THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE

Mythic Mothers and Dead Dolls: Subversive terministic screens and the myth of sex trafficking

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Rhetoric Bates College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

By Karla Marie Cook Lewiston, Maine April 11, 2014

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Jan Hovden, for her patience and support during this challenging process, for always encouraging me to think more critically, and for helping me develop as a scholar and writer. Thank you also to my academic advisor Stephanie Kelley-Romano, for the years of support and guidance. Thank you to my professors in Denmark for inspiring me to pursue this topic, and for giving me the amazing opportunity to speak directly to several anti-trafficking groups in Amsterdam and Sweden about their advertising initiatives in Eastern Europe. Thank you to my friends, for their humor and support throughout these past four years, for showing critical interest in my work at every dinner conversation, and for pushing me to constantly re-answer the question: what exactly is rhetoric? Finally, thank you to my amazing family, for their love and endless supply of Starbucks cards.

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For Nat and Tom

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION...... 5 CHAPTER I: A BRIEF HISTORY...... 10 CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW...... 28 CHAPTER III: THEORY...... 48 CHAPTER IV: METHODOLOGY...... 54 CHAPTER V: ANALYSIS OF LILJA 4-EVER...... 55 EASTERN EUROPE AS A DYSTOPIA...... 56 NATURAL NURTURERS...... 62 DESIRE TO LEAVE...... 65 MISGUIDED WOMEN...... 70 DEAD DOLLS...... 76 DRAWING CONCLUSIONS ABOUT LILJA 4-EVER...... 78 CHAPTER VI: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?...... 79 WORKS CITED...... 85

4 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE INTRODUCTION

On November 16, 2003, a group of young women gathered in a village meeting place in rural Moldova to watch a screening of a Swedish art-house drama, Lilja 4-ever, created by controversial auteur Lukas Moodysson. The event marked the first efforts of the Lilja

4-ever Campaign, a sex trafficking awareness initiative aimed at informing women in

Eastern Europe about the potential dangers of migration. Created by the International

Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization with 151 member states, in collaboration with La Strada International, one of the largest anti-trafficking coalitions in Europe, the Lilja 4-ever Campaign hosts screenings and discussions of Moodysson's film throughout rural and urban Moldova.1

Released in 2002, just a year prior to the launch of IOM's initiative, Lilja 4-ever tells the story of sixteen year-old Lilja (played by Russian actress Oksana Akinshina), a young girl with the lofty hope of escaping her dead-end existence in an unnamed post-

Soviet country.2 Moodysson based the film on the true story of Danguolė Rasalaitė, a

Lithuanian teenager who was forced into sex work in Sweden before committing suicide in 20003. Little about Rasalaitė is known, but Moodysson borrowed from her experience to create his own fictionalized account of sex trafficking in Scandinavia. Moodysson's

Lilja dreams of traveling abroad, a dream which seems to become a reality when she falls

1 "IOM Marks One Year of Lilya 4-Ever in Moldova." IOM Moldova. The International Organization for Migration, 16 Nov. 2004. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 2 Lilja 4-ever. Dir. Lukas Moodysson. Prod. Lars Jönsson. Perf. Oksana Akinshina and Artyom Bogucharsky. Sonet Film, 2002. Film. 3 Greco, Frederico. "Lukas Moodysson: Director of Lilja 4-ever." Cineuropa Magazine. N.p., 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

5 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE in love with Andrei, a Russian man who claims to work in Sweden. Andrei promises Lilja he can find her a job picking vegetables abroad. She eagerly agrees to follow him back to

Sweden, but is met instead by an abusive pimp and imprisoned in a small apartment.

Forced into the sex trade without means of escape, Lilja's resolve slowly dies away. She eventually throws herself from a highway overpass bridge, ending her suffering in the same manner as Rasalaitė.

Through based on Rasalaitė's experience, Lilja 4-ever does not show a statistically accurate portrayal of the female migratory experience from Eastern Europe to countries within the E.U. Globalization has caused a significant increase in international female labor market participation. Female migration from Eastern Europe to wealthier nations within the E.U. in search of employment has become more common. For example, women from Eastern Europe represent 50% of the total immigrant population in Italy, and outnumber men from Eastern European countries by 45-80%, depending on the country of origin. Women from Eastern Europe represent one of the largest and fastest- growing migrant population groups within the E.U.4 A model created by sociologists

Blangiardo and Menonna predicts that these numbers will only increase between 2014 and 2030, with women remaining the largest group migrating from Eastern Europe to the

E.U.5 Two of the main reasons behind this clear migration trend of women from Eastern

Europe are the economic and cultural factors which place women at a distinct disadvantage in Eastern European labor markets.6 Unable to attain work at home, women

4 Montanari, Armando and Staniscial, Barbara. “Female Migration in a Changing World. Eastern Europeans in Central Italy,” Espace Populations Sociétés 49 (2009): 227-241. 5 Montanari, Armando and Staniscial, Barbara. 227-241. 6 Montanari, Armando and Staniscial, Barbara. 227-241.

6 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE see the E.U. as a place of opportunity and growth.

Though sex trafficking and other forms of human trafficking are significant issues related to female migration, they do not represent the average experiences of female migrants leaving their home countries to find work abroad. In 2005 alone, 191 million migrants left their home countries to find work abroad. Of this figure, 94.7 million

(49.6%) were female migrants. According to the United Nations, an estimated 900,000 women are trafficked into sex work worldwide each year.7 That means that of the estimated 94.7 million women who left their home countries, 900,000 were trafficked into sex work.8 This figure is not insignificant, but it also by no means represents the majority of female migrants worldwide.

IOM's Lilja 4-ever Campaign presents Lilja's tragic narrative as the standard experience of female migrants. Statistics indicate that most women who migrate from home are not trafficked into sex work, though Lilja's story depicts sex trafficking as the natural and inevitable result of deciding to leave home. IOM's campaign has shown the film to an estimated 60,000 women in Moldova since 2003. Though the education and income levels of the women in attendance vary, the film often serves as the only source of information about migration and human trafficking that these women have. The fictional film is presented as an accurate portrayal of failed female migration, despite the statistical inaccuracies present in this assumption. Government organizations and NGOs have spent money producing ad campaigns aimed at informing women about the

7 "Human Trafficking: The Facts." United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d. Web. 8 "Women and Men Migrant Workers: Working towards Equal Rights and Opportunities." International Labor Organization. Decent Work, n.d. Web.

7 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE dangerous and signs of sex trafficking. Advertising campaigns aimed at informing women in Eastern Europe about the signs and dangers of sex trafficking rely upon narratives about migration which end inevitably in death. These narratives problematically omit the diverse socio-economic, political, and historical contexts under which women decide to migrate. Instead, the narrative is reduced to a simple progression which draws a simple conclusion: women who migrate from home die abroad. Though campaigns like the Lilja 4-ever Campaign claim to promote safe female migration and empower young women to know the signs of sex trafficking, they have the subversive effect of discouraging any form of female migration.

When used as an educational tool in IOM's campaign, Lilja 4-ever functions as a myth to suture the social disruptions caused by globalization by encouraging women to remain home. Globalization has created an unprecedented wave of female migration to the E.U., particularly from former-Soviet states in Eastern Europe. This exodus of women disrupts Eastern European societies by removing women from their place in the sphere of domesticity – a place which has become deeply reified, or naturalized, in Eastern

European worldviews. Lilja's story informs young women that their natural place is in the home. If they foolishly choose to leave home, like Lilja, they will be faced with inevitable death.

The sex trafficking myth promoted by Lilja 4-ever offers insight into the pervasive gender-based cultural hierarchy which persists in modern Eastern European society. I will explore here how this hierarchy forms powerful worldviews, or terministic screens, about the nature of women. These screens are articulated by the myth of sex

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trafficking, which discourages female movement as the means to maintaining a threatened cultural order.

9 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER I: A BREIF HISTORY

The most modern definition of human trafficking, according to the United Nations, is an extremely broad categorization of a variety of crimes involving –

“recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”9

It is clear from this broad categorization that human trafficking is a diverse, multi-faceted crime or series of crimes which tend to resist concrete definition. The presence of ambiguity in the international community's understanding of human trafficking makes it not only difficult to recognize, but also difficult to combat on both a national and international level. Scenarios of trafficking around the world occur under a vast variety of circumstances, driven by complex motivations and stretching out into an amalgamation of human rights abuses.

The term “human trafficking” was not the term used to describe this phenomenon until 1921, when 33 countries in the League of Nations signed the International

Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. Until then, the common term was “white slavery,” which offered a problematically narrow, Western-

9 “Human Trafficking. What Is Human Trafficking?” The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. n.d. Web.

10 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE centric scope on an issue prevalent worldwide.10 This ambitious new term was intended to cover the entire spectrum of commercial human exploitation among people of all ages, genders, and nationalities.

Being such a broad categorization, the definition of human trafficking is of particular interest to me as I examine the rhetorical implications of campaigns aimed at combatting this phenomenon. In the definition adopted by the UN, the “act” in an offense of human trafficking is “the recruitment, transport, and transfer” of victims. The exploitation, forced labor, and slavery-like practices which occur as a result of this “act” are viewed as independent human rights abuses resulting from trafficking. So it is the person responsible for recruiting/transporting the victim who is technically guilty of human trafficking; those responsible for the resulting abuse are viewed as guilty of separate crimes.

This emphasis on the movement of the victim becomes important when human trafficking is examined alongside other movement-based crimes which often overlap with trafficking – in particular, human smuggling. Both smuggling and trafficking deal with the assisted transport of a person from their place of origin to a new location.

One distinguishing factor used by the UN and a multitude of anti-trafficking non- governmental organizations to differentiate between smuggling and trafficking is the presence of a victim. While smuggling is categorized as “a criminal commercial transaction between two willing parties who go their separate ways once their business is

10 Aronowitz, Alexis A. "Smuggling and Trafficking in Human Beings: The Phenomenon, the Markets that Drive it and the Organizations that Promote it." European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 9.2 (2001): ProQuest Social Science Journals. Web.

11 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE complete”, trafficking ends with the exploitation of the transported person, whether by the person who transported them or by another party entirely.

The most central distinction between the two indistinct crimes tends to be what the purpose, or point of the movement is, from the perspective of the person facilitating the movement. The point of smuggling is the illegal crossing of borders – the smuggler's aim is simply to move their charge. Trafficking, which frequently deals with illegal border crossings but does not necessarily always include them, has the aim of exploitation at the place of destination; the trafficker facilitates the movement of their victim with the clear intent to exploit them, or pass them off to a party that will.

While the intent of the transportation seems to be a clear distinction in theory, it is more of a blurred line in practice. Smuggling and trafficking often appear very similar during most stages. Both deal with the facilitated movement of one party by another, from one location to another. Additionally, smuggled people, much like victims of trafficking (VOTs), can also be subject to debts, sexually exploitive crimes, and abuse. As the U.S. State Department explains, “a person being smuggled may at any point become a trafficking victim,” making the distinction between the two crimes extremely difficult to clearly demarcate.11 For this reason, statistics on human trafficking, even when coordinated globally between governments and NGOs, are extremely difficult to collect and confirm.

Despite the ambiguity and other difficulties surrounding identification of human trafficking cases, it is widely acknowledged to be increasing in prevalence around the 11 "Fact Sheet: Distinctions Between Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking 2006." U.S. Department of State. U.S. Department of State, 01 Jan. 2006. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.

12 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE world. It should be noted however that this statistical increase correlates with improved data collection cooperation internationally, so it is difficult to tell if the issue is becoming more widespread or if simply more cases are being classified as trafficking.

According to a fact sheet published by the United Nations, 2.5 million people worldwide are currently living in an exploitive situation resulting from trafficking and an estimated US$ 31.6 billion is earned annually from their exploitation. Of this figure,

43% of those trafficked are subject to forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 98% of those sex workers are female.12

While human trafficking is difficult to classify and reduce to a single chain of straightforward offenses, there are a few basic elements usually present in a human trafficking scenario. A recruiter selects a victim, gains their trust, and offers them work in another location where such opportunities are said to exist. Victims of human trafficking

– VOTs – are often deceived about the type of work they will be performing or the pay they will be receiving, but become trapped in their undesirable new circumstances due to threats, fear of legal retribution for illegal immigration, or physical confinement.

The countries of origin – the place where the VOT is trafficked from – often fits the profile of an undeveloped nation or what the UN refers to as a “nation in transition”, meaning they lack an economy developed enough to provide work. These countries often suffer from high rates of unemployment and unstable governments. Also relevant to note about countries of origin is the presence of a gender hierarchy which traditionally and

12 "Human Trafficking: The Facts." United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

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Europe13. The countries of destination tend to have more developed economies and stable governments, and most are found in Western Europe, Western Asia, and North America.14

There is no distinct profile of a recruiter – they are 52% men, 42% women, and in 6% of situations, men and women work as a team. They have a slight tendency to be strangers to the victim (54%), but they are almost just as regularly people previously known to the victim; 46% of all cases reported that the trafficker had a previous relationship with the victim. Traffickers can be friends, significant others, or even family members. Perhaps most easy to classify is the nationality of the trafficker compared to their victim: there is a tendency for recruiters to be the same nationality as their victim. 15

Essentially, there is no single statistically-supported profile of a recruiter, though advertisements warning against sex trafficking usually use a male image to represent traffickers.

Another significant point of ambiguity in trafficking situations, especially is situations of sex work, is the level of consent of the potential victim. Consent is often viewed starkly in sex trafficking situations – either a woman is a consenting sex worker or a coerced sex worker – but it is actually riddled with gray areas and more accurately thought of as a spectrum. Many women trafficked into sex work were previously

13 Eastern Europe refers to the 21 countries of Europe geographically east of the Ural Mountains: Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. 14 Human Trafficking: An Overview. Vol. 1. Vienna: United Nations, n.d. United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2008. pg. 42. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 15 "Who Are the Victims of Human Trafficking?" United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.

14 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE involved in sex work, migrate with the intention to work in the sex industry, and are exploited upon their arrival; but because they were previously involved in sex work, they are denied the status of VOT and instead prosecuted for illegal migration or illegal sex work (depending on the legal status of sex work in the country in question). In other situations, women who are trafficked into sex work develop a Stockholm Syndrome-like affection for their traffickers, captors or pimps. This phenomenon, called “Loverboy” syndrome by anti-sex trafficking NGOs, makes sexual exploitation extremely difficult to identify since the women in question do not believe that they are being imprisoned, exploited, or abused, and often say that they consent to the sex work that they are involved in.

The issue of human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking of women, is complicated by a number of factors, including but not limited to questions of consent, a fluid relationship with smuggling, a similarity to migrant sex work, and the lack of a defined profile for recruiters, traffickers, and captors. Perhaps the largest issue surrounding sex work is the lack of awareness in countries of destination where sex workers are purchased, exploited, and enslaved. The UN Gift – Global Initiative to Fight

Human Trafficking – cites raising awareness – “demonstrating to the world that human trafficking exists and mobilizing people to stop it” – as the top priority for combating human trafficking on a global scale.16 In destination countries, VOTs are often not considered to be a pressing issue, as most Western Nations tend to take a it can't happen here / out of sight, out of mind mentality.

16 Human Trafficking: An Overview. 42-43.

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Due to the lack of awareness in the developed countries where these women end up, particularly in countries where sex work does not have a fully legal status, authorities are rarely aware of the signs of sex trafficking and therefore are not actively seeking them out. It takes an incredibly blatant case of sex trafficking to catch the attention of the public in destination countries, such as the case of of Danguolė Rasalaitė.

On January 7, 2000, a young teenage girl jumped from a highway overpass bridge in the affluent, relatively crime-free city of Malmö in southern Sweden. After her death, three days later in a hospital, police were able to use the three crumpled letters – apparently suicide notes addressed to friends in Lithuania – in her pocket to identify her as Danguolė Rasalaitė, a 16 year-old Lithuanian with no Swedish Visa who had entered the country with a false passport. The letters in her pockets relayed in frantic writing that

Rasalaitė had been a victim of sex trafficking.

She referred to a friend or boyfriend known only as “The Russian” who had helped her leave her poor circumstances in Lithuania on the promise of employment in

Sweden at a vegetable farm. The child of an abusive father and a mother who abandoned her for the United States, Rasalaitė's circumstances were poor and she was desperate for an escape, she told friends. It was apparent that she trusted and was very familiar with

“The Russian” who promised her a better life, as she wrote happily to her grandmother of a man she'd met who was going to move abroad with her.

Upon arriving in Sweden, Rasalaitė's black-market passport was taken by “The

Russian” and she was imprisoned in a run-down apartment in Arlöv, a quiet city near

Malmö. Her captors claimed that she owed them 20,000 Swedish kroner (around US$

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3,000) for her travel expenses and informed her that she would have to prostitute herself in order to earn the money. Rasalaitė's captors raped her on a daily basis, threatening her with violence and death if she attempted to reach authorities in Sweden. Alone, scared, and abused, Rasalaitė was forced to sell sex to clients in and around the affluent, low- crime area of Malmö. When she was able to escape from the apartment in Arlöv on

January 7, she did not seek out authorities to help her, as she had been told by her captors that prostitution was illegal in Sweden and she would be arrested and put into prison.

Seeing no other alternatives of escape, she jumped from a bridge.

With such little information on Rasalaitė and her captors, the police response was ineffective at identifying and prosecuting Rasalaitė's captors or those who had purchased sex from her. They were only able to conclude that “The Russian” who trafficked

Rasalaitė is now thought to have been a Lithuanian man named Gidreus (according to neighbors in the apartment complex), though he was never further identified nor arrested.17 The apartment in Arlöv which police were led to by a phone number in

Rasalaitė's pocket was also prison to two sisters – Klaudia and Livia, 16 and 13 years of age respectively – who informed police they were trafficked from the Czech Republic and also forced into prostitution by Gidreus.

Danguolė Rasalaitė's death made national news in Sweden, where stricter anti- prostitution laws had been put in place just a year earlier, in 1999. Driven by a gender equality movement and public demand, the Slutbetänkande från

Kvinnovåldskommissionen (The Commission on Violence Against Women) had just 17 Björneblad, Peter. "Hon Tvingades Bli Prostituerad: Tog Livet Av Sig." [Stockholm, Sweden] n.d.: n. pag. Aftonbladet. Swedish Trade Union Confederation, 22 Mar. 2000. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.

17 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE overseen the passing of the Kvinnofrid law, called the Violence Against Women Act in

English. The law operated on the premise that prostitution was an inherently gendered issue and reinforced a gender-based hierarchy, since women represent nearly all sex workers in Scandinavia. The law did not put any kind of particular focus on the issues of migrant sex work or sex trafficking, but focused mainly on prostitution as an insular, domestic issue. It sought to eliminate the issue of prostitution by defining the purchase of sex as an act of violence, regardless if the person selling the sex consented or not.

Essentially, it criminalized the customer, hoping to reduce the supply by way of the demand. 18

Rasalaitė became a quiet, enduring symbol of the work that was yet to be done in sex trafficking. Her story became embedded in the conversation about sex trafficking, reminding law makers and the public that despite the lack of visibility, victims of forced sexual exploitation exist beneath the calm surface of developed European nations. Stories similar to her “Loverboy” situation have become the dominant narrative in anti- trafficking campaigns, despite the fact that they are not representative of the entire scope of sex trafficking scenarios, only a small slice.

In 2002, just two years after Danguolė Rasalaitė's death, Lukas Moodysson, a

Swedish auteur director famous for his social commentary and blunt portrayals of

Scandinavian culture, released a film inspired heavily by Rasalaitė's story, Lilja 4-ever.

His third feature, the film was received extremely well by critics in both Scandinavia and

18 Ekberg, Gunilla. "Prostitution and Trafficking in Human Beings The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of Sexual Services: Best Practices for Prevention of Trafficking Women." Violence Against Women 10.1187 (2004): 15. Sage Publications. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

18 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE abroad, earning the young director international attention and acclaim. The film was praised by the New York Times for “never feeling exploitive” despite its scenes of graphic rape and brutal abuse19.

Moodysson was straightforward about his inspiration for the film, citing a story in the newspaper about Danguolė Rasalaitė's suicide as spawning his idea for Lilja. In writing and directing a film about a young girl from an Eastern European country being trafficked into prostitution in a quiet Swedish suburb, Moodysoon wanted to illicit a strong reaction from his audience. “My intention was for the audience to just sit there and feel like they were being run over by a train,” Moodysson explains, “and that they cannot really defend themselves. I don’t want people just to be sad and depressed. Most people get angry. That’s really the reaction I wanted.”20

Though the film highlights Rasalaitė's story as a failure of the Swedish prostitution laws, Moodysson himself has stated the Lilja is more a story about the failure of the European Union to properly manage immigration, and how draconian border measures spawn horrible social consequences, such as sexual exploitation. The film is also a comment on the disparity between developing and developed Europe, and how the gap between the impoverished and the wealthy nations only exacerbates poverty, desperation, and cultural backwardness in Eastern Europe. Moodysson told Cineuropa

Magazine:

“Yes, in part this film points the finger at Sweden, but the story of Lilja 4-ever is a

19 Holden, Stephen. "Lilja 4-ever: Hopes Disintegrate Into a Life of Degradation." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 18 Apr. 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 20 James, Steve. "A Moving Portrayal of the Tragedy Suffered by Young Russians." World Socialist Web. International Committee on the Fourth International, 23 May 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

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result of the 'free market' that came as a result of the fall of communism. A place where everything can be bought or sold. I wanted to show the gap that exists between the so-called free and rich countries and the poor ones. We are all members of the European Union but each of us is doing everything in our power to close our borders.”21

Moodysson himself is known for his outspoken politics and criticism of capitalism; directly prior to beginning work on Lilja 4-ever in 2001, he attended an anti-capitalist demonstration on Gothenburg which stressed issues with disparities among nations in the

EU. His criticism of capitalism as the cause of these disparities is evident in his latest film, Mammoth (2009), which deals with the fracturing of traditional family life, as well as the pressures to migrate and the difficulties facing people who decide to migrate. In

Lilja 4-ever, the anti-capitalist themes are more subtle, reflected in the decay of Post-

Soviet Russia, “the vile social conditions and unrelenting backwardness that have come with gangster capitalism, where children, like everything else, have become commodities to be looted.”22

Sex trafficking in Europe, from Moodysson's perspective, is not only a result of the disparities between rich and poor, but also the EU's regressive immigration policies which make legal migration nearly impossible. He also faults the lack of awareness

Western countries have for the extreme poverty faced by people like Lilja, living in Post-

Soviet squalor without the means to better her life.

The Swedish Ministry of Industry, Employment, and Communications took note of “the finger” Moodysson points at Swedish/Western society's willful blindness toward

21 Greco, Frederico. "Lukas Moodysson: Director of Lilja 4-ever." Cineuropa Magazine. N.p., 2003. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 22 James, Steve. "A Moving Portrayal of the Tragedy Suffered by Young Russians."

20 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE sex trafficking in Lilja 4-ever, and as a result they granted 1.5 million Swedish kroner

(around US$ 240,000) so all 16-18 year old students in Sweden would watch and discuss

Moodysson's film in school. The aim of these required educational film showings, which took place in 2006 (five years after the film's premiere), was to instill that the ideas of gender, class, and sexual equality are essential for a just global society, and that sex trafficking and prostitution are inherently damaging to these concepts. Government researchers interested in studying discussions about gender among Swedish youth, recorded the classroom discussions following film viewings. The government's goal in funding these films was openly political; Sweden was beginning an initiative to further promote de facto gender equality in schools and reduce the sex trade in Sweden as two sides of the same coin.23

Prior to watching Lilja 4-ever, the students self-reported no prior knowledge of sex trafficking being present in Sweden, viewing it instead as an issue affecting others.

During the post-viewing discussion which took place in co-ed classrooms, the male students still marked the men purchasing sex as divergent “others,” despite the fact that they were Swedish, often middle-class men. The film viewing succeeded in reinforcing the idea that sex trafficking was detrimental to gender equality, but the students failed to see how the film connected specifically to Swedish society, ignoring Moodysson's narrative of European class inequality which drives Lilja's desperation to leave Russia.

Additionally, the student discussions never touched upon the relationship between closed

23 Sparrman, Anna. "Film as a Political and Educational Device: Talk about Men, Male Sexuality and Gender among Swedish Youth." Visual Studies 21.2 (2006): 167-182. Web.

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European borders and sex trafficking – one of Moodysson's major points of the film. 24

The Swedish government's educational screening of Lilja 4-ever had the political purpose of positioning sex trafficking as a major artery of gender inequality, keeping issues of female disempowerment alive in Scandinavia. However, the screenings reinforced one of Moodysson's major points of the film – that insulated Western societies like Sweden are not only largely blind to the issue of sex trafficking, and also fail to connect socioeconomic disparities in Europe and the closing of EU borders to the continued onslaught of forced sexual exploitation.

Swedish classrooms are not the only place Luka's Moodysson's sex trafficking nightmare has been used for educational purposes. It is also used as a tool in Eastern

European countries to warn young women about the “realities” of sex trafficking, and equip them to “know the signs.”25 The International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched a “Lilja 4-ever Campaign” in Moldova, aimed at showing the film to young

Moldovan women aged 14-30, who live in rural poverty and lack high school-level education. Since its first screening in 2003, the campaign has reached an estimated

60,000 Moldovan women. The film often serves as their only source of information about trafficking and migration

The Lilja 4-ever campaign has elevated Moodysson's film to a widely-used educational tool about the dangers of traveling abroad and sex trafficking in Eastern

Europe. For example, members of the Russian police, or Duma, were required to watch

Lilja 4-ever to gain a greater understanding of the issue and identify/prevent similar 24 Sparrman, Anna. 167-182. 25 "IOM Marks One Year of Lilya 4-Ever in Moldova." IOM Moldova.

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“loverboy” type situations in real life.26 Lilja 4-ever has been adopted by IOM (and the other groups following their example) as a definitive resource about sex trafficking, though statistics about the demographics of VOTs and recruiters do not support the male trafficker/female victim scenario as the average situation.

IOM, formed in 1951 following World War II to resettle displaced persons, is an intergovernmental organization with 151 member states which aims to promote “humane and orderly policies in the movement of persons across borders.” IOM's Lilja 4-ever

Campaign is also officially sponsored by the United States government, the European

Union, Läkarmissionen (Swedish Medical Mission) and the government of Moldova.27

Though IOM's mission statement is to promote safe migration education through the Lilja

4-ever Campaign, many of the organization's member countries and its official government sponsors have advocated for regressive migration policies in recent years.

In 2003, when the Lilja 4-ever campaign was launched by IOM in Moldova, the

EU was experiencing a significant spike in migration from nonmember countries in

Eastern Europe. In fact, the entire first decade of the 21st saw a large influx of nonmember immigrants entering the EU, representing a 12% increase in migration from the previous decade. This wave of immigration reached its peak in 2008, when a staggering 3.8 million immigrants entered the EU from nonmember countries. The largest group within this figure were Eastern Europeans, representing 1.8 million of those seeking relocation.28 Overwhelmed economically, socially, and culturally with this

26 Suchland, Jennifer. "Double Framing in Lilya 4-Ever : Sex Trafficking and Postsocialist Abjection." European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1177 (2013): n. pag. Sage Publishers. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 27 "IOM Marks One Year of Lilya 4-Ever in Moldova." IOM Moldova. 28 Migrants in Europe 2011 Edition: A Statistical Portrait of the First and Second Generation. 2011 ed.

23 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE unprecedented influx, the EU began a shift towards policies which would restrict non-EU immigrants from entering Schengen. It makes sense then that a campaign like IOM's Lilja

4-ever Campaign would gain significant support from the EU member countries. The campaign's educational aim has the effect of discouraging women from Eastern Europe from accepting offers to travel abroad, thus in theory reducing the number of non-EU female migrants.

The EU is not the only government group to find political appeal in the Lilja 4- ever Campaign. Eastern European governments have spent the last decade struggling to prevent their populations from further dwindling due to heightened emigration. For over ten years, the number of emigrants leaving Eastern Europe has far outnumbered the number of immigrants entering, resulting in the depletion of labor markets and the steady decline of the regions economies.29 Seeking ways to keep their populations from leaving, governments like Moldova would see the Lilja 4-ever Campaign as a way to encourage people to remain at home by portraying emigration as an ill-fated, hopeless process.

The Lilja 4-ever campaign emerged among a flood of anti-immigration policies and sentiments throughout Europe. As immigration from Eastern Europe has continued to flow into the EU, Europe has witnessed a dramatic shift towards regressive immigration policies. The heightened levels of immigration are directly related to the anti-immigration policies gaining popularity and becoming the overwhelming majority opinion. Synnøve Ugelvik, a researcher at the Department of Public and International

Law at the University of Oslo, has been examining the push among EU member countries Belgium: EuroStat, 2011. EuroStat. European Union, 2011: 14-20. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. 29 Migrants in Europe 2011 Edition: A Statistical Portrait of the First and Second Generation. 14-20.

24 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE to enact stricter immigration policies to discourage migration, stating that “stricter control of foreign citizens is an unavoidable result of a more integrated Europe.”30 He explains:

“The foreigners and the poor are seen as a security risk. Open borders and globalization create more uncertainties, which in some countries could lead to tough measures with zero tolerance and attempts to eliminate uncertainty as far as possible.”31

This “zero tolerance” stance to migration is evident throughout the EU; the most recent election cycle exhibited a “deluge of support for extreme right parties,” which favor policies to make legal migration more difficult and illegal migration subject to stricter punishment.32 Recent years have been an increase in border control measures and a decrease in tolerance for irregular immigration, regardless of circumstances.33 In Norway

(a non-EU member of the Schengen agreement, which subjects them to cooperation with the EU on external border policies), the prison population of non-EU citizens has increased by one-third since the enactment of more penalties for illegal immigration. 34 In

2011, Denmark posed their opposition to the EU's open border policies by controversially restoring 24-hour customs control, a marker of the mainstream's increasing support for the right-wing Danish People's Party.35 Similarly in the Netherlands and Finland, the fringe right-wing Freedom Party and True Finn Party, respectively, have been adopted by the new mainstream in the face of economic uncertainty and increased immigration.

30 Foss, Arlid S. "Open Borders, Closed Europe." Science Nordic. Forskning Norway, 11 July 2012. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 31 Foss, Arlid S. "Open Borders, Closed Europe." 32 Hines, Colin. "Europe Is Falling out of Love with Open Borders." The Guardian Online. The Guardian Media Group, 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 16 Mar. 2014. 33 Hines, Colin. "Europe Is Falling out of Love with Open Borders." 34 Foss, Arlid S. "Open Borders, Closed Europe." 35 Daley, Suzanne. "Denmark Leads Nationalist Challenge to Europe's Open Borders." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 24 June 2011. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

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The culmination of the EU member states' visible push to tighten borders came with the proposal of a “smart borders” package in early 201336. The supposed system would rely on fingerprint data, rather than simply passports and travel documents, which the law's proponents stress are forged regularly by illegal immigrants. A representative for the German Green Party, which opposes the bill, claims “All non-EU travelers would be effectively treated as suspected criminals, with their fingerprints to be collected not just every time they enter and exit the EU, but also when they cross identity controls by police within the EU.”37

The official proposal by the European Commission explains that “certain groups of travelers” – defined later as “Business travelers, workers on short term contracts, researchers and students, [and] third country nationals with close family ties to EU” – would be permitted usage of “simplified border checks.” Non-EU travelers who do not fit the descriptions would be subject to increased scrutiny and increased penalties if their stays are longer than originally reported at their initial border check.38

The “smart borders” package is not simply against all non-EU travelers; the groups described in the proposal as meriting simplified admittance are all privileged groups seeking only temporary stays in the EU. Those non-EU members who the “smart borders” proposal would admit speak also to those they would not admit – individuals from impoverished countries seeking long term stays, immigrants, people looking to

36 Neilsen, Nikolaj. "EU Proposes Tighter Border Control Bill." European Union Observer. ASBL, 28 Feb. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 37 Neilsen, Nikolaj. "EU Proposes Tighter Border Control Bill." 38 "'Smart Borders': Enhancing Mobility and Security." European Commission: Home Affairs. The European Union, 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.

26 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE resettle in the EU.

Globalization has spawned an unprecedented global movement of people, testing the boundaries of the Western world, highlighting international economic and cultural disparities, and bringing rise to the abusive flow of human trafficking from impoverished countries to the economic centers of Europe. The uncertainty of a rapidly changing world has marked a recent push by EU member states to close their borders to immigrants, visible in the growing support for regressive immigration policies throughout the EU (and

Norway). Coinciding with this push for less permeable borders is the increase of the illegal and inhumane sale of human beings across borders, a hugely multi-faceted and multi-form phenomenon which takes place largely on the underbelly of EU society, evading detection from those who patrol the borders.

Politically-active Swedish director Luka's Moodysson, acknowledging that a direct connection exists between less legal migration options and an increase in illegal migration and human trafficking exists, created Lilja 4-ever, a film intended to highlight the disparities between Western and Eastern Europe and showcase the lack of awareness for the prevalence of sex trafficking in Scandinavia. Lilja 4-ever, which tells of a specific

“loveboy” scenario inspired by the story of Lithuanian VOT Danguolė Rasalaitė, has been co-opted by IOM, and by extension its government sponsors, as a definitive source on the horrors facing young women who agree to travel abroad. IOM claims to support the promotion in safe migration, but EU member states who have pushed to have

Moodysson's cautionary tale shown in Eastern European countries have exhibited in favor of regressive immigration policies which promote only very limited movement.

27 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW

Anti-sex trafficking campaigns in Europe usually have two very distinct audiences and goals. First, they attempt to raise awareness among average citizens about trafficking in destination countries. Secondly, and certainly more prominently in Eastern Europe, the campaigns serve as a warning to women who are vulnerable to sex trafficking in countries known to export VOTs regularly. In order to assert the dangers and urgency of sex trafficking as a global issue, most anti-trafficking campaigns rely on the same set narrative. Many scholars have taken note of this prominent narrative, and their work suggests that while it may be representative of some instances of sex trafficking, it is by no means the only way women are lured and trapped in sexually exploitive labor. This section will explore literature concerning the basal narrative progression of anti-sex trafficking campaigns, the use of stereotypical characters, symbolic female death, the idealization of home countries, and how these factors problematically simplify the issue of human trafficking to discourage any form of female movement – the best way to combat the fractures of an increasingly globalized world.

Anti-sex trafficking campaigns operate on the presence of a basal narrative; campaigns concerning sex trafficking tend to use the same recycled and repackaged cautionary tale. These stories, no matter what form they appear in, always follow a standard downward trajectory with no possibility of recovery or return. In the narrative, a woman decides to leave home and is deceived about the actual circumstances under

28 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE which she will be working. Once abroad, a woman is enslaved into sex work, abused, and imprisoned without hope of escape. After a period of hardship, she dies, making the return to the safety of the home impossible. This use of a basal narrative discourages female migration by ignoring the context in which a woman decides to migrate, telling her instead that any decision she makes to travel abroad will end in forced prostitution and death.

Rutvica Andrijasevic was the first to specifically define the plot points of narratives about sex trafficking. Andrijasevic examines a print poster campaign from the

Baltic States and the Czech Republic which were funded by both the International

Organization for Migration (IOM) and La Strada International, an Amsterdam-based coalition of female advocacy NGOs in Europe focused on counter-trafficking initiatives.39

The campaign features edited photographic images of brutalized female bodies alongside written, first-person victim accounts of their experiences in sex trafficking. Though each of the stories vary in slight ways, they all seem to follow the same narrative structure which reduces the complexities of female migration – why they decide to leave, what alternatives they have or do not have – to stories about women falling victim to fate.

The starting point of the trajectory begins with the concept of “hopeful migration.” In this stage, a woman is excited by the possibilities of going abroad to work.

It is important to note here that the reasons women decide to leave their home countries are completely minimized or excluded in anti-trafficking narratives, a point both

Andrijasevic and another scholar, Nandita Sharma, bring up in their discussions.40 This 39 "Who Are We." La Strada International News. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Mar. 2014. 40 [1] Sharma, Nandita. "Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns." Refuge 21.3 (n.d.):

29 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE exclusion signifies that anti-trafficking narratives are not concerned with the context in which trafficking takes place, presenting it as an abnormal phenomenon born from female naivete rather than the pressures of poverty, war, or globalization.41

Following a woman's “hopeful migration” is the moment where deception becomes clear, and she is coerced into forced sexual labor. This stage is presented as a direct result of the woman's desire to travel abroad. The agency or individual who arranges for her travel and eventually deceives and coerces her is presented as a mere logistic detail, rather than the real reason she becomes enslaved. This presentation poses that it is the woman's misguided desire to travel abroad, rather than her misplaced trust in the trafficker, which results directly in her forced sexual imprisonment. It is the woman's fault she has been trafficked, not the actual trafficker.42

“Once the theme of the forced prostitution is introduced,” Andrijasevic explains,

“the plot ceases to advance.”43 In the series of advertisements used as artifacts in her examination, all the provided VOT narratives effectively end with forced prostitution, leaving no room for any kind of further development. Once the women have been trafficked, they have reached rock bottom – a place of no return. This migration narrative's “end-stop” is always a form of death, whether symbolic or literal.44 All narratives reach abrupt conclusions in which the VOT through physical and emotional

54-65. Web. [2] Andrijasevic, Rutvica. "Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti- trafficking Campaigns." Feminist Review 86. (2007): 24-44. Print. 41 Sharma, Nadita. 54-55. 42 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 24-44. 43 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 28. 44 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 28-30.

30 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE damage has been stripped of not only their control, but also of their future. As

Andrijasevic points out, “in order to convey the danger of trafficking [these advertisements] equate women's migration with forced prostitution,” and work to

“encourage women to stay at home” as the best and only way to avoid this fate.45 Sharma reflects this idea, saying “Instead of empowering women to migrate safely,” anti- trafficking narratives can be “best described as discouraging informal labour migration and advising staying at home as the safest option for young women.”46 As the Global

Alliance Against Traffic (GAATW) in Women explained in their most recent analysis of anti-trafficking campaigns:

Unfortunately GAATW has observed that some safe migration programmes have used 'scaremongering' or sensational tactics to try to convince people not to move. This is often the case, for instance, when trafficking is discussed in sensational ways that inflate the risk out of proportion. When taken to the extreme, people can end up in a state of fear, rather than with any new knowledge or with any new abilities to negotiate terms of their migration. They also might leave with an idea that all migration ends up in trafficking, or that all returning migrant women have been forced into prostitution.47

Narratives in anti-trafficking campaigns which end in death make two things abundantly clear: 1) all roads of female migration lead inevitably to forced prostitution, and 2) there is “no escape or recovery” from forced prostitution.48 The only conclusion that can be drawn from these two “truths” is that the singular way to completely avoid the death that results from forced prostitution is to not migrate at all, and to stay at home – no matter what the circumstances at home may be.

45 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 42. 46 Sharma, Nandita. 56. 47 GAATW: Beyond Borders: Exploring Links Between Trafficking and Migration. Working Papers Series 2010. Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women, (2010): 26. Print. 48 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 33.

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Also important to these narratives about sex trafficking is the presence of stereotypical characters which promote an idea of passive, naïve femininity set against aggressive male criminality. When these stereotypical characters are presented as fact, it presents a problematically simplified picture of human trafficking and a hierarchical gender structure which serves as a kind of natural order. The female's desire to migrate is a result only of her misguided female innocence – of course male criminals will take advantage of her decision to step outside of the hierarchy, she is deviating from the natural order! They are only showing her that she has no place in the globalized world, and that the consequences of deviating are dire and irrevocable. Unfortunately, this narrative tactic problematically simplifies the motivations behind migration, and mischaracterizes traffickers as predominantly male. In terms of discouraging female migration, the use of exclusively stereotypical characters in anti-sex trafficking narratives suggest that a naturally-occurring gender structure exists which confines men and women to specific roles, and that deviating from this norm by trafficking will inevitably have negative effects.

As we saw in the narrative structure for anti-sex trafficking campaigns, it is the migration itself which directly leads to trafficking, rather than the traffickers. However, despite the idea that the a woman's desire to travel abroad is the reason for trafficking, women still lack any form of legitimate agency in these narratives. As Andrijasevic points out, anti-sex trafficking rhetoric:

confirms stereotypes about eastern European women as beautiful victims, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women

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within the highly disabling symbolic register of 'Woman' as to maintain an imaginary social order.49

Andrijasevic's reference to “the symbolic register of 'Woman'” here refers to the idea that female agency is often reduced to the representation of “Woman” rather than an actual, living, agent of woman. “Woman” is the stereotypical sketch of women, a picture of passivity, femininity, sexuality, and submission to men.

The women in anti-sex trafficking narratives are reduced to victimized caricatures which represent feminine passivity, “demarcating the limits within which women can be imaged as active agents.”50 In other words, though the starting point of the trajectory towards forced sexual exploitation is the woman's decision to travel abroad, her decision does not come from a place of any legitimate agency. Rather, it is the forces of evil and criminality – the traffickers – who prey upon her female passivity and innocence and exploit her dangerous idea of traveling abroad.

Andrijasevic explains that anti-trafficking consists of –

a repertoire organized around the notions of passivity, domesticity and crime [which] impel a representation of eastern European societies in manners that are highly stereotypical, and constrict eastern European women and men within confining and disabling order of representation.51

When confined within these inaccurate and restrictive stereotypical terms, all the characters of anti-trafficking campaigns are presented without agency. The male traffickers are merely representative of Eastern European criminality: a force which occurs as part of a reified dichotomy between female passivity/male criminality.

49 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 24. 50 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 26. 51 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 38.

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In addition to Andrijasevic, many scholars, in their examinations of anti-sex trafficking rhetoric, have taken note of this dichotomous relationship and how it simplifies trafficking in a problematic manner.52 As Jo Doezma argues, anti-trafficking campaigns in Eastern Europe often utilize:“'the paradigmatic image ... of a young and naïve innocent lured or deceived by evil traffickers into a life of sordid horror from which escape is nearly impossible'.”53 This dichotomy is deeply embedded within stories of sex trafficking. As Doezma explains, they perpetuate inaccurate ideas about who is trafficked and who traffics.

The complex and varied experiences of migrant sex workers do not fit into the stereotypical portrayal of a young and naïve innocent lured or deceived by evil traffickers into a life of sordid horror from which escape is nearly impossible. Yet these images continue to dominate media perceptions, feminist activism, and policy making. In the myth of trafficking in women, structured around the figure of the passive and unknowing innocent, the active, aware ‘sex worker’ disappears.54

Asserting that male criminals are the primary traffickers is also problematic, as statistics mentioned previously in this paper have shown that the portrait of a trafficker resists profiling and categorization. They are likely to be family members, friends, acquaintances – male or female. The idea that traffickers are always males involved in organized crime is inaccurate, and feeds into the gender hierarchy of Eastern Europe as the governing force of human trafficking.

Ronald Weitzer, who equates anti-sex trafficking and anti-prostitution narratives

52 [1] Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of 'white Slavery' in Contemporary Discourses of 'trafficking in Women'" Gender Issues 18.1 (2000): 23-50. Web. [2] Weitzer, Ronald. "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade." Politics & Society 35.447 (2007): 447-475. Sage Journals. Sage Publications. Web. 53 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 24. 54 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 48.

34 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE to moral crusades by the religious right, acknowledges the use of stereotypical characters in these narratives. Male traffickers are presented as “folk devils” – forces of pure evil – while female victims are defined primarily in terms of innocence and naivety. 55 Female victimhood is denied any form of agency, Weitzer asserts; “The central claim [in anti- trafficking rhetoric] is that workers do not actively make choices to enter or remain in prostitution, and there is no such thing as voluntary migration for the purpose of sex work. The notion of consent is deemed irrelevant.” 56 Men and women, Weitzer observes, are presented in “highly dramatic” terms – evil and innocence, respectively. Any real context surrounding human trafficking and migration (motivations, laws, societal norms) is removed, and instead this stereotypical “anecdotal horror story” stands in.57

Anti-trafficking campaigns asserts that the gross hyperbolic perils of female migration and the inevitable force of criminality preying on innocence are useless to fight against. It is a woman's desire to travel abroad – her foolish hopes to run against Eastern

Europe's imaginary and stereotypical natural order – which lead to forced prostitution and death. The only way to avoid being a victim of your own innocence as a woman is to abandon ideas of exerting your agency to migrate.

The conclusion of the ever-present basal narrative on sex trafficking presents the idea that women, once their sexuality has been exploited through forced prostitution, have absolutely nothing, which only reaffirms the female status as “passive objects of male violence” defined entirely in terms of their sexuality.58 Their desire to travel abroad

55 Weitzer, Ronald. 452-453. 56 Weitzer, Ronald. 453. 57 Weitzer, Ronald. 458. 58 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 26.

35 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE is removed entirely from the historical context of their situation in their home country, and instead figured only in a stereotypical Eastern European landscape where female innocence exists as the natural prey of male criminality. There is not agency in this landscape, only a natural imaginary order which corrects itself with the death of the female who attempts to leave “the familiar space of heterosexual domesticity” in her home country.59 The only way to avoid danger is to remain in the sphere of home.

Their sexuality exploited, left without any course of reprieve, victims of trafficking inevitably die within these narratives. Symbolic death solidifies the idea that women cannot survive away from the home. By death, I mean a lack of a future, the idea that prostitution has no escape – if not physically, then emotionally. Andrijasevic explains this death in the form of a female doll metaphor: “in order to convey the lived experience of trafficked women,” she explains, the female figure becomes “captured in the trope of the doll.” The “doll” is a symbol of a woman who is out of control, who is only subject to the control of others, and who is without a future. Essentially, becoming a “doll” is the convergence of death and femininity.60

This “doll” image – woman permanently reduced to an object to be acted upon by men – is a trope embedded deep within Western Culture. Elizabeth Bronfen explores themes of women as doll-like symbols which populate history, from images of female death in early paintings to novels which end in female death as the means of re- establishing balance. The female body is often the battleground upon which changes in society are negotiated. Bronfen explains: 59 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 42. 60 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 34.

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Over her dead body, cultural norms are reconfirmed or secured, whether because the sacrifice of the virtuous, innocent woman serves a social critique and transformation or because the sacrifice of a dangerous woman re-establishes an order that is momentarily suspended due to her presence61

In other words, when the natural order of things becomes threatened, the death of a female body, the sacrifice or crucifixion of the doll, can set things on the right path again.

The failures of society are righted by the death of a virtuous women, as her death reveals that society has ills, which need to be fixed; the balance of society is kept level by the death of a dangerous woman, who is destroyed to keep the peace. The women who appear in anti-sex trafficking campaigns can be seen as both virtuous and dangerous – either way, they have to die to re-establish order. When seen as virtuous, the female migrant dies at the end of human trafficking narratives to signify that female migration is a societal ill, and in order to maintain balance, society must discourage female migration.

When seen as dangerous, her decision to travel abroad makes her a dangerous upset to the balance of society, and her death re-establishes this balance. Both views establish that the female migrant is an unnatural phenomenon which hurts society, and that women should remain at home. 62

“Home,” in sex-trafficking narratives, is presented as the only safe space for women. If they want to avoid death, the only sure way for a woman is to remain in the domestic sphere and not view migration as a viable option. A number of scholars take note of the safe home/unsafe other dichotomy present in human trafficking narratives63.

61 Bronfen, Elizabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (1992): 182. 62 Bronfen, Elzabeth. 189. 63 [1] Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 24-44.

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Andrijasevic's work takes note of this phenomenon:

Instead of empowering women to migrate safely, the series is best described as discouraging informal labour migration and advising staying at home as the safest option for young women (Sharma, 2003). By doing so, the campaign places images of women within the traditional representation of womanhood, which positions women outside of the labour market, that is, production, and inside the realm of home thus relegating women to reproduction within the private sphere. Consequently, the La Strada/IOM series upholds the idealization of home as a place devoid of conflict, danger and exploitation.64

Here Andrijasevic concludes that the IOM/La Strada campaign narratives do not promote safe migration of women, but rather no migration of women – the underlying idea here being that women inherently belong in the home, where they will be safe from the harms of the outside world.

“Home” here has no context; just as the female innocence/male criminality dichotomy occupies a landscape steeped in stereotype and ungrounded in reality, the safe home/unsafe other dichotomy fails to account for the differences in situations under which VOTs decide to leave their home nations. It also problematically demarcates the boundaries of female movement, denying the effects globalization has on more women entering the increasingly-international labor market, and presents the true female place as inherently outside of the labor market.

The issue with presenting “home” as an idealized place is that it further removes human trafficking narratives from reality and places them in a problematic landscape devoid of historical, institutional, and legal context, which is dangerous as it grossly

[2] Bronfen, Elizabeth. 182. [3] Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 23-50. [4] Sharma, Nandita. 57-65. 64 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 31.

38 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE misrepresent the issue, causes, and who is responsible/vulnerable. This simplistic binary narrative of a submissive victim and dominant criminal, layered with this idealization of

“home,” is far too simple to accurately depict the multi-faceted global issue of human trafficking, and the many reasons women seek work outside of their home nation, often as means of escape and pursuit of a better life.

As Nandita Sharma points out, the removal of home country context and injection of idealization fails to ask vital questions about the national contexts and legal/economic/personal circumstances from which women become vulnerable to forced sexual exploitation. Sharma claims these campaign narratives actually aim to counteract the increasingly globalized international labor market and instead keep migrants from deciding to leave through instilling a fear of trafficking and idealizing the home as the one true safe space – regardless of where a person's home is and what the circumstances there are like. As Sharma explains:

one of the key underlying motives of these campaigns is to restrict the mobility of migrants, particularly undocumented movements of people. Indeed, deeply embedded within the anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling discourse and particle are anti-immigrant sentiments expressed best in the idea that migrants are almost (if not) always better off at “home65.

This romanticized “home” has been ripped from its contextualized lining and is presented as a reified fact. The bottom line is that women are better off just staying where they are.

Forced sexual exploitation is reduced to an issue that occurs only in the realm of the unsafe other, and only when one is foolish enough to leave the confines of the home. The idea that a person can become dislocated from their national home is never addressed by

65 Sharma, Nandita. 54.

39 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE these campaigns. Though, statistics tell us that places vulnerable to trafficking often suffer from economic, social, and legal issues which stir the desire of people to leave and find work and survival elsewhere. 66

The real issue people become VOTs, these campaigns assert, is the movement of people from their home countries. Not the myriad of institutional conditions which motivate people to migrate and others to traffic in human beings – it is the movement itself, this unnatural, exceptional, and ultimately doomed journey from the home (an idealized state of safety), which causes people to become trafficked. “By making migration the problem, it is assumed that migration is something that is inherently damaging,” leading to irrevocable consequences such as forced sexual exploitation.67

In addition, the home is presented as the natural place for women; leaving the sphere of home is depicted as dangerous because it contradicts the classic order of feminine exception from the public sphere. As Jo Doezma explains, “women's independence was, and is, seen as a threat to the stability of the family and by extension, of the nation. Contemporary efforts to stop trafficking draw on underlying moral values of feminine dependence and ideals of women's role in the family.”68

Both this idealization of home and the presence of stereotypical characters dramatically oversimplify the complex issue of human trafficking, and not just in rhetoric. The narratives promoted by anti-trafficking campaigns reflect an international policy agenda to institutionalize the discouragement of female migration. The huge

66 Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 39-40. 67 Sharma, Nandita. 54-55. 68 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 41.

40 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE myriad of contexts under which human trafficking occurs is ignored by law makers in favor of a problematically oversimplified narrative promoted by anti-trafficking campaigns.

The weaving of these simple binaries of home/other and victim/criminal to form statements about national identity and an implied natural order of gender and movement are reminiscent of rhetorical constructions present in moral crusade rhetoric. In his examination of anti-trafficking strategies used by NGOs and the U.S. government to combat sex trafficking, Ronald Weitzer presents the idea that the moral crusade he views occurring against sex trafficking in America has become a series of “anecdotal horror stories,” which “stoke popular revulsion and support for draconian measures” against immigrants in the U.S.69 Anti sex-trafficking campaigns, whether they come from leftist feminists or the religious right, provide “shocking exemplars of victimization” in “highly dramatic terms,” which starkly present the issue of sex trafficking without gray areas – an assertion that is simply not true, as human trafficking is extremely difficult to define precisely because it occurs in so many forms against a backdrop of legal and political nuances and agendas.70

These unambiguous strains of discourse about human trafficking promoted by the crusaders are intended “to alarm the public and policy makers,” thus resulting in otherwise unjustifiably harsh, regressive policies towards migrants. According to Weitzer, this stark, alarmist rhetoric gave rise to conservative policies. Discourse on migrant victimhood was in the early 2000s rapidly “becoming almost fully institutionalized in 69 Weitzer, Ronald. 463. 70 Weitzer, Ronald. 448.

41 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE official discourse, legislation, and enforcement practices under the Bush administration.”71 It is not a stretch to view the stark, unambiguous, extremely simplified dichotomies of the safe home/unsafe other and feminine victimhood/male criminality present in European anti-trafficking rhetoric as contributing to an institutionalized moral crusade in this area as well.

Sharma too sees the institutionalization of these narratives in global policy, despite their inaccuracy. When voters and policy-makers think of human trafficking, they think first of the stereotypical and statistically inaccurate narrative presented in anti- trafficking rhetoric. In her work, Sharma explores the connection the constructions of an idealized home and dangerous other have to the agendas government institutions, asserting that anti-trafficking campaigns serve the interests of restrictive government policies on migration. To reach this connection, she examines the definition of human trafficking as it has been accepted by the UN and independent governments around the globe. Though defining human trafficking has proven a difficult task due to its variance in forms and difficulty to separate it from smuggling and other forms of illegal migration, the vast majority of definitions, Sharma concludes, contain the “significant aspect,” which “states that to be considered trafficked a person would have to be exploited, abused and deceived in a community other than the one in which such a person lived at the time of the original deception.”72

This stress on the crime of exploitation taking place in the realm outside of the home creates a problematic distinction between exploitation in a home community and 71 Weitzer, Ronald. 449-450. 72 Sharma, Nandita. 54.

42 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE the same exploitation occurring away from home. Again, it is the movement itself away from the home which becomes the issue, since it is the movement which defines a crime as human trafficking. “The exploitation,” Sharma says, “comes to be identified with people's movements abroad and loses its mooring from the organization and expansion of capitalist social relationships wherein people's labour is alienated. In the process, 'home' is left naturalized and therefore depoliticized as a site where harm is also done to persons.”73 Sharma's critique here would suggest that the entire construction of human trafficking as it is defined by international bodies of law and viewed in the context of globalization is a deterrent for migrants and an excuse for governments to remove

“trafficked” people from their national labor markets.

The label of being “trafficked” implies a passivity, which ignores the conditions under which a person becomes detached from their home enough to desire international movement. The label additionally promotes victimhood, which allows the government to remove migrants labeled as “trafficked” from their nation under the umbrella of doing what is best for the foolishly tricked VOT. Returning them to their home restores the imagined natural order. Anti-trafficking campaigns fail to address that it is often the undocumented status and the difficulty/impossibility of acquiring legal work permits and residency that makes migrants vulnerable to exploitation, because they need to rely on traffickers to leave their home countries and gain employment. As Sharma sees it, applying the label “trafficked” to a person is an inadequate umbrella term to describe a large, varied population of migrants who leave their home countries and are exploited in

73 Sharma, Nandita. 54.

43 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE their new ones.74

This oversimplification of human trafficking makes it a more digestible issue for law-makers, but they ignore the variety of circumstances under which trafficking occurs and instead apply a false cookie-cutter image of who is trafficked and who traffics.

Doezema examines how knowledge about sex trafficking is constructed and legitimized through the simplified narratives pushed by anti-trafficking groups. As a sex worker rights activist, Doezema attempts to bring the concerns of professional, consensual sex workers to the conversation of on prostitution, which is usually dominated by sex trafficking discourse. Anti-trafficking narratives isolate the consensual migrant sex worker's autonomy. Doezma points out:

The reality of female labour migration for the sex industry and other industries is complex, messy, and resists easy explanations and solutions. It certainly has very little to do with the stereotypical interpretation of 'trafficking in women'. Myth, on the other hand, is persistent precisely because it reduces complex phenomena to simple causes and clear-cut solutions.75

Doezma's approaches this “myth of trafficking in women” by comparing it to what she views as a similar phenomenon of rhetorical narratives becoming institutionalized in public policy: white slavery. The myth of white slavery emerged in the 20th century as the means to mediate increasing anxieties about female autonomy, immigration, and national identity. “White slavery” essentially referred to “the procurement, by force, deceit, or drugs, of a white woman or girl against her will, for prostitution.” The myth attempted to control female sexuality by restricting female autonomy under the guise of protecting innocent white women from falling to forced prostitution. In reality, women in 74 Sharma, Nandita. 56-59. 75 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 44.

44 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE prostitution during this time did not fit the profile of the fabled “white slave,” and were mostly migrant sex workers traveling from or within Europe to find work. Despite the lack of factual backing, “white slavery” resulted in a widespread moral panic, and led to regressive policies on female autonomy in Europe and North America. The same processes that constructed the myth of white slavery work to form the myth of sex trafficking: the adoption of discursive themes, which establish a dichotomy of innocence and evil as the means to making sense of a complex and diverse situation.

Doezma views the direction of anti-trafficking rhetoric as following that of white slavery, establishing a specific myth about women who decide to migrate.

“Contemporary accounts of trafficking, I demonstrated, consistently coupled their arguments for protection of innocent women with narrative elements which discursively subverted their supposedly liberatory intent.”76 In other words, the stories popularized in anti-trafficking rhetoric seem to support the “liberation” and autonomy of women, but the themes of these stories undermine this effect. Instead, they encourage women to abandon their autonomy of movement. This subversion of liberatory intent, as Doezma calls it, is the result of the myth created by the themes of female innocence, criminality of the other, and the consequences of female autonomy.77

This myth attempts to demarcate female movement as a kind of social suture, restricting women as the means to stabilizing society.78 When reality faces a crisis,

Doezma explains, “myth serves to suture social dislocations through a representation of

76 Doezma, Jo. "Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Sex Workers at U.N. Trafficking Protocol Negotiations." Social and Legal Studies 14.4 (2010): 61-89. Sage Publications. Web. 77 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 23-50. 78 Doezma, Jo. "Loose Women or Lost Women?” 48.

45 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE what could be.”79 Globalization causes a crisis by disrupting the gender structure of

Europe – women are leaving the home, breaking down their confined role within the home. Globalization causes women to leave the confines of the social sphere, venturing out from the home to enter the labor market. The increased international exchange of labor caused by globalization means that the rates of women entering the labor market have shown considerable growth since the 1990s. More women working means less women remaining in their traditional roles as wives and nurturers. Female motivations for entering the labor market are incredibly varied and resist simple definition. There is no one reason to explain increased female labor participation outside of the home, but rather a myriad of complex socioeconomic and political factors involved.80 Women who are trafficked into sex work represent a fraction of female migrants, and the trafficking itself occurs under a variety of circumstances and factors.81 The simple narratives of anti- trafficking campaigns are a way of explaining the complicated reality of sex trafficking and female migration in its myriad forms through the promotion of this one simple form.

Globalization causes disruptions to the social structures of society. Cohen's classic definition of moral panic is applicable here:

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or groups of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially-accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved (or

79 Doezma, Jo. "Now You See Her, Now You Don't” 65-66. 80 "Engaging in Globalization: Implications for Gender Relations." Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) (n.d.): United Nations. Web. 81 Doezma, Jo. "Now You See Her, Now You Don't” 67-69.

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more often) resorted to...82

Female migration is a moral panic perpetuated by anti-sex trafficking campaigns, since it threatens the perceived nature order. The myth of human trafficking, relying on highly- stereotypical terms, effectively neutralizes this threat by discouraging female migration, presenting it only as an inevitable road to death, and encouraging women to remain at home.

While Doezma concluded that the myth of human trafficking is used to remove female agency and keep woman at home, I assert that this can be taken a step further. In my own work, I will draw upon the elements of the stereotypical sex trafficking narrative defined in this section, attempting to understand how these elements form a powerful, institutionalized myth which works to counteract the moral panic of globalization – not only through the removal of female agency, as Doezma asserts – but through the creation of a series of highly simplified dichotomies (home/other, evil/innocence, male/female) which remove context and promote restrictive, draconian immigration policies in Eastern

Europe.

82 Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panic. Working Papers Series 2010. New York: Routlege. (1972): 24-25. Print.

47 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER III: THEORY

In order to best understand the processes taking place within the discursive goals of

IOM's Lilja 4-ever campaign, theories of rhetorical myth can be applied, since myth is often used to mediate and simplify complex issues into more easily digestible forms. At the most basic level, myth is an origin story. It is the mechanism by which humans construct a hypostatic system of sense in chaos, explaining otherwise inexplicable aspects of their world. Myth often rises to fill the gaps where our understanding fails to derive meaning – e.g. birth, death, creation – the places we cannot witness ourselves but which require explanation in a complete worldview. Myth as a concept is most associated with primitive societies, though more modern rhetorical theorists understand that mythologies are still an important force in behind societies' meditation of discursive structures of reality and existence.

Myth can also be used to a deliberative effect to promote certain political ideologies, privileging heavily-calcified terministic screens so that they are accepted as a naturalized state. In my analysis, I will adopt an understanding of myth from Ernesto

Laclau, who understood that myth could be used to gain acceptance for political ideas, as well as act as a stabilizing force in societal conflicts. The deliberative tissue of myth – the ideologies communicated and instilled in those who accept it as truth – is articulated through the selection of a world view or Burkean terministic screen that the myth chooses to represent.

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Myth is much more than an origin story for society, it is also an ideologically- marked narrative used to construct societal beliefs and suture societal crises. Society,

Laclau asserts in his work, is a symbolic order, a coherent pattern which allows members of a given community to operate under a shared understanding of how the world is organized and analyzed. Myth organizes and narrativizes these chains of discursive symbols in a way that makes sense to all members of society. Essentially, a dominant societal myth ensures that a community shares the same hypostatic version of ideal reality.

In this way, a myth is performative, a vision of ideal society and a blueprint on how members of a community should understand reality. While dominant ideologies of how society should function certainly exist, visions of ideal society exist at various points of calcification in a given community, and can be manipulated rhetorically by anyone, not just the dominant powers that be. Political activists In this way, the performative of myth not only can explain to members of a community how to view the world, it can also be used deliberatively to explain the benefits of alternative world views.

More than a static, ideologically-marked narrativization of societal values, myth is adaptive where it needs to be, serving as a suturing agent for points of dislocation. A dislocation, Laclau explains, occurs when the dominant, hypostatic myth of societal understanding is met with an “other,” an event it cannot explain in its existing terms.

Nothing in the existing symbol system can explain a dislocation, so the myth must grow and adapt to cover and soothe away this disturbance in terms everyone can understand. 83 83 Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time / Ernesto Laclau. London: Verso, 1990. Print. 39-59.

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For example, in a hypothetical primitive society, the emergence of fire would be a dislocation, that is, it would present a gap in this society's myth. Nothing in the society's previous understanding of reality can explain fire, so in order to make sense of it, the myth must cover or “suture” the gap in understanding – hence a new myth is born which makes sense of fire in terms of everything else this society knows to be true.

Myth constructs new representational spaces which attempt to mediate the arrival of the other within the existing symbol system. Though Laclau does note that points of dislocation also provide opportunities for mythological upheaval – that is, the abandonment of an entire societal myth in favor of a new understanding and order – I concern myself here with myths which attempt to explain the new in terms of the old, or existing order.84 It is best to think of these suturing myths not as new myths entirety – since they must fit seamlessly with the rest of a society's mythology to explain the disturbance – but rather new chapters in the existing world view. It is useful to think of myth as a body forming society's worldview; when a bone becomes dislocated, in order for the skeleton to remain functional, new tissue must form to fill the gap perfectly.

Coherent societal myth in this sense has to consistently expand to order to make sense of dislocation in terms of what is already “known.”

In my understanding of anti-sex trafficking rhetoric, myth is the performance of an ideal, naturalized as the accepted natural order; not simply as political ideology, as in

Laclau, but as fact – the way nature intended society to be organized. In this way, myth is the performance of ideology as nature.

84 Laclau, Ernesto. 60-64.

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This performance of nature is articulated through the assertion of certain terministic screens. Terministic screens are the messages communicated through myth.

They are the viewpoints asserted by myth. Those who buy into a certain myth are viewing reality through the terministic screens which the myth articulates.

Burke explains his theory of terministic screens with a metaphor: a single image of the same object is reproduced multiple times, each with a different colored filter. Each of the images depict the same object, yet each depiction is distinct as a result of the colored filters used. Language, Burke asserts, functions in the same way as a colored filter – it “colors” observation of reality, altering the viewers' perception so the same action, event, object, etc. can be viewed and understood in many distinct ways. “The terms or vocabulary we use as a result of our occupations,” Burke explains, “constitute a kind of screen that directs our attention to particular aspects of reality rather than others.”85 The screen is formed by the terminology used, hence the name, terministic screen. Individuals perceive reality through an endless overlap of terministic screens – their religion, their political beliefs, experiences etc. – and some terministic screens are more calcified as others, meaning they hold as stronger influence over an individual's (or entire societies') perception of reality. All observation is confined by terministic screens; we will never see the image without the colored filters. Language shapes and demarcates our understanding of the world, so we cannot “observe” reality without peering through our kaleidoscopic, overlapping lenses of terministic perception.

Most relevant to my understanding of myth in Burke's theory of terministic 85 Burke, Kenneth. "Terministic Screens." Language as Symbolic Action. Saratoga Springs, NY: Empire State College, State University of New York, 1973. 44-45. Print.

51 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE screens is how certain screens are selected, while others are deflected and omitted from reality. As Burke explains, “Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality”86 In other words, a terminology is notable not just by what it includes, but also what it omits or ignores entirely. For every perception of reality, there are endless galaxies of rejected realities. To this effect, terministic screens and the reality they select can be used deliberatively; the acceptance of a worldview necessitates the rejection of alternatives.

Myth can be understood as containing a terministic screen which has been calcified to the highest degree – naturalized into undisputed, organic fact. When a terministic screen is reified to this degree, it ceases to be understood a construction of language, and comes to be known as fact. The more a myth or terministic screen becomes calcified and understood as fact, the more alternative screens or myths are rejected or ignored to the point where they are, in the most extreme cases, no longer even considered as possibilities in the realm of reality. Myth is the dramatization of terministic screens

This becomes extremely problematic when heavily-calcified terministic screens form the dominant myths of political ideologies. A political group can promote a certain ideological worldview as pure, indisputable fact. Take for instance the myth of a racial hierarchy, which served as a “factual” and “natural” justification for slavery for over two- hundred years in certain American political ideologies. The Abolitionist Movement was forced to counter “fact” and a sense of “natural order” which was deeply-embedded in the

86 Burke, Kenneth. 45.

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American mythos by terministic screens of racial superiority. Myth, the illogical, is a powerful rhetorical exigency, but also a powerful deliberative tool to assert ideology for political gain. Myth is ultimately the performance of an ideological order which articulates reified terministic screens to form an ontological state of the world.

Anti-sex trafficking campaigns often assert deeply-reified worldviews about

Eastern European society as a simplistic location of gendered dichotomies. The terministic screens regarding gender in Eastern Europe form a hierarchical relationship between female domesticity and hegemonic masculinity. The cultural and historical context of Eastern Europe has caused these terministic screens to become calcified to the point of reification. Increased movement due to globalization causes a Laclauian disruption to this naturalized order of society, since women leave their natural place of domesticity. To mediate the anxieties caused by challenged terministic screens, the myth of sex trafficking is created and expressed in anti-trafficking campaigns. The suturing myth applies existing terministic screens of gender hierarchy to the new situation of female migration. This is an an attempt to maintain a consistent worldview in Eastern

Europe by carrying over existing terministic screens to explain a disruptive situation.

53 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER IV: METHODOLOGY

To better understand how Lilja 4-ever uses a powerful, subversive myth about gender in Eastern Europe, I will examine the plot progression and character development of Lilja, the main character. I will explain how gender hierarchy in the region has been calcified by culture, history, and politics, analyzing how Lilja's narrative relies upon and reinforces these terministic screens about gender relations in Eastern Europe. I will show how the disruption of female emigration from Eastern Europe has created a cultural need for a suturing myth which applies these terministic screens to this new phenomenon.

Finally, I will show how the suturing myth of the film, which carries over old terministic screens to explain a new problem, can create problematic gaps in our understanding of sex trafficking. It maintains terministic screens which promote stereotypes of women as vulnerable objects for male aggression, and demarcates sexual and international boundaries for women. Through Lilja's story, I will examine the subversive effects the continuation of pervasive terministic screens can have on not only the way women are viewed, but the way the international community deals with the issue of sex trafficking.

54 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER V: ANALYSIS OF LILJA 4-EVER

In my analysis of Luka's Moodysson's 2002 crime drama, Lilja 4-ever, I will examine myth of sex trafficking which the film promotes through the narrative of deeply-rooted terministic screens. I argue here that when used to educate women, the film serves the subversive purpose of discouraging any form of female migration from Eastern Europe to the E.U. Lilja 4-ever promotes a myth of sex trafficking used to a politically deliberative effect of demarcating the boundaries of female movement in Europe by asserting that all women who leave Eastern Europe under any circumstances to travel to the E.U. will be trafficked into prostitution and face inescapable death. As Laclau discusses, myth can serve a suturing purpose, allowing societies to mediate social and cultural anxieties in times of crisis. The unprecedented international female movement and female labor market participation cannot be contextualized in Eastern Europe's existing terministic screens. They represent a disruption to the perceived natural order of a gender hierarchy.

The myth of sex trafficking acts as a suture, making sense of increased female migration in terms of the reified terministic screen of gender roles present in Eastern European society. The terministic screen of a natural hierarchical gender structure promoted by this myth is visible in the progression of Lilja's narrative away from the home towards death.

The further Lilja ventures from the role of domesticity as a female nurturer within the home, the more male aggression she attracts. Traveling abroad represents the ultimate dislocation from her natural female role and results inevitably in her reduction to a

55 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE brutalized body and death.

Lilja follows an ill-fated progression from hopeful migration to suicide, a progression which closely mirrors the one noted by Rutvica Andrijasevic as a cautionary narrative present in many anti-sex trafficking campaigns. This narrative asserts that once a woman has decided to migrate away from her home country, no matter what the circumstances of this migration, she will at some point be betrayed and coerced into the sex trade, a fate which will end certainly in the dissolution of her future in emotional and/or physical death. Lilja's progression from a hopeful young woman dreaming of successful migration to a battered prostitute jumping from a highway overpass bridge to her death neatly follows this progression. The terministic screen of a naturalized gender hierarchy asserts that the natural place of women is the home. The myth of sex trafficking simplifies the circumstances under which a woman decides to travel abroad, depicting it instead as a linear narrative from migration to certain death. The female migrant faces death not because of the brutality of circumstances, but rather because of her decision to migrate in the first place. Death is sealed the moment a woman decides to leave her natural place at home and travel abroad from the idealized home, so the only way to avoid it is to remain in the natural female sphere of the home country.

56 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE Eastern Europe as a Dystopia: divergent women cause poverty

In the myth of sex trafficking, female divergence from their natural role not only leads to female death, but also the death of the community they leave behind. Female domesticity is therefore presented as a foundational element of functional society – if women like

Lilja leave the home, a cycle of abandonment and poverty is perpetuated. The myth of sex trafficking as it operates in Lilja 4-ever is cautionary and dystopic, showing a world where the dislocation of women from the sphere of domesticity has led to a perpetuating cycle of extreme poverty. When women, the natural nurturers of society, abandon their roles, the whole society collapses.

The poverty and hopelessness of Lilja's vaguely Eastern European world – described only as “Somewhere in the Former Soviet Union” by an opening caption – is painfully apparent in Moodysson's establishing shots. The landscape is stark; concrete housing blocks, abandoned military bases, and factories from the former days of Soviet

Russia are shown overrun with garbage and brutal, mindless crime. Moodysson's politics are clear at first glance – the dissolution of the Soviet Union has left Eastern Europe in a pile of battered ruins and bottomless poverty. However, the film asserts that the most destructive and perpetuating force of this cyclical poverty and crime is not the dissolution of Eastern Europe's economy, but rather the removal of women from their natural place in the home as mothers. The dominant terministic screen within the myth of Eastern Europe asserts that women should remain at home, and that female domesticity is essential for keeping societal balance. Since globalization pulls women from their natural place, the

57 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE suturing myth of sex trafficking mediates this disruption by asserting that female dislocation causes societal collapse.

The concept of a gender hierarchy is deeply-embedded within Eastern European culture. Gender roles form a heavily-calcified terministic screen, dictating how the sexes should behave and interact with each other. Following the fall of communism, Eastern

Europe experienced a massive upheaval culturally as well as economically. The Marxist idea that both men and women should work outside of the home was abandoned, and family structure regressed to pre-communist ideals about female domesticity. This is not to say that de facto gender equality existed under communism. Patriarchal concepts of women as true nurturers in the home remained present, and the true purpose of women was to birth and rear children. During communism however women were afforded more equality in the workplace, though they were expected to continue to be the primary caregiver in the home. Following the fall of communism, workplace discrimination forced women from the commercial sphere and made it extremely difficult to gain employment. This cultural trend was reflected by a significant drop in female employment rates in recovering Soviet countries. In East Germany, the employment rate among women dropped from 91% during communism to 61% post-communism.

Statistics indicate that this trend in low female employment has persisted into the 21 st century. In Hungary, female employment has dropped by 20% in the last decade alone.

Labor market discrimination against women in Eastern Europe continues today to be common. Single-mothers, like Lilja's mother in the film, are affected most negatively by this institutionalized patriarchal culture. Research indicates that single-parent homes run

58 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE by women are most adversely affected by the economy in former-Soviet countries, due to high unemployment and low wages. Women are encouraged to marry young and rear children, on which there is a significant cultural emphasis. For example, in a national survey in Romania the majority of participants indicated that they needed to have a child to feel fulfilled. The role of females as nurturers who remain in the home has become culturally significant in how Eastern Europeans view women and female agency. The terministic screen of gender roles dictates that the natural state of society requires women to remain in the domestic sphere as caregivers.87

Female domesticity is nearly non-existent in Lilja 4-ever. The society has failed to function due to the failure of women, leading to a cycle of poverty and crime. Lilja's mother, who appears only in the beginning of the film, abandons her daughter to go to

America with her boyfriend, and later sends a letter to child services renouncing her parenthood of Lilja, making her abandonment official. The scene is potent – a screaming

Lilja is ripped from her mothers arms by Sergei and falls into a pile of mud with a dog, all in slow motion. Lilja's fate here is clear. As she thrashes in the mud, she is reduced to the lowest possible status among the dogs. Her mother's abandonment has left her with nothing.

Though we do not ever learn of Lilja's mother's fate, her character is significant not in where she goes, but what she leaves behind. This abandonment leads to the extreme worsening of Lilja's circumstances, making her desperate and hungry enough to enter the world of sex work. She is displaced from the modest, run-down flat she shared 87 Robila, Miheala. "Families in Eastern Europe: Contexts, Trends, and Variations." Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research 5 (2004): 1-14. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.

59 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE with her mother and left to live in a dark concrete block among the filth of the previous tenant. She no longer has the means to purchase food and she drops out of school. Her mother's abandonment of her in search of a better life leaves Lilja with an intensified resolve to leave as well. In going abroad, Lilja's mother has not only abandoned her child to a certain dismal future, she has inflicted her with the dangerous idea that home is not the best place for her. Looking out a window at the barren landscape, Lilja tells a friend,

“Total fucking shit, I understand why my mother left, there's nothing there.” Lilja's determination to leave home is intensified by her mother's abandonment, since she has nothing left in Eastern Europe. This film promotes the idea that if you leave to go abroad, you will not only cause destruction to yourself. You will also upset the balance at home, leaving your children with no resort except to try and seek life outside of Eastern Europe.

In the film, abandonment breeds more abandonment, until the society is completely collapsed. Volodya, a young homeless boy, is abandoned by his mother and is left with only his father, who is unable to provide him with the nurturing he requires and forces Volodya out onto the streets. Lilja fulfills this role as nurturer, providing the young boy with food, shelter, and genuine affection that only a woman can give. This idea that females are the only possible nurturers is punctuated by the metaphor of a basketball in the film. Lilja, the female nurturer, gives Volodya a basketball for his birthday, and

Volodya's father, a male incapable of rearing a child alone, stabs the basketball with a knife and destroys it, kicking Volodya out of the house again. The message here is clear: only women can take care of children. When children are left with men, they will only grow up to continue the cycle of poverty.

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Lilja's symbolic adoption of Volodya only serves to make her desire to leave home increasingly problematic; not only is she leading to her own death, she is leaving behind a child, and as evident in her own mother's abandonment this will only perpetuate the cycle of poverty and societal disfunction at home. While Lilja remains at home, she saves

Volodya's life several times, talking him out of suicide on multiple occasions. After she leaves for Sweden and is no longer there to care for the young boy, Volodya, resigned to death in the absence of his nurturer and left with no other options, takes a bottle of unknown pills and dies on the steps of Lilja's abandoned apartment. Lilja's maternal presence was the only thing keeping Volodya alive, and without her, there is nothing to stop him from taking his own life.

Female abandonment of their natural roles is therefore the real reason why Eastern

Europe has collapsed into this display of extreme disfunction. The real context of Eastern

Europe's overwhelming poverty are ignored by this myth and explained instead in terms of the terministic screen of hierarchical gender structure. Women who travel abroad like

Lilja and her mother are responsible for perpetuating the cycle and breaking the society down. The implied assumption here is that if they had remained in their natural places they would have somehow prevented the community from collapsing into despair.

Women need to stay in their natural roles in order for society to function. Globalization causes a disruption to Eastern European society. The myth of sex trafficking must contextualize this new phenomenon in terms of the existing gender hierarchy, showing what happens to society when women step outside of their rightful place.

61 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE Natural Nurturers: idealization of the mythic home as a place of safe mothers

The deliberate subversion of economic, political, and historical context to describe

Eastern Europe's failing society in terms of female roles is perpetuated in anti-trafficking narratives by what Nandita Sharma calls the idealization of the home.88 When the idea of home is presented as a romanticized vision of as a place of safety for women, any place outside of the home becomes, in contrast, a place of danger. This perpetuates the terministic screen of gender roles by asserting that the home, regardless of the context, is the only place of safety for a woman, and that traveling abroad will only bring destruction. While Moodysson's bleak portrayal of Lilja's vaguely Eastern European country hardly seems a place of romantic safety, the concept of home in Lilja 4-ever is idealized through religious symbols and dream sequences throughout the film.

Religion composes a significant component of Lilja 4-ever. Lilja herself is presented as a deeply religious character; her prized possession is a painting of a small child clutching the hand of a female angel – a clear maternal allusion to the concept idea that women are natural nurturers. Though none of the female characters in the film are presented as natural maternal figures as the angel, the painting is representative of an idealized state in which women take care of children. While she is in her home country,

Lilja is shown lovingly polishing and praying to the painting, which comes to symbolize how the home should be if women remained in the home as nurturing figures. Her loving care of the painting shows her dedication to what it symbolizes – the rightful place of

88 Sharma, Nanditra. 54.

62 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE women as nurturers. After being trafficked to Sweden, Lilja smashes the painting in a fit of despair. This act of destruction symbolizes not only Lilja's own personal loss of faith, but also her final abandonment of her role as a nurturer. The painting represented her last ties to her place as a caregiver, and her last hope to return to her rightful role. Smashing the painting of the idealized female nurturer punctuates the idea that traveling abroad ruined this future and dislocated her from her role.

The idealization of the home as a mythic location (a place in which the natural order is restored and all women remain at home as nurturers) is best exemplified by the ending scene. As Lilja lays dying on a hospital gurney, medical personnel surrounding her after her jump from the bridge, she has a vision as she slips from reality and enters heaven. As if on rewind, Lilja is shown back in her home country on the day she is supposed to leave the country with Andrei, the man who traffickers her. The sun is shining for the first time in any scene of the film as Lilja marches up to the window of

Andrei's car and informs him that she will not be going with him. In this vision, she is able to see through Andrei's deception clearly. “Do you think I'm stupid?” she shouts at him, “they don't pick vegetables in winter!”89 As uplifting music swells, Lilja is shown meeting Volodya again in heaven, which is simply a sunny version of a rooftop Lilja and

Volodya used to play on back in Eastern Europe. Though Lilja spends the whole film believing that the only heaven she needs to believe in is a life outside of Eastern Europe, the film concludes with her realization that heaven is actually her home country after all.

Ignoring the poverty and hunger Lilja was living in, the myth of sex trafficking asserts 89 Andrei deceives Lilja by offering her a job picking vegetables in the winter in Sweden, which she blindly ignores and accepts.

63 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE the idea that the home is truly the only place where a person can find true happiness and prosperity. This myth sutures the social wounds of globalization by insisting that women can find safety and happiness only in the domestic sphere at home. All Lilja had to do to reach this understanding was to tell Andrei “no” and give up her idea of a life away from home, implying that her main misstep in life was agreeing to travel outside of her natural place.

64 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE Desire to Leave: the first misstep towards death abroad

In Lilja's progression away from her natural place at home and towards her fated death abroad, the first step she takes towards dislocation is her misplaced desire to leave the home. In the terministic screens of Eastern European gender structure, the only true place of female safety and future is the home. Leaving the home and becoming dislocated from the domestic sphere is presented in the progression of the sex trafficking myth as fatal to women. The myth asserts that women should remain home or else they will meet inevitable death abroad. Lilja 4-ever promotes the sex trafficking myth by directly linking

Lilja's death abroad to her desire to leave her role at home, implying that an inevitable correlation exists between leaving home and dying abroad.

In Lilja 4-ever, Lilja's death is never a matter of question. The film opens with a scene of Lilja in clear crisis, her face purpled with bruises and her hair chopped off at strange angles. She is shown sprinting frantically down the side of a highway in downtown Malmö, Sweden (the place established by a cheery “Welcome to Malmö!” sign against the otherwise gray landscape). It is clear she is being chased, but by whom or what is unclear. She is not being followed, though she stops every once in a while to glance over her shoulder before abruptly changing directions. Her path is erratic and seemingly random; if she is running from something, she does not know what direction it is coming from. Eventually she comes to a highway overpass, and breathing heavily, she stops and looks down over the edge. Her fate is clear: she will jump. The scene then abruptly cuts to a much healthier looking Lilja as a caption establishes the time as “3

65 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE months earlier” and the place as “Somewhere in the former Soviet Union.” Her hair longer and shiny, her complexion clear of brutal marks, the pretty teen is shown smiling and chatting excitedly with her best friend about the idea of leaving home as she packs her suitcase. The jarring juxtaposition leaves no room for interpretation; leaving home will somehow result in this smiling young woman's demise at the bottom of a bridge.

Framed by Lilja's suicide, the film takes on a cautionary note. It is established right away that anything Lilja does throughout the course of the film, whatever decisions she makes, will lead to her death. We know right away that we are watching a story of a decline and fall.

The film's opening scenes point to Lilja's desire to leave home as her first misstep towards death. In myth of sex trafficking, death becomes inevitable at the point of hopeful migration, and Lilja's defining trait throughout the film is her unwavering desire to migrate in search of a better life outside of Eastern Europe. This is presented as her fatal flaw and sets her apart from the other members of her community. No character in

Lilja 4-ever seems satisfied with their lives. In fact, the people around her seem to be defined only by their intense dissatisfaction with existence. The characters in Lilja's world live against a bleak landscape of poverty and crime in the ruins of the former

Soviet Union, frequently using drugs and alcohol to escape the pain of day-to-day living.

Despite this universal and pervasive hopelessness, no one in Lilja's community sees leaving the country as a viable, realistic option to a better life. Only Lilja holds the misguided belief that she can escape Eastern Europe and achieve a higher standard of living. Everyone else's dissatisfaction merely ends with resignation. Lilja's demands

66 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE change, and more importantly, demands movement. From the framing of the film, it is clear that this movement will not be as successful as Lilja believes.

Lilja's friends and peers have difficultly understanding her need to leave. While everyone seems to share her feelings of hopelessness about their world, they find her desire to leave almost disrespectful, or in some cases, comically above her station in life.

Her friend Natasha seems angry and dejected when Lilja announces she is going to move to America with her mother. Lilja tries to cheer her up by saying “you can go to America too!” but her friend merely gapes at her incredulously, as if it had never occurred to her that leaving was even within the realm of possibility. Lilja's plans to travel to America fall through after she has spent the first few scenes of the film bragging about her escape from Eastern Europe, and her peers act smugly towards her failure to escape, knowing that it was misguided all along. “Shouldn't you be in America?” her teacher asks her snidely while handing back a failing exam grade to a distracted Lilja and remarking sarcastically about Lilja's ridiculous belief in a “golden future.” Lilja, furious and defiant, responds, “Go to hell bitch! You can be sure I have a golden future!” and storms out. Her words here are thick with dramatic irony, since the film depicts Lilja's future from the start as anything but “golden.” There is no room to root for Lilja's successful migration here; in the progression the sex trafficking myth, death is inevitable since the first hope of migration. We can only witness Lilja's downfall and note the direct connection the film makes between her desire to leave and her later suicide.

The fatal difference between the hopeful Lilja and her more resigned peers is made most apparent during a scene in which a small gathering of teenagers in her

67 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE apartment turns into a party. An upbeat song plays while a montage of Lilja and the other teens laughing, kissing, drinking, and doing drugs flashes across the screen. After the party is broken up by one of Lilja's irritable old neighbors in the impoverished apartment complex, most of the teens tumble out of the room laughing and joking around with each other, bringing their little party outside to the courtyard. Lilja however, remains, crying against the rusted radiator in her dark apartment as Volodya, the young homeless boy with whom she develops an emotional bond, attempts in vain to console her. The brief respite offered by the drugs and booze, while clearly enough to placate her peers, is not nearly enough to distract Lilja from her intense need to escape. While Volodya attempts to calm her by explaining his version of heaven as the means of escape from reality, she exclaims, “That's bullshit! I'm not going to die, I'm going to America!” There is something about Lilja's dissatisfaction which marks her as divergent – while everyone else in the film merely discusses leaving this “shithole,” Lilja is brazen enough to consider it a tangible opportunity.

By framing the film with Lilja's death away from home, Moodysson inexorably links Lilja's desire and drive for a golden future outside of Eastern Europe with her inevitable suicide in Sweden. Lilja's death at the beginning of the film is directly juxtaposed with the scenes of her hoping desperately for the chance to travel abroad. It has already been established that she will die abroad, so her desire to travel abroad seems ill-fated. In the myth of sex trafficking, hopeful migration is the fatal flaw which leads to death. Once a woman has decided she will migrate, her fate is sealed completely, since she is venturing from the safety of the idealized home. The sex trafficking myth asserts

68 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE that the farther a women travels from the realm of domesticity in her home country, the further she damages her chance at a future. This mediates globalization in terms of the

Eastern European gender order by showing that the new phenomenon of increased female migration still subjects women to traditional roles.The terministic screen of confined female roles promotes the idea that women belong in the home. No matter how battered and unforgiving this home may be, is the natural place, the only place, where one can live out their days. Lilja's idea that leaving is a real possibility is viewed not only as deviant, but dangerous, unnatural, and something that will lead to her downfall. This myth narrates the terministic screen of female domesticity to show what happens when women leave the home. Hope for a life outside of the home is the first misstep towards death, since it brings her to the precarious edge of her natural role. Lilja 4-ever makes this connection clear by directly juxtaposing Lilja's death in Sweden with her hope for a better future abroad.

69 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE Misguided Women: female divergence attracts male aggression

In order to make sense of increased female migration, the myth of sex trafficking explains female migrants in terms of existing gender roles. In other words, women who migrate cannot be explained by the current Eastern European understanding of the world, so this myth must show what happens when women migrate. The sex trafficking myth follows a progression from hope for a better future to inevitable death, a progression which is driven by increasing female dislocation from their natural state and the idealized home.

The further a woman removes herself from the safe sphere of domesticity, the more vulnerable she becomes to male aggression. In fact, female divergence from natural roles attracts male aggression.The myth of sex trafficking holds that the dominance and predatory nature of men occurs naturally, and that the only safe place for women is to remain in the domestic sphere of their home nation. When women leave the home sphere

– whether to sell sex outside of the home, or the ultimate unnatural movement of leaving the home nation entirely – this myth asserts that the women will face and be conquered by male aggression. However, since male aggression occurs naturally, it is the fault of the women for making themselves vulnerable; the only real way to be safe from male aggression is to remain home.

In Lilja 4-ever, prostitution is presented as the stage of dislocation which follows misguided hope to travel abroad. Prostitution represents a misuse of sexuality, since it takes place outside of the sphere of domesticity and therefore outside of the natural female role. Prostitution is presented as a negative effect of the poverty caused by female

70 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE dislocation from their roles. It draws desperate, divergent women out of the safe domestic sphere and into a world of vulnerability to male aggression.

Prostitution in Eastern Europe emerged as a prominent issue in the post- communism era, and remains a common phenomenon in the region today. Increased male dominance as social and economic leaders led to the persistence of a pervasive male identity characterized “by work in the paid labor market, the subordination of women and girls, heterosexism and the driven and uncontrollable sexuality of men.”90 Diminished female roles outside of the home led to an emphasis on feminine qualities; the most important traits being submissiveness and sexual receptivity. Women who are unfortunate enough to lack a dominating male force in their life to provide income are left with very few employment options, and regularly turn to prostitution as the means to survive.

Prostitutes are prime targets for sex traffickers, who exploit the market demand for sex workers and prey upon the desire of young women to escape their current circumstances.91

The sex trafficking myth attempts to counteract the flow of young women from the domestic sphere by asserting that male aggression and uncontrollable sexuality will dominate and destroy natural submissiveness. The myth presents women as natural victims of male violence. The single way to avoid male aggression is to remain in the safety of the home, regardless of the circumstances there.

In Lilja 4-ever, the further Lilja removes herself from the sphere of domesticity,

90 Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. "Sex Trafficking: The Impact of War, Militarism and Globalization in Eastern Europe." Journal for Political Theory and Research on Globalisation, Development, and Gender Issues (n.d.): n. pag. Globalizacija. Web. 8 Apr. 2014. 91 Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. n. pag.

71 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE the more heightened her victimhood becomes. The film shows that once a woman enters the world of prostitution, she loses any chance to return to her natural role as a nurturer.

Prostitution is presented as a cycle of dislocation and abandonment; women who become prostitutes leave behind abandoned children who must resort to prostitution themselves

(female), or die (male).

It is mentioned that Lilja's mother was a prostitute, and Lilja herself was the result of a john impregnating and abandoning Lilja's mother. This act of prostitution condemned her and her mother to a hopeless life on society's impoverished outskirts, and her mother was never able to re-enter her natural place as a nurturer, eventually abandoning Lilja to travel abroad. Misuse of female sexuality such as prostitution is depicted here as dangerous, the penultimate dislocation of women from their roles. Lilja, the child of such a dangerous dislocated women, is caught up in the cycle of poverty and abandonment her mother's misuse of sexuality brought down upon them – a cycle we see repeated when

Lilja begins selling sex and abandons Volodya to travel abroad.

Prostitution is depicted then as both a symptom and a perpetuating factor of a society damaged by the dislocation of women from their natural roles. Lilja is reluctant to begin selling sex, only resorting to it after she sees that she has no other option. Desperate and starving, Lilja goes to see her spinster aunt, an old crone of a woman who swindled her out of her flat at one point. The older women dismisses her niece, explaining that if

Lilja needs money so badly, she can “do what [her] mother did... go to town and spread her legs.” Lilja, distraught with the possibility of resorting to prostitution, initially tries to make money in other ways, none of which are shown as successful. At a yard sale she

72 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE holds, she beseeches a passerby, “Don't you want to buy something?” to which the person responds, “there is nothing here to sell!” In the jump cut to the next scene, it is clear that

Lilja – a full face of makeup and a resigned expression on her way to town to “spread her legs” – truly has nothing to sell but herself. The desperate situation which leads her to sex work is the result of her mother's own sex work and consequent abandonment. Lilja's own entrance into sex work leads to the eventual abandonment of Volodya, who, left with no other alternatives, kills himself.

Once involved in sex work, Lilja's vulnerability to male aggression increases dramatically. This view of divergent women as the natural victims of male aggression is visible throughout Lilja 4-ever. Male violence towards women is a common theme of the film, and it occurs naturally and seemingly without any motivation. In one particularly graphic scene, a group of young men from Lilja's apartment building break down her door and invade her home, beating and raping her into submission as they throw her meager possessions out the window. The same group of young men was shown earlier drinking and laughing with Lilja at a party, but her new lowered status as a prostitute – a woman who has removed herself permanently from her natural role – makes her a target for male aggression. If Lilja had not entered the world of sex work, she would not have been subject to this act of violence. The more a woman removes herself from her place in the world, the more vulnerable she becomes to male aggression and violence. The sale of sex is the penultimate displacement of women from their natural roles. Just short of leaving home, selling sex removes women from the domestic sphere and places them in the commercial sphere in a way that makes them vulnerable and helpless to the natural

73 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE predatory nature of men, which can only be kept in check if women remain in the domestic sphere.

It follows then that leaving the home nation represents the ultimate form of female vulnerability to male aggression – a form of vulnerability which will lead to inevitable death. When Lilja arrives in Malmö, Sweden, the violence against her is extreme compared to the violence she endured as a sex worker in her home country, since she has abandoned the safety provided by the home sphere. After Andrei, the trafficker, deceives her into traveling abroad by preying on her desire to escape, any control she had over her own body is removed and her death becomes an inescapable fact. A pimp meets her at the airport and takes her passport, suspending her ability to return to her home country. She is then locked in an apartment building where the pimp brutally rapes her before leaving her alone in her new prison, naked and dejected in the bathtub. What follows is a disturbing montage of male clients grunting and thrusting above Lilja while she lies beneath them, resigned, unmoving and corpse-like.

At this point in the film, any agency Lilja had previously is stripped from her, reducing her to a mere object for male violence. She becomes imprisoned physically, emotionally, and psychologically. In one scene, Lilja desperately screams and pounds on the locked door of the apartment, attempting in vain to get the attention of a passerby in the hall. The only person who hears her cries is her pimp, who busts into her room to silence her, explaining, “I kill you if you run away! If you go to police, they send you back, and my friends wait on you and then we kill you.” He then pats her rump reassuringly, in an almost father-like way, hushing her cries by saying gently, “it's okay,

74 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE it's okay.” The “it's okay,” means that everything is simply occurring as it should in this situation, so there is no need for Lilja to be upset about something she cannot change. In the myth of sex trafficking, Lilja's fate is sealed since she exited the realm of safety, and now there is nothing she can do to fight it.

Though she is trapped in a populated city, Lilja's plight is completely unknown to those around her, further emphasizing her helplessness. The Swedes are not the “kind” folk Andrei promised her that they would be, and instead they look past Lilja, never seeing her plight. Instead, Lilja experiences only male violence at the hands of the

Swedish johns who pay her pimp for her services. If they are not purchasing sex from her, the people Lilja encounters do not seem to see her at all. This becomes painfully apparent when Lilja's pimp brings her into an upscale department store downtown.

Though the store is full of people and Lilja is not physically incapable of escaping the situation, she does not run, since she has nowhere to run to, and the people around her cannot help her. She has been reduced to a body upon which male violence is enacted, and there is no way and no one who can help her escape.

75 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE

Dead Dolls: reduction to a brutalized bodies

Though the inescapability of Lilja's death is known from the opening scene of the film,

Moodysson highlights a moment of emotional death at the hands of male violence before

Lilja's actual death. Towards the end of the film, Lilja knows that her fate is inescapable, but she has been shown to rebel in small acts of defiance, such as cutting her hair off at odd angles and distorting her face with makeup to make herself look less sexually attractive. It is not until she visits a wealthy john in the affluent suburbs of Malmö that she is reduced both physically and emotionally to a mere brutalized body. The john attempts to role-play with Lilja, who is uncooperative:

Lilja: I hate you, you think I'm your prop but I'm not. The john: Be quiet. Do your homework. Lilja: You think you can buy me, but you can't buy my heart and soul. The john: Shut up! Lilja: You think I'm your property.

Though Lilja seems like she is asserting her rebellion here, her words, spoken in Russian, are completely lost on the Swedish-speaking john. In response to what he views as unintelligent babbling, the john sodomizes Lilja. Though many rape scenes have occurred throughout the film at this point, this scene is notably distinct in two important ways.

First, it is the first scene with a john in which Lilja is shown not simply lying inert and corpse-like, but rather she is actively screaming and trying to break free. Second, this is the first rape scene in which the camera does not show Lilja's point of view. All previous scenes have shown Lilja's vantage point, the men grunting into the lens of the camera. In this scene, the camera adopts the vantage point of the john, and we see the back of Lilja's

76 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE head as she struggles. Lilja has become the “prop” she told the john she refused to be.

When her pimp picks her up, he has to carry her like a doll. He dumps her like a dead body on the floor of her apartment, where she lays completely still, crying. Her words of defiance to the wealthy john were the last words she will speak to anyone on Earth. Male violence has overcome her completely at last, and she is merely a brutalized body.

Immediately following Lilja's emotional death is her physical death, which seems only to be a formality. Volodya's angel comes to Lilja with “a christmas present” – the pimp has neglected to lock the apartment door, leaving Lilja the opportunity to escape.

Lilja, who is effectively a dead body at this point, seems uncomprehending, and has to be coaxed out the door by Volodya. The opening scene of the film is the shown again – Lilja erratically running in different directions, knowing she has nowhere to go. At a gas station, she spots a police officer; but instead of asking the officer for help, Lilja begins to run again. No one can help her at this point since she is already far beyond help, a mere shell of the hopeful girl in Eastern Europe. This time, when Lilja is shown coming to the highway overpass bridge, she jumps. Though the scene cuts to Lilja in a hospital gurney being rushed into the emergency room, her vision of ascent into heaven with Volodya confirms that she dies a physical death to mirror her earlier emotional one.

77 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE Drawing conclusions about Lilja 4-ever: a subversive terministic mythology

Lilja 4-ever attempts to cover the gaps in Eastern Europe's worldview caused by increased female labor participation and migration through the myth of sex trafficking.

Acting a as a suture to the disruption of globalization, this myth explains female migration in terms of the terministic screen of rigid gender roles.The myth of sex trafficking essentially serves as a cautionary narrative which shows the dangers for women and society as a whole if female gender roles become dislocated from their naturalized state. The further a women becomes removed from her natural place as a nurturer, the more male aggression she will attract, eventually leading to death. Men, in turn, are not responsible for their own aggression, since it occurs naturally. It is women like Lilja who become taken with the dangerous concept of migration who bring male violence down upon themselves. The natural aggression of males eventually leads to the dehumanization and subsequent death of dislocated women, who are inevitably reduced to brutalized bodies with no hope of escape. This myth serves the ideological purpose of discouraging female migration, since the myth asserts that women who migrate from the home will inevitably follow Lilja's descent towards death. The only reasonable way to avoid this is to remain home.

78 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE CHAPTER VI: WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

An analysis of Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4-ever in the context of IOM's Lilja 4-ever

Campaign reveals that anti-trafficking narratives subversively demarcate the boundaries of female movement from Eastern Europe to the E.U. The rigid gender hierarchy of

Eastern Europe is deeply-reified in terministic screens. Women have a heavily-calcified cultural history of confinement to the home and exclusion from the public sphere.

Globalization and the efflux of women from former-Soviet states causes a disruption to this perceived natural order; since women are leaving their natural place, society breaks down into poverty and the women who leave become vulnerable to male aggression. Sex trafficking is constructed as a myth to make sense of this female movement and to discourage it. It stretches the gender hierarchy of Eastern Europe to cover female migration, serving as a cautionary narrative that explains what happens to divergent women. When women leave their natural roles, they face death by male sexual aggression. This myth attempts to maintain the reified natural order of Eastern Europe by reasserting that the home is the only safe sphere for women.

The myth of sex trafficking reveals much about the persistence of a pervasive gender hierarchy in Eastern European society. When constructed as natural nurturers, women are defined entirely by their roles as mothers. Care of children becomes their primary and singular purpose. This not only confines women to the home, but it excludes them entirely from the public sphere. This exclusion has extremely negative effects on

79 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE the ability of women to earn sustainable income independent of men. Women therefore become dependent on men for a source of income, which maintains not only economic male dominance but social dominance over women as well. The social dominance of men creates an environment where male aggression is accepted as natural. Women who digress from their natural roles are cast as the natural targets of male aggression, since the home is the only safe space for them. The pervasive hierarchy of Eastern Europe explains economically why there is a willingness in Eastern European women to travel abroad for possible employment. Not only are the economies in post-Soviet states notably weak, but the gender hierarchy restricts women from earning money in a legitimate way.

This can also explain why the sex industry in this region has high female participation and male demand. Sex work is one of the only ways in which a woman can earn money without male attachment. In environments where women are placed in positions of vulnerability and low agency, the demand for sex work increases, since women outside of the domestic sphere are seen as objects of male sexual aggression.92 An analysis of Lilja 4-ever offers some insight into the cultural reduction of women in the sex industry to objects upon which male violence is enacted, but another important factor to understanding the historical and socioeconomic landscape of Eastern Europe is the compulsory hyper-masculinity of men. This hegemonic masculinity has been suggested as a contributing factor to the culture of organized crime in the region.93 Organized crime is viewed as the height of hegemonic masculinity, since it incorporates dominance over women and violence as the means to economic gain. The domestic sex industry, as well 92 Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. n. pag. 93 Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. n. pag.

80 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE as the international market for sex trafficking, are both fueled in part by this Eastern

European masculinity. I speak briefly here about hegemonic masculinity as a natural foil for female vulnerability in Lilja 4-ever, but the history and processes of reification behind

Eastern European masculinity would contribute greatly to a more complete understanding of how the region has used suturing myths to maintain gender roles. Furthermore, while globalization is undoubtedly responsible for disrupting the way Eastern European countries perceive themselves and their people, it is by no means the only cultural disruption the region has experienced. A tumultuous landscape of war, economic transition, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has caused cultural upheaval in the past fifty years.94 Exploration into the way Eastern Europe has grappled with these anxieties mythically would benefit a more comprehensive study about how gender roles have evolved over time.

This analysis also raises questions about the subversive motivations of IOM's

Lilja 4-ever Campaign. While IOM claims to have purely educational intent in screening

Lilja 4-ever in Moldova, this analysis reveals that Lilja 4-ever relies upon a myth which demarcates female movement and reduces female agency. Rather than empowering safe female migration, the film asserts that women who leave Eastern Europe to enter the E.U. will only face brutal death abroad. As discussed in the literature review, many forms of anti-trafficking rhetoric rely upon this narrative, discouraging all forms of migration instead of informing women about how to migrate safely. Anti-sex trafficking campaigns would benefit women more if they were to inform their audiences about safe pathways of

94 Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. n. pag.

81 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE migration, rather than asserting that all paths lead to death. This would increase female autonomy of movement and empower them to make choices about their own movement.

Though ideally anti-trafficking rhetoric would shift to increase rather than restrict female autonomy, this analysis reveals that these campaigns have potentially subversive intent. This promotion of a statistically-inaccurate portrait of sex trafficking as a cautionary norm has several alternative ideological purposes besides education. Countries like Moldova in Eastern Europe are facing not only an efflux of women due to lack of female opportunities, but are also trying to mediate their threatened gender order at home.

The country of Moldova has a vested interest in preventing the further loss of their female population. The Lilja 4-ever Campaign discourages women from leaving the country, which could potentially work to stabilize female emigration rates.On the other side of the issue, the European Union is experiencing a dramatic political shift to the right on this issue of open borders. An increasing number of E.U. member countries (including

Norway95) have expressed political and economic interest in overhauling existing open border policies in favor of more internal border security within the E.U. Ideologically, the

E.U. has become increasingly anti-immigration in recent years, resulting in a noted lack of pathways or support for people attempting to enter the E.U. legally for employment purposes. The E.U. officially provided financial sponsorship of IOM's Lilja 4-ever

Campaign. Providing education for at-risk women in Eastern Europe might have been the primary purpose, but the subversive effects of the campaign cannot be ignored. Given the

95 Norway, while not a member of the European Union, is strongly linked to the E.U. economically and politically. They are official members of the Schengen Agreement, which eliminates the need for internal passport control among participating countries.

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E.U.'s interest in closing borders and severing immigration pathways, the Lilja 4-ever

Campaign's myth can be seen as a way to discourage female migration into the E.U. under the guise of providing educational tools to women.

The myth of sex trafficking articulated in Lilja 4-ever also exposes issues with the way sex trafficking and migratory sex work problematically lack distinction in international discourse. Sex trafficking is used as a broad umbrella term for a variety of crimes which involve movement and sex work, but the issue of coercion as the core criminal element of sex trafficking has become secondary to the sex work itself.

Prostitution is viewed as the real crime in many cases of sex trafficking, and VOTs are regularly denied rehabilitation services. Instead, they are more often than not deported for their activities in the sex industry. In Lilja's narrative, it is her participation in the sex industry which leads her to be coerced into sex work in Sweden. Female sex workers are viewed as the ultimate objects of male aggression. The issue of female agency in prostitution becomes irrelevant in discussions of sex trafficking. Self-identified autonomous female sex workers exist in the European sex industry96, but are blatantly ignored in campaigns like IOM's Lilja 4-ever Campaign, which present only images of damaging sex work from desperation or coercion. In 2006, 45% of all sex workers in the

E.U. were migrant sex workers from Eastern Europe, the largest group represented in the

European sex industry.97 Until methods to obtain data on sex workers improve, it is nearly

96 "Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto." ICRSE Resources. International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, n.d. Web. 8 Apr. 2014. In 2005, 120 self-identified autonomous sex workers from 26 countries authored and released The Sex Workers' Manifesto, a declaration of sex worker recommendations and rights to improve legal and cultural attitudes towards sex workers in Europe. 97 Brussa, Licia, comp. Sex Work in Europe: A Mapping of the Prostitution Scene in 25 European Countries. Vol. 1. Amsterdam, Netherlands: TAMPEP International, n.d. European Network for

83 THE DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC BATES COLLEGE impossible to gain a figure on how many women voluntarily participate in prostitution around the globe. Despite this gap in our understanding of sex worker autonomy, it is problematic that discourse claiming to provide education about sex trafficking ignores the existence of voluntary migrant sex workers. Instead, this myth promotes the idea that all women in the sex industry are victims, either of circumstance or of trafficking.

Narratives about sex trafficking need to be refined to represent a more statistically accurate portrayal of women trafficked into sex work. While myth simplifies and sutures, it also ignores complexities vital to a complete understanding of what it attempts to explain. Sex trafficking is not a straightforward issue of a naïve female victim misled by an aggressive male force; it is a multifaceted phenomenon, a variety of crimes involving sex and movement riddled with gray areas and gaps in our understanding. Discourse on sex trafficking should reflect these exigencies and complexities, or in the very least acknowledge them.

HIV/STI Prevention and Health Promotion among Migrant Sex Workers, Dec. 2009. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.

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