Christian Fundamentalists and Private Military Contractors? The Strange
Bedfellows of the Sex Slavery Anti-Trafficking Movement By Emi Koyama,
Bitch Magazine
Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on February 11, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153457/christian_fundamentalists_and_private_military_contractors_the_strange_bedfellows_of_the_sex_slavery_anti-trafficking_movement
In the 2008 film *Taken*, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA
operative whose undercover past is called into action when his daughter is
kidnapped while traveling abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Using his
counterterrorism skills to torture and murder those who stand between him
and his daughter’s captors, he eventually rescues his daughter and comes
home a hero, with no consequences exacted for the violence he’s inflicted
in the name of his daughter’s safety.
The film was a commercial, if not critical, hit (a sequel is forthcoming in
2012), perhaps because, like many a made-for-TV movie or *Law & Order:
Special Victims Unit* episode, it served a voyeuristic interest in the
world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking involving attractive
young, white, middle-class female victims and ethnically Other (Eastern
European in this particular case) male perpetrators. Its success also
mirrored the real-world events of a presidential administration that
justified the use of torture—euphemistically referred to as “enhanced
interrogation techniques”—as a valid means of preventing catastrophic
terror attacks, and which dismissed reported cases of extreme prisoner
abuses like those at Abu Ghraib as exceptions: safety at any cost, by any
means necessary.
The self-purported inspiration for Bryan Mills was retired colonel Bill
Hillar of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets), who was a
popular keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant on the topic of human
trafficking. Claiming to have multiple advanced degrees, he gave lectures,
trainings, and consultations in which he described his daughter’s abduction
into sex slavery to law enforcement officials, private groups, and college
audiences. According to Hillar, his daughter was abducted and sold to a
brothel while traveling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Using his
professional connections as a counterterror specialist, Hillar supposedly,
like Neeson’s character, traveled around the globe in search of his
daughter. But, as he sadly told audiences, his story did not have the same
ending: Despite his efforts, his daughter never came home.
Hillar was widely acclaimed as an American hero who, despite his loss,
continued to share his experience and expertise in an effort to end human
trafficking. In November 2010, he was scheduled to present the keynote
lecture at the annual conference of Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans
(OATH), on whose board he served. When, at the last minute, he canceled his
appearance due to personal circumstances, OATH instead presented a video
recording of one of Hillar’s earlier lectures.
As an audience member at that presentation, I felt unsettled by Hillar’s
demeanor in the video. There was something off in his graphic, detailed
description of the taking, selling, and murdering of his daughter, and the
fact that there was little to no mention of their relationship prior to her
abduction. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn, months later, that the
“personal circumstances” that precluded Hillar’s appearance at the
conference included a pending investigation into his long history of fraud.
As it turned out, Hillar never served in the U.S. Army, let alone the Green
Berets<
http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/01/bill-hillar-inspiration-for-film-taken-arrested-by-fbi-47382.html>.
He had no academic credentials, nor any expertise in counterterrorism. And
his daughter was never kidnapped, trafficked, or murdered.
Yet the simulacrum that is Bill Hillar has become part of the reality of
the anti-trafficking movement, in which a language of militarization and
vengeance is the basis for a disturbing take on activism in the name of the
exploited.
“Human trafficking” is a relatively new term to describe the selling and
trading of people. While it had been used in policy contexts in the past
(as in the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons
and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others), it entered common
parlance around 2000 with the passage of theTrafficking Victims Protection
Act <
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/laws/61124.htm>. A quick search on a news
database shows that there were only three references to “human trafficking”
or “trafficking in humans” before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000,
41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In
2010, there were more than 500 references.
The proliferation of the term signifies a rhetorical shift on the part of
the U.S. government. Simply put, framing forced migration and labor (sexual
and otherwise) as the work of international criminal enterprises,
comparable to the smuggling of drugs and weapons, elides the reality that
it is a social and economic issue arising from poverty, economic
disparities, globalization, and unreasonable restrictions on migration. The
U.S. government’s approach places the focus squarely on identifiable
enemies who are often construed, like the kidnappers in *Taken,* as evil,
sadistic, ethnic Others—ignoring the ways in which capitalist social and
economic structures (some of which the U.S. government has actively
promoted) make people vulnerable.
As a result, the United States’ recent committment to a “War on
Trafficking” mimics previous efforts—the epically failed “War on Drugs,”
the nightmarish “War on Terror”—copying the “Just Say No” urgings of the
former and the “Either you’re with us or you’re against us” rhetoric of the
latter and offering an easy, black-and-white worldview that lacks
structural analysis into systems of inequality and domination.
Take anti-trafficking newcomer Stop Child Trafficking Now (SCTNow), which
is quickly gaining the support of companies like Facebook and Microsoft as
well as the blessing of celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. The organization
describes its “innovative approach” to addressing the trafficking of minors
thus:
Stop Child Trafficking has chosen to fund a bold, new approach, one that
addresses the demand side of child sex trafficking by targeting
buyers/predators for prosecution and conviction. […] SCTNow has launched a
national campaign to raise money for retired military operatives targeting
the demand side of trafficking…. These operatives use the skills developed
in the War on Terror in this war to bring down predators. Professional law
enforcement have vetted this strategy and are eager to work with these
operative teams once funding is secured.
Special Operative Teams gather information about child predators both in
the U.S. and abroad…. These teams possess skills beyond the average
military or law enforcement individual—skills that enable them to achieve
their goals in foreign lands independently, without support of U.S. law
enforcement resources.
Part of me wishes that this approach could really work. But shouldn’t we be
a bit hesitant to trust military operatives who developed their skills in
the War on Terror, seeing as how these same “experts” led the United States
to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, detained Arab and
Muslim Americans without due process, tortured innocent civilians and
prisoners of war, conducted surveillance on Arab and Muslim communities in
the United States, “renditioned” suspects to countries to outsource
torture, and illegally wiretapped our telephone calls?
SCTNow’s description of its “special operations”—which the organization
outsources to Global Trident, a private for-profit military intelligence
firm with close ties to defense contractor Northrop Grumman, evangelical
Christian outlet Middle East Television, and former members of military and
domestic intelligence agencies—is troubling. Equally disturbing is the fact
that, as a private organization, “the Special Operatives are not bound by
the same restrictions that keep U.S. law enforcement from conducting
research against sexual offenders.” Thus, the intelligence they gather need
not be limited to something that is directly related to trafficking or even
prostitution. Operatives are encouraged to record anything and everything
that they deem relevant or interesting, which means they can collect
information about immigration status or the personal lives of people
uninvolved with sex trafficking. Because the organization is a private
entity, the usual policies of evidence discovery do not apply, and neither
do prohibitions against racial profiling and entrapment. There is no public
oversight. So while the organization claims to obey all applicable laws,
can we feel truly confident when these same experts violated laws and
regulations in their supposed pursuit of “terrorists”?
SCTNow, like many contemporary anti-trafficking organizations such as
Shared Hope International and Love146, is part of a Christian
fundamentalist movement (an article in the November 2011 issue of *Christianity
Today*<
http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/portland/portlandabolitionists.html>
even
carried the subtitle: “Leading [Portland, Oregon’s] efforts to halt child
trafficking is a network of dedicated Christians. Just don’t go advertising
it.”). SCTNow was founded by Ron Lewis, the televangelist pastor of North
Carolina mega-church King’s Park International Church, and his wife, author
Lynette Lewis. Though I have spoken to several members of SCTNow who insist
that most of the organization’s money comes from its nationwide “awareness
walks,” King’s Park appears to be the organization’s single largest funder.
Other prominent funders of anti-trafficking groups include NoVo Foundation,
started by one of Warren Buffett’s children, and Hunt Alternatives Fund,
founded by heirs to the fortune of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt.
Given this background, it is not surprising that SCTNow, along with similar
anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in
its discussions of trafficking. In this way, its selling of the
anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the “War on
Terror” in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Instead of
untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally
through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the
nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that
terrorists “hate us because they hate freedom.” We wanted enemies that we
could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in
humility and self-reflection. Likewise, today’s mainstream anti-trafficking
movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking
happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your
kids away from schools and malls. Thus, its prevention efforts focus less
on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire
circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on
installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more
security guards at malls. And it measures the success of its activities by
the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the
long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at
risk.
Furthermore, contemporary anti-trafficking efforts like SCTNow and USAID,
with its “anti-prostitution pledge,” conflate prostitution and trafficking,
even when their efforts are well-meaning. They may rightly reject the
Hollywood myth of the glamorous, happy hooker who’s fully in control of her
circumstances, but in doing so they substitute an equally simplistic trope
that denies resiliency and agency in the choices people make to survive
structural inequalities. This, too, appeals to a simplistic idea: Namely,
that no one chooses to engage in prostitution unless they are physically or
psychologically forced to do so. If we believe that prostitution happens
because bad people (often depicted as men of color) force good children
(often depicted as white and middle-class) into engaging in it, all we need
to worry about is how to keep these bad people out of our schools and
communities and let law enforcement handle the rest.
Indeed, there’s a historical precedent for what we’re witnessing today. In
the late 19th and early 20th century, the profile of the American citizenry
was changing: Racial and sexual anxieties took hold in the United States as
emanicipated slaves moved north, white women organized to demand suffrage,
and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia flocked to the country. One
result was a “white slavery” panic stoked by xenophobia. In response, an
evangelical Christian movement was mobilized to combat the alleged evil.
The presence of Asian women in brothels drew particular attention; because
Asian women were considered hyper-submissive and therefore incapable of
exercising agency, it was assumed that they had been imported for the
purpose of sexual slavery. The panic eventually subsided without producing
any actual evidence of such slavery, but its rhetoric did produce the
nation’s first federal law against prostitution and trafficking, the Mann
Act, and effected the extension of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act.
It’s not a stretch to say that the United States today is in the midst of
similar anxieties about the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup.
Anti-immigration sentiment is violently high, and legislations, such as
that enacted in Arizona in 2010, are dangerously broad. Fear of terrorism
is used to justify discriminatory treatment toward Muslims, Arabs, and many
others who don’t fit a status-quo “American” look. Queer and trans people
are still marginalized, but are coming closer to equality every day, at
least in their legal status, including the right to marry someone of the
same gender. And of course, we have a president of the United States whose
father was an immigrant from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. So
it’s particularly frustrating to witness the rise of a simplistic,
military-minded anti-trafficking movement that refuses to engage with the
social, economic, and political nuances of the environment in which it
exists. Even more galling is the movement’s failure to acknowledge (and is,
in fact, responsible for) undoing the many existing collaborations between
public health officials, anti-violence activists, healthcare professionals,
homeless advocacy groups, advocates for youth, immigrants, queer and trans
people, groups led by people of color organizing within their own
communities, sex workers, and other groups that took many years (beginning
in the early stages of the 1980s AIDS epidemic) to develop.
Many of the groups in this broad coalition, especially the small grassroots
groups led by members of vulnerable communities themselves, have been
forced to shut down or scale back due to harsh economic conditions in
recent years, while groups led or influenced by religious ideologues and
law enforcement officials are expanding their reach as they receive
anti-trafficking grants. Groups that have traditionally worked together are
split between those that prioritize working with and seeking to empower the
people who engage in the sex trade and those that support using state
powers to crack down on prostitution. Some feminist foundations that
previously supported grassroots groups—the Women’s Funding Network and New
York Women’s Foundation among them—seem to have put their dollars on the
anti-trafficking bandwagon. Women’s Funding Network, for instance, recently
sponsored and promoted a methodologically flawed study claiming that sex
trafficking of minors on Internet classified sites in New York, Michigan,
and Minnesota had increased by up to 65 percent in just six months.
Groups committed to social and economic justice are being replaced by a
movement that promotes religious ideology, action-hero solutions, and
flawed research (e.g., the oft-repeated but false claim that the “average
age of entry into prostitution” is 12 to 14, or that 100,000 to 300,000
youth are forced into prostitution in the United States). The mainstream
anti-trafficking movement negates the history of resistance against
violence and self-empowerment within marginalized communities, and seeks to
further militarize our schools, our borders, our public spaces, our
society. And, as has been pointed out by the likes of INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence <
http://www.incite-national.org/>, granting more
power to police, courts, prisons, immigration enforcement, and
counterterrorism “experts” very often makes women and girls of color, as
well as other marginalized people, more, rather than less, vulnerable to
violence.
Take, for instance, the November 2010 raid of Club 907 in Los Angeles, a
“hostess club” where men pay women to drink nonalcoholic beverages with
them and to dance for them, fully clothed. According to the* L.A.
Times*<
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/13/opinion/la-ed-raid-20101113>,
the raid was intended to investigate allegations including labor code
violations and human trafficking, but 81 out of the 88 people arrested were
women working as hostesses, many of them undocumented immigrants who had
been instructed by club management to obtain fake IDs. The *Times* further
reported that the hostesses were “required to earn $600 a week for the
club, which means being selected by men to socialize for at least 20
hours.... Those who don’t meet the quota see their wages drop to 16 cents a
minute and receive no paycheck at all until they make up the shortfall. If
a customer leaves without paying, the dancer is in debt to the club.” The
police knew in advance that many women working at the club were likely to
be undocumented, and that they were likely to be severely exploited by the
club owners, in conditions possibly reaching the legal definition of human
trafficking. Yet the cops moved in as if the women were the criminals
rather than the victims. That they arrested more than 80 women on criminal
charges arising from their undocumented status should lead us to question
the authorities’ commitment to enforcing labor laws and protecting victims
of human trafficking.
The battle feminists and human-rights activists are facing now is not a
simple rehash of whether sex work should be legal, or can be empowering, or
is itself grounds for victim status. It’s about how to acknowledge the
realities of trafficking and work to curb it while not tacitly supporting
and furthering the tone set by religious fundamentalists, myopic law
enforcement, and sensationalistic media. In September 2010, Third Wave
Foundation issued a
statement<
http://www.thirdwavefoundation.org/part-of-the-solution/>
that
emphasized a need to recognize “young people engaged in sex work and
impacted by the sex trade as critical partners in ensuring health and
justice” rather than viewing them as powerless victims in need of
unilateral “rescue.” With support from INCITE! and Third Wave Foundation, a
group of radical women of color, queer people of color, and indigenous
people who have engaged in or are currently engaging in the sex trade held
a national leadership institute, which led to the recent formation of
FUSE <
http://lightafuse.org/>(Fed
Up and Strategizing for Empowerment). FUSE works to counter the worldview
that collapses the complexities and diversity of people’s experiences
within the sex trade as well as social and economic factors that shape them
into an overly simplistic notion of “modern-day slavery.” It opposes
Hollywood-style “solutions” that harm the very people—like the hostesses at
Club 907—they ostensibly aim to help, and calls for approaches that engage
and empower those of us who experience the sex trade. The struggle must be
ongoing, because no single policy change—decriminalizing prostitution, for
instance—will fundamentally transform the social and economic structures
that abet the exploitation of marginalized communities.
Activists like those in FUSE face an uphill battle in an environment
dominated by organizations that mask their moralism with a desire to
protect the vulnerable, politicians who want to score tough-on-crime
approval points, the private security industry that makes money off crisis
and panic, the mass media that profit from oversimplification and
sensationalism, and celebrities who need a pet cause. Still, regardless of
how one thinks about prostitution and pornography, feminists have a common
investment in solutions that actually reduce violence.
Feminists have been organizing against trafficking of women, children, and
others for the purpose of sexual exploitation long before televangelists,
counterterrorism experts, and celebrities got on board. We can lead society
once again by refocusing the anti-trafficking movement to center the voices
and struggles of people whose stories are not the ones dramatized on the
movie screens—and who are all the more vulnerable for their erasure.
*Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social-justice activist and writer. She lives
in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at eminism.org. *
© 2012 Bitch Magazine All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/153457/
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Received on Sat Feb 11 2012 - 23:03:21 EST
