Isabella Lund

Igår skrev jag om ECPATs retoriska knep. Idag kan jag konstatera att vår debattartikel och ECPATs svar har väckt en del starka reaktionerna. Childwatch gör t.ex. ett “klargörande” i Expressen idag. Hmmm klargörande kanske inte är ett passande ord…

Om du söker sanningen läs vad de skriver i Expressen och läs sedan vad de har skrivit om ECPAT i deras rapport om barnprostitution (rapporten är ett samarbete med bl.a. Unicef och Cambridge University). Här är en del av texten från den rapporten:

“The role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), in particular End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), in raising awareness cannot be underestimated. It is they who first brought the issue to public attention, set the agenda and have continued to dominate the debate. Although the countries for which they mainly campaign are Thailand and the Philippines, they are also concerned with Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Korea. Their work is widely disseminated through both the Western media and national English language press. These NGOs also publish articles widely in the popular press and ECPAT is responsible for two influential books, The Child and the Tourist (O’Grady, 1992) and The Rape of the Innocent (O’Grady, 1994), popular paperbacks designed to appeal to a non-specialist audience. Drawing on ECPAT’s success, other groups now campaign against child prostitution but ECPAT remains a central information source. It is rare to find an article on child sexual exploitation in a Western newspaper that does not make reference to ECPAT.

The content of this information follows predictable formulae. A typical example would be a case study of a very young girl forced or tricked into a brothel where she is obliged to service 20 customers a night for very low remuneration. In the story she will be rescued by a welfare agency and sent back to her village, only to discover that she has contracted HIV and will shortly die. It will be stated or implied that it is demand from Western men that causes her to become a prostitute. Aspects of degradation and abuse are repeatedly emphasised, as is the youth of the girl. The language used is often emotive. For example, one report describes ’the lifeless body of an eight year old child, left in a Saigon hotel room after a night of sexual abuse’ (ECPAT Newsletter, 1995), while a campaigner told the press ’I still remember vividly the tears in the eyes of the child rescued from a Bangkok brothel who told me how she begged a customer not to harm her, only to have her pleas mercilessly rejected’ (Bangkok Post 6/10/93).”

In the current campaigning literature, both within South East Asia and in the West, the image of child commercial sexual exploitation is of small children being sought out and exploited by Western tourists. Much press coverage now is concerned with finding and punishing these men (and it is assumed that all sex tourists are male in this geographical region, even though there are reports of female sex tourists in other areas). Yet around the slums of the port of Klong Toey in Bangkok, men who cannot afford a ’real’ (meaning fully grown) woman will find a young girl a reasonable substitute because she is cheaper and easier to control. While this is an aspect of child prostitution that many campaigning groups in Asia would prefer to ignore, it is likely that the majority of young prostitutes are not found in the bars of Bangkok or Manila but in the brothels in the rural areas or the back streets of cities. In many local brothels in Thailand and the Philippines, younger women are said to be prized for their innocence and freshness, while girls even younger are prized for their cheapness (Ennew, 1986; Black, 1994). Even among the better-off Thai men, there is a marked preference for younger girls. A 1994 survey conducted among students, office workers, and residents of a slum area, to assess the impact of HIV on children found that the most desirable age for prostitutes is under 18: ’Many males felt that child prostitutes between 15 and 18 were more desirable than adults, but that it was wrong to sleep with younger ones (under 14)’ (Sittitrai and Brown 1994, p. 4).”

…

”One problem in the NGO literature is that the academic literature seems to be largely ignored or unknown. In addition, within the mainstream, campaigning literature, certain categories become blurred. Thus it is a feature of the reporting that: 

• child prostitutes are often by implication only girls

• pre-pubertal and post-pubertal children are often included in the numbers given for child prostitutes along with young women over the age of 18 years

• numbers given for Western tourist clients are confused with numbers of Western tourists as a whole, with no account given of local clients

• within the undifferentiated category of child prostitute, the origins of child prostitutes are hidden, obscuring aspects of origin, such as ethnic or socio-economic factors.”

…

”Just as ECPAT dominates the overall discourse, so the single idea of sex tourism, with which ECPAT is associated, captures media and other attention (Lorayes n.d., Salinlahi et al, n.d; Asia Partnership for Human Development, 1985; 1992; Miralao et al, 1990; Lee, 1991; Hall, 1992; Anglican Synod of Australia, 1993; O’Grady, 1992; 1994). ECPAT began as a sub division of ECTWT (Ecumenical Coalition on Third World Tourism) apparently perceiving child prostitution as an inevitable consequence of tourism (ECTWT, 1983; 1990). One of the leading anti-tourism campaigners once wrote ’too much tourism is the rape of culture, the environment, women and children’ (Srisang et al, n.d). The success of the campaigns now apparent in the growing interest in sex tourism in other parts of the world, but is particularly acute in Asia, where it often takes on an expressly anti-Japanese tone. ECPAT’s original statement of intent makes this clear: ’The conduct of the tourists destroys all attempts to heal the wounds incurred during the Second World War. We would prefer to forget Japanese military imperialism, but, instead of the uniform, the Japanese come today in suits and violate the dignity of the people of Asia with a particular malicious form of socio-economic imperialism.’ (ECTWT, 1983, p. 14)”

…

“The concentration on child prostitutes who service foreign clients raises the concern that other child prostitutes catering for local customers are being neither counted nor provided for within current policies and programmes. The concern with sex tourism may well be obscuring a large part of the child prostitute population, just as focus on street children forces attention away from the far larger numbers of deprived and marginalised children living and working in urban and rural areas. By presenting information in the way they do, many organisations committed to the eradication of the commercial sexual exploitation of children make it appear that child prostitution to has a single root cause and a single solution — foreigners, the external enemy. This means that questions about national structural causes of poverty and marginalisation need not be asked. The approach taken by Treguear and Carro in their study of girl prostitutes in Costa Rica is thus all the more refreshing (Treguear & Carro, 1994). Even though Costa Rica is a major tourist destination and gender relations are implicated, they lay the blame for child prostitution on structured, economic and political violence against the poor, who are defined not simply in terms of lack of access to employment, goods and services, but also more specifically through their lack of access to power. These authors end their theoretical analysis by quoting Schibotto (1990, p. 163): ‘each one of these girls is a reflection of the violence, not only of her lovers or her clients, but also the entire social formation. Because, in the last analysis, everyone of us — at some time or in some way — has gone to bed with them’ (our translation).”

…

”Perhaps the most disquieting aspect of the literature is the generally poor quality of research. The overwhelming majority of publications and ’grey literature’ in the field of the commercial sexual exploitation of children is characterised by muddled, low level or misunderstood theories, badly thought out and applied research methods, poor data and inadequate analysis. Most of the literature consulted for this review was so poor that it was not worth including in the annotated bibliography and, indeed, inclusion should not be taken as a sign of high, or even adequate, quality material. It seems that, in this field, the burden of proof about the truth of a statement does not rest with the research witness who is thus enabled to make a priori claims about the existence and extent of facts that people in general find so desperately uncomfortable that they would rather accept the incredible than ask questions.

It is worth listing the more common errors of research method and analysis, because they contribute to the reproduction of unreliable or mythological information within the literature:

• Much so-called research is carried out by lawyers or activists with no background in the social sciences, whose activities are best described as ‘fact-finding’ and who accept as fact what would be thrown out of court as hearsay evidence;

• Data are probably biased when (as frequently happens) researchers gain access to research subjects by means of institutions, projects and programmes. Information may thus reflect what the children and others think the project would like them to say, fear of reprecussions from institutional staff, or exaggeration in order to attract greater project advantages.

• Samples are also likely to be skewed because they are drawn from what might be called the ‘unsuccessful’ prostitutes whose activities have attracted the attention of helping or controlling agencies.

• Researchers seldom use control groups when designing their research.

• Samples tend to be small, yet the information is frequently stretched extremely thin by being subjected to inappropriate quantitative analysis.

• Results of research with small-scale samples are generalised to represent large populations.

• Research is often divorced from local and cultural contexts. Little or no detail about research subjects is given.

• Researchers rely on single-method studies, often on anecdotes that are passed off as case studies. Information gathered is seldom cross-checked (sometimes called ‘triangulation’) by using other methods, or by comparison with other studies and secondary data.

• Far too often the only social science method employed is the questionnaire survey, which is at best a poor method when used alone, at worst a bad tool to use with children, particularly where sensitive subjects such as sexuality and abuse are concerned.

One factor in the reproduction of inadequate information in the literature of commercial sexual exploitation of children is the style of language used. Language is the means by which ideas are reproduced. The way it is used in any one context reflects the structure of the paradigm or overall theory that has given rise to these ideas. Language is never neutral. If a structure of ideas is repetitive, so the words and phrases that it gives rise to will bear the same repetitive characteristics. Literature on the commercial sexual exploitation of children is characterised by assertiveness. Uncertain verb forms such as the conditional or the subjunctive mood are seldom used. Thus writers seldom say that something ‘might be the case’ or ‘it is reported that…’., preferring to present their case in the positive indicative, ‘is’, ‘was, ‘were’. Thus sentences often begin ‘There is evidence…’, or ‘It is claimed..’ or ‘It has been found…’ although the nature and source of such evidence, findings and claims are not presented. A further immediacy is given to texts by the use of what is called ‘the ethnographic present’ which is the device of writing about past events in the present tense. A pastiche might be: ‘Caroline stands outside the nightclub waiting for a client. She is shivering with the cold and hopes that the next man will not be violent like the man who blacked her eye yesterday. She is twelve years old, but she has the eyes of a much older woman.’ This often obscures the fact that the case study was gathered long ago by someone else and that Caroline, if she ever existed, for it is common for writers to invent a composite or typical person, probably is a much older woman by the time the reader encounters her in the text.”

Och om du orkat läsa ända hit så kanske du förstår varför jag kritiserar den heliga kon ECPAT… Det mönster som Childwatch beskriver i sin rapport känner jag igen när det gäller hur sexarbete bland vuxna beskrivs och diskuteras. Och ofta är det samma fantiker som ligger bakom och som säger sig äga sanningen. Tyvärr orsakar deras “välvilja” ofta mer skada än nytta.

Ps…
Det var dags för trist men nödvändig fakta i den här debatten, därav är detta inlägget lite trist och utan bilder men ändå mycket, mycket intressant. Jag är rätt säker på att många andra kommer skjuta på den sittande fågeln… jag avstår från detta idag.

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Andra bloggar om: prostitution, debatt, media, horstigma, sexarbete,
sexarbetare, barnprostitution, barnsexhandel, ECPAT, Thailand
Thomas Bodström, Helena Karlén, sexturism, Childwatch, Expressen
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written by Isabella