Rights Talk and Domestic Work
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Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill targets recruiter abuse
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Senate bill introduced in the Senate yesterday includes key protections against labor recruitment abuse. (See page 577 of the bill: Title III, Subpart F: Prevention of Trafficking in Persons and Abuses Involving Workers Recruited Abroad). Let’s hope these provisions remain intact as the bill works its way through the House!
read moreCelebrities in Human Trafficking, Part II
In Part II of this posting I begin to detail the involvement of particular celebrities in human trafficking activism, policy making and general influence. 1. Angelina Jolie Angelina Jolie was recently promoted from Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, to Special Envoy. Inspired to become an “ardent, persistent and well-briefed humanitarian activist” after filming Tomb Raider in Cambodia, her humanitarian travels for UNHCR to places like Sudan, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Chad, and Pakistan, receive tremendous press coverage. Asked what she hoped to...
read moreAn Update on India’s Criminal Law Amendment
Anti-trafficking advocates often push for definitions of sexual exploitation to include sex work. In a victory for sex work advocates, the amended section 370 of the Indian Penal Code recognizes the difference between sexual exploitation and sex work. Sex workers and women’s rights activists across India have welcomed the Government’s move to drop the word “prostitution” as exploitation from the amended Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code. The new formulation targets sexual exploitation and not adult consensual sex work. To read...
read moreDaphna Hacker and Orna Cohen. “The Shelters in Israel for Survivors of Human Trafficking.” US Department of State (2012).
Shelters are an important part of the slim segment of the anti-trafficking industrial complex that can be deemed a human rights project. They present the opportunity to give genuine aid to victims. But what is genuine aid? A recent report to the U.S. State Department by law professor Daphna Hacker and social work professor Orna Cohen provides a rich account of how difficult it can be to answer that question in theory and in practice. Hacker and Cohen were commissioned to study the two shelters for trafficking victims in Israel – one,...
read moreLabor abuse in the name of “cultural exchange,” courtesy of the J-1 visa program (again)
On March 6, 2013, student guestworkers from around the world held a surprise strike to expose severe exploitation at McDonald’s restaurants near Harrisburg, PA. The students guestworkers, who came from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Malaysia, among other Asian and Latin American countries, each paid $3000 to participate in the U.S. State Department’s J-1 “cultural exchange” program. They were expecting to come to the United States to experience cultural exchange and decent work that would at least let them earn back the...
read moreRead Now: NY Times Op-Ed by Noy Thrupkaew “A Misguided Moral Crusade”
The Sunday, September 22nd edition of the New York Times featured an op-ed by Noy Thrupkaew entitled “A Misguided Moral Crusade.” Read the piece here. Sharing and comments welcome.
read moreThe Celebrification of Human Trafficking, Part 1 (in a Six Part Series)
Celebrities, people “known for [their] well-knownness,”[1] now regularly engage in and effect human trafficking policy and practice. As a result, celebrities are not only raising public awareness about the existence of these problems, but influencing people, policy objectives, and ameliorative schemes in the public and private sectors. While criticizing people purporting to help other people can sound like sour grapes, it is important to critique one-dimensional, oversimplified, appeal-to-the-masses (and -funders) approaches to human...
read moreThe Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade
By Ronald Weizer Abstract The issue of sex trafficking has become increasingly politicized in recent years due to the efforts of an influential moral crusade. This article examines the social construction of sex trafficking (and prostitution more generally) in the discourse of leading activists and organizations within the crusade, and concludes that the central claims are problematic, unsubstantiated, or demonstrably false. The analysis documents the increasing endorsement and institutionalization of crusade ideology in U.S. government...
read moreThe Mythology of Prostitution: Advocacy Research and Public Policy
By Ronald Weitzer Abstract Over the past decade, public policies on prostitution and other types of sex work have been increasingly contested, both in academia and in popular debates. One perspective, the oppression paradigm, is increasingly reflected in media reporting on the sex industry and is steadily being articulated by government officials in the USA, Europe, and elsewhere. The proliferation of myths based on the oppression paradigm is responsible for the rise of a resurgent mythology of prostitution. This article examines the...
read moreSex trafficking and the sex industry: The need for evidence-based theory and legislation
By Ronald Weitzer From the introduction: Under U.S. law, sex trafficking is defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.”1 To be punishable, the offense must involve a “severe form” of trafficking involving (1) a person under age eighteen who has been induced to perform a commercial sex act or (2) an adult who has been so induced by the use of “force, fraud, or coercion.”2 Adults who sell sex willingly, with some kind of assistance, are not...
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