Ceci N'est Pas Une Gazetteer

Translation: "This is not a pipe" -- René Magritte. Photo by Flickr user Ceci n'est pas. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So. About trafficking. Who to believe? Anti-prostitution groups claim that 80% of all human trafficking worldwide is sex-trafficking. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says more like 50%. Anti-slavery groups say it's more like 80% are *non-sex* laborers. WTF?

Having spent (too) much of yesterday chasing the issue around (and around, and around) it... *looks* like they could all be right because there's a great deal of ambiguity between the words or phrases

- trafficking
- smuggling
- sex-trafficking
- aggravated sex-trafficking
- labor trafficking
- slavery
- sex work
- sexual slavery

Neither the text of the 2007 Wilberforce/TVPA bill itself, nor its proponents, nor its opponents put much effort to resolving the equivocal nature of the terms.

Because there's so much ambiguity, from so many sources, I'm pretty sure nobody will agree 100% on anything, but based on a close reading of multiple sources here's my own (admittedly exasperated but good faith) set of definitions.

• Smuggling is what happens when person A in location X arranges with person B to be transported to location Y *and* after person A arrives in location Y person B has no hold over them.

• Trafficking is what happens when person A in location X is taken in by person B by means of guile, threats, or violence and transported to location Y *and* after transportation then either 1) person B retains a hold over person B or else 2) person B sells or assigns person A to be held by someone else. Peculiarly, whereas many, many trafficked persons are (in the words of a Darfuri slave named Aluat** quoted in E. Benjamin Skinner's A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery) used in a "sex way" they don't count as "sex-trafficked" under the existing *or* proposed law unless they're being "prostituted" to third parties. (Go figure.) Because...

• Sex-trafficking as the law stands now is ordinary trafficking where the labor the victim will be forced to perform involves commercial sex. Currently sex-trafficking is treated as a civil-rights crime under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Under the proposed amendment "sex-trafficking" will be any and all prostitution. If the amendment remains when the bill comes out of conference sex-trafficking, a.k.a. prostitution, will be deleted from 13th Amendment protection (where all *other* forms of human trafficking and coerced labor reside) and plugged under the jurisdiction of the Mann Act, which deals exclusively with commercial sex. Peculiarly, once removed from 13th Amendment coverage the specific crime of sex-trafficking, unlike other human trafficking, will no longer legally be considered a human rights violation. (But no worries because...)

• The new crime of "Aggravated Sex-Trafficking" will replace the old crime of "sex-trafficking" under the amended TVPA.

• Labor Trafficking is any kind of trafficking that's not sex trafficking. Should the TVPA amendments pass labor trafficking will be even less like sex-trafficking in the sense that it will still only be labor trafficking if an international boundary is crossed, whereas prostitution will be defined as sex trafficking even if the prostitute works from home.

• Slavery. Most slaves aren't technically trafficked. They're generally agricultural, industrial, and domestic slaves, and very, very often children. Slaves can (and are) be found (and occasionally rescued) today in India, China, Africa including especially Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Somalia, in Southeast Asia (where they're generally sex slaves, about which more in a moment), in Haiti they're often children and almost always household slaves, in South America they're most often enslaved for use in agriculture.

• A sex slave is a slave who's held captive for the sexual gratification of her or his owners and/or their friends, family, business partners, and/or employees. Sex slavery is tricky under the amended TVPA. Huge, *huge* numbers of trafficked, smuggled, and/or mere slaves are sexually assaulted and exploited for the gratification of their employers. However unless they're exploited for *commercial* sex by 3rd parties (i.e. really *prostituted*) and not just assaulted by their owners and friends and associates of their owners they're just considered particularly unfortunate but neither trafficked unless they're actually *trafficked* across borders, and not *sex-trafficked* unless cash changes hands.

• Sex work is commercial work of a sexual nature that technically covers everyone from prostitutes to dommes/dominatrixes to strippers to porn performers to phone-sex operators. Sex work may be willingly undertaken, reluctantly but willingly undertaken under contingencies, and unwillingly extracted through guile, threats, or violence.

• Prostitution is a specific form of sex work that involves physical, generally genital contact with customers. Unlike all other forms of sex work prostitution is currently counted as "sex-trafficking" when it's coerced and, under the amended TVPA, unlike all other forms of sex work, prostitution will be counted as "sex-trafficking" even when it's *not* coerced.

Yes, my editorial point of view shows up in some of those definitions but I repeat that very few hands are clean when it comes to *agreement.* And, as logicians, rhetoriticians, and mediators have been saying since, oh, say, Plato, without agreement on terms there can be plenty of fighting, name calling, and exercise of raw power but neither real dialogue nor debate nor resolution.