In January 2024, the French administration declared that, ahead of the upcoming Olympics in July, they would set up a platform to report on the "risks of prostitution" in housing so that landlords can be warned, and sex workers can be evicted. In May, AirBnB, the online home rental platform, signed a convention with the French government to develop a guide to assist travellers during the Olympics in identifying signs of exploitation and in working with police and judiciary. These measures stem from the false moral panic that the Olympics will lead to an increase in trafficking for sexual exploitation.
This blog uses evidence from past mega sporting events to ask the question: is there a way to rewrite the script around these games where the fight against human trafficking for sex and other labour does not harm sex workers?
MISPLACED CONCERN
It is important to ask what perpetuates policies of increased policing, moral panic, and the notion that host cities will witness a rise in sex work and trafficking. Some research attributes this to the media strategy of “sex sells” as news. For example, one research shows that for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, media outlets speculated an increase of 20,000 forced prostitutes being trafficked into the area. Before the 2006 World Cup in Germany, this number had gone up to 40,000 women. For the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the figure from media outlets of suspected trafficking victims at 40,000. Sex trafficking was expected to exceed its annual average. These claims of media outlets were not based on any evidence, and there is no follow-up on whether these predictions, in fact, materialised.
GAATW’s 2010 research, “What’s The Cost of a Rumour” refutes the sensational predictions and finds that instead of a rise, there is actually a drop in demand for sex work because paid sexual services are not affordable and such short-term events are not profitable for traffickers. The research also contradicts the assumptions that these events are attended predominantly by male fans, thus leading to an increase in demand for commercial sex and, hence, are a rife ground for trafficking. The evidence suggests that the fanbase widely includes, in large part, women and families.
Kin khao duai gan kha (let’s eat together) is one of the first phrases I learnt in Thailand. It often marked a moment when strangers became friends. Getting to know and love the food of this country and connecting it with memories of food from my homeland made me feel at home here.
Food brings people together. Sharing a meal with friends and family is one of the simplest pleasures of life. People across the world, rich and poor alike, take pleasure in cooking and eating together. Food memories are special for all of us. Years after we have eaten a meal, we remember its taste and smell, the place, and people with whom we had shared it and how we had felt at that time.
Questions & Concerns
But we can’t talk about food without talking about its absence. About hunger and malnutrition. About the inequality and unfairness in our food systems. About the degradation of environment that we have caused to produce more food. There is enough food to feed everyone, but hunger and malnutrition are a reality for at least 10% of the world’s population. The 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) projects that the situation may worsen in the coming years. The report notes that unless timely action is taken, today’s youth are poised to inherit food systems that are unsustainable, inequitable, and non-inclusive.
While an increasing number of middle-class people around the world are becoming conscious about their diet and opting for healthy food and organic produce, the urban working class is increasingly reliant on fast food. Yesterday’s smallholder farmers and rural crafts persons are today’s urban migrant workers in precarious jobs. They do not have time or space to grow their own food. Nor do they have money to buy chemical and pesticide-free food. How, then, can low-wage workers ensure that they and their children have enough food and adequate nutrition? Shouldn’t healthy food be available to all at affordable prices? The systemic and policy level challenges to achieving food security for all are overwhelming. But the good news is that activism around food sovereignty is also getting stronger and there are many initiatives in different countries to bring about systemic changes. How can we link their work with ours and learn from them?
Connecting Social Justice Movements
These questions and concerns have become urgent for GAATW alongside our deepening engagement with women workers in low-wage jobs. Women Workers Forum, one of our core programmes, has created a space for intersectoral and inter-movement dialogues among women in a range of low-wage jobs. The specific context of each group is different but there are similarities among them. Some members of the Forum are based in rural areas and work on the land as agricultural wage labourers or smallholder farmers. Thanks to the sustainable agriculture movements and state support, they have a high degree of food literacy. It is the urban workers, often internal migrants, who have a low level of food security. They earn more than the rural women workers, but costs of living in the cities are also higher. Domestic workers who live in their employers’ homes often talk about inadequate food and inability to cook their own meals. Those who live with families in the cities live in cramped spaces. Many also have meagre and uncertain incomes, nominal or nonexistent social protection and long working hours. We wanted to start a conversation about food with them. To find out what they eat, how much nutrition they get and what steps can be taken to make their diet healthy, tasty, and affordable.
On a rainy mid-September morning in Chiang Mai, 20 women migrants from Shan state in Myanmar were gathering outside the MAP Foundation office. Their bright pink, red and maroon clothes were in stark contrast against the grey, cloudy sky. Some had come on their motorbikes, others had taken one or two public buses to reach by 8:30. The women were domestic workers and had come on their day off to attend a Food Literacy workshop organised by MAP and GAATW
By 9 AM, everyone had boarded the songthaews that took us to Mae Rim, a short 30-minute trip from Chiang Mai. It was not a quiet ride. The women were making selfies and videos, chatting about food, work, employers, and partners.
MAP is a Thai NGO that provides assistance to migrant workers in the region and advocates for their human and labour rights. The organising of migrant domestic workers is led by Pim, a migrant worker from Myanmar. After working as a domestic worker for nearly 17 years, and after attending many trainings by MAP, Pim is now part of the organisation’s staff. Her presence helps to create a link between the GAATW team and the workers.
In July, the GAATW Secretariat organised a five-day Women Workers Forum (WWF) meeting with participants from Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and India. The women work in different occupations and geographic locations and speak different languages (Hindi, Khmer, Thai, English, Bahasa). To create a space of co-learning and sharing, we onboarded translators and rented translation devices. This blog focusses on the role of translation in activism and social movement building at the level of a transnational collective that has come together to create a vision of social transformation.
Songs recorded by Messenger Band, Cambodia
The Women Workers Forum, as the name suggests, is a space focused on the political education and mobilisation of women workers located at the intersection of gender, labour, and migration in different countries. It is intended to shift the power and decision-making from CSO actors to women workers, with CSOs involved only as facilitators or catalysts. This is driven by the conviction that women workers are best placed to set their own learning agenda and articulate their vision of change. Continuing with one of GAATW’s focus area of political education of women low-wage workers, this initiative hopes to foster the self-organisation and social awareness of workers and empower them to speak for themselves and engage with the state and other stakeholders to make their demands heard.
WWF challenges women workers’ invisibility in the economy by building their collective voice and organising power. Through workers’ education, WWF will raise their awareness of the ways in which gender inequality in their personal sphere acts as a barrier to their collective empowerment in the public-political sphere. It takes place in several countries in Southeast, South, and West Asia.
Poster designed by OPSI, Indonesia, to raise awareness about sex workers’ rights in Indonesia
In the spirit of creating a space for such a transnational social movement, GAATW places high value on translation. Within feminist movements, ‘Language translation and language interpretation are political works!’ as articulated by Margo Okazawa-Rey, Co-Founder of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism. During our meeting, it was with the aid of translation that we learnt about tools that workers use to mobilise and organise. Messenger Band, a ‘girl band’ of women garment workers from Cambodia discussed the need of learning to play the guitar to enhance their group performance and the ability to deliver social messages via their songs. They emphasised learning about issues impacting other workers like sex workers, farmers, and factory workers to create their songs and poems. Another workers’ group, JALA-PRT from Indonesia, focusses on training to create posters and videos to challenge the invisibility of domestic workers in public spaces by campaigning on social media platforms. They also encourage workers to keep diaries to share with the collective. During the discussion on documentation, one of the participants said, ‘we have to tell our own story, no one else can do it as it won’t be their reality’. Similarly, some of the groups also link art with organising workers.
Homenet Thailand illustrated the volume of care work done by women
The current to communicate, listen, and harness each other’s experience was running high. Could this enthusiasm be conveyed from and to five languages? Translation is not limited to speech. There is also an expressive dimension of physical bodies that is not reliant on speech alone. This has been part of feminist movement and solidarity building, what feminist scholar Judith Butler frames as ‘performativity’. At the meeting, this performativity was exhibited not only by the participants but also by the translators. It was found in collective singing or dancing (the meeting included a dance movement therapy workshop) that binds people together not only by words but with synchronised, rhythmic movements. Translation may not have been perfect word-for-word, but the ‘performativity’ of the translators added more subconscious meaning of understanding between participants. The portability of the translation devices allowed participants to look at the speaker and match what they were hearing from the translators to the body language and display of the speaker. This strengthens the communication beyond words and creates a sense of togetherness that slowly, over the five days, evolved into solidarity.
Panorama de la trata de personas en América Latina a la luz de la pandemia: Dinámicas de la trata de personas en Colombia y principales obstáculos para la asistencia a las víctimas
A pesar de la existencia de marcos normativos, leyes y decretos que reafirman la responsabilidad de los Estados en la lucha contra la trata de personas, en América Latina y Caribe siguen persistiendo condiciones que impiden la asunción de esta obligación en su totalidad y mantienen a las personas en una condición de permanente vulnerabilidad: desigualdad, desempleo, pobreza, violencias, escaso acceso a la educación superior y la formación profesional. A todo esto, se han sumado las consecuencias de la pandemia de COVID-19 con impactos desproporcionados en la economía y la sociedad.
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A pesar de la existencia de marcos normativos, leyes y decretos que reafirman la responsabilidad de los Estados en la lucha contra la trata de personas, en América Latina y Caribe siguen persistiendo condiciones que impiden la asunción de esta obligación en su totalidad y mantienen a las personas en una condición de permanente vulnerabilidad: desigualdad, desempleo, pobreza, violencias, escaso acceso a la educación superior y la formación profesional. A todo esto, se han sumado las consecuencias de la pandemia de COVID-19 con impactos desproporcionados en la economía y la sociedad.