This essay first appeared in Cliterati on September 14th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
I am often asked if, by calling “sex trafficking” a myth, I’m saying that there is no such thing as coercion in sex work. The answer, of course, is “not at all”; what I’m saying is 1) that coercion is much rarer than “trafficking” fetishists pretend it is; 2) that the term “trafficking” is used to describe many different things along a broad spectrum running from absolutely coercive to absolutely not coercive, yet all of them are shoehorned into a lurid, melodramatic and highly-stereotyped narrative; and 3) that even situations of genuine coercion rarely bear much resemblance to the familiar masturbatory fantasy of an “innocent” middle-class girl in her early teens abducted by “pimps” from a shopping mall, bus stop or internet chat room. “Let Me Help” discusses the first two factors, but I recently discovered a fine example of the third: a situation of genuine coercion which nonetheless runs counter to many “trafficking” claims.
…Pardip Singh [of Indianapolis, Indiana]…was convicted…of promotion of human trafficking, criminal confinement, intimidation, battery and domestic battery. On May 11, 2012, Singh called several men and told them that for $500 they could come to his…apartment and have sex with a “teacher’s daughter from India”…The first potential client to show up learned that the victim was Singh’s wife and witnessed Singh hit her…that man “told Singh he should not treat his wife that way and then left”…Just after midnight on May 12, 2012…police…responded to a domestic disturbance at the couple’s apartment…the victim, “visibly shaken and crying,” told the officer she needed help…
Right from the start, the true story belies the familiar “trafficking” porn. Singh is clearly no slick, mastermind pimp with insidious hypnotic powers, but a crude bully. He didn’t have a dozen slave-captives confined in dog kennels or controlled via “Stockholm syndrome” or magical mind-control philter, but one wife that he attempted to control through garden-variety brutality. He didn’t advertise her on Backpage or any other site used by sex workers, but by contacting people personally. Though the rescue industry’s professional victims entrance their salivating audiences with tales of daily parades of dozens of callous, uncaring men oblivious to their plight, the very first man who answered Singh’s advert was disgusted by what he found and refused to participate. And while those same prohibitionist shills claim to have been successfully held captive for years, Singh’s wife escaped the very next day after he started trying to “traffic” her.
…Court documents describe a devastating chain of events that began March 13, 2006, when the victim became Singh’s wife in an arranged marriage in their native India…Singh was living in the United States but traveled to India for the marriage…After the wedding, he returned to the United States while his new wife stayed in India to attend college. In 2012, after obtaining a nursing degree, the victim moved to the United States to live with Singh in New Jersey…Within a few weeks, Singh began physically abusing [her]…Singh was angry that the woman’s family did not send the couple more money [so he] took her to Atlantic City to try to get her a job in a strip club…which he believed would generate a more immediate windfall. Singh would not allow the woman to speak with her parents except when he was within earshot…and regularly hit and abused her. During one week when Singh worked as a semi truck driver…he forced [her] to remain in the back of the truck cab during a long interstate trip. At stops, he would get into the back…and force her to have sex with him…The events in Indianapolis occurred about a week later…
The conventional narrative tells us that huge cartels of slick international gangsters abduct teen girls by the tens of thousands and reap vast profits without detection, but what do we see here instead? A greedy, pathetic wife-beater who tricked a grown woman (and university graduate) via a venerable social institution. This sort of “pimp” is much closer to the norm than the racist stereotype in clownish attire, yet I don’t see anyone screaming for the criminalization of marriage. Prohibitionists are fond of saying that sex workers “believe pimps are their boyfriends” because they can’t face the uncomfortable truth that neither emotional attachment nor a license from the state is a guarantee against emotional or economic exploitation in a relationship, and that the main difference between a “pimp” and a “sex trafficking” fetishist’s own abusive spouse is the label.
I agree. They have been blowing the horn of “trafficking” because it’s making a lot of people money. I’ve found that the abortion rights people have not gotten ahold of this movement and they’ve twisted it completely out of shape. I know because I was one of the original architects of this movement to have people learn that domestic trafficking was real and did exist and I didn’t think those victims should be treated as criminals when they needed help not jail. Now these people have come along and kicked me out of my own movement! All because I refused to agree with this insane notion that “all” sex work is forced. It’s not. What’s worse in my opinion – is that with all the noise they’ve been making – things like HIV education have been sorely sorely neglected. I’m seeing a new epidemic breaking out as we speak and a whole generation of young sex workers who are not fully informed nor prepared about things like HIV (and other diseases) because of all this trafficking noise. It’s like how the AIDS people said the cancer people really siphoned off their resources. These people have gone so far – that they actually have “hijacked” my program. When they couldn’t get me to agree with them – they hired people to set up “fake” meetings of ours that are not meetings of ours so they could get their funding. Well I’m not standing for it and preparing a lawsuit for copyright infringement and defamation because they are totally destroying the message of who we are and what we do simply because they have become the real “pimps” on this block now. In preparing my lawsuit – I got to “follow the money” and I have to tell you – it’s quite an interesting trail! If there’s any lawyers out there who want to help me – please get in touch.
Question …
I have read online tales of women abducted … then chained to a bed for days with little food or water … and repeatedly raped in horrific and painful ways while being forced to smile throughout. This has been represented as a standard “breakdown indoctrination” for new women stolen for trafficking purposes. And … supposedly, it’s a standard operating procedure for human traffickers. The process even has a name – though at the moment it escapes me.
Have you ever heard of this? I’m sure it may have happened with a few women, but I don’t think it’s part of any organized trafficking scheme. It sounds more to me like a masturbation fantasy that was made up by some sadist and then passed off as something that happens routinely.
Reason I’m asking is I’ve seen this story parroted over and over. Minor details change depending on who’s telling it – but the basics are always the same – women raped almost to the point of death.
Here’s just ONE example of it …
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1069198.html
It’s horrific, it would make me want to kill any man engaged in it. I used to kind of believe it – but these days I try to use reason rather than anger and emotion to decide things.
I’m not sure this kind of “indoctrination” would even work. I mean – POW’s in Japan during WWII went through much worse (I knew some of them and they told me the stories). Yet – they didn’t “turn” to the Japanese. They were never really “broken” to the point that they gave up on life (though a few did – the ones I knew most definitely did not).
So I don’t even know if this would be effective.
There is also the French ruthlessly torturing in Algeria to break the resistance. The thing is they never got any useful information, despite going to the extremes possible in torture. It is usually used as an example that torture does not work to get you information and merely satisfies a need for revenge.
There is older advice from Sun Tzu to to treat your enemies well and with respect, because then some may come over to your side and give you valuable information. This is, to me, an indicator that he knew well that torture was not a suitable means to force collaboration.
I share your doubt that this would work. And if applied on a larger scale, it would probably just create some victims that make destroying their capturer utterly their new goal in life and so the whole approach may be highly counter-productive.
In addition, forced labor of any kind has this tendency to be not very good.
Give that man a cigar! That’s exactly what it is; I think it’s even borrowed in part from the Gor books, then dressed up with fashionable psychobabble and peppered with details drawn from domestic violence cases. It’s no more “standard” in any part of the sex industry than male escorts making hundreds of thousands from hot female customers is, and both fantasies come from the same thing: people trying to project their own sexual issues onto whores.
Unfalsifiable, have any raids discovered women in rough shape chained to beds, or even empty beds with chains attached? Chains that aren’t used on the “johns” that is…
Cops who make lots of money giving “sex trafficking” talks to middle-aged white women often claim to have seen such things, but somehow they always forget to take pictures. And they can never present transcripts of prosecutions in which the prosecution even alleged such, much less proved the allegations. Kind of the same way that the “traffickers” who mistreated the “victims” who give such talks are never, ever caught or even investigated, no matter how horrific the allegations of abuse, serial rape, mass abduction and multiple murder that in any other case would have the FBI all over that like white on rice. Funny how that works.
There have been several such cases – if you replace “sex trafficker” with “pathetic loser rapist who chained a woman up in his basement”. But they aren’t selling women. You try that, and your first customer will call the cops.
La Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia) has the position of avoiding the exploitation of prostitution because the margins are low, and the risk of detection is very high. This case is a perfect example of that.
Makes sense. Forced labor is never of good quality and the laborers may easily turn on you.
I think this whole “trafficking” panic has a similar companion, namely the terrorism panic. For example US domestic terrorism is routinely perpetrated by people so inept that the FBI has to do basically everything for them. Bruce Schneier (famous IT security person) even went so far as to write a piece “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot”: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/portrait_of_the_1.html
It is not only going on in the US. For example, there was a “terrorist attack” on a German local train: The person doing it stuffed a 5kg Propane container into a suitcase together with a 1 liter bottle of petrol and had attached some sort of ignition-wire to the petrol. That was supposed to blow up the Propane by heating it up. Trouble is, that does not work. There is not enough energy in that amount petrol to heat the propane container up enough, even if you get it all in and people are just standing around ignoring the fire and the fire-extinguishers that would make short work for it. The police officials talking to the press used sneaky language like “could in principle detonate” and other lies by misdirection to create fear and paint them in a positive light, when in fact this were just clueless idiots that could at worst have done some property damage (they did not even manage that). Any drunk driver is vastly more dangerous.
The “trafficking mastermind” Maggie writes about seems to be on that level as well. My conclusion is that “law enforcement” has a huge problem justifying their size and expenses and possibly existence, and desperately need to drum up some “crisis” that gives them legitimacy.
I agree with you that the terror “panic” is extreme. But I DO think that vigilance is required. I don’t think we need to violate people’s privacy and civil rights to do that though. I DO think it would be pretty damn awesome if the FBI and BATF and DEA stopped putting resources on things like the drug war, or gun show sales, and HUMAN TRAFFICKING, and reassigned some of them to tracking terrorists.
Terrorists, and their equivalents by any other name, have always been a potential threat requiring vigilance through most if not all US history. They’re no doubt a greater threat for some periods, such as currently, requiring heightened vigilance.
But, what puts “to panic or not to panic” in perspective for me is the fact that, in comparison to the relatively few killed here or there by terrorists, about 90 people are killed each and every day on US highways. Heck, in 2001, in contrast to the horrendous slaughter of 3,000 at the towers, over 42,000 died in traffic accidents on US highways. And, those fatalities are, essentially, all caused by people who are not even trying to kill anyone.
Objectively, then, which poses the greater threat? Ninety killed per day or the handful killed infrequently? A person’s daily chances of being killed on the highway vastly exceeds the chance of being killed by terrorists. If anything should be a cause for panic, logic leads to it being the daily slaughter on US highways.
Yet, the media and the government (likely for their own benefits and agendas) dramatize terrorist threat while giving mere mention to the highway threat. US citizens barely give the highway potential a thought — heck, some of those fatal accidents might even have happened when a driver listening to a talk show sensationalizing the terrorist threat became frightened enough to be distracted from his driving.
Point here isn’t traffic fatalities — point here is, relative to what people face every damned day in a typical US life, the terrorists pose little risk to us. Not at all ZERO risks to us — as I said, I do believe terrorism needs to be addressed — but a comparatively minor risk, far less than the media and government exploits them into seeming to the public.
law enforcement and the rescue industry are in this together. The convince the government that there is huge conspiracy and the only way to solve it is to throw a whole bunch of money at it and these friendly organizations are only more than willing to explain to the gov’t where these funds can best be spent. Trust me, it’s not in helping the handful of victims that actually exist. Look for cushy offices and expensive conferences in warm climates.
[…] The Face of Sex-Trafficking: http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/the-face-of-trafficking/ […]
Do u know the blog of Felicia Anna? She is a romanian prostitute working on De Wallen (Holland’s Red Light District) that, as u, claims that the trafficking tales are false.
behindtheredlightdistrict.blogspot.com
I have linked a number of her essays.
I’ve lived both sides of it. The some-part-of-the-spectrum-trafficked to totally empowered.
I’ve followed this debate for years. One camp telling the other camp they’re imagining things. The sex-trafficking “fetishists” saying you guys inflate your numbers; you saying of the same of them. Both sides accused of over-generalizations. Neither side really willing to come to the table and listen to each other’s very real, individual, female experiences.
My experience is that my experience isn’t so uncommon. I started as a minor. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I didn’t like what I was doing. I couldn’t get out of it.
I met many others. I met some of them again when I got out of it years later and started working for a street youth organization and they were out on the street on meth. Kids like I was exist.
Young adults, too. Lots of immature souls that shouldn’t be in this business are in this business because someone may not have physically twisted their arm, but still coerced them. When police joined forces with a youth organisation in Quebec a few years ago, 100 such coercive characters (involved with minors) were arrested over a three year period. 90% of arrests ended in convictions. I am not making this stuff up – the data is available if you look at individual organisations and programs.
Sex trafficking is a problem in Canada. It’s not like the famous definition of porn, “I know it when I see it”. It is much more insidious than that and the fact that so many sex workers defending their right to work freely are so quick to discount its existence is proof of the power of things we do not want to see.
I’ve been on the other side, too. The university grad student who was high-dollar-hooking. Who loved every moment of it. Who met great, kind spirits. Who was no longer in a situation of abuse because *I* was in control of my means of production and could decide who I’d see and under what terms.
Sex-work has paid my university education. Sex-work helped many of my friends finish school too, raise kids, grow businesses, do something more with themselves than they could with a minimum wage 50-hours-a-week job.
Sex-work destroyed part of me as a youth and young adult. It destroys the lives of many more. I have no trouble at all estimating the proportion at 10 to 20%. That still leaves a good 80% on the other side.
It is possible to admit to both realities. It’s possible to have better policy that accounts for both realities. Actually, if you ask me, the only time policy ever becomes feminist policy (because isn’t that what’s at stake here?) is when women come together as a unit by recognizing each others’ struggles instead of acting toward each other as the very oppressive forces they fight against.
All this to say, stop denying a reality because it isn’t yours. Stop claiming you know what the empirical picture looks like – you don’t. And I say the exact same thing to those on the other side who keep claiming 99% or I don’t know what idiotic figure represents the proportion of women who hate or are victims of sex work.
Defend your rights, fine, and I support you whole-heartedly in that fight. But not at the expense of other women’s rights. Especially not the youngest, most vulnerable women. That is not what feminism is about. Feminism has never been defined as the fight of some women.
The difference is that the policy we support (decriminalization) will help both groups, and the policy they support (criminalization) hurts sex workers, clients and everyone else. There’s no way to “compromise” on that, and no middle ground with people who think they have a right to make everyone’s choices for them.
I understand the stakes. What I’m saying is that both sides are talking over each other. You do it when you call my experience a myth (or “so rare” that we shouldn’t even bring it up); they do it when they stereotype you (and me) as so alienated that you don’t even realize you’re oppressed.
I disagree that decriminalization (as currently presented) will help both groups. Financing, programs geared toward at risk groups, social programs, and a “culture reform” aimed at legal, health and police workers to remind them sex workers have the same rights to justice, health services and security as other Canadians will help the second group (and even the first one), not writing a law off the books. For instance, it doesn’t make a huge difference to street sex workers if you remove all the CC provisions but they still get fined for loitering, not crossing the street at an intersection, or whatever BS cops come up with to harass and stigmatize them (which happens far more often than getting arrested under some CC law). Same thing for justice. Is it really because the laws exist that more women than men are currently in jail for prostitution-related offences? And health. Have you ever been told by a nurse in an ER that she wouldn’t get a doctor to perform a rape kit on you because “you wouldn’t have gotten in this position if you weren’t hooking”? It happened to me. I’m sorry, but my occupation should never be used as an excuse to not provide me services I’m owed as a Canadian citizen. Change the laws, you still haven’t changed the culture of the people who think they’re above the law and can treat sex workers as second class citizens.
I’ve known this business for 20 years. I’ve worked in many “incall” agencies – there are countless in this country. If marginalized women that work the streets continue to work on the street it isn’t for a lack of locations where they can work more safely. I’ve yet to see the study that identifies the factors linked to their choosing to stay on the street despite safer – albeit illegal but culturally tolerated – options.
There is no single case in Canadian jurisprudence of a mother being convicted of living off the avails because she lived in the same home as her sex-worker daughter. There are many, many people who have been convicted because they represented the proverbial pimp. I agree that a driver or bodyguard shouldn’t be put in the same category as “pimp”. I’ve yet to see a drying up of the supply of these workers as a result of the laws. Yes, they get arrested. No, it’s not hard to hire a driver and bodyguard if you want one.
Communicating – I completely agree with that one. There is no question in my mind that the communication provision currently undermine sex worker safety.
I think there shouldn’t be laws governing women’s bodies or telling them what is a moral or immoral way of making a living. Government has no business in adult women’s private life.
As a society, we also have responsibilities towards those who are most vulnerable. I can never agree with a policy that quashes living off the avail provisions unilaterally. However, it is possible to have a living off the avails law that defines what a real predator is and stick to that definition when passing down sentences.
Incalls should definitely be legal, too. When I say women can currently work in incalls if they want I don’t mean that it’s ok that they can do it with the threat of arrest looming over their head. But that threat is evidently not great enough to lead to incalls going out of business – they still represent a big segment of the sex trade economy. In Montreal, at least, incalls are largely tolerated as long as they don’t bother the neighbours. The best step, yes, would be to get our heads out of the sand and decriminalize an activity that is already largely tolerated. We also have the responsibility to ask ourselves why – and I’d wager a lot of money on this – women will continue to work the streets even if that provision were removed.
Decriminalizing living off the avails, nope, sorry. I could never agree with that unless there was a counter-measure to insure that real abusers can’t continue profiting from women. As a woman who was an independent escort for 10 years, there is no way I can support decriminalization across the board. I’d much rather we imagine incentives that make it easier for women to *not* have to turn over 30 to 50% of their earnings in exchange for what, 10% worth of advertising and booking? Talent agents usually get paid around 10% of an artist’s earnings. What services and time do sex trade agents give and put into their protégés that is worth the additional money they make for not sleeping with anyone and sometimes putting sex workers in dangerous situations because they’ve only got their bottom line in mind?
Fiscal incentives and fiscal education might be useful to get more sex workers to become their own bosses. You know, you can currently declare your earnings and declare your expenses and then be in a position to get a mortgage. I know a lot of women do this – mostly independent escorts. I recognize that many women are not natural entrepreneurs but many who aren’t might be if we bothered to tell them about the advantages and the relative ease of running your own one-person business.
So, we agree on the end, but not on the means. I’m a realist – I’ve known this trade long enough (good and bad) to know where law or no law, it won’t make a difference to those who are already marginalized. Have we ever wondered how come it is that agencies (including outcalls) are tolerated in this country but there is no regulatory framework that governs the way they function? Could you imagine removing sanitary regulations and letting restaurants to do whatever they want? Would you eat in a restaurant that wasn’t obliged to store food at adequate temperatures or sanitize cooking surfaces, etc? Why can we imagine agencies that put sex workers in danger? Every single time something bad happened to me in this business, it was when I was working for an agency – and all of these agencies were run by men who’d never been out on a “call” in their life. Ask any girl who’s worked in an agency for a minimum of a year and they’ll have a horror or near-horror story to tell. This is unacceptable. There are good places, I recognize that, but from my experience, the majority of agencies do whatever they want. Sex-work should be a recognized occupation and it should come with the same rights any other worker has. Employers (they’re not “agents”) should be held accountable when they put sex-workers in dangerous job-related situations. You don’t drop a girl off in the middle of no where and drive off without her confirming because you’ve got another girl in the car that needs to be at the other end of the city in 15 minutes. You don’t send another girl to a bad client just because he’s a paying client. You don’t threaten to kick a girl out of your agency if she doesn’t come in to work tonight when she said she couldn’t. I could go on and on and on, and all this would be based on my own and many of my friends’ experience.
So there you have it. Sorry for this long message, but thanks for reading the first one (and hopefully this one) till the end. I know it’s possible to have this kind of conversation amongst women – where we disagree on some things but can agree on others. I don’t have a perfect solution, but I don’t think full decriminalization is the perfect solution either. The perfect solution for me is the one that addresses *all* causes of violence against women, and some of these come from within the trade. I guess that’s my main point. It seems to me that the decrim debate has largely been centred on the premise that the laws cause violence, whereas, seriously there’s just as much violence going on on the inside, where people don’t have to respect any laws. Who are sex-workers going to tell anyway? The cops? Ha!
You apparently haven’t read much of my back-catalog, and you still believe in the power of laws to “help” people (which I do not). Your support of avails laws also reveals you are very naive about the fact that cops and prosecutors will use any law to persecute anyone who falls vaguely under it – like the street workers persecuted for loitering. If sex work is ever to be accepted as work, decriminalization is the only route; perhaps you need to read up more on the history of the drug war to understand that. As it is, however, you’re arguing from a false equivalency: one side wants people free to transact peaceful, consensual exchange, and the other wants those people violently suppressed. There is no equivalency, balance or middle ground between those positions, as opponents of gay rights are discovering.
I think if you read my comment more closely it’s pretty clear that I don’t think laws “help people”. In this particular case, I think social policies need to be implemented. I pointed to a number of those above. I also spoke of a need for education to change the culture in our legal, health and police systems.
Naivety is perhaps better defined as thinking removing laws from the books will change the culture of those who treat women as if they weren’t beneficiaries of the Canadian Charter of Rights. When a health worker denies a sex worker services, her or she isn’t turning to the Criminal Code to justify that decision. They are referring to their stereotypes. The same goes for judges who give women harsher sentences and police forces that consistently arrest women for breaking municipal bylaws. If Criminal Code provisions have nothing to do with cultural stereotypes, how would striking down provisions of the Criminal Code have any more effect on amending that culture? Do we have laws in this country that say that the LBGT community is underserving of the same dignity as non-LBGT citizens? No. But we progressively change homophobic culture by *educating* people. That process normally begins in schools.
The only comment I made in support of any “law”, is a *modified* law on living off the avails. A law with a clear definition of who is a predator. Roommates, drivers and bodyguards are not predators.
Or perhaps you were referring to my comment on the regulatory framework that I feel should govern how escort agencies operate? I don’t see what’s the problem with instituting regulations that enable workers to hold their employers accountable and provide them basic workplace security. Most businesses in this country function under some sort of regulatory framework. I don’t see why we can’t offer the same safeguards to sex-workers that work in agencies.
I am far from naive about how laws are used against women in this country. Again, my comments above reflect that when I point to the legislative system as systematically putting women in prison while the proportion of men convicted under the same provisions – and the length of their sentences – shies in comparison. They also reflect that when I say that the bawdy house and communication laws indeed, need to be taken off the books. They reflect that when I say government has no business legislating on issues related to women’s bodies or the moral appropriateness of their occupations. Finally, they reflect that when I say I’ve experienced it myself.
No, I haven’t read the “back-log” – I landed here after following a Twitter link. It may be a little unjust to expect people to do a full background check on you in order to be taken seriously when we respond to a text you’ve made publicly available.
The tone of your last response is fine. I’m quite used to it. I’m called an anti-feminist by abolitionists, and an abolitionist by the opposing camp. There’s no room for a middle ground, which is pretty much the state of all things of Politics.
Women can continue warring against each other forever; I hardly care anymore. When a woman with academic credentials and extensive on-the-field experience is told to “go read up on history”, I tune out. Did I mention I was myself an escort agency owner? For four years. You might know what you’re talking about with respect to your experience. I certainly know what I’m talking about with respect to mine and that sector of the sex-trade.
Finally, if history lessons are needed here, may I suggest Feminism 101 rather than the War on Drugs?
Good luck with your fight.
[…] McNeill, “The Face of Trafficking”, The Honest Courtesan, […]
[…] is much rarer than ‘trafficking’ fetishists pretend it is,” insists Reason contributor and former call girl Maggie McNeill. “The term ‘trafficking’ […]