Human Trafficking and Sex Industry: Does Ethnicity and Race Matter?

Abstract

In this article, I argue that racial and ethnic women are likely exposed to trafficking due to (1) structural poverty and marginalisation and (2) sexual violence is a common fact in domestic and social realms of socially excluded women and men. Racism affects women differently than men. The coinage of ‘ethnosexuality’ by Joane Nagel is indeed useful, as sex and sexuality are not detached from the social and cultural implications of race, racism and nationalism. My own scholarly interest in nationalism (state building and nation formation) has led me to turn towards racism and ethnicity and by looking at the empirical ground of such concepts these are constructed symbolically and objectively with sexuality. In the light of the evidence gathered, the following themes are interrelated: racist and sexist stereotypes of women are used in the sex industry; traditional patriarchal culture plays a role in reproducing female passivity and submission; racialised and ethnicised groups are prone to experience violence in all its forms, sexual exploitation being one of them.

Keywords:

• Human Trafficking
• Sex Industry
• Ethnosexuality
• Racism
• Symbolic Violence
• Racialised Sexuality
• Intersectionality

Acknowledgements

This article is part of the research project ‘Racismo en la era del multiculturalismo’ (IIS-UNAM). The author wishes to acknowledge the two anonymous evaluations that this article received. Many thanks to Luis Madáhuar for guiding me in the world of male consumption of popular literature and to Abeyami Ortega and Dalia Quiroz for their editorial advice.

Notes

[1] Sophisticated practices of trafficking of women and adolescents have reached indigenous communities. Procurers from Chihuahua and Juárez are arriving to small villages in the Sierra to recruit young women under the promise of a job, but the real aim is to force them into prostitution. It happened in the Norogochi region, where eight young women return to their village and told what they were forced to do. It was denounced by Juan Gardea García, indigenous from Norogachi, Guachochi, who is also a State Coordinator of Tarahumara de la Coordinadora Estatal de la Tarahumara (Volchanskaya 2005, My translation).