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Bernstein's “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns” (2010)

Sex workers’ rights organizations have objected to the prevailing rubric of “sex trafficking,” arguing against the analytic separation of trafficking for prostitution from trafficking for other forms of labor.

[T]his article seeks to demonstrate the extent to which evangelical and feminist antitrafficking activism has been fueled by a shared commitment to carceral paradigms of social, and in particular gender, justice (what I here develop as “carceral feminism”) and to militarized humanitarianism as the pre-eminent mode of engagement by the state

This research is also informed by a decade of ethnographic investigation with sex workers (Bernstein 2007b), which demonstrated that the rubric of trafficking is inadequate to describe sex workers’ highly diverse experiences under conditions of late capitalism, consistent with a growing body of anthropological and sociological inquiry (see, e.g., Kempadoo 2005; Agustín 2007; Cheng 2010).

As commentators such as legal scholar Jennifer Chacón (2006) have noted, trafficking as defined in current federal law and in international protocols could conceivably encompass sweatshop labor, agricultural work, or even corporate crime, but it has been the far less common instances of sexually trafficked women and girls that have stimulated the most concern by conservative Christians, prominent feminist activists, and the press. Members of these groups themselves acknowledge (sometimes with frustration) that a focus on sexual violation, rather than the structural preconditions of exploited labor more generally, has been crucial to transforming what had previously been of concern to only a small group of committed activists into a legal framework with powerful material and symbolic effects. As Brian McLaren, a progressive evangelical author and activist, observed to me during an interview, “It’s disturbing that nonprofits can raise money to fight sex trafficking in Cambodia but it’s much harder to raise awareness about bad trade policies in the U.S. that keep Cambodia poor so that it needs sex trafficking.”

During the past decade, the term “trafficking” has once again been made synonymous with not only forced but also voluntary prostitution, while an earlier wave of political struggles for both sex workers’ and migrants’ rights has been eclipsed (see, e.g., Kempadoo and Doezema 1998; Chapkis 2005; Agustín 2007). According to observers both laudatory and critical, this displacement has been facilitated by the embrace of human rights discourses by abolitionist feminists, who have effectively neutralized domains of political struggle around questions of labor, migration, and sexual freedom via the tropes of prostitution as gender violence and sexual slavery.

Evangelical advocacy around human trafficking would receive another burst of energy after George W. Bush’s administration expanded upon President Clinton’s “charitable choice” initiative to allow avowedly faith- based organizations to become eligible for federal funding. Since 2001, the year that President Bush established the Office of Faith Based Initiatives, evangelical Christian groups have secured a growing proportion of federal monies for both international and domestic antitrafficking work as well as funds for the prevention of HIV/AIDS (Mink 2001; Butler 2006).

[F]or those familiar with the evolution of what Janet Halley has termed governance feminism (in which feminism “moves off the streets and into the state”; Halley 2006, 20), as well as the historical precedent of the white slavery panic, the inclusion of prominent feminist activists at the Hudson Institute event might come as somewhat less of a surprise. In addition to the echoes of white slavery, there are also important historical resonances between the current U.S. antitrafficking campaign and the Meese Commission antipornography hearings that took place during the 1980s, in which conservative Christians and secular feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin similarly joined forces for the sake of sexual reform (see, e.g., Duggan and Hunter 1995; Vance 1997). As Judith Walkowitz (1983) and Wendy Brown (1995) have previously observed, the feminist embrace of state-anchored sexual moralism is particularly apt to resurface during periods of right-wing ascendancy like the Reagan and Bush years, when opportunities for more substantive political and economic change are elusive.

While the embrace of discourses of criminalization, democracy building, naming and shaming, and family values by a new crop of avowedly conservative feminists is certainly significant, noteworthy too is the extent to which feminists who identify as secular liberals have found themselves in easy agreement with much of this agenda and have thus been ready and eager partners to conservative-feminist antitrafficking campaigns. While commentators such as Wendy Chapkis (2005), Kamala Kempadoo (2005), and Miriam Ticktin (2008) have previously pointed to a collusion between mainstream feminism and state agendas of border control in contemporary antitrafficking campaigns (where feminist activism unwittingly supports the deportation of migrant sex workers under the guise of securing their protection), my ethnographic fieldwork extends this insight, revealing carceral politics and a securitized state apparatus to be antitrafficking feminists’ preferred political remedies.

Angela Lee, from the New York Asian Women’s Center, was the final speaker at a 2007 NOW-NYC rally on behalf of a trafficking bill that would increase the possible penalties against prostitutes’ customers from ninety days to a year in prison. An impeccably dressed woman in her mid-forties, she made no mention of the role played by global poverty in the dynamics of trafficking and prostitution but had a great deal to say about the sexual integrity of families. “This is a family issue,” she declared outright, “especially as Chinese New Year approaches and there are so many victims’ families who won’t be able to celebrate.” In this formulation, Lee located sexual menace squarely outside the home, despite a previously hegemonic feminist contention that homes and families are the most dangerous places for women to be.

At a March 2, 2007, discussion focused on “ending demand” for sex trafficking at the Commission on the Status of Women meetings at the United Nations, the link between sexual and carceral politics was even more powerfully revealed. At this meeting dedicated to problematizing men’s demand for the services of sex workers, the panelists used the occasion to showcase how the carceral state could be effectively harnessed to achieve amatively coupled, heterosexual, nuclear families. The opening speaker from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) explicitly hailed the five white, middle-class men in the room as exemplars of a new model of enlightened masculinity and urged the audience members to “to bring their husbands, sons, and brothers” to future meetings. The model of prostitution and trafficking that the CATW panelists invoked bore little if any connection to structural or economic factors, rendering prostitution wholly attributable to the actions of a small subset of bad men: husbands within the family who might seek the sexual services of women outside of it, or bad men outside the family who might entice women and girls within it to leave. Although the CATW regards itself as a progressive feminist organization, members displayed surprisingly little hesitation in their appeals to a punitive state apparatus. Nor did they demonstrate much awareness of the political-economic underpinnings of the singular form of heterofamilial intimacy that they advocated (see, e.g., Bernstein 2007b; Padilla et al. 2007).

The evidence indeed suggests that U.S. antitrafficking campaigns have been far more successful at criminalizing marginalized populations, enforcing border control, and measuring other countries’ compliance with human rights standards based on the curtailment of prostitution than they have been at issuing any concrete benefits to victims (Chapkis 2005; Chuang 2006; Shah 2008). As Bumiller argues, this is not just a question of “unintended consequences” but rather has transpired as a result of feminists directly joining forces with a neoliberal project of social control (2008, 15).

In contrast to their Christian-right predecessors, the young evangelicals who have pioneered Christian engagement in the contemporary antitrafficking movement not only embrace the languages of women’s rights and social justice but have also taken deliberate steps to distinguish their work from the sexual politics of other conservative Christians. Although many of these evangelicals remain opposed to both gay marriage and abortion, they do not grant these issues the same political priority as their more conservative peers.

[C]ontemporary evangelical antitrafficking activists hew closely to a liberal-feminist vision of egalitarian heterosexual marriage and professional-sphere equality in which heterosexual prostitution, as for many middle-class secular liberals, represents the antithesis of both these political aims.

As Power notes in her recent interview with [International Justice Mission founder] Haugen for the liberal-leaning New Yorker magazine, “Haugen believes that the biggest problem on earth is not too little democracy, or too much poverty . . . but, rather, an absence of proper law enforcement” (Power 2009, 52). Through IJM’s rescue missions, men are coaxed into participating in women’s and other humanitarian issues by being granted the role of heroic crime fighters and saviors.

IJM’s members make frequent reference to the backward traditionalism of third-world cultures as one of the primary causes of sex trafficking, a framework that helps them to define and reinforce their own perceived freedom and autonomy as Western women. In this regard, they follow what Inderpal Grewal (2005, 142) has identified as the contemporary feminist model of human rights activism, produced by subjects who imagine themselves more ethical and free than their “sisters” in the developing world.

The embrace of the third-world trafficking victim as a modern cause thus offers these young evangelical women a means to engage directly in a sex-saturated culture without becoming “contaminated” by it; it provides an opportunity to commune with third-world “bad girls” while remaining first-world “good girls.”

Controversies arose in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where “rescued” women used bedsheets to escape through the windows and climb to the ground in order to run back to the brothels from which they had been “liberated,” and also in India, where a local sex workers’ organization threw rocks at IJM staff members (see Soderlund 2005; Power 2009).

A recent photograph from a special issue of the magazine Christianity Today on sex trafficking titled “The Business of Rescue” makes this dynamic quite clear. The image depicts a smiling young activist from a Christian human rights group who is ministering to a sex worker in a Thai brothel (see fig. 1). Although the magazine’s evangelical readership would be likely to interpret the woman’s happy affect as evidence of Christ’s love (see Wilkins 2008), young missionaries’ brothel visits are also situated within the contemporary practices of consumer-humanitarianism, in which touristic adventures in exotic settings serve to reinforce Westerners’ sense of freedom and good times.

Practices of humanitarian tourism reach their pinnacle in the social justice “reality tours” that both evangelical and secular groups now sponsor, including a sex trafficking tour of Cambodian red-light districts that is jointly sponsored by the evangelical Not for Sale Campaign and the secular-progressive organization Global Exchange.

For contemporary evangelicals, the purchase of consumer goods in the name of fighting trafficking serves a dual purpose in solidifying the distinction between freedom and slavery: on the one hand, “freedom” resides in Western consumers’ ability to purchase the trinkets and baubles that “trafficking victims” produce; on the other hand, it pertains to the practice that new evangelicals call “business as mission,” in which former “slaves” are brought into “free” labor by producing commodities for Western consumers. Ultimately, business as mission can be seen as a global-capitalist refashioning of the nineteenth-century evangelical practice of “rescuing” women from prostitution by bringing them into domestic labor or teaching them to sew (see Agustín 2007).

Elena Shih (2009) ... has done ethnographic research with several different evangelical Christian rescue projects in Thailand and China. She has found that nearly all the “victims” who are employed as jewelry makers by the rescue projects are adult women who had previously chosen sex work as their highest paying option, but who, after accumulating some savings, elect to engage in evangelical Christian “prayer work” and jewelry-making instead. After signing on to the jewelry-making projects, they soon discover that their lives will henceforth be micromanaged by their missionary employers, that they will no longer be free to visit family and friends in the red-light districts, and that their pay will be docked for missing daily prayer sessions, for being minutes late to work, or for minor behavioral infractions. Many come to question whether their current lives really offer them more freedom than they had before.

“Save us from our saviors. We’re tired of being saved. (Slogan of VAMP, a sex workers’ collective in India)”

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