Archive for October, 2009

Oct 22

Bus stop public art project gets green light

When I first moved to London and had more time than friends in the vicinity I spent a lot of time riding around on double decker buses just looking at the city. My favourite moments on those journeys were spotting the random things that people at street level couldn’t see. The winning object? An apple-sized ceramic ginger cat head perched on top of a garage on Highbury Grove Road, which watched the traffic with appropriately catlike disdain. Having shared a childhood home with a large number of cat ornaments, I am pretty sure the head was the lid of a teapot.

Ginger Cat Teapot

Ginger Cat Teapot

The flat tops of bus stops also yielded a fascinating array of items (including the Shoreditch meteorites) but rather a lot of single shoes and empty vodka bottles. So while I am very pleased to hear that the Bus.tops project which plans to cover 64 bus stop roofs in LEDs to display digital artworks has got the go-ahead, there’s a little wistful nostalgia mixed in. Regular readers will know I have strong feelings about public art, and I like this idea a lot. It has the potential to brighten the grim journeys made by millions of Londoners every day, while getting art out of the gallery and clawing back some of our shrinking public space before advertisers get hold of it (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they cotton on soon). But I can’t help wondering if any of those bus stops are already decorated with bizarre discarded items, and whether some lonely passenger will miss the mystery. Anyway, here’s their short video introduction on the Bus.tops site. There’s some annoying ‘urban’ jazz, and one of the artists describes bus stops as ‘street furniture’ but don’t let that put you off the whole project.

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Posted in Art, London, Wandering

Oct 20

Is sex trafficking a myth? No, but prostitution is the real problem

“Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution” (link). Well, that’s sorted then.

I won’t waste time attacking the article,  but I’ve a couple of points to make about the  debate. I did my Masters dissertation on this topic, so I am basically an expert. If they just listen to me everything will be fine.

So: Misleading media coverage and misguided policing has helped to establish a set of  criteria for ‘legitimate victimhood’ for women who have been trafficked, which excludes a huge number of serious cases and obscures the wider problems faced by women in the sex trade. You probably know the stereotype: virginal 15 year old Albanian blonde is promised a job as a waitress, or maybe even kidnapped, and when she arrives in the UK she is beaten and raped and forced to work as a prostitute. This is real. It does happen. And amazing but severely under-funded organisations like the Poppy Project can tell you about it, because they spend every day picking up the pieces.

But it doesn’t happen nearly as much as the tabloid press would have you believe. And – astonishingly enough – the lives of real women are more complicated than lurid Sun case studies. There are many different routes for migrant women into the UK sex trade, and coercion may or may not be involved at any point.

Because the media, the police, the government and – sadly – a number of campaigns have focused so narrowly on kidnap and involuntary prostitution, many migrant women working in the sex trade are unable to access services when their human rights have been abused. As an example, a woman who willingly enters the UK sex trade, but finds that she is forced to hand over all her earnings to her pimp, has no ability to refuse customers and is prevented from leaving. That is slavery, whether she comes from Thailand, Moldova or Bromley.

By conjuring a moral panic based on a discourse of innocence, border violations and kidnap, the media and the government fail to engage with the risks and problems surrounding ‘domestic’ prostitution. This means that many women working in prostitution continue to be failed by a State that does not offer them protection, but it also impedes progress in combating trafficking for sexual exploitation where it does occur.

Hope that makes a bit of sense. It’s been tricky trying to condense 15,000 words into 500 so if anyone wants to actually read the thing you can do so: Violating the Body Politic

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Posted in Feminism, Human Rights, Politics