Abstract
Kamala Kempadoo (ed.) Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights. Paradigm Publishers: Boulder, CO, 2005, 288 pp.: 9781594510977 (pbk)
Mary Crawford, Sex Trafficking in South Asia: Telling Maya’s Story. Routledge: London, 2010, 208 pp.: 9780415778435 (hbk)
Human trafficking has attracted a great deal of academic, policy and political interest in recent years. Yet, the dominant law and order discourse on trafficking is often based on conceptual confusions, unreliable statistics, sensationalist accounts and moralistic claims about global sex slavery. The ‘war on trafficking’ language also tends to fuel the state’s criminalising and pathologising agenda directed at non-citizens and deviant Others, and increases rather than reduces the risks and harm suffered by trafficked victims and other irregular migrants. In contrast, there is now a body of work in criminology that problematises the highly contested nature of the term ‘human trafficking’, the hierarchy of trafficking victimhood, the conflation of immigration with trafficking control measures, and the violent logic of anti-trafficking policies and practices (Anderson, 2007; Kelly, 2005; Lee, 2011; Segrave et al., 2009). There is clearly a need for a more critical interrogation of trafficking narratives and anti-trafficking interventions and grounded observations of trafficking which are sensitive to the intersections of class, gender, race, ethnicity and other dimensions of power within particular societies. That is why the two volumes which are under review here are so invaluable to our knowledge and understanding of trafficking, especially in Asia.
One of the central themes underlying both books is that human trafficking is inextricably linked to the tensions and inequalities associated with a ‘hierarchy of mobility’ in a stratified global order (Bauman, 1998). The same structural processes that are producing a new global underclass also serve to provide the imperative for people to be ‘on the move’ generally from the global South to the global North, to defy state immigration controls, and to cross borders in search of physical and economic security. ‘Global structural inequalities in the distribution of wealth and in access to education, employment, health care, and social security; militarized conflicts and occupations; dispossessions from the land and environmental disasters; and gender-based or religious violence and ethnic conflicts’ (Kempadoo, xvii) produce the conditions conducive, not only for trafficking, but also forced migration and other forms of irregular migration. More significantly, women are disproportionately represented among the poor, the undocumented, the debt-bonded, and the international migrant workforce. They tend to bear the brunt of the dark side of globalisation and the growing immiseration of economies in the global South. In what Sassen (2002) has termed the ‘feminization of survival’, households and whole communities are increasingly reliant on the labour efforts of migrant women to make their living. A broad range of authorised and unauthorised cross-border activities under varying exploitative conditions may be involved, including the export, smuggling and trafficking of women as contract brides, domestic workers, sex workers and entertainers within the ‘circuit of globalised economies’. As these two books convincingly demonstrate, it is the global structural inequalities and gendered dimensions of oppression, exploitation and migration that shape the particular patterns and dynamics of trafficking and anti-trafficking interventions in South and Southeast Asia today.
Kempadoo’s edited volume Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered. New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights grew out of a series of workshops on feminist participatory action research held by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) in Thailand in 2000 and 2001 following the adoption of the Trafficking Protocol under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime. The collection foregrounds critical examinations of official and conservative non-governmental organisations’ definitions and responses to trafficking and presents alternative ways in which trafficking has been redefined and made operational by academics, professional consultants, anti-trafficking practitioners, and sex workers’ rights and human rights activists. Specific case studies of Taiwan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam highlight the complex interactions of forced and voluntary labour and migrations and the continuum of migrant exploitation and positions of vulnerability; the gender stereotypes and patriarchal family values that surround the trafficking debate; the conflation of sex trafficking with prostitution and a more generalised panic about uncontrollable female sexuality; and the repressive and counter-productive nature of many existing anti-trafficking laws, policies and interventions. Taken together, the collection focuses on a ‘rearticulation of the trafficking discourse that has taken place through mainly feminist definitions… drawing attention away from state drives for greater immigration control and global policing, and recentering upon the needs, agency, and rights of migrant and working communities’ (pp.xxiv–xxv).
Crawford’s book Sex Trafficking in South Asia on her firsthand experience as a Fulbright Scholar researching into a Nepali anti-trafficking organisation dovetails with this critical stance on trafficking. Through her personal diary excerpts, case notes, extensive ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews with NGO staff, trafficking victims, village mobilisers, women’s rights and indigenous rights activists, Crawford provides a compelling story of how the narratives and realities of trafficking and anti-trafficking interventions in insurgency-ridden Nepal are shaped by local structural conditions, local systems of understanding, and the dynamics of the fast-expanding development establishment (with at least 57 NGOs claiming to be involved in anti-trafficking efforts in Nepal in the early 2000s).
The cultural construction of sex trafficking is shaped by social systems of gender, caste, and class and by Nepal’s dependence on foreign development aid, all of which contributes to the stereotypical representation of women, especially low-caste and ethnic minority women, as passive, needy, gullible, backward, and naïve. (p.162)
Throughout the book, Crawford’s highly reflexive account lays bare not only her own subjectivity with her research project as a feminist social psychologist, but also the biases and dilemmas of high-caste privileged anti-trafficking practitioners whose paternalistic rescue missions have disempowered rather than empowered the low-caste and impoverished women and girls in Nepal.
It is perhaps poignant for both books to adopt an empirical focus on South and Southeast Asia. This is by and large a region where global trafficking victims originate, even though, as the two volumes acknowledge, countries such as India are also countries of destination in intra-regional trafficking. It is here that the gendered consequences and troubling effects of anti-trafficking policies and interventions (especially those sponsored by NGOs) are most keenly felt in the areas of prevention, rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked victims.
Frederick (Chapter 7) and Marshall and Thatun (Chapter 3) in the edited volume discuss some of the problems with anti-trafficking interventions in Nepal and the Greater Mekong Sub-region. For example, prevention activities tend to be based on narrow understandings of the causes of trafficking and stereotypical conceptions of women as ignorant, and leaves little room for their agency to be expressed. Marshall and Thatun argue that awareness-raising interventions which focus on the dangers of migration and trafficking are often at odds with people’s own experiences and perceptions of their existing situation. ‘The major risk factor here is not a lack of knowledge but the lack of legitimate and safe opportunities for labour migration’ (p.50). Furthermore, Frederick argues that awareness-raising interventions tend to carry conservative patriarchal values and the implicit message that women who ‘run around’ on their own are a discredit to the family honour.
The denial of Nepali women’s migration and the patriarchal ‘Hindu woman’ paradigm inherent in the [sex trafficking] myth have manifested in migration policies and awareness messages which discourage migration and women’s freedom of movement, even that of a girl going alone to a local marketplace. (p.138)
Indeed, a gender-specific ban on migration (e.g. banning Nepali women to travel to the Gulf States for work) has been justified in the name of trafficking prevention. But rather than reduce the problem of exploitation, such movement restrictions have brought unintended consequences. They tend to reduce whatever oversight and protection women might have had as legal migrants and push them into the way of more organised criminal groups, more dangerous routes (e.g. travelling to the Gulf States via India or Bangladesh), and more vulnerable situations. As Crawford reminds us in the Nepali context, where there is endemic poverty, a history of (seasonal) migration for work, and where officially migrant women send home around 10.7 per cent of the total remittances entering the country every year, trafficking prevention in the form of movement restrictions is ‘culturally insensitive’ and counter-productive to the survival needs of women and rural families (Crawford, p.146). The key argument is that a more progressive and rights-based approach to trafficking prevention should be oriented towards fair and safe migration policies that dovetail with global labour market realities. There is evidence that at least some NGOs and anti-trafficking networks have made attempts to empower women in an open, participatory process and to combine awareness-raising with a ‘broader life-skills package’ and alternative-livelihood options (in Kempadoo; Boontinand, Chapter 10; Ahmed, Chapter 11).
In South Asia, NGOs play a very powerful role in preventing trafficking, caring for its victims and their families, and advocating for change. Yet many NGO-sponsored interventions that are ostensibly aimed at preventing sex trafficking have the effects of reinforcing the patriarchal ideology of women as the property of male family members and restricting women’s right to travel and migrate. One example is the highly controversial practice of border patrolling by NGOs to intercept suspected trafficking victims and their captors in Nepal. While male migration is a longstanding and accepted practice in Nepal, female migration is heavily scrutinised, judged and stigmatised. ‘Women who have been rescued from brothels are trained and organized into surveillance teams that work with police or private security guards to spot traffickers in the process of taking women across the border’ (Crawford, p.126). Crawford argues that many of these intrusive ‘search and rescue’ operations on the Nepal–India open border take place without adequate evidence that women and girls are in danger of being trafficked. In the name of paternalistic protection, any woman crossing the border may bear the burden of proving that she is not being trafficked. If a woman cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for her travel, she may be intercepted and detained. Indeed, women and girls have been forcibly intercepted and ‘rescued’ by NGO ‘Border Guards’ and returned to their villages against their will or institutionalised in ‘transit homes’ or ‘care homes’ for an indefinite period.
Where anti-trafficking interventions involve intercepted or repatriated girls and women, the dominant protectionist paradigm in rehabilitation and integration has tended to be based on stereotypical notions of women and girls and the roles that bind them – as dutiful wives and compliant daughters – and narrow notions of counselling or other forms of psychosocial intervention. Trafficking returnees are generally treated as ‘passive, helpful and damaged’ victims.
Their capabilities and resiliency are not recognized, and they are not given the right to participate in decisions about their lives, including return to society. Token participation activities, such as selection of menus or daily chores, are provided in some institutions. (Frederick in Kempadoo, p.142)
Critics have argued there is no systematic evaluation of intervention outcomes, and little assessment of the family circumstances or emphasis on life skills training. Others have pointed to the coercive nature of rehabilitation where shelters routinely violate survivors’ rights to freedom of movement by surrounding them with guards and even detaining them against their will.
So what are the alternatives? A message central to both books is that a human rights framework offers the possibility of directing attention to the structural causes of trafficking, to individual agency and resistance, and to the violations of girls’ and women’s rights to citizenship, movement within their country and migration across national borders. It seems to me that taking trafficking seriously as a human rights issue involves clarifying and specifying the rights protective and rights destructive elements in the trafficking discourse and anti-trafficking interventions. As critical social scientists, our challenge is to rectify the empirical deficits and unexamined value-laden perspectives underlying much of the existing sex trafficking research, make visible the rights destructive elements in the trafficking prevention-rehabilitation integration regime, and to pave the way for anti-trafficking interventions that are theoretically and politically informed so that they do not inadvertently reinforce the socio-political conditions that foster trafficking. The two books here have clearly risen to the challenge. Taken together they provide a strong antidote to the dominant discourse of sex trafficking and exemplify what a critical gender-based analysis has to offer to the field of trafficking and migration studies.
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, and Visiting Fellow, University of Essex, UK