Debate on Sex Trafficking

Introduction to the Debate
Background: Historical Discourses on Trafficking
International Instruments and Trafficking
Conclusion: New Framework to Address Trafficking

Introduction to the Debate
The present day phenomenon of trafficking in persons, which takes on different forms, fulfills different purposes, and includes men, women, and children, has diversified the definitions, interpretations, and public understanding of this complicated issue.

Negotiations leading up to the United Nations 2000 Protocol on Trafficking revealed the differences between two distinct viewpoints as the definition of “trafficking in persons” was debated. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) (www.catwinternational.org) argued that “trafficking” should include all forms of recruitment and transportation for prostitution, regardless of consent, while the Human Rights Caucus (HRC) supported the view that prostitution is work and that force was the important factor in defining trafficking.

The pro-prostitution viewpoint includes groups like those which make up the Human Rights Caucus, such as the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) (http://www.thai.net/gaatw) and Network of Sex Workers Project (NSWP) (www.nswp.org). These groups defend the right to self-determination, right to work, and the right to self expression, believing that women can make informed choices about engaging in consensual commercial sex. The anti-prostitution viewpoint, on the other hand, held primarily by CATW and its many international partners questions the wider socio-economic and cultural context within which such “choices” are being made and warns of systematic reinforcement of male dominance and oppression against women if gender disparities of rights and status are ignored.

The campaign literature of CATW states that “prostitution victimizes all women, justifies the sale of any woman and reduces all women to sex.” They stress that the international call for an economic recognition of the sex-industry will further widen gender inequality, compromising the status of women. According to Janice Raymond of CATW, “if women in prostitution are counted as workers, pimps as businessmen, and buyers as customers, then governments can abdicate responsibility for making decent and sustainable employment available to women.” Dismissing reasoning that options for women might be limited and prostitution often a survival tactic, CATW questions the social utility of prostitution and the difficulty of resisting a lucrative sex-industry that flourishes at the cost of disadvantaged women. The NSWP claims these views are challenged by emerging research indicating that it is sex-workers, rather than coerced innocents, that form the majority of the traffic in women.

Background: Trafficking in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Discussions regarding trafficking have traditionally been closely related to prostitution and more specifically to women and girls being sold into prostitution. The 19th-century discourses on prostitution came from England as well as other western European countries and the United States.

The “regulationists” in England saw prostitution as a necessary evil and sanctioned a state system of licensed brothels. Policy makers and the general public saw prostitutes as deviant and as spreading diseases. A series of Contagious Disease Prevention Acts enacted by the British government brought forth moral outrage amongst feminists, such as Josephine Butler, who spoke out against the forced examinations of women. Known as “abolitionists” Butler and others blamed “unbridled male lust” for prostitution and viewed involuntary prostitution as “white slave trade.” (White slavery came to mean the procurement by force, deceit, or drugs, of a white girl against her will for prostitution.)

With much support from social purity reformers, who joined the abolitionists in their efforts, stories of innocent white girls forced into prostitution began flooding the media and garnering public support for punishment of anyone who enticed a woman for immoral purposes. A campaign focusing on morality initiated by the social purity reformers soon overtook the abolitionist agenda. The Criminal Law Amendment Acts in Britain (1885) and the Mann Act in the US (1910) made prostitution a legal offense.

International Instruments in the 20th Century
It was in 1949 that an international instrument first attempted to bring a common understanding to the issue of trafficking. The UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others agrees to punish any person who “procures, entices or leads away, for purposes of prostitution, another person, even with the consent of that person and exploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person.”

The new Trafficking Protocol adopted in Palermo by the UN General Assembly in November, 2000, takes a different approach to trafficking from that of the 1949 Convention. According to the Protocol, “Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.” Exploitation was given to include, at a minimum, forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. The consent of a victim to the intended exploitation is irrelevant where any of the exploitative means have been used.

Although the Protocol does recognize the distinction between voluntary prostitution and forced prostitution, it shies away from defining the phrase "exploitation of prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation" because government delegates to the negotiations could not agree on a common meaning. Groups on both sides of the trafficking debate see this indecision as potential for prejudice by governments in addressing prostitution in their domestic laws.

A New Framework to Address Trafficking
A new framework to understand and address trafficking is still under constant debate after the adoption of the Palermo Protocol. It is being sketched out in discussions, demands, and demonstrations by sex-workers lobbying governments to interpret the Protocol to protect the rights of trafficking victims, and by the CATW lobby to diminish the necessity for women to turn to prostitution.

According to CATW, the solution lies in decriminalizing the women in prostitution and criminalizing the men who buy women and children and anyone who promotes sexual exploitation. They ask for State policies and practices to provide better education and employment opportunities that enhance women's worth and status and give them more options. According to the Human Rights Caucus, although the new protocol contains a strong law enforcement provision and a first-ever international definition of “trafficking in persons,” the protocol does not require governments to provide shelter or services to victims of trafficking, or to cease arresting, imprisoning, and summarily deporting victims of trafficking. According to a Human Rights Caucus press release, “This serious gap in the protocol is partly due to government reluctance to make any commitments to provide services and protection to undocumented migrants even if they are victims of a horrific crime."

Various sex-workers’ rights activists dismiss the “free and force” distinction and argue that the harms of prostitution are caused largely by moral attitudes and their domestic legal consequences. Jo Doezema of NSWP outlines a framework that would reject both the neo-abolitionist position, which denies women the ability to consent to prostitution, and a neo-regulationist perspective that condemns “forced” prostitution, but offers nothing in the way of rights for the “voluntary” prostitutes. She believes that it is sex-workers themselves who need to author this new framework to remove the repressive legacy of trafficking and incorporate elements of labor rights and women’s rights in the sex industry, which should go beyond the theory of oppressed women and oppressive men.

The framework laid out by the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery in its Draft Program of Action, filed under the Commission on Human Rights, highlights the key principles of self-determination; human rights; social justice; prevention through awareness and action; and women-centered agendas. Despite the divergences in opinion regarding the best strategy to ensure the respect of trafficked person’s human rights, the World March of Women (http://www.marchofwomen.org) states that there is a consensus with respect to certain measures that states should implement in the short term to improve conditions for prostitutes and victims of trafficking. This includes housing, financial and legal aid; guaranteeing the right to social services and housing in the receiving country; protection during criminal proceedings against traffickers, decriminalization of prostitutes and trafficked persons, and ensuring their right to organize. The solution should lie within the human rights and humanitarian framework and strategies should focus on trafficking and the criminal nature of those involved in this conduct, rather than on the victims of trafficking, whose human rights should be assured.