I believe we can come pretty close to wiping out trafficking into prostitution, sexual slavery and torture, and we can do it in part by raising the cost of slavery as Kristof suggests. But we can only do that if we make a clear distinction between sexual slavery and prostitution. Kristof acknowledges that there’s a spectrum, but every fibre of his prose yearns to make it a continuum: however much autonomy you now have, you started selling sex because you were physically, mentally or financially enslaved. The hunger to sympathise with the girls who really have been enslaved — and let’s be clear that slavery does exist in the sex trade — clouds his thinking.

“Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade,” says Kristof, suggesting motorcycle theft as a respectable alternative. But the examples he gives in his column raise the costs not just of trafficking, but of prostitution across the board. That’s like cracking down on slavery in the American south by taking measures against all farming, regardless of who’s working the fields and how much they get paid: it turns the outcome on its head. The cost of running an establishment which provides decent health and safety standards for sex workers increases disproportionately, leaving the field to the more abusive businesses. What we need is to manipulate incentives in the other direction — to support regulation of businesses that allow women to sell sex when they want to, to clients they are willing to serve, at a price they’re willing to work for, and in conditons that protect their health and their safety. That makes it much easier to crack down on businesses that don’t meet these standards.

Kristof urges the Obama administration to crack down on slavery, and I support that. But in these troubled economic times, I don’t think anyone thinks that the new president should crack down on employment.

Thanks to Kim Lee for prodding me on this issue.

If one were looking for an unexpected ray of light in this dreary tale it would be in the testimony from the sex worker who was raped by six policeman. Nothing light about that, obviously. But the fact that she was able to persuade five of the six unwanted men to use condoms is surely evidence of how thoroughly an earlier, more pragmatic approach to HIV prevention in commercial sex has changed norms in Cambodia. It makes it all the more depressing that these “rescue the sex workers” policies continue despite being so demonstrably wrong-headed.

This is a trailer for a longer documentary, which you can find, with others on the same theme, at the Sex Workers Present channel on Blip TV. Thanks to Andrew Hunter of APNSW.

Four in ten sex workers in Cambodia were infected with HIV when the government started its admirable programme to promote condoms in brothels, karaoke bars and on the streets. Sex worker groups also organised to demand health services, and for the most part, they got them. HIV infection rates came crashing down, halving in just 5 years. It is estimated that condom promotion had saved 970,000 Cambodians from HIV infection by 2007.

The programme worked because brothel owners and sex workers were organised, easy to reach and involved. Now, under pressure from the White House, Cambodia has launched a massive crackdown on the sex trade. The result, according to the Phnom Penh Post, is that sex workers are losing their livelihoods, their jewelry, their cash, and getting beaten up in the process.

Cambodian authourities have been persuaded by rescue missionaries such as the International Justice Mission (aka Cops for Christ) that women who sell sex for 5 dollars a day would rather sew T-shirts for three cents a piece. “It is no problem for [prostitutes] when brothels are closed. They can learn different professions from the ministry and local NGOs,” a policeman was quoted as saying.

Sex workers beg to differ.

Chanting “save us from saviors” and waving placards saying “condoms protect, police threaten,” hundreds of red-shirted sex workers demanded their human rights be respected and asserted they did not need to be “saved” from their jobs in brothels, least of all by lecherous, avaricious police officers.

The crackdown is the result of a new “Law on the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation”, which is based on US-style model anti-trafficking legislation. It assumes that the best way to get rid of the very nasty crimes of trafficking and sex slavery is to criminalise the sex industry as a whole. Never mind that there is not a shred of evidence to support this view, and a fair bit of evidence that the reverse might be the case. (A new study from New Zealand, for example, shows that decriminalisation of sex work has led to less exploitation with no increase in prostitution.) What the US Administration demands, Cambodia seeks to deliver. Even the US Ambassador to Cambodia, Joseph Mussomeli, has said he thinks it is likely that Phnom Penh has initiated the crackdown “just to keep the Americans off their back”.

To that extent, it has worked. The latest State Department report on trafficking, published a few days after the crackdown began, has upgraded Cambodia from the wicked to the less wicked category on its trafficking watchlist.

Does the crackdown mean men will stop buying sex? Unlikely. Does it mean that it will be harder to deliver the sorts of HIV prevention and health services that have won Cambodia accolades as an example of “international Best Practice”? Almost certainly, as sex worker activists, reproductive health specialists and even United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have pointed out. (Disclosure statement: I drafted the introduction and epidemiology chapters of the Asia Commission report at the launch of which Ban argued against the criminalisation of prostitution.)

I’ve commented on what’s happening in Uganda before. But readers may be interested in this comment from Sam Ruteikara in the Washington Post. I provide the link not because I agree with his comment, or even particularly because I disagree, but because it is a phenomenal example of spinning the facts by accusing others of spin. Spin doesn’t save lives. Honesty might.

Writing in The Economist’s lifestyle quarterly spinoff “More Intelligent Life”, Evan Zimroth speculates at length about what these codes might mean, and readers add fuel to the fire. With an epidemiologist’s blinders on I’d expect him to code his data the way we do: Anal insertive, anal receptive, oral, if we’re looking at sex between men. But then we’d want to look at the possibility of infections spreading from the gay community to heterosexuals (or even in the other direction, as was demonstrably the case in Cambodia, for example). So we’d want a code for sex with women, too. If I could only have three, I’d sacrifice the oral, if I were an epidemiologist, and the distinction between top and bottom, if I were Keynes.

I’d hate to try to outdo Keynes as a card-carrying data nerd, but in one study of sexual behaviour among gay men in Indonesia, we had no fewer than nine permutations of oral/anal/male/female/paid/unpaid partnerships. Our codes started off cryptically (b5r3b etc), but it all got too complicated and we renamed them things like: unpaidmananal. If Keynes had done the same, he’d have deprived a lot of people of the fun of speculating about the joyous activities of an eminent economist who has been dead for 60 years.

Thanks to Jeff Ballinger for pointing me to Zimroth’s work.