How do you feel when you hear the word “slavery”? What mental image do you have? What is your definition of “slavery”?
Separated from the trans-Atlantic slave trade by more than 100 years and a seeming eternity in human development, human trafficking today might appear to be an aberration, a dreadful anomaly in the march of human progress. In reality, human trafficking has re-emerged only in the sense that it has re-entered public consciousness. Slavery has always been a part of human existence and was not eliminated by the nineteenth-century abolition of trans-Atlantic slavery (Miers, 2003). In the early 2000s, according to varied and frequently conflicting sources (see Wong, 2005), 27 million people worldwide were enslaved (Bales, 2004); either four million or 600,000–800,000 (or some unknown number of) individuals are trafficked annually across international borders (Kapstein, 2006; U.S. Dept. of Justice (2006); Richard, 2000); and each year 14,000–17,500 people are trafficked into the United States (U.S. TIP Report, 2006). By 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that 40 million persons are enslaved worldwide (IOM Global Trafficking Trends, 2006–2016).
The modern trade3 in human beings – their purchase, sale, and distribution – has significant ramifications for international human rights, international criminal law, and the global economy. The modern “re-emergence” of trafficking in human beings and of slavery is said to be linked to the deepening interconnection among countries in the global economy, overpopulation (with its consequent production of disposable people) (see Bales, 2004), and the victims’ economic and other vulnerabilities. Despite the expenditure of a great deal of intellectual, legal, social, and other resources to prevent and punish human trafficking, there is little or no evidence of effective, systemic impact on the size and operations of these activities (U.S. TIP Report, 2018).
The UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery first raised the issue of sex tourism in its 1978 report (Miers, 2003), and the existence of international sex markets became generally known through media reports and other information channels (see, for instance, Handley, 1989; Erlanger, 1989; Simons, 1994; Kempadoo, 2005). However, it was not until the 1990s that modern human trafficking began to fully engage the consciousness of Western legislators and the public in general (see, for example, Man Pleads, 1999; Connolly, 1999; Crecente, 1999; Chen, 1999; Barry, 1998; Nicholson & Wheeler, 1998; Triads, 1997). A perceived growth in the buying and selling of human beings followed the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union (Wong, 2005). Media and other reports disseminated frightening statistics and horrific reports of the purchase and sale of women and young girls from republics of the former Soviet Union, in particular, into Western Europe (Caldwell, Galster, & Steinzor, 1997).
Is human trafficking “slavery”?
The dominant perception of modern human trafficking is that it is an abnormal parasitic appendage to global and domestic economies and the product of the greed of particularly monstrous individuals and groups. The images of forced sexual slavery on a large scale was alarming and created concern that spread throughout the globe. According to dominant narratives, growing numbers of victims were enslaved by modern-day traffickers: tricked by schemes offering employment abroad or other prospects of fruitful economic opportunity – or simply sold by parents or other authority figures – countless men, women, and children around the world were being subjected to sexual or other exploitation without compensation. Victims were deprived of freedom of movement, raped, beaten, and violated in various ways through mechanisms of violence, force, psychological abuse, coercion, and fraud. By the late 1990s, conventional knowledge held, based on varying statistical sources, that up to four million people were trafficked annually across national borders (see USAID, 1999). In addition, the trade in humans was said to be a $5–7 billion per year illicit industry – less profitable than only the traffic in illegal drugs and arms (Tiefenbrun, 2002).
Confronted with evidence of the increase in the traffic and exploitation of human beings and violations of state borders and laws, scholars, policymakers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and legislators came together in both the international and domestic U.S. arenas to combat human trafficking. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2001) (hereinafter the Trafficking Protocol) United Nations, 2001a was adopted and ratified as a protocol to the more wide-ranging Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (2001) (hereinafter the UN Convention) (for analysis of international legal tools see Ollus and Joutsen, Chapter 3, this volume). One of the principal achievements of the Trafficking Protocol is the creation of the first international definition of trafficking. The Trafficking Protocol defines trafficking in persons as:
The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or other services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
(United Nations, 2001a)
The U.S. domestic statute, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 (United States, 2000), was adopted a mere month before the UN Organized Crime Convention and Trafficking Protocol were opened for signature.4 Together, the international instruments and the U.S. legislation have been influential in the fight against and interpretation of modern trafficking in humans. In addition to the obligations voluntarily undertaken by state parties under the Convention and Protocol, the series of U.S. State Department reports issued pursuant to the mandates of the TVPA have vastly increased public and institutional awareness of, and knowledge about, human trafficking (see C.deBaca, Chapter 2, this volume for analysis of U.S. domestic policies). For example, the U.S. State Department has issued annual reports each year from 2001 through the present. Each successive report reflects an increase in the depth and breadth of coverage of human trafficking and the efforts against it.
Two contrasting accounts illuminate the emergence of broad public awareness around trafficking and the subsequent development of an international consensus to combat it. Commentators such as Kelly Hyland (2001) pointed to growing international concern regarding the scope, complexity, and criminality of modern trafficking in humans as the impetus for the development and adoption of the United Nations’ anti-trafficking treaty in 2000. In contrast, other scholars have high...
