A week ago, The Village Voice tore into the statistics of child sex trafficking in the US,proving that the numbers are much, much lower than we’ve been led to believe. The publication made an example of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s DNA campaign and my mouth dropped as Village Voice disproved the “100,000-300,00 kids a year” number, not because I was shocked at it’s falseness (though their pegging it at more like 840 a year is insane.) Rather, I was awed at their picking up what sex worker advocates have long been saying: that these “trafficking” numbers are false.
But since the Village Voice article emerged, the consensus seems to be “Who cares if the numbers are wrong? If one child is trafficked that is one child too many. What Ashton is doing is admirable.” I posed this “who cares if it’s wrong” question to the sex worker advocates who’ve long been saying the facts matter. Here I talk with Audacia Ray of The Red Umbrella Diaries, Furry Girl of SWAAY, Sarah E. Patterson of SWOP NYC, Serpent Libertine of SWOP Chicago and former sex worker and activist Veronica Monet. Sex trafficking is a real and horrific problem. This discussion is about finding better ways to tackle that problem.
I think there is confusion on what exactly trafficking is– what sometimes what looks like trafficking isn’t–there are differences in choice, circumstance and coercion in sex work. Can you shed any further light here?
Serpent Libertine: A good example of when circumstance becomes trafficking is a situation I handled last year. A woman applied for a job with an escort agency fully consenting to the job. She was traveled to another city for the agency, but the agency sent someone to collect ALL her money from her after each client. After being in a motel for over a week with no money she asked for what she was owed and a plane ticket home, which she was promised. They refused and she was trapped in a city far from her home with no money–the people running the agency stopped taking her calls. It was a situation she came in to with consent but was then tricked into what became an abusive situation. She had no money to get home, her motel room stopped getting paid and she was kicked out.
I work with street workers during my volunteer work and many of these street economy workers are actually not trafficked. They are working with consent, but under less than desirable situations. Many are drug users, but that doesn’t mean they are trafficked either. Additionally, indoor workers can oftentimes be in coercive situations so it’s important to realize this is not street=trafficked, indoor=non-trafficked.
Audacia Ray: In most people’s realities, choices are constrained by something. There isn’t really such a thing as “free choice,” especially when it comes to making a living and supporting your family. Though the mainstream media creates extremes of the “empowered high class call girl” and the “exploited drug-addicted street worker”, the reality of the sex industry is much more complex, and it is important to amplify the voices of real people who exist in that gray area. That gray area is “circumstance,” and it is the reason most people work at all.
I hear “who cares if the stats are wrong, one child trafficked is enough” and agree, but there is more to the picture. For instance many anti-trafficking groups are also often prostitution abolitionist groups– anti sex work–and their tactics harm sex workers.
Sarah Elspeth Patterson: Many of the organizations that use the 100,000-300,000 statistic, assume that those who enter the sex industry as youth are always trafficked into it. They disregard other factors, such as socioeconomic background, discrimination based on race or gender, or lack of youth services. Criminalizing anyone for their involvement in the sex industry, especially in the case of youth who are trading sex for survival, is not the solution. Making individuals’ lives safer by offering services on a voluntary basis, in a space where they can access assistance on their own terms, is a better way to help. You cannot help a population you do not understand.
Audacia Ray: I do believe that even one child coersed into sex work is too many, but I also believe that human rights of all people should be protected. In attempts to stop sex trafficking, there are abuses experienced not only by consenting sex workers but sometimes by survivors of trafficking themselves.
For example, here in New York, young people who are commercially sexually exploited are often arrested and imprisoned for prostitution – arrest is often the main way victims of trafficking (both youth and adult) are identified. Some get prison records, while others are put into forced rehabilitation programs that may not meet their needs, but are identified as an alternative to prison.
Village Voice admits they have stake. They own Backpages.com, which has reportedly increased business at least 15% since Craigslist was targeted by anti-trafficking groups and shut down. Now, activists like Kutcher are calling for Backpages.com to be shut down. Why is this problematic?
Furry Girl: Is the world now free from sexual exploitation because Craigslist doesn’t have an adult services section any more? Or, are there just more sex workers on the least privileged end of the scale pushed back into working unsafe environments where they don’t have the chance to screen potential clients?
As with any social issue, it’s the people with the least money who are most heavily impacted. A sex worker selling blowjobs on Craigslist for “50 roses” probably doesn’t have the startup capital to launch their own web site and pay hundreds of dollars to advertise in other venues. If Kutcher has his way and drives more cheap advertising venues out of business, it does nothing to help real underage victims, and it will make working conditions less safe for sex workers who can’t afford to go elsewhere.
Ed note: this powerful piece written by a victim of coersed prostitution explains this why taking down Craigslist was a bad idea.
Serpent Libertine of SWOP made a video with the message: Sex Workers want to Help End Trafficking. Why has this not been heard by anti trafficking groups?
Furry Girl: Which large anti-trafficking NGOs have actually been willing to consider the voices and concerns of sex workers? I can’t think of any. But I’d like to see more talk of how sex workers in the developing world are harmed by anti-trafficking campaigns. Western NGOs push for them to be jailed in “rehabilitation centers,” where inmates report violence and rape at the hand of guards. Sex Workers Present is an essential video collection that often touches on the way Western anti-trafficking NGOs affect other countries, especially Southeast Asia and India.
Sarah Elspeth Patterson: Sex workers and their clients are also more likely to encounter trafficking victims, but are unable to report these crimes based on the criminalized nature of their own work. In that way, sex workers are silenced and their potential role as allies to the anti-trafficking cause is disregarded. Here’s Laura Agustin talking about one way her research and knowledge was ignored by Kutcher’s DNA program.
What are most Americans not “getting” about trafficking in the US? What should we know?
Veronica Monet: I have met so many adult women who began working on the streets as teens and they get pretty pissed off when the second wave feminists talk about teen runaways like empty headed victims. The dirty secret we as a society still do not want to face is that some girls would rather turn tricks than stay home and get molested by their fathers.
Many prostitutes will say they don’t want to work in the profession if they get caught. Why would you do anything but claim to be a victim? It works in your best interest. This is the best way to work with law enforcement or NGOs because they all represent authority which has the power to incarcerate and deport. This becomes quite the shell game as many of the “rescued” prostitutes go right back to the “dreaded” profession they were” rescued” from.
As long as prostitution is illegal we will NEVER know who is working of their own free will and who is being forced or trafficked into it. And it’s important to distinguish between decriminalization and legalization. Legalization just creates a two tiered system where the government plays pimp to the privileged prostitutes and continues to jail the ones working illegally.
Sarah Elspeth Patterson: It’s also important to remember that just because a group is concerned with reporting the facts, rather than leading with a statistic that is inflated and wrong, they are not the enemy of anti-trafficking campaigns. It also does not make them in favor of children being trafficked, by any stretch.
Supporting large celebrity causes in lieu of supporting youth shelters or researchers who seek to examine the real way that trafficking functions instead of guessing, is not the way to effectively fight the problem of trafficking (or, for that matter, the issue of youth trading sex for survival). People are often offered “easy” answers to trafficking, when in reality, trafficking is an extremely complex issue that affects a variety of populations.
Continuing to criminalize sex work as though it will bring an end to trafficking will only make it harder to attack the problem of trafficking. As Charlie Glickman put it in this recent piece, “just as we can work to end sexual assault without trying to end all sex, we can work to end trafficking without trying to eradicate sex work.”
Images — Barbara Kruger
16 Comments
Just a quick reply to furrygirl-I actually have sat on my local human trafficking coalition as a sex worker’s rights activist for almost 2 years. They invited me to join, and have taken some of my input in to consideration with proposed initiatives like trying to mandate dancers to be licensed in my area (it was later killed due to input from myself and a local club that came in to talk to us). More needs to be done to include sex workers in to these groups and conversations, but it can happen.
Wow, Megan good to hear. What area are you from if you don’t mind my asking? I recently moved to NYC from Chicago, and in Chicago this definitely was not the case.
A few months ago in Chicago, I went to a “seminar” on trafficking run almost wholly by anti-trafficking groups, but a lot of sex worker advocates showed up. Over and over the advocates kept pushing–why are you against sex work, let us help you. And the anti trafficking orgs tried to just sort of skirt the question. Finally, one advocate nailed the orgs when they began talking about “ending demand”. He posed to the panel: “How can you say your goal is ending demand, and not act like you are anti sex work–ending demand isn’t going to help sex workers now is it?” The room roared with applause and one by one the panel members responded with “no comment”.
I think though, even if you are anti sex work and a prostitution abolitionist that it would serve your cause to also help all sex workers have safer environments and options!
Megan: That’s great if your local anti-trafficking group was willing to listen to you. But that doesn’t refute my having never seen any *large* NGOs seek input from sex workers.
RRW-I’m in Toledo. If you are from Chicago, you must know Serpent…I know we have had many convos about CASE and their lack of willingness to really *hear* anything beyond their own stuff. It’s an uphill battle there for sure. I think part of the difference in Toledo is that we are a smaller community, therefore there is not as big of a machine to contend with.
FG-I’m actually in contact with Polaris Project trying to work on a collaboration right now. I am approaching the collaboration slowly and carefully mind you, but they seem excited to have had a sex worker reach out to them.
Yeah! Serpent is doing such important work in Chicago. At the conference I am talking about, she was actually the only one who spoke on the pro-sex work side! Chicago is a very interesting city for sex work awareness and trafficking awareness. From what I have read and understand prostitution in Chicago IS very class segregated/racialized (kinda like the whole city itself.) There is a lot of street work.
When I did my “Johns” work interviewing sex buyers, I interviewed face to face quite a few men from Chicago. And many of them had stories about buying on the street or being propositioned on the street. I honestly have no idea what the picture of sex work is like in Toledo, but not being far from Chicago and still being Midwestern, I wonder how different in could be…Curious if you have any insight.
Also I didn’t add a call-out question asking what you guys think, but I am curious if you have been following the Kutcher vs Village Voice debate, what you guys think?
Thanks for this article Rachel. Also, folks should know that the number of people in the USA who are trafficked for non-sexual labor (picking vegetables, domestic labor) far exceeds the number of people trafficked for sex labor. The voices of these people are largely unheard because there is such a emphasis on sex trafficking. Activists (and celebrities- listen up, Ashton and Demi) might be more effective in their work if they look to expose and end ALL forms of trafficking and create solidarity among these movements.
Lisa, thanks for this, you are so right. I saw a comment somewhere online about how these other forms of trafficking might be harder for Ashton, Demi and their celeb friends to face–trafficked nannies, hard laborers, house cleaners. According to the commenter, these “trafficked bodies” are just the type of people celebs and big shots use to staff their mansions. And, for sure I don’t think a celeb campaign against these other forms of trafficking would go far. Is it just because we are so obsessed– as humans, and as a culture–with sex? Regardless, I think that commenter was onto something, there are different truths in looking at other forms of trafficking that make us uncomfortable.
I see this whole debate going hand-in-hand with America’s use of scare tactics instead of actual facts. All of our politicians use this on a regular basis, so I think celebs getting politically involved are following suit. I couldn’t help but laugh when Ashton said something along the lines of “I can’t get all my facts straight, I’m just trying to stop sex-trafficing.” As if being a spokesperson for a political movement doesn’t mean knowing about your cause…
thanks so much for actually talking to people who are informed, not just some popular and pretty faces.
Eliza, Yes I totally agree. And what also fits hand in hand with this is the idea that Ashton and Demi and others who are taking on trafficking like Mira Sorvino are also just pawns of sorts for politicians. Politicians/anti trafficking/sex work abolitonists use them to sway public opinion–and it works. It might sound a little bit conspiracy theory, but consider Laura Augustin’s comment directed at Ashton Kutcher:
“Laura Agustin said…
And in Luxor, did you listen to me on the BBC panel? Or did you pull faces and groan every time I spoke, along with others from Hollywood? Were you interested in any of the issues I brought up, or did you simply ignore them and stand up to repeat the wrong statistic that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13? In order to get big applause? I had been talking about diversity amongst people who travel and sell sex, you changed the topic to bring up the erroneous figure of 13, which, if you have done the research you say you have, you know is simply taken from a single study and being misused horribly. You can’t claim to be knowledgeable about a field if you haven’t read a wide range of research – not emotional stories, not ideological rhetoric. Will you take a look at my book, Sex at the Margins? my blog, which has loads of resources your government agencies will never tell you about?”
There’s one more thing I want to bring up for possible discussion, because it’s plaguing my brain.
And that is the idea that sex trafficking IS worse than other forms of trafficking because forcing someone to have sex is worse then forcing them into hard labor. I’ve heard this idea tossed around, and I want to dissect it a bit.
My first reaction is, yes, perhaps it is worse. Because sex is as emotional as it is, because of the social conditioning we have around sex/virginity/madonna/whore, it is at least more psychologically rife with hardship.
But, something about this viewpoint demeans sex work as actual work. Sex work is real work, it’s hard work just as any physical work/manual labor is.
The thing, about trafficking is though, that it’s rape. At least in many ways/senses of the word. But is rape any worse than other forms of violence (such as forcing someone into labor/beating them, etc.) and if it is–why?
@Rachel
I’m not sure what good it does to play the ‘which is worse’ game, especially when we’re talking about incredibly broad concepts. I mean, asking if sexual abuse is worse than physical abuse could be asking if one-off sexual harassment is worse than being repeatedly beaten to a pulp, or if being raped is worse than being slapped, etc. etc. I wouldn’t say one is worse than the other in every instance. I think degree matters. And I think personal experience matters more.
Personally, being chronically sexually harassed was worse for me than being sexually assaulted and being hit. It was the ongoing terror that really got me, the constant feeling of not being safe. For other people, the answer might be different.
@Rachel- I think you are right, that celebrities are getting into this because it’s sexier and more interesting, and most importantly because they are uneffected by it. it’s easy to say trafficing has to stop if you are in no way benefitting from it.
I honestly could not say whether or not it’s better or worse. I know, for myself personally, I would rather be forced into hard labor than be raped. But I’m not exactly sure why. Is this just a natural feeling, or have I just been conditioned to feel this way?
Lori, I think you are right–it is a personal experience thing at play. So, do you think those who are arguing that sex trafficking is worse then other forms of trafficking just shouldn’t make that argument? Curious of your thoughts…
Eliza, Yeah and I do wonder about Ashton and Demi’s also being anti prostitution though, because surely among their high level male friends, seeing sex workers is a regular thing. And I think there is the point here that rape is super harrowing and can be devastating psychologically, emotionally and harmful physically– and society reinforces this. I’ve read accounts from trafficked women who talk about the social stigma of their being trafficked as though they are at fault, or to blame. It doesn’t seem so far off from rape or incest victims blaming themselves
We have such fucked up messages about sex and gender roles and I think we see this illustrated here.
This kind of attitude always raises red flags for me, because it always seems to speak to a rigid agenda. If someone strongly opposed to motor vehicles said, “If even one child dies in a car accident, that is too many!” that would set off red flags for me too. I mean, you can’t exactly say “Well, actually, I think there is a trade-off to be made here, and that the benefits brought to us by motor vehicles actually outweigh the deaths of thousands of children a year,” without coming off as a complete asshole. And so it sets up the vehicle-opposed person to be able to push unreasonable demands without being questioned, because if you question it, then you must be a horrible person that doesn’t care about the thousands of children that die every year in car accidents.
So for me, variations on, “If even one…!” immediately makes the speaker suspect. It is not a phrase that you often hear from people that are actually looking to develop reasonable, balanced solutions. It is far more often a phrase that you hear from people pushing for a specific extreme solution that they already have their hearts set on. There are exceptions of course. But still, it makes me take a speaker less seriously, not more.
@Rachel:
I agree with Lori, that this is going to be a bit of a subjective “personal experience” sort of question. To an extent, the worst crime is going to be the one that does the most harm. But certain kinds of harm–especially emotional harm–are going to vary a lot from person to person.
I would much rather be raped than have my right pinky finger cut off. But other people might feel differently. In fact, I remember having a conversation with a guy who said he would rather be murdered than raped, which is inconceivable to me, but that’s how he feels. For me it is worse to be treated as dangerous due to being male than it was for me to be teased for my tourette’s when I was a kid. Etc. etc. etc.
I do, however, think that the emotional harm to a woman being raped in particular is amplified from what it necessarily needs to be, because our culture pedestalizes sex with women, and because we tell women that they are losing something/being harmed even when sex is consensual. I find it hard to believe that emotional harm would not be significantly impacted by the placebo effect in such circumstances.
I wonder if by looking at how men are affected by rape from women we might be able to start synthesizing a more accurate view of what the harm of rape itself is, aside from cultural components.
Xakudo,
I want your opinion on something I’ve been thinking about for awhile re: this hysteria surrounding sex for women. Do you think that perhaps the way we talk about “gray areas of consent” just feeds into this? ( I think you and I may have circled around this idea in a different thread, maybe the Slutwalk one.)
I think that maybe the way we talk about gray areas of consent– in these hushed tones, wanting to call it “gray rape”–is just another way that we build sex up as something to be given away with reverence, something that takes away from a woman. By reminding women that when they didn’t want to but couldn’t speak up or say what they needed correctly, that they were raped seems it can only further add to this idea that sex is more important than other things that it is a huge and sacred thing that must be saved or treated with reverence.
But it’s a double edged sword, because as you said, because there is such a social baggage around sex, no doubt a victim of “gray rape” will have so much to unpack.
I feel I am being unclear, so I could use some help navigating the idea…Thoughts anyone?