Levi Pulkkinen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 Police Blog brings home to points that are really, really critical in debates about human trafficking, as opposed to “sex-trafficking.”
The first point is that non-sex-trafficking human trafficking is perfectly real.
The second, even more important point, is that while not all human trafficking is “sex trafficking,” i.e. not all trafficked people are trafficked into conscripted sex work, all trafficked people face the prospect of coerced sex. Some face the reality of it.
For instance…
A Pacific couple previously convicted on human smuggling charges was sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.
Maria Bartola Santos-Gonzalez, 63, was sentenced to three years in prison Tuesday, while her husband, Juan Gonzalez Guerra, 55, was sentenced to one year and a day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement statement. Both pleaded guilty to in January.
Investigators with the Pacific Police Department and ICE launched the investigation in May 2009 after a 7-year-old girl told her school counselor that an older man had been molesting her, according to the ICE statement. The Pacific Police Department followed up on the claim and it led them to Gonzalez Guerra.
So. As often happens in these kinds of situations, the Gonzalez couple hired runners in Mexico to locate people who wanted to be smuggled into the U.S. so they could find work. So the people willingly entered into agreements to be brought here.
So. Their intention was to be in migration. Their agreement was to be smuggled in exchange for a fee to be paid after they arrived. Their reality was that when they arrived they were blackmailed, defrauded, threatened with violence, and were victims of violence at the hands of people they’d believed to be smugglers but who instead had instead trafficked them into forced, largely uncompensated labor.
And while they at it their children were tied up, beaten, sexually assaulted, and, it sounds like, raped by their traffickers.
But I guess since they were only being sexually assaulted and raped by their captors instead of “prostituted” it’s not really very important. Because to their mind only sex-trafficking matters. (In fact some of them, mostly, no surprise neoconservatives and/or their very-conservative feminist allies, claim that concern about “human trafficking” is a deliberate dodge invented by the sex industry to distract resources away from them.)
Point being this case illustrates that yeah, really, there really, really is human trafficking, often of would-be ordinary migrants, and that people who say otherwise are liars. And yeah, some of the people trafficked into the U.S. — a little less than half according to credible, non-partisan estimates — are trafficked into sex work but the rest aren’t, and people who say otherwise are liars about that too. But finally, yeah, this case illustrates that the assholes who claim that only the sex-trafficking matters because ZOMG!!!TEH!!!WHITE!!!SLAVERY!!! are assholes who don’t get that regardless of age, gender, orientation, or forced profession once you’re coerced you don’t really have a lot of recourse if your trafficker wants to use your body as well as your paycheck.
Pulkinnen’s article adds
At the hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman said, “[Ms. Santos-Gonzalez] took their money, put them in circumstances that were dire … children went to bed hungry … [she] took advantage of these people … in many ways it was a form of modern-day slavery… it is at the fundamental core that you cannot take people and grind people down… this is not the way to treat other people… you need to treat them with respect, you need to treat them with dignity.”
Just a little reminder that accusations of “accommodation” can go both ways. To obsess about the sex part of trafficking, instead of the trafficking part of trafficking, is to enable not only slavery, debt peonage, coercion and labor conscription but also sexual assault and rape.
For why this issue is so nettlesome to me see, also, for instance
In President Obama’s press
Submitted by fiveofnine (not verified) on Fri, 2010-05-28 03:18.In President Obama’s press conference yesterday, he briefly touched on the FED’s increased involvement in the apprehension of human traffickers on the Mexican border.
On the flipside of that
Submitted by Thaddeus Blanchette (not verified) on Fri, 2010-05-28 06:34.On the flipside of that argument, prostitution is often viewed as ipso-facto human trafficking, no matter under what conditions its carried out.
In Brazil, we have a new emphasis on anti-trafficking in law enforcement. The official, for-prime-time-T.V. definition of trafficking follows the Palermo Protocols. The OPERATIVE definition (i.e. what the cops really look for) follows an old Brazilian criminal law from the 1950s that simply states that the paid movement of prostitutes is trafficking.
So a prostitute moves from point A to point B and is financially aided to do this. Let’s say she goes from Minas Gerais to Rio to take up a job offer in a strip club and her new boss forwards here half of the first month’s pay check as an advance to help her move.
This, under Brazilian law, is trafficking and is treated as such by the police and reported as such by the media.
Neat how flexible the term “trafficking” is, huh?