Book Notes : Brokered Subjects
Dec 8
BROKERED SUBJECTS
SEX, TRAFFICKING & THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM
ONE
TRACING THE “TRAFFIC IN WOMEN”
Elena recounted to us how during these bar visits, anti-trafficking activists would offer the dancers alternative employment through their socially entrepreneurial business venture producing and selling jewelry made by “formerly trafficked women.” Nearly all of the “victims” who accepted the offer were slightly older women (in their thirties and forties) who had previously chosen sex work as their highest-paying option but who, after accumulating some savings and finding themselves aging out of the prime markets in sex work, elected jewelry making instead. After accepting their new positions, the women soon discovered that their lives would be governed by some unwelcome regulations: they were officially prohibited from visiting their former colleagues in the red-light district, and their pay would be docked for being minutes late to their shifts, for missing daily prayer sessions, or for minor behavioral infractions. Many also complained about the uniforms that they were required to wear to work: shapeless black polo shirts with the organizational emblem embroidered on the chest, and the Thai word for “freedom” stitched boldly across the right arm.
Although the women we met with that evening had not had an easy time working in the sex trade (or, for that matter, in their lives preceding their employment in this sector), they resisted the increasingly prevalent terminology of “trafficking” as an apt description of their experiences.9 Propelled by social circumstance rather than by brute force or organized crime, they were in many ways similar to the sex workers in other regions of the world whom I had worked closely with over the course of several decades. Even those who had begun sex work at young ages, or who had incurred debts to labor brokers, or who had experienced violence at the hands of customers or their employers overwhelmingly rejected this rubric and the implications of its associated lexicon of terms. Indeed, as both the anecdote here and an accumulating corpus of social scientific research have shown, the framework of “trafficking” (along with its attendant notions of sexual victimization and exploitation) has been far better suited to the goals of aid organizations and governments than it has been to the needs of sex workers.
Only recently have journalists provided the burgeoning “trafficking industrial complex” with a modicum of critical scrutiny, following revelations of falsified public accounts by one of the most high profile and celebrated of anti-trafficking activists, Cambodian “survivor-activist” Somaly Mam. A May 21, 2014 Newsweek cover story drew on years of research for the Cambodia Daily by investigative journalist Simon Marks and featured interviews with family members, neighbors, teachers, and hospital officials.10 Marks not only called into question Mam’s own backstory of sexual servitude (one she had carefully recounted in her best-selling autobiography11) but also debunked one of her foundation’s most circulated stories of victim salvation. Among Mam’s chief fund-raising vehicles was the story of Long Pross, presented as a young trafficking victim who had lost her eye to a brutal attack from the brothel owner. The Newsweek story revealed that the young girl had in fact suffered the injury after the surgical removal of a tumor, and that she had been placed at Mam’s foundation at her parents’ request because they were too poor to provide for her. After the release of the Newsweek exposé, not only was Mam herself forced to resign from her post as the Foundation’s head, but her defenders were briefly spurred to consider the broader implications of her fictions.
Over the past few years, there has also been a growing body of academic writing on particular communities of sex workers and the gaps and disjunctures between their experiences and those that have been asserted by the official trafficking discourse. In her study of migrant Filipina sex workers working in South Korea, for example, the anthropologist Sealing Cheng has found that their experiences “defy the binaries . . . of innocent Third World women vs. powerful First World men; well-intentioned nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) vs. evil-intentioned employers; the protection and shelter of rescuers vs. the danger of the clubs; and the risks of migration vs. the safety of home.”
sexual commerce “is not a totalizing context for everyone who sells sexual services,” but rather one form of economic survival among many for rural migrants in the informal sector.
Christine Jacobsen and May-Len Skilbrei draw on extensive interview-based data to provide a sharp contrast between the women’s own self-representations and the accounts of victimhood that prevail in international trafficking discourse. In particular, they note that prostitution, for their interviewees, is forced on them neither by cruel men nor by situations of dire economic hardship, but rather provides much coveted access to “consumption and leading lifestyles associated with ‘modernity’ and ‘the West.’”
Why did narratives of sex trafficking suddenly reemerge after almost a century of slumber, resuscitating long-dormant accounts of the horrors of the “white slave” trade? How was the idea of a global “traffic in women” resurrected out of the framework of prostitution as a victimless crime, which prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the gathering movement for sex workers’ rights, which gained prominence over the following two decades? And what is it, precisely, that has enabled “trafficking” to travel so well—across secular and religious divides, across geographic borders, and across wildly variant activist constituencies? In law and policy and the mass media, on college campuses, in church pews and in corporate social responsibility campaigns, the “sex-trafficking victim” has become an iconic figure of our era, capacious enough to serve as the emblem for quite disparate imaginations of social suffering. In recent years, she has become a nearly ubiquitous symbol of gender inequality and exploited labor,of open borders and unbridled commodification, and of myriad forms of sexual violence.16 While she has periodically shared the spotlight with a range of other iconic figures of sexual exploitation—from the burkha-clad Muslim woman to the presumptively white victims of sexual assault on college campuses and in elite workspaces—the image of the trafficking victim has been durable as well as malleable.
“rescue industry” these include local, state, and transnational governing institutions, secular
feminist and faith-based activist campaigns, and a bevy of nonprofit as well as for-profit ventures that have recently emerged to “end sex trafficking” and to help victims. As in other forms of neoliberal governance, these “brokers and translators” are rarely questioned in terms of the beneficence of their motives or the effects of their interventions.
consider how and why certain kinds of social relations get singled out for moral and political redress, and the role that sex and gender play in forging these distinctions.
At stake is the vision that is shared by contemporary activist campaigns to combat “sex trafficking,” as well as an emergent and expanding set of mechanisms of global governance (often proceeding under the banners of “women’s rights” and “empowerment”) more generally.
A GENEALOGY OF ‘SEX TRAFFICKING’
over the course of the past decades, had led me from the sociological study of sex work toward the study of the growing cadre of humanitarian projects that have emerged to reclassify all or certain forms of sexual labor as “trafficking” or “slavery,” to press for laws that punish the individuals who are deemed responsible for this captivity, and to vigorously pursue sex workers’ rescue.
While in the early and mid-1990s such struggles were increasingly pursued under the culturally and politically ascendant banner of “sex workers’ rights,” in more recent years this framework has been powerfully challenged by a bevy of anti-trafficking laws and policies that equate all prostitution with the crime of human trafficking and that rhetorically capture both of these activities under the new rubric of “modern slavery.”22 These laws have been pushed forward by a remarkably diverse array of social activists and policy makers—a coalition spanning from left to right and comprising secular feminists, evangelical Christians, human rights activists of diverse stripes, and a cadre of prominent celebrities and corporate officials. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher criminal and economic penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, as tensions mounted over migration, urbanization, and the social changes being wrought by industrial capitalism, narratives of the traffic in women and girls for sexual slavery abounded. Such narratives drew upon the nation’s legacy of race-based, chattel slavery as well as a resonance with biblical notions of “slavery to sin,” conjuring scenarios of irrefutable moral horror: the widespread abduction of innocent women and girls who, en route to earn respectable livelihoods in metropolitan centers, were seduced, deceived, or forced into prostitution, typically by foreign-born men. Although empirical investigations would eventually reveal the white slavery narrative to be largely without factual basis—the evidence suggested that large numbers of women were not in fact forced into prostitution, other than by economic conditions—anti–white slave crusaders were nevertheless successful in spurring the passage of a series of “red-light abatement” acts, as well as the federal Mann-Elkins White Slave Traffic Act, which brought the nation’s first era of wide-scale, commercialized prostitution to a close.
At the international level, anti-trafficking committees worked together to incorporate anti-trafficking platforms into the League of Nations and then the United Nations by way of a succession of multinational anti-trafficking accords. Beginning in 1904, these accords sought to more stringently contain prostitution, both migrant and domestic, with each successive iteration. The 1904, 1910, and 1921 League of Nations accords would eventually give way to the 1940 United Nations Convention, which, without distinction between domestic and international trafficking, transformed brothel keeping and all procurement for prostitution into punishable offenses, regardless of the age or consent of the victims. As the historical sociologist Stephanie Limoncelli has observed, trafficking was in fact the first women’s issue taken up in international accords, “well before other issues that were being advocated during the same period, including suffrage, education, and married women’s citizenship.”
From the 2000s to today, the term “trafficking” has again been made synonymous in policy circles with not only forced but also voluntary prostitution, while an earlier wave of political struggles for both sex workers’ and migrants’ rights have been eclipsed. According to observers both laudatory and critical, this displacement has been facilitated by the embrace of human rights discourses by abolitionist feminists, who have effectively neutralized domains of political struggle around questions of labor, migration, and sexual freedom via the reductionist tropes of “prostitution as gender violence” and “sexual slavery.” Indeed, as one progressive human rights advocate who witnessed the early stages of the feminist trafficking debates has noted, by the time of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, “trafficking as a labor issue had been successfully transformed into a sexual violence and a slavery issue.”29 In her much-heralded Beijing declaration that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” then First Lady Hillary Clinton made explicit reference to the political urgency of sex trafficking, declaring it “a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution for human greed.” She went on to argue that “the kinds of reasons that are used to justify this practice should no longer be tolerated.”30 Indeed, from the perspective of abolitionist feminist anti-trafficking organizations, the shift to the human rights field was crucial to relocating a set of internecine political debates among feminists about the meaning of prostitution and pornography—the so-called “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s—to a humanitarian terrain in which the abolitionist constituency was more likely to prevail.31 By reframing the harms of prostitution and trafficking as politically neutral questions of humanitarian concern about third-world women, rather than as issues that directly impacted the lives of Western feminists, anti-prostitution feminists were able to wage the same sexual battles virtually unopposed.
the administration of George W. Bush, who, in a noted embrace of evangelical framings of the issue, declared in a 2003 address to the UN General Assembly: “There’s a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of the sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life—an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others, and governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.”34 Significantly, Bush also expanded upon President Clinton’s earlier Charitable Choice initiative to allow avowedly faith-based organizations to become eligible for federal funding. Since 2001, the year that President Bush established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, evangelical Christian groups have secured a growing proportion of federal monies for both international and domestic anti-trafficking work, as well as funds for the prevention of HIV/AIDS.35 The rise of Christian NGOs on the global stage was thus enabled by the political ability of evangelical organizations to ensure their own funding alongside previously established secular groups. This was particularly important given a context of reliance on NGOs for the provision of social services, services for which the neoliberal state had itself relinquished responsibility.
during his tenure in the US State Department’s Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons from 2003 to 2006, the inaugural ambassador John Miller argued that the ongoing use of the term “sex worker” by certain NGOs, activists, and troublesome feminist academics served “to justify modern-day slavery, [and] to dignify the perpetrators and the industries who enslave.”36 In accordance with Miller’s declaration, a spate of US anti-trafficking laws emerged to create an enforcement apparatus for Miller’s view that all forms of sex work both within and beyond US borders should be regarded as the moral equivalent of slavery: stepping up criminal penalties for pimps and sexual clients, imposing financial sanctions on nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem prostitution, and stipulating that NGOs that did not explicitly denounce prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights were to be disqualified from federal funding. Miller’s agenda not only remapped the field of fundable NGOs but also provided more general political support for the rapid proliferation of sexually and carcerally focused strands of anti-trafficking activism, both secular feminist and evangelical Christian in orientation.37 Since 2001, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has spent nearly $250 million on anti-trafficking programming internationally.
A critical accompaniment and co-agent in state- and activist-led campaigns against sex trafficking has been the steady proliferation of media accounts, which have rehearsed similar stories of the abduction and sexual enslavement of women and girls whose poverty and desperation render them amenable to easy victimization in both first- and third-world cities.
movies, popular fiction, television shows, newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, websites, and online games and apps—has emerged to reinforce ideas of prostitution as sexual slavery, and ideas of heightened policing and low-wage labor as appropriate remedies.
Most recently, a growing number of celebrity activists, including Angelina Jolie, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Mira Sorvino, and Jada Pinkett Smith, have also highlighted this issue through their allocation of financial resources, public service announcements, and testimony before US Congress and the United Nations.41
the story of prostitution’s moral and political transformation from a “necessary evil” into “the Social Evil” of the late nineteenth century has been amply recounted by numerous scholars,
the (re)discovery of the “traffic in women” in the late 1990s, considering the ways in which burgeoning markets in sexual commerce have become intertwined with evolving feminist, evangelical, and political-economic interests. Beyond demonstrating the deleterious effects of this discourse on workers and migrants, this discussion provides an important window onto broader transformations of sexual politics, new paradigms of humanitarian intervention, and the subjective meanings and political techniques of late capitalism.
recent campaigns against the “traffic in women” have been spurred not simply by diffuse social anxieties around globalization, immigration, and the liberalization of sexual mores (as previous commentators have offered); they also are indicative of something more: a new politics of sex and gender that is directly brokered by the neoliberal state, is entrenched in right- as well as left-wing cultural spaces, and is expressed in both secular and religious idioms.
Definitional and Calculative Flux
the anthropologist Sverre Molland observes that the term “human trafficking” first appeared in the New York Times in 1976, in an article about the trafficking of persons out of East Germany. It resurfaced on two occasions some twenty years later, in reference to discussions preceding the 2000 UN Protocol on Trafficking in Persons, the policy instrument that has proved most influential in disseminating the trafficking discourse on a global scale. Usage of the term has increased steadily each year since that time, with the number of mentions in the newspaper reaching a total of 284 by 2012, and 1,972 as of December 2017. Amid this rapid proliferation, the ambiguity of “human trafficking” as a signifier has been marked by both older vestiges of the term (in which residues of the nineteenth-century “white slave traffic” are ever present) and by successive political struggles at key institutional junctures (including the United Nations and the US State Department of State). Given that the very definitions of both “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking” have eluded clear consensus, efforts to try to quantify their prevalence, or to calculate numbers of victims, remain tenuous at best. What cannot be clearly defined or specified cannot be meaningfully counted.
For example, while the 2000 UN Protocol, the most frequently cited document on these matters, carefully enumerates the activities that constitute “trafficking” and “exploitation,” it never precisely defines the term. According to article 3 of the UN Protocol:
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
What exactly is to be understood by the force, fraud, vulnerability, and exploitation that constitute the key elements of the crime of “trafficking” remains unclear. Most notably, the meaning of “the exploitation of the prostitution of others” is never stipulated, a phrase left deliberately ambiguous because of intractable arguments among activists about the nature of prostitution at the time the protocol was negotiated.43 The awkward phrasing that resulted from these struggles allows for easy vacillation between understandings of exploitation as direct physical coercion and exploitation in the Marxist sense of mere economic benefit.
The US Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 is similarly vague in its definitions, and usage of the term has fluctuated across the TVPA’s subsequent reauthorizations. According to section 103 of the original act, “sex trafficking” is defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act” (here, the presence or absence of force is left unspecified), and “severe forms of trafficking in persons” are commercial sex acts that include an element of “force, fraud, or coercion,” or those in which those who perform sexual labor are younger than eighteen years of age. Severe forms of trafficking in persons are also said to include “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” Although “trafficking” is explicitly equated with all forms of sexual commerce, the act later specifies that only “severe forms of trafficking” are subject to official state sanction. In successive renditions of the law, underage prostitution occurring within US borders (in which questions of consent are considered irrelevant) and certain nonsexual forms of labor have increasingly been marked as critical targets for state intervention, but the law’s central definitional contradictions have never been resolved.
Writing as early as 2003, the sociologist and feminist scholar Wendy Chapkis observed that the US Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act relied upon “slippery statistics and sliding definitions.” She noted, in particular, the CIA’s estimate that between forty-five thousand and fifty thousand women and children were trafficked into the United States each year, an estimate that was formulated using a broad and unspecified definition of trafficking to bolster the magnitude of the problem.45 Although the United States’ official estimate of the prevalence of transborder victims of trafficking has since been downgraded (to between fourteen thousand and seventeen thousand people per year), the CIA’s initial figure is particularly noteworthy given that “50,000 trafficked women” was also the number that was circulated during turn-of-the-century debates around white slavery.46 It is also remarkable given that, since 2000, the initial year of the law’s passage, there have only been 6,384 T visas issued, 1,461 cases filed with the Department of Justice, and 896 convictions—for sex and labor trafficking combined.47 In the city of New York, purportedly one of the central hubs of sex trafficking in the United States, since 2008 there have been only sixty-two convictions for the crime.
