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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.

Photo “Boston red light district” by Flickr user hebedesign. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Via Echidne Pierre Thomas of ABC News says (emphasis mine)

In the last three days, the FBI and police from 29 cities rescued 47 children from 73 alleged pimps and more than 500 others who authorities say sought to exploit them. Among those children saved: a 12-year-old from Texas; a 13-year-old from Ohio; and a 14-year-old from Michigan.

...

FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole vowed today that the effort would continue. “Those that exploit children should know they will be brought to justice,” Pistole said.

Read all about here.

When I saw that “more than 500 others” I thought if it’s 73 pimps it must be 500 customers. Finally, I thought to myself, we were going to see action taken against the customer. And, given the fiery rhetoric Federal authorities used to decry sexual exploitation of children, they’ll face penalties stiffer than a few weekends at “john school.” Maybe, I thought, prosecutors will finally get serious about those who pay for sex with children by throwing the book at them for having sex with children! Including, oh, say, sexual assault of a child, statutory rape, sexual exploitation of a minor, pedophilia or ephebophilia, and all the other appropriately extremely draconian laws reserved for adults who have sex with children. Oh, and followed by, preferably, spending the rest of their lives registered as class two or class three sex offenders, reporting to local police every time they change address, having their names posted on neighborhood-watch registries, and putting big orange signs on their front doors on Halloween that say “No Candy At This Residence.”

Imagine my dismay then when, dissatisfied with the meager information at the ABC site I discovered instead that (emphasis again mine)

“Operation Cross Country II” involved efforts in 29 cities and resulted in the arrest of 73 pimps and 518 adult prostitutes, the FBI said.

Source: CNN.

Actually, to the extent that any adult prostitute knowingly fails to report sexual exploitation of a minor (inside or outside trafficking) I think it’s actually hunky-dory that they, like any other involved adult, be charged as accessories to the crimes committed against the victims. (Although admittedly the fact that adult sex work, even when coerced, is criminalized makes it not only personally but legally perilous for them to report trafficking of children or anyone else.) Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case either — instead the 500+ adult sex-workers were evidently just swept up in the course of the investigation.

So. Seriously. If people were serious about prostituted children then why the sam hill are they giving a pass to those who pay to have sex with them? And if people are serious about reducing demand for prostituted children it ought to be extraordinarily efficient to employ already well-established criminal law against the customers of the pimps who traffick them.

Thus announcing the arrest of 500+ adult prostitutes is beyond unimpressive. Either they were coerced adults in which case they too should have been rescued rather than arrested, or else they were voluntary sex workers in which case their arrests were irrelevant to the stated purpose of the law-enforcement initiative to rescue prostituted children.

I mean, seriously, a year-long, multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction “Operation Cross Country II,” presumably directed by a team that had already conducted a previous Operation Cross Country didn’t turn up one single solitary customer arrest? Yielding not one solitary prosecution for sexual assault of a child?

Priorities, people, priorities!

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For the record I think it’s dumb to prosecute affirmative, non-coerced sex between consenting adults, including sex for compensation between consenting adults. (In fact as I pointed out above, it’s counterproductive to protecting conscripted or otherwise trafficked children and adults.) But there we’re talking about consenting adults: adults, plural. Minors, by legal, social, and developmental definition aren’t adults and consequently none of the arguments supporting sex work for consenting adults have no bearing whatsoever on this discussion.

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See also – Why Reality Trumps Fantasy – “Patrons” of Child Prostitutes Need to be Registered as Sex Offenders – The Fledgling Fund: Very Young Girls – Not Pretty Babies – “Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle” (pdf)

Photo “Child Bride” by Flickr user TRiver. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the scoop on a too-often ignored, and particularly disgraceful form of sex-trafficking

Her disappearance from a Skagit County migrant worker camp a week ago launched a nationwide manhunt for a teenager accused of kidnapping.

But it turns out that the Mexican woman being sought as a kidnap victim since Sept. 13 was instead escaping an arranged marriage, authorities said Monday.

An arrest warrant for kidnapping that carried $1 million bail for Elena Garcia’s purported kidnapper — who turns out to be the man she wants to be with — was quashed, Skagit County Chief Criminal Deputy Will Reichardt said Monday.

Two witnesses, including her father, who claimed Garcia was robbed at gunpoint on Sept. 13 and forced into a van with her 2-year-old son recanted over the weekend, Reichardt said.

[Read all about it here.

Naturally the only charges likely to be filed are for “false reporting” and not, at all, for attempted sex-trafficking. Because thanks to aggressive lobbying by evangelicals, neo-conservatives, and their various dupes “human trafficking” in general and “sex trafficking” in particular means only, and exclusively, conscription and transportation for commercial sex.

Garcia said her father had promised her hand in marriage to a 27-year-old Mount Vernon man whom she had no desire to be with. She wanted to be with Sanchez-Velasco.

Garcia said her father’s attempt to enforce the arranged marriage led to her flight with Sanchez-Velasco, and that no firearms were used and no money was stolen.

There’s no evidence (at least not yet) that the father had outright sold his daughter to the Mount Vernon man she didn’t want to marry. So if it wasn’t about money what was it about? Here’s a hint.

Garcia told investigators that, in his culture, he had lost all credibility when his daughter left with another man.

Thus, evidently, the “credibility saving” claim she’d been kidnapped by thugs at gunpoint. And evidently there really were consequences for the father’s failure to hold up his side of the patriarchal arrangement

The man her dad had arranged for her to marry, however, who comes from the same area of Mexico and shares similar beliefs concerning marriage arrangements, was reportedly upset over the rejection, he said.

I’m… pretty darn sure I’m as bitterly opposed as the next activist to slavery in general and sex slavery in particular. And while I disagree pretty forcefully with some people about how anti-trafficking resources should be prioritized I’m pretty darn passionately believe it should all be a pretty darn high priority. I do think, however, based in no small part on Shulamith Firestone’s work in the early 1960s, that economic/transactional/arranged/chattel marriage and the acquisition of labor it implied — in other words real, non-romance-facilitated traditional marriage documented by Stephanie Coontz and others — was the basis… the real “original sin” if you will, for all other subsequent forms of exploitation.

Consequently I’d really appreciate it if, say, anti-sex-trafficking (a.k.a. anti-prostitution) activists would expand the scope of their fulminations to this original form of sex and labor trafficking.

E. Benjamin Skinner says in A Crime So Monstrous, Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, only one out of fifteen trafficked humans worldwide are trafficked for sex work, and not only are the fourteen out of fifteen trafficked humans “only” industrial, agricultural, or domestic slaves, but because those who traffick the let’s-ignore-them-they-don’t-count non-sex workers are still really really bad people.

A few weeks ago I ran across a post on someone’s group blog that claimed the sex industry had coined the term “human trafficking” in order to distract people from the “fact” that only prostitutes are trafficked. That post has either been withdrawn or was so obscure anyway that I can’t Google it back up. In the forward to Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous former Clinton-administration Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke corroborates my concern.

But there are complications. Among activists and policymakers, even the definition of slavery is disputed. Some people maintain that every prostitute is a slave; some go so far as to assert that the only present-day slaves are prostitutes. This absurd view in effect consigns to limbo the millions of men and women who are, by any standard, living in slavery but not working in the sex trade.

Source: A Crime So Monstrous; pg. xi

Here’s another complication: Jessica of Jezebel explains in mostly short words why it’s a very bad idea to try and claim that human trafficking is all about serving the sex industry.

Earlier this week, a group of mostly Central American illegal immigrants living in a “drop house” discovered by officials in South Los Angeles told authorities about the sexual assault that had been perpetrated by their smugglers. Drop houses are locations where smugglers hide hide newly-arrived immigrants and collect their sizable fees for helping bring the aliens into the country. The drop house where women were reportedly assaulted was a single-family dwelling which housed 60 immigrants, according to the Los Angeles Times, and was filled with “piles of trash and rotting food.” One of the women living there has been impregnated by a smuggler, and all the denizens of the house on South Normandie “reported being held against their will and paying $5,000 to $7,000 in smuggling fees to be led across the border in Arizona.

She said it here.

Ok. So does begging people to remember that human trafficking is far bigger than a “sex worker” problem mean I’m sanguine about trafficked sex workers? No — Skinner’s chapter on The Netherlands makes me want to vomit in somebody’s face, as did the now-decade-old NPR story about trafficked sex slaves in Italy** that got me activated to the problem in the first place.

I just happen to think that people who go around lying about trafficking to buttress their distain for prostitution are obviously doing no favors at all for people who are trying to actually make a living as sex workers. They aren’t really doing much for the minority of trafficked people who really are prostituted either, let alone the millions of other trafficked humans who are trafficked for all other purposes.

[** The situation in Italy was and, I’m betting, still is just a horror show. It’s evidently a bigger crime to be undocumented there, and a prostitute there, than it is to be a trafficker, and so pimps who tire of their slaves can simply drop them off at a police station where they’ll be perfunctorily jailed and then deported without question… whether they’ve been beaten unconscious first or not. What really burned me though, and what first soured me on prostitute’s customers is that thanks to the prices and locations where they find them virtually all Italian customers specifically know they’re dealing with women who are forced into prostitution and… don’t are. I can’t support the extremist claim that every customer who has sex with a prostitute is raping here, but there’s absolutely no way around Italian men knowing they’re paying to rape someone. —fl]