With all the legitimately horrifying human trafficking occurring in the world, you'd think the U.S. State Department office dedicated to the subject would have better things to do than issue directives about politically correct language. Then again, I'm never surprised to hear how federal agencies under the Bush administration choose to interpret their jobs. So I was less than shocked to read that last month, the State Department office for combating human trafficking sent a directive to U.S. agencies and several foreign governments explicitly instructing them avoid using the terms "sex worker" and "child sex worker." What are the State Department's preferred terms? According to John Miller, the office's (now retired) director, "women used in prostitution" and "sexually exploited children" will do just fine, since by Miller's reckoning, those terms are "neither pejorative nor pretend that violence to women and children is ‘work.'"

All right. First of all, Miller's rationale might make sense if sex work wasn't, in fact, work. But, for a lot of women, it is, thanks to some worldwide economic realities that the Bush administration would rather ignore. Check out some of the articles from "Sex Work and Money," the most recent issue of the fantastic annual journal Research for Sex Work, to get a better sense of how and why women decide to sell sex.

Second, I can stomach the pairing of "women and children" when it refers to civilian casualties in wars fought primarily by men, but when it comes to sex work, I just have to draw the line, even if the State Department prefers to pretend that the line simply doesn't exist. Sorry, but women are not children. A 9-year-old girl trafficked into prostitution isn't the same as a 40-year-old women making a tough but realistic financial decision when she has few economic options at her disposal and a family to support. Of all the agencies in the world, I would hope that the State Department Office for Combating Human Trafficking would be aware of the distinction between trafficked and non-trafficked persons. But that office – and the entire Administration, for that matter – often seems more interested in conflating sex work and human trafficking than combating the latter. This trend also extends to a number of right-wing organizations focused on the subject, as Ian pointed out last year on this site.

Third, Miller's suggested terms may not be the most pejorative ones on the market, but who wants to be referred to as a "woman used in prostitution"? "Sex worker" is a term that sex workers often use for themselves, whether they are conducting research or advocating for their own rights. And as much as the U.S. State Department would love to write off organized, empowered sex workers as suffering from some sort of elaborate sexual-capitalist false consciousness, they're making a huge mistake, as these women are often in the best position to finger the same traffickers and enslavers that the State Department is allegedly attempting to combat. You don't have to be a champion of sex work to recognize that sex workers are among our best partners in fighting sexual exploitation. But you do have to be in favor of trading in simplistic victimizations for complex realities.