Hillary Supports Sex Trafficking

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 14, 2000 | by Catherine Edwards

When a carefully worded transnational definition of sex trafficking is modified to outlaw only involuntary participation, the result is legalized institution by semantics.

She was filled with hope after accepting a job to work in a restaurant. She finally could leave behind the back-breaking labor of lemon harvesting. Her family in Mexico would be proud. But her happiness soon turned to unimaginable despair. When she met her new boss, he gave her tight clothes to wear and condoms to give customers. She was beaten, raped, locked into a trailer and forced to have sex with whomever walked through the door. It was every woman's worst nightmare.

Two million women and children each year are "trafficked" by criminals in this way for sexual purposes. Half of them are in Asia, where Thailand and Burma are infamous for enslaving children and women into a lifetime of sexual prostitution.

But this trailer prison was not in Bangkok. This woman was in Florida. She is one of the 50,000 women brought into the United States every year to become sex slaves. Promised a better life and a respectable job, their lives become a living hell.

This literally is slavery. And an unlikely coalition of religious conservatives and feminists has developed to fight it. But a small group of feminists has been trying through the back door to decriminalize sex trafficking. Led by the President's Interagency Council on Women, which is chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton, these women actually have become advocates for the sex industry by trying to change the definition of prostitution in a way that critics fear may legalize it. That definition now is being negotiated in Vienna for the U. N. Convention on Transnational Organized Crime.

Religious critics and a powerful lobby of feminists led by Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland claim that the administration's position only can have the effect of legalizing prostitution. The dispute in Vienna is about defining the word "trafficking." The definition supported by the Hillary Clinton team speaking for the United States, the Netherlands and several other European countries would include only persons who are trafficked by force, fraud or deception. This differs from the current U.N. definition, which outlaws sex trafficking for any reason, be it voluntary or forced.

Proponents of the change contend that women should be guaranteed the right to sell their sexual favors as they please and be protected by labor laws and local government services. Opponents to changing the definition, fearful that the Vienna convention would be finalized in mid-January, fired off letters to the president and the first lady demanding to know why the administration was attempting to legalize prostitution by international agreement.

Former White House aide Chuck Colson, the Christian advocate who runs Prison Fellowship Ministries, and former Reagan secretary of education Bill Bennett, now codirector of Empower America, wrote a critical op-ed article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. They called the Clinton position "hard to fathom," especially when the Clinton/Gore team purports to be pro-woman. "There can be no meaningful "consent to one's own sexual exploitation," they added, "particularly when one lives in poverty and desperate circumstances."

Republican Rep. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania and 32 other members of Congress sent a letter to the president in mid-January expressing concern about administration advocacy of legalized prostitution. The congressmen noted that by narrowing the definition of trafficking in the Vienna protocol to allow for the prosecution only of those who can be proved to have used force, only a handful of sex traffickers ever would be prosecuted.

"Is prostitution forced upon a young woman whose family tells her they will starve if she does not sell her body?" the congressmen asked, expressing hope that they could work with the Clintons and Gore to reverse the course of action and to liberate, rather than legitimate, women and children in bondage to the sex trade worldwide.

Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission was joined by other religious conservatives in a tersely worded letter sent to Hillary Rodham Clinton in early January questioning her commitment to combat sex trafficking. Soon President Clinton received a similar letter from the major feminist organizations, including Equality Now, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority.

The 1949 U.N. Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others calls for punishment of any person who exploits the prostitution of another person, even with their consent. Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now and the other cosigners of the letter to the president expressed grave concern that the administration's position would undermine the long-standing U.S. commitment to this older convention and to fight prostitution, be it forced or voluntary.