Technology and the Media
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101 Things to Be for Halloween Other Than a Pimp
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Glenn Beck: Progressives Are Like Slave Owners
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Buy Responsibly Campaign Helps You Buy Better
The Internet's Role in Human Trafficking
Published September 20, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Here's a pop quiz for you. Is the Internet a.) A series of tubes invented by Al Gore b.) an evil system of perversions with no redeeming qualities c.) one of the greatest facilitators of human trafficking in commercial sex markets or d.) all of the above? If you chose c.), you're right! If you chose d.), perhaps you might want to do a little background reading. The Internet is a tool, and like all tools it can be used for good or bad. And right now, the Internet is one of the largest facilitators of sex trafficking in the world.
Here are some common Internet technologies and how they are used to facilitate human trafficking in commercial sex:
- Craigslist.org: Used to sell child and adult trafficking victims for commercial sex. You may have noticed I've got about as much love for the adult services section of Craigslist as Taylor Swift's mom has for Kanye right now, but that's because they are a huge facilitator of illegal prostitution and the sale of children for sex all over the word.
- Online photo sharing: Allows for mass dissemination of child pornography without having to worry about being caught by the nosy developer or mail carrier. Online picture catalogues help buyers choose a girl as an "escort" or sometimes even as a wife. Online ordering of women has revolutionized how some traffickers do business.
- Mobile upload technology: Like photo sharing technology, mobile upload technology allows pimps and traffickers to conduct business on the road, sharing pictures and videos with perspective clients and making sure the girls they exploit are available 24/7.
- Social networking sites: Allow people interested in exploiting women and children to connect with each other and with potential victims. Traffickers use social media to connect with both buyers and victims, and in some cases to connect them directly to each other.
- Vast availability of porn websites: Pimps who sell children often use legal, adult pornography as a grooming technique. And I'm sure it's a huge surprise that they have no problem finding plenty of it all over the Internet.
- E-Commerce tools: Used to conduct the financial transactions of child pornography and of victims of human trafficking. Think someone would never charge sex with a child to their credit card via a website? Think again.
- Encryption technology: Enables transactions, information trails, and conversations to be difficult to impossible to detect by law enforcement.
Fortunately, law enforcement agents have access to these same technologies and are using them in sting operations and to identify and prosecute pimps and traffickers. However, too often the criminals are several technological steps ahead. They see the exploitative potential of emerging technolgies before we do, a dynamic that must change. Because, while these tools revolutionized the business of exploitation once, it won't be long until something new comes out and does it again. And this time, we want to good guys to be the tech-saavy ones.
Photo credit: dalbera
Government Funded Feminist Porn
Published September 14, 2009 @ 03:39PM PT
Sweden has famously taken a unique stand on how to end the exploitation of women in the commercial sex industry -- promote gender equality in prostitution. Now, they're expanding that philosophy to the porn industry by using government cash to pay for "feminist porn." But will by-women, for-women skin flicks free the porn industry from exploitation and misogyny?
The idea behind the feminist porn initiative is that porn can be wonderful and empowering for women both watching and acting in the films when it's not driven by a profit motive based in male sexual desires and couched in a culture which views women as sex objects. In other words, give the cameras to feminist filmmakers, fund the project with tax revenue, and you'll have "empowering erotica," not just male-centric porn. The project also aims to end exploitation in the industry, including ensuring everyone who takes it off on screen is at least 18, and no one is there as a result of force, coercion, or desperation. In theory, state-funded feminist porn avoids the degradation and exploitation the mainstream, commercial porn industry propagates.
Sweden poses (as usual) a creative solution to the problem of human trafficking and exploitation of women and children in the porn industry, but one with flaws as transparent as the costumes in these films. First of all, what exactly is "feminist porn?" Just like men in the mainstream porn market demand different things from their porn, so would women as porn consumers. Who gets to decide what makes a feminist hot? Secondly, the success of this initiative is based on the assumption that all women in the porn industry will act ethically and respect other women by not exploiting them. I got news for you Sweden -- women traffic other women and girls into prostitution and porn, too. I wish ending exploitation in pornography were as easy as funding feminists to make their own porn, but the fact is women can commit crimes of exploitation just like men. And finally, isn't there a better use for this money? Out of all the ways we can end exploitation and improve equality for women, is making more porn really the answer? I'm not sure it is.
Regardless of whether or not the porn initiative is effective, or whether Swedes decide that it's a good use of their tax dollars, Sweden's idea poses some interesting philosophical questions. If you could somehow make society gender-equal, would porn cease to be exploitative? Is using tax dollars to fund pornography ethical if the goal of that pornography is to represent a traditionally marginalized group? Pornography, like art, has always been a subjective category. But does that reduce its value in achieving social equality?
This initiative might have a prayer in Sweden, but I can safely predict it won't take in the U.S. Unless, of course, we manage to sneak a provision for feminist porn into the new health care reform bill that everyone's already skimming and arguing about. And that would bring a whole new meaning to Republican complaints of getting screwed by the government on health care reform.
Photo credit: pnoeric
Fatal Promises Premiers in NYC
Published September 14, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT
Kat Rohrer, co-producer of the new film about human trafficking Fatal Promises, discusses her film which premiers in New York this week.
New York is America’s biggest port of entry for human trafficking. So it is crucial that our film Fatal Promises film premieres in New York City at the heart of the crisis. Fatal Promises, four dedicated years in the making, is now finished and premiering from the 16th to 24th September.
We found out about human trafficking thanks to a single news item in the New York Times about people being bought, transported across borders, sold and re-sold and, finally, discarded. Humans as commodities? Not in the developed democracies, not in this modern age, surely! After some research we felt compelled. The stories of victims have to be told and documented, public awareness must be raised. How can we, as a conscientious society, tolerate slavery in 21st century?
The survivors we met are truly remarkable people who have been through ordeals we could not even imagine. It is their voices and their anger that we want the public to hear in this film -- stories like Katja’s, an ambitious Ukrainian who was promised a summer job on America’s east coast but landed in a strip club in the Midwest. Or that of 18-year-old sailor cadet Eugene, who was promised good money crab fishing off the Russian coastline, but was in fact starved and abused on an unmarked ship.
As activist Gloria Steinem says in Fatal Promises,
The stories of the victims have to be told – not just the bare facts and numbers like human trafficking being a billion-dollar-business.
We remain stunned by the fact that, despite all the endless conferences and proclamations to end modern day slavery, the trade has been growing steadily since we started the work on the documentary in 2005. Activist and Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson was so right in 2008 at the million-dollar Vienna Forum of the UNODC when she condemned the "karaoke for the concerned“ in an interview for Fatal Promises, and asked "What is the point of us all traveling to Vienna when we don’t have a plan?"
The title of the documentary not only refers to the promises made to potential victims which, for many, turned out to be fatal. It also refers to the empty promises made by governments and organizations like the UN which vow to abolish modern day slavery but lack the political will to act.
Fatal Promises is playing at Cinema Village, E 12th St, New York, NY, 10003 from 16 – 24 September 2009.
Photo credit: epredator
What Fox News Doesn't Want You to Know About the ACORN Prostitution Scandal
Published September 13, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT
Some workers at ACORN offices in Baltimore and Washington DC made some pretty bad choices recently in front of an undercover film crew pretending to be a pimp and prostitute trying to buy a home. They didn't protest when the actors told them they wanted to bring thirteen 15-year-old girls from El Salvador into the country to sell in prostitution, helped them with creative ways to avoid the cops, and even suggested how to claim the girls as dependents on their taxes. However, there is a lot more to these videos and the media blitz behind them than meets the eye.
Fox News and other conservative media outlets would have you believe this is a story about sex trafficking. It's not. It's a story about race, class, prostitution, tax evasion, and serious ethical and legal concerns. In the edited versions of the videos, the actors and the ACORN employees discuss activities that could be classified as trafficking only about 1% of the time. The rest of the time they talk about prostitution, which the woman claiming to be a prostitute repeatedly says she is engaging in by her choice and keeping the money she makes (therefore, she is not a trafficking victim herself). The ACORN employees should have taken action when the actors talked about prostituting underage girls; not doing so was reprehensibly unethical and illegal. And since prostitution is illegal in both Maryland and DC, they shouldn't have condoned lying (and in some cases cheating) on taxes to support it. But Fox and the conservative media have twisted these videos to indicate ACORN as an organization was promoting child prostitution, which was never the case.
The videos are certainly an indictment of four ACORN employees, all of which have now been fired. But they are also an indictment of the conservative media outlets that push stories like this as a way to discredit and defund liberal organizations like ACORN under the guise of concern about sex trafficking. The sting was orchestrated by conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe who targeted a number of ACORN offices, with incriminating results found in two. It's clear the goal of the operation was nothing to do with preventing harm to children, and everything to do with finding ACORN employees willing to help a prostitute get housing and set up a business. From the perspective of the ACORN employees, they were helping a woman without education or resources set up a business to survive. From the perspective of we the taxpayers, they were helping a woman cheat on her taxes and earn income illegally through criminal activity. Had the woman been selling cocaine instead of sex, the legal and ethical implications would be similar. What the employees did was unethical, but it was about taxes, not trafficking, and it was a lot more complex and nuanced than Fox News is making it out to be.
The videos from Baltimore and DC are here below. Watch them for yourself, and then take a look at the way some news outlets have been covering them. It's a scandal for ACORN to be sure, but not one that's really about human trafficking.
Miley Cyrus, Dolls Market Pole Dancing to Tweens
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:03PM PT
The newest sensation to sweep the tween market seems to be .... pole dancing? Miley Cyrus shook her underage stuff (what little she has of it) up and down a pole at the Nickelodeon Teen Choice awards in August, in front of an audience of kids and tweens. And now, kids can buy their very own Poll Dance Doll. What's next -- sexy thongs for kids? Oh wait, that already happened ...
Marketing pole dancing to kids gross and dangerous. Both the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana empire and dolls are marketed to girls in the 7-13 age range. And girls 7-13 have no business pole dancing. There's a great scene in the movie Mean Girls where the popular girl's clueless mom (Amy Poehler) is smiling as she watches her 9-year-old daughter imitate an MTV spring break show by dancing provocatively and flashing the TV set. I always thought that scene was a funny hyperbole of what happens when children are parented soley by pop culture, but now it looks like a scary tarot-like prediction of a Tweens Gone Wild video. Watch the press coverage of Miley Cyrus closely, and you can see the media salivating for her to turn 18 so they can find a good-girl-goes-bad angle. They did it to Brittany and to Jessica and to the Olson twins. And they're going to do it to Miley.
This cultural Madonna-whore complex that eats young teen pop stars alive is moving to devour more and younger girls. At the end of the day this isn't just about a doll or a dance move. It's about the fact that kids are being sexualized at younger and younger ages, and that over-sexualization has serious consequences. It glamorizes commercial sex for young girls that have no understanding of the realities of the commercial sex industry. Desensitizing kids to commercial sex makes it easier for "friendly" pimps to lure them into prostitution and pimp control. Pimps prey on the natural sexual curiosity of teens, which has been warped and over-stimulated by a media culture which tells girls they are only valued for their complete purity or complete depravity. And once a pimp has control over a girl, it becomes exceedingly harder for her to leave.
I'm sure a lot of people will look at this and say, "big deal, it's just a doll." It is just a doll, but this doll and the carnage of fallen teen pop stars and the sexy thongs for kids and MTV and all the other sexy things that are marketed to kids start to add up into a pretty big pile of hyper-sexualized garbage.
Kids play in that garbage. And we're surprised when they come home dirty.
Photo credit: Gizmodo
Rambo 5: Rambo vs. Sex Traffickers
Published September 01, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
Rambo -- America's most loved, most parodied, and most clichéd action hero -- is prepping for his fifth big screen adventure. And this time, he's kicking some serious sex trafficker ass. Will the film ultimately hurt or help the anti-trafficking cause?
Sylvester Stallone returns as the title role in Rambo 5, this time to find and save a young girl kidnapped on the U.S.-Mexican border. In the process, he fights his way through hoards of sex traffickers and drug lords, one assumes by employing the usual tactful etiquette and diplomacy the Rambo series has come to embody. Production for the new Rambo, not yet given a working title, will begin in the Spring of 2010. Rumors predict it will be set and filmed in the character's hometown in Arizona. Common sense predicts people will get shot and big things will blow up.
The number of films that revolve around human trafficking is increasing as the issue gets more and more media attention. In the beginning, trafficking films were mostly small-budget, indy productions like Trade and Holly, both of which I've recommended. However, big studios are finally starting to realize that human trafficking, or more specifically sex trafficking, involves most of the elements that make a good action movie -- gobs of violence, really evil villains, hot young women in peril, macho law-enforcement-type heroes, and of course, sex. But just because the studios understand the elements of trafficking doesn't not mean they understand trafficking. Taken (the film where Liam Neeson is an ex-CIA agent whose rich, white, well-connected daughter is kidnapped in Paris) is the perfect example of how a major film company can completely fail to see how human trafficking really works. Real life spoiler alert: Traffickers prey on vulnerable people, not the educated and resourced daughters of American intell professionals. So will Rambo 5 be true to the issue? Or will it take the Taken route and focus explosion height than on actual substance?
I'd love to be wrong, but my money is on the machine gun fire being the most accurate and educating part of Rambo 5. Still, at the end of the film the score is sure to be Rambo: 1, Sex Traffickers, 0. And I'll probably shell out the $9.50 just to see them loose.
Photo credit: Nukeit1
Slavery: Worse for Women Today Than in 1800s
Published August 26, 2009 @ 10:10AM PT
Being a female slave 200 years ago was about as much fun as being a nudist septic tank cleaner for a digestive disease treatment center. In other words, crappy. They were legally owned by another person, frequently raped, physically abused, torn apart from their families, and forced to work exhausting hours for no pay. And yet, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof's new book Half the Sky, women have it way worse today.
The fact that women make up the large majority of human trafficking victims in the world today is not the only thing making life rough on them. Girls are more likely to remain uneducated than boys, and thus more likely to live in poverty. Women are raped, forced and duped into abusive relationships, killed during childbirth and from HIV/AIDS, as well as sold as slaves into prostitution and forced labor. But despite all that, are women really worse off today than 200 years ago?
I put together some of the pros and cons of being a woman in the 19th Century and being a woman today. Here's what I came up with.
Despite the obvious benefits Hugh Jackman brings to the collective lives of women, I think it might be a toss up. And that's pretty sad, considering how much society as a whole has progressed since it was legal for one human being to own another. In the old system of slavery, it was Africans, African-Americans, and other dark-skinned people who were enslaved because of the color of their skin. Today, it's women and girls who are enslaved and oppressed because of their gender. Can that really be called progress? No.
