Trafficking in Women
Beef Tacos and Forced Prostitution
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta suburb Woodstock, GA, was famous for two things -- the beef tacos in the front of the house and the young women and teen girls selling sex in the back. That's because this Mexican restaurant was a front for a human trafficking operation from Central and South America to metro Atlanta. Selling ethnic foods by day and human beings by night is a trend among traffickers all over the country.
At La Cabana, women and girls as young as 15 were smuggled from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador into the U.S. While the restaurant was open, they served customers plates of Hispanic delicacies. But after the kitchen closed, the restaurant became a gentleman's club, and they serviced the mostly Hispanic male audience sexually. In a back room, the women and girls were forced to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling debt. Interestingly enough, none of the news reports I found on this case called it human trafficking. But if this isn't human trafficking, then I'll buy Rush Limbaugh's greatest hits tape.
Keeping trafficking operations within one cultural, racial, or ethic group are one technique traffickers use tp avoid detection by the police. The philosophy is that operating a criminal enterprise within a community of "friends" is safer. This happens often with suburban brothels in private homes that sell cater exclusively to Korean men, Hispanic men, East African men, etc. But large numbers of men going in and out of a private home at odd hours might look suspicious to neighbors. Therefore, an ethnic restaurant provides an ideal cover for the traffickers. Plus, they have two sources of income from the women they are exploiting: their labor in the restaurant and their sexual exploitation. In this case, fortunately, the police were a couple steps ahead.
The La Cabana trafficking ring got busted because someone, presumably who lived in the area, called in a tip about the loud music late at night and Hispanic women going in and out of the building frequently. This is one more example of how people like you, just by being aware of your surroundings, can help trafficked people to safety. If you see something suspicious, don't trick yourself into believing you're the Dark Knight and go running in guns-or-video-cameras-blazing. But do call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or call local law enforcement.
Photo credit: Loco beef taco by jasonlam
Prostitution or Starvation: Refugees Face Few Options
Published August 31, 2009 @ 09:17AM PT
The New Canaan camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya is named to sound like a promised land, but for many of the women living inside, it is anything but paradise. That's because increasingly, women living in this and other refugee camps in Kenya are faced with a terrible choice: feed themselves and their families via prostitution or risk starvation and death.
Many of the women at New Canaan fled their homes during the post-election violence in Kenya a year-and-a-half ago. Some were abandoned by their husbands after being raped, demonstrating the polar opposite of the concept of a "supportive partner". Others left their husbands in search of a man who could provide for and feed their children, which given the abandonment of their victimized sisters isn't surprising. Either way, once in the camp, these women have very few options to earn a living and to support their children. They see prostitution as the only viable option, and in their defense, they're sometimes right. According to Dr. Regina Karega, chairperson of the National Commission on Gender and Development, women who have no food reason that if a man is offering to feed them or their children in echange for sex, they'll "take the risk and feed [their] children.” What mother wouldn't?
The risk Dr. Karega refers to is contracting HIV/AIDS or another STD via unprotected sex in the refugee camps. However, women who have entered prostitution out of desperation, such as those in IDP camps, face additional risks, including rape, beatings, severe emotional and psychological trauma, and social isolation. Prostitution is dangerous for women, and often those dangers are exacerbated in camps like the ones at New Canaan.
Because these women are adults and no other person is forcing, coercing, or tricking them into prostitution, they are not considered victims of human trafficking. But isn't the lack of options for survival other than prostitution a form of coercion? If the choice is prostitution or watching your children starve, is that really a choice? The women of Kenyan IDP camps (and other refugee camps) are perfect examples of women who enter into prostitution out of desperation and a lack of other viable options. They can't be called victims of human trafficking because another person or group of people is not exploiting them. But surely they are victims of circumstance, victims of a gender-biased system, victims of a dearth of choices. They are not empowered women making active choices; they are fighting for survival despite the terrible risks.
In the Bible, Canaan was supposed to be a land flowing with milk and honey. New Canaan and the camps like it are lands overflowing with desperate women, hungry children, and increasingly, a coerced form of prostitution. It's not human trafficking, but it's exploitation nonetheless. Prostitution or starvation is not a choice anyone should have to make. In fact, it's not even really a choice.
Polygamy and Prostitution
Published August 27, 2009 @ 12:50PM PT
What do men who use prostitutes and polygamists have in common? According to Marci Hamilton, quite a lot. They are both populations of men who get away with raping, abusing, and degrading women, even in places where what they're doing is illegal. And like polygamists, johns are rarely prosecuted.
I've never really heard johns and polygamists compared in such stark terms, but I think Hamilton may be on to something. Both prostitution and polygamy reduce a woman to a commodity. In prostitution, a woman becomes an object, a tool for the pleasure of a man no more human than a sex toy. Because the transaction of prostitution is about money, (not mutual desire, affection or pleasure), it commodifies as woman's body and values it only as a means of male pleasure. In polygamy, a woman also becomes an object, though in this case a tool of reproduction, social status, and occasionally pleasure for a man. Polygamy, as is practiced in fundamentalist religious communities, values women as commodities- suppliers of children. They are just as much a machine designed to work for men as women in prostitution are.
Prostitution and polygamy are both symptomatic and catalystic of a fundamental gender inequality, where women are objectified and commodified without regard to their humanity or agency. And yet, the male perpetrators of both these crimes, the johns and the polygamist husbands, are rarely held accountable for their actions. I once worked on a case where a 40-something man was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl, for whom he had paid $200. The police arrested the girl, put her in the back of the cop car, and brought her to jail. They told the man what he was doing was wrong, but let him drive away. When asked later why the cop let the john go, he replied,
"He had a wife, and I thought it would be bad to embarrass him like that."
Having sex with a kid should be embarrassing! It sould be a lot more embarrassing, in fact, it should result in an actual punishment. How are we afraid to embarass men who are engaging in prostitution, but we're not afraid to embarass the women and girls?
What interests me the most about the parallels between prostitution and polygamy is that many people who see prostitution as an opportunity for empowerment for women see polygamy as the opposite. In fact, I would argue the contrary. Prostitution and polygamy share more common values than dissimilar ones. Those values include a view of women as tools of men, female bodies as tradable commodities, and social superiority of men over women.
Photo credit: Jasonsager
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.
Change.org Reader, Survivor Finds Justice After 10 Years
Published August 21, 2009 @ 11:22AM PT
Even in the darkness that human trafficking casts over the world, we occasionally find a bright ray of light. That ray shone on me today from a survivor named Privilege, whom I have been very lucky to correspond with.
Privilege first contacted me last March, hoping to find a way to share her story with the world. She had been brought to the U.S. by a husband who brutally abused her. And against all odds, she had managed to escape that abuse and ask for justice. Yet years later, she was still waiting for the U.S. government to grant her a U Visa, which would give her temporary legal status and work eligibility in the United States for up to 4 years. Without that visa, Privilege couldn't get a job to support her children. She couldn't truly feel free. She asked me to publish her story and I did, because it needed to be told.
Today, after an almost decade-long struggle, Privilege received the news that she was a U visa recipient, and her new life in America could begin in full. She says,
Today my attorney called me to inform me that I am now a U Visa recipient!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can now earn a living for myself and decide how my life will go!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have been waiting two months short of ten years for this moment. There is a God out there and He has smiled on me! Thank you to everyone who prayed for me and called and wrote to USCIS on my behalf. A new day has dawned. I hope and pray that the waiting period will be even less for those that follow in my steps!
Good luck to you, Privilege, and to your family. I know having overcome so much, you will continue to do great things. We at Change.org are happy to have been of service to you in your quest for justice.
Are Robots the Future of Prostitution?
Published August 20, 2009 @ 02:00PM PT
A creative new solution has been proposed to the problem of tourists demanding commercial sex in areas where women are unwilling to supply it: let them do robots. Tourism futurologist Ian Yeoman has pointed out that the possibility of robots in service roles such as waiters is very real in the next 40 years, so why not robots as prostitutes?
Supposedly, these robo-women would not pass along diseases such as HIV and other STDs, and wouldn't pose the serious questions of ethics that prostitution with real women and girls involves. Unless, of course, you have concerns about paying for sex with an inanimate object, which is a whole other issue. In a way, robots would be the perfect prostitutes. They have no shame, feel no pain, and have no emotional or physical fall-out from the trauma which prostitution often causes. As machines, they can't be victims of human trafficking. It would certainly end the prostitution/human trafficking debate. But despite all the arguments I can think of for this being a good idea, I've gotta admit it creeps me out a little bit. Have we devalued sex so much that is doesn't even matter if what we have sex with isn't human? Has the commercial sex industry made sex so mechanical that it will inevitably become.... mechanical?
Maybe robo-prostitutes are just a concept developed by a "tourism futurologist," whatever that is. But maybe they're also a bit of a methaphor for how we expect women in prostitution to be today; we already see them as robots. Pimps and traffickers see them as money-making machines. Johns see them as instruments of pleasure. No one cares how they got into prostitution or why they stay- force, choice, deception, desperation. What matters is that once in prostitution, the industry treats women like non-humans. The commercial sex industry is not about individual women as people, it's about the revenue they generate. It's about their output. And the fact that they do feel shame and pain and trauma takes a backseat to their ability to make money or pleasure.
Maybe the future's not as far away as we think. Maybe it's already here.
Image from canalred.com
Legal Prostitution in Australia a "Failure"
Published August 18, 2009 @ 10:53AM PT
Ten years ago, Australia made a risky policy move it thought would help protect women and children: it legalized prostitution. Today, only 10% of the prostitution industry operates in Australia's legal brothels. The other 90% takes place in underground, illegal sex markets thick with forced prostitution and human trafficking victims.
The University of Queensland Working Group on Human Trafficking recently released a report stating that the prostitution laws in Australia had failed. Since 1999, women in Australia have had the option of working legally in licensed brothels or on their own. The hope was that women with an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for commercial sex would set up their own businesses, and make everything safe, legal, and regulated. That hasn't happened.
What has happened, instead, is entrepreneurial pimps have lured and trafficked Asian women to Australia and set up illegal brothels with lower prices. Trafficking is "booming" in Queensland, and there are few laws to help protect women who are lured or coerced into prostitution against their will. And as legal brothels try and compete with the trafficking boom, they cut costs, which often involves cutting freedom and benefits for women. Even in the legal, liscenced brothels of Queensland, women have reported being coerced into working under unfair conditions or against their will.
Australian advocates and policy-makers are offering a number of solutions to this problem, everything from increasing the police force looking for illegal brothels to making the legal brothel's fees lower to adding new legal protections for immigrant women in the commercial sex industry. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women. But how should it be fixed?
Here's my vote: Legal prostitution in Australia isn't working to protect women because legal prostitution doesn't work to protect women. It will always be cheaper to set up an illegal brothel full of slave labor than to pay fees and salaries and health care to licensed workers. As long as there are men demanding cheap commercial sex, there will be traffickers willing to supply it. And where there is a legal market, there will be more men demanding sex, though not always at legal market prices.
Australia's experiment is one more example of when the theory of prostitution and the practice of it don't match up. In theory, Queensland should now be full of empowered women owning and working in commercial sex businesses and a vast majority (if not all) of women in commercial sex participating freely. In practice, it is a tiny, ineffective legal commercial sex industry with little entrepreneurship and a massive, booming industry of sexual slavery.
Image from abc.net.au
