Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Not a feel-good story

Recently I was talking to an aquaintance of mine about how life was different in her homeland in Africa. She was telling me that it was easier there because women had help.


Hoping to clarify I asked, "You mean that you lived in a community of other women who worked together?"


She laughed. "No, I mean HELP... like maids." She explained that everybody, even the poorest families have maids. There were women who would pick up your clothes and wash them for wages, but almost every family had a live-in maid who would do household chores in exchange for being sent to school. She admitted that some families abused their maids, but said that most did not.


It sounded like a fascinating culture to me until I watched and read these from ABC News. Now it sounds different than what I had originally heard.


http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=5326508&page=1

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=5327812&page=1

These types of problems are often deeply linked to illegal immigration in some cases too (across various countries), where the vulnerability of these people makes them choice targets for exploitation.

I can't think of slavery without thinking of the atrocious sexual slavery rampant in some poverty stricken countries.

alcyone

The horrible story of Ti Soeur is a story about how the weakest in a society can be divested of all human rights and be treated like slaves or animals. But Ti Soeur's story is also a story of a society where the very unluckiest ones are girls and women - and where other women help uphold this horribly sexist system by taking advantage of other women's utter powerlessness themselves.

Consider eleven-year-old Ti Soeur and the sexist slave society she lives in. Her mother was forced by her new husband to sell Ti Soeur. The buyer of the girl, Onita Aristide, was herself a poor woman who lived in a shantytown, but she had more money than Ti Soeur's family and could therefore acquire the girl like a piece of property. After Onita Aristide bought the child she could treat her any way she wanted to. Consequently, she forced the girl to work all the time, forbade her to go to school, and battered and abused the child because she brought a friend to Onita's house.

When Ti Soeur's mother learned of her daughter's fate, she tried to save her. She made her husband go to Onita Aristide and force her to give Ti Soeur up. However, because she spoke up against her husband Ti Soeur's mother acted inappropriately in the sexist society she lives in, and in retaliation her husband kicked her out.

I find this an awful example of how women and girls are abused and oppressed by their own society, and at the same time how other women in the same society take advantage of this system and become oppressors of women themselves. These female oppressors of women in sexist societies also defend their own societies, because they can improve their own lives by making other women and girls more miserable.

This reminds me strongly of a story I read recently about the fight against child marriage in Jordan. "Child marriage" does not mean that ten-year-old boys are forced to marry thirty-year-old women, of course, but it does mean that ten-year-old girls are forced to marry men in their thirties, forties, fifties or sixties. Recently there have been two cases in Jordan where two ten-year-old girls have asked for and been granted divorces. However, the fact that little girls have been allowed to divorce their middle-aged and abusive husbands has led to an outcry from - would you believe it??? - from conservative women in Jordan who can't be vociferous enough in their condemnation of this attack on the holy institution of child marriage. After all, who knows what might happen to these conservative women if they were to speak out in defence of totally powerless little girls? And by defending their oppressive society and its sexist institutions, the conservative women hope to reap rewards, or the condescending blessings, from the men who are the rulers of this society.

Too often women won't even consider the idea of supporting other women, because the price they might pay for doing so is too steep. But it breaks my heart every time I see women paying for their own protection and comfort by supporting a deeply sexist system which is trampling other women in the mud.

Ann

None of the examples here were of immigrants, though. They were of children willingly given into slavery. Also, while the slaves mentioned in the article were girls, there are an equal number of boys.

One of the causes of slavery may seem unrelated, but is really not. Pornography dehumanizes people, making it okay to do things that are not okay. Hearts are hardened by pornography. In a global world all these little things are tied together.

Also the acceptance of prostitution makes slavery okay. Prostitution is just one step away from slavery since you can buy a body, male or female, for a little while.

Do you realize that if I rape someone I am called a rapist but they are called a victim. However, if I take someone and force them to be raped for money neither I nor the rapist are called rapists; we are businesspeople making a transaction. The raped individual is not called a victim, but a prostitute or (even worse) a "sex worker." Our very language legitimizes owning people. We label and arrest the victims but leave the businessmen free to own and exploit someone else. I'm trying to remember the average age that a "sex worker" begins the trade; I want to say it's 11 to 15 years old--clearly a child who is too young to educatedly consent.

If we want to end slavery we need to start by acknowledging the ownership of people around us. It's not okay to purchase or view pornagraphy because it exploits the weakest amongst us and makes owning people seem hunky dorey. I know that some of you live in places where "prostitution" is legal and all of us live in places where pornography is legal, but just because something is legal it doesn't make it right. Paying for people is wrong.


Elisabeth

Not the examples you posted, no. But the two are intimately linked if you look at the issue. Especially if you follow sexual slavery and where it occurs. Girls from Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, to name a few, are lured by the promises of money in developed countries only to be forced into sexual slavery.

Like I said, the two are connected, which is why I brought it up. In the end, when people are starving, they do horrible things and put themselves in terrible situations.

I disagree quiet vehemently with this for a variety of reasons. I wrote them out, but then decided I didn't want to get into it in detail.

We can go around in circles talking about whether pornography is exploitative or not, especially to women. That's a very complicated subject and feminists have been fighting about it for a while, both sides making good points. However, to bring that in as a reason for the sex trade where the global economy (developed countries exploiting less developed countries) is the prime suspect seems like you're not doing justice to either the problems in pornography OR the issues at the base of human trafficking. Your brush strokes are too wide to be productive.

So I passionately disagree. And I think legal prostitution is another can of worms for various reasons which I won't get into here. I don't want to dismiss that money lies at the bottom of this and that for some people it's not about luxury, but about survival (and here I'm thinking of the woman Spitzer consorted with for thousands vs. a 10 year old child from S.E.A. who barely is given enough to eat). That gets blurred away when you dismiss the politics of race and class.

There's a lot that can be righted in the world if you actually feed people. Because not being able to feed yourself or your family dehumanizes you.

alcyone

I knew I was painting with wide brushstrokes but that doesn't make it any less true.

We protect what we value. Porn values "entertainment" over people. Whether or not you want to argue, it places one person's rights over another person's needs.

In the same way slavery values clean dishes or whatever else over people. It is shameful to use people in this manner.

I agree with you that one of the ways to curb the problem is to meet basic needs, although I prefer to give people the means to feed themselves over giving them food. Food is too easily misdirected and people who are given food never learn self-sufficiency. If you would like the addy of the organization James and I use to enable the world's poor drop me an e-mail.

The point of my originally posting those links was two-fold. First, we live in a global world. It is no longer acceptable to say that something is not a problem because it isn't happening in your backyard. (But it really is in our backyard. Current FBI estimates are that 100,000 minors are prostitute slaves in the US right now.) Secondly, people are more valuable than we are currently treating them. Life is a gift and so are people.


Elisabeth

The term "sex worker" is not "worse", as you say, but actually preferred. As a recent graduate of the field of study, that is what I've been told by every Criminologist I've spoken to on the subject matter.

"Sex worker" is the current PC term. Just as "prostitute" is preferred over "hooker" or "whore", "Sex worker" is now preferred over "prostitute".

There is no way that the poorest families are going to have maids. I'm sure that Ti Suoer's family did not have a maid.

Do you remember Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet? Well, Juliet has a nurse. The nurse was a poor woman who had lost her own baby, but she had milk in her breasts, so she could nurse Juliet instead.

Why didn't Juliet's own mother nurse Juliet? Because it was a bother. Because it was easier to have someone else nurse her baby.

What if the nurse hadn't actually lost her own baby, but needed the money she could get from nursing Juliet? Then she had to give her own baby away to another woman who was even poorer than herself. Then she could pay that other woman a little for nursing the nurse's baby.

What about the poor woman who nursed the nurse's baby? What if she hadn't lost her own baby? Well, in order to get the money she needed to nurse the nurse's baby, she had to give that baby priority over her own. She had to give her own baby less milk than she gave the other baby. If she couldn't give her own baby away to an ever poorer woman, she might have to let it starve to death.

The idea of hiring a poor woman to do your work for you, and expecting her to hire an even poorer woman to do her work for her, is a game that always ends up leaving the very poorest people as bigger losers than they were from the beginning.

Ann

These are your convictions about pornography and that's great. But they are not "facts" that are any more true than anyone else's view.

And the problem I implied with my comment on your argument's wide brush strokes was that it posits a similarity between being a sex worker by choice and being a sex slave. In these wide brush strokes, my sense is that you actually cripple your point, instead of make it persuasive.

Talking about a "global world" does not mean that the solution to human trafficking is as simple as "stop watching porn." The fact that something like that would even be mentioned before a call to meet basic needs is in itself astounding to me in how it trivializes the issue of sexual slavery.

alcyone

Let's look at my bias. As you can see, it's not just an opinion but is backed up with documented facts.

This is the life of what you call a "sex worker by choice." ABC News documented that porn actress are led into the porn industry because of histories of sexual and physical abuse (see #1 below). Healthy people don't sell their bodies. Once inside the business very few film companies provide health coverage to their actors (2). They do not pay for STD testing. They do not pay royalties for successful films (3). They don't use condoms during filming and they don't test for STDs before filming (4 and 5). With the reality of AIDs in this world, men and women just might be paying with their life for someone's entertainment and someone else's profit. Call me biased, but I feel that these risks are exploitive.

This is why I don't see a difference between sexual slavery and prostitution. The average age of entry into the commercial sex industry is 12--too young in most states to legally work or to legally consent to having sex (6). The fact that her pimp is paid doesn't mean she is any less a prisoner of her industry. She should be given food, clothing, safety and health care; instead she is labeled a prostitute and dismissed because she's obviously consenting. 20% of pornographic images on the internet are of children, a well-thought-out business move since child pornography is a $3,000,000,000 a year industry (7 and 8). In addition, 80% of people who purchase child pornography are active child molesters (9). Call me biased, but I feel that any industry is exploitive where 80% of the customers are molesting children.

I would agree with you that we need to ensure that the world is fed, but that doesn't mean it's the only solution. Instead of an either/or attitude, how about both/and.

How about the funds that used to be used to view pornagraphy be diverted to providing food, water and shelter? How about deciding not to pledge one more penny to an industry where the workers are paid less per film than the costs of the STD testing they will need, let alone the treatments? I am not naive enough to think that one voice will end a $10,000,000,000 industry with 40,000,000 regular customers. However, when one voice joins with another and another and another, change can happen. As I said before, we protect what we value. Let's value people.


Elisabeth
PS I appreciate that you are responding to my posts. Most people simply blow off or blast those that say things they disagree with. You've chosen the high ground.


1) ABC News 28 Oct 2007 1-2. 26 February 2008 http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Story?id=131574&page=1

2) “FACT: Pornography is Harmful.” Enough is Enough 1-3. 26 February 2008. http://www.levelbest.com/design/sites/Enough/index.html

3)“Porn Profits: Corporate America’s Secret.” ABC News 27 May 2004 1-3. 26 Feb 2008 http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Story?id=132370&page=1

4) "AIDS in pornography industry of California contained says adult industry body." Medical New Today 04 Apr 2004 1-2. 02 Jan 2007 http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/7652.php

5) Abbott, Sharon A. "Motivations for Pursuing an Acting Career in Pornography." Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry 2000: 17-34

6) (2007, Feb 7). Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Schumer (D-NY) Introduce the Safe Act of 2007. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web site: http://www.missingkids.com/missingk...et?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=3061

7) Estes, Ricahrd J. and Neil Alan Weiner

8) Pornography Statistics. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from Preserving Family Values in a Media Driven Society Web site: http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics.html

9) http://www.sharedhope.org/what/dmst.asp

One reason for my lack of links is that I'm out of the country and hesitate to spend loads of time pointing you to articles that talk about how not *all* porn is exploitative and how our first goal should be to protect sex workers, not force them underground where they'll be more at risk.

...And to be frank, I'm not sure if it wouldn't be a waste of time. You will say my facts are invalid because they're tainted with a pro-sex bias and vice versa. I'm not sure I'm going to change my mind based on ABC articles and stats gathered by places like the "Preserving Family Values in a Media Driven Society Web Site." And by the same token, I doubt the words of sex-educators such as Nina Hartly or Pat Califa (and scholars like Gayle Rubin) and Violetblue, who point to how the media villifies and exploits the topic of sex in our conservative US society to enforce patriarchal ideologies, would convince you.

If the "facts" that you just presented were end-all and there were no fact-ladden reasonable arguments on the other side, like I said, then there would be no controversy. I've read quite a bit on the sex wars and feminism so my own ambivalence on the matter is based on the back and forth between MacKinnon and Dworkin and pro-sex activists in the 80s where censorship was a heavily debated. I'm not exactly going "with my gut" here. And even with those ladies speaking my "language" (feminism) I'm still torn. But here we are talking about porn in the US, which I did not want to get into. More than because of my limited time, this discussion is unwieldy and obscures the central issue.

Like I said in one of my earlier posts, pornography in itself is complicated enough without bringing human trafficking into it. When you do, it sounds like you are in effect using human trafficking to further an anti-porn agenda. And that's where I draw the line.

Being starved, taken from your family, then being raped and abused is different from going to LA and choosing to get tangled with the adult movie industry regardless of the risks. Selling yourself on the street in the Strip because you have no money for rent is different than deciding to make a couple of more bucks in an adult movie for self-expression (and they would be offended if you said that they were mentally disturbed for it though I'm sure they've heard it all the time). And both of these are worlds different from being starved, taken from your family and being forced into protitution in a country of the global South. Not all forms of exploitation are the same and the way to combat them is not the same.

The more I think of your dismissal of these significant differences, the more disturbed I get, so I think this will be my last post on the matter.

If you want to talk about porn, then I can go through my list of feminist links and show a variety of perspectives on it. That's fine and goodness knows there is so much misinformation that such a discussion would be interesting. But I will not continue to participate in a discussion that works on such wide brush strokes to the detriment of such a serious topic as human trafficking.

alcyone

This pornography and prostition question is a thorny issue. I'll never forget a documentary I saw on Danish television. Here we met a nun who had been a prostitute for many years. The woman, who was dressed very modestly but in "civilian clothing", spoke almost lovingly about her time as a prostitute. She explained that she had become a widow at a young age, and then she had decided to fill the emptiness in her life by inviting select gentlemen to her apartment and giving and taking pleasure with them, for an agreed-upon fee. Her eyes were warm when she talked about this part of her life, and she smiled.

Well, I don't think this woman was a typical prostitute. I think most prostitutes have little control over who they cater to, and how, and how often.

I once heard a radio show which discussed prostitution, where they said something which made a big impression to me. They compared the situation in Sweden and in Holland. In Holland, prostitution is not only legal, but I believe that there are also legal, state-controlled brothels, and prostitutes are supposed to pay tax and and contribute with their tax money to their own future retirement funds. In Sweden, it is legal for people to sell sex, but it is illegal to buy sex. If the police see a transaction going on between a sex worker and a buyer, they nab the buyer. This has a strongly dampening effect on how much prostititution is going on in Sweden. It is hard to make a living as a prostitute if your customers risk being caught by the police if they buy your goods. And prospective buyers think twice before they go looking for a woman (or a man, or a girl, or a boy) to have sex with.

Anyway, let's return to that radio show. In there, somebody said that the main reason for Holland's generous legislation was that this country wanted to fight human trafficking and sex slavery by making prostitution legal and state-controlled. It would be hard to exploit people too badly if the long arm of the law kept an eye on your activities.

However, now someone objected that if that had been what the Dutch legislation had aimed for, then it had failed. Because, according to this person, human trafficking and sex slavery in Holland had increased greatly after prostitution became a job among jobs in that country. By contrast, human trafficking and sex slavery had not increased in Sweden, because of the relative difficulty of making a safe and lucrative business with sex slaves in Sweden.

I can't guarantee that this is true, since I have not seen any actual figures myself. All I can say is that the line of reasoning makes intuitive sense to me.

However, if any of you have figures and statistics which prove that fewer people become sex slaves when prostitution becomes legal, easily accessible and regulated by the law, then please share those figures with us!

Ann