Criminalize Trafficking

Criminalize Trafficking, not Prostitution

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­In his January 25th op-ed piece for the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof tells the depressingly familiar story of a desperate 13-year-old girl trying to escape from the vicious pimp who has been marketing her “services” through online ads on Backpage.com. Almost equally depressing, it turns out that Backpage is owned by Village Voice media, owner of the Village Voice newspaper. The site, says Kristof, “is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.”
…………Despite a national campaign of several years standing — as well as demands from the attorneys general of 48 states to eliminate the ads, Village Voice Media has refused to back down. (The photo at the beginning of this paragraph is from an ad campaign launched by The Rebecca Project and other groups more than a year ago, calling on Village Voice to do the right thing — so far without effect.)
…………Psychologist Melissa Farley is the founder of Prostitution Research & Education, a 15-year-old San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to the abolition of trafficking and prostitution.  She is the lead author of the two studies mentioned in my recent post on Sexual Abuse & Trafficking. Melissa wrote in response to that post, suggesting several points that she thinks are of particular importance in discussing Garden of Truth, the group’s report on the prostitution and trafficking of Native American women in Minnesota. I agree, and wanted to pass her suggestions along:

The women’s poverty, their 98% rate of current or previous homelessness, the post-colonial theft of land and cultural identity,  and the racism which results in a lack of educational and employment opportunities – all of these, to me and to them also, I think – are coercive. When you live in a place where the temperature falls below freezing and you are homeless, and someone offers to exchange sexual assault for a place to spend the night – to me that is trafficking, even though the Trafficking Victims Protection Act wouldn’t define it as such. Poverty, homelessness and racist lack of opportunities can coerce people into prostitution, but it’s not called “trafficking.” That’s a shortcoming of our law. We define trafficking as third party exploitation or control.  And the control can be and often is psychological in nature.
…………— Melissa Farley, Prostitution Research & Education

Like many others, Farley notes that the definition of trafficking used by the United States – which necessitates that the victim herself prove “force, fraud, or coercion” – is excessively conservative. By contrast, she points out, the law in most Scandinavian countries focuses on perpetrators rather than victims. Sweden’s legislation, for example, de-criminalizes prostitution, and offers federally-funded supports for those seeking to escape it. At the same time, it enforces criminal sanctions against traffickers and purchasers of sex.
…………It’s reported that street prostitution in Sweden has been cut in half by this approach, without leading to an increase in other areas (e.g., via internet sites like Backpage.) Janice Raymond, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women writes that “the success of the Nordic model is not so much in penalizing the men (the penalties are modest) as in removing the invisibility of men who are outed when they get caught. This, in turn, makes it less appealing for pimps and traffickers to set up shop in countries where the customer base fears the loss of its anonymity, and is declining.”

(For more information on this approach, see Trafficking, Prostitution and the Sex Industry: The Nordic Legal Model, by Raymond, or The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services by Gunilla Ekberg in the journal Violence Against Women.)

NOTE: The image to the right, above, is by New York artist Mona Mark, and was created for the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’s Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing (1995). Courtesy: Prostitution Research & Education

Some Resources:

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Promotes women’s human rights by working internationally to combat sexual exploitation in all its forms. The first international NGO to focus on human trafficking, especially sex trafficking of women and girls.

Human Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation
A blog by Heidi Hermann on groups fighting human trafficking in southern California, as well as nationally and internationally. (See Heidi’s right-column blogroll for other related organizations.)

National Human Trafficking Resource Center
The Polaris Project: For a World Without Slavery offers a toll-free, confidential hotline for issues related to trafficking.

Prostitution Research & Education
PRE’s goal is to abolish the institution of prostitution while advocating for alternatives to trafficking and prostitution, including emotional and physical healthcare for women in prostitution.

The Rebecca Project for Human Rights
Advocates for justice, dignity and policy reform for vulnerable women and girls in the United States and in Africa.

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