Myths, Mark Williams-Thomas, Turn Off the Red Light and Child Exploitation.
I need to say something just to stop my stomach churning. I am hoping, if you read this, you will post it in response to every abolitionist org that tries to use the street children of Rio to support their agenda during the World Cup.
@turnoffRL and @ruhamaagency have begun to put up tweets and one letter to the papers, using the sale of underage sex around the World Cup in Rio as yet another topic to exploit to further their agenda.
Notice I deliberately avoid using the term “child abuse” in connection with the sale of sex in Rio? That is because, compared to the rest of the abusive, absolutely hopeless reality those children live 24/7, selling sex does not even register, and probably adds up to “one of the better, safer days”.
The lives they live, and the speed at which they have to grow up just to make it to next week earns them every right and respect which we would usually extend to an adult. God knows, most of them will be dead long before I am, and they know it, and I am a Grandmother already. So many of them will never get to be old enough to have children, let alone Grandchildren.
They only have a little time to fit a whole life into and that changes *all* the rules.
There is nothing in the world I will ever be able to do to help them, but I never forget them, not for a single day…
…and I would never, EVER, for one minute, presume my idea of the best way for them to live another day would do anything but endanger them.
They know what they need to do to survive 10 times better than I do, that is why they are still alive.
An adult Brazilian sex worker in Europe sending money home, is sometimes the only thing that stand between other children and those dead-end streets.
Are you quite sure you want to “end the demand”?
Could you look into the thousand-year-old eyes of a Rio street child and explain why they must die so you can live in your idea of a “gender neutral” society?
“Turn Off the Red Light” and Ruhama neither knew, nor cared, that those utterly doomed children existed until they could use them as an excuse to demand legislation that will only create utter desperation for other families for them to exploit for big salaries, lavish junkets, and obscene expense accounts.
Children being executed so an ex cop can make a few quid is just FINE AND DANDY as long as the child is not being subjected to sex.
In real, heart wrenching terms, selling sex at the world cup for a pittance will probably be the best summer those tragic children will ever know in their lives…because sometimes life really is shit…and you do what you have to do…
…and spoiled Blackrock brats and ex-beat coppers on a power trip haven’t got a clue how that feels.
Neither have I, because I was only a street child in a privileged country, where they aren’t allowed to shoot you.
Chris Rodgers at the BBC finds me “disgusting” for stating the above truth…but, I notice, he couldn’t care less about the children existing, and dying on those terms except to sensationalise them for the wealthy abolitionist lobby, while completely ignoring the far deeper and more dangerous horror of their real plight. However, if he could find a few celebrities and/or royals to participate in a documentary, that reality could turn on a sixpence.
Mark Williams Thomas is now chiming in and calling me a “disgrace” which is pretty flattering compared to what I have thought of him since he came hustling me not once but “twice” looking for celebrity dirt from Duncroft.
I was more innocent then, I thought he might genuinely care about kids and asked him if there was anything he could do about double convicted paedophile Anthony Luckwill trawling around. Because there were no headlines in that for him he did not even bother to reply to suggest I go to the Gardaí – meanwhile three more boys were seriously assaulted and damaged for life before Luckwill was apprehended.
Note well that neither of these paragons of the 5th estate has expressed the slightest dismay at street children in Rio being exterminated like vermin over the past 20 years or so. Apparently that is totally cool with Chris Rodgers and Mark Williams Thomas, despite the fact that they have only recently stood face to face with some of those doomed kids (I feel certain Dr Robert Hare could shed light on how they can be that cold-blooded.)
It would now seem Chris Rogers is reporting me to the Police for endorsing the exploitation of children on the strength of this article alone…and yet, he and Mark Williams Thomas are the ones who took lavishly funded trips to Rio to exploit the street children in the context of selling sex without even noticing, much less mentioning or caring that many, if not most of those children have no way, AT ALL, with or without selling sex, to survive the next 5 years. Some will have no way to survive to Christmas…and these are real kids I am talking about…not cardboard cut outs.
Whether they sell sex for enough to eat, to buy something to kill the pain and fear is a great big NOTHING compared to the fact that they have no way to stay alive, and no hope at all. All the great white pseudo-crusaders for children care about are the tabloid headlines that make fame and fortune for themselves…and that, assholes, is DEFINITELY the ruthless exploitation of children.
They even had the chance once I raised the wider and more devastating issues affecting Rio’s street children to seize the moment and the opportunity to use the positions they have wheedled and clawed their way into, to highlight those issues for the sake of the kids they both just made a shitload of money out of, and couldn’t care less about, but, instead they attack, threaten and bully me for catching them out and showing them up.
Good luck with that.
Then the next day (12 June 14) it got even more chilling with this tweet from Mark Williams Thomas (presumably, by then, he had actually read this article rather than blindly attacking anyone who dares to suggest he is not a minor God):
I am sure Himmler was convinced that it was “distorted thinking” to suggest that being Jewish was better than being killed too.
Is Mark Williams Thomas really suggesting that wherever we have no better alternative to offer than selling sex to survive we should exterminate the victims for their own good?
Strangely that has often struck me as being at the heart of abolitionist thinking and something that might start creeping out into the open as time goes on.
Does Mark Williams Thomas intend to go on making a name and a fortune for himself by becoming the vanguard?
Rolling out documentary after documentary “proving” that anyone forced to sell sex (which would be everyone according to the abolitionists) is better off dead, children first, without once attempting to check whether they agree with that.
If John Pilger was really as sick, twisted, phoney, and self-serving as this new generation of journalists – don’t tell me, I need to go on half believing in SOMETHING.
Would I rather sell sex and get a REALLY good meal, or huddle in the shadows, trying to ignore the hunger inside while I wonder if the death squads will get me tonight?
Decisions, decisions…
The real scandal here is that we *do* live in a world where life is still allowed to be so cruel and unfair that real, innocent children are trapped in situations where selling sex is their best and only option. That is not because selling sex is in any way acceptable, but because the options those children wake up to every single day of their lives are so drastically and hopelessly worse.
To add insult to injury, instead of even trying to find a way to change that and help them, all anyone is willing to do is make a name and a fortune for themselves out of making those impossible, unbearable, lives even harder. To me that beggars description…
WHO CARES if they are selling sex until they get the same right to survive at all, let alone eat, as any other child.
You can exterminate the problems if it hurts too much to look, at any time you want, because you have the power and the victims do not, but you cannot make that fair, right or even forgivable.
I do not want an apology from Chris Rogers or Mark Williams Thomas; they would not mean it, and I would not believe it. I want them to GO BACK at their own expense, apologise to those children in person for exploiting and mocking them and then tell their true story…
…with all proceeds to go straight back to the street children of Rio…without stopping to be tithed by any form of “admin”.
If you are in Rio, and a child tries to sell you sex ask them their price, hand them at least double, apologise for the terrible life you have abandoned them to, then walk away.
I endorse that.
GD
- Robert the Biker
June 13, 2014 at 9:40 am -
A serious question; where do all these kids come from?
If the parents don’t want them, why the hell do they keep having them? Blaming ‘the Church’ won’t work either. women have known the ways around unwanted pregnancies for thousands of years. There have been organisations working with this problem for years, result, more kids on the streets!
I agree with the idea of just giving the money to the kids, but is that going to get us more than more kids to give money to? This sort of thing has always struck me as a form of Danegeld; while you keep paying the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
Brazil is, or should be, a rich country, this sort of thing should not happen there.- Moor Larkin
June 13, 2014 at 10:12 am -
@ If the parents don’t want them, why the hell do they keep having them? @
My Irish grandfather and his sister were picked up off the streets of Dublin in about 1908. They were picked up by the Irish charitable organisations geared to the Catholic Church that have been utterly dismantled by the Child Abuse industry in the last decade or two. They were both [well] educated and cared for until adulthood. He joined the British Army. I never knew his sister, but Grandad ended his days being cared for by Sisters of Mercy, suggesting to me that he had no knowledge or experience of the allegations of today about the past.I found out more recently that his birth mother later lived nearby (in England by then) and was known as Auntie… There appears to have been a distant but amicable relationship between them. The only sense I can make out of all this history is that my Grandad’s parents were so dirt-poor that they simply could not feed or clothe all their children and those two were put on the streets in the full expectation that they would be picked up by the nuns and priests, whilst the parents coped with the siblings (no idea about numbers – this history is very dim now). In today’s society this makes no sense whatsoever but perhaps in times when parents readily expected a goodly proportion of their offspring to die due to disease anyway, it was simply a matter of making the best job they could out of life, the only alternative perhaps being that they watched their children starve to death maybe. It is also the case that children are born survivors.
- Lucozade
June 13, 2014 at 1:18 pm -
Robert the Biker,
Re: “A serious question; where do all these kids come from?
If the parents don’t want them, why the hell do they keep having them?”I suppose at least some of those parents will be out working all the hours god sends so don’t really have the chance to see their kids too much and end up leaving them with older siblings etc and some might have been brought up in practically the same way and not known much different so allow their kids to grow up that way too.
That’s one problem with prostitution, it involves sex and sex can often lead to babies…. :/
- Moor Larkin
June 13, 2014 at 6:00 pm -
@ sex can often lead to babies…. :/ @
Except in the case of Jimmy Savile, where his oft-claimed specifically “un-protected” rampage through three decades of innocent white females seems to have resulted in not one single pregnancy, and we know he cannot have been firing blanks since some woman claiming to be his daughter was given the right to DNA verification, which would not have happened if he wasn’t fertile. There’s lies, damned lies and then there’s nedical miracles…. - Frankie
June 13, 2014 at 8:02 pm -
“… A serious question; where do all these kids come from?
If the parents don’t want them, why the hell do they keep having them?”One might ask the same question about all the other benighted parts of the world, where hapless, hopeless people who have absolutely sod all and spend their miserable short lives in abject squalor and poverty keep having heaps of children, who, like their parents have absolutely sod all, spend their miserable short lives in abject squalor and poverty and force the rich Western countries and aid agencies to keep them alive…
Its a very cruel world, all told. Perhaps there is something in the human psyche that argues for the maintenance of the blood line – irrespective of the cost.
- Moor Larkin
- Moor Larkin
- Moor Larkin
June 13, 2014 at 9:50 am -
The notion that “sex” is worse than death only goes to reveal that these folks are round-headed Puritans and would sooner burn you than offer you any practical help whatsoever. The BBC World Service is full of propaganda just now about the “campaign” to stop sexual abuse in War situations… Talk about putting the cart before the horse!!
Best of Luck talking Reason to these Zealots, you’ll need all of your courage to withstand their attempts at moral blackmail and their bullying. They have an army of well-marshalled “kitten-lovers” and vapid media-whores to do their unctuous bidding
- Chris
June 13, 2014 at 10:23 am -
“The Internet Remedial Army” – footsoldiers for the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse – are nearly always anonymous (apart from a handful of media nonentities trying desperately to make a name for themselves in the same way their Puritan Leader has), and if not out-&-out social inadequates crouched frothing at the mouth being a yellowed keyboard are in reality trolls employed by extremist organisations (so-called charities and the like). Best ignored if you don’t actually know who these imbeciles are.
The current ‘stop sexual abuse in warzones’ is a clear indication of the senseless handwringing – Jeremy Paxman was clearly on the verge of smashing his head against a wall on Newsnight when faced with such idiocy. Who knows how these people imagine what a ‘warzone’ actually is, a computer game?
There’s an unhinged nihilism at the core of this current wave of puritanism, and one that is talking no prisoners as it crashes through society like tanks in those warzones. As for Williams-Thomas, his appetite for child sex exploitation really holds no bounds – he did look remarkably ‘at home’ grooming the kids of Brazil on our televisions. A charlatan of the worst kind, and one who seems to be throwing around monster myths that it would seem apply more to him than any of his chosen targets. These ‘carers without conscience’, modelling themselves on a certain answers-to-nobody former ‘minister without portfolio’, are to all intents and purposes real-life Daleks.
Exterminate!
- Chris
- Ho Hum
June 13, 2014 at 10:12 am -
I think it was Conor Cruise O’Brien who once described a national newspaper as ‘being in the amiable habit of saying that the world would be a better place if it was other than as it is’
In this country, we really do pussy foot around the nasty realities of life, and the experiences that others, in much less fortunate circumstances, encounter. You only need to look at a few pages of Liveleak or the like to see that. One of my kids spent the summer with an NGO that works in the slums of a central Africa republic. The world he found there was certainly something he would have wished to be other than that it was. We need more people saying it as it really is, not less
But if some people here are now seriously saying that they will report people to the police, people who are not condoning what is happening, for pointing out the true horrors of the realities inherent in other people’s lives and what their mere survival from day to day entails, if that really is the case, that is truly sick making. The great reformers of days gone by would be ashamed of them
- rabbitaway
June 13, 2014 at 10:13 am -
Well said – can’t read those tweets though !
- erichardcastle
June 13, 2014 at 10:26 am -
Nothing could be more revolting and more hypocritical than these 2 as examples of the hand-wringing of the West when they discover Third World plight in such timely manner. A month ago they couldn’t have given a flying fucking fig for these kids. It is beyond revolting that they now express and interest because of frigging football.
I have been invited to Rio several times. i refuse to go because of the situation Anna describes but these 2 are beneath contempt.
- Clarissa
June 13, 2014 at 10:46 am -
And in a month’s time when it is all over they will go back to not giving a damn.
- Clarissa
- Duncan Disorderly
June 13, 2014 at 10:56 am -
I suppose the problem with the article is that it presumes a false dichotomy between murdering children and the same children selling sex.
- Moor Larkin
June 13, 2014 at 11:13 am -
Isn’t the dichotomy about someone murdering children and buying sex off them (rather than their selling of it)?
Seems to me there is a world of a difference to the crimes unless you subscribe to the concept of Honour Killing.
- Moor Larkin
- GildasTheMonk
June 13, 2014 at 12:02 pm -
“If you are in Rio, and a child tries to sell you sex ask them their price, hand them at least double, apologise for the terrible life you have abandoned them to, then walk away.”
And buy them a meal- rabbitaway
June 13, 2014 at 1:12 pm -
Exactly, we all have a duty to help and NOT exploit our fellow man !
- rabbitaway
- Lucozade
June 13, 2014 at 12:13 pm -
I agree that childhood according to our definition of it is pretty much a luxury of the privileged, but 9 and 10 year olds prostituting themselves and people paying for sex with 9 and 10 year olds is too much.
Some of these kids appear to be being forced into prostitution by criminal gangs or just doing it for money to buy drugs. Imho drugs are a luxury, if it was for *food* i’d be thinking ‘lets get some money to them now!’, but the fact many are doing it for drugs suggests to me the problem is more complicated than just pure ‘poverty’, there’s something about the culture and society that accepts (even to an extent, *encourages*) this kind of behaviour.
I did wonder if the 9, 10, 11 year olds doing this have parents at all or if they did, what kind of parents did they have. The ones that aren’t forced by criminal gangs are probably just following the example of the older girls they see around them doing the exact same thing i’d guess…
- Jim
June 14, 2014 at 12:17 pm -
Lucozade…I think that when you are hooked on drugs your idea of priorities go out the window and you literally are not functioning. If buying glue is cheaper than buying bread and the glue takes away the hunger pangs and makes you sleepy and helps you forget……
- Lucozade
June 14, 2014 at 1:26 pm -
Jim,
Re: “Lucozade…I think that when you are hooked on drugs your idea of priorities go out the window and you literally are not functioning. If buying glue is cheaper than buying bread and the glue takes away the hunger pangs and makes you sleepy and helps you forget……”
Is glue addictive? I don’t know i’ve never tried it, but one of the main girls in the programme who was prostituting herself was saying the drugs she used were marijuana and occasionally cocaine but she hadn’t had that in a long while, so we’re not even always talking about serious addictions here that motivate them to prostitute themselves for cash, some were on crack cocaine etc, but not all of them.
It looks to me like as well as being a result of poverty, it’s also a cultural thing – in their own little bubble, circle of friends etc, prostitution just doesn’t have the same stigma it usually has, and has been kind of normalised to an extent.
I fully appreciate that these people are living in grinding poverty – but if I was to hazard a guess i’d honestly say the drugs, like in other countries to, are just part of the culture they live in, sometimes there to help them sleep, give you more energy etc – other times there just a social activity they do with their friends, same with drinking.
People prostituting themselves for food, gives the impression of far greater desperation – and that these people really would not be doing this if they had any other option.
I’m not saying they ‘enjoy’ prostitution, not for a moment, but they’re possibly trapped in a culture where it is normalised and seen as the ‘done thing’ to an extent.
P.s I think this sort of thing goes on in America too, not that you can believe everything you seen in American chat shows, but i’ve seen American chat shows where there’s been a 12 year old girl who says she’s been prostituting herself to help support her mother and sisters crack habit – so it’s not surprising it would happen in favelas in Brazil as well. Again, i’m not trying to trivialise it, just that these sort of horror stories are no big new revelation….
- Lucozade
- Jim
- English Pensioner
June 13, 2014 at 12:19 pm -
Meanwhile Oxfam spends money producing leftist propaganda telling us how badly off the poor are in this country.
- Engineer
June 14, 2014 at 12:45 pm -
Indeed.
Forgive my cynicism, but Oxfam have to generate a substantial income to support their extensive establishment of well-paid professional ‘do-gooders’. I wish they would spend it on doing more good. Giving some Brazilian street kids a chance might be a good place to start.
- Engineer
- Margaret Jervis
June 13, 2014 at 12:22 pm -
I find it very difficult to know what’s really going on here. In the 80s and 90s the numbers of kids living on the streets in Rio and elsewhere were vastly inflated ‘guesstimates’ that have subsequently been scaled down and more subtly researched. It seems that ‘street kids’ are a mixutre of kids who live at home but like to congregate on the streets for the same reasons as kids do everywhere, others who make a living out of casual work or are part of criminal gangs and delinquents, often on the run from institutions (apparently mostly boys average age 14) and some who grow up in the favelas in poverty stricken families where sex-work may be an adult lifeline. How many live on the streets – I think it was less than a thousand a decade ago scaled down from the millions projected. How many children are sex’workers’? and at what age – under 14-16-18 21? so defined. Are they mostly girls or boys? I’m asking these questions because I don’t know and don’t know of any reliable research.
However, I would caution against paying any money to kids ‘soliciting’ – yes it’s a nice idea to simply give them money – but if you do then you might become subject to a ‘sting’ of a false allegation. You have paid ‘for sex with a child’ albeit without carrying this out and for the best of protective motives. But remember the story of W T Stead who found himself at the wrong end of the law when he did precisely this?
In the UK the act of giving the money alone would be evidence of a criminal offence – S10 Sexual Offences Act 2003.
As for MWT etc – I don’t know what he ‘researched’ but I entirely endorse the scepticism as to his, and similar sex sensationalists, cause.
I did read that the authorities in Rio wanted to clean-up the red light areas prior to the World Cup and this has resulted in many adult sex workers being displaced and losing their income. So the kids would lose out through this without being part of any ‘sex work’ themselves.
There are prostitutes who have children everywhere – I guess this would put their children more at risk of lots of things but perhaps no more or less than others living on the edge. Are the children of sex workers in Rio more likely to turn to sex working than the children of sex workers in Balsall Heath, or Manila? And again – at what age? Of course there are sex workers living in Mayfair – though I doubt with families ensuite. In general, these things are linked to poverty, social mileau and opportunity.- Moor Larkin
June 13, 2014 at 12:37 pm -
It crossed my mind that with lots of rich westerners on the streets, sending Pablo out to tell them he’s a prostitute could make for a very lucrative month. Nothing like a rich fool who knows nothing about the locals. It reminds me of stories about Liverpool in the London ‘papers. Odd that the same media alternately tells us stories of the tragic homeless and rich street-beggars over here. Who does no know where the truth lies. Certainly not these media-whores.
- Jonathan Mason
June 13, 2014 at 1:04 pm -
Excellent post, Margaret, raising a number of good points.
- Lucozade
June 13, 2014 at 3:21 pm -
Margaret Jervis,
Re: “However, I would caution against paying any money to kids ‘soliciting’ – yes it’s a nice idea to simply give them money – but if you do then you might become subject to a ‘sting’ of a false allegation. You have paid ‘for sex with a child’ albeit without carrying this out and for the best of protective motives”
….and the money for the most part probably won’t be going on food…. :/
- Moor Larkin
- Lucozade
June 13, 2014 at 1:05 pm -
Re: “The real scandal here is that we *do* live in a world where life is still allowed to be so cruel and unfair that real, innocent children are trapped in situations where selling sex is their best and only option. That is not because selling sex is in any way acceptable, but because the options those children wake up to every single day of their lives are so drastically and hopelessly worse.
To add insult to injury, instead of even trying to find a way to change that and help them, all anyone is willing to do is make a name and a fortune for themselves out of making those impossible, unbearable, lives even harder. To me that beggars description…
WHO CARES if they are selling sex until they get the same right to survive at all, let alone eat, as any other child”
Good point not everyone has the same luxury to choose as more privileged people, one persons situation is not automatically comparable to anothers – so people have no choices….
- Giles2008
June 13, 2014 at 1:26 pm -
The plight of Brazilian street kids is nothing new. Hector Babenco highlighted the problem over thirty years ago in his film ” Pixote” The film was shown on UK Channel Four in its “Red Triangle” season of movies (1986) and has i believe not been shown since and has never been made available on DVD in the UK.
I doubt that MWT has even heard of it!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4)
- The Blocked Dwarf
June 13, 2014 at 5:43 pm -
RE: Pixote. It can however be downloaded, with GB subtitles, from that place that dare not be mentioned -that green and lush cove filled with dusky bare breasted maidens and above which flys the Skull & Cross Bones….
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Fat Steve
June 13, 2014 at 2:22 pm -
Gosh CD —-you are every bit as good as Anna in setting my thinking right.
Gotta say I never really had the intelligence to think of the issue in the way you have expressed it …..loads of things are not my bag —football and paying for sex being but just two and my eyes glaze over as I turn off and probably accept the notions expounded —-but clear thinking is an aspiration so a big thanks for setting me right.
Don’t take too much notice of MWT —he is angry coz you are spoiling the franchise he’s trying to carve out —-its unlikely to be a durable one and there will be a chance to see him examined and shown for what he is. - erichardcastle
June 14, 2014 at 1:28 am -
Never fear : Dame Angelina Jolie who did so well in promoting Somaly Mam is now on the case
- shah8
June 14, 2014 at 2:06 am -
I’m an abolitionist, and I don’t think I’m puritanical. I do think some people, not necessarily you guys, tend to underestimate what a prostitution industry precisely is. Being forced to sell your body for sustenance and well below any genuine compensation is a violence done upon you. It goes without saying that plenty of other violence is happening to you, *especially* since you are labeled a dirty prostitute in Catholic Brazil. And of course, such children die young. Thing is, prostitution is so often intrinsically part of their demise one way or another. Banning sex solicitation doesn’t really work, but neither would legalizing or permitting it on the terms of the patriarchy works, either. There has to be more of an effort to understand that prostitution is part of purposeful social violence that one set of people does to poorer and darker people, and it is a political event every bit as much as a famine is. Brazil is fantastically unequal and violent, and we have to stop *that*, and that would help dry up prostitution. Just understand that there would be a lot of people who would ferociously fight to maintain the privilege of thinking of certain others as mere trash. Understood that people getting all worked up about some dude having sex tourism with kids aren’t necessarily being helpful, but it’s so much more than that.
- erichardcastle
June 14, 2014 at 8:29 am -
Certainly MWT, the BBC and Britain’s ghastly tabloids have little understanding of the complex social problems that cause kids to sell themselves on the street.
Nor will they give a stuff once the World Cup hulaballoo is over. These children and adults selling themselves will be there long after Williams-Thomas has discovered a new heretical crusade to follow and I doubt Dame Jolie will show much interest either. - Duncan Disorderly
June 14, 2014 at 10:59 am -
I found a blog post that explains these panics always seem to spring up before every major sporting event. The panic happened in London before the Olympics, and will continue to happen.
http://paper-bird.net/2013/08/26/the-emergency-of-everyday-life-what-activists-who-care-about-the-russia-olympics-should-learn-from-sex-workers-and-why/“Prostitution is legal in Brazil (though pimping and keeping a brothel are against the law), but Paes doesn’t care. It’s disorder, and deserves a shock. Earlier this year one judge, who acquitted detainees from a brothel raid, described a “repressive political climate rising from the adoption of hygienist measures, aimed at preparing Rio de Janeiro for the mega sporting events in 2014 and 2016.”
- Engineer
June 14, 2014 at 12:40 pm -
” Brazil is fantasically unequal and violent, and we have to stop *that*, and that would help dry up prostitution.”
I’d agree with this – the prostitution is a symptom of poverty, not an isolated evil, so it can’t be cured without addressing the poverty. If you’re a thirteen year old on the streets with nowhere to go and nobody to turn to, and dodging the official ‘murder squads’, what would you do to survive?
We’re damn lucky in the ‘developed’ West. We haven’t had conditions of poverty like these in generations, so applying modern Western ‘bien penseur’ thinking isn’t going to help. If you are determined to intervene on the behalf of Brazil’s street children, doing something to give them a roof over their heads, some security, a regular meal and a rudimentary education would be a good place to start – perhaps the Brazilian government should be condemned for tolerating the conditions that allow the prostitution to flourish, and encouraged to improve matters.
I can’t for the life of me understand why Anna is being reviled for this article. (I’m not aiming this comment at you, shah8 – I may not wholly agree with all you wrote, but at least you at least had the courtesy to put your point of view politely.)
Anna – thank you for this article. I was totally in ignorance of all this.
- Fat Steve
June 14, 2014 at 3:24 pm -
Anna posted on her blog but she is not the authoress so I believe unless she is both Anna Raccoon and Gaye Dalton. But I thank both (or the one) as you do for addressing my ignorance –I am repeatedly humbled by my lack of perception and general gullibility when I visit the Raccoon Arms and listen to the conversations that take place.
Like you Shah 8 I suspect I am an abolitionist at heart but probably not a prohibitionist —- but abolition can’t be achieved till poverty and oppression are a thing of the past
- Fat Steve
- GD
June 14, 2014 at 6:39 pm -
Shah, before I hop in I want to thank everyone else too for the wonderful considered comments here…some of them brought tears to my eyes. Caught between two very different issues that are perversely similar in their corruption for the past couple of years my faith in humanity is always flashing “low battery, please plug in to the mains”.
Why abolish someone else’s choices at all?
I was a survival sex worker very much against my wishes, not as a minor (I got by on survival sex…far less financial autonomy and much more anal sex) out of blind aversion and assumption. I suppose, even though I knew, and still deeply respect, a lot of sex workers among my neighbours in Powis Square Notting Hill if I did not hold identical views to you I probably would not have noticed the difference (except for the “patriarchy” references, being someone who could never took gender inequality seriously in the first place). But the truth is that sex work is very different when you actually do it. It is just a task you do not want to do, for less money than you would like to get for it, and, for me was far less traumatic and degrading than any other realistic possibility (crime was unthinkable, I have an inflexible moral code). Though I can assure you I spent almost every minute of my time as a sex worker feeling sorry for myself sex work and woyuld dread it again, sex work does not bear the slightest resemblance to the way the abolitionist industry presents itself.
I agree with everything else you say. Without reference to sex work at all we should always strive to vanquish and banish every intolerable form of existence we become aware of, even though we can never fully succeed. Desperation is always with us, in one form or another. I think blindly causing intolerable desperation in the lives of others, usually armed with a very good but totally empty excuse, is a part of the human condition that can never be eradicated.
Meanwhile all abolitionism achieves is extra harm to the desperate…nothing else…I would not, personally, make a full time, unpaid job out of fighting against anything less.
But if, hypothetically, you could eradicate every bad thing that ever forces people to sell sex…all you would have left would be people who choose to sell sex (and I personally believe there would only be a very few), and if that were so it would be nobody’s business but their own.
Clients do not force anyone to sell sex, they honestly are not important enough (they are not important enough to traumatise anyone either) and the only time you notice them at all is when you count them to make sure the money tallies.
Something struck me especially about your comment and it was this, essential truth:
“there would be a lot of people who would ferociously fight to maintain the privilege of thinking of certain others as mere trash.”In my experience that is exactly what the hierarchy of abolitionism are doing. They treat sex workers as trash…people who cannot think and speak for themselves. People who are stupid enough to hand over most of their earnings to predators. People who need guidance from their “betters” to know how they should feel, think and speak…
…meanwhile the hierarchy of Abolitionism seems to consist of some of the most morally bankrupt human trash it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I would not feel comfortable letting them have power over pot plants let alone people. I know people in general say things like that about those they oppose almost for sport, but I do not. If there was any good or sincerity in them I would feel obliged to remark it as such. It is so bad that your own obvious sincerity surprised the daylights out of me.
- erichardcastle
- Jim
June 14, 2014 at 11:41 am -
I was nearly crying with anger at the way Anna’s honesty and sincerity has been treated by those with financial and and political agendas.
Anna – thank you for one of the most real, truthful and honest articles. The concern and love for these children shines through.Don’t worry…there is no one who doesn’t know exactly what you mean. There is no one who doesn’t know exactly what you are asking for or recommending. There is not a single part of your article that could possibly be innocently misinterpreted. A 12 year old child could read this article and know exactly what you you meant.
The responses you have received via twitter are from some of the most evil hearts I have come across.
I will be posting this as widely as I can. We in Britain / Europe have absolutely no conception at all about what hardship is like.
- Henry the Horse
June 14, 2014 at 7:22 pm -
The reporting on Angelina Jolie’s crusade against sexual abuse in wartime this week has revealed an equally absurd situation where sexual abuse is seen as worse than death. Or maybe it is just current warped priorities: a mans death in war is nowhere near as important as preventing sexual abuse to a woman …
- Jonathan Mason
June 14, 2014 at 8:55 pm -
These issues like rape in war zones are hard for the ordinary person to understand unless the advocates discuss specific examples and cases of what they are talking about and what could be different and how this can be enforced. It is a bit like Princess Diana’s campaign against land mines. I could never quite understand which governments and weapons manufacturers she was campaigning against. Anyway, it seemed very ineffective.
- erichardcastle
June 15, 2014 at 5:41 am -
probably one way to prevent war time rape is to not start the war in the first place but since WW2 the West has been on an orgy of invading countries who have never harmed them . And Iraq worked out so well didn’t it.
Dame Jolie of Hollywood may have noble intentions but hobnobbing with those that support these wars probably won’t put a dent in the problem.- Jonathan Mason
June 16, 2014 at 7:38 pm -
Of course, now we are celebrating the 7oth anniversary of D-Day, it is probably still not too late for a few Norman teenagers now in their eighties to step forward and make their case for compensation against either the Germans, the Yanks, or the Brits for pinched bums and worse.
- Ho Hum
June 16, 2014 at 8:40 pm
- Ho Hum
- Jonathan Mason
- erichardcastle
- Jonathan Mason
- Lucozade
June 15, 2014 at 8:26 am -
Re: rape in warzones:
Can they try and do something about *murder* in warzones while they’re at it????
Leaving people without a father/mother, son/daughter, friend etc…. :/
- Major Bonkers
June 15, 2014 at 1:43 pm -
Oddly enough, the leader in this week’s ‘Country Life’ touches on this subject, drawing attention to the absurd sums spent on animal charities.
The leader is entitled, ‘Save the children, not the animals’, and starts off pointing out how pet owners will cut back on their own shopping in times of hardship, but not that of Tiddles and Rover. In 2012, the Cats’ Protection League pulled in £37m.; the Dogs’ Trust £72m.; ‘one donkey charity alone’ £23m., plus, of course, £132m. to the (Communist front organisation) RSPCA, £31m. to the Blue Cross, and £95m. to the PDSA ‘as well as the funding for a myriad other organisations dealing with every cause from mules in the Holy Land to animal rights in Russia’.
‘It does seem that we’ve got our priorities wrong. These are sums that could relieve human suffering and give children a proper start in life. Is it really right that, instead, we should devote so much to cats, dogs, and donkeys?’
- Martin
June 16, 2014 at 2:27 am -
I can see that ammount of money would annoy readers of Cunty Life who would much rather it was spent on hunting down and torturing animals.
- Engineer
June 16, 2014 at 6:26 pm -
On the contrary, they’d rather it was spent on helping maltreated animals (as the charities in question were set up to do) rather than on politically motivated campaigning and fat salaries for politiacl apparatchiks masquarading as charity ‘executives’.
At the same time that the RSPCA spent in excess of £300,000 bringing a politically motivated court case against (I think) the Heythrop Hunt, they allowed their Blackpool branch to close for lack of funds. I strongly suspect that most people would rather they had spent some of their considerable wealth in keeping their Blackpool branch open.
- Engineer
- Martin
- Gil
June 17, 2014 at 10:14 pm -
Can you shed light on this?
https://twitter.com/mwilliamsthomas/status/274181776283406337
Name revealed to world months before an arrest.- Moor Larkin
June 17, 2014 at 10:16 pm -
ACPO washes whiter.
- Moor Larkin
- Gil
June 24, 2014 at 1:28 pm -
The timeline seems interesting.
3 October 2012: UK TV channel broadcasts ‘Exposure: The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile’ (http://www.itv.com/news/2013-01-11/timeline-of-events-in-jimmy-savile-investigation/)
19/20 November 2012: Australian TV channel broadcasts ‘Exposure: The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile’, replacing the programme originally scheduled (http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/11/15/3633714.htm)
21 November 2012: UK TV channel broadcasts ‘Exposure Update – The Jimmy Savile Investigation’ (https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/exposure/series-15/episode-1-exposure-update-the-jimmy-savile-investigation)29 November 2012: Exposure presenter Tweets name of UK/Australian celeb to the world alongside Savile’s (https://twitter.com/mwilliamsthomas/status/274181776283406337)
March 2013: celeb arrested
August 2013: celeb charged with sexual assault (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23880768)
December 2013: celeb charged with further counts of sexual assault (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-25489501) - Alexander Baron
July 16, 2014 at 5:19 pm -
Authorities release shocking images of child abuse. No action to be taken.
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