Abstract
The first decade following the U.S. Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPA 2000) was marked by key legal and political struggles that attempted to make sense of the rather abrupt arrival of “human trafficking” on the U.S. policy landscape. The current second decade has created opportunities for researchers to ask about the impacts of such laws on those designated as victims of trafficking in the United States. Denise Brennan’s Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States is the first scholarly monograph to document the day-to-day life accounts of migrants trafficked into forced labor in the United States.
Discourses around human trafficking have been characterized by “melodrama” (Vance 2014) or “mythology” (Brennan p. 5), crafting tales around innocent victims, criminal traffickers, and heroic saviors. Such accounts have been deeply racialized and have privileged Global North—and predominantly American—rescuers’ perspectives at the expense of silencing survivor accounts, or only selectively propping up certain appealing survivor testimonies for public consumption. The diverse accounts presented in Brennan’s book frame an important counter-narrative to prevalent anti-trafficking melodrama.
Beneath the glossy appeal of a happy ending for rescued victims of trafficking, Brennan importantly details the exceptionally mundane character of life after trafficking—what she refers to as “everyday lifework” (p. 4). This chronicle of life after trafficking as told through the lives of recent labor migrants—mostly female—resonates with a large body of work on labor migration and immigrant assimilation. The central question of this manuscript asks “how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor set up their households, care for their children, find decent work, take classes, make friends, fall in love, and spend their free time” (p. 4).
Such accounts are rare because it is often difficult for researchers to build relationships with formerly trafficked persons for an array of reasons ranging from their transience to the manner in which they are protected by the organizations and agencies that assist them. Brennan’s access was achieved through a decade of anthropological fieldwork with migrant and workers’ rights organizations in California, New York, Florida, and the greater Washington, D.C. area. Her account offers insight into the policy, institutional, and personal levels of life after trafficking.
Part II of this book, titled “Life after Trafficking,” is dedicated to the processes of creating home (Chapter 3), settling into home (Chapter 4), and work after forced labor (Chapter 5). These chapters bring readers into the homes, relationships, and workplaces of migrant workers to understand how “characteristics of formerly trafficked persons’ resettlement . . . diverge from other populations that have experienced violence” (p. 119). These challenges range from the bureaucratic—for instance, social workers must quickly move through a “resettlement checklist” in one year before U.S. government assistance runs out (p. 118)—to the intimately personal, in the case of those duped by co-ethnic immigrants who find it difficult to trust others in their immigrant social networks (p. 123), and lastly to the material needs of trafficked people who seek food, medical attention, housing, and child care.
Formerly trafficked persons face pressure to find work, and the “subjective valuation of good jobs” (p. 169) coupled with the specific skills and desires migrants possess vary greatly according to their experiences with labor exploitation. Work, therefore, widely heralded as the pathway to social mobility for immigrants and the American working poor, may be a profound “zone of disempowerment” (p. 168). Brennan notes that work after trafficking can be any number of things, including empowering, therapeutic, mundane, or a place of reclamation and accomplishment as “one of the first sites formerly trafficked persons negotiate on their own, without the guidance of social workers or attorneys” (p. 167).
Lacking many sources of support, many formerly trafficked persons thrive in survivor-based advocacy groups, which provide community space, potluck dinners, activist and advocacy opportunities, and host events like green card parties for their members. Brennan reveals just a hint of some of the problems that exist for survivors as they move away from such organizations, for instance:
A formerly trafficked person tries to raise funds to start her own organization, but she faces stiff competition for antitrafficking funds, including with some of the organizations that have assisted her. (p. 185) Another trafficking client regularly receives invitations to speak at various events hosted by women’s rights and human rights organizations. They pay for her travel and lodging, but she usually does not receive any other compensation for her time and expertise. When she is on the road she not only does not earn her hourly wage, but also has to pay a babysitter to take care of her children. (p. 186)
These two glimpses offered in Brennan’s conclusion lend important insight into the paradoxes of what I have called the “anti-trafficking rehabilitation complex” (Shih 2014). Trafficking survivor groups, whether they encourage survivor-led advocacy or life-skills and vocational training, are agents that capitalize on and often complicate life after trafficking. Brennan’s access to both institutional and personal dimensions of life after trafficking left me wanting a deeper inspection of anti-trafficking organizations as agents and beneficiaries of rehabilitation projects. For instance, while Brennan is critical of the overwrought language that is often used to describe the horrors of human trafficking to raise funds, she fails to mention that the photograph of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking’s survivor caucus (p. 191) is one that was printed on postcards for a mass fundraising campaign. Fundraising and empowerment are not mutually exclusive, but there exist a great number of T-Visa recipients who feel disenfranchised or co-opted by the organizations that have assisted them.
In the Introduction and Part I of the book, Brennan steers a heavily U.S.-weighted anti-trafficking discourse away from conservative and sensational sex panics that conflate all prostitution with sex trafficking and conflate all human trafficking with sex trafficking. In doing so, Brennan has devoted many pages to placing labor trafficking along a continuum of labor exploitation across a range of industries in the United States. This approach implicitly pushes human trafficking as a category to become more gender neutral; however, Brennan has left some ambiguous space in her analysis of gender and migrant labor. The majority of the accounts she tells are of women migrants; likely, this has to do with the fact that the majority of trafficking visas have been granted to women as opposed to men. However, the gender subjectivities of life after labor trafficking are largely ignored in this book.
In a similar vein, I wished for more distinctions in how labor exploitation and life after forced labor are shaped by home country politics. Do different sending conditions of migration influence whether people want to stay or influence people’s understanding of the institutional and personal dimensions of life after trafficking? In steering clear of any consistent mention of country of origin for migrants, this book creates a rather homogenous account of trafficked persons who decide to stay in the United States. Further inquiry into how ethnic origin and race shape the assimilation trajectories of trafficked persons is a productive line for future research.
To Brennan’s credit, forced labor is the concerted focus of this manuscript; but there are unavoidable material and organizational distinctions between anti-trafficking organizations like the Freedom Network (whose survivor leadership training fund will receive the proceeds from this book) and migrant labor organization like the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW), whose work on migrant worker rights pre-dated the anti-trafficking movement by a decade. Such distinctions play out in the lives of migrants, some of whom may be classified as victims of labor trafficking by United Nations standards but may not be able to gain a U.S. Trafficking Visa for a number of reasons. At times it is unclear how Brennan conceptualizes this murky in-between classification, as the majority of her in-depth interviews seem to focus on those who have been officially classified as victims of trafficking by anti-trafficking agencies or the U.S. government, though the experiences of migrants who might not be classified as trafficked also appear in these pages.