Space for Moderation: A Response to "The Abolitionist Fallacy"

The position of political moderate today is being hastily abandoned in the halls of Congress and at nongovernmental organizations, and the anti-human trafficking movement is no exception.   Ann Jordan recently published an essay called "Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy", in which she described the self-appointed "abolitionist" movement and the "sex-worker's rights" movement as diametrically opposed in the technique and mission of addressing sex trafficking.  As long as those of us committed to ending human trafficking and increasing viable economic options for women and girls focus on what divides us and ignore what unites us, we will lose the ultimate fight against trafficking. 

We are in the biggest transition in the history of anti-trafficking work.  The Bush administration, under which most federal funding streams to address trafficking were developed, refused to engage with organizations which supported the legality or legitimacy of prostitution, including those which distributed condoms to women in areas with high HIV/AIDS rates.  The Obama administration, as of yet, has made non-specific commitments to continuing anti-human trafficking work.  Fans of Bush policies hope he will keep them; critics hope for an overhaul. 

What do we as a whole hope for?  We hope women will have multiple, viable economic options for themselves and their families so they don't need to turn to prostitution in order to survive.  We hope women don't contract HIV/AIDS or other STDs.  We hope women won't be beaten, raped, or harassed.  All of us hope for this.

Ms. Jordan, I know you advocated for the Obama administration to throw out everything the government has created related to these issues, but we have all worked too hard for the past decade to scrap what we have accomplished and start over.  We have found trafficking victims and removed them to safety.  We have arrested, prosecuted, and sentences traffickers who committed heinous acts.  And of course we need to improve our techniques, find smarter ways to identify these criminals and aid the people they harm.  We need to take more action to prevent this global, systemic abuse.  But none of us can do that alone.

We need space for moderation, space to move forward together.  There will always be those individuals in the extremes of all viewpoints who refuse to collaborate on common ground, but we as a whole anti-trafficking community are more than that.  If we can find the courage to put aside our differences, though insurmountable they may seem at times, and focus on just a few common goals, we can really tackle improving the lives of individual women and girls.

Here are five goals to end human trafficking.  Can we agree to work on them together?  Can we agree to discuss them together?  Can we agree to do anything but disagree?  

1.) Create educational and skill-building opportunities for adult women around the world, including literacy programs, higher education opportunities, trade skills, technical and computer classes, and educational grants, so that women have real options to choose from to support themselves and their families.

2.) Train law enforcement officers to approach and treat all women with respect and dignity, to recognize women as more then their bodies, and to protect women's basic human rights, in order to reduce the amount of abuse women suffer during contact with law enforcement.

3.) Conduct bi-partisan, objective research on the real numbers of human trafficking victims in prostitution and other industries, so we can have a more accurate understanding of the scope, depth, and nature of human trafficking, and thus be better able to address it.

4.) Raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and other public health issues, including rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and family planning so that women can make safe, informed decisions about their lives and their bodies.

3.) Teach boys to respect women, to treat them as human beings who are more than their bodies, and to never be violent either physically or sexually towards women, so that the next generation of men will have more respect for women and girls.

Ms. Jordan, I am extending my hand in the spirit of moderation, communication and collaboration to you, to the whole "abolitionist movement", and to the whole "sex-worker's rights movement".  I believe together, we are powerful. 

Will you take it? 

Image from deviantart.com user Earths-shadow