Analysis – JustCommIT

2015/10/012015/10/01

Battlegrounds of “Good”: the Cold War and its ideological aftermath in American activism

It’s 2015, and American Capitalism has won.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP

Last Friday, President Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro, announcing the end of a 53-year-old embargo that has punished, for more than half a century, this small Caribbean country for its Communist sympathies and its Cold War alliance with the USSR.

Much of this punishment has probably been unnecessarily harsh. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was already clear that America had won. The Soviet Union crumbled from the inside, and had been crumbling all along. Secrets were spilled of the horrors of Soviet gulags, of how China’s Great Leap Forward left maybe 18 million, maybe 32.5 million, people falling backwards into their graves – and very quickly, the hippie glow of ideal Communism, crumbled into disillusionment. That idealism, which caused quite the Red Scare in the 60s, now seems like a silly thing to have been so worried about.

After all, according to the leading neoliberal doctrine of our day, any tampering of the state in markets leads to inefficiencies, so the best thing to do is to leave well enough alone, and let corporations maximize their “comparative advantage” by dutifully pursuing their self-interest, for the greater profit of all. (Signed with love, Milton)

Freedom has been America’s mantra – free markets and political freedoms – “they hate us for our freedoms,” we declared, even as we marched our troops into Baghdad and Kabul. Dictatorship is the great enemy. Communism, which is necessarily autocratic, must be contained and defeated, lest it spread like a disease across the planet. We quarantined Cuba like a disease, injected our American medicine by night into Nicaragua and Guatemala, thrashed about feverishly in the juggles of Vietnam, and when that proved to be unwise, we conjured up a much more potent medicine: financial loans and economic doctrines, direct from Chicago to Chile, the institutionalization of “development” and the popularization of “human rights.”

The idea of “human rights” arose in the afterglow of blitz-torn battlefields, and like much of Europe, was sponsored with the American seal of approval, and budgeted in with the Marshall Plan.
As long-suffering heroes like Vaclav Havel took leadership after decades of war-torn trauma, there was a weariness against more bloodshed over ideology; rather, human rights were supposed to be “non-ideological.” That is, they do not challenge class hierarchies or global inequalities. The predominant focus of Human Rights doctrine has always been about “indisputable” political and civil liberties of the “American freedom” variety, not the more controversial economic or socio-cultural demands for equitable distribution of wealth (which sounds way too much like “ideological” Communism, God forbid.)

According to historian Samuel Moyn, in his book The Last Utopia, the rise of human rights also signaled the fall of utopic Communism. Human rights takes on the voice of universalism, and claims to have roots in the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment. Some historians, such as Micheline Ishay, claim that the basis for human rights, the idea of a common moral code for all humankind, is seen in every civilization, from Babylon to China to the U.S. Constitution. Yet according to Moyn, this claim to universalism is a reconstruction of “human rights,” which would be better understood in historical context, as a Western (American-led) response to the challenges of the Cold War and the World Wars, which more than anything took predominance during the Carter administration’s diplomatic efforts abroad. The seemingly “neutral” language of human rights is now the dominant vocabulary for justice work across the globe, replacing other vocabularies for justice such as Marxism and anti-colonialism / anti-imperialism. While this language is useful in articulating political oppression and empowering marginalized people to stand up against the state, it is also important to take note of where the language of human rights is less effective, in challenging corporations and economic inequality. Moyn warns us that it is important to consider what other utopic visions have been replaced by the dominant vocabulary of “human rights.”

Human rights plays so nicely with money-based solutions like “corporate social responsibility” and “social entrepreneurship.” Like the investment side of global Capitalism, human rights crosses borders and functions internationally, bringing attention to wrong-doings of the state to be judged before the international community of the United Nations. It prioritizes the rights of the individual, and can serve as a powerful platform for individuals to raise complaints against their own governments before a global audience. It also empowers wealthy countries to send Non-Governmental Organizations to do a kind of missionary work that weaker states seem to fail at supplying. It accomplishes all this with the pristine halo of “non-ideological” and indisputable charity.

However, charity is a gift with strings attached. A charitable organization relies on an unequal relationship between the giver and the receiver, wherein the receiver is indebted to the giver. Nonprofits reliant on philanthrocapitalism and the current do-gooder ecosystem of grant-giving foundations, are ever in the service of paying gratitude. In this system of service provision, as money trickles down from top to bottom, from the first world to the rest of the world, from corporations to the poor – leaving a trail of expensive human rights conferences, fat salaries, hotel rooms and all-inclusive breakfasts – there is a cookie trail, with the ones closest to the money grabbing the biggest crumbs. In this trickle-down model of social change, grassroots movement-building is coopted by saviors with expensive backpacks. As voluntary mutual aid and neighborhood associations become professionalized, and plugged into the ecology of philanthrocapitalism, they become reliant upon an elite system for resources and legitimacy, and become less and less able to challenge that system in any meaningful way.

American Capitalism has won by bribing all its opponents into sweet submission. However, not everyone is taking the bait.

In America, human rights is not the only vocabulary for social justice. The other, more radical, vocabulary that has been gaining power in the U.S. is the vocabulary of People of Color (POC) Feminism and queer theory – not the gilded, superficial snarkiness of corporate feminism, but the kind of feminism led by women of color, which challenges the American enterprise from within: its for-profit prison system, its racially segregated underclass of low-wage workers, its educational inequality as systemic oppression, and its corrupt electoral system of sham-democracy and corporate rent-seeking.

POC feminism, the second most dominant vocabulary of justice in the U.S., provides a stronger connection to other vocabularies of popular movements rooted in the global South: the anti-imperalist and nationalist movements of Latin American and Africa in the 1950s, and the Marxist ideas of class struggle and economic oppression. However, it also has its points of weakness in the conundrums of “strategic essentialism,” the impossibility of true “representation” in identity politics, and the reinforcement of essential oppressions linked by definition to groups of people who selectively benefit from affirmative action policies. Like many other theoretical systems of thought, the academic language of feminism takes an elite form, and is most often propagated among students in wealthy private colleges, rather than rising more organically out of the lived experience of working people. The anti-Capitalist idealism of this language often contradicts the day-to-day resource needs of working people, who are beholden to the monetary system for survival. Given the dominance of neoliberal Capitalism, it is usually more pragmatic for activists to speak the language of economic policy than the language of radical theory. However, selling out entirely to the language of philanthrocapitalism in the name of “pragmatism” also feels like it is not demanding enough – and the structural injustice of racist criminal law and asymmetrical trade agreements require much stronger demands for change. What language should I use, and when?

As a Chinese-born immigrant, growing up in New York City public housing, I am one of the lucky recipients of selective non-profit aid from an affirmative action organization called Prep for Prep, which took me out of an underfunded public school and placed me on scholarship in an elite private school. Prep for Prep is often critiqued for selectively helping a few students out of an unjust educational system, and assuaging the guilt of a few private schools and universities that recruit from this small pool of the “privileged poor,” but failing to challenge the greater system, or devote its resources to improving public education for all.

While I agree with this critique of Prep for Prep, I am also grateful for the enormous gift that this nonprofit brought to me. That said, due to this unearned gift, my self-definition has been strongly shaped from a very young age by attempts to rationalize that gift – which required believing firmly in the narratives of “strategically essential” identity. I needed to believe in structural racism in order to feel justified in taking the scholarship I was given in compensation. I needed to believe in racism to feel entitled to receive special help. And now that I have received this help, I need to believe that my body and my life can be an instrument towards fighting that racism, so that the investment in me will not have been in vain.

During high school, I participated heavily in radical Asian American activist groups, whose “political consciousness education” programming for youth took the code name of “leadership development” – which seemed to me at the time like a necessary boost for college applications. This leftist “political education” involved inculcating Marxist and feminist ideas of oppressor/oppressed binaries along a spectrum of categories, from race, gender and class, to age, ability, and sexuality – all in rather reductionist terms.

Thus, without really knowing it, I was recruited from a very young age into a long-standing political battle rooted in the previous century, between an increasingly neoliberal American state and a handful of NYC people of color organizations, still fighting the good fight of a rapidly weakening Marxist left.

My life has been so strongly shaped by the messaging of these organizations, and the impact of affirmative action policies on my education, that it is difficult, at times, for me to question the primacy of identity politics. When I entered college, I felt a strong sense of duty to “give back” to my community. The first place I looked to “do Good” was the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and its director, Jeffrey Sachs, whose Millenium Development goals at the UN seemed like an unerringly “Good” path. Yet, no sooner was I introduced to the ideas of Sachs, I was confronted with equally enthusiastic criticism against Sachs for his “White Man’s Burden” attitude towards economic development, and his previous failings doling out “shock therapy” in Russia while working for the IMF.

Suffice it to say, I was so confused by the contradiction between the “economic development” view on doing good in the world via charitable “social entrepreneurship”, and the “radical” anti-Capitalist and “critical race theory” view on social justice, which demanded power not charity. I knew that I wanted to dedicate myself towards doing meaningful work in service of making things better for people in some way, but after my first year of college, I had no idea which was the “right” direction to turn. I was left thoroughly cynical and disillusioned by these competing vocabularies of justice.

At this point in my life, I lean left towards the second, more radical mode of thinking – not just Keynesian economics, but a kind of Naomi Klein shock doctrine of disaster Capitalism and an Audre Lorde prescription about not using the Master’s tools…

I am currently training to be a community organizer through a program that emphasizes “capacity-building” rather than service delivery. The mission of the program is “to create a just and equitable society and the diverse leadership to sustain it.” This is a bold mission towards equity, which seeks to support movement-building that challenges existing power structures, so that “diverse” and historically marginalized groups of people in this country can lead structural change.

As a prison abolitionist and an advocate for open borders and migrant labor rights, I am a firm believer right now in the importance of structural change that is led by a strong populist base – one that goes beyond the superficial charity of heroic nonprofits led by privileged white philanthropists. That said, I am not without fear of the tragedies of history – of the mistakes of Communism and the great human cost of populist struggles in the last century. I am afraid of causing harm upon the “everyday” poor people who want merely to live “regular” lives, work hard and raise families – who are not interested in activism, and whose beliefs are not well represented by the “activists” who claim to speak for them. Often, I am afraid of the reductive and alienating nature of identity politics, and disgusted by the hypocrisy of “minority elites” who self-appoint to represent their communities without truly connecting to their base. Even more so, I am afraid of usurping the voices of already silenced peoples, and exposing these people to risk in the face of entrenched oppression, against powerful interests which can do unthinkable violence upon their opponents. I am afraid of the retaliation of the oligarchic superclass, not for my own sake because I seem to have already resigned myself to the life of being a pawn for the movement that created me – but for the “everyday” people who should not have to suffer from the failure of our movement, should we fail. And of course, as history indicates, populist movements fail often and fail tragically.

I am afraid of bloodshed. I am not a militant. I recognize that the world we live in is a mix of Capitalism and socialism, and it is complex and never “pure.” I recognize the troubling failures of theory to capture that complexity, and I recognize that real social change must be done slowly and steadily, or people will get hurt in the process. I want to build alternatives for living in community within the dominant system – nurturing spaces that heal people, and valorizes all the qualities of human life that are undervalued under neoliberalism. I want to do this without becoming isolationist in my utopianism, and without neglecting the bigger picture of pushing for greater structural change for all people outside my immediate community.

And what role could I hope to serve in this movement-building? What should my work be? Prep for Prep left me in the trenches of No Man’s Land, between the rich and the poor, neither elite nor underprivileged. I am well-educated, and I have grown up with personal connections to some very wealthy and powerful people and institutions. I am a banana, more American than Chinese, and even though I grew up poor in public housing, my educational privilege makes me feel separated from other people in my neighborhood. Though my parents have worked in restaurant work and domestic work, I personally do not feel I can speak for the working poor, since even though I live below the poverty line now, I still feel privileged to be paid to organize.

Writer and activist Rinku Sen of Colorlines wrote in the first chapter of her book, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy, that in order for the left to revitalize itself, there needs to be considerable base-building among the working poor, accompanied by supportive intellectual work:

“The most important goal is increasing our organizing to build new constituencies of progressive activists among people in the most desperate straights. Such direct action organizing needs to be accompanied by substantial research and media capacity – intellectual resources…Our increased intellectual capacity should allow us to reframe key debates and influence public opinion….Progressives need to take a lesson from the New Right – its disciplined organizing, attention to ideas, willingness to lose battles in order to win the war, apparent unity in messages and political goals….Regaining that ground requires that progressive organizers turn their attention to ideological work without delay in order to articulate a set of values that will help win back the constituencies that are rapidly losing to the right.”

Although I love organizing, cherish my one-on-one relationships, and value bringing people together by creating warm, nurturing community spaces – I am, above all, a bookish person, who is more introverted than extroverted. I feel better suited to providing what Rinku Sen calls “intellectual support for movement-building,” rather than inserting myself directly into identity-based organizations that are composed of people “in the most desperate straights,”or claiming membership among the working poor. I never feel “representative” enough, even (and especially) as a sex worker and former domestic worker / restaurant worker / dabbler in construction work – though I think often about what it means to be a good ally. Somehow, the politics of self-advocacy sometimes seems for me too reductive and dangerously narrow, though I defend its use for others. When it comes to community organizing, as much as I believe that people need to organize “for themselves,” I am also wary of falling into the double-think trap of “strategic essentialism.” I strongly believe that the role of a community organizer is to put others before her/himself, to build platforms for direct advocacy, but then to take a step back by focusing on supporting others. The ultimate work of community organizing is to make your organizing redundant and your organization no longer necessary; and not to leech on to the problem like so many NGO’s do. In my work as a community organizer, I want to stay behind the scenes as much as possible, and serve with as little ego as possible. While I acknowledge how impossible this goal is in practice, given the way campaigns are strategized from both top-down and bottom-up, I think it is important for a community organizer to try their best to minimize their “self” (or, as they say in post-gonzo journalism, be as fair and “objective” as possible, while acknowledging your “standpoint” and the limitations of your fleshly lens) – even while you actively support the primacy of self-advocacy for others.

After all, strategic essentialism is a tool, and we must never forget that this tool was built to be temporary, and even with the moderating efforts of intersectional theory, this analytical tool could become a gravestone instead – a ceiling for progress – when it takes on the identity of the oppressed with a definitive permanence.

In general, I would prefer to do the capacity-building work of technological, media and research-based, archival and analytical support – that could benefit the people who are organizing for change, according to their own experiential analysis, and I am committed to doing so without the self-serving ego of academia, which so often coopts community knowledge without giving anything back. In my activism, I would like to serve as a good librarian of sorts, like Che Gossett with IT skills, operating quietly outside the system, striving to build resources and infrastructure for nurturing spaces, but never to dominate them.

Here we are, at the height of a second industrial revolution, driven by the World Wide Web, and the world is ripe with possibility – we can be guided by the wisdom of history, and we can use history to disentangle the myths that have been naturalized, but we don’t have to be tied down by history or limited to the analyses of the past. In the words of historian Yuval Noah Harari, socialism was the biggest idea of the last century, and the reason why socialism was so impactful was that it was rooted in the present – it provided much needed analysis for all the technological changes of the day, during the industrial revolution, and it provided a vision for people based on present possibilities. Today however, I feel that many socialists are weighed down by analyses of the past, by an outdated sense of what class struggle and Marxist labor organizing ought to look like. But like a classic Marxist, I believe that technology is key in determining the relations of production, and the possibilities for resource creation and distribution, for movement-building and strategizing power, for staying relevant and navigating the unique challenges of our planet now. That is why I want to focus on technology and information – to ever be working towards harnessing these forces as a resource for popular movement-building and social justice.

https://soundcloud.com/intelligence2/yuval-noah-harari-on-themyths-we-need-to-survive

In a time of great technological change, when people’s jobs are rapidly replaced by machines, we need to divorce ourselves from the notion that people must do menial work in order to have a right to survive – there must be a movement for basic income – housing should be a human right, rather than merely a commodity to be traded on. In the face of enhanced reproductive technology, there needs to be a movement for changing family structures and restrictive gender roles. When there is enough food production and resources in the world for all people to live fulfilling lives without having to pay for it with “the sweat from their brow,” we need to abolish our antiquated ideas of “work” as tied to money, and money as tied to housing and food and economic survival, especially when unnecessary production in the name of economic growth occurs at the cost of environmental degradation – all to serve the orthodoxy of neoliberal economic doctrine even at its dangerous and irrational limits.

Capitalism has played a positive role in some ways, by incentivizing some technologies that have brought humanity to a place of greater material wealth and human welfare/health. To argue otherwise would be obtusely dogmatic. However this wealth is not evenly distribute and many people are suffering more than ever before. Now we need to work towards equity and the non-material, non-economic values of wellness, community/friendship, and artistic expression in peoples’ lives.

That said, here I am, at the height of this second industrial revolution – and I’m manically typing away, in isolation, on my MacBook Pro, even though I know the NSA could be watching, and even while I’m aware of all the Orwellian dangers, how Big Brother harvests my click-habits into the data warehouses of “evil marketing corporations” – how we are all slowly selling our souls, click by click, into the inevitable Matrix, wherein one day, our merciful robot overlords will drown us in virtual reality and exploit our brains for (very inefficient) battery power. Or something like that… I understand that technology is likely to be our greatest tool and greatest oppression. Nevertheless, I slothfully submit to my web-oppressors because the data privacy apps on Firefox are far too complicated or inconvenient, and I am not a savvy Linux user / cool hax0r bro, so I don’t even trust my own use of these tools most of the time; or maybe I’m just cynical. Or maybe, it’s because the dystopia I live in feels more Brave New World than 1984, which really just doesn’t seem all that bad yet, right now. And probably, when I’m done writing this post, I’ll share it on Twitter or Reddit, since my personal “soma” feels a bit like the dopamine rush of a Facebook notification, the ping of a Twitter mention, the upwardly mobile stats of a WordPress chart.

American Capitalism is winning hard – so much that even as we say “the revolution will not be funded,” we are simultaneously demanding that organizers be properly compensated for their work and their time. We are simultaneously critical of, and reliant upon, this “nonprofit industrial complex” – the Master’s tools; the hand that feeds, and becomes us.

I don’t know how to “create the revolution” or if revolution is truly what we need. What I do know is that there is no simple solution along ideological lines – that all solutions require material resources and fallible human energy, and all strategies must be tested and improved in particular contexts by particular people – I am not afraid of mathematics or scientific methodology (nor do I believe these are essentially “gendered” or “Capitalist” in any intellectually honest way – sorry feminist epistemology!) I am anti-theory and pro-empiricism when it comes to social change.

Most of all, I don’t believe in being manipulated to fight on the old battlefields of past generations, using old frameworks that may no longer apply, revering old gods or canonized prophets, playing for power at the price of people’s lives – Let the Communist Revolution and the Cold War pass now, in peace – I will not fight an army of ghosts, or spectres.

I am committed to the living.

2013/08/212015/11/10

MISERY to MINISTRY: Kathryn Griffin’s Prostitution Rehab in Texas

“I know that I was not created to be a prostitute or a drug addict,” said Kathryn Griffin, the founder of a Texas reform program for incarcerated sex workers, “but because this entered into my life, I learned how to turn this misery into a ministry that covers all levels.”

In the Harris County Jail of Houston, Texas, recovered drug addict and former street-based sex worker Griffin has found a captive audience for her stories of redemption. Selecting 18 to 20 women at a time for her 90-day rehabilitationprogram, Griffin says that the mission of the program is to help “victims of prostitution, drug abuse, and/or sex trafficking” to “build self-esteem” and re-establish “healthy” relationships with men, so they can “clean up” their lives.

Running on only $40,000 a year, over 30 women have been court-sentenced into Griffin’s taxpayer-supported “diversion” program since January, and only one or two women are known to have relapsed so far. But it is still too soon to see the long-term effectiveness of this program.

The women in the program are hesitant about sharing personal details, but Griffin pushes them to confess in what she believes to be a safe, non-judgmental space with peers. “To get well, you got to tell,” she has the women repeat after her. The inmates sing in unison through their tears, and clap their hands. “I am your recovery coach,” Griffin promises them – in a video exposéwith the Texas Tribune and the New York Times, Griffin delivers her sermon to her hand-selected “victims,” who, according to the New York Times, “can not be freed until they release the filth of their pasts.”

“What made me decide [to come here]?” said one of the women in Griffin’s program, who agreed to be in the video, “You decided” – she points to Griffin and laughs, jokingly.

The daughter of a songwriter, who still earns royalties from the songs her father has written for Marvin Gaye, Kathryn Griffin is not to be confused with the self-proclaimed “D-List celebrity” comedian, who had a reality TV show on Bravo about scheming to climb up the Hollywood ladder. This Houston-based Kathryn Griffin became addicted to cocaine 30 years ago, while on tour with R&B singer Rick James. To support her drug habit, she sold sexual services on the street, a lifestyle that she now regrets. After completing over two dozen drug treatment programs, and seeing what works and what doesn’t work, Griffin has stopped using cocaine for 10 years, and now speaks to others in the language of rehabilitation.

Griffin has been through much personal struggle, and it’s certainly admirable how she has changed her own circumstances. But with her Christian moral values at the forefront of her engagement with incarcerated sex workers, she broadcasts a loud and tough message of reform, which is targeted at “victims” of prostitution, and is certainly not for everyone. Her experiences with drugs and street-based sex work are not representative of everyone’s experience in the sex trade.

[Read the full article, originally printed here, on Slixa.]

While volunteering at the Houston City Hall, Griffin befriended then City Councilman Adrian Garcia, who has since become the Harris County Sheriff. With his help, Griffin has lobbied to push through legislation to create mandatory prostitution courts with a focus on rehabilitation, which is being implemented this year in other counties throughout Texas. Jurisdictions across the country from Seattle to New York are now paying attention to her “diversion” strategies.

However, there is very little research that indicates that prostitution diversion programs have been successful in the United States. With high recidivism rates and a lack of long-term support for program graduates, these programs often fail to focus on the main underlying reasons why people turn to prostitution: poverty, lack of desirable employment alternatives, lack of adequate or stable housing, and sometimes drug addiction and psychological illness. It is not “lack of self-esteem,” but rather lack of funds that entices people into sex work. Being neuroatypical limits people from employment in other jobs, and an expensive drug habit makes the black market of sex work more appealing than other jobs with equally low barriers to entry.

In a 2006 study on a prostitution diversion program in Salt Lake City, researcher Stephanie Wahab concluded that the greatest benefits of the program for its participants are firstly, the opportunity to avoid incarceration and expunge prostitution charges from criminal records; secondly, the unintended consequence of creating a community space for sex workers to share emotional support with one another; and thirdly, harm reduction and rights-based counselling along with referrals to other legal, financial, and medical services.

Griffin’s moralistic reform program does not seem to prioritise any of these proven benefits.

By taking on an individual-blaming tone of sin and reformation, mixed with a merciful “second chance” mantra, Griffin’s tactic of condemnation, confession, and redemption has strong religious parallels. The forced confession that Griffin pushes program participants to do, in the name of “sharing” in a safe space, can also be extremely exploitative. Furthermore, this rhetoric emphasises individual reform rather than address the structural inequalities and social institutions related to street-based sex work. More importantly, it does not question why sex workers are incarcerated to begin with, or question the additional harms that criminalisation brings.

Griffin’s program participants are filtered through a justice system that conducts discriminatory arrests of street-based workers, the most marginalised and most vulnerable of sex workers. More than 80% of arrests for prostitution in the United States and Canada are of street-based workers, who constitute less than an estimated 20% of total sex workers; these are more often people of colour, immigrants, the homeless, people using drugs, and the poor. Therevolving door of criminalisation makes it more difficult for these people to attain employment alternatives after completing their sentences, especially if their criminal records are not expunged by certain diversion programs that are designed for this purpose. Griffin’s program, which takes place inside the prison system, rather than as an alternative to incarceration, is not created in this restorative justice model.

As a reformed drug user and former sex worker, Griffin is given the spotlight as the spokeswoman for others in the sex trade. Delivering insightful and important interviews from ABC News to the Steve Wilkos Show, Griffin presents a straightforward “tough love” that may be honest to her personal experience of people on the Stroll. Her program, We’ve Been There Done That, seems to show a sense of solidarity with other street workers. While Griffin may be effective at communicating with some others who share her experience; and while she may also doing good work in changing public perception of former child prostitutes, such as Tricia Chambers, who have suffered much abuse and severe victimisation throughout her lives; the popular American media would be mistaken if they take Griffin and Tricia’s experiences as representative of the diverse range of sex worker experiences in the United States, or indicative of how all prostitution cases should be treated by the law.

Griffen’s moral ministry does not speak to the experiences of all street workers, and certainly, not all sex workers. While delivering much needed social services to sex workers in jail, she does not go far enough as to inquire as to whether the jailhouse is the right place for street workers to be receiving these services.

INTERNATIONAL PROSTITUTION REFORM & AMERICAN MEDIA

Griffin’s photogenic heroism is reminiscent of the rescue-and-reform strategy that Americans employ in many other parts of the world; in which the sensationalist media is quick to join their international crusades. Recidivism is rampant in America’s reform projects abroad, but the failures of these moralistic interventions are largely silenced by the anti-trafficking hero narrative.

In 2004, Gary Haugen, from the International Justice Mission (IJM), a Christian human rights organisation, courted MSNBC Dateline in a quest to rescue “sex slaves” in Cambodia, through dramatic raids and arrests on Svay Pak brothels, all captured by a hidden digital camera to be packaged for American TV: “Guns were drawn, sirens blared, children wailed, and panicked men and women ran in every direction,” wrote sociologist Gretchen Soderlund from the University of Chicago about Haugen’s rescue project, but “shelter escapes are commonplace in areas where anti-trafficking groups are currently targeting their efforts….At least 40 percent of the women and girls taken to his shelter escape and return to work in Svay Pak’s brothels. Indeed, six of the teens taken by MSNBC/IJM had run away from the home within a week of the televised busts.”

The well-respected New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, is also guilty of unsolicited American heroism. In 2004, the columnist bragged about how he bought two Cambodian teens out of the sex trade, and praised the Bush administration for policies defending the human rights of women abroad. Later, when one of the teens returned to her brothel in Poipet, Kristof accused her of having “low self-esteem” and an “eerily close relationship” with the brothel owner. Reflecting deeply on his failed Samaritanism, Kristof crafted this paternalistic response:

“Aid groups find it unnerving that they liberate teenagers from the bleak back rooms of a brothel, take them to a nice shelter—and then at night the kids sometimes climb over the walls and run back to the brothel…It would be a tidier world if slaves always sought freedom. But prostitutes often are shattered and stigmatized, and sometimes they feel that the only place they can hold their head high is in the brothel.”

These are not the words of a non-judgmental helper. American organisations in Asia seem not to understand how differences in cultural attitudes towards sex work in countries like Thailand, as well as vast differences in the wages that can be earned in menial labour between sex work and other jobs, sometimes make the brothel a far more desirable place to work than the clothing factory, where many organisations place their program graduates, puzzled why they would run away when faced with the even more exploitative wages.

While preventing children below the age of consent from involvement in sex work is a good practice, many American organisations do not discriminate between consensual and non-consensual sex trade in their raids and rescues. Instead of helping the “victims” of coercive sexual labour practices, these raids, rescues, and moral reform tactics often result in the coercive detention of Asian sex workers for months to years without legal recourse. Refusing to acknowledge the human rights of sex workers, and only granting sympathy if “victims” fit the “sex slave” narrative, much like the selection process of Ms. Griffith in Houston, these condescending and moralising attitudes shown by many religiously-motivated Reform organisations, only serve to heighten the stigma faced by people in the sex trades, rather than raise anyone’s “self-esteem.”

The moral judgments against sex work also prevent self-promoting heroes from recognising and supporting the successful efforts of sex workers whocollectively organise to prevent sex trafficking and underage labour within their own workplaces and communities; such as the 65,000-person strong sex worker union in India, which has a strong record of combatting trafficking and other forms of labour exploitation in the Sonagachi Red Light District.

Griffin’s reform project in the prisons of Houston, Texas, is at least commendable for one important reason: it is a sex worker-led organisation (or at least, it is led by a former sex worker, with a particular set of experiences in drugs and sex work – in the United States, where sex work is criminalised, this may be the only legitimate way for a project to be sex worker-led). Best practices from evidence-based organisations around the world show that sex worker-led organisations are, in fact, the most effective in tackling exploitation and promoting public health within our own communities.

However, Griffin’s message of Christian moralism does not create a truly “non-judgmental” space, and she may be silencing her participants, who may not share her experiences or her view on sex work. Given the power dynamics of the situation, where Griffin is teaching an audience of prisoners, there is little room for challenging the way Griffin frames sex work by bringing up contrasting experiences. Similarly, many former participants in American human trafficking reform programs abroad have also felt silenced by the anti-prostitution attitudes and moral judgments of these organisations, especially when they are incarcerated in rehabilitory detention centers much like this one, where participants have literally killed themselves in attempting to escape from “anti-trafficking” help programs.

In Thailand, the sex worker-led organisation, Empower, along with the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers, composed of over 100,000 sex workers from across India, Southeast and East Asia, condemn the U.S. for its imperialistic, Christian reform programs in the name of “anti-trafficking,” strengthened during the Bush era of religiously-motivated sexual moralism, which violate the human rights of sex workers worldwide.

“We have now reached a point in history where there are more women in the Thai sex industry being abused by anti-trafficking practices than there are women exploited by traffickers.”

In an Open Letter to the Prime Minister of the Royal Government of Thailand, Empower wrote:

“We accuse the United States government of using the issue of human trafficking to coerce its allies into tightening border and immigration controls. The US agenda has also created a climate where women crossing borders are all seen as suspect ‘victims’ of trafficking. Recently on the 21st February 2012 Empower released an in-depth research report, Hit & Run, done by sex workers, which clearly identifies how the State is breaching rule of law and police procedure while arresting wrong people.”

The narrative of moral reform is used both domestically and internationally to serve a sort of American charity-heroism, which is embarrassingly insensitive to the experiences of the people they purport to be helping, and actually exacerbates the structural conditions of harm. The United States also uses the anti-trafficking moral crusade to tighten immigration border controls and promote its other geopolitical interests: ranking countries according to their “progress report in human trafficking” through an annual U.S. Trafficking in Persons report, and placing certain countries like Cuba and North Korea into lower tiers than American political allies, with little justification, in order to exercise economic and political leverage on seemingly moral grounds.

By adopting a policing and a criminalisation model for tackling harm in the sex industry rather than a labour rights model that supports collective organising, the politics of moral reform blames and silences the individual, while failing to make any efforts to change the economic conditions that motivate this work.

In this past year, international organisations from the United Nations Global Commission on HIV and the Law, to the World Health Organization and Human Rights Watch have issued reports recomending the decriminalisation of sex work, in the interest of public health and sex worker human rights.

Rather than addressing the economic inequality between and within nations which motivates labour migration and predatory immigration practices across industries, as well as addressing the lack of dignified jobs for young people and fair wages for under-skilled workers – the rhetoric of prostitution reform chooses to create a narrative of good versus evil, blaming individuals rather than unjust global economic relationships, and silencing voluntary sex workers rather than recognising the pragmatic decisions many make in the absence of labour opportunities and labour rights.

The Violence Against Women framework for human rights activism insists that all sex work is “violence” against women, rather than acknowledging the individual acts of violence that occur when sex work is criminalised, or acknowledging that global poverty and inequality, which compels some women to travel across the world to become nannies and servants at low wages for middle-class people in the First World, is also a form of violence – and sex work is one choice for many within the constraints of the violence of poverty.

BEST PRACTICES FOR PROSTITUTION DIVERSION IN THE UNITED STATES

Domestic rescue and reform organisations, and the social work profession, have long used a language of moral reform, rescue, and rehabilitation, when talking about prostitution, while failing to address the problems of discriminatory policing, homelessness, domestic violence, drug abuse, and psychological illness, as separate conditions in a subset of diverse sex work experiences.

Other organisations serving street-based sex workers in the United States, such as Streetwise and Safe, Young Women’s Empowerment Project, HIPS, Different Avenues, and Safe Sex Work recognise that for street workers, criminalisation and discriminatory policing is the biggest source of violence and harm.

Why does Griffin refrain from acknowledging this fact?

Neglecting to recognise the harms of criminalisation, and only granting sympathy and legal recourse to “trafficking victims,” – Griffin corroborates in the silencing of sex workers who demand more than moral redemption, who demand their human rights.

But it is no surprise that some former sex workers, when caught by law enforcement or when deciding to exit the sex industry of their own volition, would find support and validation from reformers and abolitionists, particularly when their personal experience with sex work is compounded by other negative experiences, such as drug abuse and domestic violence. However, it must be recognised that these individuals do not speak for the experiences of all sex workers.

Many former sex workers, like Ms. Griffin, who find social recognition through confession and condemnation of the sex trade, are genuinely trying to help other individuals gain the same kind of social re-acceptance that she has found through moral repentance. It is important to recognise the good that Ms. Griffin may be doing on an individual level to comfort and support some incarcerated sex workers who may share her Christian moral views on prostitution, or share her negative experiences of drug abuse. However, Ms. Griffin could be going further to help these people by questioning why they are incarcerated to begin with, and thinking about what truly supportive alternatives and diversion programs might look like.

Here are some things Griffin could do, based on some best practices of other U.S. diversion programs:

Make sure that upon completion of her program, the criminal records of her participants are expunged so that they have better opportunities to find alternative employment.
Provide realistic, quality training for alternative employment, and support in accessing these jobs.
Create a truly non-judgmental “safe space” in her program, so participants can share experiences and mutual support, and be recognised as people of dignity, agency, and great survival strength, instead of fallen “victims” in need of moralising rehabilitation. Make no stigmatising assumptions about the “self-esteem” of participants.
Make sure that people exiting her program have access to supportive housing, should they need it, and other social services, including drug treatment programs, health care, and child care solutions, so that they are not compelled to return to sex work to meet these basic needs.
Create a “diversion” program that takes place as an alternative to incarceration (like many other diversion programs in the U.S.) rather than one that only takes place within the prison system. Use fundraising gains from any media attention she is currently getting to strengthen programs with supportive social services for people outside of jail, who are at risk of incarceration for prostitution.
Acknowledge the realities and benefits of sex work: that it is by and large the most lucrative “unskilled” employment option, which carries many benefits, including a flexible work schedule, especially desirable for mothers with childcare responsibilities during the day. Accept and acknowledge the possibility that some people may choose legal forms of sex work, such as stripping or porn, over other non-sex work employment; and allow space for respectful dissent for people who don’t feel like what they were doing was wrong.
Use the harm reduction model, which has been proven to be most effective, for meeting people where they are at, and observe the best practices and methodologies of these existing programs.

Instead of catering to mainstream rhetoric, Griffin could be using her platform to talk about the dire lack of social services for sex workers outside of prison, due to criminalisation and social stigma – and use her spotlight to bring the public a far more nuanced look at the sex trade.

There are many unhappy workers in the sex industry, just as there are many unhappy workers in many other kinds of work, and criminalisation only serves to exacerbate the level of exploitation and violence in this market; nevertheless, sex workers demand the same human rights and labour rights as all other people. Moral reform lectures, delivered to prison inmates, are not the best use of state resources when many other preventative social services are direly needed.

We have yet to see the long-term impact of Griffin’s project. It is encouraging to see strong women like Griffin rise out of oppressive personal circumstances and support others. It would be much more hopeful to see Griffin deliver truly non-judgmental social services without the moralism of “reform,” and empower other former sex workers to build much needed peer-led community spaces.

In the New York Times video, one participant of Griffin’s program tells the cameraman that she was doubtful in Griffin’s program at first. But after meeting Griffin, she has decided: “I see you shine. I want exactly what you have.”

From misery to ministry, Griffin has made herself into a powerhouse, and she aims to become a “trainer of trainers” – to teach other former sex workers how to preach in diversion programs like hers. She instructs the participants of her program to sing in unison – a song from the movie Sister Acts, where Whoopi Goldberg plays a singer who wants to make it big, and disguises herself as a nun in a convent to avoid trouble from her past:

“If you wanna be somebody /
If you wanna go somewhere /
You better wake up and pay attention”

Griffin has surely grabbed a lot of attention this year. The hope is that she will now direct this attention to creating truly empowering, sex worker-led solutions for addressing the complex social problems surrounding prostitution in Texas.