39 See earlier references to Mexico and (n.15), supra.
28
Disrupting religious privilege
Code of conduct for religious institutions, faith communities and faith-based organisations for their work with survivors of forced labour, human trafficking and modern slavery1
Yvonne C. Zimmerman
Introduction
Religion engages people’s deepest convictions about the world and what their places in it should be. It is central to how many people understand themselves and organise their identities. Frequently, people are socialised into a religious identity from birth, and in that sense do not choose their religion any more than they choose their first language or culture of origin. Yet religion is not just inherited. People may change their minds concerning religious belief and practice, including to the point of adopting a new religious identity – sometimes changing many times over the course of a life. The malleability of such a deeply held human value means that religion can become a tool or site of manipulation, coercion and abuse; a recognition that places religion among the human goods worthy of protection. Protection against religious coercion is not the same as discouraging religious change. On the contrary, protecting religious identity, belief and practice recognises that the right of religious change belongs irrevocably to the person experiencing and living that change. Religious identity belongs to the individual, and should not be compelled by another.2
Religion intersects with anti-trafficking activism and advocacy in multiple and complex ways. Most assessments of how religion impacts anti-trafficking work tend to proceed from one of two contradictory ideas about religion. On the one hand, religion is treated as sacrosanct. The religious motivations that inspire people to social action are understood as uniquely authentic, deep-seated and durable expressions of conscience. Here, religious and spiritual grounding is regarded positively as a vital moral resource. For example, religion is treated in this way in Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, Laudito Si: On Care for our Common Home, in which he writes:
I would like from the outset to show how faith convictions can offer Christians, and some other believers as well, ample motivation to care for nature and for the most vulnerable of their brothers and sisters.3
Thus understood, motivations and convictions that are articulated as ‘religious’ are seen as important and intrinsically valuable and, as such, are accorded decency and social respect.
On the other hand, religion is treated as ideology. As ideology, religion is part of a deeply and unselfconsciously held world view or cultural paradigm by means of which people make sense of the way the social system operates, so that existing distributions of power and privilege are rationalised as normal, merited and moral.4 Here, religion and spirituality are regarded sceptically, as tools that serve the status quo – ultimately preserving existing relations of power, even when deployed in the name of an overarching social good like justice. For example, the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right as significant political forces in the US during the late 1970s meant that religious (read: Christian) activism and advocacy on social and economic issues came to be virtually synonymous with support for conservative perspectives and goals. Simultaneously, politically conservative perspectives and agendas were articulated and defended by means of conservative Christian theological arguments. This happened so frequently and repetitively that the compatibility of Christian theology with politically conservative stances was taken as a foregone conclusion. Even when no theological argument was offered, the presumption was that conservative equals Christian.5 Religious motivations thus came to be seem as myopic and inherently partisan.
Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein and religious studies scholar Janet Jakobsen challenge the idea that the impact of religious influence on anti-trafficking activism and advocacy has been uniformly positive or negative. Some of the effects of religious influence on anti-trafficking politics and advocacy that they identify include the rescue of some persons from trafficking relationships, some of whom express genuine gratitude for these groups’ concern and efforts on their behalf and, more generally, the way that evangelical Christian engagement with the issue of human trafficking has contributed to the elevation of this issue to greater social, political and cultural prominence. Negative impacts include the financial crises experienced by many peer-based sex worker projects that, despite intense pressure and outright de-funding, have refused to repudiate sex work and prostitution as valid ways for people to earn a living; the funnelling of formerly trafficked persons who are able to gain official certification as victims of human trafficking into minimum wage jobs that have little or no possibility of advancement – thereby creating a situation of financial precarity that increases the likelihood that they will accept risky employment opportunities in which they are again vulnerable to exploitation and abuse as a strategy to earn enough money to meet their needs; expanded initiatives to criminalise domestic sex workers and other participants who work consensually in the street-based sexual economy; and the arrest and subsequent deportation of migrant sex workers, documented and undocumented alike, who are apprehended by the police in anti-trafficking raids, prostitution stings or even in the name of enforcing immigration law.6 Given this range, Bernstein and Jakobsen characterise the effects of religious influence in anti-trafficking politics and advocacy as ‘broad and often contradictory’, because at the same time that religion is a vital human good worth protecting, its social effects vary considerably.7
While religion and religious motivations empower many anti-trafficking activists and advocates, the effect on, and for, formerly trafficked persons8 is more ambivalent: sometimes empowering, sometimes alienating. This chapter addresses how to prevent the religious motivations and convictions that many anti-trafficking activists, advocates and service providers hold as so essential to their work with trafficked and formerly trafficked persons from becoming sources of alienation and disempowerment for the individuals they aim to serve. The first section discusses the concept of religious privilege and explores how it operates in the anti-trafficking movement. The second section presents a Code of Conduct for Religious Institutions, Faith Communities, and Faith-Based Organizations for Their Work with Survivors of Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery (hereafter, Code of Conduct). The Code of Conduct is intended as a tool of accountability for service providers, to assist them in checking the religious privilege they might otherwise unwittingly assume in their work with persons who have been trafficked. Next, anticipating concern that the Code of Conduct unnecessarily inhibits anti-trafficking activists’ and advocates’ religious expression, the third section contextualises the Code of Conduct by situating it within the history of religious anti-trafficking activism and advocacy in the US. Religion is as much a potential site or source of coercion and manipulation as it is a source of empowerment and liberation; therefore, careful attention, in the context of helping relationships, to the relations of power inherent to religion, and that religion occasions, is morally imperative.
Religious privilege
Privilege refers to “unquestioned assumptions and unasked questions of things that ‘everyone knows’ and upon which ‘everyone’ is presumed to agree”.9 Privilege denotes the ability to count on the benefits that accompany being in the norm or categorised as belonging to the dominant group. Religious studies scholar Caryn Riswold further describes privilege as “unearned tools and special provisions that individuals can count on using, and about which they are never meant to be aware”.10 Typically, privilege operates below the level of conscious intent: a person with privilege does not need to intentionally try to access the advantages their privilege affords in order to benefit from it; rather, these benefits appear to accumulate to them automatically, as if by natural entitlement. Thus, a deceptive aspect of privilege for those who have it is that privilege usually does not feel special or powerful to its holders – it does not feel like privilege: to a person with privil
ege, privilege feels like normal.
Religious privilege refers to the advantages that accompany a religious identity or claiming a religious affiliation. An example of religious privilege is how a religious or spiritual grounding tends to be regarded positively as a vital resource for anti-trafficking activists, advocates and service providers. When religious reasons are invoked for objection to human trafficking, in many cases those reasons are automatically accorded legitimacy and moral status – even when they are never fully explained. For instance, Question: ‘Why do you oppose human trafficking?’ Answer: ‘I oppose human trafficking because I am a Christian’.11 The ability to invoke religion, whether in terms of belief or identity (for instance, as a Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, etc.), as a widely recognised and de facto legitimate explanation of why one opposes human trafficking, is an example of religious privilege. Similarly, the ability, in some situations, to assume that claiming a religious identity will be seen as an asset to the fight against trafficking also illustrates religious privilege.
In the context of the US and its anti-trafficking initiatives, a further dimension of religious privilege is Christian privilege.12 Tricia Seifert defines Christian privilege as “the conscious and subconscious advantages often afforded the Christian faith” in American institutional and public life.13 Despite the fact that those who identify as Christian are declining as a percentage of the US population (and numerically), Christianity remains the religious norm in US-American institutions.14 Jakobsen and Pellegrini argue that American cultural sensibilities presuppose religious ideas and, in particular, religious ideas that are rooted in Protestant Christianity:
We think it’s important for Americans to come to terms with the fact that Christianity, and often conservative Christianity, functions as the yardstick and measure of what counts as ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ in America. To be traditionally American is to be Christian in a certain way.15
Further, to the extent that American identity entails being “Christian in a certain way”, they continue: “Part of our critique of American secularism, then, is that it is not really secular”.16 In the US, not only is Christianity the religious and spiritual norm (such that religious privilege is specifically Christian privilege), but even ostensibly secular politics is infused with, and presumes, Christianity.
Christian privilege manifests as the ability of those who are (or are perceived to be) Christian to do and get away with things that those who are not (or are perceived not to be) Christian could not. Hence, the ability to wear Christian religious symbols without being profiled as a terrorist or religious extremist, or even as necessarily especially religious; being able to take for granted that one’s workplace calendar will respect Christian religious holidays and Sabbath; and the ability to invoke one’s religious identity as a Christian as a means to escape punishment for law-breaking and/or criminal activity, are all examples of Christian privilege.17 In the context of US anti-trafficking politics, Christian privilege includes the general presumption that Christianity (as a religion) opposes human trafficking, and that individual Christians similarly object to it.18 The ability to assume that one’s religious identity and commitments as a Christian will be seen as an asset to anti-trafficking work is a further instance of Christian privilege.
The ways that Christian ideas about appropriate gender and sexuality permeate the US’s anti-trafficking polices is another example of Christian privilege.19 The enduring power of Christian ideals of sexual propriety are nowhere more evident than in how prostitution has become the anti-trafficking movement’s defining issue over the past 15 years. Further, hand-in-hand with concern about prostitution and commercial sex is the frequency with which American evangelical Christians and others identify the theological category of sin as the root cause of THB.20 Notable here is the long history of the use of the concept of sin, and especially of sexual sin, as a tool to discipline and condemn sexually transgressive women.21 US anti-trafficking politics and policies that centre on prostitution as the paradigmatic form of human trafficking are ideologically reinforced by a Christian concept of sexual sin, and by the concomitant desire to save, reform and/or discipline sexually transgressive women. Finally, Christian privilege also permits individuals or organisations to invoke a Christian identity as a means to escape accountability for harm their actions cause to people they have tried to help.
To reiterate, a key aspect of privilege is that it can function without any conscious intent and awareness, as if the advantages it confers are entitlements. Christian privilege, therefore, is not just unearned, but also often is unseen by those who have it. Riswold explains that because privilege is invisible, it affords advantages “that holders of it can actively deny existing, yet count on every day”.22 In the anti-trafficking movement, then, Christian privilege need not manifest only as overt Christian triumphalism and, in fact, usually takes the more subtle form of a presumption on the part of Christians that everyone else thinks and sees the world – or ought to – like they do.23
The Code of Conduct
Following the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Code of Conduct for NGO disaster response work as a model for conveying clear standards to which all humanitarian workers should adhere, Claude d’Estree and this writer drafted the Code of Conduct for Religious Institutions, Faith Communities, and Faith-Based Organizations for Their Work with Survivors of Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery in an effort to articulate a set of standards concerning the role of religion in anti-trafficking work and service provision.24 Working from the assumption that advocates and service providers wish to avoid any semblance of manipulating, coercing or otherwise compelling persons who have experienced trafficking, the primary purpose of the Code of Conduct is to stop and prevent dynamics of religious privilege as they play out in relationships between service providers and the trafficked and formerly trafficked persons they serve.25 In this way, the Code of Conduct is consistent with victim-centred approaches to anti-trafficking service provision that place the needs, desires and perspectives of trafficked and formerly trafficked persons at the moral and practical centre of services. The Code articulates standards to which formerly trafficked persons have the right to expect that those who seek to assist them will adhere.
Code of Conduct for Religious Institutions, Faith Communities, and Faith-Based Organizations for Their Work with Survivors of Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery26
Religious education and activities shall not be a compulsory aspect of the services provided to survivors of forced labour and human trafficking.
Conversations about religion and spirituality must always be initiated by trafficking survivors, not by anti-trafficking advocates or workers.
Anti-trafficking advocates and workers must respect the religious backgrounds of their clients, even when these backgrounds are different than their own.
Anti-trafficking advocates and workers will provide religious literature, training, and instruction only when this is solicited by the trafficking survivor. These may never be offered by the organisation providing primary services.
Pastoral counselling, religious based therapies, and spiritual direction are not a substitute for standard therapeutic models, and should only be offered at the request of the trafficking survivor. Again, these may never be offered by the organisation providing primary services.
In Regulating Religion: Case Studies from Around the Globe, Richardson highlights the regulation of religious groups in contemporary societies as a form of social control.27 Social control can be exerted through the government by means of law and policy but, as Richardson points out, “may also take the form of self-monitoring by religious groups”.28 The Code of Conduct is intended to be voluntary: a form of religious groups’ self-monitoring. As such, it is proposed as a tool for religious and faith-based groups, organisations and even individual service providers, to hold themselves accountable to broadly held standards of service provision to trafficked and former
ly trafficked persons as concerns religious, theological and spiritual matters.
In context: religious anti-trafficking activism and advocacy in the US
Contemporary efforts to end human trafficking commonly make reference to the eighteenth–nineteenth century movement to abolish chattel slavery as an inspirational touchstone. The way that the Christian convictions of William Wilberforce, William and Catherine Booth and others informed their opposition to slavery is held up as a model for current anti-trafficking activists.29 Another social movement, the 1990s religious freedom movement, has shaped much US-based religious activism and advocacy on human trafficking at least as significantly. Situating religious anti-trafficking activism and advocacy in relation to this prior social movement illuminates the significance that many American evangelical Christian anti-trafficking organ-isations and programmes place on providing services that are explicitly religious and, in turn, raises questions about the relations of power that attend ‘religion’ in anti-trafficking work and activism.
The passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act marked the crowning achievement of the 1990s religious freedom movement. Signed into law on 27 October 1998 by President Clinton, this legislation made religious freedom an official component of US foreign policy, and it committed the US to a stance of advocacy on behalf of individuals in foreign countries experiencing persecution on account of religion.30 The conception of religious freedom in this legislation includes as constitutive dimensions: belief,31 thought,32 conscience33 and practice.34 The application of religious freedom is not restricted to certain religions, and the only mention of any specific religious groups highlights previous Congressional actions concerning religious freedom: a resolution adopted by the House of Representatives “concerning the emancipation of the Iranian Baha’i community”;35 and two others adopted by the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively, that denounce “persecution of Christians worldwide”.36
Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking Page 72
