This document discusses issues facing migrant sex workers globally. It notes that while legalization and labor laws exist in some countries, they often do not apply to migrant sex workers. Migrant sex workers make up an estimated 50-60% of all sex workers worldwide. Anti-trafficking laws strengthen immigration control and policing but do not create legal pathways for migrant sex work, making their lives more risky. Research has failed to confirm exaggerated trafficking numbers promoted by some anti-trafficking organizations. Migrant sex workers face lack of access to health, housing, immigration and legal services due to stigma and lack of trust in services. The document advocates for legal status and access to permanent residency for migrant sex workers.

1. Migrant Sex Workers
Can Defeat
Anti-Trafficking
Narrative
PUSHING BACK AGAINST U.S.
CARCERAL POLITICS AND
MORAL IMPERIALISM
byKateZen(MigrantSexWorkersProject):
DesireeAlliance,July2016

2. Migrant Sex Work v.
Anti-Trafficking
 Legalization and labor laws don’t generally apply to
migrant sex workers in New Zealand, Netherlands,
Australia, Denmark
 Migrant sex workers comprise of estimated 50%-60%
of sex workers globally, and as much as 90% of sex
workers in Spain
 Laws around anti-trafficking strengthen immigration
control and policing, without creating legal visa
pathways for sex work, making life more risky for
migrant sex workers

3. Butterfly Effect
 Failure in discover in U.S.,
Canada, and globally to
confirm the sex trafficking
numbers that are projected
in moral panic propoganda
by anti-trafficking
movement.
 “Money and Lies in Anti-
Trafficking NGO’s” (Truth
Out, investigative reporting
by Anne Elizabeth Moore)
 Nicola Mai’s UK research.
Somaly Mam in Cambodia.

4. Criminal Laws? Labor Laws?
 Low socioeconomic status means more difficult
working conditions, but labor protections don’t apply
 Anti-trafficking narrative erases range of labor and health
issues.
 The broad and violent stroke of criminal law are
insufficient to tackle everyday exploitation that all
migrants face across many industries: wage theft, long
hours, safety and health conditions.
 Immigration laws!
 Legal status for migrant sex workers and pathways to
permanent residency
 “Access without Fear” policy

5. “Like Aid From a War Plane”
 Migrants are silenced by anti-trafficking agenda
because they are vulnerable: no status, no rights
 Migrants are “spoken for,” like youth in sex trades, people
with mental illness and disabilities, and people who use
drugs
 Challenge social sector and Rescue Industry /
nonprofit industrial complex
 Lack of access to health, housing, immigration and legal
services for migrant sex workers
 Lack of trust in services by sex worker rights
organizations as well as ethnic community (stigma)

9. Cambodia:
harms of U.S. anti-trafficking regime
 2008 Cambodia anti-trafficking laws against
“solicitation” and “procurement” used over-
broadly by police to arrest, imprison, and
abuse Cambodian sex workers, including
beatings and detention at Prey Speu Social
Affairs Center: a torture site for sex workers,
beggars, drug users, and homeless people,
including children. Advocacy and outreach
by sex worker groups also criminalized
under these laws.
“Off the Streets:
Arbitrary Detention and Other
Abuses against Sex Workers in
Cambodia”
(Human Rights Watch, 2010)
“Police abuse sex workers with impunity. Sex
workers told Human Rights Watch that police
officers beat them with their fists, sticks, wooden
handles, and electric shock batons. In several
instances, police officers raped sex workers while
they were in police detention. Every sex worker
that Human Rights Watch spoke to had to pay
bribes or had money stolen from them by police
officers.” At least three people, and possibly
more, were beaten to death by guards at Prey
Speu between 2006 and 2008, a detention center
for sex workers, drug users, street children, and
homeless people.

10. Garment Workers & Sex
Workers:
Low-Wage Women Workers Unite
Video:
https://news.vice.com/video/the-high-cost-
of-cheap-clothes

11. CHOOSE:
… or Labour Organizing?
Police Violence, or…

17. "We locate these tensions within three paradoxes of neoliberalism: the apparent
amorality of neoliberalism and its facilitation of a conservative moral agenda; the
depoliticization of social risks and the hyperpoliticization of national security; and
the continuous creation and ravaging of vulnerable populations coupled with the
celebration of humanitarian/philanthropic responses from governmental and NGO
sectors....
Even though the anti-trafficking movement hails women's human rights, gender
justice, and protections afforded by the state, its operation relies mainly on
framing sex work as a crime while reinforcing gender, class, racial, and global
inequalities. We argue that global anti-trafficking initiatives as they have taken
shape in the twenty-first century are part of neoliberal governance, grounded in
populist campaigns, racial codes, culture wars, and sex panics that justify the
repression of those who are outside the norm (Duggan 2003)."
Neoliberalism on the Massage
Table
The Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Migrant Korean Sex
Workers in the United States and “Sex Trafficking”
Sealing Cheng and Eunjung Kim

18. Mirror to Hypocrisy
 Global Justice issues mirrored in Migrant Sex Work
 BORDERS, economic violence
“Our price points are a mirror to
economic inequality in all of society”
 CASES:
 Chinese migrant sex workers in Australia (low-wage)
 Chinese migrant sex workers in Douala, Cameroon (high-wage,
displacing local workers)
 Ndjio, Basile. “Magic Body” and “Cursed Sex”: Chinese Sex Workers as “Bitch-Witches” in
Cameroon.” African Affairs 113, no. 452 (July 1, 2014): 370-86.
 Chinese economic imperialism in Africa
 STRUCTURAL RACISM

19. The Racism We Carry
As We Migrate
 Hong Kong sex worker price listings from most
expensive (European) to least expensive (Indonesian)
 Addressing anti-blackness
and colorism in Chinese and Asian
immigrant communities
 Chinese migrant sex workers in Canada
 Organizing around “Access without Fear” policy
 Elene Lam will talk more about Butterfly and Chinese
migrant sex worker organizing in Toronto…