The difference between the kind of exploitation experienced by “trafficking” victims and the exploitation experienced by all the other workers facing low pay and poor conditions is not qualitative but quantitative they are at the extreme end of a continuum of misery under capitalism.
So the so-called human rights approach to “trafficking” is based on a thoroughly confused notion of “exploitation” which does nothing to get to the real roots of workers’ misery, whether in the sex industry or in any other sector. On the one hand, it assumes that all prostitutes are exploited simply because they
are prostitutes, as if they had no will or agency of their own; on the other hand it also assumes that workers in any other industry are only exploited if they have been subjected to specific types of coercion, regardless of how low their pay or how poor their working conditions may be.
This only reinforces the stigmatisation of prostitutes as “other” and keeps them divided from workers in other sectors.
anthropophagous
Archive Audio Images RSS FeedThis is just a collection of things I think are neat.
A general overview of 'things I think are neat':abandonment/the post-industrial midwest, anarchism (syndicalism, insurrectionalism, etc), race/ethnicity (esp. defining/constructing the boundaries of whiteness), gender, class (talking/thinking about class generally seems to be an underrated activity), health care (access to, the experience of obtaining, etc), art, science fiction, punk music, conservative talk radio and anthropology (which probably incorporates almost everything else about people).
