Tag: political economy

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The Global Political Economy of Sexual Exploitation

On By Sara

I recently attended a workshop aimed at preparing a submission for a UN consultation on business & human rights on the role of the so-called ‘sex industry’ in Australia. One of the key observations made by scholars, practitioners, and activists was that this legal, regulated industry in Australia enjoys a special, exempted status from the scrutiny of business ethics such as the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights. While there is much to be said about the incongruity of the ‘job like any other’ discourse regarding the sex industry and mechanisms to ensure corporate responsibility for upholding basic human rights, one aspect I find far less considered is the way in which both legal and illegal forms of sexual exploitation seem to undergird so many aspects of our regular, licit economy.

It struck me from socializing with men and women in the banking and IT sectors how normal it is for workplace socializing to be conducted in strip clubs. A number of my friends and acquaintances admitted the regularity with which their ‘team’ would wind up after Thursday night drinks at a strip club, while others relayed rumors of their company holding corporate accounts with such establishments. It has made me wonder just how integral is sexual exploitation to lubricating our core economic sectors in an advanced, capitalist country?

With this ‘feminist curiosity‘ in mind, I came across an article about 50 formerly prostituted women suing Salesforce for facilitating their being sexually trafficked. Salesforce is an American Fortune 500 tech company perhaps best known for its ‘customer relationship management’ (CRM) software, used by millions. This week, fifty “Jane Does” have filed a lawsuit in San Francisco accusing Salesforce of “sex trafficking, negligence, and conspiracy” for providing CRM services to the notorious classified advertising site Backpage.com.

Last year, Backpage made international news when its CEO pleaded guilty to an array of charges associated with sex trafficking and money laundering as a result of publishing ads relating to prostitution, sex trafficking, and the sexual exploitation of minors. This new lawsuit against Salesforce alleges that the company and CEO, Marc Benioff:

engaged in nefarious activities while claiming to be fighting trafficking. “Behind the scenes … Salesforce kept taking Backpage’s money and supporting it with the CRM database of pimps, johns, and traffickers that Backpage needed to operate.”

Most perniciously, at the same time the company was attempting to paint itself as ‘good guys’ concerned with global corporate responsibility,

“Salesforce knew the scourge of sex trafficking because it sought publicity for trying to stop it. But at the same time, this publicly traded company was, in actuality, among the vilest of rogue companies, concerned only with their bottom line,” the suit alleges. “And human beings—many more than just these 50—were raped and abused because of it.”

“The Jane Does were forced, coerced, and made victims of sex trafficking by means of force, fear, fraud, deceit, coercion, violence, duress, menace, or threat of unlawful injury to themselves and others, including family members,” the lawsuit claims. “Salesforce committed acts at issue with malice, oppression, fraud, and duress.”

The claim of Salesforce’s complicity rests on the recognition that the industry of sexually exploiting women and children cannot operate alone, but requires all the same support services, technical services, and financial services as any other. Thus, the claim lodged by the 50 women accuses Salesforce of complicity in actively maximizing “customer acquisition” of johns/punters and aggressive marketing towards this acquisition. As such, the suit claims that not only did Salesforce’s technology provide “the backbone of Backpage’s exponential growth,” but it was also under Salesforce’s guidance that Backpage came to dominate the illicit industry in the trafficking and trade in women’s and children’s bodies.

Such recognition of the complicity of giants in our economy in the sex industry is an important first step. For as research has shown, the sexual exploitation of women and children isn’t done just by a handful of deviant, lonely men. Rather, it is sustained by both a widespread culture of acceptance that women’s bodies can be bought and used as commodities, as well as by an economic system that enables the trade.

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Economies That Work for Women Post-War

On By cduncanson

This blog is based on a forthcoming paper by Carol Cohn (Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights) and Claire Duncanson (University of Edinburgh). It originally appeared on Monash GPS blog here.

Building lasting peace and security in countries coming out of war is challenging. Many recent publications point to how badly the international community has fared in its attempts, and there has been much recent soul-searching within the UN system itself as to how to improve its record.

Economic recovery, reconstruction and development are critical, if often neglected, elements of attempting to create peace and security post-war. Regarding this more specific area, too, the UN and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) who are the key actors in this sphere, have been the subject of several critiques.

One strand of critique focuses on relatively technical issues, such as sequencing and timing, flexibility and coordination. The international community fails, in this account, because it insists on implementing “development as usual” policies too early. Rather, it should accept that post-war states need to do several things which are not optimal in terms of conventional conceptions of economic growth – primarily providing decent jobs and basic services for ex-combatants, as well as other groups impacted by war, so as to give them a stake in the peace. In the immediate aftermath of war, “the peace objective should always prevail over the economic”. The IFI’s economic prescriptions are essentially sound; what is required is tweaks in how and, crucially, when they are applied.

A second set of criticisms focus more on the way that IFIs do not sufficiently recognise how their policies exacerbate the inequalities and violence of the “clandestine economies of war”. In this critique, neoliberal economic policies might be sound in general but not in post-war contexts because the profits created are subject to elite capture and corruption. The recommended policy response is “good governance”:  creating the institutions and regulatory framework that can facilitate inclusion in economic growth.

The IFIs have been receptive to these two lines of critique and evidence of adoption of these recommended solutions, at least on paper, is clear.

A third set of scholars make a more fundamental critique. The neoliberal policies themselves, and not just their propensity to elite capture in post-war contexts, are the problem.

Feminist colleagues working in this area and I agree with the scholars in this third strand. Although good governance (and better sequencing, timing and coordination) would be nice, they, alone, are not going to bring about the transformations required for gender-just sustainable peace.

What the third strand of scholars tend not see or highlight, however, is the gendered nature of neoliberal capitalism. As such, they overlook some of its harms and drivers, and how they play out in conflict-affected areas. They also miss the solutions that feminists offer.

To take one example, typically the World Bank’s reconstruction programme will be dominated by physical infrastructure, which usually comprises at least 60 per cent of the programme. Physical infrastructure is of course important for peacebuilding, but one might question the emphasis on physical infrastructure over social infrastructure (spending on health, education, childcare and so on), given the level of need for these services in post-war contexts. Moreover, the physical infrastructure projects tend to be designed primarily with men and markets in mind, and privilege superhighways, for example, from mines to ports over rural roads enabling people to get safely from home to healthcare. Investment in infrastructure is increasingly funded through public-private partnerships (PPPs). Evaluations of such PPPs focus on profitability, rather than on whether infrastructure serves the needs of people, including the specific needs of women. Rather than a basic good for all, infrastructure is conceptualised as a source of potential profit for foreign-owned commercial interests.

Central to the IFI’s approach, it is clear, are some neoclassical economic assumptions. A central one is the idea that the economy is for solving the problems of how to distribute things efficiently, and the beauty of market-provided solutions, according to mainstream economics, is that they are efficient. This approach is problematic in several ways. First, it elevates efficiency to the status of primary goal. Second, it privileges the monetised aspects of the economy, while ignoring the sphere of “social reproduction” or “unpaid work”, which includes both subsistence production (particularly significant in much of the Global South) and unpaid care (for family, friends and neighbours) that keep the social fabric together. Third, it is an approach which focuses on meeting human wants, without asking “how much is enough?” This is clearly problematic given finite resources on an increasingly degraded and dangerous planet.

Feminist economists (in company with other heterodox economists) see the purpose of the economy differently: human well-being, not economic growth, is the central measure of economic success. There are many different feminist approaches to the economy, but there are at least three which challenge the neoclassical model, and provide new ways of thinking about post-war economic reconstruction: the human rights approach, the centring care and social reproduction approach, and ecological and sustainability approaches.

Adopting a human rights approach could transform the way that IFIs respond to post-war countries. It would arguably compel them and post-war states to put employment creation (decent jobs, not just any jobs, food security, housing and land rights, for example, at the heart of their approach to economic reconstruction. Approaches that seek to make care visible and valuable also have the potential to be transformative. If IFIs and post-war states invested in social infrastructure, it would not only help meet the huge demand for health care and education, but create jobs on a massive scale, considerably more than physical infrastructure does. As such, an economy based around social infrastructure starts to become self-financing, as the tax base widens and the productivity of the labour force increases. The third approach, making sustainability a goal of the economy would move us away from the model of extraction and exportation of natural resources. These strategies, that degrade and destroy the natural environment and undermine women’s security, are all too dominant in post-war contexts.

Nonetheless, challenges and questions remain. What does putting sustainability at the heart of economic models mean for post-war countries?  How can the IFIs be persuaded of the need for alternative models? How can post-war states, often weak and corrupted, be the vehicles for transformation envisaged in many feminist economist accounts? These questions are part of an important research agenda, creating a Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace, led by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, and involving a team of international interdisciplinary researchers. For more information see http://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace.

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