Unholy Alliance

On January 15, 2003, field missions around the world for the United States' international aid agency (USAID) quietly received notice that, henceforth, no more funding for projects against trafficking in people would go to "organizations advocating prostitution as an employment choice or which advocate or support the legalization of prostitution."

On a small scale, the policy shift stands to affect the funding given to groups like Empower, a sex workers' group in Thailand that has vocally supported legalization and the political organizing of sex workers. Though the money they receive for anti-trafficking programs is small, it covers the cost of literacy classes. What remains to be seen, is how much else is at stake.

The provision was part of a now well-known cable sent out by Colin Powell that set out USAID's new foreign policy under the Bush administration. It announced that funding would be cut to projects perceived as supporting "trafficking of women and girls, legalization of drugs, injecting drug use, and abortion." The attack on abortion and the tying of HIV-prevention funding to abstinence-based programs stirred up a firestorm of protest from women's groups and health activists in the U.S.

Though touted as a grave set-back for the feminist movement's advances around reproductive rights, in an interesting twist, some feminist groups found a diamond in the rough: The provision on prostitution, at least, could be counted as a victory. "The challenge now is to implement these landmark [anti-prostitution] policies in order to free women and children from enslavement," said a celebratory Donna Hughes of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) last month.

For groups like hers, the change was the fruit of hard work, since USAID's new stance comes as a result of the combined lobbying efforts of the seemingly-strange bedfellows of anti-prostitution feminist groups and the Christian Right. Despite their disparate constituencies, the current incarnation of the feminist-rightwing alliance was crystallized a few years ago in 2000 around the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States. A successful joint campaign was mounted to ensure that the TVPA would not only condemn forced labor and forced prostitution but condemn sex work as a whole -- forced or not.

Conservative pundit Charles Horowitz jubilantly crowed to conservative Christian magazine World: "You've got soccer moms and Southern Baptists, the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Evangelicals on the same side of the issue. Pro-family issues are usually controversial, but on this one, you've got everyone in agreement. Gloria Steinem and Chuck Colson together."

Laura Lederer, editor of the classic feminist anti-pornography anthology "Take Back the Night" and current appointee to the U.S. State Department's anti-trafficking office declared that faith-based groups had brought "a fresh perspective and a biblical mandate to the women's movement. Women's groups don't understand that the partnership on this issue has strengthened them, because they would not be getting attention internationally otherwise."

Despite the content of the bi-partisan bill concentrating mostly on labor abuses across all industries such as debt-bondage and force, the bill was packaged as part of an act against violence against women. This allowed conservatives to support the bill without threatening their business constituencies and the feminist lobby to inextricably link prostitution with trafficking and violence in the law. This early slippage between "trafficking" (and all its attendant connotations) and prostitution has further been cemented in the Powell cable -- he uses the two synonymously.

It's a dangerous conflation, says Melissa Ditmore of the Network of Sex Work Projects, not least of all because it eclipses abuse of migrant workers in all other industries. "The majority of trafficking cases that I know of in the U.S. are [debt-bondage of] migrant construction workers. The bill was not a labor bill, nor a women's rights bill, despite how it was packaged. It was a law-and-order bill."