What does slavery mean? Oftentimes in this country we think of blacks on a plantation driven by their plantation masters. But slavery means much more than that. Slavery can be children forced to work. Slavery can be women and female children forced into prostitution. Slavery can be immigrants who become an illegal class forced to do whatever is demanded by their masters. Even according to Marx working for a minimum wage is a form of compulsion and therefore he would consider it slavery. In examining these topics I will look at political aspects, economic, sectoral, ethical and environmental and human rights perspectives on slavery focusing on prostitution.
Politics and Slavery
Slavery is a victimless crime. Slavery can be very profitable for the host governments. Oftentimes government overlooks slavery in their own countries because business’ profit. For example migrant workers who are here illegally are hired by the host country with full government knowledge of this practice. Little is done to alleviate this problem because of this profit accrued. When migrants complain about the terms of their employment they are liable to being turned over to authorities to be deported. Because of this migrants here illegally are exploited, do not receive minimum pay in many cases and receive no benefits.
Child labor has been abolished in the US but it is clear that child labor is being used around the world. In poorer countries child labor is needed by poor families to survive. One reform of capitalism brought about by Karl Marx was to clamor against child labor. In the 19th century child labor was used often. Children were used in the mines and were often the victims of mine collapses.
Prostitution can be classified as slavery as well although this might not always seems so obvious. Trafficking in prostitution includes both women and female children. Oftentimes women in poorer countries are told that they will be going to another country as actresses, or simply to work in manual labor but when they arrive at their destination, even with their parent’s knowledge who sold them into slavery, are employed in brothels often under terrible conditions. This is referring to trafficking in people. Oftentimes females turn to prostitution as a consequence of war.
But even with this classical definition of slavery women are often in servitude to “pimps” often supplied drugs by their pimps to enforce compliance. In the USA where prostitution in most places is outlawed they are subject to arrest and imprisonment and being charged with felonies, abused by their Johns without the ability to complain if they are beaten or raped, susceptible to STD’s.
There have been many cases of women being used in time of war. One example was the comfort women during WWII. These women are held against their will and are little more than raped by the Japanese soldiers. Abuse of women and children happens most often during times of war. Sometimes this rape occurs near the field of battle. Oftentimes it is the result of a refugee crisis where people lose there homes and their ways of making a living and must flee to another country to survive. Without money and skills they fall victim to predators that control them and may even lock them up.
Children especially female children are often used in the prostitution trade. Children get a higher price especially virgins. This involves human rights abuses as all slavery does. Children are unable to consent and this is in addition and true of adult prostitutes that lack any practical skills, drug addicted, emotionally disturbed and therefore are unable to make any choices.
It’s interesting to note that in more egalitarian societies prostitution does not necessarily exist. There were Native American tribes that had no prostitutes perhaps because there were no Victorian norms.
Slavery and Economics
Some might argue that when one doesn’t share in the profits of a corporation and must work for wages in spite of the degree of profits made by the bosses, this too has been referred to as slavery, what Marx called wage slavery. Under wage slavery a worker is paid a subsistence wage that is just enough to be able to produce the largest amount of profit for the capitalist. That is the slave is paid enough to buy food and clothes, have a house, be able to provide for one’s children. While providing for one’s children might not be seen as necessarily and serving to refute the brutality of the ruling class in fact the children too must be cared for because they provide the future wage slaves on which companies depend.
There is some question whether slavery is a natural outcome of modern society. Slavery in some form has seemed to exist in nearly all societies. The Jewish slaves in ancient Egypt, slavery in ancient Greece, the Islamic slave trade and the British slave trade or as some would argue the replacement for slavery, wage slavery. Is this the natural human condition? Are we composed naturally of like rulers and ruled like pack animals?
How did this slavery come about? “The bloody story that Marx told in this chapter is of the expropriation of the commons through the process of enclosure (the forcible imposition of private property on the landscape through the planting of hedges and violent enforcement of exclusive rights), which prevented the landless from providing for themselves in any way other than working for wages they would then use to pay for things they once had made (here specified as yam, linen, and woolens). “The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population,” Marx explained, “not only set free for industrial capital, the laborers, their means of subsistence, and material for labor; it also created the home market” (Johnson, 2004).
Prostitution and ethics
This puritan ethic and Christianity in general drives the capitalistic machine. The possessions one owns determine how well one is favored by God; this is referred to as the Christian work ethic. Someone sensual in nature and not self-denying is not godly. Also sex for money is a form of instant gratification and not self-denial mandated by common decency.
Asking if slavery is the natural condition is one question but what constitutes slavery is another.
Prostitution is often a form of slavery. In puritan societies prostitution is thought to be sinful. There was little prostitution in some Native American societies and certainly one reason for this was that sex was not frowned on. It was reported by settlers that the Native American men often walked around with erect penises and exhibited no shame. This was considered to be sinful to walk around in this manner as nudity and especially sexual arousal in public was and is verboten.
Certainly those that are the most powerless in societies around the world and in the USA as well are women. And reducing women to their basest element is the “whore”. This is the worst type of women and all women must escape this scarlet letter. Women occupy the lowest class in society often burdened with children but the absolutely most debased are the women prostitutes. These women live in one sort of servitude or another. Whether they are on the street being raped, beaten, verbally abused, imprisoned, addicted, infected they are the lowest of the low in regards to class. There is no evidence of Julia Roberts in pretty women as the romantic prostitute but one is more reminded of Jane Fonda’s “Klute”.
Very rarely do prostitutes comprise the almost socially acceptable high priced call girls that are so famous for bringing down politicians with their ill repute. But prostitutes form an important function in US society. There supply release for workers and soldiers who do not have access or the financial wherewithal to acquire wives and raise a family. These prostitutes substitute for lovers and actually can engage of seeming throws of passion when the love making is commenced.
Slavery and Society
According to Hegel history is the result of spirit coming to know itself. In order for one to have any sort of self understanding one must be sufficiently conscious. This understanding of oneself comes to fruition when one confronts another. This determines ones orientation toward the world and the two types are the master and the slave (Stewart, 1995).
Master/slave dialectic Hegel says slavery is an outgrowth of history. When two people meet in this original position one fears life over freedom and becomes the slave and the master values freedom over life and becomes the master. According to Hegel this becomes the natural condition (Kilian, 1981).
Marx a student of Hegel talks about slavery as the natural outgrowth of capitalism. In the US all actions are determined by ones class seemingly undifferentiated from the caste system of India. The masters control the mechanizations that run the capitalist enterprise. They control the means of production while the workers only control their own labor. The legitimate workers can provide “useful” labor while prostitutes comprise an illegal immoral caste.
And through prostitution not only in the act are they enslaved but because of the evilness of the enterprise prostitutes if convicted of prostitution in many jurisdictions are imprisoned and many times charged with a felony leaving any hope of more acceptable gainful employment by the wayside. So as slaves on the street they become slaves in prison for punishment of their misdeeds. It’s fitting that the US with the lofty standard of being the land of the free becomes the land of the most imprisoned. And like all criminals, the jails prisons are the repository of the poor, the mentally ill, and those of ill repute.
Those that are charged with a felony which prostitutes are often convicted are left no possibility for the future and made them even less able to resist the machine that ground them down. And like prostitution people like normal workers are treated as a commodity. Being the most powerless in society and around the world treated as goods or commodities in the human person rather than being a product of labor these unfortunates are the first to fall victim to the vicissitudes of war.
Prostitution and Human Rights
Almost two-thirds of the world’s child workers are in Asian countries. These children are often made to work 10 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, in cramped and squalid conditions in factories, on construction sites, for domestic service, and in brothels. Under these circumstances, children are denied a basic education, their health tends to be poor, and they are deprived of the chance to lead a normal family life. Since the start of the Asian financial crisis two years ago, children have increasingly become involved in dangerous and illegal activities (Brandon, 1999).
Four million persons are moved illegally from one country to another and within countries each year, a large proportion of them women and girls being trafficked into prostitution. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimates that some 30 percent of women being trafficked are minors, many under age thirteen. The International Organization on Migration estimates that some 500,000 women per year are trafficked into Western Europe from poorer regions of the world (Leuchtag, 2003). It seems clear that prostitution is one primary source for the spread of AIDS. Though the Thai government denies it, the World Health Organization finds that HIV is epidemic in Thailand, with the largest segment of new cases among wives and girlfriends of men who buy prostitute sex (Leuchtag, 2003).
A typical form of debt bondage is reported in the following:
The report contained dozens of interviews and testimonies of women who found themselves trapped in debt bondage and servitude. One of those women, Miew,2 spent more than two years working as a hostess in a so-called dating snack bar. She served drinks at the bar and accompanied clients to nearby hotels to provide sexual services. She had been recruited in Thailand with the promise of a generous salary each month, but when she arrived, she was told that she would have to work without any compensation whatsoever until she paid off a debt of 5 million Yen, about $43,000 U.S. Dollars. Her manager immediately confiscated her passport. Miew believed that if she tried to escape she would be caught either by the Japanese gangs or by the police. She was housed under constant surveillance in an apartment just next door to the bar. Motion sensitive lights tracked the movements of all the women in the apartments, making it impossible for her to go out without being noticed. After working there for two months, Miew’s debt had actually gone up, not down. The debt ballooned to 6 million Yen, about $51,000 U.S. Dollars, which included the cost of room, board and so-called protection fees, as well as a substantial fine for giving her phone number to her parents, a forbidden act. All the fines and expenses well exceeded the amount that she had actually been able to repay on her debt.3 (Vandenburg, 2002)
The protocol on “trafficking in persons” provides the first definition of that term in a legally binding international instrument. It defines such trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring 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 (Murphy, 2001). This exploitation includes prostitution. UNICEF estimates that I million children are trafficked into prostitution each year in Southeast Asia alone (Meier, 2000).
Often times it is thought that the US is largely immune from trafficking in prostitutes but the evidence does not show this. It is estimated, as documented by the State Department and others that 2 million women and children are trafficked globally, and more than 50,000 women are sold into U.S. brothels.
With the destruction of homes and the ruin of people’s life’s many have turned to prostitution.
Things are not so different in other parts of the world. The U.S. State Department’s June 2005 trafficking report says the extent of the problem in Iraq is “difficult to appropriately gauge” but cites an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation. (Bennet, 2006).
Arrangements for prostitution are typically made as follows and a love relationship is implied, perhaps to cover the shame: In Iraq, there are no red-light districts, and Halla and other prostitutes don’t walk the streets. They typically meet their clients through friends. Aya Abbas Latif, 22, talks about being “married” three times to customers. Another friend, Nada Baqr, 31, refers to being in love with one of her “boyfriends.” (Cha, 2004).
Engaging in prostitution, especially with the newly impoverished or refuges has serious consequences for the inhabitants and soldiers. [P]lacing some girls into brothel beds, where they are subject to ongoing serial rape, so that girls on the streets won’t be assaulted doesn’t work. The men who violate the girls in the brothel beds learn that the forcing of sex on a body is an accepted norm. They are far more likely to rape the girl on the street than they were before they raped the prostituted body. And far more likely to come home and rape those “decent” American girls next door (Falconberg, 2006).
In addition to prostitution in Iraq, many Iraqi refugees are forced to sell there bodies in other countries. Syria has taken in the lion’s share of Iraq’s refugees, (International, 2007). This prostitution is the direct result of destitution and often times the prostitute sells themselves so their families can survive. When families’ savings are gone, some women have fallen prey to sex traffickers, and girls and boys as young as 8 are drawn into prostitution in a desperate effort to help pay for basic necessities. (Anonymous, 2007).
That Iraqi girls and women are selling sex may not seem shocking, but prostitution is especially taboo for Arab women. “In this culture, to allow your daughter to become a prostitute means you’ve hit dirt bottom….The shame can even lead to “honor killings,” in which women are slain by their husbands or relatives for tainting the family name (Phillips, n.d.)
Iraqi women in Syria fall victim to the local prostitutes who accuse the Iraqi prostitutes of transmitting AIDS. A rumor circulating Damascus claims several policemen have contracted AIDS from Iraqi whores. The word on the street is that the Syrian regime is so upset about the situation, it has to jail and deport every Iraqi convicted of prostitution (WorldNetDaily, 2008). Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group, they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months. (Zoeph, 2007).
All slaves including prostitutes and child laborers are more likely to be infected with HIV. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), approximately 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 work in developing countries and many of them are in danger of AIDS because lack of access to health care or being subject to sexual exploitation and drug addiction (ILO, 2008).
The Future of Health and Slavery
With the increased disparity between rich and poor it seems clear that slavery is going to continue to be a large problem around the world. The intensity of war and therefore displaced children and women could contribute to continued and even increasing suffering and displacement. But this can be avoided. With NGO’s and government funding (I read today that President Bush has proposed more money for poor countries because of the impending food crisis), charitable organizations, the intervention of the WHO and the World Bank as well as the efforts of the Micro Loan lenders perhaps much of this catastrophe can be avoided. Only time will tell.
As far as prostitution is concerned generally, it is here to stay. Without changing the legal status of those that engage in prostitution and empowering these women, prostitutes will continue to be exploited and these women will continue to suffer greatly.
References:
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