In my activism I often encounter the most cutting edge arguments by the sextrade lobby for convincing the public that we’re evil sex-hating nazi’s who want to destroy the lives of sex workers instead of the opposite. And they’re really succesful in that, because they have money, media and professional spindoctors working for them and all we got is the truth, our experiences and the wish for others to not be forced to endure what we had to endure. So today I’ll be talking a little about exactly how lobbyists manage to make a very obvious negative thing into a win for them in the public arena.

Let’s start with the facts: pimps and human traffickers exist, they make good money through exploiting prostituted women and although I can have quite a bit of sympathy for marginalised people who live in poverty and have no other choice than to turn to “crime”: pimping is so incredibly destructive that there is just no excuse for it. Pimps use all kinds of techniques to do what they do: after all, why would a girl voluntarily make him all that money selling her body while he can keep his clothes on? She doesn’t, so he needs to use tricks to make her do that.
A common trick is to use love. Love is a very powerful thing, it can work for good, but also for bad and in this case it works for bad. Many pimps act as a boyfriend for a prostituted woman, that technique is as old as time itself. Other tricks are blackmail, physical force, reducing a woman’s sense of self worth, manipulation or abduction. Pimps who use techniques that involve things like love or manipulation we generally call “soft pimps” (although they’re not soft at all… they’re brutal guys, this is just a term).

Now here is where the lobby builds the argument: if a pimp can be considered a prostituted woman’s boyfriend, you can call him “one of her loved ones” and that’s a very strong way of expressing something. When we as survivors of prostitution or our allies say “we want to hold pimps accountable, we want to end this exploitation”, the lobby can bend this very easily into a negative.
They ask: “okay, so define what a pimp is?”. And even though my answer to that would be “a pimp is a person in a position of power over a prostituted woman who directly or via another person or institution takes a cut or all of her earnings”, they always try to establish the following definition of a pimp: “anyone who benefits/profits from a sex worker’s earnings”.
This is a great straw man, because if one would define a pimp like that, you can use that loose definition to basicly call anyone a pimp, obfuscating what a pimp is and then make a move to politically protect pimps.

Let me go a step further than just the dry theoretical process. What the sextrade lobby does is paint the objection that we survivors and our allies have toward pimps and traffickers as if it were something else: a hatred for “sex workers” and a way to punish her for being a “sex worker”.
They do this by using the idea that pimps often act as the boyfriends of prostituted women to turn them in “sex worker’s loved ones”. When we say we want pimps to be stopped, to be held accountable and to see women free from pimp control, they want the public to think of this:

Picture a loving family: a dad and a mum (white and middle class of course, because society is racist and classist as fuck and the public needs to be played) sitting at the breakfast table with their 2 children, mum is a “sex worker”, but a great mum (which is true btw, many prostituted women are sacrificing themselves so that their kids can have a better future) and they’re a happy little family. Suddenly they hear a loud noise: the police has forced the door open and men in uniforms and helmets surround the table where the youngest child accidentally knocks over the orange juice out of shock, they point semi-automatic weapons at the family. The police officers agressively tackle dad in his pyjamas to the floor and cuff him while saying “you’re under arrest for human trafficking Sir! You have the right to remain silent, everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, if you can’t affort one you will be appointed one. etc. etc.”
The children cry “please don’t take our daddy away!” while hugging a teddybear in the doorway as they watch their father being thrown into a police van.

Sounds horrible, right? This is the picture the sextrade lobby wants to paint when they talk about “criminalising pimps is a front for criminalising a sex worker’s loved ones to punish her for being a sex worker”. And I have to admit: that is a really effective tool to make the public angry and make them shout “hands off of sex workers! Let them just do their job in peace!”. We don’t hate “sex workers”, we ARE them: our past selves, our current selves or the future selves of our friends, sisters, daughters or women we don’t even know. And we don’t want pimps to harm or exploit us or anyone else.

There’s only one problem: the scenario I described in cursive is bollocks. We don’t advocate for these things, they don’t happen in this form (they do happen of course, but not on the grounds of protecting prostituted women from pimp exploitation, usually on grounds of “basicly anything a person of colour does” and I’m fighting that tooth and nail myself) and that’s not how court cases against human trafficking work, especially not in my country.
What does happen is that human trafficking court cases almost never end in a serious conviction in my country: the burdon of proof is incredibly high, especially under a legalisation regime. Even if you take the most bleak view of what survivors and allies would want (accountability for pimps and traffickers through the criminal law system to the fullest extent) then the burdon of proof would still be so high that as long as a prostituted woman is not testifying against her pimp, he will never get a conviction.

Personally this view is even too bleak for me, I generally do not advocate for these things, because I think the state is not the right institution for accountability in current society. I’d be much more interested in more research on how the sex industry functions and to make pimping obsolete as a choice to escape poverty on one hand and to find ways to take away the power of ‘entrepeneur-style pimps’ (people like German megabrothel Pascha owner Armin Lobscheid, Dutch brothel mogul Theo Heuft, UK escort agency owner Dougles Fox or the madame (or as I like to call these women: ladypimps) from the USA Maggie McNeill) on the other.

Hopefully this writing made you learn something. 🙂