‘Sex Slaves’ Or ‘sex Workers’? Cross-cultural and Comparative Religious Perspectives on Sexuality, Subjectivity, and Moral Identity in Anti-sex Trafficking Discourse

Abstract

The global trafficking in women and children (primarily girls) for prostitution and sex work has become a multi-billion dollar industry in recent decades, especially in parts of South and Southeast Asia. Despite their common goal to eliminate or diminish the sex trafficking industry and assist the victims, the various entities engaged in anti-sex trafficking efforts have sharply disagreed about a variety of issues, including a basic definition of sex trafficking and the appropriate strategies for combating it. In this article, I examine one central area of disagreement, which revolves around the issue of the morality of prostitution and other forms of commercial sex work. This issue brings with it divergent, even antithetical, views regarding women's gender roles, self-identity and moral agency in relation to sex work. I show how the religious dimensions of this issue have been inadequately attended to by demonstrating how anti-trafficking discourse is devoid of non-Western religious perspectives. Since Thailand has been the centre for sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry in the Asia-Pacific region, where the greatest percentage of sex trafficking takes place, this article will discuss Thai Buddhist perspectives to illustrate how the anti-sex trafficking discourse has ignored cultural differences in its analysis.

Keywords:

• trafficking
• sex work
• religion
• morality
• prostitution
• personal identity

Notes

1. Another source states that there are ‘some 200,000 sex slaves worldwide bringing their slaveholders an annual profit of $10.5 billion’ (Leuchtag 2003, 1). To illustrate the difficulties of accurately estimating the numbers of trafficked persons, the US State Department recently revised its estimates of persons trafficked into the United States down from 50,000 to between 18,000 to 20,000 annually, with the explanation that differences from the original US Government estimate in 1997 were due to ‘improvements in data collection and methodology rather than trends in trafficking’ (US Department of State 2003b). This covers men, women and children trafficked across borders ‘for forced labor or sexual exploitation’, which are defined in the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act as ‘severe forms of trafficking’ (US Department of State 2003b).

2. Eighty countries signed the Protocol in December 2000, and the required 40 countries needed for ratification signed by the end of September 2003, so it entered into force on 25 December 2003 (Agalawatta 2003; see Signatories to the UN Convention against Transnational Crime and its Protocols [UN, 2003])

3. Brock also contends that transforming our understanding of sex trafficking and prostitution ‘means noting the long pathological Christian legacy around sexuality, power, and women’ (Brock 2000, 256).

4. However, the past few years have witnessed a tremendous rise in trafficking in other parts of the world as well, especially former Soviet Republics and African nations.

5. The study is significant in being one of the few English-language documents that reveals the motivations, experiences, and voices of actual trafficked women, something that is unfortunately often lacking from analyses of trafficking conducted by governments and NGOs, as we will see later in this paper.

6. These include the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948 ), the UN Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949 Trafficking Convention; UN, 1949), the UN Convention for Civil and Political Rights (UN, 1966), The Women's Convention (UN, 1979), the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989), the Platform for Action (UN 1995) and, most recently, the UN Trafficking Protocol (UN, 2000a). For example, the UNIFEM also has been developing a gender-responsive rights-based approach to trafficking (See UNIFEM 2002a).

7. More extensive discussions of this history are included in several sources, including Irwin (1996), Doezema (2000) and Bindman (1997).

8. Although each of these defined trafficking differently, they were all abolitionist in their orientation to protecting women and children from engaging in prostitution. Prostitutes themselves were not prosecuted under this approach, since they were regarded primarily (or even essentially) as victims (Bindman 1997, 6; Derks 2000, 4).

9. For example, states are given the discretion to protect only those victims who agree to appear as witnesses in the prosecution of suspected traffickers (GAATW 2001).

10. Doezema claims that an analysis of the discourses of trafficking and prostitution reveals that ‘the real concern for the public and policy-makers is not with protecting women in the sex industry, but with preventing “innocent” women from becoming prostitutes’ (Doezema 2000, 18).

11. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum shares this view in contending that whereas many of the perceived evils of prostitution will not be remedied through criminalisation, some of the harms that prostitutes experience, such as physical abuse, risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and even stigma (to some extent) could be alleviated through legalisation (Nussbaum 1999, 278).

12. Indeed, Ben Svasti, the coordinator of TRACFORD, a joint task force formed with US support in 2002 to attack sex trafficking in northern Thailand, admits that ‘Its hard to figure out who are the victims’ and that he's heard ‘of the same migrant sex workers being rescued from brothels two or three times’ (Montlake 2003, 2). In part, this is because the conditions of these women's lives at ‘home’ may be far worse than abroad as sex workers, as in Myanmar, where the systematic rape of ethnic Shan women by Burmese soldiers has been documented (Montlake 2003, 2). In such circumstances, ‘being put in the hands of traffickers may be the lesser evil’ (Montlake 2003, 2).

13. Buddhist societies today include Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka as well as significant parts of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Japan, and historically included India, the birthplace of the historical Buddha, and mainland China. These are all regions in which sex trafficking takes place.

14. The exclusion of women from the Sangha (the official monastic establishment, which is recognised and supported by the government in Thailand) forecloses an important means for them to make merit that is accessible to their ‘brothers’, and contributes to the denigration of females in Buddhist cultures by providing ‘evidence’ of their spiritual inferiority (Eberhardt 1988, 78). The reasons for this are historical. Women were admitted to the Buddhist monastic institution or Sangha from the first days of the Buddhist religion. The order of nuns died out centuries ago in Theravada Buddhist countries and has not been reintroduced, in part because of the opposition of the orthodox male monastic establishment (even though male orders have been reintroduced in several other Buddhist countries after having disappeared).

15. As she states elsewhere: ‘To empower me as a sex worker you assume the role of acting on me and you assume that I see myself as an individual engaged in sex work. If I don't see myself this way, then I am disqualified from the empowerment project …’ (Agustin 2000, 1).