Abstract
There are many difficulties in reporting and writing about individuals and social groups who suffer from exclusion and marginalisation. The most obvious is that the lack of resources and social power of these groups often means a lack of access for journalists. High levels of irregularity and frequent change in people's lives, as well as the higher risks involved in situations of potential exploitation, often make it hard for journalists to obtain information and provide realistic reporting.
When I was researching the working life of migrant women in the sex industry for a book titled Invisible: Britain's Migrant Sex Workers (Pai,
Method 1 was limited because it was selective, as it required previous contacts introducing me to their choice of contacts and workplaces. Method 2 was difficult, as the social stigma attached to sex work made it hard for institutions, even service organisations, to reach migrant sex workers. In British Chinese communities, for instance, sex workers are subject to a great deal of contempt and discrimination and sex work is treated mostly as a taboo subject, an open secret. Working with ‘double illegality’ (i.e. both without formal immigration status and in an illegal sector as many of them don't work alone as sex workers), most Chinese sex workers are unlikely to access services available or even those offered to them. Campaigning and sexual health organisations therefore find it next to impossible to reach them.
Although I did have several doors slammed in my face when trawling London's Soho, it turned out that Method 3 was the most effective. I happened to meet several friendly women with whom I became acquainted and visited regularly. Over two years, I followed their life stories, be they workers, madams or maids. One of them was Beata, a single mother from Poland, who became the central character in the book.
However, Method 3 also has serious limitations. The interviews and meetings I had with people were mostly structured, because they had a limited amount of time to talk and many of them didn't feel completely at ease when talking to me at their workplaces. When I arranged to meet people outside their work time, I was always aware how precious this time was, and a couple of hours each time was all that I was usually given. The situations in which I found myself were mostly managed and well-controlled, for instance, meeting in a cafe or their places of residence. When meetings happened in the workplaces and when unplanned incidents occurred, such as when customers became aggressive or when there was a dispute, I was asked to leave immediately. I was treated and talked to as a journalist. So I remained an observer and a listener, and I was only able to hear what they chose to tell me at the given time.
Over time, I became convinced that I'd never understand what really goes on behind closed doors by conducting interviews and visits. I'd never find out about the working lives of migrant sex workers and the extent of exploitation experienced by so many of them by simply ‘observing’ from the outside. Although I was told about the wrongdoings of employers, I was not able to gather concrete evidence only by listening to those victimised. When these means were exhausted, the idea of adopting a participatory approach came to me in conversations with migrant workers. I discussed the idea of subterfuge with several colleagues, and came to the conclusion that working undercover would be a necessary means to an end. Having justified the case of public interest, I started out my undercover assignments. Cases of public interest in journalism, according to the BBC's editorial guidelines, include exposing crimes, corruption or injustice, disclosing significant negligence, and protecting the public's health and safety.
Over a couple of years, I went undercover several times in massage parlours and brothels all over the country. The information and findings were written in the book Invisible (ibid.), in which I changed the names of all the women I met in order to protect their identities. While appalling working conditions in the industry were revealed, I ensured that printed stories of the women's working lives never posed any risk to their safety.
The ethics of subterfuge emerged again as a much more contentious issue when I agreed to work on a documentary with Nick Broomfield (Sex, My British Job,
The secret camera glasses that were required to make the film presented new technological challenges. Filming at eye-level demanded a lot of concentration and physical stillness, which took a while to learn. With my experience of previous undercover work, I was by this time familiar with preparing a cover story for going into a brothel: for this assignment, I would be a single mother, named Xiao Yun, from Zhejiang province, who has a seven-year-old daughter. I'd outstayed my business-visitor visa and had been working in Britain without papers for almost three years. But my new equipment added a heavy weight: I was constantly concerned that the pair of severe-looking glasses on my face would somehow give away my true identity. As it turned out, keeping these glasses charged was sometimes a problem if, for instance, I happened to be staying in a room without available sockets. As a result, we developed a strategy whereby the producer would charge a few pairs of glasses and exchange them with me at a phone box nearby. Finding an excuse to leave the premises wasn't easy—and very quickly it became an issue for which my brothel employer would ‘punish’ me by increasing my workload.
On the first day of arriving at my maid's job in Finchley Central, in north London, I walked into a room where my employer, Grace, sat slurping lunch with her worker, a woman from Fujian, southern China. This woman, who introduced herself as Ah Fen, soon retreated into her room in a fit of coughing. Grace followed her, shouting through her door, ‘You've been sick long enough! What luck I have!’
‘She's been ill for two days’, Grace said to me. For the rest of the day, she would curse Ah Fen again and again, adding a couple of swear words in every sentence. ‘Why don't you just die of your sickness!’ Ah Fen had been in Britain for four years. During the first two years, she worked in catering, as do many newly arrived Chinese migrants. In the third year she was laid-off amidst increasing raids on Chinese restaurants by immigration enforcement authorities. A friend of hers introduced her to the sex trade. With no skills to find other work, she accepted immediately. She told me that, despite the abuse she received from employers like Grace, it was the best decision she'd made during her time in Britain, as her earnings—£1,500 to £2,000 in a good week, much of which she could send home—were making a real difference to her family.
Ah Fen gave me her mobile phone and asked me to read out the names in her address book. ‘My friend put them in for me, but I can't understand them’, she said. I realised she was illiterate. In Britain, as her life was confined to the space of these brothels, she never had the opportunity to interact with the outside world. The only English words she knew were what she'd learnt in the sex trade: ‘How long?’ (do you want?), ‘£90’ (per hour), ‘£50’ (per half hour) and ‘£40’ (per twenty minutes).
Employers fully exploit the vulnerable position of migrant workers like Ah Fen. Several of my co-workers in the flat revealed to me that they had been misled into thinking that unprotected sex was expected and seen as the norm in the trade. Mia, a co-worker, told me that she had been doing sex work in brothels all over the country, with the idea that unprotected sex is acceptable in the trade. One of her main employers was Grace, who endorsed this practice and even advertised unprotected sex to various customers. In these workplaces, migrant women's health is constantly put at risk and damaged.
As I found out in the first week, it's the norm that housekeepers in these brothels would be pressurised or coerced into sex work. My employer Grace tried to talk me into doing sex work from the first day. Despite that sex work wasn't part of the job description for a maid or housekeeper, she insisted that every maid does it, to ‘help out the business’, and to make extra cash when they can. It took me only a short while to realise that saying no to her request wouldn't stop her. ‘You'll be grateful to me for leading you into sex work’, said Grace, after my first few refusals.
She soon resorted to traditional moral pressure to weaken my resolve. ‘Don't you ever think about your daughter? And your parents? What is a little sacrifice for your family? Isn't this the reason why you are here, to make money for them?’ I listened quietly as I felt the weight of her argument. I looked at her, her tightened eyebrows and her intense gaze—she meant each of those words. She had been there before. Then she raised her voice slightly. ‘If you don't bring cash back home, you are nothing.’
This constant coercion began to burden me—even though I was on an undercover assignment and not supposed to be so emotionally involved. For me, all that I experienced in these workplaces was personal to me. I couldn't remain unaffected by her words and her pressure.
She treated me as Xiao Yun, my adopted persona who would give into and accept her request. When I refused her each time, it was a blow to her sense of pride. How could a worker without immigration papers ever talk back and say no? With rage, Grace began her campaign of abuse and told me that I wasn't allowed to go to sleep until the flat closed at 2 a.m., even if there were no customers. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day, having started work at 7:30 a.m.
Grace's abuse lasted the entire week. By the end of the week I was sacked for saying no to her request. Not long after my dismissal, I received a call from her. To my surprise, she wanted me to return to work-not in Finchley but in her Bounds Green premises, where she had just sacked another housekeeper. Workers later revealed to me that the housekeeper had run away during a police raid, and I was there to cover the gap.
As I arrived at Bounds Green, a Romanian woman named Cathy was surprised and delighted to see me, a new female maid who could speak English with her. She soon made up for lost time, revealing to me how exploitative and abusive Grace was as an employer. Grace was no exception in the migrant workers sex trade. The industry took full advantage of the situation where Romanian nationals were subjected to work restrictions in Britain (until January 2014), which made them the most discriminated and marginalised in the industry. Cathy, like all Romanian women working for Grace, was a standby worker. And she had to tell the punters that she was from Spain.
Many Romanian women had been taken on by Grace as soon as they'd arrived in Britain. Some had had their work arranged before they left home. They were routinely degraded. Verbal abuse on the phone was a daily occurrence. Grace's pet name for Cathy was ‘you ugly cunt’. These women were treated like commodities and objects, swapped around the premises as Grace pleased, even within the same day.
Soon enough, Grace placed me back in the Finchley flat, while using me to cover gaps when maids ran away from the Bounds Green premises. The arrangement gave me the opportunity to get to know the scale of her businesses and to film at both places. Meanwhile, she tightened her control over me in Finchley. Here her relentless pressure for me to take up sex work and the abusive treatment that would follow each refusal began to feel intolerable. I felt not only anger, but fear. Her intimidation, moral lecturing and at times coercion and threats, made me fear the sight of her. The awareness that I was on an undercover assignment and that in theory I could walk out at anytime if things got nastier didn't make me feel any better. For I was the undocumented worker of whom I was posing. What affected Xiao Yun affected me. To the surprise of my film director, I was finding it more and more difficult to detach myself from what Xiao Yun was experiencing. There was no longer a distance between Xiao Yun and me.
My emotional turmoil also affected the technical work that I was there to do. As I felt more and more victimised as Xiao Yun, I wasn't able to focus on the filming. When I revealed my feelings to the film director in our text exchanges, he organised a brief meet with me during my shopping trip for Grace. He said to me, ‘Just remember that you are a journalist on an undercover job’. I stubbornly stayed on the assignment. But my adopted identity had taken over. In retrospect, I recognise the risk of over-identification that was impacting negatively on my emotional and mental health. At the time, there was little emotional support given to me by the production team who mainly dealt with technical issues. I was therefore utterly isolated, physically and emotionally. This experience taught me that a proper support mechanism is crucial when you take on such a task in an unpredictable and threatening environment. Unfortunately, in the broadcasting and film industries, it seems that such support structures are not always a part of a project, as they often are in academic research.
When Grace was screaming abuse at me, I retreated to the only space where I could be alone: the toilet. I locked myself in there and more than once had a good cry, to let out my anger and frustration. Within a couple of minutes, she would bang on the door to get me out. I felt the sense of powerlessness and entrapment that Xiao Yun would feel: there's no one to turn to and nowhere to run. No escape. Xiao Yun didn't have alternatives. There is no running away from the exploitative world of undocumented migrant labour markets, not when she has a debt to pay off and a family to support.
I carried on, and continued to keep a diary, as I do on every undercover job. As the work was physically and mentally demanding, writing things down gave me the chance to sort out my thoughts and emotions and helped to relieve tensions. However, even that became difficult as Grace insisted that I stay up until 2 a.m. every day. Often, I was too exhausted to write anything in my diary.
The emotional impact of this undercover assignment lasted beyond the confines of the Finchley brothel. When I finally walked away from the flat, Xiao Yun didn't just vanish. Calls kept coming in from Grace, asking me to return to the job. My fellow workers called and talked about how intolerable it all was. A few weeks after leaving, and following the film director's request, I organised meetings with several fellow workers during the gaps in their shifts. I revealed my true identity and explained the aims of the assignment. Surprised as they were, they didn't hold a grudge and continued to confide in me. One of them still called me Xiao Yun. They were then presented with the option of having their identities revealed in the film, with those who agreed paid an attendance fee under an attendance agreement. Those who decided not to take part would have their identities concealed in the film. As our phone communications continued, I learned that the making of the film did not put my former fellow workers at any risk. It has not changed their work arrangements in any way: they've carried on working in the sex trade.
Based on previous undercover assignments, I believe that it's possible to assess the impact of your research, at least to a degree. By following up with the people I spent time with during these assignments, it was possible for me to learn whether the research had any negative effects on their work arrangements and working lives.
While the findings from the undercover assignment became part of the book Invisible (Pai,
Footnotes
Author Biography
Hsiao-Hung Pai is a journalist and writer. She is the author of Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour (London: Penguin, 2008), Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants (London: Verso, 2012), Invisible: Britain's Migrant Sex Workers (London: The Westbourne Press, 2013) and Angry White People: Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right (London: Zed Books, 2016).