What do they mean, “trafficked”?
This phrase set me off: “a UK initiative established to raise awareness of the plight of workers trafficked into the sex industry.” (1)
Why “trafficked”? What’s with this terminology? You see it all the time. “Tantamount to slavery.” “Conditions indistinguishable from slavery.” Why “tantamount”? Why “indistinguishable from”?
It IS slavery. It is slavery of the worst and most disgusting sort. Even hard labor does not involve body invasion. It is slavery with every possible revolting humiliation included. It is slavery with physical torture, disease, and early death, just like “real” slavery. It is human beings carrying a price tag, bought by men. That isn’t “tantamount” to slavery. It IS slavery.
Why do so many people work so hard to call it something else? Look at the terminology in that first sentence: “workers,” “trafficked,” “industry.” Workers is what we all are. Nothing special there. Traffic is just a term for buying and selling stuff, with connotations of a busy bazaar, borderline deals, and smuggling. Maybe bricks of cocaine are being moved around. And “industry,” well, that’s positively good. Hard work, salt of the earth. Admittedly, it’s qualified as being the “sex industry,” but still. It feels like they’re talking about regular economic transactions.
What they’re talking about without euphemisms is the plight of women and children sold to men.
Slaves aren’t “workers” unless workers are now locked up and beaten. The women aren’t bricks on a conveyor belt, shunted to new buildings. Lies and kidnapping keep the pipeline full of new slaves, just as they did in the bad old days. Unless you want to call selling organs an industry, that’s the wrong word for it. It’s a crime.
In our free and enlightened time, there are more people enslaved than ever before. The estimate is some twenty seven million living in slavery (1999). That includes only forced labor, not workers struggling with appalling conditions. Of those 27,000,000, over 70%, three quarters, the vast majority, most, are women or girls. Fifty percent of all slaves are children, most of them girls. Female slaves are generally violated, even when suffering sexual torture isn’t their primary function.
Slavery is no longer focused on a class or a race. Now it’s not whites who think blacks don’t feel pain the way real people do. Now it’s men who think buying women is okay because who cares what they think and anyway they like it.
Slavery is not okay. Everybody knows that. Maybe, if we called it by its right name, there’d be no way to continue pretending it is.
Excellent post, quixote!
A little too radical for Sky Dancing, I take it?
The slavery of men has a beginning and an end, but the slavery of women never ceases, it seems. Until we put a final end to it.
“Trafficking”, “workers”, “industry”. Indeed just euphemisms for the reality of slavery.
Branjor on April 25th, 2012 at 19:39
“A little too radical?” Not at all, Branjor. :D. Partly, I’m just lazy, and it takes an extra few minutes to crosspost. Partly, it’s that Skydancing has a current events focus, and I figure that me throwing a rant about what is, horribly, an constant problem, maybe doesn’t fit.
quixote on April 26th, 2012 at 07:32
About the current events focus – as the slavery and oppression of women is both ancient history and completely current, it would not be so out of place on a site with a current events focus. It’s just completely ignored by the MSM.
In some ways, Sky Dancing strikes me as conservative where women are concerned.
Branjor on April 26th, 2012 at 20:23
Quixote – dakinikat has a Monday Morning Reads post up now which discusses the efforts of some woman legislators to alleviate Google’s role in accommodating “Human Trafficking” (scroll down). Now is the perfect time to make your point about that terminology!
Branjor on April 30th, 2012 at 09:25