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.

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.

Read the quote in context here.

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

• The Sex-Trafficking (Neo)Con
• Wiberforce Reauthorization Finally Passes

• Cool! Someone With a Clue Who Cares About U.S. Trafficking Policy

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Development Programme. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Lurid tales of sex-trafficking around the world, and… problematic conflation of any sort of adult sex work with trafficking notwithstanding, the situation of child trafficking in Haiti is well-documented and endemic.

A very quick bit of Googling will turn up the same stories over and over. Here’s a representative sample from a reliable source, the U.S. Department of Labor:

A 1997 UNICEF study estimated that there were some 250,000 to 300,000 child domestic workers in Haiti, 80 percent of whom were girls under the age of 14. In Haiti, child domestic workers are commonly referred to as restaveks , a Creole word meaning “to stay with.” They are among the most vulnerable and exploited of all children in Haiti. Isolated from family and peers, restavek children are largely unprotected from abuse.

According to UNICEF, most restaveks reach the age of 15 without ever having been to school. Most restaveks work 10 to 14 hours per day and do not receive any compensation for their work. They are often psychologically and physically punished by the master or mistress of the house and sometimes even by their children. Girl restaveks are sometimes sexually abused by the males in the employing families. If a girl becomes pregnant, she will generally be released into the streets. Many such girls become street children or prostitutes.

They said it here.

Also by tradition even in the best of times these children, who’s parents send them from their impoverished countryside to the only scarcely less impoverished city on the usually-empty promise that they will receive an education, are worked the hardest and fed last by their owners “employers.”

This is not the best of times.

If it’s left up to the (often lower-to-middle-class) Haitan families who use them these children will receive disaster-related food, water, shelter, and medical care last. With nowhere else to go (many are brought in too young even to remember where their real homes are) these children may have no where else to turn but the families that used them before.

If you’ve ever spent a minute of your time worrying in the abstract about trafficking it might be a good time, right now, to start thinking about the very concrete problem of what to do about up to a quarter million trafficked children who are now doubly screwed.

My partner and I have already donated to Doctors Without Borders because they’re good people and not just spending all their fundraising dollars on… more fundraising. Which is more than I can say about some of the more sanctimonious “anti-trafficking” organizations. So I’m on the lookout for reputable groups able to directly address the specific needs of displaced coerced children in Haiti. If I find one I’ll post about it here.

According to the charity rating service CharityNavigator the following groups are reputable and fit the approximate criteria. Again I’ll update if I find something more specific.

Save the Children

Note: I’m advocating for donations, not admonishing. Right now there are more than enough priorities in Haiti to go around, and as long as you’re giving through a reputable organization it’s needed and will make a difference.

See CharityNavigator’s list of established organizations on the ground in Haiti now.. Note: The same page has a good list recommendations for how to make sure any donations you go where you want them to go, and how to avoid being scammed instead.

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says

Wouldn’t you think the media would be a little more invested in figuring out why Ling and Lee were considered threats by North Korea? It’s because they were investigating sex trafficking for Current TV, as only briefly noted in this NYT article, which states: “It ended a harrowing ordeal for the two women, who were stopped on March 17 by soldiers near North Korea’s border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking.”

She said it here.

To be perfectly honest no, I don’t think the press was so much not invested in the trafficking angle as they were in the much more operatic “ZOMG North Korea’s Got Kim Jong-il and Teh Bomb.” An oldie but goldie for the press since the lead up to the Korean War in the 1950s.

That’s not to say the situation for North Korean migrants in China isn’t really, really dire. They caught firmly in classic political and economic shears: on the one hand there’s no, zero, none opportunity in North Korea and a fairly substantial chance of outright starvation; on the other hand it’s particularly illegal to migrate without documentation to China from Korea, and the penalty (being “repatriated”) brings gruesome penalties at home. Consequently migrants there, like, say, undocumented Romanian migrants in Italy or undocumented Haitian migrants in Florida are extraordinarily vulnerable to sexual or other forms of labor exploitation. Something about “all I have to do is contact the authorities and you’ll be dead in a month” that really gives employers… or for that matter random-but-documented passers by… extraordinary leverage in negotiating, um, tasks and wages.

When the border in question separates cultures which both have strikingly awful human rights records and indifferent to bad attitudes towards women in particular then yeah, good for Lee and Ling for putting their lives on the line to shine light on the situation. Now that they’re home, and once they’re rested, I hope Lee and Ling will have an opportunity to write not only about their experiences in custody but also about the topics they went into jeopardy to cover in the first place.