Cool point about gendered thinking from Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex

Protocols attached to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime attempt to distinguish between trafficking and smuggling of people. The trafficking protocol explicitly mentions women, children, coercion and prostitution: absent is any mention of the will to migrate. The smuggling protocol, in contrast, discusses men as migrants and does not speak of sex or prostitution. This gender bias has several negative, confusing effects.

• Women are positioned as sexually vulnerable above all
• Women are lumped with children as though we were children
• Women are not seen as capable of initiating migrations
• Women are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are not seen as capable of being trafficked in the worst sense Men are not seen as capable of preferring to sell sex over other options
• Men are associated with dodgy behaviour such as paying someone to help them get around the rules

Read the quote in context here.

Y’know how MRAs are always saying stuff with the template “But men can be {insert whatever} too?” And how there are, like, 1,000 institutionalized yeah-but rebuttals? Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m not going to say “but men can be trafficked too.”

How ‘bout I say instead that women can know what they’re doing too? That women can independently recognize they don’t want a dead-end life in a 2nd- or 3rd- world or rust-belt village. That women can aspire to more than a life of borscht stirring or water-jug toting. That women can initiate the same steps to get the heck out? That, as Agustín delicately reminds us, that women aren’t children?

I mean… c’mon!

It’s not that women or children can’t be exploited for sex (um, not at all.) Nor that women, any more than men, can wind up in bad situations or worse when they undertake to seek uncertain fortunes in the world rather than rot in certain poverty and oppression (um, not at all.)

It’s that failing to recognize the possibility in 1st-world, world-class aid agencies that women are people says much about their attitudes and the attitudes of their funding bodies.

I mention this in no small part because, while I don’t know about the rest of the world, or even the rest of the United States, there are noticeable numbers of women from, especially, the 2nd world (the former Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, and urban Africa) in clerical, retail, technology, restaurant, and other trades positions. In what conversations I’ve had with them they weren’t “brought” here by husbands or fathers or brothers, they came here.

And yes, for the most part they’re here legally. (I say “most” because, for instance, I’m pretty sure none of the three young Russians, one a woman, who came door-to-door asking if we wanted our house painted a few years ago weren’t here legally.) But that’s not the point. According to the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime’s checklist they don’t exist at all!

In other words this post isn’t about what smugglers and traffickers think of migrant women, it’s what we think of them. It’s not about their attitudes about the fates, or roles, or natures of women it’s about ours.

And it’s relevant not because some… too many if there are any... women are bought and sold. It’s that by imagining all women migrate involuntarily, or even only reluctantly, whereas only men migrate freely or even enthusiastically we mask rather than distinguish those who really do get in over their heads.