Intimacy, love, freedom, heartbreak, separation and migration

By Kate Hawkins

A conference participant views the 'Queer Crossings' poster

Sitting in front of a South African poster on ‘queer crossings’ was one of my highlights from the recent Migrating Out Of Poverty conference in Singapore. It made me happy that one of my pet subjects – sexuality – was being addressed by such a stellar line-up of researchers studying gender, poverty and migration linkages.

I find it difficult to think about gender without a corresponding focus on sexuality as the two things so often intersect in interesting and important ways. It is particularly pertinent when we look at issues of women’s empowerment:

If for example, you look at women’s empowerment through a sexuality lens, you see a more complete and realistic picture of a woman: not a victim, nor an end-product ‘empowered’ woman, but a woman with a complex and changing life. You see a woman whose well-being depends, among other things, on making choices about her own body, about pleasure and about her own sexuality. You also see a woman who lives within or perhaps challenges the confines of social pressure and expectations about her behaviour. A woman’s sexuality and identity can affect many aspects of her life including her work and her means to earn a living, her family relations, her ability to move around in public, her opportunities to participate in formal and informal politics, and her access to education.

It is also a useful way of thinking about gender in terms of men and people who define themselves as something beyond/outside the binary of man and woman. (Even Facebook now has a list of over 58 gender options that people can choose from to describe themselves. Some of us scholars are lagging behind on this score!)

Sexuality came up in many of the sessions at the conference – even if it was rarely used as a frame of analysis.

Poverty, precarity and sexuality

Susie Jolly has written about the importance of housing to the realisation of sexual rights and desires and the constraining effects of poverty. This seemed relevant to some of the examples of migrant life spoken about at the conference. Trond Waage’s film, Les Mairuuwas, followed migrants from the Central African Republic in Northern Cameroon who were working as water carriers. One character didn’t see the point of a home, or felt that it was an unnecessary use of resources. But when he moved in to a room he realised that he had invested in the community and it also gave him the opportunity to have a sexual relationship. We heard from many presenters at the conference about the (inappropriate/inadequate) housing conditions of migrant workers. Some were living in their workplace with employers, particularly domestic workers. It would be interesting to better understand the effects of these living and working arrangements on migrants’ abilities to form intimate relationships and the wider effects on their lives.

‘Dangerous’ sexualities and the female migrant

There is a prevailing narrative about the sexual vulnerability of female migrants which was echoed in some of the discussions at the meeting and the presentation on employment brokers was particularly chilling in this regard. However speakers also pointed to the way that female migrants are often stigmatised on the grounds of their sexuality – which is imagined as undisciplined and unruly when far from home.

In a memorable talk about young women from Zimbabwe Stanford Mahati quoted one boy as saying ‘Good girls do not cross the border’. Mahati’s analysis of humanitarian workers’ formal and informal discourse around working migrant girls showed that they were often labelled as ‘promiscuous’, ‘lacking in morals’ and ‘far from innocent’. Meanwhile Ishred Binte Wahid spoke about notions of ‘purity’ in relation to Bangladeshi women migrants who travelled to work in the Gulf States. Female migrants found that religious piety (for example wearing the burkah) was a way of counteracting negative aspersions about what may have happened in their sexual lives whilst they were away from their families. She questioned the notion of female migration as inherently empowering and pointed to how it could sometimes reinforce patriarchal norms.

We heard from South African sex workers in the MOVE visual exhibition. Sex workers are arguably some of the most maligned ‘bad women’ in patriarchal societies’ bogus hierarchy of womanhood. Visual methods enabled them to take back control of the stories about their lives and express their humanity. Chantel, a participant from Johannesburg, wrote in her journal,

Telling my story is so powerful for me. Every day I look forward to writing or thinking about my story. I want to take images that show the way that sex workers are treated. That I am a person. This project let me do this. It helps me to take away stress and to know that I am not alone.

The conference was silent on the issue of the clients of sex workers, despite the fact that it is likely some of them are men characterised problematically in the HIV literature as 'mobile men with money'. Migration researchers may have some interesting insights for their counterparts in health on this issue.

The pain and the liberation of separation

Some presentations at the conference explored the ways that prolonged separation due to migration could lead to challenges in maintaining ‘family unity’. One study from Indonesia showed how 18% of married migrants ended up getting divorced which was contrasted with a divorce rate on 7% in non-migrant families. This had particular impacts on the income of divorced women who also faced negativity from the wider community on account of their divorcee-status.

Deirdre McKay’s presentation of the lives of Philippine women working without documents in the UK explained how long separations with little chance of being reunited due to cost and visa restrictions created stress and a strain on family life. However, she also argued that living in chronic poverty can cause family tensions. She pointed to the potentially liberating aspects of separation in some circumstances and highlighted how when men are ‘dud’ husbands (i.e. they gamble, drink, or can’t look after money) there is often migration in lieu of divorce.

Future sexuality-migration exploration

As a newcomer to the field of migration studies it was fantastic to attend the recent conference. I hope that as work on gender continues there is critical reflection on the topic of sexuality and some cross learning with other programmes working on the poverty-sexuality links. In particular it would have been interesting to hear more about same sex desire and the migrant experience and to have a more explicit focus on heteronormativity. Interesting research from (my friends at) Galang in the Philippines described how lesbian women and trans men migrated because of homophobia and gendered discrimination. For these people migration (and the money earned) sometimes created opportunities for sexual freedom and improved status within the family but it could also leave people vulnerable to homophobic abuse. These are interesting insights which are ripe for further investigation in other contexts.

Kate Hawkins is the Director of Pamoja Communications. She works on communications and research uptake for projects looking at health, gender, sexuality, and more. Kate was the communications consultant on the Gendered Dimensions of Migration conference for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.

'Labour trafficking' – What's behind the term?

By Dorte Thorsen

 

A new term - labour trafficking – has crept into the vocabulary surrounding migration facilitated by agents and other intermediaries. It is a timely attempt to shift attention onto the nexus between trafficking and labour migration and to move away from a narrow focus on migrant sex workers as the victims of trafficking. But is labour trafficking a good term? And does it have the same connotations for female and male migrants, and for younger and older migrants?

The definition of trafficking set out in the Palermo Protocol  makes it clear that for migration to be legally defined as trafficking, the migrant must have been recruited, transported or accommodated by another person. This person must have used force, violence, deceit, abuse of power or of the migrant’s vulnerable position and he/she must have been intend to exploit the migrant upon arrival to his or her own ends. As the Protocol is an instrument used by states to combat organised crime, state measures to combat trafficking focus primarily on preventing the movement of persons perceived to be at risk of being exploited and abused for the benefit of the trafficker and on prosecuting people perceived to broker the movement of others to their own financial benefit.This focus tends to blur the distinction between trafficking and smuggling – the illegal transportation of goods or people - especially at a time when global mobility regimes have made it more difficult for many people in the global South to migrate legally.

The tightening of border control, not just in the global North but across the world, has opened a space for migration brokers, who set up business to help potential migrants to go abroad. Brokers come in many shades and do not necessarily operate in a way that is illegal. Some provide guidance on form filling, the safest way to travel, and how to find work at the destination; others travel with the migrant workers they have recruited and facilitate employment for these workers at the destination; others again help procure fraudulent papers and air tickets to expedite the visa application process. Some enrich themselves on the back of migrants, sometimes being unscrupulous about the risks they impose on them; others become brokers just to scrape by or to consolidate their social status. The processes of facilitating migration, smuggling and trafficking people thus overlap in the early stages of migration.

While brokering businesses have proliferated alongside tighter border control, the use of intermediaries is not a new phenomenon, nor is it tied to international migration. It is the commodification that is new, for in many places it is considered strange and, indeed, risky to travel alone, especially for women and girls. Apart from the very real risk of sexual abuse, their respectability may be undermined by suspicion and scurrilous rumours about intimate relationships if travelling by themselves.

On this point local ideas of appropriate behaviour for women of different ages converge with one of the main concerns that has shaped the anti-trafficking discourse, especially in the beginning: the persistent myth that the destination of trafficking is sex work, and that sex workers are women and that these women are trafficked. The overlap is not about appropriate behaviour but about women’s perceived inability to fend for themselves and make good – read sensible and well-considered – migration decisions. Over time, trafficking has come to include a much broader range of concerns - including child labour, domestic servitude, forced labour, forced marriage and child soldiering - and it has become as much of an issue for internal migration as for international migration.

 

This brings us to the question of how to distinguish between trafficking, smuggling and the facilitation of migration and migrants’ insertion into the labour market at the destination. In principle, the relationship between the migrant and the smuggler ends once the migrant arrives at the destination, while the relationship with the trafficker continues. Reality is, of course, much more complex for the migrants and for authorities dealing with them. The distinction is shaped by moral, economic and political concerns.

 

When the focus is on migration management – whether international or internal – the division of migrants into ‘innocent, possibly passive, victims of trafficking’ and ‘irregular or unruly, street-living migrants’ is also a distinction between those, who deserve help because they are perceived as victims, and those who don’t, because they have gotten themselves into trouble through risky behaviour. From this perspective, migrants are seen either as having no choice or as having had near-to-full information about all risks involved in migration and to have ignored them. Only, women and children are rarely seen to have such a high level of information.

 

As a matter of fact, very little empirical evidence exists on the recruitment processes and the continuation of relationships between brokers and migrants at the destination. While some women are forced into sex work, others choose this occupation because they can earn more and can control when to work and when to rest. If they are all treated as victims of trafficking, important questions about unequal labour markets and gender inequity are overlooked.

 

Similarly, when the focus is on child migrants moral concerns about the right kind of childhood is at its heart of the discussion. Images of lost childhood, unhappy children, very heavy work and, in case of adolescent girls, sexual abuse, are invoked in the name of trafficking and the worst forms of child labour. The youngest children are foregrounded despite the fact that the majority of children migrating in their own right are teenagers over the minimum age for taking employment. For them, migration is a rational strategy to earn money and acquire skills. That they are frequently exploited and deceived by employers is not evidence of trafficking but rather of generic problems in the labour market.

 

Currently there is a push to work on regularising certain migrant workers and the labour market for migrants to minimise exploitation and unfree conditions. Our panel debate Labour Trafficking? Understanding the use of brokers in women’s and girls’ labour migration in the global South on Friday 6 March in Jubilee 144 at the University of Sussex contributes to the discussion. We outline the realities for women and girls of using brokers and intermediaries in their migration; examine how anti-trafficking interventions have affected female migrants; and explain why these interventions have changed over time. See http://migratingoutofpoverty.dfid.gov.uk/newsandevents/events?id=29299 for full details.

 

 

Dr Dorte Thorsen is the Gender Theme Leader for the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium. She also teaches Anthropology at the University of Sussex.

 

This blog was originally published as 'Labour Trafficking' - What is behind the term? at http://sussexglobal.org/blog/labour-trafficking-what-is-behind-the-term/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Art’ of Research Communication

by Kuda Vanyoro

From my experience at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and engagement with literature by other writers who have faced similar, it is clear that at times research findings and evidence on nationally contested issues like migration may prove the positive contributions of migration to development and poverty eradication prematurely, when the audience in question is not ready to hear the positions that researchers take. In other words, there may be socially entrenched stereotypical perceptions of migrants, as is the case in South Africa, which lead the recipients of the message to ignore it. In such instances, targeting a policy audience alone when communicating research findings and evidence is insufficient to impact or influence policy because of regressive societal attitudes which may also be held by policy makers.

 

There then arises, today more than ever, the need to tactfully disseminate research findings in a more decentralised, artistic and aesthetical manner. This may involve targeting a ‘popular culture’ non-policy audience through art and other forms of eye-candy such as film, exhibitions and storytelling in order to drive the facts home. The success of this process depends on creativity on the part of the research communicators tasked with coming up with a means of enticing and attracting this non-policy audience. Where this drive is led by the sole purpose of myth-busting and de-construction of shared societal misconceptions and stereotypes of migrants, such creativity may yield positive results, even in spite of the danger of further subjecting those whom we hope to emancipate with the research, to further stereotypes, which is a common pitfall.

 

Research communication is therefore in my view both a profession and an art. A good example of tackling a sensitive issue successfully is an ongoing research project at the ACMS titled Volume 44, which is a collaborative research project on migrant sex workers in the cities of Johannesburg and Musina. The South African National Aids Council has estimated that there are 153,000 sex workers in South Africa. A large proportion of these are located in Gauteng, the smallest but most populous province in South Africa, in which both Johannesburg and Pretoria are located. Sex work is popularly perceived as migrant dominated, and work conducted by Marlise Richter and Jo Vearey based on interviews with 1636 sex workers found that just over 85% of sex workers were migrants. Of these 39% were internal migrants and 46.3% were cross-border migrants. Volume 44 builds on a 2010 project which sought to highlight the experiences of migrant women involved in sex work within inner city Johannesburg through visual medium in the exhibition ‘Working the City’. At the time of writing, Volume 44 has staged 3 exhibitions: one in Johannesburg 21 May – 27 June 2014; a second in Amsterdam 25-28 June 2014; and the last one in Bogota in 14-19 July 2014. The exhibition was highly visual and its Johannesburg launch, for which I organised the publicity, attracted an attendance of nearly one hundred people from all walks of life: young students, media professionals, sex workers and academics.

Sex work in South Africa is not legal, and activist voices are calling for its decriminalization in a bid to combat the lack of access to health care, stigma, discrimination and criminalisation under the Sexual Offences Act faced by those engaged in it. While both migrant and local sex workers face stigma, particularly at grassroots levels, migrant sex workers are viewed with the utmost hostility. Therefore, it is only reasonable to assume that advocacy for the protection of sex workers in South Africa can only yield tangible policy results once social attitudes that result in stigma have been eliminated, or at least sensitised, from below. 

In the coming years, researchers will need to learn to adopt popular packaging for their research communication if their voice is to be heard beyond the ivory towers of universities. This is especially true with contentious topics like migration where research positions are often not what receiving communities and policy makers may want to hear. Volume 44 is an attempt to use photography, real-life narratives, audio and other forms of exhibitory art to get ordinary people thinking in a different way about contested issues. The art, complementing the research findings about migrant sex work, can provide potent weapons to communicate unwelcome research messages for positive evidence-based policy making, social transformation and other envisaged policy outcomes.

Visitors to the Johannesburg Volume 44 exhibition view '"Letter to a young sex worker" - a wall of letters written by the project participants'

 

Kudakwashe Vanyoro has concluded his Research, Communications and Outreach Internship at the African Centre for Migration and Society(ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium. Read Kuda's profile.