Brain on Porn (Social #1) - DeYtH Banger (uplifting book club books .txt) 📗

noteworthy that when Corey Davis, a New York pimp, was arrested by federal investigators in December of 2006, a copy of The Willie Lynch Letter was sitting in his Mercedes. Other titles on Mr. Davis’ reading list included The 48 Laws of Powerand Whoever Said Whoring Wasn’t Easy?

The books weren’t the only things seized. Investigators also took his $91,000 watch, the Timberland boots he used to stomp girls when they didn’t obey (pimps call it “timming”), and of course, the tee shirt Davis was wearing when he was arrested. It said, “The Beatings Will Continue.” [3]

Why would a modern New York pimp be reading a 300-year-old set of instructions for how to break a slave? Considering the degree of intimidation, coercion, brainwashing, and violence that that accompanies sex trafficking today, it makes a lot of sense.

How bad is the problem of modern-day sex trafficking?

Sex trafficking activists occasionally have to defend their use of the word “slavery.” [4] Some people don’t believe the sex trafficking problems we have today rise to a level that would merit such an emotionally charged word. Others feel the word somehow romanticizes the problem. In fact, believe it or not, arguing about the word “slave” is just one small part of the larger debate about sex trafficking, especially in the United States. Some people question whether the problem is really as bad, or as big, or as widespread, as the reports make it sound. [5] Others question the motives of the abolitionists and human rights activists on the front lines of the fight. [6]

Here at Fight the New Drug, we know sex trafficking is a huge global problem and that this modern form of slavery is inherently, inseparably linked to the problem of pornography. Because this is an underground issue numbers are harder to come by, but if anything, the numbers reflecting what is actually happening around the globe are bigger than what has been reported. And isn’t even just one person being trafficked, one too many?

Our goal is to give you the facts, so consider this your one-stop read to learn all the basics about sex trafficking and its relationship to porn. Then you’ll and have the information you need to draw conclusions and join the conversation about how porn fuels sex trafficking.

What is sex trafficking?

The legal definitions get technical, but sex trafficking is a type of human trafficking, and human trafficking is exactly what it sounds like: trafficking in humans. If “trafficking” means buying and selling things, or moving things so they can be used for profit, then “human trafficking” means buying or selling humans, or moving humans so they can be used for profit. It’s the purest form of objectification—the literal commoditization of a person.

Whether you knew it or not, chances are very good that, at some point in your life, you have eaten fruit that was picked by a slave, worn a shirt that was made by a slave, used a device that was partially produced by a slave, or stood in a building that was built by a slave. Estimates of the number of slaves worldwide are between 21 and 32 million. [7] The vast majority of them come from vulnerable populations like immigrants, refugees, the impoverished, and children. They may be forcibly taken or lured away with promises of good jobs, only to find themselves powerless, in a foreign place, with nowhere to turn. Often they owe money to the people—the traffickers—who brought them. Traffickers will hold the debt over their heads, confiscate their immigration papers, threaten them with legal action or deportation, threaten them or their families with violence, and even inflict violence if the victims do not place themselves in servitude. The traffickers are often the only ones around who speak the victims’ language, and the victims find themselves in a foreign land, cut off from home or help. Working in these circumstances, they earn an estimated $150 billion every year for their abusers in all kinds of industries and settings, from factories and farms to hotels and brothels—even in the United States. [8]

Of those millions of global human trafficking victims, a little less than a quarter—about 22 percent—are trafficked for sex acts. (Those 22 percent earn a whopping 66 percent of the global trafficking profits! [9]) That’s what sex trafficking is: the roughly 22 percent of human trafficking wherein the victims are exploited for sexual purposes.

Now, before we go any further, we know what you’re thinking. This is the part where most people start visualizing the Hollywood version of sex trafficking: young boys and girls kidnapped or tricked in some Third World or Eastern European country, kept in chains and forced to perform in black market pornography, or to work as prostitutes in some massage parlor, seedy motel, or other makeshift brothel—or boys and girls from the same backgrounds, smuggled into the United States and abused in similar ways.

And yes, those stories do exist. They’re not just real; they’re closer to home than you imagine. Just read the way one police raid of a quiet little house in a middle-class New Jersey suburb was described in the New York Times:

On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren’t prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren’t working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. … The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ”morning after” pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished. [10]

Those are the types of situations most people envision when they hear the phrase, “human sex trafficking.” And you can see why filmmakers would gravitate to that version. It’s viscerally disturbing. Most people would be shocked just to learn that a scene like that was possible right in the heart of a modern American suburb.

But here’s the thing: if that “Hollywood” version is all you know about sex trafficking, then you’re only seeing one part of a much more complex picture. Many Hollywood depictions, and even many of the examples of sex trafficking in this article, represent situations where women and girls were victims, but it’s important to note that men and boys are also victims of human sex trafficking and part of this bigger, more complex picture. And to understand that picture, you have to understand the TVPA.

What is the TVPA and why is it important?

In the year 2000, in response to reports of international human trafficking, one of the broadest bipartisan coalitions in history came together to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. [11] The landmark legislation identified “severe forms” of human trafficking, imposed harsh criminal penalties for offenders, and provided support systems for the victims. [12]

The TVPA defines sex trafficking as a situation in which “a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.” [13] It was designed in response to internationalsex trafficking like the New Jersey example we just described, but it had an interesting result. It ended up shining a light on everyform of sex trafficking in the United States. Here’s how one article described the effect:

One positive blowback of the T.V.P.A. was that it brought attention to domestic sex trafficking—pimping—which follows the same models and patterns as its international counterparts. “The logic was: if you get weepy-eyed about a young girl in Cambodia, why not feel the same way about the girl trafficked from Iowa?” [14]

Remember Corey Davis? The pimp with the slavery manual in his Mercedes? His victims weren’t smuggled from other countries. They weren’t held in servitude by complicated immigration situations or kept constantly imprisoned by armed guards. They were Americans. At various times in their ordeals, they were physically free to come and go. Davis kept them in servitude through a combination of fraud, physical violence, and psychological intimidation to the point that they felt they had no choice but to obey. [15] Another pimp who was prosecuted under the TVPA had victims ranging from a twelve-year-old runaway to a university coed on a track scholarship. [16] By identifying the practices that constitute human trafficking, the TVPA brought attention to all instances of trafficking, regardless of where the victims were from.

But there’s more. Look again at the TVPA’s definition of sex trafficking: “a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion.” That last word, coercion, is important. It means that a commercial sex act can be sex trafficking, even if no one was physically assaulted, even if no one was tricked or defrauded. All it takes is coercion. The moment a victim is coerced or intimidated into a commercial sex act against his or her will, sex trafficking has occurred.

Once again, this aspect of the TVPA cast new light on all the little forms of pimping and exploitation that might otherwise fly under the radar. An individual bullies their spouse into prostituting themselves. Trafficking. A boyfriend or girlfriend pressures their partner into stripping on a live webcam show and then threatens to show the partner’s family and friends if they don’t do it again. Trafficking. A porn performer shows up on set to discover that the scene is much more degrading than they’d been told, and their agent gets them to go through with it by threatening to cancel their other bookings. Again: trafficking.

And this is where the connections to pornography begin.

How is sex trafficking connected to pornography?

I was in California and I had a blowjob scene. […] I go there and he’s like, “Oh yeah, it’s a forced blowjob,” And I’m like, “What?” Just one guy, one little camera on a tripod. […] I was scared. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I could tell him no. Or the fact that we already recorded 15 minutes of it, if I could just f—ing leave. Then what? That’s when I understood that’s how rape victims feel. Like, they feel bad about themselves. [17]

There are all kinds of connections, big and small, between pornography and sex trafficking. There are incidental connections, like the fact that exposure to pornography has been shown to make viewers less compassionate toward victims of sexual violence and exploitation.[18] (See How Consuming Porn Can Lead To Violence.)  There are “supply-and-demand” connections: the simple fact that pornography—especially when viewing habits and fantasies involve violence or other fetishes—increases the demand for sex trafficking, as more and more viewers want to act out what they see. There is the “training manual” connection: the well-documented fact that porn directly informs what goes on in trafficking. Traffickers and sex buyers get ideas from porn, and then make their victims watch as a way of showing them what they’ll be expected to do, so that the violent fantasy concocted by some porn director and his or her actors becomes the reality for some trafficking victim. [19] And then there is the risk factor connection: the fact that, along with poverty and substance abuse, a child growing up in a home where pornography is regularly consumed is far more likely to be trafficked at some point in his or her life. [20]

But what’s the biggest, most surprising connection between pornography and trafficking? It’s this: they’re often the same thing. We can spend hours and hours pointing out these cause-and-effect, symbiotic relationships between trafficking and porn. Those connections are real, and that’s an important conversation to have. But let’s not allow that to entrench the idea that porn and sex trafficking are always separate. Far more often than people realize, they’re not.

How are sex trafficking and porn the same thing?

To begin with, nearly half of sex trafficking victims report that pornography was made of them while they were in