“It was along the railway tracks during the rainy monsoon season. It was just wet garbage with these posts, and thin planks laid over the posts and all these galvanized tin rental rooms. You walk on these gangplanks over this muck and filth, and babies are hanging in headscarves with their umbilical cords, crying.”

The scene is that of the rental rooms in Phnom Penh, inhabited by local sex workers, as described by Paula Stromberg, an NGO journalist and documentary filmmaker. Stromberg spent two months in Cambodia filming her documentary Sex Workers Hurt by Rescue in Cambodia. While she was there, Stromberg worked in close collaboration with the Women’s Network for Unity (WNU), a 6,400-member sex workers’ union that also includes transgendered and male sex workers. These sex workers are adamant in their message that they are all adults, they are all freelance workers, and they are all in the industry by choice; they are not victims, nor are they being exploited by anybody. After lengthy discussions with multiple friends and acquaintances in Vancouver, Stromberg recalls asking workers from WNU who is keeping them there, and whether they had pimps or brothel owners. “Whoever is saying that is coming from a rich country,” they responded. “Whoever said that has never been hungry.”

The life of the Cambodian sex worker is devastating. “People can’t afford condoms, and so the customers get them pregnant. The women are turning tricks while they’re pregnant, and then they have the babies, and they can’t afford them,” describes Stromberg. “There’s poverty, there’s malnutrition, there’s rickets, you can see people with their bones showing, and they’re hungry”. Their lives are made even more difficult, however, by the police’s brutal “Raid and Rescue” policies, which are the main topic of Stromberg’s documentary. Under the pretense of rescuing the sex workers from exploitation, they conduct raids of brothels, where they arrest everybody present. “The ‘rescuing’ is to arrest all these women who are saying: ‘Leave us alone! We’re hungry, we are just trying to feed our families,’ ” says Stromberg. This leaves the children of the sex workers to fend for themselves while their mothers are in custody. Stromberg’s documentary illustrates how difficult these raids are for sex workers and their families: “When the police arrest Mother, I go hungry,” says the son of a sex worker, carrying his baby brother.

Not only does this system do nothing to protect the workers from the marginalization and health threats that accompany their line of work, but the raids themselves add to the problem. In December 2010, Human Rights Watch did a report on the police violence taking place against the sex workers during these raids. Furthermore, they are subsequently taken to detention centers. “When they’re in the detention centers, all kinds of human rights abuses occur,” adds Kerry Porth, former executive director for PACE (Providing Alternatives, Counselling & Education), and Pivot board member. “The women often have their belongings seized, will have money extorted from them in order to get out, and they’re often gang-raped while they’re in there.” From there, they are usually sent to work at garment factories as “training” and “rehabilitation.”

The garment factories make up Cambodia’s largest industry, employing approximately 350,000 workers, 80 per cent of whom are women. Work in these factories requires long hours of tedious work, and the workers are faced with dangerous working conditions. Furthermore, they earn minimum wage working in these factories: $61 CDN a month. Freelance sex workers, on the other hand, earn $5–10 CDN a night, more than double the minimum wage they would be making in garment factories, their only alternative industry. Hunger and poverty are rampant in Cambodia, and the options for women are extremely limited. “These are all grown women. Nobody really knows what they’re getting into when they go into sex work, but they’re not stupid,” says Porth of the decision to go into sex work. “They weigh their options very carefully, and some of them choose to go into sex work. The number one driver into sex work is poverty.”

The documentary and the WNU try to clear up some of the misconceptions we have about their situation. First of all, despite common belief — and unlike neighbouring Thailand — Cambodian brothels tend to be set up for local men, and these sex workers rarely do business with visiting Western men.  Another belief is that trafficking and enslavement are enormous, omnipresent issues. “What [WNU] felt was that the numbers of sex tourists and the numbers of enslaved women and the numbers of enslaved children are grossly exaggerated by all the NGOs who get money for rescuing them,” says Stromberg. This is not a new fact, but it is a lesser-known one. In 2009, FIRST — a group that advocates the decriminalization of prostitution — wrote an open letter to the Salvation Army in response to an anti-trafficking campaign they had launched. The main focus of the letter (titled Rights Not Rescue) was the anger that the sex worker community had not been consulted, but

also that it was incorrect in many aspects. “Global estimates of trafficking victims are often no better than ‘guesstimates,’ and can be grossly over-inflated, often to fit a pre-ordained political agenda,” reads the letter. “When researchers try to verify such numbers, a different story often emerges.” The letter goes on to use the statistical estimate of Cambodia’s trafficked women and children as an example: this number was placed between 80,000 and 100,000 when, in fact, only 2,488 trafficked persons were found.  When trafficking occurs is a serious and urgent matter but rather the approach that policy-making and law enforcement is taking may be based on faulty information.

“The rescue industry has grown worldwide, because the sex trafficking hysteria has really taken off,” says Porth, adding that about nine in 10 cases of trafficking are for labour purposes in industries other than sex work. “But that’s not getting any attention, the only thing getting attention, of course, because it has to do with sex, is sex trafficking.” This anti-trafficking movement has crossed paths with the abolitionist movement that believes that the answer is not to decriminalize and control prostitution, but rather to eradicate it completely. According to Porth, the problem with this is that it then paints a picture of all sex workers being slaves, and all sex workers being victims of trafficking. To illustrate, she quoted sexuality educator and author Charlie Glickman’s analogy: “Sex work is to trafficking as sex is to rape;” not all sex work is exploiting the worker, and not all sex work falls under the category of trafficking.

Porth noted the influx in celebrity endorsement for the fight against sex trafficking. “We think we have the answers for the developing world,” says Porth. “My answer for the developing world is to go there and ask them what [they] need to make [their] life better, and let’s facilitate that. Let’s not decide what’s dignified and not dignified for other people.”  Stromberg sees this theme as being another one in her documentary as well. “We can be blind to [the misogyny] in our own culture, but it’s so much easier to see in others,” she says.

At the screening of Sex Workers Harmed by Rescue in Cambodia, Porth gave a speech and spoke about global initiatives being launched to fight sex trafficking. In 2010, she says, global anti-trafficking initiatives came in at over $36 billion, which is approximately $3 billion more than what was spent on HIV/AIDS research in the same year. Of this money, $185.5 million came from the United States alone. The majority of that funding goes to enforcement and control, with only a very small portion going directly to victims of trafficking. With this much money invested in the initiative, the U.S. has great power; Cambodia, coincidently, receives most of their GDP from foreign funding, such as the U.S. Every year, the United States Department of State releases a TIP (Trafficking in Persons) Report, which ranks all of the countries in the world on three tiers, based on what the human trafficking situation is like in their country, and how much the government in that country is doing. In the 2012 TIP report, Cambodia was ranked a Tier 2 country, which in the report is defined as “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.” The police raids that are in the forefront of Stromberg’s documentary are part of these “significant efforts” that the country is making. It is important to the country’s funding that they stress to the United States that they are “rescuing” as many of these sex workers as possible. The reality is that they may be doing more harm than good. The WNU has noted in the past that there are stark contradictions between the implementation of the “Raid and Rescue” programs, and the Cambodian government’s HIV/AIDS programs. In the process of arresting and raiding brothels, the police seize condoms as evidence, and it is not uncommon for the sex workers to swallow used condoms to avoid arrest. Many of the sex workers fear the possession condoms, knowing that it could have implications were they to get arrested. Needless to say, this fear puts them at an increased risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and other STIs, not to mention unwanted pregnancies.

“The problem with this new global hysteria is that it obliterates nuance and all kinds of sex workers are being harmed by policies, laws, and rescue programs that push sex work further underground and push sex workers away from HIV prevention and treatment,” wrote Porth in an article published in September of this year. “The most serious problems associated with anti-trafficking initiatives and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment are the enactment of new laws and policies that further criminalize and stigmatize sex work and sex workers.” Stromberg agrees that this continuous stigmatization and terror that sex workers experience is one of the biggest problems. “The more they marginalize people like that, the less responsibility the government or society has to get girls educated, or provide them with other career options,” she argues. “It’s quite awful when that’s the only career option. The country needs infrastructure, it needs a better economy.” The Cambodian sex workers in this documentary are driven into this industry by their hunger and poverty of a magnitude that we cannot imagine in a developed country like Canada. Yet, some issues in sex work are identical in developing countries and in the Western world. Though the motives and nature of sex work may differ, there is nonetheless a stigma that follows these men and women everywhere, and this stigma makes it nearly impossible to receive protection under the law. On an even broader scale, all marginalized groups, regardless of age, gender, or location, must deal with the feelings of insignificance and shame placed upon them.

The sex workers in WNU are all consenting adults, and they are all freelance. They insist that they are victims only of poverty, and of a system that does not reach out to them. Granted, they had little choice to begin with, but the workers in this union are adamant that their situation is not at all similar to that of trafficking victims. They just want the freedom and legal protection to do their work. “We do not want to be rescued,” says a sex worker in Sex Workers Hurt by Rescue in Cambodia. “We just want the right to feed our families.”