The New York Times has cottoned on to the unpredictable glories of Indonesia. But they’ve got it just that little bit wrong. Here’s what they have to say about US President Obama’s childhood minder:

“His nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball.”

If Obama’s nanny was playing volleyball on teams like those that now take on the cops behind the Melia hotel, he was not an openly gay man, she was a waria, or transgender. As you can see from the photo above, waria live as women — they even do the whole beauty pageant thing. She probably didn’t carry on an affair with a butcher — it’s more likely she was “married” to him. Indonesia’s attitude to homosexuality in the late sixties was not relaxed, it was unbelieving. Waria, on the other hand, are just a part of society; in some provinces, though not Jakarta, Waria is an accepted gender on the all-important national ID cards. Finally, transvestites don’t hang around the streets singing. They hang around the streets cruising for people who will pay them for sex.

Still, nice to see the Times ticking the “exotic diveristy” box as best it can.

Can you protect your nation from HIV by testing immigrants for the virus? Even the United States now thinks that’s a daft idea; it finally dropped its HIV testing requirements for immigrants earlier this year. Now South Korea has followed suit, sort of. The country will drop HIV testing for some, though it has announced different rules for teachers and entertainment industry workers.

Should the International Union of Sex Workers start girding their loins to fight for equal rights for hookers? No. Seoul has decided that people applying for entertainment industry visas do not need to be tested for HIV. People wanting to teach English do. An official of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology explained the decision thus: “Education is considered a very intimate relationship. According to an unofficial survey by the Prime Minister’s Office, the majority of parents wanted solid evidence of their children’s teachers’ HIV status.”

The implication — that English teachers from Wisconsin are more intimate with their clients that hookers from Vladivostock are with theirs — is clearly absurd, and the Korean authorities are squirming a bit about the silliness. But it reminds me of a piece of ancient history in the HIV industry’s cooking up of Stigma Soup.

Many years ago, we were trying to come up with ways of measuring HIV-related stigma in international surveys. We suggested three questions: Should HIV infected nurses be allowed to treat patients in hospital? Should HIV infected teachers be allowed to teach? Would you buy cooked food from someone with HIV? To everyone’s surprise, a lot of respondents in African surveys replied no, no, yes. So was HIV stigmatised, yes or no? A bit of qualitative work shed more light. HIV-infected nurses shouldn’t be allowed to treat patients because they had compromised immune systems and it was better for them not to be around sick people. Not all that stigmatising, then. Food sellers? What? Everyone knows you can’t pass on HIV in a pot of stew! No stigma there, either. But teachers, what about teachers? Well they’re always having affairs with the pupils; we don’t want our daughters to get anywhere near a positive teacher. It strikes me that’s stigmatising of teachers, though not necessarily of HIV.

While we’re on the subject of HIV and immigration, I do think it remains the great untouched subject of the UK HIV epidemic. A first glance at figures provided by the soon-to-be late and very much lamented Health Protection Agency shows us a great wave of heterosexual infections in the UK.

If you take away the infections that are diagnosed in people who were born in a sub-Saharan or Caribbean country with high HIV prevalence, the picture looks very different indeed:

The difference is assumed to be the infections that are “imported”. In fact, there may well be quite a bit of transmission within communties of African-born people in the UK. But there’s virtually no effective targeted prevention programmes for that group, because we’re all so scared of two things. [Note comment on this point] Firstly, the Daily Mail getting hold of the issue and beating up support for a “test the immigrants” campaign. Secondly, the idea that targeted prevention would be stigmatising. Imagine, it might engender a backlash from all those Pentacostal Churches in East London. And then we’d be in the same situation that so many African countries are in: community leaders choosing to deny a problem rather than help their people by dealing with it.

Needless to say there’s been a big kerfuffle about this. The “all prostitution is explotation crowd” are banging the drum again, anxious to entrench the image of the sex tade as nothing but tawdry. But as Catherine Stephens of the International Union of Sex Workers eloquently points out in this segment on Channel 4 News, those sterotypes are unhelpful.

(For those who are confused by Cath saying she doesn’t think practicing hookers should go public, it’s amazing how Channel 4′s hair and makeup team can nerd a girl down.)

The University of Bristol, where Brooke Magnanti PhD works, has very sensibly said that the way she chose to finance her studies does not have any bearing on the quality of her work. The university doesn’t mention that there are many other similarities between being a hooker and a research scientist. We all provide the services that the people who put down the cash demand, whether they are punters or science funding bodies.

The fact that raids on over 800 brothels didn’t net any traffickers doesn’t mean that there isn’t anyone in the UK selling sex against their will. But (I’ve said it before and in today’s Guardian I say it again) trying to wipe out the sex trade completely only makes things worse for the minority who are forced into it.

There is little one can do to change the minds of those who object, viscerally, to the commodification of sex. And the numbers will always be open to dispute, as they are with any illegal activity. But a lot of good researchers have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get a handle on trafficking in the sex trade — you can find excellent references here and here, and there’s a pretty good discussion thread over at Badscience. It’s like the massive, hidden HIV epidemic in the Middle East — if we haven’t found it after two decades of looking, maybe it really isn’t so massive after all.

For those who don’t have time to read the whole Guardian article, I’ll pull one key quote from a cop:

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: “The facts speak for themselves. I’m not trying to argue with them in any shape or form,” he said.
He said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. “What we’re trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here,” he said.
“It’s not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there’s a trafficked individual.
“There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air.”

**UPDATE** The Guardian has published more interesting contributions to the debate, including the opinions of people who sell sex for a living.

With Halloween coming up, and in contrast to the hysteria around migrant sex workers, I offer this seasonal celebration of migrant pumpkin pickers in Canada, courtesy of Ickaprick.

I’ve been following this issue a bit recently — in fact I wrote a little a piece about it for this month’s Prospect — and I was keen to go to the meeting in Parliament which Cath mentions. Sadly, I’m unable to assess her contribution to the debate. I got through parliamentary security with a bottle of wine and a cheese knife (!) but couldn’t get past the feminist bouncers who were turning away anyone who is interested in actually debating the future of prostitution in this country. Also turned away: colleagues from the World Bank, staff from the offices of MPs supportive of rules that will make sex work safer, and (needless to say) anyone who actually chooses to sell sex for a living — the people the meeting organisers don’t believe exist.

“As everyone in the room agreed, it’s time to bring an end to the selling of women and girls: who could possibly disagree with that?” concludes Ms Elliot. The organisers didn’t need to police the crowd to get everyone to agree on that point. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that selling people is wrong. Not anyone outside the Premier League, anyway. Selling sex, on the hand, is not wrong, in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who choose it as a profession. Oh but wait, they don’t exist….

The truth is that they do exist, just as the ex-Nevada hooker who left the profession with debts because she hadn’t managed to save any of the $2000 + a week she earned while on the game exists. Some women who sell sex do it because they are forced to. They are trafficked, and we already have laws against that. Some do it for the same reason people work in McDonald’s — because it is the best job they can get for the skills they have (though you tend to earn more selling sex than burgers, and the hours are more flexible). Helping people who hate their jobs (in prostitution or McDonalds) to “exit” is surely a worthwhile thing to do. But some women (and men, of course) sell sex because they want to. Forcing them to stop by criminalising punters would be like promoting welfare in the restaurant industry by outlawing fast food. The distinction between the voluntary and involuntary sale of sex is an important one, and one that the draft policing and crime bill is inching its way towards recognising. Trying to keep willing sex workers out of the room is both undemocratic and unhelpful.

I’ve fretted before about the bill, which criminalises men who buy sex. But a fantastic lobbying effort by UK sex workers (notably the International Union of Sex Workers and the English Collective of Prositutes) has meant that the version of the bill which gets its third reading today is a VAST improvement on earlier versions. Most importantly, only men who buy sex from women who have been “subjected to force, deception or threats” can be nicked. While it’s still a wide net, it’s not one most people in the indsutry object to — no sex worker wants to work alongside colleagues who have been trafficked or forced into the business. The wording is certainly a damned sight better than earlier versions, which made it illegal to buy sex from people who are “controlled for gain”. That includes anyone who gives an agent a cut of their fees for finding clients (or for finding a publisher, a gig at Wembley, a part in the new Stephen Spielberg movie… No, let’s not go down that route).

There are other proposed ammendments worth supporting too. Catherine Stephens, one of IUSW’s most energetic and dedicated campaigners, draws attention to the following:

• new clause 4 which decriminalises anyone under 18 who is selling sex
• new clause 37 which defines a brothel as more than two people selling sex plus a maid
• new clause 38 which decriminalises “associated workers” (e.g., maids) in brothels
• amendment 6 to clause 15 which defines persistently for street sex workers as “twice a week” rather  than the current “twice in three months”
• amendment 7, which removes clause 16 (compulsory rehabilitation for street sex workers as a substitute for fines or jail time)
• new clauses 25 and 26, which, like the government amendments, require that the person selling sex has been coerced and that the client knows this.

Of course the abolitionists are yelping about the changes. If you’re a voter in the UK, you’ve got til 2pm to call your MP and ask them to support the changes, which will make sex work safer and more rewarding for people who want to do it, while helping to protect people who don’t. You can call your MP on +44 20 7219 3000 (and find out who to badger here).

Congratulations to those sex workers who have shown that reasoned, evidence-based engagement in the political process is worthwhile. You’ve brought some wisdom to parliamentarians. Of course one could be forgived for expecting a sympathetic ear from our elected representatives; they know a thing or two about selling themselves to the highest bidder…

Taking the floor will be Laura Agustin, whose book, Sex at the Margins gives one of the most nuanced accounts of the whos and whys of professional sex, together with the always compelling Catherine Stephens. Catherine is a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth pre-Raphaelite dominatrix who moonlights as an arts critic when she’s neither doing her day job nor persuading the government that sex professionals have voices, too. John Birch of the Metropolitan Police’s Vice Squad will be giving the cop’s perspective, and Georgina Perry will describe how her clients, East End sex workers mostly, cope in an increasingly criminalised environment.

Conspicuously absent from the line up (though certainly not from the audience) are the front-line abolitionists, the Poppy Project et al. This does mean that the debate will probably be less of a “No I’m not, Yes you are” slagging match than usual. But their exclusion does make me a wee bit uncomfortable. I have no time for the “every sex worker is a victim” approach, and I know that those who are anti prostitution, full stop, often try to keep sex professionals from making themselves heard. But two wrongs don’t make a right. I know it is boring to hear people trot out their misery anecdotes as if it were science, to tout ideology as if it were fact. But if we believe (as I do) that the evidence is strongly stacked against criminalisation and abolition of commercial sex, and in favour of better support services and health and safety conditions for people who choose to work in the profession, then we have nothing to fear in allowing those who believe otherwise to have their little rants.

I’ve been shouted down on this front before (eg when I tried to invite the High Priestess of abolitionists Donna Hughes (aka Dumpy Donna) to defend her position at the Bangkok AIDS Conference in 2004). I know it is hard to fight ideology with fact. But I still feel we should have the courage of our convictions, and should be prepared to defend them in debate with just about anyone.

I think it will be a lively evening — I urge any readers in the London area to join the fun. It starts at 7.00, and there’s more info here

Pic by Jason Cragg via DCist

Many people are thrilled that the Bush Years are almost over. Few more so than sex workers, who have essentially been declared not to exist under the administration’s HIV funding rules. Though many are disappointed that Mark Dybul will stay at the helm of PEPFAR for a while, some of us hope that he’ll do away with the most egregious of his old boss’s idiocies, starting with the “anti-prostitution oath”. So yes, we should be thrilled that Bush is out and Obama in. But I’m not sure how thrilled sex workers in DC will be at the vaccation being forced on them in honour of Obama’s inauguration.

DC has declared downtown a hooker free zone until January 25th. No work during the party or the hangover, then. Seems like a shame; in these difficult times it would have been nice to take advantage of the boost in business that will almost inevitably come with tens of thousands of out-of-towners all intent on having a good time.

Thanks to Lisa M.

I believe we can come pretty close to wiping out trafficking into prostitution, sexual slavery and torture, and we can do it in part by raising the cost of slavery as Kristof suggests. But we can only do that if we make a clear distinction between sexual slavery and prostitution. Kristof acknowledges that there’s a spectrum, but every fibre of his prose yearns to make it a continuum: however much autonomy you now have, you started selling sex because you were physically, mentally or financially enslaved. The hunger to sympathise with the girls who really have been enslaved — and let’s be clear that slavery does exist in the sex trade — clouds his thinking.

“Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade,” says Kristof, suggesting motorcycle theft as a respectable alternative. But the examples he gives in his column raise the costs not just of trafficking, but of prostitution across the board. That’s like cracking down on slavery in the American south by taking measures against all farming, regardless of who’s working the fields and how much they get paid: it turns the outcome on its head. The cost of running an establishment which provides decent health and safety standards for sex workers increases disproportionately, leaving the field to the more abusive businesses. What we need is to manipulate incentives in the other direction — to support regulation of businesses that allow women to sell sex when they want to, to clients they are willing to serve, at a price they’re willing to work for, and in conditons that protect their health and their safety. That makes it much easier to crack down on businesses that don’t meet these standards.

Kristof urges the Obama administration to crack down on slavery, and I support that. But in these troubled economic times, I don’t think anyone thinks that the new president should crack down on employment.

Thanks to Kim Lee for prodding me on this issue.

The first step backwards is of course that counterfeit drugs usually don’t work very well. But people who take them presume, at least until they get hopelessly sick, that they are working. They believe their viral loads are falling, and they believe that they are getting less infectious. We already know that people get sloppier about using condoms it they think they are not infectious (or, if they are uninfected, that any HIV-infected partners will be on meds and not infectious). So it’s not encouraging to think that those may be the very people whose viral load is bouncing skywards because they are on ineffective medication. Oh, and that resistance is almost inevitably going to rise because people will be on and off “real” medication depending on the supply.

The second step backwards is that this kind of thing gives the self-appointed guardians of Big Pharma’s bottom line a new cudgel with which to bash generics and compulsory licensing. And sure enough, there they are today, wielding the cudgel on the op-ed pages of The New York Times. (Note the source of Roger Bate’s funding…) Conflating generics with counterfeit drugs is like conflating sex work with trafficking. One provides services people want at a price they agree to pay, the other is illegal and dangerous. But waging war on the first is almost certainly going to make it harder to wipe out the second.