'Streetwalkers Show the Way': Refraining the Debate on Trafficking from Sex Workers' Perspective

摘要

Trafficking of women and children across and within nations is said to have escalated dramatically in the last decade. At the same time, we are told how much political commitment to, and funding for, anti-trafficking interventions, preventive and punitive legislation has grown. For both propositions to be true there must be something wrong, either in the definition of trafficking, or in the ways it is being tackled. Despite the media headlines on desperate Third World men dying in their hundreds in closed containers that haul them across international borders, there remains a steadfast conviction that those who are trafficked are predominantly women and children. After all, the most persistent of all trafficking myths asserts that the destination ofall trafficking is prostitution, all prostitutes are women and as no woman can deliberately choose to be a prostitute, all of them are trafficked. The principal causes of trafficking are commonly believed to be the so-called "push factors" of poverty and gender inequality. Moreover, it is supposed that organised gangs of traffickers carefully orchestrate all trafficking that takes place, both internationally and within national borders. Then it is assumed that those who are trafficked remain in a situation of everlasting powerlessness, unless rescued by external agents, preferably anti-trafficking non-governmental organisations (NGOs) ... and the list goes on.