Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (61 page)

C O N C L U S I O N

The antiprostitution/trafficking campaign has made considerable progress in transforming itself from crusade into a project of the U.S. government, becoming almost fully institutionalized in official discourse, legislation, and enforcement practices under the Bush administration. During this period, there has been a remarkable osmosis between crusade and government ideology and policy preferences.

All the hallmarks of a moral crusade are evident—framing a condition as an unqualified evil; creation of folk devils; zealotry among leaders who see their mission as a righteous enterprise; presentation of claims as universalistic truths; use of horror stories as representative of actors’ experiences; promulgation of huge and unverified numbers of victims; and attempts to redraw normative boundaries by increased criminalization. Prostitution is depicted as immoral or intrinsically harmful, and systems of legal prostitution as dens of iniquity and oppression. Activists (and now government officials) have presented questionable statistics and anecdotal horror stories as evidence of a worldwide epidemic of coerced prostitution.

What is particularly striking is the degree to which current claims recapi-tulate arguments made a century ago regarding “white slavery,” a problem that was largely mythical.100 It has been argued that “today’s stereotypical

‘trafficking victim’ bears as little resemblance to women migrating for work in the sex industry as did her historical counterpart, the ‘white slave’.”101

Coercive sex trafficking is by no means fictional. Force and deception are realities in the sex trade, and there are indeed victims in the U.S. and abroad.

But instead of focusing on unfree labor, the campaign has broadly targeted all sex work. What is largely missing from crusade discourse is attention to the
343

RONALD WEITZER AND MELISSA DITMORE

root causes of migration and trafficking, including barriers to women’s employment and economic advancement throughout the world. Crusade leaders occasionally mention structural factors, but this has been overshadowed by the dominant moral discourse and by a focus on individual victims and customers (the “demand”). A leader of Concerned Women for America seemed to dismiss the role of socioeconomic conditions when she stated: “While the U.N. blames social and economic disparities for fostering trafficking, the demand for prostitutes is the driving force behind sex trafficking.”102

An alternative model would (1) pay more attention to the socioeconomic conditions that promote sex work, (2) focus on unfree labor rather than prostitution per se, (3) faithfully represent workers’ varied experiences in prostitution, and (4) identify concrete ways of enhancing workers’ health, safety, and control over working conditions.103 A full discussion of policy implications is beyond the scope of this chapter, but any such discussion must take into account differences between types of prostitution. In other words, policies should be sector specific. Some workers, concentrated in the upscale echelon (call girls, escorts), are not interested in leaving the trade,104 and their biggest concern is being arrested. Other workers, both internationally and domestically, whether trafficked or not, want to leave the sex industry, yet other employment options offering livable wages are woefully lacking. In the United States, most cities provide virtually no government-funded support services for sex workers. Desperately needed are resources for temporary housing, counseling, healthcare, and job training. Regarding sex trafficking, as noted earlier, interventions focused on persons who are unequivocally victims and perpetrators of coercive trafficking would be a superior strategy to the undifferentiated and often counterproductive practices of many faith-based rescue organizations, whose practices are driven by this moral crusade’s broad goal of abolishing the entire sex industry worldwide.

N OTE S

1. This chapter is a revised and updated version of an article by Ronald Weitzer, “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade,” in
Politics and Society
35

(September 2007): 446–475. Sage Publications.

2. Stanley Cohen,
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
, New York: St. Martin’s, 1972; Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda,
Moral Panics: The Social
Construction of Deviance
, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.

3. Cohen,
Folk Devils
; Goode and Ben-Yehuda,
Moral Panics
.

344

SEX TRAFFICKING: FACTS AND FICTIONS

4. Joel Best,
Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New
Victims
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 103–118.

5. Phyllis Chesler and Donna Hughes, “Feminism in the 21st Century,”

Washington Post
, February 22, 2004.

6. Laura Lederer, quoted in Mindy Belz, “No Sale,”
World Magazine
, March 25, 2000.

7. Mainstream feminists have been involved in the debate at certain junctures. During international negotiations over a U.N. treaty on sex trafficking in January 2000, Gloria Steinem and the presidents of NOW

and Planned Parenthood sent a letter to President Clinton protesting the administration’s refusal to define all types of prostitution as “sexual exploitation” and insistence that only forced prostitution be so designated. (See Barbara Stolz, “Educating Policymakers and Setting the Criminal Justice Policymaking Agenda: Interest Groups and the

‘Victims of Trafficking and Violence Act of 2000’,”
Criminal Justice
5

[2005]: 407–430, at p. 418.) Later, the New York State chapter of NOW pushed for provisions in the New York antitrafficking law that equated sex work with trafficking and for provisions that increase penalties for clients of sex workers, a bill that was passed. NOW’s New York City chapter led a campaign to encourage print media to eliminate advertising for sex work businesses. And National NOW signed on to a joint letter with CATW and Equality Now (dated January 24, 2008) to Senator Biden (chair of the Judiciary Committee) during the negotiations leading up to the 2008 TVPRA, encouraging him to expand the Mann Act to combat all prostitution.

8. Melissa Ditmore, “Trafficking in Lives: How Ideology Shapes Policy,” in Kemala Kempadoo, ed.,
Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New
Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights
, Boulder: Paradigm, 2005.

9. Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition,”
NWSA Journal
17 (2005): 64–87.

10. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad,”
New York Times
, October 26, 2003; Nina Shapiro, “The New Abolitionists,”
Seattle Weekly
, August 25, 2004; Laura Blumenfeld,

“In a Shift, Anti-Prostitution Effort Targets Pimps and Johns,”

Washington Post
, December 15, 2005.

11. On trafficking into the United States, see, for instance, Anthony DeStefano,
The War on Human Trafficking: U.S. Policy Assessed
, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

345

RONALD WEITZER AND MELISSA DITMORE

12. Phil Williams, “Trafficking in Women and Children: A Market Perspective,” in Phil Williams, ed.,
Illegal Immigration and Commercial
Sex
, London: Frank Cass, 1999, p. 153.

13. DeStefano,
War on Human Trafficking
, p. 88.

14. Joanna Busza, Sarah Castle, and Aisse Diarra, “Trafficking and Health,”

British Medical Journal
328 (June 5, 2004): 1369–1371.

15. Thomas Steinfatt,
Measuring the Number of Trafficked Women and Children
in Cambodia: A Direct Observation Field Study
, Washington, DC: USAID, 2003, p. 24.

16. Melissa Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door: The Use of Raids to Fight
Trafficking in Persons
, New York: Sex Workers Project, 2009. The names of women quoted here are pseudonyms.

17. Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, pp. 32–33.

18. Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, p. 52.

19. Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, p. 26.

20. Laura Agustín,
Sex At the Margins
, London: Zed, 2007, pp. 45–46.

21. Busza, Castle, and Diarra, “Trafficking and Health”; see also the identical findings in Steinfatt,
Measuring the Number
, pp. 23–24.

22. Laura Agustín, “Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the Trafficking Debate,”
Social Politics
12 (2005): 96–117, at pp. 98, 101.

23. Judith Vocks and Jan Nijboer, “The Promised Land: A Study of Trafficking in Women from Central and Eastern Europe to the Netherlands,”
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
8 (2000): 379–388, at pp. 383, 384.

24. Linda Meaker, “A Social Response to Transnational Prostitution in Queensland, Australia,” in S. Thorbek and B. Pattanaik, eds.,
Transnational Prostitution
, London: Zed, 2002, pp. 61, 63.

25. Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of ‘White Slavery’ in Contemporary Discourses of ‘Trafficking in Women’,”
Gender Issues
18 (2000): 23–50, at p. 24.

26. Amy Farrell, Jack McDevitt, and Stephanie Fahy,
Understanding and
Improving Law Enforcement Responses to Human Trafficking
, Boston: Institute on Race and Justice, Northeastern University, 2008, p. 111.

27. Farrell, et al.,
Understanding and Improving
, p. 76.

28. Farrell, et al.,
Understanding and Improving
, pp. 82–83.

29. Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, p. 20.

30. Officers quoted in Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, pp. 9, 38.

31. Department of Homeland Security, Press Release, December 18, 2008.

32. Official quoted in Ditmore,
Kicking Down the Door
, p. 36.

346

SEX TRAFFICKING: FACTS AND FICTIONS

33. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children,
The U.S.

Response to Human Trafficking: An Unbalanced Approach
, New York: WCRWC, 2007, p. 6.

34. Lederer, quoted in Bob Jones, “Trafficking Cops,”
World Magazine
, June 15, 2002.

35. Ron Sider, quoted in Shapiro, “New Abolitionists.”

36. Timothy Morgan, “Sex Isn’t Work,”
Christianity Today
, December 29, 2006.

37. Dorchen Leidholdt, “Prostitution and Trafficking in Women: An Intimate Relationship,”
Journal of Trauma Practice
2 (2004): 167–183.

38. Donna Hughes, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: No Way to End Sex Trafficking,”
National Review Online
, October 9, 2002, p. 2.

39. Donna Hughes, quoted in University of Rhode Island Press Release,

“Expert on Sex Trafficking Contributes to Passage of Historic New Law,”

January 11, 2006.

40. Donna Hughes, “Accommodation or Abolition?”
National Review Online
, May 1, 2003, p. 1.

41. Kamala Kempadoo, ed.,
Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New
Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights
, Boulder: Paradigm, 2005.

42. Ronald Weitzer, “Flawed Theory and Method in Studies of Prostitution,”
Violence Against Women
11 (2005)
:
934–949.

43. One example of this tendency is the report on sex trafficking authored by Janice Raymond and Donna Hughes. Their report, funded by the Justice Department, is based on interviews with only 40 women who were involved with organizations committed to getting women out of prostitution. From this small and skewed sample the authors draw numerous, sweeping conclusions about victimization. (Raymond and Hughes,
Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States
, Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2001.)

44. Rebecca Surtees, “Traffickers and Trafficking in Southern and Eastern Europe,”
European Journal of Criminology
5 (2008): 39–68, at p. 60

45. Raymond and Hughes,
Sex Trafficking
, p. 25.

46. Weitzer, “Flawed Theory”; Ronald Weitzer, “New Directions in Research on Prostitution,”
Crime, Law, and Social Change
43 (2005): 211–235; Ine Vanwesenbeeck, “Another Decade of Social Scientific Work on Prostitution,”
Annual Review of Sex Research
12 (2001): 242–289.

47. Horowitz, quoted in Blumenfeld, “In a Shift,” p. A16.

347

RONALD WEITZER AND MELISSA DITMORE

48. Donna Hughes,
The Demand for Victims of Sex Trafficking
, University of Rhode Island, 2005, p. 7, report funded by the U.S. State Department.

49. http://www.sharedhope.org/what/predatorproject.asp.

50. Blumenfeld, “In a Shift.”

51. Goode and Ben-Yehuda,
Moral Panics
, pp. 36–44.

52. Quoted in Jerry Markon, “Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence,”
Washington Post
, September 23, 2007, pp. A1, A8–A9, at p. A9.

53. Hotaling, quoted in Meredith May, “Sex Trafficking: San Francisco is a Major Center for International Crime Networks that Smuggle and Enslave,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, October 6, 2006.

54. Amy O’Neill Richard,
International Trafficking of Women to the United
States
, Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2000, p. 3.

55. U.S. Department of State, “The Link between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking,” Washington, DC: Department of State, 2004.

56. Markon, “Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence.”

57. Steinfatt,
Measuring the Number
, p. 11.

58. U.S. Department of Justice,
Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons in
Fiscal Year 2004
(Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2005), p. 4.

Between FY 2001 and FY 2004, the Justice Department prosecuted 131

persons for sex trafficking offenses, and obtained 99 convictions. Though relatively low for a 4-year period, the figures were almost five times higher than during the previous 4 years, a period prior to the TVPA. See Attorney General,
Report, 2004
, p. 20.