I came to the U.S. in the early 1980s to study at Mt. Holyoke College. It was an exhilarating time where I learned about feminism and gave voice to all the struggles I had growing up in a patriarchal extended family in India. One of the earliest issues that I became involved with was trafficking in women - at a time when few were aware of the scale and dimensions of the problem.

Learning about Trafficking

My introduction to this issue came through an internship at the International Women's Tribune Centre, where I worked with Charlotte Bunch and Kathleen Barry. I helped organize one of the first global gatherings on trafficking in women (held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in 1982). During that period, the dominant understanding of trafficking was that it constituted "Female Sexual Slavery", with the best analysis provided in Kathy Barry's book by that title. What this meant was that all forms of trafficking and prostitution were thought to be the result of sexual coercion.

At the conference, I realized that sex workers themselves brought a different perspective to the conversation. Priscilla Alexander and Margo St. James of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) expressed how sex work can also be entered into by choice. There was a lot of hostility expressed toward that point of view, and for years the prevailing feminist position was that sex work did not constitute a legitimate form of work and only empowered pimps.

I did my thesis on trafficking and forced prostitution in India, spending my summer wandering around "red light" areas in Mumbai and Kolkata trying to "talk" to women and girls on the streets. Despite the theoretical knowledge I had gleaned about the criminal aspects of the issue, nothing prepared me for the stonewalling and outright hostility I encountered in trying to speak to women. But I was 19 with fire in my belly and I turned to an unlikely source for information - my male friends.

From my male friends I discovered where the red light areas were, the states and countries of origin of girls and women in prostitution, the rates for different kinds of prostitutes, as well as the shockingly young age of girls. I also learned the depth of gender differences. It was astonishing to me that girls and boys could inhabit similar social spaces and still be worlds apart. While my girlfriends and I giggled over dating and a stolen kiss, hiding from our parents, the guys we hung out with were frequenting brothels and comparing blow jobs.

I changed strategies in order to get into direct contact with trafficked women and girls. I found a government run "rescue" home that housed trafficked Bangladeshi women who had been rescued from brothels. There I met Saira, a lovely young woman whose head was shaved. Although we were not allowed to talk by ourselves, I was able to hear her story because we both spoke Bengali. I discovered that Saira had been sold into prostitution by her husband, an older man that her parents arranged for her to marry.

In Saira's induction into prostitution, she had been raped several times before beginning to service an estimated 15 clients a day. A police raid had brought her to the rescue home, which she felt to be almost as oppressive as the brothel. The home provided a regimented environment that bordered on the cruel. Her head was shaved as punishment for her attempting to run away because her family did not want her back and she did not want to be trapped in the home.

Since Saira, I have had the opportunity to talk with many trafficked women and sex workers. What strikes me the most is that the actual experience of being trafficked for sex is simply part of a continuum of oppression and abuse. Girls have been sold by their parents or husbands, and tricked by neighbors and friends into the sex-trade. They are abused by cops, customers, pimps and madams. Even if they get out of the sex-trade, families will often refuse to take them back or they face "shelter" where they are treated like criminals or infantilized.

Since those early years, the voices of women of color and those from the Global South have added greater depth and knowledge to our understanding of trafficking. More recently, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been a major factor in bringing more public attention to the lives of trafficked women and sex workers.

The Bigger Picture

We now know that trafficking includes more than prostitution. Many of us who work on women's issues tend to focus on the experience of individual women, without really understanding the economic, social and political structures that benefit from sexism and other forms of discrimination. And trafficking is no exception.

My own understanding of the complex structure of trafficking developed after I graduated, moved to New York City and began to coordinate an international network against trafficking that came out of the Rotterdam conference. I also co-founded a local group called Asian Women Against Sexual Exploitation (AWASE).

One of the first and most shocking revelations was the role of the U.S. armed forces in trafficking and forced prostitution. U.S. army bases in Vietnam, the Philippines and South Korea had spawned huge sex industries, which not only serviced American soldiers but also became recruiting grounds for women to be trafficked overseas, including to the U.S. Through our work at AWASE, we began to track the phenomenon of GI brides-Asian women who married American soldiers and then were sold to brothels and massage parlors in the US.

One year, the District Attorney in Queens, New York cracked down on Asian massage parlors. He wiretapped their phones to find that a large number of calls were going to U.S. army bases. He then decided to simply close down the massage parlors in his jurisdiction without implicating the armed forces.

The U.S. government has not been alone in exploiting women's bodies. Governments in Southeast Asia have relied on the foreign exchange earned through the sex tourism industry. The foreign exchange was necessary to repay debt and service balance of payments. Some governments also encouraged women to go abroad as domestic workers, who then worked in exploitative conditions and sent the foreign exchange back home.

Women's bodies also support other layers of this complex structure-pimps, brothel owners, procurers, traffickers, and bribed cops. Government officials and organized crime are also involved ...and don't forget the larger tourism industry (like tour guides, airlines, travel agencies, etc.) who package sex tours to "exotic" destinations.

This begs the question: How often do traffickers actually get prosecuted for their crimes? Clearly, if government agencies and officials are involved, there's little danger of ever being caught or convicted of any wrongdoing. And again, all the onus of criminal conviction or enforcement falls on women.

An Intersectional Approach

While we can debate differing strategies to address trafficking, it's clear that we must uphold one of the first principles of feminism: listen carefully to the voices of women who are most affected.

When we do that, we understand that there are many circumstances and reasons that lead women to be trafficked or to end up becoming sex workers. We also need to understand these experiences by taking an intersectional approach: we cannot focus solely on sexual abuse and ignore other types of exploitation based on race, class, geographic location, etc.

Trafficking is connected to imperialism and colonialism, globalization, the armed forces, immigration policies and a host of other factors that are interconnected, including patriarchy. A trafficked woman isn't just a trafficked woman; she has many identities. If we are to advocate for policies that truly protect human rights, we need to understand whole people and not just "victims".

U.S. post-9/11 immigration policies also affect how anti-trafficking laws are enforced. The primary concern of border patrol officers is not women's human rights. The problem of trafficking is only going to grow and go further underground, as our borders get tighter. More and more women will become vulnerable, as they become less likely to escape from abuse because of the fear of deportation. The stakes are getting higher.

As feminists, we have traditionally begun our work after a violation has occurred. But we need to start dealing with attitudes and perspectives from a young age. At age 19, it was a revelation that my male friends could provide a comprehensive overview of prostitution in Kolkata while I had to struggle in piecing together newspaper articles and being stonewalled when I tried to get into "red light" areas. The differing notions of sexuality and gender roles that we grew up with in Kolkata have parallels all over the world.

We have to make our work more about vision and less about violation. We have a responsibility to ensure that all human beings can live with dignity. If we articulate and understand human rights as values that are part of how we choose to live our lives, then we become more proactive in creating the circumstances that lead to those outcomes.

My own work today focuses on finding ways to build human rights values through popular culture. The organization I founded, Breakthrough, works in India and the U.S. on a range of issues, including violence against women, HIV/AIDS and sexuality, racial justice, immigrant rights, and religion and peace.

Other Suggested Links:

1. Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women
2. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women