So Skewed

Have you watched the movie Taken? Many of you must have - It was really popular but for those who didn’t, here’s the story. The hero, played by Liam Neeson, is an ex- CIA agent. His daughter and her friend go to vacation in Paris when they are attacked and kidnapped by what he later finds out are Albanian sex traffickers, part of a sex trafficking ring who kidnap young girls and sell them into prostitution. Then begins the action part where the hero goes looking for his daughter and eventually rescues her from a secret sex slave auction.

Taken is usually the example given when drawing the picture of what sex trafficking looks like, atleast in the West. A young “innocent’ girl or woman is kidnapped at random, there is no context – she is just taken; tied up, transported, drugged, chained, there may be some dark room or dungeon involved, she is “broken into” and then eventually, she is sold into a brothel to be exploited through her prostitution. This representation is not representation put forth by the movie Taken or Hollywood at all. This is the picture presented by many real life anti-trafficking campaigns across the world. We are told deliberately - sex trafficking can happen to anyone – any girl or woman can be picked up and sold into prostitution.

But what if we are told that this isn’t actually true. That there are almost no cases of trafficking that look like this. That these are all part of the moral panic started by the anti-prostitution camp, who have been building on this false narrative for decades, spreading fear and then campaigning against it as if it’s the truth – as if this representation of sex trafficking is not only common but is the norm.

Hi, Welcome to So Skewed. I’m Surabhi, a lawyer and researcher. This is episode 4. In this episode – we are discussing contemporary global trafficking discourses; what is trafficking, what is the current law on trafficking and how bad is it?

A basic google search will tell you that human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour or sexual slavery or commercial sexual exploitation – referred to officially as modern day slavery. The International Labor Organization in 2012 estimated the number of trafficked victims at 20.9 million adults and children. Human trafficking is considered to be one of the largest and fastest growing criminal industries in the world, in the same list as drugs and weapons trafficking. Sex trafficking is considered to be the biggest form of human trafficking sometimes called the ‘largest on-going slave trade in history’. The UN Office on Drugs and Crimes that is the UN organization that monitors trafficking says that 75% of all trafficked victims are women and girls for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Common sex trafficking source countries often citied include Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, India – so countries in the Global South especially South and Southeast Asia.

Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission based in the USA, a very influential global anti-trafficking organization has said:

“There are approximately 27 million slaves in our world today – not metaphorical slaves, but actual slaves. That’s more slaves in our world today than were extracted from Africa during four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade.”

Well. Some including sex worker activists, are very suspicious with these figures and claims. No. in fact. they are a 100% sure that these figures and claims are highly inflated numbers to suit a certain narrative. It’s not like it’s deliberately incorrect data – more like what is considered as ‘trafficking’ is so broad, pretty much all prostitution fall under these trafficking figures and that is just the beginning – we aren’t even talking about what all constitutes forced labour to fall within the definition of human trafficking.

Remember how the evangelical movement in the 19th century in England and British colonies deemed prostitution a sin, fought against the so-called white slave trade which led to the enactment of the 1949 UN anti-trafficking convention, and this became the commonly accepted moraland humanitarian position? Remember how the radical feminists during the second wave feminism argued that all prostitution is rape and sexual exploitation, and the violation of a woman’s basic human rights and this became the commonly accepted liberal and academic position?

Well, now what has happened is that all prostitution, irrespective of consent, is covered under the definition of sex trafficking and included in international trafficking figures and it is often looked at as morally and/or intellectually outrageous if this framing is challenged which has been a huge obstacle for sex work activism.

So let’s talk:// the modern-day anti-trafficking regime. Because it is now fully confirmed – there is no doubt anymore - that the moral panic starting from the White Slave Trade is still on-going. It’s just called Trafficking now. It has been successfully rebranded. The discourses have taken on a different form - it is more academic and liberal and less evidently religious, moralist and racist. The hysteria though - is even more and action against sex workers is more aggressive and more controlling than it ever was before.

Part 1: The Palermo Protocol

The 1949 UN anti-trafficking convention was pretty much only a Human Rights convention of the United Nations – so not much action could be taken under it against countries seen to be in violation. However what it did do was fully reinforce this framing of the trafficking discourse – all prostitution is trafficking; there is no such thing as sex work; prostitution is the exploitation of women and can be nothing less.

Now after this 1949 law, conversations around trafficking were dormant – nothing much was happening –prostitution is mostly illegal, across the world. But remember the sex wars in the US during second wave feminism? The time after the sexual revolution – where we see radical feminists joined by the evangelicals unsuccessfully attempt to ban porn ?? Well, after this failure – we soon see that conversations around trafficking start again led by the Radical feminists including the powerful and influential ones we saw in episode 2.

By the 1990s, radical feminists in the US and Europe started discussing their concerns around trafficking and the need to update laws, at an international level. But this time their “concerns” are slightly different from the Victorian feminists’ during the White Slave Trade – or rather, it is the exact inverse. This time – the anti-prostitution camp starts talking about the non- whiteprostitute and their concerns are now directed towards women in the global south and unfortunately, their attention turns here.

Now during the White Slave trade panic – so 19th century and early 20th century, the issue was framed as white women from Europe and North America being “exploited” by non-white or “native” men in the colonies in Asia, Africa and South America. Well, this time – from the 1990s, so 20th century and early 21st century – the concern is for women in the Global South, exploited by both non-white and white men. If you think about it logically, it makes sense. The geographical direction of migration had shifted - now from the Global South to the Global North - people from ex-colonies were going to the “West” as opposed to earlier where people were coming from the West to the then- colonies. So now - there needed to be control over the migration of women looking to move westwards. A lot of this interest in the US also started with ‘concerns about sex tourism’ in south – east Asia’ because ? there were a lot of US military camps in South east Asia at this time.

With all their “concerns” – lobbying began by this anti-prostitution camp in the USA and Europe for reforms in international trafficking laws. This time – they were smarter though. Their campaigns weren’t about prostitution being a sin; it wasn’t moral or religious; it wasn’t women having to be pure and chaste; it wasn’t feminists harassing sex workers; it wasn’t anti-sex. This time – the campaign was to help poor vulnerable women in the “third world” and prevent their exploitation.

Soon - began negotiations in the United Nations led by the USA to update international trafficking laws. The negotiations in the UN saw two opposing sides – the usual.

The first, more prominent and stronger group was the anti-prostitution camp. This had the radical feminists, the evangelical Christian organisations, and well - the US government. The anti-prostitution camp also call themselves the anti-trafficking camp cause they believe all prostitution to be trafficking. Or the new-abolitionists, the original - abolitionists being those who fought for the ending of slavery in the US. They use the term intentionally – to say that commercial sex is modern day slavery equivalent to what African enslavement was in the US and Colonial Europe.

This anti-prostitution camp, we know this, sees no difference between trafficking and sex work. All sexual labour is slavery. To them there is no such thing as voluntary prostitution; all prostitution is a violation of a woman’s human rights. They call for an end to the sex trade with the criminalization of all third parties’ involved while decriminalizing the women – the sex workers who should not be treated as criminals, but as victims in need of protection and rehabilitation. For them – if prostitution is legalized – it will increase incentives for trafficking. So, the only way to abolish trafficking is to eradicate the sex trade completely. This anti-prostitution camp in these UN negotiations had all the prominent radical feminists that we saw during second wave feminism in the US and the anti-trafficking NGOs they founded, from both USA and Europe. The Coalition of Trafficked Women was one such organisation – it’s founded by the Radical Feminist Kathleen Barry whom I mentioned in episode 2; Her book Female Sexual Slavery is heavily relied upon by this side. Other feminist anti-trafficking organisations include Equality Now and European Women’s Lobby. Catherine Mackinnon is also part of several such organisations; All anti-trafficking organisations will be part of the anti-prostitution camp.

Against the anti-prostitution camp in the UN negotiations was the pro-sex work camp. They were called the neo-regulationists. To them – sex work was a legitimate form of labour; it was sexual labour – much like physical labour and they wanted the recognition of voluntary commercial sex work and to separate it from the issue of trafficking which they saw as forced prostitution and forced labour. Some human rights organisations including the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women take this stand. Liberal feminists and sex worker collectives including those from the Global South also joined this camp.

Discussions from this time from the anti-prostitution camp shows the neo-colonial lens of these narratives– it’s women from the Global North discussing the “poor, exploited woman” in the “third world”. Joe Doezma and Kamala Kempadoo, two pro-sex work feminists who have strongly criticised the anti-prostitution camp since the beginning, have pointed out that just like the traditions of the Victorian feminists during British Colonial Rule in India who would take up causes on behalf of Indian women; even the radical feminists justified their outrage and concerns for women in the Global South by painting this picture of the exploited “other”. These ‘victims’ in the Global South who to them were women in prostitution who had no voice, were ignorant, helpless, naïve, unempowered, uneducated - so incapable of being agents in their own lives. Prostitution does exist in developing countries more than developed countries and this visibility of prostitution was taken advantage of. If you see academic research and books from this time, and there is a lot of literature – it will have descriptions of women in South or Southeast Asia who are sold by her own family due to poverty or descriptions of women behind bars in shoddy brothels or caged; descriptions of women being “broken into” . They painted a picture of prostitution being so prevalent and so exploitative in these “third world countries” that sex workers there were condemned to a life of poverty, sexual exploitation, diseases and eventually death. Think the worst case scenarios and these were used by the radical feminists in their representations to justify their advocacy on an international scale and to justify their interventions into the Global South.

It was finally them of course, the anti-prostitution camp, that succeeded. In the year 2000, the UN passed the ‘Convention against Transnational Organized Crime’ known as the Palermo Convention and it was supplemented by 3 protocols. The first being the ‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children’ so to deal with prostitution; the second was against the smuggling of migrants and the third was against weapons trafficking.

The UN office on Drugs and Crime within the United Nations monitors the Palermo convention. This UNODC basically consists of international law enforcement agencies who were overlooking negotiations regarding prostitution. So they saw aggressive criminalisation as the solution to ending prostitution. Prostitution is now treated as the same as cross border weapons and drugs trafficking. The Palermo Protocol fixed the definition of trafficking but so broadly that it pretty much is left to the enforcer’s interpretation. It technically does not make prostitution illegal but states that consent of the “victim” will not be considered when determining the crime of trafficking so making consent irrelevant to decide what falls within the definition of trafficking, and it criminalises all prostitution related activities. So again, it conflates trafficking with prostitution and sees no difference between the two. This Palermo convention now also becomes the instrument in international law that allows inter-state cooperation to combat this “organised crime”. Now, this anti-trafficking convention even though presented as if to save victims of sexual exploitation is no longer a human rights document like the 1949 UN convention, it is now in the field of criminal law. The logic now is – harsher laws and harsher punishments to catch the so-called “traffickers” but basically to ensure that no one works in the sex trade so sex workers become the main and easy targets.

With the Palermo Protocol – countries pass their own laws to deal with trafficking and prostitution. Today, we see 4 main legal models around prostitution.

First: Complete criminalization[We see this in the US, Kenya, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China]: Here, the act of selling sex and related activities – all illegal. Sex workers can be arrested, fined or both – there is no selling sex for money; no brothels; no pimps – everything is illegal. In the US – the state of Nevada is allowed to have brothels in some zoned areas – otherwise zero tolerance in the US despite it having a large sex trade.

The Second Model is: Partial Criminalization: We see this in the UK and in India. Like the UK, in India – the act of buying or selling sex is legal but everything else is illegal– like soliciting, working in brothels, and third – parties. The definition of a brothel is when 2 or more women sell sex together and any place can become a brothel under these conditions. So unless you sell sex alone and in your own home– it is illegal. if you work on the streets – it’s solicitation, which is illegal; if you work alongside someone else – even 1 more person - it’s brothel keeping which is illegal. Third parties so managers, agents, pimps, landlords – all illegal. We’ll discuss what this looks like when talking about laws in India.

The Third Model is the Nordic Model– Sweden, Norway, Ireland: In the year 1990 – Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon and other radical feminists were called in to Sweden for the drafting of a law which passed in 1999. Sweden, a country that describes itself and is seen as a feminist nation, with strong socialist policies - presented this as the ‘End Demand Model’. This model criminalizes the men including the men who buy sex so the clients and third parties– so why this is different is the buying of sex is illegal not the selling of sex. But it also criminalizes third parties – pimps, brothel owners, landlords just not the sex workers. They argued that criminalizing the demand, the client, the men - would shrink the sex industry – and over time, fewer women will be able to sell sex, so fewer will be “exploited”, and then these countries will become a less attractive destination for traffickers.

The Fourth Model is Legalization: Germany and Netherlands follow this.

Germany and Netherlands took the liberal Feminist stance on prostitution and went for regulation instead – so the legalization of the sex trade. Their logic was that registering sex workers would ensure only voluntary sex workers are in the trade, and it’ll be monitored. This involves zoning and regulations. The operation of brothels is allowed in zoned areas; sex workers who work in these brothels can apply for social benefits schemes, and have basic labour and employment rights. The zoned areas are regulated by the police, the health departments and tax and custom departments.

Sex worker activists have criticised all models, now even legalisation and endorse a different one – decriminalisation. The problem of these models and the decriminalisation model - we’ll see in a later episode.

While the objective of these laws is to abolish prostitution completely – spoiler alert: prostitution continues across the world under every legal regime, yes even Sweden, yes even Russia, China, US and sex worker activism is strong in all these places - even stronger in the more criminalised jurisdictions.

Yet anti-trafficking efforts and endorsement of these laws continue to this day which is strange ?? Why aren’t these anti-trafficking efforts considered controversial or why aren’t we listening to what sex workers are saying because they do not support these laws at all that are allegedly for their benefit. To understand this, we have to discuss:

Part 2: Carceral Feminism.

Carceral Feminism is a critical term used to describe the type of feminism that supports criminal law as a way to achieve the goals of gender justice. Like the name suggests, it supports harsher laws and harsher punishment for individual men. It started from the time of second – wave feminism, from the 1970s onwards, globally. We see a shift in feminism from activism to state and police interventions. And it finds some of its roots in radical feminism. Even in India we see when the feminist movement starts in the 1980s – it starts directly addressing gender issues through law. Carceral feminism believes in one premise, that is flawed. It believes in ‘universal women’s solidarity’ – that the biggest common risk that all women face in the world is violence at the hands of men in a patriarchy and these individual men must be brought to justice under the criminal justice system. Today – it’s values are strong in mainstream feminism globally and it is carceral feminism that looms large over anti-trafficking efforts.

Now: this is obviously not to discount the progress that feminism has definitely achieved to demand accountability for gendered crimes like rape and sexual assault; this is also not to say that men must not be accountable for other gendered crimes as well. However, carceral feminism is criticised for over emphasising on law and order and ignoring socio-economic conditions and structures that are often the cause of a lot of gendered crimes.

A common example to explain the problem with carceral feminism is the constant push for stricter domestic violence laws. This is how it works. Carceral feminism believes that all women are at the risk of facing domestic violence at the hands of their partners. Universal Women’s Solidarity. All women can be vulnerable to abuse. It believes the individual men who abuse their partners are the epitome of male violence in a patriarchy. It believes that the issue of domestic violence will be solved by punishing these individual men who abuse their partners, and so the feminist cause has to be harsher and compulsory arrest laws. Now - these domestic violence laws may benefit the middle class to upper class women but to many women, especially the more marginalised, the risk of poverty, homelessness, joblessness and losing the ability to care for her children, may be bigger problems than the abuse she faces from her husband. This woman is vulnerable but not only to abuse – she’s also vulnerable to poverty, joblessness, homelessness. The arrest of her husband while it looks like a symbolic feminist victory will actually not help this woman at all – but carceral feminism demands we celebrate this victory of the arrest of a man but ignore that there is now a woman at the brink of poverty, homelessness, because she received no parallel support with the arrest of her husband and he was her primary provider. This woman now has to provide and physically care for her whole family (her husband being in jail and now having a criminal record so practically impossible to get a job) – all while fighting a very expensive and time – consuming legal case. But all of this is her problem – carceral feminism just wants to see her husband in jail. So, the truth is – as unfortunate as it may seem, for many women, the consequence of reporting domestic abuse is sometimes worse than the abuse itself.

Male unemployment is commonly linked with domestic violence, across the world. Most women in the world today are poor and many women often do not have the resources to leave an abusive situation. Plus to her, leaving an abusive situation may be a better solution than to arrest her husband which might add to this woman’s problems, but this is ignored – even outrage expressed at this idea. How can you protect this abusive man from the law – the woman will be accused of.

Carceral Feminism also promotes the stereotypes of a perfect victim and the perfect villain. The perfect victim is the battered woman who is helpless, abused and in need of saving. Then there is the perfect villain – her partner, the man. He becomes the epitome of male violence; of male privilege. He is a danger to society – to all women, which actually is not true – men do abuse their partners but mostly do not proceed to harm other women. Any discussions around his issues or transformation becomes taboo. And the onus of saving society from this villain – this man – is now on his wife – who will be seen as anti-feminist or a weak woman for not reporting her husband despite her actually having very good reasons not to. So carceral feminism thinks that the job is done with the arrest of the man for as long as possible without thinking about the material needs of the woman related to him. This is another dead giveaway of mainstream feminism’s privilege because the women who advocate for harsher laws and punishments do not have to worry about poverty or homelessness. Carceral feminism says the abused woman can get help but only through the arrest of her husband – that’s the only solution. The rest is her problem.

This is the same for the anti-trafficking cause. For the anti-prostitution feminist – all sex workers are the perfect victims – they are helpless, exploited and need to be ‘saved’ from the individual men who ‘exploit’ them so the pimps, brothel owners, even the clients and these men should be arrested. It’s black and white. They refuse to acknowledge the material needs of the sex worker; refuse to believe that sex workers may want to stay in the sex trade even if exploitation has happened to her. She might need other support but not the men getting arrested. Plus the arrest of her or the men around her can have other devasting consequences for her - like poverty, loss of livelihood but this is also ignored. If a woman does not want the individual men around her arrested – and wants to be in the sex trade – she will be called an immoral woman firstly and secondly, a woman who does not need help at all. So if you are a sex worker who wants help, you have to leave the sex trade and get the men around you arrested.

So Elizabeth Bernstein, a Sociologist, she coined this term – carceral feminism in 2007 and used it to describe the efforts of this anti-prostitution camp to abolish prostitution through aggressive law measures at the cost of sex workers. In her article titled "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism', referring to the neo-abolitionist so the anti-prostitution camp, she talks about how her research into sex work led her to inevitably confront the politics of this anti – prostitution camp, where radical feminists went rightwards politically and evangelical Christian organisations went leftwards; and the two met and came together to form this anti-prostitution discourse of human trafficking and sex work being the same thing - synonymous and how they have successfully branded all sexual labour as ‘slavery’ ensuring that sex workers can no longer assert their labour rights.

This anti-prostitution camp uses carceral feminism for harsher punishments against the individual men– like third parties who they portray as the perfect villain responsible for the exploitation and abuse of sex workers. And sex workers - they portray as the perfect victims, helpless, and aggressively pursue sex workers’ ‘rescue’ – looking to not help – but SAVE these women and remove them from the sex trade which they think of as the only solution.

Sex workers since the beginning have said that legal restrictions around prostitution make their lives harder, it makes them unsafe – and the anti-trafficking laws do very little to “punish the men who actually need to be punished”. But carceral feminism believes in binaries – we will save you but on our terms, and we will call you a victim, otherwise you are an immoral prostitute who deserves any and all harm done to you in the sex trade. We can’t help you if you don’t listen to us. With this binary framing – feminists ignore other issues that this sex worker might be facing. It tries to remove any element of complication or complexity or even discomfort. They will only focus on removing sex workers from the sex trade. She can be telling the NGO or Police that her father needs the most expensive medicine for a rare disease and so she has no choice but to do sex work, but her unforeseen economic needs will be ignored by the anti-prostitution camp and they will say that the woman is used and exploited by her own family and we must now save her, just to fit this narrow understanding of exploited or not.

Laws and efforts are positioned as if to help the women in the sex trade and punish the men but to this day - all countries report that most of the arrests or detention under anti - prostitution laws are of women – the sex workers. Investigation and punishment against third parties or these “traffickers” are not as common and they will say that the men are hard to trace. And today in anti-trafficking efforts, the belief is - even if we don’t catch the men responsible which we concede we won’t because it is too difficult, we will continue to save the women; we’ll keep targeting them and keep removing them from the sex trade.

So this anti – prostitution camp by insisting that prostitution is nothing short of slavery justify their intervention into the lives of sex workers – despite the fact that unlike slavery, the criminalisation of prostitution has never resulted in its abolishment; despite the fact that unlike slavery – sex workers themselves do not support these laws, and despite the fact that sex work continues in every country across the world today and sex workers say they are in the sex trade willingly unlike slavery.

And sex work activists have long pointed this out. Margo St James had said back then that anti-trafficking laws were just a war on sex workers and minorities, and ensure that sex workers cannot get funding for their activism. She was absolutely right. Today sex worker activism led by marginalised women is severely underfunded and anti-trafficking activism led by powerful, influential, educated feminists is a thriving business headed by the USA and attacks sex workers across the world.

Part 3: The Global Anti-trafficking Industry

The Rescue Industry is what Laura Agustin calls industries within the social sector whose main job is to reform or protect ‘vulnerable’ groups so like rescuing animals or reforming sex workers. The authors of the book, Revolting Prostitutes argue that this rescue industry around sex workers allow middle class women to assert their class hierarchy over their working class sisters. So employees in these anti-trafficking organisations earn middle class salaries and their main job is to morally and physically police sex workers, who struggle to make ends meet. Melisa Gira Grant in the book Playing the Whore argues that this rescue industry also derives its value from the “production of awareness” and it measures success by how much people are talking about a particular issue.

So making trafficking look like it is common and widespread, is in the interest of these anti-trafficking organisations. They convinced everyone that trafficking is modern day slavery and have successfully produced a rescue industry around prostitution. These anti-trafficking organisations forcibly ‘rescue’ sex workers out of brothels using police force and forcibly rehabilitate them in state institutions –while claiming this is for the benefit of the sex workers – all in the name of feminism. With each rescue intervention though - sex workers lives become worse and worse.

And, anti-trafficking organisations usually come from a radical carceral feminist perspective or a Christian perspective or both so focus a lot on trafficking into prostitution. Quoting from the book Revolting Prostitutes “Typically, their work tends to align around the goal of abolishing commercial sex through criminal law in order to ‘end sex trafficking’.

In this book, the authors – Juno Mac and Molly Smith, also point out that annual funding of the anti-trafficking cause runs in the billions of dollars. Governments, NGOs and big multinational companies all fund under the name of “anti-trafficking”. In 2012 – in only the USA – the collective budget of 36 anti-trafficking organizations was 1.2 billion dollars. A 1.2 billion dollar annual budget and this doesn’t even include the US governments budget to fight AIDS and trafficking, which is also very high. Against this: for sex worker activism - in 2013 – the collective budget for the whole world was estimated at 10 million dollars. This is how underfunded sex worker activism is and they are up against the world’s biggest organisations who form discourses backed by books and academic research, and who campaign at an international stage. So 1.2 billion dollars from the US NGOs alone in a year to abolish prostitution vs 10 million dollars in the whole world to fight for sex worker rights - which activism by the way is funded by mostly sex workers themselves who are mainly poor and marginalized women. Sex workers struggle to get funding because of how powerful the anti-trafficking cause is.

With more and more NGO activities in this field of anti- trafficking– the race is to show this problem of trafficking to be much bigger and much more sinister – it’s now called modern day slavery. The bigger the problem can be shown to be – the more the funding. The more the hysteria – the more the funding. And how are these billions of dollars spent in anti-trafficking efforts? Sex workers point out that a majority of the budgets of these organizations goes in campaigns around the danger of trafficking for women and very little money is spent to actually help and support sex workers. Even if you look at these anti-trafficking campaigns, you’ll see how it engages in moral hysteria– a lot of the campaigns will show a young girl who is taped or chained or caged or behind bars, against the shadow of a big man. These organizations run campaigns with names like ‘Not for Sale’ or ‘Sold Into Slavery’ or something to do with “Innocence” or some similarly named - emotionally-charged- campaign.

Just like with the white slave trade, anti-trafficking conversations today can become sort of racist including against the men in the sex trade. Pimps are demonised. We are also told that pimps are all horrible – men who make prostitutes out of women; who use her; who exploit her. There is no distinction, no nuance. We saw how during the white slave trade panic, white slavery laws were used against Black men or Jewish men in the West. These anti-trafficking laws even today are used to target men from marginalised backgrounds across the world who may be related to, work with or live around sex workers. The stereotype is that pimps abuse the women; force them to sleep with clients – this is simply not true. Surely there are both good and bad agents. A pimp could be exploitative, cannot rule that out but mostly - he’s just a manager or an agent.

Clients are often portrayed as men who can’t “earn” sex – paying for sex is inherently worse than even casual sex, it is implied. Clients are portrayed as men with uncontrollable sexual urges. Clients are indirectly accused of sleeping with drugged and chained women? why would a client want that? Those questions can’t be raised.

The anti-trafficking cause also has experts in the field of trafficking who interestingly have never worked in the sex trade but claim to know everything about it and now lead the discussions. We’ve’ seen the feminists and activists, but this also includes journalists, politicians and even citizens – we’ve seen community led campaigns in the West against “trafficking”. And who do they target? Sex workers, of course.

One expert in the field of trafficking is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who writes for the New York Times called Nicholas Kristof. He writes about the work he does against trafficking and his years - long experience working in the brothels of India and Cambodia to save victims of trafficking. He once went along with the police and NGO in Cambodia on a rescue mission into a brothel, tweeting the whole thing for his audience on twitter – while its happening. He called the girls and women – ‘rape victims’ whom he ‘saved’ - to his followers on twitter, while its happening. This is not uncommon – these neo - colonial humanitarian interventions. Such missions have been happening in South and South east Asia since this modern prostitution panic. These western activists have for so long presented themselves as the saviours of the women in these “backward, third world countries” and how do they save these women – through undercover raids and rescue missions which these women never asked for.

There’s also a tendency in the West to portray that child prostitution is allowed in South and Southeast Asia. This has been since the beginning. The UNICEF in 1995 said that the majority of girls trafficked from Burma to Thailand were between ‘12 and 25 years old’ . So they are heavily implying that girls were trafficked from Myanmar but their data says the girls were between 12 to 25? How does that show anything? While there are cases of minors in prostitution, perhaps lesser now than earlier, but the norm was always portrayed as the worst case scenario, almost promoting the argument of child prostitution being common in these countries – preferred even.

Nicholas Kristof once wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times where he said that American men were ‘promiscuous’ but Indian men have a ‘cultural tendency to pay for sex with 14 year olds’. This was his observation through his work in India’s brothels. So trafficking discourse also paves the way for the stereotyping of the men from the Global South to ultimately prove the ‘cultural and class’ superiority of the White man in the West. Today we are realising the long held cultural prevalence of this narrative– that men from India, Asia, Africa are – more perverted, more brutist, less modern, less feminist, sometimes even more ‘feminine’. You know, just not the right amount of masculine, classy and modern as the white man.

Amia Srinivasan writes about this in her book – where she observes that when there is an incident of rape or any gendered violence in say, India, it is looked at as the cultural norm – brown men who are sexually repressed are conforming to the norm of committing sexual violence in India but if there’s a similar case in the West with a white man – it’s not the cultural norm in the West, this guy’s the exception.

Now - I want to be clear - this is not a criticism of all NGOs or the social sector – this is specific to the prostitution panic. How much the trafficking issue has been morphed and used to favour this anti-trafficking industry. The issue with the anti-trafficking industry is that it is a global industry; has powerful people involved who lead these discourses – unchallenged; imposing their views on marginalised working class women and they are using their billions to keep justifying intervention. Now there is a public sentiment against sex workers and they keep building on it and keep making it look more grave. Successfully branding sex workers as helpless victims also ensures noone listens to sex workers – cause we’re told sex workers are too abused and exploited to know better and so need to be rescued. And a lot of attention and money goes into stopping prostitution despite it harming sex workers and despite it not working, but funding will continue as long as you keep showing high numbers to justify intervention and show some cases where women say they were rescued by these organisations. So why, why, even in the Global South where more women may turn to prostitution due to economic conditions, is there such an aggressive stand against prostitution?

Part 4: America’s Involvement

Have you heard of Hilary Clinton’s famous speech at the UN’s Beijing conference when she was First Lady of the US, in 1995. It has been voted among one of the best speeches of the 20th century. It was said that Clinton opposed the US administration who thought she shouldn’t be so outspoken and might upset China. But Hilary Clinton defied them and went on to famously say “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all”.

This speech was celebrated by western media and feminists. Why are we talking about this speech? This speech marks the period in time which saw the beginning of the USA using women’s rights and human rights as a cause for them to champion, across the world.

In 2001 – when the US under George W Bush invaded Afghanistan, Laura Bush – the then- First Lady went on radio and she told Americans that this was not just a war on terror but a war for the rights and dignity of women in Afghanistan. What she left out is US’s role in destabilising Afghanistan which made women extremely vulnerable and since then – USA’s 20 year war on Afghanistan has had devastating consequences economically and especially, for women.

Yet – America has become the de facto ruler of women’s rights across the world. With this comes the justification for the US’s “concerns” for the rights of women. And The USA and the West uses this as a violent political tool - justification for political and civil interventions, wars, bombings, embargos and destabilising governments in the Global South.

US feminism also has been the most powerful and visible form of feminism globally since the 1980s, with us continuing to borrow language from it. The global feminism movement has since been spearheaded by the US.

We’ve seen how the US led discussions around the Palermo Protocol. Since then, the US has pretty much dominated the global anti-trafficking field, along with prompting and funding the most aggressive action against sex workers, across the world. This is important – the US is really invested in ending prostitution in the whole world.

See - Apart from the Palermo Protocol, something else happens in the year 2000 which really put US’s involvement in the cause of prostitution on overdrive. The election of George W. Bush. The Bush administration made the fight against prostitution a top priority and again, not only for America but for the whole world. This was not surprising. One of his most loyal voter bank were the evangelical Christians and now he could also win the approval of the secular radical feminists who were seen as liberals voting leftwards. And US makes no qualms or apologies about this – it doesn’t matter what your country in the Global South decides, it has given itself the right and authority, and wants to stop prostitution across the world.

It is also very amusing to see how the USA tries to brandish governments or leaders or even countries by using sex or prostitution or what they will call ‘sexual slavery’ as a way to justify their vilification of the leader and the country, they are trying to target. One such example is related to Fidel Castro. Cuba and the USA have an extremely strained relationship since Cuba’s turn to socialism, and US has imposed embargos upon Cuba since the 1960s which embargo is unfortunately still on-going. With this came economic devastation, and Cuba heavily relied on tourism in their economy. Bush, when he gets elected in the year 2000 continues this embargo. George Bush’s vilification of Fidel Castro included accusing Cuba of promoting sex tourism and child prostitution; of violating the human rights of women; he said Cuba replaced Southeast Asia as a destination for paedophiles and sex tourists. George Bush banned American citizens from travelling to Cuba justifying the decision as helping Cuban women by reducing prostitution in Cuba. He once attended a conference on human trafficking and told journalists about how Fidel Castro brags about the Cuban sex tourism industry because according to him Castro had once said "Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world."

Everyone was wondering where this quote came from cause they couldn’t find any such statement from Fidel Castro. When they finally found the source – it turned out to be a college research paper written in the early 1990s which Bush had twisted and the author of the essay was also pissed about this; what Fidel Castro had actually said was this:

“There are hookers, but prostitution is not allowed in our country. No women are forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily ... We can say that they are highly-educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest number of AIDS cases”

Now obviously Cuba, a country economically in need, will have women turning to prostitution. Fidel Castro’s statement is quite humane actually; he’s not disgusted by sex workers, he understands practical health related concerns, he doesn’t think sex workers are immoral, and he is not aggressively pursuing them using state and police force. But George Bush (and this is how the anti-prostitution camp’s language is), he made it seem like having prostitution is the worst thing that can happen to a country and to the women – worse than poverty; worse than police harassment; worse than assault and anyone who does not oppose prostitution like he does is ‘shameless’ and “is promoting sex tourism”.

SO - It was evident that the Bush administration was going to focus a lot on the issues of sex trafficking, one of their top priorities (he didn’t really care much about other forms of human trafficking, it’s the sex again) and he was going to use it to demand compliance from other countries. And he did. The USA started pressuring countries in the Global South to establish criminal systems to target prostitution as the only way to combat “trafficking”.

Now we’ve seen how American radical feminists are among the founders of the biggest and best funded international anti-trafficking organizations, such as the Coalition against Trafficking of Women, which has been part of the anti-trafficking discourse since the beginning. Apart from this, there are plenty of other anti- trafficking organisations in the US which all started coming up after all the hysteria around trafficking and passing of the Palermo Protocol because a lot of funds started being dispatched for anti-trafficking causes. We also see evangelical Christian organisations joining the fight against trafficking, no longer prostitution. In the US - where the culture was changing, evangelical Christian organisations realised that taking a moral stand against prostitution was no longer working and so these organisations started displaying a more moderate stand towards sex and instead started doing a lot of activism against sex trafficking. So alongside radical feminist anti-trafficking organisations, evangelical Christian faith – based organizations in the USA also started working on trafficking. International Justice Mission – in the USA is one such organisation – they operate out of 14 countries and are generally endorsed by all political sides – moderates, liberals, conservatives. All these radical feminist and evangelical Christian anti-trafficking organisations are based in the USA. So, they are mandated to follow US law and policies. These organisations are also extremely well-funded, including by the US federal government and they do anti-trafficking work in the US and the West but more in the Global South. It is also these anti-trafficking organizations that receive government funds for the prevention of HIV/AIDs and never the sex worker led collectives and organisations.

Now in the year 2000 – the USA passed its domestic anti-trafficking legislation called the ‘Trafficking Victims Protection Act’ which even though a domestic law had international reach. It basically established the US government’s right to impose economic sanctions on those countries that do not comply with US’s minimum standards set for anti-trafficking compliance. So the USA essentially gave itself the right to police other country’s anti-trafficking efforts based on their standards and if these countries failed – economic sanctions could be imposed.

In 2003 – the U.S. passed a law which got called - the anti-prostitution pledge. This mandated all NGOs that receive US government AIDS or anti-trafficking funds to adopt an organization-wide policy opposing prostitution – not trafficking, expressly – opposing prostitution. Look at the reach of this law. The anti-prostitution pledge must be adopted by NGOs in the USA or anywhere in the world that receive any funding by the US government or a US based NGO and it should be adopted organisation wide no matter what the local country law is. An official, Ambassador John Miller who served in the US State Department’s Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, in 2004 opposed the use of the term sex worker; saying the use of the term ‘sex worker’ by feminists and activists “served to justify modern day slavery and to dignify the perpetrators and the industries who enslave”. So the Bush administration ensured that all organisations even HIV/AIDS organisations could not do anything that would recognise ‘sex work’ or sex worker rights. Anti- trafficking organisations to this day– don’t use the word sex worker. They can’t. Organizations based in the Global South including India that receive funding from a US based NGO or the US government directly and which funding comes in a lot - they must officially condemn prostitution under the anti-prostitution pledge and cannot use the word ‘sex worker’ so you will often hear anti – trafficking organizations use the term ‘women in prostitution’ instead. Else - they will be disqualified from receiving funding from the US government and from any organisation based in the US. Most anti-trafficking organisations in the Global South including Prerna and Sanlaap in India get funds from either the US govt or NGOs based in US and so are bound by US policies against prostitution.

On top of this, around this time, it was also decided by the Bush administration that to qualify for the crime of trafficking – a woman does not have to cross international borders anymore – so trafficking can also happen within a country, within a state, within a city, in your own home – it is not only a transnational crime anymore and now this is commonly accepted in the field across the world. So transportation of the woman is no longer required to prove the crime of trafficking. This helps now to say even more concretely – all prostitution is trafficking; you don’t even have to leave your home to consider to have been trafficked.

The USA also directly pressures other countries to pursue prostitution through the criminal justice system in their own respective countries and who do you think they target? Like I said - the Bush administration had on the top of its agenda – abolishing prostitution worldwide and often pressured national governments especially those in the global south to establish aggressive measures against ‘trafficking’ which we all know now means prostitution. So the USA is heavily invested in this, it’s not taking this lightly. And how does the US Government keep track?

Since the Bush administration and this continues till today, the USA tracks every country’s compliance against trafficking and consolidates the data into an annual report so this is done every year. The US Department of State submits this ‘Trafficking in Persons’ report to the US Congress every year that details all countries’ efforts to tackle human trafficking. This annual report lists every country in the world and tracks their compliance as per US standards. The Report has a section for every country’s compliance, countries are then ranked and those that do not comply with US’s standards are placed in the lowest tier and subject to financial and other sanctions. Of course those in the lowest tier are often countries that the US does not want to associate with anyway like Cuba or wants the country to behave in a manner conducive to the US . So trafficking ratings by the US which are taken very seriously by them - are really just used to politically blackmail countries to act as per the US rather than to protect any women.

And the US is extremely aggressive in pressuring other governments into compliance. This becomes the very problematic aspect of anti-trafficking laws to the Global South – the militant insistence by the US that countries in the Global South abide by America’s anti-prostitution stand. Let’s take the case of Cambodia in South East Asia. Cambodia a country with a colonial past and a fractured history with the US, is a developing country in the Global South. Cambodia has a sex worker population like most countries do and commendable sex worker activism. Around 2008, the US State Department start pressuring the Cambodian government to take a stand against prostitution or else lose HIV/AIDs funds that Cambodia got from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). So the Cambodian Government doesn’t want to lose its international AIDs funds and starts working with the Cambodian police, who have a long history of harassing sex workers anyway since Colonial times. The police start their raids – sex workers are pulled out of brothels, put into trucks; street – based sex workers are chased in public and beaten, and they are all detained for months without charge at ‘rehabilitation centres’. Cambodian and international human rights organisations reported : cases of 40 women kept in 1 cell; how sex workers were beaten, sexually assaulted by guards; some not given access to HIV injections and others medicines; atleast 3 sex workers died after such beatings and the rest were illegally detained for months away from their families and their source of livelihood. Cambodian sex workers pointed out this USAID itself that gave Cambodia its AIDS funds had previously done a study of 20,000 sex workers in Cambodia and found in their study that 80% of them were not forced into sex work and this report was done at the behest of the US Government and so it was available to them. So the US government, despite knowing that these women in Cambodia were not forced into prostitution as per their own study, still – it mandated the Cambodian Government to take action against sex workers by threatening to withhold AIDs funds – and the Cambodian Government obliged; they used the police who in turn just went to remove sex workers from the streets and brothels and imprisoned them – under horrid conditions, and violence and abuse. But this was of no concern to the USA – who congratulated Cambodia by upgrading Cambodia’s ranking in its 2010 Trafficking in Persons report with a small note saying that the raids could have been carried out in a more sensitive manner and further training should be given to the Police. Done and dusted.

Similarly, Thailand – defamed to be a sex tourism or sex trafficking destination (depends on who you ask) has a visible sex worker population and strong sex worker activism. Thailand heavily relies on tourism and has a large informal sector which includes sex workers. While prostitution is illegal in Thailand, the sex trade is seen to be socially tolerated and also by law enforcement - mostly due to constant efforts of Thai sex workers, and well – corruption, it is alleged. But Thailand constantly faces allegations of promoting sex tourism which is untrue - the Thai Government doesn’t promote sex tourism – it just used to refuse to treat sex workers as criminals. In the past - the Thai Government had considered legalisation, again - credit to the Thai sex worker movement – but it finally got strong armed and in 2008 – it passed its anti- trafficking law in line with the Palermo Protocol and started initiating action targeting sex workers, for international compliance purposes, which drew criticism from? sex workers. Now I don’t know about the sex trade in Thailand but reports and articles constantly suggest that trafficking and exploitation of the women is rampant in the sex trade in Thailand but sex workers have for a long time and continue to: demand for the repeal of these laws and the recognition of the sex trade.

It was reported that Thailand allegedly paid 400,000 dollars to a lobbying firm to try to convince the US to not downgrade Thailand to Tier 3 in their 2014 Trafficking in Persons report but they were unsuccessful. This was also due to allegations of trafficking in other sectors. Tier 3 means countries who do not meet US’s minimum standards and are not even making efforts to do so. Now they are in back in Tier 2. India is also usually in this Tier 2. Tier 2 would imply that countries do not meet US’s minimum standards but are seen to be making efforts – and how do show the US that you are making efforts? Aggressive criminalisation through laws and also, constant police action against sex workers.

So the US led anti-trafficking discourse is really concerned about “trafficking” across the world. This is justified because huge numbers are thrown around. Like huge. In 2012 – it was 20 million. Today – it is almost 30 to 40 million – total trafficking, not just sex trafficking but 75% of total trafficking is sex trafficking so that’s bad, right? Surely if the numbers are that high – the US and anti-trafficking organisations have a point, no?

Part 5: The Data

One thing about the trafficking discourse is that strangely it is the anti-trafficking organisations who paint the picture of what trafficking looks like. However, the victims as per them, the sex workers, they don’t seem to have the same picture of trafficking which is the first red flag.

Trafficking discourse is moral paranoia backed by horrible and unreliable statistics. These numbers shouldn’t even be called statistics but they are.

The US institute against Human Trafficking on their website have said “there are 100 (s) of thousands and potentially over a million victims trapped in the world of sex trafficking in the US. Because of the hidden nature of the crime, it is difficult to know how many for sure."

Okay. So there isn’t data but there are potentially over a million victims.

The US’s 2014 Trafficking in Persons report said that they found a total of 44,000 survivors worldwide and over 20 million victims were yet to be identified. Just look at the mismatch in numbers. 44,000 found and over 20 million are yet to be found. The natural thought would be that the police and state takes this lightly but that is not true at all. Trafficking is a well-advertised; well-funded cause. NGOs and the police are everywhere in the sex trade. Many of these 44,000 women will also include voluntary sex workers. So actual “trafficking” numbers will also be much lesser than the 44,000 women found. Let alone the projected number of 20 million.

This is a huge red flag. This is obviously a highly inflated number. This is also highly unethical. Academic articles, international organisations and governments rely on these numbers for their research and policies. The justification always is that trafficking is an underreported crime and invisible in nature so it is hard to track these women so figures are impossible to arrive at but we are assured that the numbers are huge – with no evidence backing that up.

The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, the pro-sex work organisation undertook a year and a half-long investigation into ‘trafficking in women’ commissioned by the UN Special Rapporteur On Violence Against Women. But said that finding reliable statistics on the extent of trafficking was almost impossible because of the flawed definition and the flawed data. This problem has been going on since the beginning of the whole trafficking discourse. In 1998, it was estimated that number of trafficked victims in Mumbai was between 1 lakh to 6 lakhs – that’s a huge variation. Kamala Kempadoo said: “To any conscientious social scientist, such discrepancies should be cause for extreme suspicion on the reliability of the research, yet when it comes to sex work and prostitution, few eyebrows are raised and the figures are easily bandied about without question”

The main thing The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women found was that all sex workers were counted in the number for ‘trafficked victims’ and so trafficking figures were inaccurate and they concludedthat abduction for the purpose of trafficking into the sex industry was very rare. Research by the Foundation for Women in Thailand said that Thai women found in Japan and said to have been ‘trafficked’ used to work as sex workers in Bangkok but they migrated for a better job in Japan. But they are counted under trafficking numbers. Similar research out of Ghana, in the Caribbean, Dominican Republic – so women in the Global South are not tricked; they are not duped, they are not helpless - they choose to move for work. But they are all considered to be victims of sex trafficking.

Figures of trafficked people or “enslaved” people which will include other kinds of trafficking like forced labour which is a whole different conversation in itself, are projected in the 30 – 40 million range which justifies what the USA means when they keep insisting that modern day slavery is as bad as African enslavement -- as bad as people kidnapped from their homeland and transported in chains for free labour?

Now let’s not get stuck in binaries. Complicated cases with layers of abuse and exploitation do exist which we’ll talk about. Even the worst case scenarios like abduction may have happened like any other horrendous crime but you cannot ban an entire industry because of a handful of cases that anti-trafficking organisations have successfully projected as the norm when it is the exception, the rarest of rare. It is the equivalent of banning the entire agriculture or mining industry, after finding a few cases of forced labour or immigrants working without visas, and claiming that the agriculture or mining industry harms men and so needs to be shut down completely. These are also not unheard of in these sectors by the way, cases of forced labour into these industries continue to happen, but there are no calls to ban these industries. I mean, let’s take it a step further – domestic violence is way more common than trafficking – imagine if this starts a campaign that successfully bans marriage. Women though working in the sex trade.?? A few worst case scenarios are used to justify controlling all women in it across the world.

Another problem with these highly inflated numbers is we have no meaningful data, and so cannot have meaningful conversations. 25 years of the Palermo Protocol, billions of dollars dispatched annually, well – funded anti-trafficking organisations, support of the state and police – and we just don’t have the data. The outrage that all prostitution is trafficking and slavery means we don’t know actual know numbers of people who are forced, who are trapped, and don’t know what help and support they do need because? the anti-prostitution camp is so outraged by prostitution itself – they see no difference between forced and voluntary.

The people who bear the brunt of these politics are sex workers across the world who clearly say they are not forced and want to work in the sex trade – which, by the way, is the overwhelming majority. That is actually the norm – voluntary sex workers.

SO anti-trafficking is basically a scam. With billions of dollars involved. Justifiedby intellectual discourse and moral outrage.

In the beginning of this episode – I spoke about the movie Taken. So I should tell you that after the movie was successful, parents in the US got really paranoid about sending their kids to school trips in Europe. Liam Neeson had to release a statement reassuring parents that their children could go for their school trips without being snatched by Albanian sex trafficking gangs. So the actor playing the hero of the film on sex trafficking had to tell people his film was fictional and that they should not panic. This is how influential and widespread the anti-trafficking discourse is. And the lives of marginalised women is on the line.

Despite this billion dollar anti-trafficking industry, with the resilience of sex workers, sex worker activism persevered. In the beginning of the 2000s, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an end to the criminalization of sex work and sex workers. The International Labour Organization today recognizes sex work as labour. The World Health Organisation and the Human Rights Watch also recommend the decriminalization of sex work and sex workers. But such support is only symbolic and doesn’t do much without the potency of the law. In the next episode – we’re going to localize – talk about laws and the sex trade in India.

So Skewed

4. The Tyranny of Amrika: Global anti - trafficking movement

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