Friday, August 10, 2007

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.

26 comments:

  1. Well, there may be a connection between underground pr0n and underground trafficking--people get trafficked for all kinds of shit, unfortunately, not least the sex industry (not exclusively either, of course).

    but the connection that doesn't get talked about much is that at least one of the bigger anti-trafficking networks is run by hardcore APRF's--Coalition Against Trafficking of Women, Janice Raymond and Dorchen Leidholdt, with Sheila Jeffreys on the board of members. They're quite influential in realpolitik; and as we know, while they may well be doing great work for the actual trafficking victims, or some of them, they definitely have a particular...worldview.

    seriously, that may be beyond the scope of this blog, but I really would like to see someone who knows what they're talking about really give CATW as well as hopefully some other anti-trafficking organizations a good explanation and fisking. Jill B, maybe?

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  2. 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.

    Not a muddy argument at all. The question is WHOSE AGENCY, as always. Did the woman willingly choose to migrate and make a rational choice to do sex work, or was this a decision made under duress (or even worse, in a deal made with her parents), in a country in which she didn't speak the language, have any papers, money, status? I think it's an easy thing to ascertain, really.

    Is she in charge, or is someone else? Who gets her money and how much? Follow the money.

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    Replies
    1. Why leave the stretched logic there? Why not state that the US is trafficking migrants from Mexico who really have no agency? Why not state that anyone who does anything is really without agency; that everything is exploitation? You can always stretch an argument even further.

      Seriously we have to credit people with agency for their lives. It's called "taking responsibility".

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  3. I do think its a muddy argument, because it basically says that if somebody has crossed an international border to do any kind of sex work, one should assume that someone has forced that person to do it and is keeping them prisoner. I mean, that's not an impossibility, but one can't automatically assume that, either. This goes doubly true for traveling between different European countries, which is as common as traveling between differnet states is in the US.

    And since it seems like Captive Daughters and CATW make such a big deal about the supposed connections between pornography and trafficking, if it was a widespread problem, I would think there would be some examples they would publicize.

    How the porn world works in the East European industry would be something worth looking into for an interested journalist. The American industry gets plenty of publicity, but people forget that a lot of porn is made way beyond "Silicone Valley".

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  4. What worries me is how so many people seem focused on sex trafficking, ignoring the fact that there is all kinds of trafficking into and within the U.S. Much of it is for domestic labor other than sexual services. But that doesn't titillate the media and the public, so it doesn't get coverage. And somehow trafficking for sexual services is worse. Because sex is different. It makes me feel kind of ill... it reminds me of when people say of a dead body, "Fortunately, there were no signs of sexual assault." Fortunately?? She's still dead!

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  5. Amber –

    To be fair, the concern about trafficking in the sex industry is special in that it adds repeated rape onto basic enslavement.

    But otherwise I hear you. Sex trafficking is a "sexy" issue, and I think a lot of people aren't even aware that trafficking takes place for a wide variety of non-sexual labor as well.

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  6. IACB is correct that MacKinnon's conflation of immigrant sex workers with trafficked sex workers muddies a fundamental distinction. Further, unfortunately, that argumentative tactic isn't peculiar to her. It's been assiduously infilatrated into the discourse of the (religious conservatives) currently in charge of US policy on trafficking & of NGOs active on the subject.

    It's a muddy argument because is presumes an answer to the questions Daisy poses in advance of evidence.

    On the topic in general, I recommend the work of Jo Doezema of the Institute of Development Studies, Univ. of Sussex. For ex., her "Loose Women or Lost Women?: The re-emergence of the myth of 'white slavery' in contemporary discourses of 'trafficking in women'," in Gender Issues 18 (2000): 23-50, online at:

    http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/doezema-loose.html

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  7. Also of general interest:

    Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir, & Chantal Thomas, "From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, & Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism," Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 335-423

    PDF file at:

    http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlg/vol292/halley.pdf

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  8. Oh, yeah, Janet Halley. She seems interesting and I've been meaning to read more of her.

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  9. I'm certain you'd find her Split Decisions (2006) of interest.

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  10. belledame222 said:

    "but the connection that doesn't get talked about much is that at least one of the bigger anti-trafficking networks is run by hardcore APRF's--Coalition Against Trafficking of Women, Janice Raymond and Dorchen Leidholdt, with Sheila Jeffreys on the board of members. They're quite influential in realpolitik; and as we know, while they may well be doing great work for the actual trafficking victims, or some of them, they definitely have a particular...worldview."

    CATW was a direct outgrowth of Women Against Pornography. In fact, you can even say its what WAP morphed into. CATW was first conceived in the late 80s at a WAP conference. Dorchen Leidholdt, who was leader of WAP at its peak, went on to head CATW, which she heads to this day. The leader of WAP in the early 90s (it faded away sometime in the mid-90s), Norma Ramos, was (and maybe still is?) on the board of CATW.

    Basically they realized that the "civil rights" antiporn position, as exemplified by the Dworkin/MacKinnon Ordinance, was going to go abolutely nowhere in the United States because it so flagrantly went against First Amendment law. At this point, I think Leidholdt realized that if they broadened the campaign to define sex work itself as a violation of women's rights and took the campaign into the arena of international law, they'd have more success. Unfortunately, they've largely managed to do that, especially since they've managed to ally with Evangelicals working on international welfare issues. Now they seem to be coming full circle and are attempting to redefine pornography as a trafficking issue.

    Laura Lederer is another one who came out of the same movement. She was head of San Francisco's WAVPM, which was predecessor to WAP. (Not to mention, early rivals of Samois.) She re-emerged as a legal scholar in the early 1990s around the campaign to ban "hate speech", alongside MacKinnon and Richard Delgado. Then, over the next few years, she starts popping up more and more in neo-con circles and was a protege of Paul Wolfowitz when she was at John's Hopkins. In 2001, she entered the Bush State Department as a Special Advisor on Trafficking and was instrumental in implementing the policy that effectively cut off groups working with sex workers unless they agreed to oppose decriminalizing sex work.

    So, yeah, these folks have been pushing an agenda for a long time.

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  11. CATW is discussed in Halley, Kotiswaran, Shamir & Thomas.

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  12. yeah, I've been meaning to read Split Decisions too. one for the nascent book club perhaps?

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  13. Clarification: I saw the documentary by Global Fund for Women, not AI... it was at an Amnesty meeting that I first saw it.

    http://www.globalfundforwomen.org/cms/content/view/23/110/

    What worries me is how so many people seem focused on sex trafficking, ignoring the fact that there is all kinds of trafficking into and within the U.S.

    The documentary made the important point that all kinds of trafficking (for nannies and seamstresses, also) has the same basic countries involved.

    They might in fact round up a bunch of females and divide them up on the spot--4 sex workers, 4 sewing machine workers, etc. It's all trafficked labor to the traffickers.

    One thing the documentary said, though--the public is very unlikely to meet a trafficked seamstress, but they ARE likely to meet a trafficked domestic or sex worker. They were also asking regular people (potential customers) to be aware.

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  14. "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"

    I don't know what Daisy flagged, but there are quite a few "child model" sites with pictures of clothed kids that are, from what I understand, legal, but that are quite disturbing. Clothes that one would expect to find an adult model in, obviously suggestive poses, etc.

    I wouldn't call that "porn" either, and don't know what I think of criminalizing that -- but it's obvious that at least some of the people looking are gonna be pedos.

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  15. "I don't know what Daisy flagged, but there are quite a few "child model" sites with pictures of clothed kids that are, from what I understand, legal, but that are quite disturbing. Clothes that one would expect to find an adult model in, obviously suggestive poses, etc."

    Yeah, I've seen those. No need to go to some shadowy corner of Thailand to produce that kind of stuff, either – a lot of those sites are American. The kids "manager" – usually a parent. Yikes!

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  16. "One thing the documentary said, though--the public is very unlikely to meet a trafficked seamstress, but they ARE likely to meet a trafficked domestic or sex worker. They were also asking regular people (potential customers) to be aware."

    In the US, the so-called "Asian Massage Parlors" (AMPs) are a hotbed of this kind of thing, from what I've heard. The San Francisco Chronicle did a series on this last year, albeit, with pretty sensationalist coverage. Many are Korean women who have fallen into some kind of debt slavery vis-a-vis South Korean organized crime groups and are forced to pay it off by being prostituted in the US. Also, Chinese illegal immigrant women who are smuggled into the US and are charged a debt by their smugglers.

    Street prostitutes are typically not "trafficked" from other countries, but may be under control of a pimp. (Street prostitution in the US is usually an outcome of home-grown poverty rather than international trafficking.)

    The higher one goes in the sex industry – strippers, escorts, porn models, etc, the less likely it is that a woman in that position is going to victimized by a pimp or trafficker.

    Sex work has its class stratification like everything else.

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  18. Check out this Mother Jones article, which I think makes the distinction clear (migration to earn more money vs. trafficking).

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  19. To be clear, Daisy, I definitely understand what the difference is between voluntary migration of labor and trafficking. I've seen many of the same documentaries on trafficking and understand how it works.

    What I am saying is that the argument MacKinnon has floated in the recent "Pornography: Driving the Demand for International Sex Trafficking" anthology muddies the clear distinction between the two when it comes to sex work.

    That said, the Mother Jones article is very good and makes clear the different stances of GAATW and CATW. Its good to see that there is a major anti-trafficking NGO (GAATW) that is making a clear distinction between voluntary sex work and involuntary sex work, and is not just approaching the issue as a simplistic moral crusade.

    The GAATW paper " Trafficking: A Demand Led Problem?" is excellent. It actually describes the global sex industry that clearly jibes with my understanding of it and makes clear distinctions between voluntary and involuntary sex work, different segments of the sex industry, and class distinctions among sex workers. They also avoid throwing around big empty numbers without any basis in fact, unlike CATW.

    Also, I see that La Strada is part of GAATW. La Strada is one of the more important groups active in Eastern Europe and the Netherlands trying to help trafficked women directly.

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  20. I wrote:

    "CATW was a direct outgrowth of Women Against Pornography. In fact, you can even say its what WAP morphed into."

    I came across this page on the CATW site that gives their full story and the early connections with WAP, Laura Lederer, etc.

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  21. In her part of the above-cited paper, Chantal Thomas raises issues (what she calls "the legitimation critique" of the current anti-trafficking regime) related to Amber’s comment:

    p. 388: “… the focus of anti-trafficking efforts on certain narrowly defined harmful practices, all relating to sex work/prostitution, to the exclusion of other labor practices affecting migratory workers, may serve implicitly to legitimate the conditions of non-sex-based migrant labor.”

    pp. 390-91: “By focusing on sex trafficking, the anti-trafficking discourse runs the risk of legitimating by implication other practices. For example, non-sexual trafficking, although definitionally contemplated, remains out of focus in may of the implementation efforts under anti-trafficking law.(180) The U.S. State Department has explained that this imbalance stems in part from the greater difficulty in tracking non-sexual trafficking.(181) However, there are numerous international organizations & non-governmental organizations whose purpose is to do precisely that,(182), & their greater involvement could help to minimize this difficulty in measuring this vast set of additional phenomena.

    "In addition to non-sex trafficking, ‘non-trafficking’ migrant labor may too often escape the attention of governments & advocates.(183) The U.S. State Department’s definition of trafficking, already narrower than the U.N. version, excludes some of the most egregious abuses of migrant workers. For example, in Central Texas, migrant advocacy groups have devoted increasing energy to representing ‘undocumented’ migrant workers who go intentionally uncompensated by their employers.(184) These advocates describe such practices as enslavement because workers are not compensated for their labor. Moreover, employers take advantage of the vulnerability these workers suffer as a result of their undocumented status.

    "So far, under the State Department rules, if the employer simply chooses not to pay workers without threatening to turn them in to immigration authorities, he is not considered to be ‘trafficking.’ Although the ‘coercion’ is defined in the relevant texts to include either physical coercion or abuse of the law or legal process(185), the State Department has stated that the latter category includes only ‘active’ abuse(186), such as explicit threats(187). Practices such as these allow the employers to exploit the background rules shaping the worker-employer relationship, without directly engaging in legally cognizable coercion.

    "Thus, the definition of coercion in anti-trafficking law may perform a legitimating role for ‘non-trafficking,’ but nevertheless abusive, migrant labor practices in much the same way that the definition of duress in contract law can permit & implicitly legitimate opportunistic or abusive employment practices that fall short of the definition(188).”

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  22. The Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) is just one of many anti-trafficking NGOs of similar orientation. A number of them have come together under an umbrella group, the Human Rights Caucus. Other members include:

    Global Rights (formerly called International Human Rights Law Group);
    Asian Women’s Human Rights Council (India);
    La Strada Program (Poland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovia, Macedonia, Modova);
    Ban Ying (Germany);
    Foundation for Women (Thailand);
    Fundación Esperanza (Colombia);
    Solomon Foundation (Hungary);
    Women’s Consortium of Nigeria (WOCON);
    Women, Law and Development Centre (Nigeria);
    KOK- Bundesweiter Koordinierungskreis gegen Frauenhandel und Gewalt an Frauen im Migrationsprozess e.V. [NGO Network against Trafficking in Women], Germany;
    Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV), The Netherlands.

    I may have left somebody out.

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  23. This whole discussion is starting to make me nervous. I am hearing more and more pro porn and pro sexwork people trying to bend into a pretzel to justify sex trafficking.

    If we are going to be legitimate, we have to stay miles away from sex trafficking.

    The only reason I can see that someone would be making these pro trafficking arguments would be if they are, or are friends with, traffickers.

    If the sex worker rights community is going to affiliate with these guys then I am taking down my web site and staying the hell away from the sex worker rights movement.

    I have seen trafficking up close. There is no "consent" going on. Once traffickers have your documents (or you have none) and the address of your family back home, you are theirs for as long as they want.

    Please I beg you, do NOT go around defending trafficking in any form. SO WHAT if not all trafficking is sex trafficking? We should be against it, not trying to justify it.

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  24. Scruffy –

    Who the hell here is defending trafficking, involuntary labor, or rape of any kind. Just because I'm highly critical of the kind of sloppy conflation of the entire sex industry with sex trafficking by groups like CATW and Captive Daughters does not mean I'm making a "pro-trafficking" argument.

    I largely agree with the description of trafficking and its relationship to the sex industry in the GAATW document I posted above. Are you going to tell me that GAATW is a "pro-trafficking" group? Get real.

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