But What About Trafficking?
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“We would like to invite you to
come and give a talk about sex trafficking. This is an issue of great
interest and concern to our students.”
“I am planning to write my research
essay on women’s sexual slavery. Millions of women are sold into the sex
industry every year, and this is a very important problem for feminists
to address.”
“But what about trafficking? The
women who are forced into selling sex against their will? I would like
to hear about that aspect of your work.”
Despite the fact that my academic work
is not about trafficking, I get these kinds of invitations, student
papers, and questions regularly. As a sex work researcher, I’m
frequently confronted with the very frustrating assumption that sex work
and sex trafficking are one and the same. While I’ve occasionally addressed this issue
in the past, I continue to think about what can explain the
preoccupation with this topic? What does the interest in sex trafficking
reveal about the complicated relationship between feminism, racism,
immigration, and border control?
Labour migration isn’t new: there have
always been national, regional, and international migration networks.
So, too, there have always been those who take advantage of the
desperation that often accompanies migrants. Given this, we must ask why
there’s so much interest in the traffic in women at the moment? Why
does everyone want to talk about sex trafficking?
One of the reasons that my women’s and
gender studies students are interested in writing their research papers
on trafficking is that feminist organizations have lobbied very
effectively in national and international policy circles to get sex
trafficking onto the political agenda. Many of these organizations argue
that no woman could possibly consent to sell sexual services. If
consent is impossible, then all migrant women in sex work are sex
slaves, trafficking victims, and therefore deserving of protection and
assistance.
We need to think about choice and
consent, and in particular about their role in feminist politics. While
feminists have long emphasized the importance of women’s ability and
right to choose, and the right to consent to what happens to our bodies,
these are messier questions than we necessarily are comfortable
acknowledging. For example, ‘choice’ in the context of debates about
reproductive rights and abortion may seem like a straight forward
feminist issue, until, that is, we consider sex selective abortion.
In the feminist ‘sex wars’, around various kinds of sex work, including
pornography, the question of ‘choice’ has always been fraught. In the
context of trafficking, matters of ‘choice’ and consent
remain at the forefront of many conversations. The idea that no woman
could truly choose to sell sex, or consent to migrating to work in the
sex industry, is frequently argued by many feminist academics and
activists. This conflation of sex work and sexual slavery, migrant sex
work, and trafficking is deeply troubling. It suggests that particular
groups of women – and they tend to be women of colour from the global
south – are incapable of choice and consent. It’s also worth thinking
about what it means for feminists to be the ones defining for other
women what consent means.
If feminist organizations have often
perceived migrant sex workers as victims in need of assistance,
politicians, policy makers, police, and immigration officials tend to be
more selective in who they define as a victim and how they will be
dealt with. Due to concerns over irregular immigration, state
anti-trafficking efforts frequently focus on crime, punishment, and
immigration control. Those victims who are unwilling to inform on others
to the police risk being treated as illegal immigrants and criminals,
and face prompt deportation. To be very clear, then: one of the
consequences of defining all migrant sex workers as trafficking victims
is their deportation, and more generally the stricter control of women’s
mobility.
We must pay attention to how victims get
used. By whom? And to what ends? Trafficking is not a discursively
neutral terrain: when we talk about trafficking, we’re talking about
belonging, space, mobility, gender, and migration control.
In the Costa Rican context, which is the focus of my own research, I’ve seen the emergence of immigration raids
on sex tourism businesses in San José (the capital city) during the
last five years. Supposedly under the guise of finding and helping
trafficking victims, sex workers are searched and many are detained.
Migrants who are in Costa Rica on student, domestic worker, or tourist
visas are deported under the argument that they’re not supposed to be
working. While the sale of sex in Costa Rica is not criminalized, it’s
neither regulated nor accepted as a form of labour, so there is some
irony in deporting migrants for doing work that the state doesn’t
recognize.
The migrant sex workers whom I
interviewed in Costa Rica came from a variety of places and had diverse
stories of how and why they ended up in the Costa Rican sex industry.
They were all singularly focused on sending money home to their
families, and avoiding detention by, or ‘help’ from, the immigration
police. When I interviewed a high-level representative of the International Organization for Migration in Costa Rica,
she told me that it was important to ‘catch them early,’ when they can
still see themselves as victims. If women migrants work undetected in
the sex industry too long, she worried, they’d choose to stay in the
country.
Focusing
on saving victims casts trafficking as a relatively simple matter of
identifying poor women and bad men, which is to say deviant individuals,
rather than taking on institutions and structural factors like global
inequalities in the distribution of wealth, health care, and social
security that make people vulnerable to poor working conditions and
exploitative immigration processes in the first place. Solutions to
trafficking are focused on criminal justice, and police and the state
are reconfigured as women’s allies.The role that feminist organizations
have played in this process is what Elizabeth Bernstein calls ‘carceral feminism.’
Such an approach has a number of costs,
obscuring the important and complex relationship between migration and
trafficking. It also creates a dichotomy between deserving and
undeserving victims: it means that the many, many migrants who work in
deplorable conditions in the sex industry can’t be defined as victims.
There is a strict division between victims of trafficking, who should
be helped (although we might question how helpful deportation is), and
undocumented migrants, who should shut up.
This is not to say that trafficking does
not happen. It does, and it is an egregious violation of human and
labour rights. But a great deal of trafficking takes place outside the
sex industry, in less titillating segments of the labour market. Quite a
lot of the time, trafficking victims are men in jeans bent over in
fields picking strawberries, or wearing hard hats and nailing support
beams onto a building. Farm workers and construction workers don’t fit
as easily into a narrative of needing to be saved by earnest white people. They also make for less interesting posters: less exciting, and definitely less sexy.
Like other sex work researchers,
it has become clear to me over the years that my research is actually
less about sexuality and more about the sociology of labour. Labour
migration takes place is a huge variety of unfree contexts, but we need
to recognize that there are degrees of unfreedom. We also might argue
that work under capitalism
is never free. Migration, controlled by nation-states, is certainly not
free. The unfreedoms of Canada’s live-in care giver program and various
temporary worker programs start to sound quite a lot like trafficking,
or at least profoundly exploitative debt bondage. Yet advocates for the
rights of care workers, for example, don’t call for the elimination of
the work itself, or for saving care workers by deporting them. Instead,
they argue for changes in the terms of their employment and general
improvements in their working and living conditions. The point is to
focus on the rights of workers and migrants in practical and pragmatic
ways.
Source: Notches |
Concerns about sex trafficking are about
the gendered terms of labour migration enforced by nation-states. They
also fundamentally reflect how we think about sex work: if we believe
that it is impossible to consent to the sale of sex, then we can imagine
that all migrant sex workers are sex slaves that (usually white)
feminists must swoop in to save. But if we recognize sex work as viable
work, then we can ask more complicated and ultimately more productive
questions about the regulation and protection of sex workers, the
conditions of their migration and their labour, and the complex mix of
subjugation and mobility, choice and constraint that are involved.
Author / Source: Megan Rivers-Moore for Border Criminologies
Megan Rivers-Moore, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Carleton University, Canada. Megan has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, and is currently working on a book about the sex tourism industry in Costa Rica.
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