"'Human Trafficking' Has Become a Meaningless Term"
November 1, 2015 8:19 AM   Subscribe

Does "human trafficking" mean "modern-day slavery," as President Obama says? No, "the word is a way to target marginalized groups like immigrants and sex workers in the name of a (confused or cynical) humanitarianism."

That article from the New Republic discusses the many surprising uses of the phrase "human trafficking," such as a teenage girl who runs away from home and sells sex without anyone else's involvement, and without leaving her own city. However:
The word “trafficking” . . . becomes a way to leverage the image of young women kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. After 9/11, [Alison Bass, author of Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law] says, the State Department was eager to embrace the language of trafficking as another way to justify immigration restrictions and surveillance inspired in the first place by anti-terrorism—which is why initiatives like the State Department "Human Smuggling and Terrorist Center" lump together "Human smuggling, trafficking in persons, and clandestine terrorist travel" as "transnational issues that threaten national security."
So what other term should we use? The article quotes Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets & the Rescue Industry:
There is no replacement term for trafficking because to use a single term simply disappears all these different situations, encourages reductionism and feeds right into a moralistic agenda of Good vs Bad.
The article concludes that the different uses of "human trafficking" are so disparate that we should be more careful to describe exactly what we really mean, instead of looking for a single better term:
If we're talking about underage sex workers with few other options for survival, we should say that we're talking about underage sex workers with few other options for survival—a discussion that should focus on resources and social service help, not law enforcement. Similarly, if the focus is forced labor conditions, then more attention should be paid to the main industries where that occurs. If the issue is about consensual sex work by adults, then legislators should be honest about using police to harass people for consensual sex work. They shouldn't pretend they're on a noble crusade against "trafficking."
posted by John Cohen (69 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite


 
the State Department was eager to embrace the language of trafficking as another way to justify immigration restrictions and surveillance inspired in the first place by anti-terrorism

For fuck's sake. Can't it just be that real, well-meaning individual people were concerned about a thing and wanted to try to do some good in the world? And that their own personal cost/benefit estimates based on their own values, which are different than yours, came out different than yours would?

No, it's evil villains twisting their mustaches and cackling.
posted by ctmf at 9:29 AM on November 1, 2015 [8 favorites]


It all goes back to the feminist sex wars of the 80s and 90s. The anti-pornography/anti-prostitution feminists vs. the pro-sex work/pro-pornography feminists. The author is in favor of consensual sex work by adults, and is calling out anti-sex work feminists for disguising their distaste and disagreement with consensual sex work as a crusade against human trafficking.
posted by all about eevee at 9:38 AM on November 1, 2015 [15 favorites]


See also this article in Reason: The War on Sex Trafficking Is the New War on Drugs
posted by docjohn at 9:39 AM on November 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


See also this article in Reason

The New Republic became a libertarian propaganda outlet so gradually, I didn't even notice.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:43 AM on November 1, 2015 [16 favorites]


Can't it just be that real, well-meaning individual people were concerned about a thing and wanted to try to do some good in the world? And that their own personal cost/benefit estimates based on their own values, which are different than yours, came out different than yours would?

I don't see what disagreements about "cost/benefit estimates" have to do with anything. That's not what this article is about.
posted by John Cohen at 9:53 AM on November 1, 2015 [5 favorites]


Terrorism is bad. Calling all kinds of different things "terrorism" because people have a knee-jerk reaction to it is bad. Doing that cynically, because you feel that those people would not otherwise support your per se good goal, is still lying and manipulating.
posted by verb at 9:57 AM on November 1, 2015 [16 favorites]


In regards to the forced labor situation, I think that "modern day slavery" is a very appropriate term. But the sex work stuff is more complicated, and comes down to whether or not you think selling sex is always degrading, no matter who you are or what the circumstances are.
posted by all about eevee at 10:07 AM on November 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


Is the assertion that men are addicted to buying sex so it's very hard to curb demand? How fascinating.

I don't think so. Most marijuana purchases, for instance, are probably not based on addiction by any meaningful measure.

I think the argument is that by keeping the sex trade illegal, demand for prostitution is not going to be curbed; as was the case with the drug war.

Personally, it seems counterproductive to conflate human-trafficking with people voluntarily engaged in sex work. As it sex-work stays illegal, it's workers are denied legal protections and are less safe; that seems to be the opinion of the Canada Supreme Court (in response to legal action brought by sex workers).
posted by el io at 10:40 AM on November 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


I've always thought that the evidence on making prostitution illegal is clearly one-sided. Sex workers in the US are more likely to have sex with a cop than be arrested by one, and this holds true even when you call them victims of human trafficking.

Perhaps if we criminalized "trafficking" and not "being trafficked" there'd be a better argument for it. Perhaps the language of trafficking helps us make that transition? But so far, it doesn't seem to have done so.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:47 AM on November 1, 2015


Selling labor is inherently degrading; sex work is reviled because it reveals the nature of the employer/employee relationship by rendering it in the most explicit, literal terms.

I think the reason why people are intensely skeptical of campaigns to stop trafficking of sex workers — typically you find their loudest supporters on the right, and typically these right-wingers hold up their opposition to trafficking of sex workers as proof that they're decent folks and not kitten-eating lizard people at all — ahem, typically people are skeptical about these campaigns because they almost always focus on punishment (of the sex workers, their clients, and their pimps) and as a rule provide absolutely no services whatsoever to the people who they are purportedly protecting.

Some of the people giving money and support to these organizations may be people of good will who are confused about what anti-human trafficking organizations do — sort of like how some people might genuinely believe that crisis pregnancy centers provide services for women — but the leadership has no excuse. It's a racket.

If you really want to see modern day slavery, you can go down to Louisiana and check out Angola. Or you could visit any other prison in the U.S. where unfree laborers produce consumer goods for private interests — fortunately, there's a whole lot of them for you to visit.

If you're alright with the loophole in the 13th amendment that allows for the enslavement of prisoners committed for crimes1, and if you want to see something even more grotesque than contemporary American slavery, you could also take a trip down to just about any island off the coast of Thailand — Ko Lanta, for example, where Scandinavian families like to vacation, or Ko Phagnan, where young people from around the world come to drink psychedelic mushroom smoothies and literal buckets of liquor while dancing to electronic music. Pick an island, go there, and then go down to the beach at night and look at all the ships on the horizon, the ones with big eerie green lights on them. These are fishing boats, crewed by slaves.

If you're concerned about modern-day slavery, you're likely an advocate for prison abolition and against trade agreements like TPP that allow the use of slave labor. On the other hand, if you don't particularly care about modern-day slavery, but even so don't want people to think you're a kitten-eating lizard person, and if you're also a little bit squicked out by how sex work literalizes the relationship between employers and employees, you can instead give to campaigns against sex worker trafficking and against trafficked sex workers.

[1]: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (emphasis added)
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:49 AM on November 1, 2015 [57 favorites]


Any conversation on the subject of trafficking in the U.S. that doesn't acknowledge the role that our restrictive approach to immigration plays in the situation is a dishonest conversation. But I would be careful in discussing the subject to not actually defend rape and abuse.
posted by thetortoise at 11:10 AM on November 1, 2015


It may be worth noting that this is by Noah Berlatsky, a fellow who has in recent months taken it upon himself to explain how to do feminism right, in the pages of… Playboy.
posted by oliverburkeman at 11:23 AM on November 1, 2015 [16 favorites]


Really, a gadfly like Noah Berlatsky eager to flash his "feminist" credentials while cherry-picking women to support him is the last person I want tackling the idea of consent in sex work. It requires someone knowledgeable and sensitive enough to consider the subject from many, many angles, and Berlatsky ain't that.
posted by thetortoise at 11:23 AM on November 1, 2015 [11 favorites]


The New Republic became a libertarian propaganda outlet so gradually, I didn't even notice.]

It pays to be little bit more skeptical. Just because it's in line with a libertarian viewpoint, doesn't mean it's wrong. Similarly, just because evangelicals and 2nd wave feminists who are unconsciously channeling the 50's believe it's morally wrong, doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve *some* thought.

It's pretty clear that criminalizing human desire (for sex, for drugs) is mostly ineffective, and generally used as a way to control certain populations, not for the stated purpose. Similarly, it's pretty clear that people should be forced, in some way, to pay more serious attention to the drugs they take and the sex they pay for, because both have serious side-effects when not done safety and with consideration.

In either case, just making some pronouncement will not do. You have to actually pay attention and modify your approach based on what is going on in the real world. This is a hard thing for people to deal with if they don't want to deal with the subject at hand explicitly (drugs & sex) -- they want a true answer and then don't want to have to think about it anymore. This, of course, is the real failing of the anti-porn/sex-work crowd and to some extent, the anything goes crowd. They want the one true answer.

To quote a commercial: That's not how it works -- that's not how any of this works.
posted by smidgen at 11:28 AM on November 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


That's not what this article is about.

I meant more what IFDS,S#9 said better than me. I don't have much of a beef with what the article said so much as the tone it seems to have blaming this on sinister motives. It's people using the tools they have to accomplish a goal they think is important. If they are using the tool inappropriately (calling simple prostitution "trafficking" because it's easier) then yes, someone's going to have to rein it back in, but that doesn't mean people are being intentionally bad.

I just think it's lazy to not assume that everyone is doing what they think is right, and it seems to me this article falls in that trap right at the part where they start assigning motives to the State Department ("eager... to justify...") instead of assuming people in the State Department had a genuine concern that they thought they could help with.

Naive? Maybe.
posted by ctmf at 11:30 AM on November 1, 2015


The major problem with addiction is that people make profoundly irrational and self-destructive choices. It seems unwise to use people's behavior around addictive substances to predict their behavior in other contexts.

I don't see the dissonance in using a addiction model for sexual behavior. We use it for food. This feels like the same old exceptionalist human argument -- as if "natural" means "reasonable". What chemicals do you think are involved in sexual desire?
posted by smidgen at 11:35 AM on November 1, 2015


Survival sex is rape by my own definition, but many of us will choose unwanted sex to starving or homelessness, going without medical care etc etc.

We need to make a commitment to offering housing, food and financial support to everyone who needs it (including people with criminal histories or who have undiagnosed difficulties with working that currently don't afford disability benefits)...

Essentially watching our fellow humans become physically and mentally ill and brutally overworked while damaged and suffering is a cruelty we are perpetuating on our fellow humans. The sick assholes who come along to profit off this suffering in more openly deliberate ways are cruel and by my definition criminal- but our failure to provide for our citizens in need is also to me, criminal (should be).

I'm a nurturer, I naturally want to care for people in need and I tend to be in tune with people's needs. I'm sympathetic to those who want to provide sexual companionship to those in need of intimacy- in a society that offers those who specialize in the realm of emotions over book/organization extremely shitty job options and protections. I think to truly help our nurturers, entertainers, heart workers, caregivers etc we should be focusing on things like paying family members and friends to caregive in the home (which is more cost effective than nursing home or in patient mental health care), we should be providing and economic base for every person that they can have some buffer from which to choose their employment from, and have a capitalist base system for extras that can flourish from there. This way the people who are better at making us laugh, listening to our feelings in a crisis, holding a hand in times of isolation-- than other types of work can do what they really do best. LOVE. Not because they are paid but because they will be lovers and nurturers no matter what because it is who they are. And these relationships are personal and chosen, not everyone fits for companionship or sexual intimacy.

While I certainly listen to the arguments made about making sex work legal as a first step, I still think generating the resources needed is the first step. I still can't help but feel there is this libertarian idealism in wanting to just make everything legal and that being the biggest talking point. There are people who are doing good work to promote access to housing and food and resources for runaways, the homeless, people living in poverty, and people who have experience trauma or other disabilities that make it hard to perform normal labor- who want to see sex work decriminalized and I respect it when it's a tandem of a host of changes being offered.

Having your whole community think that your boss can offer you sex or threaten to fire you (and I fail to see how realistically you're going to argue this can't happen if sex work is fully legalized)-- how are we going to differentiate that "those people" it's legal to threaten with job loss for not having sex (hey it IS the job) but good people in nice jobs can't be abused like this? There's a dehumanization there that I don't see accounted for in the more libertarian side of this argument.

I feel like if we had an adequate safety net this would carry far less weight (however the power for hazing, pressure, and social groupthink to push people toward decisions that are unhealthy for them for others gain is still a concern I would have around anything and sexuality in particular). But if people want to trade love gestures, companionship, caregiving, sexual care and intimacy, nurturing, money, gifts, and services in a context of equal access to resources and social status it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I get wanting to use a harm reduction approach, but to me this essentially means we are using harm reduction against rape-- allowing it to be legal for the sake of making things better for those who are being sexually exploited. Which means if we aren't going to stop it with laws we need to be working our asses off to stop these abuses through other means because it's really NOT ok. I think the sex industry as a whole is hugely problematic in the context of our capitalistic society that devalues caregiving roles that many women gravitate toward (and may be designed for in some cases, hormones really do affect us and some men might have more nurturing hormones in their make up and also be predisposed but if it skews female and we fail to be able to consider that, then telling all women to stop being that might be another form of harm and not all hat empowering) and treats women's bodies as objects for the pleasure of all, and I think trying to turn these discussions into the "anti-porn" vs the "pro-sex" is a crappy framing.
posted by xarnop at 12:06 PM on November 1, 2015 [10 favorites]


My partner, who is a sex worker, wrote this for TNR on the "Nordic model", and this for one of the Scottish papers on the trafficking agenda. I'm biased but I think they're pretty damn clear.
posted by imperium at 12:25 PM on November 1, 2015 [37 favorites]


imperium, those articles are excellent, and thank you for adding them to the thread. I hope they're shared widely.
posted by thetortoise at 12:33 PM on November 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


Seconding, those are great.

But as one sex worker organization notes (disclosure—I am a member of this organization): “If campaigners are concerned that poverty takes away people’s choices, we suggest that a real solution would be to tackle poverty, not to criminalise what is often the final option that people have for surviving poverty.”

Yeah, this is ultimately the flaw of looking at this situation from a purely libertarian perspective. The libertarian perspective does have some solid points, let people make their own choices with their own bodies, but as usual it ignores that economic coercion is probably the most powerful form of coercion in the world. Take that out of the picture, and then maybe the libertarian view is more compelling.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:44 PM on November 1, 2015 [9 favorites]


I just think it's lazy to not assume that everyone is doing what they think is right

I don't see how thinking different people may have different motivations is "lazier" than assuming everyone has the same (frankly quite nebulous) motivation.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 12:58 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


I regard the "Let's end poverty instead" argument to be yet another in the "Let's go for all-encompassing vague societal solutions rather than focus on the problem at hand" argument- most recently seen in debates about online harassment.. People love diffusing the answer to a problem away from specific remedies, because that diffuses responsibility away from actually doing anything. So for example, instead of lobbying for anti-harassment policies, we get "we need to change the culture". Instead of "Let's lobby to end anti-sex work laws, we get "Let's embark on a decades-long program to end poverty."

I mean sure, let's work to end poverty, knowing that's a huge task that may never be completed. But that shouldn't be an excuse to not work to immediately repeal the laws that criminalize sex work.
posted by happyroach at 12:59 PM on November 1, 2015 [9 favorites]


I really appreciate hearing all of the insight people have on this topic. I may be in a position at the moment that will allow me to influence policy, but I do not have enough understanding of the issues to make a sturdy recommendation, yet.
posted by Stewriffic at 1:04 PM on November 1, 2015


Instead of "Let's lobby to end anti-sex work laws, we get "Let's embark on a decades-long program to end poverty."

You read that article very differently than me if you think that was what it was suggesting. It's a situation where you should work on both for the future while recognizing the realities of the present.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:20 PM on November 1, 2015


I regard the "Let's end poverty instead" argument to be yet another in the "Let's go for all-encompassing vague societal solutions rather than focus on the problem at hand" argument- most recently seen in debates about online harassment.. People love diffusing the answer to a problem away from specific remedies, because that diffuses responsibility away from actually doing anything. So for example, instead of lobbying for anti-harassment policies, we get "we need to change the culture". Instead of "Let's lobby to end anti-sex work laws, we get "Let's embark on a decades-long program to end poverty."

I strongly agree with this point in general, but I think here people prefer the "let's end poverty" (as well as ending deportation and punitive approaches to immigration) approach because other large-scale approaches to curbing abuse in sex work have often led to worsening conditions for the sex workers themselves. I think the "let's end poverty instead" people are often the same as the "let's end anti-sex work laws" people, in fact.
posted by thetortoise at 1:25 PM on November 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


I mean sure, let's work to end poverty, knowing that's a huge task that may never be completed. But that shouldn't be an excuse to not work to immediately repeal the laws that criminalize sex work.

I think the argument is actually that, in our present system of economic coercion that causes people to "choose" jobs like poultry processing, legalizing sex work could end up causing more suffering than it relieves. It's not obviously true, but it's not obviously false either.
posted by straight at 1:29 PM on November 1, 2015 [6 favorites]


Having your whole community think that your boss can offer you sex or threaten to fire you (and I fail to see how realistically you're going to argue this can't happen if sex work is fully legalized)

Legal sex work doesn't have to come with legal pimping.
posted by LogicalDash at 2:32 PM on November 1, 2015 [6 favorites]


It all goes back to the feminist sex wars of the 80s and 90s. The anti-pornography/anti-prostitution feminists vs. the pro-sex work/pro-pornography feminists. The author is in favor of consensual sex work by adults, and is calling out anti-sex work feminists for disguising their distaste and disagreement with consensual sex work as a crusade against human trafficking.

One of the most surreal things i've ever talked to anyone about was a city council meeting(see here and here) people i know attended where they were trying to figure out strategies to fight "sex trafficking".

Basically, they refused to hear from anyone who had any positive or even just not-exploitative experiences with sex work because that's like "anecdotal", but their entire arguments were based on feelings and had no actual proof behind them. "Today our goal is to identify women who are being prostituted and treat them as the victims that they are", "Even if happy sex workers do exist, Satterberg said, he personally does not know them.", etc.

It's a heads i win tails you lose sort of thing. They get to use bullshit rhetoric and anecdotal evidence, but when anyone with actual experience or whos involved in/effected by what their talking about and their decisions wants to talk about it it's always illegitimate. As is mentioned above, it's just "i'm grossed out by this" dressed up in its sunday best.

There's probably a lot of overlap with the FPP material in this comic, but i'm still mad about the local situation with this.
posted by emptythought at 2:41 PM on November 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


Yeah, I remain concerned that the problems with creating fully legalized sex work options for the poor and vulnerable feels very similar to me to repealing minimum wages to "help" increase jobs for the poor, or to ensuring sweatshops remain open because the jobs being "chosen" and therefore are wanted.

I can barely hold a part time job as it is, honestly I am AFRAID of a popularized and legalized sex work industry that's feeding off of people like me who have had to work hard to avoid it. I have been preyed on enough I don't men making offers of money for sex all the time because it's hard enough as it is to stand up to them and I need money bad.

I wouldn't think badly of myself for accepting the offers, life's hard, but given I've already been harmed enough by imbalanced sex trades with men, I know this kind of thing hurts me. Some might like it or don't feel harmed, but I really do feel there may be some conflicts of interest here in assuming fully legalized sex work doesn't come with down sides as well. For me if I'm working as a nanny and given hints of sex trade as well it's a problem for me.

I have so many concerns with full legalization vs decriminalization and when people seem to think this is a simple easy solution I have concerned about how well they are going to ensure protections exist for people like myself who are really just tired of being preyed on and who DON'T want sex work as a solution.

Given that the other half of me thinks it would be great if I could just find a man who could pay for everything, it feels like the only hope I have that things could ever really get better in my life but I can't handle sex without love, it destroys me.

I feel that these concerns are more than concern trolling or having an anti-sex worker stance. I would like to find a way for sex workers who want to do sex work to do so without making it even more easy and socially acceptable for assholes to prey on the vulnerable and the struggling. Given that we CAN'T fix poverty quickly, how is full legalization going to protect people from being preyed on like this, or holding people who do this kind of thing accountable? It scares me when people doing advocacy for full legalization are really forceful about how sex work is the same as any other work, so such protections don't make any sense. I've worked a lot of shitty jobs, but unwanted sex is one of the most horrible things I've endured and I personally want myself and others who might feel the same way to have protections in place. It's like making selling organs legal to me, and then telling people who in desperate poverty that succumb to it they just shouldn't have made a bad choice.

Why do we agree that the power imbalance between boss and employee makes requesting sex for pay an abuse of power that people should be held accountable for, and protected from- but for the struggling and low income we can't call that sexual abuse? I am participating because I imagine some of what makes be seriously concerned about legalization others feel too, and I think there needs to me more addressed than just that people who have doubts are concern trolling or anti-sex or anti-sex worker, which I have seen stated in come conversations I've had on this, because I think there really is a lot more here to tease out. And I DO want our policies to change so we need to be having good conversations about this and making progress--- putting sex workers in jail or prison to "help" them needs to be stopped, police officers as we have just seen, have their own problems with sexual assault to be the go to solution for this-- so I think most of us on the progressive end of things agree we need to make changes.

But I also don't think that the fact that police have issues means we should just make rape and sexual abuse legal because police are corrupt.
posted by xarnop at 2:41 PM on November 1, 2015 [20 favorites]


In my ideal world (hah), any attempt to regulate or legislate sex work would be put forward with primary input from people who do or have done sex work themselves. I don't know if that's realistic, but I think this is a subject where it's far too easy for people with no experience of it (like me) to project their own feelings onto the issue and forget about the needs of the actual people involved. And I definitely don't trust a government that barely understands women's bodies to figure this out. I get nervous whenever people like Berlatsky think they can draw easy lines around "consensual sex work" because consent is complex and subject to all kinds of pressures (including economic ones). I know that saying that consent and abuse are dependent on an individual experience of a situation, not a single set of heuristics, is frustrating for people trying to develop policy/law, but it's still true.
posted by thetortoise at 3:21 PM on November 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


To everyone saying this is either naive or a false libertarian agenda, Berlatsky seems to have done a roundup of the bigger sex-work activist voices (several of whom have day jobs as social workers and who are intimately familiar with issues of poverty and non-sw labor in their communities) and turned their opinions and experiences into a thinkpiece. Would it have been better if Penny Redful had written the New Republic piece instead of some random white guy? Yes. But what he's saying about the labor politics of trafficking hysteria isn't either misinformation or a case of libertarian men hijacking a conversation.

if it gives you the political capital you need to get women who are arrested for prostitution services, instead of jail time and fines.

Internet fraud, if you read some of the writing of NYC-based sex worker activists like Lori Adorable, who has been making a project of investigating and covering the anti-trafficking courts, you'll find that unfortunately, the services they offer are unhelpful-- mostly classes preaching the evils of prostitution rather than viable exit strategies-- and that there is rarely a dichotomy between services vs jail time or a criminal record. The amount of criminalization of women who do identify themselves as having been trafficked is outrageous, and the label of the court seems to exist largely to bank off the political power of trafficking hysteria to obtain funding.

This isn't even getting into the many orgs that "rescue" sex workers to traffick them into forced sweatshop labor, like Punjammies or the horrific Irish org Ruhama, which was founded and is run by the same orders of nuns who operated the Magdalene Laundries. The trafficking craze is terrifying, and the assertions of this article really aren't conspiracy theories.

BTW, I'm going to borrow a line from Penny Redful and ask that anyone who is unfamiliar with this world who is preaching that all sex work is inherently degrading and nonconsensual, hand-wringing that the existence of sex work is morally corrupting to men and endangering the virtue and safety of non-sw women, concern trolling about whether or not poverty line sex workers can *really* give consent, etc, please take a seat, and instead of derailing an already marginalized conversation, donate $10 to your local domestic violence shelter. Thanks, and come again.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 3:33 PM on November 1, 2015 [18 favorites]


Complicated. He writes: In other words, trafficking can include sex workers who decide to illegally or semi-legally migrate from Eastern Europe to the United States. This describes the majority of women who were said to be "trafficked," according to researchers Robert M. Fuffington and Donna J. Guy. "More often than not," they write in A Global History of Sexuality, "these women have engaged in some form of sex work in their home countries and see work abroad as a chance to improve their circumstances."

If these women were sex workers (of some form?) i their home countries, does this mean they cannot be trafficked? I find that a troubling premise. Speaking from an Amsterdam point of view, Dutch people have been increasingly and uncomfortably aware that most of the women behind the windows in the red light are from Eastern Europe/Asia/Africa. Theoretically, if they're licensed, then they should have access to unions and not be trafficked. There are, however, many underground houses where things are not so clear.

What does it mean that the vast majority (estimates range from 60-70%) of the sex workers in the Netherlands are not Dutch, but are instead from much lower income countries? How much choice is there, really, in that kind of economic power dynamic?

Assume that many (most?) know why they are coming to Amsterdam and do so under their own power, then why were there so many women stepping forward every time there was an amnesty program to ask for help? I remember one quite powerful interview with a young woman from the Ukraine who said she was told that she was going to Amsterdam to strip. She admitted she was okay with that. The employment agent charged her an exorbitant fee for finding her a job and getting her to the Netherlands. Once in NL, she found her job was behind a window and they took her passport until she paid off the fee. Because she had voluntarily left to do a sex-work related job (stripping) she was afraid to ask for help from home. Is this trafficking? Or is it voluntary?

idk (but I do know I do not really like Berlatsky writing on this topic.)
posted by frumiousb at 3:45 PM on November 1, 2015 [10 favorites]


Just to put a bow on the State Department thing, the initiative linked above was not just inspired by anti-terrorism efforts but mandated by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which contains zilch about sex workers or anything besides terrorism. But there is actually an non-terrorist-related office in the State Department passed by a pre-9/11 act of Congress which relates more to the issues discussed here. Not sure how they relate or how they stack up in terms of budgeting.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:09 PM on November 1, 2015


I get where the OP is coming from but it seems less important to me to identify the motives of people on the other side of the issue than to simply say that they are incorrect. Whether they are motivated by a genuine desire to improve the lives of the impoverished and desperate or motivated by a cynical desire to curb immigration and strengthen the state or by a neopuritanical view of sex work doesn't matter if they're advocating for the same broken and ineffective policies.

It's like being more concerned with whether drug warriors are tools of the prison-industrial complex or people who think they are helping to stop the plague of addiction rather than the fact that they're often both advocating for the same broken and dare I say evil policies.

I don't care that you think you're helping people when you're actually hurting them.
posted by Justinian at 4:26 PM on November 1, 2015 [6 favorites]


BTW, I'm going to borrow a line from Penny Redful and ask that anyone who is unfamiliar with this world who is preaching that all sex work is inherently degrading and nonconsensual, hand-wringing that the existence of sex work is morally corrupting to men and endangering the virtue and safety of non-sw women, concern trolling about whether or not poverty line sex workers can *really* give consent, etc, please take a seat, and instead of derailing an already marginalized conversation, donate $10 to your local domestic violence shelter. Thanks, and come again.

I'm so tired of this tone, which seems largely deployed as a rhetorical trick designed to avoid actually having to engage with the arguments. Obviously, it would be insane to formulate policy in any area without deep consultation with those involved. On the other hand, the way democracies work is not that we identify the people currently involved in an activity (which, not incidentally, means that selection bias rules out anyone who decided then managed to leave that activity), then hand policymaking authority to them.

Furthermore, it begs the question – because often, the debate between pro- and anti-decriminalization sides is precisely an argument about what population is affected when the state takes a position with regard to the sale of sex (just sex workers? all women? all people?) – and therefore, it's necessarily also an argument about who's "familiar" with the pertinent issues. It's entirely coherent to argue that anyone who lives in a society constructed along lines of gendered power is deeply familiar with the key questions at stake. You are completely free to disagree with that position, obviously, but you have to argue your position, I think – not try to structure the field of argument in your favor in advance by suggesting that people who disagree with you aren't qualified to comment.
posted by oliverburkeman at 4:44 PM on November 1, 2015 [10 favorites]


Well, that didn't take long, and I gotta say I am COMPLETELY unsurprised by the demographic profile of the commenter claiming that all voices are equal in any discussion of civil or policy issues because ~democracy.

My request was for ignorant and inexperienced people to take a back seat and not try to center themselves in discussions about issues on which they are uninformed or underinformed, and instead to either do concrete good if they feel they must do something, immediately, now, and in the meantime to do their due diligence and educate themselves.

The handful of examples I wrote are very typical ignorant and cliched positions on sex work that I wanted to throw in before I saw them take over the thread-- I dont think I was even calling out anyone in this thread, which has mostly been pretty nuanced and on-topic (ie, about trafficking policy, not theoretical musings about gender power structures etc), so apologies if I was jumping the gun a little bit. But it seems like this fpp, based on the complexity and scope of the original article, is somewhat beyond a 101 discussion, and I'd rather not see it get derailed into off-topic comments or demands for basic education that people can get with a cursory googling. No, the people here do not "have to argue[our] position" with unaffected parties who are uncomfortable when their opinions are not the center of attention. It is not the burden of those who are involved or educated about civil issues to immediately drop the complex conversations they're having to educate people who don't want to do basic google research on demand. Come on now.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 5:28 PM on November 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


It's entirely coherent to argue that anyone who lives in a society constructed along lines of gendered power is deeply familiar with the key questions at stake.

For that to be coherent, you need to believe that someone who is privileged by that system of gendered power will necessarily recognize and reflect on their privilege. This is silly.
posted by LogicalDash at 5:47 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


There are two things going on with sex work that feel weird to me as a feminist. First, it feels weird to me to say that sex work is degrading because that's equating what a person does sexually with their worth. Second, saying that no paid sex can be consensual and that all sex workers are being coerced either physically or by their circumstances feels weird because it totally robs sex workers of agency. If a sex worker tells me they consented, I believe them. Why? Because they know better than me what happened to them and whether they consented to sex or not. If a sex workers tells me they have been exploited and that they did not consent, I believe them. That's their lived experience. They know better than me because it happened to them, not to me.
posted by all about eevee at 6:15 PM on November 1, 2015 [11 favorites]


FYI, this film has been getting press in Seattle. Think I'll finally watch it tonight.
posted by thetortoise at 7:20 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


What if some people prefer having the option of doing sexual favors at work for raises and other perks or added job security? I mean I imagine there have been plenty of people who both consented to this and were ok with it after.

Is it disempowering to tell employees that it's always wrong for their boss to give them this offer?

Worker protections are all based on the assumption that poverty and needs for money and survival, in addition to peer pressure and social expectations, will put people at unfair positions to ensure they have safe working conditions or protection from work that is too hazardous to be ethical to pay people to do. I think we do way to little in this regard, so arguments that essentially undermine the entire premise of worker protections concern me a lot.

I will add I think decriminalization could be done well, it's actually the arguments I hear people making for it that make me more concerned about what direction the people arguing for this are actually willing to take us or how aware they are of what sex work can be like for the vulnerable, a world I am very familiar with due to close friends and family of my youth being part of that world. My friends and family had overlap when I worked in homeless service and it made it very hard for me- I had family to go to unlike a lot of my friends, but they didn't really like or want me the way I was, so I found a home with runaways and couch surfers and a guy who took me in. He was a predator but I was glad to have somewhere to go.

I feel like some of the people arguing for full legalization are equally out of touch with the world of people who are on the streets, runaways, dealing with disabilities that leave them unable to get a college degree or limit their ability to participate in the workplace and how acting like it's all good as long as people consent will leave these populations vulnerable to what I see as sexual abuse. Or what it would really mean if we take arguments that sex work is the same as any other work and the risk of unwanted sex occurring to people who need to pay rent, eat, etc is the same as the risks of doing any other job-- how these kinds of attitudes will effect industries that are already doing everything in their power to prey on the sexuality of women within whatever the law will let them (or if they can keep it hidden).

And too often I hear this from people (more often men) who don't want to think about how their porn use, or visiting strip clubs, or their own participation in sex industry fits into this equation of whether their is exploitation involved- NOT people who are up close with initiatives to promote financial programs, resources, jobs that match abilities, and housing that is empowering and reflective of the needs of vulnerable populations who have a more nuanced perspective. I think we have zealots who have their own agendas on either side of this. I think decriminalization is the way to go but I have concerns about who will be in charge of that process and what all they will do with that ideology and how like everything in capitalism it will add a new angle for industry to exploit people with the complacency and acceptance of a public that sees "legal" as therefor "acceptable" thing to do to people.
posted by xarnop at 7:31 PM on November 1, 2015 [8 favorites]


Yeah there are plenty of kinds of contracts between private individuals who fully agree to the terms, that are nevertheless invalid and/or illegal.
posted by ead at 7:45 PM on November 1, 2015


Who gets to decide whether or not a sex worker consented to a sexual act they themselves participated in? The sex worker, or literally everyone else not involved in the act itself?
posted by all about eevee at 8:06 PM on November 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


What I'm saying is that in most lines of work, consent of the worker isn't the sole or even an especially significant factor figuring into regulating what employment relationship is legal or not.

You may well find this fact disagreeable but it's not at all unique to sex work to have other parties involved in drawing up rules.
posted by ead at 8:11 PM on November 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


ead, I am replying to xarnop.
posted by all about eevee at 8:13 PM on November 1, 2015


Legalizing prostitution doesn't have to mean that it will be legal for all bosses to sexually harass their employees. There are already jobs where some amount of legal sex work is expected and required (strip clubs, adult movies, even mainstream movies) and yet sexual harassment protections remain in effect.
posted by chrchr at 8:19 PM on November 1, 2015 [8 favorites]


All about eevee, apologies, misread.
posted by ead at 8:25 PM on November 1, 2015


That's okay, ead. I am talking way more about lived experience than I am about legality, really.
posted by all about eevee at 8:33 PM on November 1, 2015


There are already jobs where some amount of legal sex work is expected and required (strip clubs, adult movies, even mainstream movies) and yet sexual harassment protections remain in effect.

To a point. Tales of workplaces with gendered dress codes that verge into this territory are hardly few and far between.
posted by Dysk at 1:59 AM on November 2, 2015


I gotta say I am COMPLETELY unsurprised by the demographic profile of the commenter claiming that all voices are equal in any discussion of civil or policy issues because ~democracy.

Hahaha, OK: I am deeply comfortable with letting others draw their own conclusions as to whether this constitutes an engagement with the arguments at stake, or an attempt to avoid having to engage with arguments that you don't wish to think too hard about.
posted by oliverburkeman at 4:51 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


the way democracies work is not that we identify the people currently involved in an activity (which, not incidentally, means that selection bias rules out anyone who decided then managed to leave that activity), then hand policymaking authority to them.

This thread has gone pretty far afield from the question of whether we get worse policies under the "trafficking" language instead of the "sex work" language by virtue of the ways that "trafficking" tricks us into not knowing what we're doing. Still, I think this weird "but democracy!" objection is closely tied to original problem of propagandistic rhetoric being used to disguise and protect anti-sex work and anti-immigration laws, because the obvious conclusion is that if we're lied to about what the laws are for, we haven't preserved democratic policy-making, we've handed policy-making to the liars and propagandists.

So: one of the many reasons it's worth listening to the people affected is because they generally know more about the law as applied than the general public, who can, at best, only know what it says or how politicians defend it. And the people being affected by the law are currently suffering pretty badly under it. Not because they're often imprisoned by the enforcement of prostitution laws, but because police officers often effect an arrest and then offer to retract the arrest to extort sex.

None of the nightmare scenarios yet depicted in this thread come close to the horrors of having the criminal "justice" system be used to extort sex. Men with guns are raping sex workers because of tools and legitimacy the State gives them. Levitt and Venkatesh analyzed empirical data from Chicago and found that roughly 1 in 20 sex act performed by prostitutes there were not done for money but to prevent an arrest. That's roughly once per week per sex worker. This is not a "well, if only the police officers weren't corrupt" situation. It's a situation where the law enables and perpetuates that corruption.

So you can make the world a better place for sex workers by not giving police officers tools to extort sex. In fact, that's the first step to any other poverty reduction methods you have in mind, since even after we've eliminated poverty there will still be sex work and thus there will still be the threat of extorted sex.

The other thing that decriminalization does is allow unionization and organization. Most of the feminist scholars working on sex workers have concluded that as reprehensible as the market for sex is, forcing sex workers into the black market prevents regulation, organization, and actual protection by the police. Finally, the stigma of sex work is a double-edged sword: it prevents "upstanding" workers from participating in prostitution briefly or experimentally, but it also creates a culture that pretends that sex work permanently marks participants, which means that women have more difficulty escaping it.

That's what sex workers say. That's what feminist scholars say. That's what the data says. Why the hell should we care what people with less knowledge than that think, especially if they've been fooled into thinking they're preventing terrorism and "trafficking" in order to allow cops to keep raping prostitutes?
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:50 AM on November 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


It seems ridiculous to argue that legalizing prostitution would only (or even mostly) effect people currently involved in prostitution and that therefore those people should have the primary voice in creating such a policy.
posted by straight at 7:30 AM on November 2, 2015


I don't think it's ridiculous. They're likely the first and most directly affected.

I just agree with the referenced feminist scholar that there's a broader social policy around things one is not allowed to sell. A question addressed in many aspects of employment law.

But anotherpanacea is right that police extorting sex is a clear sign that criminal sanction (vs. some other regulatory structure) is not functioning at all as the law is written, and is likely made worse by intertwining the issue with language around trafficking and terrorism.
posted by ead at 7:39 AM on November 2, 2015


I think that's ignoring the possibility that legalizing prostitution could create new kinds of terrible employment issues for several orders of magnitude more people than are currently involved in prostitution.
posted by straight at 7:44 AM on November 2, 2015


The other thing that decriminalization does is allow unionization and organization.

It certainly doesn't guarantee unionization and organization.
posted by straight at 7:49 AM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Be careful to differentiate decriminalization and legalization.
posted by ead at 8:04 AM on November 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


"I also have a lot of questions about how/when/why human trafficking became the pet cause of American Evangelicals. I don't have a fully formed opinion on that, but it's baffling to me because yes, of course human trafficking is bad, but why does this church care about it so much, so far above every other cause? I suspect it has to do with Sex Is Bad, Particularly Any/All Forms of Sex Work, but I don't know enough about it."
The current flavor of opposition to sex work in Evangelical circles stretches way back to the Great Revivals and its start should really be viewed in opposition to a very Catholic, and even Anglican, accommodationalist approach and coming from them actually reading their bibles. This is one of the few topics where Evangelicals tend to be a lot more orthodox than liberal Christians, even if it is generally approached with a characteristic naivete that is unhelpful at best. A strident opposition to the trafficking of women as chattel in a system of sexual slavery, and the laundry list of sexual practices that Paul describes as supporting that system or being exploitatively just like it, is really one of the central things that the New Testament says should be the practical result of Christian faith.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:26 AM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


One of the things getting a little lost in this thread is that "trafficking" as a term isn't used primarily for domestic sex work (though it certainly is used extensively in that way, as mentioned in the Berlatsky article and others above) but for moving people from one place to another for the purpose of illegal labor. You can't prevent the extortion and exploitation that anotherpanacea describes, threatened by employers as well as law enforcement, without reforming immigration. Even decriminalization can't have a strong effect if we still consider human beings to be "illegal" and they can be effectively threatened and held in a situation on that basis.
posted by thetortoise at 10:04 AM on November 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


Even decriminalization can't have a strong effect if we still consider human beings to be "illegal" and they can be effectively threatened and held in a situation on that basis.

This a thousand times this.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:28 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


While trafficking may be more commonly associated with sex or drugs, it is in many labor supply chains in legitimate businesses. And not just people who crossed a border, but workers who voluntarily agree to an employment situation and end up coerced into conditions against their will - exploited, basically.

In July 2015 a contractor was ordered to pay $20 million to settle labor suits over guest workers brought from India to repair oil rigs on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They paid $10,000 to a recruiter who promised them employment and residency for themselves and their families, and ended up living in camps as indentured servants.
posted by latertater at 11:44 AM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Oh yeah if we want to get into the generally shitty and extremely complicated story of long-con / highly state-managed migrant "guest" labor, were gonna need a bigger FPP.
posted by ead at 1:41 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


My lived experience of this is that in around 1993 I had arguments similar to the ones you see on the internet today but IRL. I was the receptionist at a women's clinic and this utter tool who volunteered there picked a fight with me one day because I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper protesting the bullshit behavior of the local constabulary, who were bragging that they bargained prostitutes down to .25 per blowjob before yelling, "Surprise, I'm a cop!" and arresting them. Twenty five cents, same as in town. So predictably the utter tool started with the "what's the reactionary hidebound rhetoric all about, sister, thought we were all feminists here, if they want to sell oral sex for .25 a throw, what's it to you, my body my choice, I thought?" Right. Twenty five cents. Also at the women's clinic in 1993 we gave what is now called "plan B" to a client every single week because her lovin' boyfriend would not pay for the pill nor would he wear a condom but he would drive her to the clinic after his lil emissions. "Plan B" is not meant to be a regular go-to. It makes you really really sick. The nurses told her that. She told him that. She kept coming in. The nurses talked to him. But she kept coming in for Plan B. Because he didn't care and he didn't have to be the one puking for twelve straight hours. Also at the women's clinic in 1993 we had a sometimes client who was an "emancipated minor," which according to her pimp who drove her to the clinic meant that it was not illegal for her to do live sex shows even though she was fifteen years old. He got arrested and showed up in the same newspaper where my controversial letter about what shits the cops are appeared. None of this is exactly slavery, but none of this is exactly free agency, either. It needs to be legalized, regulated, unionized and paid top-tier money for because it is hard, skilled, necessary work, unlike pimpery and unlike much of law enforcement.
posted by Don Pepino at 3:30 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the idea it is necessary work is arguable. Necessary because many humans are beasts who can't see a human in front of them and can only see their own urges? I guess.

But I guess what I mean is if no one wants to do this work,people who want to use others for sex and pay them to keep it on their terms should just, you know, do what I do and not have sex. I've been surviving for 5 years I figure, I hear some people have lived decades without sex. I'm not saying it's great, but I also can't fucking imagine using a human being who I don't care about at all to fill my needs in this regard. I don't understand why our society pushes this is ok and normal and "necessary" to use others this way even when there are harms going on that should really make a person pause and stop seeing their sex urges as needs that override the welfare of others in front of them.
posted by xarnop at 4:44 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


but I also can't fucking imagine using a human being who I don't care about at all to fill my needs in this regard.

You're making huge and unkind assumptions about what sex workers do.
posted by chrchr at 6:05 PM on November 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I know the expectations our society has are that if you have a sexual urge it is therefore a "need" and it's ok to use someone without knowing where they are in life or how that will affect them. And sex work varies a great deal but that is the form a lot of our legal porn takes and how a lot of the sex industry works. You pay to not have to know. Or care.
posted by xarnop at 6:57 PM on November 2, 2015


Metafilter: Were gonna need a bigger FPP.
posted by el io at 8:41 PM on November 2, 2015


"Necessary because many humans are beasts who can't see a human in front of them and can only see their own urges? I guess."
No, it's necessary because many people cannot attract anyone to love them and care for them sexually for various reasons. They might be profoundly physically handicapped, for instance. Not all of those people are asexual. Some of them are going to miss out entirely on sex their entire lives. The answer to them so far has been, "Keep your chin up! There's somebody out there for everybody!" That's a vicious, cruel lie.

There are people who would like to help with this problem and who could help and who could in helping use their intelligence and empathy and sheer natural born talent in a fulfilling way and have a great career doing something creative and nurturing and fun. If this work were paid what it's worth and respected the way it should be, which is somewhere between neurosurgeon and astronaut, I guess, many many many more people on earth would have much much much happier lives. And there is not any reason it has to be debasing work and there is zero reason it must ever involve people who don't care about each other.
posted by Don Pepino at 3:23 PM on November 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Is it fair to say that your argument is that "sex work can be care work" Don Pepino? That seems right. But I wonder if you think it "could be" care work or "already is" care work.

I lean towards the idea that it already is, and that we have a habit of undermining care wherever we see it, to the point of making it a source of stigma and abuse. But I also think there's some reason to believe that a lot of sex work can't be care work under current conditions, i.e market capitalism.

A lot of what's at stake here is whether to aim for legalization, decriminalization, or the Nordic model of criminalizing clients. Or something else. These strike me as really hard questions, and all I know for sure is that we need to stop treating sex workers as outlaws who don't deserve the protection of the law, only its risks.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:43 AM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


You make a really good point. There's maybe a small problem with my claim that "...there is not any reason it has to be debasing work," namely the capitalism elephant. That thing is not just in the room, it's pretty much filling the room. Direct-care has "care" right there in the job title, but if the definition of "care work" includes respect and compensation, direct-care isn't care work. It shouldn't be debasing, surely, but it is because it's backbreaking and barely compensated. These are the people who lift our aging parents and grandparents out of bed every day and bathe and feed them and talk to them and make them laugh and give them a reason to wake up; why wouldn't we pay them? But we don't. So what chance do sex workers have of realizing the potential for that underpaid, thankless job to become a viable career, when on top of it being "care" there's also the handy stigma attached that makes it seem reasonable to tolerate cops bargaining prostitutes down and forcing them to value themselves at a quarter of a dollar before arresting them?
posted by Don Pepino at 12:53 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


We just readjusted numbers on direct cash aid for families and part of it was trying to figure out roughly what income levels are for various jobs, because we internally peg it to the garment trade's minimum wage in Cambodia as a basic income level for a working class income. You can make about 3x as much money as a street sex worker from the age of 20-30, with flexible working hours for childcare, and possibly better job security. You have much higher physical risk from clients, legal risk of harassment or prison, and health risks from STDs (including infertility), but the income level is just so much higher.

The alternative job options are pretty awful - long, long hours and low pay, frequent harassment anyway by bosses - and so the only reason I don't think more women aren't in sex work is the vilification of it. I have issues with the NZ model but it's the best of the lot.

The trafficking label being used for sex workers is partly because it is tied to fundraising and publicity. Plus it's so much easier to count because sex workers can be counted in police and law cases, while trafficking victims - real genuine sex trafficking victims are far fewer in comparison. And way more traumatised and harder to help.

Labor trafficking victims are plentiful, but who cares about fishing boat and farm slaves? Literally not a sexy headline.

Oh, and Christian anti-trafficking movements aren't new. They go back to the 18th century at least. They are tied to early feminist activism within temperance movements and abolitionists, women like Josephine Butler.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:45 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


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