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Tonight, ABC's 20/20 hit the streets looking for hookers & intending to cash in on the salacious sides of sex work ~ with Diane Sawyer as lead pimp, making her paycheck just another one of the profits earned from the poor, down-trodden, girls she herself called exploited.
Diane let us know from the start, with her Good Friday biblical references, that this was not actual news coverage nor anything remotely close to impartial reporting; and from that moment on both Secondhand Rose and myself, Gracie Passette, began typing furiously to one another ~ and no, 'furiously' wasn't our typing speed.
Here are our notes.
The two hour 20/20 was titled Prostitution in America: Working Girls Speak; apparently no one thought this ironic as Diane often interrupted her interviewees to put words in their mouths.
On several occasions Diane stated no numbers of sex workers were known ~ but she didn't let that stop her from spouting a standard "60-90%" for everything from pimps to abuses, substantiated with a "we're told".
By whom?
I guess there's no harm in percentages; 60-90% of 10 or 60-90% of 2 million is completely irrelevant, right? Unless you are going for some sort of reporting integrity.
Let's face it, Diane, the bigger the number, be it fictitious, unsubstantiated or in ambiguous percentages, is all you were after. Those are big alarmin' numbers, huh, America!
But most upsetting, unprofessional and therefore unethical was that this 'look at sex work' focused mainly on street sex workers.
It's not just that the selection process of location was the main focus (with few other side trips to other physical locations and levels in the broad industry of sex work) despite her continual mention of how easy it was to shop for sex online. (You mean to tell us that in two years of research, Diane, you couldn't find any other sex workers to interview?! We're right here!)
The focus on the poorest of our sisters was not just infuriating ~ but the analysis or lack there of was insulting.
Diane compared apples to oranges mixing issues of poverty, drug addiction, abuse and hopelessness with the work & even the workers themselves, reducing work and worker to bad & unoriginal stereotypes.
With all due sympathy & concern to both the sex workers interviewed and others in similar circumstances (and we mean that sincerely), the issues depicted, discussed, and disparaged here are not matters of all sex work.
People who live off the streets; who barely manage to survive; who are victims of drugs, poverty and abuse; and, most importantly, who do not feel they have the ability &/or resources to better their lives are groups of people dealing with those issues. If they also are sex workers, then they deal with those issues while a sex worker; just as a formerly abused, heroine addicted banker is dealing with abuse issues and a drug addiction while a banker.
Would anyone say that addicts, no matter their profession, are the best decision makers?
Who would sit still and allow any reporter to show such film footage & interviews with drug addicted bankers/blacks/Italians and use statements such as "there are no numbers, but we are told..." and then sum it all up with this is how bankers/blacks/Italians any group of people are?
Would one even ask workers in any other profession about instances of sex abuse?
Are the hopeless & depressed, frightened & oppressed, to be the speakers for the entire group?
It would be easy to go into any poor community, round up the lowest paid workers at a fast food chain and get them to bemoan their work situation ~ even cry as they admitted their hopelessness and the trials and tribulations which brought them to this place, this work. (Especially if they were given coffee or other perks for their time; and it was clear in many cases that just shelter from the wind and the cold was a rare respite for these poor women.)
But here Diane goes, lumping all these issues under the 'sex work' umbrella as if her personally selected anecdotal interviews now spoke for all of those literally countless sex workers.
We'll admit that sex work has its dangers; but the violence depicted here seems more in line with neighborhoods than the work itself.
Wouldn't it be more logical to equate the dangers and violence of certain neighborhoods to those desperate and violent neighborhoods rather than to the profession of sex work? I'd love to know how many of those living there & aren't sex workers had
