Slave Next Door (24 page)

situation worse.” This side tends to include “conservative, faith-based,

and some feminist organizations.”97 Stolz numbers among their mem-

bers such organizations as Protection Project, CATW, Equality Now,

the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the Planned

Parenthood Federation of America.98 To this group is often added the

Salvation Army.

One of the foremost spokespersons of this group is Dorchen

Leidholdt. Leidholdt, who serves as director of the New York–based

Center for Battered Women’s Legal Services at the Sanctuary for Families

in New York City, has a long history of working within the antipornog-

raphy and anti–sex trafficking movements. An attorney who has taken

her beliefs into the courtroom, she teaches a seminar at Columbia

University Law School on domestic violence and the law. She is also a

co-founder and co-executive director of CATW. Leidholdt is a well-

spoken woman who is not shy about voicing her beliefs: “We think the

legalization of prostitution really creates a huge market for sex traffick-

ing. It just confers on pimps and brothel owners the status of respectable

businesspeople. It’s the way governments put out the welcome mat for

human traffickers.” To Leidholdt and her colleagues, the model recently

adopted by Sweden would work best for America.99 This would result in

“decriminalizing all the people who are being prostituted, . . . stepping

up services, including health care, . . . developing and implementing

strong laws against traffickers, including brothel owners and pimps, and

holding buyers accountable through low-level criminal sanctions—and

for repeat offenders, jail.”100

Norma Ramos, co-founder and co-executive director of CATW, takes

exception to the claim that the antiprostitution group excludes other

forms of trafficking from their agenda. She defines their mission as the

effort “to raise international awareness around all forms of human traf-

ficking and to create an international culture that is hostile to human

trafficking. But,” she acknowledges, “given the fact that 80 percent of

those who are trafficked are women and girls, and 70 percent of these

end up as victims of sexual exploitation, that’s our major focus.”101

On the other side of the battle line, a “cluster of diverse individuals

and groups—human rights, public health, labor, and migration—are

categorized as the ‘human trafficking sphere.’”102 This group believes in

a broad definition that does not differentiate between types of servitude

but includes all forms of sexual slavery within the overall category of

human trafficking. Their stance is that all “human trafficking is a crime

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in and of itself.” It includes “any unfree labor, including children work-

ing as camel jockeys or soldiers; or men, women, boys, and girls work-

ing in the sex industry, so long as there is evidence of force, coercion, or

deception.”103 Despite the assertions of antiprostitution groups, not

every member of this group believes in the legalization of prostitution,

but that, they argue, is beside the point. “By viewing ‘human trafficking’

as a crime, an organization’s position on the legal treatment of prostitu-

tion is irrelevant, because any forced labor, including prostitution, is

trafficking.”104 Some advocates, but not all, on this side have main-

tained that many women have few or no options for earning a living and

that if prostitution is the best of the choices available to them they

should be protected and allowed to do this “sex work.” At the same

time a handful of organizations, notably Free the Slaves and the

International Justice Mission, have taken great pains to stand outside

these two camps. This small but distinct group has often sought to act

as peacemakers in the conflict between abolitionists and the anti–human

trafficking movement.

Ann Jordan is one of the more outspoken representatives of the

anti–human trafficking movement. Jordan, formerly director of Global

Rights’ Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons, was one of the founders

of the Freedom Network, a loosely affiliated group of thirty independent

organizations of service providers and victim advocates. She was battling

trafficking long before most people knew there was a war. She points out

that, while “current federal law enables prosecutions of all enslavers and

provides protection for all victims,” the broad scope of the law “is being

eroded by a U.S. campaign that equates prostitution with trafficking,

and is redirecting resources to end prostitution rather than to end traf-

ficking.” Her concern, and that of her colleagues, is that this focus on

prostitution as the main—and to many the only—form of human traf-

ficking to warrant government attention “is affecting delivery of services

to victims.” She suggests that the investigative and prosecutorial

branches of the federal government are being diverted from their pri-

mary goals of eradicating all types of trafficking and protecting and serv-

ing the victims in order to pursue a dubious and legally questionable war

on prostitution. This approach, Jordan argues, not only denies the gov-

ernment’s protection to many victims of trafficking but is in direct con-

flict with the provisions of the Thirteenth Amendment.105 Author

DeStefano agrees and likens this “simplistic approach” of the antiprostitu-

tion movement to “the way Prohibitionists advanced a ban on alcoholic

beverages as a way to cure social ills. . . . The Bush administration believed

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that eradicating prostitution would stop the evil of sex trafficking—

though it would have no effect on other forms of trafficking.”106

Of the two factions, the antiprostitution faction is by far the more

vocal, and its influence on the legislative process—through both its con-

tinued lobbying presence and the alignment of certain conservative con-

gressmen and religious leaders with its issues—has been strongly felt.

Clearly, the shift in grant funding shows that the federal government is

collaborating with an antitrafficking program that heavily emphasizes

the issue of sex trafficking, to the detriment of labor trafficking efforts.

“Changes in the 2003 and 2005 TVPA,” writes Barbara Stolz, “as well

as the later trafficking hearings to focus on aspects of trafficking for sex,

would seem to suggest that Congress has paid greater attention to the

reassurance of and conferring of deference on the ‘anti-prostitution

sphere.’”107 The 2003 reauthorization of the TVPA included a clause—

Section 7—“which required organizations to state that they do not ‘pro-

mote, support or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution’ in

order to receive funding.”108 Many NGOs and human rights groups “were

worried that they might have to answer a U.S. demand for a prostitution

policy even if they did not work on the subject.”109 The political stance

of the Bush administration fell into line with the antiprostitution group

in stressing sex trafficking over other forms of modern-day slavery. As

DeStefano writes
,
“The government’s emphasis on sex cases obscures

the fact that labor cases may be just as rampant, and its continued

focus on sex trafficking and the abolition of prostitution has become

divisive.”110

Ann Jordan sees this “gag rule” imposed by the 2003 and 2005 reau-

thorizations as standing in direct conflict with the First Amendment’s

right to freedom of speech.111 So frightened are many of the NGOs and

universities, she states, that they have compromised their services, prac-

tices, and policy positions so as not to give HHS an excuse to reduce or

remove their funding.112 A number of organizations “have purged pro-

hibited words such as ‘sex work’ . . . from their materials and websites

because they know that U.S. officials are scanning websites in search of

prohibited words, alleged by U.S. officials to be evidence of ‘promoting’

prostitution.”113 There is a pervasive sense among many service

providers in the anti–human trafficking movement that “Big Brother is

watching.” As Florrie Burke, human trafficking consultant and former

director of international programs at the NGO Safe Horizon, points

out, “Just because we’re looking at sex trafficking as a crime doesn’t

mean we’re supporting prostitution.”114

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The controversy came to a head in 2008 over four little words. In the

process of reauthorizing and amending the TVPA, the fight over prosti-

tution and slavery focused on the words “force, fraud, and coercion,”

the criteria used to define “severe forms of trafficking in persons.” A

coalition of antiprostitution groups pressed hard to delete these words

so that all that would be needed to bring a charge of human trafficking

was that a person had performed a “commercial sex act.” Groups as

diverse as Equality Now and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics

and Religious Liberty Commission were concerned that unless the law

was amended it would remain necessary for federal prosecutors to prove

that pimps used “force, fraud, or coercion” in order to establish that an

adult prostitution case was also trafficking. The DOJ, a number of anti-

trafficking groups, and the bill’s key sponsors in the Senate, Senators

Biden and Brownback, resisted this.

It was right that they did so. Human trafficking is the process of

delivering a person into enslavement. It is a process defined by its end

result. If a person is smuggled into the United States and then left free

to find a job, the crime is smuggling. If a person is brought here and

then held against his or her will and forced to work without pay, the

crime is human trafficking, which is to say slavery. The original drafters

of the bill made this clear; they defined the crime as including “force,

fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servi-

tude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” Without these criteria any act

of prostitution becomes trafficking and thus slavery. Over the years

many groups have tried to use the word
slavery
to accentuate or dram-

atize their issue. In the 1990s one group even urged the United Nations

to name incest as a type of slavery. Low-wage workers and economic

migrants are sometimes termed slaves, but the dilution of the word
slavery

serves no one. Slavery is based in violence.
Slavery,
throughout all of

human history, has meant holding people against their will through the

threat or reality of violence, forcing them to work, and paying them

nothing beyond subsistence. To attempt to expand the definition of slav-

ery to include anyone who can walk away, who can make a choice about

his or her situation, is to rob the word of its meaning and to demean

those who have suffered in slavery over the centuries. Congress may

choose to pass a law that makes prostitution a federal crime. There are

many forms this law might take, including the Swedish model that leaves

the sale of sex as legal while making the purchase illegal. But gutting an

existing antislavery law that applies to all forms of human trafficking is

not the way to go.

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S E X S E L L S

It is not accidental that when most Americans think of human traffick-

ing they think of sex slavery. It comes, in large measure, as a direct result

of the efforts and the influence of the antiprostitution faction. The gov-

ernment has frequently made it clear that when it talks about human

trafficking it really means sex trafficking. And although there have been

cases involving servitude in homes, fields, and factories, when the gov-

ernment touts its victories, the majority are sex cases, and the subject of

labor trafficking makes scarcely a ripple.115 As stated in a 2006 article

in the Tulane University law journal, “What’s enthralled the media, the

Christian right and the Bush administration is not the demanding,

multi-layered narrative of migrants, but the damsels in distress, the inno-

cents lured across borders for the purpose of prostitution. In other

words, their concern over human trafficking has become, in practice, a

concern over what they deem sex trafficking.”116 This attitude was given

voice by John Miller, who, while serving as the Bush administration’s

director of the TIP Office, referred to trafficking in women as “the sex

pillar of slavery.”117 In 2007, this trend manifested itself in the structur-

ing of the New York State trafficking law, in which the difference

between penalties for sex trafficking (a “B” felony) as opposed to those

for labor trafficking (a “D” felony) is vast. Dorchen Leidholdt is

adamant that this was not the intent of the antiprostitution group and