Introduction

Investigated in terms of a broad perspective that takes into account concrete historical and geographical particularities, the concepts of coercion/voluntarism as they apply to sex work appear to raise more questions than they answer. In this study, I intend to scrutinize the concepts as they have evolved and been invoked historically, and through an exploration of how they have been brought up in debates and lived out on the ground in disparate time periods and urban settings around the world, I hope to problematize the notions and examine the inner contradictions they reproduce. Coercion/voluntarism are intimately bound up with the issues of violence and slavery, which are problematic concepts in themselves, but still we must take those into account as well in the construction of a theoretical approach capable of teasing out complexity rather than essentializing moments of rupture and continuity. For me, the first question that comes to mind when thinking about these concepts is: How useful are they as a means of thinking about sex work? If all forms of sold sex represent acts of male violence, as some abolitionists argue via a singular model of coercion, are there no spaces at all for agency in the various ways that sex work suffuses the urban spaces of cities around the world? Conversely, if we posit a dichotomous coercion/voluntarism model in thinking about the sexual economy, an approach that recognizes agency but also the reality of force, what nuances might be elided? To begin an enquiry into these issues, I intend to examine how these concepts evolved and have been employed and discuss how they have impacted legislation and the people those laws target. By taking a broad, global approach, I think it is important for us to ask: Is this model perhaps a western notion that still today propagates latent imperialist modes of thinking? Through an examination of its inner workings in colonial and post-colonial settings, in addition to the “western world”, I think it is important to also ask: What are the moral underpinnings of the supposed coercion/voluntarism divide, and have these led to a conceptual bias that leads to blind spots when dealing with sold sex as an aspect of social history? Is it possible to “rescue and rehabilitate” this concept? Should we even try?

Legal Constructs of Prostitution

The idea of coercion/voluntarism as a popular discourse about sold sex developed in western Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concept emerged along with the interrelated issues of entrenched modes of capitalist production and labour, pervasive processes of medicalization of society and urban spaces, shifts in conceptualizations of the relationship between the individual and society, and increasingly powerful feminist movements. It is within this context that the issue of sex work arose as a concern of public debate and government legislation as women began to participate in greater and greater numbers in wage labour. Additionally, developments in transport led to large-scale migrations for work, leading to anxieties about women’s movement and place in society. Additionally, disease was identified as a threat to urban environments, and prostitutes were vilified as a critical vector in the spread of venereal diseases, which were perceived to be existential threats to the state. This also went hand-in-hand with shifts of what were perceived to be “proper” expressions of sexuality which proliferated along with an explosion of discourses on sex from the points of view of such fields as psychology, biology, sociology, and anthropology. Feminist movements, revolted by the state-sanctioned system of registered prostitution that led to the forced registration of women selling sex, pushed for the abolition of regulationism and, ultimately, as the social purity movement gained political clout, sought the eradication of all forms of sold sex. Adopting a similarly purist stance, Christian missionaries abroad set themselves the task of “saving” women through missions and interventions. Taking up prostitution as a “social affliction”, researchers over the past two centuries have set about trying to understand this “problem”, and the predominant analytical models that emerged were coerced prostitution and its hotly debated opposite, voluntary sex work. This either/or understanding of sold sex would go on to inform how sold sex has been discussed to date, but how did these concepts emerge and in what ways have they impacted how we perceive sold sex?

The urban overviews for this project and other historical research on the issue of sex work indicate that in early modern Europe ¹ there was a general pattern in which sold sex was perceived to be more or less as a “necessary evil”, and although there were bouts of moral fervour accompanied by efforts to eradicate it, ² in general the authorities were content with maintaining a modicum of control over this “sin” via forms of registration and taxation. In early modern Tuscany, for example, there were various conceptualizations of what a “prostitute” was, ranging from streetwalkers to brothel prostitutes and parlour whores to courtesans, and authorities were often asked to determine whether or not women engaging in promiscuous behaviour “counted as public prostitutes”. But rather than being perceived by the lower classes as a crime or a sin per se, it appears that prostitution was often seen as a “rational strategy” for survival. ³ Similarly, in early modern Bruges, there was ambiguity surrounding terminology; the terms “whore” and “dishonest women” did not just refer to women who sold sex, but also to women who committed adultery and sexually active women who were unmarried. ⁴ Similar terminological vagueness was common in early modern London. ⁵ By the mid-eighteenth century, the notion of the “sinfulness” of sold sex carried out by “bad women” began shifting towards discussions of it as a “condition” ⁶ along with medicalizing discourses on sexuality that sought to sequester prostitution in regulated zones to protect society from the “moral and physical” danger that regulationists claimed it posed for society. In this process, prostitution as a term of legal jurisprudence emerged. The creation of “the prostitute” as a body subject to state laws and as an object of scientific enquiry involved a conceptual shift from her as a “bad woman” to either a “victim” or a “sexual deviant”, depending on whether she was perceived to be a victim of patriarchal and capitalist violence (the feminist and abolitionist claim) or “genetically predisposed” to sexual perversion (the regulationist argument); both of these conceptualizations, of course, centred on notions about coercion and voluntarism.

The advent of the “victim” concept was predicated upon two mutually self-supporting ideas promoted by nineteenth and early twentieth century abolitionists. First, many abolitionists and feminists claimed that chastity was a characteristic of women and it should also be promoted among men, who were thought of as having the potential to be predatory. Secondly, it was claimed that no woman could willingly sell her body for sex. This move involved the replacement of the dualistic categories of “whore” versus “sexually virtuous woman” with “good woman” and “good woman-but-fallen-victim” stripped of agency, with men positioned as the active elements leading to her “demise”. In contrast, proponents of state-regulated prostitution argued that women who persisted in engaging in sold sex were sexually deviant by nature and that this deviance was often hereditary, thus effecting a shift from the notion of the “bad woman” to a “deviant” which the state needed to control.

“White Slavery” and Narratives of Victimhood

Contested Hegemonies: The Paradox of the Agentic “Victim”

Following World War i, the “racially charged term white slavery was dropped from the parlance of the League of Nations” ¹⁹ to be replaced with the term “trafficking”, but the discourse of the victimization of women who sell sex was retained. And the victim’s dark counterpart, the impossible “voluntary” prostitute continued her shunted existence in the eyes of the law, subject to state violence, incarceration, and deportation in the case of migrants—as is the case in most countries today. International decrees have often retained an obsession with the idea of the “victim”. In 1910, the same year in which the International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic was promulgated as an expansion of legislation drafted in 1904, the United States passed the Mann Act, which initiated criminal penalties for individuals caught in the transportation of women across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. However, the majority of people convicted under the law were women voluntarily engaging in sex work, not procurers (as a reflection of the racial aspect of discourses on “white slavery”, the law was also used to charge non-white men with the “crime” of having relations with white women). ²⁰ This is the grey area inhabited by “bad” women who were found, in fact, to not be “victims of the slave trade” but rather women whose sexuality transgressed moral and ethical boundaries.

While the agreements dating from 1904 and 1910 did not conflate “white slavery” with prostitution, in 1933 the League of Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women was inherently abolitionist, as was the League’s Draft Convention for Suppressing the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1937) which was intended to fill the gap in the existing conventions by protecting adults of either sex against procuration, even when they consented and were not taken abroad; this would later constitute the basis of the un Convention promulgated in 1949. The agreement dating from 1933 urged countries to actively punish “any person who, in order to gratify the passions of another person, procures, entices or leads away, even with her consent, a woman or girl of full age for immoral purposes to be carried out in another country.” ²¹ Perpetuating this discourse, in 1949 the United Nations issued the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and Exploitation of Prostitution of Others, an abolitionist document which promoted the punishment of all parties involved in the facilitation of prostitution even if there is consent. ²² Following the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the increased liberalization of economies around the world in the 1980s, large-scale international migration by both women and men has gathered pace, and correspondingly there has been a resurgence in concerns about the movement of women’s bodies across national borders. It has been argued that, “As in the earlier spate of interest in ‘white slavery’ in the early 1900s, concerns about women’s movement, women’s sexuality, women’s place in society, and women’s bodies, rather than changes in trafficking itself or some objective interest in harm to women, are driving the international focus on trafficking.” ²³ Not unexpectedly, the United Nations has also taken up the issue, which has been marked by fierce debate on the nature of women’s agency in migration.

As the above overview indicates, there are basically two approaches to the issue of coercion/voluntarism as regards sold sex. The first, as espoused by the hrc, promotes a dualistic model in which women can voluntarily engage in sex work as a form of labour, but they can also be subject to coercion and exploitation. In contrast, pro-abolitionist groups such as the catw employ a singular model of coercion in which voluntarism is ideologically impossible, as they claim that all forms of prostitution represent patriarchal violence against women; in this model, “trafficked” women, whether or not they consciously consent to migration for sex work, are to be treated as victims. The latter approach has the effect of stripping women who engage in sex work of agency, while at the same time hyperscrutinizing sex work and generating discourses on migration that reproduce notions of “male agency” and “female vulnerability”.

Post-colonialism: Moral Authority and “Unfree” Bodies

Problematics: A Way Forward?

A more nuanced framework for thinking about coercion/voluntarism seems to be needed here. It has been argued that accounts of sold sex should be viewed as “a continuum of forced and voluntary decisions” ⁴¹ and that in current protocols there is assumed to be “a neat line of demarcation between oppositional categories of migration—voluntary and consensual versus involuntary and non-consensual migration—an assumption that research shows to vastly oversimplify the systems and processes that facilitate irregular migration in the real world.” ⁴² So, in light of this need for a sufficiently nuanced approach that is sensitive to the cultural and temporal variations in discursive practices of sold sex and the myths and discourses they have produced, it will be helpful to read the overviews created for this project with the following questions in mind: Just how is sold sex defined—or better yet, what particular understandings of sold sex have been produced in cities around the world in the past four centuries—and how does the concept of coercion/voluntarism fit in (or not fit in) with these conceptualizations?

But before addressing the overviews, there is one last issue that must be addressed: How has it been determined that states of coercion/voluntarism occur? Ever since sold sex came to be constructed as an extremely politicized and polarized object of “scientific” scrutiny in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first by regulationists and then by abolitionist groups and subsequent organizations including, but of course not limited to, the League of Nations and un, there has been an overwhelming concern (bordering on an obsession with the fetishized body of the “victim”) with compiling statistics about why individuals have engaged in sold sex and how many are doing so. Often, the motivating factor is to “prove” something, to “find sensationalist stories that grab the attention of readers and legislators”, ⁴³ but sensational stories function by smoothing over complexity and ambiguity in favour of black and white depictions of so-called “facts”. It has also been pointed out that the figures produced by different sources “vary significantly, and these discrepancies in data reflect the political convictions and motivations that shape and generate such investigations.” ⁴⁴ Additionally, “many researchers may feel pressure from colleagues and activists to declare ‘whose side’ they take in relation to prostitution and trafficking”, and organizations providing funding for research also tend to support one view over the other (i.e., all forms of sold sex as coercion/violence versus sex work that can be voluntary as well as forced). ⁴⁵ And of course the theoretical approach that is used (for example trauma theory, human rights, migration, sexology, legal aid) will determine the types of questions that are asked and how they are perceived by respondents. ⁴⁶

As the discussion above indicates, the issue of coercion/voluntarism is problematic at numerous levels, from the ideological to the statistical. Bearing these difficulties in mind, however, and allowing them to highlight points of difference and similarity in the nuances of the discursive production of sold sex across time and geographies, will permit a reading of prostitution as a highly complex social phenomenon embedded in contested notions of women’s sexual agency. And, just what prostitution means is at the heart of the matter of coercion/voluntarism. One of the most striking things that emerges from the overviews is that sold sex often appears to be a fluid part of urban environments, not always perceived as a full-time “occupation” and often differing from western practices of sold sex from which emerged the coercion/voluntarism model.

Imperialisms of Sold Sex

Although the early modern Ottoman era bears numerous similarities as regards sold sex to what was happening contemporaneously in Europe, the historical outcome offers striking differences. In pre-modern Cairo (prior to colonial control), sold sex had a public presence that was tolerated and subject to governmental controls and taxation, as well as policing within the urban environment. Although they were not part of the guild system, women who sold sex were unofficially recognized but still, as in Europe, they were a marginalized group of people working in a highly informal sector that occasionally was subject to repressive government measures. ⁵⁰ Sold sex in Ottoman Istanbul presents similar patterns. Although the taxation of sold sex was abolished by the authorities in the sixteenth century, it was more or less tolerated until the nineteenth century, when the municipal authorities initiated a system of forced registration. There were periods in which the authorities actively sought out and banished women engaging in sold sex, along with the men who were caught with them, but these were generally times of social strain and women selling sex were an easy target for authorities seeking to root out the “moral corruption” of society. Pressure to eliminate prostitution from the streets of Istanbul increased throughout the nineteenth century, most likely as a reaction against “westernizing” reforms, increased social upheaval, and the spreading belief that prostitution was a western import, and discourses on sold sex became increasingly bound up with competing forms of nationalism as the Ottoman Empire slowly disintegrated. ⁵¹ Unlike in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, large-scale public discussions of “victims” did not emerge in Cairo and Istanbul, and correspondingly, nor were there large-scale projects to “rehabilitate” women who sold sex. The “necessary bad woman” seems to have remained just that. Although systems of regulated prostitution were implemented in both cities, there was not a powerful backlash against them as a form of patriarchal violence. There were active women’s movements in Cairo and Istanbul that denounced the regulatory system, but they lacked the political traction to push their views through the newly founded Turkish government in Istanbul, or through the colonial government in Cairo. While sex work was taken up as an object of “scientific knowledge” in early twentieth century Istanbul (primarily by male authorities), the abolitionist model of “coercion” did not become entrenched ⁵² and the regulationist system has remained in place in Turkey.

While sold sex in pre- and early-modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire may have shared common characteristics as regards perceptions of sold sex as a more or less “tolerable evil”, a different picture regarding notions of “coercion/voluntarism” emerges in Lagos (and across Nigeria), India, and Shanghai. For several places it has been suggested that European forms of prostitution did not have an historical precedent and were in fact a colonial import. ⁵³ Within the tolerated courtesan practices of Calcutta and Shanghai, and within traditions in the area of precolonial Nigeria as regards autonomous female sexuality, the coercion/voluntarism dichotomy does not appear to historically fit with local practices. It seems, however, that the colonial introduction of regulated systems of licensed brothels and subsequent abolitionist legislation on trafficking have reproduced the coercion model and its incumbent violence against women who sell sex, regardless of whether they are victims of deception/coercion or voluntary sex workers, and the same holds true around the world.

The Power to Wound: Violence and Bodily Rights

In the overviews for this project, the theme of violence appears often, particularly as regards state authorities. With the widespread implementation of regulation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ⁶⁰ the police were granted wide-ranging powers to detain women suspected of “illicit” behaviour, which could be broadly interpreted, resulting in increased violence against women suspected of or actually engaging in sold sex. ⁶¹ Anti-trafficking laws, which similarly grant broad powers to state authorities, have also resulted in widespread violence against sex workers at the hands of those who are supposed to defend human rights. ⁶² Naturally this has led to sex workers’ suspicion of law enforcement officers, and in this disempowered position, individuals who sell sex are unable to apply to the authorities when they have suffered at the hands of their clients. ⁶³

The violence associated with anti-trafficking legislation is predicated upon morally-charged discussions of just who should be accorded the rights of a “victim” of trafficking. As Doezema argues, “…women who knowingly migrate to work in the sex industry and who may encounter exploitation and abuse are not considered to have a legitimate claim to the same sorts of human rights protections demanded for ‘trafficking victims’.” ⁶⁴ So in order to be accorded human rights as a migrant, first an individual must prove that she did not consent to sex work, and secondly that she was subject to suffering. It has also been pointed out that violence has been utilized as a sensationalist discursive tool in constructing notions of victimization; the more violence that has occurred, the more entrenched the concept of the victim becomes: “The construction of a ‘victim’ who will appeal to the public and policy makers demands that she be sexually blameless.” ⁶⁵ The ultimate form of violent coercion is thus the enslavement of another human, and this shunts aside any and all notions of voluntarism. ⁶⁶

Slavery and Sex Work

Elusive Definitions: Just Who is a Sex Worker?

It is precisely the flux of sex work—in other words, a continuum of practices—that defies neat classification. In Shanghai, for example, there are seven “quasi-official categories” used for defining sold sex. ⁷⁹ It has been noted that in Bolivia, one form of sex work involves the distribution of flyers to advertise, but even within that approach, various practices occur with differing levels of exploitation: “These ‘small ads’, which include photos of naked women and telephone numbers, may be a front for women working independently, either alone or with other women, or negotiated by police or pimps. On the whole, they reveal the existence of women seeking to leave street prostitution, whilst also hinting at a reality far more complex than the one-dimensional concept of sexual exploitation…” ⁸⁰ It was noted that in Lagos multiple forms of sold sex interweave throughout the urban geographies of the city: “High class prostitutes or sex workers are mostly young women with more than secondary schooling, often in university or other tertiary institutions like polytechnics”, while less educated women are more likely to participate in higher-risk sexual services as a survival strategy. ⁸¹ In Singapore, as in many other cities in the world, “freelancers” operate in such places as nightclubs, karaoke bars, and strip clubs, ⁸² but this may not be perceived as a full-time, life-long occupation. Increasingly, the internet has become a commonly used means for sex workers to attract clients. While this has opened up ways for sex workers to work independently, it can also be involved in practices of exploitation by third parties, a reflection of the fact that women who sell sex even within the same city and through the same media can occupy radically different positions as regards autonomy and control over their income. It should also be pointed out that not all women engaging in the barter of sex for material gain perceive themselves as prostitutes, as in the case of female university students in Nigeria taking up “runs” ⁸³ or rural women seeking access to networks of empowerment through sex. ⁸⁴ Admittedly, while this brief survey of practices of sex work is by no means exhaustive, it does indicate the broad continuum of practices of sold sex that exists and the spaces for voluntarism and coercion that are produced therein.

Another aspect of this continuum that should be mentioned here is the temporal fluidity that tends to be a hallmark of the sex industry. As the urban overviews indicate, while it is taken up as a long-term survival strategy, a significant number of individuals who engage in sex work have seen it in varying ways. Some see it as a temporary means to supplement their existing income, ⁸⁵ accumulate capital for entrepreneurial ventures, ⁸⁶ improve their social position, ⁸⁷ participate in global consumer culture, ⁸⁸ liberate themselves from patriarchal systems of power or familial exploitation and seek financial independence, ⁸⁹ meet potential marriage partners, ⁹⁰ or any number of combinations of the above motivations, thus problematizing the singular coercion model even further. Discussions in the overviews on rescue and rehabilitation are also revealing in this manner, indicating that “catching victims” ⁹¹ in the sex industry and “rehabilitating” them often results in prison-like living conditions, violence, and inappropriate solutions that ignore the underlying economic disparities that create situations in which sex work can be just one choice among none, or a means of achieving desired ends with varying ranges of freedom of choice. ⁹² As the overview on Lagos notes, “The extent to which coercion or choice determines a prostitute’s sexual activity is dependent on the position she occupies in the hierarchy of sex work.” In this way, the question of coercion is problematized by class: “the freedom of ‘choice’ is not so free but can only be exercised by a select few”, as poverty places strict limitations on the options that are available whereas higher levels of education and access to networks of power increase a sex worker’s ability to negotiate with clients. ⁹³

Conclusion

Approached in light of these issues, it becomes clear that the array of practices of sold sex in cities around the world cannot be neatly fitted into a dualistic either/or model of coercion and voluntarism, much less be accounted for with a western-based abolitionist framework that denies any space for agency at all. As the overviews and other research have indicated, migrating women often know they are going to be involved in sex work, ⁹⁴ but much of the time the working conditions they find themselves in are far worse than anticipated. But whether migrant or not, sex workers are vulnerable to multiple layers of coercion and exploitation that can coincide with voluntary sold sex, ⁹⁵ and this must be taken into consideration along with cases in which women are forced either by severe economic duress and/or third parties, including families, to engage in prostitution. ⁹⁶ In this way, it appears that it would be more useful in social history to think of sexual labour as a field in which varying degrees of coercion can simultaneously occupy the same space as agentic labour in a continuum that is in constant flux spatially and temporally. The conflation of trafficking and “sexual slavery” so commonly found in the media and legislation, however, seeks to smooth over this complexity, leading to a situation in which sex workers are awkwardly articulated as “criminal-victims” under laws ostensibly put into place to protect them and thus subjected to even greater violence. ⁹⁷ The overviews also suggest that far from seeing themselves as “enslaved”, some women take up sexual labour as a means of achieving financial independence and liberation from male oppression, thus further problematizing the abolitionist-social purist notion that prostitution is the ultimate expression of patriarchal violence via exploitative coercion.

As a final note, perhaps we should consider just what hidden historical baggage the term “consent” might be carrying with it and what implications that could have on future research into histories of sexual labour. In current legislation and debates over the rights of sex workers, consent is a pivotal term; abolitionists argue that regardless of consent, prostitution is a breach of human rights, while sex workers and their supporters argue that so long as an individual consents to sex work, it should be treated (and protected under law) as any other form of labour and that victims of coercion should be protected as well. A noteworthy point here is that in discourses on labour, the issue of consent has been hyper-scrutinized in terms of female sold sex, not other forms of work. We do not speak of whether or not men consent to cross borders to find employment, nor if women consent to be employed as domestic workers, whether migratory or not; there is also a rather notable silence on the issue of queer sex workers in the coercion/voluntarism debates, likely because taking into account same-gender sold sex would destabilize the argument that constructs prostitution as the violent male penetration of women. It would appear that the sticking point here is an underlying moral prejudice about hetero female sexuality and how it “should” be practised. This is evident in the ways that alleged victims of trafficking are accorded human rights, whereas women who voluntarily migrate for sex work are not—they are “bad women” who “get what they deserve”. Also at work here is the conceptual blurring of the line between promiscuity and prostitution, as evident in such expressions as “whore” and “puta”, and ways that “suspect” women are subject to harassment by police, reformers, or otherwise. This is significant: the underlying idea here is a moralistic valuation which states that, along the lines of the anthropology of the sexual deviant, if a woman agrees to sell sex (or be promiscuous for that matter) there is “something wrong with her”. Seen in this way, the idea of consent is saturated in socially constructed notions of “proper” expressions of sexuality, and as such carries with it prejudices that impact how we think about sexual labour. Perhaps we need to “[overcome] the ‘voluntary/forced’ dichotomy, and the concept of consent implicated in it, that the myth of trafficking both depends on and propagates”. ⁹⁸ In this way, we may be better equipped to undertake social histories of sexual labour and avoid the conceptual traps that our tools of analysis might lay for us.