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Why did the Bible not object to slavery? (John Stott)
Sexual Gulags: Facing and fighting sex trafficking. (National Review Online, 060126)
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From Stott, John R.W. (1979): The message of Ephesians. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, pp.2554-259.
Slavery is against God’s laws. Its evil lies neither in the servitude it involves (for Jesus voluntarily made Himself a slave of other, Php 2:7; Jn 13:14-16, and so did His apostle Paul, 1Co 9:19; 2Co 4:5), nor even in the element of compulsion, but rather in the ownership by one human being of others which degrades them into subhuman goods to be used, exploited and traded, and in the cruelty which often accomanied this.
Why did the Bible not at least command slave-owners to emancipate their slaves?
[1] There is pragmatic reason. Christians were first an insignificant group in the Roman Empire. Their religion is still unlawful, and they were politically powerless. Besides, slavery was at that time an indispensable part of the fabric of the Roman society. In most cities, there were many times more slaves than free people. If slavery were to be abolished at a single stroke, the society would have been disintegrated. Even if Christians had liberated their slaves, they would have condemned most of them to unemployment and penury. G.B. Caird said, “Ancient society was economically as dependent on slavery as modern society is on machinery.”
[2] The possibility for a change of legal status out of slavery into liberty by way of manumission was constant and easy. According to Tenney Frank’s research, between 81 and 49 BC, 500,000 Roman slaves were freed. It became the common practice of the Romans to free their slaves and then establish them in a trade or profession. Many times the former slave became wealthier than his patron. This evidence helps to explain both Paul’s advice to Corinthian slaves, if they could gain their freedom, to seize the opportunity to do so, and his strong hint to Philemon that he should release Onesimus.
[3] By the time of the NT, the legal status of slaves was beginning to be eased and showed signs of further improvement to come. Steadily they were granted many of the legal rights enjoyed by free people, including the right to marry and have a family, and the right to own property. Rupprecht’s research shows that “In AD 20 a decree of the Senate specified that slave criminals were to be tried in the same way as free man.” Several emperors introducted liberalizing measures.
Despit all these reasons, we Christians cannot escape a sense of shame that slavery and the slave trade were tolerated for so long, especially later in the European colonies. And the best Christian minds recognized this. Calvin, for example, in the 16th century attributed slavery to original sin. He deduced it to be “a thing totally against all the order of nature” that human beings “fashioned after the image of God” should ever be “put to such reproach.”
While we cannot defend the indolence or cowardice of two further Christian centuries which saw this social evil but failed to eradicate it, we can at the same time rejoice that the gospel immediately began even in the 1st century to undermine the institution; it lit a fuse which at long last led to the explosion which destroyed it.
[Kwing Hung: The main crusaders against slavery are Christians and their reason for opposition is based on their Christianity.]
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Kathryn Jean Lopez
On September 2003, President George W. Bush started something of a sexual revolution.
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, the president, known more popularly by left-wing groups as the man who would “turn back the clock on women’s rights,” challenged his fellow leaders to crack down on the sex trade in their countries, promising to lead by example at home.
George W. Bush is waging a war on modern-day slavery with a winning plan for success, involving an essential ingredient: building coalitions. And what was once under most of our radars is now a fight that so many are now involved in that it’s impossible to give them all adequate credit for their work — which, in its way, is an excellent problem to have.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, investigations into trafficking “increased by more than 400 percent in the first six months of fiscal year 2005, compared to the total number of cases in fiscal year 2004.” Although keeping true numbers on these effusive crimes is next to impossible, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 14,500 and 17,500 people are being traded within the United States. Internationally, the estimate is between 600,000 and 800,000, mostly women and children. But nations plagued with sex trafficking, who’ve enabled sex trafficking, are changing in part because, according to Congressman Chris Smith (R., N.J.), “they know we mean business.”
On January 10, President Bush signed the bipartisan 2005 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, providing $361 million over the next two years to combat trafficking domestically. At the signing ceremony, the president noted, “Over the past four years, the Department of Homeland Security has taken new measures to protect children from sexual predators, as well as pornography and prostitution rings. The Department of Health and Human Services has partnered with faith-based and community organizations to form anti-trafficking coalitions in 17 major cities across our country.”
The bill renewed 2000 legislation that made human trafficking a federal crime. It was authored by Congressman Smith, who was already a veteran of the fight, having participated in the rescue of Ukrainian girls in bondage in Montenegro — long before trafficking was on most people’s radars. Closer to home, he sees the fruits of his labor: In Smith’s own New Jersey this November, one Xochil Nectalina Rosales Martinez, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from her role in running a trafficking ring that smuggled Honduran women — some younger than 21 — into the United States to be forced to work at Union City bars.
Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Rhode Island, has been an activist on the issue for some 17 years. She describes the sea change over the last decade: For a while there, during the Clinton administration, she says, her fellow feminists were more interested in “sex worker’s rights” than victims’ suffering, and won government support for their approach. And there was little prominent outrage. Hughes remembers, “During the late 1990s, all the media stories were about how empowering prostitution was, how much money the women made, how pimps were disappearing and the women were independent businesswomen, how women in India were forming unions and collectives to fight for their rights as sex workers, etc.” But, now, she notes, “the media stories more often tell horror stories of how women and girls are beaten, raped and enslaved. On the surface that may sound more depressing, but to me it is much better because it’s the truth.” The awareness — in Washington and in the press — has meant, she says, that “the truth about prostitution/sex trafficking is emerging and agencies are responding in a way that never have previously. “
Of course, we have only begun to fight. The State Department’s 2005 status report — which works on an effective tier system and promises sanctions against countries who don’t fix their problem (ten of the worst-off countries immediately jumped to action), notes “the involvement of police and immigration officials in trafficking seriously hobbled efforts to free victims of their misery and prosecute those responsible for modern-day slavery. Too many law enforcement operations were unsuccessful as brothel-keepers, sweatshop owners, or traffickers were tipped off by corrupt officials.” Human trafficking is an evil web that ensnares too many, with too many enablers.
But abroad and at home, folks are at work, educating, investigating, enforcing, and healing. This is a fight the United States is in to win because it is quintessentially what we’re about as a nation. As one slave in North Korea wrote to a rescuer-pastor in South Korea: “I want to live like a human being for one day. I am a human being. How can I be sold like this? I need freedom.”
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Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez
Earlier this month, in preparation for a syndicated column I was about to work on the worldwide sex-trade, I e-mailed Lisa I. Thompson, “Liaison for the Abolition of Sexual Trafficking” at the Salvation Army’s national headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, posing a few questions to her about her work and the battle she’s fighting for innocent victims of our modern-day slavery. She came back with detailed answers packed with information about the Salvation Army — including its 19th century fight against sex trafficking — and this modern-day fight. I had to share what she had to say; my correspondence with Thompson follows. — Kathryn Jean Lopez
Lopez: Why is the Salvation Army in this fight against the sex trade?
Lisa I. Thompson: To understand why the Salvation Army is so deeply committed to the modern-day fight against sexual trafficking, it’s necessary to understand our organization’s roots and early history. The Salvation Army was founded in London, England, in 1865 by William and Catherine Booth, revolutionaries in their time. They went against every Victorian convention and took their ministry to the dirty and dangerous streets of London’s east side where they reached out to the destitute and desperate.
To some people it will likely be surprising to learn that in the late 1800s there was considerable sexual trafficking of women and girls in the U.K. (as well as Europe). Under the leadership of Josephine Butler, an evangelical Christian, a movement on behalf of these women and girls took shape. Following on the heels of the successful movement for the abolition of the African slave trade in the British empire, Butler ignited another abolitionist campaign: This one for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, legislation which had legalized prostitution in several garrison towns of England in the 1860s. Her campaign to end the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls eventually spread throughout Europe, where several countries had adopted various forms of regulated prostitution, and where traffic in women and girls flourished.
Like the Booth’s, Butler was also a revolutionary. She upset the social norms of her time when she dared to speak publicly before men, which simply was not done in her day, and then added insult to injury, when she spoke on the scandalous subject of prostitution. It was 1886 before she saw the Contagious Disease Acts repealed, and there were many more years of struggle ahead on behalf of women in Europe and India.
It was during the 1880s that the Salvation Army joined Butler in her movement to rescue and restore “fallen women” — the Victorian-era euphemism for women in prostitution (who were more often pushed over the precipice of virtue rather than fallen!). The efforts began in 1881 with the opening of a home for women seeking to escape street life. A similar home soon followed.
However, the Salvation Army’s efforts to help women and girls in prostitution did not stop there. In one of the most fascinating chapters its history, the Salvation Army participated in the execution of an undercover investigation into the trafficking of young girls for prostitution — a detailed account of which was published in July 1885 by the Pall Mall Gazette in a series of articles called, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” At the heart of the series was the report of how W. T. Stead, Pall Mall Gazette editor, arranged for the purchase of a young girl, Elizabeth Armstrong, from her mother, with the mother’s knowledge that the girl would ostensibly meet with an illicit and immoral fate. To say that the series created a national sensation is an understatement. The circulation of the Pall Mall Gazette rose from twelve thousand to over a million and there was near rioting in the streets as people fought to obtain copies of the paper.
In the months that followed, the fervor created by “The Maiden Tribute” series helped foment public opinion in support of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, a measure which when passed in August 1885, raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 (although reformers sought 18). The Salvation Army’s advocacy efforts were a major catalyst in the bill’s passage. In addition, to speaking to large crowds of people on the topic of protection of young girls, Catherine and William Booth, wrote a petition to the House of Commons in support of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which in the course of 17 days received 393,000 signatures!
On the heels of this great victory, the crusaders received a blow, when in September 1885, many of those involved in the “purchase” of Elizabeth Armstrong, including W. T. Stead, Bramwell Booth (one of the Booth’s adult children), and Rebecca Jarrett (a Salvation Army convert who procured the girl), were pressed with criminal charges irrespective of their motives in the case. William Booth expressed his consternation this way: “. . . it seems to me more like complaining of the dogs that bark in order to show the enemy is there rather than of the wolves that bite!” Bramwell was acquitted, while Stead received a three month sentence and Jarrett a six month term.
Nevertheless, the Salvation Army’s efforts on behalf of those caught up in prostitution expanded. William Booth conceived of a “New National Scheme for the Deliverance of Unprotected Girls and the Rescue of the Fallen.” Of his scheme he held high hopes, saying, “If it can be matured and got into operation on the scale here described, I believe it will constitute one of the most effective onslaughts on one of the blackest strongholds of the devil, and be a means of rescuing tens of thousands of the most despairing and wretched victims of his fiendish designs.”
Among the plan’s elements were:
The establishment of a central office of help and inquiry in London, which was to be a place of refuge and escape to the vulnerable and the exploited alike, and to which parents and others could make inquiries regarding those feared “gone astray.”
The immediate and extensive establishment of homes of refuge for those “actually fallen.”
The Salvation Army also formed Midnight Rescue Brigades for “Cellar, Gutter, and Garret” work, sending its “brigades” at night to the back allies and attics in which they might find women and girls longing for another life. Commenting on this work, Catherine Booth said, “I felt as though I must go and walk the streets and besiege the dens where these hellish iniquities are going on. To keep quiet seemed like being a traitor to humanity.” And besiege they did. In 30 years time, the number of the Salvation Army rescue homes grew from one in Whitechapel to 117 homes in Great Britain and around the world.
In the 21st century, the Salvation Army finds history repeating itself. Once again we are fully engaged in the fight against sexual trafficking. To do anything less we risk becoming traitors to humanity and of our heritage.
Lopez: What is the most significant challenge facing the U.S. in 2006 on this front?
Thompson: Two months ago I would have said that passing legislation with measures to provide assistance to U.S. citizen victims of intra-country sexual trafficking, as well as to combat U.S. demand for commercial sex were our biggest challenges. The good news is that the Title II provisions of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2005 (TVPRA 05), which the president signed into law earlier this month, enact measures designed to address both these issues. Specifically, the law allows the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop and expand social-service programs to assist U.S. citizen victims (as well as alien victims) of sexual trafficking that occurs, in whole or in part, within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. Additionally, TVPRA 05 will allow the U.S. Department of Justice to make grants to states and local law-enforcement agencies to establish, develop, or expand programs that investigate and prosecute persons who engage in the purchase of commercial sex acts, and to educate persons charged with, or convicted of, purchasing or attempting to purchase commercial sex acts.
With these aspects of the new law in place we have taken new ground in the fight for the abolition of sexual trafficking. Why? First, because U.S. citizen victims of intra-country sex trafficking were the orphans of the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA 00), and second, because curbing demand for commercial sex is essential to ending sexual trafficking.
The social-service programs that were developed to provide assistance to victims of sexual trafficking (as well as labor trafficking) following passage of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act have emphasized aid to foreign nationals rather than U.S. citizen victims. Aid to U.S. citizen victims was not explicitly prohibited, but the argument was that U.S. citizen victims should be able to access assistance through existing social service providers. If only this were true. Yes, there are a few social-service providers that do heroic work with U.S. citizen victims, but generally such services are provided on an ad hoc and piecemeal basis with little to no federal funding, and the number of organizations providing such services is small contrasted with the need across the entire country.
Compounding the problem, U.S. citizen victims generally weren’t viewed as victims. Sure, with a little training the average law-enforcement official or prosecutor will begin to realize that foreign women in prostitution could very likely be trafficking victims, but it takes a lot more training and understanding for most law enforcement officials, city officials, prosecutors, and the general public to recognize that U.S. citizens in prostitution can be, and frequently are, victims of sexual trafficking.
Some readers may think that prostitution is irrelevant to the issue of sexual trafficking out of the perception that sexual trafficking and prostitution are two separate things. But keep in mind that all prostitution of persons under the age 18 is ipso facto sexual trafficking, and that the vast majority of adult women in prostitution in any given country experience levels of physical and psychological coercion, abuse, and torture that plainly classify them as victims of sexual trafficking. The problem for most people is that they fail to recognize signs of coercion and abuse, and fail to take into consideration factors such as traumatic bonding, the survival strategies employed by persons abused in prostitution, as well as the fact that many children abused in prostitution eventually age to become adults in prostitution.
Indeed prostitution and sexual trafficking are symbiotically related. If a person is sexually trafficked they are exploited in one or more forms of commercial sexual exploitation such as prostitution, pornography, and nude dancing. The fact people are trafficked for use in a particular industry clearly links the phenomenon with that industry, which in this case, is the “sex industry.” So then, the degree to which prostitution as an institution is accepted, normalized, and allowed to flourish in a community, is the degree to which sexual trafficking will also thrive.
Lopez: Prostitution I’ve seen across from National Review’s offices here in Manhattan, we all know it exists and that it’s not exactly Julie Roberts falling for Richard Gere at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. But is there really a big market out there to sustain this awful, widespread trafficking?
Thompson: [You ask about] demand. Most efforts to combat sexual trafficking in the U.S. and abroad have applied “supply-side” approaches. In other words, their emphasis has been on reaching those who have been, or who are at-risk of, being sexually trafficked — especially those living in source countries for trafficked persons. Such efforts have included much-needed activities such as awareness raising campaigns among populations of vulnerable women and girls; anti-poverty, literacy, and micro-finance programs conducted in source countries; identification and rescue of trafficked women and girls from places such as brothels; legislative initiatives that provide protections, like special visas, for those rescued from sexual trafficking; as well as, the development of social services to help survivors of sexual trafficking restore their lives. Such approaches are essential and important. Yet there has been a conspicuous absence of initiatives or programs which address the other side of the equation — demand for commercial sex.
Those who demand bodies to consume in commercial sex fuel the need for a supply of those bodies. Traffickers are simply supplying women and children through acts like recruiting, procuring, transporting, and the selling of persons to meet that demand. Fortunately for the sex trafficker, there is a global marketplace made up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of brothels, bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, escort services, and street corners where men purchase people for use in sex acts. This is the demand. Most people casually refer to this marketplace, its consumers, “business owners,” “employees,” and “suppliers,” in total as the commercial-sex industry. I call it the Sexual Gulag.
Here are a just few Sexual Gulag highlights:
In Japan, where prostitution is not legal, but widely tolerated, the sex industry is estimated to make [the equivalent of $83 billion in U.S. dollars]. There are an estimated 150,000 foreign women in the sex industry. Many of them are known to be trafficked from the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Russia, and Latin America each year.
Prostitution in the Philippines is a de facto legal industry that is now the fourth-largest source of gross national product (GNP) for the country. Estimates vary but the likelihood is that there are nearly half a million persons in prostitution in the country and an estimated 100,000 of them are children. Three hundred thousand sex tourists from Japan alone are believed to visit the Philippines every year.
More than 2.3 million girls and women are believed to make up India’s sex industry. The U.N. reports that an estimated 40 percent are below 18 years of age. In 2004, it was reported that transactions in prostitution are worth [the equivalent of $4.1 million in U.S. dollars) a day; [$8.5 billion in U.S. dollars] per year.
A 1998 study by the International Labor Organization on the sex industries of four Asian countries, reported that Indonesia’s sex industry was as much as 2.4 percent (US $3.3 billion) of the gross domestic product and as much as 14 percent (US $27 billion) of Thailand’s gross domestic product. The report stated, “The stark reality is that the sex sector is a big business that is well entrenched in the national economies and the international economy,’ with highly organized structures and linkages to other types of legitimate economic activity.”
Considering that all those billions of dollars ultimately represent untold numbers of discreet sex acts bought and paid for by purchasers, it is obvious that even the most unskilled and inept of sex traffickers will have little difficulty selling his “product” in light of such overwhelming global demand for human flesh (and so many venues for its sale).
Lopez: But what about the demand here at home?
Thompson: At present there is precious little statistical information about the scale of America’s commercial-sex industry. What we do know from survivor stories, the work of advocacy groups across the country, and the growing number of federal investigations into organized sex rings, suggests that prostitution is rampant. Anyone not persuaded about seriousness of the problem in the U.S. need only read the recent series of articles from the Toledo Blade. Reportedly, just last month federal investigators charged 31 men and women with transporting girls across state lines as sex slaves as part of a sex ring that rotated Toledo teens through truck stops and rest areas in Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, California, Florida, Louisiana, and other states. Some federal investigators purportedly consider Toledo, Ohio, as the U.S.’s number one center for the recruitment and grooming of girls for prostitution. And while Toledo may be the recruitment hot spot, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, functioned as the ring’s distribution center. The city, where five major highways meet, delivered an unending supply of paying customers. Last fall U.S. News and World Report also carried a story exposing the dark and brutal reality of life as a prostituted youth. Additionally, the story reported on the Innocence Lost” initiative, a campaign launched by the FBI dedicating 40 agents to task forces in 14 cities with the highest incidence of prostituted youth. Since the campaign’s inception, almost 40 federal indictments against accused sex traffickers and pimps have been obtained. This is excellent. Still I can’t help but marvel at all the emphasis on the “suppliers” versus the “paying customers” who clearly make organized commercial sex so profitable for the pimps. Surely johns are also culpable. But so far there are few major law enforcement initiatives aimed at targeting demand (albeit some communities are beginning to take this approach such as Oakland, Ca.).
The recent passage of the Title II provisions of TVPRA 05 at last provides the necessary catalyst to spur the development and expansion of programs to investigate, prosecute and educate persons charged with, or convicted of, purchasing or attempting to purchase commercial sex acts.
Lopez: What’s next on your action-item list for D.C.?
Thompson: Now our biggest challenge is to see that Congress appropriates the necessary funds to carry out the activities outlined in Title II. This will require a Herculean effort on the part of advocates, concerned citizens, and members of Congress dedicated to fighting sexual trafficking. The TVPRA 05 passed so late in the year that the Title II provisions were not incorporated in the federal government’s budget for 2006, and we are against a tight timeline for incorporating Title II funding into the federal budget for 2007. Concerned readers should call their U.S. representatives and senators asking them to vigorously seek and support federal appropriations for Title II of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2005.
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Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez
Donna M. Hughes, an occasional contributor to National Review Online, is a women’s-studies professor who speaks out about issues that you’d think her fellow feminists would, but too often don’t. For 17 years she’s worked at studying and fighting sex trafficking and, like her fellow advocates, has found a powerful ally in our current president. NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez recently talked to Hughes about the recent sex-trafficking reauthorization bill that the president signed and the wider fight against this modern-day slavery, foreign and domestic.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: When people hear about sex trafficking, they think Thailand, not, say, New Jersey. How much of a problem is sex slavery domestically?
Donna Hughes:We have a serious problem of 1) foreign women and girls being trafficked into the U.S. and 2) U.S. citizen women and girls being trafficked by U.S. citizen pimps. We don’t really know how many victims there are because no one has counted or directed resources to surveying the problem. Most of what people see as prostitution is actually trafficking because it involves force, fraud, and coercion or underage girls. Pimps are vicious, violent criminals who tightly and brutally control their victims to the point they are enslaved. And most prostitution is pimp controlled. The independent call-girl/hooker is mostly a myth. You can get a rough idea of how much sex trafficking — foreign and domestic — is in your community by looking at the advertisements for massage parlors and other fronts for prostitution. These places are full of trafficking victims.
Lopez: How important is the sex-trafficking law that the president signed earlier this month? What will it do that is most important?
Hughes: The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) passed was passed unanimously by the House and Senate. President Bush signed it into law on January 10.
Title I — Combating International Trafficking in Persons — is important. I’ll focus on just one provision that abolition activists have been advocating for several years, that foreign countries should be evaluated in the annual State Department Trafficking in Persons Report on whether they tolerate prostitution and sex industries that create a demand for foreign and domestic victims. Now a minimum standard for the elimination of trafficking will include “measures to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts and for participation in international sex tourism by nationals of the country.” This will begin to hold countries accountable for tolerating a sex trade that is populated by vulnerable women and girls trafficked from abroad and allowing its citizens to go abroad and sexually exploit children.
Title II — Combating Domestic Trafficking in Persons — is ground breaking. Title II started out as the “End Demand for Sex Trafficking Act” (HR 2012-S 937). It addresses the victimization of U.S. citizen women and girls by pimps in the U.S. It is a funding bill that provides incentives to local and state agencies to enforce existing laws against pimps and “johns,” the men who purchase sex acts. These perpetrators make up what is referred to as “the demand.” ‘Johns” create a demand for victims of sex trafficking by seeking out and purchasing sex acts, and pimps or domestic traffickers create a demand for victims by making enormous illegal profits from coercing victims into performing sex acts. In most cities, pimps make up less than one percent of all prostitution-related arrests. The low arrest rate creates a favorable climate in which pimps recruit victims and profit from their victimization. Consider the amount of money a pimp is making if he controls just two or three girls and forces them through beatings to make $500 to $800 a night — every night.
Title II provides funding for services for women and girls to assist them to get out of prostitution. We know from research that 90 percent of women in prostitution say they want out, but there are limited services available and often little sympathy for victims trapped in the sex trade. For too long prostitution has been a low priority or considered a victimless crime. At most, it was viewed as a nuisance crime. Officials ignored the damage that pimps and traffickers were doing to individual women and girls and to the whole community by allowing the illegal sex industry to operate openly. Pimps felt so confident, they held public celebrations, called Players’ Balls, at which they gave out Pimp of the Year Awards. Over the last decade an entire culture has emerged that glamorizes the brutality of pimps. Rap musicians and media glamorized pimping and clubs held Pimp and Ho parties, where young couples dressed up and pretended to be pimps and prostitutes. Even the mainstream media ran stories of the new independent women who made money by selling sex.
Title II authorizes surveys of sex trafficking and the illegal sex industry in the U.S. To date, no such comprehensive studies have been done. I did a study of sex trafficking in the U.S. in 2000. It was one of the first research studies to address this problem, yet considering the scope of the problem, woefully inadequate. Title II also directs the Justice Department to hold conferences to address domestic sex trafficking. These surveys and conferences will expose the reality of this destructive criminal culture and lay a factual foundation on which to develop law-enforcement and social-service responses.
Lopez: You were at the signing ceremony, right?
Hughes: Yes.
Lopez: Was there any one woman, one child you were thinking about as you watched the ceremony?
Hughes: Well, not just one. There are many victims/survivors I know who never had anyone see them as real people deserving of dignity and justice.
Here’s an excerpt from the congressional testimony of Tina Frundt. Tina was very active in our coalition meetings and helped educate many of us about what really happens to girls on the streets in the U.S.
When I was 14, I ran away from home to be with a wonderful guy I met that was in his mid-20s. We had a great plan about us living together, making money together, and becoming rich. I thought this was everything I had always wanted, until he told me that if I loved him, I would help make money for us. By the time I thought I was in love with him, he had given me too much to go back home. I was then introduced to the other women that he was pimping, who I hadn’t known about before. That’s what happens with pimps — at first, [it’s] just you and them, but then there were four of us.
We went to Cleveland, OH, and he immediately said that I was going to go out with the 3 other women, so they could show me how to make money for us, for all of us together, as if we were like a family. Later on that evening, his friends that he knew came by the motel. At first he told me to have sex with one of them, and I didn’t want to, so his friends raped me. Afterwards, he said that wouldn’t have happened if I would have just listened to him at first. So I took it as my fault. Instead of being angry at him for being raped, I was angry at myself for not listening to him in the first place. Right after that is when he picked my clothes out, told me what to wear, and forced me to go out on the streets.
When I first went out into the streets, and I had to meet my first John, I felt like this was something I didn’t want to do. I walked around the streets back and forth for hours, hiding, until the morning. Our quota was $500 but I had only made $50 that night to give back to the pimp. So he beat me in front of the other girls and made me go outside until I had made the money. ... Not only was I shocked, I was scared. What would happen to me if I did try to leave, and who would believe me if I told them that this was going on? So I worked from 6am until 10pm that next night, without eating or sleeping. I came back with the $500, but in his mind, I still hadn’t learned my lesson. So I had to go back outside until 5AM the next morning. After the second day, he finally bought me something to eat, but as a punishment to never to do it again he locked me in the closet to sleep.
Tina is now a healthy, strong mother and professional who works as the street-outreach coordinator for the Polaris Project in Washington, D.C. In my experience, this is a typical story of how girls get recruited and then brutalized in prostitution in the U.S. Most people don’t understand the experiences of victims and too many people treat them as throwaway girls. That changed significantly when President Bush signed the TVPRA.
In the 1990s, women’s groups in Portland and San Francisco started educational-diversion programs — “john schools” — for men arrested for soliciting a prostitute. The goal was to educate men about the harm they were doing to women and girls and the risks to themselves when they engaged in illegal activity. Norma Hotaling of the Sage Project’s “john school” said that only when men’s “demand” for victims was countered would the number of victims decrease. Her “john school” project has become a model and is replicated around the country and even around the world. Title II will encourage other communities to set up programs to investigate and prosecute purchasers of sex acts. In November 2000, I wrote and presented the World Lecture on Sexual Exploitation at the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Valencia, Spain. Entitled “Men create the demand; women are the supply”; it was a new theoretical formulation of the dynamics of sex trafficking. Up to this point, discussion of the causes of trafficking focused on the conditions of the countries from which women were recruited. Activists and scholars concluded that poverty, inequality, and unemployment were the root causes of trafficking, and therefore only global economic adjustment would end the trafficking of women. This is what I called a “supply-side” analysis, meaning the conditions that make it easy for traffickers to recruit victims were to blame. Certainly, poverty contributes to the problem of trafficking, but many of us pointed out that traffickers are criminals who prey on the vulnerable and a more ready solution was to arrest and prosecute criminals and provide services to victims. Then in November 2002, I gave a talk at a contentious anti-trafficking conference at the University of Hawaii entitled “The Demand: The Driving Force of Sex Trafficking.”
The terms in which trafficking was discussed and the analysis of causes and solutions shifted away from purely economic causes to a focus on criminal activity and how that could be stopped in destination countries. In October 2003, at the United Nations, President Bush called upon world leaders to come to the assistance of victims of the sex trade, who suffered because of a “special evil.” He addressed the demand for victims, by saying, “Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others.”
At the signing ceremony earlier this month, President Bush specifically mentioned “the demand” in his speech — and received a round of applause when he condemned it. To have a law that addresses the demand for victims and have the president address it is a fulfillment of the goals of my work.
By the way, Kathryn, I should mention that National Review Online played an important role in shifting the focus of the trafficking and prostitution debates. In October 2002, NRO published my article entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” which exposed the agenda of some of the liberal feminist, leftist anti-trafficking activists. They were using the anti-trafficking debate to advance their efforts to legalize prostitution. They claimed that prostitution was an important economic option for women in poverty, and advancing the rights of “sex workers” was the way to combat the trafficking of women. Over the next few years, NRO published important pieces that tracked the anti-trafficking debate and exposed the pro-prostitution groups’ efforts to use the anti-trafficking movement for their own goals.
The TVPRA, especially Title II, will have a tremendous impact on the illegal sex trade in the U.S., and it will have a ripple effect internationally. Ambassador John Miller, director of the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Office, will be able to point to the U.S. as example to encourage other countries to crackdown on their domestic sex industries by arresting pimps and providing services to victims.
Lopez: How are we making a difference internationally?
Hughes: The annual State Department Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report) is having a huge impact. The report evaluates each country for its efforts to comply with a minimum standard to combat trafficking. Backed up with the threat of sanctions, Ambassador Miller is able to engage other governments and get a response from them. Many anti-trafficking initiatives, including arrests and prosecutions of traffickers, have resulted from the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000 and the TIP reports. Progress has been uneven, but it has made a tremendous difference. At President Bush’s direction, federal agencies have made combating trafficking a priority. Every agency has had a response. USAID and the State Department have altered their pattern of funding. At President Bush’s and Congress’s direction, groups that support the legalization of prostitution are no longer eligible for funding. (Funding for groups that worked to “empower” victims of trafficking rather than rescue them, and supported unionizing prostitutes as the solution to trafficking started under the Clinton administration). Now, there is an emphasis on funding groups that help women and girls get out of prostitution.
Lopez: How important has the president been in this fight?
Hughes: President Bush has been the crucial factor. He has created a political climate in which all of us, from local activists to high-ranking political appointees, could do this work. Mainstream feminists like to say he’s anti-woman, but by supporting the abolitionist work against the global sex trade, he has done more for women and girls than any one other president I can think of. And he seems to have done it because it’s the right thing to do, not because of pressure or favoritism. The new law and policy will literally initiate change for millions of women and girls around the world. Years from now, when the anti-Bush hysteria has died away, I believe he will be recognized as a true advocate for women’s freedom and human rights.
The mainstream media has ignored this story. Most of the coverage has come from the conservative press as a result of faith-based groups’ involvement in coalition efforts to support the new law and policy. I believe it is a result of the liberal media dislike of the Bush administration and the lack of mainstream feminist groups’ acknowledgement of Bush’s efforts to fight sex trafficking. Most mainstream journalists don’t search out the facts, and instead accept the stereotypes and anti-Bush propaganda. When I speak favorably of what the Bush administration has done to support the anti-trafficking movement, people are often shocked because it isn’t consistent with their view of President Bush or the Bush administration. Hopefully, history will set the record straight.
Lopez: Who have been some of the other key figures?
Hughes: Laura Lederer, senior adviser in the State Department’s global-affairs office had a key role in drafting the national-security directive that President Bush issued in 2002. The directive laid out the U.S. policy on prostitution and trafficking. Lederer has a 30-year history of fighting pornography, prostitution, and sexual exploitation. She thoroughly understood the problem and the nuances of all the debates around trafficking. She was able to assist the Bush administration is drawing up a far reaching, visionary plan for the abolition of trafficking.
Ambassador John Miller, head of the “Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons,” has been a brave, energetic leader of the new abolitionist movement. He is well respected by his former colleagues in Congress, and he is popular all over the world with conservatives, faith-based groups, and even the feminists love him. When he took the job as director of the TIP office, he said it would be an activist office, and he has carried the banner of abolition all over the world.
Claude Allen, President Bush’s domestic-policy adviser and former deputy secretary of health and human services, demonstrated early on that he “got it” when it came to the victimization of women and children, and he was willing to be a strong advocate for the new abolitionist policy. He was the first Bush-administration official to step out and announce that a different approach to trafficking — particularly involving prostitution — was to be undertaken. He gave this speech at the now-infamous anti-trafficking conference at the University of Hawaii. He supported Title II of the TVPRA when some others wanted a weaker approach to domestic sex trafficking.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is overseeing a nation-wide crackdown on prostitution and child-pornography rings. Almost every day there’s news of another bust of a pimp or prostitution ring by federal agents. Federal law-enforcement agents, including those in homeland security, are working closely with state and local police on trafficking in an almost unprecedented way. He has made prosecution of obscenity a priority, and I believe we are soon going to see the connection between the production of pornography and trafficking very soon.
Lopez: Who are some of the private organizations that are most effective on this front?
Hughes: Well, that varies so much country to country. There are heroes everywhere rescuing victims, providing services, and fighting local political battles. I suggest you consult the annual Trafficking in Persons reports which each year identify several heroes from around the world.
It is really a coalition of groups that have been effective in advocating for the new law and supporting President Bush’s policy. Organized by Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, the coalition is made up of survivors of sex trafficking, conservative, faith-based, liberal, and feminist groups. They have worked together to support John Miller in the Trafficking Office, push for implementation of policies outlined in President Bush’s NSPD, and draft and lobby for the TVPRA. I’ve been involved with this coalition, and it has been an amazing experience to work so closely and cooperatively with people from such different groups. I’m in the feminist wing of the coalition. The Polaris Project, a service organization based in Washington, holds up the liberal/progressive wing. There are many survivors of prostitution/sex trafficking involved, including survivor-based service providers in San Francisco, St. Paul, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and Kansas City. Several survivors, including Tina Frundt of the Polaris Project and Julia Guzman of the SAGE Project, testified before Congress or spoke to high-ranking governmental officials who were just blown away by their stories. They put a human face on sex trafficking in America.
Then there are the powerful faith based groups — the Salvation Army and the Southern Baptists, in particular. Conservatives groups, such as Concerned Women for America, are among the leaders.
Lopez: You spend so much time on this issue. It must be so dispiriting. Why do you do it and how do you keep from distress?
Hughes: I’ve spent about 17 years working on this issue — most of that time I was on the losing side, as those who supported “sex worker” rights won almost every political battle. The mainstream feminist groups wanted to allow women to make the “choice” to be prostitutes and only oppose “forced prostitution.” The Clinton administration funded and supported this approach. I thought we had lost. Those were the depressing years. During the late 1990s, almost all the media stories were about how empowering prostitution was, how much money the women made, how pimps were disappearing, how women were independent businesswomen, and how women in India were forming unions and collectives to fight for their rights as sex workers. The utopian vision that prostitution could be turned into a form of legitimate work for women by empowering victims and organizing unions ruled in all U.N. meetings, feminist conferences, and a number of government offices. Now that was depressing!
Slowly that is changing. Media stories are increasingly describing prostitution rings in which women and girls are beaten, raped, and enslaved. That may sound more depressing, but to me it is much better because it’s the truth. I used to hear stories like that all the time from victims, but they never made it into media stories or congressional testimonies. Now, the truth about prostitution/sex trafficking is emerging and agencies are responding as never before. I think more pimps and traffickers have been arrested in the last year than in the whole previous decade.
There is movement underway to hold perpetrators accountable and assist victims of sex trafficking. I got involved in the anti-sex trafficking movement as an outgrowth of my involvement in the anti-rape movement in the 1980s. To me it was obvious that this was a form of violence against women and a women’s-rights issue. It came as a complete shock to me that some women, calling themselves feminists, were pro-pornography and pro-prostitution, or called it a choice. It has been tremendously gratifying to me to work with a broad based coalition on this issue. Although we come from different political views, we base our work on principles of dignity, freedom, and human rights. By getting down to basics, we’ve formed a movement that is going to liberate thousands of women and girls in the U.S. and millions of women abroad. That makes me feel good.
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