Sexworkers As Political Footballs to Mislead on Trafficking
5/20/06 - The use of sex workers as
political footballs continues unabated, even among self-identified liberals.
Nicholas Kristoff was at it again in New York Times Op Ed page. Just like his
comrades in the State Department, whose praises he sings with an embarrassing
effusiveness, Kristoff has let his obsession with sex trafficking lead him to
tinker with the facts. In his zeal to exaggerate the phenom, he segues
seamlessly from descriptions of girls in prostitution to the global total of all
trafficked people:
"I've seen the peddling of humans in many countries: the 8-year- old Filipino
girl whose mother used to pull her out of school to rent pedophiles; the
terrified 14-year-old Vietnamese girl imprisoned in a brothel pending the sale
of her virginity; the Pakistani teenager whose brothel's owner dealt with her
resistance by drugging her into a stupor. The U.N. has estimated that 12.3
million people worldwide are caught in forced labor of one kind or another."
According to UNICEF , a large part of that tally is trafficking of babies for
adoption in the West, trafficking of girls for mail-order brides, and
trafficking for domestic work. The significant trafficking busts in the United
States--the sinking of the Golden Venture, with its cargo of trafficked garment
workers; the New York City racket involving deaf Mexicans who were trafficked to
work as beggars on the subways--all involve adults forced into various kinds of
indentured servitude involving manual labor, not young girls forced into
brothels. UNICEF estimates that of the 246 million children engaged in child
labor worldwide, only about 1.8 million are engaged in prostitution or
pornography.
Those at the State Department and on the Christian right who have made sex
trafficking their top priority are not doing it to save those 246 million kids
from grinding labor in factories or as domestic servants. They're doing it to
serve a broader agenda of legislating morality and disempowering women. And
who's a better poster girl for that crusade than Kristoff's imprisoned
14-year-old?
Source: www.swop-usa.org