker cunningly disguises that the transaction was in any other setting a crime. To summarize Catharine MacKinnon, when a rapist pays his victim, society no longer regards him as a criminal, he’s just another john.

For a discussion of prostitution as gender violence, see Sheila Jeffreys,
The Idea of Prostitution
, especially chapter 9 (North Melbourne, Victoria, AU: Spinifex Press, 1997); Catharine A. MacKinnon,
Sex Equality
, especially chapter 10 (Eagan, MN: Foundation Press, 2001); and
https://member.cmpmedica.com/index.php?referrer
=
http://member.cmpmedica.com/cga.php?assetID=363&referrer
=
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/sexual-offenses/content/article/10168/48311
.

9
Than enforcing the law:
“Off the Streets: Arbitrary Detention and Other Abuses Against Sex Workers in Cambodia,” Human Rights Watch, July 2010,
www.hrw.org
. The abuse of prostituted women and girls is documented in activist Somaly Mam’s wrenching memoir of her life as a sex slave in Cambodia in
The Road of Lost Innocence
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008).

10
Are still sex slaves:
The modern slave trade is larger than the slave trade was at its peak in the nineteenth century and is the second largest industry in the world. There are many outstanding books and resources that deal with the problem and offer viable solutions. For the outstanding 2010 report that reflects the most recent and best thinking,
Developing a National Plan for Eliminating Sex Trafficking
, and others, please see
www.huntalternatives.org
. For books, see Siddharth Kara,
Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), David Bat-stone,
Not for Sale
(New York: HarperOne, 2010), and Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter,
The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).