Abstracts: December 2002

December 6, 2002 
Lap-dancing Club Incurs Wrath Of Charity Helping Prostitutes
Waterford News & Star

A CHARITY that works with women involved in prostitution has urged Waterford people to stay away from a new lap-dancing club in the city. The Drumcondra-based Ruhama Women’s Project is concerned over the arrival of lap-dancing in Waterford and describes it as part of the sex industry. ‘Mystique’ is held each Monday night at The Forum, an entertainment venue on The Glen near the city centre. In a statement, the venue’s proprietor, Mr. Ciaran O’Neill, said he is pleased to add Mystique to the innovative and varied range of entertainment on offer.”

Abstract to follow.

December 9, 2002
Questions to Parliament
Marie Star Cafe (SIC)
United Kingdom Parliament
Rev. Martin Smyth
Jane Kennedy
Rev. Martin Smyth: To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland whether the PSNI Aliens Branch checked individually the passports for workers at the Marie Star Cafe. [82444]

Jane Kennedy: The PSNI do not individually check passports for the workers at the Movie Star Cafe. This is an immigration matter. 

December 16, 2002
Work permits for lap-dancers suspended indefinitely
Irish Times (subscription required)
Nuala Haughey, Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent 

Irish authorities have indefinitely suspended the issue of work permits for lap-dancers following concerns of exploitation of migrant workers.

Abstract to follow.

December 16, 2002  
MP: probe lap dance permits
Belfast Telegraph
Michael McHugh
THE Home Office in Westminster should launch an inquiry into the issuing of permits to lap dancers working at a restaurant in south Belfast, the local MP has demanded. The Rev Martin Smyth added his voice to calls from local politicians and lobbyists after it emerged that the Department of Employment and Learning issued work permits to 17 stage and pole dancers from Estonia who worked at the Movie Star Café earlier this year. This contradicts accepted practice by the Home Office, which refuses to give permits to non-EU lapdancers because of fears over accountability and difficulty in fulfilling the strict criteria. 

Abstract to follow.

December 16, 2002
Lap-Dance Club Probe Demand
Belfast News Letter
Colm Donnelly
It is time for an inquiry into the working conditions and treatment of pole dancers at Belfast's only lap-dancing club, according to the MP for South Belfast. Martin Smyth made the comments after receiving answers from the Home Office to written questions which he tabled in the Commons about the Movie Star Cafe in Botanic Avenue.

Abstract to follow.

December 18, 2002 
Kerb-Krawlers in Lapdance Clubs
Statement by Melissa Farley, PhD 
Prostitution Research & Education San Francisco CA USA  
Website: http://www.prostitutionresearch.com
"I support the Women's Coalition of Northern Ireland in their call to close lap dancing clubs, and in their call for an investigation into the conditions under which the 17 women from Estonia arrived in Ireland - as long as the investigation's goal is the physical and emotional safety of the women. 

It is my understanding that the women were trafficked from Estonia and eastern European states. They were issued work permits for "professional stage and pole dancers" - these are essentially work permits for prostitution. The women should be offered protection from physical violence by the pimps and traffickers who probably control them and their passports. 

The women should be offered legal protection, and should not be returned home if that would endanger them. Like all people, the trafficked women should have the human right to earn a living by some means other than prostitution. Lap dancing, stripping, exotic dancing, topless dancing, nude dancing, table dancing, and bed dancing may sound harmless. But when you really see what happens to the women in these various types of prostitution, it is disturbing, or worse. 

In most strip clubs, in addition to watching a stage show, customers can buy either a table dance performance by the dancer directly in front of them or a lap dance where the dancer sits on the customer's lap while wearing few or no clothes and grinds her genitals against his. Even though he is wearing clothes, he tends to expect ejaculation as part of the deal. Used condoms are often found in lap dance clubs. 

Sometimes the table dance or lap dance is in front of the customer on the main floor of the club. Sometimes the lap dance takes place behind a curtain or in a private room. The more private the sexual performance, the more it costs, and the more likely it is that the dancer will be violently sexually harassed or raped. Although the typical lap dancing scenario does not involve skin to skin sexual contact - for a larger tip, some dancers allow customers to touch their genitals or they masturbate the men or perform oral sex on the men. 

Exotic dancers in Canadian stripclubs reported that the physical contact between dancer and customer during a lap dance sometimes included oral sex, penetration with fingers, and intercourse (Rabinovitch, 2002.) These sexual acts may be committed against the wishes of the lap dancer. Years ago, there was a no-touch rule in many strip clubs. Today, that rule has been eliminated, and stripping, exotic dancing, and lap dancing are part of prostitution. 

Since the 1980s, there has been major growth in socially legitimized prostitution in the Netherlands, Germany, UK, USA, South Africa, Canada, Thailand, and elsewhere. Noting that customers grabbed strippers' genitals, the Las Vegas police commented that "everything is way more out of control [in strip clubs]" (Packer, 2002.) The line between prostitution and non-prostitution has been increasingly blurred, and the level of verbal harassment and physical abuse of women in strip club prostitution has increased. 

What takes place in strip clubs is an extreme level of sexual harassment which would be illegal in USA at any other job. Women are yelled at by obnoxious drunks whose buddies hoot their support, women are called hateful names, their breasts, buttocks, and genitals are grabbed and pinched, and sometimes fingers are stuck into their vaginas or anuses. Sometimes women are raped on the premises of the clubs where they work, or they are stalked and assaulted after they leave work. Customers and lap dancers may be filmed without their knowledge or consent. 

All of the 18 women in one study had been physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, verbally harassed, and propositioned for prostitution at their jobs in stripclubs (Holsopple, 1998.) Customers were the main perpetrators of this violence against the women, but club owners, managers, bartenders, disc jockeys, security guards, doormen and parking assistants also committed violence against women in stripclubs. Verbal abuse is constant in the stripclubs. Stripclub owners were considered "glorified pimps" by the women in Holsopple's study, and doormen, bouncers, and disk jockeys were considered "wanna-be pimps" who couldn't get other jobs and thought they were cool to be working in stripclubs. Lapdancing is almost always associated with sexual abuse. 

In lapdancing, men exposed their penises, masturbated, and tried to get the women to masturbate them or raped the women. The level of violence reported by these women is difficult to imagine if you haven't been there: they were grabbed, bitten, slapped, pinched, punched, and their costumes were pulled or ripped off. They were penetrated vaginally and anally during lapdancing. Their hair was pulled, they were kicked and spit on, and all kinds of objects were thrown at them: cigarettes, beer, ice, coins, cans, garbage, and even live and dead animals were thrown at them (Holsopple, 1998.) 

If women wouldn't let customers grab or touch them, they were threatened with physical and sexual violence. A woman who previously worked as a lap dancer wrote "I cannot put into words how repulsive it is to sit in a strange man's lap and rub against his penis. It's like being raped over and over again." (Letter to the editor, East Bay Express, May 5, 1995.) Another woman said, "It was like a cow, as if you're mechanical, like they just assumed that they could do things and when you bend over they could poke their fingers up you and…They just did things. Like, poked you, injured you and.. things like that. And it was like every single night that you worked since lap dancing, you would have a few pokes. Some dancers, you could actually see them fighting off a customer. Some of them try to hold your hand and make you touch their, you know, private parts." (Lewis, 1998) A third woman reported that the strip clubs were like "walk in whore houses." (Lewis, 1998.)

Stripping and lap dancing are not marketed by the commercial sex industry as prostitution. As a result, the public tends to see stripping as less crude, and more refined than other kinds of prostitution. Yet the owners of strip clubs put extreme pressure on women to allow sexual contact. A dancer in San Francisco was raped in a private booth at a strip club. In her lawsuit against the club owners (who were, in effect, pimps) she stated that the club promoted prostitution, in part by distributing advertisements which told customers "What you do on your side of the curtain is your little secret." (Sward, 2000) 

Commercial sex businesses include street prostitution, massage brothels, escort services, outcall services, strip clubs, lapdancing, bars, nightclubs, phone sex, adult and child pornography, video and internet pornography, trafficking, and sex tourism. Most people who are in prostitution for longer than a few months drift among these various permutations of commercial sex businesses. 

Prostitution is traumatic whether its physical location is in stripclubs, masage parlors, bars, brothels, hotels/motels/john's homes (also called escort prostitution or high class call girl prostitution), motor vehicles or the streets. It is a mistake to assume that street prostitution is the worst type of prostitution. We compared stripclub/massage, brothel, and street prostitution in Mexico and found no differences in the incidence of physical assault and rape in prostitution, or symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD.) Whether women were in brothel, street, or stripclub/massage prostitution in Mexico -similar percentages of women told us that they wanted to escape prostitution but had no other options for survival. Women reported having been raped just as often in escort prostitution as in street prostitution (Raphael & Shapiro, 2002.)

In a Canadian study, women prostituting in stripclubs had a greater frequency of symptoms of extreme emotional distress than those in street prostitution (Ross, Anderson, Heber & Norton, 1990.) Similar findings have been reported in the Netherlands, where, although prostitution is legal, it causes significant harm to those in it. 90% of women prostituting mainly in clubs, brothels and windows reported extreme nervousness, a symptom which is a component of PTSD. In addition, 75% to 80% of the Dutch women reported symptoms of depression, irritability, and chronic physical discomfort (Vanwesenbeeck, 1994.)

Among other things, prostitution is fueled by racist stereotypes of exotic "others." Who often come from countries where there is extreme poverty, and where there is an even greater imbalance of power between men and women than there is in Northern Ireland or USA. 

All women in prostitution are moved around from place to place, because the customers like "somebody new." Kerb-krawlers don't care whether a woman is trafficked from within or outside of Ireland. They buy her because of her appearance, including skin color, and because she is young, and because she has been taught how to act the way men like her to act. 

A Montreal newspaper reported that hundreds of women recruited as strippers from Central and South America were forced into prostitution upon their arrival in Canada (Montreal Gazette, Feb 8 1993.) Issuance of work permits by governments is one way of normalizing prostitution as "dancing," "stripping," "sex work" or "the sex trade." 

Describing what it felt like to be in a stripclub, a college student said "This is the part of me that can still go hunting" (Frank, 1999.) Nice guys tend to be sexual predators in stripclubs. Noticing this, another man said: " I felt really bad for this one girl cuz all those guys were just passing her around. They weren't really being mean to her, but she knew her place, like she knew not to even question what they told her. She wasn't even a person, really, kinda like she was more….property." (Sanchez, 1998.)"

December 21, 2002
Ex-stripper fights 'slavery'
Birmingham Post
Shahid Naqvi
A former Birmingham stripper sparked fresh calls for a clampdown on the city's booming lap dancing industry yesterday after describing her years of sexual and physical abuse within the industry.

Abstract to follow.