Unholy Alliance
By Anna-Louise Crago
May 21, 2003
On January 15, 2003, field missions around the world for the United States'
international aid agency (USAID) quietly received notice that, henceforth, no
more funding for projects against trafficking in people would go to
"organizations advocating prostitution as an employment choice or which
advocate or support the legalization of prostitution."
On a small scale, the policy shift stands to affect the funding given to groups
like Empower, a sex workers' group in Thailand that has vocally supported
legalization and the political organizing of sex workers. Though the money they
receive for anti-trafficking programs is small, it covers the cost of literacy
classes. What remains to be seen, is how much else is at stake.
The provision was part of a now well-known cable sent out by Colin Powell that
set out USAID's new foreign policy under the Bush administration. It announced
that funding would be cut to projects perceived as supporting "trafficking of
women and girls, legalization of drugs, injecting drug use, and abortion." The
attack on abortion and the tying of HIV-prevention funding to abstinence-based
programs stirred up a firestorm of protest from women's groups and health
activists in the U.S.
Though touted as a grave set-back for the feminist movement's advances around
reproductive rights, in an interesting twist, some feminist groups found a
diamond in the rough: The provision on prostitution, at least, could be counted
as a victory. "The challenge now is to implement these landmark
[anti-prostitution] policies in order to free women and children from
enslavement," said a celebratory Donna Hughes of the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women (CATW) last month.
For groups like hers, the change was the fruit of hard work, since USAID's new
stance comes as a result of the combined lobbying efforts of the
seemingly-strange bedfellows of anti-prostitution feminist groups and the
Christian Right. Despite their disparate constituencies, the current
incarnation of the feminist-rightwing alliance was crystallized a few years ago
in 2000 around the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in
the United States. A successful joint campaign was mounted to ensure that the
TVPA would not only condemn forced labor and forced prostitution but condemn
sex work as a whole – forced or not.
Conservative pundit Charles Horowitz jubilantly crowed to conservative
Christian magazine World: "You've got soccer moms and Southern Baptists, the
National Organization for Women and the National Association of Evangelicals on
the same side of the issue. Pro-family issues are usually controversial, but on
this one, you've got everyone in agreement. Gloria Steinem and Chuck Colson
together."
Laura Lederer, editor of the classic feminist anti-pornography anthology "Take
Back the Night" and current appointee to the U.S. State Department's
anti-trafficking office declared that faith-based groups had brought "a fresh
perspective and a biblical mandate to the women's movement. Women's groups
don't understand that the partnership on this issue has strengthened them,
because they would not be getting attention internationally otherwise."
Despite the content of the bi-partisan bill concentrating mostly on labor
abuses across all industries such as debt-bondage and force, the bill was
packaged as part of an act against violence against women. This allowed
conservatives to support the bill without threatening their business
constituencies and the feminist lobby to inextricably link prostitution with
trafficking and violence in the law. This early slippage between "trafficking"
(and all its attendant connotations) and prostitution has further been cemented
in the Powell cable – he uses the two synonymously.
It's a dangerous conflation, says Melissa Ditmore of the Network of Sex Work
Projects, not least of all because it eclipses abuse of migrant workers in all
other industries. "The majority of trafficking cases that I know of in the U.S.
are [debt-bondage of] migrant construction workers. The bill was not a labor
bill, nor a women's rights bill, despite how it was packaged. It was a
law-and-order bill."
The push to single-mindedly put anti-trafficking policies – and funding – into
the hands of police and border guards, often with appalling human rights
records against migrants and sex workers, is one of the things that scares many
sex worker advocates about the new USAID policy. Gary Hanger of International
Justice Mission (IJM) a Christian anti-prostitution organization, foreshadowed
this eventuality in an April presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. "IJM is very pleased that recent legislation has cleared the way for
funding by USAID and other agencies of targeted programs that strengthen
counter-trafficking activities of specialized police and prosecution units," he
said. Donna Hughes, of CATW, the other committee presenter, remained open to a
combination of police and religious group interventions when she demanded aid
workers "be obligated to catalyze a rescue" of people in the sex trade by
"notification of the appropriate authorities or an NGO or faith-based group
that specializes in rescuing women and children enslaved in prostitution."
Although, in a small caveat she admitted that "police and officials are
sometimes complicit in trafficking."
According to Ditmore, "They will end up funding only raids or 'reverse
trafficking raids', in which the state kidnaps, transports and imprisons sex
workers and forces them to 'reform' through unpaid sewing or basket-making."
She points to the case of the violent police raids of the Tanzabar and Nimtoli
brothels in Bangladesh in 1999 where four hundred sex workers were evicted by
police and imprisoned in vagrant homes where each was given a sewing machine.
Human rights groups exposed the widespread beatings and sexual abuse that the
women were subjected to as well as the the kidnapping and beating of Saathi,
leader of the sex workers' movement against forced rehabilitation, until public
pressure forced her release. The raids were orchestrated as a "rehabilitation
effort" by the Department of Social Services in Bangladesh who had received 2
million dollars (U.S.) from the UNDP to implement "rehabilitation" projects.
In response, sex worker groups in Bangladesh, India and Cambodia have agitated,
sometimes by the thousands, under the banner of "Workers' Rights Not Sewing
Machines."
However, the times are less than friendly for such a position. In a recent open
call for help, Josephine Ho of ZiTeng, a sex workers' rights group in Hong
Kong, wrote that Asian prostitutes' rights groups were coming under increasing
pressures from "those first-world feminists and women's NGOs who have now
joined with UN workers and other international organizations in characterizing
Asian sex work as nothing but the trafficking in women and thus is to be
outlawed and banned completely." Now, says Ho, "the immense power of Western
aid, coupled with the third-world states' desire for modernization (that is,
putting up fronts of democracy and equality so as to gain aid funds without
moving toward social justice)" have led to the introduction of new laws
criminalizing sex work, possession of condoms being held as evidence by which
to prosecute women for prostitution, and the harassment and extortion of sex
workers by police. According to Ho, it has also led to the dangerous precedent
of "interpreting all forms of women's migration toward economic betterment and
sex work as mere trafficking."
The prospect of USAID putting their funding squarely behind projects with an
anti-migration agenda, is another one of the possible outcomes of the policy
change. Already in 2001, the Population Council and Asia Foundation jointly
released a study that found that in Nepal, a country that receives a bulk of
the anti-trafficking money from USAID, "a common approach to controlling
trafficking is to limit women's migration." NGOs were found to use frightening
messages to discourage women from leaving their villages while women and girls
reported being prevented from crossing the border despite vehement protests of
their free will. This echoes anti-trafficking policy initiatives in other U.S.
departments. In 1997, the INS assigned forty-five officers overseas to work on
"counter-measures in trafficking in migrants" as part of Operation Global Reach
"with the particular purpose of deterring people in the source and transit
countries."
Sex worker groups across the world, meanwhile, have taken a lesson from the
feminist establishment and the Christian Right by creating alliances of their
own with labor, migrant and human rights groups. The USAID announcement has
also brought support of sex workers from certain feminist groups. "In the U.S.,
we are now making inroads with reproductive rights groups," says Ditmore with
optimism.
But it will take more than the support of a few women's groups to fight this
battle in Bush's other war. The challenge of forging an alliance to be reckoned
with has sex workers' groups out to prove they know a thing or two about
bedfellows themselves.
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