Unholy Alliance
Mary Dmitrieva
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15947
Unholy Alliance
By Anna-Louise Crago, Rabble
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.
Anna-Louise Crago is one of the founding members of Montreal`s
sex worker political action group since 1996, La Coalition pour les
droits des travailleuses et travailleurs du sexe. She is also a writer,
activist and artist.
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