Sex and the activist

Nothing like coming back from the gym at 11 PM to have your jeeb joo een(landlord) tell you that the showers aren't working.

...and, they probably won't be working by the time you have to go to class at 9 A.M.

On a better note, I went to an amazing symposium today at the Kyobo Life Building in Gwanghwamun. Sponsored by the Bom-Bit Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping women trafficking victims, the event was called the International Symposium on the Overseas Trafficking of Korean Women. I was invited by a Wellesley Women's Studies professor I met at a Yale Law school symposium on human trafficking back in April. I talked to her after the Yale symposium, and she offered to help me find volunteer work in the field for the summer. At dinner after the symposium, I met some of her friends who work at the shelter for prostitutes where I start volunteering next week!

The issue of prositution divides anti-trafficking activists into two pretty passionate camps. One side argues that prostitution is the root of human trafficking. These activists favor the crimilization of prostitution. The United States--the leader in global anti-trafficking efforts--subscribes to this view. The other side argues--persuasively--that conflating prostitution and human trafficking is problematic for two main reasons. First, the focus on prostitution muddles the complexity of human trafficking. The victims of human trafficking are not only the women and children forced into prostitution; they include men forced to work in factories or fields and women forced to work in nail salons. By focusing on the most morally offensive form of human trafficking--sex trafficking--we do a diservice to the hundreds of thousands suffering under "less severe" conditions. Second, no one can decisively prove that legalized prostitution directly causes human trafficking. Some even argue that legalizing prostitution--thus making a country's sex industry more transparent and visible--makes sex trafficking easier to detect. The professor I've been talking to subscribes to the view that it is dangerous to cast the war against human trafficking as a battle against all forms of prostitution. Most Korean women's organizations would agree with U.S. anti-trafficking policy, resulting in her commenting to me after today's symposium, "Notice how I was getting publicly executed during the Q&A"

Choosing sides on this division has been my biggest struggle as an anti-trafficking activist. In context of battling human trafficking, I now have no reservations placing myself in the same camp as the professor. I find that the activists I've known and respect tend to be in that camp, and more importantly, I find the arguments they make ironclad. Essentially, I just don't think that it's effective to combine efforts to stop human trafficking with efforts to end prostitution.

Human trafficking aside, however, I find the seperate issue of prostitution be a little more complicated for a lot of reasons. Here are some of them:

1. Prostitution--obviously--is a very dangerous profession and women in the profession suffer not only physical abuse, but often mental illness as well. Research shows that a great number(one study estimated 68%) of prostitutes suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

2. Prostitution sends out the message that a woman's body can be bought an sold--that it is a commodity.

3. The idea that we can contain this value system embodied by prostitution and that it will only affect women in the sex industry is rididuclous. You can't contain those kind of values to one sector of society. They will spill over into larger society and affect how men view and treat women.

4. I find it very difficult to believe that a woman--faced with other viable employment choices--would still choose to do commercial sex work.

5. Racism and classism are intrinsic to prostitution

But, for all my idealism, I know that prostitution isn't "the world's oldest profession" for no reason. And, there are certainly arguments to be made in defense of legalized prostitution.

You could refute my first point by arguing that legalizing prostitution legitamatizes what these women do, enabling us to better protect them by making the sex industry more transparent.

You could refute my fourth reason, especially, very easily. On that point, you could argue I am coming from a middle class, male, Catholic background. As a federal prosecutor from Rio De Jaineiro I met at yet another Yale Law School symposium(this one on prostitution and pornography) argued, "does all sex have to be emotional?" Is it right to impose our conceptions of sex, our value systems on others?

However, I really can't think of any ways you could refute points 2, 3, 5. And I'm not sure that I can accept the refutations of points 1 and 4. I'm not so naive to think we can eradicate prostitution entirely and provide every prostitute in the world with viable, alternative employment, but I'm also not sure that we--as a society, global community, etc--should endorse a system that I can't help but find inherently degrading to women. Yes, by legitimatizing prostitution as legal employment we may be better to help prostitutes, but you have to ask, is legalizing and regulating prostitution--making it the "best" it can be--the best we can do to help these women?

This volunteer experience should be interesting and helpful to me in working out my still developing attitudes. I'll be writing out about the actual symposim later.