Weitzer Movement
Weitzer Movement
Weitzer Movement
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Ronald Weitzer*
1 An exception is a bill in the Hawaii State Legislature in 2007, which would have
decriminalized indoor prostitution and zoned street prostitution. The bill failed.
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I would extend the latter point to sexual commerce in general. In the United
States, crusade efforts were latent in the 1990s but gained renewed vigour in
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The facts regarding sex trafficking are murky, but certain aspects are clear.
We do know that relocation from one place to another for the purpose of
selling sex has long existed. We also know that there are victims of coercive
or deceptive enticement into the sex trade: people are transported to
locations where they are pressured into prostitution. Reports from around the
world indicate that coercive sex trafficking is by no means fictional. We also
know that sex trafficking can be quite lucrative for the third parties involved.
In fact, there are 'few other criminal activities in which the profit-to-cost
ratio is so high'.9 The most exploitative actors make huge profits off the
labour of workers who accumulate little if any money of their own. In
addition, some third parties act violently toward sex workers or demand sex
from them, sometimes over a long period of time.
We do not know how many persons are trafficked across borders every
year. The grand claims made by abolitionist groups that the magnitude of the
problem is huge and growing are entirely unsubstantiated, but quite strategic.
What do I mean by strategic? The size of a social problem matters in attracting
media coverage, donor funding, and attention from policy makers. Moral
crusades thus have a vested interest in inflating the magnitude of a problem,
and their figures are typically unverifiable.10 The anti-trafficking crusade
claims that there are hundreds of thousands or millions of victims worldwide,
and that trafficking has reached an 'epidemic' level. Such claims have been
echoed by government officials in the United States and other nations. When
specific figures are presented, they have ranged from 600,000 to 4 million.
Like the global numbers, domestic American figures have changed
drastically in a short period of time. In 2000, the government claimed that
45,000-50,000 persons were trafficked into the United States annually - a
figure based largely on one government analyst's review of newspaper
clippings.11 This dubious figure was cited in the landmark Victims of
Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, 2000 (TVPA) as justification for
the new law, which states unequivocally that 'Congress finds that ...
approximately 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United
States each year'.12 The State Department's Trafficking in Persons report
repeated the figure in 2002, but just one year later, the figure fell to 18,000
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The 2008 Trafficking in Persons report by the State Department, for the
first time, offered no specific number but instead used the fuzzy term
'thousands'.15 The report also states that 1,379 trafficking victims were
identified between 2001 and mid-2008, but this figure remains but a fraction
of the number of persons allegedly trafficked into the United States during
this time period (using the most conservative official figure: 14,500 x 7.5
years = 108,750).16
Crusade organizations and United States government agencies also claim
that the number of trafficked victims is steadily increasing. A leader of the
Polaris Project, for instance, claims that trafficking is 'fastest growing crime
worldwide'.17 Curiously, this claim contradicts the government's own
numbers on both domestic and international trafficking, which steadily
declined during the eight years of the Bush administration.
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Moral crusades paint problems in black and white, but the trafficking issue is
full of nuances - complexities that are rejected by crusade leaders and by
allied government agencies. One gray area is the issue of consent and
intentionality. If the total number of trafficked persons is opaque, it is just as
unclear how many individuals have been trafficked by force or deceit versus
the number who have migrated with full information and consent regarding
the type of work and nature of the working conditions. Crusade leaders
typically lump these together or simply deny that anyone can consent to
working in the sex industry.
Within the population of migrant women who have entered prostitution,
there is a great deal of variation in their experiences of the migration process
and complex relationships with intermediaries, ranging along a continuum.
Migrants also hold diverse goals and desires, which need to be considered in
relation to conditions in their home countries. As Julia O'Connell Davidson
points out, even when migrants experience unpleasant or exploitative work
ing conditions in the destination locale, some consider this 'preferable to
remaining at home, where threats to their security in the form of violence,
exploitation, or straightforward starvation may be far greater'.24 Laura
Agust?n concurs, describing both push and pull factors behind some
migrants' actions:
many people are fleeing from small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous
streets, and suffocating families. And some poorer people like the idea of
being found beautiful or exotic abroad, exciting desire in others.25
24 J.O. Davidson, 'Trafficking, Modern Slavery, and the Human Security Agenda'
(2008) 6 Human Security J. 8, at 9.
25 L.M. Agust?n, Sex at the Margins (2007) 45-6.
26 A. DeStefano, The War on Human Trafficking: U.S. Policy Assessed (2007) 88.
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These are not isolated findings; other research shows that many migrants
sold sex prior to relocating or were well aware that they would be working
in the sex industry in their new home. One analyst concludes that, 'the
majority of "trafficking victims" are aware that the jobs offered them are in
the sex industry'.31 Whether or not this indeed characterizes the majority, it
is clear that traffickers do not necessarily fit the 'folk devil' stereotype
popularized by the anti-trafficking movement. Some facilitators are
relatives, friends, or associates who make travel arrangements, obtain
necessary documents, provide funds, and otherwise assist with migration.
Many of the Vietnamese women working in Cambodian brothels, for
27 J. Busza, S. Castle, and A. Diarra, 'Trafficking and Health' (2004) 328 Brit. Medical
J. 1369; see, also, the identical findings in T. Steinfatt, Measuring the Number of
Trafficked Women and Children in Cambodia (2003) 23-4.
28 L. Meaker, 'A Social Response to Transnational Prostitution in Queensland,
Australia' in Transnational Prostitution, eds. S. Thorbek and B. Pattanaik (2002) 61,
63.
29 L.M. Agust?n, 'Migrants in the Mistress's House: Other Voices in the Trafficking
Debate' (2005) 12 Social Politics 96, at 98, 101.
30 J. Vocks and J. Nijboer, 'The Promised Land: A Study of Trafficking in Women
from Central and Eastern Europe to the Netherlands' (2000) 8 European J. of
Criminal Policy and Research 379, at 383, 384.
31 J. Doezema, 'Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of
White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women' (2000) 18
Gender Issues 23, at 24.
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1. Targeting prostitution
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Abolitionist groups have fought for policies that target sex trafficking
more than labour trafficking. A journalist sympathetic to the crusade
nevertheless took issue with this exclusive focus on sex trafficking:
To the dominant coalition ... the only slaves - anyway, the only slaves worthy
of American attention - were prostitutes. And all prostitutes were slaves.
Theirs was a circular logic that dumbfounded those who regularly aided real
slaves, real prostitutes, and really enslaved prostitutes.37
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Another way of reporting this 'finding' is that as many as 62 per cent did not
believe that women were trafficked into the brothels, while the remainder
either did not have an opinion or believed that there were undocumented
immigrants, who are not necessarily 'trafficked'. Interestingly, Farley
converts the beliefs of a minority into evidence of trafficking. Elsewhere,
Farley writes that a few women in one brothel told her that women in another
brothel had been trafficked from China. Instead of treating this as hearsay,
Farley presents this is factual and calls the women who told her this story
'witnesses', lending their statements an aura of credibility.68
Second, Farley twists findings to fit her abolitionist orientation. In
interviews with some workers at eight of Nevada's thirty legal brothels, she
states, 'I knew that they would minimise how bad it was'.69 If the respondent
did not describe working in a brothel as 'bad', they were in denial, and Farley
sought to penetrate this barrier: 'we were asking the women to briefly remove
a mask that was crucial to their psychological survival'.70 She also asserts that
'most' of the women working in the legal brothels had pimps, despite the fact
that the women were 'reluctant to admit that their boyfriends and husbands
were pimping them'.71 And 'a surprisingly low percentage - thirty three per
cent - of our interviewees in the legal brothels reported sexual abuse in
childhood', a percentage that 'is lower than the likely actual incidence of
sexual abuse because of symptoms of numbing, avoidance, and dissociation
among these women' or discomfort discussing such experiences.72 In citing
research by Brents and Hausbeck that concluded that the brothels 'offer the
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The letter writers oppose both obscene material (that is, pornography that has
been judged obscene by a jury) and the 'scourge' of pornography in general,
including legal porn.
CONCLUSION
The evidence presented here shows that the dominant forces in the anti
trafficking, abolitionist crusade and their allies in the United States
government are committed to a far-reaching attack on commercial sex -
prostitution, strip clubs, pornography - all of which are associated with
trafficking and 'sexual slavery'. A crackdown on, if not outright
criminalization of, pornography and strip clubs becomes more palatable to
mainstream organizations and moderate politicians if they can be linked to
sex trafficking, that is, if they can be convinced that sex workers in these two
sectors have been coerced and trafficked. Such domain expansion has been a
gradual process. The initial, exclusive focus on trafficking was subsequently
broadened as activists began to insist that all sectors of the commercial sex
industry should be targeted for repression. Evidence of this domain
expansion can be found in the areas designated for increased scrutiny in
the End Demand Bill, the growing crackdown on domestic prostitution
provided for in the 2005 and 2008 TVPRA, the requirement that those
seeking government funding for their research or interventions on trafficking
or AIDS sign an anti-prostitution pledge, and the Justice Department's
increasing investigation of producers and distributors of adult pornography
under the obscenity laws.
This moral crusade has succeeded, remarkably quickly, in transforming
itself from social movement into a project of the United States government -
becoming almost fully institutionalized in official discourse, legislation, and
enforcement practices under the Bush administration. During this period,
there has been an extraordinary osmosis between crusade and government
ideology and policy initiatives. As I have shown here and elsewhere, the
success of this movement is largely due to the convergence of interests and
110 Letter from Alliance Defense Fund to Attorney General Eric Holder, 15 July 2009.
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