Scholars of the contemporary panic about ‘sex trafficking’ have found resounding parallels with the upsurge of anxieties about White Slavery at the turn of the twentieth century.32 The context for the rise of these concerns at this particular historical juncture is complex, and two major themes are prominent. Firstly, this new wave of anti-trafficking concerns has taken shape at a historical moment when global flows of voluntary and forced migrants have reached an unprecedented high, thereby creating a major national security concern for most States. This serves as the backdrop to State promotion of aggressive criminal justice responses. Secondly, in the neoliberal reconfiguration of sexuality, there are increasing concerns to police the exchange of sex for money, while making liberal ideas of unfettered freedom and love the only legitimate basis for sex. These discourses have a tendency to turn migrant women in sex work (and female sex workers in general) into signifiers of victimhood, and overlook the complexity of contexts, identities, and agency, commonly portraying these women as poor, innocent, and powerless.33
‘Sex trafficking’ has become a popular way to refer to migration into sex work, saturating reports of trafficking with images of female sexual victimhood and titillating language of “sexual slavery” and “enslaved women,” creating a moral panic that “displaces anxieties about female sexuality onto trafficking victims.”34 Notably, the Palermo Protocol defines human trafficking as coerced labour in all work sectors (not just prostitution), and provides no separate definition of ‘sex trafficking.’ One important premise for the development of ‘sex trafficking’ as a distinct category of crime lies in one sentence in the definition of human trafficking in the Protocol: “Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation” (Palermo Protocol Article 3a). Both “sexual exploitation” and “prostitution” are the only two terms “intentionally left undefined and are also not defined anywhere else in international law.”35
This ambiguity was the product of a lack of consensus between the Member States on whether consensual adult sex work constituted human trafficking. Leaving it undefined allowed individual States to address prostitution in their respective domestic laws – including whether voluntary adult sex work is a form of human trafficking. Therefore, ‘sex trafficking’ could mean simply prostitution, movement into prostitution, the experiences of violence and exploitation in the sex industry, or entry into forced prostitution, depending on the speaker and the circumstances. The US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) does define “sex trafficking” as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act” (Section 103 (9)). Significantly, this definition does not include coercion, but equates “sex trafficking” with prostitution and its mediation. It is also a legally non-operational term because it has no criminal penalties or immigration benefits attached to it.36 Only trafficking into forced prostitution or the prostitution of minors is defined as part of “severe forms of trafficking” in the TVPA (Section 103 (8)). Only “victims of severe forms of trafficking” would qualify for a range of social and immigration assistance. Peters’ ethnography of the implementation of the TVPA showed that “in the misleading light of the panic, trafficking looks like an issue of purely sexual violation instead of forced or coerced labor and service of all stripes.”37
Yet the ready equation of prostitution as trafficking is rooted in a much longer history of State regulation of women. Historical research has found that the panic around ‘White Slavery’ at the beginning of the twentieth century arose against a background of anti-immigrant sentiments, such that the migration of European women to Latin America and Africa for sex work was construed as the sexual enslavement of white women by foreign men. Historians have found that most of these women were not forced into prostitution.38 Nevertheless, the urge to protect innocent women led to national outcry and international efforts to arrest the outflow of women from Europe and the US. These efforts included the 1904 International Act to Suppress White Slavery, invoking the key figures of the ‘evil traffickers’ and ‘innocent women,’ serving as the original script for understanding the illegitimacy of women’s migration and sex work.
In the new millennium, we witness a reactivation of the search for the authentic victim of trafficking into forced prostitution, focused on the absolute innocence of the woman. Ana Paula da Silva et al. discussed how a mythical narrative about the absolute innocence of the authentic victim has become central to discourses about trafficking in Brazil for policymakers and civil society, upholding the narrow view that THB is solely about the migration of prostitutes.39 In this paradigm, the presumed passivity and ignorance of the victims engenders the belief that some women must be “educated to understand that they are victims,” and their movements must be curtailed.
Yet it is peculiar to see this narrative of female innocence and sexual passivity rehearsed virtually without irony in an age when gender equality, sexual diversity, and women’s reproductive rights have occupied so much space in activism and State policies, at least in the Global North. Agustín argues that unlike other forms of migration flows, a woman’s migration for sex work immediately negates her identity as ‘migrant’; she belongs entirely to the growing discourses of ‘trafficking’ that justify stricter border control and further criminalisation of the sex trade.40 Dozema located these dismissals in the colonialist, white middle-class saviour discourse of trafficking, imposing a victimhood on sex workers that pre-empted any discussion of sex workers’ rights.41 Furthermore, as Kempadoo observes, the anti-trafficking discourse is “firmly linked in postindustrial areas of the world to the criminalization of women from the global South, and to greater policing and control of their mobility, bodies, and sexuality.”42 Studies from different global sites have shown that “[s]ex trafficking has become yet another site for the enforcement of borders.”43 The recognition of women’s sexual autonomy has become dependent on one’s class and global location, and circumscribed by the absence of direct monetary exchange. In fact, Bernstein has argued that sex workers (and their clients) have become targets of anti-trafficking measures because of their violation of the neoliberal ideals of relational heterosexual intimacy and middle-class femininity.44 Sex remains an important site where boundaries are maintained.
In fact, the regulation of women’s mobility and sexuality has been the twins of State responses to moral crisis and border anxieties. Women who migrate into sex work, or those who are suspected of engaging in prostitution, become the main targets of such control. And in the twenty-first century, advocates and State agents have promoted a reductive narrative that focuses on trafficking in the sex sector to the exclusion of non-sex-sector trafficking, and on a conflation of prostitution with trafficking;45 they built an aggressive criminal justice agenda that expands State powers rather than strengthens institutional protection of human rights.
Yet how does one address the correlation between women’s vulnerability and ‘sex trafficking’? This is particularly pertinent in the attribution of ‘cultures’ and ‘traditions’ as reasons for women’s victimhood.46 Some have suggested that the “vulnerable position of women in society” is a powerful “push factor.”47 Contrary to expectations, however, the data in Cho’s careful statistical analysis shows that gender discrimination and development do not have a straightforward relationship with THB. In fact, very low levels of gender equality and development (e.g., high fertility and mortality rates) have “constraining effects on human trafficking outflows.”48 This finding echoes with an existing body of work that shows how migration is, for many, a hard-earned opportunity that requires both material resources and social networks, and is inaccessible to those who live in “extreme poverty.”49
The stories of Ira and Jin recounted above illuminate the complexity of women’s migration decisions and journeys, and their perception of violence and opportunities that may differ significantly from those of activists and State
s. Instead of assuming that these women have been ‘pushed and pulled’ into their migration overseas, it is pertinent to recognise and examine their projects of aspiration in displacement, and how regulatory regimes such as anti-trafficking measures have delegitimised their journeys and rendered their migration dangerous. While global discourses of ‘sex trafficking’ have adamantly identified these migrant women in sex work as ‘victims of trafficking’ (rather than the more silenced category of ‘criminals’ that many of them end up in), my research showed these women to be migrant and sexual subjects who make the often unsafe journey overseas to pursue their projects of aspiration, unwilling to align themselves with the anti-trafficking agenda of NGOs and the State that is often focused on criminal justice and immigration control.50
As Eunjung Kim and I have argued:
‘Sex trafficking’ thereby operates as a discursive device anchored in a particular way of thinking about and managing licit/illicit sex and lawful/unlawful migration with specific gender/class/racial effects.51
Beyond push and pull: sex work and changing intimate economies
This chapter critically engages with the push-pull model of understanding THB, with specific reference to migration into sex work, often indicated with the ambiguous term of ‘sex trafficking.’ In its original conception as part of modernisation theory, the push-pull model assumes an individual as a rational actor who weighs the push and pull factors against the obstacles to moving, and makes a decision on whether to migrate or not. Yet it also articulates a particular relationship between the sending and receiving countries, creating a binary understanding of societies as developed vs. developing, urban vs. rural, modern vs. traditional. In extending the push-pull model to the discussion of THB, not only is this hierarchical relationship reinscribed, but the individual’s passivity or naïveté is accentuated for the emphasis of victimhood, justifying a set of criminal justice interventions that fail to address the structures and policies that make human rights possible. When applied to migration into sex work, the fundamental premises of the push-pull model facilitate a myopic concern with female sexual victimhood, and with the individualised evil of the traffickers, detracting consideration from the structural-historical factors that engender unsafe migration and human rights violations. As the cases of Ira and Jin illustrate, the impact of regulatory regimes on migration flows shapes migrant sex workers’ vulnerability in crucial ways that a push-pull model cannot effectively capture.
This chapter does not deny that trafficking into forced prostitution exists. Far from that, it wants to point out the inadequacies of this approach to understanding such travesties of justice. A good example to illustrate the limitation of the push and pull model lies in what is often known as the ‘End Demand’ approach. It is an extension of this polarising mode of thinking about human trafficking into forced prostitution. Parallel to the forced division of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, the imagination that the demand for sex created the supply of ‘trafficked sex slaves’ promoted the idea that if there were no demand, there would be no supply. This approach dismisses the structural conditions that encourage unsafe migration, the accessibility of the sex sector due to its illegitimate and therefore unregulated nature, as well as the lack of protection of sex workers in host countries.
Interestingly, it is only the ‘demand’ for prostitution that is a target for elimination, and not other ‘demand’ for products of highly exploitative labour (trafficked labour for cheap agricultural products, such as tomatoes and shrimp, for example). This glaring imbalance exposes the exceptionalism applied to sex work, and a concomitant tolerance of other forms of coerced labour, in current anti-trafficking discourse.
The problems of extending the push-pull model into understanding migration into sex work are manifold, but we could focus on three particular issues here. Firstly, the assumption of ignorance of the victims translates into the gendered assumption of female innocence in the production of authentic victimhood, further denying any possibility of agency in women’s migration into sex work; secondly, the assumption of female innocence further invokes the power of the evil traffickers, further rendering invisible the structures that create and maintain the conditions of abuse and rights violation that now qualify as ‘human trafficking.’ Thirdly, the moral panic around ‘sex trafficking’ justifies the aggrandisement of State powers and border control at the expense of migrant rights and labour rights.
It is not the goal of this chapter to completely dismiss the ‘push and pull’ model as a way to think about cross-border travels. After all, it may serve as a useful communicative device to make sense of certain dimensions of such migration flows. However, we need to be aware of its limitations and pitfalls. In the case of female migration for sex work, the push and pull model has been used to delegitimise women’s mobility and sexuality outside of the domestic realm, subjecting them to State and moral policing. Yet if we could come to see women’s (or anyone’s) migration into sex work as the pursuit of “new autonomies and new gender-based projects,”52 then we may also come to recognise that migrants like Ira and Jin embody, at least partially, the reshaping of the boundary between intimacy and commerce in post-industrial societies.53
Notes
1 Lee, E.S., “A Theory of Migration” (1966) 3(1) Demography 47–57.
2 Kearney, M., Changing Fields of Anthropology: From Local to Global (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little Field Publishers, Inc., 2004), p. 100.
3 Ibid., 105.
4 Hughes, D.M., Best Practices to Address the Demand Side of Sex Trafficking (2004), http://works.bepress.com/donna_hughes/20/.
5 Nikolic-Ristanovic, V., Social Change, Gender and Violence: Post-communist and War Affected Societies (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2002).
6 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking In Persons (Geneva: UNODC, 2009); Bales, K., What Predicts Human Trafficking? (2015). Unpublished Manuscript, www.freetheslaves.net/wp-content/.
7 Brettell, C.B., “Theorizing Migration in Anthropology: The Social Construction of Networks, Identities, Communities, and Globalscapes”, in Brettell, C. and Hollifield, J. (eds.), Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 97–135, 102.
8 Anderson, B. and O’Connell Davidson, J., Trafficking – A Demand Led Problem? (Stockholm: Save the Children Sweden, 2002); Anderson, B. and O’Connell Davidson, J., Is Trafficking in Human Beings Demand Driven? A Multi-Country Pilot Study (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2003), http://publications.iom.int/es/books/mrs-ndeg15-trafficking-human-beings-demand-driven-multi-country-pilot-study#sthash.6N5FuNRF.dpuf.
9 Cheng, S., On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
10 Cheng, S. and Eunjung, K., “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Migrant Korean Sex Workers in the United States and Sex Trafficking” (2014) 21(4) Social Politics 355–381.
11 See note 9, above.
12 See note 10, above.
13 Akee, R., Bedi, A., Basu, A.K., and Chau, N.H., Transnational Trafficking, Law Enforcement and Victim Protection: A Middleman’s Perspective (Bonn: IZA, 2011), http://ftp.iza.org/dp6226.pdf, 6 (accessed 23 September 2015).
14 Chin, K. and Finckenauer, J.O., Selling Sex Overseas: Chinese Women and the Realities of Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
15 Piscitelli, A., “Revisiting Notions of Sex Trafficking and Victims” (2012) 19(1) Vibrant 276–310, 292.
16 See note 15, above.
17 See notes 9 & 10, above.
18 Cho, S.-Y., Modeling for Determinants of Human Trafficking (Economics of Security Working Paper 70, Berlin: Economics of Security, 2012).
19 Bales, K., What Predicts Human Trafficking? (Online Manuscript, 5, 2015), www.freetheslaves.net/wp-content/.
20 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Toolkit to Combat Trafficking in Persons (Geneva: UNODC, 2005), p. 424
.
21 Jones, L., Engstrom, D.W., Hilliard, T., and Diaz, M., “Globalization and Human Trafficking” (2007) 34(2) The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 107–122, 113.
22 See note 19, above, 13.
23 Anderson, B. and O’Connell Davidson, J., Is Trafficking in Human Beings Demand Driven? A Multi-Country Pilot Study (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2003), http://publications.iom.int/es/books/mrs-ndeg15-trafficking-human-beings-demand-driven-multi-country-pilot-study#sthash.6N5FuNRF.dpuf.
24 Ibid.
25 See note 18, above.
26 See note 19, above, 13.
27 Ibid., 11.
28 Ibid., 12.
29 Cho Seo-Young tested for the robustness of 78 push and 67 pull factors suggested in the literature for up to 180 countries published during the period of 1995–2010.
30 See note 18, above.
31 UNESCAP, Situation Report: International Migration in South and South West Asia (2010), http://sitreport.unescapsdd.org/protection-rights-migrant-workers-key-issues.
32 Agustin, L., “The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Migrants Who Sell Sex” (2006) 32(1) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29–47; Saunders, P., “Traffic Violations: Determining the Meaning of Violence in Sexual Trafficking Versus Sex Work” (2005) 20(3) Journal of Interpersonal Violence 343–360; Soderlund, G., Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
33 See note 9, above, 135.
34 Peters, A.W., Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 15.
35 Jordan, A., The Annotated Guide to the Complete UN Trafficking Protocol (2012), p. 8, http://lastradainternational.org/doc-center/1916/the-annotated-guide-to-the-complete-un-trafficking-protocol (accessed 8 July 2016).
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