Trafficking Hadassah

Collective Trauma, Cultural Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and in the African Diaspora

Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000530032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The representation of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther has parallels with the cultural memories, histories, and materialized pain of African(a) girls and women across time and space, from the Persian Empire, to subsequent slave trade routes and beyond.

Trafficking Hadassah illuminates that Africana female bodies have been and continue to be colonized and sexualized, exploited for profit and pleasure, causing adverse physical, mental, sexual, socio-cultural, and spiritual consequences for the girls and women concerned. It focuses on sexual trafficking both in the biblical book of Esther and during the transatlantic slave trade to demonstrate how gender and racism intersect with other forms of oppression, including legal oppression, which results in the sexual trafficking of African(a) females. It examines both the conditions and mechanisms by which the trafficking of the virgin girls (who are collectively identified) are legitimated and normalized in the book of Esther, alongside contemporary histories of Africana females. This important book examines ideologies and stereotypes that are used to justify the abuse in both contexts, challenges the complicity of biblical readers and interpreters in violence against girls and women, and illustrates how attention to the nameless, faceless African girls in the text is impacted by the #MeToo and #SayHerName social movements.

This book will be of particular interest to those studying the Bible, religion, gender, theology, and sex trafficking. It is also an important book for those in the related fields of Africana Studies, Trauma Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Diaspora Studies, Critical Race Studies, as well as to the general reader.

An Introduction to reading Esther 1–2 as a Story of Sexual Trafficking

DOI: 10.4324/9781003168911-1

This book focuses on sexual trafficking both in the biblical book of Esther and during the transatlantic slave trade. Methodologically, I employ Africana biblical criticism as the means to place the particularities of Africana¹ life, history, and culture at the center of the interpretative process. I investigate and describe sexual trafficking in both literary and cultural/historical contexts to illustrate that sexual trafficking is a collective, communal issue that disproportionately impacts minority and minoritized groups. Further, my project demonstrates how gender and racism intersect with other forms of oppression, including legal oppression, which results in the sexual trafficking of minoritized groups. I argue that sexual trafficking constitutes cultural trauma that marks the identity and memories not only of individuals but also of collectives in often damaging and irrevocable ways. Thus, this project elucidates the relationship between collective trauma, identity, and memory.² Drawing on the theories of intersectionality, collective memory, collective trauma, and horror, my reading of Esther contributes to and expands the #SayHerName movement, calling attention to global instances of violent abuse against Africana females. I focus on Esther because the book’s location in the Persian empire is characterized by socio-cultural practices and ideologies that normalize and minimize the sexual trafficking and abuse of countless individuals in the story world. The story specifically refers to the geographical locale of Ethiopia, signifying that African girls are among those trafficked to the king’s palace. I give careful attention to ideologies and stereotypes used to justify such abuse, the conditions and mechanisms by which the virgin girls in the story are trafficked, and the traumatic impacts of sexual trafficking on individual and group identities.

Moreover, this book offers a dialogical reading of the book of Esther with histories of Africana females of the transatlantic slave trade. As such, it discusses the cultural trauma of sex trafficking among African(a) girls and women across contexts (ancient-biblical and contemporary) – including examination of the US slave trade and its reverberations right up to the twenty-first century. As a dialogical cultural study, this project contributes to and expands Esther studies by shedding light on the ancient community’s struggle to deal with sexual violence and exploitation. At the same time, it sensitizes contemporary audiences to the wider social and global problem of sexual trafficking. My intersectional analysis offers a new direction in Esther discourse, revealing the systematic establishment and mechanisms of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther, including identification of the parties involved. Further, it illumines the complexity, fluidity, and diversity of diasporic identity marked by contestation and negotiation in colonial contexts. The two aims of this book are: first, to challenge the complicity of biblical readers and interpreters in violence against girls and women; and second, to illustrate how attention to the nameless, faceless African girls in the text is impacted by social movements such as #MeToo and #SayHerName.

I structure the book as follows: In this Introduction, I will define sexual trafficking and discuss the scope and range of this global phenomenon. I also outline the theoretical and methodological approaches that frame my dialogical cultural study. In Chapter 1, I then apply these definitions of sexual trafficking to the first two chapters of the book of Esther and engage with sexual trafficking discourse to make visible the manifestation and mechanisms of sexual trafficking in the narrative. To summarize, the two opening chapters of the book of Esther detail gender-based violence (GBV), sexual exploitation, and horror. I draw particularly on the second chapter of Esther, where the king’s imperial court – in consultation with the royal servants – conceptualizes and implements the following policy:

Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king. And let the king appoint commissioners in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in the citadel of Susa under custody of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who is in charge of the women; let their cosmetic treatments be given them. And let the girl who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti.

(Esther 2:2b-4a NRSV)

As explained in Chapter 1, sexual exploitation commences in Esther 1 with Vashti and intensifies in Chapter 2 when virgin girls are captured and transported for this purpose across national geographical boundaries to the king’s palace in Susa. After displacement from their homes and provinces, the virgin girls are shuffled from one harem, to the king’s bedroom, to another harem, as their bodies become object/abject for the king’s sexual pleasure. The king and his officials, who represent Persian colonial powers, orchestrate and implement a sexual trafficking system, whereby virgin girls are brought from all over Ahasuerus’s empire for his sexual consumption and gratification. Sexual trafficking is therefore embedded within the narrative, and the movement of sexually trafficked girls includes, notably, racialized, minoritized bodies.

Chapter 2 delineates instances of sexual trafficking during the transatlantic slave trade and centers these as a site of collective memory for Africana girls and women. Both Jewish and African diasporic identities emerge in contexts marked by colonialism, capture, sexual exploitation, displacement, genocide, ethnic suppression, and the need for cultural persistence in such horrific and hostile environments. My investigation assesses the conditions and processes by which female collectives are trafficked in the contemporary context and, the traumatic impact of trafficking on collective identity and memory. In addition, I discuss the centrality of movement and boundaries in sex-trafficking enterprises.

Chapter 3 analyzes stereotypes and socio-cultural attitudes regarding Africana female sexuality. Attention is given to euphemisms and cover-ups in the sacred text, and to attitudes and practices in contemporary contexts that further contribute to and exacerbate sexualized violence and rape culture. In addition, because Esther 1–2 describes gendered violence, horrific exploitation, and there is other widespread gruesome violence throughout the book, I suggest the book of Esther should be considered as belonging to the genre of biblical horror. I elucidate how the application of the humor/comedy genre can instead direct readers away from those elements of the text, such as sex trafficking, that are too often ignored in traditional Esther discourse. In doing so, readers/interpreters continue, if inadvertently, to cover up or mask the sexualized abuse and ignore or fail to critique rape cultures. Other iterations of horror, beyond the traumatic sexual encounter, include additional physical, psychological, biological, and spiritual impacts on both individuals and collectives, as well as challenges to researching sexual trafficking.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main arguments put forth in the book and outlines the implications of my hermeneutical orientation, both for biblical studies and the #SayHerName movement. My intersectional polyvocal framework opens up the text in different and meaningful ways that enable readers and interpreters to acknowledge and address social and cultural complexities that arise from living in societies marked by kyriarchy, colonialism, and patriarchy. Specifically, my interpretation allows readers and interpreters to recognize various types of systematic and structural violence perpetrated against African(a) females and geographical locales in ancient and contemporary contexts, to critique these intersecting forms of violence, and to consider the role that sacred stories play in creating and maintaining hierarchies of power, alongside their impact on the psyches and identities of readers.

Sex(ual) trafficking defined

Sexual trafficking is a multifaceted, complex phenomenon that is growing in scope and magnitude and presents a threat to already vulnerable and marginalized persons globally. Specifically, the trafficking of women and children has become an urgent concern for nations around the world. Sexual trafficking is one of many forms of human trafficking and, economically speaking, one of the most profitable. Recognized as an organized crime, sexual trafficking is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbor, or receipt of people, by coercive or abusive means for the purpose of sexual exploitation” (US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report). It takes the forms of forced sexual slavery and sex work, forced marriage and child marriage, child prostitution, and/or forced pornography, including of children (Davis and Snyman 2005). Sexual trafficking is associated with and recognized as a form of GBV. GBV includes physical, sexual, and psychological violence inflicted upon individuals or collectives on account of gendered norms and unequal power distributions (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees).

Three elements of trafficking

There are three elements of trafficking: the process, the means, and the goal. The process involves recruitment, transportation, harboring, transferring, and/or receiving. The means are through threat, force, fraud, coercion, abduction, deceit, or deception. The goal is sexual exploitation, prostitution, pornography, slavery, forced labor, debt bondage, and/or involuntary servitude: all physically embodied outcomes. Economic mobility is also a goal of human and sexual trafficking. According to the US Department of State, only one element must be present in order to constitute trafficking (“Human Trafficking Defined,” US Department of State Diplomacy in Action). If the goal is sexual violence or exploitation in any form, sexual trafficking is at issue. Consent, or the lack thereof, is not sufficient for identifying victims of sexual trafficking, because consent, as mentioned, is often obscured by other situations of vulnerability, including but not limited to gender discrimination, oppression and violence, forced displacement, poverty, war, and lack of options and opportunities.

Parties involved in sexual trafficking

Sex trafficking typically involves four key parties: the perpetrator, the vendor, the facilitator, and the victim. The perpetrator sexually exploits the victim. The vendor extends the services and capital, making sexual trafficking possible. The facilitator expedites the victimization process. Finally, the victim is the one who is sexually exploited (Beyer 2001: 308). These elements and parties involved bringing focus to my investigation of the virgin girls in the narrative world of Esther and of Africana girls and women during the transatlantic slave trade, firmly identifying both as victims of sex trafficking. Furthermore, the interconnections between the two disparate examples show that sexual trafficking is a fixture of empire building and an urgent category of study (among other forms of extraction and abuse) in postcolonial and empire studies.

Sexual trafficking is a geopolitical issue but one that lacks a comprehensive framework for understanding and evaluating the structural and cultural factors that create and support its manifestations. Operated as an underground enterprise, sexual trafficking thrives on silence, invisibility, and the heightened vulnerability of victims. Reporting is further complicated by the dynamic and unpredictable nature of global events and by a lack in uniformity of reporting structures. The International Labor Organization reports that in 2016, at any given time, 40.3 million people were in modern slavery and that one in four victims of modern slavery were children. Moreover, women and girls are excessively affected by forced labor accounting for 99% of victims in the commercial sex industry and 58% in other sectors (Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage Report). According to the Polaris Project which focuses on the US context, reports of trafficking increase yearly but trafficking remains underreported. This also reflects global trends.

Although unable to provide a full picture of the scope of trafficking, the Polaris Project notes that the majority of persons who are trafficked are from vulnerable populations such as oppressed or marginal groups, the poor, and undocumented migrants, groups that are often disproportionately represented by minority and minoritized people of color. Their 2016 statistics report reveals that, of the 7,572 cases reported to their trafficking hotline, 77% were sexual trafficking or sex and labor-related trafficking cases. Of the 8,542 survivors, 7,128 were female. Of the 3,116 survivors that reported their race/ethnicity, 2447 were Latino/a, Asian, African, African-American, Black, and multi-ethnic/multi-racial (2016 US National Human Trafficking Hotline Statistics, Polaris). Even with tremendous underreporting, this gives us a small snippet of the scope and scale of global sexual trafficking and its impact on minoritized children and women. Similarly, and more recently, the US Department of State released a 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report that is based on information gathered from 148 countries. This report reflects the trends of the Polaris Project report: that the most common form of global human trafficking is sexual trafficking (77% among women; 72% among girls) and victims predominantly girls and women (roughly 70% of all victims) (Trafficking in Persons Report 20th Edition, US Department of State, January 2021).

The United Nations Convention on Transnational Crime Article 3a further delineates that human trafficking is:

The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud or 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 … for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at minimum, the exploitation of prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

(UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto, italics added)

There are many issues with the concept and role of consent in definitions of sexual trafficking, including with determining if and when someone, especially a child, can grant consent. Other challenges posed are that consent is often dubious, because it is obtained through improper, coercive, or deceitful means, or because consent at any one stage does not provide consent for all stages of the process of trafficking. In some situations, girls and women consent because they believe they have no other or no better options (“The Issue of Consent” Toolkit to Combat Trafficking). These challenges highlight the ambiguity in notions of consent and the complex and problematic nature of sex trafficking. British lawyer Helena Kennedy adds that consent within legal frameworks is based on a sliding scale proportionate to gender, ethnicity, race, class, and economic worth (Kennedy 2005). Additionally, stereotyping and vilification of minority ethnic girls and women often undermine both their credibility and their consent.

Social conflict, displacement, little if any legal ramification for sexual exploitation, globalization, forced and non-forced migration, domestication,³ patriarchal culture, and racist stereotypes all exacerbate the problem of sexual trafficking and increase victims’ vulnerability. Although current understandings and manifestations of globalization are not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• An Introduction to reading Esther 1–2 as a Story of Sexual Trafficking
• 1 “One Night with the King”: sexual trafficking in the book of Esther
• 2 Sexual trafficking during the Maafa: a site of collective memory for Africana girls and women
• 3 Stereotypes and social and cultural attitudes regarding the Africana female collective and how these attitudes contribute to sexual violence
• 4 “For Such a Time as This?”: conclusions and Implications of Intersectional Polyvocal Africana Biblical Interpretation
• Index