It Isn't All About Sex

HUMAN TRAFFICKING is one of the least morally controversial social justice issues of our time. Agreement that human trafficking is wrong and must end is widespread, if not completely unanimous. Yet when most people hear the term “human trafficking,” they envision sex trafficking: vivid images of young women forced to work in “massage parlors” and brothels, selling sex on the streets of major cities.

But human trafficking is broader than sex trafficking. U.S. law defines human trafficking through the legal categories of fraud, force, or coercion. In simple terms, human trafficking occurs when individuals lose control over their lives and are forced to work for nothing or next to nothing. Someone who has been trafficked does not have control over the terms and conditions of their employment; they can’t leave for fear that they or someone they care about will be harmed as a result.

So while trafficking certainly can take the form of sexual exploitation, it can also look like nannies or janitors, workers in slaughterhouses or meat-packing plants, people forced to work on factory assembly lines and rural farms. It takes place in both the formal and informal economies; it may involve adults and children.

When sex trafficking isn’t

Human trafficking hasn’t always been so tightly linked to sex trafficking. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were a number of nonprofits dedicated to combatting labor exploitation in all its forms. But when one of the first pieces of anti-trafficking legislation was proposed in 1999, its congressional sponsors wished to differentiate between sex-trafficking and other forms of labor exploitation. They “did not want ‘low-wage sweatshop issues’ to cloud the issue of human trafficking, which, they argued, was essentially about the sexual exploitation of women and girls and not about exploited labor more generally,” as Letitia Campbell and I wrote in 2014. Significantly revised anti-trafficking legislation was signed into law in late 2000.

Beginning in 2001, the George W. Bush administration implemented the new anti-trafficking law, making prostitution and sex-trafficking centerpieces of its gender policy. A 2002 National Security Presidential Directive on human trafficking called prostitution “inherently harmful and dehumanizing,” and the administration insisted that prostitution and sex-trafficking are linked phenomena.

For many people—especially those who cannot imagine selling sex except by force, fraud, or coercion—conflating commercial sex and human trafficking makes sense. Linking prostitution and sex trafficking also resonates with many Christians’ moral sensibilities.

Yet people in the sex industry report widely varying experiences. And as Christian author Benjamin L. Corey points out, not everyone in the sex industry has experienced trafficking. Human trafficking is “always an issue of forced labor, and must meet the definition of being conducted through ‘force, fraud, or coercion,’” explains Corey. “Without one of these criteria, a situation can never be considered human trafficking. A great way to summarize the three criteria is to ask: Are they choosing to do this work, or is someone making them? If someone isn’t making them do it, it’s not trafficking.”

Chickens and eggs

According to legal scholar Rebecca Wharton, “forced or exploitative labor has always been more acceptable than prostitution in American culture.” As a result, labor trafficking garners far less attention than commercial sex and sex trafficking. But as anthropologist Denise Brennan argues in her recent book Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States, there are plenty of reasons we should be concerned about labor trafficking. “Contrary to sensationalistic claims that slavery is all around us, a more mundane and politically thorny reality is that exploited migrant labor undergirds parts of the U.S. economy,” she writes. According to Brennan, labor trafficking in the U.S. has two primary causes: migration, and abuses surrounding labor.

Both of these factors played major roles in a recent labor trafficking case in which federal prosecutors indicted six people at one of the U.S.’s largest egg producers, Trillium Farms in Wyandot County, Ohio. In December 2014, authorities raided a trailer park in nearby Marion County, taking 45 people, including eight teenage minors, into protective custody. The Guatemalan teenagers reported being forced to work on the chicken farm for 12 hours per day, six days a week, while making as little as $2 per day.

So how did eight Guatemalan teenagers end up as trafficking victims in America’s heartland? Some history is helpful: In 2006, Guatemala’s 36-year civil war ended; now, a decade later, the nation still struggles to compete in the global economy. Wages are so low that many full-time workers do not earn enough to feed their families. Others cannot find gainful employment; gang violence and drug cartels thrive, forcing many to flee.

But Guatemalan native Aroldo Castillo-Serrano found a way to make good money in the impossibly tough Guatemalan economy: smuggling people to the U.S. His services commanded upward of $15,000 per person, according to The Washington Post. Once in the U.S., his clients paid their debts off by working at Trillium Farms.

The parents of one teen, who I’ll call “Javier,” paid smugglers to help their son get to the U.S. because they knew his future in Guatemala was bleak. Javier hoped to go to Florida to live with an uncle.

Javier became one of the more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2011—a dramatic increase from previous years. Some of these minors were denied entry, but others, like Javier, were placed in Office for Refugee Resettlement-run shelters until they could be reunited with their parents, relatives, or other qualified sponsors.

While Javier was in the shelter, smuggler Castillo-Serrano arranged for someone to file a Family Reunification Application, fraudulently claiming to be a family friend. Upon his release, Javier was taken to the Ohio chicken farm where Castillo-Serrano informed him that he must work to pay off the $20,000 fee he now owed. He told Javier that his parents would be shot if he tried to leave before his debt was paid. Javier called his uncle in Florida and described the violent threats, miserable living conditions, and how he had to hand his paychecks over to Castillo-Serrano’s associates. “Please,” he said. “I’m hungry, and my heart is bursting with fear.”

“They were working enthusiastically”

Situations like the labor-trafficking at Trillium Farms occur because the U.S. does not have universal legal protection for workers. Most worker protections are contingent on a worker’s immigration status. For undocumented workers such as Javier, legal protections against exploitation are very limited. Employers know they can get away with treating undocumented migrant workers in ways they could never treat employees who are American citizens. Further, the demand for migrant labor is concentrated in labor sectors such as agriculture that typically pay low wages and that are poorly regulated, if they are regulated at all. “Widespread migrant labor abuse—including trafficking—is the result of a robust demand for low-wage workers, the absence of federal immigration reform, ineffective labor laws, and migrants’ fear of detection, detention, and deportation,” writes Brennan.

Nonetheless, many migrants are highly motivated workers. Bartolo Dominguez, a van driver who took the teens to and from the egg farm each day and one of the defendants in the Trillium Farms case, claimed that he didn’t realize the Guatemalan teens were in a trafficking situation. “If I would have known about the abuse of the teens, I would have told somebody. I thought everything was fine,” he said. “They were working enthusiastically.”

Of the 45 immigrants taken into custody in the December 2014 raid, the indictment identified all eight of the minors and two adults as victims of human trafficking. The teens received initial care and services from the Salvation Army of Central Ohio before they were returned to federal custody and transferred out of state. The fates of the other 35 people who were not determined to be victims of trafficking is less clear. There is a razor-thin line between the law’s ability to recognize undocumented workers as victims of human trafficking who need services and support, or to categorize them as law-breakers. There is no neutral legal category for undocumented immigrants. They are either criminals or victims. Likely, they were deported.

Notably, Trillium Farms escaped indictment because the Guatemalan migrants were not formally their employees, but employees of Haba Corporate Services, a company Trillium contracted to provide manual labor.

This is how it ends

What strategies most effectively prevent human trafficking? By far the dominant legislative response to human trafficking has been criminalization. By 2013, all 50 states and Washington, D.C., passed state-level anti-trafficking laws, augmenting federal policy. But while anti-trafficking laws have a role to play in ending trafficking, the criminalization model has problems. Some experts have suggested that anti-human trafficking laws have been more successful at criminalizing already marginalized communities and punitively enforcing immigration policies than at providing concrete benefits to victims.

Not all legal mechanisms rely on criminalization, however. Other approaches include comprehensive immigration reform to fix the broken system of U.S. immigration laws and strengthening worker protection laws. Regularizing migration and changing visa requirements for foreign workers so they could change employers at will would lessen migrant workers’ vulnerability to forced labor. Strengthening worker-protection laws complements immigration reform. Workers’ legal protections should not be contingent on their immigration status.

But what does anti-trafficking activism look like for people who aren’t professional lobbyists or savvy policy wonks? Meg Munoz, a trafficking survivor and founder of the nonprofit organization Abeni, which works with people in the sex trades and who have experienced domestic sex-trafficking, identifies Christian anti-trafficking activists’ obsessive preoccupation with sex as a major roadblock to effective activism and advocacy on human trafficking. She pleads with Christian anti-trafficking activists: “Please stop focusing on the ‘Is sex work right or wrong?’ narrative and start focusing on people. We are all entitled to rights, respect, dignity, and protections. Please stop limiting human rights to those you simply agree with.”

Anti-trafficking work that is rooted in respect for human rights can take many forms. It can look like feeding hungry people through shelters, soup kitchens, food banks, or brown-bag lunch ministries, as well as addressing food insecurity more systemically. It can look like joining local efforts to expand affordable housing, increasing public mental health services, or participating in the “Fight for $15” movement to raise the minimum wage. The common thread uniting these suggestions is meeting tangible material needs of people who are vulnerable to exploitation.

For people concerned specifically with child trafficking, anti-trafficking work can look like providing childcare to low-income families so their kids are safe and cared for while they’re at work. It might mean mentoring youth through Big Brothers Big Sisters, advocating for kids in foster care, or supporting the expansion of shelters and other services for queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming youth who’ve been kicked out of their homes. It can look like becoming a foster parent.

Anti-trafficking activism can also include writing letters to elected officials in support of comprehensive immigration reform; supporting ballot measures that expand protections of sex workers’ civil rights; or protesting police brutality and racial profiling. People might join together to call the corporate headquarters of Wendy’s asking them to join other companies (including McDonalds, Burger King, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, and Walmart) in signing on to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program in which corporate buyers of Florida tomatoes pay farm workers an additional cent per pound and agree to comply with a Code of Conduct that includes zero tolerance for forced labor and sexual assault of workers. Such action, coupled with refraining from patronizing Wendy’s restaurants in the meantime, sends a strong message. Anti-trafficking organizations and groups that assist people who are vulnerable to trafficking, such as Abeni and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, are always in need of financial support.

Experiencing human trafficking means losing control of one’s life. Therefore, the goal of liberative anti-trafficking activism and advocacy must be to return control back to people who have experienced trafficking. This takes place through recognition of and support for their human dignity and human rights (economic, political, and social) and increasing the number of realistic and meaningful options people have in their lives, as well as respecting the choices that people make with their freedom.