Human Trafficking and the War on Women

“There is a ‘war on women.’” My colleague, a longtime feminist and gay activist, reaches for this catchphrase and wants me to hear it starkly and clearly. She was responding to an agonizing report by a young student who was doing an internship in a country in which the rape and murder of women, particularly women thought to be lesbian or trans, was at horrifying levels. The murders were particularly brutal. And when not actually murdered, scores of young women were infected with HIV in a culture with few medical resources and no domestic or social space for a dishonored girl or woman.

My old friend, Ynestra King, a peace activist and feminist of forty-odd years, got in touch with me recently to talk about the reissue of a radio program I had made 36 years ago and in which I had interviewed her. Nothing has changed, she says grimly. Except it has gotten worse. We have to go back and say those things we said decades ago. Nachträglischkeit, Freud termed a process where the past reframes the present. We need some new term that lets us go back and forth, fight for what has not changed, celebrate what has, see how the present demands the past, rewrites it, and needs to encounter it again and again.

Human Trafficking

Is human trafficking part of this “war on women”? Is it 21st century slavery? Is it work? Is it sex? Where is consent? Which of these questions must we answer? Which of these questions are still unanswerable? I gave a version of this paper in Iceland in October 2014 and I am struck at the different stage of our understanding and social responsiveness between that conference and this paper. Less than a year has passed since that conference, and I feel the widening concern about human trafficking. I walk down airport corridors and see signs and posters urging consciousness and attention to trafficking, particularly the transmission of trafficked persons (hence the concern at airports).

I got involved in learning, speaking, and writing about human traffic