“My husband used to rape me, pimp me, and force drugs on me. I needed help and I couldn’t trust anyone around me. Not even the police. Hend* welcomed me to her brothel helped me escape verbal and physical abuse.”
“So you don’t consider yourself a victim to sexual exploitation?”
“No. My husband used to force me to sleep with his friends. But here it’s my choice. I mean I can’t be a nurse or a teacher and I don’t know how to read or write… It’s not like we enjoy sleeping with strangers but we don’t have a choice…”
“Thanks, Sarah. What about you, Rana?”
“It is complex, I used to be a street based worker, Khaldeh to be specific. I needed someone to protect me and one of the women there put me in contact with someone. He was very kind at first …show more content…
The brothel is run by a 45 year old woman who was like, Sarah, physically and sexually abused by her ex-husband.
“Few weeks ago, Lebanon 's security forces have dismantled the country 's largest known sex trafficking ring and freed 75 mainly Syrian women. The women were tortured and only left house for forced abortions.” (Dailymail) This incident became debate material for the public on sex trafficking and abortion. Unfortunately, most people, “activists” included, do not acknowledge the difference between sex work and sex trafficking nor did they link it to the unethical abortions imposed on the 75 freed women.
The problem with the sex work discussion among us is that we completely focus on the question: “Is sex work a good or a bad thing?" and forget that at least the discussion should be first "Is it truly sex work or sex trafficking? And is it going to disappear with prohibition?" and then "Is full on prohibition of prostitution beneficiary or harmful to the workers?”
What’s the difference between sex work and sex trafficking, and how do we describe the conditions of sex workers (whether forced or by choice) in …show more content…
However, sex work has been around in for ages. Sex work just like any other form of labor has its own issues and those are directly linked to gendered division, sexual exploitation and general economic exploitation. Sex work is labor, yes, but saying that “it is a job like any other” is very simplistic. It 's based around specific ideas of gender, patriarchy and sexuality, and archaic notions of ownership and exchange of women - it 's not quite the same as any other kind of wage labor. Sex work cannot be viewed purely in terms of economics because that overlooks far too much of the gendered history of it, and gender and sexual patriarchal “concepts” cannot be explained by economics alone. Sex work is work, a profession, with its own complexities. Yes, Yes, The number of murdered and abused sex workers all over the world is shocking, but well, the number of murdered, battered, sexually and emotionally abused WOMEN all over the world is shocking. The murder and abuse of sex workers is not a cause of the profession itself but of a system that enslaves people and see them as commodities, it a result of patriarchal hierarchal apparatuses. So, sex workers need their own safe space, and how do they do that? By resorting to the state and asking it to legalize it? But we all know that the state itself has its own masculine dimensions, and here I refer to Wendy Brown’s article “Finding the Man in the State” in which she
“So you don’t consider yourself a victim to sexual exploitation?”
“No. My husband used to force me to sleep with his friends. But here it’s my choice. I mean I can’t be a nurse or a teacher and I don’t know how to read or write… It’s not like we enjoy sleeping with strangers but we don’t have a choice…”
“Thanks, Sarah. What about you, Rana?”
“It is complex, I used to be a street based worker, Khaldeh to be specific. I needed someone to protect me and one of the women there put me in contact with someone. He was very kind at first …show more content…
The brothel is run by a 45 year old woman who was like, Sarah, physically and sexually abused by her ex-husband.
“Few weeks ago, Lebanon 's security forces have dismantled the country 's largest known sex trafficking ring and freed 75 mainly Syrian women. The women were tortured and only left house for forced abortions.” (Dailymail) This incident became debate material for the public on sex trafficking and abortion. Unfortunately, most people, “activists” included, do not acknowledge the difference between sex work and sex trafficking nor did they link it to the unethical abortions imposed on the 75 freed women.
The problem with the sex work discussion among us is that we completely focus on the question: “Is sex work a good or a bad thing?" and forget that at least the discussion should be first "Is it truly sex work or sex trafficking? And is it going to disappear with prohibition?" and then "Is full on prohibition of prostitution beneficiary or harmful to the workers?”
What’s the difference between sex work and sex trafficking, and how do we describe the conditions of sex workers (whether forced or by choice) in …show more content…
However, sex work has been around in for ages. Sex work just like any other form of labor has its own issues and those are directly linked to gendered division, sexual exploitation and general economic exploitation. Sex work is labor, yes, but saying that “it is a job like any other” is very simplistic. It 's based around specific ideas of gender, patriarchy and sexuality, and archaic notions of ownership and exchange of women - it 's not quite the same as any other kind of wage labor. Sex work cannot be viewed purely in terms of economics because that overlooks far too much of the gendered history of it, and gender and sexual patriarchal “concepts” cannot be explained by economics alone. Sex work is work, a profession, with its own complexities. Yes, Yes, The number of murdered and abused sex workers all over the world is shocking, but well, the number of murdered, battered, sexually and emotionally abused WOMEN all over the world is shocking. The murder and abuse of sex workers is not a cause of the profession itself but of a system that enslaves people and see them as commodities, it a result of patriarchal hierarchal apparatuses. So, sex workers need their own safe space, and how do they do that? By resorting to the state and asking it to legalize it? But we all know that the state itself has its own masculine dimensions, and here I refer to Wendy Brown’s article “Finding the Man in the State” in which she