Kathleen Barry: Global Sexual Exploitation

“We're casting our nets widely this week in this meeting. Not only to reaffirm the work that we have been doing in our different countries and cultures, to get support to go back and to do more, but to launch a proactive as opposed to a reactive movement.”

“It seems sometimes to us unimaginable to accomplish the things that we propose. But there have been no real gains in this world unless we think the unimaginable. And then actually start to believe that we can do it.”

The exploitation of sexuality underlies the political and economic subordination of women through colonisation of women's bodies and expropriation of their selves. While sexual exploitation permeates most forms of violence against women, it is a political condition of sexism that is not confined to acts of force and victims. Research and policy that confines work on violence against women only to that which violates women's consent cannot address the underlying social, cultural, and economic conditions which promote sexual exploitation, reducing it to its individual occurrences. 

Prostitution, an institution and industry of sexual exploitation. has dramatically expanded globally in the last decade. While there is a commonality that unites women in the struggle against sexual exploitation globally, it is also shaped by the differing practices and economics of each world region and the impact of the global economy. This is explored through tracing the personal consequences of sexual exploitation for the political and economic subordination of women from trafficking to sex industrialisation to the normalisation of prostitution, or "the prostitution of sexuality," or legitimised exploitation. 

Kathleen is Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University. She co-founded the United Nations Non-Governmental Organisation ‘The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’. Her publications include The Prostitution of Sexuality: Global Exploitation of Women (1995), which presents a new global analysis, feminist theory and international legal approaches to sexual exploitation. She lectures widely in the US and abroad on women’s rights and international feminism.

Listen to FiLiA's interview with Kathleen in 2020 on the FiLiA Podcast.