Table of Contents

List of Tables Acknowledgements Abstract i ii iii

I. INTRODUCTION II. THEORETICAL AND CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK A. B. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM PROVIDING THE CONTEXT: ON THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MIGRANT WOMEN WORKING IN THE SEX SECTOR 1. ON THE FEMINIZATION OF MIGRATION 2. SCRUTINISING THE PHENOMENON OF TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN 3. TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AS DISCOURSE 3.1. Trafficking as Legitimising the Curbing of Migration 3.2. Trafficking as a Moral Crusade 4. ON THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MIGRANT WOMEN AS VICTIMS 4.1. On Innocent Victims and Guilty Traffickers 4.2. Female Migration as a Desperate Move 5. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE VICTIM RHETORIC 6. HELPING (MIGRANT) WOMEN WHO SELL SEX III. METHODOLOGY A. B. C. 1. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 3. 4. 5. 6. ON THE SEARCH FOR SUBALTERN VOICES RESEARCH QUESTION(S) THE USE OF METHODOLOGY RECRUITMENT OF PARTICIPANTS SAMPLE DESCRIPTION The Counselling Centres The Individual Participants GATHERING DATA A NOTE ON LANGUAGE DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BIASED SOME NOTES ON SELF-REFLEXIVITY

1 4 4 6 6 8 10 11 12 14 14 17 19 21 24 24 25 26 27 28 28 30 31 33 34 36 39 39 39 42 44 44 45 45 47 49 50

IV. RESEARCH FINDINGS A. APPRAISAL OF THE REPRESENTATION OF MIGRANT SEX WORKERS 1. ON FOOTBALL, SEX AND DEADLOCKED IMAGERY 2. THE EFFECTS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF MIGRANT SEX WORKERS ON THE WORK OF COUNSELLING CENTRES B. ASSESSING THE COMPLIANCE WITH THE VICTIM RHETORIC 1. CONCEPTUALISING THE VICTIM CATEGORY 1.1. Technical Understandings 1.1.1. The Classic or True Victim 1.1.2. The Victim as Evidence or Where Have All the Victims Gone? 1.1.3. The Victim Status as Advantage? 1.2. Personal definitions of victimhood

2. TAKING ON THE MIGRANT PERSPECTIVE 2.1. Feelings of Victimisation 2.2. Self-Identification as a Sex Worker 3. PROBLEMATIC PRACTICES 3.1. Perceiving Complicity 3.2. Problematic Cooperation 3.2.1. Cooperation with Governmental Bodies and the Police 3.2.2. Cooperation with Other Organisations C. CHALLENGING THE VICTIM RHETORIC 1. STRATEGIES TO REVERT DISCOURSES 1.1. Emphasising the Distinction Between Migrant Sex Work and Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation 1.2. Changing the Framework Correcting the Images 1.2.1. Centering Migration 1.2.2. Challenging the Masculine Frame of Constraint 1.3. Finding a New Language 2. CONSTRAINTS IN THE FORMULATION OF COUNTER DISCOURSES 2.1. Media Representations and Media Cooperation 2.2. Institutional Constraints 2.3. Challenges from Within 2.4. Relativising Violence or Drawing a Too Rosy Picture V. DISCUSSION A. B. 1. 2. 3. C. D. E. F. BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE RESEARCH FINDINGS CONSTRUCTING MIGRANT WOMEN WORKING IN THE SEX INDUSTRY VICTIM TALK THE VICTIM-WHORE BINARY SELECTIVITY IN THE APPLICATION OF THE VICTIM CATEGORY COMPLICITY VERSUS RESISTANCE PROBLEMATISING POLARISATION CONSTRUCTING THE SUBJECT POSITIONS OF THE PARTICIPANTS VALIDITY CONCERNS - ASSESSING THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

52 53 54 56 56 57 58 58 60 60 60 61 62 63 64 66 66 67 69 70 72 72 74 74 76 77 79 81 82 84 86 87

VI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS VII. REFERENCES VIII. APPENDIX See attached CD Rom, which includes - Transcripts and notes of all conducted interviews - Fieldnotes - Interview guide - Example of Recruitment Material

I. INTRODUCTION
If and when we figure in political or developmental agendas, we are enmeshed in discursive practices and practical projects which aim to rescue, rehabilitate, improve, discipline, control or police us. Charity organisations are prone to rescue us and put us in 'safe' homes, developmental organisations are likely to 'rehabilitate' us through meagre income generation activities, and the police seem bent upon to regularly raid our quarters in the name of controlling 'immoral' trafficking. Even when we are inscribed less negatively or even sympathetically within dominant discourses we are not exempt from stigmatisation or social exclusion. As powerless, abused victims with no resources, we are seen as objects of pity.

Sex Workers Manifesto Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee Calcutta, 1997 This quote from the Sex Workers Manifesto summarises the ways in which the authors, who identify as sex workers, conceive the constant undermining of their agency through the attempts of others to govern their actions and to lead them back to a life that is in line with societal norms. These efforts are commonly preconditioned upon an assumption that the sex workers themselves are incapable of taking responsibility over their own lives. The notion of the denial of agency is aggravated if the sex worker is further racialised and constituted as a Third World or non-Western person. Prominent German feminist Alice Schwarzer (2007:133, my translation1) in her recent book claims that the problems of German sex workers today arise out of the trivialisation and societal acceptance of prostitution as well as of the pervasiveness of migrant sex work and hence of docile and cheap foreign women, who nowadays constitute 70-80 percent of all prostitutes and who (have to) do everything for a bit of money2. Although Schwarzer is admittedly radical in her repudiation of the institution of prostitution, the racist image she creates of the migrant women working in the
All quotations that were originally published in German, were, if not otherwise mentioned translated by me.
1

Was den deutschen Prostituierten heute so besonders zu schaffen macht, sind einerseits die willigen, billigen Auslnderinnen, inzwischen 70-80 Prozent aller Prostituierten, die fr wenig Geld alles machen (mssen) und ist andererseits die Verharmlosung, die neue Gesellschaftsfhigkeit von Prostitution.
2

German sex industry3 reflects the widely shared assumption of migrant women being coerced and forced into working in the sex trade. Especially since the 1980s, a growing number of governmental and non-governmental organisations on both the national and international level started to invest their resources into programmes that aim at facilitating the womens exit out of the sex industry or claim to combat what is generally referred to as forced prostitution4 and/or trafficking in women for sexual exploitation (Doezema 1998:36). It is these forms of interventions, which I believe the authors of the Sex Workers Manifesto allege of reinstituting the image of women working in the sex industries as powerless, abused victims, and as objects of pity. Authors such as Laura Augustn (2005b:107), who criticise the conventional representation of migrant sex work, state that due to the migrant womens assumed victimisation, they are not being listened to and although in theory constituting the protagonists of the discourse, ultimately become irrelevant, while the helper takes center stage. Even though the authority derived from their expertise on the topic constitutes those helpers as crucial actors within the formulation of the discourse on migrant sex work, scant attention has so far been paid to the ways in which they create meaning through and in their work. Aiming to contribute to the filling of this gap I centre my qualitative research project around the question of the extent to which employees of local counselling centres reproduce and/or challenge the hegemonic representation of migrant women working in the German sex sector. In the first part of this work I will provide the context of the debate on migrant sex work and will summarise the main arguments of those authors who consider the notion of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation not as a reality but as a discourse in the Foucaultian sense of the term, within which the subject position of the migrant woman working in the sex industry is being created. I will specifically focus my attention on the discursive construction of the women as victims and on the implications that this representation has. I will further review the available literature dealing with the social construction and the relevance of those actors who promise to
By referring to either the German sex sector or the German sex industry I aim to convey the large scale of the sex markets, their interrelationship with other large industries and infrastructures and also the diversity of the businesses involved (Augustn 2007:65). In Germany the sex industrys business volume is estimated to amount to at least 5 billion Euros annually (Laskowski 2002:482).
3

In accordance with pro-sex conceptualisations I base my understanding of prostitution on a definition that perceives it as a per se voluntary income generating activity. The notion of forced prostitution therefore cannot exist and, just as child prostitution, constitutes a euphemism for sexualised violence. Since the term recurrently appears in the discourse on trafficking in women I will use it, but will emphasise my repudiation of the concept by using quotation marks.
4

provide assistance to sex workers in general and to migrant women selling sex in specific. The second part will outline the methods used in this qualitative research project, starting with the formulation of the research question, followed by an outline of the ways in which participants were recruited. Information shall be provided on the sample of social workers that participated in the study as well as on the in-depth interviews that were conducted with them. Finally, after an outline of the methodology that was used to analyse and interpret the data, space shall be given to questions of self-reflexivity that emerged during the research process. In the third part of this thesis the findings will be presented, which will be subdivided into three parts. The first one will deal with the participants assessment of the hegemonic representation of migrant sex work and the affects that this representation may have on their work in the counselling centres. The second part will assess the extent to which the participants may be said to comply with the victim rhetoric, which will include an outline of their conceptualisations of the victim category, their judgement of the ways in which the migrant women they work with perceive themselves as well as a summary of those aspects of their work that they consider problematic. The third part of the finding section will focus on both the strategies that the participants apply in order to counter the hegemonic presentation of migrant women selling sex and on the challenges that they encounter in the formulation of what may be called a counter or reverse discourse. The final part of this thesis will discuss the findings in relation to both, the existing literature on the topic and to the initial research questions. I will conclude this work with an assessment of the contribution that this research project has on the existing knowledge base.

II. THEORETICAL AND CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORK

A.THE RESEARCH PROBLEM
According to estimates, the majority of the women working in the sex industry of the old European countries are of a migrant background (Munk 2006:56). Due to their invisibility to the general public, resulting from their often illegalised status and the concomitant constraint of their work to the informal sector, the voices of migrant women working in the sex industry are hardly heard. Instead they are being talked over and about by journalists, scholars, politicians, activists and social workers, which generates the establishment of a body of knowledge on the migrant woman5 working in the sex trade. During the past decade a parallel process was set in motion and a growing body of mostly scholarly literature started out to criticise the common representation of the concerned women as a homogenised group of victims. According to these critics this representation denies migrant women who work in the sex sector any form of agency. It renders their autonomous migration projects either into journeys, forced upon them by trans-nationally organised trafficking networks, or into desperate flights from the horrendous living conditions said to prevail within their countries of origin. The critics further argue that the discursive construction of the concerned women is propagated and used by conservative politicians in both, sending and receiving countries, to legitimise the implementation of laws and regulations that restrict female mobility and female sexuality. In accord with the above mentioned critics I consider an analysis of the creation of the subject position of migrant women working in the sex sector as constituting the necessary basis for a critical reflection on the phenomena of migrant sex work and of trafficking in women as well as for calling into question those regulations that are implemented in the name of the victims. Due to the contested position of sex work within the field of feminist theory, the
The fact that also migrant men and a significant number of transgender people find employment in the sex sector is often ignored in accounts dealing with migrant sex work. The hegemonic discourse on victimisation and agency thus emerges as a gendered one that is exclusively applied to womens assumed experiences in the sex industry (see for instance Augustn 2005b and Andrijaevi 2005). Since this work is not dealing with the actual experiences of migrants working in the sex trade, but focuses instead on their representation within the hegemonic discourse where gender identities other than female are excluded from consideration, I will also consciously refer to female migrants only.
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debates surrounding the issue of migrant sex work are often restrained by the respective opinion held on the institution of prostitution and the place of (female) sex workers within it. Acts and statements of the different actors involved in the formulation of the discourse on migrant sex work are therefore commonly ascribed or even reduced to their positioning within this polarised debate. Critics usually accord the responsibility for the depiction of migrant women working in the sex sector as victims to sensationalist media accounts, to the (abolitionist) anti-trafficking movement, to international organisations and to the conservatism of many governments in both sending and receiving countries. On the other end of the line these critics reference the sex workers rights movement, which they position as representing the more authentic voice of the discourses subjects and therefore as legitimised to counter the image of the victimised prostitute. Within the literature scant attention is usually paid to local institutions, such as counselling centres, which offer help and assistance to migrant women working in the sex sector. If they are taken into account they are commonly also categorised along the same lines and are thus divided into the more conservative or Christian influenced institutions, which are held by the authors to affirm the victim discourse, on the one hand, and the pro-sex institutions, which advocate sex workers rights and assumingly counter the victim ascription, on the other. What is often being neglected in those accounts is that, no matter what position on prostitution they are taking, the very work of local institutions is already considerably embedded within the discourse on migrant sex work, which also creates a subject position for the individual social agent, not only as helper but more importantly also as expert. This position in turn constitutes her/him as a powerful agent in the formulation of the discourse. What needs to be considered, however, is that her/his subject position and thus her/his authority is ultimately dependent on the assumed existence of migrant women in need of the assistance that the local institution promises to provide. Therefore the question emerges as to how, through her/his interaction with the concerned women, but also with other institutions and always mediated through her/his own positioning within the discourse, the social agent constitutes the subject of her/his work and further whether this constitution is reproducing or challenging the dominant representation of migrant women as victims.

B.PROVIDING THE CONTEXT: ON THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MIGRANT WOMEN WORKING IN THE SEX SECTOR

In the following I will outline the arguments of those authors who set out to scrutinise the more conventional accounts on migrant sex work. This will include first, a brief summary of the phenomenon that is commonly referred to as the feminisation of migration. I will then move on to delineate the more critical assessments of the notion of trafficking in women, within which the analysis of female migrant sex work is usually placed. This will directly lead to a reconstruction of the ways in which female migrants are constituted as victims within this discourse and to the implications that this representation has. Finally I will outline the arguments of those few authors that engaged themselves in an analysis of the role of the help industry within the debate on migrant sex work. While a great majority of the reviewed authors situate their analysis within an Anglo speaking context, I will try to substantiate their arguments by referring to examples drawn from the German context and further provide the reader with some information of the specific situation of migrants working in the German sex industry.

1. On the Feminization of Migration

In the recent past much attention has been directed to an assumed increase in female migrants, a notion that is commonly referred to as the feminization of migration. Scholars of migration studies such as Zlotnik (2003) show however, that already by the 1960s female migrants accounted for almost 47 percent of the total migrant population and that the increase within the past forty years only constitutes two percent. The feminization of migration hints thus more to the gender blindness of classic migration studies than to an actual increase in female migrants (Augustn 2006:119). The shift that has occurred in the last decades is that, contrary to the common assumption that women migrate in order to follow their male family members (Augustn 2007:19), an increasing number of women engaged in migration projects independently from their families, a notion that has led to what Sassen (2002) refers 6

to as the feminization of survival, the growing dependence of households and whole communities on female migrant labour abroad. The patterns of female migrant labour are very illustrative of the extent to which global processes address women in their racialised gender (Andrijaevi 2005:201). In the destination countries female migrants commonly find employment in a limited range of occupations that are culturally, though not exclusively, associated with femininity and which include primarily domestic, care, and sex work.6 Due to the lack of access of especially illegalised migrants to formal employment, the work offered to migrant women is usually located within the informal and unregulated sectors which are characterised by a high risk of abuse and exploitation and a concomitant denial of the social recognition of their work. According to statistics sixty percent of the estimated 400,000 persons working in the German sex sector are of a foreign background, fifty percent of which stem from Eastern European countries (Munk 2006:61). Although Germanys Prostitution Act7, which came into force in 2002, can be considered as a relatively progressive approach to the regulation of sex work, its application is limited to EU citizens and therefore excludes a great number of people working in the German sex industry from its legislative reach and restrains their work to the informal sector (Laskowski 2002:485). Although exploitation and abuse are common features of the informal sector in general, disproportionate attention has been directed to migrant women working in the sex sector (Andrijaevi 2005:86). The bulk of the literature dealing with this issue, which includes scholarly works, reports of governmental, inter-governmental, and non-governmental organisations, as well as media accounts does not analyse the experiences of these women as instances within the process of labour migration, but instead conceptualises their journeys within the context of what is generally referred to as trafficking in women for sexual exploitation.

The notion that wealthy womens domestic chores have been displaced onto poorer womens shoulders (Augustn 2006:122) is commonly referred to as the international division of reproductive labour (see Truong 1996).
6

Very broadly the Prostitution Act can be said to be aiming at the strengthening of sex workers sexual and economic freedom. According to Laskowski (2002:479-480) the two primary purposes of the Prostitution Act are first, to enable prostitutes to enter into the social insurance scheme under their profession as prostitute, and second, to perform their business under good and legally secure working conditions, regardless of whether they work as freelancers or as employees in brothels or for model agencies.
7

2. Scrutinising the Phenomenon of Trafficking in Women

The first internationally agreed definition of trafficking in human beings was provided by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime 8, which was opened to the states for signature in Palermo, Italy in 2000 and which is therefore commonly referred to as the Palermo Protocols or the Trafficking Protocol. Article 3 (a) of the Trafficking Protocol defines trafficking in persons as ... the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. For a long time the assumed pervasiveness of trafficking for sexual exploitation remained unquestioned. More recently however, scholars and activists started scrutinising the accounts on trafficking and found a number of paradoxes, including the actual extent of the trafficking phenomenon. Statistics on the numbers of assumed victims of trafficking vary considerably from account to account9 and are often based on unrevealed or unverifiable sources (Doezema 1999:28). Germany, assumingly Europes primary target country in terms of trafficking (Sadoghi 2006:124), offers an illustrative example of the highly speculative nature of numbers on trafficking. In 2005, one year before the football world cup was to be held, rumours spread that around 40,000 foreign prostitutes who by the German feminist magazine EMMA were eventually turned into 40,000 forced prostitutes would be trafficked into Germany in order to satisfy the sexual desires of the male football fans. The topic received massive media attention internationally, formed the basis of a number of
Many authors criticise the highly gendered nature of the Protocols that are already entailed in their titles. While the Protocol on trafficking aims to prevent the trafficking of especially women and children, the Smuggling Protocol abstains from an emphasis on gender. This situates female migrants as passive victims of trafficking and male migrants as self-determined criminals. Also the linkage of women and children is often viewed as patronising women in situating their legal status alongside the status of children which is interpreted as denying women the rights attached to adulthood (Ditmore and Wijers 2003:82).
8

By comparing statistical data of different governmental and non-governmental bodies, Andrijaevi (2005:26) shows that the numbers diverge by hundreds of thousands. While the IOM for instance estimates that annually 700,000 women and children are trafficked globally, UN sources oscillate between two and four million people.
9

nationwide campaigns against trafficking and forced prostitution and even led politicians to call for interventions on the international level10. Although a number of NGOs quickly disassociated themselves from the figure, claiming that there was no basis for the estimate, the campaigning continued. Finally, after the world cup had ended and no increase, neither in prostitution nor in trafficking was noticed, few people seemed to know where the number had actually originated from (Hennig et al 2006:14). Another problem, which adds to the inability to establish reliable data, is constituted by the continuing confusion in terms of the conceptualisation of trafficking. As one report published by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in 2005 states, notwithstanding the existence of definitions of trafficking by the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies, do governments, the media and even scholars still conflate migration, asylum, refugees, trafficking and smuggling (Kelly 2005:239). Much more revealing for many critics were however the accounts given by the assumed victims themselves. According to a study, based on action research, conducted by MAIZ, an Austrian organisation for and by migrant women, 81 percent of the respondents voluntarily left their countries and 71 percent knew beforehand and consented to working in the sex sector (Caixeta 2005:4). Although also these numbers need to be questioned for their representativeness, the fact that many other studies, undertaken by organisations and local institutions dealing directly with assumed victims of trafficking revealed similar tendencies (Augustn 2005b:101, Kelly 2005:238), led critics to content that, what is generally subsumed under the category of trafficking as a form of forced migration, to the largest extent actually constitute instances of facilitated labour migration. (Doezema 1999, Zimowska 2004, Andrijaevi 2005, OConnell Davidson 2006 etc.).11
Probably the most notorious recommendation was issued by the European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, Franco Frattini, who proposed to implement or re-implement temporary visas for all third-party countries that are possible states of origin in trafficking in women and children. After being accused of gender discrimination Frattini retracted this demand a few days later, emphasising he had never intended to implement visas exclusively for women (cited in Prasad and Rohner 2006:6). Following OConnell Davidson (2006b:8) the Swedish Ombudsman for gender equality even called for an international boycott of the whole world cup.
10

Surprisingly hardly any of the approaches refer to the notion of smuggling, to better address the migration projects of the women. This may be due to the fact that smuggling as defined by the Palermo Protocols always involves illegal ways to enter the destination country which is not always the case in trafficking. Kelly (2005:238) concludes that neither smuggling nor trafficking accurately describe the experiences of many migrants and therefore suggests to suspend the clear distinction between the concepts and to view them instead as a continuum, shading into and out of one another across a number of dimensions.
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3. Trafficking in Women as Discourse

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. (Morrison 1993)

The terms in which trafficking is being discussed in both official circles as well as by the general public led critics to a conceptualisation of the same as a construct (Doa Carmen 2007), a hype (Murray 1998), a myth (Doezema 1999), a discourse (Berman 2003) or even a moral crusade (Weitzer 2007). Especially the two latter conceptualisations point to the significance, not only of the speculative and unverified character of the extent of the phenomenon, but more crucially to the implications and practical consequences that emerge from and are justified by the debate on trafficking. I would suggest that Bermans (2003:47) conceptualisation of trafficking in women as a discourse constitutes the most productive approach to an analysis of the debate. Following Foucault (1990:100) discourses should be understood as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. In the case of the discourse on trafficking, not only the phenomenon of trafficking but also the subject positions of the actors within it are being produced through their subjectification to the inextricable link of power/knowledge. According to Foucault, discourse should be understood as both an instrument and an effect of power. Important to the Foucaultian understanding of power is that it is always convoluted with resistances, which are inscribed as powers irreducible opposite (Foucault 1990:96). The discourse on trafficking does thus also bear the possibility of constituting a site of resistance to its own claims. Resistance is however complicated through the very working of discourse which has been defined as organised and controlled practices that discipline utterance and behaviour at certain sites and under specific conditions. Discourses therefore always constitute exclusive practices, which enable certain ways of perception and at the same time disable others (Hark 2006:362). In the case of the discourse on trafficking in women for sexual exploitation, the complex forms of womens migration involving everything from deception and abuse to informed decisions are delimited and collapsed which ultimately leads to the representation of the women as victims of a crime. Following this logic, criminalisation is seen as the most effective means to solve the trafficking problem (Berman 2003:49). 10

In the following I will show that just as the counter-explanations of trafficking themselves, alternative solutions to the perceived problem are commonly excluded from consideration in the hegemonic discourse.

3.1.

Trafficking as Legitimising the Curbing of Migration

Critics have claimed that Germanys policies on trafficking especially in terms of victim protection are still lagging far behind international human rights standards (Renzikowski 2007). Uhl and Vorheyer (2006:24) emphasise the blatant absence of codes of practice on the recognition and protection of trafficked persons, whose legal status is still not fixed by law. This emerging vacuum is filled by reference to criminal law, which invariably defines the identity of the trafficked person as victim. Within the criminological discourse however, a victims relevance is solely based on her/his function of enabling the criminal proceeding of the perpetrator. In order to be granted protection, the trafficked person is therefore required to first renounce her/his migratory project and position her/himself as a victim of a third partys manipulation or exploitation and secondly, to give her/his testimony in front of a judge and to cooperate with the investigating authorities (Uhl and Vorheyer 2006: 24-26). The German legislation thus illustrates that although trafficking for sexual exploitation is usually being presented as a human rights violation, the measures that are taken against it give precedence to the eventual conviction of the perpetrators. Both at the national and the international level trafficking is usually framed within the context of fighting against transnational organised crime (OConnell Davidson 2006:9, Kapur 2000:875). This perspective enables a relocation of the problems from the domestic level, where the laws regulating migration and migrant labour as well as sex work would have to be scrutinised, to the exterior where the permeability of the borders can be constituted as the root cause (Doa Carmen 2007:4). Instead of being a European problem, trafficking thereby becomes a problem for Europe (Ihme 2006a:2). Berman (2003:49) argues that the emergence of the hysteria over trafficking in women coincided with the integration and expansion of the EU after 1992, and thus with a moment in which the identity of nation states both in terms of their territorial and their authoritative sovereignty started to come under increasing threat. The discourse on trafficking in women then becomes a means through which the state redresses this grave threat to security, can claim control over the border and perform 11

the role of the securer of the nation (Berman 2003:50). Following this logic, the discourse on trafficking in women serves to create societal acceptance of the increasingly repressive treatment of migrants, including the implementation of ever more restrictive immigration policies (Chapkis 2003:933).12 A consideration of the ways in which restrictive migration policies themselves become crucial factors in fuelling both regular and irregular forms of facilitated migration, including trafficking, is excluded from the hegemonic discourse (Zimowska 2004:55). Similarly absent is also the recognition that further restrictions will ultimately extend the dependencies of migrant women on third parties and thus raise both the costs and the dangers involved in migration projects. Viewed from this perspective, restrictive immigration policies actually work in favour of traffickers as they establish their services as a kind of supplementary migration system (Andrijaevi 2005:48).

3.2.

Trafficking as a Moral Crusade

A second point of contention is constituted by the moral tones that are assumed to underlie the discourse on trafficking for sexual exploitation (Weitzer 2007, Doezema 1999, OConnel Davidson 2006b). Apart from justifying the continuing restriction of migration, the discourse is also held to serve a conservative wish to further the control within the domestic sex sectors of the receiving countries, if not to ultimately prohibit prostitution (Doa Carmen 2007:6). This is made possible through the establishment of a direct link between sex work and trafficking for sexual exploitation, which conceptualises the existence of domestic sex sectors as a precondition for the occurrence of trafficking. Schwarzer (2007:134) for instance sees the implementation of the German Prostitution Act of 2002 as responsible for Germany becoming the European hub for human trafficking and an Eldorado for pimps. On the inter-governmental level the European Commissions Brussels Declaration on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, issued in 2002, lists the demand for sexual services alongside cheap labour and other forms of exploitation as one of the root causes for trafficking, which therefore needs to be addressed and reduced.
Chapkis (2003:933) illustrates this notion further by pointing out that every two years the U.S. government authorises the appropriations of 15 million dollars to fund projects aimed at enhancing economic opportunities for women in labour exporter nations. This gesture stands in stark contrast to the annual investment of one billion dollars into patrolling the U.S./Mexican border.
12

12

In many cases this approach aims not necessarily at a criminalisation of the sex worker but of the purchase of the sexual services through the client. This illustrates a shift in terms of the ascription of deviant sexuality from the sex worker to the client (OConnell Davidson 2006b:8) whose desires come to be conceptualised as distorted (Schwarzer 2007:138). Another alternative, also favoured by a number of politicians of the current German government13 is to introduce legislation to punish the purchase of the services of forced prostitutes. Both these approaches are rejected by a number of authors who claim that the majority of the problems that are associated with trafficking, including debt bondage, illegal confinement, deception, extortion etc. are already covered by existing international and national labour and human rights standards, but are simply not applied to migrants and (both migrant and native) sex workers (Doezema 1999:37, Berman 2003:45). Doezema (1998:45) therefore concludes that the actual motivation behind governmental attempts to criminalise prostitution or the purchase of (coerced) sexual services is based on a continuing moral indignation that is cloaked in terms of the victimisation of women.

The introduction of the Prostitution Act by the former German centre-left government in 2002 was opposed by the conservative party that now constitutes the majority in the German parliament. While this former government dismissed the introduction of a legislation to punish clients who purchase the services of forced prostitutes, the current ministry responsible for womens affairs announced in 2006 its aim to implement such a legislation (see Bundesministerium fr Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend 2007).
13

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4. On the Discursive Construction of Migrant Women as Victims

Helpless before violence, in pain and rage. Yes: rage. Pride and resistance: thus: no pity, please. (Anonymous cited in MAIZ 2004:95) I would like to emphasise at this point that by conceptualising the category of victim as a construct, I do not mean to question the validity of the experiences of the women that are subsumed under this category. Instead I wish to accentuate and highlight the processes by and through which a person comes to be labelled a victim. An analysis of this process presupposes an understanding of the concept of victim as a product of social relations, including culture and language, all of which are always inherently permeated by power. A precise definition of the concept is therefore impossible, as its meaning is constantly shifting, depending on who is using the term, in which context and to what end (Lamb 1999a:3-4). One qualification of the concept can however be made: a victim, in the broadest sense of the term, distinguishes itself through its powerlessness vis--vis its environment and the perpetrator, responsible for the victimisation (Thie 2006:1). Victimhood is thus marked by passivity, or a lack of agency. In the representation of migrant women working in the sex sector, the lack of agency on the part of the women is being established through a number of discursive strategies. One way is to situate their migration projects within the framework of prevalent understandings of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation which evokes a unilinear understanding of power as emanating from a trafficker or pimp usually described as male. A second move is to reconceptualise the womens motivations for migration as pressures or forces, which basically turn their migration project not into a question of choice, but instead of survival; the women thereby are being constructed as victims of poverty, or of patriarchal cultures.

4.1.

On Innocent Victims and Guilty Traffickers

Dominance feminism describes gender oppression as arising out of stark inequalities of power, realised and expressed through mens sexual coercion of women (Abrams 1995:308). Female sexuality is consequently seen as primarily a construct of 14

oppressive forces defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender (MacKinnon 1989 cited in Abrams 1995:309). Viewed from this perspective, prostitution constitutes the most explicit form of female oppression, signifying the sale of the self and therefore sexual slavery (Sullivan 1999:4). Since masculine domination over women is said to not only shape prevalent social views on women, but further also to influence womens conceptions of themselves, womens consent to work in the sex sector is explained by dominance theorists and abolutionists to be a form of false consciousness. In an interview with the German magazine Spiegel Alice Schwarzer states: Voluntariness is a myth nurtured by those who profit from human trafficking and prostitution... Chief commissioner Ubben says that 95 per cent of the women working as prostitutes are victims... But he also complains: most of the women, at least for a certain time, do not perceive themselves as victims.14 (cited in Reimann 2007) Both the dominance approach in general and its conceptualisation of prostitution in specific were criticised extensively for their essentialist understandings of gender and sexuality and the denial of agency and autonomy to women (Abrams 1995, Kempadoo 1998, Kapur 2002). The hegemonic discourse on trafficking in women for sexual exploitation can be said to be heavily influenced by dominance approaches15, in that female labour migration into the sex industry is commonly analysed within a frame of violence against women, which conflates and often even equates trafficking and forced prostitution with prostitution (Augustn 2007, Kapur 2002). Resulting from this is a view that totalises the diverse experiences of migrant women working in the sex sector as the objectification of their sexualities, which is commonly emphasised by references to the women as goods (Koelges 2005:34) piled up on Eastern European slave markets
Die Freiwilligkeit ist ein Mythos krftig genhrt von denen, die von Menschenhandel und Prostitution profitieren Hauptkommissar Ubben sagt, dass in der Prostitution 95 Prozent der Frauen Opfer sind Doch, so klagt er auch: Die meisten Frauen haben, zumindest fr eine gewisse Zeit, selber kein Opferempfinden.
14

In much of the English speaking literature reference is made to Kathleen Barry, the founder of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) who has been very active in the anti-trafficking movement and has therefore considerably influenced the discourse on trafficking (see Kempadoo 1998, Kapur 2000, Scoular 2004 etc.). Though not so actively involved in campaigns against trafficking, Alice Schwarzers frequent statements and publications on (or rather against) prostitution and trafficking in women resemble Barrys approach and rhetoric. Due to Schwarzers celebrity like status and her position as the German face of feminism, I consider her statements, though also often criticised, as considerably impacting on public debates on both prostitution and trafficking.
15

15

(Bell 2005:49), sold to traffickers who cart them to Germany like cattle (Schwarzer cited in Reimann 2007) where they will be consumed by the clients (Koelges 2005:18). Such accounts remove the women from all responsibilities over their own condition and thereby lead to a construction of them as invariably victims of male oppression. Their victimhood is preconditioned on their innocence which in turn is discursively construed through a number of rhetorical devices, including an accentuation of the young age of the women16, which is equated with sexual unawareness and thus with purity. Further emphasis is placed on their assumed naivety, their lack of knowledge, or their unwillingness to work in the sex sector (Doezema 1999:26). Authors who primarily deal with discourses on trafficking of women from Eastern European countries (see for instance Ihme 2006a, Andrijaevi 2005, Berman 2003) also stress the womens Whiteness17 as an important credential for victimhood. If situated within the context of negotiating entitlement to membership of the European community, their ascribed Whiteness positions Eastern European women as racially indistinguishable from their European counterparts, yet through an emphasis on their status as exploited victims, the difference to assumingly modern emancipated European women is re-instituted (Berman 2003:54). Andrijaevi (2005:207) therefore concludes that Eastern European women occupy an ambiguous position between inclusion and exclusion or between being European but not quite. An emphasis on the victims Whiteness also serves to demarcate her from the racialised darkness of the foreign trafficker. While the German Federal Criminal Police Office notes in its report on human trafficking of 2006 (Bundeskriminalamt 2007), that like in the last years the majority of traffickers were German nationals, German media representations usually mark them as foreigners. Ihme (2006a:32) further asserts that the fact that traffickers are often ascribed Turkish or Ukrainian nationalities is not coincidental, but reflects instead the doubts on the Europeanness of the two prospective accession states. Kapur (2002:34-35) concludes that by construing migrant women exclusively as victims of male dominance, we fall back onto an understanding of power as
Doezema (1998:44) notes that the distinctions between children and adults are commonly blurred, so as to include as many as possible in the category of unquestionable innocents. She gives the example of a UN report on child trafficking in Burma, where the age group is being referenced as between 12 and 25 years old (UNICEF 1995, cited in Doezema 1998, emphasis Doezema)
16

The term Whiteness is consciously capitalised in order to emphasise the political (as opposed to descriptive) function of the term and to further problematise the racist classificatory system centring around the Black/White binary.
17

16

monolithic and as emanating from a coherent sovereign. The abuse and exploitation that women suffer during their migration projects thereby become fully the fault of traffickers and pimps, and redirects the attention away from exploitative employment practices, restrictive immigration policies and vast economic differences between poor and rich nations (Chapkis 2003:926). The discourse on trafficking thus simplifies the reality of prostitution and female migration to a melodramatic formula of victim and villain (Doezema 1999:26).

4.2.

Female Migration as a Desperate Move

Classic macro approach theories of migration commonly focus on push and pull factors as determining the causes for migration. Although these factors are inarguably relevant, a sole focus on them easily evokes an image of Third World migrants18 as being acted upon by structural conditions (Augustn 2003:3, her emphasis). The reality of migrancy however, is a much more complex one, constituted of highly selective processes which belie the image of the migrant as gravitating blindly toward any richer country s/he can enter (Sassen 1999, cited in Augustn 2003:31). The image of Third World migrancy does however persist and especially female migration is often presented in exclusively negative terms, as a desperate flight from intolerable conditions (Doezema 1999: 34), including poverty, patriarchy and repressive political situations. These features, typically ascribed to Third World countries only, are reconceptualised as forces that coerce women into migrating and ultimately into working in the sex industry. According to Kapur (2000:869) the association of poverty with force gives way to an equation of choice with wealth, and of coercion with poverty which leaves no space to recognize and validate the choices that women make when confronted with limited economic opportunities. Doezema (1999:24) similarly states that while economic motives often predominate, working in the sex sector to many means a route to amassing capital or ensuring later economic independence, rather than as a last resort from dire poverty.
Augustn (2003:3) emphasises that the notion of migration is usually associated with Third World citizens. Within the context of Euramerican migration, push and pull factors are rarely mentioned: these are more likely to be described as modern selves searching actively for better situations in which to realise their identities.
18

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The reference to the assumingly patriarchal cultural backgrounds of female migrants constitutes a second factor, which renders their choices into instances of coercion. Although it may be seen as a way to escape the construction of the victim subject as based on essential notions of gender, the consideration of culture commonly runs the risk of reifying cultural differences which in turn reinforce stereotyped and racist presentations of the same (Kapur 2002:6). What is referred to as culture is often displaced onto a First World/Third World or an East/West divide and commonly acts as an explanatory scheme for all sorts of practices. Kapur (2002:16) refers to this notion as the exotic move, and sees it as freeing the researcher from her/his responsibility to investigate the respective issue at a deeper level: In the global South and East, victims of the sex trade are often young women and girls who are desperately poor, in cultures where females are expected to sacrifice themselves for the well being of their families and communities (Co-director of CATW quoted in Doezema 2001:31). The fact that the connection between culture and violence is almost invariably brought up in relation to the Third World or the East (Kapur 2002:14) is also evidenced by a cultural grounding of the male motivations for trafficking: No matter if Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Albanians, or Bulgarians, an increasing number of Eastern European delinquents is pushing the trafficking carousel in Germany and the rising trend continues -, and all of them are the product of their Eastern European system. A completely rotten value system connected to long decades of communism and the daily disrespect for human dignity that is linked to it, because it originated from an ideology that does not value the individual. The Eastern European pimps are part of a society that is characterised by a high potential for violence... The traditional propensity towards violence in Eastern Europe is continuing. Women were and continue to be beaten at home. The massive consume of alcohol is part of the daily routine, just as the elementary crudeness and the latent or open aggressiveness. (Bell 2005:44, my emphasis) This quote does not only evoke the notion of a homogenised Eastern European culture as characterised by violence and aggression and apparently crossing through the whole of the Balkans and reaching up until Russia, it further also blames an obscure form of communism and its emphasis on collectivism for the traffickers unscrupulousness. In Orientalist fashion the account projects at the same time an imaginative picture of a superior Western European market capitalist society and its emphasis on individuality

18

as more respectful and apparently free of gendered violence.19 A macro analysis approach to migration easily leads to a reconceptualisation of the factors influencing a persons decision to migrate into forces. Little space is given to other more subtle and subjective instances, such as desire or aspiration and ultimately leads to the conclusion that people situated in structurally less powerful positions than First World/Western citizens are not able to take decisions (Augustn 2003:33). Ironically the representation of migrant women fleeing their home countries completely contradicts the stated aim of governments and international organisations to rescue assumed victims of trafficking by returning them home (Murray 1998:56).

5. The Implications of the Victim Rhetoric

The implications of the victim rhetoric are in fact manifold. The most obvious one is the reproduction of an inherently colonialist representation of the Eastern or Third World woman as oppressed, backward, incapable of self-determination, and therefore above all helpless and in need of rescue. This image at the same time enables the marking and maintaining of the superiority of the saving western body (Doezema 2001:31). Interventions, whether by state or non-state actors, are therefore easily justified in the name of the victim-subject. The implementation of protectionist and conservative policies justified by a victim rhetoric is by many authors seen as a means to restrict the mobility and autonomy of women, rather than as a way to end exploitation in the sex industry (Berman 2003:45). As an example Kapur (2002:6) states that the Nepali government, as part of an antitrafficking campaign, has implemented a policy which restricts women under thirty from travelling outside the country without the permission of a husband or male guardian. Andrijaevi (2005:208) who analysed the imagery of anti-trafficking campaigns launched by the IOM in Eastern Europe concludes that due to a representation of the bodies of trafficked women as entrapped, wounded and hanged a direct association
According to a study conducted by the University of Bielefeld in Germany from 2002 to 2004, the extent of gendered violence in Germany is relatively high compared to other European countries with, depending on the narrowness of the definition, every 5th to 7th woman living in Germany having suffered from extreme forms of sexualised violence at some point in her life (Schrttle 2004:3).
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of migration with slavery and crime is being established which ultimately aims at discouraging womens informal labour migration. Since Eastern European women are thereby posited as eroticised victims, the possibilities to create new images of female subjectivity are being limited. Apart from a restriction of female mobility, some authors also argue that the construction of female migrants working in the sex sector as victims also acts as a justification for surveying and controlling female sexuality. This notion becomes especially apparent in the conceptualisation of the female migrants postulated innocence, which marks her as a forced prostitute. The dichotomy of forced/voluntary enables a number of categorical divisions which disguise the overlaps and similarities of the experiences of all women working in the sex industry (Andrijaevi 2005:62). In the discourse on migrant sex work these divisions are further racialised and evoke a representation of the voluntary and selfdetermined Western sex worker who is demarcated from the imagery of the forced and exploited migrant prostitute (Doezema 1998:47). The distinction between guilty and innocent and between voluntary and forced lies according to Doezema (1998:45) also at the heart of many governments legislations on trafficking and disqualifies the voluntary sex worker from human rights considerations. The binary thereby also reproduces the whore/Madonna division within the category of prostitution and further reinforces the belief that women who knowingly transgress sexual norms deserve to be punished (Doezema 1998:42). Notwithstanding the tendency to represent the majority of migrant women working in the sex industry as victims, in practice the definition of victimhood relies on an erroneous demarcation of forced from voluntary migration and prostitution. As a consequence only extreme cases of abuse are being considered for legal protection. Lamb (1999b:109) states that ... to the extent that abuse is a normal occurrence in [migrant] womens lives, a narrow and extreme prototype of victimization serves only to divide [migrant] women from one another and works against a large scale reshaping of gender relations in society, which the problem ultimately requires. The exclusive focus on the utmost abuse suffered by women who were trafficked for sexual exploitation thus obscures the everyday occurrences of exploitation and abuse in migrant womens lives, whether they work in the sex industry or not. In order to counter this tendency Andrijaevi (2005:58) concludes that we need to 20

recognise the complexity of womens migration projects in order to be able to acknowledge their immediate struggles against the ways in which structural inequalities shape their lives. Instead of assigning her the subject position of victimhood, we need to take into account migrant womens contradictory locations in relation to different arenas of power. Kapur (2002:32) contents that by pointing at moments of resistance we will be able to validate the migrant sex workers agency without at the same time effacing the harms to which she may have been subjected.

6. Helping (Migrant) Women Who Sell Sex

In the above discussion it has already been pointed out that the construction of migrant women who sell sex as helpless Others, is serving the interventionist impulses of the Western Self. In the literature critiquing the discourse on migrant sex work only scant attention is paid to those institutions offering assistance to the women. Harsh critique is often directed at the anti-trafficking movement and especially at the above mentioned abolitionist CATW, whose rhetoric is often compared to that of Victorian feminists in their efforts to save native women (Scoular 2004:350). These self-proclaimed feminist groups are also further criticised for aligning themselves with conservative religious groups, who actually hold very opposing views on other social issues, such as abortion and same sex marriages. The single-issue focus of the anti-trafficking movement on sex work, however, trumps all other issues and facilitates their willingness to work with right-wing groups (Weitzer 2007:449). In other accounts references are found to unspecified non-governmental organisations, whose anti-trafficking campaigns are accused of reproducing the trafficking myth with all its implications and of ultimately serving governmental interests with the NGO acting as civil border controls (Doa Carmen 2007:4). A different approach is taken by Laura Augustn (2007, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c) who constructs a genealogy of the giving of assistance to women working in the sex sector and traces its institutionalisation back to its origins in the late eighteenth century and to what she refers to as the period of the rise of the social (2005a:5). Until this period, Augustn (2005a:10) asserts, no word or concept existed which referred exclusively to the sale of sexual services. Improper sexual relations, including 21

commercial sex, for a long time formed part of a larger concern to root out vice and the obscene which also included non-sexual habits and forms of behaviour. With the rise of the social however, the selling of sexual services came to be identified as a distinct social problem. The prostitute, now constituting a fixed identity, started to be associated with victimhood rather than with danger, which allowed philanthropists to feel pity rather than fear: pity deflects the force of that group and redistributes power in terms of a conventional relationship organized around notions of social conscience, compassion and philanthropy (Nead 1988, quoted in Augustn 2005a:16). This redistribution of power enabled social critics and philanthropists, all stemming from the middle to upper classes, to construct an identity for the prostitute as one necessitating intervention. Weitzer (2007:448) writes that social conditions become problems only as a result of claims-making by interested parties, claims that may or may not reflect actual social arrangements. By constituting the condition of working class womens sale of sexual services as a problem, critics were able to designate themselves as peculiarly suited to intervene. Their intervention was importantly based on their own bourgeois conceptualisations of what constituted the norm20, which highlights the place of the social, as a site where rival interpretations and discourses about peoples needs are produced and played out (Mahood 1990, cited in Augustn 2005c:77). During the rise of the social helping became a profession that relied on identifying subjects and then placing them in closed spaces where they could be worked upon and controlled (Augustn 2005a:5). The institutionalisation of giving assistance to women who sell sex can therefore be seen as a form of government in the Foucaultian sense of the term, where it is understood as the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed (Foucault 1982:790). Through the institutionalisation of assistance both the subject positions of the helpless as well as of the professional helpers were discursively constructed, with the latter occupying at least as important a place as the former. Augustn (2005c:75) tells us that it was primarily women from the middle classes who took on the work of the newly created profession of the social worker. Social work provided them with a career that in no way compromised the then institutionalised norms of bourgeois femininity and thereby became a vehicle for creating a whole sphere of functions positioned as
Augustn identifies the same period as the one in which the value of the nuclear family, in its bourgeois definition, came to be identified as societys central unit. Within this concept of family, women were seen as the figures holding the family together, which led to a conceptualisation of the prostitute as the archetype of the woman outside the home and her domestic role (Augustn 2005c:75).
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belonging naturally to women, a notion that is still quite prevalent today. Through their work and thereby through their entry into public space, female social workers contributed to their own emancipation. Their initiatives at the same time often opposed the emancipation of those women they set out to help. Augustn (2007:194) arrives at the conclusion that also today helping careers, while generally associated with unselfishness, continue to serve the interests of the people employed in them. Until today social agents derive their authority from their positions within discourses of helping and saving and therefore have the power to define the problems of the Other, as well as to propose and implement the solutions to these problems, which ultimately makes them complicit in the reproduction of the marginalisation of the Other.

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III. METHODOLOGY
A.ON THE SEARCH FOR SUBALTERN VOICES

...no need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. (hooks 1990 cited in Fine 1994:70)

Initially I had planned to centre my research project around the narratives of migrant sex workers. My interest in their experiences emerged from their position at an intersection of gender, race, class, often legal status and precarious and highly stigmatised work. Their multiplied marginalisation which I saw responsible for the exclusion of their voices from the discourse that had created their subject positions as victims, generated to me an image of migrant sex workers as prototypes of the subaltern, defined by Spivak (in Dhawan 2007:3) as those who are denied access to the abstract structures of civil society and whose voices are therefore ignored in dominant modes of representation. When I approached the institutions that I hoped would gain me access to the subaltern, I encountered scepticism: Whats gonna come out if one woman tells you her story?21 (Charlotte FN: 29); Whats the womens benefit?22 (Charlotte FN: 24); Im not gonna exhibit the women23 (Iara FN: 7); Dont think youre doing pioneer work here24 (Charlotte FN: 31). Given the short amount of time, and as I have been told, the high mobility and legitimate mistrust of my initial target group it emerged to be simply impossible to find interview partners. Apart from that, I had also started doubting on the implications of my project as grounded in standpoint epistemology to rewrite the discourse on trafficking from the standpoint of its victims, and especially of how to
21 22 23 24

was hast du davon wenn dir eine Frau ihre Geschichte erzhlt? (Charlotte FN: 29) welchen Nutzen ziehen die Frauen daraus? (Charlotte FN: 24) ich will die Frauen nicht vorfhren (Iara FN: 7) glaube nicht, dass du Pioniersarbeit leistest (Charlotte FN:31)

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overcome the notion of me giving them the opportunity to speak out. Spivak (in Do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan 2004:213) warned that representation easily acts as a way to stabilise those power relations that created the position of subalternity in the first place. Representation reinforces the need of the subaltern of mediation by a powerful agent in order to be heard and therefore reproduces the subaltern as Other, as a discursive figure that can be acted upon. Scott (1991:777) asserts that by taking the experiences of the Other as self-evident, studies lose the possibility of examining those assumptions and practices that excluded considerations of difference in the first place. So rather than taking the Others experience as evidence of her difference and thereby reinforcing it, we should engage in an exploration of how discourses establish this difference. This shifts the responsibility from representing things in themselves to representing the web of structure, sign and play of social relations (Derrida 1978 cited in Lather 1993:675). Concentrating on the narratives of social agents working in counselling centres that deal with migrant women who have working experiences in the sex sector seemed to offer a promising solution to the inescapability of representation (Lather 1993:675). First of all it would highlight the processes by which the subject position of migrant sex workers as victims is being recreated and/or refuted through the work and narratives of employees of counselling centres. Through the attempt to suspend with the polarisation that characterises the debate on migrant sex work, I further hope to challenge common assumptions about the complicity or the lack of it that is accorded to the institutions, depending on their positioning within the feminist debate on prostitution. Finally I also aspire to highlight the multiple subject positions of the employees, who themselves are situated at complicated intersections of a number of often also contradictive discourses, that shape their experiences and influence their work and their attitude towards the women they attend to.

B.RESEARCH QUESTION(S)
Very broadly my research question can thus be framed as follows: how do social agents who work in counselling centres that offer assistance to migrant women having working experience in the German sex sector construct the subjects of their work? Viewing my project as a contribution to the above outlined counter-hegemonic assessments of the discourse on migrant sex work, my study rests on a number of 25

presuppositions. 1) There exists a hegemonic discourse on migrant sex work, which constructs the subject position of the women as victims. 2) The work of counselling centres is inherently shaped and to a large extent gains its legitimacy from this hegemonic discourse. 3) The hegemonic discourse on migrant sex work constitutes not only the subject position of the migrant sex workers but also of those who offer their assistance to the women. Given those presuppositions, my research question can be refined to one that asks for the extent to which the work of social agents working in counselling centres reproduces and/or challenges the hegemonic representation of migrant women as victims.

C.THE USE OF METHODOLOGY

Roberts and Wilson (2002:2) conceptualise the view on human action as shaped by external society as a positivist thought and as commonly characterising quantitative research approaches. Though I rather tend to see the relationship between human action and the broader structures of society as a reciprocal movement, my research project is based on the assumption that the agency of the social agents is being conditioned, as opposed to determined, by the workings of the discourse on migrant sex work. I however see an inductive qualitative approach as the most appropriate means to attempt to answer my question. Although discourse, in the Foucaultian sense, should not be reduced to language, I see the relevance of meaning, created through speech acts, as one of the central themes of my research questions. Now in agreement with the above mentioned authors, I see quantitative research methods as incapable of giving full recognition to the ambiguities and complexities that characterise language (Roberts and Wilson 2002:3).

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1. Recruitment of Participants
As stated above, before actually embarking on working on this topic, I had already started contacting several counselling centres, which I thought would help me in gaining access to migrant women working in the sex industry. Once I had to realise that I would have to shift my focus I started contacting them again, informing them of my new plans and asking for their support in terms of giving me interviews. Two of the employees of Medusa25, a prostitutes project based in Berlin, who I would later also conduct interviews with, can be said to have acted as key informants. During my initial research project I met and talked to them separately about the possibilities of conducting research on and with migrant sex workers. Already then, did their scepticism and critique provide me with some important insights not only on the context of migrant sex work, but also on the field of social institutions offering assistance to the concerned women, which ultimately led me to reformulate my research project. After I had explained to them my new focus they further provided me with some names and contact information of counselling centres that they thought might be of interest to me. Other institutions were mostly found through research on the internet. The criteria on which I based my decision to contact the respective counselling centre consisted in the institutions preoccupation with a target group of migrant women who have made the experience of, or were still working in the sex sector. I consciously did not discriminate between those counselling centres that place the focal point of their work on assisting women who have had experienced violence during their migration projects and whose services included for instance the provision of safe homes, as opposed to those institutions which are rather preoccupied in providing more basic services, such as giving legal or medical advices to still actively working women. In fact the majority of the institutions that were contacted can anyways not easily be categorised along these lines. While they may prioritise one or the other form of service, they often perform both. Although I could not be completely sure of their political agenda in terms of their attitudes towards sex work before I actually conducted the interview, I also aimed at
The names of all participants as well as of the institutions they are working for were changed by the author.
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including both institutions with a pro-sex attitude and those which I expected to tend more towards supporting abolitionist views.26 Through email and telephone calls I contacted a total of ten institutions in and around Berlin (see Appendix for recruitment material), including organisations based in the cities of Hamburg and Frankfurt, Oder, describing them my research topic and asking for the possibility of conducting an around one hour long interview with one of their employees. While some immediately consented, others declined for different reasons, the most important of which was their lack of time. Others were not responsive to the mails and phone calls and also after repeated efforts could not be contacted or ultimately declined.

2. Sample Description
2.1. The Counselling Centres

Out of the ten institutions I had contacted, six employees of four counselling centres consented to give me interviews. Out of these four counselling centres, two, namely Fino and Vita are affiliated with the Catholic Church and focus more specifically on those migrant women who have experienced violence during their migration project, including the experience of being trafficked for sexual exploitation. Out of the two remaining institutions Medusa is a local self-proclaimed prostitutes project27 affiliated with the sex workers rights movement and Migramed belongs to a Europe wide network focussing on AIDS and STD prevention among migrant sex workers.

One criterion according to which I assumed that a counselling centre would be tending towards abolitionist ideas was its affiliation with church related institutions. By saying this I do not aim to play down the diversity of Christian influenced social institutions which certainly display a great variety of political views. I further also recognise that an institutions political agenda does not necessarily mirror its employees opinions and views, a notion that will be problematised in the finding and discussion section.
26

In German, prostitutes projects call themselves Hurenprojekte, which would best be translated as whores' or hookers' projects. While Hure in German is still a strong swear word, the projects celebratory use of the term can be interpreted as creating a counterculture which challenges dominant cultural representations and moral codes surrounding prostitution (Andrijaevi 2005:65).
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Table 1 Information on the Counselling Centres, the Participants Work for

29

2.2.

The Individual Participants

Apart from their female gender, the participants varied greatly in terms of their ethnic background, their age, their work experiences as well as in their motivations to work in this area. The following table includes only those details about the participants which I consider as relevant to a further understanding of the data that emerged from the interviews. While I for instance consider the question of whether a participant has herself experienced migration as relevant, I do not see the mentioning of their country of origin as of explicit importance, suffice it to say that all those participants who did migrate to Germany stem from non-Western or so called developing countries. Table 2 Overview Participant Sample
Name Migration Organisation Work Area Background Yes Fino, Berlin Medusa, Berlin Counselling Coordination of and participation in streetwork; work in the area of human trafficking and trafficking for sexual exploitation Project coordinator Length of Work Experience Approximately one year Approximately five years

Anya

Charlotte No

Iara Katarina

Yes Yes

Migramed, Hamburg Vita, Berlin

Approximately fifteen years

Project coordination, which Approximately according to Katarina does not fifteen years only include the coordination but the actual realisation of the project. Responsible for all issues concerning migrant sex work, including trafficking for sexual exploitation Working on female migrant issues approximately 26 years, work concerned with migrant sex work approximately twelve years, with Medusa four years Approximately one year

Lidia

Yes

Medusa, Berlin

Susanne

No

Fino, Berlin

Project coordination

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3. Gathering Data
Between November 2007 and January 2008 I conducted five in-depth interviews with six employees of four counselling centres. Apart from one interview that was conducted with two participants at the same time, all other participants were interviewed separately. Already during the recruitment phase of both the initial and the current research project, fieldnotes on the telephone conversations and the brief meetings with the key informants of Medusa were taken. Before the interviews started, both the topic as well as the purpose of the interview was again outlined. The interviewees were assured of the confidentiality with which the data would be treated and were asked for their consent to be audio recorded. Four of the five interviews were audio recorded and for one, where the participant did not consent to be recorded, notes were taken and later supplemented from memory.28 All of the interviews were conducted at the workplace and during the work time of the respective participant. The length of the interviews differed considerably, ranging from forty to ninety minutes, which depended mostly on interruptions during the interviews as well as on the time available to the participant. During the interviews no notes were taken. Relevant points that emerged from conversations which sometimes followed after the respective interview was officially ended, as well as the impressions of the researcher on the interview were later included into the fieldnotes. In the text quotations from the fieldnotes can be distinguished from quotations from the interview transcripts through the reference of the abbreviation FN. During the interviews an interview guide was used (see Appendix), which was further developed in the course of the research as new relevant questions that arose out of preceding interviews were included into later ones. The basic questions remained however the same. The interview guide can be divided into eight sections, starting with an introduction of the participant and her working position as well as of the institution she is working for. Secondly, more general questions were posed about the institutional treatment of the terms human trafficking, trafficking victim, and forced or coerced prostitution.
The unrecorded interview was conducted with two interview partners. After the event I felt incapable to clearly distinguish between the individual statements of the two participants and therefore decided to reference quotations from this interview always as Anya and Susanne. This is clearly a weakness, as it may draw off the attention from the participants as individual subjects and instead generate an image of them as representatives of the institution they are working for. I however preferred to treat the quotations that way rather than putting words in the wrong persons mouth.
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Then questions were posed that aimed at grasping the views of the participants as to how the problems of labour abuse and exploitation within the sex sector could be tackled. From this rather practical level the interview moved on to questions concerning the participants perception of the dominant discourse on migrant sex work, which was followed by the question on the extent to which this discourse possibly affected the work of the participant. The sixth section referred explicitly to the victim rhetoric, and most importantly to the question of whether the representation of migrant women as victims can be, or actually is strategically used by either the counselling centre or the concerned woman. This was followed by a request to outline how the participant estimated the self-perception of the women. Finally some questions were posed that referred to the cooperation of the counselling centre with other institutions, such as the police. In most interviews the questions were asked in a rather open and general manner. In one out of the five interviews, however, the questions were directly related to the situation of one of Berlins street walks, which at that moment received a lot of media attention. The mostly newspaper articles centred around a number of newly arrived migrant sex workers from predominantly Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania, whose allegedly deviant and aggressive behaviour enraged the local community living and/or working around the area of the street walk. The significance of that case lay according to my opinion in the particular representation of those women not as victims, but rather as delinquents. Since I did not adhere to the guide in a very strict manner, leaving space to the issues that seemed to be of particular relevance to the participants, I would refer to the form of my interview as a semi structured one. Although I approached the participants as experts on the matter of migrant sex work, I would not describe the interviews as expert interviews. This is not to claim that the participants expertise was not asked for or that it did not inform the data. To the contrary, my main interest lay in the perceptions on the work of counselling centres, on the women that are attended to by these institutions, and on the assessment of the ways in which the women are represented by the broader discourse on migrant sex work as articulated from the subject position of an expert within this debate. So while some of the responses entailed factual expert information, as for instance explanations on the implementation of German legislation in terms of trafficking, my focus was always concentrated on the processes by and through which meaning was created and accorded to the information. 32

4. A Note on Language
After I had collected the data, the four recorded interviews were carefully transcribed in verbatim manner, following the here outlined transcription legend: I: P: YES: [laughs]: [?]: [??]: [possibly?]: ...: (Pause): /: Interviewer Interview Partner Words in capital letters were emphasised by the speaker. Non-verbal communication, description of circumstances One or a few words are inaudible on the tape Parts of sentences inaudible on the tape Inaudible, the words in brackets being the best guess Short pause Longer pause Interrupted

As already stated I consider language, in terms of the use of terminology, wording etc. to play a crucial role for my research and thus for the data analysis and therefore judge the data that emerged from the interview that was not recorded to be of a lower quality compared to the others. In terms of language another difficulty was stemming from the fact that all the interviews were conducted in German while the presentation of the data would be in English. Gonzalz y Gonzalz and Lincoln (2006:2) note that literal equivalency in wording often convey meanings that are not parallel across languages and cultures, a notion that I was also made aware of when attempting to translate some of my data. I do not consider the fact that the majority of my participants were of a non-German background to have posed a problem in that sense since the questions of the interviews were always geared towards the same German context within which both the participants and myself are being situated.29 Yet the notion that most of the literature that I had reviewed was written in English made me tempted to adjust the German narratives to the English concepts that had emerged from my literature review. The
When listening to the recorded interviews, I sometimes admittedly had problems understanding parts of what my participants had said. I do however not think that this should be accorded to an assumed insufficiency of their German skills, but rather to the complexity and especially to the immediacy of language events in general, which complicate the comprehension of the same event if situated outside of its immediate context.
29

33

problem deriving from this is that the literature usually also referred to an Anglo speaking context which may to a certain extent resemble the German one, but still not match it. More importantly however, much of the specific implications of my participants narratives would get lost if simply assimilated to preconceived concepts which are additionally framed in a different language. During the analysis of the data I therefore always used the original German text as my point of reference and also kept the coded pieces in the original German form. The language in which the codes and concepts that emerged from the data were framed, alternated between German and English, simply depending on my perception of how accurately a term described the process that I wanted to subsume under a code30. In that sense, my English and German language proficiency actually enriched the coding process as I could resort to a greater variety of concepts and terms. In order to keep the presentation of the data as close to the original meanings as possible I chose to provide the direct quotations from my transcripts in both German and English.31

5. Data Analysis and Interpretation

My focus on the discursive construction of female migrants working in the sex sector presupposes a conceptualisation of meaning as socially construed. Through the interviews I hoped to gather data that would enable me to retrace the processes through which the research participants construed the reality, i.e. the meaning of their work with and on migrant women selling sex. Since the whole research project was preconceived upon my assumption of the existence as well as upon my criticism of a hegemonic discourse that constructs a gendered and racialised subject that is denied its agency, I ambitiously would like to view my research as working towards counter-practices of authority (Lather 1993:674) and would therefore describe my interpretative approach as a postIn many cases the English language provided me with more concrete terms for the processes that I felt were described by the participants. Take for instance the notion of agency, a concept that in its directness simply does not have a German equivalent.
30

In order to not interrupt the fluidity of the text, I chose to use the English translation of the quotations in the text and to add the German original in the footnotes. Readers with sufficient German language skills are advised to primarily focus on the German original, which, for the above mentioned reasons, is still considered to be of greater quality.
31

34

structuralist feminist one (Denzin 1994:510). Although my analysis can be said to be inherently shaped by this theoretical frame, I aimed to reach my conclusions as directly as possible through an analysis of the data. I therefore oriented myself by the inductive methodology of grounded theory as outlined by Charmaz (2002). The analysis of my data, which immediately followed the transcription, was realised in four steps. In the first step I tried to follow Charmazs (2002:685) guidelines on dissecting action codes, which are supposed to move the researcher away from the descriptive contents of the accounts and preventing the codes from taking the shape of little summaries of what was said, and raise her/his attention instead to the processes, to that what is happening in the data. In the second round of selective or focused coding (Charmaz 2002:686), I tried to find more abstract themes under which I could subsume the initial codes that I felt were connected or associated with each other. I started the second round of coding only after I had finished coding the data of all the transcripts and fieldnotes, which enabled me to set the emerging focus codes in relation to each other across the different interviews. I thereby did not just select those initial codes that seemed to frequently reappear in one transcript, but could also already mark those themes that may not have seemed so relevant if isolated within the individual account, but which gained their importance if set in relation to those in other accounts. I then started writing memos on those themes that seemed particularly rich and useful. While at this stage I returned to an assessment of the codes within the individual transcripts, I would later bring this information back together and compare and associate the different accounts of participants on for instance the theme of classic victimhood. It was at this late stage, by identifying and associating those themes that I found the focus of my work which brought me to the formulation of my research questions.

35

6. The Good, the Bad, and the Biased Some Notes on Self-

Reflexivity

The desire for neutrality and dialogue, even as it should not be repressed, must always mark its failures (Spivak 1990:72) Only when there is an Other can you know who you are. (Hall 1991, cited in Fine 1994:72) The fact that I criticise the polarity that characterises the debate on migrant sex work, as well as the reproduction of the same by a number of those authors that question the hegemonic discourse, does not mean that I myself am able to completely free my own thinking from its binary frame. Although I am a complete outsider to the sex sector, and also had not engaged myself very directly with the topic of prostitution before I started my research project, I developed a rather strong, though not always unambiguous opinion on the themes of sex work in general and on migrant sex work in specific. By positioning prostitution in the realm of work rather than sexuality I view sex workers as entrepreneurs in an economic sense (Andrijaevi 2005:212) and thereby feel able to stress the agency also of migrant women working in the sex trade. This in turn makes me more prone to generally sympathise with those feminists who advocate sex workers rights. Already before I set out into the field I noticed my strong bias against the more conservative views that envision the solution to the trafficking problem in the prohibition of prostitution and caught myself categorising the institutions that I had so far only contacted along the same lines, into what I consider reactionary and progressive and ultimately into bad and good. In the interviews that I would conduct with the employees of the two Christian influenced counselling centres that I had contacted and which I assumed to represent the more conservative voices, I clearly anticipated (and hoped) to take an adversary position to their narratives and to thereby affirm my assumptions. During the other interviews in turn, I expected confirmation of my own view. Listening to the recording of the first interview which I had conducted with a representative of the progressive 36

camp, I realised that questions, which were initially phrased openly, were posed in ways that clearly did not seek information but rather affirmation. Take for instance this quote of one of my questions to Iara, the coordinator of Migramed, which followed her outline of a classification of sex workers into three categories, without stating whether she was referring just to migrants or also to Germans working in the sex industry: I: Mhm. But all of that, you would say, also applies to German sex workers? Definitely.32 (myself in Iara:62-63) In my question I already imply Iaras answer (you would say) and even affirm it (definitely). While in this case my question (and answer) did not directly determine Iaras answer, the form of our interaction did create a certain climate which influenced the course of the interview. Jensen and Welzer (2003:3) claim that in order to establish a common basis for a communication process, every party to the conversation will talk in a way that s/he assumes s/he is expected to talk by the respective other party. While this may be true for instance in Iaras case, I believe that especially the participants who work for the Christian influenced institutions could also easily identify my position within the spectrum of political attitudes towards sex work33 and may have felt that I aimed at pigeonholing them (see Katarina FN: 8-9). This in turn may have influenced their answers and may have even led them to counter the process, described by Jensen and Welzer, and thereby not to state what they had expected that I would expect them to say. When talking to Katarina about the possible political implications of the victim rhetoric, she (351) affirmed the negative consequences that the representation may generate and stated: Of course, ... and youre not getting me into this, or something like that.34 Although most interview situations were characterised by a friendly and relaxed atmosphere and a conversational tone, I often perceived myself as an apprentice facing the professional, or the expert. Due to this sentiment I think I can consciously exclude other notions such as distinctive ethnic backgrounds, migrant status etc., which distinguished me from the participants and which may have constituted sources of
Mhm, aber das trifft alles drei, wrdest du sagen, trifft auch auf hm deutsche Frauen zu? Auf jeden Fall, also (Iara:62-63)
32

I think that already the topic as well as the title of the project, which were both known to the participants beforehand, did reveal my stance.
33 34

Ja sicher, deswegen, deswegen, mich kriegst du da nicht rein, oder so (Katarina:351).

37

power imbalances affecting the interview. As Denzin (in Fine 1994:79) remarks however, the Self and the Other should not be reduced to dichotomous categories or to oppositions construed out of clearly defined cultural, ethnic, racial [sic], and gendered differences. In the case of my research project I view the differential political stances that are taken by myself on the one hand and by the participants on the other as possible sources for the discursive creation of Otherness. While I selfrighteously position myself on the side of the absent voices of the marginalised, I run the risk of pre-emptively marginalising those opinions that are otherwise included in the hegemonic discourse and at constituting their bearers as my personal Others. I do not believe in the existence of objective scholarship and I certainly want to write a politically informed account which reflects my opinion on the topic, at the same time I do not want to reduce the complexity of the experiences of those who offer assistance to migrant sex workers to the notion of good versus bad social agents. One way of doing this is by using self-reflexivity as a method (Jensen and Welzer 2003) and to question not only my interpretation of the data, but also to conceptualise the raw data itself as a co-construction of the participants and myself, which also includes an assessment of my own behaviour, i.e. of the formulation of my questions and of my responses and reactions to their answers. By making transparent to the reader the ways in which my own writing is being conditioned by my position I at the same time see the possibility of asserting the validity of my findings within the context of a science after truth (Lather 1993:678). In accord with Haraway (1988 quoted in Lather 1993:682) I view self-conscious partiality as a way of making rational knowledge claims, which leads to a conceptualisation of authority as emerging from engagement and self-reflexivity as opposed to distanced objectivity. This however does not mean that I view selfreflexivity as the panacea to all the problems involved in qualitative research. To the contrary, I recognise that using self-reflexivity as a method clearly also involves the acknowledgement of its limits, a notion that will be discussed in the final part of this work.

38

IV. RESEARCH FINDINGS

In the attempt to answer my research question through the accounts given by my participants a number of sub-questions emerged which can be broadly divided into three blocks. The first block deals with the ways in which the research participants perceive the representation of migrant women working in the German sex sector and with their assessments of the influence that this representation has on their counselling work. The second block aims to provide answers to the question on whether the employees own representation of the migrant women can be said to reproduce the imagery of the women as victims. Finally a third block will assess the ways in which the research participants possibly counter the hegemonic representation of migrant women working in the sex sector and which challenges they perceive in this reconceptualisation of the image of the women.

A. APPRAISAL OF THE REPRESENTATION OF MIGRANT SEX WORKERS

In order to get a first impression on the ways in which the discourse on migrant sex work is being articulated among the participants, I will first briefly outline how they perceive the public representation of both migrant sex work and of the phenomenon of trafficking in women. I will then move on to their assessment of the extent to which these discursive formations influence their work in the counselling centres.

1. On Football, Sex and Deadlocked Imagery

I have already mentioned the unverified rumour that 40,000 (forced) prostitutes would be smuggled/trafficked into Germany for the football world cup in 2006, which generated some sort of a moral panic both at the national and the international level. In many accounts of the participants the events surrounding the world cup constitute both a starting point and at the same time also already a negative climax in terms of 39

the representation of migrant women working in the sex sector as victims. Seen as the experts on the topic, the counselling centres also received at lot of media attention: Because last year the world cup hype really gave us a hard time, everything, everything was being lumped together, hundreds of times we were quoted without even being asked35 (Lidia: 950-953). Katarina (285-292) even states that since and due to the world cup hysteria, she refuses to comment both on the topic as a whole and on the medially generated image of migrant sex workers as victims of trafficking in specific: You know Im so fed up with these discussions, since the 40,000 for the world cup, ... that I simply dont talk about it anymore, full stop36 (Katarina: 285-290). Especially those participants whose work also involves the advancement of sex workers rights, namely Iara, Lidia and Charlotte, are of the opinion that inherent to the equation of migrant sex work with trafficking in women, there is a tendency to condemn sex work in general as a violation of womens basic human rights (see for instance Iara: 338-341). The campaigns that are launched against trafficking in women for sexual sexploitation, including the ones that were initiated around the time of the world cup in 2006, are therefore often seen as attempts to ultimately clamp down on prostitution (see for instance Lidia: 510-514). Katarina clearly distinguishes between criticism aimed at the institution of prostitution and the generalisation over both migrant and non-migrant women working in the sex trade. While to her the former constitutes an opinion which may be based in moral or ethical convictions, the latter simply does not reflect or takes into account the variety of experiences of the women actually working in the sex trade: I think its absolutely okay if he says for example that prostitution is not a profession like any other... its an opinion, Im alright with this, but if somebody comes and says ALL are victims then its not an opinion, its bullshit, Im sorry.37 (Katarina: 319-323)

Weil uns das das letzte Jahr mit diesem ganzen WM Rummel hier wirklich das Leben sehr schwer gemacht hat, es hat, alles, alles wurde in ein Dings rein geworfen, wir wurden hunderte von Malen zitiert ohne dass man uns gefragt hat. (Lidia:950-953).
35 36Weit

du ich bin so genervt auch mit diesen Diskussionen also seitdem 40 000 zur WM, ... dass ich einfach gar nichts mehr dazu rede, so (Katarina: 285-290) find ich total in Ordnung wenn er das sagt, dass Prostitution zum Beispiel kein Beruf wie ein andere ist, ist es eine Meinung, find ich in Ordnung, aber wenn jemand kommt und sagt ALLE sind Opfer dann ist es keine Meinung, das ist Scheie, Entschuldigung (Katarina: 319-323).
37

40

A very different stance is taken by Anya and Susanne. While they remain unsure about the truthfulness of the figure of 40,000, they in any case see the initiatives that were implemented following the rumour in a positive light (83-85) as it geared the attention of the public to a topic that was, according to their opinion, till then underrepresented (59-60). They still wonder why the exigency of the topic of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation does not create more public uproar and demand that more space and more attention shall be given to the discussion (183). To most other participants the great attention that was geared towards the topic fixed the image of migrant women working in the sex trade as victims in the public consciousness. According to Lidia the term victim is commonly associated with femininity. Its location within a discourse on human trafficking further racialises it as non-German, i.e. as a migrant femininity: ...in people's ways of thinking, if you say victim, then you are first of all very often seen as female, so when I talk to people I realise they think victim, it's feminine, although it's IT and not she and if you say human trafficking, then they see a migrant woman, so the images are quite deadlocked. 38 (Lidia: 268-273) As already mentioned, the attributes of the feminised victim are often construed in opposition to the characteristics of a masculinised perpetrator. The participants criticism of the representation of migrant sex work in many cases was not limited to the depiction of the working women, but also included references to those usually construed as the criminal traffickers or pimps. Iara (120-126) for instance, criticised the oversimplification of the hegemonic representation of victims and perpetrators, which commonly undermines the existence of both male victims and German victims (women and men), as well as the fact that also women (both German and non-German) often act as traffickers or pimps.39 Charlotte (727-741) concludes that contrary to the public representation of German sex workers, which she states had greatly improved in recent years, the images
in den Gedanken der Menschen wenn du auch Opfer sehr oft sagst dann bist du erstmal so sehr oft auch als Frau gesehen, also wenn ich so spreche mit Menschen dann merk ich sie denken Opfer, es ist weiblich obwohl das ES ist und nicht sie und wenn du dann sagst Menschenhandel, dann sehen sie eine migrantische Frau dabei, also sind schon festgefahrene Bilder (Lidia: 268-273).
38

In its report on the prosecuted cases of trafficking during the year 2006 the German Federal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt 2007:6) notes that victims with German nationality amounted to 23,4% and thereby even constituted a small majority among the prosecuted cases. Women suspected of having acted as traffickers amounted to 23% (Bundeskriminalamt 2007:5).
39

41

connected to notions of migrant sex work, victims of trafficking and pimps, in their emphasis on victimhood, violence and criminality constituted a new challenge to the work of prostitutes projects.

2. The Effects of the Representation of Migrant Sex Workers on the Work of Counselling Centres
Probably one of the most important effects of the representation of migrant women working in the sex sector as victims, mentioned by Lidia, Charlotte and also by Iara is constituted by the conflation of the themes of migrant sex work with trafficking for sexual exploitation, a notion which also considerably affects the work of especially those projects that aim at advancing sex workers rights, such as Medusa and Migramed. As a consequence of the discursive blurring of the themes, also the two work areas become increasingly enmeshed. Lidia's and partly also Charlottes working positions as well as the tasks connected to them were not created on Medusa's own initiative, but in response to a request of its donor, the Berlin Senate, which demanded that part of the budget given to the project shall be spent on work connected to issues of trafficking for sexual exploitation (Lidia: 11-15). While working for Medusa, a self proclaimed prostitutes' project, which aims at the full recognition of prostitution as a profession, Lidia finds it difficult to engage herself with issues of trafficking for sexual exploitation. She describes the incompatibility of working on the latter theme from within an organisation such as Medusa as a mentalen Spagat (16), a mental balancing act: ...I cannot be in favour of prostitution and at the same time look for victims of trafficking from within this counselling centre40 (16-18). The perceived difficulty stems partly from her fear that anti forced prostitution campaigns will take precedence over the prostitutes projects priority of propagating the recognition of rights of sex workers (908-911). In relation to this, Iara (722-725) reports of an already existing bias underlying the distribution of funds to projects and organisations concerned with notions of sex work. While prostitutes projects find it increasingly hard to obtain funding, organisations
... ich kann nicht gleichzeitig fr Prostitution sein und irgendwie wiederum aus dieser Beratungsstelle heraus nach Opfer von Menschenhandel suchen (Lidia: 16-18).
40

42

whose stated aim it is to combat trafficking and forced prostitution or who promise to implement programmes supposed to facilitate womens exit out of prostitution usually do not have problems to find donors. Another fear of Lidia (513) and the others, which was already hinted at, is that the campaigns and especially the values communicated through them will eventually be used against41 the work of the prostitutes projects. Following Iara (350-361), the conflation, if not equation of sex work with trafficking in women ultimately leads to an assumption that trafficking will only be defeated if prostitution will be abolished. One example which substantiates the participants fears about the consequences of the blurring of the two topics is that of Medusa coming to be increasingly seen as an expert organisation for issues of human trafficking, notwithstanding the fact that this issue only constitutes 5-10% of the organisations work (Lidia: 899-905). The NOK on the other hand, an umbrella of around forty organisations42 that explicitly aims at the eradication of trafficking in women, is often approached as an expert organisation on the theme of sex work (Lidia: 785-788). Other difficulties stem from the discrepancy between what the counselling centres on the one hand and governmental institutions on the other subsume under the concept of trafficking (see for instance Charlotte: 90-97), a notion that will be further elaborated on in the following sections. In relation to their assessment of the public representation of migrant women working in the sex sector and trafficking in women, as outlined above, Anya and Susanne again take on a very different stance from other participants. They state, that so far they did not notice any negative repercussions for their work as stemming from the representation of the notion of migrant sex work or of trafficking in women (182).43

41 42 43

...das wird eines Tages wirklich gegen uns alles verwendet (Lidia:513)

All of the organisations that the participants work for, form part and cooperate within the NOK.

Compared to the other participants, Anyas and Susannes work experience is relatively short, and, according to them, limits their ability to thoroughly evaluate the situation in terms of the effects that the public discourse may have on their work (181).

43

B.ASSESSING THE COMPLIANCE WITH THE VICTIM RHETORIC

The fact that the majority of participants emerged as very critical of the hegemonic representation of the migrant women as victims does not presuppose that within and through their own work they do not adhere to and thereby reproduce the victim rhetoric. The first step to assess whether they comply with the victim rhetoric is by way of clarifying how the participants conceptualise the category of victim. A further step is to look into the ways in which they conceive the migrant womens own perspective on themselves. Finally I will outline those instances in which the participants voiced concern over their working practices as possibly reinforcing the hegemonic discourse on migrant women working in the sex sector.

1. Conceptualising the Victim Category

Given the diversity of the institutional and political backgrounds of the participants, the ways in which they defined and understood both the term and the concept of victim differed considerably and even within the same account of the same participant its meaning or function changed frequently. One reason for this last point may be based in a distinction that emerged from many participants accounts, where technical understandings were discerned from personal definitions of the victim category. By technical understandings I refer to those conceptualisations of the victim category that are encountered frequently during the participants work. These include official working definitions by international bodies, such as the UN and were often referred to as circumscribing classic or true victimhood. This concept was however often also reformulated and supplemented by different and additional victim attributes, which emerged from the implementations and handlings of those official definitions by institutions and authorities, such as the German police. This contextualisation of the victim category eventually led to a notion of the victim as evidence and the therefrom emerging question of the victim status as advantage. What will be outlined in the section on technical understandings are therefore not 44

primarily explanations on either official or working definitions of the victim category, but their interpretations through the participants. The personal definitions are distinguished from the technical definitions through a focus on the more sentimental and political associations in participants accounts on the victim category. It is important to note that both technical and personal definitions are to be taken as subjective understandings. It should be further emphasised that both categories necessarily shape and inform each other and should therefore not be seen as mutually exclusive.

1.1.

Technical Understandings

1.1.1. The Classic or True Victim When first asked about the working definition of notions of trafficking and victimisation, many participants referred to official definitions of human trafficking, such as the already mentioned Palermo Protocols, whose definition was also adopted into the Council of Europe Definition on Actions against Trafficking in Human Beings. Iara (21-22, 44-54) asserted that the difficulty to establish a clear cut category for those to be seen as true victims of trafficking44 (Iara:27-28) arises out of the fact that notions of violence, exploitation and dependency, though not necessarily connected to prostitution, are constituting ubiquitous features of female migrant labour in general and can therefore not be seen as defining characteristics for victimisation in relation to trafficking. Hence only those women whose migration projects are characterised by a combination of different features that comply with those official definitions of trafficking for sexual exploitation were referred to as either klassische Opfer classic victims (Lidia:129, Charlotte:42) or wirkliche Opfer - true victims (Iara: 27-29). The function of definitions is to fix the meaning of a term and in the case of victims of trafficking, to enumerate those criteria that a persons migration project has to fulfil in order for her/him to be officially recognised as a victim and to be eligible for the treatment that is being recommended by the respective document. Notwithstanding its relatively broad acceptance among counselling centres and governmental authorities
44

die wirkliche Opfer von Frauenhandel, wie h es im Palermo Protokoll steht(Iara:27-28).

45

(Anya and Susanne: 32-33, Katarina: 75-76), both actual practices and convictions concerned with the notion of the classic victim, still deviate from the definition and subsequent recommendations that are laid out in the Protocols. Lidias and Charlottes work also includes periodic visits of the deportation centres, where a majority of migrant women who work in the sex trade and who are apprehended by the police are first brought to. During these visits, Charlotte (43-45) asserts that they rarely encounter classic victims of trafficking, yet when they do, both Lidia (125-133) and her assert, the womens victimisation is often not recognised by the authorities. In those cases the social agents are hardly able to help the women and to prevent their eventual deportation, leading to what Charlotte (47-48) referred to as their double victimisation45 through the judicial system. Apart from, or rather supplementing the aspects outlined in official definitions, the participants mentioned other attributes which determine whether a migrant woman is being perceived, both by the authorities and the general public, as a victim or not. Lidia for instance emphasises the relevance of racism as a structuring factor in the conceptualisation of the classic victim. She notes for example that women from African countries, who often constitute a majority of the women in the deportation centres are usually less likely to be accredited with a victim status: ... to get anything for them is twice and three times as hard as to get anything for the others ...46 (Lidia: 582-587). The already mentioned case of the women from Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary whose assumed deviant behaviour on the streetwalk of Berlins Kurfrstenstrae stimulated a public outcry in 2007 is also very illustrative in that matter. Charlotte (369-372) holds the Rroma background, i.e. the non-Whiteness, of many of those women, as well as their EU citizenship and hence their legal status (857863) as partly responsible for them not being presented by the media as victims, but to the contrary as delinquents. Lidia similarly sees the legalised status and the assumed equality under law of those women from the new accession states as responsible for the different ways in which they were being perceived: They are no longer the classic ones, because they are EU citizens, that means they practically have the same rights, you know, they are also not necessarily illegal and some of them are registered as self-employed, that means they are also allowed to work, so this basis is also there, and then the question, what are we gonna do with them? A year ago, it was really
45 46

dass sie nicht doppelt Opfer wird, nmlich auch noch abgeschoben wird (Charlotte:47-48)

und fr die irgendetwas zu bekommen ist noch doppelt und dreifach oder noch mehr schwieriger als fr die anderen . (Lidia:582-587)

46

comfortable, we could simply send them to the deportation centre, but thats no longer possible, because they are equal to us under the law, THEY are equal to us, you know, it really annoys many, but its a fact, ... 47 (Lidia: 454-462) With this quote, in which Lidia takes on the voice of the authorities, she asserts her suspicion that underlying the establishment of classic victim attributes there are political motivations to restrict the access of (certain) foreigners to German territory in general and to the German labour market in specific. She further also highlights the importance of the eastward EU enlargement process within the German context of migration and the shifts that it generates within the discourse on trafficking. The participants accounts suggest that, notwithstanding the existence of an internationally recognised definition of trafficking, the implementation of actual policies against the phenomenon may open up large spaces within which the concept of the victim of trafficking is being reinterpreted for political and institutional ends.

1.1.2. The Victim as Evidence or Where Have All the Victims Gone? In Germany, the police together with the public prosecution decide whether a person shall be considered a victim of trafficking or not. Since both these bodies function from within a criminological context, their interest lies in the prosecution of the traffickers (Lidia: 701-706). To be categorised as victim, a woman should consequently not only display the above mentioned classic victim attributes, but should further be able to recount the process of her becoming a victim and give as precise information as possible about the places, times, and especially about the actors involved, i.e. the criminals (see for instance Lidia: 711-732). As already noted above, many women who are considered classic victims by the participants are not recognised as such by the police. This may be due to the above mentioned preconceived images of the classic victim or because the respective woman is simply not able to give accurate enough information to be used for prosecution purposes.
Die sind nicht mehr die Klassischen, weil die sind EU Brgerinnen, das heit praktisch die haben die gleichen Rechte, weit du, es ist auch nicht gesagt, dass sie illegal sind und einige sind auch selbststndig angemeldet, das heit die drfen auch arbeiten, also es ist auch diese Basis vorhanden, und dann die Frage was machen wir jetzt mit denen? Ne, das war so angenehm vor einem Jahr konnten wir sie in die Abschiebe schicken jetzt geht es nicht mehr, weil sie uns gleich gestellt sind, DIE sind uns gleich gestellt, weit du auch so, es rgert viele aber das ist jetzt erstmal so ein Faktum, (Lidia:454462).
47

47

The notion that the classic victim, as conceptualised by the participants, is not congruent with the definition of the police is also manifested in Katarinas account (67-70) when she outlines one of Vitas work areas as the support of witnesses, which are defined as women who are not victims in this really dire definitional sense but who still act as witnesses in the court cases against human trafficking.48 This would imply that the ability to give valuable information in court is taking precedence over the display of classic victim attributes. Both Charlotte and Lidia note a trend where always less women are being accredited with the victim status (see for instance Charlotte FN: 92-93). Lidia (728-740) assumes that the police are often questioning the truthfulness of the stories recounted by the women and that they commonly suspect them of taking advantage of the victim procedure. Other participants also reflected on the reasons for the relatively low number of identified victims. Anya and Susanne (76-80) suspected that since and due to the implementation of the Prostitution Act in Germany in 2002, the police control within the sphere of the sex industry had diminished. Katarina (427-442) similarly speaks of a decrease of police intervention into the realm of sex work, yet bases her observation on a lack of police capacities which are currently more concentrated in the area of the fight against terrorism. She further also mentions the difficulty of the police to identify a woman as a victim of trafficking, as there are no standards according to which someone is to be recognised as such. In order to be recognised, she states, a woman has to identify herself as a victim:Well, I usually advise people to go there and to have a look at those beautiful women. How will you recognise them? In most cases they have to identify themselves, because you will NOT recognise her as a victim49 (Katarina: 579-582). Since many of the women are mistrustful of the police, they often do not turn to them or identify themselves as victims in front of them (Katarina: 605606). Apart from the fear that is associated with the police Iara (223-224) also asserts that the German legislation on victim protection (or rather the lack of it) hardly motivates women to identify themselves as victims.

Wir betreuen aber auch Zeuginnen, das heit das sind Frauen, die nicht unbedingt Opfer sind in dem wirklich ganz ganz ganz schlimmen definitorischen Sinne. hm dann sind die als Zeuginnen hier in Prozessen gegen Menschenhandel trotzdem hier, ja (Katarina:67-70).
48

Also ich rate dann immer geh bitte in den Bereich, kuck dir die wunderschnen Frauen, wie sollst du's erkennen? Entweder geben sie, in den meisten Fllen mssen sie sich selber zu erkennen geben, weil du wirst NICHT erkennen, dass sie Opfer ist.
49

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1.1.3. The Victim Status as Advantage? If somebody is considered a victim of trafficking German law stipulates first an at least four week period during which the victim may decide whether s/he is willing to appear in court. If s/he is willing to become a witness, s/hell be granted a residence permit limited to the period of the court case, after which s/he will be voluntarily returned to her/his country of origin (Katarina: 494-496, Iara: 197-202). Taken that being accredited as a victim does not guarantee a proper residence permit or the right to work or to study, not many participants saw any advantages in being accorded with the status apart from evading the implications of deportation50. Yet, contrary to the general assumption that victimhood and its association with passivity relegates a person into a state of voicelessness, Lidia asserts that women collected during police raids are only given the opportunity to be listened to, if they are suspected of being a victim of trafficking: ... but before they become a victim, many will not be able to speak, because they are not accorded with the term, with this advantage of being a victim ...51 (118-120). According to Lidia (139-148), the women are conscious of the advantages that the victim status may deliver and some therefore deliberately present themselves as classic victims in front of the police. The other participants very rarely experienced that women strategically used the victim status for their own benefits (see for instance Katarina: 535-543). Charlotte (553-561) saw an explanation for this by conceptualising the notion of receiving help in the form of benefits as a consequence of victimisation as a much more common feature of wealthy societies. Coming from a context of poverty, in turn, where survival is often a question of struggling and fighting, she assumes that the majority of the women never made the experience of receiving assistance and did therefore also not expect to be helped if they identified as victims.

It should be noted that the price for deportation is (literally) high. In the case of deportation a person is bound by law to pay a considerable amount of money for both the stay in the deportation centre and for the return to her/his country of origin. In the case of non-EU citizens will the person further be banned from returning to not only the country of deportation but to all Schengen member states (Freiabonnements fr Gefangene e.V. 2006).
50

aber bevor sie berhaupt zu Opfer werden, viele werden nicht sprechen knnen, weil die kriegen diese Begrifflichkeit nicht, also diesen Vorteil Opfer zu sein .
51

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1.2.

Personal definitions of victimhood

For many participants the direct negative associations of the term victim constituted the reasons for a refusal to apply it to the women they attended to. Victim in many accounts, was associated with a notion of passivity or a lack of agency: ... so victim is always something passive and nothing active, thats why I generally dont like the term ...52 (Charlotte: 353-355). It was further claimed by participants that the labelling of migrant women working in the sex industry as victims diminished the courage that they had invested into the migration project and that it further denied them the right to determine their lives in the way they wanted to (Lidia: 312-317). There are however discrepancies in the accounts between those who disliked the labelling of the women as victims because according to their perception it does not characterise them well, and those who did not see the labelling as a productive approach to the work with the women and to the improvement of their situation. Although Charlotte generally dislikes the term, she however sticks to her position of passivity constituting the central defining characteristic of victimisation and does call those women victims whose narratives do reveal instances of passivity. Talking about the women from Eastern Europe who she encountered on Berlins Kurfrstenstrae she says: ... because I really had heartbreaking conversations with the women, who sometimes had their first child at the age of fourteen, to me they are victims of VERY patriarchal cultures, who often do not have school education, who often after the second school year were taken out of school in order to work somewhere, to help somewhere, thats for me, thats how I determine victimisation, because thats passive, thats something thats being done to them... 53 (Charlotte: 420-426) Notwithstanding her reluctance to generally apply the term, Charlotte uses it, if she is convinced that it characterises the situation of a person well. Her conceptualisation of victimisation in the context of migrant labour is thus primarily grounded in an
also Opfer ist immer was Passives auch und nichts Aktives, deswegen mag ich den Begriff an und fr sich nicht (Charlotte:420-426).
52

weil ich hab wirklich herzzereiende Gesprche mit den Frauen gefhrt, die zum Teil hm mit vierzehn ihr erstes Kind bekommen haben, die hm fr mich wirklich Opfer von SEHR patriarchalen Strukturen sind, die oft keine Schulausbildung haben, die oft nach dem zweiten Schuljahr von der, aus der Schule genommen wurden um irgendwo zu arbeiten, irgendwo zu helfen, das ist fr mich, da kann ich Opfer ansetzen, hm weil das ist passiv, das wird mit ihnen gemacht . (Charlotte:420-426).
53

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understanding of sex work as labour that shall be chosen consciously and freely. Women who were socialised in a way in which their qualities were specified as feminine and eventually reduced to reproductive labour and who consequently pick up the work of a sex worker out of economic pressure and a felt lack of alternatives are seen by Charlotte (444-451) as unfit to work in the sex industry. She specifies their victimisation as a patriarchal one. Anya and Susanne (131-134) on the other hand also reject the notion of labelling the women they attend to as victims, yet they place it within the context of the work with the women and seemingly judge it more according to its utility. So although they state that often victim attributes do characterise the situation of the women, they refrain from emphasising them. Especially while working directly with the women, one should instead highlight their energy and perceive them as persons who can and do play an important part in society. Iara similarly sees the labelling of the women as victims as a specific approach to work. She criticises this approach for giving way to an objectification of the women. She contrasts this approach, which is defined by her as a negative one, with one that emphasises the rights that the women are entitled to: Yes, it will not be represented as victim, right, because then you would always see the women as little stupid things. h, no, one doesnt talk about victims but about rights, meaning they have the right, you see. They have the right to migrate, and thats mentioned everywhere, they have the right to look for something different, they have the right to a dignified life, to access to health care provision, all these are rights, and thats what youre fighting FOR ... that means you always show it in a positive way, and you dont talk about victimisation, to the contrary, victimhood is not even mentioned. 54 (Iara: 311-322) It is unclear whether Iara personally does perceive some of the women as victims or not. This does not seem to be relevant however; in her account the rejection of the labelling of the women as victims becomes a principle and is seen as a strategy to emphasise and thereby to improve the legal situation of migrant sex workers.
Ja, es wird nicht als Opfer dargestellt, ne, weil sonst wrdest du immer da die Frauen als kleines bldes Ding da sehen. h, nein, es wird berhaupt nicht ber Opfer, aber ber Rechte gesprochen, das heit sie haben das Recht, ne Sie haben das Recht zu migrieren, und das steht berall, die haben das Recht etwas anderes zu suchen, sie haben das Recht auf h ein wrdiges Leben, auf Zugang zu Gesundheitswesen, alle diese sind Rechte und DAFR kmpft man, das heit man gibt es immer auf einer positiven Art und nicht diese Opferrolle, im Gegenteil, die Opferrolle wird berhaupt nicht erwhnt (Iara:311-322).
54

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Another set of images that was commonly associated with the labelling of the women as victims and which is connected to the concept of passivity concerns notions of charity and saving. The concept of saving women here again is often interpreted as a form of instrumentalisation which moves the focus away from the supposed victims and lets the saviour take centre stage. Lidia (57-58) for instance refers to acts of charity as lifting the person to do the charity to a morally higher ground and as ultimately benefitting her/him by making her/him feel better about her/himself. Iara (143-144) likewise conceptualises the saving of victims as a moral act. Following her account, if this moral motivation is taken further, it merges to a certain extent with a political one which often ultimately aims at the abolition of prostitution: ... meaning we save the women by taking them out [of prostitution] and then thereby abolish prostitution ...55. In that sense the abolition of prostitution is being interpreted as an intended side effect of the ambition to save the victim.

2. Taking on the Migrant Perspective

The problematic nature of speaking for the Other has already been mentioned above. While representation assumes the existence of an actual referent, whose identity, by way of representation, is being reproduced and further fixed, this act of speech also necessarily acts as a form of self-representation (do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan 2004:211). Most of the answers that will be outlined in the following sections emerged from questions that explicitly asked for the participants elaboration on the migrants perspectives and feelings and should therefore at least in these instances not be interpreted as attempts to colonise their voices. Within this section I will first discuss the participants assessments on whether the migrant women perceive themselves as victims, and second, whether they identify as sex workers.

55... das heit wir retten die Frauen sie daraus zu nehmen und dann somit Prostitution abzuschaffen ... (Iara:143-144)

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2.1.

Feelings of Victimisation

The answer to the question of whether the participants thought that the women perceived themselves as victims was almost invariably negative. The reasoning behind this answer differed however. Lidia (183-190) first of all emphasised the contextuality of the meaning of the term victim, stating that many women who are ascribed with the victim category have a different understanding of the term from those who ascribe it to them. The obvious linguistic difference makes the assumption probable that for instance the Russian word for victim may not be completely congruent with the German word for it. Moreover, the same term in the two languages is given further different meanings if placed within the respective discourses on human trafficking, which again differ considerably in sending and receiving countries. According to Lidia the debate on victims of trafficking is not as prominent in sending countries as it is in receiving countries and women who are construed as victims within a German context therefore do not usually see themselves as such. Charlotte (514-533), the only participant to refrain from a general negative answer, referred to the age of the women as a crucial distinguishing factor in terms of their feelings of victimisation. Like many others, Charlotte argues that a majority of those migrants, who work in the sex industry, view their work as a short-term strategy to earn relatively large amounts of money in a relatively short and especially limited amount of time. While this perspective allows younger women to envision for themselves a more positive future of more opportunities, older women see their opportunities in a foreign country, where they often do not fluently speak the language, as relatively few, which in turn constitutes them as the more sad ones, who probably feel betrayed by life, I would say, rather than feeling victimised56 (137-138). Although she mentions feelings of victimisation, Charlotte (507-508), like the others, prefers to use different expressions in order to describe the emotional state of mind of the women. She further asserts that the women themselves would probably not use the term victim. Also in other accounts feelings of victimisation were often contrasted with other emotions, such as anger or rage (Anya and Susanne: 138), sadness, unhappiness (Charlotte: 512-513) etc. which were seen as more appropriately characterising the womens emotional state.
das sind die Traurigeren, die sich wahrscheinlich vom Leben betrogen fhlen, mchte ich mal so sagen, als dass sie sich als Opfer fhlen (Charlotte:137-138).
56

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Iara (245-254) who also claimed that a majority of the women would not perceive themselves as victims, based her argument on a reconceptualisation of trafficking, as not a criminal act, but as a deal that is negotiated between a woman wishing to migrate and a third party, able to facilitate her migration project. Although the act of paying large amounts of money to a third party may be defined as a form of exploitation, Iara contends that the concerned woman does not perceive it as such, because, in order to realise her migration project, she simply needs the services that the third party promises to provide. Both Iara and Lidia further abnegate that migrant women see themselves as victims of global structural inequalities. The inequalities, Iara (259-274) states, are a matter of fact, but they are not seen by the women as a source of victimisation. Instead of according migrants with a victim status because of their structurally disadvantaged position within the global economy, Iara proposes to focus on the individual situation of a migrant and to problematise her/his motivations to migrate. Migration movements should not be seen as unilinear movements from poorer to richer countries, but are translated by Iara as a search for better opportunities57 (Iara:266), which may also be found in an equally poor neighbouring country.

2.2.

Self-Identification as a Sex Worker

While most of the participants emerged as being convinced that the women did not perceive themselves as victims, a great majority also doubted whether they would identify as sex workers. In order to clarify her point of view, Iara (5-25) applies a general classification of people working in the sex sector into three categories. The first one consists of the selfassertive, politically outspoken sex workers who constitute a minority within the prostitution spectrum. The second one, which should be seen as the largest group, delineates those people who do not identify as sex workers but who do see sex work as an opportunity to earn money for a limited amount of time. The last category is the victim category, under which drug addicts and also victims of trafficking are being subsumed. This group again constitutes a minority. Iara asserts the validity of those categories for both German and migrant sex workers and consequently places the majority of migrant women also within the second category and not as self-identifying
57

bessere Mglichkeiten (Iara:266)

54

as sex workers. When talking with Katarina (262-263) about the possibility of introducing a special green card regulation for migrants wishing to work in the sex industry, she disputed the willingness of Eastern European women to apply for such a visa: ... be careful, I dont believe that many would let their passports be stamped like this58. Apart from the assumption that the women conceptualise sex work as a short term possibility to earn relatively large amounts of money59 and are therefore primarily motivated by economic considerations, Charlotte also names the continuity of the stigmatisation of sex work as a reason for the womens reluctance to identify with their work. Talking about how some of the Eastern European women working near Berlins Kurfrstenstrae perceive the street workers she states: ... they also find it pretty bold that we approach them so acceptingly and that we talk about occupation and sex work. hm, thats what they find bold, they have adopted this external, societal tabooisation, but also because, I think that hardly any one of them is pursuing this freely and outside of economic pressure. Their dreams and wishes are completely different. 60 (Charlotte: 469-475) Although to a lesser extent, Charlotte asserts (481-487) that also German sex workers often have similar feelings, suffer from stigmatisation and lead a double life in which they disclose their income generating activities to their families and friends. Although coming from a completely different background, Charlottes account in this instance interestingly resembles the one of Susanne and Anya (43-46) who also blame structural inequalities and the living conditions of the women as ultimately pressuring them into working in the sex industry. While I see Charlottes statement as an assessment of the situation of this particular group of women who she came into contact with through the street work on
sei vorsichtig, ich glaube nicht, dass da viele sich so etwas in den Stempel rein knallen lassen (Katarina:262-263).
58

Charlotte (523-525) in her interview stated that the expectations of the women in terms of how much money they could earn in what amount of time are often unrealistic. Yet, depending on variables such as the workplace, whether they work on the street or in a brothel or apartment, some women definitely do earn much more money than they could possibly earn as for instance a domestic worker.
59

[]die finden es auch ganz verwegen, dass wir so akzeptierend auf sie zugehen und dass wir von Ttigkeit und Sexwork reden. hm das finden die verwegen, die haben diese Tabuisierung, die von auen auch gesellschaftlich da ist, die haben die selber auch bernommen, aber eben auch deswegen weil ich glaube dass es von kaum einer ein wirklich, auerhalb von Sachzwngen frei gewhlte Ttigkeit. Deren Trume und Wnsche sind ganz andere (Charlotte:469-475).
60

55

Kurfrstenstrae, I perceive Anyas and Susannes account as constituting a more general judgement of the motivations behind womens entry into the sex trade. During the interview they were telling of an ex-sex worker who approached Fino in order to work voluntarily with the organisation. The ex-sex worker disputed the notion that women would take up the work of prostitutes voluntarily. As long as they are inside the business, she reportedly stated, they are incapable of making judgements on their own situation, for their right to self-determination is restrained (Anya and Susanne: 51-54). Due to their conviction that women generally do not want to perceive themselves as sex workers, Anya and Susanne (163) agree with the other participants that also the migrant women working in the sex sector do not self-identify as prostitutes.

3. Problematic Practices
If we conceptualise discourse as a form of social practice that is inherently mediated by power, and if power is not seen as a monolith or as emerging from one sovereign, it is impossible to trace the unfolding of discourse back to a single origin. A similar difficulty emerges if we try to discern those practices that are complicit in the reproduction of the same diffuse discourse. Yet, to get closer to the notion of complicity I will now outline the accounts on those aspects of their work which the participants themselves considered to be problematic, or even of posing a risk in terms of a reproduction of a homogenised representation of migrant women working in the sex sector as victimised. I will first introduce the notion of perceiving complicity, which represents those instances in which participants expressed their awareness that social agents are benefitting from the existence of migrant women in need of assistance. Secondly the issue of problematic forms of cooperation with other institutions involved in the work with migrant women working in the sex industry will be addressed.

3.1.

Perceiving Complicity

A felt complicity in the reproduction of the victim rhetoric through the nature of her work is probably most clearly articulated by Lidia. She conceptualises the discourse on trafficking in women as a Gewebe, a web that is constituted of the different actors 56

involved in the debate and whose ambitions and aims ultimately obscure the concerns and interests of the women (103-113). For Lidia, the employees of counselling centres, including herself, form part of that web of actors and therefore also actively participate and benefit from the formulation of the discourse on trafficking in women. But of course, we as a counselling centre, or not only us, but all counselling centres also play an important role in this web, we are also actors, hm, we are also involved, and, well, I dont want to talk about guilt, but I would say we also have advantages from attending those women that are affected by trafficking, we get our job and we get our funds... 61 (Lidia: 87-93) Charlotte, like Lidia, also states that the counselling activities create employment, yet are questionable in terms of their effectiveness in achieving any positive changes on a broader level. She thereby also scrutinises the main functions of Medusa as an organisation and poses the question of whether it should not act as a form of union, concentrating on lobbying activities, rather than as a counselling centre (797-801). Iara, in her account on those organisations that follow the presumed moral imperative to save victims, also states that those saviour organisation62 (Iara:388) legitimise their work as well as the receiving of funds through a depiction of the women they attend to as victims (337-341). It is however clear that, unlike Lidia, Iara distances both Migramed, the organisation she is working for, and herself as a social agent from these types of organisations.

3.2.

Problematic Cooperation

Another work area which was seen as problematic by a number of participants is situated within the realm of cooperation with other institutions, including authorities, such as the police, but also other counselling centres that work on similar issues.

Aber natrlich wir als Beratungsstelle, oder nicht nur wir hier, sondern alle Beratungsstellen haben da auch eine wichtige Rolle zu spielen in diesem ganzen Gespann, wir sind da auch Akteurinnen dessen, hm, wie auch immer total verwickelt und auch nicht, also ich mchte nicht von Schuld reden, aber wir haben auch sag ich mal erstmal so Vorteile, wenn wir die Frauen, die Betroffene von Menschenhandel sind, betreuen, haben wir unsere Stelle und kriegen wir unsere Gelder, (Lidia:87-93).
61 62

Retterorganisationen (Iara:388)

57

3.2.1. Cooperation with Governmental Bodies and the Police The difficulties to work with the police were seen as mainly emerging from the different emphases that police and counselling centres respectively place in their work. Due to these different foci, different conceptualisations of the victim category emerge which often, as seen above, conflict with each other. According to Katarina (470-472) and also Lidia (639-642), the counselling centres are mainly interested in the well being of the women. The police on the other hand prioritise the prosecution of internationally organised crime. Similarly Anya and Susanne (156-158) state that in the context of police raids the polices priority is not one of identifying victims of trafficking or exposing prevailing exploitative working conditions, but instead of identifying and eventually seizing those who violate immigration law. As an attempt to reconcile the different interests, the Berlin police together with some of the counselling centres worked out a cooperation contract. While a majority of the participants argued that this contract did to a certain extent improve the necessary cooperation (see for example Katarina: 474-479), others remained very critical of the cooperation per se. Lidia for instance ( 644-657) tells of recurring attempts by the police to tighten the cooperation between themselves and Medusa in order to get access to presumably valuable information that the police assumed the counselling centre would have. On the other hand she also states that the mistrust can also be mutual and on the side of the police. She reports (668-688) that the police once accused all counselling centres of producing victims63, namely of preparing the women through information in such a way that they would be more likely to be considered victims. This again, Lidia confirms (708-711) illustrates the polices ambition to keep the numbers of the victims low.

3.2.2. Cooperation with Other Organisations As already mentioned above, the counselling centres that the participants work for, all form part of the umbrella organisation NOK. Through this but also through other alliances, the projects are in relatively close contact and also frequently cooperate with each other. Due to the different foci and especially the diverse political standpoints, this cooperation was often seen as problematic by individual participants.
63

Opfer produzieren (Lidia:670)

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Lidia (781-793) for instance finds it difficult to work with organisations which clearly support abolitionist stances. Apart from the fact that politicians often ignore the diversity of opinion displayed within the NOK and refer to it as one unified body (870871), she also feels that the discrepancy between the different stances on prostitution and the problems that emerge from them are not being sufficiently discussed within the NOK. Interestingly do Lidia (781-800) and Anya and Susanne (167), who work for organisations that could be positioned on diametrically opposed sides in terms of their stances on sex work, both see their own voices as constituting a minority position within the NOK. Another point of criticism brought forward by Lidia (828-838) is the felt lack of joint internal reflection on the themes of trafficking, of victims of trafficking, and of migration from within the NOK. Instead of taking the time to assess their different understandings on these themes and to evaluate them within their political contexts, the different counselling centres accept the delegation of always new tasks from governmental institutions without even questioning their implications: ... in order to not constantly accept the tasks, you see, thats the point, theres a new task, a political one, and us women, us nice girls, are already into it and develop ideas, instead of pausing first, instead of saying wait, hold on, whats actually happening here? 64 (Lidia: 847-852) This quotation reflects Lidias fear of being instrumentalised by governmental institutions and their political will. It also entails a criticism of the assumed selfevident relationship of femininity with care work, which she mentions a couple of times during the interview (see also Lidia: 290-292).

64

dass wir nicht stndig die Auftrge, das ist der Punkt, weit du, da kommt neuer Auftrag, ein politischer, wir sind schon als Frauen, brave Mdchen sofort dabei wir machen das und haben schon Ideen, anstelle erst mal zu stoppen und zu sagen warte mal, Moment mal was ist denn jetzt eigentlich los?

59

C.CHALLENGING THE VICTIM RHETORIC

The stated objective of many participants was to correct the images surrounding the notion of migrant sex work and to move towards a more differentiated presentation of the issue. In the following sections I will first outline those strategies that are being applied by the participants in order to counter the hegemonic discourse on migrant sex work. I will then move on to an analysis of those factors that I interpreted as challenging the formulation of such a counter discourse.

1. Strategies to Revert Discourses

From among those practices that I analysed as strategies to counter the hegemonic representation of migrant women working in the sex industry I will first discuss the rather practical notion of emphasising the distinction between migrant sex work on the one hand and trafficking in women for sexual exploitation on the other. I will then move on to an outline of the more abstract issue of correcting images, which will be subdivided into the concepts of centring migration and challenging the masculine frame of constraint. Finally the advantages of some participants stated aim to find a new language shall be discussed.

1.1.

Emphasising the Distinction Between Migrant Sex Work and Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation

Some participants stated that in order to counter the above mentioned equation of migrant sex work with trafficking in women they simply insist over and over again on a clear separation of the two themes. Within the NOK for instance, in recognition of their lack of expertise as well as in the absence of a consensus concerning the member organisations opinions on the institution of prostitution, there exists a mutual agreement that the umbrella organisation will not publicly comment on issues pertaining to sex work, but will 60

instead refer to the individual organisations such as Medusa which will make their independent statements (Lidia: 858-862). Lidia (905-908) herself states that she refuses to talk to politicians and journalists about topics other than sex work: I simply turn the journalists and politicians away, I tell them we can talk objectively about the topic of prostitution and that this is still our most important work area65. Iaras above mentioned distinction between positive approaches that centre around the advocacy of migrant sex workers rights and negative ones that deal with notions of trafficking and forced prostitution and Migrameds focus on the further is another example of this strategy (Iara:730-734). Notwithstanding the perceived incompatibility of the two work areas, Lidia (784-785, 806-807) recognises that, due to the climate that has been created through the conflation of the two topics and which now constitutes part of the German public discourse on prostitution, Medusa, as a prostitutes' project, should continue to take part in the debate and should not disconnect itself from the work on issues of trafficking in women.

1.2.

Changing the Framework Correcting the Images

Another way to reconceptualise the debate on migrant sex work and thereby also to alter the image of migrant women working in the sex sector is by situating the debate into a different framework, a notion that was also mentioned by Charlotte (53-56) when stressing her dissatisfaction about being compelled by their donor to deal with the notion of migrant sex work in the context of trafficking for sexual exploitation. From the interviews I was able to dissect two main themes which were seen by many participants as responsible for the discursive undermining of migrant womens agency and therefore ultimately for their representation as victims. These themes included first, the analysis of the situation of migrant sex workers within the context of trafficking in women and second, the conceptualisation of migrant sex work within a

65 ich schicke einfach JournalistInnen oder die Leute in der Politik einfach weiter, sage wir knnen uns ganz sachlich zum Thema Prostitution uern und das ist nach wie vor unsere wichtigste Arbeit (Lidia:905-908).

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masculine frame of constraint66. From the accounts, the addressing and the eventual adjustment of those issues, emerged as the starting points from which to formulate a counter discourse which possibly could change the image of the migrant sex worker as held by the general public. Although I will briefly discuss the two themes separately, I hope to show that they are inherently connected if not constitutive of each other.

1.2.1. Centering Migration The advantages of analysing the womens situation from within the framework of migration lie in the possibility of conceptualising their journeys to Germany as autonomous projects and to see the women as conscious agents. This recognition is very clearly articulated in Iaras account when she emphasises the migrant identity of the women over their sex worker identity (see for instance Iara FN: 20). [M]igration, she states, is the real intention, ... prostitution is just a consequence of the process, the migration process 67 (Iara: 367-368). As already mentioned above, in order to give full recognition to the agency entailed in the migratory process, migrancy as such also has to be reconceptualised. In order to counter the image of migratory projects as being exclusively driven by poverty and despair, Iara (260-270) highlights the importance to look at the diversity of situations that compound individual migrant womens lives prior to their journeys and which she sees as constitutive of the different motives underlying the womens migration projects. Apart from emphasising the agency and the courageousness entailed in the womens migration projects (see for instance Lidia 312-315), the migrant experience itself was also reconceptualised as a form of competence. Being mobile and thereby always being the new face68 in a setting, were conceptualised as important parts of the business for both native and migrant sex workers. Iara (521-530) concludes that relative to their
Charlotte coined this expression in her interview (60-61). While it sounded a bit awkward in German (Charlotte herself was laughing) I found the slightly modified English translation very suitable. In the interview she based her preference for dealing with the notion of migrant sex work within the frame of migration, feminisation of migration and prostitution out of poverty on the fact that it would highlight that the frame of constraint is an economic one, rather than a masculine one ... der gezwungene Rahmen eher ein konimischer ist, als ein mnnlicher .
66

weil das ist der Sinn der Sache, die Migration, die Prostitution ist nur eine Konsequenz des Prozesses, des Migrationsprozesses . (Iara:367-368).
67

... aber das mit der Migration, das ist auch ein Teil dieses Geschfts, ne, das heit, dass du irgendwo anders als neues Gesicht bist, reizt. (Iara: 521-523)
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German colleagues, migrant sex workers through their greater experiences in terms of mobility have a comparative advantage in their work. Analysing the situation of migrant sex workers within the framework of migration also often entailed a stark criticism of the restrictive German immigration laws, which crosscut the different positions on prostitution and was basically shared by all participants. For example, while probably basing their criticism on different motives, Iara as well as Anya and Susanne use exactly the same argument when criticising the inherent contradiction in German legislation, which takes a relatively open stand on prostitution and at the same time is extremely restrictive in terms of immigration (Iara: 183-185; Anya and Susanne: 113-116). Given that four out of the six participants are themselves of a migrant background, I perceive their criticism of German immigration law to not exclusively be connected to their professional work but also as resulting from an empathy grounded in their own migration experience. In the cases of both Charlotte and Katarina their professional concern is further supplemented by their political convictions and their activist work in the area of the advancement of rights for refugees, asylum seekers and illegalised migrants. Charlotte (FN:73-74) for instance emphasises the incompatibility of her political convictions with her work with assumed victims of trafficking, which due to German legislation, usually ultimately results in either the deportation or the voluntary return of the woman in question. Similarly Katarina (253-256) grounds her rejection of propagating the implementation of a Greencard regulation exclusively for migrants planning to work in the sex sector in her former political work with illegalised migrants. Due to her political commitment, she states, she refuses to prioritise the rights to employment for one group of migrants over others.

1.2.2. Challenging the Masculine Frame of Constraint Already in the above discussion I have stated that both victim and perpetrator are mutually constitutive of each other. In order to evade the unitary and unidirectional explanations of power that commonly characterise the trafficking discourse and which ultimately represent the migrant woman as a victim of crime, a reconceptualisation of the masculine perpetrator seemed to be of great relevance to some participants. The male protagonists within the discourse on migrant sex work are the trafficker, the pimp and the client, all of who are often construed as dangerous, criminal, violent and twisted. Due to those direct associations Charlotte (72-81) refrains from 63

the usage of both the term trafficker69 and pimp and reconceptualises them according to their tasks and activities. Just like Iara (245-254), she sees the trafficker as a third party that facilitates migration projects when other (legal) migration channels are being blocked. Similarly she does not use the word pimp, but talks instead of Hintergrundmnner, the men in the background. From her observations as well as from the conversations she has held with both German and migrant women during street work, she concludes that the Hintergrundmnner are predominantly responsible for the establishment of a safe working infrastructure for the women (269273). This includes, in the case of migrant women, the facilitation of transport, both from and to the sending country, as well as inside the receiving countries, the provision of workspace, and of protection from possible assaults by clients (284-292). So both those people referred to as traffickers and those seen as pimps, are reconceptualised by Charlotte as providing services to the women, for which they usually charge part of the womens earnings. She notes that in cases where the business relationship between the working woman and the Hintergrundmann is mixed up with love, violence is not a seldom occurrence but need not necessarily be connected or reduced to the realm of prostitution (280-283). Through her reconceptualisation Charlotte does not only redirect the attention to the agency of the migrant women, but further also problematises the association of migrant sex work with organised crime or Mafia-like structures, an image with often racist undertones that commonly appears in the German press (308-314).

1.3.

Finding a New Language

Lidia in many instances has pointed at the importance and also the force and power of language in general. In the context of the debate on trafficking in women, she states that the choice of language has often transfigured the problems and necessities of the actual protagonists, i.e. the concerned women (Lidia:72-75). The above outlined decline by the participants to refer to the women they attend to as victims, already constitutes one form of critique of the discursive representation of the migrant women. The reluctance to use the terminology characteristic of the discourse on trafficking can be interpreted as forming part of the larger concern to reformulate
During the interview Charlotte used the German word Schleuser, which would be translated more literally as smuggler. I however think that the negative connotations that Charlotte perceives to be associated with the German word Schleuser are better translated by the English word trafficker.
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the way in which migrant sex work is being talked over. When speaking about the medial representation of those migrant women who work on Berlins Kurfrstenstrae, Charlotte repeatedly emphasised her opposition to a description of the women as aggressive and confrontational. She does not deny the different comportment of those women if compared to the other (mostly German) sex workers on the street walk. Yet, she attempts to understand their behaviour by analysing the situation of those women within the context of the EU enlargement process, which only recently, in January 2007, enabled the women who predominantly stem from Bulgaria and Rumania to legally access and work in Germany. Based on her analysis she reconceptualises their behaviour as happy, euphoric or more offensive70 and as grounded in their feelings of relief about being able to work openly and not having to hide anymore (Charlotte: 204-210; 214-215). Taking into account the inappropriateness of a terminology that reduces the complexity of (migrant) sex work to notions of force, violence and criminality and the refusal of many of her colleagues, including some of those who participated in this research, to continue to use this language, Charlotte (787-788) emphasises the need to work towards the establishment of a new vocabulary that could be commonly applied by social agents and the sex workers rights movements. The notion that an insistence on the application of a different terminology and the propagation of a change of the vocabulary to describe the complexity of migrant sex work may also alter the understanding of the phenomenon is evidenced by a success story mentioned by Charlotte herself (105-112). Through Medusas cooperation and discussions with representatives of the police on boards and panels, she notes that the police itself started partly to abstain from the use of terms such as forced human trafficking which, according to Charlotte, reflects an increasingly differentiated perspective on the issue of migrant sex work on the part of the police.

At this point translation again becomes an issue: the German word offensiv which was used by Charlotte to describe the behaviour of the women, does not imply any of the connotations that the English word offensive carries. Rather than inferring an insulting behaviour, Charlottes use of the word offensiv aims to describe the directness and activeness that characterises the womens way of promoting their services to possible clients.
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2. Constraints in the Formulation of Counter Discourses

In the course of the interviews many participants complained about a number of factors, which I analysed as constraining their efforts to reconceptualise the discourse on migrant sex work. These included the persisting sensationalist media accounts on the topic of migrant sex work and trafficking in women. Other problems were stemming from the institutional embeddedness of the participants work in hierarchical structures, constitutive of various forms of dependencies and accountability. Further difficulties were associated with sex workers rights propagation, and the reluctance of many of the institutions active in this field to engage themselves more thoroughly with the theme of migration. Finally, many participants also complained about recurrent allegations against them of relativising the violent experiences of migrant women working in the sex sector and of drawing a too rosy picture (Iara:578-579).

2.1.

Media Representations and Media Cooperation

One of the most important channels through which the imagery of the victimised migrant woman working in the sex sector is being conveyed to the broader public is through media reports. Many participants accounts on media representation as well as on possible or even fruitful cooperation with the media were characterised by a high level of frustration. The conceptualisation of journalism as selling news was shared by a number of participants who also emphasised the awareness of journalists of which news sell well to the public, and which do not (Charlotte:653-659). Katarina (296-298) saw the notion of voyeurism as inextricably linked to the topic of prostitution, which, according to her opinion, will always make it prone to be exploited through sensationalist media accounts. Charlotte further emphasised the influence that politics have on media representations. She saw for instance the implementation of the Prostitution Act as having enabled the removal of a lot of taboos from the institution of prostitution and as eventually also having aided a process of rehabilitation of the image of the German sex workers as conveyed through the media (737-739). Conceptualising the current political climate as one in which Europe is increasingly 66

strengthening its exterior borders, Charlotte (742-747) viewed media accounts as increasingly targeting outsiders as scapegoats, which materialises in the conveyance of negative images of migrants and their countries of origin. Much of the frustration in terms of the media also resulted from the many instances in which the expert voice of the counselling centre was misused in media accounts in order to give more credibility and authority to the texts. Lidia (419-439) states that the altering of statements or even the publication of quotations of fictive employees, made up by journalists, is a very common occurrence also among the more reputable magazines and newspapers. The problem that seems to emerge for many participants is that on the one hand they recognise the importance of raising media attention to their work and their opinions, on the other, their experience tells them that the cooperation with the media usually does not result in much positive feedback (Lidia:968-971). Katarina (302-304) concludes for herself, that she cannot work against the hegemonic representation of migrant sex work. Any attempt to foster a more differentiated image would simply run counter the medias interest of selling news and would therefore not get published anyway: P: If you simply say, excuse me, thats not true, then they wont use it anyway. I: Because theyre not interested in it. P: Because its not bloody enough and wont sell. 71 (Katarina:308-313)

2.2.

Institutional Constraints

More recently, Charlotte (752-757) states she has noted a positive shift towards a more differentiated image of migrant sex work among the police and even among some politicians. She however sees this positive development to be constrained by the actors embeddedness into institutionalised hierarchies and their concomitant accountability to the next higher authority. Talking about the discrepancies between Medusa and their main donor, the Berlin Senate, in defining the notion of trafficking
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P: Wenn du jetzt ganz einfach sagst, bitte, so stimmt das nicht, dann wird sowieso das nicht benutzt.

I: Weil's sie nicht interessiert. P: Weil das nicht blutig genug ist und sich nicht verkauft (Katarina:308-313).

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she states for instance: ... they also have to do a balancing act, even if they h agree with us to some extent on the ways we define things, h it doesnt mean that they will achieve acceptance of it in the ministry of interior72 (143-146). The ministry of interior to which the Senate is accountable, she goes on (139-143), is ultimately the body that will make use of specific formulations for political ends. In terms of the definition of trafficking, she states: ... they want to see numbers and they want to see specific numbers, numbers they can use in order to enforce political regulations73 (141-143). Although they see their own position within this hierarchical web of institutions as relatively firm (Lidia: 875-880), both Lidia and Charlotte also recognise the dangers of being instrumentalised and of being used as a token by higher authorities. According to Charlotte (688-693), Medusa, as an organisation associated with civil society, runs the risk of being used as a token NGO, whose formal inclusion into a government sponsored programme or project is enough to generate an at least superficially more democratic representation of the respective project. The actual work, emerging from such cooperation, is not so much of interest, as long as they [the governmental institution] have us on board74 (Charlotte: 692-693). Medusas political stance further provides its supporters, especially in the case of governmental institutions, such as the Berlin Senate, with the opportunity to represent themselves as tolerant, open and free of moral constraints (Lidia: 388-393). Although she sees the benefits that accrue to their governmental supporters as a guarantee that the counselling centre will continue to receive funding, Lidia sees Medusas relationship with those institutions as problematic. She fears especially that the carrying out of tasks as demanded by governmental bodies will take precedence over Medusas own concerns, such as the lobbying for a Greencard regulation for migrant women wishing to work in the German sex sector (924-926). At the same time she sees a lot of those demands, such as the directive to foster programmes to facilitate womens exit out of prostitution, as not feasible, precisely because of a lack of a governmental provision of a financial infrastructure (356-358). Iara (722-728) asserts however that programmes that are in accord with dominant
die machen auch nen Spagat, selbst wenn sie in Settings mit uns h einverstanden sind, wie wir Sachen definieren, h heit es nicht, dass sie das durchbringen bis zum Innenministerium. (Charlotte:143-146)
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die wollen Zahlen sehen und die wollen ganz bestimmte Zahlen sehen, die fr sie von Nutzen sind um politische Regelungen wiederum durchzusetzen (Charlotte:141-143).
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ob die dann so arbeiten, in unserem Sinne arbeiten das ist dann nicht mehr die Frage, aber sie haben uns im Boot. (Charlotte:691-693)
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political agendas, such as those associated with trafficking and forced prostitution, still have an easier time obtaining funds than those that run counter it. The work with migrant women selling sex for instance is made complicated by the lack of funding for cultural and language mediation (Iara: 763-765). Charlotte (874-878) therefore concludes that notwithstanding some positive changes in the governmental attitude towards sex work, as illustrated by the implementation of the Prostitution Act,75 there still exists a political ambition to curb prostitution in Germany, which is now more geared towards restricting migrant sex work.

2.3.

Challenges from Within

Another constraint is constituted by the apparent reluctance among different initiatives working in the area of propagating sex workers rights to engage themselves more thoroughly with the topic of migration. Although migrant women constitute the majority of the women working in Germanys sex sector, their problems and needs still do not receive much attention within the sex workers rights movement (Iara: 757759). This may be connected to the above mentioned reluctance of migrant women to self-identify with their (usually temporary) occupation and their resulting unwillingness to engage themselves politically in the sex workers rights movement (Iara: 13-15). It may however also be accorded to the existence of a latent racism within the movement as well as the counselling centres (Iara: 749-753). Related to this is also the articulation of Lidias felt need (840-846) to not only discuss the situation of those migrant women the social agents are aiming to assist, but also to problematise the minority position of social agents who themselves are of a migrant background as well as the implications that result from this position. After a four year long effort, Lidia concludes, the themes of migration and migrant sex work are finally going to be on the agenda of the annual nationwide symposium on sex work in 2008 (846-847). Iara (760-763) interprets this late shift as the movements recognition that the high percentage of migrant women working in Germanys sex sector simply constitutes a reality that has to be dealt with.
It should be emphasised again that the legislation on sex work was introduced and implemented by the former centre-left government and was in fact opposed by a number of politicians from the more conservative party that now constitutes the majority in the German parliament. Lidia (38-43) for instance sees the new government as backlashing against the positive developments in the area of sex work.
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2.4.

Relativising Violence or Drawing a Too Rosy Picture

Many participants recount that their attempts to establish a more differentiated image on migrant sex work were often countered by allegations of relativising the extremely violent experiences of women and of drawing a too rosy picture 76 (Iara: 578-579). Throughout many of the interviews, a number of participants therefore also emphasised that their attempts to reformulate the discourse on migrant sex work and especially the position of the women within it should not be interpreted as denying the violent experiences of migrant women. Iara (580-582) states that her efforts to show the other side should not be read as an endeavour to only show the white side but instead as countering the homogenised black image created by the media and to thereby achieve the goal that she refers to as meeting somewhere in the middle77. Similarly Charlotte (882-890) explains that Medusas aim to emphasise the underrepresented side of what is generally understood as trafficking does not deny the existence of violence and the use of force in womens migration projects. While she actually tries to avoid to add to the polarisation of the debate, she sometimes feels urged to strategically position herself on one extreme of the spectrum in order to be able to counter the narrative of somebody like Alice Schwarzer, who from the beginning positions herself on the opposite side. Iara (653-656) sees the reluctance of the general public to accept a different narrative of migrant sex work as being based on moral conceptions on sexuality and the resulting inability to imagine that a woman may choose to provide sexual services as a form of income generating activity. Due to the association of prostitution with (a culturally specific form of) sexuality and the therefrom persisting stigmatisation of the profession, Iara (684-686) sees sex workers as still occupying an exceptional position in the public imagination. She illustrates this notion by referring to the distinct way with which the phenomenon of migrant domestic work is handled by the general public, notwithstanding the fact that this sector is also characterised by abusive and exploitative labour conditions: ... theres many families who employ these women in their households, right, and one can also say yes, I took this one, shes illegal, but, poor thing, Ill help her, right. But no father or husband would say yes, I also go to a
Weil immer wenn ich so rede, sagen mir die Leute immer, ah du zeichnest oder du zeigst alles sehr rosig und sehr wunderbar, (Iara:578-579)
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ich will immer die andere Seite zeigen (lacht), weil die Medien immer dieses Schwarze zeigen, ich will nicht nur das Weie, aber es ist irgendwie muss man sich in der Mitte treffen (Iara:580-582).
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[illegalised] prostitute.78 (Iara: 686-690)

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sehr viele Familien diese Frauen auch in ihren Haushalt benutzen, ne, und das kann man auch so sagen ja ich hab ja bei mir ja eine, sie ist illegal, aber die Arme, da helf ich ihr ne, so. Aber du kannst nicht, dass ein Vater sagen oder einem Ehemann zu sagen ja, ich geh auch zur Prostituierte (Iara:686690).

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V. DISCUSSION
As an exploratory qualitative research project this study is not aiming to provide final answers to the questions posed. What is to follow in this section is thus not to be understood as an attempt to generate a grand theory, but rather as a way of contributing to the critical discussion on migrant sex work through the provision of a different perspective, generated from my interpretation of the accounts of those constituted as helpers within the discourse on migrant sex work. I will begin this section by first summarising as briefly as possible the main points of the previous finding section. I will then move on to an analysis of the victim construct, as perceived by the research participants and in relation to the existing literature on this theme. After this I will discuss both the ways in which the participants view their complicity with the hegemonic presentation of migrant women working in the sex industry as well as the sites where they envision possibilities of challenging the discourse. I shall then dedicate some space to the problematisation of the notion of polarity that I sense to be characterising the debate. Before concluding this section by summarising the limitations of this study project, I will give an outline of my analysis of the complicated subject positions of the helpers, and thus of the research participants.

A. BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE RESEARCH FINDINGS

In the first part of the data presentation I highlighted the ways in which the research participants perceive the representation of migrant women working in the German sex sector. A great majority of the research participants see especially the images conveyed through the media as not reflective of the actual experiences of the migrant women in question and further evaluated the depiction of the women as victims as problematic. Except for Anya and Susanne, they also noted that this representation negatively affected their work and particularly highlighted the problems resulting from diverging definitions of what is generally referred to as trafficking for sexual exploitation and the resulting common conflation of it with migrant sex work. As noted by a number of participants the discursive blurring also led to a merging of the two work areas which was also conceived as problematic. 72

The second part dealt with the ways in which the participants defined the concept of victimhood, which included a presentation of the ways in which the category is officially defined which was contrasted with the ways in which it is being dealt with by official bodies, such as the police. Also the participants own understandings of victimisation were outlined, which showed that by and large the participants refuse to refer to the women they work with as victims. The dislike for the term was commonly grounded in its association with passivity. Further did this part provide a summary of how the participants envision the ways in which the migrant women perceive themselves. In this section a majority of the participants asserted that, according to their opinion, the women neither saw themselves as victims nor did they identify as sex workers. In the final part of the second block of the finding section I enumerated some of those aspects of the participants work, which were seen as problematic and as possibly reinforcing the hegemonic discourse on migrant sex work. This included the notion of institutional complicity and the question of cooperating with other institutions involved in the work with migrant women working in the sex sector. In the last part of the data presentation the participants attempts to challenge the common assumptions on migrant women working in the sex sector were outlined. These included the participants efforts to emphasise the distinction between migrant sex work on the one hand and trafficking for sexual exploitation on the other. The participants attempts to reframe the debate on migrant sex work and to reconceptualise it within the context of migration as well as their ambition to call into question the images associated with the male protagonists as invariably violent and criminal constituted further strategies to counter the hegemonic presentation of female migrants working in the sex trade. The factors that the participants perceived as posing problems to their endeavour of reformulating the discourse on migrant sex work emerged as stemming from a number of sources, including the persistent publications of sensationalist media accounts, the instrumentalisation of both the topic of migrant sex work and of the work of the counselling centres by governmental institutions, the lack of attention that the themes of migration and of migrant sex work receive from within the realm of sex workers rights propagation and finally the polarity that characterises the debate and which commonly results in the raising of allegations against the participants of denying the existence of violence in female migrant sex workers lives.

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B.CONSTRUCTING MIGRANT WOMEN WORKING IN THE SEX INDUSTRY

In this section the participants accounts on the ways in which they perceive the migrant women they work with shall be discussed in relation to the literature dealing with the discursive construction of the women as victims. Many aspects of the findings do reflect the reviewed literature, especially in terms of the participants critiques of the hegemonic representation of the migrant women working in the sex sector. Others in turn, partly or even completely rebut the arguments brought forward by the authors mentioned in the literature section. In the following I will first analyse the participants understandings of the category as well as of the term victim. I will then move on to a discussion of the ways in which the participants evaluated the images that the women projected onto themselves, as structured along the victim-whore binary. Finally the attribution of the victim status to migrant women working in the sex industry through the German authorities, as perceived by the participants and in relation to the existing literature will be examined.

1. Victim Talk
In their reluctance to use the term victim to describe the women, the participants quite uniformly showed an awareness of the negative implications that the application of the term may generate. It should be noted however that the interview situation and especially the topic of the interview may have at least to some extent influenced the choice of language of the participants. In the reasoning for their reluctance to describe the women they work with as victims, the participants accounts reflect many of the arguments brought forward by the above mentioned authors, including the objectification of the women and the denial of agency especially in the context of female migration. According to Atlink (1995:2 cited in Augustn 2005c:69) the victim concept ...ignores the sense of responsibility that leads women to migrate in search for work... It hurts, but dont call me a poor thing, one woman... said. Victims can also be very tough, doing anything to avenge the damage done to them and make a better life for themselves, or side with the traffickers to avoid reprisals. 74

Altinks description of the women as tough is also mirrored in some participants accounts who described the emotional states of the women they had attended to as angry or enraged (Anya and Susanne: 138), as sad or unhappy (Charlotte:512513) but hardly ever as feeling victimised. Their descriptions of the women thereby counter what Lamb (1999:117) refers to as the culturally approved victim, who will cry and show humiliation in having to describe sexual acts, but who will never be angry or bitter. In many cases the migrant womens move to work in the sex sector was grounded by the participants in their economically deprived situations. In those instances some participants conceptualised the women as not having chosen freely to work in the sex sector. This, as OConnell Davidson (2006b) notes, evokes a dichotomy of free versus unfree labour which rests very uneasily within the context of global capitalism. If seen as form of labour exploitation unfree labour is not artlessly demarcated from free wage labour, which, especially within the context of migrant labour is commonly characterised by extremely poor working conditions. Bhabha (2006) further problematises the question of choice by referring to the philosopher Alan Wertheimer who claims that one cannot be said to have acted involuntarily simply because one does not like the available alternatives (Wertheimer 1987, cited in Bhabha 2006:28). In the context of migrant sex work, Bhabha notes, the womens choices may however be informed by morally unacceptable dilemmas. Bhabha thus turns the notion of choice into a moral and a philosophical question, which I would claim, is also not easily answered by the participants, whose accounts on the womens possible victimisation often revealed contradictions. I would suggest however that by refusing to refer to the women as victims, the participants, at least in their direct work with them, impede the establishment of a discourse of pity, as described by Augustn (2005c:68). Yet, the notion that the women are in need of the social agents help in many accounts was still existent. While in these instances the participants clearly affirmed their own position as social agents, their capabilities of actually providing that help, especially in those cases where women were not attributed with the victim status and therefore were facing deportation, were also commonly called into question. I would therefore suggest that in order to counter the image of a self-benefitting help industry, a qualification of the help that is being provided to the women is very relevant. In many cases the work of the counselling centres closes a vacuum left open by 75

German legislation which for instance does not consider health care provision for nonEU citizens. Obviously, some of these efforts may, as Augustn (2007) notes, also be characterised by a lack of cultural sensitivity or by patronising stances towards the women, a notion that could however not be covered in this research. In other cases where a woman had already been apprehended by the authorities, participants stated that their often futile efforts to prevent her deportation or her voluntary return should rather be seen as ways to impede the double victimisation of the woman through German legislation. This notion was also mentioned by Renzikowski (2007:58) in his analysis of the German Prostitution Act, where the lack of protection for victims of trafficking generates the double instrumentalisation of the victim: first through the traffickers and pimps and then through the state, which uses the victim for prosecution purposes and eventually sends her/him back into the miserable conditions that drove it [the victim] into forced prostitution [sic] in the first place.

2. The Victim-Whore Binary

According to Andrijaevi (2005:133) the discursive structure of prostitution is

organised around the binary of victim-whore. Contrary to her findings where (former) migrant sex workers commonly embraced the motif of victimhood in order to work against the whore stigma, the participants of my research stated that a majority of the concerned women did not perceive themselves as victims. Except for Lidia, they also stated that the women would not use the victim rhetoric or refer to themselves as victims for strategic reasons, as for instance in order to avoid deportation. This again runs counter the observations of many other authors who state that in order to evade prosecution, migrant sex workers commonly claim that they did not know about the type of work they were going to do in the receiving country (Murray 1998:56). Zimowska (2004:56-57) concludes that as long as solidarity with sex workers is conditioned upon their assumed victimisation, they will continue to self-identify as victims in order to avoid political repression. Charlottes account on the migrant womens scepticism with which they encounter Medusas offerings during street work, as well as her explanation that a majority of the women would probably not expect to be helped if they alleged to be victims or in need of assistance bears resemblance to Spivaks account on the subaltern as never claiming 76

subalternity, because of her/his conviction that it is normal to not have access to lines of mobility (cited in Dhawan 2007:4). While participants claimed that from their experience the women did not identify as victims, they also stated that they commonly did not perceive themselves as sex workers either. The reasons for this were seen on the one hand as emerging from the common assumption that migrant women, like most people working in the sex industry, commonly view their work in the sex trade as temporarily (also stated in Kempadoo 1998:4; Augustn 2005a:39 etc.). Apart from that, it was stated that, just like many German sex workers, migrant women themselves had internalised the stigmatisation accorded to sex work, a notion also shared by a number of authors (Andrijaevi 2005, Scambler 2007). For the same reasons, Augustn (2005a:39) views the application of the category of sex worker to migrant women who use commercial sex as an occasional or periodic livelihood strategy as problematic as it still conveys a sense of identification79 with a group whose profession is not only accorded with a stigma from outside, but also from within, thus from the very women who are subsumed under the category. Every use of the term, Augustn (2005a:39) concludes, therefore reproduces the self perceived stigmatisation. It should be noted that during the interviews the participants usually referred to the migrant women simply as die Frauen the women, which gave coherence to their reluctance to accord them neither a victim nor a sex worker identity.

3. Selectivity in the Application of the Victim Category

Thie (2006:2) states that those who look for victims may find them even in those cases where the assumed victims do not perceive themselves as such. He concludes that in the context of trafficking in women, the victim rhetoric reveals more about the necessities of the prosecuting authorities than about the reality of the milieu (Thie 2006:3). Ihme (2006a:2) adds that prevention campaigns are not yielded at just any woman, but only at symbolically relevant others.
Actually the term sex worker was originally introduced in order to highlight a notion of prostitution as an income generating activity, rather than an identity (Kempadoo 1998:3). I however agree with Augustn that notwithstanding the fact that the term is not as negatively charged as prostitute or whore, the categorisation of people under the banner of sex worker does infer a notion of identification.
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This notion was also endorsed by a majority of the participants in their conceptualisation of the classic victim and their experiences during which women, who the participants themselves perceived as victimised in this classic sense, would not be accorded with the status by the authorities. Apart from stating that the womens capability of exactly recounting the process of their victimisation is commonly treated as more important than their actual experiences of victimisation, the participants also enlisted a number of characteristics, which asserted the notion that the accrediting of the victim status to a person is still partly based on an image of the classic victim positioned at a specific intersection of gender, race and legal status. While some of those attributes were also covered by the reviewed literature, the claim of some authors (Augustn 2005b:98, see also Deozema 1999:9) that race did not surface as a clear determinant of experience of migrant women working in the sex sector stood out against the participants accounts on this topic. Especially Charlotte, Lidia and Iara did attest that structural racism does play a crucial role in migrant womens lives in general and in the attribution of the victim status in specific. I would suggest that Charlottes account on the situation of the women from Bulgaria and Rumania who work on the street walk of Berlins Kurfrstenstrae constitutes a revealing example of the selectivity which characterises the attribution of the victim status. As stated before, these women were represented by the media not as victims, but were rather depicted as delinquents. While Charlotte noted that she herself did perceive some of those women as victimised, she reasoned that their newly acquired status as EU citizens on the one hand, which foreclosed their deportation, and their Rroma background on the other, which distinguished them from other women from Eastern European countries and marked them as non-White, constituted the crucial factors for them not evoking feelings of pity but rather of anger and despise in both the local community and the media. Ihme (2006b:198) in her analysis of the discursive construction of victims and traffickers within the debate on trafficking in women, distinguishes between significant inner Others and significant outer Others, with the latter usually referring to the traffickers, and the former to the victims, who due to their Whiteness bear resemblance to the (German) Self. The construction of the women from Kurfrstenstrae as outer Others which attests to the rather arbitrary ways in which migrant women are categorised alongside their origins as either victims or not supports Omis and Winants (1986 cited in Mohanty 2003:66) insight that particular racial myths and stereotypes may change, but that the underlying presence of a 78

racial meaning system still constitutes an anchoring point of culture. The example of the women of Kurfrstenstrae further highlights the importance of placing the discourse on migrant sex work within the larger framework of migration into Europe, including the eastward enlargement process of the EU and the complicated negotiation of EU citizenship, also noted by Ihme (2006b:197). I would suggest that the differing portrayal of the women of Kurfrstenstrae should be seen as an adaptation to the changing context created through the accession of the new EU state. Their representation however still adheres to the discourses effect of reinforcing a notion of us true Europeans as under attack from immoral foreigners and, most especially, immigrants (Berman 2003:55). This example further attests Foucaults (1990:100) important qualification of discourses as not constituting static forms of distribution, i.e. all migrant women working in the German sex sector are victims, but rather as matrices of transformation, that include contradictive statements, ambiguities and shifts.

C.COMPLICITY VERSUS RESISTANCE

As already mentioned, according to Foucault, power and resistance should not be seen as binary concepts. Instead, Foucault views resistance as the effect of power, as a part of power, its self-subversion (in Butler 1997:93). Discourse is therefore envisioned as a possible site for resistance at which counter strategies can be articulated and deployed. During the analysis and interpretation of the participants accounts I noticed this interlocking relationship of power and resistance through the difficulties I faced when trying to analytically distinguish between the notion of complicity on the one hand and the issue of resistance on the other. I realised that those aspects of the participants work, that were commonly seen as problematic or as posing a risk of reproducing the hegemonic representation of the migrant women as victims were at the same time often those areas where a possibility for countering the same representation was either envisioned or materialised. One of these aspects is constituted by the use of language, by naming, calling and referring to both the migrants working in the sex trade, as discussed above, as well as to the broader phenomenon of migrant sex work. The awareness that for instance the 79

terms trafficking and trafficker are directly associated with notions of criminality and violence, which easily reinstate the image of the victimised migrant woman, led a number of participants to either a reconceptualisation of their meanings or to a complete dismissal of the terms. This bears resemblance to Andrijaevi s proposition (2005:210) to abandon the current definition of trafficking altogether and to develop new definitions and a new terminology that is able to direct the attention to the abuses experienced during migratory processes as well as in the context of labour relations. While Andrijaevi s suggestion seems to promise a solution for scholars, as well as for independently working political activists, such as the sex workers rights movement, it emerges as a more difficult endeavour from within counselling centres that are placed within a context of institutionalised hierarchies and the therefrom resulting dependencies. Taking into account those constraints, which were also raised by the participants, Augustn (2007:183) asserts that for instance funding applications must be written within guidelines and using ideas known to please funders. Doezema (1999:37) on the other hand, criticises the continued use of the term trafficking in women, even in relation to its application for strategic reasons, such as getting publicity or obtaining funds: [A]ttempts to combat the myth while using the terminology of trafficking are doomed by the limits to the discursive space imposed by the myth. Each repetition to the effect that trafficking in women is a huge problem serves merely to reinforce the myth that campaigners are also attempting to break down, thus turning this into a futile effort. Some participants further stated that in those cases where they were able to convince their donors or some of the authorities of what they perceive as constituting the reality of migrant sex work, the latter actors embeddedness within institutionalised hierarchies hampered the realisation of major conceptual changes. Cooperation, both with governmental institutions as well as with other organisations preoccupied with the notions of migrant sex work, constituted a further aspect of the participants work which was seen as both problematic and as constituting a chance to challenge prevalent understandings of migrant sex work. Through their cooperation with other counselling centres on the topic of trafficking in women, Medusa as a prostitutes project runs the risk of reiterating the already common conflation of sex work with issues of trafficking and sexualised violence. At the same time their participation within these networks and alliances constitutes a way of assuring that a 80

sex positive perspective and the relevance of the propagation of labour rights within the sex sector are not completely excluded from the debate.

D.

PROBLEMATISING POLARISATION

Earlier on in this work I mentioned that the polarised nature that, according to my opinion, characterises much of the literature dealing with the discourse on migrant sex work was adding to a simplification of the analysis of the role of local institutions within the discourse. Some of the statements of the research participants surely constitute them as neatly fitting into one of the two camps of either sex workers rights supporters or abolitionists. Take for instance Anyas and Susannes (43-44) statements on the motivations behind womens entry into the sex trade, which I consider as reiterating the allegations of suffering from false consciousness against those women who state that they chose to become sex workers, which constitutes an argument that is quite commonly brought forward by abolitionists (Augustn 2005c:78). Anyas and Susannes conceptualisation of sex work as a form of coercion does however not imply a construction of sex workers as invariably victims unable to take responsibility over their lives. They state for instance that the process of getting out of the assumingly exploitative circumstances does demand a great deal of strength and agency from the women (Anya and Susanne:138-140). Contrary to the claim of many authors that abolitionists tend to view the root of the problem of trafficking in women as exclusively located in the existence of a domestic sex market (Weitzer 2007) Anya and Susanne (112-114), like the other participants, also refer to restrictive immigration policies as a factor fuelling the occurrence of trafficking. Charlotte on the other hand, who by the very fact of working for Medusa would be categorised as belonging to the pro-sex camp, was the only participant who did state that she perceived and would refer to some of the migrant women working on the street walk of Kurfrstenstrae as victims. She was further grounding the womens victimisation in their patriarchal socio-cultural background, a notion that was criticised by a number of authors (especially Kapur 2000, 2002). These findings show that the clear cut division of the helpers stances into pro-sex 81

and abolitionist simplifies the complex, and sometimes also contradictive ways in which social agents perceive migrant women working in the sex sector as well as the broader phenomenon of migrant sex work. The data further showed that the polarisation of the debate and the concomitant classification of the local institution also generated problems related to the participants work. This was clearly evidenced by Iaras and Charlottes accounts on having to defend themselves against allegations of denying the existence of violence and force in the course of womens migration projects. The classification of the institutions can further also be instrumentalised by governmental institutions who preen themselves on including a prostitutes project and by the same move enable a representation of themselves as tolerant and open. I suggested that in these instances the institution together with the political stance that it comes to represent is being used as a token, which, according to Spivak (1990b) can also constitute a way of silencing it. Talking about the tokenization of herself as a Third World Woman Spivak (1990b:61) states if you have been brought there it has been covered, they neednt worry about it anymore, you salve their conscience. Through the formal inclusion of the institution into governmental sponsored programmes, their participation is thus not warranted but may to the contrary even be inhibited.

E.CONSTRUCTING THE SUBJECT POSITIONS OF THE PARTICIPANTS

According to Butler (1997:2), drawing on Foucault, the subject is being formed and comes into being through power. From that she deduces that power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are. A subject, Butler (1997:28) concludes, is thus compelled to repeat those norms by which it is enabled. Translated into the context of social work this means that in order to keep her/his position as expert from which s/he derives the authority to act, the social agent is impelled to reiterate the construction of a marginalised Other in need of the assistance that s/he can provide. I have noted that one of the presuppositions on which my research is based was that 82

the subject position of the helper was as much a product of the hegemonic discourse on migrant sex work as the subject position of the migrant women working in the sex sector. Although this rather abstract notion cannot be directly evidenced as fact through the participants accounts, I do see instances in which some participants expressed at least an awareness of their own situatedness within the discourse and the power that derives from it. Most clearly Lidia conceptualised the discourse on migrant sex work as a web, constituted of the different actors involved in the debate and whose ambitions and aims obscure the concerns of the affected women. Both Lidia and Charlotte stated that they do see how they benefit from the discourse, and the helpless migrant women constructed through it, as it provides them with jobs and funds. If we stuck to Butlers conceptualisation of the processes of the formation of subject positions we would arrive at the same conclusion as Augustn (2007:5), namely that in order to maintain their positions and, according to Butler also their agency, the social agents ultimately need to reproduce the discourse that they assumingly condemn. I would like to argue however that this notion simplifies the complex situation of social agents as much as it simplifies the variety of experiences of migrant women working in the sex sector. In her assessment of Butlers work, Lorey (1996:148-149) provides us with a possible solution to this dilemma by way of placing the constitution of subject positions into networks of discourses. Lorey compares the individual to a dynamic field, within which a multitude of discourses are crossing, intersecting and associating themselves with each other. The simultaneous working of these different effects of power of the various discourses produce contradictions, mitigations and intensifications which in turn produce new practices which can also be counter practices. The data showed that also the research participants are positioned at specific intersections of discourses which in turn affected their work. As already mentioned a majority of the participants themselves have had migration experiences and are still perceived of as migrants (as evidenced by my own immediate ascription of their migrant identity). Most notably Lidia raises the issue of her and some of her colleagues position as migrants and their relatively limited ability to assert themselves and to participate on an equal level within a German dominated working context that marks them as foreign and as a minority group. The position of the research participants with a migrant background, who in theory have full access to citizen rights, is surely not comparable to the situation of recently arrived migrant women who work in the sex sector. Yet the circumstances of their work within the context of a 83

majority society raises questions to Augustns assertion (2005b:107) that the protagonists of the debates on trafficking are first-world citizens [and] not migrants. Another subject position that I consider relevant is that of the political activist concerned with the rights of refugees, asylum seekers and illegalised migrants. Both Katarina and Charlotte have mentioned that their political engagement outside of their professional life does influence and at times emerges as incompatible with aspects of their work. Truider (2007:10) has noted that research participants autobiographical narratives on their own subjectivity commonly hint at and draw from hegemonic discourses but that they at the same time also transcend them. I would suggest that the multiple subject positions and the self-consciousness that emerge from them enable the research participants to transcend the limits that the helper subject position implies. It further makes it possible to criticise the hegemonic representation of migrant women working in the sex sector and to ultimately find strategies to counter it. At the same time their efforts are constrained by the limits that their positions as experts or helpers within the discourse on migrant sex work sets them. The participants position within the discourse on migrant sex work can thus be seen as one that is being conditioned by enabling constraints (Spivak in do Mar Castro Varela and Dhawan 2004:214), which have been defined as structures that initially provide a subject with space to act, but which at the same time also delimit their agency.

F. VALIDITY CONCERNS - ASSESSING THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

One of the most obvious limitations of this study is the rather small sample size that was used. Yet, having to rely on such a small number of interviews conducted with participants of such highly diverse backgrounds also had an advantage as it provided me with the possibility to focus more closely on the subjective, rather than on the expert sides of the accounts and to thereby generate an analysis on the discourse of migrant sex work from a very distinct perspective. I regret however that this focus emerged rather late in the research process and could have been investigated much more thoroughly, if there would have been the time to go 84

back to do a second round of interviews concentrating more on this theme. Also the fact that I did not discuss my preliminary findings with the research participants in order to receive their feedback on my interpretations, which ultimately laid the control over the product of the research exclusively into my hands (Oakley 1999:165), can be said to be a shortcoming, both from an ethical and an analytical point of view. Due to the small sample size and the great diversity of the participants which inhibits any form of generalisation, I further see the danger of the participants being taken as either the representatives of the respective institution they are working for or the political stance in relation to sex work that they support. By discussing and problematising the notion of polarisation, I however hope to have been able to foreclose at least to a certain extent the emergence of such an impression. Further, due to the different qualities of the interviews, in terms of whether they were audio recorded or not, their different length and depth, I feel to have prioritised certain interviews, which I perceived as richer, over others. This again forecloses the possibility of generating generalisable results.

85

VI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion I would like to summarise my findings as having shown that to a large extent the research participants emerged as being aware of not only the negative implications that the victim rhetoric may generate, but also of their own possible complicity within the formulation of the representation of migrant women working in the sex industry as victims. While being constrained by their own positioning within this discourse and by the embeddedness of their work within hierarchical structures that postulate the continuance of the discourse, they at the same time also emerged as not only being eager, but to a certain extent also as being able to challenge the hegemonic representation of migrant women working in the sex industry. Notwithstanding the above mentioned weaknesses I still consider my research project as contributing to a greater understanding of the ways in which individuals, embedded within the discourse on migrant sex work, negotiate, create and challenge meanings implied in this discourse. Instead of familiarising the individual cases of the research participants as examples, I rather see the presented findings as generated from their accounts as entry points into the larger processes of the work associated with migrant sex work. The predominant focus of critical scholarship on the discourse of migrant sex work on the marginalised positions of those actually working in the sex industry, or on great governmental or non-governmental institutions, runs the risk of evoking a binary conceptualisation of power which invariably constitutes a generalised image of the helper as dominant. My research has shown however that social agents working in local counselling centres are themselves situated within a web of complex power constellations, which enable but at the same time also constrain their utterances and practices. The participants own subject positions at an intersection of a number of discourses, among them the notion of their migration background, complicates the assumptions of the intervening First World/Western helper into the Third World/Eastern subjects life. Instead of providing final answers, I believe that the findings of this research project raise a number of important questions about the context of the work of counselling centres and especially about the position of individual social agents within it, which can be used as starting points for further investigation. 86

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