I’m traveling with family and have next to no time for blogging but I did want to make what I think is a critical point raised in the middle book of the Stig Larssen “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series of detective novels.
A major thread in the 2nd book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, involves sex-trafficking in Sweden.
Sex trafficking is the current bugaboo of sex-work abolitionists, both in America and abroad.
In America you hear, um, bullshit about how hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked into the country, against both their wills and their inclinations, for use as prostitutes. It’s bullshit because a) while there’s certainly international and intranational sex trafficking in America there’s no conspiracy large enough to conceal an extra million new enslaved people coming into the country every five years and b) there’s no evidence of such numbers either.
The problem seems to be that activists believe that unless the numbers are really, really, really big then nobody will care and nobody will do anything about it. And so they inflate their numbers.
In Larssen’s books, which are set in Sweden, everyone’s scandalized that as many as 400 (that’s four hundred total) humans might be trafficked into Sweden.
You know why I think that’s so cool?
Because 400 people trafficked against their will into any country, for any kind of work, really is a scandal.
Even one would be!
That American anti-trafficking activists feel they have to gin up the numbers is itself scandalous. That they might be right that no one would care if they used real numbers is also scandalous.
Of course I happen to think that, contrary to abolitionist activist hyperbole, ordinary voluntary sex work ought to be legal. I also happen to think that if it was legal then it would be a lot easier to identify and protect the much, much, much smaller number of people who really are illegally trafficked into the country, against their will, to perform sex work. Or any other kind of work.
There is a line in a movie
Submitted by Ligeia (not verified) on Thu, 2010-07-22 07:05.There is a line in a movie called Spanglish where this over eager assistant chef tells Adam Sandler the owner of the restaurant where she says ‘I agree with everything you just said and I hope to adopt….as my own’ (paraphrasing of course). Anyway, she is who I thought of as I was reading this, because I appreciate the intelligence of pointing out the numbers, the support for legalizing sex work, and the fact that YES it is a scandal if even one person is forced into it and it is scandalous if we don’t care as a Nation or human beings unless the numbers are inflated.
So, thank you. Really. I may have to go read this book, I have been so busy on other things and reading for research I’ve missed some of the highlights that everyone is reading.
Hmmm. “Scandalous”. I’ll
Submitted by Thaddeus Blanchette (not verified) on Thu, 2010-07-22 07:18.Hmmm. “Scandalous”. I’ll agree with that. The problem is, 400 people is not exactly a huge social phenomenon, the way thr anti-trafiicking movement makes it appear.
In the first place, I’d say that even the “400” count is as much bullshit as any other number one would care to toss out there as it’s a complete shot in the dark. 400? Why not 40? Or 40,000? The logic is the same in all cases: let’s make up a number. The Swedes are just more sensitive to what people are likely to believe (or the Americans more credulous).
But the real problem is taking this relatively small, minority experience which is not sociologically normative in any sense and transforming it into THE paradigm of female migraation in the public mind. This the Swedes most certainly do, despite their more restrained numbers counts and this is what I’d say the main problem is when it comes to the social panic regarding trafficking of women.
If I’d had the second book
Submitted by figleaf on Thu, 2010-07-22 08:55.If I’d had the second book handy (I’ve just finished the third) I’d be able to quote the treatment Larssen gave it. It was reasonable though. The number wa approximate – in the range of 400, not precisely that.
Also he (correctly I think) painted it as a minor, minor enterprise by mostly petty criminals rather than the multi-billion dollar industry the anti’s claim. (Specifically he compared it’s profitability unfavorably to small-scale meth distribution.)
Which makes all kinds of sense to me. Literally enslaving human being and trying to operate them in public in open societies like the US or Sweden is really hard and unlikely to be very profitable. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen (I cite instances any time I see credible indictments or convictions) but it does explain why the ginned up scare numbers never pan out.
For me, though, that’s all the more reason I think it should be taken seriously. But, and it’s a big but, I think in order to do so people need to stop wetting their pants and wringing their hankies about normal ordinary agreed-upon sex work.
The tolerance for trafficking is purely an artifact of illegality both in sex work and all cross- border migration. Let’s put it this way: we wouldn’t tolerate the enslavement of 4 native automobile workers, even though “in the grand scheme of things” four people is a very small number. But since we go all ZOMG about sex work in the first place it becomes easy to waive off hundreds as no big deal.
And incidentally I hold abolitionists nearly 100% responsible for that. If they weren’t creating the environment in the first place then lying about the numbers I’m pretty sure we’d deal with it with intelligently and appropriately. When it actually happens. Which we both agree it usually doesn’t.
Thanks Thadeus,
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I remember watching “Lilja
Submitted by Thaddeus (not verified) on Mon, 2010-07-26 08:09.I remember watching “Lilja 4-evr” and commenting to the antis who were presenting it as a “quasi-documentary” regarding trafficking that the whole story couldn’t even take place UNLESS Lilja was an illegal immigrant who feared being sent home. There was that one scene, you see, where she sees a cop and decides to not ask for help because, really, what was the cop going to do for her other than deport her?
Turnd out, by the way, that the case Moodyson based his “true-to-life” film on didn’t quite happen like Lukas portrayed it in the film. The girl wasn’t 100% out of contact with other people and kept in captivity. If she there had been a chance that she would have been taken seriously as a human being and not an illegal immigrant to be deported, she had any number of opportunities to ask for help. But it was her ILLEGAL status which made her “captivity” possible and not any great and powerful restriction employed by the pimps who were running her. Simply put: who could she go to?
And what the antis- don’t get is that these people AREN’T liable to go to their “outreach and rescue” organizations if the upshot of the whole thing is that they’ll be “rescued” and deported – oh, excuse me: REPATRIATED – back to the country they staked everything on to leave.
Antis, in other words, think the repulsion of sex work should be strong enough to make people happy to stay at home.
It isn’t.
“There was that one scene,
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-07-27 18:50.“There was that one scene, you see, where she sees a cop and decides to not ask for help because, really, what was the cop going to do for her other than deport her?”
Yup. That’s the dimension that makes legalization or at least decriminalization so emphatically important.
Thanks, Thaddeus,
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