We Can’t Help Women Over There, Until We Change the Way We Treat Women Over Here.

A Snapshot of Who Buys Women for Sex.

He was a biker from Idaho in his late 50s, who had three daughters ranging in age from their late teens to mid-twenties. His scraggly beard reached just below his chin, and a sliver of his belly showed beneath his stretched tight t-shirt.

His friend with a crew-cut was younger than him, perhaps his mid-thirties, who looked as if he was a bodybuilder. He was less-friendly to talk to a group of young American women in the bar.

We were from the wrong country—their country—though, that mattered a lot less than the fact that we weren’t for sale.

Honestly, talking to them felt like a chore. How could any man purchase a desperate woman? Didn’t he know that HE was the problem? That by purchasing her he was just increasing the demand, forcing more and more women into the living hell of having their bodies sold to strangers.

I didn’t know how he could sleep at night. And I tried not to let my judgment of their character leak through my words as I spoke to them.

“So how’d you end up in the Philippines?” I asked with the sweetest smile I could muster, trying to coax an honest answer.

“Well, men are treated terribly and hated in the states. You can’t do anything without someone getting their panties in a wad.”

His buff friend chimed in with a “You got that right.”

The biker continued, “My ex-wife was terrible, and my daughters blame me for the divorce. So I moved to the Philippines so I could be in a place where I could be myself and be accepted.”

“These girls,” he gestures to the girls in their teens and the young woman rubbing his belly. “They accept me for who I am.”

My head spun with responses, but they aren’t accepting you, you are quite literally buying their affections, and what if your daughters worked in a bar like this? I wondered how I could make him see how he was hurting the women here.

As I sat there in silence trying to choose the best response over the pounding music, one of my friends chimed in and asked him something about his family. I couldn’t hear exactly what he or she said over the rush of music, but I wasn’t in the talking mood either so I lingered in the background, lost in thought.

Just a few minutes earlier I had watched a young dancer get groped and assaulted behind me in a booth for around 20 minutes. The man who was assaulting her was severely intoxicated and she walked away without a penny. She stumbled up to the stage, acting like she had just had the time of her life, but her smile couldn’t cover the shame or the rage she felt towards the man.

The smile on my face couldn’t conceal the rage I felt either. I spent the full 20 minutes praying for her while trying to maintain a conversation with, Lucy*, a dancer on the stage. As long as I talked to the woman on the stage, she was less likely to end up like the girl behind me in the booth that I couldn’t help.

Desperation and Coercion: Key Ingredients in Sex Trafficking

Over the past several years, I have talked to dozens of women who have found themselves trapped in these dark, dingy, bars being displayed like cattle. Their stories varied a bit, but they all shared the same theme: desperation.

May* and Mel* were there because a typhoon wiped out their family farm. With 10 other siblings, their parents sent their daughters into the city to find a job and send money back home. With no formal education, their choices were slim. So when an offer to waitress in a restaurant came, they jumped on the opportunity. When they were handed lingerie with a number attached to it and told to dance on a stage, they felt they couldn’t refuse.

Sam* had two children with an abusive alcoholic, working in the bars was the only way she could provide for her children.

Laney* had originally worked as a housekeeper, but was continually raped by her employer. When she ran, the bars seemed like a better option, soon she was indebted to the bars.

Kim’s* family had been prostituting her since she was a child, this was the next logical step to provide for her family.

During every conversation, we would tell them about Wipe Every Tear, a program that could pay their expenses and put them through college. We came with girls who had left the bars and were in school to show that it was possible.

I loved talking to the girls, befriending them and hearing their stories. But I hated the way men looked at women there, whether or not we were on stage. They catcalled loudly to the girls on stage, and occasionally to us.

 

The Objectification of Women Happens Everywhere.

Ladies, many you know what I am talking about. When a man looks at your chest instead of your face. Or when a man makes a slow study of your body before finally making eye contact.

We know because from the time we have hit puberty, no matter where we grew up, we have had men’s eyes linger on our body. We’ve had strangers slap our butts and grab our chests. We have dealt with sexual harassment and glass ceilings in the workplace. We have walked quickly past cat-callers and had a phone in our hands ready to dial the cops if that man got just a little closer. We have walked with our keys in our hands as weapons to the car, and pretended that our feelings weren’t hurt when our guy friends made a sexist joke.

And here, it was the same. Only much worse, and in a much higher concentration. The majority of men were western, but there were Indians and Asians, and Africans too. From my perspective, it seemed like men degrading women was present in every culture.

I’ve been to 49 countries now and no country is immune from it. Women are treated lesser, seen as objects, and commodified everywhere. In some countries, it is taken to the extreme, where women are literally their husband’s property, and in some countries, like ours, it comes in subtle differences the way we are treated in the workplace or how we’re treated in relationships.

Traveling around the world and seeing other women’s oppression has taught me to see my own, and I have found that the two are tied.

The way women are viewed/treated here absolutely affects the way women are treated over there. But more than that, it changes the way women see themselves.

Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere.

When I was in Kenya talking to young women, they came forward questioning the Female Genital Mutilation that had happened to them. They had heard that it doesn’t happen in other cultures and they wanted to know why it was happening to them.

Our culture’s freedom from the practice helped them know that their culture could be free, too.

Similarly, here in the United States when hearing about the maternity leave that other European nations have, or the fact that there have been many women leaders of other nations, it makes me believe that this can happen here too.

It was MLK who said:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

And I have found his words to ring true.

Do you think that the catcalling, sexual harassment and unequal pay only affect women over here? You’re wrong.

Who do you think buys women in Cambodia? Who is paying for the child pornography of the Philippines? Who do you think is not paying a living wage to women overseas?

They are the same people.

There was an article that came out recently that was titled “Who buys a trafficked child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men,” where they interviewed young girls who had been trafficked. And you know what they said about who purchased them—

“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-year-old survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said about the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people in the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”

This belittling, commodification, and exploitation of women is not just a problem over there, it is the same problem here. It just looks different.

Why Fighting Sexism Matters.

I’ve become so frustrated with people who agree that sex trafficking is wrong and they get all fired up to do something, but when I begin to tie it women’s equality they get offended. Don’t they understand that when I am speaking up for equality I am doing it so women aren’t exploited, or limited, or assaulted, or harassed?

I am so tired of feminists being called man-haters, and it’s not an uncommon sentiment as the conversation with the biker seemed to imply. But there must be a way of saying “you’re hurting me,” without the assumption that  I’m saying “I hate you” or “I hate all men”. I don’t want men to feel like they don’t belong, but I do want men and women alike to ask themselves if some of the beliefs they hold hurt women.

Do you make sexist jokes or say things like “you run like a girl”? Do you believe a woman is capable of leading or teaching you? Do you roll your eyes when someone talks about the gender pay gap? Perhaps you think gender issues abroad are a more worthy pursuit than these inequalities in the States.

I worked for a mission organization and encountered sexist language there. When I confronted it, it was eventually changed, but only after I was told I was wrong for bringing it up.

My point is that sexism, large or small, affects nearly every layer of society here in the states and abroad.

Every couple of months I have a man trying to look up my dress, or stare at me, or catcall me. Every few years or so it seems I am groped in public by a stranger. The #metoo movement has shown my experience to be commonplace.

And when I call myself a feminist people think I have turned my back on my faith, when it was my faith that taught me to care for the oppressed. And quite honestly, I believe that the largest oppressed people group on the planet is women.

So here’s my ask, the next time you hear about the #metoo movement or gender pay gap. Don’t roll your eyes, don’t discredit the women who are saying “I am hurting.” Because when you turn your back on them, you’re turning your back on those trafficked halfway around the world too.

Speak up, say something, make a difference in the lives of women, the one sitting next to you, and the one you may never meet on the other side of the globe.