Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia, by Roberta Perkins and Frances Lovejoy; Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade - and How We Can Fight It, by Professor David Batstone, HarperSanFrancisco, ISBN 978-0-06-120671-9

In considering Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia with any measure of gravity, it is important to note that its primary author, Roberta Perkins, a retired lecturer, once co-authored a statement claiming that the anti-trafficking lobby “misleads many” into believing “trafficking, ‘child prostitution' and sex tourism are enormous problems for Australia .” An intriguing statement on so many levels, it also brims with lethal ignorance: as award-winning journalist and University of San Francisco Ethics Professor David Batstone notes in his outstanding new book, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It , human trafficking generates USD31 billion annually.

More people are bartered today than in four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. 27 million people around the world are currently enslaved - many under the age of twelve, and all of them disposable. Perkins may ridicule their plight with quotation marks, but trafficked child prostitutes are, as Batstone reports, uniformly “victims of an extreme act of violence within the first forty-eight hours of their abduction. Whether through rapes or brutal beatings, slaveholders use violence to imprint their dominance.”

Perkins, a well-known transsexual, seems unaware of - or is, perhaps, uninterested in – the fact that in 2005, commercial child pornography was a USD20 billion business. 40% of the images are sourced in America ; a further 28% are made in Russia where impoverished children and orphans are brutally exploited. Babies and children under the age of twelve are now regularly featured in tableaux of unimaginable depravity and cruelty accessed, Kurt Eichenwald of the New York Times discovered, by the superficially innocuous.

“From a modern feminist perspective the term ‘prostitute' then reflects a positive attribute,” Perkins and Frances Lovejoy write, “referring as it does to those women who chose independence over being controlled by men … Politically inclined sex workers have recently reappropriated the words ‘prostitute' and ‘whore' as a means of empowerment.”

That which the authors fail to mention is that the word “prostitute” does not mean empowerment in any language. The OED definition? To “sell (one's honor etc.) unworthily, put (abilities etc.) to wrong use, debase”. Its synonyms? Abuse, cheapen, corrupt, demean, devalue, misapply, misemploy, misuse, pervert, vitiate, and whore. “Prostitution,” Dr. Helen Pringle of the University of New South Wales memorably remarked, “is not a profession, but a subjugating verb.” Like blacks who refer to themselves as “niggaz”, women who interpret the word “prostitute” as in any way positive have not only normalized unacceptable abuse, but continue to perpetrate it.

“A persistent popular perception of prostitutes is that they are drug addicts …” Perkins and Lovejoy persevere. “Society's attitudes towards prostitution, and the way in which these attitudes are mirrored in prostitution laws, reflect a historical prejudice towards what is no more than a work-based occupation.”

These statements would appear to directly contradict sentiments expressed by Perkins in The ‘Drag Queen' Scene (Allen & Unwin, 1983): “Working the streets was a dangerous occupation and nearly every girl [transgender] had a story to tell on physical assault, including knife attacks, vicious beatings and pack rapes … Why, you might ask, would anyone want to work under such conditions? Well, some girls had uncontrollable drug habits and prostitution was the most lucrative means of acquiring the kind of cash needed … The human tragedy in this scenario is that the only work available to most transgender people is that which is unhealthy, dangerous, illegal and, for many, degrading.”

Given this, can prostitution be assumed to be “unhealthy, dangerous, illegal and … degrading” only for transgender people? And how is it that the aforementioned squalor is sexily reframed as the “hot, raw sex of the streets” and as “a service industry similar to hairdressing” when applied to the female prostitutes of Call Girls ?

Perkins and his cohort offer conclusive evidence of their toxic idiocy on page 138: “[Only a few of the study's women raped under the age of 12] described the experience as rape, which is definitely negative. With respect to 14 per cent of the women in both samples who claimed to have had their first penetrative sex with their relatives or a family friend, this is not necessarily a negative experience …many … come through a pedophiliac relationship quite unscathed, and in some cases even benefit.”

Conveniently ignoring the 1,500% rise in child porn crimes since 1988 and the fact that a child under twelve is not only physically immature, but psychologically friable and vulnerable not just to adult persuasion but parental authority, Perkins, a father of two, warmly suggests that these “young ‘victims'” – his use of quotation marks is, again, to be noted – can “actually consent” to coitus with, say, their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. In effect, Perkins is proposing that a five-year-old child – at that age, the brain is not even fully developed - is capable of making an informed decision about an act for which its body and psyche are not only unprepared, but which amounts to spiritual murder.

The legitimization of prostitution also creates a social acceptance of sexuality as a form of entertainment rather than as a forum for feeling. Batstone writes of the success of the Swedish government, who in 1999 “became the first in the world to prosecute the buyer of sex, the john, while legally treating the woman as a victim … As a result, street prostitution in Sweden has dropped dramatically, as has the influx of trafficked women.”

Reconceiving the central aspects of prostitution is, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote of Nazism, impossible without consideration of its phenomenological reality. The dissociation, reductionism, objectification, and exploitation implicit in prostitution can under no circumstances be rightly classified as legitimate work; their counterpoint can only be a near-impenetrable psychological shield, something Perkins and Lovejoy are both intellectually and ideologically unfit to dismantle. As Olivia, one of the prostitutes interviewed in Call Girls , comments: “I just put up a mental block and take it.”

Few organizations help the prostituted, a tragedy that is, in part, due to people such as Perkins, whose witless championing of prostitution – the industrialization of sex is modern slavery's foundation – amounts to a sadistic disregard of suffering. As Batstone emphasizes in Not for Sale , the only people who do not benefit from the sex industry are the ones upon whom the whole network depends: the slaves.

NOTE: Support the abolition of the global slave trade by either donating a few dollars here (via Paypal), here , or here  and by shopping here: http://www.shopinlight.com And please buy this book - if not for yourself, then for someone you love.

*Originally published in The Weekend Australian