Kathleen Barry, December, 2013
http://www.kathleenbarry.net
In order to lay the groundwork for effective global action that we need to take right now, I want to clear up some confusion that has come to plague and compromise both human rights and feminist movements approach to abolition.
Abolition!
Of what?
Keep in mind that sex-trafficking is only one of the means by which women and children find themselves in prostitution. It is not prostitution, and it by no means accounts for all that is prostitution. Rather it is how women and children are moved from where they were found to the location where they are prostituted.
How have we arrived at a point where non-governmental organizations wage vigorous campaigns to end sex-trafficking but not prostitution. Some limit their efforts even further to the sex-trafficking of children only as if adult women are not being violated when they are trafficked. Others focus on adults and children in the Third World, particularly those living in extreme poverty, an easy recruiting ground for traffickers as if women in their own countries are not trafficked. Imagine the incongruity of punishing those who traffic human beings for slave labor but turn a blind eye to those who use them in slave labor. Again we face the irrationality when practices are configured to enable male customers to buy women for sex.
This is nothing other than a missionary approach which stems from pity for the “other”: those poor children, those poor Third World women and children rather than a commitment to their human rights. The missionary approach of European and American do-gooders offers paternalistic benevolence which brings to mind Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times with a camera crew at the ready to record his daring rescues of children in a brothel. The worst thing about missionaries is that they know what is best for the poor and unfortunate. In rising up through feminism and the anti sex-trafficking movement, when these anti sex-trafficking missionaries dangerously leave prostitution untouched, they leave the gates open for the sex workers lobby.
Feminists have always known better, we recognize that men’s violation and subordination of women through their power and privilege, riddled with hateful misogyny is confined to NO class, NO race, NO country, NO part of the world, NO group of people. A long time ago, feminists discovered that women who are raped, discriminated against, forced into poverty by dead beat dads, all experience the horrors of these conditions. Culture, state, economic class may create variations on the commonality of women’s experiences of subordination, but they do not change the fact that a raped woman in a park in New York City is as raped as a raped woman in the Congo.
In the same way that there is commonality to women’s experiences of male domination, so too do global human rights belong to, are vested in all people. Human rights cannot be bifurcated by splitting human beings into different groups, those who are harmed and those who are not by, in this case, prostitution. That is why I chose early on in the 1980s to focus my activism on prostitution globally approaching it through universal human rights. (See Prostitution of Sexuality, 1995) Global human rights, as they are articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are consistent with global feminism. From forty years of work on this issue, I arrive at this formulation that recognizes prostitution as a violation of human rights:
Prostitution is buying any human being to use their body for sex, sex being anything the buyer has in mind from the worst forms of violence, to the depravity of pornographic sex, to mimicking a loving encounter with a human being who is only better than a pornographic doll because she can be made to react in whatever form is demanded of her by the customer. In this exchange, to the buyer she is merely an object who is without humanity and instead is his commodity like the new tire he purchased for his car.
As no human being should ever be treated that way, it follows then that PROSTITUTION IS A CORNERSTONE OF ALL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN WORLDWIDE. It supports sexual exploitation which is what customers buy. It is a reserve labor force that allows the economy to not have to fully employ all women seeking paid work. Prostitution structures families differentiating between wife and whore, pitting women against each other in ways that protect male dominance in the family as well as on the streets and in brothels. The list is as endless as is male domination and patriarchy. It is based on the recognition that women are a class hence what affects women in prostitution affects all women. To that end, to see that prostitution is recognized as a universal violation of human rights is to assert the right to human dignity in all of its meaning… whether or not it is chosen or coerced, whether or not it is trafficked or pimped or is self-imposed by women themselves.
Before I withdrew to attend to my health I had been working on promoting the adoption of a new feminist human rights treaty, the Convention Against Sexual Exploitation, January, 1994 (Appendix of Prostitution of Sexuality) Working with UNESCO, we identified sexual exploitation as an act of power which violates human rights:
Sexual exploitation is a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification, or financial gain, or advance, through the abuse of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being.
That is where I left off in the late 1990s. It is a beginning to think about prostitution and human rights, to break the patriarchal disconnect between wife and whore by including prostituted women in the class that is exploited by sex, and it lays out the human rights law that supports criminalizing the buyers of prostitution in every state. A beginning whose time has come!
How have we arrived at a point where non-governmental organizations wage vigorous campaigns to end sex-trafficking but not prostitution. Some limit their efforts even further to the sex-trafficking of children only as if adult women are not being violated when they are trafficked. Others focus on adults and children in the Third World, particularly those living in extreme poverty, an easy recruiting ground for traffickers as if women in their own countries are not trafficked. Imagine the incongruity of punishing those who traffic human beings for slave labor but turn a blind eye to those who use them in slave labor. Again we face the irrationality when practices are configured to enable male customers to buy women for sex.
This is nothing other than a missionary approach which stems from pity for the “other”: those poor children, those poor Third World women and children rather than a commitment to their human rights. The missionary approach of European and American do-gooders offers paternalistic benevolence which brings to mind Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times with a camera crew at the ready to record his daring rescues of children in a brothel. The worst thing about missionaries is that they know what is best for the poor and unfortunate. In rising up through feminism and the anti sex-trafficking movement, when these anti sex-trafficking missionaries dangerously leave prostitution untouched, they leave the gates open for the sex workers lobby.
Feminists have always known better, we recognize that men’s violation and subordination of women through their power and privilege, riddled with hateful misogyny is confined to NO class, NO race, NO country, NO part of the world, NO group of people. A long time ago, feminists discovered that women who are raped, discriminated against, forced into poverty by dead beat dads, all experience the horrors of these conditions. Culture, state, economic class may create variations on the commonality of women’s experiences of subordination, but they do not change the fact that a raped woman in a park in New York City is as raped as a raped woman in the Congo.
In the same way that there is commonality to women’s experiences of male domination, so too do global human rights belong to, are vested in all people. Human rights cannot be bifurcated by splitting human beings into different groups, those who are harmed and those who are not by, in this case, prostitution. That is why I chose early on in the 1980s to focus my activism on prostitution globally approaching it through universal human rights. (See Prostitution of Sexuality, 1995) Global human rights, as they are articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are consistent with global feminism. From forty years of work on this issue, I arrive at this formulation that recognizes prostitution as a violation of human rights:
Prostitution is buying any human being to use their body for sex, sex being anything the buyer has in mind from the worst forms of violence, to the depravity of pornographic sex, to mimicking a loving encounter with a human being who is only better than a pornographic doll because she can be made to react in whatever form is demanded of her by the customer. In this exchange, to the buyer she is merely an object who is without humanity and instead is his commodity like the new tire he purchased for his car.
As no human being should ever be treated that way, it follows then that PROSTITUTION IS A CORNERSTONE OF ALL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN AND DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN WORLDWIDE. It supports sexual exploitation which is what customers buy. It is a reserve labor force that allows the economy to not have to fully employ all women seeking paid work. Prostitution structures families differentiating between wife and whore, pitting women against each other in ways that protect male dominance in the family as well as on the streets and in brothels. The list is as endless as is male domination and patriarchy. It is based on the recognition that women are a class hence what affects women in prostitution affects all women. To that end, to see that prostitution is recognized as a universal violation of human rights is to assert the right to human dignity in all of its meaning… whether or not it is chosen or coerced, whether or not it is trafficked or pimped or is self-imposed by women themselves.
Before I withdrew to attend to my health I had been working on promoting the adoption of a new feminist human rights treaty, the Convention Against Sexual Exploitation, January, 1994 (Appendix of Prostitution of Sexuality) Working with UNESCO, we identified sexual exploitation as an act of power which violates human rights:
Sexual exploitation is a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification, or financial gain, or advance, through the abuse of a person’s sexuality by abrogating that person’s human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental well-being.
That is where I left off in the late 1990s. It is a beginning to think about prostitution and human rights, to break the patriarchal disconnect between wife and whore by including prostituted women in the class that is exploited by sex, and it lays out the human rights law that supports criminalizing the buyers of prostitution in every state. A beginning whose time has come!
ALERT
CALL TO ACTION
In light of the United Nations initiatives to promote prostitution, we ask the Secretary General of the United Nations to initiate a UN Convention to make prostitution a violation of human rights.
Please email The Secretary General of the United Nations with copies to the High Commissioner of Human Rights and the Director of UN Women (phone, address, email at the end of this document) let them know that the normalization of prostitution is the normalization of violence against women, and that we are asking for new human right law from the United Nations while we oppose any attempts to legalize or decriminalize prostitution.
Send your protests and concerns to:
United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon Phone: 1-212-963-1234, FAX 1-212-963-7055
With copies to:
Chief Navi Pellay, United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, Email: InfoDesk@ohchr.org
Executive Director of UN Women is Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Tel: +1 646 781-4400, Fax: +1 646 781-4444
