sex trafficking

I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex

admin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:10:00 +0000

Sexual slavery is a serious problem in the world. While the numbers vary between agencies, the most commonly reported statistics are from the U.S. State Department’s 2005 report on trafficked persons, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are illegally trafficked across international borders, with 14,500 to 17,500 trafficked to the U.S. These numbers include all forms of forced labor, but sexual slavery has the highest percentage, affecting both women and children. Women are lured with the promise of jobs in other countries, but are subjected to sexual servitude. Summer Brenner’s novel I-5 follows the story of Anya, a young woman from Russia, who is stuck in prostitution in the U.S., unable to get out.

Anya’s story is gritty, and not for the weak of heart. Brenner delves deep into the character, creating a realistic narrative. Because of the subject material, there are scenes that are explicit, but it only strengthens the story. Brenner takes a powerful stance in telling Anya’s story. Anya is not shown as a victim; rather, she is a strong woman who has taken her situation and used it in an attempt to secure her freedom. While Anya tells the reader that she enjoys sex and is good at it, she does not like being ordered to service strange men, and desperately wants her freedom.

As the story progresses, Brenner includes flashbacks to Anya’s childhood, and Anya further explains how she ended up in the U.S. as a sexual slave. Besides describing Anya’s story, Brenner also goes into detail about the men who control the “market.” This gives a deeper insight into how women are drawn in, and taken to foreign countries for sex work. In addition, it sadly shows how women who try to retaliate are broken into submission. Brenner does an excellent job portraying this dark world to a chilling degree.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, June 29th 2009

The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:23:00 +0000

By Victor Malarek

Arcade Publishing

It’s impossible to study, be in, write about, or fight against _______ (you fill in the blank) sex work, prostitution, and sexual trafficking without getting some or all of it wrong. I’m not the only straight white guy to write about prostituted women, but without always acknowledging my privilege and standpoints reflexively. Like his 2003 book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, which looked at post-Soviet European bloc countries, Victor Malarek’s new work, The Johns, again demonstrates the ubiquity of sexual commerce and the obvious and banal evils that perpetuate it, but focuses this time on the demand and not the supply side.

Malarek is such a decorated writer, journalist, and television host that a film was made in 1998 about his career. He joins a long list of straight white males such as William Sanger, Geraldo Rivera, Nicholas Kristof, William Vollman, and Chris Hansen in claiming to care about sexual exploitation. Their back-patting is sometimes well deserved, and their usual contempt for heterosexual males involved in sexual commerce who are portly of body, doughy of complexion, and misogynous in their outlook is fully intact here.

And herein lies the irony. In seventeen chapters and 310 pages, johns are shown to be privileged qua heterosexual males, but so is the stealth journalist Malarek as he cruises Costa Rican bars and attends john reeducation camps. Serving up more platitudes and anecdotes than hard data, and more celebrity court cases than sociological insights, Malarek’s database consists of 16 interviews with johns (none explained), consultation of fifty-plus websites (none listed) and thousands of Internet chat room postings (ditto). He capably skewers the exaggeratedly masculine nature of such posters and postings, but that’s too easy. More difficult would be interviewing those long-haul truckers, policemen, clergy and U.N. “peacekeepers,” but that would require an accounting of his own privilege and standpoint.

I enjoyed the breakneck pace of Malarek’s narrative and appreciated that he interviewed so many anti-prostitution activists and researchers about the legalization question. Mentions of famous and infamous johns ranging from Hugh Grant, Hans Christian Anderson, and Eliot Spitzer to Charlie Sheen, Jimmy Swaggart and Clark Gable, and their easy rehabilitations will likely engage lots of non-academic readers. The chapter regarding johns arrested and diverted to First Offender Prostitution Programs started in San Francisco by the recently deceased Norma Hotaling, to whom Malarek dedicated the book, was a high point of the book.

Nevertheless, Malarek’s preference for sweeping generalizations is wearing, and the research he presents and references intratextually could fit on a plate. It flattens even the most obvious differences in prostitution’s many different labor forms and their different psychic costs, health risks, developmental precursors and economic motivators. His flat dismissals of the efforts of sex worker rights organizations rankled me, but the argument he makes for the criminalization only of buying sex and its facilitation is compelling, and I greatly appreciated his discussions of the Swedish, Australian, German and other country-wide experiments with legalization and decriminalization.

The Johns was designed to enable us to connect the dots, but Malarek leaves too many unaccounted for. It’s okay to sneer at the chubby, grubby bar patrons who are molesting pliant, brown-skinned girls and young women, but what if they’re thinking the same thing about him?

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., May 18th 2009

Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:30:00 +0000

By Susan Dewey

Kumarian Press

In Hollow Bodies, Susan Dewey travels to Armenia, Bosnia, and India to look at the institutional responses to sex trafficking in the three different cultural and governmental contexts. Armenia is plagued by poverty, unemployment and a poor quality of life that encourages migration. Bosnia is recovering from a violent war in which many women were victims of rape and forced into prostitution. However, unlike Armenia, its close proximity to Western Europe brings large amounts of donor aid and pressure to integrate with the West. Further east lies India, which receives little Western aid for trafficking issues. Therefore, its purpose in the book is to serve as an example of what can be done at a local level.

Dewey demonstrates her passion for the issue by telling her audience how her great-grandmother and grandmother survived the Depression by becoming prostitutes. This personal connection is felt throughout the text. Dewey’s greatest strength as a writer is her ability to bring the three different countries to life. In doing so, she notices the details of the landscape, the social structure of the setting and even utilizes private conversations to provide a useful context for the environment the women are operating within.

Her research mainly comes from her time as a volunteer consultant with the International Organization for Migration. Through her work with this multi-lateral association as well as through interviews with various policymakers, prostitutes and NGO leaders, she gives voice to the people involved in trying to reduce trafficking.

Dewey notes that institutions can fail to serve victims of trafficking. She is quick to criticize what bureaucrats, agencies and developmental programs do wrong, though she’s reluctant to point out what statistics she’s using to back up her claims. For instance, in the successful intervention she cites in India, she doesn’t provide impact or evaluation data, which leaves claims of effectiveness to be based solely upon subjective assessments.

Dewey admits approaching her research with a bias favoring prostitutes. Her emotional connection colors her discussions with bureaucrats and her critiques of their work loses force when she fails to address the policy aspects of trafficking or to suggest concrete changes that she thinks would improve upon current practices. Dewey’s suggestion that readers write to lawmakers to “refuse to support temporary U.S. funding initiatives that do not consider local needs and operate on a short-term basis that renders them unable to effect real or sustainable change” is insufficiently concrete. Why should US funding be permanent and how can this be achieved given the needs for benchmarks of effectiveness and our own political term limits? What type of local input should be collected and how? What is real and sustainable change? What specific goals should taxpayer dollars aim to achieve?

One of Dewey’s main criticisms is that programs fail to take into account the views of trafficking victims. Given that, the book could have benefited from more in-depth interviews of prostitutes in the three countries so that readers could gain a better understanding of what type of assistance these women would value and why.

Dewey appropriately highlights some of the failures of international institutions. She also presents a refreshingly honest portrait of the practical, ethical and personal difficulties a researcher can face. What is lacking is a more detailed picture of the women needing help and ideas of what specifically should be done to improve services to assist them.

Written by: Jessica Jacobson, May 7th 2009

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:39:00 +0000

By Siddharth Kara

Columbia University Press

Besides weapons and drugs, sex trafficking is the most profitable type of illegal trafficking in the world. In Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, Siddharth Kara takes the reader on a disturbing global tour of Coalition Against Trafficking in Womensex slavery, traveling to India, Italy, Thailand, and several other countries.

An overarching theme that Kara mentions repeatedly is the deep-rooted cultural misogyny in so many of the countries he visited. Although poverty, war and social turmoil create a fertile ground for sex trafficking, the author identifies cultural attitudes toward women as the primary reason that sex trafficking occurs. In his words: “Millions of women lived in a world that overwhelmingly disdained them."

One of the most interesting aspects of Sex Trafficking is the circumstances that led the author to write it. He first became interested in trafficking as a college student, when he spent the summer of 1994 in a Bosnian refugee camp in Slovenia and learned about the trafficking of Bosnian Muslim women. Although he has been interested in sex slavery for many years, he is not an academic, nor does he advocate for anti-trafficking work professionally. Kara is a businessman, and funded his trafficking research trips around the world using personal savings. During his research trips, Kara conducted hundreds of interviews with slaves. In order to find sex for sale, he usually talked to cab drivers, posing as an interested client. In most countries, finding cheap sex was easy, and Kara usually found conditions indicative of sex slavery where he found cheap sex. The book's revelation that legalized prostitution often acts as a cover for sex slavery was very disturbing, especially in the chapter about slavery in Amsterdam.

In one of the most devastating passages of the book, Kara locates sex slavery at a “massage parlor” in Los Angeles. The young woman he meets was trafficked from Thailand with promises of a job as a waitress. Once in the U.S., she was told that she owed $20,000 to the “massage parlor” owner she was sold to, which she would earn by having sex with several men a day. At first she refused, but was beaten and raped into submission. Most of the money she makes goes to the owner, except for a small portion that is sent to her parents. Kara offers to help the woman by calling the police, but she refuses his help because she is afraid the trafficker will hurt her parents in Thailand. The author talks about the anguish he felt about whether or not to contact the police. He ended up not doing so, but still isn’t sure if this was the right choice.

The reader might wonder if the author handles these situations in the most appropriate manner, or whether his presence makes matters worse. Although I am sure that Kara had the best intentions, I have to wonder about the ethical limits of this type of research. At times he puts himself, and possibly the women he interacts with, in dangerous situations. He is essentially powerless to help the women that he comes into contact with, other than giving them educational pamphlets or phone numbers for shelters.

Kara describes the way that the industry operates, explaining that money is the prime motivator for sex trafficking, which is dominated more and more by organized crime rings and networks of corrupt public officials who can be bought off. Using economic theory, he argues that the best way to shut down the industry is to make sex trafficking less profitable.

Sex Trafficking paints a very bleak picture of the status of women globally, particularly for women from poor countries. Urgent action is required to end sex slavery, and my hope is that people who read this book will be moved to action.

Written by: Liz Simmons, April 21st 2009

Taken

admin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:04:00 +0000

Directed by Pierre Morel

20th Century Fox

Reading this review will tell you all you need to know about Taken. If you haven't see the film, perhaps now is the time for you to cease reading, as spoilers abound. Then again, the film follows an overused and clichéd Hollywood format that makes spoilage an inevitability if you've a tendency for moviegoing, and my commentary on Taken might be more worth your while than viewing the ninety-minute film. The choice is yours to make.

Ever wonder what you'd get by mixing sexist stereotypes with ones about Muslims? Oh wait, I think that's happened before -- many, many times. Taken is just the most recent example of this ever-present phenomenon, and it has brought in $124 million to date. Apparently tired tropes sell.

Liam Neeson plays the estranged father, Bryan Mills, of Kim (Maggie Grace), a spoiled yet sweet seventeen-year-old girl who lives with her mother (Famke Janssen) and step-father in posh American splendor. Mills recently quit his job—which he describes as being a "preventer" for an unspecified special ops entity run by the US government—in order to build a relationship with his daughter. The conflict begins almost immediately, as Kim requires her father's legal permission to go on an adult-free, intercontinental vacation with a friend to follow U2's European Tour. (She initially tells her dad she'll be spending the summer in Paris). Dad tells Daughter that the world is a dangerous place. Mom tells dad he's being overprotective. Dad caves in hopes of engendering Daughter's love.

When Kim and her friend Amanda, a sexually permissive nineteen-year-old whose sole role in Taken is to put the two young women in danger by following her hormonal whims, arrive in Paris they are promptly snatched up by a group of men, but not before we learn that Kim is a virgin. We discover within minutes (thanks to Dad's "particular set of skills") that the girls have been taken by a group of Muslim Albanians that specialize in kidnapping of young, foreign girls who are traveling alone (read: without male protection) and are to be sold into sexual slavery. The star and crescent tattoo on the captor's hand somehow lets Dad know that he has ninety-six hours to save Daughter.

So how does Mills do it? By being hyper-masculine to the point of invincibility, of course. These Muslim men stole his property, after all, and he wants it back. (The kidnapping is to be read, in part, as the fault of overly permissive and naive Mom who used guilt to override Dad's "reason" to allow Daughter go to Paris, which included colluding in Daughter's lying to Dad and using ridiculous Dr. Phil-like platitudes about "not smothering" Daughter.) The mission of this now-enraged father will not be thwarted, and all tactics (including rampant killing and bodily torture) are at his disposal to save poor Kim while her purity is still in tact.

Being a virgin, and therefore highly valuable, Kim is singled out for sale to a wealthy businessman. Unfortunately, sluttish Amanda is not so fortunate and Mills finds her dead of a drug overdose, a punishment for failing to be sexually chaste. After looking in a number of seedy places, Mills works his way up the food chain to the elite meat market where he sees Kim sold—after being described as "certified pure"—for half a million dollars to an older Arab man. (Kim isn't the girl sold to this man. He has bought a veritable harem of virgins who are dolled up and dressed in white lace robes, which veil their young faces, before being bought to his bed chamber.)

I already told you that Mills saves Kim, and that's where the story neatly ends. We don't find out what happens to the rest of the girls or the traffickers that Mills encounters on his quest. And really, he makes it quite clear that he's not interested in their fate, which he sees as just a part of the business. Mills only cares about the fate of Kim because she is his daughter, and therefore, his quest was personal. (He tells this to one of the higher-ups, just before he kills him.)

Lest lascivious France escape unscathed, the French government benefits from human sexual slavery too, padding their pockets through the sale of female flesh. Interestingly, the system of trafficking itself is never scrutinized; it's simply accepted as the way things are. Except that what is shown in Taken is not really the way things are in the world of sex trafficking.

For starters, it is extremely uncommon for an American girl to be trafficked. Instead, the victims tend to be women who "originate from countries experiencing political and economic instability, internal displacement, militarism, civil unrest, internal armed conflict, and natural disasters." Women who are trafficked tend to be from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, not the United States—but reality doesn't serve Taken's cautionary, paternalistic, white supremacist tale. In order to effectively convey its fearmongering, Taken needs its victim to be a picture of feminine perfection: lily white, innocent, young, beautiful, and American. (Kim even dreams of being a singer instead of taking advantage of her family's economic privilege to pursue a more cerebrally engaging career.)

The use of anti-Muslim and anti-feminist fare in Hollywood blockbusters is certainly nothing new. (What is interesting, though, is how other reviews have ignored—or promoted—their use in Taken.) It is ironic that the makers of Taken actually reinforce the ideas that make sex trafficking possible. Advocating for social, political, and economic equality of marginalized populations is one method endorsed to curb the sale of women and build struggling economies through legal means. You see, viewing someone through a lens of humanity has the funny effect of making it more difficult to treat them as chattel or evildoers. I guess the makers of Taken didn't get that memo.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, February 12th 2009