Sex, Gender and Migrations: Facing Up to Ambiguous Realities

By Laura María Agustín
Soundings, Spring 2003, No. 23.

The United Kingdom was blessedly free of the 'trafficking' scare when I moved here a few years ago. A classic moral panic involving foreigners, sexual slavery and child abuse already had been in full swing for some years in Western Europe, but when I tried to find it here I had a hard time. Accompanying outreach educators working around London's Seven Sisters in 1998, I asked about non-UK sex workers, and places they were said to be working, and though I managed to squeeze out a few rumours, the subject was obviously not common or pertinent. 'They say there are Polish women working in the back of some Turkish cafes,' I was told. 'I know a French woman who works in Soho.' That kind of thing, anecdotal and unimportant, hardly the stuff of Home Office decrees, repeated BBC documentaries and thunderous headlines. Four years later, the island has joined Europe. Without much hard evidence that more foreign sex workers have actually arrived in the UK, the tone of outrage and panic now matches that of the continent.

I saw a similar situation in various countries of Latin America a couple of years ago. A visitor asking about 'trafficking' elicited sensationalist stories that had been heard in the media, always associating it with predatory foreign men. No 'discourse' had formed on the subject, even in a country like Colombia, accused in the European press of being a major 'sending' country for enslaved women. Recently, however, Colombia has passed a national anti-trafficking law. All over the world, now, 'trafficking for sexual exploitation' is major cause for denunciation. The point is not to deny that 'trafficking' exists, far from it; rather, it is to say that the worst kind of 'trafficking' happens to a minority of people and there is no single truth for all migrant women, whether they work in the sex industry or not, as there is none for all migrants in general. While we confront the possibilities for abuse and exploitation in this world, we need to keep our heads and be able to confront as well a wide variety of ambiguous situations where clear-cut good and evil do not exist. For those concerned with social justice, the most extreme cases are the easy ones to think about; it is all the complicated ones in between that present the challenges. The obsession with 'trafficking' works to erase the human agency necessary to undertake migrations as well as the experiences of migrants who do not engage in sex work. And this is happening to women, not men, as we once again see the patriarchal term 'women and children' that Cynthia Enloe corrected to 'womenandchildren'.¹

When I say 'this is happening to women', I do not mean that 'trafficking' only happens to women, that only women migrants do sex work or that the involved entrepreneurs, agents and 'traffickers' are all men. The overall picture shows that women and transsexual males-to-females are currently travelling in large numbers to Europe, where the jobs available to them are in the domestic and sex sectors. For migrant men, other jobs are available, but many of these are poorly paid, hard physical drudgery (such as day labour in agriculture under plastic or on construction sites) and many offer no legal status. For these kinds of jobs in the 'informal' economy, abuses of debt-bondage and inflated prices for travel and services are common, and many of these fit serious 'trafficking' definitions. Many migrant men who reject such 'traditional' male jobs, bad pay or dangerous conditions move into the sex industry, where they work in a variety of positions, including street prostitution.

In the same way that men tend to run things in the rest of the world, so they do in the sex industry. With their economic power, men are placed to buy businesses and make investments. As employees, men may find jobs in small-scale 'trafficking': meeting migrants at the airport, driving them to flats or workplaces, making arrangements for falsified documents. Women also try to get non-sex jobs in the industry, as cooks, cleaners, bar attendants and receptionists, and as madames and 'procurers'. The latter old word now includes taking trips to arrange for new migrants to travel abroad to work in the industry, often members of their own families and circles of friends and acquaintances. All this means that any gender analyses made of the sex industry need to be subtle and nuanced.

A word about numbers: I spoke of the overall picture because that is the only one we have. In the last few years, statistics on 'trafficked' women have been produced in a variety of uncontrolled ways, some based on NGO or police estimates based on direct contact, others on government numbers of deportations or overstayed visas. I have seen a statistic on the number of one country's women working in Europe turned into the number of its 'trafficked' women, with no explanation. Since by definition the majority of people working in illegal industries have not entered Europe directly, there can be no correct knowledge of how they got in, how they felt about it or how much control they had or did not have over their travel and employment. In gray economies, illegal migrants and sex workers are in the shadows. On top of this, the word 'trafficking' is not defined in the same way by projects doing the counting. Many projects who offer services to migrants meet only victims, people with terrible stories to tell, which they then extrapolate to everyone else. Those of us with long experience of interviewing migrants over time and across boundaries have learned to problematise the fantasy that there is a black-and-white situation going on, with some people completely free and choosing while others are totally unfree and coerced.

Lavishing love and caring, not sex

While a certain panic takes place related to 'trafficking' and 'prostitution', few people think twice about women working in the other widely available job for migrants, cleaning and maintaining European homes and families. In this area, feudal practices and exploitative working conditions are accepted without blinking, not only by wealthy and diplomatic families but also by those in which both partners go out to work. Live-in maids and carers routinely are expected to be available to work 12 to 18 hours a day, in a list of endless, sometimes pointless and often humiliating tasks. Maids are 'lent', like home appliances, to friends of employers. Women who have left their own parents and children behind are expected to lavish love and attention on their employers' children, relatives and even pets, and it is common for some member of the employing family to demand sexual intimacy with the maid, or offer extra benefits if it is provided. These conditions have been documented over and over, and yet no firestorm of outrage sweeps across any European country, and the domestic and caring sector remains largely unregulated.

Those who have friends who work in these sectors are aware that many women carry out both jobs; for example, domestic workers may travel from the suburbs to downtown on their afternoon off to do some kind of sex work. The former job pays unbelievably badly, the latter can pay extremely well; the former keeps one prisoner, many of the latter offer flexible schedules; the former may pay once a month, the latter, if it is street work, offers one of the few jobs in the world to pay instant cash and thus the possibility of buying food and taking it home the same day or sending it to help support one's own elderly relatives and babies.² In the case of people whose goal is making as much money as possible quickly, the way they make it is not the central issue. So domestics may do some sex work, and vice versa, yet commentators seem intent on maintaining the borders between two supposed groups, considering one downtrodden but still virtuous and perhaps 'naturally' domestic, while considering the other, now that 'fallen' is no longer a fashionable adjective, damaged victims or slaves.

Maintaining this kind of myth avoids the necessity to look at a variety of other points, notably the social context to which non-European migrants arrive. I joined the academy five years ago, in an attempt to understand why what Europeans say about these migrations differs so much from what migrants themselves say about what they are doing. I'm interested in why European families need or want so much domestic, caring and sexual service and how they think of their own needs; I've studied how the daily practices of those who condemn the exclusion that migrants suffer often reproduces their stigmatisation. In other words, I've tried to bring a little equilibrium to the gaze, so that it takes in the native's demand as well as the migrant's supply.

Dreams of getting ahead

For vast numbers of women in the world, paid jobs available in their own countries are domestic and sexual; since the same jobs are available and paid enormously better in Europe, travelling makes sense. Better wages mean the possibility of helping parents, sending a child to school, building a house or starting a business. But while 'poverty' and 'violence' are generally named as the determining factors in decisions to travel, many others exist. Home is not a lovely place for many people who may want to escape from repressive parents, boring boyfriends or bleak futures; the imagery of a luxurious, happy North swamps television and films everywhere. Why shouldn't the poor want to see it all for themselves? Potential migrants dream of seeing famous places, meeting new people, being thought beautiful, marrying, becoming independent, learning a new trade and being a tourist. These are the dreams of poor and not-so-poor girls from cultures around the world, including European girls. Valerie Walkerdine has criticised British middle-class horror at juvenile talent contests, noting that singing and dancing talents are among the few from which working-class girls are not almost inevitably excluded. The same holds for women from poorer countries who travel to Europe.

For most granted visas as dancers and artists, knowing that there will be a sexual aspect to their first European job does not mean there will be no other aspect to their future lives, nor does it signify a destiny that cannot be changed. Many, like the talent contestants, feel themselves to be dancers and artists. For others, domestic service may be an enormous step down from the kind of work they do in their own country, but they are willing to take it because of the differential in wages they can make, even as maids, in Europe. Or simply because they want to see a bit of the world. The difference is, if one is poor, these are not called holidays but must be accompanied by work. All women migrants are not uneducated, however; many have higher degrees and professions, yet they migrate and work commonly cleaning houses and in the sex industry.

Not so long ago, how people got to Europe didn't worry anyone; it was assumed that they got the money together somehow, took a bus, train, boat or plane, landed somewhere and had some kind of contacts. Until they tried to make money, asked for help or presented some kind of social problem, they were more or less invisible. Now, all the focus goes to this aspect of the process, which is complex, changes over time and cannot be summarised with a single word like 'trafficking'. People in general who are thinking of travelling to work look for information and contacts wherever they can, and a lot of luck enters into any agreement or 'package' they may buy or get into debt for. This is true for migrants who work in any job in the euphemistically labelled 'informal sector' of the economy.

Men, women and transsexuals alike, the decision taken to leave, will probably have to borrow money from someone; they will have to get the right papers for travelling and they will have to trust a series of people along the way. When difficulties arise, as happens often enough, outsiders expect the male traveller to overcome them and do not jump to conclusions that disasters have occurred. When difficulties arise for a female traveller, however, outsiders are now jumping consistently to the conclusion that they are catastrophic and that she will not be able to overcome them by herself. The fact that a particular kind of sexual exploitation is happening to a minority of migrant women — and receiving salacious attention from the media — leads to the infantilisation of vast numbers of others, who are then said to need 'protection'.³ This, all too often, leads to projects to put them in 'homes' before returning them to the country they left in the first place. And even when a migrant woman wants to escape exploitation, she doesn't usually see herself as permanently damaged by this sexual experience; her goal tends to be getting out of a bad situation and out from under inappropriate control. This does not necessarily mean getting out of sex work.

Gossip, deals and other 'informalities'

In many parts of the less rich world, and specially in countries that have been 'sending' migrants abroad for some years, knowledge networks abound with information on how to travel, where to go, how to get visas and work permits and who to trust in 'receiving' countries. Vocabulary may differ according to place and language, but it all comes down to the same thing: With Europe trying to 'close' its borders and tempers flaming among EU members over which countries are too 'soft' on immigration and too 'easy' to get into, people with contacts and inside knowledge in the informal economy are key players for those who are looking to travel to work. In an infinity of possibilities, people get in touch with-and are sought out by-intermediary agents. Some are family members and friends who have already travelled, others work freelance or are paid by a small group enterprise, while yet others are lovers who met mates while on holiday. Any of these intermediaries may have more or less benevolent intentions, be managing good or bad information and be trying to make too much money at the same time. In a sense, everyone without permission to work in Europe is in the same boat, so if I want to make money as a maid or sex worker and you want to make money helping me get access to those jobs, we are on the same general side, talking the language of how to skirt foreign boundary controls. The riskiness of looking for such helpful contacts, whether one is going to work in agriculture or sex clubs, derives from the impossibility of the traveller's controlling all the different stages of the trip or knowing personally all the people it will be necessary to contact along the way. Even the most conscientious traveller, and one who knows the right price for each component of the journey, may have to trust someone who doesn't deserve it, and this small failure may lead to small headaches or devastating misfortune.

The key factors for most trips are made of paper: passports with real or fictitious identities, visas, work permits and letters of support or sponsorship. The industry that fabricates these false documents grows in size and sophistication every day, and relies on the inside knowledge of embassy and interior ministry employees in all involved countries. Very often the media focus on 'traffickers' as individuals or gangs of men (invariably foreign) moving passive women around, but a large part of the work is done by these pieces of paper, to be shown by travellers at crucial (and nerve-wracking) moments. In this sense, those that work in the documents factory are also 'traffickers'. Any traveller knows one cannot simply get on an airplane and get off in Europe, and he or she probably knows there is a good chance that the documents to be shown are somehow dodgy. If part of the strategy is entrance via tourist visa, and the plan is to work on and overstay this visa, the traveller will find it difficult to later claim she was abused by 'traffickers'. This even when it is drastically true, because 'trafficking' laws construct women as either perfectly innocent or totally complicit in their fate. This image of passive victims abused by foreign gangs also erases the participation of family members and boy and girlfriends in these informal arrangements-a point at times overlooked by the enthusiasm to catch and punish all the opportunists involved. Often, migration projects involve several people in the same family.

A disproportionate amount of current media, government, feminist and NGO treatment of these situations-so variable, so dependent on luck-focusses on concepts impossible to define: whether migrants 'knew' they would be selling sex and whether they were 'forced', 'obliged', 'deceived' or 'coerced'. There's a kind of obsession with degrees of will and consent for women who do sex work that is not applied to any other person's situation, whether migrant or not. Yet studies with all types of migrants show that the kind of person who undertakes a migration is the kind who takes risks, who can live with not knowing everything that's going to happen and can go along with certain kinds of ambiguity. These qualities are very necessary when the problems of having to live with false documents, grey economies and partial cultural and linguistic knowledge begin. This isn't to say that people 'deserve' the bad things that happen to them but that if they are unlucky and get into trouble, they nearly always want to stay abroad, and often stay in the sex industry, hoping to pay off debts and make the trip worthwhile. Avoiding the police (now operating like a deportationist vice squad in many parts of Europe) and looking for better situations, they often stay on the move, continuing to rely on others to offer the services they need-documents, rides, introductions and hiding places. These others may be family, friends, new acquaintances or criminals: a vicious circle but a necessary one if they do not want to be deported or 'helped' to go back home. After a year or so of experience, many workers learn tricks of the trade and find tolerable situations, the object being, of course, to obtain the greatest amount of money for the littlest amount of work. The biggest practical problem they face concerns the shadowy nature of so many sex industry sites for the people that work in them, and the fact that they are unable to denounce bad or violent practices.

For some readers, the discussion of such everyday, practical difficulties may appear to deny profound ethical issues: the continuing patriarchal nature of life and terrible economic injustices that make the sex industry a viable option for large numbers of women. Some critics hear, in a pragmatic dealing with the situation such as mine, that I believe everything is fine, that women are 'choosing' what they do and that there are no tragedies happening. This is very far from what I believe, and I hope the deep work on gender and economic issues in our world will continue without stopping for as long as it takes to improve them. At the same time, there are many millions of people suffering in concrete ways that can be ameliorated by a variety of practical solutions which are also urgent and important.

Are these sectors really indefinable?

Service jobs in the formal sector are varied enough; one list of possibilities includes: Beauty Therapist, Cashier, Computer Salesperson, Embalmer, Florist, Funeral Director, Grave Digger, Hairdresser, Make-Up Artist, Nail Technician, Newsagent, Pharmacy Assistant, Retail Buyer, Retail Manager, Sales Assistant, Sales Representative, Service Station Attendant, Ticket Writer, Video Hire/Sales. But few of these are open to migrant women in Europe, who are instead offered what Saskia Sassen has called "a certain kind of labour".⁴ This statement remains about as descriptive as any to refer to the housework and 'emotional labour' carried out by women in general, which have resisted a multitude of attempts to define them and which are now becoming the speciality of migrant women. It's worth asking, as well, why the demand should be for women, particularly, to fulfil these roles: A migrant man presenting himself as a candidate for live-in domestic or caring work almost seems to be a deviant. The literature on an 'ethics of care' and 'sociology of emotions' does not agree so far as to whether women are somehow inherently better at caring. What is clear, however, is that societies widely believe that they are, across cultures; women are those who 'know how' to care; Joan Tronto has gone so far as to suggest that a "dearth of caretaking experiences makes privileged males morally deprived".⁵ Being morally privileged, then, contradictorily leads to being apportioned the least well-paid work in the least controlled employment sector in Europe, where feudalism and exploitation are routinely accepted.

A 1999 article in the New Statesman demonstrates how growth of the economy itself is judged on very partial statistics from only particular sectors, those deriving from "tax returns, VAT records, payroll data and company records. Illegal activities, involving cash-only transactions hidden from the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, do not show up" and cited Economic Trends as valuing such transactions at £700 million for stolen goods, £800 million for gambling, £9.9 billion for drug-dealing and £1.2 billion for 'prostitution'.⁶ How many of the myriad forms of the sex industry were included is not specified.

So far it has not been possible to integrate sex into other service discourses, a separation that forms part of the highly rigid manner in which migrant women workers are treated in Europe, by governments, feminists, NGOs and the press. Many theorists — within the sociology of work, for example — consider carers and domestic workers together, but only a few include sex workers with them. For those who put all three together, there exists a continuum of commercial opportunities involving intimacy; these include therapeutic massage, bartending, hairstyling, psychoanalysis, escort work and counselling students: "Though I would find the work of ministering to the sexual desires of strange men unappealing, I'm sure that many of the sex workers I've met would find my job, which involves ministering to the needs of often unprepared and unmotivated students, similarly unappealing".⁷ One intractable element to the debates, particularly the feminist, concerns the continued use of the word 'prostitution', though the sex industry has proliferated to the point where many of its jobs are far from resembling this classic term. Dancers, erotic telephone workers and performers in Internet peep shows, many of them never touched by paying clients — these are not 'prostitutes'. But the presence of any sex in jobs causes their exclusion from normalised discourses, even when workers are not migrants but young British students. This exclusion departs from assumptions about what sexual contact is supposed to be: the expression of love for a particular partner, something ineffable, more 'intimate' than anything else in the world. As far as employment opportunities for migrants go, while many don't particularly like sex work, they also don't like their other options. Deciding to adapt to a less than ideal situation is normal to human beings in all kinds of jobs.

While arguing about 'prostitution' continues, the day-to-day situation of hundreds of thousands (millions, worldwide) of people is not addressed in the practical terms necessary to improve their living conditions. Domestic and caring work are inextricably intertwined, and sex may be part of both of those or a second job for people doing them. To tackle the marginalisation of all such service jobs, it will be essential to stop fetishising sex and may be necessary to adopt a pragmatic policy of 'harm reduction'. This concept, now associated with distribution of needles and condoms to drug addicts and sex workers, can easily be expanded to include social and cultural concepts; in this way, while European societies argue about whether sex should ever be considered work or not, labour and civil protections can be granted to the human beings actually doing such jobs. Sex workers have formed their own organisations or unions in a variety of countries; some of the strongest are in the 'third world'.

The demand for all these 'services'

I do not advocate that these three occupations constitute some true category of labour, nor that they should be seen as 'the same', in any sense. I frame them together because they are the occupations solicited by Europeans willing to pay for them, and as such they constitute a genuine 'pull factor' for women, to use a term from classic migration theory. If this is so, then 'progressive' European discourses on various social themes fail to squarely address the contexts to which migrants arrive, not less important than the contexts they leave. We know there are occupations which, in general, Europeans prefer not to carry out, whether paid or not; or perhaps they would, if the pay and prestige were higher —this isn't clear. Various social changes help explain what this demand is about. Briefly, these involve family relations, gender and sexuality issues and attitudes about consumption.

In the traditional idea of the nuclear Western family, love, commitment, and sex were assumed — only in hegemonic discourses, to be sure — to be located there and only there. This idea, only a couple of hundred years old, has been modified since the 1960s, as sexual, gender and identity liberation movements have considerably transformed marriage's hegemony. Concepts of family now extend beyond the walls of houses and beyond the classic kinship relationships of blood and formal marriage, as relationships considered sexually and emotionally 'free' and 'equal' are idealised, those supposedly formed 'without interests' and which continue only as long as the two people involved (they are always two) feel fulfilled. For many people, however, this ideal does not exist or has failed, which means that sexual and emotional fulfilment is commonly sought outside marriage or 'couple' structures. We should not forget, as well, that the idea that sex is only acceptable when accompanied by 'love' is also a cultural construction, and that ethical relationships and gender equality are not guaranteed by the presence of love, marriage, children or any other cultural ideal.

Nowadays, when more and more European women are going out to work, we are seeing one kind of gender equality. But since more and more European men are not staying at home, and most men have not taken on more than minimal domestic responsibilities, this apparent equality has to be qualified. Assuming the demand remains steady for cleanliness, order and good eating inside the home, either women who work outside the house must do double labour, or someone must be hired to do the housework and caring. 'Equal' gender relations therefore may crucially rely on the employment of a third person. And while this in itself might not give cause for alarm, the nature of the typical domestic employment offer should. Yet in an increasingly common consumerist model of the labour market, the mere presence of supply and demand apparently absolves us of further thought.

The consumption model is dramatically reflected in concepts of entertainment and leisure. Not so long ago, going out for the evening referred mainly to men who went to have a drink at the neighbourhood bar while women and children stayed at home or close to the house, and an outing to the cinema or local park once a week was the norm. Now, however, a day's or evening's entertainment may include an immense proliferation of activities and places, as the leisure pages in any city's newspaper demonstrate. As for the idea of travel, at present no site is too far away or exotic to be considered, even for working-class people (if only 'once in a lifetime'). Apart from desires to rest and recreate, it is understood that travel is undertaken in order to observe or 'experience' people who live differently; this kind of consumption is generally approved. As the possible experiences that may be purchased have multiplied, so have attitudes about what may be conventionally bought. A wide range of activities have become potential consumer products, or watching other people carry them out has, so there is nothing mysterious in the proliferation of sexually oriented products and services along with everything else. Although this may be called a decline in moral standards, it is also clear that concepts have changed relating to what is moral, as more variety becomes accessible to the consumer's normal reach.

In the specific realm of sexual consumption, the Western ideal of sexual liberation has evolved from a general concept to a proliferation of specific ones: for women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, sadists, masochists and more. According to the liberation discourse, every human being ought (and has the 'right') to know him or herself intimately, both physically and emotionally. To attain this self-knowledge/discovery, experimentation is seen as necessary and praiseworthy. Since much experimentation is constructed as perverse or taboo within families, it is outside the family that a lot of it will inevitably take place. So the desire to leave home and family to relate intimately to other people is seen as positive in many contexts. Where such experiences are paid for, moral condemnation is resounding, but we should not fail to notice the fetishising of money that is taking place here, as well. Why, with all the valuing of liberation should the commercial aspect make us so crazy? Efforts to understand what is going on for consumers continue to be frustrated by this kind of self-censorship, so that the point of view of clients is nearly always excluded. Despite their obviously great numbers, they tend to be condemned or dismissed as 'perverted' and all kinds of sex work reduced to undifferentiated sex 'acts'. For those who study sexual cultures, this attitude represents a kind of fundamentalism.

Sex industry sites do not serve solely sexual desires; rather, its clientele drink, eat, take drugs, get together with friends, do business, impress partners, watch films and travel, as well as experiment with different sexual partners and services that range from a massage on the beach to a session of hard domination and from a blowjob inside a car to the company of an elegant person at an expensive dinner. Research with male clients in quite different (but equally patriarchal) cultures reveals that drinking and homosocialising are central for many, with the presence of decorative females and symbolic wealth more auxiliary elements. That a range of nationalities, 'looks', music and cocktails should be offered in such milieux is not surprising.

Earlier, I advocated for a nuanced gender analysis of the 'supply' side of the sex industry; this is also necessary for the 'demand' side. Unsurprisingly, men's control of most of the buying power in the world is reflected in their overwhelming predominance as consumers of sexual services. In most cultures, men's libido is considered higher than women's and their promiscuity is pardoned or said to be natural, so the visible demand for sex services — those who are seen or 'caught' — is male. But another kind of demand, less visible and obvious, does exist, as women increasingly pay for sex on holiday and via the Internet, which destabilises the routine kind of analysis that puts men always on the buying side of the situation.

Crossing the border into diaspora

With so many possible aspects of women's migrations to research and consider, the reductionist debate on 'trafficking' is lamentable. When the subject is not a minority of women who are duped, sequestered and enslaved, we should be able to give credit where it is due to women and transsexuals, as well as men, who dare to make decisions to better their lives by leaving their homes to work abroad, no matter what kind of work they have to do. Societies that pride themselves on having 'advanced' toward gender equality have no excuse for continuing to consider a man's decision to travel 'natural' while considering a non-European woman's decision a shame, as though her proper place were at home. The history of the feminist role in colonialism is well documented; now it is time to recognise that it is going on today, this time inside Europe. Those who denounce 'prostitution' sometimes talk as though migrant women were carrying water on their heads only yesterday, whereas most have lived in large postmodern cities in their own countries. This tendency infantilises non-European women in the name of protecting and 'saving' them. Similarly, theorists of diaspora rarely mention domestic workers and never sex workers. Is this because they are not interesting, or is it delicacy, a desire not to (further) 'stigmatise' them? Frankly, being disappeared is worse than being stigmatised in many ways, particularly where one's experiences should be central to the theories and phenomena being described.

A concern with 'trafficking' is understandable, but every NGO, journalist and feminist in Europe does not need to storm into the field, denouncing wrongs and offering to 'save' women working in sex. Accusing immoral Others is, after all, one of life's easier tasks, while dealing with the variety, complexity and ambiguity of most migrant women's projects is quite difficult. Here, there are no easy answers or quick fixes, and a lot of reasons to look at ourselves — as hard as that can be.

Notes

1. Cynthia Enloe, 1991. "'Womenandchildren': Propaganda Tools of Patriarchy." In Mobilizing Democracy: Changing the US Role in the Middle East, G. Bates, ed. Monroe ME: Common Courage Press.
2. In some work sponsored by governments, such as the Philippine, much of the money paid to domestic servants goes directly back to national bank accounts without women's seeing it.
3. I refer to the 'worst-case' scenario of a woman who had no idea sex would form any part of her future work, who did not know any of her papers had been fixed and who wants to escape from her situation at all cost, including returning home without making any money in Europe. Many who work in victim-services have met only such victims; those who have done research among migrants in general find a wide array of experiences, with more implication on the part of the traveller in her future situation.
4. "From Household to Workplace: Theories and Survey Research on Migrant Women in the Labor Market," International Migration Review, xviii, 4, (1984):1148.
5. Joan Tronto, "Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care." Signs, 12, 4, (1987): 652.
6. Kellner, Peter, "We are richer than you think" New Statesman, (19 February, 1999): 21.
7. Laurie Shrage, "Are Sex Worker Rights Human Rights?" Paper presented at Prostitution in a Global Context, Aalborg, Denmark, (November 1999): 13.