photo © Nicole Chan
“Women have always saved the world by fighting against evil, and by saving families and communities. If we didn’t, the world would have become extinct a long, long time ago.”
—TAINA BIEN-AIMÉ, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
Her grandmother was a suffragist. Her mother was a rebel. And Taina grew up thinking women ran the world. “My world, anyway,” she told me.
I first met Taina two years before our July 2019 interview when she was being honored for her commitment to end sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls through her organization, The Coalition Against Trafficking of Women.
What led her to this role was in some ways unique, yet in other ways not at all. From the beginning, it seemed, Taina was inspired by women inside her home as well as out. She described her childhood as a typical “daughter of immigrants’ upbringing,” since her mother emigrated from Haiti to the US at the age of eighteen. “My education about women came from the kitchen table,” Taina recalled, “where men never entered, and where women who were strong family matriarchs, as well as those who were battered, cooked together, talked together, and came together.” It was there that her mother often spoke about the importance of education for girls, and never to count on a man.
“One day, when I was in my teens, she gave me the first copy of Ms. magazine, and said, ‘Pay attention to that white lady with the big glasses,’ referring to Gloria Steinem.” Yet, Ms. wasn’t the only publication that influenced her early in life. “I read Our Bodies, Ourselves in one day, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex changed my life,” she added. “It gave me the tools to understand the depth of women’s inequality for the very first time.”
We met up over coffee at a local New York City Upper West Side boutique hotel lobby, a place I like to call my “better office” due to its warm and inviting environment: wide-armed Victorian chairs, plush velvet couches basking in earth tone colors, and dimmed soft lighting, making my interviewees feel at ease. I’d found over many conversations with all kinds of women that this place encouraged engagement; here, consciousness could be unleashed.
Taina arrived dressed in all white, sporting a white summer dress with matching white leather loafers. She exudes a Kamala Harris look to me, seamlessly blending calm with assurance, her bright smile never wavering.
It was just one day after she’d appeared as a guest on two political talk shows, Democracy Now and The Brian Lehrer Report, to discuss the latest news revelations about sex trafficking crimes that were reaching the highest levels in the US government. Alexander Acosta, the Trump Administration’s newest Labor Secretary, had just cut the international sex trafficking budget, while Jeffrey Epstein, a registered sex offender, financier, and long-time friend of Donald Trump, had been arrested one week earlier on charges of sex trafficking of a minor and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking. Acosta had also just been exposed for arranging a plea deal in 2008 that kept Epstein, a convicted sex offender, out of prison. “This demonstrates the total failure of our country to protect women,” Taina said.
It’s failures like these that first inspired Taina to devote her life’s work to helping women live in safety. “There was no other way for me to be but a warrior for women’s lives,” Taina reflected. Coming of age during the women’s movement in the 1970s, when she was just in her early teens, she realized there was a whole world out there where women were subservient to their husbands. “But unlike my mother, who told me, ‘If a man ever raises his hand at you, you better grab a frying pan and hit him on the head with it,’ I chose a more socially acceptable way to protect women’s rights, through peaceful activism and advocacy.” She chuckled reflecting on her mother’s unabashed candor, and then added, “I have always believed, in my heart of hearts, that even outside the kitchen, women are the most powerful beings on the planet, but how to get them to become the most powerful people in real life has always been the challenge.”
Moving to Geneva, Switzerland, at age ten, she spent her next fourteen years being educated there. When she returned to New York City to work for an international organization, and as she was planning to apply to a PhD program in comparative literature, the dean recommended she go to law school. “Law school taught me that all institutions are created by men, and that in order to make systemic change, these structures need to change, which is what a lawyer can help do,” she said. Seeing herself as one cog in the wheels of the social justice and human rights movements, she recounted, “Just as my foremothers worked hard but didn’t live long enough to see the fruits of their struggles, knowing that their daughters and granddaughters would eventually benefit was enough for them, and it will be enough for me.”
The timing of our interview was particularly fitting since it took place just two months after Taina penned an article for Women’s eNews entitled, “Handmaids and Jezebels: New York Must Not Legalize Harm,” reflecting her position on two crucial bills that would significantly impact women’s rights. These bills, which Taina viewed as “defining women as vessels for economic profit,” further concerned her since one of the bills was meant to legalize commercial reproductive surrogacy, thereby allowing anyone to rent women’s wombs. The other would fully decriminalize the sex trade, including pimping, brothel owning, and sex buying. “These elected officials, under the guise of progressive politics, are saluting an acutely regressive status of women, jeopardizing their rights to health, safety, and bodily integrity, while also hindering any collective efforts to reach equality,” she wrote in her commentary.
Yet, Taina is quick to assert that although The Coalition Against Trafficking of Women’s work is primarily dedicated to the elimination of the sex trade, it would be dangerous for her, or any women’s rights activists, to only work on one single issue. “Too often, we work in silos in the women’s movement, because the amount of work to be done is so overwhelming,” she cautioned. “But we can’t slice up women’s rights. We can’t say that a woman has a right to vote but she cannot drive. We can’t say that she has a right to bodily integrity but we’re not going to address sexual exploitation in that same discussion.” In fact, the entire question about what it means to be born female, and how governments and cultures generally view women as full human beings, forms the essence of her work. “Right now, we have a corporate culture where women are commodities. Underneath the beautiful package, which we are admired for, lies our dehumanization. The women’s movement needs to remember that our rights are inalienable, universal, and indivisible.”
For women of color, this is especially true. Drawing on the work of Toni Morrison, Taina reflected on the recently released documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Paying tribute to Morrison’s lifelong work, the film unearths the history of black slavery, and black female slaves specifically. “The history of slavery has always been very male-centered,” Taina contends. “Black women appear only as caricature. Her humanity and her suffering are never touched upon.” Taina added, “What Ms. Morrison has gifted us is that the story of slavery is the story of black women.” Similarly, Taina believes the unspoken stories by victims of sex trafficking need to be told to future generations, to prevent these victims, and their stories, from being lost forever. “We will never know the enormous contributions that could have been made had these women not been enslaved, battered, and murdered, because we don’t even know the total number of women who have fallen victim to violence.”
And even when stories are told, they can often be misrepresented. Case in point: Rosa Parks. “People think that Rosa Parks was just a tired, middle-aged woman, but she had decades of civil rights activism in her history,” Taina pointed out. “Also, did you know that there is a picture of the seminal leaders from the civil rights movement in the White House—but only men are in it. If the photographer had only moved his camera a little to the left, it would have also included Dr. Dorothy Height, revered as the godmother of the civil rights movement. But her presence is lost in that photo.”
What’s not lost on Taina, however, is her hope for what she sees as a “rising generation.” “I see young women in their twenties who already know that the essence of patriarchy is really about the control of women’s reproductive systems.” So what does a world of equality really look like for Taina? “Well, it’s not about just focusing on the way women look, or the type of jobs we do.” She specifically refers to Chairman Mao of China, who once commanded that women and men wear the same outfits, and work in the same trades. “Yet women were still raped and relegated to the most menial jobs.”
In order to change this unyielding pattern of patriarchy that limits, and even eliminates, women’s contributions to the world, she believes that “we need to work from the bottom up, and work on the ground with communities.” Taina now sits forward in her chair, her eyes appearing more intent. “But we also need to partner with governments so that they change the laws to protect women’s rights. This would be so easy for legislators to do, and then we could all just go home,” she laments. Unfortunately, however, she believes that the issue of gender equality is not about resources, but about mentality. “Why are women so threatening to men?” she asks rhetorically.
And that’s one critical reason she believes it’s increasingly important to start having conversations with men, and with the men’s groups that are working to end men’s violence against women. In fact, Taina believes this is key to overturning the toxic way women are viewed in society. “They can say things that women can never say, like how they were raised to dominate women.”
While Taina takes some comfort in the fact that women have come a long way, from achieving suffrage, to earning higher levels of education, to determining how many children they have, “This progress is very fragile,” she cautioned. “We are always just one election away, or just one war away from women again becoming fodder for annihilation.” She points to Iraq, Nigeria, the Congo, and even America today as examples. “If a woman has a miscarriage in some states now, she can actually go to prison,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
Still, it’s the next generation she believes in, and rests her hopes on, for the ultimate achievement of gender equality. Believing that a fourth feminist wave is “being formed right now,” she closed our interview by reaffirming this point: “The resistance is fierce, but we are continually inching toward success. We have to have faith in that.”
And as for Taina’s contribution to this cause, she reasserted that she is “doing the best that I can during my time on this earth.” For her, and for the rest of us, that is all any of us can ever offer, or hope for.