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Following up on my previous post, The Low Personal Cost of Sacrificing Others in Defense of Your Principles, here are at least two other examples off the top of my head.

1) Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the late-term abortion decision that “on principle” decided that all women would really prefer to be denied life-saving medical care if they only understood what late-term abortion entailed.

“It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know”

Via PunkassBlog

It’s easy to sacrifice actual women for one’s idealized principles about motherhood when one is neither a woman nor a mother.

2) Neoconservative women’s-studies professor Donna M. Hughes, who scorns “accommodationist schemes that normalize prostitution and merely try to distribute a few condoms.” Easy to sacrifice harm-reduction over abolition-only policies when your principles define prostitution as a fate worse than death. It’s an even easier sacrifice when you know it’ll never be your death you’re putting on the line.

Other examples welcome in comments.

Part 1: The setup on the conclusion of a two-year human-trafficking trial

From Joe Ryan at the New Jersey Star-Ledger

“And the girls were not allowed to keep any of the money they earned?” asked Shana W. Chen, an assistant U.S. attorney.

“No,” said Afolabi, a burly man who sat shackled before U.S. District Judge Jose Linares, wearing a dark-green jail uniform.

He said it here.

(Note: I found Joe Ryan’s article after reading the following piece. Read on.)

Part 2: The context

Laura Kenney of AOL’s StyleList fashion site uncovers a straight-up classic case of international trafficking of children as young as 10 into the United States.

The worldwide epidemic of human trafficking has reached the beauty industry.

A West African immigrant has pleaded guilty to running a human trafficking operation that forced women to braid hair for up to 14 hours a day in Newark and East Orange NJ, reports the New Jersey Star Ledger.

In a case prosecutors equated to modern day slavery, Lassissi Afolabi, 46, told a judge he headed a ring that smuggled victims from villages in Ghana and Togo. He brought twenty women, age 10 to 19, to New Jersey, where he seized their passports, forbade them to learn English and make friends, and planted them in salons where they were forced to work up to 14 hours per day, 7 days a week.

Though not as horrific as sex-trafficking, this story brings to light the exploitation of innocents who want to find a better life in the US. And this is only one case — we wonder how many more women are being made to work against their will in salons across the country?

She said it here.

Part 3: False Distinctions

Not being a sex-trafficking case this case of trafficking, with coerced sex, hasn’t yet showed up on the standard sites for hand-wringing for sex-trafficker/prostituteders. Because for most of them the real crime isn’t the trafficking or coerced labor it’s sex work. (Why else would so many of them insist that even self-selected sex-workers equals trafficking.)

Which is sort of a shame, as I’ve said fairly regularly. Because it’s not like only trafficked sex-workers have coerced sex. Here’s the Star-Ledger again.

During yesterday’s hearing, Afolabi admitted trying to have sex with one of the girls, who was under 18, during a trip to North Carolina, where he hoped to open a hair-braiding salon.

“And she begged you not to do it — “You are old enough to be my father,’ “ Chen said, quoting the alleged victim.

“Yes,” Afolabi said.

He pleaded guilty today to forced labor, aggravated sexual abuse and traveling with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.

The point being that just as not all sex work is coerced, neither does all non-sex trafficking involve no sexual coercion. Failing to get this has multiple consequences. The two biggest being that resources are spent to “protect” people (those sex-workers who are autonomous) who don’t need it and resources don’t protect other people (a substantially larger number who are trafficked, yes, and like Afolabi’s hair-braiding victim definitely sexually exploited, but who very often not the least bit “sex-trafficked.”)

Part 4, which seems to be growing into its own post, will be about a peculiarity in what I’m going to call, cynically, “benevolent trafficking” that makes prosecution, and even identification more difficult. The two-bit version is that four of Afolabi’s victims dispute that they were exploited and others report that their families at home are scorning and/or shaming them for complaining. The peculiarity being that Afolabi was actually treating his victims fractionally better than they would have been treated at home, with the result that they and their families felt they were getting a pretty good deal while… on the other hand he was treating them appallingly, and illegally, by U.S. standards and pocketing the difference between what they and their families expected them to earn in their home country (nothing) and what he was able to charge for their services (contemporary U.S. beauty-salon prices, which is quite a lot.)

Serenity Valley of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a nice piece about the conflict noted (strongly!) by Shulamuth Firestone’s 1968 “The Dialectic of Sex” between feminism on the one hand and multiculturalism on the other.

I’ve just been doing some reading for school, and I came across this article by Susan Moller Okin: “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”, published in a volume by the same name and edited by Okin, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum. In this piece, Okin defines feminism as the belief that “women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.”

Read the quote in context here.

Valley (and others elsewhere in the blogosphere) have rightly pointed out Orkin’s point that deference to cultural traditions that subordinate women are problematic. Activist Kimberle Crenshaw (who I posted about here) and others have clearly articulated how “rescue” policies are often no more helpful, or respectful, or less oppressive than sub-cultural oppression itself.

And any number of people have pointed out the complications of equality-based rhetoric when speaking about women in any culture, dominant or not. While in Kyriarchy it may be impossible to eliminate oppression and othering I think it’s possible to drastically limit the scope of such complications.

Orkin says “that [women] should be recognized as having human dignity equal to that of men.” I’m… pretty sure an awful lot of the ambiguity about how, exactly, different cultures might interpret terms like “human dignity,” “equals,” and “that of men” by replacing the clause, and underlying sentiments … and indeed much of Orkin’s preceding and following clauses, with “women should be recognized as human beings.” Or, even more tersely, accurately, and evidently radically: “women are human beings.”

This collapse of language to it’s indivisible core has twin benefits: It Disambiguates what “the same human dignity as…” might really mean. And it pitches the “accusing” or “rescuing” cultures into the same pot as “accused” or “in-need-of-rescuing” cultures since “other” cultures are not alone in reducing of some of its members to the status of objects, nor of sacrificing those members for the convenience of more intra-culturally valued, objectifying members.

To the… best of my knowledge none would defer to a subculture that claimed it needed to bring itself good luck by strangling servants in oak groves. We would not defer because servants are human beings and we would have to note that strangling in oak groves would be extraordinarily bad luck for those servants!

Similarly you can’t sew women’s pee-pees shut and claim “but it’s for the traditional pleasure of men in our culture” because it rather curtails the traditional pleasure of other human beings in that culture. Nor can you legislate that some human beings die involuntarily from preventable complications of late-term pregnancy to salve the consciences of different human beings who treat their own children abominably because that conflicts with the right of human beings not to die involuntarily.

Given this understanding multiculturalism can be in conflict with feminism only to the extent that we fail to recognize women as human beings. Not “like” human beings. Definitely not “having dignity equal to human beings.” As human beings. (Radical I know. Get used to it.)

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors is evidently unhappy about it but here’s some good news: The long-awaited and much-needed “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” anti-trafficking law has passed both the House and Senate.

Bartow blames Senator and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden for helping pass the law minus the House amendments that had held it up in the Senate and drawn opposition from such notorious human-rights haters as… Human Rights Watch and from international sex-traffick-loving organizations such as… um… anti-sex-trafficking and immigration-rights NGOs. Notorious anti-feminists like Eleanor Smeal, President of… oh wait… Feminist Majority Foundation said of the bill’s passage, “In addition to providing assistance to trafficking victims, this Act further puts the weight of the federal government behind efforts to combat trafficking for labor, sexual exploitation and child labor.”

In all seriousness Bartow’s issue wasn’t with Wilberforce itself, which has always focused on the issues of international trafficking. Instead she and others argued it was with inadequate federal-level legislation covering prostitution and, particularly, pimping. Given the fairly substantial levels of interstate transfers of funds, contacts, and humans engaged in commercial sex more tools for investigating, prosecuting such violations and coordinating multi-state efforts would probably be helpful as most anti-prostitution law enforcement happens at state and local levels.

However the effect of the objected-to amendments to the 2007 version of the Wilberforce act would have clumsily made the State Department a party to such interstate law-enforcement, effectively defined all prostitution as sex-trafficking, prioritized sex-trafficking over all other forms of involuntary servitude, diverted resources away from actual, you know, human slave trading, while relocating actual international sex-trafficking authority under the domestic-trafficking Mann (a.k.a. “white slavery”) Act, (forcing, incidentally, the creation of a new crime called, I believe, either “extreme” or “severe sex trafficking” to handle all the case of actual… international, non-domestic-prostitution sex slavery previously covered in all previous versions of the law.)

The new version merely strengthens and increases funding for the existing law. Disappointing I know. The good news, though, is its passage now creates a clear path for activists for whom the only form of slavery that matters is sex slavery to lobby for federal and state legislation dealing with actual domestic inter- and intrastate trafficking. And as long as they focus on actual conscription and exploitation of involuntary sex workers, and don’t try poaching funding or resources from enforcement of other anti-human-trafficking initiatives they have my blessing.

Meanwhile, though, the small but very real proportion of the international migrant community that winds up in outright slavery, debt peonage, or other forms of conscripted transport and servitude will receive continuing protection under the newly-reauthorized law.