Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking
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The purpose of the International Religious Freedom Act is to promote and protect religious freedom generally. However, the particular issue that animated most activists’ concern in the early days of this movement was Christian persecution.37 Movement leader Michael Horowitz, an orthodox Jew, explained that the reason for the focus on Christians was because, globally, Christianity serves as the religious carrier of the political principle of humanity equality. He elaborated:
One hundred years ago, if you wanted to know whether there were human rights in a country you didn’t need a fancy human-rights survey, you’d go in the local synagogue and if the Jews were persecuted you knew that there was some dictatorship persecuting everyone else. Now, going into remnant communist countries or Muslim countries, you don’t need a fancy survey. Go to an Evangelical church, go to a house church, and if they are scared and if they’re getting arrested and persecuted you know no one else is free.38
Elsewhere, Horowitz likened Christians’ religious freedom in foreign countries to “canaries in the coal mine”.39 His point was that the level of respect for Christians’ religious freedom in a particular place is indicative of the extent to which the general principle of human equality is valued there.40
The International Religious Freedom Act originated in the House of Representatives with a bill introduced in the autumn of 1997 titled the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act. This initial bill was motivated by concern about the persecution of Christian missionaries in ‘closed’ countries. But through the course of the legislative process, the specific concerns about Christian persecution were rearticulated, in the discourse of human rights, as a concern for protecting and promoting religious freedom for everyone.
Simultaneous to the process that rearticulated concern about religious persecution in the human rights discourse of religious freedom, yet another re-articulation was occurring within the movement. Whereas the primary subject of concern imagined in the discourse of religious persecution was the figure of the white, Anglo-male missionary (with, perhaps, his accompanying wife and children), in the ascendant human rights discourse of religious freedom, the primary subject of concern was imagined as a “poor, brown, third-world” woman.41 Horowitz put it like this:
The battle over worldwide persecution is a battle for the freedom of all – all the more so, because the explosive global spread of Christianity has made the paradigmatic Christian a poor and brown third-world female rather than the white middle-class Western male that your patronizing detractors paint you to be.42
Together, these two parallel shifts (from Christian persecution to religious freedom; and from imagery of ‘the paradigmatic Christian’ as a Western white male to a poor, brown woman from the Global South) influenced a significant re-framing of the issues: not only was Christian persecution reframed in terms of promoting religious freedom, the new imagery permitted religious freedom to be framed through the lens of gender, as an issue of women’s freedom.43
In order to capitalise on the momentum generated by the coalition of American evangelical Christians and others that had supported the International Religious Freedom Act, evangelicals began to mobilise on the issue of human trafficking as soon as the bill garnered congressional approval. Political scientist Allen Hertzke explains that this organising was framed intentionally to draw on the “scaffolding and relationships forged in the religious freedom effort”.44 The issue of human trafficking, therefore, was widely seen in evangelical circles as “a logical follow-up to their work on the religious freedom legislation”.45 Because of the resonance between the issues of religious freedom and human trafficking for American evangelical Christians, the “poor, brown, third-world woman” who they had identified as ‘the paradigmatic Christian’ of global Christianity was the central figure around which the campaign to eliminate trafficking also rallied. Thus, both the religious freedom movement and the evangelical anti-trafficking movement were centrally animated by concern about poor, brown women from the Global South.46 The central issue at stake in the religious freedom movement was the right of these women to be free from religious persecution and to enjoy religious freedom. The central issue at stake in the subsequent faith-based movement to end human trafficking was the right of these same women to be free from sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation. The theological centrality of sexual integrity and propriety to evangelical Christianity meant that anti-trafficking work seeking to free vulnerable women and girls from sexual slavery was fully consistent with, and even encompassed by, the project of advancing religious freedom. In a sense, freedom from sexual trafficking was integral to the right to religious freedom. The congruity between religious freedom and freedom from sex trafficking helped anti-trafficking activism and advocacy to rise quickly as a major arena of evangelism for American evangelical Christians.
Ending the sexual trafficking of women aligns perfectly with evangelicals’ commitment to eradicate Christian persecution and promote religious freedom. Evangelicals further understood their liberty to mobilise on the issue of human trafficking on religious grounds and in religious terms as uniquely revealing of the condition and status of their own religious freedom as Christians. The ability to provide anti-trafficking services (rescue, emergency services and longer term after-care) oriented around explicitly religious content and themes (for example, treatment programmes that employ religious themes or that are organised around theologically framed goals; initiating conversations with formerly trafficked persons about spiritual matters, with the purpose of evangelism or proselytisation; making services available to formerly trafficked persons contingent on their attendance at, or participation in, religious services) functioned for some as a crucial barometer of their religious freedom. Christian theological components feature prominently in the services that many evangelical anti-trafficking organisations (like International Justice Mission and Shared Hope International) and the anti-trafficking programmes of larger charitable organisations (like the Salvation Army) provide to formerly trafficked persons. In this way, not only does work on behalf of formerly trafficked persons promote the conditions essential for their religious and sexual freedom in a general sense, this work also serves simultaneously to articulate and enact evangelicals’ own religious freedom. The Code of Conduct holds religious and faith-based service providers accountable to standards concerning the role of religion in anti-trafficking work and service provision, and to which trafficked and formerly trafficked persons have the right to expect that those who seek to assist them will adhere.
Evangelicals’ attachment to providing services containing religious content to trafficked and formerly trafficked persons must be understood in relation to their deep concern about Christian persecution and their understanding of religious freedom. Furthermore, it should also be understood in relation to how activism to end Christian persecution, the cause of religious freedom and the global phenomenon of sex-trafficking of women and girls came to be so intricately interwoven with one another as to no longer always be fully distinguishable. Evangelical Christian anti-trafficking activism and advocacy aims to free women and girls from sexual slavery and, in the process, to introduce them to Jesus; at the same time, their liberty to carry out this work unchallenged measures the strength of the religious freedom they possess as Christians.47
Power, privilege and freedom
Attention to the history of evangelical anti-trafficking activism in the US, and its connection to the religious freedom movement, helps to clarify the importance many evangelical Christians attach to explicitly religious anti-trafficking activism, advocacy and service provision, while raising several other questions. Who does religion empower in anti-trafficking activism and advocacy? Is permitting anti-trafficking organisations and service providers unfettered freedom to practice their religion in the context of service provision sufficient to guarantee the conditions of religious freedom for people who have experienced trafficking? What is to prevent the deeply held religious and theological beliefs of ant
i-trafficking advocates from functioning as mechanisms of ideological enforcement, such that formerly trafficked persons are dominated again in the name of freedom? Are the positions of formerly trafficked persons and those of religious service providers ones of equal vulnerability concerning religion?
Relationships between anti-trafficking service providers and formerly trafficked persons are not defined exclusively by benevolence and compassion. They are also relationships of power. Service providers occupy positions of power vis-à-vis the clients they serve. Formerly trafficked persons are structurally situated in positions of relative vulnerability vis-à-vis service providers. To be sure, religious coercion and manipulation of persons who have experienced trafficking is not the intent of most anti-trafficking advocates and service providers; however, intent is but the tip of the iceberg. Service providers’ positions of power are not a function of how they feel towards clients, or of the nature of their motivations for working with people who have experienced trafficking. Service providers and clients are differently and unequally situated in therapeutic and helping relationships. The stage for abuse and other misuses of positions of power is set when those who occupy positions of power forget, deny or minimise the privilege and authority that is at their disposal by virtue of their roles. And so, regardless of intent, not everything that is done in the name of helping trafficked and formerly trafficked persons is morally commendable or ethically acceptable.
It may be as easy as it is appealing to anti-trafficking activists, advocates and service providers who are themselves religious, to assume that since they find religion so motivating and empowering to their work that, likewise, the clients they serve will (or ought to) find their religious perspective compelling and liberative. This is a possibility. But treating this possibility as a foregone conclusion is over-confident at best and acutely disrespectful at worst. It exemplifies what anthropologist Laura Agustín has termed ‘Knowing Best’: “the assumption on anyone’s part that they know how other people ought to live – know better than those people themselves”.48 By contrast, respect is premised on “the equality, dignity, and independence of others”,49 and acknowledges that “every individual has the right to live his or her life in the manner that he or she wants, as long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others”.50 As applied to religious privilege, respect recognises that one’s own beliefs (or lack thereof) in and about God, or other spiritual matters, do not need to be imposed on everyone else. Traffickers’ disregard for the agency, basic humanity and expressed wishes of their victims is easily and ubiquitously condemned by the anti-trafficking community. Those who want to help people who have experienced trafficking must reject this same logic of disrespect when it is dressed up in benevolent guise and presented as anti-trafficking advocacy – including when religious legitimation is invoked for doing so. Those who want to help people who have experienced trafficking are not any more morally entitled to tell them what they ought to believe, how they ought to live or what will save them than traffickers are.51 Doing so unbidden does not show respect or promote empowerment.
Conclusion
Religious sensibilities and convictions motivate many in the global movement to end human trafficking. Yet because religion can also be a site of manipulation, coercion and even abuse, principled religious and faith-based anti-trafficking activism, advocacy and service provision must be attentive to the relations of power that religion occasions. Attention to the dynamics of religious privilege and the structural inequalities that are inherent in helping relationships demonstrates that ensuring the space for service providers’ religious freedom (for instance, to share and speak freely about their religious beliefs with clients) falls short of ensuring that a similar space of religious freedom exists for clients who have experienced trafficking. By articulating clear standards to which trafficking survivors have the right to expect that those who seek to assist them will adhere, the Code of Conduct is a tool to help religious and faith-based agencies, organisations and programmes be aware of and manage religious privilege, and to provide guidance for the respectful and responsible role of religion in their work with people who have experienced human trafficking.
Because religion is such a deeply held human value, and so central to how many individuals understand themselves and organise their identities, raising critical questions about the relations of power that surround religion and religious motivations in the many facets of anti-trafficking work, without sounding anti-religious, is a challenge. Nonetheless, it is important to continue to engage this challenge, precisely because religion can be a site of coercion, manipulation and abuse as easily as it can be a source of strength, liberation and empowerment.
Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper titled “Good Freedom: Code of Conduct for Religious Institutions, Faith Communities, and Faith-based Organizations for Their Work with Survivors of Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery”, at The Social Practice of Human Rights conference at the University of Dayton on 4 October 2013.
2 Religious studies scholar Rosalind Hackett writes that “the propagation of one’s religion with the intent to convert others”, [p. 1] constitutes an especially pronounced tension in human rights discourses. Generally, scholars recognise a distinction between conversion –“an event of personal, spiritual transformation” [p. 2] –and proselytisation: “the initiatives, practices, discourses intended to effect … a significant change in the pre-existing religious commitments, identity, membership, or lack thereof of others” [p. 19). See Hackett, R.I.J., “Revisiting Proselytization in the Twenty-first Century”, in Hackett, R.I.J. (ed.), Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 1.
3 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common Home, Encyclical letter (Vatican 24 May 2015), para 64. For an example of this manner of treating religion in the movement to end human trafficking see Hertzke, A.D., Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 72 and 315–335.
4 Marx, K. and Engels, F., “The German Ideology”, in Marx, K. and Engels, F. (eds.), On Religion (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1993), pp. 73–81; Albrecht, G.H., Hitting Home: Feminist Ethics, Women’s Work and the Betrayal of Family Values (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 24.
5 See, generally, Sands, K.M., “Public, Pubic and Private: Religion in Political Discourse”, in Sands, K.M. (ed.), God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jakobsen, J.R. and Pellegrini, A., Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 2004).
6 Bernstein, E. and Jakobsen, J.R., “Sex, Secularism and Religious Influence in US Politics” (2010) 31 Third World Quarterly 1023, at pp. 1035–1036.
7 Ibid., at p. 1035. Bernstein and Jakobsen argue that the US’s anti-trafficking policy has not been driven by either just evangelical Christian influence or just secular feminist activism, but by an alliance between these constituencies. The common ground on which this alliance formed is the assumption, shared by both parties, that the criminal justice system and an expanded carceral State apparatus are the best means to address human trafficking. The authors highlight that the way this alliance formed and functions indicates that religious advocacy on human trafficking, including advocacy by conservative evangelical Christians, is not necessarily more conservative than secular anti-trafficking advocacy; and, conversely, secular anti-trafficking advocacy is not necessarily more progressive or liberal than that of its religious counterparts. They conclude that the primary issue in considering the relationship of religion and politics is not necessarily whether or not social or political activism and advocacy has religious content, but “to challenge Protestant dominance in US politics in both its religious and secular forms” (ibid., at p. 1036).
8 In this chapter, I follow Denise Brennan’s lead by referring to people who h
ave experienced trafficking as ‘formerly trafficked persons’. Brennan explains that, while the US Government describes people who have experienced trafficking as ‘victims’, and most anti-trafficking service providers use the term ‘survivor’, many individuals who have experienced trafficking use vague terms to describe their time in forced labour. Brennan, D., Life Interrupted: Trafficking Into Forced Labor in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 9–10.
9 Nelson, J.E., “Deconstructing Academic Writing: Continuing a Dialogue on Christian Privilege” (2010) 17 Multicultural Education 38, at p. 38.
10 Riswold, C.D., “Teaching the College ‘Nones’: Christian Privilege and the Religion Professor” (2015) 18 Teaching Theology and Religion 133, at p. 136.
11 For example, the Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST), a Baltimore, MD-based alliance of Christian organisations that work to end human trafficking, states, as part of its larger explanation of its mission and values: “FAAST exists because eradicating human trafficking reflects the heart of God” (‘Mission and Values’). For a broader discussion, see Graham, R., How Sex Trafficking Became a Christian Cause Célèbre (5 March 2015) www.slate.com/articles/double_x/faithbased/2015/03/christians_and_sex_trafficking_how_evangelicals_made_it_a_cause_celebre.html.