Modern Slavery

The Margins of Freedom

Julia O'Connell Davidson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137297297
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Providing a unique critical perspective to debates on slavery, this book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, prisoners, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge popular and policy discourse on modern slavery.

1

Imagining Modernity, Forgetting Slavery

How can we end modern slavery? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a new brand of anti-slavery campaigners (referred to in this book as the ‘new abolitionists’) tell us that around 35 million people across the globe today have been trafficked into, or otherwise trapped in, slavery. Hardly a week goes by without a documentary on some aspect of the problem being aired, an international conference on the topic taking place or a fund raiser being held to support the work of one of the many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) campaigning to free the slaves and eradicate modern slavery. Since 2000, ‘no fewer than thirty antislavery books and a profusion of research articles have been published’ (Stewart, 2015: 127). The question of how to end slavery is routinely posed on the myriad anti-slavery websites and in other materials produced by campaigners, and answered in a variety of ways. There are, for example, calls for the United Nations to take a stronger lead in the fight against slavery; for more international aid to be targeted at countries worst affected; for governments to enact tougher and more comprehensive legislation against slavery and human trafficking; for businesses to root out slavery in their supply chains; for researchers to investigate and map the problem more thoroughly and accurately; and, above all, for individuals to act against modern slavery by learning about the problem, engaging in fund raising and awareness-raising activities, inspiring others to become involved in anti-slavery activism, keeping watch for signs of slavery in their communities and consuming slave-free products (see, for example, Free the Slaves, 2007–2014a; CNN Freedom Project, 2011a; Not for Sale, 2015).

The new abolitionism has remarkably broad appeal. Those involved in campaigns against trafficking and modern slavery include religious leaders from across faiths, trades unions and big business. The Global Business Coalition against Human Trafficking includes Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Ford, Microsoft and ManpowerGroup amongst its members. As its co-founder, David Arkless, stated, ‘When you get involved in something like this your employees will love it, the public will love it and your shareholders will love it’ (Balch, 2013). Famous actors and pop stars are also there ‘lovin’ it’, contributing to what Dina Haynes (2013) terms, ‘the celebrification of human trafficking’, and lending their support to the many NGOs campaigning to end modern slavery. And this is a fight endorsed by politicians from across the political spectrum. Certainly, the imperative to end modern slavery is very much on the contemporary political agenda in affluent, liberal states. In 2013, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced her intention to introduce a Modern Slavery Bill; the US President, Barack Obama, proclaimed January 2014 as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month; in December 2014, the Australian Justice Minister, Michael Keenan, launched a five-year national action plan to intensify efforts to combat human trafficking, slavery and forced marriages (news.com.au, 2014).

Such measures, like NGOs’ exhortations to combat it, presuppose that the term ‘modern slavery’ names a definite and particular phenomenon. And yet closer attention to the ways in which the term is employed by the many and various actors involved in the fight against ‘modern slavery’ will not assist in identifying what, exactly, that phenomenon is. In fact, listening to talk of ‘modern slavery’, I am often reminded of Gustave Flaubert’s satirical work, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, which lists the inane bromides and clichés of his time. Flaubert was prompted to compile the dictionary in the 1870s by his impatience with people’s tendency to spout empty speculation and received ideas, rather than to study seriously and to think critically about the social world in which they lived: ‘Instead of examining, people pontificate’, he observed in a letter to George Sands (Barzun, 1954: 8). He considered including a preface stating that the book’s motive was ‘the desire to bring the nation back to Tradition, Order and Sound Conventions – all this so phrased that the reader would not know whether or not his leg was being pulled’ (Barzun, 1954: 3). The dictionary included the following definition of ‘Feudalism – No need to have one single precise notion about it: thunder against’ (Barzun, 1954). Had he been writing such a satire today, he might be tempted to attach this same definition to the term ‘modern slavery’.

For today, platitudes about the ‘scourge of modern slavery’ are wheeled out by politicians, media pundits and campaigners in discussions on anything from prostitution to child labour to illegal immigration to female circumcision to begging to organ-trading. And though there is no single, precise definition of ‘modern slavery’, a series of stock phrases and highly dubious statistics about it are circulated, repeated so often and so earnestly that they have taken on the mantle of incontrovertible truths. Speculation on the enormity of the problem is presented as ‘fact’, even though the next ‘fact’ to be unfurled is invariably that it is impossible to measure the scale of this hidden, criminal trade. And when political leaders pontificate on the topic, their thunder against ‘modern slavery’ is almost always redolent of an underlying desire to bring their nations back to ‘Tradition, Order and Sound Conventions’.

This book, which includes discussion of what is described as ‘forced labour’, ‘debt-bondage’, ‘forced marriage’, ‘trafficking’ and ‘sex trafficking’, offers a critique of these received ideas. The argument is not that the world is free of oppression, domination, exploitation and suffering – far from it – but rather that the new abolitionism offers a highly selective lens through which to view restraints on human freedom. Instead of posing the question ‘How can we end modern slavery?’, this book asks ‘What does the term modern slavery mean?’, or, to paraphrase Ananya Roy’s (2012) question about poverty: ‘Who sees modern slavery, and what do they see?’ What leads the new abolitionists to identify some, but not other, forms of injustice, violence and exploitation as ‘slavery’, and what traditions of thought, conceptual schema, and collective memories frame their vision? How is the figure of the ‘modern slave’ worked in political life (to borrow Honig’s (2001) question about ‘the foreigner’), as well as by those organizations campaigning for an end to ‘modern slavery’, and to what ends? Which problems, and whose problems, are addressed by professing a profound and passionate commitment to combatting the problem of ‘modern slavery’?

From state security to modern slavery: a brief history

Policy measures to address ‘modern slavery’ are invariably presented with much thunder about the need to protect universal human rights and freedoms. Yet current political interest in ‘slavery’ can be traced back to the 1990s when there was growing political anxiety about threats to state powers from what came to be termed ‘transnational organized crime’. In the context of more porous borders in the post-Cold War era, state actors worried about a perceived expansion of illegal markets, both domestic and global, viewing this as a threat to the legitimate economy and to political institutions. They were also concerned about their own capacity to control immigration (including but not limited to the mobility of criminal actors across national borders), which was regarded as a threat to national sovereignty and security. ‘Human trafficking’ first entered into policy consciousness through the lens of these disquiets. Strongly associated with the forced movement of women and girls across borders and into prostitution, it was parcelled up with phenomena such as smuggling, money laundering and drug and gun running, as part of a problem that could only effectively be addressed through international cooperation between the states it imperilled. The United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (2000), and its three additional Protocols (the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air; and the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition) sought to secure such cooperation.

The Trafficking Protocol provides a very loose definition of ‘trafficking’ not as a single, one-off event, but a process (recruitment, transportation and control) that is organized for purposes of exploitation, that takes place over time and that can be developed in a variety of different ways.¹ ‘Exploitation’ is not defined, but ‘shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs’. It is noteworthy that while in political rhetoric trafficking is said to be modern slavery, in international law, slavery is just one of a number of possible outcomes of what is termed trafficking. It is also important that, taken together, the trafficking and smuggling protocols reflect an assumption that migration is either voluntary or forced, and that a neat line can be drawn between the two. Where trafficking is held to be ‘carried out with the use of coercion and/or deception’, smuggling is described as ‘a voluntary act on the part of those smuggled’ (Home Office, 2013: 7). The assumed ‘either/or’ binary between forced and voluntary migration is reflected in the kind of obligations that states are deemed to have in relation to the two categories of migrant it produces. Though still limited, states’ obligations towards Victims of Trafficking (VoTs) are more extensive than they are towards smuggled persons (Bhabha and Zard, 2006).

In the run-up to the drafting of the Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols, and immediately thereafter, politicians and policy-makers often remarked that ‘Smuggling is a crime against the state, trafficking is a crime against a person.’ Then came 9/11, read as an even more direct and deathly threat to Western liberal democracy than ‘organized crime’, and terrorism was added to the bundle of security threats supposedly presented by or linked to trafficking. ‘Human smuggling, trafficking in persons, and clandestine terrorist travel are transnational issues that threaten national security’, a US Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center (HSTC) report states, and the HSTC was itself established under a section of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (HSTC, 2005: 1). Trafficking now appeared as a simultaneous assault on the person and the state. It was increasingly represented in international and domestic policy circles as a vast and ever-growing problem affecting every corner of the earth, part of a dark underbelly of globalization that could only be tackled through tougher immigration controls, stronger law enforcement, and new and greater powers for those charged with safeguarding national security.

The response to these perceived threats to state sovereignty and national security has been extraordinarily violent. As future chapters will show, immigration policies and border controls have been pursued that have led to many thousands of deaths, and there has been a dramatic expansion of the use of immigration detention in liberal democratic states. But alongside this growing use of force, the claim that ‘trafficking is nothing short of modern slavery’ has been frequently and vigorously asserted. Moreover, if this is so, then any and all measures to combat it can be presented as measures to protect the human rights of its victims. Indeed, in this new double-speak, cracking down on ‘illegal immigration’ becomes part of a fight to secure fundamental human rights, as opposed to implying a violation of those rights (Anderson and O’Connell Davidson, 2003). The metaphor of slavery also works to obviate difficult questions about how the exploitation, ‘unfreedom’ and suffering of the VoT is to be disentangled from that of other groups of migrants, in particular those imagined as ‘economic migrants’ and those classed as ‘asylum seekers’, for it takes trafficking outside migration. We are no longer speaking of an ordinary, everyday phenomenon in which modern liberal states have an interest (or multiple, often conflicting interests), but of an ‘old evil’, as George W. Bush put it in a speech to the United Nations in 2003, an anachronistic ‘slave trade’ that must be abolished (Bravo, 2011).

Another effect of framing the fight against trafficking as a fight against modern slavery and for fundamental human rights has been to open the door for new alliances between governmental and non-governmental organizations in the fields of human and child rights. States, especially the United States, have been prepared to commit spectacular sums to the battle against ‘illegal immigration’, and within this, against ‘human trafficking’ (Andersson, 2014a; Dottridge, 2014). Though much of this money has gone to the countless new governmental programmes and task forces to combat ‘trafficking’ that have been set up around the world, international agencies and NGOs have also enjoyed a generous share of the pie. Even in the 1990s, the growing political and public interest in trafficking and associated opportunities for fund raising provided many human and child rights international organizations and NGOs with an incentive to re-badge some or all of their existing activities as ‘anti-trafficking’ work.

It would be wrong to present the NGOs and international agencies that campaign against ‘trafficking’ and ‘modern slavery’ as an undifferentiated group. While some, in effect, function as an arm of government (helping to sort ‘deserving’ VoTs from the ‘undeserving’ smuggled or otherwise ‘illegal’ migrants, for example), others attempt to hold governments to account for their lip-service approach to the issue and the rights violations associated with their anti-trafficking policies. Nonetheless, it is the case that as more and more governmental organizations, NGOs, and researchers came to view trafficking as the topical and ‘hot’ human rights issue, the term experienced what Joel Best (1993) names ‘domain expansion’ (see also Chuang, 2013). Where initially the focus had been on forced movement into prostitution, ‘trafficking’ now came to embrace a large and disparate collection of global social problems and rights violations. By the 2000s, concerns about child labour, forced labour, domestic servitude, enforced criminal activity, benefit fraud, inter-country adoption and fostering, organ trading, child soldiers, prostitution and underage, servile or forced marriage were all included under the umbrella of ‘trafficking’, and through this, absorbed into what is dubbed ‘modern slavery’. This process of assimilation was aided by actors in the ‘new abolitionist’ movement, a strand of anti-slavery activism that emerged and prospered alongside the post-millennium flood of interest in trafficking.

The new abolitionism

In 2000, the long established, British-based NGO Anti-Slavery International acquired a new, US-based sister organization, Free the Slaves (the two have since severed their links). Many other anti-slavery NGOs were subsequently founded, especially in the United States, Australia and Western European countries, including Stop the Traffik in 2006; Not for Sale in 2007; End Slavery Now in 2008; Alliance against Modern Slavery in 2011 and Walk Free Foundation in 2012. The International Justice Mission (IJM), which had been founded in 1997, continued to focus on ‘rescuing victims from slavery and sexual exploitation’, and other existing human rights organizations extended the remit of their activities to include ‘anti-slavery’ work. Such organizations have been active in promoting the notion that ‘trafficking’ is a growing problem and the modern equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade, and have more generally set the agenda for talk of ‘slavery’ as a contemporary global problem. This they have achieved not least through their prodigious efforts to circulate certain ‘global facts and figures’ concerning trafficking and slavery, in particular: ‘there are more people in slavery today than at any other time in human history’; ‘the average cost of a slave today is less that the equivalent cost of an average slave in the American South in 1850’; ‘human trafficking is the third largest global criminal industry, behind only guns and drugs, generating 32 billion US dollars annually’. And as ‘the main attraction of these “facts” stems from their value as advocacy tools, there has been a widespread reluctance to ask how they have been calculated, and whether or not they are true’ (Quirk and O’Connell Davidson, 2015).

These ‘facts and figures’, and indeed the new abolitionist movement more generally, owes much to one man, Kevin Bales, co-founder of Free the Slaves. Indeed, his influence has been so great that this book’s ambition to deconstruct dominant discourse on ‘modern slavery’ unavoidably demands a good deal of critical attention to his work. In 1999, Bales published and then widely publicized an estimate of 27 million slaves in the contemporary world. This was a reduction to the estimate of 100 million previously bandied around by some NGOs, but an advance on the estimate of 20 million that Anti-Slavery International worked with. Anti-Slavery International (2015) remains more cautious when it comes to quantifying contemporary slavery. Bales subsequently worked with the Walk Free Foundation to produce its first Global Slavery Index in 2013, which enlarged the total global estimate to 29.8 million ‘modern slaves’. This was then raised it to 35.8 million in its 2014 report (Walk Free, 2014). The index purports to measure the size of the modern slavery problem country by country, and provides a quantitative ranking of 162 countries around the world according to the estimated prevalence of slavery (that is to say, the estimated percentage of enslaved people in the national population at a point in time).

Since ‘slave’ is no longer anywhere a legally recognized status, the index relies on data on a series of proxy categories (forced labour, trafficking, forced marriage, worst forms of child labour, bonded labour and so on). As will be seen in the course of this book, each of these categories presents its own definitional problems, and the phenomena to which they refer are embedded in, or overlap with, other – often socially sanctioned – markets, institutions or practices (labour markets and marriage, for example). They also often take place in contexts where the lives of much of the population are characterized by hardship, privation and lack of citizenship, labour or human rights. Indeed, in the countries that top the Global Slavery Index, vast numbers of people live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 per day – 88 percent of the population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 62 percent of the population in Haiti, around 30 percent of the population (some 360 million people) in India (UNICEF, 2014) and around 46 percent of the population in Uzbekistan (OPHI, 2010).

This particular method of measuring poverty, and the relation between the US$1.25 poverty level and vulnerability to extreme labour exploitation, are foci of academic debate (Phillips, 2015). However, it is undoubtedly the case that in such contexts, many people’s lives are heavily constrained by debts they have had little choice but to take on and that they are unlikely ever to repay; many people labour for long hours for wages that do not even meet subsistence needs; and many of those defined as children by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989), (persons under the age of 18) need to work, often in poor and hazardous conditions, to survive...