Yesterday we posted part 1 of a 3 part interview series between Stephanie Krehbiel and Yvonne Zimmerman on the narrative of sex-trafficking. Zimmerman is a veteran of the sex trafficking debates. Her book, Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, examines the influence of conservative Protestant theology on U.S. anti-trafficking policy.

Yvonne Zimmerman is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Methodist Theological School, with expertise in feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, human trafficking, and liberationist ethics. She is author of “Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking.”

Stephanie Krehbiel is a writer living in Lawrence, Kansas, and recently completed her PhD in American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her dissertation was titled “Community, Violence, and LGBTQ justice in the Mennonite Church USA.”

In part one, Zimmerman explained the differences between sex trafficking and labor trafficking, the theological reasons why Americans only seem to care about forced labor when it involves sex, and what social conditions create vulnerability to trafficking.

Today’s part two contains a more in-depth discussion of the question of choice in sex work, and why it’s important to fight the assumption that all prostitution is sex trafficking.

In part three, to be posted tomorrow, Krehbiel and Zimmerman discuss the sexualized violence of anti-LGBTQ theology, how it helps put queer youth at particular risk for sex trafficking, and finally, why queer youth cannot be “kittens that we rescue.”

Our Stories Untold believes this is an important, yet challenging topic that deserves our attention, thought, and consideration. We welcome conversation and dialogue around this topic, one that we often think of as far removed from ourselves but that we are in fact interconnected and participate with whether we recognize it or not. — Rachel Halder, OSU Editor 

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S: Can you talk about the arguments about what sex trafficking is, what prostitution is, and how agency enters into that?

Y: It’s complicated. I don’t think there’s a single relationship between sex trafficking and prostitution that holds in every situation. There’s the familiar line of thinking in which prostitution represents violence against women; that it represents the most tangible form of sexism to which we can point. It is men using women for their own pleasure, and at their own discretion, so it also manifests male privilege in a certain way. This way of thinking about prostitution presupposes heterosexual prostitution, and presumes that all sex work in inherently exploitative. But that’s not the only way to understand commercial sex.

When people think about prostitution—again, this is in the American context—many of us think of street-based sex workers. The sex industry is very stratified, and people who sell sex on the streets are generally at the very bottom of that particular hierarchy. Many street-based sex workers are also are coping with poverty and dealing with addiction and other mental health issues as well—not all, of course, but many. When we hear about people putting themselves through college or grad school by selling sex, they are typically working through an escort agency, or online, or other through other avenues. They don’t have to work outside, and are better able to screen and refuse clients who are known to be violent, to resist paying, or to be just plain rude. They also typically make more money than street sex workers and are less vulnerable to violence. Street sex workers are targets of lots more kinds of violence, from customers as well as the police, and just the general public.  The point is that people sell sexual services under a wide variety of conditions, for many different reasons, and report a wide variety of experiences in doing so. Some people have terrible experiences –are exploited and abused. Others have good experiences –make good money and generally like what they do. Others might be more ambivalent –both their experiences, and the way they feel about selling sex. The important thing to keep in mind is that ‘human trafficking’ is a designation that people have lost control of their lives such that they’re in a situation where they’re being paid nothing or next to nothing and can’t leave without fear of violence—the legal categories for this are coercion, force, and fraud. Some people who sell sex are in situations in which they’ve lost control of their lives. But that’s not the case for everyone. And some people who’ve lost control of their lives have never sold sex or sexual services at all. Blanket statements about the meaning of sex work miss this complexity.

There are many good, earnest, hardworking American women who have been educated in feminism and feel strongly about the rights of women, who cannot imagine selling sex. If many of these folks needed to sell sex, then, no matter what the situation, they would experience it as dehumanizing and as a violation. Statements like “Prostitution is inherently violent, prostitution is inherently sexist,” reflect a particular social location and set of experiences. It’s not that these statements aren’t ever true; it’s that they aren’t universally true. For some people, selling sex isn’t the worst thing that they can imagine happening to them. I think that in the ways that we talk about sex trafficking and prostitution it’s important to make room for both possibilities and anything in between, rather than starting with the assumption that it’s possible to know how ‘all women’ really feel, or really ought to feel, about selling sex. The one thing that I think is common for all women—for all people—is that they want to be heard and believed when they talk about their lives and experiences.

S: A lot of the arguments that I hear in a feminist context are about agency, and whether anyone in sex work actually has agency. 

Y: I think it’s important to start with acknowledging that in this country people do not have the same options and choices available to them for meeting their basic, material needs. We live in situations of great inequality; what the social ethicist Emilie Townes calls “patterned exclusion.” Even in situations of inequality, agency shouldn’t be a privilege that’s granted to or acknowledged for only those who are white and middle class, or who are US citizens and have earned a college degree. At a basic level, agency is the capacity of individuals to exert power in their own lives. And the way people do that is by making choices. To increase people’s agency, they need to be able to make choices – this is a point Lia Claire Scholl makes really well in her book I Heart Sex Workers: A Christian Response to People in the Sex Trade.  Rather than questioning whether anyone in sex work actually has agency, I think that a more productive and respectful line of questioning that is about what it means to support people in the choices that are actually the ones they have in front of them, as well as how to be involved in the kind of advocacy work that builds more options for people.

Anti-trafficking work that supports agency through building options is less focused on a rescue mentality than it is an empowerment mentality. It focuses on the question: what does it mean to build scenarios in which people have more options? Here, the focus is not on the person or organization doing the ‘rescuing’ or making choices for people who experience trafficking, but on helping people decided for themselves what they want and need, and connecting them to the resources and support they need to those ends.  An empowerment model does not assume that outside parties can talk with integrity about the meaning of other people’s choices (like the decision to sell sex); rather, the working assumption is that, whatever choice people have made to cope with situations of poverty and injustice—or just to make ends meet– it’s the best choice they could make given the options that they have.

S: It seems like one of the things that is challenging about your work is that people want straightforward solutions. So when you complicate everything—at least this is my experience in doing scholarship that complicates everything—people get mad, because you’ve taken away their morally clear action. What you’re doing is telling people that we’ve built a society in which people aren’t fairly compensated for their work. We’ve created all these different kinds of social vulnerabilities. And so you can’t expect to attack the problem of exploitation with one policy. You have to care more about people. You have to have a society that is more just. And wow, does that mess things up politically.

Y: Yes it does! And to arrest and criminalize people who sell sex—and people who buy sex, although for different reasons—actually doesn’t create justice. It doesn’t make the lives of sex workers more humane, or more safe, or more survivable. Although that is the intent, the unintended consequences are that arresting people who sell sex makes them more vulnerable to violence, and to abuse.

For example, Scholl points out in I Heart Sex Workers that throwing a person who sells sex in jail gives them a criminal record, which then makes it more difficult for them to find legitimate employment. That doesn’t help get people out of sex work. It just digs them deeper in.

Often people ask me what I think good anti-trafficking work looks like if I’m critical of anti-trafficking ‘rescue’ operations and don’t think arresting people who sell sex is a good idea. In my view, the most effective kinds of anti-trafficking actions that people can take are the kinds of things that people who have been working to strengthen local communities have been advocating for years, long before human trafficking ever got sexy. Things like advocating for safe and affordable housing. Advocating for good access to public transportation. Free medical clinics. Food pantries and food banks. Decent jobs for formerly incarcerated people. The kinds of things that, for people who are economically disadvantaged, help make their lives easier and more humane. For business owners, or if you employ people, paying them a fair and decent wage. If you pay someone to clean your house or take care of your children, pay them fairly. Support the ‘Fight for $15’ campaign to raise the minimum wage. These are the kinds of things that fight trafficking far more effectively than arresting people for selling sex in the name of “helping” them.

In addition, many people who care about the issue of human trafficking connect it to their awareness of the social problem of sexual violence against women and girls. One of the ways to address concerns about young people’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation and human trafficking is to really address issues of domestic violence and child abuse in the home.  Children and young people run away from home when home is not safe; when they don’t want to be there. It is a mistake to assume that young people encounter violence and abuse only after they leave home. It is not accurate to assume that if young people stayed at home, or are made to return home, they will then be safe.  We have to take the violence young people experience at home and at the hands of people who ostensibly love them seriously. Sometimes leaving home is a courageous act of agency, even if it means that a young person ends up living on the street and selling sex to survive. This is one of the reasons why it’s imperative to make more shelters and other services and programs for youth and young people who need adults in their lives who are not going to be violent to them, who are going to listen to them and take their stories seriously. Those kinds of services have to be much more widely available.

That’s prevention work. But it’s not sexy. It’s sexy to talk about how many victims of trafficking you rescued. It’s not sexy to talk about how many hours you worked at the food back, or the shift you volunteered for at youth shelter, or the anti-violence advocacy work you do in your neighborhood.  Yet, these and others are the kinds of things that are utterly crucial for people who want to connect activism and advocacy related to human trafficking with justice work. In many ways, Mennonites are well poised for this –or you would think so.

S: My understanding is that a lot of sex workers avoid law enforcement because law enforcement poses a physical and sexual risk to them. That there’s a pretty widely established pattern of sex workers being assaulted by police officers, because police officers can get away with it. It seems to me that that’s a really good argument for not conflating prostitution and sex trafficking. As you said, there’s no neat way to separate them. But if you say that every contact sex workers have with a customer is rape, or sexual violence, then they don’t have to power to say when an encounter with a customer is completely non-consensual.

Y: Exactly. One of the problems with conflating prostitution and sex trafficking is that it makes every encounter tantamount to rape. I want to be clear, I’m not denying that rape and sexual assault aren’t problems in the commercial sex industry. They are. But the logic that says that people can’t really consent to prostitution makes every instance of paid commercial sex into rape, no matter how it transpires. This conflation is problematic because it leaves us without the moral vocabulary to understand people’s actual experiences and the choices they’ve made. We need language and conceptual categories that enable distinctions between situations (consensual commercial sex and rape, for example), even—or especially—when they’re morally complex. The ability to make these kind of distinctions is important since people who sell sex have a wide range of experiences, ranging from “pretty good” and even “pleasurable” or “well-compensated,” all the way to really terrible and horrific situations of rape. There’s a whole range. So just to put them all under the “rape” umbrella, or to construe all commercial sex as, de facto, “sexual violence,” really leaves us without the vocabulary to make sense of what people who sell sex and who have sold sex say about their lives and choices. As an ethicist, I place a high value on being able to understand what’s going on socially. This is why I think having nuance in our concepts and vocabulary is so critically important – so that we can listen to people talk about their experiences with selling sex and really hear how they experience it. This is important, even and especially if we ourselves are thinking, “If I were doing this—.“  The point isn’t about how I would feel; the point is to be able to get over myself long enough to hear how another person feels.

That’s the problem with putting ourselves in people’s shoes. On the one hand, imagining how others might feel or what they might think is how we learn empathy, and that’s a good thing. But sometimes people are talking about experiences that we have never had, and so all we can imagine is the response that we think we would have. In so doing, there’s the danger of totally missing the response that they, the person who actually lived the experience, had.  In other words, the danger is that we treat our hypothetical response as more legitimate, insightful, or authoritative than their actual response. This is a terrible thing to do to someone! This is the kind of thing on which people who work in the field of sexual violence prevention actually get a hefty dose of training: Figure out what your own visceral clutches are. Know what you’re going to respond to, and anticipate how you’re going to deal with your own crap. So when you listen to somebody else, your experience [with their story] doesn’t suck up all the air in the room and become the center of attention, because your response to their story may be very different from their response to it. And their response is what matters.