Pornography and sex trafficking: is there a relationship?

Daisy raises an interesting question in the responses to my previous "anti-anti-porn" post:

"I am concerned about the traffickers; I just flagged a blog with a bunch of Asian kids, couldn't have been more than 12-13. This kind of thing, probably filmed in Singapore, Bangkok or wherever (my sources tell me the language was not Japanese, Chinese or Korean) is the wave of the future. I saw the Amnesty International documentary on the traffickers, who are mostly working in Burma, Thailand, eastern Europe... but I'm sure you already know this. Most are teenagers. How can we deal with these people? Is there an effort in the porn industry to identify and isolate the traffickers?

I'd take the pro-porn activists far more seriously if I knew they were on the case. They are obviously hurting your business too. Using traffickers to discredit pornographers working with consensual adult models/actors is wrong, but you need to take a very principled stand on this. (The way some dope dealers refuse to sell meth or deal with people on meth, for instance.)"

First off, I don't think sites like the one you've found are "the wave of the future". There has always been child pornography (which is what the above site sounds like), but its not part of the mainstream porn industry, nor is it what the vast majority of porn viewers are looking for. Most people (even "barely legal" porn fans) are simply not attracted to pre-pubescent children and are repulsed by the thought of them being in porn. It is, needless to say, very illegal, and its unlikely that the above site even had any kind of 2257 documentation, which should be a red flag concerning the legal status of the content.

As for the larger issue of trafficking, you are right about it being an important issue vis a vis the sex industry and sex workers rights, specifically, in prostitution, or at least some segments of that industry. However, I don't think its a major issue in the porn industry, because I simply see no evidence that trafficked women make up any significant portion of the models in the commercial porn industry. That's not to say I don't think there aren't dodgy practices in the porn industry, I just don't think use of unfree, trafficked women is among those sins.

I do see this charge coming from anti-porn folks a lot, but I never see anything in terms of concrete examples to actually back it up. As in, such and such model who appeared in this video or that site was trafficked/coerced into doing this. The group "Captive Daughters" has come out with an antiporn anthology focusing on the subject, " Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking". I am interested in seeing the book and perhaps I'll try and get it through interlibrary loan. However, based on the introduction to the book I read at the website I just linked to, I don't think they're even making a case that the porn industry directly employs trafficked women, but simply that the pornography and the sex industry in general drive attitudes and a general demand for sex work that inevitably creates demand for unfree sex workers. I don't buy that argument, of course.

The introduction does note that MacKinnon makes a rather creative redefinition of "sex trafficking" to include any transnational migration for the purpose of doing sex work. By that measure, every porn industry in the world has "trafficked" women. But its a bogus argument, really – its simply muddying the waters by saying "immigrant sex worker = trafficked = unfree". That's almost never the case, not by a long shot.

There's a lot of suspicion cast on the East European sex industry since Budepest and, particularly Prague, have emerged as major centers of porn production, particularly since the Czech Republic and Slovakia have been named as destination points for trafficked prostitutes. (And, I think, there's a generalized stereotype of the "Natasha", that is any East European female sex worker as being trafficked or otherwise some kind of sex slave.) Unlike the American porn industry, there's very little inside story on what the Czech porn industry is like, at least in English language media. Here's a couple I know of:

"Talent, profits cause boom in porn", The Prague Post, October 05, 2005.
"Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked", ErosBlog, October 22nd, 2005.

Based on what I've read, and Czech- and Hungarian-produced sites and videos I've seen, the porn industry there seems to be pretty above-board. I see no evidence that the porn industry there is using trafficked women. (Immigrants, yes – from several East European countries.) The biggest criticism I've heard is that their pay scale doesn't measure up to what American porn models make.

Some of the porn I see coming directly out of Russia and Ukraine itself is more dodgy, with some of their "barely legel" models looking, well, not even "barely". I personally have no problem if they're 18-year-olds who just look real young, but its hard to tell. All of these sites claim to have their 2257 documentation in order (so as to be able to market their porn in the US and elsewhere), but I've also read that in Russia, primary ID is not nearly as secure as it is in the US and is easily forged.

What can be done about this, as well as for the abusive pornographers I named in my prior post, is not so easy. As I'll say, once again, the porn industry is not a monolith, and there's nobody sitting in an office at Larry Flynt Productions controlling what does and doesn't get marketed as pornography. If somebody can film or photograph some sexual content anywhere in the world, get it on the internet, and set up a credit card payment system – they're in business. They are are upsides to this (eg, much greater diversity in the kind of pornography being made, even compared to just 10 years ago), but also definite downsides (that is, highly dodgy people easily marketing porn).

So, while it would be a good thing for more responsible pornographers to isolate themselves from less responsible ones, how this would be done is less clear. There have been efforts to come up with some kind of "ethical porn" certification, meaning models are of legal age, consent is fully given, there have been adequate STD checks, etc. This kind of proposal inevitable gets hung up on is gray areas, such as whether "condom optional" shoots are OK, use of 18-20 year-old models, etc. Also, nobody has come up with a mechanism of how an "ethical porn" certification would actually be monitored and enforced.