Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (review)

This anthology was "initially inspired," Kamala Kempadoo writes, by a series of workshops held in 2000 and 2001 by the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), with which most contributors have some past or current affiliation. In the early 1990s, GAATW, which advocates the normalization of prostitution, emerged as a competitor to the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW), which advocates abolition of prostitution.¹ Although Kempadoo asserts that the book does not only represent GAATW's perspective, most contributors endorse its central elements. The introduction sets out the collection's main themes, which the articles then variously repeat and elaborate. They are as follows:

• • There are many kinds of trafficking for different forms of labor; it is therefore misguided to focus predominantly on trafficking for "sex work." There is nothing especially harmful about—or indeed any importantly distinct dynamics of—trafficking for prostitution.² Relatedly, we should avoid suggesting that most "trafficked persons" are women and girls, as this ignores the trafficking of men and boys.

• • Trafficking occurs only when coercion or deception is employed in order to transport a person to "a situation of forced labor, servitude, or slavery-like practices" (Sanghera, 14). All cases lacking coercion and deception are simply "migration" for work of various kinds, including prostitution.

• • The "core issue" of trafficking is migration (Ditmore, 107): people moving in order to seek better lives and economic opportunities. A major antitrafficking priority should be to remove barriers to safe, legal migration.

• • There are no reliable estimates of the true incidence of trafficking, and many commonly cited statistics are manipulated and overblown.

• • Because "it is not prostitution per se that is harmful to women" (Kempadoo, xxii), we should "conceptually separate the traffic of women from prostitution" and define prostitution as "a legitimate form of work" (xii).

Contributors to the volume more often presume or assert these central contentions than they provide evidence or arguments in their defense. Although most of the authors clearly share the editor's view that prostitution per se is not harmful to women, no contributor mentions (let alone refutes) the substantial evidence of the devastating effects prostitution has on women's physical and emotional well being.³ Similarly, they assert that migration is the "core issue" of trafficking without considering and rejecting other core issues such as men's demand for commercial access to the bodies of women and children (or even, more broadly, the demand of wealthy consumers for cheap labor and consumer goods). Finally, most contributors treat their highly restrictive definition of trafficking as if it were a settled and indisputable fact, when in fact it is based in a particular and highly contested ideology about prostitution.⁴

Certain rhetorical devices frequently serve to mask the paucity of argument. One such device is to characterize one's own approach as nuanced and complex in contrast to what is presumed to be the rigid ideology and totalizing simplicity of competing views. Another is the use of catchphrases, such as "global justice" and "rights-based approach," to which well-intentioned progressives can be expected to respond positively, while competing approaches are tagged with such progressive bugaboo terms as "policing," "state power," and "moral panic." To distort and dismiss contrary feminist views as antisexual hysteria, veiled conservatism, and "imperialist bourgeois logic" (Kempadoo, xi) is inexcusable at this stage of the debate.

Particularly significant in many of these essays is their authors' rejection of the term "victim" in favor of "trafficked person." (Similarly, they eschew "slavery" to refer to debt bondage and forced labor, preferring the Orwellian "slavery-like practices.") Kempadoo sounds this theme in the introduction, criticizing "the dominant trafficking discourse [for] the idea that those who are subject to violence and slavery-like practices are 'victims'" (xxii). Such a characterization, she explains, objectifies such persons, portrays them as "helpless and pitiful" (xxiv), and "sustains an image of women as pure, unblemished, and innocent prior to the...