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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 26, 2012
Human trafficking
Suppose, for a moment, that the institution of slavery had survived various 18th-and 19th-century challenges. The practice had continued to be frowned upon by religious people, and governments had intervened, but not to end the trade, only criminalize some aspects of it. In particular, the slaves had to enter into their contracts of bondage voluntarily; and there were various locations at which they could not work.This may seem a ridiculous proposition, but only because we suffer from anachronism. Most of us take our own current attitudes for granted when judging the past, thanks to a failure to teach history seriously. Most will not even try to mentally inhabit the past and thus learn how plausible much different attitudes were in another era; let alone try to think forward from there, to some alternative present. Yet this what I'm asking my reader to do. So: we have slavery, but we also have laws to limit the trade, and keep it, as much as possible, out of view of "respectable" people. We accept, without much thought, that some people become slaves because it's their way to keep food on the table. There may be others who are actually attracted to slavery as a way of life or who get a thrill from it - at first. Humans are strange creatures, and some actually enjoy being tied up and whipped. Libertarians may argue that, if that's your thing, and the arrangement is voluntary, no law should stand in your way. Slavery is dangerous work. Your own body is bought and sold, for use by another, and you cannot know what master you will get. There are laws, of course, preventing any master from harming you, physically. If some psychopath has been buying slaves, for the purpose of murdering them, he may certainly be prosecuted. But then, as some pundits argue, there are all kinds of dangerous jobs in our society: it goes with the trade, and you sold yourself in. "Live with it." One might even imagine a court decision which, while acknowledging this fact, points out that the very restrictions placed on the slave trade increase the dangers to which slaves are exposed. Imagine, if you can, a case brought by three eccentric slaves, who make an entertaining spectacle in the courtroom. The judge, at their behest, strikes down laws restricting the slave trade in Ontario, arguing that while "respectable" people may be appalled to have the slave trade made more visible, the safety of the slaves themselves must be the priority. People who have lived outside a slave culture have great difficulty imagining what slavery involves. Those unacquainted with prostitution may likewise entertain romantic nonsense about the lives of prostitutes. With our "modern" attitudes, we imagine that when the slaves were freed, they just walked. In reality, many slaves dreaded freedom, for the world beyond their plantation was full of frightening unknowns, and how were they now going to feed themselves? A very large part of the work of freeing slaves consisted of a Christian missionary effort, to equip former slaves with the material, intellectual, and spiritual resources to face freedom - in a world prejudiced against former slaves. We fail to realize, today, that this effort was every bit as important as the legal campaign. The trafficking in human beings is, according to Christian teaching at least, a real evil. That is why the institution of slavery, on which the whole economy of the ancient pagan world depended, began fading away in the Christian "Dark Ages." It is why, when the institution revived after the Middle Ages, despite constant condemnation from places such as Rome, the campaign to put an end to the slave trade was led by "fanatical" Christians. Human trafficking nevertheless survives today, even in Canada, at its most virulent in the sex trade. True, people may enter the trade voluntarily, for the money or whatever reason, but many are effectively sold into it, imported from abroad. The relationship between a prostitute and a pimp is anyway different in kind from other commercial relations, for the very reason that human bodies are for sale. This, at least to a Christian view, is an outrage to human dignity and to God. We have a trace of this view, surviving through feminism, in the shame that still attaches to being a "john." It was Justice Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court who, on the grounds of work safety, struck down provisions of our prostitution laws, at the behest of three eccentric sex workers, in a memorable decision 17 months ago. Her ruling is stayed pending a decision from the Ontario Court of Appeal, coming perhaps this spring. Pressure is meanwhile on the federal government to rewrite Canada's prostitution laws, or else abandon them. And I noticed this week, that the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has taken the leading position in lobbying the government to take effective prudential action against this human trafficking. It's those "fanatical" Christians again! Relatively free of enslavement themselves, to contemporary attitudes and fashions, they think that prostitution, like slavery, is absolutely wrong. Therefore we should do what we can to eliminate it. Good luck to them, in getting anyone to listen. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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