Crime, Corruption and Chaos

Abstract

During the late 1990s, two simultaneous conversations occurred on Capitol Hill. One focused on a proposed US anti-trafficking law, the other on the apparent failure of US assistance policies in the former Soviet Union. It is the synchrony of these two political conversations that operates as the catalyst for my work here. I ask: Why did US legislators' commitment in the late 1990s to halt human trafficking coincide with clashes over the apparent failure of US Russia policy? Through close textual analyses of a series of Congressional hearings on both issues, I argue that these two simultaneous conversations were co-constitutive and, consequently, reveal much about the gendered dynamics governing the review, creation and implementation of US Russia policy at the end of the first post-Soviet decade.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Russia
• sex trafficking
• US foreign policy

Notes

A political science professor at Carleton College before being elected to represent Minnesota in the Senate in 1990, Wellstone was a prominent member of the Democratic Party's left flank. He, along with his wife and their adult daughter, died in a plane crash in October 2002.

Washington, DC's Capitol Hill is the site of the US Capitol building, which serves as the meeting place for both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The term ‘Slavic’ is used here to refer to the Indo-European peoples of Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans who speak linguistically related languages.

To the frustration of Republican congressional leaders, Albright's anti-trafficking efforts in the State Department were more holistic in that they (rightly) understood sex trafficking as just one form of human trafficking, most of which involves men as well as women and children for forced labor in industries ranging from domestic service to garment industry sweatshops to agriculture (see Nathan 2005; DeStephano 2007).

Three Congressional committees convened hearings concerning sex trafficking during the 106th Congress. Their membership, like that of Congress itself in the late 1990s, was overwhelmingly white and male. Just two of twenty-two members of the CSCE were white women; two members were men of color. Just one woman, Democrat Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, served on the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. She was joined by one man of color, Democrat Eni F. H. Faleomavaega, a non-voting delegate from American Samoa.

See, for example Ermarth (1999), Lloyd (1999), McFaul (1999), Nemstov and Bremmer (1999), New York Times (1999), Rubin (1999), Schmemann (1999), Stevenson (1999) and Zakaria (1999).

Rep. Earl Hilliard (D-Alabama) before the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, Trafficking in Women and Children in the International Sex Trade (1999a: 50).

Republicans were in the majority during the 106th Congress, which meant that they controlled all the Congressional committee and subcommittee chairs, determined what issues would be granted hearings and, significantly, controlled (for the most part) which ‘expert witnesses’ would be invited to testify at those hearings. Consequently, Smith and Brownback, who led, respectively, the House and Senate anti-trafficking hearings, were empowered to invite witnesses who would legitimate their focus both on sex trafficking and on Russia, to the exclusion of other forms of human trafficking and other source countries.

Despite Smith's claim that Russia had not to that point been involved in international anti-trafficking efforts, the Russian Federation actually helped to draft and then co-sponsored with the United States the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Women and Children, which was passed late in 2000, just weeks after the TVPA (DeStephano 2007).

More recently, journalist Naomi Klein (2007: 239) has argued quite convincingly that, in fact, the USA participated fully in what she terms an ‘economic genocide’ in Russia during the 1990s.

Intriguingly, while US lawmakers laid at Russia's feet the blame for the poverty, criminal networks and corrupt/complicit government agencies that they argued causes and sustained sex trafficking, they did not at any point discuss the complicity of the United States as either a haven for Russian criminal activity (Hughes 2002: 50) or as a primary destination country for Russian women and girls trafficked for work in the sex industry (Mizus et al. 2003; see also Farr 2005).

Not surprisingly, this was also the perspective of the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, which the US State Department is required by the TVPA to compile each year. Up until the 2010 edition, the annual document had effectively removed the United States as a political and/or economic entity from the global trade in human beings. Through a ranked tier system, this enabled the USA to act as act as judge and jury by threatening countries not in compliance with the US anti-trafficking law with non-humanitarian economic sanctions and other penalties. For the first time in 2010, the TIP Report included the United States, placing it on Tier 1, the highest of three possible tiers. This placement signals that, according to the US State Department, the US government is in full compliance with ‘minimum standards’ of prosecution, prevention and protection of ‘victims’ as outlined in the TVPA. By contrast, Russia was placed on the Tier 2 watch list, which indicates not only that it is not in full compliance with the TVPA's minimum standards, but has not over the last year made significant efforts to come into compliance. For further information, see US Department of State (2010); see also DeStephano (2007: 118–27).

Of course, the official position of the US government on this issue is out of step with some US feminists who oppose sex work and prostitution not on moral grounds, but, on the grounds that as long as the United States remains a deeply misogynist society, sex work will remain inherently abusive to women, thus perpetuating the cycle of gender hierarchies.