CORRUPTION

International Affairs Forum Fall 2016
the equation, the sex buyers. Who are they? In
our cultural narrative, sex buyers are depicted
as lonely guys who want a date and such. But
in reality, these men purchase violence. They
purchase sexual harassment. They purchase
power, control, domination, and degradation.
So called consensual adult prostitution is rarely
consensual as we understand it; there is no
equal power of negotiation on the prostituted
woman’s side—one party has money, power, and
control, and the other party lives a precarious life
financially, psychologically, and medically.
You mentioned previously the case of Ashley
Dupré, and the media perception of her life
as a high-end escort or call girl. Is that the
typical image of sex trafficking within the US?
What does sex trafficking actually look like
within the United States?
It is a misnomer, but the typical image of
sex trafficking in the US is a young, foreign
woman chained to a radiator in a basement.
When you talk about sex trafficking, people
do not look at the sex trade as a whole, but
pimping is sex trafficking. By its international
definition, anyone who transports, procures,
entices, or controls another person in order to
use them for commercial sexual exploitation
is engaging in sex trafficking. CATW and our
partner organizations aim to emphasize that
sex trafficking is the means through which an
exploiter brings his victim into the sex trade.
That is the link. Without the sex trade as the
ultimate goal of sex trafficking, there would be
no sex trafficking. It is simple economics: Supply
and demand. If you take the buyer out of the
business, there would be no business at all, and
there would be no one to sell. Our organization,
like others, focuses on the demand side of the
sex trade; we focus on the individuals who are
fueling this multibillion-dollar industry. Not all men
purchase sex, but studies show that, depending
on the country, between 15% and 20% of a
country’s male population has purchased sexual
acts. From the limited surveys that we have on
sex buyers, we know that these are men who
have a tendency to be violent against women in
other spheres of their lives; they have very little
regard of women as human beings; and have
a propensity to objectify and dehumanize the
women they purchase. Examining Johns’ boards
(online “communities” of sex buyers who share
information about new brothels, they rate women
on their features, smells, performance, etc.) has
been very telling, and the kind of information
we learn from doing so helps us to identify who
buyers are, shedding light on an otherwise totally
invisible population.
In the last five to six years, law enforcement
has started to focus on the demand side of sex
trafficking. Last year (2015), President Obama
signed a federal law, the Justice for Victims of
Trafficking Act of 2015 (JVTA), which redefines
the US definition of trafficking and focuses on
demand. The JVTA aligns the penalties for
buyers of children for sex and human trafficking
victims with the penalties for traffickers, because
the harm done was found to be equivalent to the
harm done by traffickers. This legislation shows
that we are moving in the right direction inch by
inch. However, the resistance [to reform] is still
fierce, and the media, especially progressive
platforms—such as the Daily Beast, Huffington
Post, or even Feministing—have showcased
the reframing of exploitation in terms that are
very evocative of our societal values, such as
“freedom”, “agency”,“consent”,“liberation”, and
sexual autonomy. We need to separate those
concepts from exploitation. We are not saying
that women do not have a right to do what they
want with their bodies, but prostitution and sex
trafficking (and human trafficking, generally) are
complex issues that do not exist in a vacuum.
There are so many other actors that are much
more powerful than the women we often focus on
in this debate—the pimps, the strip club owners,
Fall 2016
139