Gender Cards
Trade = Gendered
Trade with Latin America is a structure of gendered exploitation – the aff offers a
model to restructure history – Gender is a key question of Latin American
literature
Strasser and Tinsman 10 (Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman - Associate Professors of History @ UC Irvine, Journal
of World History, “It’s a Man’s World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin American Studies, for Instance”,
Vol. 21, Num. 1, March 2010, pg. 75-78, Project Muse) //MaxL
But while historians as a group are only beginning to enter the fray, individual historians and various subfields of course are
anything but new to discussions of inequality between peoples and uneven developments on a transregional or even global scale.
This article concerns itself primarily with two particularly vibrant approaches: world history and historical studies of
masculinity. Both have been profoundly committed to exploring issues of domination and difference,
and they each have developed vital critical vocabulary for narrating their complex histories. At fi rst glance, that would make the two
fi elds seem like natural allies, or at least easy interlocutors, at this moment in time and in the profession’s history. But to the
contrary and somewhat paradoxically, there has been a vexed relationship between world historians and historians of
masculinity (and of gender and sexuality more broadly). They have largely remained segregated in their own
institutional and intellectual spaces, conferences and journals included. From there they have eyed one
another with some degree of skepticism and occasionally outright suspicion. Even when their thematics do overlap,
historians of gender and sexuality rarely see themselves writing world history, and vice versa.2 What’s
the problem? How can it be solved? And what’s to be gained? This article builds on conversations generated by a double-session
roundtable we organized at the 2007 meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., titled “Narratives of
Difference and Domination: World Histories and Studies of Masculinity.” Featured as a Presidential Session and including scholars
working on various world “areas,” the panels drew a large audience and lively debate.3 The session also generated interest in
Europe, where conversations about world history are beginning to gather steam. We were invited by the German-language journal
Historische Anthropologie to publish an article on our refl ections under the title “Männerdomänen? World History trifft
Männergeschichte—das Beispiel der Lateinamerikastudien” in November 2008.4 Because the relationship between gender, sexuality, and world history is of more longstanding concern within the U.S. academy, we were eager to have our essay made available in
English. We thank both Historische Anthropologie and the Journal of World History for permitting us to reproduce it here. We
contend that the oft vexed issues separating world historians and historians of gender and sexuality are not
only ones of perceptions and labels (although mistaken attributions do matter 5), but also foremost
a matter of diverging
intellectual trajectories and partially incommensurate categories. Other trends in each fi eld
notwithstanding, at this juncture, it is a heavily materialist world history that faces off with a predominantly
culturalist history of gender and sexuality. Diagnosing such disciplinary unevenness, however, is
different from asserting that “never the twain shall meet.” In trying to establish intersections between the two fi
elds, we use this article to bring a third fi eld into the mix: United States–based Latin American studies, an area of
study that has long combined these traditions and hence offers particular insights on the challenges of bringing
them together. Most promising from our point of view is the recent scholarship from Latin American studies
that illuminates how world history and histories of gender and sexuality converge naturally, as it were,
around the theme of masculinity. World history commonly centers its analyses on domains of life in
which men are primary actors, be it patterns of trade and labor exploitation, or empire building
and state formation. Histories of gender and sexuality, on the other hand, regularly examine why certain
domains or individuals are coded as “masculine,” what such codings mean, and how they matter to larger processes. The
Latin Americanist literature offers important models for combining these two topics and is
suggestive of how world history can usefully be narrated as the story of masculinities. This article is not
intended as a literature review of Latin Americanist histories of gender and sexuality, or even masculinity.6 Rather, we invoke Latin
American studies as a research area that often has fl uidly blended culturalist and materialist traditions and focused on masculinity
in ways that are highly relevant to debates within world history today.
Latin American Economics = Gendered
Using a gender lens is critical in understanding economics of Latin America
Nadell and Haulman 13
Pamela S. Nadell - Chair of the Department of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program @ American University and Kate
Haulman - historian of early North America @ American University, “Making Women’s Histories”, 2013, pg 190) //MaxL
Histories of gender and sexuality have been an integral part of Latin American studies for a good twentyfi ve years, and
have been especially important to challenging essentialist notions of Latin American
difference (backwardness) and narratives of unidirectional change. Interestingly, questions about
masculinity were present from the very beginning, thanks partly to the way women’s history and gender history
entered Latin American studies almost simultaneously, rather than consecutively. This sprang from the relatively “later timing” of
gender analysis in Latin American history, itself the result of a certain hostility from Marxism. Yet while discussions of
gender and sexuality have radically reworked materialist paradigms (Marxism in particular), they have maintained a
central engagement with narratives of political economy.21 Within this, they have made the masculine nature
of men, and its making, a key subject of study. For this reason, they provide inspiration for integrating a central
world-historical concern, the changing face of the political economy, with a critical aspect of gender
history, the shifting nature of masculinity. Three genre lessons stand out. First, one of the most long-lived traditions
for considering masculinity within Latin American history are studies of Spanish and Portuguese conquest
and colonialism in the Americas. This is a literature, beginning in the 1980s and including more recent innovations, that has
stressed the importance of sexuality to the religious and political authority of Inca and Aztec warriors, from ritual celibacy to penal
bloodletting and cross-dressing. Historians have also considered how Pre-Columbian empires were maintained through royal
“taxes” in female virgins and young males. For Iberian empires, scholars have examined the Spanish conquistador and priest as
different kinds of masculine subjects, and the key role of sexual violence and forced Christian marriage.22 Joining the literature on
sex and conquest has been a vibrant scholarship about sexual honor, in particular, the early idea that male sexual honor (via the
enforcement of female chastity) was key to acquiring political offi ce and economic power in the colonial world.23 What has counted
as “masculinity” in these studies has ranged widely and undergone an evolution away from confl ating masculinity with patriarchy to
the idea of masculinity as a contested constellation of various empowerments and disempowerments, which apply to subaltern men
as well as elites.24 Most recently, scholarship on sexual symbolism has upended heterosexual binaries entirely by showing how
many forms of power in the Pre-Colombian and Iberian worlds were understood in terms of same-sex or transsexual gendered
formations.25 Collectively, what such studies of Latin American history offer world history is a long tradition of seeing masculinity
as key to understanding the world historical moment of encounter and conquest between Europe and the Americas. This is a
literature that has focused heav- ily on high politics of statecraft and empire building. It links kinship to governance and economy,
but it does not locate the “origin” or “function” of masculinity as the family. Importantly, it is a literature especially indebted to
anthropology, a discipline whose insights world historians have barely begun to absorb. Indeed, while the cross-pollination of
history and anthropology happened in multiple fi elds, it was especially strong in Latin American studies. This was a fusion borne of
anthropology’s long focus on ethnic Otherness (Indians) and symbolic systems (religion), together with Latin America’s special place
in the U.S.-American imagination as a “fi eldwork site” for studying alterity. A majority of the fi rst wave of women’s studies on Latin
America were by anthropologists as were the fi rst gendered histories of Iberian conquest in the Americas.26 Anthropology’s
most valuable gift to Latin American history, and most
promising possibility for world history, has been to
model ways for thinking about the cultural production of difference (gendered, sexual, racial, religious),
while allowing scholars to hold fast to narratives about political domination and economic
transformation. A second genre of masculinity studies within Latin American history with important implications for world
history is the rich literature on gender and modernization. This encompasses a series of debates about the relationship between
nation building and the promotion of male-headed families and civic domesticity. As the story goes, from the late nineteenth century
on, an array of constituencies—industrial leaders, liberal professionals, feminists, the labor movement, and the Left—all pushed
varying ideals of nuclear family in which men were breadwinners and women dedicated themselves to scientifi c motherhood. This is
the “modernization of patriarchy” thesis, and some version of it plays a central role in historiographies as diverse as that on the
Mexican Revolution, Perón’s Argentina, Brazilian myths of racial democracy, and Puerto Rican anti-imperialism.27 It is the linchpin
for arguments about the resolution of “the social problem” of nineteenthcentury industrialization, the birth of the welfare state, the
failures of socialism, and the emergence of the modern “homosexual” as a deviant and criminal.28 As historians would have it, for a
good 120 years, there was a concerted effort to get even very poor men to settle down, marry, and
commit to becoming producers for the nation and providers for families. This is a productive, domesticated, heteronormative, and nationalist masculinity that is promoted with astonishing breadth by a range of very different kinds of
political projects. It is the hegemonic masculinity of the family man. Obviously, this line of argument has its
counterparts in the vast literature on the United States and Europe on domesticity and citizenship (as well as homosexuality), which
locate origins quite a bit earlier. 29 But the Latin Americanist scholarship is especially noteworthy for two reasons in particular.
First, because, for better or worse, there has been an overarching emphasis on the role of the state in
promoting male-headed family, or the state as a site of contestation over what kind of masculine citizenship was
desirable. Debates over hegemony have especially underscored the crucial role of gender and family in
everyday forms of governance. Second, the Latin Americanist literature has paid much attention to the ways the ideal of
modern family was in constant dialogue with debates from elsewhere in the world, especially the United States and Europe. The
aspiration for modernity and the anxiety that Latin America was not modern enough were constant themes for
historical actors. So, Latin Americanist historians have paid attention to the circulation of ideas
from abroad: looking at pan-American conferences on eugenics, or the export of gender models through
international development schemes like USAID, UNICEF, and Protestant missionaries.30 Latin Americanists also have given
conscious attention to the ways such internationally produced ideologies as socialism, Catholic social doctrine, liberalism, and
fascism, become global languages, spoken with different accents. Different versions of the family man as the basis of national
belonging are obviously present in scholarship on twentieth-century Asia and Africa. And there, too, the ideal worked in hegemonic
ways: ideologically powerful in state policy, if never a reality for most people. One interesting challenge for world history is
to make connections, or speak to the differences, between these different family man fantasies that occurred
globally, and that are often promoted by similar international actors (missionaries, development agencies) or ideologies
(liberalism, socialism). But it is also worth recognizing the tension between tracing different histories of masculinity versus
using masculinity as an analytical category. There is a certain danger that in looking for the place of masculinity in different projects
(colonial empires, modernizing nation-states) we come up with strikingly similar stories across vastly different societies and
temporal moments. Certain kinds of masculinity are extremely modern and very specifi c to certain places, but that doesn’t mean
masculinity as an analytic concept is useless for asking questions for other periods. One last genre lesson from Latin American
history that deserves mention is labor history. This literature has explored not only how gender divisions of labor are fundamental to
the economy but, in particular, the importance of international dynamics in their creation. Studies of masculinity and chattel slavery
speak to obvious trans-Atlantic ties between gender, commerce, and violence. Likewise, there is an important scholarship on the
masses of itinerate and roving migrant men who throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century made up the bulk of workers
in mines and haciendas: mestizo copper miners in Chile, Chinese guano workers in Peru, Almayra tin miners in Bolivia, Maya
banana workers in Guatemala, indentured South Asian laborers in Trinidad.31 These are the worlds of men created by export
economies and coercive liberal republics, in which quite often employers and companies were “foreigners” (British, U.S.-American).
In the mid twentieth century, many of these men will undergo a domestication as both U.S. companies (modeling Henry Ford’s
philosophy of welfare capitalism) and Latin American welfare states (with their eyes on European state models) actively promote
marriage and family as the basis of social peace and labor control. As scholars point out, a great deal of the labor militancy for which
Latin America became famous sprang from men’s reconstituted masculinity as “family men” who demanded “rights” to a just
standard of living for wives and children.32 What such engendered labor history offers world history is a model for making
masculinity a central object of study in stories where “there are no women,” and where the preferred story line is one focused on
global fl ows of commodities, including human bodies. Obviously, world history needs to pay just as much
attention to femininity and the production of goods (the women usually are “there”). Not all world
history need privilege economy and trade. But given existing tendencies within the fi eld, Latin American labor history offers
some instructive lessons. Looking at the construction and various forms of masculinity in labor systems (as
distinct from merely recognizing that all the workers were men) changes the overall picture of “the economy” and
brings new things into view. The everyday forms of coercion that underlay sugar plantations or nitrate mines involved
ritual violence, containment, or contests between different men, different deployments of masculinity. Men with families were by no
means a natural or obvious way to organize production; on the contrary, domestic masculinity had to be consciously promoted or
imposed by states, employers, and religion, and it was often resisted. In other words, world history needs to take up the ways
masculinity constitutes a terrain of power through which the world’s workers, bosses, and products get produced.
Modernization creates silent suffering of women as they are ignored by
development
Bolles and Yelvington 10 (A. Lynn Bolles – Proffesor of Women Studies @ University of Maryland And Kevin A.
Yelvington – Proffesor of Anthropology @ University of South Florida, “Dignity and Economic Survival: Women in Latin America
and
the Caribbean and the Work of Helen I. Safa”, Caribbean Studies, Volume 38, Number 2, Project Muse) //MaxL
The global sisterhood perspective, cloaked in a classist and racist maternalism of its own making, was very reminiscent of similar
issues faced by the second wave of the U.S. women’s movement itself (Evans 1979), and the heavy-handedness of U.S.-sponsored
international aid and development practices (see Deere, et al. 1990). A list of the damaging, broad characteristics of
the global sisterhood literature includes: ignoring women’s movements in the postcolonial world;
considering these activities as products of modernization or development; assuming a sameness in the forms
of women’s oppression and women’s movements cross-nationally. The long and short of these tendencies
meant that the majority of these studies on women from “the Third World,” before and even after Mexico City, ignored the activities
and words of women of the South as agents and as actors working on their own behalf. Whether
they were beneficiaries
or victims of “development,” women were silenced in word, in deed, and definitely on the page. For instance,
“feminism” as social and political acts became attractive to the upwardly-mobile and the middle classes of
Latin America and the Caribbean. However, by associating women’s movements led by the upper classes
with increasing levels of industrialization, urbanization, the expansion of education, and increased
employment opportunities, the larger picture shifted. In this fashion, the telling of the story of CO-MADRES
would focus on its leaders, who it would be assumed were products of the middle class. In reality, it was a group of grassroots women
workers who were the guiding forces of the organization (Stephen 1994). The global sisterhood position ignored the role of
grassroots women in their own struggle for human rights, gender equality, citizenship and economic transformation. Further, by
homogenizing women’s lives and experiences under the banner of global sisterhood another dimension to the silencing and ignoring
tendencies occurred. For example, if there were any differences noted among the women under study, then those who were poor and
non-white usually bore “the disproportionate burden of difference” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997:xviii).
Gender is an economic issue – it affects everyone
Bailey 13 (Laura E. Bailey, Papua New Guinea Post – Courier, “Gender Violence an Economic Issue”, 2-20-13,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1288939510) MaxL
Studies of gender-based violence indicate that such violence appears to be widely accepted and "culturally" condoned in many parts
of Papua New Guinea. Violence against women appears to be common throughout the country with negative
impacts on the health of women and children. More systematic, comprehensive and internationally comparative
prevalence data are needed to improve strategies and actions. Institutional responses for prevention of genderbased violence and support for victims are insufficient and inadequate. So what do these findings mean
and why are they important? Eliminating gender violence is not just a moral issue but a major economic
issue. It is an issue that everyone pays for - not just women. Higher health care costs and more frequent visits
to hospital emergency departments pose a burden to families and to the state. The insecurity
fostered by violence within the community prevents freedom of movement and prevents unfettered access to
community spaces, education and employment opportunities. Police are overwhelmed by the issue.
Tourists and investors are gravely concerned when they witness heinous acts of gender violence in the country. Parents often will
keep girls back from school for fear of rape. In economic terms, there are direct and long-term costs for both the
individual and the state associated with mental and physical health care provision, and increased
household poverty levels as a result of absenteeism, lower worker productivity and reduced income
generation.
Economic questions should be combined with gender studies
The Gaurdian 11 (Claire Provost, The Gaurdian, “The trouble with gender economics”, 5-20-11,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/18/difficult-issue-gender-economics) //MaxL
Family planning is notoriously one of the most politicised and divisive issues in development debates,
and gender equality one of the most neglected. But over the past few years, advocates for both have emerged from
across the political spectrum and from some of the most unlikely sources - including the World Bank. This week, a diverse group of
parliamentarians from around the world gathered at the French Assemblée Nationale before next week's G8 summit, calling for a
special focus on the 600 million girls and young women in developing countries around the world. Organised by the European
parliamentary forum on population and development (EPF), the summit brought together parliamentarians from across the political
spectrum, including the UK Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge, French Socialist Philippe Tourtelier, and George Tsereteli, a centre-right
MP from Georgia. EPF secretary Neil Datta argues that "each political party has a value base that can be supportive of reproductive
health", and that the trick is to mobilise support without politicising debate. Above all, it's the economic case for supporting girls –
popularised by the social media-savvy "Girl Effect" campaign and promoted by the World Bank – that is bringing unexpected allies
to the table. According to Gill Greer, director-general of the International planned parenthood federation, every year a girl spends in
secondary school pushes her future wages up by 15-20%, and women generally re-invest 90% of their earnings in their communities.
The World Bank agrees, and has thus decided to back programmes focusing conditional cash transfers on women, and providing
vouchers to employers who hire women. For the bank's expert on gender, Mayra Buvinic, investing in girls is simply
"smart economics." For Greer, the argument that investment in the rights and health of girls can spur
economic growth provides a powerful tool for advocates seeking consensus on politically sensitive issues such as reproductive
health. And according to Datta, arguments about the economic benefits of gender equality, reproductive
health, and family planning have helped to garner cross-party support in donor countries including Ireland,
Spain, and the Netherlands. But making women work for the market is not the same thing as making
markets work for women, and the economic argument for investing in girls is not without its critics. Earlier this year, a
debate about the Girl Effect campaign rippled across the development blogosphere, sparked in part by a provocative critique on Aid
Watch. Guest blogger Anna Carella argued that the Girl Effect plays into stereotypes of women as natural
caregivers and reinforces perceptions of "women's work" and "men's work". It further neglects
crucial macroeconomic issues and prioritises the wellbeing of the economy over the wellbeing of
women, she said. "While this campaign seems like a godsend for those who have been working to improve the lives of women, it
may actually be damaging to women." Meanwhile, Elaine Zuckerman, a former World Bank economist, has taken aim at the bank's
gender action plan and policy, criticising its dismissal of human rights and arguing that the "business case for gender equality" only
perpetuates the bank's neo-liberal agenda. And for Datta, the risk is that programmes favouring quick fixes will win over long-term
strategies to tackle deep-rooted power relations that require generations to surmount. All of this leaves global gender advocates in a
tricky position. They have an argument that has garnered unprecedented support for traditionally neglected issues and divisive
debates. Linking gender equality with economic growth offers a convincing argument at a time
when budget cuts and austerity talk put NGOs and aid agencies under enormous pressure to
provide innovative approaches to entrenched development issues. And it's an agenda that shows no sign of
losing steam. Next year, the World Bank will dedicate its flagship World Development Report to gender equality. And the bank's
International Development Association (IDA) fund, which provides soft loans and grants to the poorest countries, has made gender
equality one if its four priority themes. But to benefit from this unprecedented focus without seeing stickier issues slip off the agenda
– such as the hard-to-measure but crucial issues of women's rights, empowerment, and long-term generational change – is no small
task. Without a doubt, this is a debate to watch.
Gender equality is an economic issue – it’s an obstacle to economic development
Blofield 10 (Merike Blofield – assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, Development Challenges in
the Hemisphere Task Force, “Gender Equity in Latin America”, 3-31-10, https://www6.miami.edu/hemisphericpolicy/Task_Force_Papers/Blofield_Gender_Equality_in_Latin_America.pdf) //MaxL
That said, entrenched obstacles to gender equality remain that constitute crucial social policy
challenges.
Women’s continued responsibility for reproduction and family and childcare needs puts them at
a disadvantage vis-à-vis men and makes it much more difficult for them to compete on an equal
level in the labor market. While middle- and upper-class women can resolve this burden by outsourcing much of the
domestic responsibilities, high socio-economic inequalities, and a dearth of adequate social policies, reinforce this
burden for low-income women. This burden not only affects their ability to compete in the labor market on
an equitable basis, but also their ability to ensure the socio-economic integration of the next generation, for
which they remain, in many cases, solely responsible. To alleviate it, countries must eliminate explicit legal discrimination against
low-income women, enforce the equal-rights laws that exist, and promote proactive policies to ensure gender equity in two specific
policy areas: reproductive health and the nexus of paid employment and family care responsibilities. Integrating women on
equitable terms into the formal labor force, as well as enabling them to manage their reproductive responsibilities in an adequate
way and hence use half of a country’s brain power to its fullest, are not only inherently fair they make, but development sense. They
also will enhance the well-being and social integration of the children of these women, a good investment in the future. In view of
these benefits, promoting gender equity, particularly for low-income women, is the most efficient and
equitable way to increase the region’s human capital and social development. Countries that score the
highest in the United Nations Gender Development Index are also the countries with the highest levels
of economic and human development and the most consolidated democracies.
The Mexican economy has a gender gap
Martínez 8 (Sonia Frías Martínez – Professor of Sociology @ University of Texis at Austin, “Measuring Structural Gender
Equality in Mexico: A State Level Analysis”, Social Indicators Research, Vol. 88, No. 2, Jstor) //MaxL
As noted by Simone de Beauvoir it has been through gainful employment that woman has traversed
most
of the distance that separated her from the male (Beauvoir 1952). Situa tional factors such as caregiving
and care rearing, and resource factors such as the lower educational attainment have traditionally
relegated women to the household sphere and prevented them from fully participating in the
formal economy (Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos 1993). Historically, for women, the most "important?and the most
achiev able?form of power has been the economic", which has contributed to their overall status
in society (Blumberg 1984), and "may [have] set in motion the other mutually reinforcing political, economic,
cultural, and social changes that reduce inequalities (Cotter et al. 2001). The assessment of gender equality in the
economic sphere employs eight indicators that have been theoretically associated in the literature of gender
stratification with gender inequality. Table 1 sorts the states in rank order according to each of the indicators. There are
substantial state-to-state differences in almost all of the indicators. The first variable, Participation in the Labor Force (EC_1),
reveals the underrepresentation of women in the labor force. The gender gap ranges from 63%8
in Chiapas (100-36.6) to 34% in the Federal District, the most egalitarian state. The values and the ranking of this indicator are very
similar to that of Employed women (EC_2) that measures the percentage of those in the labor force actually employed. In average,
for each 100 occupied men, there are 54 women. The next two variables measure women's access to
traditionally male-dominated occupations: Civil Servants, Managers and Administrators (EC_3), and Professional
and Technicians (EC_4). In Mexico, women's incorporation to the labor market has been progressing rapidly
since the 70s (Brown et al. 1999; Pedrero Nieto 2003), yet tends to be concentrated in certain occupations and
areas of activity (Rend?n 2003). Women's share of executive and public service positions has increased during the last decades
but remains low (Zabludovsky 1997). Table 1 shows that women's representation as public employees and
managers compared to that of men ranges from 50% in Morelos to 33% in Chiapas, with an average gender gap
across states of 67%. Women are also underrepresented in professional and technical occupations. Their
share, though, is higher than in the previous category: for each 100 males, there are 65 women. The fifth indicator measures
Ownership of Businesses (EC_5), and reveals the largest gender gap in the economic sphere. On
average, for
each 100 productive establishments owned by males, there are only 17 owned by
women. The size of the standard deviation shows the homogeneity across states. Oaxaca and San Luis Potos? are the states with
the smallest gap, around 75%. At the other end, we find Michoac?n and Zacatecas, where women have barely attained 10% of men's
positions. The next two variables are related to the employment conditions. First, entitlement of receiving Health Benefits (EC_6)
either in private or public institutions among those employed. In the Federal District for each 100 employed men with
health benefits, there are 75 women. In Chiapas, Coahuila, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Nuevo Le?n, the ratio is less
than two to one. The second variable related to employment conditions is Average Wage per Hour (EC_7). Since 1987 the gender
earnings ratio has decreased (Brown et al. 1999), but still, in average, women's hour earnings are 94% of that of men. This is the
economic measure in which women have reached higher levels of gender equality as revealed by the mean. Nevertheless, in the
southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca women's earnings are more than 10% higher than those of men. A plausible explanation
might be related to structural conditions and to the influence of the farming sector. Farming activities, in which males are
overrepresented, are very low paid. A similar phenomenon occurs in agriculture, the average salary for females tends to be higher
than that of males, because women's work tends to be concentrated in certain crops and regions in which the salary tends to be
higher (Pedrero Nieto 2003; Barron 1997, cited in Rend?n 2003). The last variable, (EC_8), measures gender inequality in
households headed by males and females that are above the poverty line. The percentage of female headed
households in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, has increased over time. However, the gender gap in terms of the
head of the household income, however, has decreased (Asgary and Pagan 2004). Cort?s (1997) found that female head of household
is not necessarily associated with poverty. There is no data about the percentage of male and female headed households above the
poverty level. As a proxy, EC_8 represents the gender ratio of the households in which the head earns more than 10 minimum
salaries a month (as of 2000, an average of 352 pesos; approximately 36 dollars). In the Federal District, 12.5% of the households in
which the head earns more than 10 minimum salaries are headed by women. In contrast, in the northern states of Coahuila and
Nuevo Le?n, this percentage is below 5%. In sum, as revealed by these eight economic indicators, women are
far from having reached equality with men in the economic sphere. We observe large variations
in the sizes of the gender gaps. Women and men's average hour wages are almost leveled; which sharply contrasts with
the important differences regarding businesses ownership. Some states such as the Federal District and Morelos tend to rank
mid or high in most of these indicators. In contrast, states such as Chiapas or Tabasco tend
to rank mid or rather low in
these variables; denoting, thus, the gender inequality in the economic sphere. As we have seen, each
indicator measures an array of aspects of gender equality in the economic realm. The first step in the
construction of the composite measure of the eco nomic dimension of the index (GEIMS_EC) is to perform an internal reliability
analysis. This is presented in Table 2. The first part presents the correlations among the initial pool of economic variables. The
second part shows that seven of the eight economic variables have a positive correlation with the rest of the variables (Cronbach a =
.67). The levels of gender economic (in)equality seem not to be associated with the gap in average hour wages (EC_6). The last
columns only shows the indicators that met the criteria of having a correlation between the indicator and the sub-index equal or
greater than .30, and that the deletion of that variable should result in an increase in the a coefficient for index reliability. The
removal of EC_6 results in an increase in the index's reliability (.79). The economic component of the GEIMS is the average of these
seven measures. The State coefficients of economic gender equality are presented ranked in Table 8
Mexican economics create gender inequalities – statistics prove
Martínez 8 (Sonia Frías Martínez – Professor of Sociology @ University of Texis at Austin, “GENDER, THE STATE AND
PATRIARCHY: PARTNER VIOLENCE IN MEXICO”,
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/3878/friasmartinezs72092.pdf?sequence=2) //MaxL
Mexico is among the most unequal countries in Latin America with important cross-state
and
regional differences in terms of education, poverty, development, distribution of basic services, and health (Fuentes and
Montes 2004). These disparities call upon the development of a Gender Equality Index in Mexican States
(GEIMS) in order to assess the level of gender equality across states. Straus’ (1994:10) justification for
using states as units of analysis in the U.S. can be applied to Mexico since “each state has distinct characteristics
based on its history, environment and resources, level of economic development, racial and ethnic
composition, and numerous other factors”. These might be expected to be associated with differential
opportunities for women. In federal political systems such as that of Mexico, the states are often the initiators of legislation
and public policies, and there is usually more information available at the state level that at any other level. Centered in Mexico, the
GEIMS overcomes some of the problems associated with working with data provided by different
governments and different definitions (Dijkstra 2002). Nevertheless, one of the main problems in elaborating this type of
indexes is the problematic relationship between what needs to be measured theoretically and the available statistics. The GEIMS
is inspired in most of the earlier cited works and it is adapted to the reality of a developing country such as
Mexico. The GEIMS combines several dimensions that assess the societal level of gender
equality related to economic resources, political and public power, educational attainment and legal rights. Previous
indexes incorporated other dimensions of gender inequality such as health, well-being and family systems. Variables capturing these
realms of gender inequality are included within the four previously identified spheres. The GEIMS is expressed as a percentage. A
score of 100 represents perfect equality between men and women. Scores tending toward the zero end of the scale reflect greater
inequality favoring men. As I will explain, the score can range above 100 indicating levels of inequality favoring women. This index
compares the gender gap in each state and does not take the relative position of women across states into account in the different
components of the construct. It is therefore, a highly focused measure of the extent of inequality that does not tap absolute levels of
privilege of either men or women. Thirty-six indicators were selected to evaluate the extent to which,
compared to men, women have access to economic resources, education, positions of political
power and decision making, and have their rights protected by state laws. In the case of the economic,
educational and political dimensions, the level of equality in a given state was calculated as a ratio of the percent of gender
attainment score of women to the percent of men’s attainment in socially valuable positions in each state. Gender attainment refers
“to the absolute degree to which members of a particular gender have achieved socially values statuses such as education or
educational prestige” (Di Noia 2002:35), and it is expressed as a ratio. In the case of legal equality, instead of a continuous score,
each variable indicates the presence of absence of legislation granting legal rights to women: either protecting previously existing but
traditionally ignored rights (i.e. harassment), or statuses that grant new rights (i.e. criminalization of rape within the marriage). I
offer two justifications for expressing the variables as a ratio of the percentage of a valuable position occupied for women, relative to
the percentage of this same position occupied for men. Previous indexes such as that of Sugarman and Straus (1988) combine ratios
of gender attainment and ratios of percentages. For example, they combine they calculate the ratio of gender ratios in employment
[(females employed / females in the labor force) / (males employed / males in the labor force)] with the ratio of percentages in state
legislatures [(female state representatives / male state representatives)]. Although it is possible to compute a female labor force
participation rate since information of the total number of women and those who are in the labor force is available. On the other
hand, it is impossible to compute a legislative participation rate since there is no information on the population at risk of running for
office. In this case the only information relates to the percentage of legislators who are women. Therefore, for uniformity purposes,
the GEIMS is a ratio of percentages. There is a second reason behind expressing each variable as a ratio of percentages: the goal
of the index is to measure the gender gap in different spheres of social life, without taking into
consideration the relative position of women across states in the different components of the construct, as it would be if the ratio
would be the ratio of ratios (female attainments relative to all females, compared to male’s attainments relative to all males). The
ratio of percentages is a linear transformation of the percentage that represents women’s share in each dimension. For conceptual
reasons I choose to do this transformation that results in values that range from zero to infinity, with 100 representing equality
between men and women (50% / 50%). In other words, women are 100% equivalent to men or 100% equal with men. Although
both, each of the variables included in the index and the final index might mathematically reach values higher than 100%, is
theoretically and practically irrelevant since women are underrepresented in almost all valuable social dimensions. If instead of a
ratio the GEIMS would have been expressed as a percentage, equality would be represented by 50%, being intuitively more difficult
to understand. The following examples might help to illustrate the process behind the construction of the GEIMS. For example, the
third economic indicator is the percent of women employed as civil servants, managers and administrators relative to percent of
men in these same positions (see Table 2.1). This ratio is then multiplied by 100. In the case of Aguascalientes, according to the
National Employment Survey (Inegi and Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social 2004), 31.36% of all civil servant, managers and
administrators were women. Men occupied 68.64% of the positions. The attainment score of labor force participation in
Aguascalientes is 45.68 [(31.36 / 68.64) * 100]. This figure indicates that women’s share in these prestigious occupations is 46% that
of men. Similarly, women’s attainment as state representatives (PO_4) in Chiapas is 11.1%. The ratio was calculated by dividing the
percentage of seats occupied by women at the Chiapas’ state legislature (10%) by that of men (90%). The construction of the GEIMS
proceeded in two stages. The first consisted of the calculation of each of the four subindexes (economic, educational, political and
legal), and the second the combination of the four subindexes into a single overall measure. Two criteria were established for a
variable to be included in a specific dimension. First, after the standardization of the variables, the correlation between the indicator
and the sub-index (after adjusting for the fact that the indicator is part of the index) should be equal or greater than .30 (Sugarman
and Straus 1988). The second requirement, paired to the first one, is that an increase in the alpha coefficient for index reliability
should result from the deletion of the indicator from the index (Nunnally 1978). If an indicator had a correlation smaller than .30
but its removal from the index did not increase the alpha coefficient for reliability, the indicator was not excluded. The final
coefficient for each sphere of gender inequality is a combination of the already identified measures. As in previous indexes, both,
each of the subindexes and the final GEIMS measure, is calculated by computing the arithmetic average (i.e. Austin and Kim 2000;
Harvey, Blakely, and Tepperman 1990; Sugarman and Straus 1988; Yllo 1984). In the early stages of this index, assuming that there
was no theoretical reason why each variable should have an equal weight in the calculation of each dimension of gender equality (see
Dijkstra 2002), and following the methodology proposed by Casique (2004), I performed an unrotated factor analysis of the
variables, and applied weights to each of the variables depending on their adscription to each factor and the proportion of the
variance explained by each factor (results not shown). The correlation between each of the subindexes with and without applying
factor analysis was in all cases larger than .98. The same was true for the final measure of gender inequality. Therefore, for simplicity
reasons each of the subindexes is the average of the variables included in that particular dimension. Similarly, the GEIMS is the
average of the four dimensions. 2.2.a- The Economic Equality Dimension (GEIMS_EC) As noted by Simone de Beauvoir it has been
through gainful employment that woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male (Beauvoir de 1952).
Situational factors such as caregiving and care rearing, and resource factors such as the lower
educational attainment have traditionally relegated women to the household sphere and
prevented them from fully participating in the formal economy (Psacharopoulos and Tzannatos 1993).
Historically, for women, the most “important – and the most achievable– form of power has
been the economic”, which has contributed to their overall status in society (Blumberg 1984), and “may
[have] set in motion the other mutually reinforcing political, economic, cultural, and social changes that reduce inequalities (Cotter,
Hermsen, and Vanneman 2001). The assessment of gender equality in the economic sphere employs
eight indicators that have been theoretically associated in the literature of gender stratification
with gender inequality. Table 2.1 sorts the states in rank order according to each of the indicators. There are substantial
state-to-state differences in almost all of the indicators. The first variable, Participation in the Labor Force (EC_1), reveals the
underrepresentation of women in the labor force. The gender gap ranges from 63% in Chiapas (100-36.6) to 34% in the Federal
District, the most egalitarian state. The values and the ranking of this indicator are very similar to that of Employed women (EC_2)
that measures the percentage of those in the labor force actually employed. In average, for each 100 occupied men, there are 54
women. The next two variables measure women’s access to traditionally male-dominated occupations: Civil Servants, Managers and
Administrators (EC_3), and Professional and Technicians (EC_4). In Mexico, women’s incorporation to the labor market has been
progressing rapidly since the seventies (Brown, Pagán, and Rodriguez-Oreggia 1999; Pedrero Nieto 2003), yet tends to be
concentrated in certain occupations and areas of activity (Rendón-Gan 2003). Women’s share of executive and public service
positions has increased during the last decades but remains low (Zabludovsky 1997). Table 2.1 shows that women’s representation as
public employees and managers compared to that of men ranges from 50% in Morelos to 33% in Chiapas, with an average gender
gap across states of 67%. Women are also underrepresented in professional and technical occupations. Their share, though, is higher
than in the previous category: for each 100 males, there are 65 women. The fifth indicator measures Ownership of Businesses
(EC_5), and reveals the largest gender gap in the economic sphere. On average, for each 100 productive establishments owned by
males, there are only 17 owned by women. The size of the standard deviation shows the homogeneity across states. Oaxaca and San
Luis Potosí are the states with the smallest gap, around 78%. At the other end, we find Michoacán and Zacatecas, where women have
barely attained 10% of men’s positions. The next two variables are related to the employment conditions. First, entitlement of
receiving Health Benefits (EC_6) either in private or public institutions among those employed. In the Federal District for each 100
employed men with health benefits, there are 75 women. In Chiapas, Coahuila, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Nuevo León, the ratio is
less than two to one. The second variable related to employment conditions is Average Wage per Hour (EC_7). Since 1987 the
gender earnings ratio has decreased (Brown, Pagán, and Rodriguez-Oreggia 1999), but still, in average, women’s hour earnings are
94% of that of men. This is the economic measure in which women have reached higher levels of gender equality as revealed by the
mean. Nevertheless, in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca women’s earnings are more than 10% higher 46 than those of
men. A plausible explanation might be related to structural conditions and to the influence of the farming sector. Farming activities,
in which males are overrepresented, are very low paid. A similar phenomenon occurs in agriculture, the average salary for females
tends to be higher than that of males, because women’s work tends to be concentrated in certain crops and regions in which the
salary tends to be higher (Pedrero Nieto 2003; Barron 1997, cited in Rendón 2003). The last variable, (EC_8), measures gender
inequality in households headed by males and females that are above the poverty line. The percentage of female headed households
in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, has increased over time. However, the gender gap in terms of the head of the household
income, however, has decreased (Asgary and Pagán 2004). Cortes (1997) found that female head of household is not necessarily
associated with poverty. There is no data about the percentage of male and female headed households above the poverty level. As a
proxy, EC_8 represents the gender ratio of the households in which the head earns more than 10 minimum salaries a month (as of
2000, an average of 352 pesos; approximately 36 dollars). In the Federal District, 12.5% of the households in which the head earns
more than 10 minimum salaries are headed by women. In contrast, in the northern states of Coahuila and Nuevo León, this
percentage is below 5%. In sum, as revealed by these eight economic indicators, women are far from
having reached equality with men. We observe large variations in the sizes of the gender gaps.
Women and men’s average hour wages are almost leveled; which sharply contrasts with the important differences regarding
businesses ownership. Some states such as the Federal District and Morelos tend to rank mid or high in most of these indicators. In
contrast, states such as Chiapas or Tabasco tend to rank mid or rather low in these variables; denoting, thus, the gender
inequality in the economic sphere. 47 As we have seen, each indicator measures an array of aspects of
gender equality in the economic realm. The first step in the construction of the composite measure of the economic
dimension of the index (GEIMS_EC) is to perform an internal reliability analysis. This is presented in Table 2.2. The first part
presents the correlations among the initial pool of economic variables. The second part shows that seven of the eight economic
variables have a positive correlation with the rest of the variables (Cronbach Alpha = .67). The levels of gender economic (in)equality
seem not to be associated with the gap in average hour wages (EC_6). The last two columns only show the indicators that met the
criteria of having a correlation between the indicator and the sub-index equal or greater than .30, and that the deletion of that
variable should result in an increase in the alpha coefficient for index reliability. The removal of EC_6 results in an increase in the
index’s reliability (Cronbach Alpha .79). The economic component of the GEIMS is the average of these seven measures. The State
coefficients of economic gender equality are presented ranked in Table 2.8.
Mexican economics ignore women rights
Martínez 8 (Sonia Frías Martínez – Professor of Sociology @ University of Texis at Austin, “GENDER, THE STATE AND
PATRIARCHY: PARTNER VIOLENCE IN MEXICO”,
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/3878/friasmartinezs72092.pdf?sequence=2) //MaxL
The GEIMS is the first attempt to create a composite measure of gender equality in Mexico. As a
state-level gender equality measure, it quantifies the departure from parity in the representation
of women and men in four key dimensions of social life: economic, educational, political and legal. The GEIMS
compares men and women within each state, but does not take into consideration the relative position of women across states. This
index is inspired in the GEI (Sugarman and Straus 1988), and it has been transformed and adapted to the reality of a developing
country such as Mexico. Mexican women are far from reaching gender equality in the social structure
with men. Women have attained an overall level of equality of 44%. Women fare worse compared to men in the
political arena. Females have barely reached 26% of equality with men in the political sphere. The gender gap in the
economic and legal spheres is similar, around 42%. The law still treats differently men and women in Mexico and in
many states women’s rights are virtually inexistent from the legal point of view . Similarly, women have
hardly attained half of the positions conquered by men in the economic realm. The area in which both
genders are more at level is in the educational; nevertheless a gap of 35% percent still separates males and females. Mexican states
are quite homogenous in terms of structural equality. As opposed to the situation in the U.S. (Di Noia 2002; Sugarman and Straus
1988) there are not regional differences in Mexico. There are states that tend to rank high in terms of structural gender equality,
whereas others tend to rank low, nevertheless the differences among them tend to be rather small if the Federal District is excluded.
The Federal District constitutes without doubt the state in which women are more leveled with men. Several studies might help to
explicate this phenomenon. On the one hand, the Federal 75 District is by far the most developed state in terms of GDP per
capita (Muñiz Martelon et al. 2004), and its relative high
levels of structural gender equality could be
potentially explained by the modernization perspective that claims that high levels of industrialization lead to
decreasing gender inequality (see Moore and Shackman 1996). On the other, the greater gender equality in the political
and legal spheres might be related to the fact that the left has dominated the Federal District legislature and the government for
several periods and the culture of the center, around Mexico City, has always been more diverse and more leftist (Camp 1999;
Lujambio 2000). There is considerable research that concludes that the egalitarian ideologies of left-wing parties are more likely to
favor women’s election to high political office (Norris and Lovenduski 1995; Rule 1994). Moreover, the higher share of women in
political representation positions has been associated with ‘women making policy for women’ (Jones 1997; Rodríguez 2003). At least
in the case of violence against women legislation, the Federal District is seen as a referent in many states.
Globalization creates gender exploitation - maquiladora’s along the US-Mexican
border facilitate gendered violence
Pantaleo 6 (Katie Pantaleo – California University of Pennsylvania, “GENDERED VIOLENCE: MURDER IN THE
MAQUILADORAS”, Fall 2006, Sociological Viewpoints, http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf) //MaxL
Inequality in gender and work exists all over the world (Charles and Grusky 2004), but it is not always
accompanied by violence both inside and outside the workplace. Yet, the women who work in the
maquiladoras along the United States – Mexico border have been victims of both. Along the border,
especially in Ciudad Juarez, close to four hundred women have suffered from torture, rape, and then murder.
These murders began around 1993, and continue to the present day. They may be closely related to the maquiladora industry. This
paper discusses the sexual harassment associated with working in the maquiladoras and the violence which often leads to murder.
An understanding of the dynamics of intersectionality theory, based on the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism, helps to explain
why and how this violence occurs both inside and outside the maquiladoras. What is a Maquiladora? The official name for
sweatshops in Mexico is “maquiladoras,” which can be defined as “foreign-owned assembly plants in Mexico
[where] companies import machinery and materials duty free and export finished products around
the world” (CorpWatch 1999). Eighty percent of the billion dollar maquiladora industry is owned by the United States and lies
along the U.S.-Mexico border (Portillo 2001). Beginning in the mid-1970’s, the maquiladoras were designed not only to bring more
wealth and employment to northern Mexican cities, but also to provide inexpensive labor to multi-national companies out of the
country. In the words of Sheryl Lindsley (1999), “the maquiladora industry is representative of the
international liaisons prevalent in today’s global economy.” Essentially the maquiladoras are a product of
globalization and have solidified the relationship not only between Mexico and the United States but also
between Mexico and the rest of the world. Ciudad Juarez, a city in the state of Chihuahua, has become one of the
major locations for the maquiladoras (Amnesty International 2003). This is due mainly to the establishment of the North American
Free Trade Agreement in 1994, also a product of globalization. The products manufactured in the maquiladoras vary. The major
industries are the garment and textile business (28%), and the electrical/electronic business (16%). Other areas of production are
furniture (11%), transportation equipment (7%), service establishments (6%), assembly of machinery (5%), chemical products (4%),
food products (3%), leather products (2%), toys and sporting goods (2%), assembly and repair (1%), and other manufacturing (15%)
(CorpWatch 1999). Maquiladora Workers While maquiladoras employ both men and women, the number of women
working in maquiladoras has increased in recent years. Mexico presently has over 4,000 maquiladoras with
around one million workers. Out of these workers, greater than half are women (Mexican Labor News and Analysis 1999) who are
typically between the ages of 16 and 28, although some have been as young as 12 and older than 28. Those who work in the
maquiladoras usually come from a family of 6 or more members, with one or more of the women work in the maquiladoras (Young
1994). These women are also poor and since they are unable to find work near their rural homes, they travel long distances to work
in the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez. Wages may vary, but the typical wage that women workers in maquiladoras earn is between
$25 and $50 per week (Kamel and Hoffman 1999). Customarily, the management of the maquiladoras chooses to hire women and
young girls. One of the reasons for this is the belief that females possess better talent, hand eye coordination, and endurance for
manual work as opposed to men. Also, women tend to put up with poor working conditions more readily
than do men. Additionally, in comparison to men, women are believed to be cheap labor (Abell
1999). For most women, work in the maquiladoras is the only choice of paid labor available. Most have
little education and no training in the more skilled positions needed in factory work. Since women are preferred over men for
the unskilled work, one cannot argue that there is discrimination against women in hiring practices. Rather,
there may be discrimination against males in hiring. The exploitation then is not in hiring practices but in how the women are
treated within the workplace Sexual Harassment in the Maquiladoras Demeaning Practices One of the problems that many Mexican
women face while working in maquiladoras has less to do with discrimination in hiring and more to do with discriminating practices
in the workplace. While there is no discrimination against women working in maquiladoras, there is pregnancy discrimination in the
workplace. Women who are pregnant are turned away immediately, while those who are hired can
be subject to established practices designed to discourage and prevent pregnancy. These practices are
as follows: pregnancy testing, proof of menstruation, and physical harm. First of all, women can be forced to undergo
pregnancy testing throughout their work term (Abell 1999). This occurs randomly and without notice and usually consists of a
urine test. A second practice is more painful for the women, psychologically and emotionally. Each
month, women may be mandated to demonstrate proof of their menstruation by showing sanitary
napkins to managers. Also a series of intrusive questions are asked to each female employee, such as the date of her last
period, what kind of contraception she uses, and when the last time was she had sex (Koerner 1999). The third practice adds physical
harm to the existing emotional and psychological stress. Women may be deliberately punched in the stomach
and abdomen by managers to make sure that they are not pregnant or to damage any unborn
child. Because of these practices, female maquiladora workers suffer numerous consequences. In relation to reproduction in
general, maquiladora workers are likely to have irregular menstruation, miscarriages, fertility
problems, and to bear children with birth defects such as premature births or low birth weight
(Abell 1999). The maquiladora management justify these practices because they fear that pregnant women will disrupt the flow of
work within the maquiladoras especially in the later stages in pregnancy when the women will leave work to return home to care for
their child. By turning away women who are already pregnant and controlling the pregnancy status of current employees,
maquiladora owners are preventing future disruptions within the workplace. Also, a law exists in Mexico that insists on paid
maternity leave, which employers find to be expensive (Abell 1999). According to Koerner (1999), the management of the
maquiladoras or the Mexican Institute of Social Security is responsible for paying maternity benefits, depending on the length of
employment of the women. If she has made social security payments for at least thirty weeks during the preceding twelve months
prior to receiving benefits, the Mexican Institute of Social Security pays for maternity leave. Otherwise, the maquiladora
management must pay the benefits. Therefore, maquiladora employers rationalize these demeaning practices by arguing that they
do not want to pay the legally granted maternity leave to workers not only because it is expensive but also because it would mean
possibly losing full-time employees. Other forms of sexual harassment of women workers are also used by male coworkers and
managers. In some instances sexual harassment is used to intimidate; in others, sexual favors means less
work (Abell 1999). Additionally, a woman’s appearance often receives more attention that her actual
work skills, particularly at the time of hiring. Women employees are then encouraged to wear sexy, revealing
clothing to work and to “utilize [their] sexuality” (Livingston 2004). Clothing such as miniskirts, low cut shirts, high heels,
and makeup are common accessories to women who work in the maquiladoras. Livingston describes this process in the following
way. “Supervisors often stalk assembly lines playing favorites and asking for dates. Maquiladoras persuade workers to participate in
beauty contests, [and other contests in dance clubs, such as] ‘Most Daring Bra’ and ‘Wet String Bikini’ contents with cash prizes...”
Salzinger (1997), details the part that managers and supervisors often play within the maquiladoras. “[The supervisor] circles behind
seated workers, monitoring efficiency and legs simultaneously ... Often he will stop by a favorite operator, chatting, checking quality,
flirting. His approval marks ‘good worker’ and ‘desirable woman’ in a single gesture.” Salzinger also proposes the concept of
sexualization of factory life, which suggests that sex plays an important part within the maquiladoras. A
seemingly boring and tedious workplace turns into a fantasy-like world. Talk about who is dating who, who is wearing what clothes,
and which manager is interested in which employee dominates the conversation within the maquiladoras. Because of this,
most maquiladora workers develop relationships, whether sexual, romantic, or platonic, more with
managers and supervisors than with other employees. Tensions between employees for this reason may affect women’s
attitudes and force them into more sexual behavior. In addition to the sexualization of the maquiladoras, photographs are
also taken of women workers on Fridays, where the women are encouraged to act as models. One documentary
addressing this behavior suggests that practices such as these help and motivate murderers to select their
victims (Portillo 2001). But whether this is true or not has yet to be determined. Murder Murder, torture, and rape are
three things that many women today might fear. However, for the women working in the maquiladora industry around
Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City in Mexico, this is a nightmare that becomes a frequent reality. It has been
suggested that the demeaning practices and activities emphasizing women’s bodies that take place in the
maquiladoras are closely related to the murders. Female sexuality, which is encouraged within the maquiladoras,
becomes a precursor to violence towards women. Since some of the girls who work in the maquiladoras sometimes attend bars after
work for fun or prostitution, a stigma is attributed to all women who work in the maquiladoras. These girls are considered to be
living a “double life” of assembly work in the day and prostitution at night (Nathan 1997). Because of this, Mexican society feels that
young maquiladora workers are “bad girls” who are asking for trouble. However, those girls who are not involved in prostitution still
do not return home until late at night. After working their shift, women workers leave the sweatshops very late at night and it is then
that they sometimes disappear, never to be seen alive again. While walking through dimly lit areas in order to get home or to the
nearest bus stop, many young women and girls are attacked, raped, and frequently murdered. The
description of a typical female victim varies, although most are poor, slim, and have dark shoulder length hair. According to Diego
Cevallos (2003), a reporter for CorpWatch, “[The average fatality is a] woman between the ages of 15 and 30 [who works in a
maquiladora]. Most of the victims’ bodies have been found in outlying areas of the city and usually bear signs of torture and rape. In
some cases they have been burned, and many have had their nipples bitten off. The murder victims have been found ‘semi-nude,
their panties twisted around their ankles, mouth open in a scream, eyes protruding…’” After being subjected to such
torture, the lifeless bodies of the young women are discarded in deserts where they are left to decompose.
By the time they are found, sometimes weeks later, the bodies are unidentifiable (Livingston 2004). Despite the rising number of
murders, few investigations have been completed and most requests to do so are ignored.
Mexican Society = Gendered
Mexican society and language creates a dichotomy between men and women
Pantaleo 6 (Katie Pantaleo – California University of Pennsylvania, “GENDERED VIOLENCE:
MURDER IN THE MAQUILADORAS”, Fall 2006, Sociological Viewpoints,
http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf) //MaxL
Patriarchy functions as a significant part of Mexican society, especially because Mexican culture is
structured within a patriarchal order. Traditionally, men not only control the home where they have
all the power, but also the workplace. Women’s role in the home focuses on the care of children, attending to the needs
to the husband, and socializing children to honor their families. According to Heidi Hartmann (1981), patriarchy is a form of class
domination by males over females. Two types of patriarchy exist in Mexican society: individual and collective.
Individual types of patriarchy occur in the home where the male has sole, private control over
the women. Collective types of patriarchy occur in the workplace where larger numbers of men
can publicly exert control over the women (Ruiz 1987). Patriarchy then becomes a double-edged sword for the
women, but a powerful tool for the men. There is no escaping the pain and suffering of being female and
being controlled, since it is experienced both in the home and at work. Under the view of patriarchy, two
expressions are commonly used in Mexico to show the difference in status of males and females; these expressions are machismo
and marianismo. Machismo symbolizes male power and aggression while marianismo symbolizes work of the Virgin Mary and the
domestic nature of women. Women, as mothers and wives, are expected to center their lives around taking care of their family and to
not be involved in paid labor (Livingston 2004). Marianismo is important because it “promotes self-sacrifice for family” (Fuller
2004). Also, marianismo is a key part to a woman’s femininity, and whether she chooses to accept or deny the ideals that it is
associated with, marianismo will always affect her. It requires that women become self-sacrificing martyrs
who accept violence and abuse from men because of their inferiority to them (Dreby 2005). Being a
woman in Mexican society forces a woman to deal with her marianismo, and to be judged on the basis of her morals as opposed to
being a man who gets honored for his machismo. Similar to the ideologies created by marianismo and machismo, there is a
belief that Western tradition creates a dichotomy between males and females. It is as follows:
“man/woman, public/private, knowledge/experience, culture/nature, and rational/emotional”
(Wright 1997). The first term in each pair refers to men and the second term refers to women. These
reflect the attitudes towards men and women in Mexican society: the male terms are considered
to be dominant and respectable while the female terms are degrading and inferior.
Rewriting Mecian gender history by recreating stereotypes of Mexican women is
key to stop patriarchy – it is the start to a social movement
Schneider 10 (Julia Maria Schneider – Gutenberg University, “RECREATING THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN MEXICO: A
GENEALOGY OF RESISTANCE IN MEXICAN NARRATIVE SET DURING THE REVOLUTION”, May 2010,
http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04142010-170734/unrestricted/schneiderthesis.pdf) //MaxL
Women in Mexico and Latin America have been faced with great obstacles that need to be
overcome in order to form a society in which both men and women represent political subjects
of equal rights and recognition. As the various images of women as outlined in the first part of this thesis have shown,
power and culture have traditionally been strongly associated with the male and masculinity.66 Jane Flax points out that within
contemporary Western societies gender relations have been ones of domination; the task is therefore ―to
recover and explore the aspects of social relations that have been suppressed, unarticulated, or
denied within dominant (male) viewpoints‖ and to rewrite the ―histories of women and their
activities into the accounts and stories that cultures tell about themselves‖ (641). Fictional narrative as
explored in this thesis is one of the possibilities through which the position of the woman can be re-inscribed into
the public awareness and current society. With respect to the context of Latin America and the
manifold social and racial factors that shape and constitute women‘s lives in this region in addition
to issues of gender, Nancy Hartsock concludes that ―when the various ‗minority‘ experiences have been
described and when the significance of these experiences as a ground for critique of the
dominant institutions and ideologies of society is better recognized, we will have at least the
tools to begin to construct an account of the world sensitive to the realities of race and gender as well
as class‖ (―Foucault on Power‖ 172). One of these tools is literature written by, about, and for women. Raising
the woman‘s voice in literature and nation, motivated by the feminist movement, has thus been a notable undertaking of
women writers in the last decades in Latin America and Mexico. Unfortunately the emancipation of the Mexican
woman remains complicated as long as in the social, cultural, and historical discourse stereotyped images
of women dominate that have been promoted by the patriarchal ideology and reduce women to the roles
of selfless mothers or submissive wives. Only through inscribing the diverse experience of women
into the official discourse will it be possible to integrate the woman into history in a way that allows
the reevaluation of her traditional roles and the realization of her true potential in contemporary society. Before the
sudden increase of women writers in the 1980s, their work was mainly rejected with the argument that women do not write,
especially not narrative; the exception to this maxim were, according to Castillo in ―Finding Feminisms,‖ Western-trained and
European-oriented women who represented a privileged minority in the history of literature due to their advantages of birth,
education, or affluence (354). The traditional codes of patriarchy have left women silent and remote;
nonetheless, as Ludmer states, ―silence
constitutes a space of resistance before the power of the others‖ (50).
International Relations = Gendered
International relations are gendered and threat construction makes their impacts
inevitable
Tickner 1 (Ann Tickner – Proffessor @ the school of International Relations USC, “gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era, pg 44-47)
44 New issues and new definitions of security have been accompanied by calls for new ways of understanding security.
Controversy about the meaning of security has been part of a more fundamental debate over broader
epistemological issues that, on the critical side, has included questioning the state-centric foundations
and assumptions of realism as well as challenging its positivist-rationalist methodologies. Many scholars
on the critical side of these epistemological debates claim that these ontological and epistemological issues are
highly interrelated. The beginning of the debate over the meaning of security and its expanding agenda, as well as over how
to explain conflict and prescribe for its amelioration, was coincidental with the third debate in IR.
Scholars on the critical side began to question realism’s explanations for states’ security behavior based on economistic, rationalchoice models or natural-science equilibrium models associated with the balance of power. Many claimed that issues of culture
and identity must be included in order to gain a fuller understanding of states’ security interests
and policies. Poststructuralist scholars began to question the foundational myths of realist worldviews upon which realist
explanations of conflict depend. Claiming that theory cannot be divorced from political practice, critics pointed to realism’s
complicity in shaping policymakers’ understandings of and prescriptions for U.S. security behavior in the ColdWar world. Walt’s
defense of the social-scientific foundations of security studies (mentioned earlier) and his dismissal of other approaches have drawn
sharp criticism from critical-security scholars. The ethnocentricism of his review and his description of a field that appears closely
allied with U.S. security interests call into question his claim about the field’s ability to “rise above the political” and raises the issue
of whose interest security is serving. Edward Kolodziej has claimed that Walt’s philosophically restrictive notion of the social
sciences confines the security scholar to testing propositions largely specified by policymakers; it is they who decide what
is real and relevant.33 Kolodziej goes on to say that Walt’s definition of science bars 45 any possibility of an
ethical or moral discourse; even the normative concerns of classical realists are deemphasized in order to put the realist
perspective on scientific foundations. Challenging Walt’s view of the history of the field as a gradual evolution toward an objective,
scientific discipline that ultimately yields a form of knowledge beyond time and history, Keith Krause and Michael Williams have
claimed that Walt has created an epistemic hierarchy that allows conventional security studies to set
itself up as the authoritative judge of alternative claims;34 this leads to a dismissal of alternative
epistemologies in terms of their not being “scientific.” Critics claim that issues they consider important for
understanding security cannot be raised within a positivist-rationalist epistemology or an ontology based on instrumentally rational
actors in a state-centric world. In addition to constraining what can be said about security, a realist-rationalist approach
precludes consideration of an ethical or emancipatory politics. For example, Krause and Williams contest
realism’s claim that states and anarchy are essential and unproblematic facts of world politics. They suggest that this worldview is
grounded in an understanding of human subjects as self contained— as instrumentally rational actors confronting an objective
external reality. This methodologically individualist premise renders questions about identity and
interest formation as unimportant.35 These and other critics claim that issues of identity and interest demand more
interpretive modes of analysis. For this reason, critical scholars see the necessity of shifting from a focus on
abstract individualism to a stress on culture and identity and the roles of norms and ideas. Such
criticisms are being voiced by scholars variously identified as constructivists, critical theorists, and postmodernists. While not all
of them reject realism’s state-centric framework, all challenge its assumptions about states as
unitary actors whose identities are unimportant for understanding their security behavior .
Although certain of these scholars see an incommensurability between rationalist and interpretive epistemologies, others are
attempting to bridge this gap by staying within realism’s state-centric worldview while questioning its rationalist epistemology.
Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter Katzenstein have argued for what they call “sociological institutionalism”— a view
that advocates an identity-based approach, but one that stays within the traditional security agenda, a focus on states, and
explanatory social science. Where this approach differs from rationalism is in its investigation of how norms, institutions, and other
cultural features of domestic and international environments affect states’ security interests and policies. Conversely, 46 when
states enact a particular identity, they have a profound effect on the international system to which they belong.36 Alexander Wendt’s
constructivist approach also attempts to bridge the constructivist/rationalist divide. His strategy for building this bridge is to argue
against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic structures. If we live in a self-help world, it is due to process rather
than structure; in other words, “anarchy is what states make of it.”37 Constructivist social theory believes that “people act toward
objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them.”38 People and states act differently
toward those they perceive as friends and those they see as enemies. Therefore, we
cannot understand states’ security
interests and behavior without considering issues of identity placed within their social context.
Claiming that realist ontology and its rationalist epistemology are interdependent, more radical versions of critical-security studies
reject these bridging attempts. Their calls for broadening the security agenda are made within the context
of both a rejection of rationalism and a search for emancipatory theories that can get beyond
realism’s skepticism about progressive change and the possibility of an ethical international politics. Poststructuralists
claim that when knowledge about security is constructed in terms of the binary metaphysics of
Western culture, such as inside/outside, us/them, and community/anarchy, security can be understood only
within the confines of domestic community whose identity is constructed in antithesis to
external threat.39 This denies the possibility of talking about an international community or an
amelioration of the security dilemma since it is only within the space of political community that
questions about ethics can be raised. In other words, the binary distinctions of national-security discourse limit what
can be said and how it can be discussed. Thus, critical-security studies is not only about broadening the agenda— because, as
mentioned earlier, this is possible with a realist framework. According to Ken Booth, critical-security is fundamentally different from
realism because its agenda derives from a radically different political theory and methodology that question both realism’s
constrained view of the political and its commitment to positivism. Critical-security studies rejects conventional
security theory’s definition of politics based on the centrality of the state and its sovereignty.
Arguing that the state is often part of the problem of insecurity rather than the solution , Booth claims
that we should examine security from a bottom-up perspective that begins with individuals;
however, critical-security studies should not ignore the state or the military dimensions 47 of world politics: “What is being
challenged is not the material manifestations of the world of traditional realism, but its moral and practical status,
including its naturalization of historically created theories, its ideology of necessity and limited possibility, and
its propagandist common sense about this being the best of all worlds.”40 When we treat individuals as the objects
of security, we open up the possibility of talking about a transcendent human community with
common global concerns and allow engagement with the broadest global threats.41 The theme of
emancipation is one that runs through much of the criticalsecurity studies literature. Emancipatory critical security can be defined
as freeing people as individuals and groups from the social, physical, economic, and political constraints that prevent them from
carrying out what they would freely choose to do.42 A postrealist, postpositivist emancipatory notion of security offers the promise
of maximizing the security and improving the lives of the whole of humankind: it is a security studies of inclusion rather than
exclusion.43 Yet imagining security divested of its statist connotations is problematic; the institutions of state power are not
withering away. As R. B. J. Walker has claimed, the state is a political category in a way that the world or humanity is not.44 The
security of states dominates our understanding of what security can be because other forms of political community have been
rendered unthinkable. Yet, as Walker goes on to say, given the dangers of nuclear weapons, we are no longer able to survive in a
world predicated on an extreme logic of state sovereignty, nor one where war is an option for system change. Therefore, we must
revise our understanding of the relationship between universality and particularity upon which a statist concept of security has been
constructed. Security must be analyzed in terms of how contemporary insecurities are being created and by a sensitivity to the way in
which people are responding to insecurities by reworking their understanding of how their own predicament fits into broader
structures of violence and oppression.45 Feminists—with their “bottom-up” approach to security, an
ontology of social relations, and an emancipatory agenda—are beginning to undertake such
reanalyses.
Gendered Econ Engagement Solvency
Frameworks to restructure economic engagement with Mexico is necessary to stop
gendered exploitation
DOS 12 (United States Department of State, “MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN THE DEPARTMENT OF
STATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE SECRETARIAT OF FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED
MEXICAN STATES FOR THE PROMOTION OF GENDER EQUALITY, THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN AND WOMEN'S
HUMAN RIGHTS”, 9-18-12, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/198115.pdf) MaxL
The Department of State of the United States of America and the Secretariat of Foreign Relations
of
the United Mexican States, hereinafter "the Participants"; RECOGNIZING their desire to strengthen the
ties of friendship and cooperation between the United Mexican States and the United States of America; INTERESTED in
ensuring that their commitment to gender equality is reflected as a cross-cutting issue in their
bilateral relationship; CONVINCED that equal participation of women, from all communities and
ethnicities, is necessary for the full and complete development of both countries; RECOGNIZING
the role of women as agents of change in society and their contribution to the economic
development, democratic institutions, citizen security and prosperity of both nations; CONSIDERING the
importance of supporting the full social, political, economic and cultural engagement of women; AWARE
of the importance of cooperating in promoting and protecting human rights; BEARING IN
MIND international efforts regarding gender equality and development; Have reached the following
understandings: SECTION 1 Objective The objective of this Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is to provide a
framework for the Participants to advance equality, empowerment and the promotion of the human rights
of girls and women as part of their bilateral relationship. SECTION 2 Scope of Cooperation In order to achieve
the objective referred to in Section 1, the Participants identify the following areas of cooperation as key to creating equal and
prosperous societies: i. Promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for women and girls; ii. Promoting social development
that supports gender equality; iii. Strengthening citizen security, with a particular focus on women and girls; iv. Promoting increased
access to justice; and v. Any other areas as mutually decided by the Participants. SECTION 3 Forms of Cooperation In order to
achieve the objective of this MOU and to promote gender equality, the Participants are dedicated to
incorporating gender throughout the bilateral relationship and to carrying out cooperative
activities, such as the following: i. Promoting Economic Empowerment and Opportunity for Women
and Girls: The Participants recognize that women are important agents of growth and development whose
full potential has too often gone untapped. Women's economic participation promotes innovation,
agricultural productivity, the development of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. It also strengthens
business management and improves return on investment. In addition to boosting economic growth, women reinvest a
large portion of their income in their families and communities. Bilateral cooperative activities to promote
women's economic empowerment and opportunity for women and girls may include but are not limited to: •
Promoting and supporting entrepreneurial networks and public-private partnerships to foster the
exchange of information, training, and best practices which empower women to take full
advantage of economic opportunities; • Promoting access to training, markets and financing
mechanisms for women entrepreneurs, particularly for small and medium enterprises; • Promoting bilateral
actions to foster increased economic engagement of women as a key element of the strategies to
increase our mutual economic competitiveness; and • Encouraging opportunities for women in the formal labor
sector, at all levels, so that women can take full advantage of training and advancement opportunities and compensation and
benefits programs. ii. Promoting Social Development that Supports Gender Equality: Social development, with a focus on women
and girls, is key to growing the next generation of leaders for the public, private and non-governmental sectors. It includes raising
awareness of gender equality, and helping women and girls receive the education and develop the skills they need to fully participate
in public life. Bilateral cooperative activities to promote this type of social development opportunities for women and girls may
include but are not limited to: • Promoting awareness about gender equality and laws that address it, and about the elimination of
discrimination in schools, the workplace and other public spaces; • Promoting the use of technology to foster equal access to
education, including in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields; • Encouraging the participation of women in
civil society- including the development and implementation of community programs - and in all other aspects of public life; and •
Supporting women's leadership development through exchange programs, development of networks, capacity building and
mentoring. iii. Strengthening Citizen Security, with a Particular Focus on Women and Girls: Ensuring citizen security is crucial to
building prosperous and secure nations. Criminal activity, including gender based violence (GBV), undermines efforts to promote
gender equality and women's full participation in civil, social, political and economic spheres. Bilateral cooperative activities in the
area of citizen security may include, but are not limited to: • Creating networks and promoting the use of technology and innovative
techniques to disseminate and share best practices to combat gender based violence (GBV), including programs which engage
women, men, girls, and boys; • Combating trafficking in women and girls, including for forced labor or sex trafficking; • Establishing
new shelters and improving existing ones for victims of gender based violence (GBV) and trafficking in persons, in part through
publicprivate partnerships and cooperation with civil society groups; and • Supporting women's participation in capacity building
initiatives to promote the rule of law and reduce impunity. iv. Promoting Increased Access to Justice: Full and equal access to justice
is a critical element of citizen security. Women and girls should be able to avail themselves of judicial remedies, guarantees, and
protection mechanisms to redress criminal acts, particularly those involving violence. Bilateral cooperative activities in the area of
access to justice may include but are not limited to: • Supporting bilateral exchanges to build the capacity of judicial and law
enforcement actors to develop, implement, and enforce laws that promote and protect human rights for women and equal
opportunity for women and men; • Promoting the dissemination of information on laws that affect gender equality, including
organizing forums on full and equal access to justice which provide specialized attention to women affected by crimes, particularly
those involving violence; • Developing outreach capabilities, including workshops, to help ensure that survivors of gender based
violence (GBV) and other criminal acts understand their legal rights; • Promoting networks that provide legal assistance and other
kinds of assistance to women and girls with family law issues, where appropriate through public-private partnerships and other
means; and • Cooperating with civil society to strengthen the legal framework for the protection of women's rights, as well as its
implementation and enforcement. The Participants may also engage in other bilateral cooperative activities as may be mutually
decided in furtherance of the objective of this MOU.
Mexico will adopt the MOU to integrate women
Clinton 13 (Hillary Clinton – former secretary of state, Department of State, “United States-Mexico Sign Agreement to
Collaborate in Promoting Gender Equality”, 9-18-12, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/09/197909.htm) MaxL
Today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Patricia Espinosa
signed the U.S.-Mexico Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the Promotion of Gender
Equality, the Empowerment of Women and Women’s Human Rights prior to the Merida Initiative High-Level Consultative
Group meeting. This MOU demonstrates the U.S. and Mexican commitment to full integration of
gender equality into our bilateral relationship. It recognizes the essential role women play as
agents of change in society as well as their contributions to the economic development, democratic
institutions, citizen security, and prosperity of both nations. The United States and Mexico agreed
to cooperate on gender equality efforts and initiatives in a number of key areas, including but not limited to: 1.
Promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for women and girls; 2. Promoting social
development that supports gender equality; 3. Strengthening citizen security, with a particular focus on women and girls; 4.
Promoting increased access to justice. The MOU reflects Secretary Clinton and the Department of State’s
commitment to integrating the advancement of women and girls fully into the formulation and
conduct of U.S. foreign policy. For more information, please visit the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues
www.state.gov/s/gwi/index.htm.
Mutual partnerships are able to create gender equality with Mexico
Jarrett 13 (Valerie Jarrett – senior advisor to Obama, “From Snacks to Cleaning Products: Women Empowered to Start
Businesses”, 5-8-13, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/08/snacks-cleaning-products-women-empowered-startbusinesses) MaxL
In Mexico, President Obama and President Enrique Peña Nieto underscored the importance of their
countries’ cooperation on regional and international issues, including gender equality. On this, we were thrilled to
hear that Mexico will join the Equal Futures Partnership, a multilateral effort to expand women’s economic
empowerment and political participation which I helped launch last September. Also in Mexico, I participated in a roundtable
for Women Entrepreneurship in the Americas, or WEAmericas with Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne. The goal of our
roundtable was to discuss and identify potential opportunities to work together to support more women entrepreneurs throughout
Mexico, the region, and around the world. WEAmericas was launched by President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton at the Summit of the Americas in April 2012. Using public-private partnerships, this initiative seeks to increase women’s
economic participation, and addresses four key barriers women confront when starting and growing small and medium enterprises:
access to capital, access to markets, skills and capacity building, and women’s leadership. We address these barriers
through programs such as: WEAmericas Small Grants initiative, through which 24 small grants have been awarded in
15 countries throughout the region, including Mexico, to support broader economic empowerment and
development for women-owned businesses. About 20,000 women are expected to benefit from this initiative. WEConnect, a
partnership with the private sector that certifies women-owned businesses and connects buyers and
sellers, providing access to products and markets. WEAmericas International Visitor Leadership Program. Started by the State
Department, this is a prestigious, two-week exchange annual program to the United States, which helps
women entrepreneurs develop their business skills. At the roundtable, I discussed the Obama Administration’s
commitment to women and girls as reflected in the Presidential Memorandum, which strengthens and expands
the Administration’s efforts to promote gender equality and empower women and girls across all
U.S foreign policy. This memorandum will be implemented by the State Department under Secretary Kerry, who is
equally committed to promoting the rights of women and girls and ensuring gender equality.
US economic engagement fuels Maquiladora’s which increase gender inequality
World Crunch 13 (Daniel Lederman and Julia Oliver, The World Crunch, “THE LESSONS OF MEXICO'S
MAQUILADORAS: WHERE FREE TRADE AND LABOR RIGHTS COMPETE”, 4-22-13, http://www.worldcrunch.com/businessfinance/the-lessons-of-mexico-039-s-maquiladoras-where-free-trade-and-labor-rights-compete/nafta-low-skilled-workersglobalization/c2s11434/) MaxL
CIUDAD JUAREZ – A maquiladora, or maquila, is an offshoring factory or manufacturing plant operated
under U.S.-Mexico free trade agreements to encourage the development of industry in Mexico.
Mexico allows materials used in maquilas to enter duty-free, provided the finished product is then immediately exported out of
Mexico. The U.S. in turn charges these products a much lower tariff than products from other
countries. Companies using this labor arrangement include Levi’s and Siemens. The world is as interconnected as ever, and there
is no better place to see that than the U.S.-Mexico border. Lined with factories, the border between both
countries has become less clear because of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), international
production chains and other economic and social links. On the Mexican side of the border, almost 3,000 factories import
components and raw materials. Workers assemble the products – most of the finished goods are destined for the U.S. market. The
big question is: does this benefit Mexican workers? These export-oriented industries provide almost two million
jobs, which translates into a strong drive for development in Mexico. But as it turns out, these job posts can disappear
very quickly. In this sense, the economic benefits for the U.S. depend largely on the labor
conditions of Mexican workers, who absorb up and down cycles through a series of adjustments. While the U.S. economy
is rarely unstable, this is an important finding that could have political implications in the whole world. Mexico resembles a growing
number of countries that promote the export-oriented industry as a strategy for development and enact trade reforms that integrate
the local economy to the global market. A study conducted by the World Bank International Trade Department, The Inter American
Development Bank and Macalester College, used data from Mexican social security records and U.S. customs records between 2007
and 2009 to analyze how economic shocks emanating from the U.S. are transmitted to the offshoring maquiladoras of northern
Mexico. The study produced four specific conclusions: First, the study showed that when Mexican imports fell during
the crisis, employment in the maquiladoras did as well. This defies common sense with regard to what you
would normally expect in trade. Normally, when imports drop, employment increases because industries
that compete with imports thrive. In the typical scenario, a decrease in imports cushions the negative impact of a
decrease in export demand. However, the findings in the study are consistent with an environment that relies heavily
on imports for the assembly of finished goods, as is the case in northern Mexico. Such an environment, the study
showed, is subject to large fluctuations in employment. In fact, the maquiladora industry is doubly
affected when the U.S. economy deteriorates: first, because American consumers buy less, and second, because they
stop sending raw goods and U.S.-manufactured components to Mexico.
Grassroot Movement Solvency
Grassroot movements to disrupt sexual exploitation solves
Medicino 5 (Toni Mendicino - Radical Women Bay Area organizer and a union activist at the University of California at
Berkeley, Freedom Socialist Party, “Not one more death! Stop femicide in Juárez”, http://www.socialism.com/drupal6.8/?q=node/800) MaxL
For over a decade, corrupt authorities on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border have covered up an epidemic
of
brutal murders of hundreds of young women in Juárez, Mexico. Grassroots activists have
struggled determinedly to call attention to the crisis, but the deaths continue unabated. Only
organized global outrage will end these murders. An international campaign by feminists and
unionists is needed urgently. Double jeopardy at the border. In the last 12 years, nearly 400 women have been
slain in Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua. An equal number are believed missing. Juárez, a sprawling city of
1.3 million just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is home to more than 380 maquiladora factories. A third of the killed and
disappeared are maquiladora workers; others are waitresses, students and laborers in the informal economy. Many victims
were sexually assaulted, tortured and mutilated before their bodies were dumped in the desert
or discarded in inner-city lots. There is wide speculation about the murderers: are they serial killers, drug smugglers, sons
of powerful elite families, cops, cultists, organ harvesters, snuff pornographers, husbands or boyfriends of the victims, perhaps sex
offenders crossing over from El Paso? Despite pressure from victimsí families, feminist organizations, and human
rights groups, only a few scapegoats have been prosecuted for the continuing wave of
kidnappings, rapes and homicides. As the murder count keeps rising, state and federal authorities in Mexico are widely
condemned for complicity. Activists and journalists report rampant corruption, planting of evidence, and gross negligence, in
addition to harassment and threats against those pressing for justice. Many people believe the police are directly involved, citing
their failure to carry out basic forensic work such as searching for fibers on corpses and establishing times of death. Cops have also
hampered efforts to connect the Juárez cases to similar slayings occurring in Chihuahua City, 233 miles to the south. Under
escalating pressure to stop the carnage, investigators have focused on arresting "undesirables" like gang members and vagrants, and
extracting false confessions after lengthy jailings and torture. Meanwhile, U.S. law enforcement is funding anti-immigrant
"homeland security" border patrols instead of prioritizing a binational probe into the murders of the women, many of whom work
for U.S. corporations. That the killings are happening in a city flooded with maquiladoras owned by U.S.
and European companies is no coincidence. Thanks to NAFTA, goods
produced in these dangerous sweatshops pass
into the U.S. duty-free. Vast profits are made by harshly exploiting female laborers as young as 14,
who migrate from all over Mexico trying to escape poverty. Women employed in Juárez maquilas are paid
under $5 a day to work in unsafe conditions, with long shifts, few protections, and frequent
sexual harassment from the bosses. Many travel on isolated routes to work from outlying colonias populares
(shantytowns), leaving them especially vulnerable to predators.
State Bad
State action should be rejected – it creates gender inequalities
Martínez 8 (Sonia Frías Martínez – Professor of Sociology @ University of Texis at Austin, “GENDER, THE STATE AND
PATRIARCHY: PARTNER VIOLENCE IN MEXICO”,
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/3878/friasmartinezs72092.pdf?sequence=2) //MaxL
The nature of the State is complex and ambivalent. The State has the power to implement policy
change and
grant rights. These features of the State, however, cannot be understood without taking into
consideration the influence of social movements. There are several types of theories of the State. Charles (2000)
differentiates between representational and non-representational theories of the State, with the level of
representation depending on whether or not the State participates in the construction of
political interests, and thus represents itself, or limits its role to the representation of already existing interests.
Therefore, representational theories of the State such as Marxism or social-democracy see the State as “representing
interests that are constituted elsewhere, usually at the economic level” (Charles 2000:6). In contrast,
nonrepresentational theories see the State as an actor in its own right, one that reflects its own political
interests, and tend to focus on how the State exercises its political power. The role of the State in the promotion of women’s
rights, as well as its relationship with individual and organizational actors is best understood from the perspective of feminist
theories of the State. The State can be conceptualized along classical Weberian lines as a set of social
institutions that have the monopoly over legitimate coercion and as the organizational source of
social cohesion (Walby 1990). The modern Western State has gone through different stages of development. The 18th and 19th
centuries saw the emergence of the liberal state (classical liberal, liberaldemocratic and laissez-faire). The liberal tradition
differentiates between the public and private spheres. The public sphere is the domain of the State, while the private sphere is left to
the control of individuals, families, business enterprises, social organizations and local communities. The 20th century witnessed the
full development of the Welfare State, which found its most complete expression in the nations of northern Europe (EspingAndersen
1990; Esping-Andersen 1999; Esping-Andersen, Gallie, Hemerijck, and Myles 2002). Since the 1980’s a neo-liberal turn,
characterized by the policies of Ronald Regan in the U.S., Olof Palme in Sweden and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, sought to
reduce the role and prerogatives of the state in social life. Despite the adoption of neo-liberal policies, many
developed nations and nearly all of the nations of Latin America retain the basic characteristics
of Welfare States. In what follows I will review different feminist analyses of the relationship between gender and the Welfare
State, since there is no dominant cohesive feminist theory of the State (Waylen 1998). Some theories view the State as exclusively
repressive and controlling, others believe that the State enables individuals and groups to fulfill their interests and protect their
rights. A third group of theories falls between these two. As of the motivations and pressures behind the adoption of legislation and
public policies, these theories do not commit us to a representational or non-representational characterization of the State. 4.1.aThe Repressive and Controlling State The social control theory sees the State as repressive and controlling
and women are viewed as victims of men’s control which is mediated and reinforced by the
State. From this perspective, then, the State is not a mechanism for promoting social change because the
State is a monolithic institution. This structuralist approach sees the policy making content of the
State as being representative of already existing interests, while formally it is regarded as an
institution or group of institutions with a set of institutionalized rules and procedures that can be used
for the representation of the interests and views of opposing social actors. Socialist feminists added the
woman’s question to the traditional Marxist class analysis, and sought to determine the origins of women’s oppression. They claimed
that the male-breadwinner family structure and women’s economic dependence on men is
supported by the capitalist State. In terms of economic logic, this arrangement is beneficial for the
capitalist mode of production since women’s work is cheap and flexible. Therefore, as the State supports
the capitalist way of production, the State becomes the natural advocate of patriarchy: the State
guarantees the structures that enforce women’s subordinate role in society and those gender
relations, either in the household or in wage labor, that are oppressive to women (McIntosh 1978). From this perspective, the
State is seen as the instrument of the ruling class, predominantly male and capitalist, and aims at
maintaining both class and gender domination, essentially defined by the extraction of surplus labor value (i.e.
Hartmann 1976). 135 In later formulations of this theoretical approach, patriarchy and capitalism were conceived as
two linked systems of domination (Hartmann 1981; Young 1981). However, even those feminists who discard the
apparatus of Marxian theory to explain the source of women’s domination agree that the State has functioned not only as a
repressive and controlling institution vis-à-vis women as a social group, but, even over the course of the change from the nineteenth
century liberal State to the twentieth century Welfare State, has shown itself unwilling and unable to represent the interests of
subordinated groups, including women. In the book, Gender and Governance, Brush (2003) argues that the State maintains
men’s social superiority and fosters women’s subordination in two different ways: directly through the structures,
procedures, ideologies and discourses related to gender (gender of governance) and indirectly through
the maintenance of a false appearance of gender neutrality (governance of gender). Radical feminist analyses,
such as those of Catherine MacKinnon (1989), which view the State as an instrument of patriarchal domination, deal mostly with the
gender of governance. State’s actions, or lack thereof, are conceived as a tool for reproducing the
patriarchal system because the State is “male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women in the
way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989:161-162). By governance of gender, Brush (2003) labels the actions of State
institutions and practices of governance that perpetuate the different and unequal treatment of men and women in spite of the
ostensible gender neutrality of State laws and policies, since these laws and policies are rife with genderladen assumptions. As
shown by Weldon (2002), these assumptions result in the State reproducing and promoting gender
differentiation. This perspective does not only fail to acknowledge the institutional and political
complexity within the State, but also fails to acknowledge the relationship among social
movements, society and the State
A2: Neolib Turns the Case
Neolib doesn’t come first and isn’t a root cause to patriarchy
Nadell and Haulman 13
Pamela S. Nadell - Chair of the Department of History and Director of the Jewish Studies Program @ American University and Kate
Haulman - historian of early North America @ American University, “Making Women’s Histories”, 2013, pg 190) //MaxL
It is true, however, that in this revisionist world history enterprise, questions of the political economy have taken
center stage and so has the goal of (re-)mapping global connections. Related to this is the prominence of nineteenthand early twentieth-century social theory in word history discourses (albeit often as an object of critical appraisal) and a
traditional, institution-centered view of politics. As world historians themselves have noted, a deep engagement
with culturalist theoretical paradigms from anthropology or literary studies remains the exception rather than the rule.12 Not
surprisingly then, the cultural production of difference and its political deployment in all spheres of life,
issues that
are of paramount importance to historians of gender and sexuality, inhabit the analytical
periphery of the world historical debate. More frustrating still, while a materialist emphasis does not per
se preclude gender analysis—one only needs to recall the many superb feminist labor histories written within national
frameworks—much of world history marches along merrily without paying much attention to gender and
sexuality at all. Beyond their presumed transparent relation to demography, gender and sexuality remain altogether
invisible, not to mention inoperative as categories of historical analysis. En-gendering World History within Area
Studies: The Case of Latin America But the materialist and culturalist approaches that often separate world
history and gender and sexuality studies are by no means inherently incompatible. For reasons specifi c to the
history of Latin American studies as a field, Latin American history anticipated the concern of both world history and transnational
cultural studies with international dynamics of domination, dependency, and difference.13 It has long been both comparative and
interested in how a particular region fi ts into a global story. Like world history, the dominant narratives of Latin
American history have been those of empire building, global capitalism, and state formation. At
the same time, Latin Americanist feminist scholarship and studies of sexuality have been heavily materialist, even
as they incorporated the linguistic turn’s emphasis on meaning. Scholars have engaged poststructuralist calls to see gender as a
multilayered fi eld of power, and sexuality as constituted through ideology and performance. Yet what they have most produced
is an
outpouring of social and political history on gender and sexuality—in labor relations,
government institutions, social movements, and national modernization. Much of this literature
reworks, rather than jettisons older notions of political economy and the state, even as Foucault and
Lacan enter more prominently into the framework. It is not that Latin Amercanists “lagged behind” or failed to
take enough of a cultural turn, but rather that different questions were being asked about Latin America
than about Europe and the United States, which compelled different uses of—and investments in—materialism,
gender, and sexuality.
Policy Focus
Latin American policy must focus on gender inequality
Blofield 10 (Merike Blofield – assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, Development Challenges in
the Hemisphere Task Force, “Gender Equity in Latin America”, 3-31-10, https://www6.miami.edu/hemisphericpolicy/Task_Force_Papers/Blofield_Gender_Equality_in_Latin_America.pdf) //MaxL
Latin America has the highest inequalities of any region in the world, with an average Gini coefficient (a
measure of inequality: 0 = complete equality; 1 = complete inequality) for the region of .52. The corresponding figure for highincome countries is .33; for East Asia, it is 0.4. The only region that approximates Latin America is sub-Saharan Africa, with an
average Gini coefficient of 0.5, hardly a propitious development comparison (World Bank data from Ferreira and Ravallion 2008).
These inequalities have remained largely unchanged since the wave of democratic transitions in the 1980s. While we have seen some
recent marginal improvements toward equality in Brazil and Chile over the last five years, in other countries, such as Bolivia and
Colombia, inequalities appear to have worsened. An analysis of gender equity must take these inequalities
into account. Government policies tend to reinforce these inequalities. The contributory social security
systems in the region protect those who are in the formal sector and already better off (Filgueira 2009, Martínez Franzoni and
Voorend 2009). For example, those in the top quintile of the population in Latin America receive about 60 percent of net social
insurance transfers; that is, after their contributions are factored out (Lindert et.al. 2006). These transfers are often subsidized from
general tax revenue, in effect representing a massive regressive redistribution of income upwards. Meanwhile, almost half of the
economically-active population in Latin America – 45 percent in 2006 – works in the informal sector, and both contribute and
receive little. The informal sector limits economic development through lack of information, accountability and
enforceable contracts (De Soto 2000), and limits social
development through its lack of regulations, labor
rights and social-security contributions (Centeno and Portes 2005). Given these inequalities people’s economic and
social achievements in Latin American countries – including their level of education and health – are significantly limited by their
circumstances, not by their choices (Crespo and Ferreira 2009). This constrains economic development, and the region’s human
capital is not developed to its fullest. Low-income women bear the brunt of this exclusion in several ways. Their
reproductive burden, combined with extremely low resources, make it particularly difficult for
them to invest in their education, health, and integration into the labor market on an equal level,
as well as to promote social integration and educational opportunities for their children. I discuss
specific factors that aggravate this burden, drawing particularly on a recent report (June, 2009) on work and the family in Latin
America, published jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Labour Organization
(ILO). First, while women now equal, and in some countries surpass men in educational levels, this is not
reflected in wages. The UNDP/ILO Report indicates that women still earn only 70percent of what men
earn. Moreover, much of the new job creation is in the informal sector. The problems of the informal sector
affect both genders but can have particularly negative consequences for women. According to the
report, women are more likely to work in the informal sector than men (51 to 41 percent). In the informal sector, women lack
access to maternity leave and family allowances to help them cope financially with family
responsibilities. In addition, work interruptions for such responsibilities reduce access to pensions,
even for women who are in the formal sector, making them more vulnerable to poverty in old age. Indeed,
only 36 percent of women in the urban areas of Latin America have social security, while 49
percent of men do. Second, 30 percent of households in the region today are headed by women, without the presence of an
adult male. This is up from only 23 percent two decades ago, according to the UNDP/ILO Report. In these households, women
bear the burden of providing both income and care to their children. While the labor-force participation
rates of these women are significantly higher than in other types of households, these women are also more likely to
find themselves in extreme poverty. This indicates that these households are often unable to
meet basic needs in food, shelter and care in a satisfactory way. Third, even in two-parent households,
traditional gender roles in household work predominate. A large survey done by the UNDP on time-use in 14
Latin American countries revealed a huge gender gap in the time spent by women versus men in household and care work.
Responsibility for family care continues to fall almost exclusively on women, even when they
participate in the workforce, producing what many scholars refer to as the “double burden” for women. In
addition, this burden differs by class as well as by sex. While both low-and high-income women work outside the home, their options
in resolving this double burden are dramatically different. For middle- and upper-class families, it is resolved through access to
cheap domestic labor. Indeed, paid domestic work is the single largest employer of women in the region – around 12 million women
and girls are domestic workers, constituting over 15 percent of the economically-active female population. Low-income women and
girls take up these jobs as nannies and maids in wealthier households. Fourth, the conditions for this type of care work
tend to be dismal. Countries in the region still explicitly discriminate against domestic workers due to labor codes that
mandate longer work hours, lower pay and lower benefits to them compared to other workers (see
Blofield 2009). Only four countries in the region – Uruguay, Costa Rica, Colombia and Bolivia- have equalized the rights of these
workers with the better rights of other workers. In Brazil and Mexico, for instance, domestic workers can be legally
obligated to work 16 hours a day, and in many countries, including Argentina and Venezuela, they are legally
obligated to behave in a “subordinate” way. In Argentina – and Chile until 1998 – they are explicitly excluded
from maternity leave, a particularly powerful form of discrimination in an occupation made up
overwhelmingly of lower-income women. In addition, enforcement of the rights that do exist is very inadequate and most domestic
workers labor informally, without written contracts or social security. Hence, domestic workers suffer from a double discrimination:
explicit legal discrimination and lack of proactive enforcement of rights that do exist. Such discriminatory policies, in effect, provide
a massive subsidy to the middle- and upper-classes in resolving their household and childcare needs. These same women who work
as nannies and maids often feel unable to have children of their own, given their long hours and low wages or, if they do have
children, they must leave them in informal care arrangements for long hours. A high percentage of these women constitute the thirty
percent of female-headed households. Sadly, even if they have a male partner in the household, the UNDP time-use survey indicates
that traditional gender roles are more rigid in the lower classes, where men report that they do even less around the house than their
upper-class counterparts claim to do. In the worst cases, women find themselves forced to leave their children home alone
(Heymann 2006). Also, an increasing number of women migrate within and across countries to work as
domestics and, in order to support their families and children, leave them behind. Another, but
related, problem is lack of access to decent reproductive health services that allow women to
control their fertility safely and to decide whether and when to have children. The regional fertility rate is 2.9 children per
woman. The problem is that much of fertility regulation takes place through pregnancy termination rather than prevention. While
legal abortion in Latin America is highly restricted, an estimated four million abortions are performed clandestinely per year. As a
result, abortion-related deaths and hospitalizations are high (Alan Guttmacher Institute 2008). This reflects the tremendous unmet
needs for contraception in the region, and the use of abortion as a method of birth control.
We must make equality the focus of policy
Clinton 13 (Hillary Clinton – former secretary of state, Department of State, “Presidential Memorandum on Promoting Gender
Equality and Empowering Women and Girls Globally”, 1-31-13, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2013/01/203579.htm) MaxL
The Obama Administration has made it clear that advancing the rights of women and girls is
critical to the foreign policy of the United States. This is a matter of national security as much as it is an
issue of morality or fairness. President Obama’s National Security Strategy explicitly recognizes that “countries are
more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity.
When those rights and opportunities are denied, countries lag behind.” That’s why I’m so pleased about
the Presidential Memorandum that President Obama signed yesterday, which institutionalizes an elevated focus on global women’s
issues at the State Department and USAID and ensures coordination on these issues across the federal government. And it is so
important that incoming Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed his support for the continued elevation
of these issues in our foreign policy. As I have said many times, protecting and advancing the rights of
women are critical to solving virtually every challenge we face as individual nations and as a community of
nations. We have made great progress, but there is more to do. This is the unfinished business of
the 21st Century, and it is essential that it remains central to our foreign policy for years to come.
Trafficking Supplement
Database Cards
Database analysis fails and gets trafficking policies kicked off the agenda
WSJ 10 (Carl Bialik, The Wall Street Journal, “Suspect Estimates of Sex Trafficking at the World Cup”, 6-19-10,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704289504575312853491596916.html) MaxL
But the claims spotlight a hidden form of prostitution that is notoriously difficult to measure. Sex
trafficking—the transportation of individuals for sex work who have been induced by force, fraud or coercion—is a widespread
problem, including in South Africa. Some experts say there is evidence sex trafficking and prostitution might increase at sporting
events that draw hundreds of thousands of men away from their homes. Those fears likely prompted the South African government
to sound the alarm about sex trafficking tied to the World Cup. In a warning cited in dozens of news stories, the South African
Central Drug Authority suggested that some 40,000 sex workers could be trafficked into the country during the tournament. An ad
against human trafficking featuring local celebrities that has run online and on South African cable television warns that "as many as
100,000 victims are expected to fall prey" to the sex trade during the Cup. Advocates who fight trafficking point out that the 40,000
figure is identical to the one used ahead of the World Cup in Germany four years ago. Researchers at the International
Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based intergovernmental agency, looked into the number following the
2006 event. Officials they interviewed said they saw no jump in measures related to sex trafficking, including
police cases and calls to hotlines, says Sarah Louise Craggs, a project officer with IOM. The IOM's findings were largely corroborated
by a 2007 report from Germany's delegation to a European Union group fighting organized crime. The IOM couldn't even
identify where the 40,000 figure originated, despite extensive searches. Similar confusion surrounds the
re-emergence of the same figure for the 2010 World Cup. The South African Central Drug Authority and the country's embassy in
Washington didn't respond to numerous requests for comment. Chandre Gould, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security
Studies, a think tank based in Pretoria, South Africa, who has studied the country's sex trade, says the figure seems to have
originated in a "throwaway comment" by an official at the agency in a public session with journalists. "I don't think at any stage it
was really a serious answer," Dr. Gould says. But initial reports attributed the figure to the agency, and the number took on the
sheen of an official estimate. Already, there are indications that trafficking hasn't risen in South Africa during the World Cup. "We
have not seen an increase or any cases that are directly linked to the World Cup," says Mariam Khokhar, a researcher with IOM in
South Africa. Part of the difficulty in studying sex trafficking is that researchers and advocates agree
only a small fraction of cases are identified by the legal system. And police statistics might
reflect changes in enforcement strategies rather than underlying shifts. Earlier this decade, the U.S. State
Department included an estimate of 800,000 people trafficked across international borders for any purpose each year in an annual
report on the problem, but the last two reports, including one out this week, didn't include the figure. "We had the sense toward the
end of the time I was ambassador that it was time to start being careful about using that estimate," said Mark P. Lagon, former
ambassador at large and director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons in the George W.
Bush administration. Still, adds Mr. Lagon, trafficking is a massive problem. "The questions about the numbers for human
trafficking are, are they large or are they immense?" (A State Department spokeswoman didn't return a call seeking comment.) Some
social scientists are attempting to come up with more reasonable numbers. Marlise Richter, a researcher at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, is working on a study that will follow 60 sex workers in three World Cup host cities, and survey
hundreds of others. She hopes the study will yield insights into demand and perhaps the total number of workers in the trade,
though she is confident the 40,000 figure is "completely ridiculous." In the meantime, advocates who fight trafficking
say they are worried about the unintended consequences of using misleading numbers. "The
problem with the estimates is, they may put the issue on the agenda, but when they're found to
not be founded, it falls off the agenda very quickly," says the IOM's Ms. Craggs.
Data is not enough – its to vague
Dumienski 11 (Zbigniew Dumienski, The Centre for Non-Traditional Security, ‘Critical Reflections on Anti-human
Trafficking: The Case of Timor-Leste’, NTS Alert, May 2011, Issue 2, http://www.rsis.edu.sg/nts/HTML-Newsletter/alert/NTSalert-may-1102.html) MaxL
What all these figures have in common is that they rarely have identifiable sources or
transparent methodologies behind them (Belser, in Bialik, 2010; see also the criticism of the TIP Report in US
Government Accountability Office (2006)). In most instances, they are nothing more than the ‘result of certain
activists who pull their numbers out of thin air’ (Weizer, in Bialik, 2010). These estimates are so often so tenuous
that debunking them has become ‘a sport for sceptical journalists’ (Howley, 2007). The truth is that all
attempts to quantify human trafficking are ‘questionable’ (Agustin, 2008:36) since the phenomenon of
trafficking is reportedly a vague ‘covert activity’ happening in the ‘shadow economy’ (Rothschild,
2009b). What statistics on human trafficking seem to do best is obscure the murkiness of the concept itself.
Fed Gov Key
Federal government key warrant
WWC 9 (Woodrow Wilson Center Mexico Institute, The United States and Mexico:
Towards a Strategic Partnership: a report of four workign groups on U.S. - Mexico Relations”, January 2009,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/The%20U.S.%20and%20Mexico.%20Towards%20a%20Strategic%20Partnership.
pdf) MaxL
To a large extent, all of the other issues addressed in this report—security, economic integration, and migration—come
together at the border between the two countries. It is tempting to think that we can control the border by limiting
transit and commerce across it—the model perhaps best exemplified by the building of a fence on the U.S. side to control
immigration and the flow of drugs. However, unilateral approaches rarely work and they belie the actual
bilateral nature of border interactions. Even narcotics trafficking is the subject of bilateral flows: illegal
drugs move to the north and cash and arms to the south. It is impossible to develop an effective strategy for
controlling these flows that does not build on some form of binational cooperation to reduce flows in
both directions. !e two federal governments need to balance the legitimate right to assert their own
sovereignty in stopping illegal traffic across the border with binational strategies that follow a more strategic and
targeted approach. Since it is impossible to inspect all people and vehicles moving across the border, cross-border intelligence and
carefully designed risk management strategies, supported by the latest technologies available, are more likely to yield real results. !is
report also argues that the two federal governments need to find a way to balance the real needs for
security with equally real needs to facilitate the flow of goods and people that sustain border
communities and are essential for the economies of both countries. Implementing new security
requirements without sufficient attention to the impact on trade can often impose costs on border communities and their fragile
economies, as well as places a drag on the broader economies of both countries. In many cases, federal authorities could
learn from the experiences of how local and state authorities manage their relationships across the
border in designing effective cooperative strategies.
UN Bad
The UN is to corrupt and peacemakers facilitate more trafficking
NYT 11 (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, The New York Times, “Peacekeepers’ Sex Scandals Linger, On Screen and Off”, 9-7-11,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/world/08nations.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) MaxL
UNITED NATIONS — On screen, two senior United Nations officials in Bosnia are arguing about firing Kathy Bolkovac, an
American police officer battling to stop peacekeepers from both trafficking in young women and
frequenting the brothels where they became indentured prostitutes. “It is a point of honor for me that
the U.N. is not remembered for raping the very people we must protect,” says Madeleine Rees, a spirited
human rights advocate played by Vanessa Redgrave. “Those girls are whores of war,” growls the male bureaucrat heading the United
Nations mission. “It happens; I will not dictate for morality.” Ms. Rees, the director of the human rights office in Sarajevo from 1998
to 2006, said that dispute in the movie “The Whistleblower,” recently released in the United States, was lifted almost verbatim from
a running argument she had around 2001. A decade later, a string of sex scandals from Bosnia to the Democratic
Republic of Congo to Haiti
involving peacekeeping missions has forced the United Nations to change
the way it handles accusations of trafficking, rape and related crimes. But the issue still bedevils
the institution — a point underscored by the skirmishing among senior United Nations officials over
whether to embrace the movie or try to ignore it. The issue has certainly not gone away. This week, hundreds
of Haitians protested in support of an 18-year-old who said he was sexually assaulted by
peacekeepers from Uruguay on a United Nations base, eliciting a furious rebuke from Haiti’s president and an apology
from Uruguay. The United Nations has focused serious attention on addressing sexual crimes among the more than 120,000
personnel it has deployed in 16 peacekeeping missions globally, including widespread training. But the question that diplomats,
advocates and even some United Nations officials ask is why the efforts still lag in terms of investigating
accusations and, most important, making sure those who send troops and contractors abroad hold
them accountable. Human rights experts and some member states fault the United Nations for leaving too much of the job of
enforcing its “zero tolerance” policy announced in 2003 to the countries contributing troops. Individual cases and any disciplinary
action are rarely made public. “They never come up with actual facts; they never come up with actual cases,” Ms.
Bolkovac said. She won a wrongful dismissal case in 2003 against a subsidiary of Virginia-based DynCorp International, which was
contracted by the State Department to provide police officers for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia. But Ms. Bolkovac
says she has never been hired by another peacekeeping mission. (DynCorp issued a statement noting that “The Whistleblower” was a
work of fiction and that new owners had since enacted their own zero tolerance policy.) United Nations officials brandish the
statistics published on the organization’s peacekeeping Web site as evidence of transparency. The numbers, whose source
is
somewhat vague, indicate that cases dropped from 108 substantiated accusations of sexual exploitation and abuse in 2007 to
85 in 2008, then to 63 in 2009, 33 last year and just 5 so far in 2011. But more than 200 such accusations remain unresolved, and
the United Nations annual report on such crimes for 2010 noted that sexual activity with minors
and nonconsensual sex represented more than half of reported accusations, little changed since 2008.
Cases have come to light where peacekeepers paid children $1 or with candy to make a rape seem like
prostitution. Finally, efforts to gather information from troop contributors about legal or disciplinary
action are often ignored. The United Nations got answers roughly a quarter of the time, or 88 responses from 333 queries
sent, since 2007, according to its figures. Senior officials defend the numbers as improving, and argue that publicly shaming
member states would make finding peacekeeping troops more difficult. “Going into a blame and shame
approach is counterproductive because this requires a mind-set change,” said Susanna Malcorra, head of the logistics
end of peacekeeping. Activists and some diplomats condemn the United Nations as timid, with internal
policing particularly weak under Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban waged an extended feud over hiring with the
head of internal oversight before she left in 2010, leaving dozens of investigator jobs empty. Senior officials admit that its
investigators have the mandate to do more to track sexual abuse cases. The United Nations pays $1,024 a month per soldier, making
peacekeeping a profitable venture for many poorer nations. In June, member states voted themselves a bonus of roughly $100 per
soldier per month, costing $85 million, for the coming year. The United Nations lost an opportunity by not hinging the bonuses on
better cooperation, advocates contend. “Member states are not reliable enough to do a good job on their
own, especially in the early stages of a military investigation,” said Prince Zeid Raad Zeid al-Hussein, the
Jordanian ambassador and the author of a damning study of sexual exploitation in peacekeeping in 2005 as special adviser on the
issue under the previous secretary general. Mr. Ban never filled the post. Member states rejected the study’s
recommendations to establish a coordinated, nimble investigation and discipline process.
Soldiers serving the United Nations are subject to their own countries’ military justice. The only
wrist slap often faced by contractors is being sent home, because they enjoy immunity as United Nations employees. Soldiers
linked to crimes are often repatriated. In April, 16 peacekeepers from Benin were sent home from Ivory Coast — more
than a year after Save the Children U.K. found that the soldiers traded food for sex with poor, underage girls.
More than 100 troops from Sri Lanka were sent home from Haiti in 2007 because of widespread accusations of sex with minors. In
many cases, however, the final outcome remains a mystery. “The U.N. is not even a player in the investigation,
doesn’t know the evidence and has no way to follow up with the way the military decides to deal
with this issue,” Prince Zeid said. “We, the member states, have by and large failed to do what I had hoped we would do.”
Politics Link Turns
Anti-Trafficking is bipartisan
Washington Post 13 (Brad Pulmer, The Washington Post, “There’s a new bipartisan bill to crack down on gun trafficking.
Will it work?”, 2-5-13, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/05/congress-wants-to-crack-down-on-guntrafficking-will-it-work/) MaxL
Gun control can be a divisive issue, but here’s something that at least some Republicans and Democrats appear to
agree on: Congress could do more to crack down on illegal firearms sales and gun trafficking. On Tuesday,
lawmakers from both parties in the House unveiled a bill (pdf) that would place new restrictions on
illegal gun transfers. Among other things, the bill would impose steeper penalties on “straw purchasers” who knowingly buy
guns for convicted criminals. The House bill is sponsored by Reps. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Scott Rigell
(R-Va.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). There’s a similar bipartisan bill in the Senate sponsored by Sens. Kirsten
Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) The idea here is to try to prevent guns from falling into the hands of people who aren’t
allowed to own them. Surveys have found that most armed criminals acquire their guns either from friends, from family members or
“on the street.” Often this can be done through straw purchases — a person with a clean record will buy a gun legally and then
transfer it to someone who’s prohibited from owning a gun. The House anti-trafficking bill would make these transfers a federal
crime, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The bill would also make it a crime to lie to a federally licensed gun dealer — that is,
there’d be steep penalties for anyone who says he’s buying the gun for himself when he’s not.
Congress recognizes the horrors of human trafficking – the devil is not in the
details
Maloney 13 (Carolyn B. Maloney press release, “Reps. Maloney & Carter Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Fight Human
Trafficking”, 3-1-13, http://maloney.house.gov/press-release/reps-maloney-carter-introduce-bipartisan-bill-fight-humantrafficking) MaxL
WASHINGTON – Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) and John Carter (R-TX) have introduced the Human
Trafficking Reporting Act to fight human trafficking. U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Richard
Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced its companion in the Senate. “As a crime that ruins lives and exploits men, women,
and children, human trafficking should hold the same classification as voluntary manslaughter
and rape,” said Rep. Maloney. “And by including human trafficking offenses in the data reported to the Department of Justice,
we can expand our knowledge of the prevalence of this modern-day slavery." "Human traffickers are like cockroaches.
They operate in the dark. The American public has no real knowledge of the atrocities going on around the world. The human
trafficking bill will be like turning the light on the cockroaches. They'll scatter and we'll be able to catch them," said Congressman
John Carter, Chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. “We must work together, at every
level of government, to equip law enforcement with the tools they need to crack down on human
traffickers. Our bill will aid Texas and other state and local governments as they battle organized criminal
syndicates and violent gangs that traffic humans for labor and sex,” said Sen. Cornyn. “Human trafficking is
a heinous crime which egregiously exploits women and children and forces them into modern day slavery,” said Blumenthal, a
former Connecticut Attorney General who co-chairs the Senate Caucus To End Human Trafficking with Senator Rob Portman.
“Trafficking deprives people of their liberty and freedom through indentured servitude and forced labor.”
Plan popular – TVPRA proves
Charisma News 13 (Melanie Korb, “Congress Sends Human Trafficking Bill to Obama, 3-4-13,
http://www.charismanews.com/us/38499-congress-sends-human-trafficking-bill-to-obama) MaxL
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Friday to pass a Senate-approved version
of the Trafficking Victims
the way for President Obama to sign into law the United States' most
important tool in the fight against human trafficking and modern-day slavery. An estimated 27 million
Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), paving
people worldwide are victims of modern-day slavery, and human trafficking is the second largest criminal enterprise in the world,
generating over $32 billion in profits to traffickers annually. The TVPRA reauthorizes key federal anti-trafficking programs for the
next four years, provides for new partnerships with cooperating countries to protect children and prevent trafficking, adds new
protections for human-trafficking victims, and provides new tools to prosecutors to go after the traffickers who exploit others. The
law expired in 2011, leaving critical programs to fight human trafficking and provide survivor services at risk. The
Senate
demonstrated overwhelming bipartisan support earlier this month, voting 93-5 for the TVPRA
when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) offered it as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization bill. The
House approved the bipartisan VAWA and TVPRA by a vote of 286 to 138. “Congress’ renewal of the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act re-asserts U.S. leadership in the effort to eradicate modern-day slavery, our greatest global human
rights scourge,” explained David Abramowitz, director of the Alliance To End Slavery & Trafficking (ATEST). “This is an important
step toward freedom for the millions of women, men and children around the globe who are trafficked into forced labor and sex
slavery each year. “We applaud Senators Leahy and Rubio for their steadfast leadership in the fight against modern slavery and we
look forward to seeing President Obama sign this cornerstone anti-trafficking measure into law,” added Abramowitz, who is also vice
president for Policy & Government Relations at Humanity United. Director of policy for the Polaris Project, Mary Ellison, says the
group welcomes Congress' bipartisan support of the Violence Against Women Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act
(TVPA). “Today's action is a victory for us all to celebrate,” Ellison said Friday. “This legislation is critical to protecting humantrafficking survivors and stopping the perpetrators of violence, exploitation and enslavement. “All across the United States,
hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims are trapped and waiting to be free,” she noted. “Congress has sent a
message that these people deserve our best efforts to find them, protect them, and hold their
traffickers accountable.” Marina Colby, director of Public Polcy & Government Relations for ECPAT-USA, congratulated
Congress “for strengthening important protections and services for survivors of human trafficking, as well as domestic and sexual
violence, by reauthorizing both the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Violence Against Women Act. “With the President’s
signature on this bill,” she said, “we can continue to build a strong response against human trafficking, including enhanced services
for children, and most importantly we can prevent these egregious crimes from occurring in the first place.” Vital Voices is also
celebrating the passage of the reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, said its Global Partnership Director of
Human Rights Melysa Sperber. “In a welcome demonstration of bipartisanship, the House of
Representatives put survivors of violence and exploitation first,” Sperber commented. “Today, we look
forward to this important law reaching President Obama's desk and to subsequent efforts to ensure its implementation so that
perpetrators are prosecuted, survivors at home and overseas receive services, and impact-driven interventions prevent trafficking
from happening in the first place.” Avaloy Lanning, senior director for the Anti-Trafficking Program at Safe Horizon, noted that
human trafficking affects people of every nationality, gender, religion, age and socio-economic class. “It can occur in almost any
industry, from manufacturing to agriculture, from health care to transportation, construction to the commercial sex trade,” Lanning
said. “This sends a powerful message to victims throughout the entire country who are need of emergency shelter, case management,
counseling and other essential services who can now access these programs without delay. We are now better equipped to provide
critical resources and new tools in the fight against human trafficking at home and abroad.” “We strongly applaud the passage of the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) by the House and Senate,” Free the Slaves Executive Director Maurice I. Middleberg said.
“This legislation is the cornerstone of the American effort to combat the horrors of human slavery and trafficking. This action by the
Congress and the President’s signature will send a strong message to people in slavery that help is on the way. It restores America’s
reputation as a world leader in combating human trafficking at home and abroad.” Neha Misra, senior specialist of Migration &
Human Trafficking for the Solidarity Center, said the passage of the TVPA “affirms that the United States will continue leading the
fight against forced labor and labor trafficking. The Solidarity Center supports partners around the world to advocate for greater
protections for marginalized workers, who are vulnerable to forced labor, debt bondage and other forms of human trafficking.
“TVPA is one such protection and its reauthorization will send a strong message to other governments that they need to pass
similarly strong legislation to protect victims of human trafficking, and do more to enforce laws to prevent the trafficking of
vulnerable workers,” Misra continued. Kay Buck, CEO of Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, said: “As a
direct victim service provider, CAST celebrates the passing of the TPVA, which will have a direct impact on protecting survivors of
modern day slavery. We applaud this demonstration of bipartisan support to help survivors rebuild
their lives.” International Justice Mission also applauds Congress “for crossing party lines to renew the landmark law that gives
the U.S. the essential tools to fight human trafficking both at home and abroad,” Director of Advocacy Eileen Campbell stated.
“Foreign governments pay close attention to U.S. leadership on trafficking and slavery, and today the U.S. Congress has reasserted
our global position in protecting the least of these—women, men and children in slavery.” World Vision's Senior Policy Advisor for
Child Protection, Jesse Eaves, said that Friday marks “an inspiring shift in the current political rancor of
Capitol Hill. To see Congress move past politics and support this bill is truly an incredible day
for all of us.”
We bipartisan
WMC 13 (Mary Ann Swissler, Women’s Media Center, “Human Trafficking Bill Resurrected in Congress”, 2-15-13,
http://www.womensmediacenter.com/feature/entry/human-trafficking-bill-resurrected-in-congress) MaxL
This week the Senate took care of the unfinished business of reauthorizing legislation to combat the crime of trafficking, including
services for domestic victims. Now it's up to the House. The Senate applied the buddy system this week to shepherd anti-human
trafficking legislation through the system. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) attached the Trafficking Victims
Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as an amendment to the Violence Against Women Act
(VAWA). On Tuesday, Leahy's amendment passed 93 to 5 and VAWA then passed 78 to 22. If the Senate
version becomes law, funding for housing, legal services, counseling and case management will be available for the first time to
domestic victims of sex and labor trafficking; it’s estimated that American-born citizens make up 83 percent of sex trafficking cases
in the U.S. “Our effort is to stop human trafficking at its roots by supporting both domestic and
international efforts to fight against trafficking and to punish its perpetrators,” said Leahy. “We provide
critical resources to help support victims as they rebuild their lives,” he said. Many updates are included, According to an aide in
Leahy’s office: “It ensures better coordination among federal agencies, between law enforcement and victim service providers, and
with foreign countries to work on every facet of this complicated problem. It includes measures to encourage victims to come
forward and report this terrible crime, which leads to more prosecutions and help for more victims.” The TVPA had expired in 2011
and failed to get reauthorized in 2012. Another failed attempt at reauthorization this session would have been devastating to
domestic victims of sex trafficking, who saw their best hopes of treatment and prevention programs stalled last year, even though it
had enjoyed bipartisan support since first passing in 2000. A Democratic aide explained the impact after chances of passage
disappeared at the end of December: “Funding will continue through the appropriations process [through 2013], but the failure to
pass a reauthorization bill" would mean "no updates or improvements to existing programs, like services for domestic trafficking
victims.” If the Senate version is passed in the House, funding would be extended through 2017. A second, bipartisan
trafficking amendment was added to the VAWA also on Tuesday through the offices of Senators Richard
Blumenthal (D-CT) and Rob Portman (R-OH), to protect child sex-trafficking victims. Another sign of momentum in
Congress on combating trafficking is Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) bill that would “establish the United States Advisory Council
on Human Trafficking to review federal government policy on human trafficking.”
Trafficking = Economic Issue
Human trafficking is at its core an economic issue – traffickers are motivated by
the benefits of the trafficking market
Wheaton et al 10 (Elizabeth M. Wheaton – professor @ Red Oak Texas, Edward J. Schauer – Proffessor @ A&M
University, and Thomas V. Galli – Professor @ Chinade Unviersity of Honolulu, “Economics of Human Trafficking”, International
Migration, 2010, https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/247221/original/Economics%2Bof%2BHuman%2BTrafficking.pdf) MaxL
This paper models the human trafficking market as a monopolistic competition consisting of many
sellers and buyers dealing in differentiated products. Traffickers encounter few barriers to entering the market
when they see profit being made by other traffickers or exiting the market if they find they are not making a profit. The ease of
entry and exit precludes a monopoly or oligopoly. Despite the large number of suppliers in the market, product
differentiation (in this market, trafficked individuals with different personal attributes) allows monopolistically competitive sellers
to have some control over the price at which they sell their products. The monopolistic competition model best fits
the market for human trafficking for a number of reasons. First, there are many sellers in the market.
Whether human trafficking is by organized groups of criminals (Office on Violence against Women., 2000) or by small, loose
networks of entrepreneurs (Klueber, 2003; Zhang and Chin, 2002a, 2002b; Bush, 2004; Kwong, 1997), the benefits so greatly
outweigh the costs that a willing cadre of traffickers is assured. As Bales (2005: 89) states, ‘‘Criminals are inventive.
They work in a context of intense competition, they must be flexible, and they must adapt
quickly or (at times literally) die’’. Second, many buyers demand human trafficking victims for employment for a variety
of reasons. Employing trafficked individuals is by nature exploitative. In many cases, the trafficked individual does not have the right
to decide whether to work, how many hours to work, or what kind of work to do (Bales, 1999: 9). Third, the human trafficking
market is characterized by product differentiation. Bales (2005: 158) points out that ‘‘attributes vary according to the jobs or
economic sectors in which the retail consumer intends to use the trafficked person. Different attributes are needed for prostitution
or agricultural work or domestic service, though these will overlap as well’’. Because there are so many different uses for trafficked
individuals, the economic model in this paper assumes that the trafficker and employer negotiate over
price so that the trafficker has some control of selling price. Supply and demand in the human trafficking
market Human traffickers participate in a monopolistically competitive market supplying a product in
many forms. The price the trafficker will receive is based on availability of the desired product,
characteristics of the product, the number of similar products available, and the negotiating
acumen of the human trafficker. At very low prices, human traffickers will be unwilling and unable to supply trafficked
individuals because costs exceed revenue. If the trafficker’s costs do not change, an increase in the price received leads to increased
profit and thus an increase in the number of trafficked individuals supplied. Employers willing to employ trafficking victims face the
traffickers’ upward sloping supply curve. Because the employer is trying to decrease labour costs, the employer’s downward sloping
demand curve is zero at high. In Figure 1, at a price above PHIGH employers can employ legitimate labourers because they do not
benefit from using trafficked labour. This is shown by the dotted part of the demand curve. The viable price region in which those
employers who use trafficked labour would be willing to employ trafficked victims would be at a price below PHIGH.
Trafficking is a complex issue but profit is the driver of traffickers – viewing it
through an economic lens takes out the incentive for traffickers
Wheaton et al 10 (Elizabeth M. Wheaton – professor @ Red Oak Texas, Edward J. Schauer – Proffessor @ A&M
University, and Thomas V. Galli – Professor @ Chinade Unviersity of Honolulu, “Economics of Human Trafficking”, International
Migration, 2010, https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/247221/original/Economics%2Bof%2BHuman%2BTrafficking.pdf) MaxL
When describing the rational-choice approach to crime, Becker (1995) states, ‘‘people decide whether to commit
crime by comparing the bene- fits and costs of engaging in crime.’’ Becker cites income from illegal
work (1968) and psychic benefits (‘‘getting away with something’’) (1995) as benefits of crime. Human traffickers
offer differentiated products; limiting the number and type of individuals they traffic to
employers (or use as employers). This means that each human trafficker faces an individual demand curve
for his product. This demand curve depends partly upon how unique consumers perceive the supplier’s product to be in
comparison with similar products available from other suppliers. The revenue from human trafficking is large, an
annual estimated average of US$ 13,000 per trafficked victim totaling US$ 32 billion (Belser, 2005: 18). Trafficked
individuals are assessed as much as US$ 100,000 each in the United States (Zakhari, 2005). Bales (1999: 23) reports that slavery
is a US$ 13 billion industry. Vulnerable populations exist in every part of the world due to such
factors as globalization, economic and political instability, disease, disintegration of families,
and war. This has increased labour movement both within countries and across international borders resulting in a steady supply
of vulnerable individuals available to traffickers. Schloenhardt (1999) says the demand for slave labour is an impetus
for criminals to create an illegal market.
Trafficking is a Threat
Traffickers are a threat – they use victims as leverage to get what they want
HT, No Date (Makini Chisolm-Straker, Human Trafficking, “Information and Resources for Emergency Healthcare
Providers”, No Date, http://www.humantraffickinged.com/contact.html) MaxL
1. Human Trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harboring or receipt of
persons: by the threat or use of kidnapping, force, fraud, deception or coercion, or by the giving or receiving of
unlawful payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, and for the purpose of sexual
exploitation or forced labor.1 The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons: Trafficking does not require
transnational movement of persons; anyone can be a victim of human trafficking: documented and undocumented immigrants,
migrant workers, US citizens and residents. By the threat or use of kidnapping, force, fraud, deception or
coercion: Trafficking can result from a real or a perceived threat; the victim only has to believe
that he/she or loved ones are in danger, they do not actually have to be in danger. The victim
believes that if s/he does not do what the trafficker demands, regardless of the traffickers actual
ability to follow through with said threat(s), there will be dire (physical, financial, or other)
consequences. Traffickers use a variety of techniques to control their victims. A hallmark of the criminal industry is the
sophisticated use of psychological and financial control mechanisms, often minimizing or precluding the need for physical violence
or confinement.2 Or the trafficker actually does a harmful thing, causing the victim to reasonably believe s/he has no other choice
but to do as the trafficker tells her/him.