We have collected a number of articles which question many of the beliefs behind sex trafficking by leading doctors and specialists in this field. Feel free to comment about them (or recommend other articles) in the forum section if you would like.
Sex-trafficking articles
Yet another sex-trafficking report on the way
Brooke Magnanti featured this article by The Heresiarch from Heresy Corner at (http://heresycorner.blogspot.co.uk)
With the Bailey review having strutted its hour upon the stage, the market for reports into childhood sexualisation is probably saturated - for the time being at any rate. But not to worry - there's always sex-trafficking to get worked up about. A subject very like "sexualisation" in its ability to unite the outraged sentiments of Mail and Guardian alike.
A press release from the Centre for Social Justice - the Conservative think-tank established by Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Montgomerie - announces the setting up of a "major inquiry into modern slavery". The report's remit extends beyond the sex-trade - it will also look at domestic servitude and people-smuggling for the purpose of forced or illegal labour (that latter being, numerically, by far the larger phenomenon). But the statement doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
The CSJ claims that people trafficking is "the fastest growing international crime". No evidence is given to prove this assertion - though I've found this report in which FBI Agent Steven Merrill is quoted as saying that it is "widely regarded" as the world's fastest-growing crime. Other popular candidates for the "fastest-growing crime" accolade include identity theft, rape and child pornography. The problem, needless to say, is that no-one can agree on what "people smuggling" actually is, and what distinguishes it from illegal immigration.
Could abolitionists stop mixing up chattel slavery with sex slavery?
People in the United States who want to lead a new anti-slavery movement should know better than anyone what chattel slavery is: The institution that allows one person to legally buy another and do whatever they want with them. Legally is the keyword: that is, the sale and purchase of human beings is permitted by the state in open sales; the slave becomes the owner’s possession in the same way a house or box of chocolates does. The women in the picture above, hanging out in front of a brothel or bar, are unlikely to have been purchased in that kind of sale or to feel themselves that they are slaves. Very likely they would feel offended to be called that, even if they don’t care for the work they are doing or object to working conditions.
Free the Slaves, founded by Kevin Bales, says there are 27 million slaves in the world today, which doesn’t match anyone else’s estimates. That’s because they lump together a very wide variety of people as slaves, mostly because their working conditions and pay are awful. That this reminds people of slavery is understandable, but to not distinguish between different states of freedom, volition and labour of individuals is a way of imposing an abstraction on them. Yes, it is colonialism again, by saying We Know What Your Situation Really Is, We Know Better Than You Do. Poor You, We Will Rescue You.
Sex trafficking in Sweden
I suppose in a dictatorship it might be possible to write a law aimed at punishing traffickers where no meaningful evidence was required. Then arrests and convictions could shoot up and prisons be full of men who might or might not have had bad intentions or done anything wrong. But despite the unpleasant rhetoric and complete lack of interest in evidence evinced by some of Sweden’s Gender-Equality Warriors, the Swedish legal system operates as (in)effectively as those in other contemporary democratic-style states. This was made obvious in police comments on the difficulty of convicting men for buying sex and now here on the subject of convicting traffickers.
The story below attempts to explain why there have been so few convictions of traffickers, but the impossibility of getting the law’s wording right is obvious. Legal language is often tortuous, but this quality is exaggerated when it attempts to pin down ultimately indefinable states of mind: Note, in the key paragraph (in green below) the use of coercion, deception, abuse, vulnerable. defencelessness, dependent, improper means, controls, exploit. The meaning of each of these key words changes completely according to context and moment and easily mean different things to migrant (or victim), smuggler (or perpetrator) and rescuer.
The story comes from Ireland, where some legislators who want to penalise the buying of sex sent a delegation to Sweden – which absolutely everybody does, it’s the in thing, but all they usually do is talk to government representatives in Stockholm, who tell them what the visitors could have read online without taking an expensive junket. Note that this entire analysis makes no mention of migration at all, which continues to be the fundamental issue despite protestations that it is not because now we are talking about slavery.
Guess a way to guess numbers of trafficking victims and win a big prize!
The Monty Python team have entered the anti-trafficking field. They must have, as who else would draft an initiative as daft as this one from the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking?
As everyone knows, it’s impossible to know how many people are real trafficked victims (they didn’t register with anyone at the border, remember). Year after year institutions claim they have got the right numbers and year after year the figures are debunked. The high-end figure I mentioned the other day – 27 million slaves worldwide – changes the terms of the guessing game to include vast new groups of people.
When the game announcement was sent around my networks yesterday, all sorts of suggestions were made: fill a jar with beans and ask someone to guess the number, count every third person that passes your window over a certain period, make up a fancy algorithm, put a keyboard in your mouth and bite down and so on.
Lost Boys and the disclaimer about sex-trafficked ‘foreigners’
Those who want to save women and children from sex trafficking have a ready-made excuse every time research shows people have taken up selling sex for their own reasons: Whatever methodology was used for the study could have missed the really enslaved people, the ones in chains in a back bedroom or cellar.
This idea is not informed by quantities of research carried out with migrants who sell sex, including my own, and fails to see how difficult it would be to hide people for long who, by definition, are meeting and interacting with members of the public (as clients) every day, and who cannot provide sexual services while chained up or tied down. Moral crusaders promote the idea that all possible customers are monsters who don’t mind violating slaves, but the majority of those buying sex are not demons and are likely to be disturbed by miserable-looking women and sometimes willing to carry distress messages to the world outside.
The Rescue Industry always transfers the conversation to a discussion of the Worst Cases, avoiding the ambiguous, ambivalent, everyday majority who sell sex – which is the large group of people I insist need more attention. It’s not a question of who’s happy or whether life is fair but of what kinds of proposals are useful to those selling sex, or, if Rescuers are not interested in them, what interventions have a chance of ameliorating injustice and social conflict.
If this were about men, they would be seen as empowered
Sex selection, sex trafficking and girls:
In Mara Hvistendahl's book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, looks at how advancements in prenatal technology have led to extreme cases of gender selection across much of Asia. As economic development spurs people in developing countries to have fewer children and gives them access to technologies such as ultrasound, parents are making sure that at least one of their children is a boy. As a result, sex-selective abortion has left more than 160 million females “missing” from Asia’s population. It’s estimated that by 2020, 15 percent of men in China and northwest India will have no female counterpart. The consequences of that imbalance are far-reaching and include rises in sex-trafficking, bride-buying and a spike in crime as well.
Note to researchers: Forget trips to view no sex trafficking in Sweden
Note to visitors to Sweden who want to see, examine, document, research or otherwise report on the effects of the law to criminalise buying sex: Cancel your trips, there is nothing to see.
How can you see ‘less’ sex trafficking’, ‘less’ sex work? How does one interpret emptiness? What does the absence of people on this bus mean? Does no one ride buses anymore? Is this one out of service? Is it on display in a museum? Has the route been cancelled? Who knows the answer?
I receive messages continually from people planning trips to Sweden: journalists, filmmakers, researchers, students, fellowship-applicants. They have all had the same idea to visit a country where a law prohibiting the purchase of sex is claimed to have reduced its sale and reduced sex trafficking. If these visitors write to me, I suppose they have read what I (and others) have written on the failure of the government evaluation to prove anything about the law and the difficulty that any such evaluation faces. Yet people assume they will somehow be able to observe the effects of the law. The whole idea of effects is questionable, but in the case of prohibitionist laws even more so. The most obvious first effect of prohibition is to discourage people from being seen doing whatever has been prohibited. Some people might really stop (or might never start) doing whatever has been made illegal, and some people might find different ways to do it that will be harder to discover.