Human Trafficking

Marie Segrave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409448891
• eBook ISBN: 9781351929561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Human trafficking captured the attention of the global community well over a decade ago, inspiring multifarious international, national, regional and local responses. While formally recognized as one of the major threats associated with transnational organized crime, human trafficking remains an issue about which much has been written and yet little is known or supported by empirical evidence. The essays selected for this volume reflect four key areas of debate: the transnational organized crime framework; the data and research landscape; the implementation of anti-trafficking responses; and the articulation of alternative responses to human trafficking. These essays are written by well-known and more recent contributors to this field of research. The collection draws attention to contemporary arguments as well as recent empirical research, and points to the importance of contextualizing human trafficking within both the global and local setting. This volume reflects where human trafficking data, research and debate is currently located and where it is heading, and as such is of interest to academics, students, policymakers and practitioners.

Part I
Analysing the Framework

[1]
(Un)Popular Strangers and Crises (Un)Bounded: Discourses of Sex-Trafficking, the European Political Community and the Panicked State of the Modern State

JACQUELINE BERMAN

Rockefeller Fellow, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA

While the ‘trafficking in persons’ is a problem that has long plagued the international community, sensationalized media coverage and governmental anti-organized crime initiatives have produced a new set of discursive practices that conflate violent crime against women with complex forms of post-communist gendered migration. These discourses refer to many different forms of exploitation and migration as ‘trafficking in women for purposes of sexual exploitation’. In other words, they portray all international, often illegal, migration and labour as acts of violated gender and raced innocence and of international organized crime. In this frame, criminalization of all activities related to trafficking appears to be the most logical and effective means of redressing this problem. It simultaneously, however, subjects all East European migrant sex workers to categorizations that defuse what may function as the challenges presented by their sovereign and symbolic boundary transgressions. A focus on crime and violated borders (rather than on the conditions under which women migrate or are forced to work) extends barriers to migration and renders it more dangerous for women while not necessarily hindering movement or assisting the actual victims. Because it emphasizes the role of state-based institutions in fighting international organized crime, criminalization also serves as a means through which practices of ‘statecraft’ work to reiterate the privileged place of the state in IR. As such, discourses of sex-trafficking provide a particularly incisive site at which to examine European integration, immigration, ‘globalization’ and their effects on IR in a gendered and race-cognizant frame.

KEY WORDS ♦ gender ♦ globalization ♦ immigration ♦ international security ♦ nation-state ♦ political community ♦ sovereignty ♦ state ♦ trafficking in women

Introduction

Girls . . . some 9 years old, were essentially sold to traffickers . . . ‘for less than the price of a toaster’ [and] are forced to work ‘in an indentured sexual servitude’. (Brinkley, 2000b)

In the period since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the media, governments, non-governmental organizations and multi- or supra-national institutions have devoted increasing attention, debate and resources to the issue of human trafficking. This focus has taken several forms, including — overwhelming and frightening statistics (‘500,000 women trafficked annually’; ‘$12 billion year in profits’); sensationalist, gendered and raced language (‘trafficked for sex’; ‘supply the flesh’; ‘hellish journey’; ‘white slavery’); the conflation of gender and race with innocence (‘naive Slavic women’; ‘stupid girl’; ‘new white slave trade’; ‘trafficked sex slaves’) and an implicit criminalization of the issue (‘a priority of the law enforcement community’).¹ It has emanated from such authoritative sources as the New York Times, EU Ministers, the US Department of Justice (DOJ),² International Human Rights Groups,³ former President William Jefferson Clinton⁴ and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.⁵ Indeed, a ‘discursive verbosity’ now surrounds debates about trafficked women (Foucault quoted in Stoler, 1995: 180).⁶

So much — and such high profile — attention to ‘sex-trafficking’ provokes, for me, a series of critical questions — what precisely is this phenomenon simultaneously referred to as ‘trafficking in women’ and a ‘new white slave trade’?⁷ Does this incendiary language suggest some kind of paranoia or has a ‘new white slave trade’ actually developed in the former socialist states? What is at stake when public figures depict ‘trafficking in women’ as a ‘new white slave trade’? Is this really a law enforcement issue? A ‘grave threat’ to international security? How does it relate to international politics and globalization more generally? Most importantly, has all of this attention helped to rectify the problem?

In this article, I will first explore how current discourse about sex-trafficking criminalizes the surrounding issues and thus limits both understandings of and solutions to the problem; and second, how the criminal aspects of this discourse provide a site at which sovereign performances of statecraft take place — performances that reiterate state sovereignty at an historical moment when forces associated with globalization have left the state in crisis. I will argue that these performances become visible in processes of European integration that increasingly focus on immigration. Despite the Schengen Accords (1995) tightening of external borders, fears about unfettered immigration brought on by the lifting of internal boundaries have played a role in implementing a number of policies tantamount to the criminalization of migration. In European integration processes and in debates over immigration, the complex circumstances of trafficking and other forms of gendered migration function as a metonym for crime and an opportunity to intensify border control in the name of protecting citizens and women. I will argue that under the axiom of criminalization, immigration laws have become increasingly restrictive while assistance to trafficked and migrant women has been relegated to a proximate or even subordinate status — hardly the exigency they claim to represent.

If EU policies do intend, however, to approach and to rectify the intricate and heterogeneous problem of trafficking, they must move beyond the frame of criminalization to consider the forces that motivate women to migrate for work, as well as the contingencies they encounter in moving and working abroad. This is not to suggest that there are not criminal elements involved and that egregious abuses and exploitation of women do not occur in trafficking. Clearly, they do and cases of trickery, mistreatment and forced sex work have been corroborated by reputable governmental and nongovernmental sources as well as in my own fieldwork.⁸ Trafficking in women is an international problem often involving complex transnational and criminal elements. It is also, however, an immigration issue, a labour issue and a gender issue. Only in an immigration, labour, race-aware and gendered frame can the exploitation that women confront when they seek to move for (sex) work be redressed.

In approaching these questions, I will argue that issues of trafficking are inextricably linked to the changing social, political and economic conditions associated with ‘the most over-used term in the current political lexicon’ — globalization (Bromley, 1996: 120). Globalization has generated, in the West, a sense of anxiety, especially around the modern nation-state, in what might be called a crisis over boundaries.⁹ In order to explicate how certain representations can address the crises of a political community and its security in the context of globalization, I will explore the ‘discursive’ characteristics of sex-trafficking and argue that in the wake of this sense of crisis, a ‘discourse of sex-trafficking’ has emerged.¹⁰ I employ a Foucauldian notion of discourse in order to interrogate how and where discourses come to ‘define what conditions and in view of which analyses certain of them’ (representations) have become ‘legitimate’ (Foucault, 1972: 26). The specific associations, conflations and contradictions created through this discourse will help to explicate how, and in what form, this issue has come to the top of so many international agendas.

My argument about trafficking in women also takes up two key themes in international relations — security and globalization — as they intersect with constructions of gender. An analysis of the gendered tropes that undergird and inform the debate over trafficking is particularly important for coming to terms with post-Cold War debates over security, in particular, the relationship between identity and security. A gendered frame functions as a mode of critique that can locate and analyze informing oppositions of especially human security inherent in issues of identity. Categories of self and other (i.e. European citizen and exterieur constitutif), for example, indispensably rely upon, among other distinctions, gender, ethnicity and race. A gendered analysis helps to read the structuring role gender plays in such security issues as trafficking and identity, especially in constituting the division between self/other, public/private, domestic/international.

A ‘Crime Crusade’ against ‘Global Gangsterism’: The Criminalization of Trafficking in Women

While stories about East European ‘sex-trafficking’ began to proliferate in the Western media soon after the fall of the Soviet bloc, in January 1998, a pivotal article appeared, in section 1, page 1, of the New York Times under the provocative by-line, ‘Contraband Women — A Special Report. Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women’ (Specter, 1998). This article recounts the harrowing story of a beautiful but impoverished Ukrainian girl of 21, Irina, who, after the fall of communism, sought new economic opportunities abroad.¹¹ She accepted a job as an exotic dancer but found, after two weeks, that she would be forced to work as a prostitute. Her ‘enormous green eyes’ fill ‘softly, [with] slow tears’ as she describes being ‘driven to a brothel, where her boss burned her passport before her eyes’, announcing, ‘You are my property and you will work until you earn your way out.’ For some 3700 words, the article constructs a depraved, criminal underworld populated by nefarious Mafia figures from ‘Russian crime gangs’ who orchestrate human auctions of ‘naive and desperate young women . . . on blocks, partially naked . . . sold at an average price of just under $1,000’ into ‘sexual bondage’ (Specter, 1998).

In the New York Times article, as in sex-trafficking discourses more generally, the nexus of gendered and racialized innocence and heinous crime serves as a central representation: young, innocent, ‘white,’ east European girls, tricked, kidnapped and forced intro prostitution. From ‘Nicoleta, 17, a beautiful Moldovan student’ to Daniela, a Czech ‘18-year-old student and beauty contestant’ to ‘Mia, a 14-year-old Hungarian girl . . . [i]n a skinny jumper and miniskirt,’ media accounts detail in emotive, graphic and titillating language crimes of trickery, kidnapping, physical and sexual violence and forced prostitution perpetrated against young, white women as they clandestinely and illegally cross state borders. According to these media accounts, forced, coerced or willing, these popular strangers¹² ‘end up in brothels, brutalised by pimps in Germany, Holland, Belgium and even Britain, where demand for young, white, compliant and above all cheap east European girls has become insatiable’ (Butler, 1997b).¹³

In one particularly lurid but not untypical depiction, a reporter describes how some 60 young women ‘seeking to migrate . . . were turned into sex slaves by an organized crime gang that lured them from Bulgaria with false promises of legitimate jobs’ in Western Europe (Katz, 1997). Summoning the sine qua non of evil, one Czech police officer described their place of captivity as ‘a concentration camp’ with ‘metal bars on the windows and the three rows of barbed wire atop the high fence surrounding the property’; women ‘were kept as prisoners. There was no way to escape. They got fed once a day, soup and bread, and they were watched the entire time. These girls were forced by violence to become prostitutes’ (Katz, 1997). When the women did not ‘show the proper enthusiasm for their work, beatings are often administered . . . women who failed to produce enough revenue were burned with irons or cigarettes and beaten with baseball bats’ (Katz, 1997). These accounts create a portrait of atrocious crimes committed against women whom, by virtue of their gender, ‘whiteness’, youth and inexperience have fallen into the clutches of traffickers and been coerced into sex work. Irrespective of a myriad of circumstances that might lead women to seek the assistance of these traffickers to migrate — including actual instances of forced trafficking — media accounts collapse the differene to fixate on crime and its victims.

In these stories, the criminals figure as prominently as the trafficked women themselves. Indeed, it is the criminals who are agentized and active perpetrators while the women remain passive victims of their crimes. These discourses recount how ‘criminal gangs lure’ or kidnap ‘tens of thousands of young women from Eastern Europe’ ‘into a heinous underground of modern-day enslavement in foreign countries’ (Smith, 2000; Harris, 1998; see also Lyons, 2000). The women are ‘[s]old several times over, raped and sometimes tortured by Serb and Albanian pimps’ only to ‘end up in brothels in Europe’s major capital cities’ where the traffickers ‘will not shrink from mutilations or even killings when they deal with recalcitrant or loudmouthed girls’ (Briseida and Porte, 2000). Huge, international ‘crime syndicates’ traffic up to 500,000 women a year; the traffickers are now ‘beyond police control’ and ‘appear to be a law unto themselves’ (Crane, 2001; Garrett, 1997; Butler, 1997b).¹⁴

Within this discursive logic, the most appropriate response to the problem becomes criminalization to prevent these gangs from violating the sovereign bodies of these women and the sovereign spaces of the nation-state. ‘Criminalization’ or a ‘crime control’ approach encompasses creating stricter border controls and implementing legislation to punish those who engage in ‘trafficking’ or assist in any way persons who might seek to immigrate illegally. The focus on criminality relies on the principle that ‘adopting stronger legislation can curb trafficking in persons . . . [with] more effective detection and prosecution of traffickers and increase the penalties for trafficking’; criminalization allegedly provides the most effective means of combating ‘this terrible commerce and other forms of global gangsterism’ (Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, 2001: 79; Christian Science Monitor, 2000). Examples of criminalization might include the US decision to ‘double to 20 years the maximum penalty faced by those convicted of selling others into involuntary servitude’ and a ‘new globalized FBI offensive’ to combat ‘mafia gangs’ and organized-crime groups from the former Eastern bloc that have created ‘a network of international operations ranging from money laundering and prostitution to drugs, arms, and people smuggling’ (AFP, 2000; Langenkamp, 2000).

In the European context, criminalization involves the European Parliament placing police and judicial cooperation ‘under the first pillar of EU competence’ to ‘fight’ trafficking in women but refusing ‘to legalise prostitution’ at the European ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I ANALYSING THE FRAMEWORK
• PART II DATA ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING: WHAT WE KNOW, HOW WE KNOW IT AND IMPLICATIONS
• PART III IMPLEMENTING COUNTER-TRAFFICKING STRATEGIES
• PART IV ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORKS
• Index