A very sad article at the NY Times about how young female victims of sex trafficking are at an extremely high risk for HIV got even sadder when I saw the accompanying language.
Adding another bleak dimension to the sordid world of sex slavery, young girls who have been trafficked abroad into prostitution are emerging as an AIDS risk factor in their home countries, according to a study being released today.
Girls who were forced into prostitution before age 15 and girls traded between brothels were particularly likely to be infected, the study found. Shunned by their families and villages on their return, they sometimes end up selling themselves again, increasing the risk.
The study, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, concerns girls from Nepal trafficked into bordellos in India, but the problem is also emerging elsewhere, said the lead author, Jay G. Silverman, a professor of human development at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
Girls from China’s Yunnan Province sold to Southeast Asian brothels, Iraqi girls from refugee camps in Syria and Jordan, and Afghan girls driven into Iran or Pakistan all appear to be victims of the same pattern, he said, and are presumably contributing to the H.I.V. outbreaks in southern China, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Yes, that’s right: the girls are to blame for the HIV outbreaks.
Of course, the article takes pains to repeatedly refer to these girls as victims and discuss how sad their situation is. It talks about how social factors cause girls to get caught in the sex trade.
But hey, it’s still these girls’ fault for infecting the non-slutty population of these countries.
Not once does the article explicitly blame the fathers who knowingly sell their daughters into sexual slavery. Not once does it blame the men who then repeatedly rape them and take money from other men, who also repeatedly rape them. It doesn’t blame the men who pay to repeatedly rape them and then go home and have (probably also non-consensual) sex with their wives. In fact, the word “men” is used only three times in the entire article. And it does explicitly place blame upon them any of those times. The word rape only appears once.
Do I think that the writer intended to directly blame these victims rather than the men who abuse them? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I don’t think that it matters. Because that is exactly what has been done, here. Language matters. The way that we talk about crime, about victims and about social problems often tells us a lot more than what is actually said. And I think that it’s pretty clear, from reading this article, and from the fact that there has not been and will not be any large media uproar, that many people still– whether consciously or unconsciously– blame victims of sexual slavery for their own situations.
I’ve long had a dream that someday, our society will realize that women who make a living off of prostitution are not to blame for prostitution– it is the men who are willing to pay to have sex with or rape strangers that are to blame. I’ve also long had a dream that someday, there will be no need for any blog posts about people who think that women are to blame for their own rapes.
And then I read an article about fucking children who are forced into prostitution, forced into sexual slavery, repeatedly raped and then blamed for spreading HIV. It makes me realize that I many not live to see my dream come to fruition.
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I particularly like this part:
“It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” Dr. Silverman said. “Some of them are just shells — and shells of very young human beings. It’s every father of a daughter’s worst nightmare.”
Because, you know, it’s not like it’s every WOMAN’S worst nightmare, right? No no, just their fathers.
Its so frustrating to see articles like this one. Clearly the author is concerned on some level for these victims, but he is still so blinded by his socialization that he cannot really *see* them as people separate from their social position. Is there someway we could introduce Empathy 101 to the education system?
Before you reach such conclusions as you’ve expressed in your postings, you MUST take it upon yourself to read the actual study in JAMA, rather than rely on this article in the NY Times. You will note from the actual study in JAMA, that the authors DO emphasize the need to change men’s behavior’s and demand for purchasing sex–that is one of the primary conclusions. As you know from your feminist discourse, the media has a unique talent for twisting words to sell a story–at the expense of advocates and victims alike.
In this post, I did not criticize the study itself ANYWHERE. I only criticized the article. The reasons you have stated is precisely why I did not criticize the study. I’m very glad to hear that the study did blame men for the epidemic rather than the victims, though.
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