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by paulgb
2687 days ago
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You're not just jaded. "Trafficking" has become a vehicle for the religious right to shut down anything they don't like, from robot brothels [1] to, in this case, hookup apps. And nobody is for trafficking, so politicians from across the spectrum tend to go along with it. It's been this way since at least the Mann Act, which was ostensibly about trafficking but used to crack down on interracial relationships (notably by Jack Johnson, who recently got a posthumous pardon) "Remember when some tea company added "blockchain" to its name and stock prices soared? "Trafficking" is the equivalent word in the policy / non-profit world." -- Alex Frell Levy [2] [1] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/30/houston-robo... [2] https://t.co/HaNQ2H7kFX |
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Nobody in first-world countries, you mean. In third-world countries, a lot of what gets categorized as “human trafficking” is just self-motivated border-crossing by career prostitutes.
You know how you might find a fellow working in America who is from, say, Bangladesh, and is here for the jobs that pay 100x as much as jobs in Bangladesh do, so he can send money home to his family? Well, in the hotbed countries of “human trafficking”, many of the women involved are just people who did exactly the same thing, moving from countries like Cambodia (“human trafficking source countries”) to countries like Thailand (“human trafficking destination countries”) because they know there’s far more of a market of sex tourists there with higher expectations of average prices. And her family back home? Thinks exactly the same of her as the family of the Bangladeshi man working in America does. “She’s providing for us; we’re proud of her.”
The annoying thing is that “human trafficking” was established to go after what is, at its core, a real and horrifying crime—the combination of kidnapping and slavery that mafias tend to consider the highest-margin way to operate brothels, factories, etc. If someone isn’t themselves doing the kidnapping, or operating the brothel, but is just, say, driving the kidnapped people around, we didn’t have a crime to charge them with and had to let them go, until we invented “human trafficking.” It was essentially a gang-busting crime, a way to put pressure on ground-level members to get them to give up their higher-ups. But now, basically everything related to the original intent seems to fall under the aegis of that crime†, and its scope has grown to the point that we’ve forgotten why we invented it.
† Probably because of motivated reasoning of statisticians working for the trafficking-related nonprofits. Sort of like the motivated reasoning of statisticians working for cigarette or sugary-cereal companies.