Abstract
Human trafficking is broadly recognized as one of the most pressing human rights and security issues of our time, and has captured extensive media, political and academic attention, especially in the United States of America. Since 2000, numerous laws and policies directed at eradicating the human trade and ensuring freedom for those who are enslaved by it have been devised and implemented at the US federal level. In Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, Yvonne Zimmerman provides a focused and sophisticated genealogy of such efforts, examining specifically the anti-trafficking efforts enacted during the administration of President George W. Bush.
Zimmerman contributes to the already developed literature on human trafficking and the sex trade by using a diverse assemblage of government texts—both historic and since 2000—along with the theological and criminological literatures on slavery and trafficking. In so doing she seeks to explore how religious, largely Protestant, values on sexual morality and gender ideals shaped the laws and policies enacted under the Bush Administration. Developing existing feminist theory, Zimmerman explores the influence of puritanical Christian culture on anti-trafficking, advising us that our scrutiny of trafficking laws must account for the role that religion has played in shaping concepts like freedom. She suggests that, in the US context, such concepts are formed within a uniquely Protestant worldview. She therefore identifies a lack of separation between the Church and the State, despite rhetoric to the contrary, which she suggests limits our visions of how to respond to trafficking.
Chapter 1 begins with a review of the history of anti-trafficking legislation in the United States, starting primarily with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA). Through such legislation, Zimmerman suggests that trafficking was solidified as a national, rather than local issue, which the federal government placed at the heart of all its formal responses and accountability mechanisms. Simultaneously, she argues that the TVPA embodied particular understandings of masculinities and femininities that placed trafficking as a pressing issue for government, not because it is unjust, but instead, because it is ‘immoral’, specifically an ‘evil’ (pp. 31–34). By moralizing the issue, she suggests, trafficking becomes connected to proper performances of gender and sex. For instance, Zimmerman finds: The TVPA’s primary objection is … to the abuse of passive, powerless and vulnerable women. … [P]assivity, vulnerability and powerlessness are natural aspects of femaleness, and violence against women is likewise a natural characteristic of maleness … male violence against women cannot be eliminated. At best such violence can be moderated and controlled.
By conceiving trafficking as a special evil, the crime becomes a symptom of spiritual and metaphysical issues, rather than a manifestation of poverty, gender inequality and other social factors. Framing trafficking as a moral issue then conceals its links to broader justice issues, allowing gendered configurations in particular to remain intact. The result is a ‘trickling down’ of religious conceptions of trafficking, gender and sex, through all levels of the anti-trafficking response.
In Chapter 2, Zimmerman explores how this trickling down of religious and theological ideals manifested within the practical response of the Bush Administration. She traces the language of relevant laws and policies and finds that religious symbolism was used to create a moral urgency around trafficking, and to make the punitive response to it ‘a standard of values above the political order’ and therefore ‘absolute’ (p. 55). She suggests trafficking was politically defined as a personal, spiritual problem, and thus one of a set of ‘problems of the heart’ (p. 74). This forged a direct place for trafficking as an issue of sex and of personal responsibility.
In Chapter 4 Zimmerman attempts to explain how this configuration can be explained in light of Protestant philosophy and, in Chapter 4, she explores why such philosophy remains dominant in US culture. In a compelling, if far-reaching, argument, she suggests that the history of Puritanism and Protestantism in the Colonies, as well as the United States, is the reason why religious values penetrate US views of what is moral—especially around marriage and sex. She finds that, in line with Protestant conceptions, ‘“sexual exploitation” … refer[s] first and foremost to sex that fails to conform to the ideology of romantic love. … sexual trafficking dramatizes the epitome of “bad sex”’ (p. 128).
Chapter 5 connects the inclusion of these traditional gender values in anti-human trafficking documents to the demise of force, fraud and coercion—elements integral to the definition of the crime at an international level—within the US context. Zimmerman finds that values around ‘bad sex’ prevailed because in the US-American context these values have now become ‘traditional American values’ rather than just Protestant ones (p. 158, emphasis in original). In this chapter, and the Conclusion, Zimmerman observes that while the Obama Administration has moved beyond merely funding faith-based organizations, it too continues to invoke religious imagery and theological rhetoric around trafficking because these very things have become ‘American’ rather than simply religious. Political speeches made until 2012 are used to prove that the Obama ‘partnerships’ approach emphasizes that ‘sex ought only to be free while labour ought never to be free’ (p. 174, emphases in original). There is, then, a placing of sexual moralities alongside ‘productive labour’, which Zimmerman suggests, reflects Protestant-American outlooks, and shapes freedom in moral terms as the cessation of immoralities (p. 178). The result, she states, is a ‘rescue’ mentality and a failure to engage with a diversity of conceptions of freedom and possibilities beyond trafficking.
In all, Other Dreams of Freedom offers a nuanced and rich account of the US political process in responding to trafficking and, rather than rejecting claims about the gendering of the human trade to propel a broader human rights and empowerment agenda, Zimmerman instead reveals how the anti-trafficking project requires a consideration of the very content of the values that underpin the American state and social order itself. Grounded in rich legal and policy analysis, as well as engagement with diverse theological texts, Other Dreams provides a clever and persuasive cultural analysis of a clearly significant relationship that has hitherto remained unexplored and under-theorized in the anti-trafficking arena. While the book is more of a theological exploration than a criminological text, its content is certainly a valuable contribution to criminological understanding and our appreciation of the nexus between the state, gender regulation and religion. Zimmerman’s observations are suggestive of a need for future research on trafficking in the US-American context to account for the role religion has played in shaping debates and language choices, and I would argue that it is relevant for studies of criminalization more broadly. Her work gives pause for thought in our analysis of the Culture of Control, as she raises many interesting points about the management and control of maleness and femaleness—of sexual relations and morals—as central elements of the state reaffirming its rightful role in responding to trafficking. Her attention to the concept of freedom in Protestant-American terms and of sexual boundedness and limitation, rather than empowerment and engagement, adds a layer to our understanding of control and desire for management rather than abolition in criminalizing, especially with regard to violence against women.
It is perhaps on the very point of conceiving trafficking as violence against women that Zimmerman’s text shows some strain. Zimmerman’s analysis overreaches in its attempt to connect religious imperatives of US policy makers to the construction of the issue as a federal one; she overlooks the international debates that already place the state at the heart of anti-trafficking efforts before 2000, and those that position women at the core of this concern. In my view, another layer that could be added to her account is the ongoing debate between human rights bodies and abolitionists (both feminist and religious), at the international, as well as domestic, levels. These debates result in sharp divisions in the anti-trafficking movement, resulting in efforts to facilitate consensus and appease both sides, and thus bring about a more moderated, state-oriented, response in international law (see Doezema, 2010).
Moreover, Zimmerman largely ignores the existing trafficking legislation in the USA prior to the TVPA, and she only dedicates one-and-a-half pages to considering the regulating of ‘white slavery’ and trafficking in women earlier in the 20th century (pp. 122–124). The influential analysis by Jo Doezema (2010) suggests that this white trafficking regulation was fundamental in connecting the word ‘trafficking’ to sex and gender. Zimmerman’s analysis of this history is thin at best. She fails really to capitalize on how the historical formulation of gender, race and virtue in this earlier era influenced and became a platform for modern responses. In an otherwise innovative cultural and symbolic analysis, Other Dreams of Freedom thereby under-examines the ways that the law structures and is constitutive of future regulation. In accounting for the complex cultural relationships between religion and state in shaping, even limiting, freedom, Zimmerman fails to account for law’s role in reimagining the concept. She centers her analysis on legal instruments and criminalization, but in inviting us to reimagine freedom from engagement and empowerment, she provides no suggestion for the role of law or government in this process, which leaves a point for further research and engagement itself.