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Feminism and Sex Trafficking: Rethinking Some Aspects of Autonomy and Paternalism

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Abstract

This paper argues that potential cases of oppression, such as sex trafficking, can sometimes comprise autonomous choices by the trafficked individuals. This issue still divides radical from liberal feminists, with the former wanting to ‘rescue’ the ‘victims’ and the latter insisting that there might be good reasons for ‘hiding from the rescuers.’ This article presents new arguments for the liberal approach and raises two demands: first, help organizations should be run by affected women and be open-minded about whether or not the trafficked individuals should remain in the sex industry. Second, the career choices of trafficked individuals should be expanded by the introduction of an opportunity-extending right to asylum.

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Notes

  1. The 2000 UN “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking In Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime” defines trafficking in persons as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. The protocol goes on to specifically include sex trafficking: Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation. (http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking.html) Thus, sex trafficking can occur in transport – recruitment, transportation – and/or at the destination – transfer, harbouring, or receipt for purposes of exploitation.

  2. Major statements of liberal feminist positions on prostitution include Schwarzenbach (1990–91), Shrage (1996), and Nussbaum (1999).

  3. Hence I will not discuss Peter de Marneffe’s liberal paternalist view that sex work should be regulated (not abolished or criminalized) to deter teenage girls from entering sex work in order to diminish the severe harms that he believes are endemic to sex work (2010, 13–17). For criticism of his empirical claims, see Schwarzenbach 2011, 440–441, and for skepticism about the separability of these harms from moral harms, see Yankah 2010, 2.

  4. See Peach 2006 for thoughtful discussion of the tensions between viewing trafficked sex workers as victims or as agents.

  5. Despite his analysis of the grim psychodynamics of sex worker/client interactions, Jeffrey Gauthier reaches a similar conclusion (2011, 182).

  6. It is worth noting that childcare and serving coffee have sometimes been foisted on female employees whose job descriptions don’t include such tasks, but feminists have successfully eroded such bosses’ prerogatives, and there is no evidence that such extraneous duties are being written into official job descriptions. See Liberto (2009) for related discussion.

  7. Both Miriam and Anderson are sympathetic to the view that suppressing sex workers’ liberty is justified to bring an end to the objectification of and injustice to women as a social group. For a careful discussion of sex work that makes parallel points about the effects of prostitution on women’s “standing in society” but does not advocate legal abolitionism, see Satz 2010, 144–153.

  8. Radhika Coomaraswamy served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women 1994–2003.

  9. For a thicker account of autonomy that shares Narayan’s concern that individuals be protected from excessive state coercion and that no one who should be accorded full citizenship rights is excluded, see Christman 2009.

  10. There is a growing consensus in the philosophy of action literature that autonomy is a matter of degree and that it may be achieved episodically. For discussion of degrees of autonomy, see Meyers 1989, 160–162, 166, 170; Friedman 2003, 38. For discussion of episodic autonomy, see Meyers 1989, 48, 162, 165, 166, 232; Benson 1991, 397; Christman 2009, 135. In fairness to Narayan, I note that she concedes that thicker conceptions of autonomy may be useful for measuring degrees of autonomy (2001, 430).

  11. I would argue that the account of autonomy I set out here complements the brand of liberal feminism that Brooke Ackerly and Susan Moller Okin defend (Ackerly and Okin 1999).

  12. My characterization of adaptive preferences is meant to allow for both conscious and unconscious adaptations as does Serene Khader’s (2011, 42, 51).

  13. For valuable discussion of how “fractured self-images” and “preferences with multiple/ambivalent effects on flourishing” subvert the power adaptive preferences exert over agency, see Khader 2011, 122–132.

  14. For detailed discussion of the compatibility of agency and victimization, see Meyers 2011.

  15. I do not mean to imply that men should not apply their agentic skills to terminating oppressive gender practices and institutions. In this section, however, my aim is to answer Miriam’s call for an account of women’s individual and collective agency under patriarchy.

  16. For evidence of the oppositional synergies that women generate in “resistant social spaces,” see Khader 2011, 3–7, 15, 124–127.

  17. Kamala Kempadoo’s report “Sex Workers’ Rights Organizations and Anti-trafficking Campaigns” sketches the positions and activities of organizations in China, India, and Thailand and provides a valuable supplement to the information available on these umbrella organizations’ websites (2005, 149–155).

  18. For helpful discussion of how the Anti-trafficking Protocol could be implemented in a less draconian, more humane way, see Abramson 2003.

  19. Thanks to Sarah Babbitt for vital research assistance on this paper and to the editors of this issue for their comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. Philosophy Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Diana Tietjens Meyers

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Meyers, D.T. Feminism and Sex Trafficking: Rethinking Some Aspects of Autonomy and Paternalism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 427–441 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9452-1

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