Anti-Trafficking Review
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Reflections from the Field: Disparate responses to labour exploitation in post-Katrina Louisiana
Get PDFHurricane Katrina was a devastating natural disaster that changed the landscape of the United States’ Gulf Coast. This was followed by a human-made disaster of failed policies, poor governmental oversight, and rampant labour abuse. This article compares how the anti-trafficking and labour rights movements responded to the widespread labour abuse following Katrina. It examines how the worker rights movement responded to systemic issues impacting labourers, and explores the anti-trafficking movement’s criminal justice response to severe forms of exploitation. It shows how the anti-trafficking movement failed to adequately address severe forms of labour abuse, as opposed to the more successful organising efforts of the worker rights movement. The article concludes by considering how the two movements may respond to conditions of labour exploitation emerging as a result of a new disaster impacting workers in Louisiana: the COVID-19 pandemic
Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves? Listening to migrant domestic workers’ everyday temporalities
Get PDFThis essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human trafficking and labour abuse. Simultaneously victimising and venerating workers, I argue that both terms spectacularise experiences of migrant domestic work, untethering it from lived, material conditions. In so doing, the everyday nature of exploitation and abuse encountered by many migrant domestic workers is obscured, as well as the everyday expertise that enables them to evade, de-escalate, and survive it. Through making collaborative soundwalks with migrant domestic workers—a creative form similar to site-specific audio guides—my research identifies ways in which performance methodologies can be attentive to the specific temporalities of their lived experiences and to their decisions about self-representation
The Struggle of Waste Pickers in Colombia: From being considered trash, to being recognised as workers
Get PDFOrganised waste pickers in Colombia are formally recognised as subjects of special protection and as providers of the public service of recycling. As a consequence, they now receive remuneration for their work, but this was not always the case. This article highlights the strategies waste pickers used to successfully demand their rights while exploring the tensions and contradictions surrounding the formalisation of waste pickers as public service providers of recycling. These include a lack of sufficient guarantees from the government, attempts by private companies to appropriate waste pickers’ benefits, and a lack of respect by both the state and private businesses for the recognition of their rights in law. It concludes that there is an inherent tension between the main objectives of the waste pickers—to improve their working conditions and overcome poverty and vulnerability—and that of the state, which promotes free market competition in the provision of public services
‘Ways of Seeing’—Policy paradigms and unfree labour in India
Get PDFThis article traces the trajectory of different initiatives to address unfree labour and their impact on workers’ capacity to aspire to and exercise their rights in India. We attempt to understand the dimensions and effects of different ‘ways of seeing’ precarity and exploitation within the larger context of economic policies, social structures such as caste-based discrimination, gender-based violence, and state indifference. In a caste and gender-unequal society such as India, with deep regional disparities, we examine how different lenses have impacted on development-led historical processes of informalisation and flexibilisation of work. We do this by contrasting two different ‘models’ in the country, one in the north in a rural setting and the other in the west in an urban context. Context is important, but the organisations and activists involved in our two case studies saw their role and that of workers differently, operating according to distinct goals and working practices. Our research demonstrates that ‘ways of seeing’ matter, as they lead to disparate results in terms of workers’ capacity to mobilise and claim their rights
Letting Go of the Dream of Traffickers behind Bars: We can do better for exploited workers
Get PDFResponse to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.
Strategic Redirection through Litigation: Forgoing the anti-trafficking framework to address labour abuses experienced by migrant sex workers
Get PDFResponse to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.
Freeing the Modern Slaves, One Click at a Time: Theorising human trafficking, modern slavery, and technology
Get PDFThis paper analyses relations between human trafficking, modern slavery, and information communication technology. It looks at the history of the technology-trafficking nexus and flags some key advances in the counter-trafficking discourse in the last two decades. It provides an overview of how technology has been framed as both a part of the problem and part of the solution in the trafficking/slavery context and emphasises the impact of such developments on a range of actors, in particular, potential victims, NGOs, and the nation state. We suggest that the technology-slavery/trafficking connections, while often elusive, act as potent narrative and policy setters that can advance existing challenges and create new points of tension in the counter-trafficking context. We critically analyse these points of tension and destabilise some of their underpinning assumptions. In the conclusion, we highlight the need for rigorous empirical evidence, arguing that a more robust scholarly engagement with the role of technology in enabling and disrupting exploitation is essential. We also point to the importance of ensuring that technology is not a distraction from addressing the root causes of exploitation and abuse
Witnessing in a Time of Homeland Futurities
Get PDFCurrent US rhetorical strategies of imagining a future of the homeland have led to the creation and utilisation of new technologies to contain and manage the border. These responses to the US border and immigration impact anti-trafficking efforts, sustaining a ‘homeland futurity’. Homeland futurity draws on and extends discourses of emergency that solidify borders as dangerous and risky. This article traces how homeland futurities emerged in US anti-trafficking efforts. Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with service providers and survivors of violence in San Francisco, the article demonstrates how migrant labourers are impacted by a discourse of threat and containment of the border. However, migrant labourers and their allies are innovating to secure a life that mitigates risk through migrant labourers’ use of technology. This article illustrates through the example of Contratados.org how technology may facilitate opportunities of future visioning by migrant labourers beyond a homeland futurity, to enact practices that bring to the centre migrants and their experiences through social networking and information sharing on job prospects
Editorial: Gains and Challenges in the Global Movement for Sex Workers’ Rights
Get PDFOver the past two decades, there has been a growing body of excellent academic and community-based literature on sex workers’ lives, work, and organising efforts, and on the harmful effects of anti-trafficking discourses, laws, and policies on diverse sex worker communities. Importantly, a significant portion of this work has been produced by sex workers and sex worker organisations.[1] When we decided to devote this Special Issue of Anti-Trafficking Review to the theme of sex work, we acknowledged this reality. However, we also thought that, given that the discourses, laws, and policies that directly impact sex workers globally are continually changing, the production of new evidence-based research and critical perspectives is constantly needed
The ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy’: A sex worker rights and anti-trafficking initiative
Get PDFThis article presents a case study of how sex worker and anti-trafficking organisations and activists in San Francisco, California, worked together to develop and pass the ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy’. This policy, as enacted by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department, creates a legal environment where people can come forward and report to law enforcement when they are a victim of or witness to an array of violent crimes while engaged in sex work, and not be arrested or prosecuted for their involvement in that criminalised behaviour or for any misdemeanour drug offences. The article details how the groups came together and the challenges they faced while developing the policy. The work was fuelled by the recognition that no one wants people in the sex industry to experience violence. That is true whether selling sex is their choice, influenced by their life circumstances, or something they are being forced or coerced to do. The Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy is a unique example of the way in which sex workers, people who have experienced trafficking, service providers, activists, women’s rights policymakers, the police department, and the District Attorney’s office came together around a common goal