* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Perhaps there is still hope for a united, feminist front against all pimps, corporal and electronic, and in favor of real choices
It’s all very meta. Law enforcement shuts down Backpage.com, which was both the biggest purveyor of online advertisements for commercial sex and—not unrelated—the most significant sales platform for peddling victims of human trafficking. Organizations claiming to represent true feminism decry the move. The Twitter feed @womensmarch states that “sex workers’ rights are women’s rights.” In doing so, this important voice representing the aspirations and values of millions discounts entirely the fact that Backpage was found to be an active participant in trafficking women and girls and that sex trafficking survivors’ rights are women’s rights, too. Reactionary news organizations respond gleefully to the conflation of feminism with prostitution.
In other words, women are exploited, again.
Can we stop already?
We feminists, anti-trafficking advocates, sex trafficking survivors, and sex workers have so many more important things to do for and with each other. Let’s start by simultaneously recognizing the very real dangers facing women right now while also talking honestly about Backpage, a site that grossed an estimated $500 million since 2004. If Backpage may have inadvertently helped some in the sex trade feel safer than they would on the streets it also, according to the findings of a U.S. Senate investigation, scrubbed its ads of words like “little girl” and “young” so they could be posted without getting flagged for what they really were: child sex trafficking.
These are powerful, corporate mega pimps.
They are not, never have been, the good guys.
Maybe, after acknowledging all that, we might even begin an honest conversation about agency, and about feminism, within the concept of selling our bodies.
Safety first. Sex trafficking victims living under the control of a pimp are those most at risk without Backpage. Pimp control often means that you are forced to make your pimp a certain amount of money every day (a quota) and the consequences for not making this quota can be violent and severe. Without Backpage, these individuals must now risk the increased violence of street-based sex or imminent violence from their pimps.
But there is also this: A multimillion dollar business that helped to sell the trafficked for sex is no more. Facing potential loss of both riches and freedom, the Backpage executives are turning on each other. That’s satisfying evidence of poetic justice and, more importantly, a massive disruption to the sale of humans. Backpage and businesses like it enabled, if not strengthened, traffickers. Now they can’t. To many whose bodies were sold on this website, this signals a paradigm shift in holding the powerful accountable for profiting from the exploitation of the disempowered.
That kind of accountability, I think we can all agree, is the first step toward a world in which every woman has a chance to truly choose her path. In this future world, there might well be some who examine the array of good options before them and choose sex work. What there would not be is anyone who is trafficked, tricked, coerced, manipulated, lied to, traumatized, abused, silenced, impoverished, or otherwise led into sex work under the guise of agency and the reality of powerlessness. In this world, there would be no difference between sex workers’ rights and women’s rights.
Frankly, I’m not that hopeful. Since the Backpage indictments, the conversation has deteriorated beyond what I would have thought possible only a month ago. A publicity blitz on behalf of the privileged sex workers who truly have chosen this line of work has utterly silenced the voices of sex trafficking survivors. In their zeal to defend the legitimacy of sex work, they have asserted that the sexual violence endured by survivors is the equivalent of being mistreated by one’s employer. In one particularly egregious case, they have used the worst examples of sensationalism about sex trafficking to question whether sex trafficking survivors exist in great enough numbers to worry about at all. They do.
Perhaps it is just the heat of the moment and there is still hope for a united, feminist front against all pimps, corporal and electronic, and in favor of real choices, in all realms of a woman’s life. I, for one, am ready to start building this new reality, starting with a pledge among us to remember that your liberty is bound to mine and that our work is done together.
Lara Powers worked on the National Human Trafficking Hotline for five years and now serves as the Survivor Engagement Advisor for Polaris, one of the largest anti-human trafficking organizations in the United States that works on both sex and labor trafficking and the operator of the National Hotline.
