Wilberforce

Photo by Flickr user alist. Used under a Creative Commons license.

M'kay, so to all but the harshest critics of prostitution I don't come across as exactly a big fan. Yes, I believe passionately that it should be legalized but far more because the status quo makes prostitution egregiously dangerous to workers than for the perfectly-acceptible-in-isolation principle that if emancipated adults should be free to willingly initiate such transactions. My biggest issues with the idea of fee-for-service sex revolve around highly gendered paradigms of sexual scarcity, the virtuous woman, and the bestial indiscriminate man. (Yes, in theory worker, customer, and onlooker should all give cash for sex the same moral weight as cash for chiropractic or child care but there's strong evidence that virtually no one is fortunate enough to be able to do so.)

I mention this because the intertubes are all aflutter over an amendment to a House of Represenatives bill that reauthorizes the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2007, or TVPA or, at the moment, H.B. 3887. (Note William Wilberforce was a 19th Century activist responsible for outlawing slavery and participation in slave trading in England.)

According to both proponents and opponents the amendment would redefine all prostitution, forced and unforced, as human trafficking in the eyes of the law. Current law says prostitution is trafficking only if there's evidence the prostitute is only working due to force, fraud, or coercion.

The debate, which grows increasingly and intractably incivil, is shedding very little light on an a subject -- enslavement, transportation, and exploitation of human beings -- that by birth, upbringing, education, and inclination (if not always heritage) I care just as passionately about. So if I've seemed quiet lately it's because I've been trying to chase down information from both sides to see who's allegations are fair and who's aren't.

It gets pretty bitter. According to Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors

Who opposes this bill? The Bush Administration, the Heritage Foundation, coercive pimps, a few others. Why? Of course the pimps want to continue sex trafficking without interference, while the Bush Administration and its supporters consider helping coerced, prostituted women “a waste of money,” deeming them tainted and unworthy of assistance.

She said it here.

By others she means, specifically, Jessica Valenti of Feministing who's been hosting a series of guest posts by anti-labor-trafficking and sex-worker-rights activists who oppose the measure. (Bartow accuses Valenti of "dishonest pro-prostitution cheerlead[ing]" here.) This seems as unfair as saying who supports the bill? The viciously anti-feminist and anti-woman (and by-origin vehemently pro-slavery) Southern Baptist Convention and a professor from a law school in "Cradle of the Confederacy" South Carolina "and a few others." Where "a few others" include Rep. Tom Lantos and Equality Now.

In fact despite unsavory and utterly untrustworthy allies on both sides (Southern Baptists? Really? Heritage Foundation? Really?) both sides also have thoroughly creditable allies as well.

By complete coincidence I wrote about the original, 2000 version of the bill last last month and about the "original sin" anti-prostitution spin embedded in it by extremist partisan neoconservatives in order to discredit the late Senator Paul Wellstone's, then-First-Lady Hillary Clinton, President Clinton and the Clinton-era State Department. Embedded, I might add, at the expense of the far less "glamorous" and more easy-to-deny slaved trafficked "merely" for agricultural, industrial, and domestic exploitation.

The latest amendment seems to be more of the same and so I'm siding with opponents.

Note: So far *everybody,* except possibly the Heritage Foundation, supports reauthorization of the law. The *only* issue is whether it should be passed with or without the new amendments.

A site called The Multiracial Activist that on it's main pages hosts various letters of petition to legislative and regulatory entities reprints an open letter supporting reauthorization. (They're also a signatory.)

Signatories, the "some others" Professor Bartow mentions, includes such "dishonest pro-prostitution cheerleading" pimp-lovers as

• Alexandria House, an L.A. area transitional (emergency-to-permanent) shelter for women and children.
• Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (here's a PDF of their trafficking-awareness brochure.)
• Ayuda, Inc (here's their trafficking initiative page)
• Susie Baldwin, MD, MPH, Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and presenter of Human trafficking victims: In a neighborhood near you?
• Human Rights Watch (m'kay?)
• Denise Brennan, a Georgetown Cultural Anthropologist (here's a something about to her presentation "Beyond the Hype: Trafficked Persons to the United States Rebuild Their Lives")
• Break the Chain, an anti-slavery group
• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (Here's a PDF of their *anti-sex-trafficking* brochure -- real pro-pimpers these ones, eh?)
• Rocky Mountain Survivor's Center (a support group for immigrant survivors or torture and war trauma)
• Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center which (in this PDF) criticized a recent New York anti-trafficking law for, among other things, "Labor trafficking is not treated as serious a crime as sex trafficking; The law does not include an independent private right of action; The law does not provide for restitution or forfeiture of traffickers’ assets; There is no provision that allows for victims to vacate prior convictions for conduct involuntarily engaged in as a part of the trafficking scheme. (*So* pimp-friendly, no?)

In other words it's a bunch of anti-slavery, immigration-rights, sex-work social-workers, anti-trafficking, and women's rights groups... not at all unlike... the people who instead support the amendment for equally well-considered reasons.

Having made my decision to support one side people interested in "fair and balanced" can Google up their own (and there are plenty) though please see the equally reasonable and respectable EqualityNow, NOW, The Feminist Majority, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

There's assholery and acrimony the other way too -- someone allegedly Googlebombed Feminist Law Professors which is also reprehensible.

The total difference of opinion might boil down to something Ann Bartow says "Opposition to H.R. 3887 is aimed at privileging coerced, trafficked factory and farm workers over the well being of coerced, trafficked sex workers." The problem is that opponents believe the proposed amendments instead privileges sex-trafficing over labor-trafficking.

After almost half a day of researching the bill, its pros and cons, and its supporters and detractors my take on the whole kerfuffle is that anti-prostitution people ought to get their own damn law, of which they've already got a ton, including the federal Mann act and thousands of others in various states, territories, and possessions, and quit subverting what's almost the only modern law against... enslaving, transporting, and exploiting the labor *regardless* of type.

And I really mean that, by the way. There are plenty of willing legislators, plenty of laws that could be amended, and when it comes to coerced sex work and sex labor plenty of support including from me and pretty much everyone else except their pimps and customers of those pimp's victims.