The Signs of Sex Trafficking Business Card
The National Center for Civil and Human rights helped launch their sex trafficking program in 2014, their expenses was about 177k, while their revenue was about 167k.
I’ve been bundled in bed all day down with a nasty cold, for hours I’ve been scrolling through sex work Twitter which had found sex trafficking organizations announcing a wave of law enforcement crackdowns just in time for SuperBowl One Tweet by Dave Huddleston showing a card from “Human Traffick Proof the ATL” got a lot of attention.
It really showcases how vague signs of “sex trafficking” really are from these organizations. Despite the fact that these organizations always say that human trafficking is “really complex”, and “not like the movie ‘Taken’”, they show a very stereotypical, vague, cliché idea of what it is. The number at the bottom that they are telling people to call is Polaris (an hotline affiliated with ICE (DHS), and law enforcement). “National Human Trafficking Hotline 1 (888) 373-7888. BeFree Textline Text "BeFree" (233733)”. Dave Huddleston, being a reporter, was probably at an event learning about “sex trafficking” from this organization and was told to call that hotline if he saw any of the “signs”. The people involved are faith organizations, law enforcement, the feds, and various corporate organizations.
Human Traffick Proof the ATL basically create ads and programs aimed at teaching the horrors of trafficking and what to do if you spot “signs” of it. It was created by the International Human Trafficking Institute and the National Center for Civil and Human rights. This page goes over their 3 year plan, which you can see relies mostly on law enforcement, and calling law enforcement. https://www.ihtinstitute.org/plan.
The goal is to criminalize demand, meaning call the cops on people buying sex. The whole approach reeks of victim blaming, slut shaming/whorephobia, and hatred of sex workers.
For instance their “focus areas” include “traffic-proofing vulnerable people”, basically to make it impossible for people to become victims. Which is kind of an odd thing to say because sex trafficking, (the act of forcibility selling someone into the sex industry against their will) isn’t something you can prevent in the way they are highlighting. Sex trafficking is rape, it’s force, it’s violence, it’s against your will. According to these organizations, people are vulnerable and targets for sex trafficking “due to poverty, frail families, and lack of positive adult relationships”. No one is sold against their will, or raped because they don’t have positive adult relationships, weak families, or because they’re poor. You would NEVER tell a rape victim that she was raped because she had a bad family, or didn’t have positive role models. Some people believe that kind of logic, but it’s called victim blaming and doesn’t really address the perpetrators of the crime. I want to be clear that when they say “sex trafficking”, they really mean people going into the sex industry. Specifically they are talking about women and girls becoming whores/ sex workers. We become whores because we are “broken” people, because we have bad families, because we don’t have “positive adult relationships”, and because we are poor and desperate for money. We aren’t capable of making smart decisions because we weren’t raised the right way, and because we aren’t rich enough to make good decisions. This is a huge stereotype.
I think a big part of the ignorance on this topic, is that America has NEVER wanted to have a serious conversation about racism and slavery. What caused Slavery? Was it individual white people who just decided they should be allowed to buy human beings? Did corporate America, the Police, and federal government work together to stop these individual evil white people? People fail to understanding that the entire concept of “human trafficking” is about modern day slavery. Despite what the feds, and organizations working with the feds tell you, it’s not all too different from the past. Slavery exists today because the entire system (corporate American, and the prison industrial complex) relies on human exploitation and suffering. The conditions needed to create it is fear (police violence, deportations, stigma), and systemic oppression from the law, corporations, law enforcement, schools, and on and on. One of things the organizations want to do is align existing resources to address systemic conditions to improve social, educational, and economic conditions. These resources already exist, so they aren’t doing anything new. If you have ever been poor and homeless, you know the resources available are extremely limited and don’t do much to get people out of poverty. If you are an undocumented immigrant like me, you know most of these resources will not be available to you. I would argue that these organizations will not accomplish much, and will actually harm more people in the community. They are working with people who are actively creating the social, educational, and economic conditions that cause people to enter the sex industry. Discrimination against LGBT kids and adults in rampant in the corporate world, in the government, by police, and in our society. Many LGBT kids and teens are abandoned by their families, kicked out onto the streets, or suffer in abusive households. Some of them runaway, and the police usually force them back into their abusive households, or imprison them, or they are left in the orphanage system. LGBT individuals and undocumented immigrants no longer have the option to join the military. Undocumented immigrants sometimes do not have the right to work legally, so you can imagine why some of them might decide to enter the sex industry. African Americans and Hispanics tend to have less access to quality education, job opportunities, and have less wealth than their white peers. We tend to be the ones most targeted for crime despite the levels of crime being equal among race. To me the approach that this plan is taking will make the inequality worse. It would be like trying to fix the drug problem by treating drug dealers as victims, and persecuting drug buyers. Afterall, a big reason why teens and adults sell drugs under the table is because of poverty. What’s interesting is that they admit that we are persecuted at all levels. On the local, national, and global “anti-trafficking effort”, they focus on “victims”, and “pimps”. Have you noticed that they completely ignore sex workers? They act like it’s impossible to be a person making ends meet, working, and paying bills. They are selling you the idea that they are only targeting “buyers” and not sex workers. This is a HUGE lie.
The numbers they cite are very questionable just by looking at them. The 7,200 men a month buying sex from teen girls is from 2010, the study is basically posting a sex ad of a “young girl” on various sites. The researchers didn’t say how old the girl looked, or what age range they aimed for her to look like, they didn’t post that they were underaged because it goes against the rules of the site. Website turn over information like that over to law enforcement. People would call the number on the ad, and researchers would ask for their preferences, and allude to their “young” age not being very clear on what they mean. Basically this study is based on assumptions. The truth is sex workers would post their ad on various sites, to get as many callers as possible, most of those calls aren’t serious, end up going nowhere, or plank calls. So sex workers and operators have to weed through which ones are serious (most of them aren’t). There are 24 hours in a day, so assuming it’s a 31 day month there 744 hours in that month. The researchers posted ONE ad in several locations, and they concluded from this that a total of 7,200 men a month are buying this underaged girl in the ad. There aren’t in that many hours in a month for one person. Their reasoning is that because men are asking for a “young female” they must not care if she’s underaged or not. Men are like this in regular life, and on dating websites. They show an extreme preference for young women. The biggest reason why this is outdated though is because Donald Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA into law, meaning that the ads they used in this study can no longer be used to advertise sex work AT ALL! BackPage is gone, Craigslist no longer has their adult services section, many other sites sex workers used are gone too. Tumblr is kicking sex workers, and porn creators from their site, and payment processors and banks are also kicking us out. The sad reality is that these researchers and “anti-trafficking organizations” won, they got exactly what they wanted, and they have pushed sex workers further underground.
The other figure they cited was 276 cases of human trafficking to the Polaris number (the one working with DHS/ICE/Police). Those weren’t “cases”, they count the number of calls or texts they get on their 24/7 national phone service. Their organization gets grants of the government, and gets millions of dollars every year.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, In fiscal year 2015, 1,923 suspects were referred to U.S. attorneys with human trafficking as the lead charge—39% for peonage, slavery, forced labor, or sex trafficking; 32% for production of child pornography; and 29% for transportation for illegal sex activity.
The reason I bring this up is because there are 36,247 arrests for prostitution in the US in 2017. Some of those arrests for prostitution in the state of Georgia was juveniles
A chart from the “sex trafficking” website. Notice that the “supply” are called “victims”. Sex workers are being completely dehumanized, and viewed as nothing but objects who need to be “saved” by police in order to be human. Everyone is in worldview is viewed from a purely economic point of view.
To prove my point, here’s a story about “sex trafficking”, sixteen people were arrested, according to police, and the youngest person involved was 17. That’s 33 arrests during the past four days according to DHS. This is federal and state level crackdown on sex workers. Now that many sex workers can’t advertise online, they had to work underground. But that’s not good enough, they are “cleaning up” the town by getting rid of people in the sex trade. DHS were helping the local police to do this, and I wonder how “undercover” they went. They don’t give any details of what they did, or what they plan to do. The only other detail we are given is this: Investigators have also found more than 2,000 counterfeit items, according to Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security.
Donald Trump and Kirstjen Nielsen are always talking about fighting “trafficking”. Here’s a part of a speech where Nielsen defends the zero tolerance/child separation policy:
There is a lot of misinformation about what D.H.S. is and is not doing as it relates to families at the border. And I want to correct the record here. Here are the facts. First, this administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws…We have a long existing policy — multiple administrations have followed — that outline when we may take action to protect children. We will separate those who claim to be a parent and child if we cannot determine a familiar or custodial relationship exists…We also separate a parent and child if the adult is suspected of human trafficking. There are cases where minors have been used and trafficked by unrelated adults in an effort to avoid detention. And I’d stop here to say in the last five months, we have a 314 percent increase in adults and children arriving at the border fraudulently, claiming to be a family unit. This is obviously of concern…And separation can occur when the parent is charged with human smuggling. Under those circumstances, we would detain the parent in an appropriate secure detention facility separate from the child. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. Everyone is subject to prosecution.
As someone who was smuggled here by a coyote who were paid 10k by my parents to bring me to them at the age of 6 years old, I can tell you I was not a victim. Border Patrol and the government during the time treated me like a criminal. It doesn’t really matter if you are a young person, or if you are a victim, the system is set up to deport and imprison everyone who is involved with drugs, sex work, immigration, or in poverty. I was put behind bars at 6 years old, the system is blind. Why are calling the police to handle everything? They are terrifying, and often violent, they are trained to do things by force. When we’re talking about immigration, sex work, drugs, mental illness, or poverty, we’re talking about social issues that require care and nuance.
In Kirstjen Nielsen’s speech she used the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) to justify the harsh policy of separating families, and imprisoning them in detention centers. The website goes over it as well saying that it was, “was the first comprehensive federal law to address trafficking of persons.” Like everything else on their page, it’s a lie. The first federal law about trafficking was the The White-Slave Traffic Act, or the Mann Act of 1910. It was used to crack down on minority neighborhoods mostly Asian and Hispanic towns, deport immigrants, and criminalize sex work on a federal level for the first time. The Mann Act was also used to criminalize interracial marriage. It’s still a federal law, and was never repealed. According to Polaris (who works with DHS):
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2013 (TVPRA 2013), which was passed as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act, establishes and strengthens programs to ensure that U.S. citizens do not purchase products made by victims of human trafficking, and to prevent child marriage.
This is odd because child marriage is still perfectly legal in the US, and US citizens can import underage girls to marry – all perfectly legal. The problem with all this, if you are following me so far, is that the police, the government, and all these organizations are NOT targeting what’s causing SYSTEMIC INEQUALTIY AND PROBLEMS, instead they are targeting INDIVIDUAL people. One thing we can say at least, is that our prisons and detention centers will always be full.
They are working with law enforcement, the private sector, and schools to target “buyers” - “to train on identifying at -risk youths”.
The most disturbing part is their 3 year plan, because it reminds me of the war on drugs, and the war against immigrants. Basically they send out religious figures and teachers to shame and scare children and communities. “Don’t have sex, Don’t do drugs”, without really educating them on reality, or changing their social and economic situations. The purpose is to teach children to be ashamed, scared, and to fully understand that if they fall out of line they can go to prison. The police force, and federal policing and surveillance increase to be “tough on crime”. What we end up with is minorities and the poor being criminalized the most for non-violent “moral” crimes.
Just in case it wasn’t completely clear what they are ACTUALLY TARGETING AND DOING, “Shift language: from ‘prostitution’ to ‘sexually exploited children’, from ‘John’ to ‘buyer/perpetrator’”. One of the most disturbing things they want to do is “target youth as potential buyers”. They are fully aware that what they really want to do is eliminate sex workers and anyone involved. They are well aware that targeting prostitution/sex workers doesn’t sell as well as calling us “sex trafficking” or “sexually exploited children”. This isn’t about saving people, it’s about persecuting the sex industry and anyone that LOOKS LIKE they could be in the sex industry. They want everyone from religious figures, to schools, to the government, law enforcement, to corporations to adopt a “zero-tolerance” policy. We need to address inequality in this country, this endless persecution helps no one but the people who profit from incarceration.