Arrivederci Silvio and Hello to the Move Against Demand

Created by law in 2000, the T-visa for trafficking victims is a wonderful sign of America’s heart – a status to allow an undocumented person who is in fact a human trafficking victim to stay in America and get richly deserved help. To its credit, Italy had a similar policy even before the United States.

Sadly, something in Italy today highlights a major driver of the victimization those visas seek to counteract, namely demand.  Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi defiantly faces manifold legal charges.  The most striking revelation is that he regularly hosted prostituted women – in veritable orgies – at his official residence.  With bravado, he laughs off claims that this represents an impropriety.

Buying commercial sex is no monopoly of the right side of the political spectrum.   Governor Eliot Spitzer left office for buying a so-called “high-end call-girl,” Dupre, over an extended period of time.   As a major public figure, he got away with barely a slap on the wrist – despite the fact that his conduct was not only horrible to his wife but illegal.  As Governor he supported a strong New York anti-human trafficking bill to take on violent pimps whose force and manipulation meet the standards of human trafficking.

To say Dupre was “high-end” obscures the reality that without a commercial sex industry and the demand for it, there wouldn’t be sex trafficking.   The degree of choice for those sold like commodities is less than meets the eye.   Maybe there is even less choice for prostituted teenagers, or those who grow to be prostituted adults, or adults subject to compulsion and trickery of pimps.  But there’s only bad and worse in the commodification of females.

“Customers” and “clients” and “buyers” are euphemisms.   Johns are consumers and users of other human beings bodies.  They are responsible parties in exploitation.  “Enablers” is too weak a term.

When public leaders like Berlusconi chortle at the thought that their horndoggery should be the subject of public debate, it undercuts the important realization that it is the demand by males which allows the sex trafficking of females to occur.

That’s why it is tremendous that this week the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Hunt Alternatives Fund convened a meeting of experts on demand.  While I’m hardly a hero, the other attendees were like a Justice League of voices for demand being a major driver of modern-day sex slavery.  They included the architect of this meeting, former Ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt; Indian  survivor empowerment advocate, Ruchira Gupta; Stephanie Davis, who helped Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta uncork her “Dear John” public campaign; Samir Goswami, coalition builder and innovator with the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation; feminist leader Norma Ramos of the Coalition Against Trafficking Women; and leading scholar Michael Shively.

In an effort to put the “move” into the anti-sex-trafficking “movement,” (as one important attendee put it so aptly) we examined best practices of what works to fight demand.  These range from before-the-crime human rights education of boys in Sweden to after-the-crime classes for arrested sex buyers (“johns schools”), empirically proven efficacious in the United States and South Korea.

One conclusion was that johns should be both punished and educated.   We learned that the toughest john school in the country is in Norfolk, Virginia.  Not only does it mandate that arrested sex buyers go to a john school, but also get their car seized, and pay a $1500 fine, and do community service (paying $40 a day to cover the needed  supervision).

Silvio and Eliot deserve no less.  It would send a sign to all that the era of “boys will be boys” is dead, and ethical change affecting the market profitability of sex trafficking.