|
The new abolitionists
Freeing ‘sex slaves’ is now at the top of the human rights agenda,
thanks to Christian evangelicals, the Bush administration, and two former
Washington politicians, Linda Smith and John Miller. How did the
anti-trafficking crusade evolve, and is it being overhyped?
By Nina Shapiro
August 25, 2004
In 1999, the hell-raising conservative Christian populist Linda Smith left
Congress and disappeared from public life. It was like a whirlwind had suddenly
stopped in midstorm. Hailing from Vancouver, Wash., Smith had improbably made
it to the House of Representatives two terms before as a write-in candidate.
Once there, she became nationally known as one of a new breed of Republican
women leaders crusading for traditional values and helping Newt Gingrich put a
female face on his tax-cutting, welfare-reforming agenda. The New Republic once
profiled her in a story titled “Invasion of the Church Ladies.” But Smith was
more interesting than that. Much to her own party’s chagrin, she was also an
early and strident champion of campaign finance reform, a role that gave her
some crossover appeal in her 1998 bid for Patty Murray’s Senate seat, which she
nonetheless lost.
Last year, Smith resurfaced. She was now, of all things, working with young
girls and women who had been forced, or “trafficked,” into prostitution in
Southeast Asia and elsewhere. She had founded a nonprofit organization that was
setting up homes for these women, called Shared Hope International. And she was
a leading organizer of an international conference on trafficking held last
February under the auspices of the State Department in Washington, D.C. She
brought several previously trafficked girls from India with her for press
interviews then, and took one of them to Disney World.
From shaking up congressional politics to providing social services, from
campaign finance reform to Asian prostitution, it seemed a puzzling, if
virtuous, transformation. In her Vancouver office one day in June, surrounded
by a few old brassy political posters and many more tranquil pictures of her
wearing saris and surrounded by girls in India, the 54-year-old Smith explains
what happened this way: During her last year in Congress, she got a call from a
man who had visited missions in India affiliated with the Assembly of God
Church, to which Smith belonged for many years. Through the missions’ work with
prostitutes, he had seen “little girls in cages,” and he wanted Smith to know
about it.
“I thought it was a bit much,” Smith recalls, “but I couldn’t sleep. So I
called my staff and told them, ‘I have to see it.’” Within days, she flew to
India, where a representative from the Assembly of God organization Teen
Challenge took her into the red-light district. “It was one girl, one day,” who
changed her life, she says. The girl was about 11 years old, and for some
reason, she hugged Smith. “She felt so frail in my arms. I can feel her today.”
She reminded Smith of the girls she knew from Sunday school, of her own
granddaughter. She felt an unaccustomed wave of emotion. “It was so different
for me. I’m pretty cut-and-dry.” As she looked down at the girl, she asked
herself, “What do I believe?” and answered, “I believe you are made by God.”
Right there and then, she made a resolution: “Today I’m going to act on my
faith.” She returned to her hotel and immediately started fund-raising for
homes she wanted to build for these girls.
There’s a mythic quality to her story, the way she dropped everything and found
revelation in a single moment. It’s easier to understand, though, if you take
into account the changing currents around her. Smith’s redirection reflects
that of the religious right as a whole. Looking past the divisive social issues
that ignited the movement for much of the ’80s and ’90s, conservative
evangelicals have turned their attention to international human rights, forging
new and unlikely allies along the way. One of the biggest issues to seize their
imagination is that of human trafficking. The archetypal case—a young girl,
tricked into leaving her impoverished homeland by the promise of a respectable
job, then brutally held captive, raped, and forced into prostitution—strikes
deep moral chords. Making common cause with feminists also fired up about the
issue, evangelicals are largely responsible for turning the issue into a top
priority of the U.S. government.
Leading the government’s charge is another local: former three-term Republican
Congressman John Miller of Seattle. Although Jewish, Miller’s convictions and
record on human rights—he opposed granting most-favored-nation status to China
despite Boeing’s ardent lobbying for it and labored against Soviet control of
Eastern European countries—helped to make him the pick of evangelicals working
on the issue to take over the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons. President George W. Bush appointed him to the post in
December 2002 and this June empowered him with the title ambassador at large.
Miller has used his authority to make sure the issue is a top priority of
governments around the world as well. His energy and bipartisanship have
generated enormous goodwill among groups on both the right and the left. An
inspiring spokesperson for the cause, Miller brands human trafficking
“modern-day slavery” and calls it “the emerging human rights issue of the 21st
century.”
It is being treated as such by the press as well as nonprofit groups and
government agencies. Thousands of stories have been written on the subject in
the last year, including a cover story in The New York Times Magazine under the
headline “The Girls Next Door,” stressing that trafficking is all around us,
even in the “normal, middle-class surroundings” of Main Street, U.S.A.
There’s only one catch. There’s widespread confusion about what exactly
trafficking is and how big a problem it might be. Consider this: Washington
state has its own anti-trafficking task force—the first in the country—charged
by the Legislature to study the scope of the problem locally. In June, the task
force, run out of the Office of Crime Victims Advocacy in the Department of
Community, Trade, and Economic Development, released a 92-page report.
Congratulating the state for “leading the country in taking collaborative
action against human trafficking,” the report asserts that “Washington
possesses many of the underlying conditions that support trafficking of
persons,” such as its border status. Midway through the report, however, it
notes the number of cases brought under a year-and-a-half-old state trafficking
law: zero.
The Christian Right: The Next Generation
“It just jumped off the pages of the newspaper.” Richard Cizik, the influential
vice president for government affairs of the National Association of
Evangelicals, is talking about how human trafficking became a cause for
crusade. He remembers reading a piece about the trafficking of women in Eastern
Europe, where the harsh economic realities following the collapse of Communism
made many vulnerable to false promises. “If we truly stood for human rights for
all, surely the trafficking of young girls and boys for the purposes of human
slavery could not go unchallenged.” Cizik helped put together a coalition of
groups across the religious and political spectrum to work the issue. Gloria
Steinem sent a representative to meetings. So did the B’nai B’rith. The
coalition succeeded in passing federal anti-trafficking legislation in 2000
that created Miller’s office.
The coalition did not come about by accident. It was part of a deliberate
strategy to move away from the unyielding methods of formative leaders like
Jerry Falwell. “Second-generation leaders—people my age—saw the initiatives of
the 1980s crash and burn and decided we had to do things differently,” the
52-year-old Cizik explains. If evangelicals wanted to accomplish anything, they
would have to build coalitions with people they previously considered
opponents, on issues they could agree on. Not only did they form alliances with
feminists on human trafficking, Cizik says, evangelicals worked with Jews,
Catholics, and Buddhists on passing the 1998 International Religious Freedom
Act, monitoring religious persecution around the world; with the Congressional
Black Caucus on bringing about the Sudan Peace Act of 2002; with the American
Civil Liberties Union on pushing through last year’s Prison Rape Elimination
Act; and with gay people on securing more international AIDS funding.
Speaking by phone from Washington, D.C., Cizik sounds practically giddy as he
considers the victories won. He notes that some evangelicals take issue with
the notice they are getting for their global activism, insisting that it is
nothing new. “The difference is this,” he tells them. “We have been
internationally involved for 100 years, but we have never been successful
before on Capitol Hill.” Cizik recognizes that having a born-again Christian in
the presidential office hasn’t hurt.
If leaders like Cizik set a new alliance-building course for the evangelical
movement, the topics that rose to the top of the agenda came more from the
grass roots, according to Allen Hertzke, director of religious studies at the
University of Oklahoma and author of the forthcoming book Freeing God’s
Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. Hertzke maintains that
the dramatic growth of evangelical churches around the world has led “American
evangelicals to an awareness of the plight of their brothers and sisters” in
impoverished, often repressive societies.
The religious viewpoint of evangelicals has not been irrelevant in the way they
have perceived that plight. It is a reason that human trafficking, more than
almost any issue they have worked on, has stood out as an urgent matter. “In
some ways, I think having a moral view has actually helped the community see
the issue more clearly,” Hertzke ruminates. “Trafficking was in a kind of
netherworld,” he says. It wasn’t the kind of human rights issue traditionally
addressed by secular groups like Amnesty International, which focused on
government abuses of citizens. Hertzke believes that evangelicals saw past that
because they came with the understanding that “this is not the way children of
God were meant to live.”
Out of all the ungodly miseries of the world, though, why did evangelicals pick
human trafficking as their clarion call? For one, the notion of modern-day
slavery resounded with them, reminding them of the leading role evangelicals
like the British parliamentarian William Wilberforce played in the abolitionist
movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then there is the sexual side of the
issue. “It certainly fits with an evangelical concern for sexual integrity,”
says Ron Sider, founder of the Pennsylvania-based Evangelicals for Social
Action, which challenges his peers to work for economic and racial justice. By
sexual integrity, he means that “sex is to be reserved for a marriage
relationship where there is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman”—a
tenet clearly abridged by prostitution.
The fact that prostitution was being forced upon people, that even children
were being held as “sex slaves,” seemed all the more horrible but also fit into
their world view. “This is just another example of depraved moral behavior,”
says Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University government professor who writes
about the Christian right. “The world is a sinful place.” Human trafficking
resonates with many Christians in the same way that recovered memories of
satanic sex rings did in the ’80s and ’90s, and the way white slavery did at
the turn of the century—phenomena, incidentally, that were hailed as endemic
until they were scrutinized more closely.
In some respects, the evangelical worldview is similar to that of certain
strains of feminism, which also see the world as full of evil—perpetrated by
men on women, with sex a primary means of exploitation and abuse. Hence,
Equality Now, a New York organization that works on international women’s
rights and has Gloria Steinem on its advisory board, is enthusiastically
working with religious groups on trafficking. The famous feminist University of
Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon, also affiliated with Equality Now
and whose fervent antipornography views have put her in alignment with the
Christian right before, is deeply involved with the cause.
Sex, however, is only one side of human trafficking, which encompasses all
forms of coerced labor. The biggest case brought by the U.S. Justice
Department, revealed in 2001, concerns a garment factory in American Samoa,
where, according to the department, more than 250 Vietnamese and Chinese
nationals were forced to work in a guarded compound “through extreme food
deprivation, beatings, and physical restraint.” When one victim objected, she
had her eye gouged out with a jagged pipe. Trafficking victims are also forced
to work as domestic servants, on fishing boats, on cocoa plantations, and
elsewhere.
There has developed a thinly veiled fault line in the anti-trafficking world,
with the evangelical-feminist alliance on one side and, on the other, the kind
of liberal, do-gooding groups that traditionally toil in international causes
like famine relief and family planning. To the liberal groups, it seems as if
the evangelical- feminist bloc, which has the Bush administration’s ear, has
placed an undue emphasis on sex trafficking. While defenders respond that such
is the most common form of trafficking, statistics that back that up are
controversial, and critics argue that the emphasis on prostitution is for
ideological reasons. “The general public gets confused,” says Christina Arnold,
founder of an organization called Project Hope International (no relation to
Linda Smith’s group), which is starting the first shelter on the East Coast for
trafficking victims. “All they hear about is prostitution. . . . It’s gotten to
the point where other organizations are having to mount re-education
campaigns.”
Read full story at Seattle Weekly by clicking
here.
Copyright 1999-2004, Seattle Weekly. All rights reserved. No content
may be reproduced in whole or part without written permission. Please
contact us via the link below for re-print and syndication policies.
|
|
China's
migrant makeover
8-2-2004
China
convicts baby traffickers
7-26-2004
Police
tackle prostitution
7-21-2004
Sex
work in China
1-29-2004
Drug
use, prostitution put Asia's 'Big Three' at risk
11-25-2003
|
