The woman who sold women

By Lydia Cacho 18/02/2014

At an international event to discuss detailed strategies to eradicate slavery, our table was dedicated to considering how to weaken the criminal economy of trafficking. We were joined by the Australian director of the Global Network of Sex Worker Projects (NSWP).

Following a presentation by a financial expert, she took the microphone and explained that she had been a prostitute in the past. She then proceeded to attack all of the organisations across the world that rescue victims of human trafficking.

She said there was some kind of conspiracy among human rights advocates; to take the right to sell their bodies away from young people and women. And she tried to discredit those who have saved thousands of children from being exploited for sex tourism in Southeast Asia.

It was clear that the event had been sabotaged, but for the English organisers it seemed politically incorrect to rebuke the sex industry advocate. Later, an Interpol expert explained to us, behind closed doors, that this woman was suspected of promoting brothels in which there was clearly slavery of very young women.

It remained a conversation in the corridor; at the slightest attempt to open it to discussion, we were accused of moralising over women's right to use their body however they see fit.

A few days ago Mexican newspaper El Universal revealed that the Mexico City authorities had arrested Alejandra Gil, known as the "Madam of Sullivan". While posing as a defender of sex workers’ rights, she was actually part of a well-established network of sexual slavery. According to the wide-ranging Attorney General investigation she exploited 40 women, who were threatened with violence and death.

Some young women managed to escape and report this supposed sex workers’ rights activist; and their testimonies revealed the strategies used by human traffickers across the world, in response to new laws to eradicate the trade.

Evidently, not all activists that defend human rights from within the sex industry are traffickers. However, there are many survivors of the sex trade that, once inside the criminal industry, choose to be part of it. They convince themselves that now its their turn to exploit a new generation of youths, normalising the trade as a false form of economic freedom controlled by third parties.

We have seen the industry of exploitation win hundreds of both low and high-profile cases; such as that of the Trevi/Andrade clan who, supported by the entertainment industry, emerged triumphant and even more famous after destroying several young lives.

Because legal systems are much faster-moving institutions than cultural norms, the culture of violence in our society impedes the progress of justice and the fight against crime.

There is a perverse logic at work here, which confuses debate and prevents understanding of the slave trade’s complexities. Labour exploitation in the interest of economic progress has been normalised over centuries, contributing to the creation of a false discourse that justifies economic, race and gender inequalities as being inevitable.

In other words, our culture has been permeated with the notion that exploitation, poverty, class discrimination, racism, and sexism are unavoidable and should therefore be assimilated. Most sex traffickers argue that they provide security, income and freedom to prostitutes, which gives them the right to economic retribution and control over their "employees".

Nobody said it would be easy to determine how each human being should assume their partial freedoms; or work out how and why millions of people who grow up with violence go on to reproduce it, and come to see abuse as something deserved.

No one said it would be easy to identify the psycho-emotional components and the emotional and psycho-sexual manipulation that lead someone to be enslaved, and to believe that they deserve this abject condition.

Rafael Barret said: "If Good does not exist, we’ll have to invent it". The same could be said of Freedom.

Slavery cannot be eradicated without throwing the spotlight on every group that insists on justifying the sale of human beings as an economically profitable business. As we have seen in the recent case of the "Madame of Sullivan", the traffickers are sat at the table that defends the freedom to enslave, disguised as freedom of choice.

Translation by Ben Riddick.

Original Spanish article, 'La mujer que vendía mujeres'