“Human Trafficking Is Modern Day Slavery”: Rev. Margaret Fowler, Sex Work and Trafficking

Abstract

The late Rev. Margaret Fowler, United Church Minister, was a key supporter of LGBTQ rights and a vocal advocate against human trafficking in Jamaica. As the founder of the Theodora Project, Rev. Fowler served many persons coerced into sex work or subject to sexual exploitation. She argued that human trafficking is a complex connection of economy, gender, social dynamics, law, and foreign relations. She called for the Church to be involved in anti-trafficking work as to do nothing risks “the very real possibility of Jamaica becoming another major area of sex tourism”. As we celebrate her life and ministry, we are given the opportunity to carefully excavate her perspective on the nexus among trafficking, slavery, and sex work. It does appear that her discourse follows the traditional Church line, which conflates slavery, trafficking and sex work in a fashion that views sex work as wholly coerced. In exploring the arguments that validated her important ministry in Negril, this chapter centres sex positive approaches to sex work and questions the slavery and exploitation framing that is normal in Christian discourse.

1. Introduction

Sex work, human trafficking and sex trafficking are very emotive subjects that touch on core beliefs about sexuality, morality, justice, gender, and human rights. Christians have been a vocal group on all three matters; these matters are generally viewed in strongly moral terms as sinful and abhorrent, and are deeply intertwined. The expectation, therefore, is that Christian advocates condemn sex work and believe that women who are trafficked are trafficked for forced sexual slavery; sex trafficking is seen erroneously as the main form of this “modern day slavery” (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014). Indeed, the late Rev. Dr Margaret Fowler (d. 2020), United Church Minister and trained social worker, was one such; she was a key supporter of LGBTQ rights (Brown 2017) and a vocal advocate against human trafficking in Jamaica (Fowler 2012). As the founder of the Theodora Project, Rev. Fowler served many persons coerced into sex work or subjected to sexual exploitation. While not a prolific writer about sex work and sex trafficking, her perspectives can be gleaned from a few sources in which she discussed sex work and sex trafficking in the context of her significant activism and direct action in awareness raising, national service, and church mobilisation. Being a clergy woman, the church was oftentimes the focus of her advocacy and activism. She argued that human trafficking was a complex connection of economy, gender, social dynamics, law, and foreign relations (Fowler 2012). She called for the Church to be involved in anti-trafficking work as to do nothing risked “the very real possibility of Jamaica becoming another major area of sex tourism” (2012, no page). She outlined a seven-step process by which individual churches may get involved and break the silence on human trafficking and the sex trade, as detailed below.

In celebrating her life and ministry, we examined her perspective on the nexus among trafficking, slavery, and sex work. Her discourse traversed the familiar terrain where advocates against human trafficking from often-times differing ideological spaces—feminists, evangelical Christians, human rights activists, and progressive Christians—conflated slavery, trafficking, and sex work in a fashion that viewed sex work as wholly coerced and neglected the voices of marginalised groups, including sex workers, migrants, male sex workers, and LGBTQ persons. Grant (2018) described this coalition as “strange bedfellows”, coming together despite wide ideological, political, and theological differences. In exploring the arguments that validated Fowler’s important ministry in Negril, Jamaica, this chapter centred sex positive approaches to sex work and questioned the slavery and exploitation framing that is normal in much Christian discourse. It made clear that the Christian perspective on sex work is by no means monolithic. Not all Christian concern with human trafficking turned on sex trafficking or with sex work (Zimmerman 2011; Integral Human Development 2019).

2. Methodology

After an introduction to Rev Fowler and her Theodora Ministry, this discussion drew on her corpus on sex trafficking and sex work—an online article in ecclesio.com (2012), a PhD thesis (2009), and a report given at the Council for World Mission (CWM) Global Consultation on Combatting Human Trafficking (2009)—to appraise her perspective. Given the lack of attention to the experiences of sex workers generally, and Jamaican sex workers in particular, in the human trafficking and sex trafficking discourse, the chapter attempted to give their voices a hearing while presenting countervailing arguments to Fowler’s perspective. Sex work in Jamaica is a clandestine activity; so, in seeking out the experiences of these persons, first person reports from the Jamaican media were an important source. Throughout, the postcolonial Jamaican context, which is significantly shaped by Christian approaches (Perkins and Lewis 2022), was foregrounded. The ambiguities of the sex tourism industry as a (neo)colonial enterprise, which Fowler did not countenance, were also contemplated.

As noted previously, Fowler’s description of human trafficking as “modern day slavery” was by no means unique. Proponents of this description are as varied as legal scholars (Lehti and Aromaa 2006; Vlachová 2005), the Roman Catholic Church, which described trafficking as “the Slavery of our age” (Scheper-Hughes 2015), and the United Nations. Fowler’s argument was seated in what George et al. (2010) described as the “Neo-Abolitionist View”, which viewed sex trafficking and prostitution as interchangeable, making the issue of consent irrelevant. Neo-abolitionists, among whom were many Christians, argued that the sex industry objectified and oppressed women and should therefore be eliminated. Both sex trafficking and sex work were seen as parts of a system which makes violence against women and girls profitable; predators were rewarded sexually and financially from the exploitation of women. Christians in particular were concerned with the morality of sex outside of the context of a monogamous, heterosexual union; this was seen as immoral and an afront to the dignity of human beings created in the image of God (Grant 2018; Brock and Thistlethwaite 1996). Sex work, coerced or uncoerced, was therefore especially harmful and must be eradicated.

This perspective was counterbalanced by the perspectives of scholars such as Campbell and Zimmerman (2014), Zimmerman (2011), and Kempadoo (2020, 2017, 2016a, 2016b, 2015, 2009, 2007, 2001a, 2001b), for whom the issue of consent was central. Campbell and Zimmerman (2014) were clear that human trafficking was abhorrent and rejected efforts to portray commercial sexual exploitation as the most common form of human trafficking. They therefore rejected the wholesale condemnation of sex work as the necessary condition for opposing trafficking that followed automatically. Doezema (1998) rejected the distinction between forced and voluntary sex work as it produced a framework that implicitly supported the abolitionist agenda, thereby denying sex workers their human rights. Scheper-Hughes (2015) detailed the presence of such differences even within the Roman Catholic discussions on human trafficking, where “friction” arose around defining prostitution as, by its very nature, coercive and eroding human dignity versus maintaining that not all sex work was coerced or tied to human trafficking. Interestingly, Pope Francis, speaking on 8 February 2022, the International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking and the Feast Day of St Josephine Bahkita, a formerly enslaved woman, distinguished among human trafficking, coerced prostitution, forced marriage, and slave labour (Wooden 2022; Integral Human Development 2019). Nonetheless, the work of O’Connor (2017) was taken seriously as she cautioned, based on the lived experiences of women who had been trafficked and others who entered sex work voluntarily, that notions of choice, agency, and consent were best viewed along a continuum. So, rather than seeing a binary opposition between voluntary or coerced, women’s experiences must be placed on a continuum with a range of constraining contexts considered. Kempadoo’s research added value for its portrayal of the sex work industry in the Caribbean; in questioning the taken for granted consensus around comparing trafficking to modern day slavery, she proposed a vital rethinking that considered the history of indentureship in the Caribbean.

3. Margaret Fowler and Sex Trafficking

Margaret Fowler, a Scotswoman who became a naturalized Jamaican, was a trained social worker before becoming a minister in the United Church of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Ms Fowler arrived in Jamaica less than a month after the devastating impact of Hurricane Gilbert in September 1988. She came as a mission partner from the Church of Scotland in response to an appeal “for assistance with broadening the scope of the mission among residents of the inner-city of Kingston. Her genuine expression of loving care was felt in ministry even as she sought to bind up the broken-hearted. This led to her sense of call to the Ministry of Word and Sacraments” (UCJCI Update 2019, p. 1). After ordination, she served in the Negril United Charge and the Hope United Charge. She served in the Hope United Charge for over a decade until her passing in 2019. Fowler received a Doctor of Ministry degree in 2009 from the United Theological College of the West Indies (UTCWI), Jamaica, and Columbia Theological Seminary. She was awarded two academic prizes for her study (Jamaica Gleaner 2019), which was entitled “Human Trafficking, a Modern Day Challenge for the Church” (Fowler 2009); this was her major discussion on the issue of trafficking and was focussed on the role of the Church. In her work, the role of the Church was distilled in seven steps:

(1)

Engage in Prayer on behalf of persons moved by the plight of trafficked persons, for organisations working with them, and for the healing and rescue of victims, especially girls in our communities.

(2)

Engage the Mind by studying the Word of God, watching a relevant movie, and reading a relevant trafficking report;

(3)

Engage the Voice by inviting speakers, organizing fundraisers, and holding events;

(4)

Engage the Hands by exploring the work of the Jamaica taskforce on trafficking, sharing the knowledge, and volunteering to help the [Theodora] Project;

(5)

Engage the Time by joining others interested in stopping human trafficking in Jamaica, volunteering to work for the Theodora Project, or assisting in fundraising for safehouses;

(6)

Engage the Relationships with young people and talk with them about sexual exploitation:

(7)

Engage the Resources by considering supporting one of the antitrafficking organisations. Overall, she exhorted the Church to “Work to be a powerful, prayerful, outward looking church community; a community that will heal, transform, and renew” (Fowler 2012, no page).

She also served as a former Chair of the Protection Sub-Committee of the National Taskforce Against Trafficking in Persons (NATFATIP); she was lauded by the Taskforce as “a passionate advocate for social justice, gender equality as well as the elimination of human trafficking, child trafficking, child abuse and gender-based violence” (NATFATIP 2020).

Her foray into anti-trafficking work began while she was the pastor for the United Church in Negril. She was eating at a well-known restaurant in Negril and saw a middle-aged man arrive with two young girls; she judged them to be about ten and twelve-years-old, respectively. The man ordered alcoholic drinks for them, arousing Rev. Fowler’s concern; she decided to investigate what she saw. “She was able to get his name, and sure enough, investigations led to his arrest for human trafficking” (Lowrie-Chin 2016, no page). She later came to know that the tourist resort of Negril was a haven for sex work and children exploited in the trade (Lowrie-Chin 2016).

The Taskforce said that Fowler made a significant contribution to raising awareness about human trafficking, especially among faith-based organisations. In 2018, she received the NATFATIP Chairman’s Award for her outstanding contribution to Jamaica’s anti-trafficking agenda. Along with her pastoring of the Hope United Church, she was, up to the time of her death in 2019, the Chair of NATFATIP and a member of the Caribbean Women Theologians for Transformation (CWTT). She was fearless in her defence of the vulnerable, even chiding fellow clergy “for not doing enough to counter human trafficking, as well as sexual, physical, and child abuse” (Porter 2018, no page). “If you go to the Bible and check the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, it’s trafficking. If you look at the story of Joseph, it’s trafficking; the boy Joseph was trafficked, but yet the church takes a high-handed approach and does not say it’s wrong,” said Fowler (Porter 2018, no page). “During this period [of her illness], she continued to work assiduously, researching issues relating to human trafficking and spearheading the drafting of a Victims’ Protection Protocol. She was resolute in lobbying for the protection of victims, particularly women and children, who are among the most vulnerable to human trafficking” (Jamaica Gleaner 2019). Indeed, “Her commitment to Jamaica’s fight against trafficking in persons was unparalleled, and she remained committed and concerned about human trafficking and NATFATIP even to the end” (Jamaica Gleaner 2019).

4. The Church Must Not Remain Silent

In a brief 2012 article for Ecclesio.com, entitled “We Must Not Keep Silent”, Fowler made a passionate case for the Church in Jamaica not to remain silent in the face of human trafficking. In her estimation, human trafficking was not an isolated issue “since there are complex connections to economy, gender issues, social dynamics, law and foreign relations” (Fowler 2012, no page). Given such complexity in the issue, the Church needed to recognise that trafficking must be approached holistically, while ensuring that global networking was carefully engaged. Grounded in her Christian faith traditions, Fowler called for prayer and efforts to share information among various organizations and faith communities. This, according to her, would inspire, refresh, and encourage those who worked so hard for this cause.

She argued that the Church must decide how to “reach out to those who are on the fringe of society” (Fowler 2012, no page), recognising that they cannot tackle perpetrators but were responsible to “remain[…] with the victims”. The Church could not treat with all the economic issues related to poverty or even change some of the laws on the statute books. Nonetheless, for the Church to remain silent spectators was not an option. This was so because, as Fowler maintained, the Church was called to care for all God’s people. The Church was called to neighbourly love of every man, woman, and child. She laid out the global statistics regarding human trafficking, making the point that it is comparable to drugs and guns trading, generating in excess of US $8 billion each year. She also quoted a United Nations estimation of 700,000 people trafficked each year in the sex trade, of which Jamaica was but a small part.

She admitted that human trafficking took many forms, including to meet the demand for cheap labour. She claimed, however, that research shows that two-thirds of those trafficked were sexually exploited. However, the figures for trafficking, much less sex trafficking are notoriously difficult to pin down (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014; George et al. 2010). “In Negril, the vulnerability of young women [wa]s a paramount concern. Many of these young girls have limited education and as a result [we]re at greater risk to be involved with sex work” (Fowler 2012,no page).

For Fowler, the frightening aspect of human trafficking in Jamaica was that no one wanted to say anything; all wanted to keep silent. Silence was the easy option. To ignore the stories and the statistics and to pretend that these things only happened in some dark and distant land was not an option. Soon, the silence must give way to loud alarm and horror. The thought of young women being bought and sold was a harsh reminder of the dark days of slavery in Jamaica. It was terrible to think that all this was going on in a community that valued its tourist industry and strove for the highest standards (Fowler 2012).

Similarly, in her contribution to the “Global Consultation on Combatting Human Trafficking”, organised by CWM GLOBAL and CWM SARC (2–7 March 2009), Fowler spoke about the Jamaican situation. According to the Consultation Report, she shared on the “Theodora Project Fighting Against Human Trafficking” (CWM Global and CWM SARC 2009). She raised a specific concern with how young people were lured and deceived before being caught up in the bondage and exploitation of trafficking. In describing the Theodora Project, Fowler noted that it had its roots in Church Action Negril, an ecumenical approach to the issues being faced in the community. The Theodora Project was developed to respond to the emerging issues that Jamaicans began to appreciate involved human trafficking (CWM Global and CWM SARC 2009).

5. The Theodora Project

The Project was aptly named after Theodora (c. 497–548 CE), the wife of Roman emperor Justinian; she was “a woman with a past” (Fowler 2012). The original Theodora worked to expand the rights of women, closed brothels, and created space for women to support themselves. The Project, started by Rev Fowler in 2004 in Negril, a booming resort town in western Jamaica, was grounded on education and personal development, targeting young women between 17 and 25 years of age. Negril was identified as a town with a problem of sexual exploitation of women because of the increase in exotic nightclubs and the visible increase of “prostitutes on the street”. In her dissertation, Fowler (2009) noted that the participants in the sex trade had become vulnerable because of gaps in the education system; this contributed to their potential for sexual exploitation. The programming, she noted, provides for shelter, education, personal development, and business opportunities as a means of addressing vulnerabilities in what she referred to as the human trafficking trap so that they could make “positive choices”.

The Project was created not just to reduce risk to young women who may be trafficked under the guise of “work opportunities” and then exploited and forced to engage in sex work. Rather, the Project sought to steer them away from sex work as legitimate work. Underlying that response is the belief that sex work was inherently exploitative and equivalent to trafficking. At the same time, unlike many other Christian ministers (Perkins and Lewis 2022), Fowler did not treat sex workers as immoral and sinful. Rather, she viewed them as victims of a patriarchal system. “[Indeed,] arguing that churches need[ed] to do more than trying to convert sex workers to Christianity, [Fowler said] that this approach [wa]s oftentimes not realistic, given the fact that sex workers would normally earn more in a night compared to what they would earn in a week as domestic helpers” (Porter 2018, no page). In her lack of moral condemnation of sex workers, Fowler maintained the stance of openness, which was present in her advocacy for LGBTQ persons. In that regard, she urged members of the LGBTQ community not to give up on the church even as many churches were selective about whom they offered pastoral care. In tandem, she exhorted her fellow church people to be more open and not to treat persons with “a different perspective”, such as the LGBTQ community, as the enemy (Brown 2017). Indeed,

We have to educate our own church community that we must be open to people. It is not easy to create that kind of space when you have a set of people who only want forgiveness for church people, so anyone outside the realm of the faith you have to join the line, you have to change your ways before you can receive forgiveness. But Jesus didn’t say that, He simply said that those who are without sin cast the first stone and all of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

(Brown 2017, no page)

Fowler’s perspective on sex work appeared to be shared by her fellow clergywoman, Barbadian Anglican priest Sonia Hinds (2021). Hinds also had a compassionate approach to sex work and sex workers. She raised concern after the body of a woman was found in an area of Bridgetown that was frequented by prostitutes. The response to the murder caused the clergywoman to ask: “So, do faith communities see sex workers as immoral women who have to put up with the hazards of the trade? Are they sinners in need of salvation? Are they not the victims of exploitation by men espousing the values of a patriarchal society?” (Hinds 2021, p. 20A). Hinds did not engage with the sex worker perspective. Clearly, Hinds, just like Fowler, viewed sex workers wholly as victims of an exploitative patriarchal system. Fowler’s analysis appeared to have been shaped by the compelling personal cross-cultural research undertaken by Brock and Thistlethwaite (1996), a copy of which was in her library collection that was donated to the International University of the Caribbean. American feminist liberation theologians, Brock and Thistlethwaite described sex work as a form of institutionalised sex abuse of the most vulnerable by the most powerful in a male-dominated society; importantly, it turned on financial transactions arising from the sexual use of the women involved (Brock and Thistlethwaite 1996). While they did make distinctions among the various aspects of the sex industry—“this loathsome thing”—they argued that there was significant overlap among traditional prostitution, sex trafficking, and sex tourism. They were deeply concerned with the experiences of suffering of the women involved in the sex trade, focussed, just like Fowler, on the exploitative nature of the industry, as was evident in Negril.

6. Negril and the Negril Tourism Industry

Human geographer Kevon Rhiney, in his analysis of the development of the tourist industry in Negril (Rhiney 2012), noted the prevalence of sex work by both women and men as a livelihood strategy undertaken by locals who were excluded from formal employment in the exclusionary and highly unevenly structured tourism industry. The high level of poverty in resort areas such as Negril was also a key factor. He outlined some of the issues arising from the illicit sex work trade in the community, including high rates of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV and AIDS and disruption in families due to tensions and conflicts between sex workers and family members or partners. He, like Fowler, expressed particular concern with the rise in the inclusion of children in sex work, naming them as victims of domestic trafficking to feed local and tourist demand. The presence of children in sex work in Negril was confirmed by the reporting of a self-identified prostitute, “Diamond”, who described having worked in numerous sex shops/massage parlours across Jamaica, where she had seen girls as young as 14 or 15 engaging in sex work. She said: “There is one [brothel] in particular in Negril. They have 14-and 15-year-old girls. It carry [sic] a lot of young girls. And there is another in Montego Bay” (Hussey-Whyte 2017, no page). Diamond related horrific stories of the girls’ experiences in the brothels. Rhiney (2012) called for fundamental changes in the conditions in which people lived as a response to the illicit industry, which exploited young girls.

Rhiney (2012) named current social interventions, including the Theodora Project, but called for more to be done. A Neo-regulationist, he called specifically for the reduction of the vulnerability of sex workers through formalising the work (a call which he recognised as being highly controversial). Such formalising would allow for regulation of the sex work industry and provide opportunities for the education of sex workers on matters such as safe sex. He recognised the problem of child sex tourism and the exploitation of minors through trafficking as a different issue and called for greater legislation and law enforcement in that regard. Diamond, who detailed the exploitative experiences of sex workers in brothels, similarly called for the Government to “have a set of people who go into these places [brothels] and really check it out and make sure the girls have ID, and they get their test (for sexual infections) and so” (Hussey-Whyte 2017, no page). At the same time, Rhiney acknowledged that the Government had made some headway in the fight against human and sex trafficking and, therefore, did not conflate sex work and sex trafficking or even human trafficking. Nonetheless, he charged that efforts remained ad hoc and inadequate.

The work of Kyriakakis and Goddard-Durant (2022) among female cis-gender sex workers in Barbados similarly noted that poverty, family instability, low educational attainment, and early entry into intimate relationships with older men were emergent factors associated with entry into sex work. There was a fixed pathway from poverty to low educational attainment to meeting immediate needs through intimate relationships, usually with older men, to hampered educational attainment to entry into sex work. Kyriakakis and Goddard-Durant’s findings emphasised the role of the highly restrictive context of gender-based poverty along with family and relationship norms rooted in a strong colonial history. In that regard, they “call attention to systemic and policy solutions that address intergenerational poverty, provide childcare supports, and widen the employment options and capabilities of women so that sex work becomes one of many viable employment options for women” (Kyriakakis and Goddard-Durant 2022, p. 952). Diamond’s experiences resonated with O’Connor’s research, which, though undertaken among a small group of sex workers in Ireland, highlighted the coercive context within which their consent was given. This, of course, called into question, even with the acceptance of a continuum of agency, consent and choice and whether their consent was actual. Importantly, O’Connor (2017), like Kyriakakis and Goddard-Durant, challenged the silence around the experiences of sex workers in research.

7. Colonial Influences on Sex Work

Ways of viewing sex work in the Caribbean today must take account the history of colonialism. “Sex tourism, as a product of slavery and colonization, is not new to the Caribbean” (Meszaros and Bazzaroni 2014, p. 1256). “[Indeed,] prostitution dates back to the time of enslavement when female slaves were hired out to provide sexual services” (Moore and Johnson 1999). Enslaved women did not own or control their bodies and so were subject to sexual violence of all kinds, including rape, forced sex work, and unwanted childbearing. After Emancipation, some women were obliged to sell sexual services to survive but, as Moore and Johnson (1999) noted, there was also an element of choice as some women gave up jobs as domestic servants and seamstresses to undertake brothel keeping and sex work. Even then, sex work was more lucrative, as Fowler acknowledged it is for some women in Jamaica today (Fowler 2012). By the end of the 19th century, there was an organised sex industry in cities including Kingston, Jamaica, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. It was also present at port towns, with sailors as the main clientele.

Halford H. Fairchild, in presenting a contemporary reading of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, re-engaged oh so briefly with Fanon’s notion of tourist nations, such as those of the Caribbean, as “the brothel of Europe” (Fairchild 1994, p. 192). While Fairchild did not deeply engage the notion, he saw the tourist trade as recreating the exploitation inherent in colonialism. Sex tourism played a significant role in the neo-colonial relationships established through the global tourism industry. Ros Williams also elaborated a postcolonial critique of sex tourism that built on Fanon (Williams 2011). She chose to explore post-colonialism as she recognised that it was primarily reacting to the global colonial legacy. Williams concluded that “sex tourism is best understood as a contemporary product of imperialism” by Europe and North America (Williams 2011, no page). The legacy of slavery and colonialism were re-enacted through the “boundaries of difference” (Williams 2011, no page) that tourism helped to produce and sustain. The ‘Caribbean paradise with its sun, sea, sand, and sex’ is fetishized and consumed by foreigners. Of course, popular music celebrated this, as was illustrated by Jamaican reggae artiste Shaggy in his tune “Sugarcane”; Shaggy painted a picture of a Jamaican man selling the uniqueness of the island, his “sugarcane”.

• My ladies!
• HA, HA, HA, HA
• You know you gotta run away
• With me to the islands…
• [….]
• She said she’s tired of the city life
• Says she wants a simple life
• Tell me she need me
• Want to settle down and be my wife
• Introduce her to the island life
• She says it everything that she likes
• We bought some fruits from the fruit stand
• Roots from the roots man
• Coconut water well we get it from the jelly man
• She had a piece of my sugarcane
• From then she hasn’t been the same.
(Shaggy 2011)

Caribbean popular music was endlessly fascinated with the penis and this song was no different. The “sugar cane” immediately calls to mind such hits as the Barbadian group the Merrymen’s 1969 calypso, “Big Bamboo”.

• Well, I asked my lady, “What should I do to make her happy and make love true?”
• She said, “The only thing that I want from you is a little, little piece of a big bamboo”.
• With the big, big bamboo, bamboo
• O la la la la la la la la la
• Working for the Yankee dollar.
(The Merrymen 1978)

Instructively, the male owner of the “big bamboo” was “working for the Yankee dollar”, so was involved in sex work in the tourism industry. Even so, the interactions between the male protagonists and the female tourists in both songs were, of course, presented as romance even where there was financial exchange. Today, the “Big Bamboo” is a popular image in the tourist industry, with many souvenirs referencing and representing this “island delicacy”.

Although dominated by ciswomen, the Jamaican sex work industry was also occupied by men and transwomen (Logie et al. 2017). The men who dominated sex tourism were often referred to as “beach boys” or “rent-a-dread” or “rastitutes”, even if they did not wear the locked hairstyle; they did a brisk business providing succour to female visitors, ranging from tour guiding to sexual services, as Shaggy and The Merrymen indicated. The man was allowed to engage in these relationships by his female partner as a means of support for her as well as her children, but, as was noted in the case of Prettyface below, men were oftentimes not supportive of their female partners engaging in the sex trade. Linden Lewis argued that “for as long as the region has represented itself as a tropical paradise, sex has been an important part of the libidinal economy of tourism” (Lewis 2004, p. 238). Traditionally, the body that had been central to this sex trade economy was the female body; however, more attention has been paid to the male body “as the embodiment of exotic sex and sexuality” (Lewis 2004, p. 238). Indeed, “the Black male body in idyllic tropical conditions in many ways represent[ed] the ultimate taboo for young and old North American and European white women who, after years of socialisation and preachments against such liaisons, participate[d] in a dance of forbidden pleasure, under the cover of anonymity” (Lewis 2004, p. 239). Of course, increasingly, these white women were joined by Black women, who came to the Caribbean “to get their groove back or on” (Williams 2018). These mainly heterosexual men often existed in material conditions where, being young with limited education, few formally acquired skills, and living in conditions of poverty and deprivation, they had little option but to sell sex in the marketplace to strangers, who offered money, fun times, the possibility of better life abroad, and other kinds of material benefits. Some beach boys, who may be homosexual or bisexual, also sold services to male tourists. “However, given the public hostility to homosexuality in the Caribbean, these men have to be much more discrete about their liaisons. Often, they find alternative spaces to make contact with foreign men for sexual encounters” (Lewis 2004, p. 240). Undoubtedly, the comingling of sexuality and race remain important subtexts of the tourism trade that require further investigation.

8. Sex Work in Jamaica

Commercial sex work was, despite its stigmatized status, deeply entrenched and was practised in both rural and urban areas in Jamaica (Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey 2008). Jamaican researchers Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey (2008), in their study of sex risk among sex workers, estimated that there were 2500 persons, both male and female, involved in the formal sex industry in Jamaica. In 2014, Director for Jamaica’s National HIV Prevention programme, Marion Scott, claimed that about 18,000 girls, or 2.5 per cent of the adult female population, were involved in sex work (Wilson 2014b). Of course, this number was an estimation, given that sex work occurs underground and informally for the most part, and was, therefore, “invisible in most accounts of women’s work, commercial activities, and economic and labor force reports” (Kempadoo 2001a). Enumerating sex workers was also complicated by the fact that sex work is highly stigmatized, and the workers are subject to discriminatory and criminalizing policies, laws, and ideologies, including Christian ideologies (Perkins and Lewis 2022). Nonetheless, the researchers confirmed that the industry included heterosexuals, transsexuals, bisexuals, and homosexuals working in different ways, including as exotic dancers, ‘beach boys’, ‘rent-a-dread’, and, sadly, child prostitutes.

As the research in Barbados (Kyriakakis and Goddard-Durant 2022) indicated, Jamaican sex workers usually entered the trade as adolescents or in their early twenties. They were often unskilled, had low levels of education, and very weak family support systems. This was not the entire picture, of course, as some women who sold sex noted that they are educated and have other jobs but were not able to survive on those jobs. They were also able to build up other businesses as a result of the income earned from sex work, which they were able to control. Sex work paid well on a good night, they reported (Jamaica Gleaner [Western Focus] 2016). Notably, according to Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey (2008), many commercial sex-workers did not identify themselves as such; they were often highly mobile and could move across locations and areas of work easily, as Diamond’s experiences indicated. One sex worker, “Princess”, whose story was reported in the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, was from the parish of St Catherine; like her, many of the sex workers operating in Montego Bay were from other parts of the island. “Coming to Montego Bay is a way of disguising what they are doing from residents of their home communities” (Jamaica Gleaner [Western Focus] 2016, no page). Various and varied persons could be found among the clientele of sex-workers and “include[d] just about anyone with a need for sex who [wa]s willing to pay for it” (Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey 2008). As one Montego Bay-based sex worker, who gave her name as Munchie, noted, “Everybody out yah have them regular client weh come every night. Married man, businessman and even the same police” (Jamaica Gleaner [Western Focus] 2016, no page). The presence of lawmakers and enforcers among the clientele of sex workers posed a significant difficulty. Indeed, Dr Sandra Knight, then executive director of the National Family Planning Board (NFPB), claimed that although prostitution was illegal in Jamaica, those who have been tasked with curbing its growth were also benefiting from it. “One of the problems we are having is that some of the lawmakers are clients” (Wilson 2014a, no page). Of course, this was not unique to Jamaica or the Caribbean.

9. Sex-Workers’ Perception and Experiences of Sex-Work

In examining the specifics of how sex workers viewed sex work, Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey (2008) discovered that, with the exception of some of the male sex-workers, all other groups of sex-workers thought that their kind of business was morally wrong or degrading. Some of their comments included:

“Is not a nice work but is good, quick money.”

“I do it because of financial need, it makes me feel guilty but I have my children to look after.”

(Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey 2008)

As the sex workers lamented, sex work is fraught with serious drawbacks, including violence, inconsistent earnings, high levels of competition, and dishonest clients, who would either demand their money back or steal it back. There is little consideration for retirement from sex work or participation in welfare activities. In general, sex workers experienced poor job satisfaction; “everyone would rather be doing something else” (Eldemire-Shearer and Bailey 2008). These experiences were confirmed by participants in O’Connor’s research (O’Connor 2017).

This difficult experience was exacerbated by the pandemic (Perkins 2021). As “Prettyface”, a sex worker who plied her trade in New Kingston, Jamaica, told her story, “sex work amid the pandemic has been desperate and difficult, with the dribble of clients often leaving her in tears”:

“Sometimes mi nuh have the guts fi come [go out]. Sometime mi want come [go out], and mi a cry. Sometime mi come and nothing no mek, and mi worse cry, ‘cause me nuh know what to do… Every different man from all bout jus come wid dem destruction body come lay down and gone. Mi haffi fret if condom a go burst.”

(Williams 2020b, no page)

[Sometimes, I don’t have the guts to go out and do sex work. Sometimes I want to go out and I cry. Sometimes I come out and I don’t make any money and that makes me cry even more…because I don’t know what to do. So many different men possibly with all kinds of disease pay for my services and go. I am so afraid that a condom will burst.]

Indeed, sex workers were at increased risks of catching COVID-19. As Jamaica Daily Gleaner reporter Andre Williams (2020a) noted, sex workers generally wore no masks and had limited, if any, hand sanitiser for their personal or client use. As one of these vulnerable women told Williams:

“You haffi just try protect yuhself, don’t? Yuh nah go know [who has COVID-19]. Anuh every time me wear mask, still, but yuh haffi try protect yuhself and use Father God”.

(Williams 2020a)

[You have to protect yourself, right. You don’t know who has COVID-19. I don’t wear a mask in every sexual encounter, but I have to try to protect myself and depend on God’s care.]

Another sex worker detailed her circumstances as she offered customised services to her clients, “Is a little bottle (of sanitiser) mi did have, and it finish last night. Mi nuh have none now, but me have me wipes”. [I had a small bottle of sanitiser, but it was finished last night. I don’t have any now, but I have wipes.] (Williams 2020a).

Prettyface, like her fellow sex workers, plied her trade in the shadows because sex work continues to be illegal. Some police officers have turned a blind eye to the unofficial red-light districts that have cropped up across Kingston. However, she risked being prosecuted even if she was a victim of a felony while on the job. Her trade-off for survival, which was focussed particularly on taking care of the needs of her son, who had recently won a place in a traditional high school, included giving sexual favours to cops (Williams 2020b). Furthermore, she was unable to access state COVID-19 welfare because her work was illegal. In addition, women like Prettyface were at increased risk of domestic abuse because they lacked the financial power to assert their independence. Prettyface admitted to being in an abusive relationship; she had the scars to show from the abuse meted out by her partner, who wanted her to quit sex work.

“Him a seh, ‘Stop sell’, and him nuh have it to give me. You know what that is? That mek mi want kill myself, and mi can’t give up ‘cause my son just pass…. Him a stress mi, ‘Mommy, mi want this, mi want that,’ and if me nuh give him, him say, ‘Mommy, yuh don’t care, and a yuh man alone”.

[He [her partner] says she is to stop selling sex, but he can’t support her financially. You know how difficult that is. That makes me want to kill myself but I can’t give up because my son has recently won a place in a traditional high school… He [my son] is stressing me out. He keeps saying, “Mommy, I want this, I want that.” And if I don’t give it to him he says, “Mommy, you don’t care about me, you only care about your partner.”]

Nonetheless, contrary to popular belief, according to Dr Knight, financial need was not always the main reason persons become sex workers, notwithstanding that the current economic climate could drive several young girls to enter the profession. “They will tell me that they love it, they love what they do” (Wilson 2014b, no page). Interestingly, most of the operators of the brothels/massage parlours/sex shops in Jamaica are women. This seemed to continue a historical trend, as Moore and Johnson detail. Investigations suggested that many of these women operate their establishments in an exploitative fashion. As described by “Apple”, one such massage parlour owner, “We work all day, we work all night. There is no time limit. We don’t give day off and we don’t give over an hour on the road” (Wilson 2014a).

In detailing how she operated her business, Apple, who described herself as more lenient than other brothel owners, stressed that each new girl is required to live at the parlour for anywhere from one to two weeks. They were not paid a cent until after this induction period was done. Thereafter, a fee of $JA2000 per week was deducted from the salary of each girl for accommodation; monetary fines for infractions, such as spending more than one hour off the job for lunch, were standard; there was a mandatory $JA100 fee for purchasing detergent for laundry. However, the girls were provided with free condoms. Apple warned her sex worker employees:

Make sure say you sort out your kids, because mi no really run joke with the go-home, go-home thing. Mi no take excuses, because you have to understand that it’s a business and you have a choice to stay here for a week or two week…If you know you have things to do, you brush off a week and go handle your business and come back.

(Wilson 2014a)

Such working conditions were fuelled by the illegality of the sex work trade and need to be addressed to protect the human rights of the workers. Calling for such legalisation should recognise the impact of legalised sex work on human trafficking. Cho et al. (2013) noted that, on average, countries with legalised sex work reported increased trafficking inflows. However, their research was predicated on the claim that most women and girls were trafficked for sexual exploitation. They admitted the difficulty of establishing a relationship between clandestine activities such as sex work and trafficking (Cho et al. 2013). Furthermore, the potential benefits of such legalisation on the experiences of those employed in the industry may be overlooked.

10. Sex Trafficking as Slavery?

Of course, the experiences of sex workers in the Caribbean were complicated by the concerns with human trafficking, as expressed by Fowler and others. Caribbean laws prohibited coercion of women and minors into sex work. Local laws also covered kidnapping, forced detention, and assault, which could be used to prosecute traffickers. However, these laws were overshadowed and even duplicated by recent international attention to human trafficking.

UN Protocols and US State Department ranking and accompanying economic sanctions forced many Caribbean nations to pass anti-trafficking laws; under the duress of annual reporting requirements, some Caribbean governments targeted the sex trade as an easy space from which results could be quickly produced since the sex trade is generally clandestine and may include migrant women who could quickly be framed as “victims of traffickers” (Perkins 2021). In so doing, the root of the problem of trafficking was not addressed while sex workers were increasingly surveiled and subjected to arrest, detention, and deportation (Kempadoo 2009). In fact, Kempadoo maintained that the US War on trafficking has become indigenized in the Caribbean, even as some nations resisted US policing (Kempadoo 2009).

As with Kempadoo (2016b) and Nixon (2016), Lepp and Gerasimov (2019) launched a trenchant critique of the global “anti-trafficking industry” that emerged in the USA in 1990s as a deliberate attempt to unite the left and right (Grant 2018). Similarly, Christian ethicists Campbell and Zimmerman (2014) cogently demonstrated that the condemnation of human trafficking serves as a point of rare moral consensus among US Christians across the theological spectrum. Feminists and human rights activists, Christian conservatives and moderate evangelicals routinely identified human trafficking as an issue of great urgency and concern on which they worked together (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014; Zimmerman 2011). Lepp and Gerasimov (2019), as with Campbell and Zimmerman (2014), maintained that sex workers and sex worker organisations have been forced to deal with this anti-trafficking “industry,” which had strong anti-sex, anti-sex work, criminal justice, and border control agendas propelled by a moralistic agenda (Lepp and Gerasimov 2019).

As discussed previously, Fowler echoed the language of this anti-trafficking coalition from the USA. “Trafficking is a modern form of slavery” had become “a conventional metaphor among many anti-trafficking advocates” (Grant 2018). In so doing, they made a facile connection between prostitution and trafficking and slavery, especially slavery in the Old American South, and the kidnapping and the transatlantic trade in Africans, specifically women and children (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014). Clearly, “slavery” worked easily as a metaphor for lack of freedom (Kempadoo 2017). Notably, Kempadoo (2017) argued that the conditions of indentureship in the Caribbean were much more analogous to those in contemporary discussions about human trafficking and “modern slavery” than slavery. In this regard, she maintained that Caribbean histories of indentureship provided more suitable tools for thinking about coerced labour today, given the parallels between this past migrant labour system in the Caribbean and so-called “modern slavery” or human trafficking. Kempadoo (2017), therefore, advocated for moving away from the common approach of conflating slavery and human trafficking with all forced, bonded, and migrant labour, which “elides and obscures specificities and differences in legal status and conditions of work and life” (Kempadoo 2017, no page). Additionally, greater attention needed to be paid to the historical evidence of indentureship. Kempadoo admitted, of course, that while a focus on “indenture could deflate some of the hype and moral panic that comes with notions of ‘modern slavery’ and human trafficking, its adoption would not necessarily get ‘to the bottom of things’” (Kempadoo 2017, no page).

Without denying the exploitation of human trafficking and some aspects of the sex trade and sex tourism, the key harmful effect of this agenda was the conflating of sex work and sex trafficking; this conflation “undermines and ignores sex workers’ agency as well as their legitimate demands for better working conditions and human, social, and labour rights” (Lepp and Gerasimov 2019, no page). Furthermore, sex workers and sex worker organisations have been excluded from and silenced in the development of legislation and policies that directly affected their lives and livelihoods, including anti-trafficking and anti-sex work laws. The experiences of sex workers like Apple, Diamond, and Prettyface, detailed previously, need to be considered in any legislative action. “The dominant framing of trafficking likewise glosses over issues of agency, empowerment, and structural violence that rise to the surface in the stories of migrant women and men who report that they sometimes choose work in sexual and erotic services because they prefer it to other kinds of work available to them” (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014, p. 157). Furthermore, the Caribbean region might do well to resist international pressure to comply with hegemonic anti-prostitution and anti-migration perspectives that go against Caribbean histories, practices, and realities. Indeed, the easy equating of sex work and sex-trafficking calls for on-going interrogation. As Kempadoo maintained, “We need a more complex conceptualisation of sexual labour and the ways in which women participate in sexual-economic relations, as well as a critical examination of ideologies about women’s sexuality, in order to dispel the moral indignation and stigma that surrounds sexual-economic activities” (Kempadoo 2007, p. 84).

11. A Brief Closing Response

Diverse persons engage in sex work—cis-gender women, bi- and homosexual men, transsexuals, migrants, etc. They are not all coerced and/or are not victims of sex trafficking. Indeed, it is to be recognised that sex work is an intelligible response to the historical, socio-economic, and cultural realities of the Caribbean, especially countries such as Jamaica, where poverty is widespread. This does not deny or ignore the exploitation experienced by sex workers, even those who choose to participate in the field. Nor does it ignore the scourge of child sex work or those who are trafficked. Where there is a thriving tourism industry that is often exclusionary and unequally structured, sex work has become part and parcel of the industry as a result of fewer means of access. At the same time, the dominant and domineering interventions of the Global North, along with the trajectories of international law and policy, continue to frame sex work based on trafficking, with the dominant metaphor being “human trafficking is modern day slavery,” which well-intentioned Christian activists like Margaret Fowler bought into. Sex work is presented as the form of trafficking most often engaged in, even though the statistics do not bear this out (Grant 2018). As a result, Kempadoo (2015) critiques three contemporary trends, modern antislavery, abolitionist feminism, and celebrity humanitarianism, that originated primarily in the Global North. She argues that these trends are rooted in White supremacy, which actually “shores up the power and subjectivity of the North” (Kempadoo 2015).

Caribbean nations are caught in the neo-colonial web of the Global North’s fight against trafficking/sex work/sex trafficking. Many Caribbean nations are, therefore, forced to go after sex work as a soft target in order to meet reporting requirements and rankings. Resources are wasted on enforcement that could be channelled into protection and education. This must be challenged. So, too, must the widely accepted ideas that sex workers are victims in need of rescue, immoral women in need of conversion, or criminals in need of reform be interrupted and space made for the voices of sex workers to facilitate better understanding of their realities (Perkins and Lewis 2022).

The exchange of sex for money, gifts, or benefits is not inherently sexual violence, even while it is mediated by classed, gendered, and racialized relations of power. Rather, it is the criminalization and stigmatization of “prostitution”, upheld by normative moral orders, legal systems, and state practices, that lies at the heart of the problem, producing conditions for police violence, public scorn and condemnation, unregulated brothels and sex clubs, discrimination in the health-care system, and hostile judicial systems (Kempadoo 2020, no page).

The causes of trafficking and the very subjectivity and humanity of the victims are, therefore, secondary in such a moralising frame, which Fowler, in her compassion, operated from. “Moreover, there is a notable lack of engagement with the other perspectives and experiences, especially those of women from the Global South and the ‘subaltern’” (Kempadoo 2015, p. 18). These movements and campaigns do not learn from and respect the knowledge and experiences of the poor, which sometimes calls for “saving from the saviours”, a redistribution of wealth, and the provision of opportunities to succeed in neo-colonial societies like Jamaica.

In this regard, Margaret Fowler’s ministry and approach to sex work and human trafficking was limited. It called out for a wider engagement with other Christian perspectives, which do not presume that sex that takes place in the wrong relational context profoundly harms the dignity of the person (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014). Given her compassionate advocacy for LGBTQ persons, there was a missed opportunity to engage their experiences, especially as they are participants in the sex work industry (Perkins and Lewis 2022). As her legacy of service and compassion for the poor and marginalised, especially women and girls who sell sex in Jamaica, continues, care must be taken to untangle the misrepresentations of sex workers as victims of trafficking or wholly as victims. Efforts should continue to address the developmental needs of women and girls, whose poverty and other social vulnerabilities lessen their agency in making choices of work, inclusive of sex work. Importantly, as those efforts continue, advocacy needs to be engaged to improve the working conditions of those who freely chose sex work as a viable option (Perkins and Lewis 2022). Furthermore, the equating of sex work, modern day slavery and trafficking must cease.