The idea to write this book crystallised in my head at a very particular moment in 2012 as I was walking towards a day conference being hosted by Irelandâs Department of Justice on the future direction of prostitution policy in the state. I was going to the conference because of my research interest in human traffickingâand in Ireland, as in many other places, debates on the issue have become focused around the particular question of sex trafficking and whether the âanswerâ lies in how states regulate prostitution. Although just an audience member, I was dreading the day because I knew it would be a fraught event for everyone involved. There are two camps in the prostitution policy debate. Feminists who consider prostitution and sex trafficking as synonymous forms of violence against women that are always exploitative and feminists who do not equate prostitution to trafficking, arguing that sexual labour is not necessarily coerced and should be recognised as legitimate work. Their policy prescriptions are worlds apart: abolition of prostitution and criminalisation of sex buyers on one side, a legal and rights framework for sex workers on the other. When the sides clash, debates are always vehement and highly emotional, and indeed that would prove to be the case that day, with diametrically opposed claims to knowledge provoking anger and tears. Yet, approaching the event I felt puzzled by a disjuncture between the intensity of debates and energy being vested in civil society and political responses to the issue of sex trafficking and the sense that there was no clear evidence or consensus about the nature or extent of the problem. Listening to the debates, it was clear that the civil society representatives were divided on who should be classed as a trafficked person or what should be done about it. Women and men with experiences of prostitution/sex work offered clashing perspectives on their understandings of their lived experiences. A police representative from Sweden promoted his countryâs neo-abolitionist approach, but self-defined sex workers in the room strongly condemned the impact the law has on women. The civil libertarian-inclined Minister for Justice seemed swayed by the legalisation route but appeared outnumbered by a broad pro-abolitionist political coalition that was forming. The politics were intense but also bewildering. What had brought the issue of human trafficking (particularly sex trafficking), so relatively obscure until recently, to such heated prominence and discussions at the heart of government?
Although I begin from my Irish context, this is a puzzle the spreads across international dimensions. Twenty years ago human trafficking was virtually no oneâs concern globally. Widespread nineteenth-century panics in colonial metropoles about the apparent trafficking in women for what the sensationalist press of the day dubbed a âwhite slave tradeâ of forced prostitution (Soderlund 2013) gradually subsided into international bureaucratic measures. After being considered in the work of League of Nations committees and then codified in a 1949 UN Convention, by mid-twentieth century, human trafficking was largely parked in a âhallowed, if irrelevant, position on the sidelines of the United Nationsâ human rights systemâ (Gallagher 2009, 792). Yet over the course of the last two decades human trafficking has come to be commonly referred to as âa defining problem of the 21st centuryâ (Shelley 2010, 58), with others claiming that âhuman trafficking chains increasingly blanket the globeâ (Tiano and Murphy-Aguilar 2012, 4). Human trafficking is commonly said to be the third largest form of transnational organised crime (after drugs and arms) and an industry worth tens of billions each year to criminals (UNRIC 2016). Some accounts of the significance of the problem to contemporary global peace and security are almost apocalyptic, such as Louise Shelleyâs analysis that trafficking will cause governmental corruption, the spread of diseases and family breakdown (Shelley 2010, 60â61). In reaction to this apparently frightening problem the last 20 years have seen the development of a large and complex edifice of international and national anti-trafficking responses. This includes the spread of anti-trafficking norms, new international and domestic legal frameworks, policing and security measures, services provided by multiple civil society organisations, slews of academic and advocacy research, generous funding streams and omnipresent cultural representations. All of this exists despite the equally commonly acknowledged problems that there is little consensus on what human trafficking is and no one is very sure how to count or counter it. This book, trying to banish my own puzzlement, explores the international politics of how we got from there to here.
Human Trafficking: The Shaky Evidence Beneath the Global Edifice
It is very common, and only honest, that many studies of human trafficking begin with the proviso that data on the extent of the problem are unreliable. The reasons for this difficulty are pragmatic and/or political. On the practical side, there are the methodological obstacles to researching âhidden populationsâ or activities involving criminality (Zhang et al. 2014, 68). Accessing representative samples and negotiating with âgatekeepersâ may add to these complications (Brunovskis and Surtees 2010, 6). Lack of definitional clarity about who constitutes a âvictim of traffickingâ also problematises research (Tyldum 2010, 7), as do the constraints of research ethics, which necessarily delimit research into âvulnerable populationsâ (Lee 1993). However, the politics of what is being counted are even more confounding of reliable research than the practicalities when it comes to collecting data on human trafficking.
There is an internationally agreed definition of what constitutes human trafficking as found in the UN Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Human Beings, Especially Women and Children (UNODC 2000). That definition reads as follows,
âTrafficking in personsâ shall mean 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 services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs...The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth [above] shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth [above] have been used.
This is obviously a convoluted definition that is hard to operationalise. It can be boiled down to human trafficking being the result of three stepsâmovement of a person, by an act of deceptive or coercive recruitment, which ends in their exploitation. Yet, as my introductory paragraphs above hinted, even when reduced to a simpler formula, the devil is in the interpretation. Feminists cannot achieve consensus on whether all commercial sex is a form of exploitation or whether it is possible to consent to sex work. And they are not the only ones addled by different stances on aspects of the definition. State agencies seeking to prosecute traffickers are focused on being able to connect evidence of all three elements of the definition; service providers seeking to assist people they see as exploited care less about how they got to the difficult place they are in than the exploitative situation they are facing.
My own awareness of these difficulties emerged from the research process of trying with my colleague EilĂs Ward to conduct the first baseline study of sex trafficking into Ireland in 2006â07 (Ward and Wylie 2007). By interviewing service-providing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and statutory agencies, we tried to establish some basic figures. Methodological problems were plentiful, such as incomplete records amongst NGOs or the fact that we were only counting cases known to our informants. Yet, more importantly, it became obvious that the numbers given were seen through the prism of each intervieweeâs position on the prostitution/sex work debates. Most NGOs took the neo-abolitionist line on the indistinguishable relationship between prostitution and sex trafficking, so all women they dealt with were by definition trafficked. Those involved in law enforcement took the narrower view that the three elements of coercion, movement and exploitation needed to be provable to constitute a countable case. The numbers were never going to add up to everyoneâs agreement. In the end our data were too low for the NGOs and too high for the law enforcers. Ten years on, and hopefully wiser, I would not attempt the same study again, having learned through the process that gathering trafficking data is inherently problematic and unavoidably politicised.
The need for caution about trafficking data is often noted in the literature but this does not prevent the wide circulation of some numbers that have acquired the status of common knowledge on the subject. A good example here is the headline figure from the US State Departmentâs annual Trafficking in Persons (TiP) Report (US Department of State 2016). Over recent years this report has regularly returned the number of 700â800,000 people trafficked around the globe annually (80% of whom are women and children for sexual exploitation). Due to its provenance in the powerhouse of the State Department and its frequent repetition in government statements and numerous venues, the TiP figure gains traction. However, the methodology behind the TiP Report is frequently queried, most embarrassingly by the US Governmentâs own Office for Accountability in its 2006 report, which noted the lack of clarity about the methods used and reliability of the data (GAO 2006 and Feingold 2010, 64). TiP data rely on reporting from US embassies throughout the world who themselves rely on estimates from local sources, and so ideological positioning along the whole chain of reporting inflects the eventual statistics. The localised politics I illustrated in relation to Ireland are passed up the global chain, while the ideological persuasion of the US administration of the day affects the slant of the data too. Under George W. Bush, for instance, who was a strong endorser of anti-prostitution activism, sex trafficking figures were privileged and wider labour exploitation statistics neglected.
Other trafficking data projects, such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime GIFT project (Global Initiative to Fight Trafficking) (UNODC.GIFT.HUB 2016) aim to provide harder statistics by relying solely on judicial data about prosecuted cases from around the world. Yet this kind of project is questionable as well for its reliance on how effectively states police trafficking laws or how differing justice systems interpret the meaning of the law. It also leaves hanging a sense that this approach cannot capture the full extent of the problemâwhatever it is defined to be.
David Feingold and his colleagues in the UNESCO Bangkok Project on trafficking data make it their goal to collect, trace back and try to identify the research methods and empirical bases of trafficking data from multiple sources around the world (UNESCO Bangkok 2009). His conclusion is that in relation to human trafficking there is plenty of ânumerical certaintyâ but behind that huge âstatistical doubtâ due to differing definitions at work in each data set and methodological opaqueness. The numbers however tend to gain veracity by repetition (Feingold 2010, 59) or an invincibility given by the claim that âhidden populationsâ can never be fully known, so whatever numbers we have must be underestimates. Carole Vance makes a telling point in her inspired reference to trafficking statistics as ânumerical vampiresâ that cannot be killed off (Vance 2011, 936). One explanation for the seemingly eternal life of these statistics lies in the political work the numbers do, justifying the great global anti-trafficking edifice that I will give a rough sketch of below.
Before doing so it is important to clarify that in refuting the reliability of human trafficking statistics, I am not denying that many people suffer the kinds of experiences, particularly as they migrate, that the trafficking definition tries to capture. My own position, based on research I was involved with in Ireland on trafficking for forced labour alongside my wider reading of international literature, is that the narrowness o...