Hello and welcome Behind the paddle podcast with me, Porcelain Victoria. And if you are watching this right now on Dark Fans or Many Vids or I think that's my best day. I have just bleached my hair and um I'm gonna dye it tomorrow. And what was the point of this? Oh just because I look crazy right now. Just a little, just a little. But yeah, if you're listening, hi, welcome back. We are on page 56 of Revolting Prostitutes The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. Chapter 3 Borders It is common for sex workers' rights advocates to argue that sex work is different from trafficking. This serves as a kind of rhetorical dividing line. It says quote, we do not have to talk about this. It is a different category of thing. This is not the argument we are going to make. The reality is both more complex and more important. Trafficking is a topic that rightly concerns progressives. It speaks to global inequalities of power, money and safety. It is legitimate to be sympathetic to sex workers' rights perspectives and also have big concerns about trafficking in the sex industry. Sex trafficking is often presented as the iteration of human trafficking to the extent that the two phrases often seem to mean the same thing. Given how strong this link is in the public mind, you might be impatient for this chapter to discuss commercial sex, not borders. However, a major problem with the way these ideas are lumped together is that trafficking into the sex industry is in fact only one symptom among many in the much larger process of undocumented migration. Commercial sex within this context cannot be properly understood without talking about migration. Exploited people working in the sex industry, in car washes, in hotels, or in freezing cabbage fields in Lincolnshire are victims of problems that are systemic and largely originate from the state rather than from individuals. However, trafficking is often not clearly defined. People use the same word but mean different things by it, focusing just on commercial sex. Some people use trafficking to mean all prostitution or all migration into the sex industry. Others mean all migration into the sex industry that involves help from a third party, even if that third party is not seeking financial gain. For instance, a friend or a relative. It might cover anyone who incurs debt in the process of crossing borders without papers, or who incurs such a debt and pays that debt off through sex work. It might mean anybody who works for a manager while selling sex, or it might mean all sex industry workplaces where abuse occurs regardless of the migration status of the workers. It might mean kidnap and rape. Being specific about what kinds of situations are being discussed helps make sense of the conversation even when the speakers disagree about the problems or the solutions. Trafficking is often presented as an apolitical topic about which everyone can agree. As migration academics Bridget Anderson and Rutvika Andrecevic wrote, approaching the topic of trafficking critically is akin to saying that one endures slavery or is against motherhood and apple pie. Trafficking is a theme that is supposed to bring us all together. But once we drill down the specifics, genuine political fault lines are revealed. Everyone does not agree. Governments, NGOs, and corporations all fund policies and actions under the heading of anti trafficking. UK law defines trafficking as arranging or facilitating the arrival of another for the purposes of exploitation, using force, fraud, coercion or in exchange for the giving or receiving of payments, i. e. for money. Exploitation is defined as slavery, servitude, forced or compulsory labour. The removal of organs or general prostitution offences. This means, for example, that the countries where brothel keeping is criminalized, arranging someone's travel so that they can work in a brothel becomes a trafficking offence. US law defines sex trafficking as the recruitment, harbouring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act, which reading closely we note does not necessarily entail the kinds of harm we might associate with the term sex trafficking, harbouring, after all, can mean letting a sex worker friend crash at your place for a while. Some corporations are legally bound to do anti-trafficking work, for example, auditing for trafficking in their supply chains. Some do additional work, for example, retailers like Body Shop and All Saints have launched awareness raising campaigns, with a portion of their profit going to anti trafficking work. Governments attempt to counter trafficking through legislation, for example the UK's twenty fifteen Modern Slavery Act, as well as trade deals and diplomacy. Broadly, most anti trafficking NGOs come at the issue from either a human rights perspective, a carceral feminist perspective or a Christian perspective. Some mix two or more of these perspectives, but these free strands are the most useful for categorizing these organizations approaches. Generally, NGOs that approach the topic from a human rights-based perspective are doing work that is relatively unglamorous and not usually headline grabbing. For example, they may be working on issues around cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, fishing off the coast of Thailand. Or migrant domestic workers in the United States. Christian and carceral feminist NGOs both tend to focus on trafficking into prostitution. Typically their work tends to align around the goal of abolishing commercial sex through criminal law in order to quote end sex trafficking. Very few ordinary employees in these organizations are wealthy. Most earn average incomes. Some grassroots anti-trafficking campaigners like sex worker activists struggle to earn a living, but although individual activists may not feel it, a huge amount of money is poured into anti-prostitution work done through the prism of anti-trafficking. In 2012, in the United States alone, the collective budget of 36 large anti-prostitution anti-trafficking organizations brackets with many smaller organizations excluded from the calculation totaled $1.2 billion while the US federal government budgets a further $1.2 to $1.5 billion annually for anti trafficking efforts. The vast majority of this money is spent on campaigning, as opposed to supporting survivors in 2014. The United States had only about 1,000 beds available for victims of trafficking. By contrast, in 2013, the collective budget for the sex workers' rights movement for the entire world was ten million dollars. Monstrosity and innocence. Carceral feminists hold that if we could abolish prostitution through criminalizing clients and managers, the trafficking of women would end, as there would be no sex trade to traffic them into, as the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden writes. It is very obvious to us that there is a very clear link between prostitution and trafficking. Without prostitution there would be no trafficking of women. This perspective also views prostitution as intrinsically more horrifying than other kinds of work, including work that is low status, exploitative or low paid, and the such views attempting to abolish prostitution through criminal law as a worthwhile end in itself. For those who hold these views, defending sex workers' rights is akin to defending trafficking. In these conversations, trafficking becomes a battle between good and evil, monstrosity and innocence, replayed with heavy handed imagery of chains, ropes, and cuffs to signify enslavement, and descriptors such as nefarious, wicked, villainous, and iniquitous. This evil is driven by the appearance of commercial sex and by anomalous and distinctly radicalized bad actors, the individual villain, the pimp, the trafficker. A police officer summarizes this approach as we'll put all these pimps, all these traffickers in prison, and that'll save the problem. Numerous images associated with modern anti-trafficking campaigns feature a white girl held by a black man. He is a dark hand over her mouth or a looming shadowy figure behind her. Fancy dress, quote pimp costumes, offer a cartoonishly racist vision of 1970's black masculinity. While American law enforcement unshamedly use terms such as gorilla pimp and link trafficking to rap music, this is a horror movie entertainment quality to this at times. Tourists can go on sex trafficking bus tours to shudder over locations where they're told sexual violence has recently occurred. Brackets perhaps you are wondering where these crimes take place or by an awareness raising sandwich featuring a naked woman with her body marked up as if for a butcher. Conveniently, sexy nude women are depicted wrapped in tape or packed under plastic with labels indicating meat. Conversely, the victim is often presented with her girlishness emphasized. This imagery suggests another key preoccupation shared by modern and nineteenth century anti trafficking campaigners Innocence A glance at the names chosen for police operations and NGOs highlights this lost innocence saving innocence freedom for innocence The Protected Innocence Challenge Innocence at risk, restore innocence, rescue innocence, innocence for sale. For feminists, this preoccupation with feminine innocence should be a red flag, not least because it speaks to a parent interest in young women. Conversely, LGBTQ people, black people, and deliberate prostitutes are often left out of the category of innocence, and as a result, harm against people in these groups becomes less legible as harm. For example, a young black man may face arrest rather than support. Indeed, resources for runaway and homeless youth whose realities are rather more complex than chains and ropes were not included in the US Congress twenty fifteen reauthorization of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. Anti-trafficking status often exclude deliberate prostitutes from the category of people able to seek redress, as to be a legitimate trafficking victim requires innocence, and a deliberate prostitute, however harmed, cannot fulfil that requirement. There is a huge emphasis on kidnapping and correspondingly heroic rescues. In the wildly popular action film Taken, the daughter of the hero is snatched by Albanian sex traffickers while on holiday in Paris. Taken typifies many real anti-trafficking campaigns, presenting trafficking as a context free evil. A kidnap that could happen to anyone, anywhere. As if to emphasize the links between Hollywood and policy, the court hero is literally written into US law. The Hero Act, which stands for the Human Exploitation Rescue Operations Act, takes funding from immigration and customs enforcement to train US military veterans to fight trafficking. In Taken, Neeson has daughter rescuing skills due to his time as a CIA agent. Visitors to the website of the Freedom Challenge and anti trafficking NGO are told You crawl into bed and wrap yourself in your favourite blanket. You're alone, sleeping soundly and dreaming sweetly. Suddenly, a rustling in the next room jolts you awake. You tiptoe across the cold floor and crack open the door. A bag is thrown over your head, you're carried away. A spokeswoman for another organization told reporters that being stolen off the street at random by human traffickers constituted a very big possibility and warned people to stay in groups to avoid being kidnapped. An anxious mother's claim that she thought her children were going to be abducted by traffickers in IKEA was shared more than a hundred thousand times on social media. All this resonates with nineteenth century white slavery fears. In 1899 a missionary with the Women's Christian Temperance Union reported There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks at this time, but little white girls 13, 14, 16, and 17 years of age. They are snatched out of our arms and from our Sabbath schools and from our communion tables. Slick shareable videos depict young girls grabbed by strangers on the street vanishing into vans. The plot of Taken repeatedly highlights the trafficker's nationality. After the film's success, Neeson had a To issue a statement reassuring US parents that their children could go on school trips to Paris without being snatched by Albanian trafficking gangs. The foreigner, writes historian Marie Ludi, has always been an international figure symbolic of the white slaver. The role of the border. People are not being snatched off the street. A report from the UK's Anti-Slavery Commission notes that court cases of kidnap are very unusual, especially because it would make little sense to quote give someone the services of taking them across the border across a border for free when people are willing to pay up to £30,000 to be taken across that same border. The vast, vast majority of people who end up in exploitative situations were seeking to migrate and have become entrapped in a horribly exploitative system because when people migrate without papers they have few to no rights. Acknowledging that people who end up in exploitative situations wanted to migrate is not to blame them. It is to say that the solution to their exploitative situation is to enable them to migrate legally and with rights. Everything else is at best a distraction, sexy chains, evil villains, and at worst actively worsened the problem by pushing for laws which make it harder, not easier to migrate legally with and with rights. You might be thinking that we seem to be talking about people smuggling rather than people trafficking, and that those two things are different. People smuggling is when someone pays a smuggler to get them over a border. In UK law, human trafficking is when someone is transported for the purposes of forced labour or exploitation using force, fraud or coercion. It's tempting to think of these as separate things, but there is no bright line between them. They are two iterations of the same system. Let's break it down. It is common for people to take on huge debts to smugglers to cross a border. So far so good. Clearly smuggling. But once the journey begins, the person seeking to migrate finds that the debt has grown. All that the work they are expected to undertake upon arrival in order to pay off the debt is different from what was agreed. Suddenly the situation has spiraled out of control, and they find themselves trying to work off the debt, with little hope of ever earning enough to leave. Smuggling becomes trafficking. The discourse of trafficking largely fails to help people in this situation because it paints them as kidnapped and enchained rather than as trying to migrate. It therefore seeks to rescue them by blocking irregular migration routes and sending undocumented people home. Often the very last thing trafficked people want. Although they might hate their exploitative workplace, their ideal option would be to stay in their destination country, in a different job or with better workplace conditions. An acceptable option would be to stay in the country under the current shit working conditions, but the very worst option would be to be sent home with their debts still unpaid. By viewing trafficking as conceptually akin to kidnap, anti trafficking activists, NGOs and governments can sidestep border questions of safe migration. If the trafficked person is brought across borders unwillingly, there is no need to think about the people who will attempt this migration regardless of its illegality, or conclude that the way to make people safer is to offer them legal migration routes. People smuggling tends to happen to less vulnerable migrants, those who have the cash to pay a smuggler up front or have a family, or community already settled in the designation country. People trafficking tends to happen to more vulnerable migrants, those who must take on a debt to the smuggler to travel and who have no community connections in their destination country. Both want to travel, however, and this is what anti-trafficking conversations largely obscure with their talk about kidnap and chains. Our position is that no human being is quote illegal. People should have the right to travel and to cross borders and to live and work where they wish. As we wrote in the introduction, border controls are a relatively new invention. They emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of radical domination and exclusion. ICE, the Brutal American Immigration Enforcement Police, was only created in its modern form in two thousand three. The previous iteration of it is as recent as nineteen thirties. An agency called Immigration and Neutralization Services. The mass migrations of the twenty first century are driven by human made catastrophes, climate change, poverty, war, and reproduce the glaring inequalities from which they emerge. Countries in the global north bear hugely disproportionate responsibility for climate change, yet disproportionately close their doors to people fleeing the effects of climate chaos, leaving desperate families to sleep under canvas amid snow at the edges of fortress Europe. As migrant rights organizer Harsha Wallier writes While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies and the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today real reveals the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others. A system where everybody could migrate, live and work legally in safety would not be a huge radical departure. It would simply take seriously the reality that people are already migrating and working, and that as a society we should prioritize their safety and rights. Some journalists and policy makers argue that migration brings down wages. However, the current system wherein undocumented people cannot assert their labour rights and as a result are hugely vulnerable to workplace exploitation, brings down wages by ensuring that there is a group of workers who bosses can underpay or otherwise exploit with impunity. Low wages and workplace exploitation are tackled through worker organizing and labour law, not through attempting to limit migration, which produces undocumented workers who have no labour rights. However, instead of starting from the premise of valuing human life, the countries of the global north enact harsh immigration laws that make it hard for people from global South countries to migrate. You don't stop people wanting or needing to migrate by making it illegal for them to do so. You just make it more dangerous and difficult and leave them more vulnerable to exploitation. Punitive laws may dissuade some from making the journey, but they guarantee that everyone who does travel is doing so in the worst possible conditions. Spending billions of dollars on policing borders actively makes us worse. Without addressing the reasons people might want to migrate, notably gross inequality between nations, which in large is a legacy of colonial and contemporary plunder and imperialist violence. Thinking about how this plays out in practice may help illustrate the absurd cruelty of this set of systems. Again, let's keep commercial sex to one side for now, because it takes attention away from what is crucial here. Borders make people vulnerable, and that vulnerability is what abusive people prey upon. A citizen of France can purchase a French passport for under a hundred euros. If they then find themselves in Turkey, having a French passport means that they can purchase a ferry ticket to Greece. In other words, into the European Union for less than twenty euros because this person can travel legally, they can travel cheaply, safely and without the help of a people smuggler. In contrast, someone in Turkey with smallier travel documents attempting to reach friends within the European Union does not have the correct documents to take the tourist ferry. This person is likely to have to pay a smuggler. Because the smuggler is taking on a relatively high degree of risk. People smuggling is a serious criminal offence. And because the person seeking to migrate is desperate to travel, the price point is high. The person without papers might be charged several thousand euros to make a similar journey to that of the tourist ferry, but in an unsafe, overcrowded boat. You can see this dynamic in action at the US Mexico border. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed. Two million Mexican farmers were forced off their land and into destitution while food prices within Mexico rose. As a result, a quarter of the population is regularly unable to afford sufficient food to avoid hunger. During the same period, the border was increasingly hardened and militarized, making it more and more difficult for undocumented people to cross. In 1982, the US Border Patrol had 3,555 agents on the southern border. By 2009 it had more than 20,000. Nonetheless, people continue to try for the obvious reason that they are seeking to escape hunger and poverty and to send remittances home to mitigate the poverty of their families. The clash between people's need to migrate and intensifying border fortifications has predictable outcomes. Migration scholars Nasan Majidi and Sarurika Dadu Brown wrote that intensifying border restrictions creates new migration smuggler relationships, adding that smugglers will take advantage of a border closure or restriction to increase prices. Since the early 1990s, the Border Patrol has recovered the bodies of 6,000 people on the US side of the border, with as many as double that number thought to be lying undiscovered in the desert. Isabel Garcia, co-chair of a local US migrants rights organization, says we never thought that would be in the business of helping to identify remains like in a war zone, and here we are. The US Department of Homeland Security reports that as the border hardened of migrants who hire smugglers significantly increased, yet the proportion of migrants using the services of smugglers also increased from forty-five percent to around ninety-five percent, even as the inability to cross borders legally directly pushes would-be migrants into the arms of people smugglers. It increases the fees these smugglers can charge. Ethnologist Samuel Martinez writes We have known for more than a decade that higher and longer walls, increased border patrol surveillance and heightened bureaucratic impedements to migration have deflected immigrants into the grip of smugglers. This pattern repeats at borders around the world. In Nepal, the International Labour Organization found that banning women under the age of thirty from emigrating which aimed to tackle their exploitation had instead strengthened unlicensed migration agents, increasing the ability of these agents to entrap women in exploitative situations. This interplay is familiar to us in other contexts. When abortion is criminalized, women seeking abortions turn to backstreet abortionists, some of whom will be altruistic, many of whom will be unscrupulous. Although the pro-choice movement obviously decries people who charge exploitative fees to perform criminalized abortions in unsafe or neglectful ways. We also recognise that these bad actors are not aberrant villains who have come out of nowhere. Instead, the criminalization of abortion has directly created the market for unscrupulous abortion providers, rather than simply quote cracking down the policy solution that has been put out there, that has put them out of business. Where it has been implemented is of course access to safe legal free abortion services. Now this is where we end the podcast for today. Well, episode. Bye!