and to determine the impact of the West and its global economic dominance on the developing world;
2. to adopt a symbolic-interaction approach to interpretation in studying the individual experience of sexual exploitation, particularly prostitution;
3. to analyze the interaction of the macro/global condition with micro-individual/interactive experience in terms of international human-rights law, and to identify projects and programs that did not exist when I was writing Female Sexual Slavery but that now are some of the best examples of success in confronting sexual exploitation, particularly in prostitution; and
4. theoretically to consider sexual exploitation as a condition of oppression in terms of sexual relations of power.
Adopting global, theoretical, individual/interpretive, and programmatic-policy and legal approaches, one could argue, is too large an undertaking. Surely such a work risks overgeneralization. However, because sexuality has not been dealt with comprehensively but rather is typically disaggregated in sexological and criminological research, an overall study of the interlocking forces of male domination is required in order to locate women in prostitution within the class conditions of women under patriarchal domination. In order not to reduce women in prostitution and women who are subjected to the prostitution of sexuality to biologically sexed beings or to deviants and criminals, it is necessary to risk some overgeneralization in the process of bringing together the forces that shape sexual exploitation of women today.
My research in this book has developed over two decades. During that time, through my work with women on all the continents, I have had repeated opportunities to present my analysis, confirm my findings, and reassess my assumptions so as to achieve their present refinements. In order to study global macro trends in the absence of concrete statistical data, I have turned to a variety of sources: my own original research in documenting specific cases of female sexual slavery, as well as cases documented and brought before the United Nations, court proceedings, and newspaper accounts. Through the international network and the number of international meetings I have organized, I have been able to confirm cases. From many divergent sources, I have drawn together a range of material that has made it possible to identify new patterns and practices.
To study the interactional effects of the individual experiences of sexual exploitation, I have drawn from my own interviews with prostitute women that began in 1977 and have continued as I have worked with women in different world regions. With these interviews and those from recent research, I explore the interactive dimensions of sexual exploitation.
Symbolic interaction is the study of the interpretation of gestures in human interaction.3 It posits that in interpreting the meaning of the other, we approximate our understanding of the other’s meaning by putting ourselves in the place of the person with whom we are interacting. Not only does symbolic interaction provide an intense approach to the interpretation of meaning of subjects in experience; for me it also establishes the point of view of the researcher.
For the researcher in symbolic interaction, the meaning of a situation is derived by interpreting that meaning from the point of view of the person in the situation. That is, all that is taken in by the persons engaged in interpreting each other’s gestures constitutes the interpretation and the situation. Interpretation is then what produces social reality and is the source of social facts.4 For the feminist researcher studying women’s experiences that are violations of human rights, one step further is required in order effectively to interpret interaction. Engagement with one’s subject involves taking on the meaning of the other by putting oneself in her place, by asking “What would I have done?” and “What meaning would I have interpreted if I were in that situation?” This feminist approach, combined with symbolic interaction, is what makes it possible to break the silences surrounding sexual exploitation.
As a research approach, the significance of symbolic interaction is that it is neither intraindividual nor deterministic. It recognizes not only that interaction takes place in a situation (what some psychologists prefer to call “context”) but also that interaction is the situation. It is the part and it is the whole. To conduct research from this approach it is necessary to reconstruct the situations of sexual exploitation in order to determine their meaning—meaning that is both individual and social. The situations are both the interpretative interaction and all that surrounds the individuals, including the individuals that are taken into account in the interpretation. But the situation in which interpretation takes place stretches far beyond the immediacy of interaction to include the geographic, economic, and political landscape from which meaning is drawn in interpretation. Therefore, global conditions and private life intersect in interpretation. In analyzing conditions of sexual exploitation, this is how macro and micro are brought together. In this sense interpretation produces social facts that are neither reducible to the individual, nor to intraindividual phenomena, nor to dissociated personal interaction.
Some things stay the same as much as they change and that is why I began this work only as a revision of Female Sexual Slavery. But two years into the “revisions” I was back to doing original research and developing new theory. Revision proved to be an impossible project because too much has changed since 1979. I am grateful to Donna Ballock and Brenda Seery for assistance with entering revisions into the manuscript and for their willingness to do that over and over again long after I would declare that I had finished but I had not. I deeply appreciate Rosemary Gido’s reading of earlier drafts, Polly Connelly’s reading of the final manuscript, and Colin Jones, Director of New York University Press for his suggestions and patience with the rewrites.
Prostitution of Sexuality, as the title of the work reveals, indicates the direction of the changes in prostitution toward its normalization in nonprostitute sexual exchanges. This book presents new theory and analysis that explore in depth the effects of prostitution on women and the implication for women’s human rights. All that remains in this work from the original Female Sexual Slavery are some of the original cases and analysis that I have included now for the purpose of comparison with the present situation. I have documented the major practices in trafficking today and left those cases from the earlier work that reflect the connections and comparisons between trafficking then and now. Moreover, it is now possible politically to theorize about this issue beyond the ways that were just beginning to be possible in the 1970s.
Prostitution and sexual exploitation have grown dramatically and changed significantly since I wrote Female Sexual Slavery. As I compared then with now, the Prostitution of Sexuality, much more than a revision of Female Sexual Slavery, became a new work. As I sifted through the new knowledge we have gained, the revisions became rewrites and eventually new chapters. Through the meetings, work, organizing, and campaigning of the 1980s and the 1990s with feminists around the world and within the United Nations and UNESCO, my theories and analysis have grown, changed, and developed. This has led to entirely new chapters on “Prostitution of Sexuality,” “Sexual Power,” “Industrialization of Sex,” “Traffic in Women,” and “Human Rights and Global Feminist Action.”
I have retained my historical study of Josephine Butler, who, for decades, has been a model for me. However, today I probably understand better why. Her passionate commitment to fighting state-regulated prostitution was deeply connected to her direct work with women victimized by it. When I first wrote Female Sexual Slavery, I was particularly concerned to give a feminist-historical base to this work and to analyze her struggle against regulated prostitution. In the last decade, as the proprostitution lobby and the sexual liberals have promoted prostitution as free sex and a viable profession for women, I now know that Butler was not only an important but also a problematic historical figure for me—because of the issues she challenged, and because of those she did not challenge. When I reread this chapter from Female Sexual Slavery and began to revise it, I was surprised to see the extent to which I had not explored the underlying bases of abolition,
