I described why I was going to Luxor to do this debate, which took place 12 December 2010, I made a short report when it was televised the weekend of 18-19 December and I was interviewed about it in the Huffington Post not long ago.
It has been edited heavily, so that all the audience interaction is cut in at random new points. One result is that Mira Sorvino’s UN Ambassador attack on me, which took place very early on, has been shortened, softened and moved closer to the end. Alas, the comment made that I am like a holocaust denier isn’t heard here.
Media mavens may notice how often they cut back to my reactions. There is no drama in four panellists agreeing about everything, and 50 minutes is a long time to expect television viewers to stay tuned. Now you understand why the BBC invited me and why the editors keep cutting back to me.
Some people who saw this on television criticised me for frowning, which leads me to reveal that those are not my own eyebrows but a Bollywood version added by a makeup artistat the last moment. I am far more likely to laugh than frown – which can also be criticised of course.
You can’t tell but the temperature had sunk to five above zero and we on the panel could not wear coats, so the whole time I was pressing my hands on my leg to avoid shivering and shaking.
The debate is in five parts, with the following description on the BBC site:
Human trafficking exists in almost every country on earth. As many as 27 million people are estimated to live in modern slavery. Can this problem be stopped?
Laura Agustin, Author, Sex at the Margins
Sophie Flak, Executive Vice-President, Accor
Rani Hong, Trafficking Survivor
Siddharth Kara, Author, Sex Trafficking
Ronald Noble, Secretary General, Interpol
Mira Sorvino was not worried about stating, in front of rolling tv cameras, that I should not be allowed to speak at the BBC debate in Luxor. Why are you doing this? she asked me, as though having a different point of view made me some kind of enemy. After the debate was over, several people from the audience came up to me to say You were verybrave. This all reminds me of 1984 and Brave New World more than anything else, dystopic visions of societies where not agreeing with the state renders people dangerous and in need of silencing, surveillance and sedation.
Imagine my happy surprise, then, when I was advised of the following blog post from the Freedom Center in Ohio, in a description of David Henry Sterry’s interview with me in the Huffington Post:
While the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.
What a relief to hear a reasonable voice from the so-called Other Side. How much better all our efforts would be if there were more collaboration and listening. Here is Upsetting the Human Trafficking Apple Cart, by Paul Bernish, Director of Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiatives at the Freedom Center.
Anyone engaged in the anti-human trafficking cause today is bound to notice a certain sameness to the ongoing discussions about the issue. It’s no surprise that people are passionately against modern forms of slavery, abuse and exploitation, and it is certainly good that they communicate that passion at local meetings, regional and national conferences and especially by posting their outrage at traffickers and concern for victims in the social media world. I know, because I often do this myself.
Yet cumulatively, I feel a growing sense that modern-day abolitionists (again, myself included) are existing in an echo chamber where our thoughts, ideas and suggestions are repeated in a continuous loop, with very little that is new or insightful about the issue and what to do about it.
There’s a lot of conventional wisdom, as a consequence, that may actually be preventing us from seeing the issue clearly and objectively. This point came home to me rather abruptly in an early December during a meeting with three visitors to the Freedom Center from Thailand. One runs an anti-trafficking NGO; the other two are police officers who deal with the reality of trafficking every day.
I asked about efforts in Thailand to raise public awareness about sex trafficking, which, as most everyone asserts, is virtually endemic in this south Asian country. All three, through their interpreters, gave me an insight about the situation in their homeland that I had not heard, or considered before. Yes, they said, sex trafficking is a major issue in Thailand. But forced labor was the the much broader and difficult trafficking issue. Thousands of men, women and children from Cambodia, Myanmar, Viet Nam, as well as Thai citizens, were working as virtual slaves in back alley sweatshops and isolated manufacturing plants throughout the country. This, they said, was Thailand’s trafficking nightmare.
What they said called into question my assumptions about Thailand. More broadly, their comments about what’s the real problem in their country was a reminder that it’s always helpful to question long-held assumptions about the nature and extent of trafficking in the world.
A similar reminder came from an article on Huffington Post about a person who’s engaged in the trafficking issue, but is an iconoclast who has no problem challenging conventional thinking about the problem. Laura Agustín, who describes herself as the Naked Anthropologist, delights in going against the grain of the anti-trafficking establishment on her website and in her controversial book, Sex at the Margins.
Agustín recently took part in a “debate” at a well-publicized anti-trafficking conference in, of all places, Luxor, Egypt. The conference attracted the usual coterie of celebrity abolitionists, government officials and anti-trafficking leaders, but Agustin was apparently not on the guest list until the BBC asked her to participate in a debate on trafficking trends. Her presence set sparks flying, as recounted in the Huffington Post interview.
The point of all this is to say that while the anti-trafficking movement is still in its infancy, it would be a shame to cut off internal debate just because some may have already determined the parameters of the issue.
There’s much about trafficking and forced labor that we don’t know (because the data is so suspect and many of its victims remain invisible) and much that we don’t know we don’t know. Outliers like Laura Agustin provide a valuable check on reality. If we want to abolish slavery and trafficking — and we’re all agreed on that — let’s keep an open mind, and regularly tip over our apple carts of assumptions.
Back in December I wrote briefly about my dramatic – no, melodramatic – experience at a UN event called EndHumanTrafficking, held in the Temple of Luxor. I went at the request of the BBC to be the only dissenting voice in a panel called Can Human Trafficking Be Stopped?, a television programme which showed a few weeks ago. Someday it will be put online – I will advise. David Henry Sterry, author of Chicken, amongst other books, wanted to talk to me about my run-in with Mira Sorvino, and this interview in the Huffington Post is the result.
David Henry Sterry, 5 January 2011, The Huffington Post
When I first came out as an ex-sex worker, I started getting invited to prostitute and sex worker conferences. There are two distinct groups who inhabit this world: decriminalizationists and abolitionists. Decriminalizationist conferences are populated by academics, policy wonks and activists, plus a few current and former hos, hookers, call girls and rent boys. Abolitionist conferences are populated by much the same, plus politicians and law-enforcement. Both groups are evangelical, rhetorical and theoretical. Statistics are bandied about, dogma is flung and resolutions are passed. The decriminalizationists keep screaming “Decriminalize sex work!” The abolitionists keep screaming “Sex work is slavery!” and want human traffickers to be hunted down like dogs.
I first met Laura Agustín at a conference in Brussels and was immediately struck by how different she was from all the people I met on either side of the decriminalization/abolitionist divide. First of all, she had a sense of humor. This alone was shocking in either world. But she also had a calm reasonableness about her. She wanted to hear what other people have to say, basically unheard of in either camp. On top of that, the things she had to say were so smart and counterintuitive. And they all made sense. What she had to say explained so much about why so much money is so foolishly wasted when it comes to actually pursuing traffickers. And why human beings with very few resources continuously get the short end of the stick when it comes to choosing where they live and work, and determining their own destiny.
At these conferences, there are certain people you connect with in deep meaningful ways. Laura and I made just such a connection, and it has remained fertile. I read her book, Sex at the Margins, which challenged all the conventional ideas continuously trotted out about migration, sex work and trafficking. She’s one of the few people talking about this subject who will acknowledge the mind-boggling complexity of these issues, which everyone else seems to want to simplify to suit their own needs and grind their own axes. This book led to Laura Agustín — now known as The Naked Anthropologist — becoming an international expert in this emotionally charged arena. Her blog is now one of the go-to resources for well-researched, well-reasoned, sane debate about selling sex for money, crossing borders to work and the reality of what is and is not trafficking.
When she told me she had been invited by the BBC to participate in a debate at the EndHumanTrafficking event in Egypt, I just knew that the fur was going to fly. Sure enough, with her patented calm, unflappable, intellectual yet accessible style, she managed to invoke the wrath of many present and become the target of the wrath of an Academy Award winner in high hooker heels.
DHS: So, Laura, how did you come to be invited to this event?
LAURA: BBC Television was holding one of their World Debates there and invited me. The event itself was limited to particular UN agencies, business leaders and guests of the Egyptian president’s wife – plus several movie actors. It was the kind of event to which you only invite those who agree with you. But the BBC wanted to do a debate, which means they had to get in at least one person who would disagree.
DHS: Yes, those British have some crazy ideas about presenting different sides of an issue don’t they? Haven’t they learned anything from Fox News?
LAURA: Apparently not.
DHS: I saw who the other panelists were: the head of Interpol, an ex-victim of trafficking and a guy who personally saves sex slaves. Didn’t they all see trafficking as it’s traditionally and hysterically presented by the media?
LAURA: It was an incredibly stacked deck, four against one, so it was never going to be a real debate. But I went for the chance to reach the television audience. The BBC World Service is a 24-hour international news channel watched all over the planet, so in my head I was reaching people interested in trafficking issues anywhere who might have doubts about the way trafficking is usually talked about.
DHS: Doubts about what? Don’t we know human trafficking is the greatest scourge of the 21st century? Aren’t millions of people being trafficked as we speak?
LAURA: I try to break down these huge generalisations. Some people are working in conditions that look like traditional slavery, but a lot are undocumented migrants with debts to pay, workers under the age of 18 and people who would rather sell sex than do any of the other jobs open to them. People who say there are 30 million slaves in the world are including all those and many more.
DHS: Wait a minute, I thought we were talking about trafficking. Where does slavery come in?
LAURA: Originally the term trafficking referred to certain kinds of illegal moving of people across borders, but that has changed. Anti-prostitutionists have defined prostitution as violence, rape and now trafficking, but the new word is slavery. I realise some think this is a way to raise consciousness about injustice, but it is confusing to call everyone slaves and erases whatever ability to maneuver lots of people have.
DHS: The setting sounds unbelievable — the Temple of Luxor — how did you feel getting up on that stage?
LAURA: It felt surreal. Not that ong ago I was an NGO worker in Latin America – I didn’t seek out this kind of gig! But something about Sex at the Margins has struck a chord, I have been invited to talk all over the place to different kinds of audiences and I just finished three months as Visiting Professor in Gender and Migration in Switzerland. I had certainly never been in a situation where every single other person in the room was hostile, however. And I have never been attacked by a film actress before.
DHS: Okay, let’s talk about Mira Sorvino, now Goodwill Ambassador for Trafficking for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Was she wearing those hooker heels she loves?
LAURA: She was, but I am not sure she understands that she’s allied with abolitionists. I had only spoken a few times when she began waving her hand to get the moderator’s attention. She demanded to know what I was doing there, why I was being allowed to speak. She seemed to think she could over-ride the BBC. I don’t mind people having different ideas from mine but implying I don’t have the right to speak?
DHS: You mean she tried to stop you from talking? What did the BBC moderator do?
LAURA: She asked me if I wanted to respond, so I said in the British tradition debate means dissent, and the BBC invited me because I have a different point of view. Sorvino came across as wanting to censor me, which is shocking in a ‘goodwill ambassador’, isn’t it? I don’t know quite what they are supposed to do, but acting outraged every time I spoke, keeping up a running commentary to people near her (including Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore), is certainly not ambassadorial.
DHS: Was there any consequence for her breach of etiquette?
LAURA: People applauded, as though attacking me were a heroic act. Someone heard her use the term ‘holocaust denier’, too.
DHS: Wow, comparing trafficking to the holocaust! What do you think was going on?
LAURA: I think the event participants did not understand what the BBC was doing there and thought the panel should be just stating conclusions. Maybe they thought the BBC was there to cover the event! But that would be weird, since such go on all the time — they are hardly newsworthy. Someone had not explained, and they took it out on me just because I questioned some of the statements made.
DHS: What was the take-away for you, from the event?
LAURA: Beware movie stars who see themselves as crusaders.
DHS: I think lots of people misunderstand this whole issue and want to know what they can do to help. Do you agree?
LAURA: Anti-trafficking campaigns are now a popular form of social action, but many don’t know what kinds of abuses take place in the name of saving people. That information doesn’t get discussed at events like the Egyptian one — if it were, maybe things could improve.
DHS: Thanks, Laura, I’m glad you survived your attack from Hollywood.
Note: Many people have written to ask me how to protest Sorvino’s behaviour. The best I can find online is:
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Goodwill Ambassadors
Coordinators:
Ms. Norha Restrepo, Public Information Officer (Vienna)
norha.restrepo [at] unodc.org
Ms. Simone Monasebian, Chief of New York Office
monasebian [at] un.org
Interested folk (not just academics, I am urged to say) are invited to a seminar on sex and regulation at the British Academy in London on 1 February 2011 from 1400 to 1700. The seminar focuses on the regulation of sex in relation to three key areas: media, labour and the internet.
Speakers
Laura Agustin, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (2007)
Yaman Akdeniz, author of Internet Child Pornography and the Law (2008)
Martin Barker, author of The Video Nasties (1984), Ill Effects: The Media-Violence Debate (2001), and The Crash Controversy (2001)
Julian Petley, author of Censoring the Word (2007) and Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide (2009) will introduce and chair the event.
Nearest tube: Charing Cross (Cockspur Street exit), Piccadilly Circus (Lower Regent Street exit)
Buses: Piccadilly Circus, Lower Regent Street, Haymarket, Trafalgar Square
Wheelchair access: The British Academy has access for most wheelchairs.
The seminar is organized by the AHRC funded Onscenity research network. If you would like to attend, let Feona Attwood know before 20 January: f.attwood [at] shu.ac.uk. She will confirm you have a place.
The BBC World Debate programme on Human Trafficking is now online.
