How America enables sex-trafficking
It is the TIP silly season again when the Trafficking in Persons report is released. This is when countries around the world must appease the world’s sole superpower based on its concept of morality.
America is the only significant First World industrialised country under the political influence of fundamentalist Christians.
Half of its feminists are anti-sex, aligned with the religious right and the Republican Party. The environment this issue lives in was formed by 16 years of censorship and aggressive opposition to all prostitution, even where it is legal, that were criteria for receiving US government funding.
This began in 2003 with the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which was assailed on freedom-of-speech grounds until it was ruled unconstitutional in 2014. The pledge to attack all prostitution internationally remains in effect, however.
The result has been an informal yet overwhelming training programme that espouses one point of view about sex work and sex trafficking. It is not the only point of view Thailand should consider.
In 2014 Russia told America it would not cooperate with the TIP programme for reasons of national sovereignty. I have often wondered why more countries do not do the same.
This year Amnesty International came out in favour of decriminalising sex work as the best way to prevent sex trafficking. There is a substantial but under-funded network opposed to America’s stance on trafficking and sex work.
Thai government is in a transition stage, but the country still has the potential to lead the world in decriminalising (or regulating) sex work in far more responsible ways than America demands.
Many people agree with me that world population growth has reached a tipping point where people outnumber jobs. Sex work is one of the few alternatives for many people with limited job skills. Hopefully that is just a transitory stage.
But the proselytising of America’s conservative sex culture, with extreme exaggeration as its centrepiece, is effectively an attack on poor people everywhere.
John Kane
