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The No-Sex Class: A Chilling Confirmation From Slavery Apologists Before the American Civil War

Sun, 2010-02-07 22:52 — figleaf

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.

A Good Time to Think About Haiti's Coerced Domestic Child Servants

Fri, 2010-01-15 15:23 — figleaf


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.

Sungold on Protecting All Trafficking Victims: "Because There's Nothing Sexy About Their Enslavement"

Thu, 2010-01-14 02:38 — figleaf

Sungold of Kittywampus says almost all that needs to be said about certain monomaniacal definitions of “trafficking.”

Nor do I want to see trafficked domestic workers (for instance) completely ignored because there’s nothing sexy about their enslavement. (As if forced prostitution might be sexy??!!?)

Read the quote in context here.

She’s referencing a bill in the Ohio legislature, introduced by Rep. Teresa Fedor and endorsed by the Polaris Project that defines human trafficking a stand-alone crime that shocking, I know “include[s] a broader definition that covers forced labor in addition to coerced sexual activity.”

Which is pretty cool.

Also cool is Sungold’s thoughtful distinctions about who is and who isn’t a victim in sex work and how our (too-often willful) misunderstanding complicates the lives of all manner of vulnerable subsistence and migrant populations.

Also, happy 2nd blog anniversary to Sungold.

Clarification On That U.N. Trafficking Report

Mon, 2009-02-16 11:54 — figleaf

So I finished yesterday’s post about a U.N. report on trafficking (large pdf) feeling a bit like I should have been wearing a tinfoil hat.

My basic concern is that the U.N. document says sex-trafficking is disproportionately intercepted, prosecuted, and reported. Reporters, however, are turning the figure of 79% of reported cases being sex trafficking into 79% of all cases being sex trafficking. Which I’m afraid will get translated into pressure to divert even more resources away from all other forms of human trafficking.

My feeling is that people are repeating the 79% figure as fact because a) it fits their preconceived notions and b) it fits their moral priorities. I might add that, in too much of the world authorities prefer an emphasis on sex trafficking because (as in, say, Brazil, India and Pakistan, much of the Caribbean, parts of Asia and Africa) economies benefit tremendously from slave labor and therefore have a direct interest in seeing that ignored. (See forced male labor on sugar plantations, forced child labor in textile and carpet industries, and forced female labor in Asia and, um, too many U.S. territories and protectorates.)

So let’s try a different approach at forcing a closer look at that UNODC report (emphasis mine.)

Victims of human trafficking were identified through the criminal justice process and through victims’ assistance organizations. Over 21,400 victims were identified in 2006 among the 111 countries reporting victim data for that year.

UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, pg. 11 (large pdf)

If you’re willing to accept that there were scarcely more than twenty thousand victims of human trafficking last year I’m willing to accept that 79% of them were sex-trafficking cases. M’kay?

—

Of course I’m not willing to accept either figure and neither should anyone else. Even after distinguishing smuggling of voluntary migrants from the trafficking of victims of involuntary debt peonage and outright enslavement (as the UNODC document recommends) I wouldn’t be surprised if the number wasn’t off by one or more orders of magnitude.

However (*also* as made clear in the report) since many of those 111 countries have radically different definitions of what constitutes trafficking. For instance some countries define only sex trafficking but no child trafficking. Others define child trafficking but no sex trafficking. A few others… last year almost including the United States… inflate some numbers by defining all sex work as human trafficking while severely deprecating other forms by… shifting resources away from other forms in order to further emphasize sex trafficking. Scarcely any countries define selling women into marriage as trafficking. In all countries both law enforcement and non-profit organizations actively seek out sex-workers (trafficked or otherwise) whereas very few countries actively seek out trafficked labor. And virtually no one pays attention to, let alone formally tracks, the non-commercial sexual coercion imposed on male, female, and child victims of non-sex trafficking.

In other words the numbers reported are bogus and therefore the percentages based on those numbers are bogus. Which would be why… the authors of the document stress the need for more and especially more accurate information before conclusions are drawn.

Lying with Being Mislead By Statistics

Sun, 2009-02-15 18:39 — figleaf

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.

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

Mon, 2009-02-09 11:25 — figleaf

Katherine Franke of Feminist Law Professors has a very nice, nuanced rundown of the promises and perils facing America’s anti-trafficking efforts under new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

I heard little sign in [Clinton’s] testimony of a desire to change policy from the crusade undertaken by the Bush Administration that overdetermined the problem of human trafficking in sexual terms (thereby ignoring the enormous problem of other forms of forced labor), driven largely by an evangelistic judgement about sex work more generally.

Read the quote in context here.

Secretary Clinton may have had larger fish to fry at her confirmation hearing than human trafficking but it seems… unlikely that she’d give up entirely on the balanced, core-principles on human trafficking she forged with the late Senator Paul Wellstone back in the 1980s… and was consequently excoriated for by hyper, hyper-partisan Republican neoconservatives, hyper-partisan Republican evangelicals, and a handful of dupes and fellow travelers who believe that a) all prostitution is sex slavery b) all trafficking is trafficking in sex slaves, and c) anyone who, like Clinton or Wellstone, claimed otherwise was carrying water for rapists, pimps, and traffickers. (This latter construction, and it’s source, is a personally painful bugaboo of mine.)

At any rate, Secretary Clinton is and has been on the right side of the issue in the past and it’s difficult to imagine she’d let a pack of shrill right-wing knee-squeezers change her mind. Still, after eight years of not simply negligent or incompetent but overt malevolent foreign diplomacy Clinton, as I say, may have bigger fish to fry. So at least for the near future it won’t be Clinton herself that matters most but who she selects to run the State Department’s anti-trafficking and human rights divisions.

Katherine Franke also points out that, at least as currently constituted, federal-level enforcement of international trafficking falls heavily on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security. She’s very rightly concerned that at least so far Napolitano has kept Bush campaign attorney (see Florida, 2000 election) and patronage appointee Timothy Keefer on as Chief Counsel for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at ICE.

As for ICE’s overreliace on raids to protect the victims of trafficking, the Sex Workers Project in New York has just issued a report, Kicking Down the Door: The Use of Raids to Fight Trafficking in Persons, in which it documents how in the name of “rescue” these raids often result in the arrest, detention and deportation of trafficked persons because they are undertaken by ICE, together with local law enforcement officers, who are poorly trained or ill-equipped in identifying victims of trafficking, and who are, after all, focused on arresting criminals, people who pose potential terror threats, are dealing drugs and/or are sans papiers, that is, found without necessary paperwork demonstrating legal presence in the U.S.

I urge all who are concerned about this issue to read the Sex Workers Project report and to monitor the new team and policy being developed at Janet Napolitano’s “Homeland” Security and ICE.

It’s really great to see someone who seems interested in results rather than optics examining the nuts and bolts, inside-baseball side of anti-trafficking policy.

Not Enough News In the News

Tue, 2009-01-20 11:09 — figleaf

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors prefaces a quotation from the LA Times with “It would be nice if human rights violations like this got more media attention.”

Here’s part of Bartow’s excerpt from the LA Times article


When Sandra agreed to make the perilous trek from her native Guatemala to the United States in 2006, she said, she was lured by the prospect of a job as a housekeeper that would enable her to send money to her impoverished family back home.

Her father had a hernia that prevented him from working, and money was so tight that she and her 12 siblings sometimes didn’t have shoes or enough to eat, the young woman testified Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.

But not long after Sandra was delivered to L.A. by human-smuggling “coyotes” she learned that the job awaiting her had nothing to do with cleaning houses.

Instead, she said, she was told that she would have to “lay with men.”

Read the rest of the LA Times article here.

Since I’m sanguine about intentional sex work but bitterly opposed to both slavery and unwanted sex I’m inclined to agree that stories like this should get more attention.

And so I went to Google News to see how often the story had been picked up. At the moment Google News has what really boils down to 28 links to basically different snippets of the same Associated Press story in English and Spanish. So score one for Bartow! On the other hand regular old-fashioned Google turns up 86 links… still mostly links to the same old thing though. Blogger.com’s blog search turned up some links to the original indictments back in August, 2007 — for instance from a now-abandoned blog called Human Trafficking News. (It’s evidently taken this long to bring the case to trial.)

One disservice I think Bartow may have made is failing to quote two further snippets from that LAT article. First, it’s easy to conflate the point that most customers of sex workers are men with an assumption that all traffickers are men.

Among the defendants in the case are sisters Mirna and Gladys Valenzuela, both illegal immigrants from Guatemala who, according to prosecutors, hatched the plan to begin luring young women from their home country to the United States, where they would force them into prostitution. Also charged are two of the sisters’ nieces and Mirna’s live-in boyfriend, Gabriel Mendez.

Second, had Bartow quoted a bit more of the article her readers might have learned that, in addition to being a violent, coercive, manipulative jerk the woman who was allegedly running the trafficked sex-slavery ring is also a fucking racist and a prude.

At one point, she said, the defendant she was living with, Mirna Valenzuela, threatened to sell her to a pimp if she caused any problems. She said Valenzuela told her the pimp would force her to have sex with men of different races and to submit to oral and anal sex.

“I kept telling her not to sell me,” the young woman said.

Finally, a point I’d like to make, one I’m pretty sure Bartow wouldn’t touch with a 10-page legal brief: the defendants are allegedly justifying their actions with the claim that the women they were trafficking had knowingly come to the States to be prostitutes. As if this was an excuse for… (italics mine)

The women typically charged $80 for 15 minutes of sex and some saw as many as 30 clients a day, prosecutors alleged in court papers. The women were forced to turn over all the proceeds to the defendants, they said.

No… see… agreeing to be smuggled to the States to perform agricultural labor doesn’t entitle one’s smuggler to sell your agricultural labor and keep your earnings. Same with sex work. The work you intend to perform has no relevance to whether you wind up enslaved, m’kay?

It would be nice if that got a little more coverage.

#%!#$!!@$@~

Wiberforce Reauthorization Finally Passes

Fri, 2008-12-12 13:58 — figleaf

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors is evidently unhappy about it but here’s some good news: The long-awaited and much-needed “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008” anti-trafficking law has passed both the House and Senate.

Bartow blames Senator and Vice-President-elect Joe Biden for helping pass the law minus the House amendments that had held it up in the Senate and drawn opposition from such notorious human-rights haters as… Human Rights Watch and from international sex-traffick-loving organizations such as… um… anti-sex-trafficking and immigration-rights NGOs. Notorious anti-feminists like Eleanor Smeal, President of… oh wait… Feminist Majority Foundation said of the bill’s passage, “In addition to providing assistance to trafficking victims, this Act further puts the weight of the federal government behind efforts to combat trafficking for labor, sexual exploitation and child labor.”

In all seriousness Bartow’s issue wasn’t with Wilberforce itself, which has always focused on the issues of international trafficking. Instead she and others argued it was with inadequate federal-level legislation covering prostitution and, particularly, pimping. Given the fairly substantial levels of interstate transfers of funds, contacts, and humans engaged in commercial sex more tools for investigating, prosecuting such violations and coordinating multi-state efforts would probably be helpful as most anti-prostitution law enforcement happens at state and local levels.

However the effect of the objected-to amendments to the 2007 version of the Wilberforce act would have clumsily made the State Department a party to such interstate law-enforcement, effectively defined all prostitution as sex-trafficking, prioritized sex-trafficking over all other forms of involuntary servitude, diverted resources away from actual, you know, human slave trading, while relocating actual international sex-trafficking authority under the domestic-trafficking Mann (a.k.a. “white slavery”) Act, (forcing, incidentally, the creation of a new crime called, I believe, either “extreme” or “severe sex trafficking” to handle all the case of actual… international, non-domestic-prostitution sex slavery previously covered in all previous versions of the law.)

The new version merely strengthens and increases funding for the existing law. Disappointing I know. The good news, though, is its passage now creates a clear path for activists for whom the only form of slavery that matters is sex slavery to lobby for federal and state legislation dealing with actual domestic inter- and intrastate trafficking. And as long as they focus on actual conscription and exploitation of involuntary sex workers, and don’t try poaching funding or resources from enforcement of other anti-human-trafficking initiatives they have my blessing.

Meanwhile, though, the small but very real proportion of the international migrant community that winds up in outright slavery, debt peonage, or other forms of conscripted transport and servitude will receive continuing protection under the newly-reauthorized law.

New York's Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act Signed Into Law

Fri, 2008-10-17 12:18 — figleaf

Nick Confessore, former political blogger and now of The New York Times, says

September 26, 2008

[New York] Gov. David A. Paterson on Friday signed into law a bill shielding sexually exploited girls and boys from being charged with prostitution.

The law, known as the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act, will divert children under the age of 18 who have been arrested for prostitution into counseling and treatment programs, provided they agree to aid in the prosecution of their pimps.

He said it here.

[Via $pread magazine online. —fl]

The law has evidently been held up for year in the New York state legislature by law-n-order types, Senate Republicans and NYC Mayor’s office who believed it would just make it harder to “crack down on prostitution.”

The compromise bill allows charges to be reinstated for child prostitutes who refuse to cooperate with court mandates and also includes a sort of “one strike you’re in” provision where reoffenders just go to jail.**

While I’m actually, eh, sympathetic with qualms that if poorly administered the new law could just provide new avenues for gaming the system, on the other hand system-gaming-wise it’s already pretty much nickel night at the casino. So what’s wrong with attempting an approach that sidesteps that system?

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere there’s a bit of a disconnect between the standard protective impulse “OMG, here’s an underage victim who’s been conscripted into prostitution” and the standard response which is “arrest the little whore.”

Whichever way we might feel viscerally about sex work we can not be proud of the pure oxymoronics of “criminal victim.***” And on the face of it, anyway, this looks like a step away from punishing victims and towards punishing (silly me for asking, I know) the actual criminals in such cases: pimps, traffickers, and customers who buy and sell children’s bodies.****

—-

Next up, one hopes, would be diversion initiatives along Safe Housing / Safe Environments lines? The answer would appear to be… yes. According to a summary of the bill from something called the (randomly via-Google) Polaris Project Action Center there are provisions for…

Safe Houses

  • Every local social services district is required to provide a short-term safe house to sexually exploited children who live in its district. In addition to secure housing, the facility should include 24-hour crisis intervention and access to various medical care and other supportive services. Existing resources, including respite beds or runaway and homeless youth programs, can be used if appropriate, and local social service districts may work together to provide these resources on a regional basis.
  • The Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) is required to contract with an appropriate agency with experience working with sexually exploited youth to provide at least one safe house for longer-term care, in a geographic area that would meet the needs of sexually exploited youth and that cannot be readily accessed by perpetrators of sexual exploitation.

Planning
Every local social services district is required to:

  • Determine the needs of sexually exploited children in their respective districts;
  • Include the determination of the need in the integrated county plan;
  • Provide crisis intervention and community-based programs to meet the determined need; and
  • Recognize and plan for the separate and distinct needs of girls, boys, and transgendered youth who have been sexually exploited.

Oh, but wouldn’t you know? Perhaps the bigger objections to the bill weren’t so much about about law ‘n order as some people not wanting to pay to do the right thing.

A recent study conducted by the state Office of Children and Families reports that counties are currently not equipped to handle the needs of this victim population. The study, New York Prevalence Study of Commercially Sexually Exploited Children, was released April 18, 2007. It examined 159 agencies from a sample of local departments of social services throughout the state, including New York City. Among its conclusions, the study details the service availability and capacity, as well as the problems preventing local departments of social services from providing the necessary services.

Hmm… should we help victims or lock them away? Yeah, “which one’s cheaper” is always a moral choice.

[** If convicted. If I’m not mistaken one of the big problems for pimped or trafficked sex workers of any age is that their pimps and traffickers a) know the ropes and b) can afford good successful lawyers. —fl]

[*** I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere my strong preference for a different, more appropriately focused construction… like treating customers of child prostitutes as Level 1 or Level 2 lifetime-registerable child sex offenders. The act, incidentally, mainly covers children under age 16 so “chilling effect” on what really ought to be legitimate adult sex work customers? Not so much. —fl]

[*** Oops, maybe I’m not so happy: Based on Confessori’s article it looks like Bloomberg et.al. pressed for requiring cooperation against traffickers but… as usual no mention of prosecuting the customers of pimps and traffickers. —fl]

"Patrons" of Child Prostitutes Need to be Registered as Sex Offenders

Mon, 2008-08-18 17:04 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user lawgeek. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier today I mentioned an article, via Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, about an underage girl from Massachusetts who was being prostituted out of a New Jersey motel room.


Authorities: Kidnapped girl rescued at motel

ABSECON — Police arrested a Vineland man and three other people after a Massachusetts girl called her mother to report she was being held against her will at a White Horse Pike motel.

...

Authorities would[n’t] give the exact age of the victim, or when she was first allegedly kidnapped, stating only that she is under 18.

Source: South Jersey News

Response #2:

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere recently but can anyone explain why let alone pimps and traffickers of the underaged, let alone their customers, shouldn’t spend the rest of their lives on sex-offender registries?

And no, it doesn’t matter whether their prostitution is voluntary or, as in the case of the New Jersey girl, coerced. Nor does it matter that (as Lux Alptraum correctly points out) “...adolescents are not children.” Because as she also points out, neither are they adults.

And yet, as Debra Boyer pointed out in “Who Pays the Price? Assessment of Youth Involvement in Prostitution in Seattle” (pdf)

The routine fine for those arrested for “patronizing” is $500 although the maximum that can be imposed is $1,000.

What’s not just wrong but sick and wrong is that in virtually all instances the penalty for “patrons” of minors is no higher with the result that…

- Customers have no incentive to check. Which is ironic because in cases of non-prostitution “She looked old enough to me” isn’t a defense. It’s also ironic because evidently customers have no qualms, at all, about checking whether a sex-worker is actually an undercover cop.

- There’s no additional penalty for those pimps and traffickers who conscript minors. Which is a particular shame since minors, especially runaway or kicked-out minors, are particularly vulnerable.

- Particularly disturbingly from my perspective is that, evidently, if there are no additional penalties then police and prosecutors evidently have no additional incentive to investigate or bring charges against prostitution, or “patronage” of minors.

- And finally, if “patrons,” pimps, and police aren’t checking ages and responding accordingly then it’s easier for minors themselves to slip into prostitution, either voluntarily or by conscription.

Show of hands, please, if anyone thinks that status quo is just hunky-dory? Didn’t think so. So! WTF?

Actually, three WTFs

1) Why aren’t anti-prostitution activists specifically targeting child prostitution for reasons other than flash or buzz value? (For instance would Professor Bartow have given the New Jersey child case any attention at all if she wasn’t pushing to extend TVPA coverage to all adults?) It seems to me that even if you wanted to stop all prostitution going specifically against prostitution of minors would let you build up a lot of momentum. Unless I’m mistaken and anti’s are content to let children be prostituted in order to maintain a high scare-quote quotient against prostitution in general. (Anyone know why anti’s are so reluctant to single out prostitution of children? Is it that they like the shock-troop value that child prostitution adds to what might otherwise be a more straight-up libertarian issue?)

2) Why aren’t pro-prostitution activists specifically supporting targeting child prostitution? It seems like a no-brainer if you really wanted to see prostitution legalized and/or normalized. Not least because anti-prostitution types get so much mileage with prostituted-child statistics (even if, evidently, they never otherwise lift a finger to stop it — see the preceeding point.) And not to put too fine a point on it but why on earth do adult prostitutes tolerate competition from minors in the first place? Why on earth do they tolerate the diversion of paying customers to generally less expensive and more conventionally desirable child prostitutes? (Anyone know why pro’s are so reluctant to single out prostitution of children? Is it that most adult sex-workers have better sense than to draw attention to themselves for fear of arrest? Is it because nominally pro-prostitution customers themselves enjoy “patronizing” children when they can get away with it? Especially since there appear to be no, zero, none consequences if they do under the current system?)

3) Why aren’t reporters, parents, community activists, politicians, and police specifically supporting targeting child prostitution? Actually this might be less of a no-brainer than the preceding ones because, to too many people, once someone’s had sex, even if they’re a child, they’re “broken” or “damaged goods” or their “innocence” is “lost.” On the other hand, it seems to me that they’d be most easily recruited to support anti-child-prostitution policies.

At any rate this seems like a classic case of if you’re not part of the solution you’re the problem** whether you disapprove of, approve of, or are utterly indifferent to prostitution between adults. So again, WTF? If you’re not part of the solution you ought to be ashamed of yourself: pimps and patrons of prostituted minors should be registered as the unambiguous sex offenders they are.

[** Not just part of it. —fl]

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