trafficking

I have copied-and-pasted a lot of the material below, from various sites. I haven't given many references for it but you can always Google phrases or sentences to get to the original. This page may be a bit bitty or incoherent and needs rewriting. Because the information is from different sources there may be minor inconsistencies, but there is much valuable information about trafficking here.


Trafficking does not necessarily involve coercion, deception, illegal migration or prostitution. Most trafficked people are not involved in prostitution but in other things like domestic work or work in a factory.

Trafficking is an issue that was promoted by Protestant Evangelicals. Their cause was given a huge boost, both in terms of publicity and funding, by George W Bush, at the expense of funding for groups fighting AIDS, combating poverty, and promoting women's autonomy. This was in 2003, the year that the Iraq invasion was launched. One of the biggest beneficiaries of these faith-based initiatives, receiving tens of millions of dollars, is the International Justice Mission, a militant evangelical outfit that employs hundreds of Christian lawyers and moral cops, and participates in vigilante raids on brothels.

In 2000 US Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and became a top Bush administration priority.

In October 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a victim.

The measure toughened penalties against traffickers, provided extensive services for victims and committed the United States to a leading role internationally, requiring the State Department to rank countries and impose sanctions if their anti-trafficking efforts fell short.

During the Clinton administration there was concern about prostitution and pornography, but only really in terms of international trafficking and child pornography. It was in 2001 at the beginning of the Bush administration that all prostitution and pornography came under attack. Bush was influenced by Evangelical Christians such as Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham.

In late 2000 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) came in.

In 2001, the State Department created a new unit, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

In 2001, President George W Bush established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which gave religious organizations new access to federal funds for causes including anti-trafficking work. Anti-trafficking initiatives also became government policy.

In 2002, President Bush signed a Presidential Directive on trafficking that defines prostitution as “inherently harmful and dehumanizing”.

In 2003 the Bush administration passed a Global AIDS bill that prohibits international agencies from receiving funds unless they explicitly sign an oath that they do not support or condone prostitution in its many manifestations and that no funds will be going toward harm prevention among sex workers.

In a 2003 speech at the United Nations he declared, “Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others.”

In 2005, the Justice Department launched a new crackdown on adult pornography and obscenity. The stated objective of the 2005 End Demand for Sex Trafficking bill was to “combat commercial sexual activities” in general.


Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey brought together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist.


In 1978 Laura Lederer helped to organise an anti-pornography conference attended by Andrea Dworkin and Kathleen Barry. In the late 1990s she opposed a bill by Senator Paul Wellstone which was meant to deal with forced labour. The reason she opposed it was because it dealt with forced labour in all it's forms whether it was in factories or on farms or in brothels.

Instead she supported Republican Congressman Chris Smith's alternative bill because a "focus on a range of labor issues would distract from combating sex slavery". She wasn't interested in combating forced labour in all it's forms, only 'sex slavery'. She thought that all prostitution is sex slavery: she did not distinguish between voluntary and forced prostitution. In this she was helped by the International Justice Mission, which is a right-wing Evangelical group.

She helped bring feminist groups such as Equality Now together with Christian groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals and The Salvation Army. This coalition helped bring about the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). This was in late 2000 at the end of the Clinton administration and it was used by the Bush administration to try to stop prostitution wherever in the world they found it. Laura Lederer has now become an Evangelical Christian, according to this site: what her opinions about abortion are now I have no idea.


30% of the funding for one of Melissa Farley's studies came from the State Department.


More than 70,000 women were denied the opportunity to earn a decent wage because of rules created and enforced by the United States, according to professor Rhacel Parreñas.

The sociologist testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about sex trafficking on April 13 2012.

The United States declared that Filipino hostesses who work in Japan are victims of human trafficking. According to the government, the women had been coerced through fraud to be prostitutes. To protect the women, U.S. officials pressured Japan to deny their visas.

The impact was immense as Filipina hostesses, who totaled nearly 80,000 in 2004, now number about 8,000. According to Parreñas, the women were not prostitutes or victims of human trafficking. See here. It seems that Bush appointee to State Department trafficking office John R Miller had a hand in this.


In India a local NGO called Sangram criticised a different NGO called Restore International because they had captured and held women against their will. This was due to a brothel raid. The US revoked funding for Sangram.

Sangram set up a sex worker collective called VAMP. VAMP helped with HIV prevention. A Christian organisation called the Indian Rescue Mission raided a brothel and 'rescued' an adult woman. The police dragged women out of the brothel by their hair. IRM lied and said on their site that she was a minor, using a photo of a crying girl about 4 or 5 years old. The adult woman was imprisoned for several months. Nobody from VAMP was allowed to visit her.

The rise in influence of the neo-abolitionists and the existence of the APLO (Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath) brought VAMP under the scrutiny of the US government for providing sex worker services. Despite the simultaneous accolades, Sangram was publicly accused of trafficking women and girls. VAMP also became the target of a locally operated and internationally funded raid and rescue industry set out to quell the political mobilisation of sex workers in Sangli (Maharastra).

Kathleen Barry is said to have been an influential feminist author on the subject of trafficking. She wrote Female Sexual Slavery published in 1979. I asked for a copy of this book at Liverpool Central Library and I was told that it has been withdrawn. So it looks as if nobody reads it these days.

I've looked at the first few pages on google books and she writes about the maisons d'abattage which were brothels in Paris where the women might have over a hundred customers per night. There was coercion going on in these places. She writes that she saw one when she went to Paris, but brothels were outlawed in France in 1946. So either she saw something else or bans on brothels don't work.

Her political beliefs seem to be that a woman who works in a brothel is exploited in the same way as someone who works in a factory. A woman who has sex with a client is objectified in the same way that every woman is objectified when she has sex with a man. So unless you want factory work and all heterosexual sex banned then it wouldn't make much sense just to ban sex work. This is what people need to realize about Radical Feminists like Kathleen Barry, Sheila Jeffreys, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A MacKinnon.

Below is a quotation from Barry's book Female Sexual Slavery. It is clear that she doesn't think sex can be just for fun. If that's what she thinks then she is entitled to her opinion, but she doesn't have the right to tell other people what to do. Sex can be different things to different people. Many will agree with her, especially the religious right. It seems to me that Barry and people like her are disgusted by basic human sexuality and that is the real motivation for trying to stop prostitution: it's not because they care so much for sex workers.

"We are really going back to the values women have always attached to sexuality, values that have been robbed from us, distorted and destroyed as we have been colonized through both sexual violence and so-called sexual liberation. They are the values and needs that connect sex with warmth, affection, love, caring. . . . Sexual values and the positive, constructive experience of sex must be based in intimacy. . . . Sexual intimacy precludes the proposition that sex is the right of anyone and asserts instead that it must be earned through trust and sharing. It follows then that sex cannot be purchased, legally acquired, or seized by force."

In 1991, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an abolitionist group that Kathleen Barry founded, took its case of 'prostitution as slavery' to the United Nations. 'To be a prostitute was to be unconditionally sexually available to any male who bought the right to use a woman's body in whatever manner he chose,' CATW told the working group on contemporary forms of slavery. This unconditional availability and the man's right to do whatever he wanted was tantamount to ownership and slavery.

They didn't get anywhere. Sex workers choose their clients. They can and do deny their services to any man they choose. They tell the man what they will accept and what they won't. If a man wants anal sex without a condom he won't get it. There are no 'survivors' who say that he will. In Rachel Moran's book, for example, she states that she didn't have anal sex once.

So the whole basis of Barry's argument is false. The whole basis of the Radical Feminist argument is false. They don't know what they are talking about. 


This page is very enlightening on the subject of trafficking. Between Victim and Agent: A Third-Way Feminist Account of Trafficking for Sex Work by Shelley Cavalieri. I'm not sure I believe what she says, or even understand all of it, but it gives some interesting background information.

In the introduction to this work she states the effects of a brothel raid in Cambodia and how they harm women. Elsewhere in this work she looks at feminist theories about prostitution.

I am aware that some people will say my approach to prostitution is a 'liberal' approach. They will say that I am ignoring the 'coercive force of societal oppression'. That means my views of consent are invalid and I lack an analysis of the cause of women's suffering.

I think the opposite is true. If a woman works for a pimp, I see the real reason for that. Why does a woman work for a pimp and not for herself? It's not because she has been forced by violence but because of the legal situation. If she works for herself she can be arrested for brothel keeping. If she is working for a pimp she is doing nothing illegal herself. This is especially important for a woman who has children: an arrest will mean separation from her children.

If she is working in unsafe conditions it is because if she tried working under different conditions she would be arrested. It is not regulation that can make women safe, it is letting them organize themselves so that no woman is alone in a flat with a customer.

When a sex worker dies the Radical Feminists and the Evangelical Christians call for sex work to be banned. Just as when a heroin addict dies they call for the war against drugs to be stepped up. But I can see the reason why heroin addicts die is because they can't buy heroin of consistent strength and can't judge how much to take. The reason why sex workers die in some countries is also because of restrictive laws upheld by social conservatives.

I don't believe that women are 'complicit' because they consent to sex work and therefore don't deserve help. I don't believe I am ignoring their abuses if they happen or her conditions. Just the opposite, I would give them all the rights that other workers should have. That includes letting them organize themselves and protect each other.

Abuse of sex workers has to include deportation, eviction and arrest. These happen in Nordic Model countries. It is the Radical Feminists who ignore the abuses perpetrated against women.

Their analysis is facile. All it says is that it's all down to the patriarchal society. Which is wrong because the men are just as impoverished. There are many causes of poverty: lack of education, capital, health care or family planning.

What do they do with this splendid analysis? They use it to restrict the options of women still further. If a woman can't consent to sex work then she can't consent to working in a garment factory either. Yet they want to send her back into the garment factory that she has tried to escape.

If a woman can't consent to sex work then she can't consent to sex either. That is what the political lesbians believe. So bring back the Magdalene Laundries. They've already got Ruhama in Nordic Model Ireland having sex workers referred to them by the police.

This is another document that gives lots of background information: Sex Wars Revisited: A Rhetorical Economy of Sex Industry Opposition by Alison Phipps.

Other documents that shed light on this issue are 'Running from the Rescuers' by Gretchen Soderlund, 'Strange Confluences', 'The Girl Next Door' by Gail M Deady and 'Beneath the master narrative' by Edward Shajdr.

Below are the full details of all these documents (all but one written by women)

Between Victim and Agent A Third-Way Feminist Account of Trafficking for Sex Work by Shelley Cavalieri
Sex Wars Revisited A Rhetorical Economy of Sex Industry Opposition by Alison Phipps
Running from the Rescuers New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition by Gretchen Soderlund
Strange Confluences Radical Feminism and Evangelical Christianity as Drivers of US Neo-abolitionism by Crystal A. Jackson, Jennifer J. Reed and Barbara G. Brents
The Girl Next Door A Comparative Approach to Prostitution Laws and Sex Trafficking Victim Identification Within the Prostitution Industry by Gail M Deady
Beneath the master narrative human trafficking, myths of sexual slavery and ethnographic realities by Edward Snajdr

Another important point I want to make is that feminism was originally anti-capitalist. It was Radical Feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys who took feminism away from anti-capitalism. Sheila Jeffreys, in a lecture titled 'The Need for Revolutionary Feminism', chided socialist feminists for failing to recognize that male violence, rather than capitalism, was the root of women’s oppression. Feminists who believe in decriminalisation today tend also to be anti-capitalists, such as Juno Mac, Molly Smith, Emily Kenway, Amia Srinivasan and Shon Faye.

I don't share their rejection of capitalism, but the point is that people who believe in decriminalisation are not always liberals who ignore the 'coercive force of societal oppression'. Neither do I share their demand for more open borders. There is also a tendency for these authors to state that women are forced to go into prostitution by poverty. There are two problems with that, first of all it's not true: the majority have choices about how to earn money. Secondly, most people aren't going to accept that just because someone has been forced to do something it should not be banned: in Victorian times children were forced to sweep chimneys but we banned it nonetheless.


This is an excellent analysis of the problem of global trafficking: Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusades Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition by Gretchen Soderlund. Below I have quoted an important paragraph.

"During the 1990s, sex worker rights groups promoting harm-reduction strategies were actively working in conjunction with AIDS/HIV outreach programs globally and domestically to deliver legal, medical, and other services to sex workers. Although the TVPA constituted a symbolic threat to groups working with sex workers, there were no provisions within the legislation itself that actively prohibited harm-reduction activities. This has not gone unnoticed by the Bush administration, which has since 2001 created new policies and legislation to stem the (very small) flow of federal funds that were channeled toward international sex worker advocacy. Its reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy (also known as the 2001 Global Gag Rule), which bans NGOs from receiving federal funding if they provide abortions, discuss abortions with their clients, or advocate changing a nation’s abortion laws, provided the template for two subsequent policies that have curtailed all funds to nonabolitionist groups that interface with sex workers."

Another great document on trafficking is Strange Confluences: Radical Feminism and Evangelical Christianity as Drivers of US Neo-abolitionism by Crystal A. Jackson, Jennifer J. Reed and Barbara G. Brents.


About 10 years ago the American State Department was pressuring the Cambodian government to take a stand against sex work or else lose aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The American State Department then upgraded Cambodia's compliance ranking. In Brazil it was a different story. The groups had been strong-armed by the US into signing loyalty oaths declaring their opposition to prostitution in order to keep their AIDS funds. Rather than sell out sex workers, the entire country of Brazil refused to sign the pledge and gave up $40 million.

America put pressure on the Cambodian government to suppress prostitution. They threatened not to give Cambodia millions of dollars in aid unless they did. In 2008 the Cambodian government implemented the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation. Sex workers were abducted and imprisoned without charge in large numbers. They were kept in appalling conditions, many denied medication. Beatings and rapes were common and some were killed by guards. America then upgraded Cambodia's compliance status (although they later downgraded it again).


An academic study by Thomas Steinfatt funded by USAID in 2003 - one of the few studies using statistical estimations based on actual counts - concluded the majority are over 18 years of age. Steinfatt estimates that of a sample of 20,829 female sex workers, 2,488 women and children are trafficked for sex work in Cambodia, or approximately 12 percent. This is similar to a 2006 study conducted by White, Sidedine, and Mealea amongst 250 brothel based sex workers (all female), which found that 14 percent were trafficked, whereas 86 percent chose sex work on their own.


The anti-trafficking law has had some positive aspects in seeking to criminalize specific acts in line with international standards, including forced sex work and other forms of forced labor. However, aspects of the law criminalizing sex work have had a more negative effect, facilitating police harassment, violence and extortion of bribes from sex workers, trafficked persons and children in sex work. Criminal provisions on 'soliciting' by adult sex workers, and an over-broad definition of 'procurement' to cover activities 'assisting or protecting the prostitution of others' as well as acts 'hindering the act of prevention, assistance or re-education' of sex workers risk criminalizing the legitimate exercise of fundamental rights, such as advocacy on the parts of sex workers or outreach activities.


It seems that American evangelicals have become embedded within the Cambodian police. For example, James McCabe is director of operations for the Child Protection Unit, a police operation. Agape International Missions works in partnership with the anti-human trafficking division of the national police. It is their stated aim to eliminate brothels in an area called Svay Pak. These evangelical charities have Cambodian children and teenagers under their care.

John McCabe pleaded guilty to stealing methamphetamine from a drug trafficker during a fake police operation and spent roughly two years in jail in Australia. I don't know if John McCabe is either American or an Evangelical.

The Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen, tried to get Agape International Missions removed from his country. He failed. He was angry that Agape International Missions told CNN that women had been selling their daughters into prostitution. CNN broadcast a report that said it was Cambodian women whereas they were ethnic Vietnamese.

If mothers in Cambodia had been selling their daughters into prostitution then Agape International Missions should be commended for exposing this exploitation. However, James McCabe said he had never seen a case of this, and Samleang Seila, country director of Action Pour Les Enfants, said his NGO had never confirmed such a case either.

So what's going on? Evangelicals such as Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, had enormous influence with the Bush administration. He has been described as George W Bush's personal pastor. That influence hasn't gone away. Franklin Graham has had controversial views about homosexuality and Islam. He doesn't believe that Moslems worship the same god as he does. He is a missionary. He's the equivalent of Jim Wells in the UK.


In 2007, police forces across Britain started a wide-scale investigation into sex trafficking. Called Pentameter Two it included brothel raids. It resulted in 5 convictions for trafficking. In operations Pentameter One and Two over 1300 locations were raided. 255 women were 'rescued'. 16 were deported, 36 returned home, 37 accepted victim support services and 166 disappeared.

According to Nick Davies: "The internal analysis of Pentameter Two reveals that after six months of raids across the UK, 11 women were finally 'made safe'".

Another take on Pentameter 2 (from AntiTraffickingReview_issue7): "The most spectacular instance of the UK’s repressive mode of control was the police-led, multi-agency anti-trafficking mission, Pentameter 2. Beginning in 2007, this mission coordinated 55 police forces and raided 822 premises across the UK and Republic of Ireland. But Pentameter 2, like the Cuddles raid, had a dismal result. The mission led to the conviction of 15 men and women for trafficking offences, including ten people convicted without evidence they coerced women into prostitution, and the five convicted of using force were all detected by investigations preceding Pentameter 2. In a Guardian expos , journalist Nick Davies revealed Pentameter 2’s outcome: ‘The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign’. Nonetheless, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith deemed the policing mission ‘a great success’."

Project Acumen was set up by ACPO. Of the 210 migrants interviewed none was kidnapped or held hostage. 202 of them knew they would be working as prostitutes when they came to Britain.

There are 3 articles which give more details
1. Nick Davies 2009 Guardian Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody Into Prostitution
2. Nick Davies 2009 Guardian Prostitution and trafficking - the anatomy of a moral panic
3. Jerry Markon 2007 Washington Post Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence


Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist championed by American advocates, including Nick Kristof, turned out to have fabricated significant elements of her heart-rending personal story.

"Mam was not orphaned and sold into the sex trade as a child, but instead lived with both her biological parents throughout high school, before sitting the teachers exam (privileges that many girls do not have in Cambodia due to gendered inequities in education).

The publicised trauma stories of Mam’s rescued ‘sex slaves’ were also allegedly untrue. Meas Ratha (from the 1998 French documentary) had apparently auditioned for the part and was chosen because she was the most convincing at performing misery. In exchange for the emotional performance, Ratha received education from Mam’s organisation. In 2012, Long Pros’ parents revealed that her eye was not savagely maimed by a brothel manager, but instead was the result of a non-malignant tumour that had developed when she was age seven." pdf html


There were negotiations in Vienna in 1998 to decide the UN Human Trafficking Protocol. On one side of the debate was the Human Rights Caucus (HRC) and on the other side was the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). The official definition of trafficking that resulted is that if a woman has not been coerced, deceived or manipulated then she has not been trafficked. In the words of Emily Kenway writing in her book The Truth About Modern Slavery:-

"the protocol says that consent is negated when particular methods are used to move and exploit someone, like fraud, deception, abuse of power or a position of vulnerability. If these things have been part of the process of someone moving and being exploited, then their consent to the situation is void. If, by contrast, those methods aren't present, then trafficking has not happened. The nature of sex work and how it relates to exploitation is left ambiguous by the following phrase in the protocol: 'exploitation shall include, at a minimum, exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation'. Six words there - exploitation of the prostitution of others - have unsurprisingly been construed in totally opposing ways by the two warring sides. To those fighting for sex workers' rights, they consider the phrase to mean practices that exploit those performing sex work, not the sex work itself; for those who believe that all sex work is fundamentally exploitative, it has been construed to mean the entire sex sector. This is despite the fact that official records on the protocol state that it should not be interpreted to mean that states are required to adopt legislation that makes sex work in entirety illegal."

According to Nick Davies "And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.

But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety."

The Palermo Protocol was a result of two years of negotiations at the UN Centre for International Crime Prevention in Vienna. The Protocol was the target of heavy lobbying by religious and feminist organizations, on the one hand, and human rights advocates, on the other hand. These two groups represented two opposing views of prostitution.


If a woman in Lithuania looks at the website of a brothel in London, she may decide to contact the brothel and ask if she can work there. She can get on a plane or a coach. That could be quite daunting especially if you don't speak English well so she may be met at the airport or coach station. Then taken to somewhere she can stay.

In these circumstances the brothel owner can be prosecuted for trafficking. It does not matter that nobody has been forced. It does not matter that the migrant has come legally. It is still trafficking.

As Project Acumen revealed, of 210 migrants interviewed none was kidnapped or held hostage. 202 of them knew they would be working as prostitutes when they came to Britain. The problem is that some people just can't believe that a woman working in a coffee shop could choose to start sex work. They think that women are groomed and bullied into it by pimps. If not that then it must be desperate poverty.

Of course it is related to economic circumstances, but the majority of women in Britain are not pimped or desperately poor. The choice seems to be stay in your home town and be unemployed, move to a city and work in a coffee shop or as a cleaner, or move to a city and become a sex worker. They work in a coffee shop or someone's home and then when they are fed up scrimping they try sex work.

Most women stay in their home towns. Some move to a big city and do menial work. In London that could be minimum-wage and zero hours. Some of these try sex work. Some stick with it. Now we have Universal Credit there are women who have to wait for benefits. Most women who start sex work can get the menial jobs but they don't want that, especially when you take childcare into account.

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