Yale University Online Debate: Beyond Trafficking and Slavery

Marketing mass hysteria: anti-trafficking awareness campaigns go rogue

From Brown University, Yale University, and OpenDemocracy

Sex Workers Rights Joint Statement In Response to Law Suits Against BackPage.com

The Desiree Alliance has serious concerns over the ongoing attacks against sexual freedoms of adult-oriented industries.  We view the right for consensual sexual freedoms as fundamental civil liberties every citizen is afforded to engage in without legal recourse, without policing, and without moral repercussions.  These intrusions and deprivations debase personal privacy and equality that censor the First Amendment right guaranteed to every citizen.  The targeting, profiling, arrests, and convictions against vulnerable populations inherently impair the health and well-being of communities that have limited or no access to services that provide safe working environments and protections against state-sanctioned violence.  When government begins to criminalize sex in the guise of morality and jettisons legal language, we question the validity and reasoning as to why government interference belongs in the consensual labor of sex and online advertising sites that provide safety from second and third party interferences and exploitations.  (Cont.)

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STATEMENT AND SEE ALL SIGNATORIES

The Women’s March represented all women but what are the conditions of their support?

As sex workers stood in full support with a statement issued by the march organizers, it was quietly removed in the middle of the night, then re-added with a exploitation statement of trafficking. Here’s our response to the addition/condition of their pseudo support

The Desiree Alliance appreciates the support of the Women’s March for sex workers’ rights. We represent the many intersections that cross this profession and continuously strive to include those voices in our work.

We have concerns over the erasure of the entire statement of your support. We are also deeply concerned of the added trafficking statement that was quietly inserted back while sex worker advocates slept (there was a 5 AM screenshot and screenshots during the entire day of this unfolding). We supported the initial statement until this add-on was inserted. The problem with this symbiotic enmeshment of trafficking is harmful to our work against laws, policies, targeting, hyper-criminalization, etc., that has put sex workers at risk due to the anti-trafficking narratives that are being tangled up with consensual sex work. I have spent a great deal of my time refuting these narratives and to see what played out yesterday is very disheartening and quite frankly, insulting. No sex worker rights organizations were asked to assist in the design of the Unity statement and again, all inclusive, is in fact, not inclusive when the entire statement was erased in the dark. Appending a sentence to the original support statement regarding trafficking exploitations has not been added under any other group mentioned, and specifically targets those who work in alternative underground economies.

We agree wholeheartedly that trafficking exists in all forms of human, labor, and sex. We do not promote nor endorse these heinous forms of clandestine markets in any way, shape, or form. However, with your add-on sentence, you cherry-picked how you were going to support our rights. We hope this will be resolved as our community is an important asset to your march.

We urge the Women’s March to retract this add-on sentence in your support for sex worker rights. “Urge” is a gentle word with how I’m feeling right now about this support fiasco. Rearranging that statement would have made all the difference in how we view this march. You chose to erase, then piecemeal your support for us, and this is the very reason I will not be marching at your event.

We hope lessons are learned here and we support all women who struggle, fight, and demand their human rights as equal citizens. I am a 56-year old woman and have been fighting for my equality as long. I looked forward to this march and wanted my great-grandchildren to understand the struggle, that we as women, are still fighting just to exist in this world. Sadly, this will not happen with the way you have come out in support of sex workers; I will not be marching with the generations of women in my family. We ask you to reconsider your statement that fully supports our rights and rescind the trafficking add-on sentence.

Sincerely,
Cristine Sardina MSJ
Director, Desiree Alliance
director@desireealliance.org

Selling Snake Oil: Anti-trafficking Awareness Campaigns

By Cristine Sardina – Director, Desiree Alliance

How effective are anti-trafficking awareness campaigns surrounding sex trafficking? Scare tactics of victim-age numbers, hip buzzwords, dying blue streaks in hair, Modern Day Slavery memes, and #Not1More hashtags, are just a few of the new-age trafficking awareness campaigns aimed to educate the public that we are (un)aware of what is really going on. Stock photos show same-person models in different poses of bondage, dirty male hands of Black/brown color, threatening dark-skinned black men standing menacingly behind pallid young girls (many times with objects of enforcement i.e. bats, rope, chains, etc.), barcodes tattooed on the backs and necks of young girls, dirty-faced and half-naked girls holding teddy bears, doe-eyed blonde-haired girls with fear in their eyes, etc., all appealing to uninformed communities that your mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, … could possibly be sex trafficked – if only you become aware of your unawareness

I find the media campaigns nothing less than appalling. Depending on where you are, the graphic images are strategically designed for target audiences. College campuses have posters of young blonde Caucasian women with a single tear running down her cheek. Economic Security (welfare) waiting rooms have posters of obscure-looking women of color in bondage and agony. Child protection waiting rooms have posters of dirt encrusted children holding teddy bears. These horrific images are designed to alert the public that trafficking leaves no one out and you might be, could be, will be, sex trafficked. The 800#s attached to these posters request the public immediately call if they suspect trafficking is happening, pressuring citizens to police citizens against violent and dangerous traffickers (think, It takes a Village…). Posters and media campaigns give a simplistic overview what sex trafficking looks like: A young woman with a much older man, someone deliberately avoiding eye contact, someone who works excessively long or unusual hours, someone with few or no personal possessions, someone acting especially anxious or paranoid. This depiction describes any person on any given day.

Educational and language value of these campaigns also skew public information awarenesses of how many people are being sex trafficked. One poster states that 50 percent of trafficked victims are less than 16 years of age, another claims 300,000 U.S. children are being forced into sexual slavery, another touts the average age of entry is 13-14 years old, another poster advertisement states average age entry is 12-14 years old for girls and 11-13 years old for boys, another claims 2.2 million children are sold into the sex trade every year – averaging 4 children per minute, another, 253,000 children sold into sex slavery in the U.S. Another poster states “No Smoking/Eating/Trafficking people in your taxi” (What does that even mean?), another shows a row of Caucasian women modeled as chicken wings wrapped and barcoded in supermarket packaging claiming “This could be your daughter: Stop human trafficking”. Another disturbing picture with a male hand around a screaming Caucasian woman’s throat “Julia: violent pimp, 30 men a day, indebted, enslaved”, and a more disturbing depiction of a half-naked Caucasian woman thinly clad in white bikini underwear and white tank top, seductively smiling and sexually posed with her legs half-spread and propped up on a wall, headlining that being bought can happen to anyone. Another poster says 27 million people are living in slavery due to human trafficking with 70 percent of that number being females trafficked into commercial sex industries, another shows a pie chart with 38 percent carved out for commercial sex trafficking with no other information given, and yet another claim that every minute of the day a woman or child is sold into sexual slavery. Out of the thousands of stock photos I’ve researched, only one caught my eye to a half-truth, “Human Trafficking: 24 cases 2011 – 34 cases 2012 – 50 cases 2013”. These free-for-all campaigns bringing people to the conclusion that trafficking is at epidemic proportions is once again depending on the unawareness of awareness. Citizens are far removed from obtaining factual numbers and can only deduce one thing from these campaigns: Trafficking is a huge problem and you’re the next statistic.

Human trafficking films such as Tricked, are screenplays that became reality through the director’s reading one (1) article about sex traffickers coercing women into going with them to work at Miami’s XLIV Super Bowl. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Forbes Magazine affirmed her suspicions by claiming that 10,000 prostitutes were trafficked for sex during the event and other sources had claimed up to 100,000 victims. Super Bowl XLV, 59 people arrested on prostitution-related offenses, only 13 were non-local sex trade workers. Super Bowl XLVIII, the FBI rescued 16 minors (another claims 25) and arrested 45 pimps, averaging 2.8 pimps per victim. Super Bowl XLIX netted hundreds of arrests in nationwide pre-event prostitution stings and rescued/arrested 68 (another source claims 82) underage victims thought to be trafficked. Super Bowl 50 arrested 42 potential trafficking victims with 2 minors arrested. Those who work on trafficking campaigns vet not to look at the actual numbers of arrests: “The process of combating trafficking is as much about gathering numbers as it is educating the public and training law enforcement. Relying solely on the measurement of arrests to indicate that there’s a problem is unfair” (source). The near-biblical statused Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) states that “Given the complex nature of human trafficking, it is difficult to amass reliable data to document local, regional, and global prevalence.”. Every statistic put forth by the 2016 TIP Report is explained: “The above statistics are estimates only, given the lack of uniformity in national reporting structures.” If citizens cannot rely on factual numbers to understand how deep sex trafficking goes, is spoon-fed guesstimation sufficient?

By effectively constructing a Woozle Effect, the ideologies of anti-trafficking campaigns have sensationalized the need for justifying hyper-militarization in combatting modern day sex slavery. Everyone from politicians, law enforcements, celebrities, feminists, academia, religious leaders, etc., now lay claim to knowledge and expertise on the deeply complicated intricacies of sex trafficking. It is a mind-bending task to locate the factual numbers of sex trafficking as there are no separate criminal categories for what Norma Jean Almodovar satirically refers to as the most pressing issue of our time (source). To come to any sort of cogency regarding trafficking data, one must sift through the multitude of government sites with thousands of pages of state and federal arrests/convictions, trudge through endless data on federal/state law enforcement sites, search separate government contractors tasked with the record-keeping of global trafficking incidents, track tier countries in compliance/non-compliance with US guidelines, read national and global trafficking reports, and have a set of replacement batteries for your calculator. The expectations are minimal that the lay public will delve further into trafficking research other than social medias, memes, posters, hashtags, in-the-know websites, and celebrity spokespersons.

The do-good intentions of the save and rescue industrial complex must be held suspect as to the motivations of these loosely controlled campaigns. Research by sex worker groups compiling state by state resources for trafficking victims has shown hotlines, text lines, shelters, and crisis centers are not providing the assistance that they claim to offer. If a city has received 1.5 million dollars in federal funding, it is expected that victim resources could supply a safer lodging other than a room set aside at the Christian homeless shelter, provide more than a public “spot” the trafficking victim/trafficker training, and offer university gatherings with like-minded experts on trafficking. The smattering of weak resources that are provided mandate criteria that immigrants, migrants, and other marginalized groups are hindered from obtaining such services. Many times, law enforcement agencies force immigrant victims to provide information on their trafficker or face serious consequences of incarceration and/or deportation. What this fails to discern regarding deportations is the grave risk of societal and cultural outcasting, isolation, separation of families, repeat trafficking, and violent death. Audre Lorde refers to this as The Great American Double Think – Blaming the victim for victimization.

Awareness campaigns are orchestrated designs to sell fear and hysteria. Throwing numbers against the wall to see what sticks, determining what the public will buy into, and creating hyped media sensationalism, is a calculated Red Herring fallacy that absolves any responsibility to the save and rescue narratives for factually reporting data and presenting it to the public as accurate information. These campaigns with their fast and loose falsehoods are comparable to finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, reported sightings of Elvis eating fried peanut butter banana sandwiches at a diner in Springview, Nebraska, or spaceships beaming up humans for scientific experiments. None of these examples have proven to be true but yet some believe it could be true. It is dangerously irresponsible to purposely mislead the public with fallacious assumptions that eventually become pseudo-truths if you repeat it enough times. As long as a constant stream of funding is being pumped into anti-trafficking campaigns with no accountability, we can believe Elvis is on his way to Oskaloosa, Iowa to sing karaoke at the town talent show with a cache of weapons in his spaceship. You must do better than this.

DONATE TO THE
DESIREE ALLIANCE GENERAL FUND
THROUGH PAYPAL