There is a brewing controversy, in the blogosphere at least, about the cover story from this week's New York Times Magazine, "The Girls Next Door," describing the sexual slavery industry in the U.S. The author of the article, Peter Landesman, has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air and CNN's American Morning.
The day after the Times Magazine story ran, Jack Shafer published an article at Slate questioning the veracity of some of Landesman's claims and the reliability of one of Landeman's main sources. In a column yesterday, Shafer continued his investigation of Landesman.
A few bloggers have commented on the original story and subsequent challenges to it, most notably Ampersand and Radosh. It's also worth reading the comments by Echidne of the Snakes on Amp's post (comments don't have individual links; scroll down).
I'm of (at least) two minds. On the one hand, why are people so quick to question stories about violence against women? As Echidne says, "I don't care if the article in the NYT was yellow journalism or not. That one picture of the men standing around looking at the thirteen or fourteen year old was enough for me. It kept me up all night. Nobody should have to do that and certainly not at that age. However common or rare sex slavery might be, it definitely exists."
On the other hand, the women, girls, and boys suffering such violence are done a disservice if their plight isn't well-reported and factually described. Irresponsible reporting can lead to easy dismissal of the reality of violence. Shafer is careful to say that he doesn't doubt the reality of sexual slavery in the U.S. Rather, he thinks that Landesman's story is poor journalism. Such journalism, however well-intended, ultimately hurts those it was intended to help, by making it easier for people to disbelieve claims about sexual slavery and other kinds of violence against women.
This reminds me of the 1990s controversies over "false memory syndrome" and books like The Courage to Heal. I knew feminist therapists who believed with full conviction that many women suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and hence such abuse was more prevalent than imagined. At the same time, I was convinced by some of the psychological literature which sought to debunk these "recovered memories" by demonstrating the unreliability of memory and the power of suggestion. That is not to say that children aren't abused, nor that some women and men don't suppress memories of childhood abuse. However, I'm fairly convinced that in their zeal to uncover abuse, some therapists misled and even harmed their clients by raising the possibility of sexual abuse as a reason for a client's current difficulties.
Maybe I'm wrong. In the cases of sexual slavery and sexual abuse, I feel like I don't have firm footing, like I don't know who to believe or even how to go about deciding who to believe. I heard Landesman's Fresh Air interview, and he was kind, passionate, and convincing. Yet I appreciate Shafer's healthy skepticism, too.
(I do know that making fun of others' misery is disgusting.)
Update: Not incidentally, philosopher Karen Jones's work on the epistemic value of trust is incredibly useful in thinking about who to believe and why.
Update 2: Today (1/29/04) Slate published a statement by Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, and Shafer has responded.
I think it's important to note that child sexual abuse and sexual slavery occupy a very specific cultural space. I've heard this space refered to as social or moral panic. Child sexual abuse, while very real, is a concept heavily influenced by its location in the cultural imagination of the United States. Along with drugs, communism, terrorism and the witch hunts of old, child sexual abuse causes a powerful fear among many. There is little room for any meaningful discussion in public discourse for fear of being to closely associated with such a no-no. I believe that this dynamic hampers any good look into the what's truly going on with child sexual abuse.
Posted by: navigatordave at January 28, 2004 02:57 PMSo the moral panic around sexual abuse functions to obscure the truth? (That is, the panic reinforces rather than challenges the status quo.)
Posted by: Cleis at January 28, 2004 03:45 PMI think that the cultural fantansies of child sexual abuse create a panic that obscures the banal reality of child sexual abuse, thereby promoting child sexual abuse. That is, because child sexual abuse or sexual slavery is such a taboo subject, people get confused when they start thinking about how to deal with it. The film, "Capturing the Friedmans" is a great example of that. The father was a pedophile, but the government(I suspect) convicted him (mostly)for acts that he did not commit. He died but not all pedophiles die in prison. What this means is that pedophiles are not generally seen as human beings with a problem but monsters that must be destroyed. Ultimately, this stops us from identifying pedophiles (Catholic priests, for instance) because we expect monsters, not human beings. And this stops us from effectively treating many pedophiles, thus ending the problem. This is not to mention the fact that children are regularly sexualized.
Posted by: navigatordave at January 28, 2004 04:45 PMIs there any relationship between childhood sexual abuse and later fear of snakes?
Posted by: Donna at February 5, 2004 07:13 PMThanks for posting an article about the harrowing article and the controversy surrounding it. I agree with you that are lots of reasons to be unhappy and a bit off-put about Landesman's article--the way in which sensational scenes are set up only to be glided away from without any follow-up on what happened, whether the police did anything, whether they heard but refused to do anything, whether women and girls escaped, etc. There's also his heavy reliance on evangelical Christian groups--there is only one feminist source cited that I can recall (Laura Lederer), and she's not even identified as a feminist source. Isn't there a very problematic edge to this, and the way it plays out in the story? I mean, if Gary Haugen's work saves just one woman from sexual slavery, then thank God for it, but it often seems that Haugen and his comrades are more interested in "saving" women from sin than they are with seriously challenging the system of pimping **as such**, and shift the discourse away from the demand side--there's a lot of talk about the elaborate organization and methods of terror and control exerted by pimps, but very little sustained discussion of the red-blooded, white-faced, horrifyingly banal American businessmen who fund and sustain the whole operation because of their apparent opinion that being born with a penis gives them the right to sexual access to women's and girls' bodies, no mater what.
So I definitely agree that some criticism and skepticism of the story is needed. But I also have to agree that what has been directed at it so far is very worrying. I think I might go a lot further--Shafer's criticism, in particular, strikes me as anything but healthy. As you say, he seems awfully ready to question accounts of violence against women. The most stomach turning moment is in his recent posts (such as "Enslaved To His Sources") in which Shafer launches assaults on the reliability of survivors. We are asked to throw out "Andrea's" testimony wholesale, for example, because she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder--thus using the horrible emotional suffering that being SEXUALLY TORTURED HER WHOLE LIFE has left her with as an excuse to write off her testimony and pretend that nothing happened. This sort of wholesale discount of survivor testimony, and the constant refrain of murky speculations about what seems "plausible" to Shafer based on little more than his personal incredulity at the scope of the problem. is eerily reminiscent of Katie Roiphie's assault on the feminist movement against date rape in THE MORNING AFTER... and, to be rather blunt about it, it's also sickeningly reminiscent of the cognitive techniques of Holocaust denial. (Having fulfilled Godwin's Law, I may have brought this post effectively to an end; but let me press on about it.)
This is part of the reason that I'm very encouraged to see this post and to read the other commentary linked from it. What we need is some solid feminist analysis and commentary about this story. Thanks, and I hope that this important discussion will continue.
Plainfield, NJ, also has some misgivings about Landesman's sex slavery story. We find the following discrepancies--address [non-existent] of the bordello, color of the house, description of the neighborhood, and--like Vista, CA, an incomplete telling of the story of the local police work.
--you can check them out on my blog at--
http://plainfield-times.blogspot.com/
where you can read about it from a Plainfield point of view, as well as find links to other comment.
Did you know Bush treats it only as an "international" problem? Where is the funding for training for our police, building an adequate database of traffickers, and meaningful outreach programs for the victims?
Dan Damon (home)
Public Information Officer
City of Plainfield (NJ)
(908) 226-4905 office