I recently came across the CNN headline story, Trapped by Tradition , and immediately thought about our previous class discussions on tradition and culture. The included article explores a CNN documentary that investigates the traditional implications for child prostitution in some Indian villages (there is a YouTube video embedded within the article for further inquiry). The title of the documentary, “Trapped by Tradition”, is what initially stood out to me. As I read further, it became increasingly clear that this type of terminology is directly related to our previous discussion on ‘cultural relativism’. This criticism of tradition throughout this article explicitly uses the notion of tradition as a major impediment to gender equality in these regions.
Although there is reference to the economic hardship that drives families and girls to enter prostitution, it is clear that that article blames the ‘backwardness’ of these communities as being detrimental. If you go to the Plan India's website and read the main goals of this intervention, you will see that this NGO targets "the most backward" communities, a clear indication of their focus. While investigating further, I found another DailyMail article on Trapped in Traditon that had some rather strong points on ‘tradition’ as the problem. In exploring the documentary, the article states that that the overarching goal is “to shatter hundreds of years of tradition which have blighted thousands of lives”.
So, if it is the culture that is the problem, how do you suggest we eradicate tradition? Slumdog Millionaire star Anil Kapoor recommends the use of education and awareness raising. In doing so, Kapoor argues that we need to change the attitudes of the communities and provide alternative choices to girls. Part of this education involves provided awareness to adults on the ‘dark side of this tradition’. In our previous class discussions about culture and context, it seems to be one of the biggest challenges in development intervention, especially within the GAD paradigm. Additionally, not only is it difficult, it is controversial. How do we implement interventions that tackle deeply rooted cultural beliefs without imposing outside beliefs systems?
As someone with an anthropology background, I am often at odds with the ethnocentrism of development discourse and policy. I believe it is extremely important to exercise caution when one is tackling an issue from such a precarious angle as tradition. Such speech can carry overbearing language and inaccurate assumptions about contextual implications. However, I do recognize that just because something is culturally relevant doesn’t necessarily make it right. As our class discussions and stories such as this one have illustrated, there is a very fine line between intervening without imposing cultural dominance. I believe more discussions on this topic as well as further probing of such interventions is a good starting point for finding balanced solutions.
As a cultural/political Geographer,I am at the same odds as you Katie. None of us want to see young girls and women sent into a life of prostitution because of lacking funds. However, there are some people who go into this path to try to find a better life in 'greener pastures' so to speak in terms of gaining mobility. I have looked into this issue in the past while concentrating on the Albanian/Italy border:
ReplyDeleteHuman trafficking for both sex and labor is a problem that does not just happen in the underbellies of the developing worlds, but also in the so called developed nations of Europe and North America. Many times, the humans being trafficked are women who, aside from often being kidnapped, are looking for a better life and the chance to experience freedom in mobility. The concept of having the ability to travel, or to resist from being forced to travel is known by Tore Sager as positive freedom (Sager 467, 2006). The opposite of this, not having control over your mobility, is known as negative freedom (Sager 467, 2006). In a testimonial given by a native Albanian woman forced into human trafficking, we can see how these negative freedoms are used by people in positions of social power to control the mobility of others:
I got acquainted with a boy who was 20 who said he loved me and promised to marry me. He convinced me to go to Italy for 'a better life.' I thought my sufferings now were at an end, but I did not know the real hell that was expecting me. I was compelled to work on the street. I did so for nearly three years. My exploiter savagely battered me frequently, mainly when I did not bring home the required sum or when he faced drug trafficking problems.
(E.R.)
E.R. Interview with Association of Albanian Girls and Women. Accessed through:Polaris Project. http://actioncenter.polarisproject.org/the-frontlines/survivor-testimonies/38-testimonies/66-testimony-of-er>.
Sager, T. 2006. Freedom as Mobility: Implications of the Distinction between Actual and Potential Travelling. Mobilities. Vol. 1. No. 3, pgs 465-488.
Especially after reading this week's articles, the title "Trapped in Tradition" made me cringe. Can you imagine a documentary with this title to depict human trafficking in the U.S.? I can't. That’s because “we” have the power and influence over the dissemination of information to never allow such a linkage between our culture or traditions to a horrific occurrence like sex trafficking.
ReplyDeleteKatie's comment on cultural relativism is interesting in this context as this documentary crew is trying to portray sex slavery as a product of their "backward" culture. Aligning sex slavery in this community with culture is problematic in itself and as Abu-Lughod in "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?" points out, there are "dangers of 'cultural explanations'" (787). This is seen as dangerous because their "culture" is just as historically rooted and interconnected as ours. From what I saw in the documentary preview and DailyMail article, no comment was made on the decades of British colonialism, nor any underlying socioeconomic or political explanation as to WHY this community feels inclined to sell their female family members to sex trade to generate income. Obviously they are extremely poor, their homes being adversely described as a “fetid shack swarming with flies” (what a nice/respectful interpretation, eh?). Fundamentally, they do not seek to understand why men and women cannot earn a living without having to prostitute their loved ones. That is the question swarming in my mind at least but it seems this documentary is too wrapped up in the shocking poverty and taboo nature of selling their women to traffickers than to sufficiently grasp the bigger picture. This is not a "its just their culture and let’s respect it because its uniquely theirs” scenario- there is so much more to this sex trade “tradition” than the CNN documentary crew is portraying. Even the title of the DailyMail article Katie mentioned, "Chilling tradition of the town where every girl is born to be a sex slave"—its as if the people want to maintain this tradition and that there is no way to reverse this godforsaken destiny, that is until super star Kapoor and the CNN team come to the “rescue.”
This video was truly compelling Katie, thank you for posting it. I think that it embodied, regrettably I may add, all of the red flags Narayan signaled in her Death by Culture article. Indeed, instead of dowry murders, the issue of sex trafficking in India could have easily served as another illustration of the case she makes against attributing practices to culture (Narayan, 1997).
ReplyDeleteAfter hearing Anil Kapoor give his explanation of how villages where “it’s a tradition to have girls being sex slaves” come to exist, I was vigilantly watching to hear him make the case of why sex trafficking in India would be a cultural phenomenon. What evidence has he come across that would suggest so? True to form, he did not present any. Instead the documentary centered on what Abu-Lughold described as cultural explanations. In Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving, talking about the link some were quick to imply between the war on terror, Afghan women and Islam, the author rightfully argues that “Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots and nature of human suffering in this part of the world” (Abu-Lughod, 2002).
Indeed why weren’t the reasons behind the prevalence of sex trafficking in India more thoroughly explored? When I think of issues such as sex trafficking, child forced marriage and even female genital cutting, above all of other justifications, I think of the economical situation of those communities. Sex trafficking, as much as the Trapped by Tradition video would like to suggest, has little to do with culture, nothing mystic or exotic about it, but is in my opinion a direct response to poverty; a mere form of child labor. In poor communities around the world, parents will oftentimes sell their children for sex in in order to put food on the table, pay off debts, or they may be deceived to believe that it will open up more job possibilities and a better life for their children.
Lastly, this documentary also made me think about the images in Trịnh T. Minh-hà’s movie watched in class. Indeed, women and children recorded seemed extremely happy, as they were a lot of laughter, games and food present all throughout the movie. Those images directly invalidating the stereotype notion we have of a developing community, hungry, without activities and sad, as Kappor describes the villages in the CNN documentary. His words were backed by the many sad faces of women and children filmed. But I am suggesting that sex trafficking does not define the level of happiness of a community.
It is a shame that CNN and an influential man such as Kapoor, who has the potential to truly make a positive impact, resorted to such clichés and ideas.
I read this article more that once and I did not see anything cultural about selling girls to sex trade but rather poverty and environment surrounded by famine. I think I could be in more chance to contribute if the title of this article should have read “Trapped by poverty, then What's the Escape Route?
ReplyDeleteLook at the following sentences “In a fetid shack swarming with flies”
“Eventually, distraught, she wanders out into the filthy yard where chickens peck fruitlessly at the dry earth”
“Twenty years on, she is the sole provider for her decimated family, including the mewling baby lying in a wooden crib”
The sentences above proof that the family is selling female family member to generate income but we cannot call it tradition.
Anil Kapoor agreed to this, upon asked he answered, I didn't expect it,' he says. 'The condition of the house and the way they were living”.
To my understanding it is not the issue of product of their "backward" culture but rather what are the reasons behind sex trafficking? It is not the tradition that shattered hundreds of years of blighted thousands of lives but it is the poverty. I think plan India should plan a way forward to eradication of poverty not backward culture.
I found myself experiencing a similar dilemma while researching sex trafficking in the caribbean, most specifically the Dominican Republic. For those of you who do not know, the United States currently evaluates other Nations yearly on their efforts to combat human trafficking and rates the nations on A Tier 1-3 scale. Nations that are Tier 3 are seen as the worst in this area and suffer sanctions from the U.S. In the past, many countries in the Caribbean have been Tier 2-3 level ratings, despite many efforts to combat human trafficking. One of the dilemmas here is that sex trafficking has become a large part of the human trafficking, and many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America have legalized prostitution thus making it difficult to correctly identify those who have been forced into prostitution through trafficking and those who have made the decision by themselves. When the U.S rated the Cariibbean countries last year, several Caribbean officials were upset with the results, stating that there is a confusion with how the Caribbean defines prostitution and sex trafficking in relation to the U.S. standards. The article did not discuss what the Caribbean definition would be, but it discuss the notion that selling sex is a common part of Caribbean culture, thus governments and organizations are often slow to respond to sex trafficking tips on the premise that they wil end up just being a part of the growing legal sex trade that is important to the Caribbean economies. THe frequency of selling sex in the Caribbean can be linked to colonial times when darker skinned women were heavily exploited by european settlers for cash. If this sex trade initiated in European hands, even in the Caribbean, than how could this be seen as a part of Caribbean culture? What was more disappointing to see was that several articles and reviews of the problem in sex trafficking linked the legal prostitution to Caribbean culture, are we then to believe that the commodification of women's bodies is part of culture and thus ignore it? IT is obvious that the sex trade also became important to the area because it became important to the job sector and the economy, therefore, where do we draw the line between what is economically beneficial and what is culturally appropriate? I think that most of the nations in the Caribbean recognize that it is morally wrong, and a big issue in the country but do not want to put enough efforts to solve it because it does cause a flow of money. Furthermore, I think that associating it with CAribbean culture may just be an excuse to thwart international concerns as we have seen that Westerners are criticized for not recognizing cultural identities.
ReplyDelete