Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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

According to Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster, LAPD (ret.) of Criminal Justice Online

Florida Couple Charged in Forced Labor and Document Servitude Conspiracies

April 28, 2010 – WASHINGTON – Sophia Manuel and Alfonso Baldonado Jr. have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a human trafficking scheme to hold Filipino nationals in forced labor in country clubs and hotels in Southeast Florida, the Justice Department announced.

According to the indictment, defendants Manuel, 41, and Baldonado, 46, owners of Quality Staffing Services Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., conspired to obtain a cheap, compliant and readily available labor pool. The indictment details the defendants conspired to hold the workers in their continued service, for little or no pay, and housed them in substandard conditions without adequate food or drinking water.

The indictment alleges that the defendants used false promises to entice the Filipino nationals to incur debts to pay up-front recruitment fees; and then compelled the workers to remain in the defendants’ service, despite inadequate work or income to pay off the debts, using a scheme of threats to have the workers arrested and deported with no way to repay their debts, confiscation of the workers’ passports and rules and controls restricting the workers’ freedom of movement and communications with outsiders.

He said it here.

But wait, from the same website there’s more

Arlington, Texas Couple Convicted of Forced Labor and Other Crimes for Holding Nigerian Woman in Domestic Servitude

February 3, 2010 – WASHINGTON—A federal jury has convicted an Arlington, Texas husband and wife Emmanuel and Ngozi Nnaji of engaging in a nine-year scheme to compel the labor of a Nigerian victim as their domestic servant, the Justice Department announced today. The jury found the defendants guilty of conspiracy, forced labor, document servitude, alien harboring and false statements. Ngozi and Emmanuel Nnaji each face a maximum sentence of up to 55 years in prison.

According to the evidence at trial, Emmanuel Nnaji and Ngozi Nnaji enticed a widowed Nigerian mother of six to come to the United States to be their domestic servant by falsely promising a salary and support for her children, who she was struggling to support.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of human rights that will not be tolerated in our free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

But wait, there’s still more

Two Brothers Plead Guilty in Conspiracy to Hold Thai Workers in Forced Labor in Hawaii

Defendants Alec Sou and Mike Sou, co-owners of Aloun Farm, pleaded guilty on Jan.13, 2010, in federal district court in Honolulu, to conspiring to commit forced labor. The two defendants, who are brothers, each face up to five years in prison for their respective roles in a labor trafficking scheme that held Thai agricultural workers in service at Aloun Farm through a scheme of debts, threats, and restraint.

During their respective plea hearings, the defendants acknowledged that they conspired with one another and with others to hold 44 Thai men in forced labor on a farm operated by the defendants, using a scheme of physical restraint and threats of serious harm to intimidate the workers and hold them in fear of attempting to leave the defendants’ service.

“Holding other human beings in servitude against their will is a violation of individual rights that is intolerable in a free society,” stated Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This prosecution demonstrates our commitment to combating human trafficking in all its forms, vindicating the rights of trafficking victims, and bringing human traffickers to justice.”

He said it here.

Now why, you might ask, would I be talking about all this domestic, agricultural, sexual, and labor servitude, a.k.a. human trafficking on a nice morning in May, 2010?

One big reason derives from a companion piece to the Dreams Die Hard documentary about trafficking and involuntary servitude in the United States from Free The Slaves. The companion piece is called the Dreams Die Hard Study Guide. In the section “What Happens to Slaves?” the following bullet point really stood out.

When they turn to officials, trafficking victims may get harsh treatment if the police officer or immigration staff regards the escaped victim as an illegal immigrant. Although some law enforcement officials have immediately rescued and protected people in slavery, there have been tragic situations where police simply failed to recognize slavery. Proper training is crucial.

Source: Pg. 3

It just made me wonder how much better off Arizona’s de facto slave owners are now that the state legislature has made it even more illegal to be an undocumented immigrant. And, given the gleeful promises of ever-more draconian enforcement by sadists like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, how much further is this law going to shift the balance of power even further in the direction of those who already abuse trafficked people.

—-

Note: I was inspired to write this post by search results that showed up while I was trying to verify whether the authors of the website Citizens Against Trafficking were living up to their claim that they’re “a broad based coalition formed in 2009 to combat all forms of human trafficking.”

The short answer appears to be no: they instead appear to have been primarily opposed to prostitution, which they say is a hotbed of trafficking, and only in the state of Rhode Island. They were particularly opposed to a loophole in Rhode Island that made some forms of prostitution legal there.

The law has recently been amended, with much applause and support from the website’s authors: it’s now as illegal to be a sex-worker in Rhode Island as it is to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. With what will turn out to be, I’m afraid, similar consequences for sex workers.

As I’ve mentioned relatively often I personally don’t care much for sex work in the current dominant paradigm since I believe, strongly, that it reinforces rather than relieves our expectations that all sex between men and women is ultimately transactional. And I strongly regret when people cross borders illegally. On the other hand I don’t think either sex work nor immigration ought to be illegal primarily because it increases rather than mitigates the underworld environments serious anti-traffickers are concerned puts victims most at risk — whether they’re “massage parlor” workers in Rhode Island, or “nannies” in Maryland, or “lettuce pickers” in Arizona.

Another point that can be extracted from Hugo Schwyzer’s post about the research into men who hire prostitutes...

It’s not hard to see that this belief — part of what I refer to as the myth of male weakness — serves a particularly important self-justifying function. “I need to have sex with prostitutes”, the line goes, “or I might rape.”

...

They want the myth of male weakness to work because it serves their agenda; they know that in their own lives, the myth is oversold. This is cynical, yes, but devastatingly effective.

Read the quote in context here.

It wouldn’t hurt to ask if the same accusations could be made of the socially-conservative philosophy of some of at least some of the researchers behind the original project (pdf).

Because on the one hand, yes, if it’s very helpful to assume all men are potential rapists if one is asserting that all prostitutes are conscripted.

But!

On the other hand, recalling the major point of Hugo’s post, sticking with that dichotomy handily enables men who excuse themselves hiring prostitutes in those terms!

And even though I’ve run out of hands an even more important consideration is that the dichotomy alienates at least two groups that could be really, really useful allies in confronting abuse in prostitution: men in general for one, and the subset of prostitutes (however large or small) who either aren’t or who don’t perceive themselves as coerced.

Julie Bindel, writing in The Guardian has a number of interesting points about a research project she participated in by interviewing men who volunteered and/or otherwise agreed to discuss being customers of prostitutes.

The most interesting point in her article, by far?

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

She said it here.

One really, seriously cool thing about Bindel’s article? She links to an ungated copy of the research report(pdf)! That’s very cool.

One reason it’s cool is that if you read the report you can see stuff like, oh, say, who the co-authors and sponsors of the study were. And one of whom was the not always exactly correct activist Catharine A. MacKinnon. Which lets you know to pick up a grain of salt while reading.

Skepticism notwithstanding, while there’s a distinct possibility that the quotes were cherry-picked there’s no reason on earth to doubt they found men who actually said those things.

Not least because it’s close to conventional wisdom: lots, and lots, and lots of people believe men are such borderline-criminal, verging-on-rapist, impulse-control-of-a-three-year-old-child animals.

Oddly, as Bindel points out, a demoralizing number of men believe it.

Lest one leap to accuse contemporary feminists for spreading that belief I’ll just point out the idea substantially predates contemporary feminism, which only really cropped up in the late 1960s. Whereas the idea that prostitution prevents rape was already current in the 1360!

Anyway, Bindel’s quotes nicely illustrate that whatever minor problems feminism might have with men it’s usually nothing compared to the abiding misandry of non-feminists and anti-feminists.

(Clue: Of course most men are actually perfectly capable of controlling their urges. Hello! Masturbation?)