Those women

Elai, in her Sociology class, has been researching an issue that is more and more concerning to her and to all of us: human trafficking. I am helping her find sources for her paper and am learning more than I want to know. Elai first learned about human trafficking and the sex trade when she read Half the Sky in high school (the book describes how women are treated in different parts of the world, reminding us that something like 100 million girls are simply missing in the world because of neglect and discrimination; read it. It’s also a six part documentary on Netflix). Now she is studying how one country put a new kind of law into effect that has had a noticeable effect on the sex trade in that country and has caused other countries to sit up and take notice. Many are considering similar kinds of laws.

The Swedish government has taken the stance that prostitutes are often victims, coerced by economics, trauma, or force to do something no human should have to do. The ones driving prostitution, the ones with the power, are the clients, almost always men. Without men demanding it, the supply would disappear.  And when the sex trade diminishes, then sex traffic goes down along with it. So Sweden has enacted a law that prosecutes only the clients and lets the (usually) women go free. Once the law was in effect, the number of johns prosecuted quadrupled, and the number of women walking the streets plummeted. Swedish men now think twice about hunting for a prostitute, because if they go to trial, their wives find out. Over the years, while prostitution and sex trafficking has grown in countries where prostitution is legal, Sweden’s numbers remain stable.

At the other extreme is Holland, who decided many years ago to take a pragmatic approach. After all, “boys will be boys,” and everyone will be better off if we just accept the inevitable. Holland has ten times the prostitutes of Sweden and an enormous problem with sex trafficking, violence toward women, and child abuse. Most of Europe’s  trade of children goes through Holland. And this one piece of data really got to me: the pedophile lobby in Holland is very strong, pushing to allow children their “sexual freedom,” and they have gained legal victories including this one: sexual abuse of children over 12 is now illegal only if the child or a parent complains.  Talk about a slippery slope.

And at this point I am stalled. I think about how this stuff happens within minutes of my home in Oaxaca, just a short drive to certain downtown streets, or to the brothels in Xoxo, where, I’m told, Central American women are trafficked. And here, a half an hour away from me, Niagara Falls boasts of its “escort” services. And like all horrible causes, this moves me, but these people remain invisible to me.

I am called elsewhere. My family serves a different vulnerable people. Among these people, the fathers say they “sell” their daughters in marriage, charging exorbitant sums for them (for they are beautiful, as all young women are). When some of these fathers met Jesus, they decided it would honor their daughters to stop this custom. God changed the way these men looked at women. I like that.

I hope Sweden’s experiment works well and can be tried in other countries, chipping away at the number of men who hurt women and calling to account those that drive the system with their money.  Of course that’s not all that’s needed.  The thing is complicated, and laws don’t solve the problem, especially if they don’t reflect a consensus. They only punish and deter. They don’t change attitudes toward women, especially those women. I’m not sure how much studying the topic changes anything. It must, but it feels big and foreign and elusive, a horrifying research project. Lord, may there be many, many competent people fighting this battle, too.