I will consider the most challenging critiques to anti-trafficking interventions, which, not surprisingly, come in an organised form precisely from those who are normally excluded from the debate: sex workers rights’ groups.  This dissent is based on two main points.

The first is a point of evidence from the ground: the classic trafficking idea that migrant women working in the European sex industry have been forced against their will to leave home and to work with sex is just not true for the large majority of cases.

Subsequently, the second point of dissent is that trafficking discourse and policies are based on a wrong distinction between voluntary sex workers and trafficked victims, and this distinction supports policies that have negative consequences both on young migrant women, potentially or actually selling sex, including those who are in a situation of heavy exploitation and abuse, and on all workers of the sex industry, including transgender people and men selling sex, and including European citizens.

The second part of my paper introduces a materialist feminist analysis as produced by an alliance of prostitutes and non-prostitutes feminists between the mid70s and the mid80s in different contexts in Europe. This analysis can allow us to interrupt the crucial complicity supporting anti-trafficking interventions, which is the condemnation of sex work per se, which it turn is reproduced by the exclusion of sex workers’ analyses from the debate.

In the first part of my article, I describe the contours of the current migration of women to Europe and how these voyages come to be characterised in the ‘trafficking’ discourse that defines one side of the contemporary debate. Here I depict how migrant women’s own descriptions of what they are doing contrast with the characterisations of outsiders, particularly the gendered emphasis on passivity, ignorance and force. In the second part, I discuss the problematic politics of defining some women as victims and others as helpers. In the third part, I discuss the position that seeks to normalise sex work, bringing out the contradictions of working in a sector where illegality is the norm. The reproduction of stigma among migrants themselves and their belief that their sexual employment is temporary mean they lack the identification with their work that might stimulate their participation in labour activism and political associations. More importantly, most migrants do not enjoy a civil status in Europe that allows such participation. At the same time, government proposals for ‘systems’ to control the sex sector introduce problematical ‘sanitary controls’ for workers.

The testimonies suggest that women migrants are actively engaged in using social networks to travel, often aware of the sexual nature of the work, and, like other migrant workers, variably able to resist the economic, social and physical forms of compulsion they face. Their status as ‘illegal’ migrants, without permission to work in Europe, is, for them, the single overarching problem to solve, and their irregular status, not sex, is the heart of the issue. In the conclusion, I argue that migrant women’s exploitation would be better understood and confronted if European supporters could leave their own debate behind, listen to migrants’ own voices and include migrant women as equal partners in any efforts to improve their situation.

...

The anxiety about ‘trafficking’ building up in the past ten years in Europe is part of a general trend focusing on transnational crime, penal law and citizen security expressed in the idea of a ‘Fortress Europe’ that must protect itself from invasion. In the discussion on ‘trafficking’, emphasis increasingly goes to hypothetical large-scale crime organisations dedicated to enslaving migrants, although the UN Crime Commission’s own report found little proof of such activity (CICP 2003). Rather, opportunist networks appear to form in particular situations where people see migration as a solution to their problems, networks composed of current, former and potential migrants.

Agustín Laura María (2005): ‘Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other Voices in the “Trafficking” Debate.’ in: Social Politics, 12, 1, 96-117.

In many cultures, irrespective of continent, modernization meant that formal institutions of slavery metamorphosed into quasi-legal slaveries, informal slaveries, caste servitude, neo-feudal seigneurial arrangements, mass public penal servitude (labor drafts, chain gangs), bonded labor, debt slavery, foreign domestic slave-work, and ever-more inventive forms of industrial wage and non-waged slavery. The concepts of 'slave' and 'slavery' themselves became ambiguous, such that formal legal bans on slavery could be imposed and cited as evidence of social progress, yet parallel replacement systems arose that enforced the same racial, gender, and class hierarchies. As the number of formal institutional slaveries diminished, informal neo-slaveries rose to replace older systems. In the first years of the twenty-first century, these neo-slaveries have become more powerful, blatant, and inescapable of public notice. Now no season of Law & Order: SVU is complete without a show focusing on Romanian sex slaves or smuggled Chinese immigrants doing forced sweatshop labor.

Cynthia Hoffman and Joe Lockard

Introduction: Moral Empire and the Rhetoric of Slaveries

Bad Subjects

Issue #69, June 2004

Lately, I am getting more and more confused about the concept of human traffic as applied to women migrating to work. What is the difference between human traffic and smuggling? What is the difference between human traffic and abusive work conditions or work scams? Is every woman who wants to migrate a victim of human trafficking? I'm not sure I am able to answer these questions, but let's go step by step:

As always, the authoritative definition in these cases can be found by taking a look into a UN protocol.

Art. 3  of the UN-Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime  (Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 55/25 of 15 November 2000) defines trafficking in persons as follows:

 "Trafficking in persons" shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;

My first question relates of course to the title: "especially women and children" Because they are more often victims? Because they are  defenceless? Because we are being paternalistic?

It cannot be affirmed with any degree of certainty whether more men or women fall victim to trafficking. What can probably be said is that worldwide more women and children become victims of trafficking, although this may not be true of particular regions and countries, where young men and boys are often trafficked into bonded labour or as child soldiers.

IOM, 2007: The IOM handbook on the Direct Assistance to Victims of Trafficking.

From Himalayan villages to Eastern European cities, people - especially women and girls - are attracted by the prospect of a well-paid job as a domestic servant, waitress or factory worker. Traffickers recruit victims through fake advertisements, mail-order bride catalogues and casual acquaintances.

Upon arrival at their destination, victims are placed in conditions controlled by traffickers while they are exploited to earn illicit revenues. Many are physically confined, their travel or identity documents are taken away and they or their families are threatened if they do not cooperate. Women and girls forced to work as prostitutes are blackmailed by the threat that traffickers will tell their families. Trafficked children are dependent on their traffickers for food, shelter and other basic necessities. Traffickers also play on victims' fears that authorities in a foreign country will prosecute or deport them if they ask for help.

from: The UN Office on Drugs and Crime website