“These are people that are horrible people bringing in women mostly, but bringing in women and children into our country. Human trafficking, … we’re going to have a strong border. And the only way you have a strong border is you need a physical barrier. You need a wall.”
– Donald Trump
“No humanitarian nation can allow this deadly trafficking to continue.”
– Priti Patel and Vincent Biruta
Is there anything as disingenuous as the architects and enforcers of state violence using the language of compassion to excuse the militarisation of borders? Over recent decades, there has been increased posturing from such figures on broadly-named issues of ‘human trafficking’, ‘modern slavery’ and ‘people smuggling’. The policies and legislation designed to confront these issues are symbolic of broader carceral and nationalist approaches to such global challenges, and represent an utter refusal from states to confront the root causes of exploitation, inequality, and migration, with states opting instead for a reductive punitive and exclusionary approach. In this piece, I’ll look at how ‘anti-trafficking’ has been utilised again and again to flatten and over-simplify the complex conditions, drivers, and actors of migration and labour, and examine how border-focused responses to trafficking have consistently relied on the criminalisation, victimisation, and neglect of those ostensibly being ‘protected’. These responses ultimately serve to produce and maintain gendered and racialised structures of harm and inequality.
The trauma, exploitation and violence suffered through trafficking, migration, and abusive work is undeniable, as is the need to find workable solutions that centre the needs and agency of those most affected. In critiquing responses to these conditions, we in no way want to undermine the realities of these experiences. However, responses to these phenomena that centre migration control, state sovereignty, and criminalisation are fundamentally incapable of addressing such harms, and indeed overwhelmingly produce and reproduce the conditions that make the vulnerability to exploitation possible.
Heroes, Villains, and Victims
Part of the complexity of the anti-trafficking debate comes from the ambiguities around what exactly constitutes trafficking and exploitation, and questions of intention and consent. Such ambiguities partly explain the ‘novel assemblages’ of actors seemingly in coalition in anti-trafficking campaigns, from NGOs and activists to states and law enforcement. Dominant approaches, however, tend to converge to produce and sustain a particular narrative replete with pernicious ‘evil villains’, innocent, passive ‘victims’, and moral-crusading ‘heroes’, distinctly gendered and racialised, in a framing that locates the issues as ‘external to Europe and untethered to border imperialist power’, inevitably resulting in coercive migration controls.
This is particularly true in relation to sex work and prostitution. Much of the framing of anti-trafficking has emphasised sexual exploitation: it is the first example of exploitation given in the UN’s Trafficking Protocol, and was central to the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, consequently shaping the US-issued ‘Trafficking in Persons’ (TIP) Report and informing states’ anti-trafficking responses across the world through the report’s ‘name and shame’ style of ranking. The horrific stories of those coerced into sex work, predominantly but not exclusively women, and the exploitative and dangerous conditions often experienced are documented to some extent elsewhere, though inevitably many stories remain obscured. Yet the tendency of anti-trafficking responses to sweep all women, or all those in sex work, into the net when ‘catching victims’ fails to solve this problem, and is to the detriment of those affected. Instead, the diverse experiences of those who migrate are flattened in a search for ‘perfect victims’, inviting paternalistic and punitive responses that infantilise and immobilise those concerned. In her exceptional study of the ‘victim subject’, Kapur explores such policies, locating them within ‘the representation of the Third World woman as thoroughly disempowered, brutalized and victimized: a representation that is far from liberating for women’.
This is often contingent on a perception of victimhood as innocence, a term common to police and NGO operations. The victim must uphold this status: she ‘cannot be angry, or take action, for in this case she is not deserving of help’. The consequences of failing to meet such criteria are significant, demonstrating states’ hierarchical ascription of rights. When sex work is concerned, workers are treated as criminals first and victims second, and policing reflects this: ‘rescue missions strongly resemble enforcement sweeps’. Sex workers, like ‘irregular migrants’, are viewed as a threat to state power. The state responds in turn: as sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith emphasise, ‘[c]riminalisation grants the police power over sex workers, and at the same time creates points of leverage which can be exploited by predators’. Through the criminalisation of sex work therefore, as with the criminalisation of ‘irregular’ migration, conditions are worsened across the board, emboldening employers, ‘traffickers’, and authorities alike to enact violence on those supposedly being protected. This is not limited to anti-trafficking, as broader responses to violence against women discipline women to suit the state and capital’s needs, and heteronormative and patriarchal structures.
There is a constant demand from states, border enforcement and international conventions themselves to demonstrate one’s innocence, or more generally to conform to standards of the ‘perfect victim’. Governments happily wield this image of the ‘deserving’, ‘legitimate’ refugee as an excuse to heighten restrictions on those they deem to fall outside of this metric. British Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s tirade on whether or not fear of persecution for your gender or sexuality is “sufficient to qualify for protection” is arguably exemplary of the logic contained within the 1951 Refugee Convention and similar agreements: by setting high standards on who should be allowed to migrate, time and again it is states who are left to decide on who best fits this category. Unsurprisingly, this provokes excruciating and re-traumatising processes of interrogation for those who are seeking protection, and makes safe routes virtually unassailable for those whose reasons for migrating are complex and driven by factors outside of the refugee convention.
Disciplining the ‘Transnational Subaltern Subject’
Anti-trafficking policies have often been used to immobilise and deny agency to women en masse. Nepal is a notorious example of this, where intense restrictions have been imposed on women’s ability to migrate, including rules that require the permission of a husband or male guardian. Within a migration perspective, this ‘victim’ is inextricably tied to a paternalistic and prejudicial ‘Othering’, projecting a distinct ‘foreignness’ that ‘must be pitied, but … kept out’. The Khartoum Process exemplifies the logics of European states funding policies of containment, revealing anti-trafficking projects’ aim to ‘keep the Native home.’ What happens to the apparent ‘victim’ is of little concern, so long as she doesn’t arrive at European shores.
Such framings have serious implications for the agency of those involved. What supposedly distinguishes ‘trafficking’ from ‘smuggling’ is the question of consent; the separate protocols for smuggling and trafficking that accompanied the Convention Against Transnational Crime, are representative of this imagined binary. Yet the decisions involved in processes of migration are far more complex than a simple voluntary/involuntary dichotomy. O’Connell Davidson looks at various instances of what might be called ‘free choice trafficking’, with an illuminating example of Nigerian migrants seemingly consensually engaging in ‘sex slavery’ in Italy as a means to an end. She argues this represents a broader question of migration as ‘a temporal strategy’, in which debt and violence are knowingly suffered in pursuit of better future conditions.
Debt problematizes much of the discussion around ‘voluntary’ versus ‘involuntary’ migration, labour, and conditions. Debt can come from expensive visa and residency costs, or ‘illegal’ migration services. It is a key feature of systems such as the Kafala system in the Gulf states, and is a common result of the increasing role of states and private agencies in facilitating contracts for migrant workers that resemble indentured servitude. ‘Status’ is central here, as the hierarchy of rights that come with citizenship, labour, and residency laws are fundamental in cultivating conditions for dependency, exploitation, and vulnerability under capitalism. The ‘right to quit’ is one of the few ‘freedoms’ at times granted to workers in what would otherwise be seen as trafficking or ‘modern slavery’, yet as has been pointed out, such a right is virtually meaningless if the worker is in debt. As Kapur points out, the ‘disadvantaged migrant woman becomes the ideal worker’. Anti-trafficking and migration control thus play a disciplinary role: the transnational subject must submit themselves to capital, exploitation, and a ‘highly conservative moral agenda’.
Within destination states, state resources are directed far more towards migration control than towards preventing the exploitation of workers. Fudge and Strauss argue migrant domestic workers are ‘rendered unfree at the point of contract’; it is through contact with the law that vulnerability emerges. This can have fatal consequences, as in the Rantsev case, in which policing and immigration enforcement took priority over a migrant worker’s wellbeing. This puts workers and migrants in an increasingly difficult position, in which greater attention on poor conditions tends to be accompanied with punitive interventions from the state. The UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 is an effective example of this. Any ‘humanitarian’ aspects of the act were completely undermined by the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts, expanding the border’s presence in everyday lives and creating conditions ripe for exploitation. Indeed, efforts to centre the exploitative conditions of migrant domestic workers in the build-up to the 2015 Act ultimately led to such migratory routes being closed off altogether, and an expanded jurisdiction of criminal law over the issue more broadly. Anti-trafficking responses that centre migration control thus consistently threaten the ‘right to locomotion’ and the safety of ‘victims’, migrants, and workers alike.
The very framing of ‘modern day slavery’ for these purposes is highly problematic. Figures from policy-makers, police officers and the Vatican make grotesque comparisons between contemporary issues of trafficking and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (the Vatican, for example, explicitly describing prostitution as ‘worse’). Border-imperialist governments use such language to construct an image of themselves as white knights: as Emily Kenway highlights, the 2019 UK Conservative Party manifesto stated “From helping to end the slave trade to tackling modern slavery, the UK has long been a beacon of freedom and human rights – and will continue to be so”. As activists such as Robyn Maynard and Harsha Walia have argued, this represent a gross appropriation of Black abolitionist struggles, where the language of abolition is weaponised and turned towards the criminalisation of mobility, overwhelmingly of Black and Brown populations. Fundamentally, responses to the so-called ‘modern day slavery’ betray a gross hypocrisy from states when it comes to the ‘right to locomotion’, instead developing and legitimising the structures that restrict such freedoms, pushing those suppodesly being ‘protected’ or ‘saved’ into ever-more precarious and dangerous conditions of movement and labour.
Transnational Criminals and Migration Control
The dominant framework of ‘anti-trafficking’, then, has been one of criminality and exclusion. Nowhere is this better represented than in the Trafficking Protocol attached to the 2000 UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. Kotiswaran identifies the Protocol as an instrument of ‘transnational criminal law’, while Anderson contrasts it to the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families, noting the stark difference in ratification figures; it is unsurprising that states have been overwhelmingly more willing to sign up to what has been described as a ‘blank cheque’ in anti-trafficking responses over a convention of human rights obligations. O’Connell Davidson highlights how the Trafficking Protocol’s preoccupation with ‘illegal immigration’ allows for authorities to position immigration enforcement as ‘frontline actors’ when it comes to Victims of Trafficking (VoTs). The emphasis on migration control as opposed to human rights is evident in the text of the Protocol itself, with Articles 5 and 11, on Criminalization and Border Measures respectively, using assertive language such as ‘shall adopt’ and ‘shall strengthen’, whereas articles on the assistance, protection, and status of victims are consistently suggestive, asking states to ‘consider’ protective measures. We can see such an approach replicated in state practice, visible in the UK’s 2022 Nationality and Borders Act; while then-Home Secretary Priti Patel introduced the legislation using the language of protecting ‘the lives of the vulnerable’ from ‘criminals’, the Act imposes greater scrutiny for identification of potential victims of trafficking and extends powers of disqualification for the state. The Illegal Immigration Act of 2023, of course, goes even further in blocking the access to asylum and modern slavery protections.
A related effect of the ‘transnational criminal’ framing is the separation of the individual from the different contexts that drive migration, exploitation, and crime. This is part of a broader process of ‘depoliticization’ that ignores structural inequalities as drivers for movement and proximity to vulnerability and exploitation, empowering the state to exclude, criminalise and punish instead. This positions states as ‘forces for good, saving goodies from baddies’ and legitimises the border and the violence of exclusion, detention, and deportation. The migration control approach is representative of broader carceral methods of governance, in which individual harms are magnified in place of underlying conditions. As Angela Davis writes of the prison, ‘it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.’ This allows for what Clemente describes as the ‘acquittal of the state’ and its role in producing and upholding economic, civil, and social conditions of inequality.
Carceral responses feed into narratives of destination countries as ‘civilised’, resulting in strategies ‘reminiscent of imperial interventions in the lives of the native subject’. This obscures local instances of trafficking, exploitation, and indentureship, such as those resulting from the 13th Amendment in the US, Overseas Domestic Worker programs in the UK, or Temporary Foreign Worker Programs in Canada, to list but some examples. Indeed, many lawful systems of migration and labour leave workers in extremely precarious and dependent positions. Addressing such issues would necessitate a much deeper reckoning with national and global structures of inequality and existing international frameworks of capital, labour, and production. Any approach that fails to look further than ‘bad apples’ is incapable of addressing the real harms that occur when those who have been made vulnerable by systemic inequality, underdevelopment, and a myriad of other factors are forced into unsafe and surreptitious migration routes are areas of work.
Fighting for the Freedom to Move
The realities of human trafficking are complex. The experiences of the countless people who suffer conditions of exploitation, coercion, violence and a great number of other harms are, quite frankly, beyond the scope of this paper to cover. One thing, however, is clear: there is no simple fix to these issues. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we reject simplistic narratives from states that reduce the actors involved to malicious, ‘foreign’ criminals, crusading saviours, and helpless victims. Such narratives have time and time again been used to deprive people of the ‘right to locomotion’ and instead bolster territorial sovereignty and the power to exclude. Fundamentally, these solutions do not work. Punitive and state-centric responses to movement invariably push those seeking to move into increasingly surreptitious and clandestine routes, in increasingly vulnerable and exploitative conditions, and have consistently reinforced states’ powers to police, detain, and exclude those deemed ‘vulnerable’ on distinctly gendered and racialised lines.
Meaningful solutions to the exploitative and violent conditions of migration, labour, and survival must centre those most affected, not as victims but as agents in their own lives. We should see movement as an act of agency, of empowerment, recognising that these decisions are not taken lightly. Ultimately, if people did not have to pursue ‘irregular’ routes of migration, there would be no market for trafficking. People will move regardless of the risks incurred, and we should all be able to make such decisions in pursuit of a better future for ourselves or our loved ones; criminalization simply serves to make such routes more hazardous. It is only through the dismantling of the systems of immobilisation, incarceration, and immigration control, and through a deep commitment to the ‘right to locomotion’, that we can create such a future.
We must be unwavering in our commitment to the freedom to stay, and the freedom to move, for all. Most importantly, we should listen to the voices and recognise the work of those most affected in challenging the multiple forms of border violence. Below are some organisations and resources from those fighting against criminalisation and border securitisation; we encourage you to share similar organisations and campaigns, and ways of supporting them.
- Captain Support organise across Europe in support of those criminalised and persecuted for facilitating the freedom of movement across borders.
- SWARM is a UK-based movement founded and led by sex workers fighting for the global decriminalisation of sex work.
- Butterfly is an Asian and Migrant Sex Worker Support Project in Canada.
- The Migrant Sex Workers Project is a grassroots group of migrants, sex workers, and allies organising around the intersecting issues of migrant justice and sex workers’ rights in Canada.
- The National Network of Sex Workers in India brings together different organisations across the country fighting for decriminalisation and sex workers’ rights.
- The Iuventa crew were conducting Search & Rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2016 and 2017 until their boat was confiscated by the Italian authorities, and crew members accused of aiding unauthorised entry. They provide examples of numerous other groups and individuals under similar scrutiny.
- We recommend this conversation between Harsha Walia, Robyn Maynard, Chanelle Gallant, and Elene Lam on Sex Work, Policing, and Border Abolition.
Written by @myleshoward94.
Footnotes with specific citations have been removed from this text for legibility. Cited sources are included in the further reading section below. If you would like a copy of this text with footnotes included, please email booksagainstborders@gmail.com
Further Reading:
- Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories, 2003)
- Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control, (OUP 2013)
- Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (CUP 2008),
- E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ [2022] 110 Geo LJ 445
- Elizabeth Faulkner, ‘The Victim, the Villain and the Rescuer: The Trafficking Of Women And Contemporary Abolition’ [2018] Journal of Law, Social Justice & Global Development, 21, 1
- Emily Kenway, The Truth About Modern Slavery (Pluto, 2021)
- Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha, Against Borders: The Case for Abolition, (Verso 2022)
- Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, (Haymarket 2021)
- Judy Fudge and Kendra Strauss, ‘Migrants, Unfree Labour, and the Legal Construction of Domestic Servitude: Migrant Domestic Workers in the UK’, in Cathryn Costello and Mark Freedland (eds.), Migrants at Work (OUP 2014) 160
- Julia O’Connell Davidson, ‘The Right to Locomotion? Trafficking, Slavery and the State’, in Prabha Kotiswaran (ed.), Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labour and Modern Slavery (CUP 2017) 157
- Julia O’Connell Davidson, ‘Troubling Freedom: Migration, Debt, and Modern Slavery’, [2013] Migration Studies 1 2 176
- Julia O’Connell Davidson, ‘will the real sex slave please stand up?’, [2006] feminist review 83 4
- Maggy Lee, ‘Human Trafficking and Border Control in the Global South’, in Katja Franko Aas and Mary Bosworth (eds.), The Borders of Punishment (OUP 2013) 128
- Mara Clemente, ‘The Counter-trafficking Apparatus in Action: Who Benefits from it?’, [2022] Dialectical Anthropology 46 267
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness, (first published 2010, Pengiun 2019)
- Molly Smith and Juno Mac, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (Verso, 2020)
- Oscar Martínez, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America, translated by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz (Verso 2016)
- Prabha Kotiswaran, ‘From Sex Panic to Extreme Exploitation: Revisiting the Law and Governance of Human Trafficking’, in Kotiswaran (ed.), Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labour and Modern Slavery (CUP 2017) 1
- Ratna Kapur, ‘The ‘Other’ Side of Globalization: The Legal Regulation of Cross-Border Movements’, [2003] Canadian Woman Studies 22 3, 4, 6
- Ratna Kapur, ‘Travel Plans: Border Crossings and the Rights of Transnational Migrants’ [2005] 18 Harv Hum Rts J 107
- Ratna Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the ‘Native’ Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’ [2002] 15 Harv Hum Rts J 1
- Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity, and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl, (Edward Elgar 2018)
- Header image credit – Right to Remain
Books Against Borders 