Sex Trafficking, Human Rights, and Social Justice

Tiantian Zheng, Tiantian Zheng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136952739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The recognition of women's human rights to migrate and work as sex workers is disregarded and dismissed by anti-trafficking discourses of rescue in the latest United Nation's definition of trafficking.

This volume explores the life experiences, agency, and human rights of trafficked women in order to shed light on the complicated processes in which anti-trafficking, human rights and social justice are intersected. In these articles, the authors critically analyze not only the conflation of trafficking with sex work in international and national discourses and its effects on migrant women, but also the global anti-trafficking policy and the root causes for the undocumented migration and employment. Featuring case studies on eleven countries including the US, Iran, Denmark, Paris, Hong Kong, and south east Asia and offering perspectives from transnational migrant population, the contributors rearticulate the trafficking discourses away from the state control of immigration and the global policing of borders, and reassert the social justice and the needs, agency, and human rights of migrant and working communities.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, gender studies, human rights, migration, sociology and anthropology.

1
The NGO-ification of the anti-trafficking movement in the United States

A case study of the coalition to abolish slavery and trafficking

Jennifer Lynne Musto

Introduction

The ideas for this paper have emerged over the course of the past two years in which I have sought to combine my academic research on trafficking and sex work with participatory action research¹ and human rights activism. The latter has brought me into contact with a spate of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), both in the Netherlands² and the United States,³ which provide advocacy and social services to sex workers and trafficked persons, most of whom are women.

Scholars who are interested in conducting research on trafficking in the United States that focuses on the perspectives of individuals who have been trafficked are inevitably required to work closely, and at times, exclusively, with social service agencies (Brennan 2005: 39). As a gatekeeper between trafficked persons and researchers, social service providers create and disseminate particularized definitions and ideologies of trafficking. Far from benign, social service agencies, or what are often referred to as “NGOs,” have led the “anti-trafficking movement” in the United States by advising policymakers, training law enforcement, and drafting anti-trafficking legislation, in addition to providing a wide range of services to individuals who have been trafficked. Yet despite innumerable reports, scholarly papers, conferences, and media coverage dedicated to the subject of human trafficking, the unfiltered voices of trafficked women, men, and children are seldom, if ever, heard. Doezema observes that in the absence, or what might be the strategic exclusion of trafficked persons’ voices, an image of a trafficked person emerges; one that is innocent, naïve, and unable to exercise agency over his or her life. “The picture of the ‘duped innocent’ is a pervasive and tenacious cultural myth. High profile campaigns by NGOs and in the media, with their continued focus on the victim adds more potency to the myths … in reports on trafficking it is often stressed that the women did not choose to be prostitutes” (Doezema 1998: 45).

It is important to note that not all sex workers are trafficked nor are all trafficked persons forcibly and coercively moved between and within borders for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation. Although feminists have been at the fore of discussions surrounding sex work and trafficking, not all NGOs that work with trafficked persons identify as feminist or work from a perspective in which survivors are at the center of their social service and advocacy efforts. Indeed, NGOs whose work addresses human trafficking identify with one or more theoretical perspectives that range from abolitionist and neoabolitionist perspectives⁴ to those that view trafficking on a continuum of migration, 5 as a human rights issue,⁶ within a pro-sex work/labor framework,⁷ and as an extension of religious/ faith-based beliefs (Soderlund 2005: 70).

Though NGOs proffer valuable services to trafficked persons, this paper will explore how increased professionalization or what may be more aptly deemed the “ngo-ification” of the anti-trafficking movement in the United States has curtailed trafficked persons efforts to organize a movement that speaks to their experiences and needs. In her article, “Methodological Challenges in Research with Trafficked Persons: Tales from the Field,” Denise Brennan notes that “the sustainability of an anti-trafficking movement in the U.S. hinges not only on ex-captives telling their own stories but also on taking their own active leadership role in its direction, agenda-setting, and policy making” (2005: 38). While I embrace Brennan’s contention that a vibrant anti-trafficking movement must include the voices of trafficked persons, I argue that within the current anti-trafficking milieu in which NGOs remain overwhelmingly if not exclusively dependent on federal funding, an emergent anti-trafficking movement led by trafficked persons seems highly unlikely if not altogether impossible.

In order to highlight the limitations of the current anti-trafficking movement as it emerges vis-à-vis U.S. NGOs, I will provide an overview of the U.S. government’s position on trafficking in an effort to chart how explicit policies on trafficking and the implicit ideologies they evoke influence NGOs’ relationship to the federal government. From there, I will explore how such policies contribute to the professionalization of the anti-trafficking movement and discuss how this has contributed to asymmetrical power relations between NGO staff and the clients they “serve,” while restraining an anti-trafficking movement in the United States led by those who have experienced, firsthand, the process of irregular movement and exploitation.

Ideological blindspots

Against the backdrop of highly contested international debates over how to define trafficking⁸ and what, if any linkages exist between prostitution and trafficking,⁹ NGOs, are given little choice but to “take sides” in discerning where they stand. Indeed, NGOs that receive U.S. governmental anti-trafficking funds must sign “an anti-prostitution pledge,” prohibiting the promotion of prostitution and sex work as a labor option (Kim and Chang 2007: 4). Recipients of funds must also accept that trafficking thrives in areas where prostitution has been legalized and/ or decriminalized.¹⁰ The gag rule in its global and domestic manifestations has been widely criticized by NGOs and groups that work directly with trafficked persons (Kinney 2006). As Kim and Chang astutely point out, “non-governmental organizations assisting trafficked persons domestically and internationally report that the U.S. emphasis on criminal enforcement and anti-prostitution policies curtails the rights of trafficked persons voluntarily engaged as sex workers, and marginalizes trafficked persons in non-sex related industries. These policies and practices inhibit a rights-based approach that respects the agency and choice of adults to decide how to organize their lives” (2007: 2).

In light of such restrictions, NGOs that promote and/or accept sex work as a legitimate profession and argue against the conflation of voluntary prostitution with trafficking run the risk of losing their funding.¹¹ By suggesting that all forms of prostitution are exploitative, akin to “sexual slavery,”¹² and a “gateway”¹³ to trafficking, NGOs that receive U.S. government funding are bound to narrow interpretations and definitions of trafficking and as a result, typically interface with only those trafficked persons who fit proscriptive profiles.

Anderson and O’Connell Davidson find that governmental and intergovernmental organizations are keen to position trafficking within a framework of crime control and prevention. From this vantage point, harms inflicted upon “legitimate” trafficked persons, juxtaposed to those who are deemed “voluntary” economic migrants, concurrently represent a threat to the state. “The beauty of trafficking, constructed as a problem of organized transnational crime is that it apparently represents a form of forced migration that simultaneously involves the violation of the human rights of the ‘trafficked’ person and a threat to national sovereignty and security” (Anderson and O’Connell Davidson 2002). As a result, only those individuals whose situations align with current scholarship, policy, law enforcement and NGO conceptualizations of what trafficking is and who trafficked people are, will be identified as trafficked juxtaposed to labeled as voluntary migrants.¹⁴

To this point, Tyldum and Brunovskis observe that “the ratio of cases identified by law enforcement or nongovernmental organizations to the total number of trafficking cases in an area is seldom known, it is difficult to determine to what extent the identified cases are representative of the universe of trafficking cases, and which biases they introduce” (2005: 24). Tyldum and Brunovskis’s observations are noteworthy in that they draw attention to personal and institutional biases that may, in practice, perpetuate tendentious assessments of the “trafficking universe.” What else might explain the vast discrepancy that exists between the estimated numbers of people trafficked into the United States each year and the actual number of individuals that are identified and certified¹⁵ as victims of trafficking? Though improved methods of detection are touted as the main reason the numbers have “gone from 45,000 to 50,000 in 1999, to 18,000 to 20,000 victims reported in 2003 to 14,500 to 17,500 quoted in the 2004 TIP report,” ideological biases against immigrants in general and prostituting immigrants in particular also appear to attribute to difficulties in identifying trafficked persons¹⁶ (Gozdziak and Collett 2005: 10). In the absence of research that systematically assesses the extent to which law enforcement and NGO biases influence identification practices, it seems reasonable to assume that NGOs, like the governments that fund them, perpetuate ideological blind spots in negotiating a trafficking terrain where moralizing discourse stands in for conclusive empirical data.¹⁷

Awkward alliances: brief contextualization of the division of labor between the U.S. government and NGOs

Aside from the ways in which selective seeing delimits understanding about trafficking, what seems additionally perplexing is the degree to which NGOs are capable of maintaining critical distance from government policies. William Fisher notes that although “NGOs are purely voluntary groups with no governmental affiliation or support, some groups so designated are created and maintained by governments … while the moniker ‘nongovernmental organization’ assumes autonomy from governments, NGOs are often intimately connected with their governments” (1997: 451). Though an in-depth exploration of the ways in which NGOs reproduce, re-entrench, and resist governmental practices remains outside the scope of this paper, it seems important to point out the obvious: not all NGOs are “good,” progressive, nor inherently invested in struggling toward social justice with the individuals for whom they work. Moreover, since NGOs in the United States increasingly function as an extension or dislocated arm of state sponsored policies, it behooves scholars, policy makers, and community stakeholders alike to critically interrogate the role that they play in ameliorating trafficking on the one hand, and whether they help, hinder, complicate, and/or facilitate trafficked persons’ empowerment on the other.

As a “hot topic,” that has captured the public imaginary, policy makers, researchers, and activists have pressed for greater resources to curtail trafficking. Regardless of their ideological position regarding prostitution or immigration, a consistent thread throughout the scholarly, intergovernmental, and NGO literature is that more attention and funds are needed to assist trafficked persons (Bump and Duncan 2003; Zarembka 2003; Chuang 2006). The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and its 2003 and 2005 Reauthorization draw upon a three-pronged approach, or what is known as the three “P’s”, to prevent trafficking, prosecute traffickers, and protect trafficked persons (Bump and Duncan 2003).

Despite its rhetorical catchiness, the U.S. government has focused more of its energies on prosecution than on prevention and protection. Chuang notes, “efforts to combat trafficking have proceeded from a narrow view of trafficking as a criminal justice problem, with a clear focus of targeting the traffickers and, to a lesser extent, protecting their victims” (2006: 148). As a result of the U.S. government’s prioritization of prosecution over protection, NGOs have, by default, been delegated the responsibility of protecting victims. Rerouting the responsibility of victim protection from the state to NGOs is evidenced by Ambassador John Miller’s comments. Miller states:

There is no question about it … carrying out the “three P’s” of dealing with human trafficking – prosecution, protection and prevention – requires a great role for NGOs, protection particularly. Our policy is to reach out to local NGOs and especially get to the smaller NGOs that are on the ground doing the work.”

(Alta 2006)

Though Ambassador Miller deems NGOs to be the ideal protectors of trafficked perso...