Sex Trafficking Isn’t the Only Form of Modern Slavery
By: Heather M. Edwards
Tags: Politics, Equality, Human Trafficking, Culture, Human Rights

Sex Trafficking Isn’t the Only Form of Modern Slavery

But a girl like me isn’t the only one who should read Girls Like Us

Author and Executive Director Rachel Lloyd, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services. Used with permission.

The oldest profession in the world is anything but a victimless crime.

Rachel Lloyd is among many experts at the forefront of shifting our collective social attitudes toward the sex trade by raising our awareness of who gets trafficked — how and where, by criminalizing human trafficking and by changing the language we use to talk about sex trafficking specifically.

“Commercially sexually exploited” is a legally, politically and socially accurate term. It is the term adopted by the United Nations, UNICEF and advocacy experts. Outdated labels like prostitute, hooker, call girl and worse need to become as marginalized as the victims who get trafficked into the sex trade.

“The term ‘sex work’ was created to remove some of the stigma associated with prostitution and to perhaps normalize the sex industry and those within it. The term is gaining in popularity and is a favorite of feminists and academics everywhere, yet it’s misleading, particularly when erroneously applied to children.” — Rachel Lloyd

Pimps and sex traffickers prey on vulnerable children and women — disproportionately poor and people of color, manipulate their understanding of love and convolute their sense of family in order to brainwash autonomous human beings into obedient and loyal employees.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 does not require that anyone under 18 working in the commercial sex industry prove that they experienced “force, fraud, or coercion.” But Americans 18 and older working in the sex industry are considered criminals whether or not they were trafficked.

Instead of perpetuating the narrative that everyone in the sex industry fully and freely chooses to rent their bodies to strangers from a plethora of other accessible lifestyle or career options we need to think Stockholm syndrome. Violent international kidnapping isn’t the only way vulnerable children and women get trafficked. Most fall prey to a time-tested and professionally perfected formula where a vulnerable person tries to escape the very circumstances that make them vulnerable. They are taken under the wing of a “boyfriend” who exploits their need for love and belonging while incrementally transitioning them into the sex trade. The girls reluctantly agree (or are forced) to do increasingly sexualized “favors” because they’ve grown to love their “daddy”. Vulnerable people desperate for love and safety don’t choose to sell sex overnight. It’s a slow boil.

Instead of criminalizing the selling of sex by arresting vulnerable people while the men who purchase sex skate through life unstigmatized we need to criminalize the buying of sex. Especially if “customers” are purchasing a child. Since minors cannot legally consent to sex men “hiring” them are criminals paying to rape children. The age of consent varies by state but the legal age of a minor does not.

Opening image from Law and Order: SVU. All rights © NBC

When debating whether or not to legalize the sex trade I will always default to the insight of survivors. And the majority of experts and survivors advocate for the Abolition Model, also called the Nordic Model, which criminalizes buying sex, pimping and trafficking without criminalizing the persons being prostituted.

The same experts denounce the depiction of sex trafficking in movies like Taken. This hyper-dramatized save-the-kidnapped-virgin adventure was manufactured to feel like a fast-paced action heist. But Neeson’s fictionalized quest to capture the prize resembles the Mario Bros. rescuing Princess Peach from the Mushroom Kingdom more than the reality of domestic sex trafficking within our own countries.

Liam Neeson’s jet-setting ass-kicking does not reflect the reality of the vast majority of commercially sexually exploited children and women. And it exports our concept of the illegal sex trade, foreignizing it as an underground criminal enterprise orchestrated only by greedy Eastern Europeans procuring virgins for evil billionaire sheiks on yachts in the Middle East. Sex trafficking is not just a foreign problem. It is as domestic as every mall and high school in the US.

Sex trafficking happens within and across all borders.

“The highest destination countries are Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey and the U.S.”¹ But it is a crime regardless of whether or not victims are transported across any borders.

Sex trafficking is currently the most sensationalized form of forced labor the media publicizes. Because sex sells in the media too. But human trafficking enslaves victims in many for-profit industries. Human trafficking is big business.

Freedom Sunday is an outstanding initiative by the International Justice Mission (IJM) to partner with churches around the world to raise enough awareness about human trafficking to raise the funding necessary to change laws, penalize traffickers, advocate for victims and transition them out of slavery. Freedom Sunday’s mission-driven work centers around these terrifying facts:

There are currently 40+ million slaves around the world — more than any other at any time in human history

Human trafficking generates $150B annually

1 in 4 victims of modern slavery is a child

IJM is a world-renowned NGO credited with rescuing more than 49,000 people from slavery and other forms of violence and helping local authorities arrest more than 3,800 suspected slave owners and other criminals.

Children are sold into forced labor to make jewelry, harvest cocoa to make our chocolate and to mine cobalt for our smartphones.

Slavery is as old as human history but the modern abolitionists are fighting it with drones and satellite imagery, banking data and financial forensics, AI, algorithms and crowdsourcing.

The University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab program used machine-learning algorithms to identify 169 brick kilns in Rajasthan, India likely running on forced labor.

The Rights Lab also used data from a company called Planet to investigate speed signatures of industries likely being done by the forced labor of enslaved people.

“From space, you can watch a cotton harvest in Turkmenistan and, based on how quickly the cotton disappears, you can tell whether machines or hands picked it. In the Sundarbans, an area spanning India and Bangladesh, shrimp farms and fish-processing camps employ slave labor to clear mangrove trees — a process satellites can capture.”¹

In 2015 DigitalGlobe used satellite images to analyze the likelihood that children were being forced to work in fishing on Ghana’s Lake Volta. “90,000 users pinned 80,000 boats, buildings, and fish cages.”²

In 2016 Canada’s Project Protect, a partnership between law enforcement agencies, financial institutions and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FinTRAC) is following money trails to “detect and investigate traffickers.” Banks’ anti-money laundering arms are starting to red flag suspicious accounts “FinTRAC has made 102 disclosures to police across Canada under the Project Protect label.” Only 19 were made the previous year.

Few of us are in a position to devote our life’s work to becoming the “Mother Teresa of Nepal” like Anuradha Koirala. Her personal advocacy started with eight girls begging on the streets and evolved into Maiti Nepal — her NGO has rescued more than 18,000 victims from sex trafficking and been instrumental in the prosecution of 700 sex traffickers.

But everyone is in a position to learn more in order to find out how you can help or which organization you feel inspired to support. Freedom Sunday is just one formal imperative to raise awareness and increase advocacy. But it does not preclude anyone with a heart from simply reading more about the complex economy of human trafficking and personal experiences of individual victims.

Start with a first-person narrative. Girls Like Us thoroughly humanizes any of the abstractions used to justify the “right” to buy sex. It is a deeply intelligent and beautiful expose. One woman’s memoir is both politically powerful advocacy and a supremely human story about how little separates “us” and “them”.

The majority of trafficked and exploited victims were abused as children. Estimates range from 65% to as high as 95%. From Portland, Oregon: “I was sold into routine sexual exploitation in a brothel by my father at age 11. His “training” had been preparing me for this moment. And despite what you may think, I am not referring to sexual experience or specific sex acts. His sexual abuse did not teach me how to do all the things that sold well.”³

What incest is to the family, prostitution is to the community. — Melissa Farley, PhD and Emily Butler, JD

The majority are impoverished. “Those suffering from poverty are purposely targeted by traffickers as a means of exploitation. Due to poverty, some parents sell their children. In some instances, victims are told to work to pay off debts and told repercussions include violence, police involvement or immigration. Some victims are sold to many different traffickers. There are two types of labor the victims who are trafficked are subjected to, forced labor or prostitution.”¹

The majority of trafficked people suffer from PTSD. And a heartwrenching majority “meet the criteria for PTSD on the same level as combat veterans and torture victims.”⁴

The extraordinary cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on each other can feel unreal, theatrically Mephistophelian in its predation. Reading the tragedies of what some people suffer can crush your heart to a pulp. But we owe it to them, and to each other, to learn how we can help the most exploited among us — and how we can prevent more innocent people from becoming victims.

We can start by using language that accurately reflects the reality of trafficked and prostituted children and women. Language shapes discourse.

“Constantly reframing the issue and changing the language has been imperative in changing public perception and sympathies.” — Rachel Lloyd

Raising awareness will never be enough. But it’s a crucial start.