The Sex-Trafficking (Neo)Con

[This post is about the concerted efforts by partisan, neo-conservative, and evangelical-backed activists to ignore most human trafficking in order to better prosecute involuntary *and voluntary* prostitution. I'm on record as supporting non-coerced prostitution but I'm bitterly opposed to both sex trafficking *and* all other forms, a position I share, as you will see, with Senator Hillary Clinton (who I don't want to be President, at all, but who I do admire.) Because it's a long one I thought I should mention that's what this post is about. --fl]

So this is a real pisser! I was just reading E. Benjamin Skinner's A Crime So Monstrous, Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, in the chapter about how a Reagan-era neocon named Michael Horowitz hooked up with Southern Baptist evangelicals in the 1990s to forge and pass first a "Christian Martyrdom" foreign policy bill and then, on the heels of that success, an anti-trafficking initiative.

Skinner says that even though the Clinton administration was also becoming pretty activist about the emerging problem with trafficking, including sex-trafficking (for instance then-first lady Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as well as the President himself were both concerned and involved) Horowitz, an acid-partisan Republican, worked hard to make the issue as partisan as possible.

Democrats, generally more concerned about general human rights, argued more broadly that all human trafficking is a problem. Skinner says

The late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota sponsored legislation that would have put the United states in the vanguard of abolishing *all* forms of slavery, including labor trafficking, forced domestic servitude, and debt bondage. Wellstones' staff studied modern-day slavery closely. They found that it required more than a robust enforcement of laws, that poverty was a central factor.

This of course makes perfect sense. Most people who are trafficked aren't Shanghaied, unwillingly subdued and stuffed into the hold of a ship. Instead, due to economics or, less often, by local ethnic or religious persecution, they seek out traffickers who offer to help them illegally immigrate to countries with better wages and conditions. Sometimes they even *pay* their traffickers. The problem being that very often the traffickers appropriate the would-be immigrant's documentation and force them into outright slavery -- either by direct coercion (violence and/or threats to turn their victims over to the authorities) or by debt (company-store style policies where they're obliged to "work off" the cost of transportation *and* ongoing "food and lodgings" in the brothel, sweatshop, or domestic situation.) The point being that no poverty no trafficking.

Horowitz, his ally Charles Colson the prison-converted Watergate Felon, and other partisan Republicans talk of poverty is like a crucifix to a vampire. Skinner says

When I presented him with Wellstone's general approach [Horowitz] shouted an explitive.

"That's the lie! That's the lie!" he yelled, slamming his desk and pointing at me. "The idea that you can sit back while these mafias are out there buying and selling women and say 'Wll, there's nothing much I can do about these guys because there's poverty on the earth' is a moral cop-out and a lie."

I never had the chance to ask Wellstone for a response, as he died in a plane crash the year that I began to research this book. But his closest aid on the issue told me that the senator shared Horowitz's deep revulsion at sex slavery, and spoke of his desire to see every trafficker doing hard time. The single most moving experience for him as a senator, he once said, was meeting trafficked women from Russia, his father's birth country. It's just that Wellstone also learned that, sadly, sex slaves were far from the only ones in abominable bondage.

Now, can I just take a moment here to remind everyone that Michael Horowitz's main allies were evangelicals from the Southern Baptist Conference. And can I take another moment to remind everyone that there's only one, single, solitary and absolutely God-damnable reason there's such a thing as Southern Baptists? *Southern* Baptists were founded in 1845 because America's *real* Baptists strongly opposed slavery. The Southern Baptists (including my great-great-grandfather) came into being *only and exclusively* in order to promote the idea that Christians should be able to enslave other human beings and to use violence and murder to force those enslaved human beings to labor for their captors for no pay. And yeah, yeah, that was a long time ago but just to be clear that's who Michael Horowitz was cozied up to, that's who supported Horowitz's feuds with progressives, and if he and his evangelical coven seemed concerned only about *sexual* slavery (as we shall see) then you have a little more context for why this might be.

At any rate, when Wellstone introduced an anti-trafficking bill that didn't prioritize one form of slavery over another Horowitz and his gang of anti-prostitution but soft-on-slavery sought to scale it back to just sex trafficking.

"If you want to end the enslavement of those in debt bondage in the brick factories in India, the best thing you can do is put all of the sex traffickers in jail, and just drive a stake right through the heart of that system," he continued. "The connection is these ripple effects, where if you succeed in taking out some people, you send a message to everybody else saying: 'You're next.'"

Gotta love them neocons, even then they were all about "ripple effects." I can just see it now -- what better way to send a message to child-slavers in Haiti and agricultural traffickers in Asia, Africa and South America that "ooh, once we shut down all sex trafficking everywhere we're turning our attention on *you!*" As opposed to, say, turning their attention on them at the same time.

Anyway,

Horowitz wanted to define slavery narrowly, but at a January 2000 conference in Vienna, representatives form the President's Interagency Council on Women chaired by Hillary CLinton defined the issue a bit too narrowly. Arguing for international antitrafficking protocols to combat "forced prostitution," the officials -- Horowitz contended -- implied that "voluntary prostitution" was possible. To many conservative Christians and hard-line feminists, all prostitutes were slaves.

Seizing its chance to savage Hillary Clinton, who was absent form Vienna, and who condemned trafficking as "the dark underbelly of globalization," the Horowitz coalition pounced. Chuck Colson co-authored a January 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "the Clintons Shrug at Sex Trafficking," in which he claimed that the "actions in Vienna will be counted as yet one more shameful act committed by this deeply corrupt administration." Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Conventions' political arm, followed suit with a damning editorial in the conservative Washington Times. Clinton, two months into her first Senate campating, retreated from the issue.

Horowitz won the battle to sideline Hillary Clinton...

Later, after George Walker Bush was "elected" a Clinton-administration (and Bush I, Reagan, and Ford-administration) holdover Ambassador Nancy Ely-Raphel prepared a 2002 State Department report on international human trafficking and, in Horowitz's eyes, stupidly wasted space on *human slavery* and building an anti-slavery culture in the State Department instead of dedicating the whole fucking thing to the fact that Germany and the Netherlands had legalized prostitution. In a meeting Horowitz told Ely-Raphel "I want to get rid of you, and I will get rid of you." Cool dude, eh?

So. As luck would have it, Grist, the environmental advocacy site, has an article called Slave Ethanol about an Amnesty International report on forced labor in Brazil's sugarcane fields.

Sugarcane is a deeply ironic crop on which to hang a "sustainable energy revolution." Historically, the spread of sugarcane in Caribbean islands and South America involved vast clear-cutting of coastal forests.

Socially, its legacy may be worse. To run the bustling cane plantations of the Americas during the colonial period, European powers relied on ruthlessly exploited African slaves.

Still a highly labor-intensive crop, cane evidently remains under the shadow of that atrocious past. Even today, Brazil's much-heralded ethanol miracle is built on the backs of "forced" cane workers. From a Reuters story:

Amnesty International criticized poor working conditions and forced labor in Brazil's fast-growing sugar cane sector on Wednesday, as the government tries to promote the cane-based ethanol industry as a way to reduce poverty.

Sometimes the circumstances involved not cane fields, but ethanol refineries:

Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

Read the Grist article here

Thanks to Michael Horowitz and his partisan neoconservative Republican ripple-effecting buddies, who recruited activist feminist groups like Equality Now and the National Organization for Women by branding sex-trafficking "the great women's issue of our time" and rallied them against Paul Wellstone and Hillary Rodham Clinton, those trafficked workers in Brazil don't count.

Now as it happens, I've cared deeply about human trafficking of all sorts ever since I found out that my own great-great grandfather, a slave-owner, was an inaugural convert from Baptist to Southern Baptist ministers. And I admired then, and admire now the work undertaken against trafficking -- *all* trafficking -- by the very cool Senator Wellstone and equally cool First-Lady Clinton.

Anyway, that's why, in a nutshell, I have a very hard time when people try and tell me that "human trafficking" is a euphemism coined by the sex industry. Instead it's almost exactly the opposite. And given that sex traffickers and every other kind of traffickers use pretty much the same networks, pay pretty much the same bribes, and (Southern Baptist protestations notwithstanding) sell their victims to pretty similar people, to claim that "human trafficking" should be exclusively and internationally defined as involuntary and *voluntary* prostitution instead is worse than counterproductive. Michael Horowitz is exactly wrong: attack all human trafficking because rather than "sending ripples" it would rip out the greater infrastructure in which sex trafficking thrives. Oh yeah, that plus worrying only about victims of sex trafficking condemns the *other* fifteen out of sixteen internationally trafficked slaves to lives of... more slavery.

So. Where do you stand on the position Michael Horowitz and his allies have crafted?