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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 builds on policy adoption, by tracing different anti-trafficking institutions created directly or indirectly as a result of that adoption. It analyzes and compares the establishment and development of five different anti-trafficking institutions: national coordinators, working groups, police units, shelters for victims, and victim certification processes. Although many of these institutions were developed as a result of policy adoption, they are not always codified and even some that are established, fail to work effectively and are only hollow Potemkinesque institutions. The chapter demonstrates that once anti-trafficking institutions are entrenched in countries and there are mechanisms to ensure the institutions’ survival, they have the potential to not only oversee implementation but also are effective actors in the policy subsystem working to develop better and more responsive policy in the future. A competent working group composed of civil society and government officials, which meets regularly, is the most effective anti-trafficking institution a country can possess. However, police units were the only institution that was effectively implemented demonstrating the institutional emphasis on criminalization across all three cases.

This chapter discusses how anti-trafficking institutions work together to form anti-trafficking networks illustrating the connections and cooperation among the different institutions. A network analysis is used to examine implementation networks, focusing on how different actors in the human trafficking policy subsystem come together and the ties that bind them. The networks of anti-trafficking institutions in each country reveal a stark divide and disconnect between criminalization aspects of the policy with law enforcement and police and the social aspects with rehabilitation for victims mostly performed by NGOs and women’s advocacy networks. The analysis revealed the Russian network is the smallest and most fragmented but also the densest while the Latvian network is the most cohesive with the largest number of reciprocal ties facilitated by the working group. The network in Ukraine has the highest average of incoming and outgoing connections and the most efficient connection between actors in the network. There was also evidence of interest groups in Ukraine and Russia moving around impediments in the national government by creating their own networks and lobbying specific regional level entities who were more open to cooperation. The results show that the more effective the anti-trafficking institutions are in a country, the more cohesive the anti-trafficking network is at facilitating reciprocal relationships.

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 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 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 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.