we really need to get our shit together about trafficking

after the refuge i worked at explicitly opened itself up to "women trafficked into the sex industry", when one of the first thus-labelled residents moved on, she set herself up as a high-class escort, with a fancy website. my colleagues, gathered around a computer, were scandalised and bitterly amused. "all that work for nothing!" "we were really taken for a ride there"... this woman had come into refuge because she was fleeing violence from pimps, my colleagues were not disputing that. but they felt that "all their efforts" had been in vain, because she "hadn't even wanted to exit prostitution".

as often happens in the office, i was too taken aback to really say anything of use. i muttered something about "don't you think it's great that she's free to make her own choices now?" to which they said "mmm", but continued to look disgusted.

i just find it crazy, though so illustrative, that schemes like this can get specialist funding to support trafficked women, while having no guiding philosophy (except, Trafficking Is Wrong), or politics, and no political or philosophical guidance for the staff doing the work. but it's illustrative because, of course, if an organisation was political, let alone holistically empowering of women who've survived trafficking, it wouldn't get funding.

and meanwhile, there's this crazy moral panic about trafficked women, through which any migrant sex worker, especially if she is 'illegal', could potentially find herself 'rescued' (which can take the form of deportation) against her will. it's really disturbing how there are so many feminist organisations latching onto the anti-trafficking thing, without simultaneously defending the right of women to migrate and do sex work. i was totally confused and distracted by these feminists for a long time, and until recently still couldn't articulate to myself why their campaigns were fucked up. the voices of migrant sex workers are so marginalised, including by well-meaning (? why do i keep using that word?) feminists, i'd kind of gone along with the deeply racist implicit conflation of all migrant sex workers as forcibly trafficked and enslaved, which also carries the assumption that this conflated group 'just can't ever speak out. they're too oppressed. or something.' i'm ashamed.

anyway, i've just read this amazing interview with Nandita Sharma, over at the Incite! blog, originally from No One Is Illegal Radio. she just cuts through the crap with such clarity:

"It is impossible to legally get into Canada as a sex worker and enter as a permanent resident. You don’t get “points” for being in the sex industry, even though there is high demand. The anti-trafficking legislation is another way to attack women’s ability to work in the sex industry, and it does so in a way that further legitimizes (and relies on) the idea that no woman should ever be engaged in sex work. Ultimately, the moral panic against sex work makes migrant women more vulnerable in the sex industry.

[...]

Ultimately, if we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all of our exploitation. Whether we’re working in the sex industry, a restaurant, or in a university, we’re being exploited by those who are benefiting from our labour. So, if we want to end exploitation, we don’t give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation. Of course, being a university professor is not demonized like sex work is. So we also need a major attitude adjustment. 

[...]

Those of us who are critical of anti-trafficking rhetoric and legislation are often accused of not caring about women. We’re accused of not caring about women who are kidnapped, women who are beaten up, women who are enslaved or not paid wages, women who have their passports and other documents withheld from them so that they’re rendered immobile. In response to these accusations, the important thing to remember is that all of those crimes are already addressed in the Criminal Code of Canada. It is illegal to kidnap people, to beat them up, to rape them, to not pay them wages, to withhold their documents without their permission, etc. Why do people think new anti-trafficking legislation will make women safer when the police seem completely disinterested in enforcing Criminal Code measures that already exist to protect women? Instead of anti-trafficking legislation, we should be demanding that workers in the sex industry are protected under occupational health and safety regulations, as all workers should be."

woah

have just come across Eminism.org, and a post with the stunning title: We need to abolish, not "re-evaluate," domestic violence shelters. So good to read the kind of critique of DV organisations that i've been craving (though I have read a related piece, Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors within the Domestic Violence Shelter System, by Koyama in the incredible Incite! anthology, Color of Violence which you totally need to read if you are interested in this stuff). In the linked blog post she says:

"There will always be a need for safe haven, but I don’t feel that our domestic violence shelters provides it. I think that we need to be deeply suspicious of the coupling of housing, supervision, and emotional support: while social services in general tend to be paternalistic, the concentration of various competing interests and roles into one entity (the agency) as we often see in domestic violence shelters breeds abuse."

It's kind of mindbending to me to see this stated in so many words, but i can't disagree. In the refuge part of the service i work for, the same workers are supposed to give emotional support as collect rent. When i arrived seven years ago they were called 'refuge workers' and their main role was advocacy - helping with forms and phonecalls, supporting women to deal with social services etc, plus emotional support. now they are called 'housing support workers' and 'property management' is part of their job description. they have to cap the gas and do maintenance checks and chase rent. there are a million more forms to fill in now so of course they don't have anything like the same amount of time for supporting women practically and emotionally. they have to spend a lot of time writing warning letters to residents who are in arrears, and the support and advocacy role just cannot work when the same person is the property manager. i wonder how many people reading this would be shocked by this change in roles. to us within the organisation it now seems normal.

i agree with Koyama that there was no golden age of refuge provision where they were accessible spaces. i am sure that those early, radically feminist refuges were insitutions that were massively inaccessible and unsafe for women of colour and disabled women, if they were admitted at all (hence groups like Imkaan* setting up refuges for women of colour). Koyama tells horror stories in Disloyal to Feminism about conditions and professional practice in the USA (i really want to talk more about that article in another post) and i hope i'm not being totally naive to say i think things are a bit better here. i know that 'Supporting People', while it is Wrong in so many ways, has dragged reluctant and sulking refuges towards implementing equal opportunities stuff and 'consulting service users' and so on. we have been dragged out of our white-feminist, ableist past however the process that has forced this change is government co-optation and the abandonment of activism or even much analysing/critiquing of policy. plus refuges are still often unsafe and inaccessible for LGBTQ women in the UK; Supporting People seems to have missed that one!

Koyama continues:

"In my opinion, the best solution to this problem is to decouple housing: employ housing first approach to help survivors find an apartment in the community first, with long-term rent assistance of course, and then deal with other issues. People might argue that some women desperately need support and supervision to be available 24/7, but anyone who have worked at our shelters know that such women are first to be evicted from shelters because of the difficulty of complying with all the rules and living in a crowded shared housing setting, because shelters are not designed to adequately support women with such needs. Perhaps we could adopt disability rights movement’s principle of independent living here: survivors should be assisted in the least restrictive environment each individual can handle, which to most survivors and their children would be their own apartment."

Well, in the UK there is a steady move towards survivors living in their own self-contained unit, the old hostel-style shared facilities are viewed as old-fashioned and unsuitable and are being phased out around the country. It doesn't seem to be too hard for orgs to get grants to make over the accommodation. And increasing numbers of refuges now have 24/7 staff support so e.g. you have a block of apartments with staff and security on site.

And 'Supporting People' has also massively raised standards around services being accessible for women 'with complex support needs' - what Koyama describes about these women being refused admission or evicted certainly was happening here five or more years back. back then i was a helpline worker and i'd hear outrageous responses from refuges when i called round trying to find 'bedspace': one that sticks in my mind is when somewhere wouldn't take a woman because she was on antidepressants. i think they thought that meant she was mad and thus a liability. anyhow, you don't hear that kind of thing anymore. if a bedspace is empty and a woman is not admitted, the reason for the decision must now be put in writing. Supporting People will audit it all and withhold funding if refuges are found to be discriminating. it is no longer very difficult to find bedspace for a woman/family who uses drugs/alcohol or who has mental health issues. racism and ableism will still exist, of course, within refuges, and organisations and their workers will find other less blatant ways of discriminating. but it is getting so much harder to get away with and residents have much more recourse to appeal and complain if they are oppressed by the organisation.

i completely agree though that survivors should be offered "the least restrictive environment they can handle", and that this will be different for every woman/family. but the much better provision for women 'with complex needs' has come hand in hand with much closer surveillance, e.g. taking the national insurance number of every resident (and moving towards taking such details of everyone who even calls asking for space). depends what we mean by 'restrictive' i suppose.

*tried to put a link here but their website has disappeared? does anyone know if something's happened to Imkaan?

protecting whom?

This has blown my mind recently:

"Law enforcement approaches to violence against women MAY deter some acts of violence in the short term. However, as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalization has not worked. In fact, the overall impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors."

From Incite! Critical Resistance Statement

I don't know the details of 'mandatory arrest laws' in the US and don't have time to research it just now. I'm irritated at how much more easily i'm finding analysis/critiques of US domestic abuse legislation as opposed to stuff from over here. I really want to know what impact the new legislation in the UK has had - and whether it's keeping men safer over and above keeping women safer!

working with the system

"One of the scariest manifestations of modern capitalism is the system's ability to co-opt experiences, practices, even culture, and to then re-create and repackage them within a careerist, profit-driven (even in "non-profits" [voluntary sector]), and competitive logic. The non-profit system... supports the professionalization of activism rather than a model of everyday activism. For many of us, activism has become something you do as a career. When organisers from other countries see that activists are paid to do work in the United States, it makes them wonder. It took my father (who is very familiar with grassroots struggles) a few years to understand the work that I was doing. "Your job as a community organiser; what does that mean, it's your employment? Who is paying you to do this work? And why?" And since many of us are being paid by foundations allied with corporate interests, my father also said, "Clearly, they are paying you to keep you from really challenging the system, to make sure that you are accounted for."

When we focus on organizing as a part of everyday life, the process becomes as important as the final product. In many cases, foundation funders and the non-profit culture expect groups to achieve a campaign goal in a relatively short period of time. They are not interested in funding the much slower work of base building which takes years and years to do. Consequently, non-profits become short-term goal orientated, even if they did not begin that way. Many also become focused on "smoke and mirrors" organising, in which you do something that looks good for a photo op but has no real people power behind it."

Paula X. Rojas, from Are the Cops in our Heads and Hearts? in The Revolution will not be Funded, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

This is so relevant to the three-year periods of funding that have been the status quo under New Labour. they just won't fund an existing project (in the name of 'encouraging innovation,' yeah right) - everything just lasts for three years. it's insane. or calculated. especially in the domestic violence field where everyone knows it takes women on average seven years to leave, three years is pointless and leaves women hanging, distraught, i've spoken to them when their services grind to a halt...

i would be so interested in hearing/reading critiques of the UK domestic violence voluntary sector and the ways in which its funding is messed up, if anyone can articulate this or point me in the right direction... i heard an amazing speech from Amrit Wilson, the chair of Imkaan, an umbrella body for Asian women's refuges, at the Transnational Feminisms Conference in Manchester. she had so much to say, but i haven't found anything written down, or anyone to talk to yet (i wish Amrit would be my friend, but i think she's busy).

i mean, it's becoming increasingly painfully obvious to me that we need to restart at a grassroots level according to the needs of our own local areas rather than wait for ever-more coercive state funding. Rape Crisis centres' funding is being cut with heartbreaking regularity so as to make them almost non-existent now, (far too feminist, and overtly challenging and sceptical of the state; gotta go) and they are slowly being replaced with one-stop type centres (Sexual Assault Referral Centres/SARCs ; check out the difference between RC's website talking to "you, if you need support" and the Home Office SARC page: "victims receive an integrated service," gross.) which have streamlined the whole process, supposedly to make it easier for survivors (true, you can be examined medically, interviewed and counselled in one place), but this also has the effect of meaning the police are always in the building. and although survivors do have the right to use these centres without reporting to the police, i'd be interested to know how many 'monitoring details' they have to hand over. Supporting People, the central government body that funds accommodation and housing-related support for vulnerable people, including many/most refuges for women fleeing domestic violence, has moved from just needing age/ethnic origin/blah blah a few years ago to now requiring national insurance numbers for all people passing through those services. so everyone is tracked! amazing isn't it.

and yeah. why are we doing this work as a job? why am i? why am i getting paid to be a sticking plaster on a wound, and working far more with than against forces that cause violence in the first place? i'm really not sure. but i will figure out what else to do.

you profit from the lie

riot grrrl showed me that this stuff really happens. that sexual abuse, rape and violence have been experienced by so very many young women. riot grrrl demonstrated, in typewritten and scrawled words and screams and guitars the sheer power of breaking the silence. that survivors have the right to tell their truth of what happened to them.

this is kind of a first step. as a woman (as a person) among the minority who have never experienced any physical violation, how did i become someone who is prepared to accept that these violations are real? i ask because i am frustrated and angered and saddened all the time by people who turn away from this. who deny and minimise and blame the victim. who turn away in their own minds from what their friends have been through. "if women told the truth for one day..." survivors are telling the truth, and survivors are waiting to be asked. abuse requires silence and denial. abuse withers when people look it in the face and start dealing with it.

if you have the privilege of never having experienced abuse you owe it to the world to figure out how to be an ally to those who have. like any other form of privilege: your comfort is at the expense of silencing and oppressing those who lack your privilege. this is unacceptable. you can start by accepting that you know people who have been through abuse, even if no one's ever told you such a thing. (if this is the case you could also ask yourself why no one's felt comfortable sharing this with you. do you indicate in your speech or behaviour that you deny or minimise abuse or hold victims at all responsible? do you make jokes about rape and/or paedophilia? how would you know if someone who'd experienced rape and/or paedophilia was in the room?). then the next step is, if someone tells you they have experienced intimate violence, believing them. meanwhile you could do some research about abuse, how it works, what effects it has, and how to support survivors. there is a lot of material out there to help you help people you care about. at some point i will make a list of the ones i know about on this blog. a starting point could be Support zine.

"I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist. i am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines..."
Rebecca Farr of CARA, in The Revolution Starts at Home zine produced by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.