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2. Do Traffickers Have Navels?
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2 Do Traffickers Have Navels? It may well be, of course, that no general theory of slavery is possible given that the core of the phenomena to which we attach the term—the transfer of full rights in a person—is so simple that the idea can arise again and again in quite disparate cultural and structural contexts. —Igor Kopytoff, “Slavery,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982, 224) The term “human trafficking” appeared in the New York Times for the first time in 1976, in an article regarding trafficking in persons out of East Germany.1 The same topic resurfaced in a 1978 story. Not before 1999 did the term “human trafficking” reappear in Times’ pages. Since then, reporting on the topic has increased steadily. In 2010, no fewer than 118 Times articles mentioned the term (table 1). In other words, by 2010 the New York Times on average was reporting on human trafficking more than twice a week, whereas about a decade earlier the term was not mentioned at all. Use of the term “sex trafficking” has followed a similar trend. This acceleration in attention to human trafficking reflects a general shift in focus with regard to cross-border migration. Over the past few years, it is not only the Western media that has increasingly reported on human trafficking. Since the 1990s, governments and international organizations have given it more attention. Within the development aid sector, trafficking projects have mushroomed in numerous countries . The United Nations has defined trafficking as one of its key priority areas of concern for the new millennium, launching several regional and country-based programs as well as establishing in 2004 a special 34 : chapter 2 Table 1 Use of the terms “human trafficking” and “sex trafficking” in the New York Times, 1997–2010 Number of articles in which the term appears Year “Human trafficking” “Sex trafficking” 1997 0 0 1998 0 0 1999 1 0 2000 7 3 2001 6 0 2002 7 3 2003 11 8 2004 27 22 2005 22 25 2006 42 23 2007 54 27 2008 59 36 2009 73 31 2010 118 45 Source: New York Times rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children. This growing attention is perhaps most pronounced in the legal sector, spearheaded by the United Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (UN 2000), which supplements the Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) Convention (UN 2001). Reflecting on this shift, Anne Gallagher (2006a, 163) notes: Just a decade ago the international legal framework consisted of a single, long-forgotten treaty dating back to 1949 and a few vague provisions in a couple of human rights treaties. Today, trafficking is the subject of a vast array of international legal rules and national laws and a plethora of “soft” standards ranging from policy directives to regional commitments. The breadth and depth of this legal shift is [18.118.120.109] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:29 GMT) do traffickers have navels? : 35 truly remarkable. It took just two short years for the international community to negotiate a global agreement on fighting trafficking and only a further three years for that treaty to gain enough ratifications for it to enter into force. Does this increase in attention to human trafficking reflect a response to a recent global crisis of migration and labor exploitation? Consulting both academic literature and development reports, one quickly realizes that the state of knowledge production surrounding trafficking is highly contentious. Depending on which report one reads, global estimates of annual trafficking cases range from fewer than five hundred thousand to several millions.2 To give just one example, the estimates of annual trafficking cases in Australia vary from fewer than ten to more than a thousand, depending on which organization you consult (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 2004). The spurious nature of trafficking statistics has already been a subject of commentary among both academics and development practitioners, pointing to the methodological difficulty of researching a phenomenon that is clandestine in nature, as well as the lack of consensus with regard to conceptualizing agency (Anderson and Davidson 2004; Kempadoo 2005). However, such critiques often use trafficking as both an instrument and an object of research. They have a tendency to reinforce essentialist forms of knowledge as they seek to unravel underlying ontological “truths” about trafficking in their evaluations of the moral-political agendas of state parties and other interest groups. In this vein, it becomes possible...