Dr Rebecca Pates

Dr Rebecca Pates
(University of Leipzig)

‘Sadly, we have no trafficking victims here.' German Officials' Discourses on Migrants and Sex Work

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Abstract:

EU borders towards the East opened two years ago, increasing the number of legal migrants who can legally work in the sex trade. It is estimated that 60% of sex workers in Germany come from new EU states - and that they generally work with the correct papers. This has caused a hiatus in the detection of trafficked women: The usual police practice of detecting a trafficked woman has consisted in determining whether a sex trade worker is an Eastern European illegal migrant. Now that they are legally working in the sex trade, they appear to be voluntarily working there. Within our two research projects, we have conducted about 80 interviews with local administrators in half a dozen East German cities and towns (from the municipal and criminal police, health and internal revenue offices, and social workers and members of NGOs). In this paper, I will present the classifications of sex workers our administrators have come up with, and the causal narratives concerning sex workers’ lives they inevitably proffer. One important implication of the dominant classification is the non-implementation of trafficking laws: if being foreign and unknowing of the sex trade are necessary conditions for being classified as trafficked (rather than the labour exploitation stipulated by law), then “there are no trafficked women in East Germany” - which official statistics show. I will try to explain why this is the case.

Biographical note:

Rebecca Pates grew up in Germany and was then educated at Oxford (BA in Modern Languages and Philosophy), McGill (MA, PhD in political Philosophy), and is now a lecturer in Political Science at Leipzig University (Germany). Her currently funded research projects include the state bureaucracy on prostitution (Saxon Ministry of Science), cross-border cooperation on the Czech-German and Polish-German borders (EU project, AGIS), right-wing youth cultures in East Germany and Sweden (EU project, DAPHNE), and the administrative responses to it (funded by the German Green Party). Her unfunded projects include new types of propertisation with regards to organ trafficking and First Nations' theories of justice.

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