Grim quote from The Guardian by Holly of Self-Portrait as who introduces it as “a real-life example of what happens when women are treated as commodities. This story, from the Guardian, details what is happening in Uganda, where…”
The practice of bride gifts has been relabelled “bride price”, demanded by families and fiercely negotiated. It has reduced young women to commodities and has made families see their daughters as a source of income. Today bride price isn’t a bag of potatoes, it’s a list of demands for money, animals or clothing made by fathers and older brothers, who might want to throw in requests for new shoes or school fees. The mother gets nothing because she was more or less purchased herself, and the sisters are ignored too as they are all set to be exchanged for commodities when they reach 12 or 13.
The impact of this commodification on young women is catastrophic. It breeds misery and reduces them to chattels.
Sex-trafficking is very real. It’s just not all commercial sex trafficking.
I remember reading that European slave traders in Africa justified themselves by mass-baptizing their human cargos before shipping them out via the infamous Middle Passage to the Americas. The idea being that, having been baptized the 30-50% of victims who routinely died of dysentery, scurvy, thirst, and suicide while chained ankle-by-ankle to the decks would perforce go to heaven.
I get the impression same mentality applies to their descendants for whom marriage for women, no matter how nasty, brutal, short, or profitable for her family, is automatically assumed to be virtuous.
And I think this is why we see so much more emphasis than is warranted placed on trafficking of “whores,” and virtually no emphasis on trafficking of “madonnas.”
Again, it’s not that there’s no trafficking in commercial sex. There certainly is! But just as it’s a mistake to imagine that all sex-work is sex-trafficking, it’s a much bigger mistake to imagine that only sex-workers are trafficked for sex.
