Recently, the students at my institution sponsored "Social Justice Week." Being all for social justice, I thought this was probably a good thing. Looking at the tagline on Facebook, I began to get a little unsettled. Apparently, this "social justice week" was about a single topic - sex trafficking, the current cause celebre (I know there are accents there. Anyone want to offer formatting help with Blogger?). On Facebook:
Monday 2/25Laura Agustin, an anthropologist after my own heart, blogs extensively about the "rescue industry," her term for the movement where predominantly white, rich people from the US and the UK rescue young girls from sexual slavery, particularly in countries far away. She dissects the ways that the rhetoric and practice of rescue conflate voluntary sex work with rape, slavery, and kidnapping, divorcing sex work from its social, cultural, and economic circumstances. I particularly like her take on Nicholas Kristof, of Half the Sky fame. Charging in as the white knight to rescue damsels (and always damsels, take note) in distress without regards to why people are in their current situation in the first place, how they make sense of it, or what happens to them once the rescuer departs is pure ethnocentric imperialism.
Kit-Building #1
6:30-7:45pm
Are you looking to help fight human trafficking in a practical way? Come and help build kits with us on Monday or Thursday evening. If you cannot attend either session, consider donating money to be used to purchase items for the kits. The kits will go to the Renee Jones Empowerment Center to be distributed to local strip clubs, where sex trafficking can easily hide.
The problem with the rescue industry is that it doesn't do more than promote a feel-good moment for those morally and financially superior to step in and help people "get their lives right." Celebrities, both popular and academic, can do this by visiting Cambodia and live-tweeting brothel raids. In the Midwest, apparently you can do it by making spa-kits.
There are a few takes on what, exactly, the term trafficking means. In this case, the Facebook author is referring to "sexual trafficking," which is somehow *even worse* than regular trafficking - you know, the one where someone is forced by coercion or violence to perform labor against their will in abhorrent conditions, usually isolated from family or social networks. A lot like slavery. And who wouldn't be against slavery? However, it is a big jump from slavery to voluntary sex work, and this is where I find this event problematic.
The "practical way to fight trafficking" offered to students and the public is to make "care kits" for women at strip clubs and "on the street." Note, only women. These care kits include coffee mugs, tea, lotion, and other nice things for the strippers. For women "on the street" (and I keep quoting this, because no one actually used the term prostitute, whore, hooker, escort, or any of the other possible monikers, when I talked to them), the kits contained baby wipes, chap stick, and other practical items.
First, I'd really like to know how this stops trafficking. The "larger goal" is to form relationships with women so they have someone to turn to if they get in trouble and to let them know they are valuable and loved, even if they are degraded every night. That's how it was explained to me. People will magically not be trafficked anymore if they have the right moisturizer! Somehow, purchasing and repackaging consumer goods that aren't even necessary for survival (like, how about a condom or two?) and handing them out to women (!) in a Midwestern town is going to practically fight trafficking. In other news, you can also go to a sock-hop to help trafficking victims or you can skydive to fight the modern scourge. Congratulations, you're an activist. Bet you feel better already about imposing your morals on people you have never met by couching it in terms of rescuing them from sexual slavery.
What particularly set me off about this ad on Facebook, however, was the last line: "The kits will ... be distributed to local strip clubs, where trafficking can easily hide." WTF? I was a stripper for six years. In a big city. I *never* met anyone who was trafficked. I didn't know anyone who was forced into the profession, at least not in the ways that anti-traffickers mean. If they were protesting a capitalist patriarchy that impedes all people (not the exceptions) from earning a living to decently support a family and therefore feel pressured to work in ways that leave them feeling exploited, like stripping, or Walmart, or McDonald's, I would be down with that. But barring that, we live in a capitalist patriarchy and preaching that women (or men or trans people, but mostly women) who work in *legal* forms of employment (my thoughts on the decriminalization of prostitution will have to wait for another post) are all practically sexual slaves is nothing but a ploy to police women's sexuality under the guise of saving them.
And just in case you thought this "saving" only applies to whores and strippers, take note that carrying a condom in New York City can be used as evidence that you were loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. Transgender individuals are particularly vulnerable to this tactic, as they are often singled out by the police.
Yet this doesn't outrage the students at my institution who want to stop trafficking. If you want to help a sex worker, ask what they need in the first place. Access to healthcare and childcare, a minimum wage as employees and not independent contractors, a way to financially plan an exit strategy from sex work, stable housing, all of these things would have been useful for at least some of the people I worked with. Coloring them all as trafficking victims, playing out a small-scale version of Half the Sky in your backyard, pawning off worthless trinkets as symbols of love and respect which these women (!) obviously cannot get in other parts of their lives, it only serves to make you feel better about yourself and your privilege. Congratulations. You want a cookie?
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