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Anti-anti-trafficking? Toward critical ethnographies of human trafficking
... Atualmente, existe um amplo consenso entre atores estatais e não estatais, no que diz respeito ao combate ao "tráfico", discursivamente enquadrado como uma violação criminosa dos direitos humanos. No entanto, desde o final da década de 1990, um corpo crescente de estudos "anti antitráfico" (Marcus & Snajdr, 2013) tem chamado a atenção para a agenda controversa relacionada com o combate ao tráfico. ...
... Tais interesses são ainda mais complicados devido aos estereótipos e expectativas racistas e sexistas em relação às vítimas (Kempadoo et al., 2012;Lee, 2011). O impacto dessas medidas sobre a mobilidade e a cidadania de mulheres e homens traficados, e trabalhadores migrantes que nem sempre são rotulados como tal, tem levado a pesquisa mais crítica a questionar o uso da categoria conceitual de "tráfico" (Agustín, 2007;Marcus & Snajdr, 2013). ...
O artigo analisa o papel das organizações não governamentais (ONG) na construção do cam-po de combate ao tráfico de pessoas, isto é, na conceituação do tráfico e das suas vítimas e na elaboração de políticas e práticas para o combater. Mobilizando entrevistas, observação e investigação documen-tal e adotando uma perspetiva histórica, o artigo incide na análise da experiência portuguesa. O artigo argumenta que, em contextos caracterizados por um alto nível de institucionalização do campo de combate ao tráfico e por uma fragilidade estrutural da sociedade civil organizada, as ONG envolvidas no processo de terceirização dos serviços antitráfico não interpelam as políticas e as práticas do comba-te ao tráfico-incluindo a controversa abordagem securitária, focada na persecução dos traficantes, que caracteriza o combate ao tráfico. Tais práticas incluem o silenciamento de qualquer debate sobre a prostituição, pelo menos no aparelho de combate ao tráfico. Palavras-chave: tráfico de pessoas, ONG, estudos críticos do tráfico, Portugal.
... With the influx of trafficking for sexual exploitation and the feverish awareness-raising of the issue by international organizations (Lee 2007, 2;Marcus and Snajdr 2013) came a gradual Peruvian antitrafficking response. The response would eventually span research and analysis, public campaigns and prevention strategies, rescue and rehabilitation, and the complexities surrounding law-making and prosecution. ...
Rising gold prices have led to the expansion of illegal gold mining in Peru's southwestern Amazon region. This is accompanied by an increase in sex trafficking of Indigenous girls and women from the southern Andes. This article focuses on the emerging economic and cultural connections that span Andean and Amazonian mining and sex trafficking migration in the region. The notion of precarity is applied to assess victims’ agency within a racialized, neoliberal, informal labor market at the fringes of global capitalism. In tracing the trajectory of trafficked adolescents from highlands to lowlands and, in some cases, into state‐run shelters, the role of padrinazgo (patronage of godparents) is explored. It is argued that trafficked subjects’ choices are circumscribed by padrinazgo‐type relationships with traffickers, according to which they pursue a “preferred precarity” across competing existential, vocational, and subjective states. El aumento de los precios del oro ha visto la sorprendente expansión de la minería ilegal de este metal en la región amazónica del suroeste de Perú, acompañada de un auge en el tráfico sexual de niñas y mujeres indígenas. Este artículo se enfoca en las conexiones económicas y culturales emergentes que abarcan la minería andina y amazónica y la migración del tráfico sexual al sur de los Andes. Aplicamos la noción de precariedad para evaluar la agencia de las víctimas dentro de un mercado laboral informal racializado y neoliberal al margen del capitalismo global. Al rastrear la trayectoria de las mujeres víctimas del tráfico sexual, desde las tierras altas hasta las tierras bajas y, en algunos casos, hasta los albergues estatales, exploramos el papel del padrinazgo –“patrocinio de los padrinos” – en esta forma de tráfico ilegal de personas. Se argumenta que las elecciones de las víctimas de la trata están circunscritas por relaciones de tipo padrinazgo con los traficantes, según las cuales persiguen una “precariedad preferida” a través de estados existenciales, vocacionales y subjetivos.
... The critique of "anti-anti-trafficking" (Marcus and Snajdr 2013) scholars extends to the controversial and mostly ineffective efforts that have been made to assist people labeled as "victims." In this regard, a substantial amount of mainstream literature, as well as the efforts of national and international agencies, focuses on "trafficking"-more so than current neo-liberal migration, labor, and gender regimes-as the cause of the physical and mental health issues of its "victims" (see, e.g., Le 2018;Nodzenski et al. 2020). ...
Based on long-term ethnographic research, including documentary research, qualitative interviews and observations made at a Portuguese shelter for “sex trafficked women,” this paper explores the counter-trafficking apparatus questioning who benefits from it. The discussion explores the contrasts between an institutional commitment to constructing this apparatus and the actuality of procedural efforts purporting to support “trafficking victims.” I argue that the higher goal of building a counter-trafficking apparatus — in itself a political objective — limits the rights of “victims,” making processes that claim to be part of their protection de facto neo-liberal anti-political exercises in reenforcing bureaucratic state power.
... SeeKempadoo and Davydova (2012),Molland (2012),Marcus and Snajdr (2013), andMahdavi (2016). ...
... The paternalism of anti-trafficking policies, both locally in the UK and globally, represent victims of trafficking as passively accepting exploitation, global economic asymmetry and poor living conditions. All victims of trafficking, at least as they are portrayed by the media and antitrafficking activists, are connected to a master narrative that includes elements of exploitation and abuse, (Marcus & Snajdr, 2013). This narrative is institutionally located in both the criminal justice and immigration systems, further disrupting the ability of individuals claiming to be victims of trafficking to access the rights that accompany this status. ...
This thesis focuses on the role of front-line workers in constructing individuals as eligible, or ineligible, for the status of victim of human trafficking. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this thesis brings the sociology of social problems into discussion with an analysis of public policy and socio-legal studies to develop new empirical evidence of instability in the victim of trafficking status.
Claims are made at the international and national level in the UK that policies to tackle human trafficking are based on a human rights approach. Multiple claims are embedded within this claim about the nature and scale of human trafficking, presenting an idealised view of the victim of trafficking as clearly defined. This perspective is contested in encounters between claimants to the victim of trafficking status and front-line workers. The decisions and actions of front-line workers about the eligibility of concrete individuals to the status of ‘victim of trafficking’ highlight the use of multiple definitions of human trafficking in different institutions. These decisions are influenced by the front-line worker’s assessment of the credibility of the claimant; the multiple accountabilities that apply to front-line workers; and temporality. The discretion to select a definition that is most useful for the context within which the front-line worker operates identifies them as street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980).
Framing sex trafficking as primarily a law enforcement and criminal justice issue, the U.S. State Department funds global South NGOs to work with the Indian legal system to strengthen prosecutions of sex trafficking cases. Though rescuing sex workers and training them to testify against alleged traffickers is key to these interventions, and though rescued sex workers do sometimes testify, my ethnographic research and interviews with NGOs, legal actors, and sex workers in India revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This article explores the reasons behind this reported pattern, as well as the challenges faced by those who do testify. Through these findings, it critically examines the possibilities and limitations of the prosecutorial focus of U.S.-driven, NGO-mediated anti-trafficking interventions. It situates anti-trafficking interventions centered on “victim-witness testimony” in the Indian socio-legal context, demonstrating how prosecution is shaped by a range of factors, circumstances, and contingencies involving foreign-funded NGOs, the procedures, political economy and culture of the Indian legal system, individual legal actors’ motivations, and rescued sex workers’ complex subjectivities, experiences, choices, and perceptions of justice. It draws upon and contextualizes these findings to challenge prevalent assumptions about the victimhood of global South sex workers, about global South legal systems necessarily lacking resources and commitment, and about anti-trafficking solutions rooted in criminal justice incontrovertibly benefiting trafficked sex workers.
Work and the division of labour have been central issues to the study of gender disparities and inequalities historically and worldwide. In Nepal, the changing modes of production and living under the urban-development paradigm have provoked a rapidly transformation of social structures and hierarchies, including gender.
Through a multi-sited ethnography in rural and urban settings of Nepal, this paper explores the constant (re)shaping of the meanings and patterns of work for Sherpa women.
This paper reveals at least three important factors to look at. First, the hegemonic development discourses symbolically situate ‘modern’ jobs as desirable, particularly for women, who are usually considered independent or empowered if they participate in the productive economy and bring a monetary income to the household. Consequently, government and international organization’s promote them as preferable over other traditional activities. Secondly, as far as those kinds of jobs are mostly accessible in urban settings, a particular mobility regime exists in Nepal, which promotes the dislocation of rural population to the main cities or abroad, especially young people. Finally, education is seen as a strategic access door to paid jobs and modern lifestyles, particularly for young women. To study further they need to move to Kathmandu or abroad, adapting therefore their livelihoods and job expectations.
Findings show how femininity is negotiated between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’, the public and the private, the rural and the urban, the ‘hard’ and the ‘easy’ work and lifestyles. A negotiation where their desires and expectations clash with the reality: poor quality of education, precarious jobs and an increasingly individualistic city-lifestyle. Their experiences reveal the opening of an intersectional dialogue where not only gender but also age becomes relevant to the valuation of women’s roles, capacities and values in a Nepal worshipping modern and ‘developed’ lifestyles.
In recent decades, in many countries including Portugal, human trafficking has become an important issue on political agendas, attracting increased investment of financial and human resources, and the growing involvement of civil society organizations. Employing a historical perspective, this article analyses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the counter-trafficking field, in particular, in the conceptualization of human trafficking, the elaboration of counter-trafficking policies and practices, and NGOs’ potentials and limitations in challenging them. Using data obtained through prolonged empirical research, the article argues that in contexts characterized by a high level of institutionalization and structural weakness in organized civil society, NGOs have little chance to assume a role beyond serving as a long arm of the neoliberal state apparatus. Both the outsourcing of certain counter-trafficking services to NGOs and the controversial yet undisputed national security-focused approach to trafficking represent integral parts of the practical logics of the counter-trafficking field, which remains largely unquestioned by counter-trafficking NGOs. These logics include the silencing of any debate about prostitution, at least within the Portuguese counter-trafficking apparatus.
This article, a contribution to a special issue of the Journal of Human Trafficking examining “data wars” amongst empirical researchers who purport to study the prevalence of human trafficking, explores how closer attention to legal methods may improve the validity and reliability of research regarding the prevalence of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The author hopes to illuminate and motivate two conclusions. First, some researchers have failed to accurately analyze the legal definitions of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and instead have used inaccurately narrow definitions in their research. By so doing, they have undercounted the prevalence of trafficking and have produced scholarship that is of limited relevance to legal and policy debates regarding the regulation of prostitution. Second, some researchers have provided inadequate application of the facts in particular cases to the legal definitions of trafficking for sexual exploitation. As a result, their scholarship suffers from a lack of clarity regarding why they fail to count some cases as trafficking—and this lack of clarity contributes to a lack of reliability, since the reader is unable to discern their method for determining which cases count as trafficking and which do not. As a result of these problems, the empirical research critiqued in this article is of limited value in guiding law and policy debates regarding the regulation of prostitution.
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