Sokari of The F-Word Blog in the U.K. says of the AND by failing to support those women who are real victims of crime, more women like Lara are put at risk by having to go underground and of loosing their children. What the Brothel Report doesn’t show is the hypocrisy of the British government towards trafficking victims who when found are in nearly all cases deported back to their home countries where they are once again vulnerable to be trafficked not just back to the UK but other countries across Europe and beyond.
It’s an incredible summary of what irks me about moves inspired by the coalition of evangelicals, neoconservatives, and their various fellow travelers to to divert policy and law-enforcement resources away from actual trafficking, which doesn’t seem to bother them much in favor of anti-prostitution enforcement, which — voluntary or coerced — bothers them quite a lot.
That last bit, about deporting (often summarily deporting) trafficked sex workers is a story told all across Europe. Although I oppose recently proposed amendments the otherwise generally laudable Wilberforce (a.k.a. “White Slavery”) Act in the U.S. is at least better engineered to forestall deportation. But the general deportation-centric approach for trafficking victims, along with casual attitudes towards the actual traffickers and their customers**, strongly betrays what motivates these sorts of initiatives.
I think I’ve mentioned this before but I was reflecting again today (especially after this post by Debauchette) on the by-definition not perfect analogy between sex work and agricultural labor: just as there can’t be a blanket policy that makes no distinctions between free farmers, skilled labor, substance/survival farming, migrant labor, and slave labor, a blanket policy that assumes all sex workers are trafficked, prostituted, or otherwise conscripted or coerced is going to leave the sort of substantial enforcement gaps Sokari points to. It’s why we can’t play either the blue-nose or the libertarian card but instead must to actually craft policy to fit cases. The first, obviously, between those who do what they do on purpose (however much we do or don’t approve)and those who have no say at all. (And anyone who approves of that isn’t just part of the problem, they’re the blood adversary!)
[** Remember johns of trafficking victims are the trafficker’s customers, not the victim’s. —fl]
