From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery

6. Rethinking Gender Violence: Battered and Trafficked Women in Greece and the United States

C h a p t e r 6 Rethinking Gender Violence: Battered and Trafficked Women in Greece and the United States Gabriela Wasileski and Mark J. Miller Introduction Both domestic violence and trafficking in humans pose serious problems worldwide. However, there are differences in the ways in which similarly abused battered immigrant women and trafficked immigrant women are treated by governmental agencies in Greece and in the United States. Trafficking in humans has been securitized worldwide, rather than treated as a human rights violation—that is, framed as an issue linked to international security risk. As a result, countries that do not take legal action to stop human trafficking could face U.S. sanctions such as loss of U.S. military and economic assistance. Under significant international pressure, in 2002 Greece passed a law that criminalized trafficking in humans and took necessary steps for providing protection and assistance to trafficked victims. Nevertheless, domestic violence and battered women remain silent in Greek society, and the availability of services to immigrant victims of domestic violence has eroded. We argue that, due to different issue-framing of victims of trafficking and women who have been battered, the connection of trafficking in humans to national security fosters different legal protection outcomes. Rethinking trafficking to focus on the gender inequities that create private wrongs would foster a rights-based response. 108 Gabriela Wasileski and Mark J. Miller As argued by Alison Brysk’s contribution to this volume, gender inequity needs to be viewed as a cause of both domestic violence and trafficking in the two quite dissimilar cases examined in this article. And the Greece–United States comparison underscores the need for rethinking trafficking as rights versus security, as women’s rights are human rights. For all the differences between the United States and Greece, it is important to highlight that both states belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is widely viewed as the world’s club of most prosperous democratic states. These are the states that could change the underlying structural conditions that foster trafficking and domestic violence. The United States and Human Trafficking Post-1990 The post–Cold War emergence of human trafficking issues in the transatlantic area has often been explained in connection with threats to states’ sovereignty—the threat of illegal and unregulated migration (Bravo 2007). The world is in constant flux, and the events of the last few decades, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Eastern Europe bloc, led to increased economic migration and a subsequent increase in forced migration and human trafficking. In other words, the breakdown of states, redrawing international borders, and the technological revolution freed up social forces that underlay civil war conflicts, population and unemployment growth, and globalization that produced a massive wave of population relocation . Human trafficking is an old issue, but it did not figure importantly in domestic politics and international relations until the post-1990 period (Miller 2001, 2006). Before the 1990s, human trafficking rarely appeared in migration discussions or on international political agendas. It was viewed as a form of human smuggling and a type of illegal migration (Laczko 2002). There was no reliable data available on human trafficking, both because many countries lacked specific anti-trafficking legislation and because human trafficking as a part of clandestine migration is almost impossible to measure accurately (Castles and Miller 2009). Nevertheless, sources such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and United Nations have reported that an estimated 12.3 million people are held in conditions of forced labor and trafficking for sex slavery at any given period of time (U.S. Department of State 2009). Rethinking Gender Violence 109 Several key circumstances surrounding the issue of human trafficking changed, which catapulted the problem onto the international political agenda. Increased media attention and the clarification of the difference between smuggling and trafficking have led to an upsurge in the perceived volume of human trafficking. The framing of the issue of human trafficking has historically occurred around three themes: drawing parallels between human trafficking and slavery; construing human trafficking as a security risk to states’ autonomy; and viewing human trafficking as a form of human rights violation (Bravo 2007). Describing human trafficking as modern-day slavery constitutes influential and evocative wording that draws rapid attention to the need for the public and governments to act to end it. Trafficked victims often lose...