Forced Male Maids

New Homeland Security campaign's goal: Stopping slavery

The video displays a beautiful, bare-shouldered adolescent wearing bright red lipstick, perched on a swing in a large birdcage, while a man leers at her from outside.

It might be a scene from a local strip club, except for one poignant difference: The young woman is weeping.

"I didn't leave my country for this," she cries out in Spanish.

The bilingual TV promotional spot, which began airing Monday in South Florida, is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection Division. It is asking Floridians to keep an eye out for a certain class of human beings: slaves.

That includes sex slaves, especially young foreign women forced into prostitution in the U.S., and other people imported from abroad and forced into indentured servitude in underpaid or unpaid labor.

"Some of these activities can be going on right in neighborhoods where people live," said Chuck Prichard, Border Protection's South Florida spokesman. "We're not asking people to play detective, but there are signs that can tip people off to that activity and we are asking people to report in if they suspect people are victims of traffickers."

Florida key battleground

Because of its large market for undocumented workers, Florida is seen as a key battleground in the fight against trafficking and forced labor.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department named six U.S. cities where it will base new Anti-Trafficking Coordination Teams. Miami is one of them.

"Each ACTeam, which is comprised of federal prosecutors and federal agents from the participating federal enforcement agencies, will implement a law enforcement strategic action plan to combat identified human trafficking threats," said a statement released by the Justice Department.

Wifredo Ferrer, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, will head the effort out of Miami.

"Human trafficking is modern-day slavery," he said . "The fight against human trafficking is a top priority for the Department of Justice, and for my office in particular."

Florida is home to hundreds of thousands of undocumented foreign laborers, many of whom work in agriculture, landscaping, hospitality, roofing, construction and other fields. Many were smuggled into the United States. But Prichard says there is a big difference between most of those workers and victims of human trafficking.

DSK the Woman Hater and That Hooker Maid: A Gender Story | fbomb

Unless you’ve taken to your fallout shelter in tepid anticipation of the national default – which has for the moment been averted – you’ve undoubtedly caught wind of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn maid bashing that has shot vitriol all over the court like a Sharapova tennis match.

Beneath the French public’s unsurprising distaste for the impotence of the American justice system (and American noses turned up to sniff the dubious legal proceedings) lies oblique gender commentary.

Let’s recap. During May this year DSK – until recently the managing director of the International Monetary Fund – checked into the swanky Sofitel hotel in New York City. A thirty-two year-old maid – Nafissatou Diallo of Guinea – alleged that she was assaulted upon entering the financial giant’s hotel room in order to perform housekeeping duties. The next day DSK was detained and formally arrested by the NYPD on a hefty assemblage of assault and unlawful imprisonment charges. On May 19th, DSK was indicted before a grand jury and faced up to twenty-five years in prison, trial pending, and placed under house arrest. After the maid blew her credibility to hell by admitting that she had perjured herself before the grand jury, and had discussed the possible benefits of pursuing a case with her boyfriend. DSK resigned from his post at the IMF.

The next hearing is perpetually cycling through the calendar months, though it will likely lead to the dismissal of all charges.

Amid the uncertainty over the legal standing of both parties lies simmering bias: I need only sit at the table with my mother and my sister to listen to 1970s SCUM feminist drivel about DSK being a manipulative Machiavellian-archetype who took advantage of a poor immigrant woman who wouldn’t be able to seek out help. French journalist Jean-François Kahn referred to the incident as un troussage de domestique, or the forced sexual submission of the help. Marine le Pen, the tête of le Front National (think Republican/Tea Party) deemed it a confirmation of DSK’s pathological sex-mania.

DSK is between a rock and a hard place: to be acquitted would make everyone believe that the white-male sodality had turned a blind-eye to his sexual indiscretions, and dismiss it merely as a 21st century iteration of the droit de seigneur. But to convict would be a confirmation of everyone’s darkest assumptions about the abusive sensibilities of monied men.

Vested Interests, Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety

Male femaling, a grounded theory approach to cross-dressing and sex-changing

Convict maids, the forced migration of women to Australia

Juvenile Delinquency, Theory, Practice, and Law

Blending genders, social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing