Global Crusade Against Sex Trafficking Girls & Women

Sponsored by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, examine the conflicting goals of organizations like Gary Haugen’s International Justice Mission, who are trying to help victims of sex-trafficking around the worrld, and the women victims, many of whom couldn’t wait to get out of places like Burma in the first place.

According to the Nation, many international human rights groups are opposed to IJM’s tactics, which seem to be focused on breaking down brothels around the world, and not giving the girls the “aftercare” adversited on its website.

“IJM talks about saving an individual,” says Joe Amon, director of the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch. Amon met with the group in 2007 to discuss its tactics. “And what’s incredible is that it’s not clear if that individual has been saved. IJM is not clear on how aftercare leads to protection for these kids. I asked them about deportation of these girls. And they had no tracking for that, for any minors that had been repatriated. That to me is incredibly troubling.”

Ben Svasti is the executive director of Trafcord, a Thai organization that provides liaison among social workers, police and lawyers on trafficking cases cites major perspective differences between Americans, including the Bush Administration that heavily funded IJM, and the reality of life for sex-workers in places like Thailand.

Without condoning sex work, Svasti says that organization like IJM don’t discriminate between sex workers who are “employed” against their wills and those who aren’t. “Saving” the woman can actually be an act that violates her own free will or personal desires.

The assumption of the Americans is that no one is a prostitute willingly, that she has been kidnapped and sent to places like Thailand, and wants to be repatriated — even though harsh punishments and government corruption to clear her case may await her upon return to places like Burma.

Christa Crawford, who served as IJM’s country director in Thailand, before joining the UN says that for many women the choice is to be raped for free in Burma or paid as a commercial sex worker in Thailand.

The Crusade Against Sex Trafficking also makes it clear that the girls aren’t safe in the hands of authorities, when turned over by IJM.

According to a 2006 USAID-funded study that drew on interviews with 1,000 sex workers and sixty police officers, approximately a third of the freelance sex workers surveyed had been raped by a policeman in the past year; a third had been gang-raped by police. As for sex workers who worked in brothels but also accepted clients outside, 57 percent had been raped by a lone policeman; nearly half had been gang-raped by law enforcement. Fifty percent of freelancers and nearly 75 percent of the brothel group had been beaten by police in the past year.

Not only are these statistics chilling, they underscore the ongonig reality that we focus on here at Anne of Carversville. Females exist to be fodder for men. As each story unfolds, the lack of respect for women’s bodies and human rights is astonishing.

This article will be followed by a part two extension of the conversation. Granted, the Nation is a liberal magazine, but it does seem that American funds and moral philosophy are sweeping into some of these countries with little regard for the actual women.

For Marielle Lindstrom, weighing the balance of IJM’s work in Cambodia is a difficult task. Formerly chief of the Asia Foundation’s anti-trafficking project, Lindstrom was in charge of disbursing the major USAID grant on the issue and served as main coordinator on Cambodia’s anti-trafficking strategies, convening a task force of government officials, ministries and more than 200 NGOs. She acknowledges that IJM is “doing a good thing rescuing the children” and could have a strong positive effect should its training be incorporated into the national police academy, but she is torn about the overall impact of the organization’s work.

Joe Amon of Human Rights Watch offered a slew of possible modifications to IJM’s work:

• establishing formal mechanisms like citizens’ commissions and independent investigations to pursue complaints about police abuses.

• IJM could engage in “real dialogue with sex workers’ groups, which have their own ways of gathering information and informing police they trust.

• IJM could also provide legal representation for adult sex workers, particularly those abused by police, or they could support local legal NGOs to do so.”

In the absence of those safeguards, Amon felt that IJM’s strategies have done as much harm as good, in attacking the problems of sex trafficking.

The author of the article ends on a sober note, asking the sex-worker women in Cambodia if they had any questions.

They had only one. “Sister,” Preung Pany said, “we tell our stories to so many journalists, so many people like you, but then nothing changes. Still we are raped by the police, still there are young ones in the brothels. There are so many people working on this—the rescuers, the HIV people, people like you—and so much money going into this problem. But why doesn’t anything change?” 

Anne