In this paper we focus on the ways 'victims' and 'perpetrators' are imagined in the narratives on women who have been trafficked to West Europe for sexual exploitation. Three specific domains: international/national law, local law enforcement and ethnographic academic perspective are particularly important as they strongly influence political reaction to trafficking and describe the phenomenon from the perspective of the individuals concerned. In our analysis, an explanation of the diversity of the perceptions in these three domains is provided.

This article examines how implicit notions in the concepts of ‘children’ and ‘home’ influence the study of child trafficking. Where children and adults are often presented as oppositional categories, home is regarded as territorialised, essentialised and unchangeable. These social constructions oversimplify trafficked and migrating children’s experiences, which is illustrated by three cases from the context of Marseille. They suggest that children’s agency may be better accounted for if we move from a focus on them being forcefully torn away from the safe place of home, to children’s strategies of placing themselves, continuously, in changing, hierarchical social settings.

This article intends to respond to a recent call (e.g., Zhang Global Crime 10(3): [178][179][180][181][182][183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195] 2009; Brunovskis and Surtees International Migration 48(4):1-38, 2010) for more innovative studies and methodologies in order to move beyond the current discourse on human trafficking. We do so by describing three ethnographic fragments on the dynamics of (dealing with) sex trafficking within Europe. The concepts of 'friction' and 'collaboration' (Tsing Cultural Anthropology 15 (3): 327-360, 2000, 2005) are used to analyse these fragments. These concepts refer to creative processes that occur as people interact across differences. They give insight into how universal ideas on freedom and justice enable collaboration between parties involved in fighting human trafficking who do not necessarily share a common goal. We conclude that the presented method of 'patchwork ethnography' is useful in studying sex trafficking as it implies a strong focus on connections between 'sites of diverse knowledge', without losing sight of individual stories of people making those connections. 'Patchwork ethnography' is innovative and it allows researchers to expose and untangle the workings of the supposedly all-powerful phenomenon and the encompassing, uniform, hegemonic discourse surrounding human (sex) trafficking.

This article examines the role social imaginations play in legitimizing extrajudicial killings by death squads in the era of globalization. The role of popular imagining has expanded into a widespread social practice as people increasingly draw on images from all over the world via modern communication technologies. Drawing on Mary Douglas' concept 'matter out of place' and Nancy Scheper-Hughes' 'symbolic apartheid' we argue that to a certain extent, dehumanizing imaginations about socially excluded groups legitimize death squad killings. The article compares two case studies on death squads in the cities of Medellín, Colombia and Davao City, Philippines. We conclude that social imaginations in the era of globalization may be a driving force behind death squads in these and other major cities in the world