Snake Oil: A Memoir on the Rise of ‘Trafficking’
When future historians try to understand what ‘trafficking’ meant in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I hope this memoir gives them pause. Recording how my…
When future historians try to understand what ‘trafficking’ meant in the first 20 years of the 21st century, I hope this memoir gives them pause. Recording how my…
Last week a Madrid tribunal declared that sex workers can unionise but prostitutes can’t – or that’s what it comes down to. Sindicato OTRAS was granted conventional union…
In 1995, my friend’s 17-year-old daughter Ermina was looking for work in Santiago, Chile. The obvious job available to her was posing in a short skirt beside cars…
I’m always on the lookout for guided walks where I’ll be shown sites and hear histories not in the Establishment’s textbooks. Black History Walks showed me this plaque located in…
Last December I was in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on the occasion of International Day To End Violence against Sex Workers. This is what the sex workers’…
I’ve been invited to speak at the Human Trafficking Center of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Colorado. The talk is called…
As if Human Trafficking weren’t an already over-used, ambiguous, confusing term for a raft of phenomena, some influential characters want to replace the term with Modern Slavery. I…
A combination of titillation and outrage characterise public rhetoric about commercial sex, along with a tone of moral indignation suited to crusaders. A policeman in Cornwall has just warned…
The Rescue Industry has entered the lexicon and now has its own song: Rescue Two-Step, described as ‘an anti-criminalization anthem dedicated to sex workers everywhere’. Listen and watch,…
Two bloggers have interviewed me on the occasion of publishing a new book. First I’ll show you Maggie McNeill’s, because it’s written; after that I’ll give the link…
High Hopes for refuge for human trafficking survivors seemed like just another story about small Rescue-Industry projects getting big funding and providing founders with lots of good feelings…
What isn’t on this list of signs of human trafficking? Has there ever been a vaguer term than abuse of vulnerability? It could describe being a parent or…
It has all the earmarks of a tearjerker. The billboard erected in Phoenix, Arizona, by anti-prostitutionists looks like artwork for a 1940s paperback cover or poster for a…
I nearly didn’t bother to publish Sex at the Margins. In 1998 Zed Books wanted to publish a thesis I’d written for a Master’s degree in Education, but…
My Google Alerts are now full of nonsensical items on behalf of a Trafficking Awareness Month in the USA. I first discovered Awareness Raising when I began to…