Towards critical geographies of anti-human trafficking: Producing and precluding victimhood through discourses,practices and institutions

I Introduction

Human trafficking has been recognised as a global problem, leaving virtually no nation untouched. Working from the understanding of human trafficking as a transnational crime involving the three sequential stages, or elements, of recruitment, movement and exploitation, state and non-state actors have developed a raft of measures to address the problem. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Supress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (hereafter the Trafficking Protocol), developed in 2000 and ratified in late 2003, has provided a framework by which these measures – including legislation, policy and programmatic responses – have developed. Academic work on human trafficking in the social sciences initially proceeded in line with these trends by detailing the causes, nature and extent of trafficking, and profiles of victims. More recently, however, this scholarship has sought to move beyond these early preoccupations and offer more critical perspectives on the nature and direction of anti-trafficking policies and practices. This paper seeks to make an intervention in this emerging critical scholarship by focusing particularly on the efficacy of state/institutional responses to the problem. The paper makes a case for the purchase of recent critical and feminist geopolitical scholarship concerned with securitisation and the exercise of sovereign power in efforts to begin moving towards a conceptually robust basis for progressive scholarly interventions on the nature and orientation of anti-human trafficking responses. This, I suggest, would provide a useful platform from which to begin answering questions about the commitment, motivations and interests of states and other stakeholders in governing anti-trafficking discourses, practices and institutions.

Since the Trafficking in Persons (hereafter TIP) Protocol entered into force in 2003 the number of states ratifying the Protocol and developing domestic legislation and other policy measures to address the problem has more than doubled to reach 173 states in March 2018 (UNODC, 2018). Whilst this is indeed encouraging, some states may not be fully committed to providing a robust whole of government response to human trafficking, despite their accession to the Protocol. This lack of commitment was recently suggested by the United Nations itself. The most recent global report on human trafficking by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2018) identified lack of government commitment and lack of robust data and research as the two clear priority concerns that continue to mitigate against the effectiveness of anti-trafficking work across a range of interventions and sectors. This lack of commitment is exemplified when we consider, for example, the huge gap between the estimated number of trafficked persons globally and the number of formally identified victims. The International Labour Organisation (ILO, 2005) estimates that there are approximately 2.4 million people lured into forced labour at any one time. ¹ Yet, standing in marked contrast to this, the UNODC (2006) has put the number of identified trafficking victims globally at only around 22,000 per year. When considered together, these two statistics suggest that less than 1 per cent of trafficked persons are identified and protected as victims. Similarly concerning are recent figures on the number of trafficking prosecutions, which reveal that two out of every five countries that have ratified the Trafficking Protocol have failed to secure a single trafficking conviction to date (UNODC, 2018).

Reflecting on these statistics and the broader concerns about the lack of effective anti-trafficking responses they appear to exemplify, the key question addressed in this paper is: why have states and other stakeholders that have committed to addressing human trafficking been largely unsuccessful in their efforts to do so? Contrary to much of the existing literature addressing this question, several scholars have suggested that states are not always driven by altruistic or rights-based motivations in supporting and protecting trafficked persons, with many government responses to human trafficking conversely demonstrating tendencies to delegitimise, exclude or discourage trafficked persons from seeking and receiving protections and redress, so narrowing the range of cases/experiences considered as ‘legible’ within an anti-trafficking framework (for example, O’Connell Davidson, 2017; Lewis et al., 2013).

The discussion that follows is buoyed by a recent progress report in this journal overviewing geographical scholarship on human trafficking (Smith, 2017), which suggests that human trafficking as a field of inquiry has animated geographical scholarship only marginally to date, despite significant research on the topic in cognate disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology. As Smith writes, ‘there continues to be a relative dearth of studies of human trafficking in geographic scholarship, despite the unprecedented attention to conceptually-overlapping forms of migration’ (p. 297). Three years earlier Laurie et al. (2015a: 83) also identified a ‘lack of attention to trafficking in geography’. Smith’s report situates human trafficking as a subject of inquiry primarily within population geography. The progress report consequently notes the ‘ascendency of migration studies within the sub-discipline [of population geography]’ (Smith, 2017: 297), with trafficking constituting an urgent and widespread form of forced migration. Notwithstanding the significant ethical, methodological and practical challenges in conducting research with trafficked and exploited migrants (see, for example, Siegel and De Wildt, 2016), which Smith acknowledges, the progress report incites geographers to turn towards the study of human trafficking with the same commitment as commands critical work on other subjects and spaces of the current global ‘migration crisis’. And certainly, published work in geography on human trafficking (Strauss, 2017; Blazek et al., 2017; Blazek and Esson, 2018; FitzGerald, 2016; Laurie et al., 2015a, 2015b) and the related subject of unfree/forced labour (Lewis et al., 2015; Waite et al., 2015; Strauss, 2013, 2018; Strauss and McGrath, 2017; Lerche, 2007; Rogaly, 2008; Anderson and Rogaly, 2008; Buckley et al., 2017) reflects this increasing engagement. Indeed, recent geographical scholarship on both human trafficking and unfree labour also recognises the ways different types of migrant workers are produced and demarcated legally by states and international organisations, and in ways that normalise certain types of exploitative labour situations whilst exceptionalising and valorising others, particularly by being classified as cases of trafficking or not (see also Howard, 2018). This paper responds to, but also moves beyond, Smith’s injunction in two ways: first, by exploring some of the possibilities for other sub-disciplinary contributions to the study of human trafficking beyond population geographies through a focus on recent critical and feminist work appearing within political geography; second, by arguing for greater attention not just to the nature and dynamics of human trafficking, but also to the anti-trafficking responses that have developed over the past 15 years to address the problem.

The remit of this paper does not sit within a scholarly lacuna, and a vibrant interdisciplinary field of work on human trafficking and anti-trafficking has emerged since the TIP Protocol came into force. Of particular relevance to discussion in this paper is the strand of this work that elaborates the human rights abuses that can occur in the name of anti-trafficking. The international NGO Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) produced a ground-breaking study documenting such abuses, including the detention/sheltering of victims for extended periods, lack of remedial justice, and deportation of victims into situations of continued or heightened vulnerability (GAATW, 2007; see also Dottridge, 2017). These critiques tend to locate the failure of anti-trafficking measures in privileging of criminal justice responses over rights-based/victim-centred approaches (Gallagher, 2002) and of ‘sex trafficking’ over broader understandings of human trafficking that centre labour problems/exploitation (Kotiswaran, 2017). Such interventions fit well within the remit of critical and feminist geographical projects that trouble state-centric national security imperatives and call for a heightened engagement with the continual embedding of state-security discourses over human rights, itself reflecting the continued dominance of states as the key subjects of security. Julie O’Connell-Davidson (2017) reflects on the implications of this understanding for anti-trafficking measures: ‘despite being articulated as concern to address the violation of rights belonging to all humankind, the commitment of political leaders in liberal states to the eradication of “trafficking” is born of a preoccupation with state security and sovereignty’ (p. 158). Others have identified the ways this understanding of security in discourses of human trafficking produces responses, primarily in trafficking destinations but also source states, defined by measures directed at restricting and controlling mobility through ‘managed migration’ regimes, resulting in many cases in the heightened vulnerability, rather than enhanced security, of those to whom it is applied (Anderson, 2010; Lewis et al., 2013; FitzGerald, 2016).

The key contribution of this paper is to further ground such critiques conceptually, drawing on recent critical and feminist scholarship on the production of (in)security in geography. Arguably, such a focus may assist in understanding why less than 1 percent of trafficked persons globally are identified and appropriately supported. In the section that follows I briefly elaborate some of the insights from feminist geopolitical foci on the interstices between insecurity, human rights and states made in relation to other mobile and marginalised groups, such as refugees. I then elaborate on the representational frames that characterise media and filmic representations of human trafficking, which I suggest often reinforce state agendas related to the narrowing of the range of experiences of human trafficking considered legitimate. Following this, I examine state practices of bordering and the (re)ordering of sovereign space as they relate to human trafficking activity. As with media representations, bordering processes can bolster state efforts to exclude and deflect victim claims to protection and redress. The final substantive section of the paper examines another mode of exclusion adopted by states in relation to trafficked persons; namely, the role of carceral regimes and institutions in protecting/detaining victims and ‘violators’. The conclusion reflects on some further possibilities for further critical interventions on human- and anti-trafficking to emerge from a focus on the meaning and practice of security/securitisation.

II A critical and feminist geopolitics of anti-human trafficking

Geographical discussions about the governance of human rights claims concerning mobile vulnerable subjects illustrate the potential for critical and feminist geopolitics to interrogate state responses by centring the experiences and perspectives of those marginalised. To date, such scholarship has engaged particularly with the experiences of those deemed to be state security threats, including irregular migrants and asylum-seeking refugees. Foremost amongst these critical projects is work directed to bordering as a state tactic of preclusion and, to use Alison Mountz’s characterisation, of ‘shrinking the spaces of asylum’ (Mountz, 2011). Preclusion is also an imaginative as well as a practical process and engages representational strategies in which geographers have identified the racialised, gendered and aged (amongst others) markers of fear/danger which bind exclusionary bordering tactics to particular bodies and experiences (Pain and Smith, 2008; Christian et al., 2016). Critical discourse analyses of filmic (Carter and McCormack, 2006; Dodds and Carter, 2014) and media (Tazreiter, 2015) constructions of vulnerability and its antithesis (danger) provide a precedent for an engagement with representations of trafficked persons, as well as their Others and their own self-representations (for example, Coutin, 2005). Recent carceral geographies scholarship is similarly relevant to critical discussions of anti-trafficking; not simply because human trafficking is primarily viewed and responded to as a criminal activity, but rather because institutional spaces – even those associated with protection – are often invoked as a key node through which exclusionary politics are enacted (Darling, 2011; Riva, 2017; Bruzzone and González-Araiza, 2019).

Underlying and binding this critical scholarship is a feminist geopolitics that posits the conceptual value of a dialectic of recognition/exclusion (or sometimes legality/illegality) (for example, Hiemstra, 2010). Judith Butler’s (2009) treatise on greivable lives illustrates the operations of power within this dialectic. Her arguments that human rights claimants are understood through a process of framing and representing different experiences in ways that both produce and exclude human rights subjects hold much import for critical discussions of anti-trafficking. Bodies and their histories become differentially marked and managed by states and other actors charged with enforcing securitisation agendas. For Butler, abandonment, rather than protection, constitutes a violent premise through which this organising dialectic is articulated. Critical and feminist geopolitical interventions thus locate and trace the everyday violence perpetrated against subjects marginalised by their rendering as lives ‘not human’ – feared, despised and ultimately not griveable. This violence is, as suggested above, discernible within institutions, practices and, above all, the discursive politics that enact and (de)humanise particular subjectivities and experiences (Butler, 2004; Hyndman, 2010).

It is in the measures of securitisation by states and their potential to create exclusions and vulnerabilities where feminist geographical scholarship engaging with these ideas has been most animated. As Massaro and Williams (2013: 573) suggest, ‘Feminist geopolitics forces the question of who is made more secure by such geopolitical measures’. Traversing a wide range of assemblages and practices of security, geographers have traced the securitisation effects associated with terrorism (Puar, 2007), irregular migrants (Nevins, 2008; Coleman, 2007; Hyndman and Giles, 2011) and refugees and asylum seekers (Mountz, 2003, 2011; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006). This paper argues for a critical feminist geopolitics of anti-trafficking engaging with the possibilities offered by this work. Lobasz (2009) made such a call for a critical feminist politics of anti-human trafficking several years ago, and although she identified the destructive impacts of ‘the social construction of human trafficking, which highlights the destructive role that sexist and racist stereotypes play in constructing the category of trafficking victims’, a critical interrogation of the interstices between representations, practices and institutions in state constructions of and responses to human trafficking is yet to be more fully realised.

III Producing and precluding victims through media and film

Judith Butler’s (2009) treatise on frames of war incites the question of ‘whose life is greiveable?’. Particular ‘frames’ are mobilised according to sentiments that construct (migrant/refugee) subjects in dichotomous binaries that elaborate the differences between victims and criminals, drawing on secondary tropes such as ‘(un)deserving’, ‘(il)legitimate’, ‘(ir)regular’ and so on. Geographers adopting this approach in relation to those cast as undesirable migrants suggest that states re-configure vulnerable refugee subjects according to discursive registers of criminalisation, illegality and fraud. This discursive transformation is reductive: ‘Through…homogenisation emerged the figure of the bogus, criminalised, racialized asylum seeker’ (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008: 257). Homogenisation acts to level the experiences of individuals within broad groups – such as refugees – and also to ‘conflate public discourses about terrorists, refugees, economic migrants, human smuggling and others on the move’ (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008: 258).

These discourses provide a ready outlet in the media. Hodge (2015) exemplifies this focus with his analysis of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders response to unauthorised boat arrivals into Australia. For Hodge (2015: 129), ‘the camera works to solicit and recruit “vulnerable publics” structuring the visual and discursive field of human mobility flows as “security threats” and “national emergencies”’. It is also emotionally provocative, with fear the oft-invoked register of exclusion: ‘Societal fear is actively fuelled by the reiteration of threats and creation of discursive distance between “us” and “them”, producing a crisis in search of a response’. De Genova (2016) has extended discussions of the discursive potential of fear and threat by arguing that those labelled refugees may be seen as ‘victims’ whilst in refugee camps abroad, but as soon as they exert agency (by attempting to seek asylum, for example) they become suspect ‘illegal migrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’. Space and proximity (and the exertion of agency in expressions of mobility) produce shifts in public imaginaries of refugees, particularly where they demonstrate attempts to enter territory, where they become unruly, unmanageable and threatening.

These critical analyses can be located within a rich and extensive body of geographical scholarship on the role of popular media, particularly film, as a conduit through which politics is conducted and imaginative geographies are realised (for example, Dalby, 2008; Dodds, 2008; Raimondo, 2010). This work is largely oriented to geopolitical imaginaries of the ‘war on terror’ and ‘migrant Others’ and, relatedly, to the production of subjects and relations validated and empowered to intervene (such as the iconic and celebrated figure of the American soldier). Simon Dalby’s (2008) critical analysis of the filmic portrayal of the ‘war on terror’, for example, identifies the ways films about recent American military interventions, such as in Somalia, create an imaginary of fear of the (terrorist) Other and mark the righteous American soldier/military as the valid subjects to intervene. These arguments hold much merit for geographers interested in the creation not only of master-narratives and frames of victimhood and expertise in anti-trafficking, but also the legitimacy and agency of particular forms and actors to intervene in/over the lives of trafficked persons, and to recognise the anti-trafficking movement as a construction with discursive limits, biases and potential to act in particular, often highly prescribed and stylised ways. ²

Both the media generally and the film and documentary industry in particular have become important players in the anti-trafficking sector because of their formative roles in producing narratives of (il)legitimate victims. Two types of media engagement with human/anti-trafficking are particularly notable here. The first is the production of victimhood through media reporting of migrant worker issues. The second is the use of film and documentaries to produce specific gendered and racialised experiences as grievable lives. Both these functions rely on the use of the media to create or reinforce a socio-political imaginary based on a divide between recognition (as victims) and disqualification (as migrant Others). Arguably, through a critical analysis of these discursive renderings we can locate protection and justice as it inheres to particular bodies, spaces and sectors and not others. The paradox embedded in these two differentially oriented roles of media emerges from the desire on the one hand to mobilise support for, and awareness of, trafficked persons’ plights, and on the other to exclude exploited migrants from possible characterisations as trafficked. In both these iterations, media is emotionally laden with registers of fear, anger, sympathy, sadness and so on. In geography, Meredith Raimondo (2010) has advanced a similar argument in relation to the filmic production of HIV/AIDS suffering which, she argues, privileges the plight, but not the agency of victims, and in doing so both creates sympathy (the emotive power of film) and a justification for intervention (the political effect of film).

There have been some initial forays into the role of film and media in critiques of anti-trafficking, especially the role of media in orchestrating a socio-political context of fear around exploited migrants as ‘bogus’ trafficking victim claimants. Yea (2019) has examined the ways print media has reinforced binary constructions of deserving victims and underserving migrants. Examining state media depictions in the Singapore context, I argue that exploited male migrant workers’ claims as potential victims of trafficking are re-framed as problems relating to amenities and living conditions, such as inadequate accommodation and food. For female migrants, processes of re-inscription also occur. For migrant domestic workers media portrayals transform exploitative circumstances that clearly characterise situations of human trafficking into individual (and therefore exceptional rather than routine and commonplace) instances of ‘maid abuse’, where the violence of the employer is emphasised over other key problems, such as confinement and unfreedom, financial exploitation and debt bondage. Other maids are rendered ‘criminals’ when they are arrested for ‘harms’ they inflict on employers. The context in which such ‘harms’ occur is always elided from such portrayals, suggesting maids’ attacks on employers are always unprovoked, rendering employers as innocent victims.

Where female migrant sexual labourers and entertainers are concerned, media portrayals work to establish the parameters of victimhood in ways that reiterate a victim frame centring on innocent young girls completely duped into prostitution reported as identified victims, whilst adult women who may have been complicit in some aspects of their illegal migration/work in the sex and entertainment industry, but who nonetheless experience a range of exploitative circumstances such as debt bondage, forced confinement and threats and punishments, are depicted as criminals. Srikantiah (2007) similarly argues that in the US context, deserving victims are socially and legally constructed as ‘iconic victims’, who exhibit a particular – and exceedingly narrow – experience of victimhood in which they are ‘understood to be under a trafficker’s total control, both as to their entry into the United States and as to their subsequent exploitation for forced labour or sex’ (p. 741). She notes the ways other victim types become ‘rejected as underserving’ (p. 196). The role of the media in shaping perceptions about victimhood is an area that begs urgent attention, particularly in trafficking destination states, since those deemed exploited but criminalised remain vulnerable both in their migration sojourns and upon deportation.

One area where research on the role of film and media may further contribute to emerging critiques of anti-trafficking is in examining the use of affect and emotion to create both fear/threat and compassion/sympathy. Tazreiter’s work on the discursive rendering of asylum seekers as threats, for example, provides an important precedent for such critical interventions on anti-trafficking representations. Tazreiter (2015: 106) explores the affective basis for state interventions concerning asylum seekers/irregular migrants in the Pacific, arguing that emotions as practices are developed and circulated through popular discourses about the governance of asylum seekers ‘in the daily news cycle, in parliament, on radio and television talk shows as well as saturating virtual exchange in social media’. The mobilising of a criminal imaginary based on fear and threat, and the production of the criminalised figure of the irregular and opportunistic migrant, enables and justifies the ascendancy of a securitisation discourse to the detriment of one based on human rights and the protections asylum can afford. In scholarship on anti-trafficking some have made similar suggestions, though primarily in relation to the United Kingdom (Nieuwenhuys and Pecoud, 2007; Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010; Anderson, 2010). The migrant sexual labourers in Yea’s (2019) study are similarly subject to state responses centred on raids to ‘net prostitutes’, justified not only on the basis that these women are working illegally in Singapore, but that they are invading Singapore’s ‘heartland’ suburbs by locating their brothels there, so threatening the social and moral fabric of the Singaporean nation. Significantly, such depictions create an opening for states to advance ‘enforcement agendas’ (Hyndman and Mountz, 2008: 254). Hubbard et al. (2008) and Hill (2017) have both examined the ways urban planning and policing have come to both respond to and – for Hill – even orchestrate emotive narratives of ‘sex trafficking’ vis-à-vis voluntary prostitution respectively, with profound, and largely negative, effects for the women at their centre.

Relatedly, the use of film and documentaries to advance anti-trafficking agendas has receiving much criticism for its perpetuation of essentialist frames of victimhood that reproduce gendered and racialised imaginaries of vulnerability and exploitation (Andrijasevic, 2007; Vance, 2011; Aradau, 2004). Indeed, the journal Anti-Trafficking Review (2017) recently devoted an entire special issue to this subject. Yea (2015) has contributed to this critique through an analysis of the use of film to not only raise awareness of human trafficking, but also to mobilise viewers to identify as part of the anti-trafficking movement. Her argument here is. First, that film screenings work to create an ‘affective anti-trafficking public’ which mobilises sympathy, shock and sadness as emotional registers that both mobilise individual involvement in the anti-trafficking movement and also help construct an ‘intimate public’ (cf. Berlant, 2008) in which viewers began to identify as a group through ‘shared morality and ways of expressing emotion that centre on particular forms of sentimentality, such as compassion, outrage, and pity’ (p. 47). Yea’s findings suggest that the use of film in the anti-trafficking movement can reinforce frames of victims as powerless and lacking agency, whilst viewers/activists become empowered to intervene. They can also heighten the prospects of certain types of victims being more readily identified, particularly girls and young women in the sex industry, over others. This gels with some recent studies identifying the organising potential and a/effect of a ‘victim-master narrative’ of human trafficking, and which are provocative for those wishing to further pursue this line of critique (Hill, 2017; Weitzer, 2013; Lindquist, 2013; De Shalit et al., 2014).

A recent thread running through these arguments examines the ways ‘master-narratives’ of victims and their stories both perpetuate new types of anti-trafficking work that rest on the perceived powerlessness and helplessness of (female/child) victims and, very much related to this, the ways anti-trafficking has become a new site for the enactment of (neoliberal) sexual humanitarianism. Nicola Mai’s (2012) use of the term sexual humanitarianism depicts the social and political control that emerges from moralising anxieties around sexual Others and results in specific types of governance mechanisms and infrastructures in anti-trafficking. One of the most powerful new institutions of anti-trafficking associated with the rise of sexual humanitarianism is the ‘rescue industry’ (Agustin, 2007). Others focus on the enormous charity industry that revolves around images and frames of particular kinds of victims rendered through starkly violent and brutal experiences of sexual exploitation (Hoefinger, 2016). Whilst the above arguments are varied, they are nonetheless united by the suggestion that social constructions of ‘iconic victims’ can ultimately do more damage than good in protecting victims and advancing their rights, often simultaneously advancing anti-prostitution and anti-immigration agendas (Anderson and O’Connell Davidson, 2003; Kempadoo, 2005; Agustin, 2007; Doezema, 2010). As we shall now see, establishing the contours of protection and preclusion in trafficking victimhood is not just an imaginative project but has concrete effects in anti-trafficking practice, particularly in relation to bordering processes.

IV Bordering practices and the tactics of preclusion in trafficking victimhood

State practices of bordering constitute an important means of excluding/precluding potential trafficking victims from official determinations of victim status. In the introduction to this paper I elaborated statistics that exemplify the mismatch between the numbers of identified victims of trafficking and the estimated numbers of trafficked persons, indicating the significant disjuncture between trafficked persons receiving supports, protections and, ostensibly justice, and those who sit outside those protections. Rather than looking to the ‘hidden’ and clandestine nature of human trafficking to explain the low numbers of identified victims (Tyldum and Brunovoskis, 2005), it is possible to consider that many trafficking destination states actively preclude trafficked persons from accessing such protections through a range of inherently geographical practices.

In geography this suggestion has been made most emphatically in relation to refugees and asylum seekers. Notwithstanding their significant differences in subjectivity, there are some striking parallels between the experience of seeking asylum and claiming protections as a result of exploitation in the context of human trafficking. Some of these parallels include: the experience of vulnerable and ‘forced’ mobility across international borders; the presence of international conventions specifying standards for the reception and treatment of these vulnerable mobile subjects in destination states; and the perpetuation of vulnerabilities associated with ‘being too mobile’ (for example, by asserting agency in their mobility in search of increased economic or personal security). The treatment of refugees, particularly those who seek asylum, in geographical scholarship has been prolific and variegated in its subject matter, but extant scholarship has developed a highly critical engagement with the tactics of exclusion of asylum seekers by destination states through legal-geographical processes that effectively ‘shrink the spaces of asylum’ (Mountz, 2013). This suggestion of shirking as legal-geographical practice is arguably highly relevant to conceptualising the ways governments attempt to reduce numbers of potential trafficking victims identified or detected.

Alison Mountz’s (2003, 2010, 2011) work illustrates practices where (refugee) exclusion is spatialised through stretching and manipulating jurisdictional boundaries. Despite the incredibly low numbers of identified trafficking victims in destination (and transit) states of trafficking, there has been virtually no attention to the question of whether states deliberately and actively exclude potential victims through similar sorts of processes as we see discussed at length in relation to asylum seekers. Observations from the author’s fieldwork in Asia (Yea, 2019) suggest there are two key ways states exclude potentially trafficked migrants from human trafficking determinations involving the intersection between space and the law: first, by invoking limits to territorial responsibility (what we might refer to as ‘spaces of deflection’) and, second, by creating spaces of non-territory (what we might refer to as ‘spaces of deportability’). The first of these strategies reiterates and magnifies the existing territorial boundaries and limits of the state, whilst the second works by creatively reconfiguring existing territorial spaces, such as the port, the dormitory or, in some cases, the trafficking victims shelter itself to more readily expedite removal. A recent study of trafficked migrant fishers transiting through Singapore provides an exemplary case of both these tactics of preclusion. In Yea’s (2012) study of trafficked fishers from Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines, the Singaporean government aims to engage in practices of jurisdictional deflection of trafficked fishers by arguing that trafficking takes place in international waters rather than in Singapore’s territorial waters. The Singaporean government further argues that neither the agencies recruiting the men not the vessels onto which they are deployed are Singaporean registered or flagged. Whilst none of these arguments can be empirically sustained (see Yea, 2015) the point here concerns the ways states attempt to deflect legal responsibility for the migrant fishers as victims of trafficking. As Mountz and Hiemstra (2012: 464) argue, ‘These practices aim to prevent migrant arrivals on sovereign territory in order to preclude access to the range of legal rights, social services and economic possibilities such entry triggers’. Preclusion through bordering processes can – and, as the examples of the migrant fishers in Southeast Asia reveals, often do – act as a key mode of exclusion from anti-trafficking protections and provisions.

Another line of work engaging with the interstices between trafficking and bordering processes explores the border as a site for the production of subjectivities in trafficking. A recent study of trafficked Nepali women and girls engages with the use of bordering processes by states to examine the creation of subjectivities through ‘return’ migration (Laurie et al., 2015a; Richardson et al., 2009). This study examines the precise ways return home from trafficking confers legal and social subjectivities that profoundly affect victims’ trajectories, particularly relationships and livelihoods, in the longer term. Rather than receiving support or protection upon return, in the Nepali context women and girls who have been trafficked are stigmatised which, in legal terms, can translate into a denial of access to citizenship and the rights that emerge from this. Of particular significance for those seeking to extend critical discussions of the relationship between bordering processes and (in)security in anti-trafficking is their observation that ‘very little research has addressed how the border is configured for and by those who are crossing-back over; those who are “returning home”, in this case from diverse trafficking situations’ (2015a: 83). Their suggestion that ‘bordering processes shape and circumscribe women’s lives in powerful ways’ (2015a: 83) is one that finds resonance in many contexts where borders, trafficking and return/repatriation intersect (for other examples in Asia see Brunovoskis and Surtees, 2013; Surtees, 2017).

Other work has noted the ways the possibility of trafficking can act as a powerful justification by migrant worker destination states for refusing entry to migrants (Andrijasevic and Walters, 2010). The border, in these cases, is mobilised by destination states to exclude migrants, although it is ostensibly framed as a protectionist measure, oriented not to the fulfilment of state security goals but of protecting potential victims. As FitzGerald writes in the context of the United Kingdom, ‘government action to protect vulnerable women in trafficking “source” and “transit” countries such as development aid and repatriation schemes relate to broader legal and political concerns about protecting the UK from unwanted “Others”’ (FitzGerald, 2012: 227).

In sum, a considerable body of critical geographical scholarship on spatial strategies of exclusion of migrant/refugee subjects has important possibilities for illuminating the reasons why so few trafficked persons are identified as victims, and how this (non)identification affects their trajectories, including post-return. This has been largely in response to heightened concern about the withdrawal of protections and asylum responsibilities for refugees by many states and the reframing of refugee issues through state-centric security discourses to the detriment of human rights protections (Mountz and Hiemstra, 2012; Hyndman and Mountz, 2008; Tazreiter, 2015; Mountz, 2011). Drawing on a range of discrete geographical and legislative contexts, this work illustrates the ways destination states are rendered impenetrable to asylum seekers through deliberate and carefully crafted strategies of exclusion aimed at, ‘evad[ing] the provisions of international covenants’ (Mountz and Hiemstra, 2012: 456), such as the refugee convention. This body of scholarship, as the Singapore case study illustrates, holds considerable purchase for those interested in understanding possible tactics of preclusion from trafficking victimhood.

V Carceral regimes

The study of carceral regimes and institutions in geography has proceeded apace recently in light of the growing trend towards the incarceration of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, and the expansion of prison populations and technologies globally (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Mountz et al., 2012). In attempting to propose a new perspective on carceral geographies that is characterised by circuits and connections (rather than boundaries and disconnection), Gill et al. (2018) establish the importance of questioning an approach to incarceration ‘whereby carceral and non-carceral are neatly segregated’ (p. 197). There is much here that is of value in examining the relationships between anti-trafficking and incarceration, particularly the acknowledgement that carceral spaces and institutions no longer simply apply solely to prisons and those legally deemed criminals (see also Mountz et al., 2013; Gill, 2016). Recognising this enables us to consider a diverse range of sites where incarceration occurs, and how it is increasingly decoupled in many of these sites from criminality. And, as Moran (2016) emphasises, it is also important to note that incarcerated subjects have both the power to resist and assert agency.

The relationship between human trafficking and incarceration is not a straightforward one and undoubtedly provides a marked departure from the popular and highly reductionist trope of the slave who is physically held captive (a trope often figuring prominently in media and filmic depictions as discussed above) (Kim, 2006). This is not to deny the experiences of many victims of trafficking that are characterised by the removal of freedom of movement and association through the imposition of heightened physical constraints and the use of confinement (Zimmerman et al., 2011). Identifying the limits to this characterisation nonetheless opens the possibility for examining the relationship between other state and non-state-run institutions and confinement beyond the prison, as well as the prosaic and nuanced resistance projects in which trafficked persons engage within such spaces.

If we turn first to state (and increasingly non-state) anti-trafficking institutions designed to protect victims of trafficking a range of carceral dynamics become evident. The shelter as a space of (further) incarceration for trafficked persons can reproduce the very conditions they face during trafficking, including surveillance and heightened monitoring, conformity to unrealistic rules, removal of freedom of association and of movement, and the inability to work and earn an income (Gallagher and Pearson, 2010). Musto (2016) describes such shelter-based ‘care’ as a form of ‘carceral protectionism’. Lee (2010) addresses these carceral/protectionist dynamics for victims in Asia. Drawing on what Kalhan (2010) has termed a quasi-punitive system of ‘immcarceration’, Lee (2010) found that in both South and Southeast Asia, the protective custody of women and girls in shelters for victims of trafficking is highly paradoxical because it reinforces and magnifies the unfreedoms associated with trafficking and, in that sense, undoes much of the work of protection work oriented towards restoring psycho-social health of women and girls. The NGO The Poppy Project documented similar concerns in the UK (Stephen-Smith, 2008). These types of experiences naturally raise questions about the ways anti-trafficking can heighten the insecurity of victims, often leading them into (paradoxical) situations of renewed vulnerability. Critical feminist perspectives on gendered (in)security can enliven such discussions by connecting gendered (and often racialised) protectionist measures and discourses to anxieties of states over unruly (foreign) bodies and their biopolitical governance (Dixon and Marston, 2011).

Carceral geographies also attend to resistance projects by those contained (Moran, 2016). The very little work on this subject in relation to trafficked persons tends to reinforce the common perception that people who are trafficked cannot exercise agency and resist during their trafficking experiences, and that any assertion of agency comes primarily through their involvement in legal proceedings against their traffickers (as in Meyers, 2014). However, arguably, even in situations of physical confinement and surveillance within trafficking and anti-trafficking, individuals can demonstrate the capacity to act. In a study of women trafficked to US military-oriented bars and clubs in South Korea, Yea (2016) examined the everyday spaces of confinement and agency within the bars themselves. Drawing on work in carceral geography engaging with the use of space and sight in prisons (Van Hoven and Sibley 2008), the analysis demonstrates the capacity for those physically confined in spaces of trafficking to resist the impositions of traffickers/bosses and attempt to re-work their situations. Stereotypical images of trafficked persons as slaves held captive in muted and violently repressed ways are otherwise likely to remain a prominent trope with often profound implications for the ways trafficked people’s situations are understood and how researchers, practitioners and state officials interact with trafficked persons post-trafficking. Thus, interpretations of trafficked persons as lacking agency and voice exert a powerful influence over statist and non-government institutions oriented to protecting (female) victims, as suggested by those advancing critiques of the carceral protectionism that inheres to shelter-based protection. In this sense there are palpable connections between stereotypes of victimhood and protectionist institutions and practices that, in this case, find exemplary expression in ‘the shelter’.

Detailed ethnographic attention to the situations of trafficked persons is also evocative of the ways reductionist and often raw portrayals of physical captivity and confinement often fail to capture the complexities of (im)mobility in situations of trafficking and post-trafficking. In discussions of resistance and agency of trafficked persons, and despite popular portrayals, many trafficked persons are not forcibly confined or held under lock and key. The use of tactics of control and obedience can extend beyond stark physical devices of captivity, including the use of threats and punishments designed to intimidate and discipline trafficked subjects. Some trafficked persons can leave their place of residence or work, sometimes unaccompanied, and move about more of less ‘freely’ (Hopper and Hidalgo, 2006). In fact, one of the most urgent questions for those researching human trafficking is how to understand the palpable nature of control without physical constraint (see, for example, Aradau, 2008). This is an urgent research task not least because victims of trafficking who have the demonstrated opportunity to leave and fail to do so are often perceived as false or ‘diluted’ victims and so disqualified from legal definitions of trafficking (Brysk, 2009).

In sum, critical scholarship on the geographies of incarceration is well-positioned to enliven analyses of protectionist institutions of anti-trafficking. Similar modes of control, (in)visibility and removal that states undertake to control, contain and exclude unruly subjects are evidenced by detention centres, shelters and off-shore processing facilities in relation to both asylum-seeking refugees and irregular migrants (Mountz and Hiemstra, 2012; Martin, 2012). Such carceral spaces also present these subjects as both temporary and removable (Gill, 2009; Darling, 2011) – an observation that illustrates the approach of many destination states for trafficked persons.

VI Conclusion

This paper has drawn on recent writings within and beyond geography emerging from a critical and feminist geopolitics to suggest the purchase of this work in advancing scholarly interventions on anti-trafficking representations, practices and institutions. Discussion in the paper focused on three inter-related areas where such a task could usefully proceed: the geopolitics of film and media; the geographies of bordering and exclusion; and carceral regimes, spaces and institutions respectively. The paper responded to observations made in Smith’s (2017) recent progress report on human trafficking in this journal, by aiming to extend the possibilities for critical engagements on human trafficking from within and beyond the discipline. But rather than focusing on human trafficking as the key subject of inquiry, the paper elaborated the importance of scholarly engagements centring on anti-trafficking as a discursive, practical and institutional formation undertaken by states and other anti-trafficking stakeholders. Population geography has tended to study human trafficking as an issue concerned with the movement of vulnerable population groups, causes of vulnerability, the exact nature of migration and labour/sexual exploitation and, early on, the mapping of trafficking patterns and geographical distribution of victims (as in Kangaspunta, 2003). The conceptual and theoretical lenses advanced through feminist geopolitical scholarship on the politics of representation, mobility, borders and incarceration, I suggested, has the potential to enrich critical engagements with a wide array of further topics in the study of human trafficking, some of which can directly challenge the high modernist intent behind many earlier exercises in documentation and characterisation of ‘the problem’ of trafficking.

Important issues to emerge by adopting this optic towards anti-trafficking include the exclusion of victims with possible claims to redress under anti-trafficking supports through spatial tactics; representations of human trafficking through media and, in particular, film that discursively frame both legible victims and illegible migrants/criminals; and regimes, institutions and spaces of incarceration that act to contain victims. These three topics, I would further suggest, may be approached not as discrete and separate areas of inquiry but, rather, are co-constitutive in developing an understanding of a broader exclusionary impulse in anti-trafficking responses. An example of this might be the ways filmic and media framing of victims on the one hand and migrants/criminals on the other are reproduced in migration/security policies affecting the deportation of many exploited migrants. Another example that demonstrates this productive interplay is the carceral protectionist orientation of shelters for victims of trafficking whose institutional strictures follow a narrowly ascribed victim persona established discursively through these same media and filmic representations. These two examples are by no means exhaustive and many other connections may be drawn to illuminate the interstices between the production of victims/migrant Others within and their preclusion from anti-trafficking regimes. In short, the problematic of production within and preclusion from anti-trafficking supports is bolstered and, in many cases, actively created through complex and variegated tactics of re-bordering, incarceration and (media) framing processes that collectively create and institutionalise a highly selective and narrow range of experiences and gendered/labouring subjects whilst simultaneously marginalising the human/labour rights and social justice claims of an untold number of Others.

Such contributions, I suggested in the paper, would not only build on the growing remit of a critical multi-disciplinary body of scholarship on human trafficking and anti-trafficking infrastructures that has emerged over the last 15 years but theoretically and conceptually enliven it by considering the operations of an exclusionary impulse that runs through much of the state activity that operates in the name of anti-trafficking. Such critical assessments of the effectiveness of anti-trafficking responses have expanded because of increasing disillusionment with the generalised failure of anti-trafficking measures to reduce the incidence of human trafficking, to protect victims and provide access to justice, and to stem the vulnerability of ‘at risk’ groups to trafficking. At the heart of critical and feminist geopolitical approaches is a concern with disclosing the operations of power within the everyday and in individual lives. Connecting the scales of the individual, state and global, these perspectives can enrich and extend such assessments.

The above examples by no means exhaust the possibilities for a theoretically informed critical engagement with anti-trafficking drawing on feminist geopolitical approaches. Building on Strauss’s (2017) intervention on trafficking classifications, for example, there is much scope for further examination of practices by which states disqualify potential victims from protections, particularly since those disqualified often remain vulnerable and without the safeguards of either anti-trafficking or other human rights instruments. Similarly, the bio-political management of those recognised as victims as they negotiate the subjectivities of victimhood, spaces of ‘protection’, processes of criminal justice and, for most, ultimately experiences of deportation, have profound effects not only for victims, but for their families and communities. The discussion of spaces of incarceration that emerge from anti-trafficking institutions, such as shelters, provokes a broader question about the precise ways biopolitical management of victims heightens, rather than ameliorates, the degree of insecurity felt by trafficked persons. Scrutinising the discursive construction of key subjects of human trafficking by both criminal justice and development stakeholders also lies at the heart of a critical feminist engagement with the role of representations in producing subjects through representational practices. Representations of communities and ‘target populations’ that inform interventions in the name of building resilience and reducing vulnerability in ‘at risk’ or ostensibly ‘vulnerable’ communities through projects aimed at improving livelihoods or raising awareness, for example, provide additional scope for those wishing to further cast a scrutinising gaze in the direction of anti-trafficking representations and practices. For those within and beyond the discipline of geography, exploring the multitude of possible ways the state and other (non-government) anti-trafficking stakeholders can act as agents for the magnification of insecurity in the lives of trafficked people remains as relevant a challenge now as it did 15 years ago when anti-trafficking infrastructures began to burgeon across the globe.