Being “rescued” from sex work

The New York Times magazine had a piece yesterday profiling Womyn’s Agenda for Change (WAC) in Cambodia, an advocacy organization that helps organize and improve working conditions for sex workers:
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 Precaire 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.
…[Rosanna]Barbero, [head of WAC] 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.'”

Check out the whole article; while the focus is on WAC and their work, the piece is careful to note how difficult it is to figure out what kind of “rescuing” sex workers need.