Sex, slaves and citizens: the politics of anti-trafficking

Abstract

A focus on the evils of traffi cking is a way of depoliticising the debate on migration.T raffi cking is in the news. It is on the political agenda, both nationally and internationally. Thousands of individuals, hundreds of groups, dozens of newspapers are determined to stamp it out. This focus on traffi cking consistently refl ects and reinforces deep public concern about prostitution/sex work, and also about immigration, and the abuse and exploitation it so frequently involves. So to challenge the expression, or some of the actions taken as a response to this concern, is akin to saying that one endorses slavery or is against motherhood and apple pie. Traffi cking is a theme that is supposed to bring us all together. But we believe it is necessary to tread the line of challenging motherhood and apple pie while not endorsing slavery, because the moral panic over traffi cking is diverting attention from the structural causes of the abuse of migrant workers. Concern becomes focused on the evil wrongdoers rather than more systemic factors. In particular it ignores the state's approach to migration and employment, which effectively constructs groups of non-citizens who can be treated as unequal with impunity. 135

Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe

“…In many ways this makes sense, as it is easier to regulate identifiable institutions than track down and regulate intermediaries posing as agents. Yet Anderson and Andrijasevic (2008) note that campaigns and regulations targeting the 'demand' for trafficked persons have two potential recipients for their strategy, the consumers of goods and services produced or performed by trafficked people (in this case football fans, TV broadcasters and sponsors) and the employers or labour users of trafficked people (football clubs). They argue that the difficulty with this approach is that we cannot target employer demand for trafficked labour per se, nor consumer demand for goods or services produced or performed by trafficked people (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008).…”

Human Trafficking and Media Myths: Federal Funding, Communication Strategies, and Canadian Anti-Trafficking Programs

“…European slavery was premised on an ideology of white supremacy, but anti-trafficking discourses tend to implicitly or explicitly racialize the perpetrators of trafficking, thus displacing the source of exploitation onto a racialized "other." In so doing, the exploitative labour relations characteristic of neoliberal capitalism are erased as well (bernstein, 2007;Anderson & Andrijasevic, 2008). thus, for example, Canadian state programs, such as the live-in Caregiver or temporary Foreign worker programs, that produce contexts in which exploitation of often racialized migrants can flourish (walia, 2010), are absolved by antitrafficking language, the state becoming instead the saviour of the trafficked.…”

“…(Anderson & Andrijasevic, 2008, p. 141). these critics argue that conceptions of free and forced labour should not be posed as binaries, but must be regarded as context-specific constructions under global patriarchal capitalism (Anderson & Andrijasevic, 2008). to reify human trafficking as "modern-day slavery" without taking this continuum of exploitation into consideration, and without exploring the ways in which contracts, labour laws, and related policies have changed over time, serves simultaneously to reinforce racialized and gendered conceptions of labour and migration, and to render invisible a wide range of other spaces in which workers and migrants are exploited.…”

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

“…Further complexifying Bales' picture of slavery, critics such as Bridget Anderson and Rutvica Andrijasevic (2009), Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright (2008), Claudia Aradau (2008 and Charlotte Sussman (2000) also note the complicity of Western states in slavery practices. They argue that migration is a complex phenomenon and the boundary between regular and irregular migration deserves to be recognised as political.…”