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Medicine, prostitution, & self-defense

By Daniel Burton Rose

Dec. 20— Ronica Mukerjee has been busy. After working in recent years with two Seattle-based anti-violence projects, Home Alive and Chaya, as well as being an initial member of the Infernal Noise Brigade, Mukerjee is currently establishing a Chinese medicine practice in New York City.

LiP spoke with Mukerjee about her current work with prostitutes, her past work for a Calcutta-based child prostitution rescue and support organization, and the philosophy behind being a self-defense instructor.

LiP: Tell me how you became a self-defense instructor.

RM: I studied gong fu for three years in Seattle while doing prison and environmental activism. One day the executive director of Home Alive, Christien Storm, called me up and asked me if I wanted to become a self-defense instructor with the organization. Initially I thought, ‘Oh my god, I don’t think I can do this. Don’t you have to be really tough to be a self-defense instructor?’ I didn’t feel like I was tough enough. I said, “Thanks so much for the opportunity, but no.” I just didn’t feel like I could do it.

A day before the deadline for the new instructors’ training, I called Christien up and said, “Look. I want to do this. Can I still?” I went in for the interview.

LiP: What’s the client population of Home Alive?

RM: When I first started the client population was mixed. Some of the people came from homeless shelters or detox centers, some of them from colleges, universities, and community centers. There were housewives and people from Christian groups. There were a lot of different clients. I was hired to work with sex workers specifically. The program was funded by the Sexual Health Intervention Project, which was a part of the Seattle/King County Health Department. The purpose of the program was to recruit peer educators. Everyone involved, including me, was either a current or former sex worker in some capacity.

I spent a lot of my time going to different homeless shelters, strip clubs, and other places around the city that employed sex workers, either illegally or legally. I asked people if they wanted to be peer educators. They’d teach self-defense and general sexual health to other women. The ones who did received a small stipend. I saw these women every week. We started doing self-defense classes based on their input.

When I started recruiting, I’d drive up and down Aurora, a primary street for prostitution, as well as other sites in town. When I’d approach them, a lot of the women were like “Who’s this cop?!” Then people started to recognize me and feel more comfortable. To this day when I walk around Seattle I’m bound to see somebody who’s been in the class, or otherwise involved in the program.

LiP: How did Home Alive come about?

RM: It was in response to the murder of Mia Zapata, who was the lead singer for The Gits, a punk rock band. She was raped and murdered by the Green River Killer, as were an untold number of other women. A bunch of people got together and said, “Why do we not feel safe in our own communities? What can we do to change that?” One response was, “We need to go out and take self-defense classes and see what that’s like.” They looked into it and found it was expensive and the politics and philosophy behind the self-defense instruction that was going on were about straight, white, middle-class women feeling safe in their own skin. Which is problematic in and of itself-

LiP: -Especially because the Green River Killer specifically targeted countercultural people and prostitutes.

RM: Right. Exactly. None of these people looking for a solution to the problem of unsafe communities fit into the straight, white, middle-class demographic. They decided to form an organization. The basic mission of Home Alive, which has developed over the years, begins with the question, “How do we build safer communities?” Public violence and domestic abuse aren’t issues concerning only women. It’s an issue concerning building trusting relationships with your neighbors and friends. It’s about not relying on the police department, which is often so inadequate at providing protection for anybody.

The people involved with Home Alive while I was there had many different philosophies. Some of us believed that if someone beats up or rapes somebody you know, you go to their house with baseball bats and take care of the problem personally. Because getting involved with the police is never going to be rewarding.

LiP: You’ve also done self-defense instruction outside the United States. Can you tell me about that?

RM: I did instruction in Nuxalk territory in Bella Coola, Canada. The government-run forced assimilation schools remained on the Nuxalk reservation longer than nearly any other in the country. The people have been deprived of their language, of their culture and heritage. The product of the cultural violence inflicted by these assimilation programs is a community with an incredibly high rate of domestic violence.

A lot of the work that’s been going on there for the last ten to fifteen years has been teaching the Nuxalk language and relearning [Indian] identity. Classes are held for women who experience or have experienced domestic violence in the community. A domestic violence shelter flew me up there to teach classes. Around fifty women attended each class. We ran through different self-defense maneuvers and discussed the concept of self-defense. “What does it mean in this community? How can we practice it so it feels empowering instead of putting us in a constant place of defensiveness?” We discussed our criteria for engaging in a physical confrontation but also asked, “How can we communicate better?”

Those classes were very intense because there was so much history in that room. People would cry and dissociate, which is common in classes, but definitely a lot less common on, say, a Seattle college campus.

In Calcutta, India I taught self-defense classes for an organization called San Laap. San Laap is an organization specifically for girls who have been rescued from child prostitution. Trafficking in female children is big all over the world-including in the United States --but is a particularly big industry in Calcutta. Many women illegally sold into prostitution in Nepal and Bangladesh end up in Calcutta. Over sixty percent of the girls that I was teaching-and they were definitely “girls” — all under the age of eighteen — were HIV positive.

Even without being infected it’s difficult to get a job once you’ve been involved in prostitution because the communities are connected and it’s easy for potential employers to check on the backgrounds of people who might work for them. Let’s say one of the girls wants to work as a housekeeper, a common occupation for people with their limited opportunities. The people in the house immediately discover that she used to be a prostitute. And there’s a cultural stigma. Much of the time, they’re not going to accept her because of that.

LiP: So all the women you were working with had been prostitutes but no longer were?

RM: Correct. I did some work with women who were prostitutes, but that wasn’t the majority of my work.

LiP: If they had been sold into prostitution illegally, how did they get out of the slave state?

RM: They were rescued.

LiP: What does that entail?

RM: It entails a bunch of different things. More and more it involves women over the age of eighteen who were prostitutes coming to San Laap and other organizations, saying “There’s these underage girls over here,” and directing people in the organization to them. San Laap will go and take the girls out of the brothels. As you can imagine, these girls are kept in horrid conditions. One of the girls I worked with couldn’t speak anymore, she was so traumatized by her experience of continual rape. She was locked in a room for years and the men would come into her room and rape her.

A lot of these girls, after they turn eighteen, will go back into prostitution. There’s a couple of ways you can look at that. One is, after their involvement with the organization maybe they’ll have more access to resources that will make their work less dehumanizing. They can probably read and write better than they could before, and know where to get healthcare and other services many people take for granted. If they don’t do that, then they’ll have the skills to talk about and work through different situations that might arise in their everyday lives.

A lot of these girls were sheltered before they were sold into prostitution. They grew up in their parents’ households before they got married off or kidnapped and were all of the sudden in the middle of a brothel. There was no room for them to learn the skills required to communicate and function as an adult in the culture-not that you necessarily learn these skills anyway, but these girls had no opportunity to learn them.

LiP: In your last trip to Calcutta you treated sex workers with Chinese medicine, as opposed to teaching them self-defense, correct?

RM: Yes. These were adult women working as prostitutes. Maybe they’d been trafficked into it, but now they’re consensually involved and unionized. I worked with an organization called the Durbar Mahila Swamamya Committee, which is basically a prostitute’s union. It’s based in Calcutta in a few different red light districts. My job there was to work with the women on whatever health problems they presented to me. I provided acupuncture and whatever else -- counseling, massage -- I felt was necessary.

LiP: What were the power differentials in working with prostitute clients in the United States compared with doing it in Calcutta? Are there a lot of similarities between the women?

RM: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. People in this country have the impression that women in India are more oppressed than in the United States. And maybe prostitutes in India are more oppressed than prostitutes in America. But the reality is that poverty is an oppressive force. So yes, there is poverty in the United States, I completely recognize that, but the degree of poverty in India is undeniably greater. The way that that manifests is a lack of access to education, to basic needs that are more available in the United States. I’m not saying that they’re available enough in the United States, but in India they’re just not available. For example, there’s no education on condom use or on different STDs and HIV prevention. There’s a lot of mythology and misguided spirituality injected into sexual discourses and practices so that people are more confused than informed. Some things said to be tradition are just ways to bamboozle people into doing what others want.

Prostitution occupies the lowest position of the employment totem pole....and as a result it’s hard for them to get a bank account or access civil services. And it’s very difficult for people to talk about their health with healthcare providers. As it is in this country. There aren’t a lot of health care practitioners to whom you can say, “I’m a prostitute! Help me with my problem,” you know?

LiP: In medicine the initial step in treating a client is to stop the infliction of the injury. Then you start dealing with the impact of the injury. But in sex work, I imagine, people are coming in with histories of abuse, and the injury is constantly being re-inflicted. How do you deal with that as a practitioner?

RM: The first thing is respecting people where they’re at. This is an important aspect of practicing medicine. You can adjust things and when they don’t work you move on. You figure out ways to work with people anyway. I definitely treated a lot of hip and lower back pain with these women. I got really good results, but I have no doubt that the results do not remain intact, because people have to do the same work.

Some say that you’re actually doing people more harm when you provide a short period of relief and then discontinue the treatment, because the patient has a glimpse of what it would feel like to be in a state of health, but they have to go back to their dis-equilibrium.

I disagree with this perspective. Any reprieve you can give people from physical pain is a gift.

Source: LiP Magazine <http://www.lipmagazine.org>, courtesy of Allied Press Syndicate

In the Wake of Rebellion
The prisoner rights movement and Latino(a) prisoners in New York State

By Ron Jacobs

A Review of Gender, Ethnicity and the State: Latina and Latino Prison Politics, by Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Albany; SUNY Press; 1996

Dec. 21— Gender, Ethnicity and the State opens with a summary of the months of prisoner rebellions in Long Island prisons in 1970. These rebellions were a reaction to several years of mistreatment at the hands of prison staff and the penal system itself, and were followed soon afterwards by one of the Sixties most momentous rebellions—the rebellion at Attica State Prison in September 1971. Diaz-Cotto contends that these actions by prisoners resulted in a move to reform the New York prison system. It is also her contention that these reforms were resisted by prison staff and administrators from the governor’s office down to the prison tier and only became reality after intense and concerted organizing efforts by prisoners and their outside allies.

The latter two-thirds of the book describes differences in organizational strategies in a men’s prison (Green Haven) and a women’s prison (Bedford Hills) and the variation in results and responses by those in the New York penal administration. Like the title suggests, Diaz-Cotto focuses most of her study on the experiences of Latina(o) prisoners in the system and the specific problems these groups faced due to cultural/language differences and consequent discrimination against them.

Interesting to note is that until the 1980s Spanish speaking prisoners and staff were not allowed to speak their first language in most of the prison. In addition, none of the prison regulations or procedures were available in Spanish, nor were translators available. While this was something of a problem early in Diaz-Cotto’s study, it became a greater one as the national makeup of Latina(o) prisoners changed from being primarily bilingual Puerto Ricans and Dominicans raised in New York to a population that included Colombians and other Latin Americans who only spoke Spanish. The lack of translators and the inability of the prisoners to speak their native language indicates not only the substrata that prisoners inhabit in the eyes of the state, it also illuminates the even lesser status of those considered non-citizens.

Many of the problems faced by Latino men in the New York prison system were also replicated in the women’s prisons in the system. Besides the obvious problems around language, there were also issues of education, legal support, and parole. Because there were no educational programs conducted either bilingually or in Spanish, most Latina(o) inmates were unable to participate in these programs. Consequently, they were also unable to gain “points” toward parole. In addition, those inmates who were monolingual (Spanish-speaking) had no means of presenting themselves effectively at their parole hearings, especially since the parole boards traditionally did not include Spanish-speaking individuals.

The response by prisoners to this institutional discrimination in the wake of Attica was to organize. For the most part, writes Diaz-Cotto, both Latinas and Latinos did this on similar lines: through officially recognized groups specific to their Hispanic identity and via multiethnic/multiracial underground organizations. Although both methods varied in their effectiveness, eventually a method evolved whereby the provocations from the underground groupings informed the official organizations; a strategy that forced prison officials to respond, sometimes positively but just as often with repression that was often violent. Both forms of organization relied on support groups on the outside: women’s organizations, lawyers, and prisoner support organizations.

According to Diaz-Cotto, when differences in prisoners’ demands occurred between prisons, they were usually gender specific. As in other female prison populations, the children of the women in Bedford Hills were the focus of their most important demands --more than on the men’s side of the system. This meant that much of their organizing efforts revolved around getting more access to their children. Usually this meant working with the prison bureaucracy to organize family days, and eventually for some prisoners, weekend visits with family. Also, as in other prisons, the women’s involvement with their families was manipulated by prison officials as a method of control, thereby limiting the extent of those women affected in any political movements for fear they might lose the “privilege” of seeing their children. Of course, prison staff used other forms of intimidation in the men’s side of the system.

Diaz-Cotto concludes her study with the observation that although the Attica rebellion did change the dynamics of imprisonment by forcing administrators to open the prisons to outside community members and establishing more programs and services for inmates, these reforms were tempered by constant harassment of prisoners (especially those who were politically active) through physical intimidation by guards and by administrative movement of prisoners and arbitrary changes in procedures and programs. In short, for every two steps forward the prisoners took, they were pushed back one. Indeed, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back” is the title of her concluding chapter.

The time period of this study was from 1970 through 1987. Since then, prisons have become even more crowded thanks to the “wars” on drugs and terrorism, even while they continue to be built at a greater pace than ever before in US history. In addition, more and more prisoners are women (usually in on drug related charges) and more are of various Latino heritage. While translators are now usually available and bilingual staff populate the prison system more than before, the outside assistance Diaz-Cotto considered so important to the reform movement she writes about has diminished due to lack of funding and just plain governmental meanness. In New York, the Prisoner’s Legal Services of New York barely survives because its public funding is constantly being turned on and off, thereby making it difficult to maintain a service level compatible with the demand. Additionally, educational resources and other programs for prisoners, already in too limited supply at the time of Diaz-Cotto’s study, are even further stretched as the prison population grows and these programs’ funding shrinks.

This book is an informative study of how revolutionary and radical-minded prisoners can effect change. It is also a report on the limits of said groups and the problems these groups face from the prison system and their own members’ varying agendas. Most telling of all is that without the Attica rebellion and the sacrifices of the men involved (both in terms of lives and freedom lost), the movement that followed would not only have been less effective, but probably would not have coalesced. While there is not much hope expressed here (for good reason), Diaz-Cotto does convey an underlying conviction in the power of the people.

By Atom Smasher

Dec. 22 (AGR) -- If you get a message from me, how can you tell that it’s really from me? Most of us who use email have received email with forged headers. Some of you may have even been a victim of emails forged in your name. Some mailing lists’ members are particularly targeted for having their names and email addresses used to spread false rumors, inflammatory rhetoric, or spam.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to confirm that if an email’s “From” line says it’s from someone, you could easily confirm that it’s really from that person? Well, PGP (and GnuPG) is not only great for encrypting messages and files, but also provides exactly that type of authentication.

Through a process known as “digital signatures” the author of an email or other file can digitally “sign” that document. When you receive that message you can use the signature to confirm that the message or file is authentic.

If the message that you receive is different IN ANY WAY from the message that was signed, the authentication will fail. That will indicate that the message was either forged or damaged in transit.

In order for this to work, both the person sending and the person receiving the email both have to be using PGP. Let’s say I’m posting a message to a mailing list that discusses animal rights. After writing my message, I sign it with PGP. That message and the signature get posted to the mailing list, and everyone on that list can verify that the message really came from me. Now, let’s say that someone who doesn’t agree with my views decides to post a message to that list, forging my name and email address in an attempt to discredit me. Without PGP, it would be easy to trick people into thinking that maybe I’ve changed my way of thinking about that subject. With PGP, and digital signatures, it’s practically impossible to create a credible forgery.

For anyone involved in progressive politics or social issues, the ability to authenticate an email’s sender is often more important than encryption. Under the COINTELPRO program, the FBI forged messages to activists. The Black Panther Party had forgeries sent between it’s offices, which resulted in intra-party fighting and lead to that group being “neutralized.”

The variations of dirty tricks that can be played in this way are beyond the scope of this article. Use your imagination. The bottom line is that anyone who doesn’t take advantage of this [FREE!] technology is leaving themselves vulnerable to being manipulated, or having their credibility threatened.

If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you’ll find my contact information at http://atom.smasher.org/ or you can send questions to editors@agrnews.org My PGP fingerprint is

3EBE 2810 30AE 601D 54B2 4A90 9C28 0BBF 3D7D 41E3

A Review of We are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism, Edited by Notes from Nowhere collective; Verso Books, 2003

(AGR)-- There is a rumbling beneath the global foundation of money and power. Sometimes you have to listen carefully, putting your hand to the floor to feel the vibration of thousands of people hacking away at their concrete cage as they organize their neighborhoods into self-governed communities, or when South African activists illegally hook up water to a family’s house that could not afford to pay the water bill. Other times you can’t help but notice as the foundation cracks in places like India as farmers burn a field of genetically modified cotton planted by Monsanto; or when thousands of activists lay siege to the IMF/World Bank meetings in Prague. For those who have not felt this rumbling of discontent, reading We are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism may very well feel like an earthquake.

Compiling an impressive ensemble of voices from the world- wide anticapitalist movement, this book doesn’t seek to speak for “the movement” or place different actions in an isolated box to rot in the basement of history. Instead it allows those on the frontlines to speak for themselves while weaving together their testimonials with insightful commentary, giving the reader a powerful tool of inspiration and hope.

We are Everywhere starts off in the mountains of Chiapas with the 1994 Zapatista uprising, seeing it as heralding a new era of resistance; a resistance that has no allegiance to political parties and fiercely defends its local autonomy while integrating itself into a global network. Most importantly this resistance does not seek to seize power, but to redistribute it to everyone. We are Everywhere emphasizes how this is a major break from the old Left of hierarchical political parties where members are turned into pawns of some abstract ideology waiting for the “Revolution”. Instead we find in these pages thousands, if not millions, of people creating everything from neighborhood assemblies to deal with local unemployment, to global networks created to take on the largest of financial institutions, all the while maintaining a sense of empowerment and involvement on the part of the individuals involved. These are movements that embody the idea of direct action. Instead of waiting for the mythical revolution or handouts from the state, they are creating it each day whether its by occupying an abandoned factory and putting it under workers control, or shutting down the WTO.

We are Everywhere takes you on a world wide tour to a number of these inspiring actions. You’ll travel to Australia, where over a thousand activists break out asylum seekers who have been imprisoned for years in the notorious Woomera detention camp. Next you’re off to Brazil where the MST is taking over a plantation for landless peasants to farm on. Then you find yourself in Paris, where thousands of the unemployed are meeting in daily assemblies and organizing raids on cafeterias and occupying offices. While not shying away from these sorts of militant actions We are Everywhere does a good job of shedding equal light to the more proactive community actions which we need to sustain our movement. So you also get to travel to Argentina where piqueteros have created community gardens and collective bakeries to meet their daily needs or learn about the creation of the world-wide indymedia network as an alternative to corporate media.

Whether you’re looking for a history lesson, inspiration, or an insightful look at the anticapitalist movement, you’ll find it in these pages. And for anyone whose suffering from the post Miami blues, this book will be like Prozac to your soul.