The modern pariahs

Jan 17, 2009 Editorial

‘Branded in law, stigmatised for confounding distinctions between love and work and pathologised in terms of disease, sex workers negotiate a highly particular status as public women in London today,’ writes anthropologist Sophie Day in her powerful book, “On the Game”.
Her research highlights the struggle for personhood on the part of commercial sex workers or CSWs in her part of the world, illuminating widespread fictions about normal or proper behaviours.
A professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College in London, Day provides an ethnographic account of prostitutes and prostitution in the West, especially in London and Europe. She followed the lives of individual sex workers for over fifteen long years and her research work details their attempts to manage their lives against a backdrop of social condemnation. The period of her research was one of substantial change within the sex industry in the West.Through the lens of public health, economics, criminalisation and human rights, she explores how individual CSWs live in public and in private. She brings a unique perspective to her work — as both an anthropologist and the founder of the renowned Praed Street Project, set up in 1986, as a referral and support centre for London prostitutes.
“On the Game” makes for rather enlightening reading if one is to compare the local sex industry – yes we have one – to that in Western Europe. The striking similarities between the two take one slightly aback, and rightfully so. In Guyana today, prostitution speaks to the indiscretion of boundaries where matter is out of place, where the inside is placed outside and the very word — prostitute — is taboo.
But the commercial sex industry in Guyana is thriving nevertheless. It is a sector which is as much a part of our society as just about everything else, and for that reason it is being (or should be) researched by the government, NGOs as well as international donors who are working towards the betterment of the health, education and work environment of the sex workers. Assessing the size of the local sex market is difficult because the trade is largely illegal. Unlike Asia, for instance, where according to a WHO report the sex market is highly segmented with one catering to foreigners and another for locals, the former market here is relatively small and the domestic market much larger but far less visible. What is interesting is that neither of these markets is sealed.
The hypocrisy also persists in the West. In the UK legislation dating from the 1950s provides a clear example of the contradictions and peculiarities of the language of public and private that is applied to CSWs. ‘In permitting prostitution only in private, a double standard was upheld that allowed men to purchase services privately in a domain that, for women, constituted public work,’ writes Day, highlighting the rights of CSWs and their vulnerabilities.
The situational analysis presented in her book is very close to that of Guyana, if not worse. Prostituted women and children, locally and in the West, live lives of unlimited exposure. They are constantly vulnerable and exposed to STIs, drugs, homelessness, malnutrition, murder, physical and sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, verbal harassment, isolation and hiv/aids. Women in both parts of the world suffer physical, social, emotional, and psychological damage due to the work they do. The only aspect in which the West differs and is a tad bit better is the quality of community and human rights services. Though even their women and children suffer physical injuries, organ damage, infertility and high-risk pregnancies, the fact that CSWs have certain rights and that they are recognised in the West makes them less vulnerable as compared to sex workers in Guyana. Sex workers in Guyana are isolated from mainstream society; they miss out on a normal socialisation process and have difficulty establishing intimate relationships. They are the modern Pariahs. Due to the cultural and religious stigma, psychological effects manifest in depression, drug and alcohol abuse, anxiety and suicidal behaviours.
After all, prostitution is not meant to empower women and children. ‘It was never the intention of pimps and tricks to liberate women socially, economically, sexually, or politically,’ writes Day. But whatever discomfort commercial sex causes, it should at least be clear that ‘private prostitution’, ‘common women’, and all those other fictions of law, policy and prejudice have histories that we actively perpetuate by failing to challenge them.

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