The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth by Julie Bindel

Author:Julie Bindel [Bindel, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf, epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Published: 2017-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Whose Right/s?

Simone Watson is an Australian survivor of prostitution whose grandmother is an Indigenous woman from a tribal nation that falls within the border of the State of Victoria. Watson describes her feminist activism, and in particular her directorship of Nordic Model in Australia Coalition (NorMAC) ,11 as the means by which she makes sense of the post-traumatic stress disorder she suffers as a consequence of her prostitution in a legal brothel. Accordingly, she is what she is: articulate, intelligent, political.

In a loaded debate on Aljazeera,12 Watson challenged the rhetoric of co-panellists Murphy and ‘sex worker’ Maxine Doogan . Doogan, of the so-called Erotic Services Providers Union,13 is in fact a convicted pimp.14 Watson provided well-considered responses drawn from solid evidence—that trafficking had expanded and prostituted women and girls were increasingly being harmed—but, patronisingly, she was forced to muzzle her contribution to her ‘personal experiences’ as a survivor.15 Murphy and Doogan, meanwhile, were permitted by the moderator to recite the manufactured fit-for-purpose anecdotal evidence: that stigma and this very mysterious underground were the real evils facing women and girls in prostitution, which Watson pointed out were actually responses to AI surveys given by pimps.

AI completely rejects all UN protocols, including those AI itself has previously relied upon in condemning Japanese war crimes against so-called ‘comfort women’,16 and all evidence which indicates legalised prostitution massively increases illegal prostitution, trafficking for prostitution, and male violence against women and girls. I argue that theirs is a position driven by ideology, not scientific study. AI, by way of example, in aping the evidence of Dr Graham Ellison (considered to be a Northern Irish academic expert on the sex trade) alleged in its own evidence to the Northern Ireland Committee that Sweden is a ‘country specific’ example which cannot be extrapolated elsewhere.17 While the Committee members correctly noted the obvious shortcoming of this criticism—that punters are punters are punters—The Nordic model is critiqued by AI wherever it is found. I am baffled by AI’s determination to condemn the Nordic model before it claims to have finalised its position. This is a form of bias that could be described as confirmation bias.

The person who helped drive AI’s policy is Murphy. As I note in Chap. 7, Murphy was previously head of public affairs for UK AIDS charity Terrence Higgins Trust. Two months after AI passed its policy, at a meeting in a Dublin hotel, Murphy was again condemning the Nordic Model with the authority of the AI imprimatur, this time at a university in New York, US. Here, she appeared alongside journalist and former ‘sex worker’ Melissa Gira Grant, and Sienna Baskin of Sex Workers Projects, in delivering her paper entitled ‘Sex Work and Labor Issues’.

I found Murphy’s name in an article she wrote for the BBC concerning Mark Devereaux, a disgraceful man who withheld his HIV positive status from four women with whom he had sex at different times over a six year period up to 2008. One of the women was found to be HIV positive and she terminated her pregnancy as a consequence.

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