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Human retail: Commercial exploitation and the everyday
by Elizabeth Hunter

Above the gum, mints, and candy bars at the grocery checkout, two rows of glossy women’s magazines caught my eye. Alongside the cover-model cleavage were headlines like “How to blow his mind,” “99 sex facts,” and “outfits your man will love.” All that these magazines wanted to sell me, it seemed, were ways to attract attention from men.

A quiz to determine one’s “type of sexiness” asked: What holiday gift would you give your guy? The three possible answers: “tasteful nude photos” of yourself, a watch, or golf lessons.

A teenage girl might actually think the first option was a smart, sophisticated idea. But doing something like that could quickly put her in a terrible situation. The boyfriend she gives the photos to can quickly become an angry ex-boyfriend, and suddenly, those photos are going around to everyone in her high school as well as most of her town, or plaguing her for years to come on the Internet. And that’s sexual exploitation.

I recently attended a conference on commercial sexual exploitation sponsored by several Lutheran groups from the United States and Canada.

There I met an attractive, funny woman with whom I had many things in common. But there was one experience we didn’t share: Joy had been raped as a child and prostituted for more than 20 years. She’d been told this was her power as a woman. She’d also been rejected time and time again by well-meaning church people like me.

Now, together, we listened to the voices of prostituted women and children from around the world as well as the voices of the men and women who had helped them to survive. About 50 of us worshiped, sang, and cried together, and networked about what church people can do to prevent and confront commercial sexual exploitation. As church members, as consumers, as children of God, our hearts were convicted.

Instead of telling women and girls — and increasingly boys —that their power is in their sexuality, what if magazine editors provided different content? Like this:

Seven things you should know about commercial sexual exploitation:

1. What it is.
Commercial sexual exploitation is one of the most lucrative criminal activities in the world. It is a multi-billion dollar business that includes prostitution, phone sex, pornography, and nude photos posted on the Internet.

2. Why it’s not a choice.
Joy told me that people don’t choose to be prostituted. She was raped at 15, then prostituted or trafficked for more than 20 years by pimps and men who claimed to love her.

Walking away wasn’t easy, she said. “You lose your spirit and your will. You can’t trust anyone. Cops are customers too, and once you’re labeled, it’s hard to get out.”

Joy now works with women and girls who are prostituted and men who are ordered by the courts to attend “john school.” She tells men who have used prostitutes that it is a myth that women choose this lifestyle. Their lack of choice turns into a cycle of arrests, poor education, and addiction. We should “stop saying prostitutes,” she said. “This is being done to them. They’re being prostituted.”

3. How to keep children away from sexual predators on the Internet.
Children and teens need rules, clear communication, and supervision when they use the Internet.

Chelsea Snarr of Canada helps children, parents, and organizations know how to avoid the pitfalls of the Internet.
One in four children online have had someone they don’t know ask to meet them in person, Snarr said. Yet most children don’t think of an Internet friend as a stranger, and predators use the pretense of friendship to manipulate them. Snarr said that smart kids who would be suspicious of an encounter in person are often taken in online, where there’s no body language or other clues to suggest that someone is lying.

4. It can happen to anyone.
Perhaps you can look back on your own life, or the life of someone you know, and think of at least one incident that could have turned out badly.

When I was in high school, adult men would approach me and my friends in malls, on the street, and outside school trying to interest us in making money by modeling. Though we were curious, we were cautious enough not to act on their invitations, having heard that this was how some strip clubs, porn producers, and so forth hired workers. One deeply guarded secret added to our unease: One of us had been molested by a neighbor when we were pre-teens. So we trusted no one outside of ourselves and our family.

5. You don’t have to be involved in prostitution or pornography to contribute to the problem. You just have to belong to our society.

I now know that I’ve contributed to the problem:

* By not providing a forum for healthy messages about sexuality to the young people growing up around me.

* When I can, but don’t, communicate to others what I’ve learned about commercial sexual exploitation.

* If I don’t care that rising property values in my neighborhood are eliminating affordable housing, which leads people living on the edge to exploit themselves to pay their rent.

* If I don’t write my congressperson to say I’m concerned about making sure that immigrants sold into sexual bondage outside or within the United States are treated fairly by our legal system.

6. Helping sexually exploited people can be an uncomfortable experience.
What does it mean to be the kingdom of God and welcome people who are drunk, high, prostituted, or otherwise sexually exploited?

To be brutally honest, I don’t do this so well. It was one thing to sit and talk with Joy, who is now a survivor. It’s another thing to sit down and talk with a woman who is currently being beaten with pipes, thrown from moving cars, and eating out of trash cans. But this was where Joy once was. Yet the church didn’t help her.

Joy told me: “More than once, I went to churches for help but I didn’t find refuge. I got judged because of how I looked.”

7. We are all called by God to help.
Ruth Wright, a United Church of Christ pastor in Vancouver, B.C., told us about her congregation, which offers people who are homeless and prostituted healthy food, clothing, a safe place to sleep, a mailing address, worship services, counseling and something more rare — respect. Wright reminded us to see every person as a fine, bright, intelligent person of worth, created by God.

So what should you do?
Here are four things to consider:

* Pray for people who are homeless or living in poverty--they are the ones most likely to be victims of sexual exploitation.

* Ask your elected representatives to pass legislation that punishes traffickers and helps people living in poverty avoid sexual exploitation.

* Talk with young people from an early age about what makes a friendship healthy, so that they are equipped to evaluate whether they’re being manipulated.

* Be aware of how you may be seen as welcoming or unwelcoming. Be honest about your own shortcomings, as well as everyone's true beauty and worth as a child of God.
Remember that everyone is called to help, but you can’t do everything. What specifically can you do?

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Faith reflections
by Mary Streufert

But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine [wife], and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her, and abused her all through the night until the morning. Judges 19:25a

I heard the story of a former strip club manager once. He said that to find strippers for the club, and to keep them working, he would prey on their vulnerability and exercise control over them through drugs, deception, and power plays. Now years past his strip club work, he was honest in saying that young women were deceived into selling their bodies for the profit of a handful of men and the pleasure of many. The club manager was, in reality, once a manager of “human retail.”

In the story usually called “The Levite’s Concubine” in Judges 19, an unnamed woman runs away from her Levite husband and back to her father’s household. (Read Judges, chapters 19-21.)

Although we are not told why she runs away, the climax of the story, in which she is used by her husband as “human retail” for his own protection, may give us some indication.
Four months after she has fled, her husband leaves his home town and seeks her out at her father’s house. In a scene that I’ve heard described as “excessive male bonding,” the woman’s father not only receives the husband gladly, he encourages him to stay for five days of feasting and drinking. We are not told what the woman was doing during this time or what she may have been feeling.

When the husband, wife, and a servant travel back home, they spend an evening in Gibeah, where they are taken in by an elderly man from their own land. The husband is threatened: The men of the city want to rape him. The elderly host resists the townspeople and offers instead his own daughter and the man’s wife: “Ravish them and do whatever you want to them; but against this man do not do such a vile thing” (19:24b).

His goal is to protect the husband.

The band of men takes no heed of the host, so the Levite takes charge and uses his own wife as “human retail” to pay the way for his own safety. He throws her out the door, over the threshold of safety, and into the mob of violence-seeking men. She is gang-raped all night long.

At dawn, the men release her. Where should she go? She is an outsider in the land of Gibeah and has been violated and abused by the men there. Her only possible avenue of safety is the very house that had betrayed her. In essence, she had been sold for the safety of the others who had slept in the elderly man’s house.

After making her way back to the elderly man’s house, she falls on the threshold — the horizontal line between life and death for her.

Judges 19 reveals a terrible scene with a horrifying outcome. We discover that the unnamed woman’s relationships are defined by betrayal for the good of the other party. For example, for whatever reason the woman had fled her marriage, it apparently makes no difference to her father, who dines and drinks with her Levite husband when he comes to reclaim her.

Having a daughter married off was more profitable than having her at home, a dependent in the paternal household. The elderly host also betrays the Levite’s wife, for he is quick to offer her in addition to his own virgin daughter as satisfaction for the mob’s violent desires. Most egregiously, her husband betrays her for his own safety. He could do this because as the husband, he had control over her. In the ancient structure of marriage, the wife was dependent on her husband and understood to be his possession.

The writer of Judges casts his critical lens on the situation in the closing verse: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes” (21:25). The king, the link between Israel and God, was God’s representative on earth. He was supposed to help Israel follow God’s way. The problem was that people were taking their own counsel, resulting in chaos through the misuse of power and the maltreatment of the vulnerable.

These same factors are at play in modern-day forms of commercial sexual exploitation, in which female sexuality is usually what's sold as “human retail.” Examples of human retail are both extreme and subtle, but they both deserve our critical eye and our prophetic resistance. Human trafficking for sexual slavery is an extreme form of human retail in which women, girls, and boys are tricked into or captured for sex with customers.

This happens both in malls in the United States and in countries far away.

The objectification of female bodies, minds, and spirits is a subtle form of human retail. It can be so insidious that we barely notice it. Here are two recent examples. KMart sold a white shirt with black cartoon graphics depicting a woman upset with a man. The man solves the “problem” by pushing the woman to the ground in the cartoon frame. The caption reads, “Problem solved.”

Despite initial protests, KMart decided to continue to sell the shirts. Perhaps a more familiar example is an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt that reads across the chest, “If you have these, who needs . . . ?” Apparently, a woman’s breasts are more important than her ability to think.

Both these shirts promulgate the idea that a woman’s body and mind are for the use of others. This is objectification. And objectification of female bodies allows us to see commercial sexual exploitation as normal. Women are bought and sold in many different ways, every day, around the world, including where you live.
Taking a bald look at Judges 19 in relationship to contemporary commercial sexual exploitation is disturbing. But as Christians, we need to retell and study such stories of biblical violence if we are going to engage in the kind of self-criticism that is necessary for transformation and greater faithfulness to God. And our critique must be directed not only to ourselves but also to our society and our churches, for without critical reflection, we may continue to live unaware of our own practices of “human retail.”

Mary Streufert is the director for justice for women, ELCA.

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