TRAFFICKING and the CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
by Diane Sabom
April 13, 2000

The President's Interagency Council on Women (PICW) was created by an
Executive Order to implement the Beijing Platform for Action (the Action Plan
of the 1995 women's conference in Beijing, China).  It is a Task Force of
high level representatives from the Executive Branch which coordinates, for
example, with the Departments of State, of Justice, of Labor, and of HHS.  It
is chaired by Madeleine Albright with Hillary Clinton as Honorary Chair. 
This Council has recently been charged with leading U.S. policy on
trafficking in women and children as a part of the U.S. commitment to
eliminate violence against women, goals whose elimination is set down in the
Beijing Platform.  One of the Council's ongoing inititatives has been to
negotiate a Protocol to set new standards on trafficking as part of the UN
Convention on Transnational Organized Crime in Vienna.

The activity of the Council is noteworthy because, by it, they insisted on a
definition of prostitution which experts say would legalize it.  They
differentiated between "forced" prostitution in which women and girls are
trafficked across borders by fraud and deceit and "free" or voluntary
prostitution which, it is argued, would open the way to the recognition of
the professional status of "sex workers" and, conceivably, to social security
and work contracts.  (This reclassification as sex workers is exactly what
the International Labor Organization has recommended to boost sagging
economies by being able to tax the sex trade.)  The Clinton Administration
explained that it was necessary to adopt this strategy in Vienna because
without it, consensus would break down, especially among countries like the
Netherlands and Germany with liberalized laws regarding prostitution.  These
countries would supposedly not then sign the treaty because it would place
mandatory sanctions on them for not prosecuting all trafficking. 

The Administration's action prompted an unusual coalition of feminists and
religious conservatives in agreement that prostitution period demeans and
objectifies all women.  In a Wall Street Journal article of January 10, Chuck
Colson and William Bennett wrote that the focus with the new definition of
"forced" prostitution shifts from the profiteers who traffic in women to the
state of mind of the victimized woman, making prosecution of the traffickers
exceedingly difficult. Emphatically, they agreed, there can be no "consent"
to one's own exploitation.  Moreover, to many feminists, such a definition
greatly deflects from tackling "root causes" of such exploitation that lie in
gender discrimination in employment opportunities and unequal education.

Not all feminists are behind the coalition.  In their 1998 publication Mapping
 Progress, for example, the powerful nongovernmental organization WEDO (the
late Bella Abzug's Women's Environment and Development Organization) refers
from a value-neutral point of view to the Latin American country of Belize
which recognizes prostitution "as a gender-specific form of migrant labor
that serves the same economic functions for women as agricultural work offers
to men and often for better pay" (p.32).

The hypocrisy of the Clinton Administration must be noted in that it says it
wants to do something about sexual exploitation and trafficking but which
according to Worldnetdaily has rolled out the red carpet for Macau's kingpin
of international slave prostitution, Ng Lapseng, a twelve time visitor to the
White House including a two day stay within the residential quarters, and who
is pictured with the Clintons in the book The Year of the Rat.  Known for
abducting very young women and girls from villages throughout Indochina,
Lapseng has contributed to the Democratic National Committee to the tune of
$645,000 in illegally laundered contributions (WND).  Virginia's president of
the Dulles chapter of N.O.W. remarked that the Clinton Administration and the
World Bank helped Thailand organize and nationalize the prostitution
business, which the National Organization for Women's Dulles County president
called "state-sponsored trafficking in women" as she threw the organization's
support behind the Republicans.

Those who would influence the process of decision-making might contact the
State Department to urge the broadest definition of trafficking that would
not include the words "force, fraud, or deceit".