Anti-Trafficking Review
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Resisting the Carceral: The need to align anti-trafficking efforts with movements for criminal justice reform
Get PDFResponse to ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Prosecuting trafficking deflects attention from much more important responses and is anyway a waste of time and money
Neoliberal Sexual Humanitarianism and Story-Telling: The case of Somaly Mam
Get PDFStories of trafficking into the sex industry in Cambodia are a popular feature in local and international media, academic and development literature, policy and humanitarian debates, social and political discourse, and NGO interventions. These stories are powerful for their ability to evoke deep emotions and outrage from their intended audiences. However, they are equally powerful for the ways in which they can cause harm—namely to already marginalised populations of migrants and people involved in the sex trade either by choice, circumstance or coercion. One of the most contentious contemporary trafficking stories is that of the controversial case of Somaly Mam—the self-declared ‘sex slave’ turned ‘modern-day hero’. This paper outlines Mam’s prolific trajectory of self-representation according to the tropes of sexual humanitarianism and argues that these narratives helped to set in motion one of the most lucrative, and in many ways, most exploitative and problematic anti-trafficking endeavours in Cambodia, to date. The paper concludes with offering suggestions for how the anti-trafficking industry might better address real cases of trafficking and exploitation by focusing on structural violence and systemic injustice rather than on sensationalised humanitarian rhetoric, which can perpetuate harms
Villains and Victims, but No Workers: Why a prosecution-focussed approach to human trafficking fails trafficked persons
Get PDFResponse to ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Prosecuting trafficking deflects attention from much more important responses and is anyway a waste of time and money
Rebooting Trafficking
Get PDFWhile popular psychology and appeals to emotion have unfortunately dominated discussions of ‘sex trafficking’, this article suggests that feminist psychoanalytic film theory and theories of affect are still useful for making sense of the appeal of sensational exposés like Lifetime Television’s Human Trafficking (2005). The dynamic of identification with (and impersonation of) a human trafficking ‘victim’ by the rescuing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent (Mira Sorvino) is particularly worthy of scrutiny. Film theory about the ‘rebooting’ of film franchises (iconic brands like Batman) also helps explain the preponderance of similar programming—Sex Slaves (2005), Selling the Girl Next Door (2011), Trafficked (2016)—and the way contemporary discourses of human trafficking have effectively rebranded the myth of ‘white slavery’
Expelling Slavery from the Nation: Representations of labour exploitation in Australia’s supply chain
Get PDFOn 4 May 2015, the Australian national broadcaster’s current affairs programme Four Corners aired an episode titled ‘Slaving Away: The dirty secrets behind Australia’s fresh food’, that provided revelations of labour exploitation of migrant workers on working holiday visas. The government reacted swiftly to these allegations with an ‘operation’ ostensibly designed to stop the exploitation. In reports of Operation Cloudburst, however, there was a shift in the media’s definition of the problem: worker exploitation became visa violations and newspapers shortly reported the resulting action taken: the ‘illegal workers’ in Australia’s food industry had been arrested. This paper tracks the competing discursive and visual representations of this case that ultimately made questions of labour rights become questions of immigration, making it plausible and acceptable that concern over exploitation of workers should be addressed by deportation of ‘illegal immigrants’. Such discursive slippage is enabled by cultural amnesia over Australia’s history of exploitation of racialised and migrant labourers, which allows ‘slavery’ to be represented as a ‘foreign’ problem that can be expelled in defence of the purity of the national domestic space
Not All Prosecutions are Created Equal: Less counting prosecutions, more making prosecutions count
Get PDFResponse to ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Prosecuting trafficking deflects attention from much more important responses and is anyway a waste of time and money
Trafficking (in) Representations: Understanding the recurring appeal of victimhood and slavery in neoliberal times
Get PDFRepresentations of trafficking and forced labour are pervasive within media, policymaking, and humanitarian debates, discourses and interventions. The terms exploitation and trafficking are increasingly used to characterise the work that migrants do in the sex industry and other irregular employment sectors. Of late, the notion of ‘modern slavery’ is on show in campaigns aiming to raise awareness about trafficking and funds for anti-trafficking initiatives among corporations and local enterprises as well as the general public. Celebrity interventions, militant documentaries, artistic works and fiction films have all become powerful vectors of the global distribution of the trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ rhetoric. These offer simplistic solutions to complex issues without challenging the structural and causal factors of inequality. Through fictional and narrow representations of ideal victims they tend to entrench racialised narratives and conflate all sex work with trafficking, which legitimates criminalising policies and interventions exacerbating the social vulnerability of sex workers. It is because of the under-researched role of representation in the development of anti-trafficking policies and initiatives that the Anti-Trafficking Review decided to devote a thematic issue on trafficking representations
Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia
Get PDFAs primary implementers of laws on human trafficking, law enforcement helps construct how these laws are understood and applied. This article examines how this process has unfolded in Russia by looking at the phenomenon of and debates surrounding child trafficking for illegal adoption. It argues that pre-existing experience with trafficking laws and cultural narratives surrounding adoption have led law enforcement to focus on uncovering evidence of monetary transactions rather than exploitation when prosecuting trafficking cases. This construction of the meaning of trafficking comes with important trade-offs. While the emphasis on transactions helps law enforcement to be successful at prosecuting cases involving selling children for illegal adoption, a focus on transactions rather than exploitation results in a de facto prosecution policy that ignores the many forms of exploitation that occur in other trafficking cases
Human Rights and Economic Opportunity Will End Trafficking
Get PDFResponse to ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Prosecuting trafficking deflects attention from much more important responses and is anyway a waste of time and money
The Importance of Strategic, Victim-Centred Human Trafficking Prosecutions
Get PDFResponse to ATR Debate Proposition: ‘Prosecuting trafficking deflects attention from much more important responses and is anyway a waste of time and money