The "trafficking" of persians: Labor, migration, and traffic in Dubayy

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 533-546

  Mahdavi, Pardis ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INFORMAL SECTOR; LABOR MIGRATION; PROSTITUTION; TRAFFICKING; WOMENS STATUS;

DUBAI [UNITED ARAB EMIRATES]; UNITED ARAB EMIRATES;

EID: 79954560383     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: 1548226X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-2010-032     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Pardis Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
2. Use quotation marks around this term to indicate its contested nature, about which I discuss later in this essay.
3. There are many debates around the term commercial sex worker. Mostly the phrase is used to support the idea of sexual services as labor. Once prostitution and sexual services are viewed as labor, they can then be protected by labor laws and regulated to prevent human rights violations in the informal sector.
4. Again, the quotation marks around the term trafficking indicate the contested definitions and uses of the word. There has been an increasing amount of debate about the definition of the term trafficking, most often used to refer to the movement or transport of illegal contraband, specifically arms and drugs. Trafficking in people is defined as "the transportation of people across long distances (which may or may not include crossing an international border) through some form of deceit, coercion, or force. Because the debate on trafficking in persons refers to regulating the movement of people, this conversation also necessarily intersects with questions about migration, the political and economic reasons for people leaving their places of origin, and the larger issue of economic globalization as a phenomenon that increases the mobility of capital while limiting, controlling, and regulating the mobility of labor." Srati P. Shah, "Producing the Spectacle of Kamathipura: The Politics of Red Light Invisibility in Mumbai," Cultural Dynamics18 (2006): 269 - 92. For these reasons and more it is important not to confate the often sliding definitions of terms such as trafficking, migration, and labor. The term expatriate is used throughout this essay to refer to migrant workers from around the world who are living and working in Dubayy but who have their own homes (and thus are not working as migrant domestic workers or living in labor camps). In Dubayy, the majority of the expatriate population is made up of people from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Iran, or other parts of the Middle East.
5. For an in-depth discussion of the term moral panic, Carole Vance and A. M. Miller, "Sexuality, Human Rights, and Health," Health and Human Rights 7 (2004): 5-15.
6. The term refers to general panic about issues thought to pertain to morality and is often used with regard to contentious discourse on sexuality, sex work, the body, and the regulation of bodies. For a comprehensive overview of these discussions on neocolonialism and desire.
7. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (New York: Routledge, 1998);
8. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
9. For more on this, see Pardis Mahdavi, Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai (Palo Alto, C A: Stanford University Press, forthcoming, 2011), and Rhacel Parrenas, Illicit Flirtati ons: Labor, Migration, and Sex Traffcking in Tokyo (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming, 2011).
10. Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers.
11. For inflammatory, sensationalistic abolitionist rhetoric based on hearsay rather than actual feld-work, Siddharth Kara, Sex Traffcking: Inside the Business of Modern Day Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
12. Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self Determination, 1969-1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
13. The data presented in this essay are part of a larger study on sex work, labor, and migration in Dubayy. For the purposes of this essay, I draw on par ticipant observation and interviews conducted in Iran between 2000 and 2007, as well as ethnographic feldwork conducted in Dubayy during the summers of 2004 and 2008. Translations thereof are mine. This essay is based on a nonrandom sample of twenty-two Iranian women engaging in the commercial sex industry in Dubayy. I met eleven of these women while I was doing feldwork in Tehran, and the remaining eleven I met in Dubayy. The women are not necessarily a representative sample but rather a sample of convenience. They represent the sex workers to whom I had access. I am continuing this research in 2009 and 2010 and hope to have interviewed at least ten more Iranian sex workers.
14. Karen Leonard, "South Asians in the Indian Ocean World: Language, Policing, and Gender Practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (2005): 678.
15. Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Migration in the Middle East and Mediterranean," from the Global Commission on International Migration (Athens: University Research Institute for Urban Environment and Human Resources, 2005), 5.
16. Christopher M. Davidson, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008),190.
17. Dubai Statistics Centre, www.dsc.gov.ae/en/.
18. Baldwin-Edwards, "Migration," 17.
19. Nisha Varia, As If I Am Not Human (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008), 4.
20. Rima Sabban, "United Arab Emirates: Migrant Women in the United Arab Emirates; the Case of Female Domestic Workers" (Women and Migration, working paper 10, Gender Promotion Programme [GENPROM], International Labor Office, Geneva, n.d.),9.
21. Alison Murray, "Debt-Bondage and Trafficking: Don't Believe the Hype," in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, 62.
22. I place the term human traffcking in quotation marks to indicate both its contested nature and its insuffciency in adequately describing and addressing the major issues in transnational migration and labor.
23. Takiyah R.McClain, "An Ounce of Prevention: Improving the Preventative Measu res of the Traffcki ng Victims Protection Act," Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 40 (2007): 601.
24. Baldwin-Edwards, "Migration."
25. U.S. Department of State, Traffcking in Persons Report, www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2006/ (June 2006).
26. Pinar Ilkkaracan, Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 202.
27. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russel Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006).
28. Davidson, Dubai, 284.
29. For an example, note the title of the 2000 UN Protocol on traffcking which reads the "United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime," www.uncjin.org/Documents/Conventions/dcatoc/fnaldocuments_2/convention_%20traff_eng.pdf (emphasis mine).
30. Marjane Wijers, "Women, Labor, and Migration: The Position of Traffcked Women and Strategies for Support," in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, 32.
31. Rhacel Parrenas, "Keynote Lecture: Philipina Migrants, Sex Workers, and Hostesses," lecture at Pomona College, February 2010.
32. Siddharth Kara, "The Business of Sex Slavery," lec-ture,ScrippsCollege, 18February2009. Though much of this discussion is about "Third World women," it is important to note that the phrase is used to refer to women throughout the developing world as well as women from Eastern Europe and Russia, from countries that may be considered in transition.
33. Kamala Kempadoo, "Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers' Rights," in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, 10.
34. Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers; Mohanty, Third World Women.
35. K Kempadoo, "Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers' Rights," 11. Kempadoo quotes from Mohanty, Third World Women, 56.
36. See, e.g., Kara, Sex Traffcking, Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and organizations such as Free the Slaves, www.freetheslaves.net/.
37. It is important to note here that "trafficking" into sex work, even by UN estimates, makes up only a small percentage (less than 5 percent) of global traffcking. Many scholars have noted that this overemphasis on sex traffcking takes away from the large numbers of other migrant laborers who face abuse in work settings outside the sex industry globally. Denise Brennan, "Competing Claims of Victimhood? Foreign and Domestic Victims of Traffcking to the United States," Sexuality, Research, and Social Policy 5, no. 4 (2008): 45-61.
38. Namegr Chapkis, "Traffcking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants, Gender and Women 17 (2000): 923-37;
39. Gretchen Soderland, "Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades against Sex Traffcking and the Rhetoric of Abolition," NWSA Journal 17(2005): 64-87.
40. In the UAE much of the police force must be imported because there are not enough citizens to staff the increasing demands of law enforcement. Many of the police who are imported are not trained, and some of my interviewees reported accounts of abuse at the hands of migrant police offcers.
41. Here Nava is referring to the morality police in Iran, who are known to arrest young people for "violating Islamic morals" such as improper dress, "heterosocializing," and drinking, dancing, and "improper" comportment.
42. Quoted in Kempadoo and Doezema, Global Sex Workers, 54.