Search Results

This chapter studies the new laws against prostitution, enacted to enforce Article 23 of the Constitution, which sought to end the trafficking of women. For nationalists and leaders of the Indian women's movement, independence meant the achievement of constitutional and legal equality and the emergence of the republican female citizen as a moral, productive member of society. However, legislators and social workers were confronted by a different conception of freedom when sex workers began to file constitutional challenges to the anti-trafficking laws. They asserted their constitutional right to a trade or a profession and to freedom of movement around the country, and they challenged the procedural irregularities in the new statutes. The chapter then demonstrates that despite the sex workers' minimal success in the courts, this litigation prompted mobilization and associational politics outside the court and brought rights language into the everyday life of the sex trade.

This chapter considers the uses of the anti-trafficking agenda of the authoritarian government of Belarus. It identifies the ways the Belarus government uses anti-trafficking as a basis for other self-sufficient and nationalist agendas, and by making travel abroad by students and young people more difficult. It notes that the trafficking indicators of the State Department ignore other forms of human rights repression or the excesses of policing systems in Belarus. This chapter also emphasizes the relevant theme of the importance of global indicators in authoritarian contexts, an area that also lacks research.

Conversations with NGO activists in this chapter demonstrate how racial dynamics in sex tourism and sex trafficking in Salvador Brazil can assist in defining the harm of gender-based violence and in revealing direct transnational connections to U.S. consumerist desire and antiviolence strategizing. West criticizes the ways in which Christian moral judgments about sinfulness and normative sexual expression calibrate whose gendered bodies among the economically marginal are seen as precious and whose are not, though resistance to Christian sexism is also highlighted in the ideas of one Christian anti-trafficking activist. In sum, the argument stresses that intercultural learning and activist resistance to sexual violence and exploitation necessitate an antiracist understanding of vulnerability as well as holistic engagement of mind, body, and spirit.

Chapter 3 examines the complicated nature of the European legal system in the area of human trafficking and how Council of Europe and European Union legal instruments have resulted in some confusion as to their implementation in the UK. Recognising that the legal provisions affecting the situation of human trafficking in European member states and regions can be a case study in federalism, the chapter looks at the various layers of legal protections and why there can be, at times, failures in the complex systems and processes. It argues that the use of legislation to inform practice guidelines and procedures can lead to unclear processes in practice, especially when concepts of ‘appropriate’ or ‘minimum’ levels of support / intervention are not clearly defined.

Migrant and labour rights activists have appealed to state commitments to fight trafficking as a means of advancing the rights of undocumented migrants. This chapter examines the implications of this move. It traces the development of anti- trafficking policy in the UK, setting it in its international context. It argues that the presentation of the Victim of Trafficking (VoT) as embedded in social relations contrasts with the portrayal of the economic migrant as a self-interested rational actor. The focus on morality places the plight of the victim of trafficking beyond politics. The chapter concentrates on the case of trafficking as ‘modern day slavery’ to examine the implications of the usage of the language of slavery. ‘Trafficking’ is not only increasingly presented as a human rights focussed response to difficulties of enforcement, but has introduced the language of harm prevention into the heart of immigration control.

This chapter examines how sex workers have been affected by China's abolitionist policy, which conflates all sex work with forced prostitution and results in anti-trafficking campaigns that do little to improve the living conditions of the country's migrant women workers. Drawing on more than twenty months of fieldwork between 1999 and 2002 in Dalian involving approximately two hundred bar hostesses in ten karaoke bars, the chapter reveals how Chinese police and other state authorities collude with local officials and brothel managers, forcing sex workers into a state of constant vigilance. It also discusses the factors that facilitated the growth of Dalian's karaoke bar industry and the impact of China's anti-trafficking policy on hostesses working in karaoke bars by depicting them alternately as victims or deviants. Finally, it analyzes the perception of Dalian's sex workers, most of them rural migrants, that hostessing is the best option for social mobility.

This chapter offers a perspective on the panoply of responses to the conditions of human trafficking as a downside of globalization. Globalization is defined in this chapter as a world-historical phenomenon that orders human beings in a differential system of rewards and exclusions—whether they are ready or not. These conditions have created a human rights crisis in Asia—human trafficking, or, the recruitment or transfer, through abduction, fraud, coercion, or violence, of human beings for the purpose of exploitation. Hence, the dominant anti-trafficking regimes offer a powerful and distorting lens through which to see how the world and people's lives are being reshaped by migration.

This book explores three facets of trafficking—global trafficking discourse, anti-traffickers, and the local context of sex commerce—along the Thai–Lao border, with a specific focus on the border towns of Vientiane and Nong Kai. Drawing on fieldwork conducted from August 2005 to October 2006, it considers trafficking itself and the institutions and actors that use this concept in their everyday practice. It also examines the interconnections between mobility and labor practices, on the one hand, and the organizations and actors involved in anti-trafficking, on the other; how recruitment into the sex industry in Laos and Thailand unfolds; how life experience within an oscillatory sex industry along the Thai–Lao border is intertwined with aid programs that combat trafficking; and questions of power and agency that arise from human trafficking. Finally, it analyzes the United Nations protocol on human trafficking used by anti-trafficking programs, with particular emphasis on the contradictions and ambiguities of the protocol's definition of trafficking.

This chapter examines the commonalities that underlie the diversity of the anti-trafficking sector and are expressed through legal binaries and a market metaphor. These common denominators are explained in terms of three concentric circles, consisting of a dyadic power relationship between a victim and a perpetrator at the center, organized crime as the middle circle, and a cross-border marketplace as the outer circle. The chapter first considers imageries that portray the victim as unaware, innocent, and weak, and traffickers as evil, dominant, cunning, and all-knowing. It then discusses claims alluding to the involvement of organized crime in trafficking, as well as the spatial dimension of human trafficking. It also explores the demand side of trafficking and how it relates to assumptions about both vulnerability and profitability.

This chapter examines cross-border oscillations of Lao sex workers and some of their implications for how anti-trafficking programs envisage trafficking and mobility to take place. It begins with an overview of migration patterns between Laos and Thailand and how the anti-trafficking sector has participated in articulating meanings of cross-border migration. It then considers income and price stratification in Laos and in Nong Kai, along with the role of customer frequency in sex workers' migratory trajectories. It also discusses the spatial dimension of trafficking and concludes by analyzing the ways that the imagery of socioeconomic differentiations across the Thai-Lao border has distorted understandings of actual migration practices within the arena of sex commerce.

This chapter provides an overview of the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (UNIAP). In its first phase, UNIAP had implemented several anti-trafficking programs, such as income generation and awareness raising in rural areas of Laos. An important part of the UNIAP strategy in the Mekong region was called Program 1 in its project document: building the knowledge base on trafficking. This chapter first discusses the politics of cross-border migration in Laos and the importance of knowledge production in attempts to secure particular interpretations of anti-trafficking work within the broader field of development. It then considers how human trafficking intersects with development and government practices and goes on to examine the results of two trafficking studies and a report commissioned by UNICEF. It also explains how to distinguish between a trafficker, a trafficked victim, and a “migrant.” Finally, it describes how victim identification is addressed in training programs delivered by aid organizations in Laos and Thailand.

This chapter examines how anti-traffickers in Laos struggle to reconcile the legal–economic metalanguage of trafficking with field realities, and particularly how they tend to drift between different models of knowledge in their everyday anti-trafficking work. Similarly to how anti-traffickers act in bad faith, the way they drift between different idealized models of trafficking requires externalization of complicity in the form of deliberate ignorance in order to sustain anti-trafficking programs. This chapter first considers the variety, inconsistency, and ambiguity that characterize the responses of anti-traffickers to the interviews conducted by the author. It then discusses the insider-outsider dichotomy of how trafficking is imagined to operate, including the role of traffickers, and its ramifications for how anti-trafficking programs now reshape their approaches to combating trafficking. It also explores the direct policy implications of anti-traffickers' vacillation.

This book has shown that anti-traffickers have a tendency to draw attention away from the social world in which they are attempting to intervene, even when it is literally right in front of them. More specifically, it has demonstrated the disconnect between the circulation of forms of knowledge between trafficking discourse, the local context of the Thai–Lao sex industry, and the anti-traffickers. In other words, the metalanguage produced discursively by the anti-trafficking sector differs from the actual unfolding of sex commerce and recruitment on the ground. Whereas trafficking discourse typically insists on a legal-economistic language, attention is perpetually driven away from what is essential for understanding trafficking along the Thai–Lao border—that is, social relationships and the social embeddedness of practice. This concluding chapter discusses some important insights that can be drawn from the book's findings.

This chapter first charts the short history from the early anti-trafficking strategy put in place by the Labour government in 2007 through the changes and reorganisations of the subsequent 10 years, including the launch of the modern slavery strategy in 2015 under then Home Secretary May. While focusing on the impacts felt by workers in the UK, it also takes into account the position adopted by the UK in relation to international frameworks. The second section then focuses on the importance and potential impact of the creation of the most recent governance and enforcement structures — for example, the Director of Labour Market Enforcement and the evolution of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA). As of May 2017, the GLA was rebranded as the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and has new powers to investigate serious exploitation across the whole UK labour market. The third section asks how we can best assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the modern slavery agenda.

This chapter discusses global media outreach against sex trafficking, specifically analyzing anti-trafficking media campaigns that have appeared in a variety of media formats—film documentaries, art exhibits, and campaigns by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—funded by the United Nations and launched in the United States, Britain, and Brazil. The spectacle of enslaved bodies repeated in media accounts more broadly creates national panic over the movement of people across borders. This anxiety generates collective support for an increase in state power and in the state's budget (in militarizing the border, building more prison detention centers, and deporting more immigrants) in order to apprehend and return subjects at the border. By raising fears over women's mobility through images of sexualized violence, the media works in tandem with heightened border surveillance to slow down or halt migration rather than opening up safe avenues for women to find employment.

This chapter focuses on how the women's movements represented prostitutes in their campaign for the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003. The activism over prostitution as a feminist issue captured much of the experiences and complex challenges encountered by these activists. In presenting these issues, the chapter introduces the double narrative of prostitution as a feminist issue: on the one hand, deployment of the victim narrative was successful in advocating laws on behalf of prostitutes; on the other hand, feminists were not keen on encouraging women to wear the badge of “victim” permanently in everyday practice. This chapter focuses largely on the former narrative, taken into context within existing cultural constructions of the feminine that idealized the woman as martyr.

This chapter examines how state and nongovernmental organizations' campaigns in Brazil construct sex tourism as a problem to be eradicated in part by conflating it with trafficking, along with the questions it raises about the possibilities of transnational mobility for socioeconomically disadvantaged Brazilian women. The chapter begins with a historical overview of the concept of trafficking and of global antitrafficking movements as well as the ways in which “trafficking” has been confused and conflated with “sex tourism.” It then considers how trafficking and sex tourism have been constituted as objects of knowledge before discussing the campaign activities of Aprosba and CHAME (Humanitarian Center for the Support of Women). It shows that CHAME's anti-trafficking educational campaign materials constitute an “archive of racialized sexuality” that creates “moral panics” about interracial sex and transnational border crossings that reinforces notions of who is worthy of the privileges of transnational mobility.

The closing section traces Bushnell’s waning years, from the end of World War I to her death in 1946. Even as she sought to continue her purity work, Bushnell considered her efforts to develop a feminist theology her work of greatest significance. Although Bushnell died in obscurity, God’s Word to Women would continue to circulate around the globe in the decades after her death. Conservative Christians, particularly Pentecostals, have found in her writings justification for female preaching and teaching, resources to combat the abuse of women, and inspiration for contemporary anti-trafficking efforts. By providing a theology rooted in a gospel of liberation for women, Bushnell’s work provides an alternative both to secular feminism and to a patriarchal evangelical purity culture. Yet at the same time it demonstrates the challenges Christian feminists face, in America and in the global Church, in constructing a sexual ethic that is both feminist and Christian.

Today’s companies must understand and prevent the myriad problems flowing from labor issues. Increasingly demanding, serious compliance attention and resources are now being focused on the emerging area of human anti-trafficking and forced labor laws and regulations as they relate to business supply chains. These mandates include the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, the Executive Order on Strengthening Protections Against Trafficking in Persons in Federal Contracts, and the UK Modern Slavery Act of 2015. By enlisting or conscripting companies into the fight against human trafficking, child labor, and other “forced” or “coerced” labor practices, these laws introduce a wholly new compliance reality requiring accountability and supply chain compliance.