The last feminist rant you'll have to read from me.

Human trafficking and, most specifically, sexual slavery is an incredibly nuanced global issue and approaching this issue from a variety of understandings of security will be essential. Due to some of the issues we have already encountered in the readings, it can be presumed that law enforcement, border security, punishment for perpetrators will continue to be an unsuccessful means to combat the threat posed by sexual slavery. In fact, I argue that so long as femininity is undervalued in society and so long as women’s “best” contributions to society are through their sexuality (i.e. pleasure, procreation, domestic activities), this issue will remain a security threat to the women in the industry. I would like to indicate that all of the above mentioned contributions are essential in society, and I am not picking them out to undermine our necessity for them, but rather because they are unvalued in patriarchal societies.  It also is important to not equate referring to “patriarchal society” as the blaming of all males for societal problems. Rather, this is to indicate that human beings, regardless of where they fall on the gender spectrum, predominantly exist in a patriarchal society that privileges and values stereotypically masculine work and characteristics over work and characteristics that are stereotypically feminine. For example, people are seen as more “successful” when they are in business than when they are a stay at home parent. These norms have clearly become institutionalized when the defense budget of the United States (stereotypically masculine) is disproportionately more than the education budget (stereotypically feminine), when it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to argue that education is equally important as defense.

Step one in combating the issue was discussed in class as “awareness.” However, it is not awareness of the issue that we should be prioritizing, but rather awareness as to how femininity is undervalued in society, which allows the system of sexual slavery and exploitation to continue, while disproportionality victimizing women and girls. Awareness of the issue itself is not what we need to be prioritizing because most people with the influence to change this issue probably already know it’s happening, but lack the political will to do anything about it. I argue this because our entire class is now completely aware of this issue, but as far as I know of, no one has made attempts to challenge this system directly, myself included. The point of this is: awareness does not matter when the lives at risk are not societally prioritized.

This issue does not exist in a black market because we do know it’s happening and policy makers know it’s happening, but we live in a society that has taught us to believe that when the lives of poor, female, people of color are at risk, it is morally acceptable to not really care enough to do anything about it. Because this structure isn’t changing in the near future, we have to instead develop policies that combat the incentive structure of the exploitation of women. Ideally, this would be getting everyone to care about women’s exploitation and thus eliminating the entire market for sexual slavery. However, in the short term, I believe a change in this incentive structure will only come with the legalization of free-will prostitution in the United States.

Ideally, prostitution should absolutely be legal in a world that values the feminine and masculine qualities equally, where men and women participate in prostitution relatively equally, and view it as an optional occupation. Because of the unlikeliness of this, we have to combat the capitalistic incentive structure for men to brutally force women into sexual slavery and traffick them illegally across borders. If these pimps that brutalize women have to compete against an industry in which people freely choose to engage in prostitution and thus directly profit off their own work, the market dramatically changes. Now, people looking for prostitutes have the option of illegally paying for sex with a person they are essentially raping who may be drugged or have an STD, or they can legally have sex another human being who has chosen this as an occupation, and therefore directly profits off his/her own work and will most likely have better access to healthcare. Would this option not put illegal prostitution out of business by destroying the largest market it exists in (aka the United States)? If it’s legalized, the industry may even diversify beyond just women and may have the potential to destigmatized sexual work as dirty, inappropriate, and inherently feminine.