The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

Supplying the demand 165ready to enter brothels and remove women who would prefer to stayand serve out their ‘contract’, or from police, immigration authoritiesand ‘whore stigma’, that is, negative social attitudes towardsprostitution (Agustin, 2007).The euphemisms and the practice of minimization are clear in thesubmission which the Australian sex work umbrella organizationScarlet Alliance made to a parliamentary inquiry into ‘traffickingin women for sexual servitude’ which took place in 2003 (Fawkes,2003). In the submission trafficking has all but disappeared undera host of euphemistic terms. Trafficked women are described as‘contract’ women. Instead of trafficking, Janelle Fawkes of ScarletAlliance talks of ‘women who have come to work under a contractsystem’ and ‘contract workers’ throughout. She downplays theproblem by saying that less than 400 ‘sex workers’ enter Australia‘on a contract’ each year, of whom the majority ‘knowingly consent’and are not, in the Scarlet Alliance definition, trafficked. Fawkessays that the organizations associated with Scarlet Alliance havehad contact with fewer than 10 women who have been ‘deceptivelyrecruited’. Scarlet Alliance, as a body responsible for advising thefederal and state governments on prostitution issues, has played asignificant part in downplaying trafficking and allowing the governmentto say, until 2003, that there was no trafficking into Australiabecause all the ‘migrant sex workers’ ‘chose’ and knew what theywere coming into.The submission describes trafficked women as ‘persons who aremigrating for work’. Debt bondage in their account gets disappearedtoo. They say ‘[t]hese sex workers usually have agreed to repay a feeto be “trafficked”’ (Fawkes, 2003, p. 10). They explain debt bondageas arising from the women’s ignorance. Trafficked women havean unfamiliarity with exchange rates: ‘often they do not understandthe rate of exchange with Australia so end up paying back morethan they expected’ (Fawkes, 2003, p. 10). Scarlet Alliance characterizesthe identification of women as having been trafficked as akind of insult to those women: ‘Viewing people under contract as“trafficked” denies the personal agency people exercise when theydesire to work in Australia and then choose to enter a contract inorder to do so’ (Fawkes, 2003, p. 10).Scarlet Alliance in Australia is part of a network of sex workorganizations internationally that disseminate the same languageand ideas. Europap and Tampep in Europe also deny the significanceof trafficking as an issue and redefine trafficked women as