Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

KJ of ImmigrationProf Blog says

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review will hold a conference on “Trafficking in Sex and Labor: Domestic and International Responses November” on November 13-14, 2009 at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, PA. Human trafficking is currently a major global concern. Rates of trafficking, slavery, and involuntary servitude continue to increase, and the global economic crisis is expected to worsen the problem while frustrating efforts at prevention, prosecution, and remediation. Trafficking also touches upon a broad array of domestic and international legal issues, from policies on immigration and prostitution to gender equality and the problem of violence against women. The issue is currently under active debate in Congress and is likely to receive renewed focus with the change of administration in the United States. The University of Pennsylvania Law Review Symposium will address trafficking in persons—the transportation of people across national borders, often through the use of force, coercion, fraud, or duplicity—from a domestic and international perspective.

KJ

Read the quote in context here.

(Via Google Alerts on the keyword “sex trafficking.”)

A younger friend of mine has this job. She was recruited into it at a very early age… not even twelve when she started doing it. She was very good at it — wound up making far more as an “amateur” than any of the other kids in her school. When she turned 18 she discovered she could make quite a bit more if she kept doing it than she could with any of the other entry-level jobs that were available to her. So she turned pro. Now, as she approaches her 30s, she’s growing weary of it and wondering if she’s up for it anymore and wondering even harder what she could do instead that would make anything like the same money, in this economy. Especially considering how she’s specialized in her particular skills, how she barely made it through high school, and how her prospects of going to college or even a trade school are pretty dim.

There’s a lot of heartache in her line of work. She develops sometimes intensely personal and intimate relationships with her clients but no matter how close they become the clients always move on, always lose interest. And though she tries to keep tabs on them they often forget about her entirely.

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex says my friend may soon have a hard time getting a visa to do it in Canada. For her own “protection.”

[Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenny’s] ministry issued a media release stating that the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act will “protect vulnerable foreign workers such as exotic dancers and live-in caregivers who could be victims of exploitation”.

...

According to Wong, one measure to evaluate the vulnerability of a person is insufficiency of funds. “If we allow them in, we are actually putting them in great risk,” Wong told the Straight. Wong confirmed that the bill is driven by Conservatives’ aversion to foreign strippers in Canada. “That is one of the major concerns because, legally, according to admissible criteria, these workers can come in but experience has told us that once they come in, they will be exploited,” she said.

Erika Del Carmen Fuchs of the Justicia for Migrant Workers B.C. doesn’t agree with the Conservative approach. Fuchs told the Straight: “If there’s a problem with human trafficking, they should go after traffickers, not the people being trafficked.”

In May, two Filipino caregivers alleged mistreatment by Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla’s family. The caregivers claimed that they worked 12 to 16 hours a day and that their passports were confiscated. If the bill becomes law and is applied to cases similar to the Dhalla affair, Kurland said that the only remedy available for caregivers would be to get kicked out of Canada.

She said it here.

My friend is a professional nanny.

This is not to say nannying and, say, stripping are directly equivalent professions. But they evidently are similar enough to be treated the same way by… particularly thumb-fingered and/or heartless lawmakers.

Personally I think if one were trying to make workers safer, especially immigrant workers, it would be a better idea to actually protect the workers instead of outlawing them.

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.

Feminist Law Professors, in a post titled “About 79 percent of human trafficking involves sex slavery while 18 percent covers forced or bonded labor, forced marriages and organ removal,” says

So says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in a new report that is available here. A press release providing an overview of the report can be found here.

Read the quote in context here.

There’s a little bit of fudging here. First of all Bartow says the study says

“About 79 percent of human trafficking involves sex slavery…”

Bartow says that here.

That, if true, is absolutely definitive. If true then all other trafficking amounts to wagging the tail of sex slavery.

Reading her post charitably one would assume Bartow got her definitive statistic of 79% from the press release, which says

According to the [actual UNODC] Report, the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation, although this may be an optical illusion.

Read all about it here

That, if true, is… well… not quite definitive because of that weird little “may be an optical illusion” clause… but still pretty conclusive. If true then all other trafficking still amounts to wagging the tail of sex slavery!

That bit about “optical illusions” is a giant, red, sore-looking zit on the nose of credibility though. And unlike Bartow’s title the press-release paragraph says nothing about bonded labor, forced marriage, or organ donation. So she probably didn’t get her 79% statistic there.

So let’s look at the relevant paragraph in the actual (292 page) UN Report. (Emphasis mine.)

Third, sexual exploitation is by far the most commonly identified form of human trafficking (79%), followed by forced labour (18%). This may be the result of statistical bias. By and large the exploitation of women tends to be visible, in city centres, or along highways. Because it is more frequently reported, sexual exploitation has become the most documented type of traf- ficking, in aggregate statistics. In comparison, other forms of exploitation are under-reported: forced or bonded labour; domestic servitude and forced marriage; organ removal; and the exploitation of children in begging, the sex trade, and warfare.

Source: UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons; chapter: A knowledge crisis about a crime that shames us all; pg. 6

Bartow appears to have glided right over a snippet of text qualifying that the 79% was not the quantity of human trafficking that involves sex slavery but the quantity reported, and then glided past nearly a paragraph of text clarifying those qualifications, before picking up the last little bits about bonded labor, forced marriage, and organ harvesting adding up the remainder of reported cases.

Other citations of the 79% figure in the UNODC report either contain similar qualifications about reporting (pg. 11) or make no mention of forced marriage and organ harvesting (pg. 57.)

A sidebar on page 51 of the report explains why this matters

“Why trafficking for forced labour is less easily detected than trafficking for sexual exploitation”

There is a general concern that trafficking for forced labour is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation, and at least three considerations support this concern. The first regards legislation. In 2008, most of the countries considered by this report had a trafficking in persons offence in place that included the criminalization of trafficking for forced labour, but this is a recent development. For instance, about 10 European countries expanded their definition of trafficking to include forced labour during the years 2005-2008. For many years, a large number of East Asian countries only considered trafficking for sexual exploitation, which remains the case in many countries in the region. A similar situation exists in Latin America.

The second issue relates to the first in that law enforcement agencies, as well as the general public, often view trafficking in persons only in the context of sexual exploitation. For many years and in many countries, the two concepts have been almost concomitant. Hence, an episode of trafficking for forced labour, when detected, could still be treated and recorded under another charge even when a specific offence of trafficking for forced labour exists in a country’s criminal code.

Finally, the ‘visibility bias’ is the idea that trafficking for forced prostitution is more likely to be detected than trafficking for forced labour. Prostitution (whether forced or voluntary) involves the general public because it must be visible – taking place in streets, bars or public spaces in urban areas – to attract potential clients. Conversely, most of the victims of forced labour often work in hidden locations, such as agricultural fields in rural areas, mining camps and garment factories or within the closed environment of a house in the case of domestic servitude. As a consequence, the detection of victims of trafficking for forced labour is less probable than the identification of victims of trafficking for forced prostitution.

In other words it’s not that 79% of trafficking is sex-trafficking, it’s that when nobody gives a shit about any other kind (and, especially, when people actively lobby to exclude enforcement of non-sex trafficking as, ahem, some people have) we just have a lousy idea how much trafficking — sex trafficking and, especially, otherwise — there is overall.

Celebrating because lousy data supports your biases at the expense of (in this case literally) uncounted tens or hundreds of thousands of others is a terrible idea.