”Human trafficking” calls to mind images of women and children being abducted, shipped to foreign countries, imprisoned and subjected to continual rape. A more horrific crime is difficult to imagine, and no effort should be spared in trying to end this abuse.
But international definitions of trafficking are broad, and encompass far more than this worst-case scenario. Professional sex workers who voluntarily look for work in other countries but do not find conditions amenable can declare themselves ”trafficked” under most legislation.
Most laws do not require the victim be moved — let alone smuggled — across borders, so even home-grown, adult prostitutes working in their own neighbourhoods can be classified as ”trafficked”. And it is in this possibility that an insidious side to parts of the international anti-trafficking campaign emerges.
A conference was held two weeks ago in Johannesburg on the subject of human trafficking, sponsored by the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, the National Prosecuting Authority and an organisation called the War against Trafficking Alliance.
The purpose of the conference was to discuss specialised South African legislation on trafficking, which we are bound to pass by our signing of the United Nations protocol on the issue.
The keynote speaker was the founder of the War against Trafficking Alliance, United States former congresswoman Linda Smith. Smith, an anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty Republican, gave an emotional speech about how finding children in cages in India led her to her present vocation as an anti-trafficking activist.
She then showed a slick video shot in Cape Town, which featured several local street boys who described with horrific innocence the sexual services they provided to adult men. She argued that countries that tolerate or legalise sex work are magnets for human traffickers.
Later in the day, her colleague, Mohammed Matar of Johns Hopkins University, argued that all prostitution was a crime against the individual, the family and the community. He also said he had problems with professional stripping and massage.
And so a hidden agenda emerges behind some, particularly US, anti-trafficking efforts, and the laudable drive to eliminate modern forms of slavery becomes subverted by conservative moralists. US funders refuse to sponsor anti-trafficking work done by organisations that support reform of prostitution laws.
But should this worry us? After all, most right-thinking people object to the sexual exploitation of women, whether by coercion or under the fiction of ”choice”. Shouldn’t all efforts be made to stamp out prostitution, by any means possible?
The question is really one of technique. Those who argue for the decriminalisation of prostitution do not do so because they think it is a wonderful institution.ÂÂ
They do so because they have seen, first-hand, the effects that criminalising prostitution has had on the lives of the women involved.
Nights in jail do not deter women willing to risk it all on the streets, but they do provide a handy means for police to extort bribes or sexual services. Making adult sex work criminal pushes the prostitutes into the hands of the criminals, linking it inextricably to drugs and other abuses. Ironically, the best way to allow women to leave the sex business may be to leave them alone, at least insofar as the criminal justice system is concerned.
But then why not do as Sweden has done, and focus rather on the clients and the brothel keepers? The problem with this approach, as the Swedes have learned, is that criminalising any aspect of the adult sex industry makes life harder for the women involved.
Closing down brothels pushes women on to the streets — a far more dangerous and uncomfortable place to work. Criminalising clients pushes the industry deeper into the shadows, far from the protections we would want to offer to this most vulnerable of groups.
Those who campaign against prostitution on moral grounds cannot dispute these facts. Instead, they inevitably attempt to blur the line between adult prostitution and child abuse. Having sex with a child is a reprehensible crime, whether payment is made or not. Most female sex workers, many being mothers themselves, agree on this. If nothing else, children represent unfair competition, and many adult prostitutes would be willing to point out these victims if only the police could be viewed as something other than the enemy.
It is therefore very important that care is taken in drafting our anti-trafficking legislation to ensure that we are not just creating another way of sending the women on the streets even deeper into the darkness.
Local solutions must be found to this international problem, however attractive the funding offered by those who would shape South African law from abroad.
Ted Leggett is a criminologist at the Institute for Security Studies