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Anti-anti-trafficking? Toward critical ethnographies of human trafficking
... Few accounts are available on the experience of "victims of trafficking" 1 that stress their agency (Marcus and Snajdr 2013), particularly in dealing with such violence. In turn, this paper aims to provide an empirical contribution on Italian anti-trafficking programmes from the perspective of practitioners and programme beneficiaries, specifically young Nigerian women admitted to the N.A.Ve anti-trafficking programme. ...
... Nigerian women are still a relevant target group to date, although arrival dynamics are continuously evolving. 2 This paper intends to contribute to critical anti-trafficking studies (i.e., Clemente 2022; Marcus and Snajdr 2013;Musto 2010;Walters 2011;Andrijasevic 2010;O'Connell Davidson 2006) and autonomy of migration studies (De Genova 2017;Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013;Mezzadra 2004). Anti-trafficking studies build on the recognition that NGOs delivering anti-trafficking programmes are part of the counter-trafficking apparatus. ...
... Further violence can be traced by scrutinizing practitioners' approaches that range from harm reduction and tentative empowerment on the one side (Rekart 2005) to "carceral protectionism" on the other (Musto 2010), whereby individuals cannot access nor leave shelters without prior permission. More generally, anti-trafficking programmes are largely criticized for failing to properly assist trafficked individuals (Marcus and Snajdr 2013), while rather reproducing the same inequalities perpetrated by migration policies. Antitrafficking organisations do not necessarily facilitate access to regularisation unless people collaborate with law enforcement agencies (Brunovskis and Skilbrei 2016;Musto 2010). ...
Anti-trafficking programmes in Italy have been implemented for more than two decades. Yet, little empirical evidence is available regarding their functioning. This paper draws on 56 semi-structured interviews carried out in the period of 2019–2021 with practitioners and beneficiaries of the N.A.Ve anti-trafficking programme. The interviews focused on practitioners’ experience working with Nigerian women and on Nigerian women’s experiences of the programme upon completion. By building on critical anti-trafficking studies and the autonomy of migration perspective, this contribution looks at the relationship between practitioners and Nigerian women admitted to the programme by addressing the following questions: what is the experience of practitioners and beneficiaries in the N.A.Ve programme? To what extent is the structural violence of the counter-trafficking apparatus reproduced in the relational dynamics between practitioners, particularly Case Managers, and beneficiaries? How do beneficiaries cope with such violence? I argue that the Case Managers’ approach builds on “stratified layers of institutional knowledge” and that this concept is useful to highlight how their knowledge derives both from the counter-trafficking apparatus and their social work background. Furthermore, I present evidence that such an approach reproduces structural violence through processes of “conditional inclusion”. Nigerian women denounced this violence but also seized the relational capital grown from rapport, calling for more engagement with people rather than programme objectives.
... 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.
... 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 intensified global movement against human trafficking saw the UK Government pass the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. Article 54 of the act specifically requires British companies to eradicate forced labor within their global supply chains. This essay investigates how the Modern Slavery Act affects workers at the ground level, specifically in Sri Lanka. It highlights how the onus of cleaning up supply chains was outsourced to local factory managers, who in turn placed the responsibility on workers’ shoulders, and how these developments impact a particular gray space that workers sometimes manipulate to engage in part-time sex work. The stigma surrounding factory work in some areas results in migrant workers being branded whores, and the resulting gray space is what part-time sex workers manipulate to manage their reputations. By investigating how workers play with identities and labels, this article analyzes how women navigate neoliberal aspirations and precarious, underpaid labor within competing local discourses. In doing so, the essay theorizes how gray spaces—such as the ones factory workers navigate—contain the potential for subversive politics, agency, and empowerment and how global legal narratives impinge on such spaces of play and thereby reenact old colonial power circuits even as they contribute to the imperialist character of globalized culture and policies. The essay contributes to an emerging literature on global citizen activism and highlights how resultant policies and practices may endanger complex, context-specific socioeconomic and cultural arrangements.
... 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).
This insightful ethnography delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.
With the HIV/AIDS epidemic gripping the world in the 1990s and the resurgence of the antitrafficking discourse in the 2000s, the sex work/abolitionist debate took center stage. Proponents of sex work uphold the labor and livelihood paradigm based on consent; the abolitionists, on the other hand, dismiss sex work as work to posit prostitution as the paradigmatic example of patriarchal violence toward women. The latter routinely conflate sex work with trafficking, and the former sharply demarcates them. Above all, this debate poses a stubborn ideological divide among feminists with serious policy implications for both the worker and the victim, nationally and globally. Therefore, to imagine a pathway beyond this divide, this review centers on mobility and migration vis-à-vis labor and livelihood. Sex work offers insights into migration broadly speaking because it highlights the intersecting issues of labor, agency, gender, sexual mores, and displacement, all embedded within the global flows of capital.
In recent decades, an anti-trafficking legislative and policy framework has been developed in Spain, coupled with the funding of initiatives related to the protection of trafficked persons, especially women, largely carried out by faith-based and secular organizations. Using 25 interviews conducted with people employed in programmes targeting trafficked women in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, this article provides deeper exploration of this under-studied subject with a view to gaining a better understanding of the work experiences of professionals involved in these initiatives, with special attention paid to the challenges they face in enacting anti-trafficking activities while avoiding producing violence on assisted persons. The experiences of these professionals highlight that the neoliberal outsourcing of services to non-governmental organizations nevertheless contributes towards making anti-trafficking an apparatus in which violence materializes and reproduces. Significantly, this violence involves not only the people who are being assisted as trafficking victims but also some anti-trafficking professionals.
Desde o final do século XIX, ativistas e organizações feministas internacionais têm desempenhado um papel de primeiro plano na luta contra o tráfico de mulheres. O artigo centra a sua atenção na experiência das organizações de mulheres e feministas portuguesas que foram envolvidas nos esforços institucionais antitráfico mais recentes. Ele analisa a contribuição que estas organizações deram para a construção da(s) ideia(s) de tráfico e para o desenvolvimento das atuais políticas e práticas antitráfico. Documentos e entrevistas com diferentes organizações no campo do combate ao tráfico permitem identificar alguns dos elementos principais que influenciam decisivamente estas organizações em Portugal, nomeadamente nas profundas divisões em torno da prostituição e na competição pelos recursos financeiros.
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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