I have been reading your blog for quite a while now and I have found it very educational and refreshing. However, I have been trying for some time to understand your view on trafficking. I absolutely understand your disdain for people who assert that no educated person could ever choose the life of a prostitute, and I understand that most people who work for anti-human trafficking orgs assert that every single sex worker needs to be saved from herself, pimps, and the ones who buy her services. Obviously this isn’t the case; I know that there are plenty of people who enjoy sex work and indeed choose it as a career AND lead happy, healthy lives with fulfilling relationships. However, I work with underage girls who have been through terrible coercion, often from a very young age; these are the kind of people I wish to help. Law-enforcement officers do not know how to tell coercive situations from non-coercive ones, and more often than not, they end up harassing and criminalizing both the women who choose the life and those who do not. I am in a position to educate law-enforcement, firefighters and the like, and would like suggestions on doing this. I need to address the problem, who it affects, how to recognize it, and how to stop it…AND actually address that there are people who choose prostitution – and they are not the ones we are trying to “save.” Also, what organizations apart from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) do you know to have honest, fact-based studies on numbers, ages etc…?
If every organization were like GAATW, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Unfortunately most are not, and use “trafficking” as a disguise for attacking consensual sex. Furthermore, governments use it as an excuse to restrict the migration of people from the Global South while pretending not to be racist, which would be reason enough to refuse the narrative even if it weren’t being used as a cloak for prudes. I’m very much against coercion, but unfortunately the “trafficking” paradigm is fatally flawed; it is far too wrapped up in hysteria and applied to far too many different things to be a useful descriptor.
I think the three best columns which explain my views on the subject are “Rhinoceros”, “The Power of Myth” and “Thought Experiment”, but the one resource you most need to read is Dr. Laura Agustín’s Sex At the Margins. Dr. Agustín has worked with and studied migrants for twenty years, and her insights are extremely valuable. One thing she points out repeatedly, and which cannot possibly be stressed enough, is that those who want to help others must pay attention to what those people say about their experiences. The most damaging narrative which has crept into the “trafficking” paradigm, and which in the opinion of many has rendered it useless, is the idea that outsiders have both the ability and the right to decide for migrants what is best for them. It’s similar to the “payday loan” controversy in the US; it’s all well and fine for white middle-class people to call those who offer such loans “predatory” and “exploitative”, but unless they’re willing to provide those short-term loans to those who need them at a less-usurious rate of interest, their criticism is just noise. It’s all well and fine for people in the wealthiest nation on Earth to say, “oh, what awful conditions these migrants endure; clearly they must have been tricked because I would never agree to that.” No, maybe they wouldn’t, but they weren’t raised in a rat-infested slum with no toilet and no clean water where the best job offers $1 a day. Migrants are just as rational as educated white folk, and their decisions are just as considered. Remember all those people who drowned trying to get to Europe last month? Most of them couldn’t swim, yet they took that chance because they wanted to get the hell out of East Africa. Those in the Global North often risk their lives just for a thrill, or work grueling hours to win a coveted position; how can they fail to comprehend that others are willing to endure a great deal for a chance at the kind of life we take for granted?
The idea that migrants are somehow different from Americans who relocate for jobs, and that “debt bondage” is any different from student loans and a mortgage, is at its heart racist and xenophobic. And the idea that migrants (or anyone who sells sex) are childlike retards who must be “rescued” from their own decisions is as shockingly disrespectful to them as any racial stereotype in an old movie. It is not possible to “rescue” people from their own decisions; “authorities” who try are often confused and surprised when those they “rescue” use the first available opportunity to escape from the kennels in which their “saviors” have confined them. Being picked up, caged and done to without permission is for stray dogs and cats, not human beings, yet well-meaning “anti-trafficking” organizations do this sort of thing all the time.
The single most important advice I can give you, and which you can give those you train, is to listen to the people you wish to help. Don’t say “I will do this for you”; instead ask “What can I do for you?” And then pay attention to what they say, without talking over them or saying, “Oh, but that can’t be right” or “Here, let’s do this instead.” If the answer is “Nothing”, then all you can do is walk away and leave them with your phone number. You can’t force them to want what you want, or to do things your way; all you can do is give them whatever help they actually need enough to ask for. They are not children or stray animals; they are human beings, and experts in their own lives. Would-be helpers cannot force anyone to accept their idea of what’s right, nor use “false consciousness” doubletalk or “Stockholm syndrome” psychobabble to cover up the desire to impose their will on those they perceive as “exploited”. Just because you wouldn’t do something, doesn’t make it the wrong decision for that person, and vice-versa. For example, though I’ve supported friends’ decisions to use anti-depressants, I’ve always refused them myself even in very deep depressions; just as nobody has the right to strap me down and forcibly inject me with these drugs “for my own good”, so “anti-trafficking” people have no right to “help” people against their will, no matter how much they might believe it’s the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, there are a number of terrible laws in the US which prevent people who really are being coerced or exploited from doing anything about it; they would rather stay in the US for really bad pay than be deported to their homelands where they make absolutely nothing. Punitive American policies are another problem: Americans love blame-assigning and brutal, crushing punishment, so even when migrants get in trouble they often refuse to blame those who helped them cross the border or find work. Under current policies, these people are shut off from help if their basic human decency stops them from submitting to the ugly demands of “authorities” that they rat others out by turning them over for criminal prosecution and probable deportation. In the case of sex work, the deck is totally stacked against a reasonable response: US law insists that all whores are either villains or victims, and some states insist that it’s always the latter. So when a woman is “rescued” and the cops demand she reveal her “pimp”, there is about a 92% chance she will be unable to comply; some desperate or frightened women invent a “pimp” who doesn’t exist, while others choose a victim to turn over so they themselves are not jailed. Until these bad laws are changed, there is absolutely nothing would-be “helpers” can do except to make themselves available to those who are so badly mistreated they would rather face prison or deportation than continue in their present condition…and that’s only a minuscule fraction of those who might very well accept help if it were not tied to incarceration, deportation or subjecting others to the tender mercies of the police.
As for solid “trafficking” numbers, there aren’t any. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s the truth; as long as any given activity is underground, under the radar or “off the grid”, it is absolutely impossible to produce anything more than (educated or wild) guesses. I can give you prostitution age and number estimates based on similar countries in which sex work has been decriminalized, and I can tell you that just about every survey of sex workers who are accessible to researchers shows a coercion rate of less than 2%. But obviously “authorities” cannot accurately measure people who fear them, so every figure such “authorities” produce can only be bogus. Even government numbers for people who are “rescued” or charged with “trafficking” are worthless for the reasons I’ve detailed above: they represent the opinion of the police or other government actors, not the opinion of the people classified as “victims” or “perpetrators”. The only way we will ever know how many people are involved in exploitative labor (whether border-crossing is involved or not) will be to remove all the consequences and perverse incentives for lying about it or misrepresenting it, and to take away from “authorities” the power to brand others with a label they would never apply to themselves.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
Abso-fucking-lutely.
OK, it can be hard to listen sometimes – especially across cultural boundaries – but why does it occur to so few people to even try?
Because what they hear doesn’t fit into their preconceived notions, and they have spent most of their lives being told how smart they are. If you think of most Western Intellectuals as being similar in motivations to European Aristocracy their behaviors make much more sense. Western Intellectuals spend most of their lives firmly believing that they are divinely suited to tell other people how to live. They get very little feedback to the contrary, and resent what they do get. Also, like the Aristocracy, most of them are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.
I would ask – what is the end goal here? Is it to get cops to turn a blind eye to “non-coerced” prostitutes?
They won’t.
Now … there IS some value in being able to identify coerced girls and helping them out. But again, in some places – that means placing these girls in the hands of faith-based prison homes.
Kobayashi Maru
“…nobody has the right to strap me down and forcibly inject me with these drugs “for my own good””
Well, perhaps. That’s fine if you are compos mentis, of sound mind. But if you aren’t, you cannot think or act rationally. You may then be not only a danger to yourself—which you wouldn’t be if you were sane—but also to others. The danger to others surely justifies the use of forcible treatment. Despite what the editors of the Daily Fail would have us believe, such dangerous psychotic killers are rare.
Indeed. I see no contradiction here. Protecting others from harm justifies using force that the “good” of the person you’re forcing does not.
As a bouncer – I’m not allowed to take a drunk’s car keys. He (or she) walks out the door and gets into their car – I can’t do a damn thing. Now – I DO tell them … “It’s completely fucked up if you try to drive like this.” A few will stop and get a cab when I say that. Others – “Ah! I’m fine!”
Then there are the others in the bar … “Are you gonna let that guy get in his car and drive home?”
“Yes – because kidnapping is against the law.”
I can’t can’t detain someone without their consent.
By the way – I threw a hooker out of the bar the other night. We were closing and she wouldn’t get off the video poker machine. I asked nicely five times before I scooted her out the door – she was yelling obscenities at me. I know she’s a hooker cuz she propositioned me one night – but she’s too ugly for me – and THAT says a lot about how ugly she was! LOL
Driving drunk (enough to make you react, not merely enough to trip a breathalyzer) makes you a danger for other people, not just for yourself. That might not justify detaining them, but it’s not just “for their own good”.
How is her being a hooker relevant? I bet you’d have bounced anyone who refused to leave at closing time and yelled obscenities, right?
It certainly does justify detaining them! When you become a danger to others, you’ve crossed a very clear line.
This could be problematic in the UK. There was a civil case against a pub landlord a while ago; he had allowed a drunk to drive away, and there was a crash. An (injured) passenger, I think it was, sued the landlord for not preventing the drunk driving. Perhaps things are different in the US.
Some states in the US have “dram shop” laws too, but that doesn’t mean the bar staff has the right to detain anybody. I’m surprised they don’t ask people to turn in their keys before serving them.
Yep.
What’s more the actuarial methods psychologists use to predict dangerousness aren’t remotely accurate enough to say who is likely to be dangerous considering it’s rarity.
So where is the logic in forcibly medicating people that you can’t say are dangerous to others?
And where is the justice in doing it to those who may be dangerous to themselves when the drugs used definitely are dangerous to them?
BTW, if people who get psychotic really are any more dangerous to others than the allegedly sane the difference in risk is tiny.
Another thing I agree with Thomas Szasz about is the concept of a psychiatric advance directive whereby people who believe they are in danger of becoming psychotic or otherwise losing their ability to make rational decisions can decide ahead of time whether it is appropriate to drug or restrain them ‘for their own good’.
This is, I think, a difference in morality- do we have a moral right, or even duty, to help those who not only cannot, but actually refuse to help themselves? Or are we moral bound to respect another’s wishes, even if we think (backed up by scientific data or not) they are insane, so long as the only danger they pose is to themselves?
The UK’s International Development Secretary, Justine Greening warns that “hundreds of thousands of women and girls will face the very real risk of violence, including sexual exploitation and abuse, rape, forced marriage and trafficking” after the typhoon in Indonesia. She doesn’t explain how, in the absence of infrastructure, the “trafficking” will happen:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10444849/Typhoon-Haiyan-relief-effort-We-are-failing-thousands-of-girls-at-risk-of-rape-or-trafficking-says-Justine-Greening.html?placement=CB2
It’s the ninja traffickers, man. They’re everywhere! Watch out, there’s one behind you right now!
SCUBA-traffickers! Dingy-traffickers! Deep-sea diving traffickers!
I don’t know if you watch Doctor Who, Pat, but maybe the traffickers are like The Silence, an alien race that you forget seeing as soon as you turn away from them.
“Dr. Brooke Magnanti is a forensic scientist.”
Forensic scientists are the kind of people who solve actual crimes, unlike “law enforcement”, which today is nothing but a mercenary force for certain corporations and (un)elected officials.
Only on TV.
Forensic scientists analyse evidence. In theory they are not even meant to know the details of the investigation the evidence comes from (i.e. they should be blinded), though in practice they are often tipped off as to what results the investigators want to see.
They know about the case when they appear in court but under the adversarial system they will be appearing for either prosecution or defence and their evidence is almost always partisan (any young forensic scientist who does not give partisan evidence will find her career options limited).
Partisan forensic evidence is believed to be the second biggest cause of wrongful conviction (after faulty witness evidence) and is a factor in over half detected miscarriages of justice in Australia, Britain and the US. If you look into the case histories of DNA exoneration you will find the majority were convicted with shonky pre-DNA forensic evidence.
I have no doubt whatsoever there are many people currently in prison who have been convicted with faulty DNA evidence. I personally know two people who definitely were and several others who probably were. It will take another forensic science breakthrough on par with forensic DNA to expose them.
I also know several forensic scientists who are very unhappy with how they are expected to tilt forensic evidence in court but even the most senior ones have a lot of difficulty trying to resist the culture.
One of my incomplete Masters degrees was meant to produce a code of ethics for forensic science students that would help them resist the pressure they will come under to distort evidence.
Tried to figure out how you came to the 1.5% of coerced prostitutes. Seems that u multiply 15% (ur estimate of the draction of prostitutes who are streetwalkers) by 10% ur median estimate of coerced streetwalkers (5% being a French figure and 10% the English collective of prostitutes figure see ur column pimps).
It would be useful if you could reference and or link these 2 figures, especially the French one in the current French debate on client criminalisation. Najat Vallaud Belkacem is using a 80% figure, allegedly a police figure…
Of course, ur assuming in ur calculation that no non streetwalker prostitute is ever coerced. It is probably not far from the truth but i think it would make ur estimate more bullet-proof if u could back that assumption by hard stats or simply allow for some coercion in the 85% and come up with a little higher but more conservative overall number. Also as an economist, i wanted to comment on your supply and demand. It is true that theoretically there could be supply curve where the quantity of a good or service offered decrease with the price. However, your always reminded in eco 101 that it almost never happens in real life. In our case, it may be true for some prostitutes, but on an aggregated basis, it is likely that the number of sex acts offered increases with the price, because if some women may be tempted to stop once their daily income reaches a certain level, some others may enter the market only above a given price. In other words, it is possible that the supply curve may be very steep but i doubt it is inverted. Therefore, economic analysis unfortunately do support the end demand argument.
What can be argued is that the market where the supply curve is the steepest is the streetwalker market which means that it is precisely where the end demand is supposed to help where it is the most ineffective.
You’re right that, to the extent that end-demand does, in fact, reduce demand, it will reduce quantity supplied. That effectiveness is very questionable. Prohibition did actually reduce America’s alcohol consumption. Still a pretty terrible idea though.
It’s still bad for the women this policy purports to help. It’s basically like people arguing for Prohibition because it would be good for brewers!? Directly, because they’ll get less money, and also because it’s really an “increase-demand” policy for cops and criminals.
There was one article I saw on here, I think Maggie linked to someone else, where a decrease in price was said to cause a shift of rather than along the supply curve.
Except that it doesn’t. Take a look at this coming Saturday’s column for an in-depth look at why. Quote: “sex work…is often a commercialised extension of a pre-existing, common domestic and barter behaviour…[as such] it…is more likely to be represented by Say’s economic laws, rather than any form of rigid Keynesian theory…”
Also, my 1.5% happens to be awfully close to studies in Cambodia & India which consistently show <2%.
That’s what he’s saying. If sex work is like any other work, according to basic-micro (not getting into Keynesian macro), if there is a reduction in demand, it will cause a decrease in both price and quantity supplied.
I mean, if the government arrested, brutalized, and ruined people’s lives for the “crime” of going to a restaurant, I don’t doubt fewer people would do it, and there would be fewer restaurants and fewer people working as chefs. That’s not an argument for doing it I’d say, but I don’t think there would be no effect.
I think what you’re saying is that the supply curve is very vertical when it comes to prostitution, so that a decrease in demand would have very little decrease in prostitution. And that the end-demand laws wouldn’t actually reduce demand very much anyway.
It’s also terrible in other ways. Although Prohibition did decrease demand for drinking alcohol, it did increase demand for rubbing alcohol, and a lot of people died.
Fully agree with you. Maggie somewhere else in her blog shows an inverted supply curve to support her argument which is pushing it a bit too far. Vertical is already “good”. Anyway as you said, there are plenty of very good arguments against end demand laws. I am just saying that using a “weak” point weakens the overall argument pointlessly.
Still, it would be good if you good reference your 5% (English) and 15% (French) estimate of coerced streetwalkers.
Najat Valaud Belkacem claims it is 80% for all prostitutes. I think she’s conflating this number with estimates of the proportion of foreign prostitutes…
It’s not a conflation, but rather a direct substitution. 80% of all current sex workers in France were born outside France; defining anyone who crosses a border to do sex work as “trafficked” gives us “80% of all current sex workers in France are trafficked”. Substitute the other, more useful meaning of “trafficked”, and we get “80% of all current sex workers in France are coerced.” Then drop “current” and “in France” and we get “80% of all sex workers are coerced.” Voila!
As far as economics goes, I think that given that considering people both want sex and an income, there is naturally going to be a free exchange. There is absolutely no way someone looks at prostitution and starts with the assumption coercion.
And, when you consider the efficiency of free markets, as compared to any command and control system, you’d wonder how these theorized traffickers would even compete.
There are a substantial number of prostitutes who are held against their will, however. Those in prison.
Or ladies of the evening rather.
chippie? cocotte? girl of joy?
It seems to me that if this person really wants to make a difference, they will work for decriminalization. This would not only make the work safer for everyone involved, but also make it much easier to bring light to the darker corners of the demimonde.
Don’t assume that anyone “underage” is necessarily incompetent and in need of the protection by government employees. The age of consent is an administrative convenience depending on where you live and in what period of history, it is not an expression of eternal wisdom.
In some cultures such as the Mosuo of China girls are granted sexual autonomy at puberty and their privacy is respected. Although there are cultural differences in Western countries that mean many young girls here are infantilized, that doesn’t necessarily apply to each and every individual.
This subject gives me a headache.
That said, the number of coerced sex workers is small. Two percent. It might be higher in some places, but not more than a five or six additional percentage points, eight percent according to Maggie and the NYPD. http://maggiemcneill.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/john-jay-nyc-study.pdf
The whole treatment of people like they have no idea what they are doing is insulting as well as dangerous. Unfortunately, there is a small element of people out there who don’t seem smart enough to come in out of the rain, or obey the “No Trespassing, Private Property” sign. It is because of them that so many of our laws are enacted limiting our rights and our actions. Worse still, is the simple fact that to many people in government will look at a good and necessary law, and then turn around and pass more laws, bad ones, that are similar or related to the good law. This is the point where we the people need to step in and say “NO!,” resoundingly, unequivocally, and without compromise. Democracy, even in the form of a constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic, is not a spectator sport.
“However, I work with underage girls who have been through terrible coercion, often from a very young age; these are the kind of people I wish to help.”
Another unfortunate fact is that this person might be wise to not believe everything that these people tell her. There are an enormous variety of excellent reasons to lie to people like her – many of them the result of the legal frameworks that you describe.
Exactly how does one coerce someone into prostitution as a streetwalker, anyhow? I can see a pimp enforcing a rule that “If you work the streets in _this_ town, you work for me”, until he comes up against a superior force. But to prevent a girl from just taking her latest earnings to the bus station would take a nearly one-to-one ratio between pimps and girls, which I suspect would leave both of them earning around minimum wage. A guy who’d settle for that is one of the underworld’s lowest bottom-feeders, and not actually very dangerous.
Crystal Cole was actually held by a former lover and not allowed to leave. He forced her to deal drugs for him or else. But she couldn’t sell much drugs with him tagging along, so he had to let her out on her own. He told her that he had “his people” watching her, but she found little ways to test that. Within a week she left, and he was busted, with no idea of where she was.
It seems to me that the coerced prostitute model would work better in a brothel. You don’t have to let her out on her own, and you can don’t have to let her run around with enough money to leave town before she turns it over to you.
[…] Women (GAATW) do you know to have honest, fact-based studies on numbers, ages etc…?” The following was my answer, and I thought it might prove enlightening to Cliterati readers […]