A post we recommend from Felicia Anna at Behind the Red Light District: “A blog from a real-life Romanian prostitute working in the Red Light District in Amsterdam. Blogging the truth about prostitution, human trafficking, pimps and politics.”
For years there has been now a debate about prostitution. Should we keep it legal? Should we adopt the Nordic Model? Should we criminalize clients of only forced prostitutes? How many forced prostitutes are there? How much crime is happening in prostitution?
They’re all questions I’ve already giving answer to. But what’s so interesting about the debate on prostitution, is the absence of prostitutes themselves. Sex workers get completely ignored, and the only sex workers who’s voices are being heard are those who’ve become victims. It’s interesting, I get to hear so many times from politicians, opinion makers and other people who seem to oppose prostitution rather than human trafficking, the fact that I’m just one girl.
So what if I’m just one girl? So is the girl who’s story ends up in the newspaper about how she was forced! Just because it’s one girl, doesn’t mean there are more of those! So stop shutting me down as ‘one of the few lucky girls’ who don’t get forced, because that’s absolute bullshit! I’ve been doing this job now for more then 4 years, I know almost every girl working in the night in the Red Light District, I’ve talked with them, I know their personal situations, I know what drives them to do this job. It’s absolute bullshit to claim these girls are forced by a pimp. In fact, there hardly are any pimps out there to begin with.
Of course there will always be people claiming girls are ‘forced by financial circumstances’. Yeah, duh! Of course they are, just like everyone else is forced by financial circumstances to do his or her job! It’s called capitalism, look it up! If you don’t like it, you can always move to North Korea, where they have communism, the opposite of capitalism!
[…] How manipulated stories of human trafficking in prostitution paralyze sex work organizations […]
[…] So what if I’m just one girl? So is the girl who’s story ends up in the newspaper about how she was forced! Just because it’s one girl, doesn’t mean there are more of those! So stop shutting me down as ‘one of the few lucky …read more […]
Good overall, well-written and passionate from someone who knows. One error in need of correcting. The majority of human trafficking by a mile does not involve sex work. It involves forced labor in agriculture and manufacturing. That’s not a small matter. All the headline-grabbing, manipulative focus on sex trafficking pumped by prohibitionists distracts attention from the horrifying fact that there is now probably more slavery in the world than at any time in human history. The fact that most of it doesn’t involve sex makes it invisible to those whose anti-sex-work agenda has nothing to do with actual humanitarianism and… Read more »