Ai brought Sn to meet with everyone today. There are two new volunteers who will help to set-up a blog. She was preparing to move her belongings to the new place that night. She said there is concern over her pets at the new place. There needs to be a grill or cover to be placed on the windows. This is to prevent her pets from jumping off the 4th floor as compared to her former 1st floor flat. Ai pampers her pets a lot, they're like her children. She share that a certain animal welfare shelter in Singapore drowns newborn kittens due to space constraint. She used to volunteer at this charity group and friends working there shared these incidents to her. Complex. I cringed at the idea of helpless newborn kittens drowning in a pail filled with water.
This night was terribly silent. We heard that a van and a car pulled up one street after Lorong 16 hence this was meant to be a sign of the anti-vice approaching the streets. Amazing how word of mouth spread once anti-vice squads are spotted even before they reached geylang. We met with An, LJ and two others we've yet to establish rapport with. They're transgenders and are from Singapore. We didn't see any foreign sex workers tonight. Funny how the transgenders we met were able to still walk the streets despite the warnings of anti-vice spreading around as compared to the foreign sex workers. I've heard many times from the Singaporean sex workers that foreign sex workers are not able to talk their way through to police officers/anti-vice squad. I don't understand what it meant to talk through to police officers, but I presume this means, to talk in a light-manner tone, joke around and smile a lot? But I've also heard that even with this method of 'talking through', Singaporean sex workers get caught still because at the end of the day, the anti-vice must bring in people to the station to fulfill quota.
But this brings up more questions. How do the anti-vice squad decide when to make raids or when not to make raids? Do they have a schedule and what's the purpose of having raids? We've also heard testimonies of sex workers being mishandled by police officers, how is this dealt with? J was sharing that there is one tough anti-vice officer who is bald and big sized. He is the current officer on the unofficial watchlist of geylang for being brusque, foul-mouthed and not giving one a chance to speak up. The anti-vice squad may have their watchlist of places to raid, geylang have their own watchlist of anti-vice officers and this information helps keep the women informed. I think this raises awareness and helps one to recognise police officers who seem ready to unleash their rage/violence onto you. A man who can't control his rage well has been caged far too long.
An. shared with us that the younger generation of police officers are ill-mannered. They use foul language like fuck a lot and this is in contrast to hokkien curse words. Maybe using the word fuck is a western form of rudeness that the Singaporean women are not fond of. J who popped by to chat with us when he spotted us on Lorong 16, said that the English used by westerners from USA are backwards. He said, Singaporeans use British English and we speak from the front. What I think he meant was that US English is not in clear sentences and does not have an end product, in contrast to British English where the sentences are formed and there is a direction to follow.
We walked over to the next street after Lorong 16 and true enough, saw police officers pulled up at a monastery in front of the usual coffeeshop hangout place we visit. It didn't look like a raid but more so an accident just happened.
Learning points? Anger has it's use but how it affects the other depends on why and how you use your anger. The male officers are perceptive in their views of sex workers, demonising the women which unconsciously taps onto the separation anxiety they've felt growing up with the mother-figure. Unfulfilled and sudden changes in childhood experiences could possibly be attributed to why our personalities are the way they are and why we end up in certain professions like law enforcement where performing rage could often be mistaken to be part of the job. When the real task at hand is to suss out clientele visiting geylang who're abusing the social laws of safety, HIV prevention and misleading foreign sex workers who's pimps are mostly concerned with the money they will be making and not the health of their workers. Similar to migrant workers who do not get outpatient care because costs borne by the employer is to hefty.
