BBC and framing of slavery & sexual exploitation

[MenuPlant]

Read this on BBC today and raised my eyebrows

'Modern slaves in the UK, often said to be hiding in plain sight, are working in our nail bars, on construction sites, in brothels, on cannabis farms and in agriculture.'

My reaction was

Hiding in plain sit? Surely they are hidden. This phrasing feels odd to me

Brothels casually dropped in amongst the others. Is being raped repeatedly the same as having manual labour exploited? And yes I know none of these things are any good, and they are treated appallingly. The inclusion of being raped as 'working' feels political to me.

Also weird is the idea that women working in brothels are 'in pain sight'. To who? The punters? They think that going to brothels and paying for sex is something that standard UK people (men women children) will be dying, to feel the inside of a brothel is 'plain sight'?

I felt it was really weird and an inappropriate subject to be pushing sex work is work and women are as bad as men (paying for sex).

What do you think?

It would be great to know if any have, if anyone knows.

Modern slaves in the UK, often said to be hiding in plain sight, are working in our nail bars, on construction sites, in brothels, on cannabis farms and in agriculture

It is ridiculous to say slaves in brothels or cannabis farms are in "plain sight". Those are both illegal. Every single person coming into contact with a person in a brothel or a cannabis farm knows that but the vast majority of the UK population, men and women, will never see inside a brothel or a cannabis farm or know where one is.

Have also met lots of prostitutes and everyone of them a) started by 16 and b) was abused in some way as a child. Prostitution is the continuation of abuse. It should never been sanctioned by the establishment.
Even my kid who is going on 14 said to me about prostitution and porn "people do it because they get paid. They don't really want to be doing it, so it's like rape because rape is sex when you don't want it."
I never told him that-they discussed consent at school and he came to it on his own. He's smarter than some grown punters eh?

Slavery by definition isn't "work" in the normal way.

It is ridiculous to say slaves in brothels or cannabis farms are in "plain sight

I don't think that phrase is meant to be taken wholly literally.

A heck of a lot of people buy and smoke weed. They know it comes from farms. It's also pretty well known that they are often worked by people who are in very bad positions, even if they are unaware that they are slaves - and the latter is not hard to find out if you look into it. Brothels and sex work in general are the same, even people who don't participate know its around and the fact that a lot of the women are trafficked is probably better known than with cannabis farms.

What they seem to be saying is that there is a kind of wilful or deliberate blindness involved in remaining unaware.

I know brothels and cannabis cultivation are illegal and so people don't think they are in plain sight. I just want to say they are in plain sight.

We have rows of houses and nobody knows who owns them. They are let out by agencies. One will be let, the electricity abstracted (massive fire risk by the way) and set up for a crop. The smell; the deliveries and general comings and goings are all done in plain sight. Then there's 'taxing' where one group of violent men try to steal the crop off another group of similar men and they fight it out in a residential street for all to see.

This area has a number of streets well known for exploitation of women. The streets are all well used routes in and out and it's totally impossible to miss the women who are there. The women I saw when I started were only in their 20s and 30s. I'd guess that over 1/2 are now dead 10 years on.

Ive only ever dealt with a couple of brothels one was in a residential estate and the other was above a row of occupied shops. Both in plain sight.

If sex work is work like any other, shouldn't worker protection laws apply?

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US we have OSHA laws regarding the exposure to bodily fluids that require people at risk of such exposure wear full personal protection gear -- goggles, gloves, mask, etc.

Wouldn't a sex worker be required to do the same? If not, why not? Is her personal safety on the job worth less than the personal safety of any other worker?

Oh, don't worry about slaves and sex slavery!

That's all just "hookup culture."

From wikipedia on "hookup culture":

"Historians D'Emilio and Freedman put the beginning of casual sex, including college hookups, further back in history, to the early 1800s, and explain the phenomenon as shaped by historical and cultural forces.[15] They give as examples planter class white men who had casual sex with enslaved African American women, and white male college students who had casual sex with both white and black women. Lisa Wade, a sociologist, documents that 19th-century white fraternity men often had what would be called hookup sex with prostitutes, poor women, and the women they had enslaved."

Raping your slaves, raping exploited women in brothels or who have a huge economic disparity with you, all "casual sex" "hookup culture" now. There are forces at work to absolutely eliminate even the concept of female sexual and reproductive exploitation.

planter class white men who had casual sex with enslaved African American women

'Casual sex'? FFS.

Womb that is bizarre. And hideous. And, what? I can't believe someone actually day down and thought, yes this is insightful.

Also, I'm pretty sure casual sex, or in fact rape, or prostituon, were invented in the 1800s (by Americans?).

How completely random..

Not invented

Oops!

I was thinking last night that the determination to play down / obscure that paying for sex with a trafficked woman is rape is about perspective

In the ridiculous piece above, maybe from a male perspective it was sex (sometimes) for the women it was rape.
Like the view that rape without extra violence is just sex so what's so awful. Judges saying of victims, she was not physically harmed, or, there is no long term damage.
As a poster on another thread said, many men seen to think its just bad sex, what's the big deal.
In this the perspective of the punter is taken, if he doesnt know she's forced then its hardly his fault! He perspective, that each and every punter is a rape, is not the one people naturally use.
Also the other day someone pointed out on telly etc rape is always shown from male perspective. Looking at/ down on victim. Never from hers.

So as long as the dominant narrative is the male perspective of these crimes, and that is the default, it won't change, no matter what the laws say.

Menuplant asks ” I don't believe a single punter has ever been prosecuted for paying for sex with a trafficked woman………It would be great to know if any have, if anyone knows” .

in this parliamentary answer here figures are given for offences under section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

However these differ from figures obtained by FOI requests to police forces ( published in Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 10.1111/hojo.12060) The requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to all 43 police forces across England and Wales has demonstrated that the majority have not used s. 14 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009. This raises questions about the need for this law and/or the inherent difficulties the police have in identifying women who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation. It also makes the one force which says that it has used it some 81 times to make arrests, all the more interesting. Given that this police force has utilised the law in what appears to be an inappropriate manner, further research and questions need to be raised about this incorrect application of the law to offences already covered under existing legislation.

These figures differ again from those obtained by Andrea Matolsci in her Bristol University PHD thesis also using FOI requests Section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (inserted by section 14 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009) on ‘paying for the sexual services of a prostitute subject to coercion etc

So it appears that while there have been arrests and convictions under this law it is not clear how many.

Oh wow thanks

'It also makes the one force which says that it has used it some 81 times to make arrests, all the more interesting.'

Indeed it does.

Like with the massive differences in no criming rape between forces a few years back,

Differences of this to type are v revealing