"British soldiers using sex workers in Kenya despite ban, inquiry finds", proclaims the headline. And the piece continues along the same lines:
An investigation by the British army has found that some soldiers stationed at a controversial base in Kenya continue to use sex workers despite being banned from doing so.
Soldiers at the British Army Training Unit Kenya (Batuk) used sex workers "at a low or moderate" level, a report said, adding that more work was needed to stamp out the practice.
In the propaganda of our crazy Western societies, since any sexual activity between consenting adults can never be immoral (self-determination, expressed most fundamentally in sexual self-expression being the most basic values of post-sexual-revolution thought), it follows, logically, that neither prostituting oneself nor exploiting prostitutes can be fundamentally wrong. The idea that sexual intercourse involves a union which far transcends bodily pleasure, and that our Creator designed it as part of an expression of whole-life-union, in that sense sacred, intimate, private, and impossible to conceive of as a commercial transaction just for sensual pleasure, has been abolished by secular humanists. It is utterly incompatible with their claims about the cosmos.
As such, following the logic of their views, if bodily sexual pleasure is sold as a commodity, then that is legitimate - and the person selling it is a "sex worker". It's how they choose to earn their living, just like you or I may choose to earn ours by fixing electrics or adding up accounts. It is - that most sacred of things for the modern materialist - a career, and choosing it is a career choice. It is through our career choices that we (in the modern world) are supposed to find our true value and worth, and to prove ourselves as we make our way to discovering and expressing all our potential.
Negatively, then, according to this belief nobody should be stigmatised for their sexual choices; that smells of being an unenlightened Victorian reactionary. However you express yourself is good for you, and don't judge anyone else for expressing themselves otherwise. The only thing to be stigmatised is stigma itself (a position which, of course, cannot be ultimately held on to, since it's arbitrary - why should only stigma be stigmatised? If no consensual bodily act someone else commits can be deserving of stigma, then why is someone else's expressed opinion be? Just why can words cross these boundaries when acts cannot?).
In this "enlightened" world-view, which the BBC very much approves of and promote, then, prostitutes are not prostitutes (how dare you stigmatise them); they are "sex workers". They are working, and should be allowed to do so without being shamed by reactionaries.
Do you spot the problem here, though? These things supposedly being so, why would any soldiers need to be investigated for employing these "workers"? If that is their chosen field of work, then it is, for one thing, one which cannot actually be worked in without someone else coming along to purchase the product; until purchased, there is no product. Even a baker can bake loaves when nobody buys them, as long as he has enough funds in reserve to keep providing the raw goods. A "sex worker", though, cannot exist at all unless someone else is buying. Until that point, they're merely a would-be sex-worker. Can I be a Formula 1 driver if I've not yet been in a car and done a lap? As such, then, it's only because there are soldiers who are "using" these "sex-workers" that there even are any "sex-workers" to begin with. And why that's a problem, is not explained at this point.
But later, it is.... not by the journalist's chosen framing but in the actual bona fide reportinng:
UK Chief of Defence Staff Gen Sir Roly Walker said in a statement that the army was committed to stopping sexual exploitation by those in its ranks. ... There is absolutely no place for sexual exploitation and abuse by people in the British Army. It is at complete odds with what it means to be a British soldier. It preys on the vulnerable and benefits those who seek to profit from abuse and exploitation.
Ah. It's not work after all. It's exploitation. It is an abusive activity, with an abuser, and an abused person (who may or may not have consented to her own abuse). The women are not "workers"; they're financially (or physically) desperate people who have gone into prostitution, selling the "permission" to others to exploit them in consequence in order to alleviate their financial desperation. It's something dishonourable, wrong and to which zero tolerance should be applied. A woman's body is not, in fact, a work-place, and even if two adults consent to gross exploitation when one is in a desperate situation, it is still completely wrong; grossly wicked, in fact, at many levels.
Often the woman will have been trafficked; in this case she is more accurately called a "prostituted woman" than a "prostitute". That term can really do in all cases, since it can be understood to cover the cases where she willingly prostituted herself. But in many (most?) cases, she is herself a victim. Terminology of "worker" which suggests choice and agency then tells a lie. To call trafficked people and enslaved people "workers" is like calling a someone who is repeatedly assaulted a "sparring partner", or saying that a shop-keeper who gets burgled every night must presumably in their economics be a communist.
Financial desperation itself does not transform the tragic decision (whether voluntary or under coercion) to prostitute oneself into one of selecting the caerrer of "sex worker", any more than a financially desperate man who is persuaded to join a gang of bandits is now a "redistribution worker". Somewhere there is a line between choice and coercion/exploitation, and we are not always competent to judge - and wherever the line goes, there will be someone fractionally one side, and someone else fractionally the other. Nevertheless, nobody who is selling access to their body is a "sex worker", and calling them such is unhelpful and nonsensical. If a default assumption has to be made, then "prostituted woman" in Kenya in my judgment is likely to cover more cases than any other.
Shame on the BBC. This so-called "sex-positive" vocabulary is nothing of the kind. It is a word-game played by privileged people which covers up serious exploitation and serious depravity, to nobody's gain.
"British soldiers using sex workers", BBC ? No. "British soldiers exploiting prostituted women".
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