New York Times

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 7-24-05: ENCOUNTER; The Question of Rescue

By MATT STEINGLASS
Published: July 24, 2005

In early May, when the government of Brazil rejected $40 million in American AIDS financing because of restrictions the United States would have imposed on groups that work with prostitutes, Rosanna Barbero gave a quiet cheer. She had been there before. Barbero is the head of Womyn's Agenda for Change, the leading advocacy organization for sex workers in Cambodia. WAC teaches the country's many prostitutes to organize and to improve their working conditions, and it has spun off a sex workers' union that now claims 5,000 members. Starting in 2001, the U.S. Agency for International Development supported Barbero, with about $73,000 over three years. Then in 2003 Congress mandated that any organization receiving U.S.A.I.D. assistance declare that it ''does not promote, support or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution.'' Technically, WAC doesn't do any of this, but in practice, it would have had to break with the sex workers' union. Barbero went to the union's elected leaders -- five women and two srey sros, or transvestite/transsexuals -- to ask what they thought she should do.
''They said don't take the money,'' she recalls. ''I remember one said: 'Do they think we're worse than dogs? How can they tell us all this time that we have to stand on our own two feet, and now suddenly say they can't work with us?'''
Barbero, 40, is a diminutive Australian with a singsong accent, a warm, informal, hippie-ish air and a gift for the creative use of obscenity -- something you acquire, apparently, in her line of work. When she first came to Cambodia in 1992, she had no intention of working with prostitutes; she was doing research for her thesis in Asian studies. What she found was that peacekeepers and aid workers affiliated with the United Nations were fueling a sudden explosion in prostitution. Assessing the situation, she came to see sex work as an understandable, if far from ideal, response to poverty: ''If you have nothing, what do you do? You sell sex. That's what's left.''
WAC is a kind of nonjudgmental, antiauthoritarian sanctuary for these women. Its headquarters, a double-decker barge moored on the Tonle Sap River, was previously a floating discothèque -- one of those, in fact, where Barbero used to watch U.N. peacekeepers cruise for girls. Now a visitor might find anywhere from a half-dozen to 50 women sitting in a circle on the dance floor, holding a meeting. Some might be prostitutes discussing how to avoid being raped, while others might be laid-off seamstresses brainstorming about a campaign against Levi's. (WAC also works with garment workers.)
''This is one of the most amazing things you'll ever see,'' Barbero told me on one visit, pointing to the anti-Levi's garment workers, who were working on a mobilization strategy. ''You can't do a demonstration in Cambodia. So they've decided to form a girl band.''
By tacitly accepting sex workers' choice of livelihood, WAC stands on one side of a growing divide among aid groups. Since the U.S.'s policy shift, more and more of the other groups working with sex workers in Cambodia are what are often known as ''rescue'' organizations. The rescue groups, like Agir Pour les Femmes en Situation Précaire and the Christian evangelical International Justice Mission, contend that sex work is virtually always oppressive and that many or most prostitutes are trafficked into the business against their wills. Both organizations investigate brothels for evidence of trafficking and assist the Cambodian police in carrying out spectacular raids, springing prostitutes into safe houses where those who wish to leave sex work are given vocational training, often as seamstresses. The two groups receive substantial U.S.A.I.D. money.
These raids are controversial. After one A.F.E.S.I.P. rescue on Dec. 7, an unidentified mob attacked the group's safe house and spirited the rescued sex workers back to the hotel where they had been working. Some days later, the unrescued women protested in front of the U.S. Embassy, claiming they had not wanted to be rescued at all. The protest appeared to have been stage-managed by the hotel's owners, but it illustrated how hard it is to determine whether sex workers are in brothels by choice or under duress.
No one questions the rescue groups' bravery, but many criticize their strategy. Rescue groups focus on prostitutes who are ''trafficked'': those who are under-age, have been tricked into sex work or are held captive by force or in debt bondage. But such cases are a minority. A 2002 U.S.A.I.D.-backed study found that 20 percent of the sex workers the researchers encountered directly were trafficked. But because of sample bias, the study's author, Thomas Steinfatt, says that he thinks the countrywide percentage is much lower. Another study of Vietnamese migrant sex workers, who make up about half of the prostitutes in Phnom Penh, found that 94 in 100 had sought out the work aware of the conditions they would be working in.
Barbero supports freeing children and women held forcibly but finds most other rescue operations futile: ''You're rescuing somebody and putting them back into the same situation'' that drove them to sex work in the first place. The Cambodian Women's Crisis Center acknowledges that of 48 trafficking victims it helped return to their homes in 2004, some 40 percent have already gone back to sex work. As for vocational training, Barbero says, sex workers ''are all pretty damn sick of 'We'll put you in front of sewing machines 14 hours a day and make you a better woman.'''
If rescuing sex workers isn't the answer, what is? Barbero's response is an odd mixture of realism and utopianism. Realistically, she argues, Cambodian women will never have an alternative to the sex industry until the economy improves. But like many in the antiglobalization movement, she faults the policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization for the country's poverty. Barbero has a quixotic faith that different global-development policies could lift Cambodia out of the economic misery that drives women to sex work.
Whatever the merits of its global politics, WAC is widely seen as the most effective organization in its field in Cambodia. In concert with the sex workers' union, WAC helps sex workers protect themselves from violent clients and predatory policemen. And it helps them reach out to hospital workers so they aren't refused when they seek treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. If Barbero had taken U.S.A.I.D.'s antiprostitution pledge, she would have sacrificed the quality that her constituents most value: a willingness to accept them as they are.
As U.S.A.I.D. forces the pledge upon antitrafficking and anti-AIDS organizations, an increasing number are starting to protest: in May, 171 N.G.O.'s signed a letter opposing it. Congressional supporters of the pledge seek to keep U.S.A.I.D. money from ''groups who promote prostitution overseas,'' as Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, recently wrote to the secretary of state. Rosanna Barbero hardly sees herself in that description; she says she hopes to see the Cambodian sex industry disappear, but she holds that this will be impossible until the country's overall welfare improves.
''You're sitting in the West in a comfortable situation, and you think of those girls, Oh, they have to [have sex with] 10 men a day, how disgusting,'' she told me the first time we spoke. ''As a woman, you think, How awful. But after years of developing friendships with sex workers, I see them as unsung heroes. Most of us, to survive in the awful situations that they've had to survive in, we probably couldn't do it. We have never been in a situation where we've had to consider, Do I sell my body or not?''

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