You think you know the relevant details and surely you disapprove of human trafficking. But come across its human face and you realize how little you can actually bear to know. Over time, working on and learning about human trafficking, I have discovered that I cannot actually speak about this problem without traumatizing the listener. You will see and feel what I mean when I tell you what a lovely Irish nun, Sister Winifred, said about two decades of work in Ethiopia. Speaking at a meeting full of knowledgeable and principled psychoanalysts and humanitarian aid workers, she said, “I was never, in 20 years, able, to persuade one woman who was being enticed into a move to Europe or America for ‘work’ and opportunity, not to get on that plane or boat.” No one was persuadable. Which meant, she went on, that she was often standing on tarmacs or docksides waiting for the return of a body for burial, and often that would be a body that would be missing internal organs. No one in the room said a word because no one could think.
This article is about a social problem on a global scale. In its reach and scope, it is a 21st century version of the institution of slavery that Americans and Africans and many other cultural groups still cannot fully metabolize, even though abolition has formally taken place. Many people work hard and tirelessly on abolishing human trafficking, and inevitably do so at the expense of peace of mind and mental well-being. Yet, at the level of social and political will, the vacuum of action and opposition remains staggering. This article explores the tenacity of this vacuum through a psychoanalytic lens.
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is faculty and supervisor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and a member and training analyst in the IPA.
Michael Slevin, M.A., M.S.W., a former TAP editor, graduated as academic associate from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he completed the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program. He works at Jewish Community Services of Baltimore and has a private practice.
First of all, there is the sheer scale of what is occurring. Children, women and men are trafficked for work, forced labor and sexual exploitation. A 2013 UN report estimated that annually 12.3 million persons are trafficked for forced labor, and 20.9 million for sexual exploitation. Women and children are 55 percent of the forced workforce and 98 percent of the persons sex trafficked. Children are overall 20 percent of the persons trafficked for sexual exploitation, but in several regions (Vietnam and West Africa), children are close to 100 percent. There was one particularly striking detail (new to me) from this UN report, titled “The Global Report on Trafficking in Persons: The Crime That Shames Us All.” Children being prostituted are often required to use steroids, which may make them look older and also contribute to being physically able to have sex with more partners. The children must buy these steroids from the meager payment they receive.
The four aspects of UN and government response—prevention, protection, prosecution and activism—are problematic, difficult and arduous to undertake. For over a decade, the IPA has had an NGO linked to the UN designed to bring issues of mental health to that body of officials and workers and reciprocally to bring issues of concern in the UN to mental health and psychoanalytic audiences and practitioners. It is a two-way highway of information, skills and experience. For the last two years, that group chaired by Vivian Pender, and including as members, Isaac Tylim, Russell Denea, Alexander Kalogerakis, Mona Jain, Phillida Rosnick, John Barnhill, and me, with corresponding members in California, Paris, Beirut, Brasilia and Tel Aviv, has been working in the area of human trafficking, primarily educating ourselves and our colleagues on the scope of this problem. Our mission is both educative and interventionist, as it is impossible to learn about trafficking in persons without understanding the secondary traumatization at all levels of help and engagement. The emphasis I am putting on secondary traumatization only underscores the incredible difficulty in getting help to the primary victims of human trafficking.
Entering the charged and tragic space of human trafficking has been quite an education. It is a global network. There are countries—mostly in the third world, especially Africa and the Far East—from which people are recruited. There are countries harboring those who organize the transporting of laborers and sex workers. And there are countries, mostly in the first world, that consume what has been trafficked. The UN organized its first convention on Traffic in Persons in December 1949. It then took half a century, that is, until 1995 and into the 21st century for resolutions, interventions, reports on the scale and nature of human trafficking to gain traction at the UN. Despite recent global attention to the phenomena of human trafficking, it is clear that the political, legal and humanitarian response falls far short of what is needed. While intervention, support for victims, and prosecution of traffickers and their interlocking criminal subcultures are expanding, these efforts move forward with painful slowness.
While intervention, support for victims, and prosecution of traffickers and their interlocking criminal subcultures are expanding, these efforts move forward with painful slowness.
At the 2014 National Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, UN and NGO staff involved for decades in political and humanitarian work on the problem of human trafficking met with a discussion group organized by the IPA-based NGO that consults with the UN. Psychoanalysts listened and reacted. We could easily feel and be collaborative on the matter of secondary traumatization, the degree to which workers in these areas are indelibly marked by what they hear and see. This got through to people. UN participants were taking notes, nodding.
A young lawyer described the task of watching child pornography in order to decide what was litigable or criminal. Because of the sensitivity of the materials and the delicacy of developing legal cases, this young woman watched this material in isolated and depressing circumstances. She described hours spent in front of a video screen and seemed almost surprised and ashamed at being so haunted by the film material. Certainly, she had nowhere to process and recover from the images that had invaded her mind and body. If we understood and applied ideas about dissociation and fragmentation to a variety of humanitarian projects, I think we would see massive amounts of secondary traumatization, which remain inadequately treated. There is a plausible, ethical and clinical role we can play in this regard and many colleagues have expertise to offer.
At the 2014 meeting, humanitarian workers, representatives of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies focused on trafficking in the U.S. The discussion pinpointed mass concentrations of persons, in particular the Super Bowl (due to occur within two weeks of our meeting) as sites for trafficking. In fact, the Super Bowl is the single event in the United States with the largest surrounding aggregation of human trafficking. Our committee members and the listening discussion group were deeply unsettled, attempting to process that one of the most classic, iconic, American celebrations is also a major opportunity for large scale sex trafficking.
The example of the Super Bowl brings up one of the most difficult and problematic aspects of work on trafficking. One thread of opposition to trafficking has tied these practices to masculinity and to men in general. This has fractured feminists working on human trafficking. To many, it seems to undermine efforts to get mass support for action, whether occupational or sexual exploitation is involved. To add to the complexity of the problem, a new statistic presents itself. Over 30 percent of the persons who do the trafficking are women, often women who have themselves entered this system of slavery as trafficked persons. On the one hand, this works against a very damaging gender polarity in analyzing and combating these practices. On the other hand, the muddle of victim and perpetrator makes intervention and genuine rehabilitation more difficult.
In the rest of this article, I will explore how and why it is so hard to get traction on political or cultural work on human trafficking. One irreducible aspect of human trafficking for sexual exploitation is that it involves sex or sexuality at the core. This has been problematic for organizing opposition to such practices when the forum of opposition draws on techniques of shaming and on critiques of sexual behavior and in particular sex and masculinity. It seems that to think about human trafficking does involve thinking through questions of sexuality.
In many cultural settings, and certainly within psychoanalytic cultures, there are wide and systematic differences in how we view the range of sexuality. We are becoming more comfortable with thinking of sexual practices and convictions that are variable and fluid. Heteronormativity gives way to variations of kinds of sexual objects, kinds of sexual subjects and kinds of sexual practices. Many evolutions in the experience of gender and transgender contest and explore the limits of the body, its “naturalness.” Where we are in disagreement, our discussions are mostly productive, respectful, and emancipatory. Avgi Saketopoulou was awarded the 2014 Ralph Roughton prize for a paper on work with transgender children. We can—and it is important that we do—think together with considerable complexity.
Bennett Simon in a recent talk on sexuality and ethics made the following unremarkable and simple statement, “We can all agree on the danger and criminality of sexual exploitation, particularly of children.” Simon makes this point with one or two variations in the paper and each time, I thought: Yes. We agree. And then I think of Sister Winifred's narrative. It was an unremarkable statement and probably every one of Simon's listeners and all the readers of this article would be in agreement. We might be having some discussion about the age of consent, legal and logistical questions about childhood's reach and extension, but Simon's sentence is one we would in all likelihood agree upon.
How is it then, that in the 21st century, there is broad agreement and no political or social will to address and contest the global practice of human trafficking? In the 19th century, it was possible to develop a widespread, globally significant abolitionist movement. David Brion Davis's magisterial work in 2013 on the end of slavery makes a strong case for the key role that an unprecedented moral transformation underwrote the abolitionist movement and played a profound role in its success. Racism, Davis understood, was a key barrier to the abolitionist movement and while this movement had many flaws well documented by Davis, the striking point he makes is that against economic interests (plantations were actually profitable) and against the undercurrents of racism, a moral shift occurred. He means, I believe, a shift from the unreflective view that slavery was wrong to a more entrenched, emotionally full, ethical conviction that this practice was intolerable and must be stopped. This was a moral, ethical shift that moved from symbolic to active engaged opposition.
Why then? Why not now? Many people push the analogy between 19th century and 21st century forms of slavery. But it is worth wondering what social problems can and cannot be addressed by mass political mobilizations. Slavery was visible and, no matter how grotesque, was a legitimized, visible practice that could be tracked and therefore opposed. Human trafficking is underground, deliberately obfuscated and managed through a sophisticated, international and well bankrolled network. If human trafficking were more visible, might political education and action be more plausible? Or is this aspect, its being a hidden crime, itself a smokescreen? Are we prevented from seeing or are we resistant to seeing?
The philosophical work that appeals most strongly to me in this regard is that of Emmanuel Levinas. “Prior to any act, I am concerned with the Other and I can never be absolved from that responsibility.” At the core of this idea is a practice both simple and daunting. In conjuring with the term “other” or “otherness,” I think Levinas means us to be attentive to the strangeness and inexplicable and unstable elements in ourselves as well as in others, and above all to respect both points of identification and difference between ourselves and others.
What would it mean to face these others, ones that are trafficked, ones that transmit the “objects” that the first world in various ways consumes, ones whose ways of being make us anxious and phobic. How might we break through the highly functional dissociative states and find our way to identification in Levinas's sense, an identification that does not take over and highjack the other to one's own purposes but maintains responsible ties or links. The term from post-colonial theory used in this regard is “colonization” and it might be useful to tie the political meaning to a psychoanalytic one. Political subjugation always inevitably entails a penetration of control and regulation in the bodies and minds of those brought into relations of subjugation. Psychoanalysts might find the mechanisms for this process in forms of projection along with those of guilt and shame (undergirded by force) through which feelings of unworthiness become entrained.
One dilemma here is that psychoanalysis would seem both a natural ally to colonization and to its opposition, Levinasian ethics. We might think of Ruth Stein's work on mind control on one hand, but on the other hand I quote from Eyal Rozmarin:
Psychoanalysis's raison d'etre as both theory and method is undoing the very otherness of the other: making the unconscious conscious, the unknown known, the disturbingly unapproachable yet somehow powerfully present available to the awareness, will and power of the self. Psychoanalysis is in this regard a discipline of the enlightenment, a discourse based on an ethos that both practically and ethically prioritizes the ideals of reason, truth and knowledge. In this aspect of psychoanalysis, understanding is the ultimate resolution of human suffering…The dialectic of self and other within the subject is an essential premise of psychoanalysis as theory. So is the tension within the analytic method between the drive to make the other yield and the need for it to remain unyielding in its otherness.
I think human trafficking, or as the UN starkly and acutely puts it “Trafficking in Persons,” a phrasing that helps us capture the horrible fact that conjoining those two terms tests our moral and emotional fibers to the maximum degree. Without exception, we all long to flee from and to disavow knowledge and exposure to these practices. It takes ongoing stamina to face these “others” and take on these others as aspect of ourselves and our otherness. These ideas from Levinas meet up for me in the work of David Brion Davis on the 19th century abolitionist movement. He linked the moral transformation he saw as under-riding abolitionist politics to the increasingly human face and words of free black persons who became spokespersons for opposition to slavery. Maybe we too need these human faces, these individuals speaking to us directly from their subjectivity.
Recently, at a UN meeting on the Status of Women, I heard a panel discussing and opposing the practice of child marriage, where girls are sold/bartered at a very young age. One of the speakers was a 15-year-old girl from Malawi. She began by telling a story about a best friend at school (and the audience would know that the very fact of school for girls marked these young women as unusual). The speaker's friend is forced into such an arranged marriage and was soon pregnant. The speaker has told us that many girls in this situation fear death in childbirth. Not unreasonably. Suddenly I realize that the speaker is referring to her friend in the past tense. Has she died? Is she dead to her friend? Has she suffered psychic death? My point here is that in the story the speaker and her friend become other in the Levinasian sense, others we are bound to, others whose otherness we can identify with because we approach their subjectivity. This I think would be one cornerstone in a moral transformation.
Psychoanalysts have a particular role to play in the discourses about trafficking in persons. As we take on both the instability of what we know and a conviction of what we are ethically bound to do, psychoanalysts can educate and act in the context of understanding both mass avoidance and disavowal. We can convey the depth of the traumatic effects across all levels of this phenomenon, and we can enter dialogues and shared work with activists engaged in our modern 21st century task of abolishing slavery. Whether we can go beyond education and some relief of secondary traumatization remains to be seen. But I am sure that we must try.