Anti-Trafficking Review
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Postcolonial Frameworks with Survivors’ Voices: Teaching about contemporary and historical forms of slavery and forced labour
Get PDFMuch of the information for educating students and the public about human trafficking only involves survivors’ direct experiences as brief excerpts from more complex and detailed narratives. In this paper, I draw on a postcolonial framework to argue that sidelining survivors’ voices can bolster anti-slavery stakeholders’ agendas by selectively using survivors’ narratives to illustrate narrow constructions of slavery and forced labour. As part of education and awareness efforts, such approaches to understanding slavery and forced labour also perpetuate stereotypes that trafficked persons are powerless and lack agency. Therefore, I present an alternative educational approach to remedy these tendencies by viewing and discussing narratives by, and about, trafficked persons. This paper uses a university-level humanities and social science subject on trafficking and slavery, and related assessment tasks, as a case study to demonstrate the potential of survivors’ voices in teaching about slavery
Civically Engaged and Inclusive Pedagogy: Facilitating a multidisciplinary course on human trafficking
Get PDFFor university instructors who teach human trafficking as a comprehensive course, design decisions often begin with determining scope, disciplinary orientation, and learning goals. Further decisions involve pedagogical approaches and how to best support and sustain student learning. With civic engagement principles, universities can situate themselves within local anti-trafficking initiatives by offering courses to expand organisational capacities to end human trafficking. Using Human Trafficking 4160 at Metropolitan State University of Denver as an example, this paper provides key design questions to create a civically-engaged multidisciplinary course, partnered with agencies statewide, and equipped to support students primed for social justice and systems change. It offers suggestions for community partnerships to deliver content and co-create learning activities. It also provides pedagogical techniques to facilitate inclusive, trauma-informed learning spaces
‘Little Rascals’ or Not-So-Ideal Victims: Dealing with minors trafficked for exploitation in criminal activities in the Netherlands
Get PDFTrafficking in minors for exploitation in criminal activities is a form of human trafficking that is generally not well-recognised and understood by frontline actors. This paper, based on empirical data from frontline actors, shows that this is also the case in the Netherlands. Moreover, the Dutch ethnicised understanding of the phenomenon, which is conceptualised as a ‘Roma’ problem, further obfuscates the identification of these trafficking cases, leading to a blind spot for victims of other ethnicities and differential treatment of itinerant ‘Roma’ victims compared to Dutch and resident victims. It also shows that there is a gender bias among frontline workers, with girls being more readily perceived as victims than boys, and interventions in the girls’ cases geared towards protection, whereas boys were seen as ‘little rascals’ that should be punished. The paper concludes that a focus on indicators of the phenomenon, rather than on victim profiles, could improve this situation and help frontline actors take more transparent as well as ethnic- and gender-neutral decisions
The Next Step: The California Cybersecurity Institute’s Anti-Trafficking Virtual Reality Immersion Training
Get PDFDigital gaming and virtual learning platforms have expanded the boundaries of experiential based anti-trafficking training. Virtual reality provides a technological mechanism for immersive storytelling through the simulation of a physical presence within an artefact using software and specialised hardware. The success of virtual-based immersive training is directly dependent on a series of factors, including realism, re-playability, and supplemental in-person training. This article describes the California Cybersecurity Institute’s anti-trafficking immersion training programme, which advances beyond awareness education to test law enforcement and first responder-specific skills and biases. This multi-layered programme looks to incorporate all concepts of ‘serious gaming’ within law enforcement and humanitarian communication
Editorial: Anti-Trafficking Education: Sites of care, knowledge, and power
Get PDFThis article introduces a Special Issue on anti-trafficking education. The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the sites for anti-trafficking education and the range of educators who shape how the public and institutions understand and respond to human trafficking. Thus, there is a need to analyse the formalised and informalised practices that facilitate teaching and learning about trafficking. We argue that anti-trafficking education can perpetuate misinformation and myths about trafficking as well as legitimise carceral systems that lead to dehumanisation and violence. At the same time, critical approaches to teaching trafficking can encourage and inform endeavours to create structural change, social justice, and individual empowerment. We conclude that if the expansion of anti-trafficking education is divorced from longstanding movements for equity, then it runs the risk of teaching about trafficking while upholding practices and systems of oppression, exclusion, and expropriation, as well as diverting attention and resources from global work toward social and structural change
Between Theory and Reality: The challenge of distinguishing between trafficked children and independent child migrants
Get PDFThe offence of child trafficking appears to have a clear definition in the UN Trafficking Protocol and in laws based on it. In practice, this is an illusion. This article reviews the experiences of three countries (Benin, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam), in two of which anti-trafficking laws and policies regard a broad swath of children who migrate to earn a living, without being subjected to coercion, as victims of trafficking. It questions whether the definitions in international law and in the laws of many countries of what constitutes the crime of trafficking committed against a child are appropriate to distinguish between adolescent migrants in general and those who are victims of crime (at the hands of a trafficker) in particular. It suggests that this is in part because there is no international understanding about the ages at which children habitually leave home to find work and what should be done to protect them when they do. It concludes that a possible result of considering a very broad range of children to be ‘trafficked’ is that measures to protect and assist those who suffer acute harm are inadequate
Ganged Up On: How the US immigration system penalises and fails to protect Central American minors who are trafficked for criminal activity by gangs
Get PDFThis article addresses the failures of the United States immigration system to protect Central American minors who were trafficked for exploitation in criminal activities by gangs. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which the US immigration system denies humanitarian protection to Central American minors who were forced to participate in criminal activity by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and 18th Street gangs, and instead detains them. The article will examine this trend in the context of a larger proclivity to criminalise immigration in the US, particularly minors fleeing violence in Central America. We draw upon our experience representing Central American minors in their applications for humanitarian immigration relief to highlight how the US immigration system fails to protect this vulnerable population and penalises these children for their own victimisation
Commercial Gestational Surrogacy: Unravelling the threads between reproductive tourism and child trafficking
Get PDFNarratives of commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS) as ‘baby-selling’ often conflate or interchange the transfer of children born via surrogacy with trafficking in children or the sale of children, two sometimes overlapping but nonetheless distinct offenses. Moreover, anti-trafficking laws have been used to police cross-border CGS. But when do CGS arrangements fall within the category of legitimate ‘reproductive tourism’ and when do they amount to child trafficking? In this paper I critically explore intersections between human trafficking laws and CGS, vis-à-vis the child, charting the relevant trafficking laws in the context of international surrogacy, and analysing whether trafficking laws are an appropriate mechanism through which to regulate CGS. I conclude that while child trafficking might occur via surrogacy, CGS in itself is not child trafficking under international law
Social Work Education that Addresses Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation: An intersectional, anti-oppressive practice framework
Get PDFPractice, policy, and research focused on trafficking for sexual exploitation and commercial sex involvement occur in the United States within a white, heteronormative social environment that must be addressed pedagogically in the classroom. Social work education increasingly includes the topic of trafficking for sexual exploitation as a stand-alone course or as sessions embedded within other courses. Yet, very little scholarship critically examines how instruction in social work on this topic can apply intersectional, anti-oppressive frameworks across micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Furthermore, current literature suggests that some social workers use exclusionary practices when addressing trafficking and commercial sex involvement, further exemplifying the need for anti-oppressive curricula. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse how key anti-oppressive theoretical and practice frameworks should influence education on trafficking for sexual exploitation and commercial sex involvement in social work. Written by two scholars and social work instructors, we describe how we apply these frameworks to pedagogical exercises in social work courses. Finally, we argue that intersectional, anti-oppressive social work education is critical to training social work students and, ultimately, addressing the needs of people experiencing or at risk of trafficking
Putting Childhood in Its Place: Rethinking popular discourses on the conceptualisation of child trafficking in Ghana
Get PDFPopular discourses on child trafficking are generally characterised by unverifiable statistics, melodramatic representations, and emotional reactions. More so, notions of poverty, exploitation, and the protection of children from harm have driven educational and sensitisation campaigns that seek to address trafficking in children. The ensuing status quo blurs diverse cultural conceptions of childhood and its moral representations of acceptable and unacceptable labour. Drawing on qualitative data from a Ghanaian fishing community, this paper reviews the impoverished and hazardous representation of children’s transportation to other fishing communities for work. It contends that the prevailing conceptualisation of child trafficking fails to account for the socio-cultural underpinnings of children’s movement to other fishing communities for work. Consequently, this paper argues that it is important to situate popular discourses of child trafficking within fishing community’s conceptualisation of childhood in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon within those communities