Human Trafficking

Trade for Sex, Labor, and Organs

Bandana Purkayastha, Farhan Navid Yousaf

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509521340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Demographie

The last few decades have seen a huge increase in attention paid to the trafficking of human beings, often referred to as modern-day slavery. International and national policies and protocols have been developed and billions of dollars spent to combat the issue and protect trafficking victims. Yet it continues to flourish and human beings, in both the Global North and the Global South, continue to be degraded to the level of commodities and smuggled across borders for profit.

Drawing upon feminist and human rights approaches to trafficking, this book links the worlds of policy, protocols, and social structures to the lived experience and conditions of trafficked people. Recognizing that trafficking for sex, labor, and body parts often overlaps in a broader context shaped by poverty, violence, and shrinking access to rights, the authors offer a more thoroughgoing account of this social problem. Only with such an integrated approach can we understand the exploitative conditions that make people vulnerable to trafficking, and the progress – as well as gaps – in initiatives seeking to address it.

1
Introduction

Over the last few decades, scholars, journalists, people in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and policy makers have intensified their efforts to address the trafficking of human beings. A number of international and national policies and protocols have been developed and billions of dollars have been spent to combat trafficking and protect trafficking victims. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), since the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (OHCHR 2000) entered into force on December 25, 2003, more than 90 percent of countries have developed legislation criminalizing different forms of human trafficking (UNODC 2016). In 2013, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed resolution A/RES/68/192 and designated July 30 as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons¹ in order to create awareness about trafficking in human beings and strengthen global cooperation to fight it. Estimates by the United Nations (UN) and international NGOs (INGOs), such as the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), suggest that billions of dollars have been spent to combat trafficking since the 1990s.

Yet trafficking continues to flourish. According to the estimates of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free Foundation, and International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2017, 40 million people across the world were victims of modern slavery in 2016. While there are many disagreements about the data on actual number of trafficked persons (e.g. Loff and Sanghera 2004, Mugge 2017), many reports, case studies, and narratives of trafficked persons document that traffickers continue to prey upon people who are desperate to survive or move in search of better life conditions. As trafficking has grown to a billion-dollar industry according to some estimates (e.g. ILO 2014), human beings continue to be degraded to the level of commodities, smuggled across borders for profit, and trafficked for sex, labor, or their body parts.

The scholarship, activism, and policy foci on trafficking have also increased exponentially over the last few decades (e.g. Bernstein 2010, Dragiewicz 2015, Kempadoo 2012, Yea 2014). On the scholarly front, streams of research and policy analyses have generated debates and dissensions about adequate definitions and methodologies to study trafficking. Most of the research focuses on trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation. We use a slightly different approach in this book, and focus on trafficking for sexual exploitation, labor exploitation, and organs to describe the universe of trafficking. The research on this subject has begun to show that the exploitative contexts in which they are positioned make victims of one form of trafficking vulnerable to other forms over their life course. Thus, a woman trafficked for sexual exploitation might end up being trafficked for other types of labor. Or a man who has been trafficked for labor can become the target of organ traffickers. Thus, we conceptualize trafficking as a continuum,² where one form of trafficking overlaps with and can be connected to other forms of trafficking. However, the efforts to address trafficking often deal with types of trafficking separately, as discrete crimes to be punished. By examining all three forms we show that far from reflecting a series of clandestine and illegal activities, many forms of trafficking arise out of a complex series of interactions between illegal and legal (and above-ground) practices. This complexity explains why – despite so much effort – trafficking continues to flourish.

Trafficking: an old phenomenon in a new bottle?

While trafficking is increasingly in the news in our times, what is it exactly and to what extent is trafficking a new phenomenon? While we discuss the policy-based definitions of trafficking later in this chapter, broadly, human trafficking refers to the exploitation of human beings by others who use force, coercion, fraud, deception, and/or abduction to recruit, transport, harbor and receive, and exploit human beings for profit (UNODC 2016). The victims of trafficking do not consent to this exploitation. In other words, trafficking includes the dimensions of force, fraud, coercion (in different degrees), and diverse practices that generate profit for entities in the trafficking chain; a lack of consent on the part of the people who are trafficked is a key distinction that differentiates trafficking from other forms of exploitation. While we begin with this broad definition, each one of these terms – “force,” “profit,” and “lack of consent” – includes many nuances that we will discuss later in this book.

Some scholars and activists have described trafficking as modern-day slavery (e.g. Bales and Soodalter 2009, Walk Free Foundation 2016). With a widespread recognition of the immorality of slavery, this phrase is very effective in getting people in some parts of the world to understand the extreme forms of exploitation of human beings that continue today (e.g. Bales 1999, David 2015). This phrase also helps to frame this social problem in ways that garner support for the efforts to abolish and eradicate trafficking in human beings, so it is used widely (e.g. UNODC 2009). Yet some scholars are moving away from this phrase as they describe the contemporary structures, conditions, and facets of trafficking (e.g. Chuang 2015, Mugge 2017, Plant 2015). They argue that the term is too broad and does not help to capture many facets and underlying factors of contemporary trafficking; at the same time it appears to co-opt the conditions of slavery historically without centrally talking about racism. (We present more details on this debate in chapter 7, “Afterwords: Ongoing Debates and Unresolved Questions.”)

Scholars are now looking into a number of questions including the role of states in facilitating some forms of trafficking even as the same states have laws against slavery, involuntary servitude, peonage, and debt bondage, and many have signed onto anti-trafficking protocols and devote significant resources to the eradication of some forms of trafficking. The critical questions for us today are: exactly which actors – states, corporations, crime cartels, and/or other entities – are involved in the process? How do people become victims of trafficking and what are their options for escaping from these conditions? How effective are the globally powerful policies and protocols, with their emphases on prevention, protection, and punishment, in the eradication of trafficking? Which aspects of trafficking fall through the cracks?

In order to fully understand the world of trafficking today, it is important to briefly look at the history of trafficking. According to many scholars (for instance, Gekht 2008, Knepper 2013, Samaddar 2015, Whitman and Gray 2015), trafficking for sexual and/or labor exploitation is not a new phenomenon. Just as most of the news stories about trafficking today focus on trafficking for sexual exploitation, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse also focused mostly on exploitation for sex. And the Global North-based discussions of sexual exploitation of women and girls were mostly about white women and girls.

Gekht (2008) and Pattanaik (2002) point out that by 1904 and 1910 there were international agreements to stop white slave traffic. Specifically, abolition of prostitution became one of the demands of the nineteenth-century feminist movement (Outshoorn 2005). The focus of these abolitionists remained on the prostitution of white females, especially those who were moved overseas to serve white officers in the colonies where sexual relationships with local women were frowned upon (Pattanaik 2002). As the European powers took over the political control of vast swaths of Africa and Asia, they also organized their need for cheap labor through systems of indentured labor where men and women were forced to work to fulfil exploitative contracts. Slavery was officially abolished by 1927 (Fouladvand 2018), but indentured laborers were transported from one colony to another, or migration occurred from impoverished communities within Western Europe to parts of the “New World,” where the migrants were held in conditions of involuntary servitude (for an overview see Samaddar 2015). Indentured labor has been historically associated with colonialism. Colonial powers typically took over a country to exploit its resources, for which purpose colonial powers required cheap, plentiful, and docile labor. Indentured labor met these criteria, so countries received these laborers, but made sure a range of laws and policies, from apartheid to exclusion from citizenship – with correspondin...