MacKinnon lecture fills IPJ Theatre to capacity

A highly anticipated lecture regarding sex trafficking, prostitution and sexual inequality drew crowds that filled the Joan B. Kroc Theatre as well as an overflow room. Author, legal practitioner and international icon Catherine MacKinnon opened her speech by proposing that “the main idea is that sexual abuse is gender based and it happens in a social context for social reasons.”
She elaborated in her Feb. 16 lecture that gender constructions in various third world countries metaphorically paint a target on men and women that says, “You can do this to me and I can do this to them.” She has traveled the world for 35 years trying to decipher sex crimes “under a banner of culture.”
In Japan, she dropped two yen into a magazine dispenser and received child pornography. In France, she asked a French man to define rape. He replied, “you don’t understand, women here like it.”
In India, she observed prostitution as part of a caste system, meaning that children are born into it. She said she met a 13-year-old Indian girl who became a prostitute at the age of 10 to support her family of five. The girl told MacKinnon that her father was her boss.
Indian prostitutes typically service 20-30 men daily on average, which exponentially adds up to roughly 8,000 men per year. “It’s all under a banner of culture,” MacKinnon said.
The activist’s extensive travels across the world have revealed the harsh reality of prostitution and she has done her part to help. In Sweden, she created the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance, which dropped the rape rate in that country by 80 percent the year it was instated. Her legal practices and written literature have spread awareness and helped to create concrete legal support to deteriorate the social issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution.
“There is a structure of inequality in society and it’s gender based. There is equality in form but not in context and substance. Equality is defined to not mean equality for all,” MacKinnon said.
The speaker stressed that victims need to be decriminalized. “Imagine that you are guilty of the crime you are being forced to do,” she said. According to MacKinnon, authorities need to “go after the pimps, traffickers and Johns. Buyers do not pay for what they are taking away from these women.”
She shared that women undergoing prostitution and trafficking suffer from extreme posttraumatic stress, which is equivalent to the PTSD experienced by men in combat.
The event was sponsored by USD’s Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. MacKinnon graduated from Yale University with a law degree and has written several books including, “Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws,” and “Are Women Human?”
Recognized internationally for her role in creating ordinances that classify pornography as a violation of civil rights, she has represented female victims of sexual genocide in court. MacKinnon’s case in 2000 of Kadic vs. Karadzic was accredited for gaining recognition of rape as an act of genocide. Since then, she has represented Bosnian survivors of sexual genocide and won an astronomical damage award of $745 million.
She currently works with Equality Now, international NGO promoting sex equality worldwide, and is the special gender advisor to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.