Project: Prevention, Protection and Integration of the Human Trafficking Victims in Serbia

11Jan2015

Human trafficking’ and ‘modern slavery’ have fared well in this fierce competition between causes. Over the last two decades, human trafficking has secured a remarkable level of both popular and official recognition, resulting in a state of affairs where most people now have at least a passing familiarity with this general topic. While ‘modern-day abolitionists’ routinely lament how little the general public knows about their cause, many campaigners working on other issues would count themselves lucky if they secured even a fraction of the publicity and investment that trafficking now receives. This recent success is not simply because trafficking is ‘more deserving’ or ‘more urgent’. It can instead be chiefly traced to the strong popular appeal of representations of human trafficking as an exceptional problem involving ‘innocent’ victims and rapacious villains, along with the numerous ways in which the issue of trafficking has helped to advance the strategic interests of governments seeking to control, discipline, and/or limit the mobility of certain populations.

The recent political success of anti-trafficking has come at a considerable price. In order to help get their message out, activists and officials have repeatedly turned to a range of simplistic and misleading images, dubious ‘statistics’, and self-serving narratives. Even the history of slavery and abolition has been selectively mined to support contemporary causes, while more challenging questions regarding the limitations of anti-slavery activism and the enduring legacies of historical slave systems remain neglected. Although most people have now heard about human trafficking as a form of modern slavery, they frequently have a very limited understanding regarding the specific issues at stake. Much of what people think they know about trafficking and slavery is inaccurate, incomplete or unfounded.

Take, by way of example, the popular genre of ‘global facts and figures’ concerning trafficking and slavery. According to countless speeches, books and media reports, i) there are more slaves now than at any point in human history; ii) human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, and; iii) human trafficking has become the third largest global criminal industry, behind only guns and drugs, generating 32 billion US dollars annually. Since the main attraction of these ‘facts’ stems from their value as advocacy tools, there has been a widespread reluctance to ask how they have been calculated, and whether or not they are true. 

However much various activists and organisations might proclaim otherwise, there is currently no sound methodological basis for constructing a global estimate of slavery or trafficking today. And since we don’t have a reliable baseline or sampling frame, we also have no reasonable basis for concluding that things are rapidly increasing globally. Most ‘statistics’ associated with trafficking and slavery are little more than blind stabs in the dark, with the further complication that those responsible for making up the numbers usually have a vested interest in coming to the highest possible total. Whenever comparisons take place (as, for instance, with guns and drugs), their ultimate goal is to make the problem of human trafficking and slavery as large as possible. Much the same story applies when it comes to comparisons between past and present. Modern activists use an expansive definition of ‘slavery’ when looking for contemporary slaves, yet restrict their understanding of slavery in the past to legal slavery. If many definitions of slavery used today were projected backwards through time, then huge numbers of people would need to be reclassified as slaves.

Unfounded, misleading and self-serving representations of trafficking and slavery have also had far-reaching consequences at the level of policy and practice. Several brief examples from a much longer list can be offered here. Thanks to an often voyeuristic interest in commercial sexual abuse, much less interest has been directed towards ‘unsexy’ problems and practices. Thanks to unrealistic models of ‘innocent victimhood’, individuals with more complicated personal stories have been deemed unworthy of assistance, despite the fact that they have been exploited and abused. Thanks to the construction of migration as a problem and threat, policy responses have focused upon telling migrants to ‘stay at home’, irrespective of the positive possibilities of mobility and the potential problems of ‘home’. Thanks to the popularity of ‘slavery as exception’, global patterns of systemic abuse, exploitation and discrimination and have been routinely dispatched to the margins of political conversations. Thanks to the depiction of trafficking victims as ‘exotic outsiders’ in need of rescue and salvation, there has been an uncritical return to some of the worst tropes of the colonial ‘civilizing mission’, where paternalistic intervention by ‘superior’ Westerners is justified in order to ‘save’ non-Western supplicants.

Many of these popular representations of slavery and trafficking have proved to be remarkably resistant to challenge and critique. Most of the issues highlighted above were first identified in the late 1990s—if not before—and have been repeatedly challenged in the decades that have followed. Despite this, the same representations and formulas continue to be widely reproduced. There is now, for example, an extensive literature documenting the limitations of high profile ‘fact and figures’, yet dubious ‘statistics’ persist. Similarly, researchers have demonstrated that major sporting events, such as World Cups and Superbowls, do not appear to generate major spikes in the local prevalence of human trafficking, yet each new major sporting event nonetheless generates a new round of sensationalist reports regarding the imminent threat of a massive increase in trafficking and prostitution.

This recurring pattern points to a fundamental challenge. There are numerous actors and institutions in anti-trafficking and anti-slavery circles who are heavily invested in upholding and reproducing these flawed representations and associated policy responses. This is important, because their increasingly defensive resistance to alternative voices and approaches constitutes one of the principle obstacles to developing and disseminating better understandings of the diverse problems and issues at stake, and working towards more effective strategies, interventions, and frames of reference. Popular representations of trafficking and slavery have too often hurt—rather than helped—efforts to both understand and combat global exploitation, discrimination and vulnerability.

Over the next four weeks we will publish two separate batches of articles exploring popular representations of slavery and trafficking. Our first batch of articles starts today, beginning with a major contribution from Kamala Kempadoo considering how popular representations of trafficking and modern slavery can be traced to older stories about the ‘white man’s burden’. This is the first of several contributions to take up historical themes, and to flag the on-going significance of race in ‘modern slavery’ despite new abolitionists’ insistence that it is a ‘colour blind’ phenomenon. We also kick off with a piece from Ben Rogaly, who considers how and why representations of ‘forced labour’ have likewise created an ‘exceptional’ problem, with a singular focus on migrants sidestepping contentious questions regarding capitalism and class.

Later on this week, Vanessa Pupavac challenges simplistic celebrations of the hero of the original abolitionist movement, William Wilberforce. She raises difficult questions about the construction of slavery as a problem that can be detached from more general demands for labour rights and freedom of movement. Liam Hogan explores the contemporary political agendas associated with the historical mythology of Irish indentured servants as ‘white slaves’, while James Esson examines the representations and realities of Ghanaian youth football players, who have been reported as ‘victims’ of ‘child trafficking’.  We end the week with a piece from Robbie Shilliam, who contrasts the historical amnesia of the ‘new slavery’ with parallel campaigns seeking reparations for the history and legacies of legal slavery.

Joel Quirk,  Julia O'Connell Davidson Open Democracy