Prostitution or Slave Trade?

Joel Brinkley | January 13, 2008

During the waning days of the Clinton administration, the Central Intelligence Agency published a groundbreaking study that said at least 700,000 men, women and children around the world are trafficked into slavery each year. New estimates since then have gradually increased the count. But if the Bush administration is to be believed, the actual number is closer to 7 million.

Slave trafficking victims are usually promised a good job in a distant country. But once they arrive, they are held against their will and suborned into sweat shop or agriculture labor, domestic servitude or forced prostitution. It is that last category, sex slaves, that the Bush administration has distorted to the point of absurdity.

Put simply, the administration has concocted the view that every prostitute, worldwide, is actually a slave; the very nature of the work amounts to slavery. That nonsensical position is a favorite of the Christian right, and a few years ago the administration enshrined it in law and began cutting off funding to aid groups that refused to make opposition to prostitution an official part of their charters. Two federal judges ruled the law illogical and unconstitutional, but the Justice Department appealed.

The result has been to pervert the federal program to fight slave trafficking in the United States and abroad. Under the Bush administration, it is largely a campaign to abolish prostitution ...

This would be an interesting academic argument but for the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who are, in fact, enslaved, including farmworkers forced at gunpoint to harvest crops for no pay, women imprisoned as domestic slaves and then sexually abused, sweatshop workers locked in the factory at night and beaten if they try to escape.

The Bush policy seems to care little for these victims and instead pursues its ideological anti-prostitution campaign.

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