Stella Marr: “How the Sex Industry Threatens Survivors Speaking Out while Pimps Pose as Sexworker Activists”

Pimps put up a fog of propaganda around what they do, but they can’t fool prostitution survivor Stella Marr. Here’s an excerpt from her invaluable post of June 28:

Pimp-affiliated groups such as the IUSW, SPOC, SWOP USA, COYOTE, the Erotic Services Providers’ Union and PONY must disband and reform as new organizations that are free of “management” members. Any organization claiming to advocate for women in prostitution that receives federal money or collects donations on our behalf must sever ties with all groups where this conflict of interest exists. Otherwise they are supporting the suppression of survivor voices.

Click for the complete post

See also:

The New Yorker: “The Countertraffickers”
Traffickers have become smarter…about recruitment, increasingly using a technique known, with some dissonance, as “happy trafficking”. (Anti-trafficking organizations object to the phrase.) Happy trafficking involves a Faustian deal. Victims who have worked off their “debts” (invented by pimps, arbitrarily increased by “fines” and alleged costs, and fully reinstated, if not increased, with each resale) are permitted to go home on the condition that they send back someone else–or two or three someone elses–to take their place. In order to make the sales pitch persuasive, they must represent their own emigration experience as having been a positive one. They may sometimes admit that it involved prostitution, but never that it was an onerous, degrading job in which, say, they were given no choice about the number of clients, what sexual services to provide, or whether condoms would be used…