Introduction

Our lead article, "Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States," opens up new dialogues on the social politics of children and households. Pavla Miller, in her rich textured analysis of the usefulness of children, builds upon and deepens the classic study of Viviana Zelizer on pricing the priceless child. Her article offers us a long-distance lens across many research terrains, including histories of childhood, ethnographic studies, time use research, and feminist studies of housework and welfare regimes. Her analysis emphasizes the importance of focusing on the diversity in young people's costs and usefulness, across time, regions (North/South), class and culture.

Two articles in this issue—one on lone mothers and the other on policy regimes—revisit earlier research agendas in Social Politics. Both add new perspectives and dimensions. Anne Skevik, in "Women's Citizenship in the Time of Activation: The Case of Lone Mothers in "Needs-Based" Welfare States," considers specific programs in Australia, Norway, and New Zealand for integrating lone mothers into the labor market. She reveals that not just the degree of compulsion and voluntariness, but also issues of power, autonomy, and governance, should be analyzed. Angelika Von Wahl introduces the concept of equal employment regimes in the context of the multitiered European context. In "Europeanization and the Case of Equal Employment Regimes in the EU," she argues that changing features of EU employment policies have moved from narrow economic to broad (social and economic) policies and from hard to soft law and policy learning, both of which have shaped a new equal employment regime in which all member states share core principles.

Our special section, Perspectives on Transnationalism, Trafficking and Prostitution, takes up issues that are very much on the policy agenda in international forums and have particular resonance in the European Union after enlargement.

Since the early 20^th century, there has been transnational mobilization and discourse on trafficking. The term white slavery as well as the images connected to it—of girls transported across continents and held in bondage—sought to highlight its global character. What is different in our era is that globalization discourse and processes are no longer cogs in the wheels of prostitution politics but now the main drivers—as seen in diverse policy communities addressing prostitution, the complexity of its political economy, and the intensity of migrants who are part of that economy moving across borders. Finally as these articles reveal, debates on trafficking underscore thehighly contested nature of feminist academic and policy debates surrounding it.

Rather than serving as a forum with opposing positions on one theme, these articles seek to locate trafficking within broader migration patterns, global restructuring, and European mutlilevel governance. The articles take different positions on well known divisions in prostitution politics: choice and coercion, regulation, and abolition. But in this forum, our perspectives also focus on broader structural processes. Gail Kligman and Stephanie Limoncelli argue that trafficking forms part of forced labor migration as well as the global service economy into which women and children from the former socialist states have been incorporated. Laura Agustín, through her "testimonies" of migrants, argues that prostitution is one of many diverse work strategies of migrant women; it is their illegal status, not their exploitation, that concerns them. Joyce Outshoorn, in tracing the feminist debates on prostitution, reveals the dilemmas of developing a policy response to trafficking in light of the transnational alliances representing two opposing sides: those who see trafficking as caused by the sexual domination inherent in prostitution on the one side and those who see trafficking as a polemic and view prostitution as sex work on the other.