The Truth Behind the Sex Trade

For quite some time, we've heard about the sex slaves -- the traffickers, the sexual bondage emerging at the border. The discovery makes free citizens sick; we feel like we must to do anything to make it stop, to uncover the beast.

But something very weird has been happening. Last month in the Washington Post, a shocking story appeared: Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence: U.S. Estimates Thousands of Victims, But Efforts to Find Them Fall Short.

What?

It turns out nearly 30 million dollars was spent, in a passionate effort, to find a relative tiny number of victims. The "experts" had estimated over 50,000 sex slaves, then up to a million, and warned of a tidal wave on the horizon. Yet over ten years, and aggressive funding, the activists on the ground found closer to a thousand undocumented workers who matched the description of who they were looking for.

Of course, even one person found in bondage is more than enough. But the politics and polemics of rescue seemed strangely out of whack. Other reporters had raised a red flag years before: see Debbie Nathan's "Oversexed," and Daniel Radosh's critique of "Bad Trade."

When well-intended social workers and enforcement agents sought out female migrant workers with grievances, they often found people who said, "I'm desperate for papers, but I'm not doing sex work -- I'm in a different sort of bondage!"

Or, they found migrants who said, "I am doing sex work, but I'm making it worth my while, and the one way you could help me is by either getting out of my way or getting me legal documents so I make my own decision." Or, they found male prostitutes who didn't fit the feminine portrait of victimization at all, and they weren't eligible for "help," either. The problem as conceived by the policy makers was completely mismatched with the reality.

Author Laura Agustín has written a new book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets and the Rescue Industry, which rethinks the arguments of this entire tableau. If you've EVER read a story about trafficking, "immigration problems," and felt like you didn't know where to turn, this book will turn every assumption you might have on its head.

As Agustín wrote in a recent article in the Philly Inquirer:

It's the season, again, when the United States issues its annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP). Having named sexual slavery as a particular evil to be eradicated, the United States grades other countries on how they are doing.

... Grading everyone else on moral grounds is highly offensive, particularly when such grades are accompanied by threats of punishment if the line isn't toed. It's distressing to witness the deterioration of what good will is left toward this country since the post-2001 wars were initiated and campaigns intensified that presume the United States Always Knows Best.

For crusading politicians and religious leaders, a rhetoric of moral indignation is effective in uniting constituents and diverting the collective gaze away from familiar problems at home. So the culprits, those who get bad grades in the TIP, live far away from U.S. culture, which is assumed to be better.

Intransigent local troubles -- prisons overflowing with African Americans, millions of children malnourished -- are swept aside in the call to clean up other people's countries.

This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors' bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.

I interviewed Laura in California this week as her book makes its American debut.