Out of the Woods

Sex trafficking

 

Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots football team, was literally caught with his pants down. The reporting of this affair, however, completely missed the serious import of the event. You could almost hear the reporters snicker as they retold, over and over, the mishap of a very rich and powerful person who is caught in a raid on a tawdry massage parlor. The women involved were apparently trafficked from China. But there was no information about them except that they were treated as slaves. They were not allowed to leave the premises. It was clear that they were not well fed or well cared for. We do not know their ages or their history. Do they speak any English or do they find themselves unable to communicate, very far from home, forced to provide sexual services on elderly men – a different one every 15 minutes?

The casual treatment of the victims of these massage parlors, bordellos, drinking establishments with nude dancers, and wherever else trafficked women are forced to work, is characteristic of the offhand way in which women forced into sexual services are usually treated. The dominant attitude towards the victims of sexual trafficking is one of contempt and disinterest. These women are being blamed for their victimization and therefore are thought to be of no interest.

Sexual trafficking is widespread. For obvious reasons the actual number of victims are difficult to ascertain but the estimate of the International Labor Organization of about 40 million victims a year appears to be the most reliable number available. 18,000 or so of those 40 million victims are trafficked within the US alone. These are women – often teenagers – who are born and raised in the United States—US citizens--who find themselves forced to perform sex acts on men, often much older, always complete strangers, often unclean, drunk and generally unattractive. Many of these women are victims of multiple rapes over extended periods of time. They are repeatedly exposed to vicious beatings by their pimps. They have terrible scars as reminders of their sufferings. Many of them end up as addicts or as psychologically completely detached from their experience in order to survive at all.

The prevailing attitude towards them is one of contempt. They are thought to have chosen this life of sexual exploitation. But that is a serious misconception. Each victim has her own history but often they come from families ravaged by addiction and family violence. Frequently, their mothers, completely occupied by feeding their drug habits. were unable to be proper mothers. They themselves were victims of regular beatings and violence at the hands of their husbands. They were unable to provide their daughters the love and care they needed and deserved.

Pimps take advantage of those deprivations. They pretend passionate romantic relationships to children often no more than 10 or 11 years old. They initiate them into sexual relations, they give them presents, they take them out to dinner and give them flowers. The child, starved for love, misled by public portrayals of romantic love on television and in the movies, believes that at last they have found someone who loves them. They refer to the pimp as their "boyfriend." They are in love with their pimp. At some point in this process of preparing the future prostitute, the "boyfriend" gets terribly angry and beats the child and punishes her for some, mostly imaginary, transgression. Thus the relationship is established between a very young woman loving a man who is alternately affectionate and very demanding. What he demands is that she go out and earn significant money by providing sexual services to complete strangers.

The world is solidly against her. The "john's" – the men buying sexual services – have no other concern than getting their orgasm. They despise these children who, they think, chose to live this life. It is obviously comforting for the john to make it look as if they had no responsibility in this situation. If they didn't buy 15 minutes of this teenagers time, someone else would, and, anyway, if they didn't want to be prostitutes they could go back to school and get a regular job. The fact is, however, that leaving a pimp and leaving the life of prostitution is extremely difficult and, needless to say, extremely dangerous. But the john does not care about that.

With few exceptions, the police has the same attitude. They do not understand that these young women are victims of a series of gruesome crimes. They too hold them responsible for their “choices.” They too blame the victim and accordingly fail to protect them as they are supposed to do. Most physicians never ask these young persons whether they are safe.

The ill-treatment of trafficked women is just an extreme example of the disrespect women still are subject to in our society. Women who are supposedly "respected" are expected to perform services that violate their integrity. Women who are housewives and mothers frequently have to pick the dirty clothes of their husbands and male children off the floor or bring beers to the men watching football games. Men don't reciprocate. As the recent disclosures of the #MeToo movement show, sexual harassment and exploitation of women is commonplace in the workplace. The overwhelming majority of cases of family violence involved bodily attacks by men on women.

The complete disregard of the victimization of sexually trafficked women is a clear manifestation of the persistence of very traditional, very sexist perceptions of men about women. The persistence of sexual trafficking, the widespread ignorance about the utter brutality of sexual trafficking, the willingness of men to buy sexual services and the unwillingness of police and courts as well as physicians to protect the victims of sexual services – all are testimony to the continued conception that men have of women as their property from whom they are entitled to demand sexual services.

As long as sexism remains a major characteristic of our and other societies, sexual trafficking will remain a major criminal enterprise yielding enormous profits for the traffickers. Sexually trafficked women are clear victims. Responsibility for their suffering lies with men who are not willing to regard women as full equals but continue to insist on a double standard of sexual conduct that demands complete fidelity of women and unlimited promiscuity of men.