FPIF Commentary |
Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy
Ann Jordan | March 19, 2009
Editor: John Feffer
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Economic hardship, discrimination, and violence have driven millions of women to work in the sex sector around the world, and their numbers will increase as a result of the current global economic crisis. Unless the underlying factors pushing women to opt for selling sex to support themselves and their families are remedied, many women will continue to have few other options.
Yet the Bush administration, supported by the evangelical right-wing and some radical feminists, spent eight years promoting laws to criminalize prostitution and clients as the means to abolish prostitution and stop human trafficking into the sex sector. The ideology-driven approach is notable for the absence of any concrete evidence that it works. Proponents of such an approach have also failed to demonstrate that it avoids harming women or provides other livelihoods for those it aspires to help. It reduces all adults in the sex sector (even highly paid "call girls" and those working legally) to victim status and considers all prostitution to be a form of trafficking.
Unfortunately for many of the women who are objects of this policy, the ensuing crackdowns have meant prison, violence, forced "rehabilitation" and no means to earn an adequate livelihood. At the same time, the policy has not achieved its goal of reducing the incidence of trafficking, prostitution, commercial sexual exploitation of children or HIV/AIDs. The only responses to date from the new administration are President Barack Obama's affirmation at the Saddleback Presidential Forum that human trafficking "has to be a top priority" and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement at her confirmation hearing that she takes "very seriously the function of the State Department to lead our government through the Office on Human Trafficking to do all that we can to end this modern form of slavery."
The Abolitionists
The most politically active abolitionists in the United States are Michael Horowitz (Hudson Institute), Janet Crouse (Concerned Women for America), Donna Hughes (University of Rhode Island), Equality Now, and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. They have worked successfully over the last eight years to bring about many of the anti-prostitution legal and policy changes regarding human trafficking and HIV/AIDs.
The latest entrant to this crowded field of abolitionists is Siddharth Kara, a former investment banker and business executive who has written the book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2008). Kara traveled to India, Nepal, Albania, Moldova, and elsewhere to research his book. But like his fellow abolitionists, he too falls short of producing evidence that criminalizing demand will stop trafficking or abolish prostitution. He supports criminalizing clients, in part, based on a visit to The Netherlands where prostitution is legal (but not to Sweden, where it is illegal and clients are criminalized). He quotes Suzanne Hoff of La Strada, an anti-trafficking organization, as reporting that the majority of the women selling sex in Amsterdam are trafficked. But, as Hoff told me, she did not and could not make such a statement "for the simple reason that there are not — and have never been — reliable figures on the number or percent of women being exploited or forced into the sex industry."
"If I had to choose a policy today," he writes, "I would choose the stance of the U.S. and Swedish governments: the criminalization of prostitution, including the purchase of sex acts and the owning, operating, or financing of sex establishments" because this approach "has a better chance of curtailing demand for sex slaves." Wishing won't make it so; neither is it a basis for sound policymaking.
Like similar travelers, Kara is deeply touched by the victims' stories and wants to mount a campaign to bring justice, assistance, and hope to the women and girls. The centerpiece of his campaign is the destruction of the economic basis of the trafficking business. The economic model he erects is built on several unexamined assumptions and unattributed statements of fact and data. The most seriously flawed assumption he makes is to equate human beings — trafficked persons and sex workers — with commodities. His economic model treats women as passive objects that are pushed and pulled by exploiters using forced labor to lower costs to meet demand, and ignores the poverty, discrimination, and violence that compel women to make risky decisions. Adults who make rational choices from among limited options are actors who don't fit a neat supply/demand economic model, and so they are factored out of the equation in order to situate trafficking as a commodity business.
Some of Kara's proposed solutions are dangerous, unworkable or unrealistic. For example, he advocates for private citizen community vigilance committees to go into brothels undercover to locate trafficked women and girls. But he was unsuccessful in going undercover and even chased away from one brothel area. He recognizes, on the one hand, that up to a third of victims are rescued by clients, and opines on the other that clients are looking "for a way to act out violent, racist, pedophiliac, or other antisocial traits."6 Yet, by opting to prosecute all clients, he ignores the fact that women and youth like those he met will continue to migrate and sell sex, no matter how many men are imprisoned. At the personal level, Kara also equivocates: While he advocates for raids to rescue trafficked women and girls, he nonetheless leaves a woman he believes has been trafficked in the United States to her fate because she "needed the money for her family and there was a threat of violence against her parents."
All of his proposed solutions suffer from a lack of input from the people who will be primarily affected: trafficked persons and adult sex workers. To develop effective, evidence-based, do-no-harm policies, advocates and policy makers must work collaboratively with persons who may be helped or harmed by the proposed laws and policies.
What Works
Effective change comes from the bottom up, within the affected community where the persons who are the most knowledgeable and motivated live and work. The only way to build sustainable movements for change is to empower and support a vibrant civil society. This is particularly important when the issues have social, cultural, and economic bases that are highly resistant to any attempt at regulation by criminal law. Sex worker organizations in the United States, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Brazil, South Africa, and elsewhere are the front-line actors, who have first-hand knowledge about how raids, anti-prostitution campaigns, "vigilance" committees, and law enforcement approaches impact their lives and undermine efforts to combat trafficking, child prostitution, and the spread of HIV/AIDs.
Instead of harassing and stigmatizing women in the sex sector, governments and civil society should recognize and value their accomplishments — such as removing children and trafficked women from brothels, creating adult literacy programs, organizing micro-enterprise programs so women can find other sources of income, setting up schools for their children, and raising awareness about HIV/AIDs and health issues.
The Obama administration should reject the ideology-driven policies, practices, and programs of the past eight years. Specifically, it should base all programs and policies on proven results and sound ideas derived from objective evidence. It should take into consideration the concerns and ideas of sex worker groups when developing new programs and policies. The administration should stop applying the anti-prostitution pledge in a way that prevents the funding of U.S. and foreign organizations that work with sex workers. Civil servants who have been trained to carry out the anti-prostitution agenda over the last eight years must abandon that agenda and operate under a new, more open and inclusive policy based on rights and evidence. And the government should remove all of its materials related to human trafficking, sex work, and/or HIV/AIDs that are inconsistent with the above recommendations from websites and distribution.
In this way, the new administration can create progressive, non-judgmental, rights- and evidence-based strategies in partnership with sex worker organizations and other experts to ensure that U.S. goals to stop human trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDs are accomplished without causing further collateral harm.
Ann Jordan is the director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Forced Labor at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, American University Washington College of Law. She is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.
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Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Ann Jordan, "Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, March 19, 2009).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/5970
Production Information:
Author(s): Ann Jordan
Editor(s): John Feffer
Production: Jen Doak |
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Latest Comments & Conversation Area
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| Name: |
Amanda Kloer |
Date: Mar 20, 2009 |
I have written a response to Ms. Jordan on my blog at http://humantrafficking.change.org, which I would be honored if she would read.
http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/space_for_moderation_a_response_to_the_abolitionist_fallacy |
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| Name: |
michael horowitz |
Date: Mar 21, 2009 |
| read your study; thought it unfair in missing the key objective of us "abolitionists" -- going after all pimps on a per se basis. thought it unfair and almost bizarre in portraying us as people who want to go after the girls and women in the "industry." It's we who think of them as victims, the author of the piece -- sad old ann jordan of course -- who calls them "sex workers."
thought it less than honorable in failing to point out that most of us are decidedly unfocused on women who are manifestly not enslaved (even though they are almost certainly making choices likely to be tragic for themselves) -- e.g., people like the "society madam" women or even those who worked for/with spitzer's escort service. At the same time, we favor making all acts of pimping per se crimes because -- as the most violent street pimps and organized mafias around the world know -- the real world consequences of proof requirements compelling women in prostitution to testify (and prove beyond a reasonable doubt) that their pimps defauded or coerced them will mean that the defrauding and abusive pimps will never be effectively prosecuted.
Our core disagreement w/you, Ann, comes from out belief that your approach ultimately protects the very people BOTH of us abhor: the street pimps, massage parlor operators and urban brothel owners who routinely and systematically beat and destroy the people who "work" for them.
there's more to be said, but i still maintain the hope that we will join forces to end the reigns of tyranny over millions of girls and women exercised by the very people both of us want behind bars.
michael horowitz |
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| Name: |
Taina Bien-Aime |
Date: Mar 22, 2009 |
| Although Ms. Jordan seems to recognize that poverty, discrimination and gender-based violence make women vulnerable to the sex trade, instead of addressing ways to examine the very industry that perpetuates human rights abuses against women, she seems to support its structure and existence. Ms. Jordan also makes a number of unfounded assumptions that should be clarified. First, Equality Now agrees that prostituted women should neither be stigmatized nor harassed; should not be brutalized by the police, or criminalized under the law. Secondly, we too agree that effective change comes from the bottom up and that governments must develop progressive, rights and evidence-based strategies to address human trafficking and HIV/AIDS, as well as provide alternative options to exploitation in the sex trade. Equality Now also partners with grassroots groups, in the US and around the world, from India to Peru, Iceland to Zambia, that work with governments, law enforcement, survivors and sex trafficked women to find effective ways to address human trafficking. These community-based organizations stand in solidarity with these women and together, reject the international multi-billion dollar sex industry that imposes a brutal system of gender-based violence and third-party commercial sexual exploitation. One cannot delink sex trafficking from the sex industry - one would not exist without the other.
It is critical that the Obama administration and its State Department recognize the links between prostitution and sex trafficking. While not every woman in prostitution has been trafficked, every woman who has been sex trafficked ends up in prostitution. The commercial sex trade, including prostitution, and the demand for it, fuels sex trafficking. If we are serious about ending trafficking in women, it would behoove us to start working together to find effective measures to protect and support the victims of human trafficking and duly prosecute traffickers and pimps. We cannot eradicate poverty and gender-based discrimination and violence while ignoring the devastating harm, which amounts to fundamental human rights violations, inflicted by the sex trade on the world's most vulnerable populations.
Taina Bien-Aimé
Executive Director, Equality Now |
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| Name: |
Mark Hoerrner |
Date: Mar 31, 2009 |
| This reads remarkably like a 2007 article by Ronald Weitzer. Close enough, in fact, that I would say the two developed theories on this together.
What seems to be lacking in this article is an acknowledgement of human trafficking and in its place a vehement argument for the promulgation of the sex industry. While touting the myriad economic considerations that generally push women towards sex services, there's no recognition that these factors - lack of quality jobs, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, oppressive government systems - are the root causes, not correlations, with why so many women enter the sex industry.
Out of all the victims I have met and all of the independent prostitutes I have met, not one of them recalled dreaming about being a sex worker when they were young. Their environment and lack of other job opportunity pushed them into sex work.
And while I think the faith community has been central in the fight against human trafficking, I am not an abolitionist because I am looking to create a higher morality in my country - I am looking to free slaves. Pure and simple, I want no person to be under the boot of involuntary servitude. Unfortunately for independent sex workers, much of that slavery happens in the sex industry at distressingly younger and younger ages. |
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| Name: |
Steven Locke |
Date: Apr 03, 2009 |
| There are many myths about both trafficking and prostitution that are shared by some prominent activists, organizations, media, and governments. What is lacking is evidence-based policy. Instead, much of the anti-trafficking discourse is based on unverified claims as to (a) the extremely high numbers of victims and (b) the nature of prostitution itself. The fact is that we simply do not know how many victims there are, by which I mean persons who are coerced or deceived into working in the sex trade. We frequently hear vague numbers like "millions" but such claims are belied by the impossibility of counting persons involved in underground, clandestine activity. One can stand firmly opposed to coercive trafficking, as I do, without embracing the popular but unsubstantiated claims made by anti-prostitution organizations and activists. Second, prostitution is an incredibly varied phenomenon. Claims about negative aspects of "prostitution" often apply to a certain type of prostitution -- survival sex on the streets. ALL of the so-called "studies" of prostitutes (those presenting percentages of prostitutes who have been assaulted, raped, robbed, trafficked, etc.) are based on unrepresentative, non-random samples -- usually of a small number of street prostitutes in one part of one city. Yet the findings are often generalized to "prostitution." When these numbers are presented as "facts" and repeated in the media, they gain a veneer of credibility that is undeserved. The result is a growing Mythology of Prostitution. Ann Jordan's article offers a healthy skepticism which is needed in the debate over trafficking. Many of the anti-prostitution activists are operating with unfounded assumptions (often based on anecdotal information or mere articles of faith) rather than any solid evidence for their grandiose claims. |
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| Name: |
Bishakha Datta |
Date: Apr 04, 2009 |
| I am writing from India in response to Mark Hoerrner's comment that 'out of all the victims I have met and all of the independent prostitutes I have met, not one of them recalled dreaming about being a sex worker when they were young.'
In India, where poverty is overwhelming, I have never met one woman who 'dreamed about' being a rag picker, a vegetable vendor, a domestic worker or a construction worker, when 'she was young.' Yet, women who are poor routinely turn to all these low-paid, informal sector jobs where they have very few rights - just as they do to sex work. We need to understand their livelihood options from the points of view of these women.
It's not about dreams; it's about reality. It's about ensuring you get two square meals a day - from domestic, construction or sex work. Or rag picking. |
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| Name: |
Michael Goodyear |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| I agree with Ann Jordan's position, as would nearly all people doing research into this topic. There has been far too much rhetoric and very little in the way of verifiable facts proposed in much of the literature advanced to justify a war on trafficking. We all abhor exploitation of human beings, but the 'abolitionist' position over the last few hundred years has done little to alleviate this, and much harm. Issues around migration are complex, and sex work is merely one profession that migrants may undertake. It is time for some common sense, clear thinking, and above all high quality empirical research. Hopefully the winds of change blowing over the United States will provide an opportunity for some rethinking on this topic. |
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| Name: |
Mark Hoerrner |
Date: Apr 30, 2009 |
| I find this interesting because it seems a lot of the researchers railing against the lack of evidence and empirical research seem to have a considerable lack of quantitative research to point to in the area justifying their own position. I am also fascinated by the fact that it seems that none of these researchers are out there working with the populations of which they write. I've worked with the street kids in Peru and had them relate firsthand numerous stories of not just being trafficked for sex, but multiple forms of exploitative labor. I've talked with the girls and women rescued from nightly forced rape in Cambodia. I've listened to the stories of women brought from S. America into Staten Island, NY, where they were forced into prostitution and raped repeatedly by police. I've read the files of many underage prostitutes here in Georgia - all sex trafficked as children as young as 8 - and I think that as long as we have one child forced into this kind of lifestyle, I'll be glad to call myself an abolitionist.
I would note, however, that I think there are significant needs for additional empirical research, but we find a host of challenges in the form of no common tracking system among governments, misclassified crimes, no common lexicon in the human trafficking world, and few easy ways to take large-scale samples of sex-trafficked victims.
And let's be clear - these are not children who, for lack of an ability to get a meal or make a couple of extra dollars, turn to prostitution. These are children and adult females who are forced, through physical or emotional violence, to submit to nightly rape. That's not a lifestyle choice and you can dress it up as a Spitzer-style coed "happy hooker" scenario if you so desire, but in the end, those of us who take on the moniker of abolitionist are not fighting against the independent prostitute, we are fighting against those who are thieves - of freedom, of innocence and of a person's sense of security. |
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| Name: |
Autumn Cha |
Date: Nov 08, 2009 |
| I think we, as humanity, should educate one another about human rights abuse in schools, at work, and in communities. We should report and prevent sex trafficking. I learned a lot through my report for my second bachelor's degree. Sex trafficking seems it is not consensual. It looks as if it is brainwashing, violent, and disturbing. The traffickers and victims should be persuaded to seek help. |
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