From Human Trafficking to Human Rights: Reframing Contemporary Slavery

4. Rethinking Trafficking: Human Rights and Private Wrongs

C h a p t e r 4 Rethinking Trafficking: Human Rights and Private Wrongs Alison Brysk Over the last decade, international humanitarian campaigns and policy have begun to address the horrific and increasing transnational sexual exploitation of women and children. While this is a welcome development, it is too often based on a distorted understanding of trafficking, violence, and globalization. Sexualized, individualistic myths regarding trafficking limit appropriate attention and response to victims of a wide range of globalized exploitation and coercion—including the intended beneficiaries of antitrafficking efforts. The fight against slavery is seen as the first international human rights movement, but the persistence and revival of this ancient evil shows that in an era of globalization, a prohibited public crime has morphed into a massive private wrong. “Private wrongs” are contemporary patterns of human rights abuse committed by nongovernmental forms of authority: from firms to families (Brysk 2005). While the enslavement of tens of millions of Africans in the Americas was state-sanctioned and sometimes state-sponsored, modern slavery operates in the gaps of governance: in rural backwaters, failed states, and the freefall of illicit migration. Its victims, like most current forms of exploitation, are second-class citizens and “disposable people”— women, children, outcasts, and the marginalized poor (Bales 2004). The key to understanding and combating private wrongs is to recognize these affronts to human dignity as abuses of power as much as any act of 74 Alison Brysk government, unmasking their justification as states of nature, cultural traditions , or personal choice. Slavery is not an accident or an atavism; it is a predatory strategy of commodification of fellow human beings in a privatizing world. In this “race to the bottom,” traditional inequities and stigmas are brands signaling who can be exploited and how. Women are especially vulnerable to the sex trade—but women are equally vulnerable to exploitation in the “maid trade,” and any other traditional role where domestic disempowerment meets globalized displacement. Prevailing constructions of international commercial sex have brought attention to a tragic underside of globalization, but they generate incomplete responses to abuse and obscure linked forms of exploitation. Antitrafficking policies depart from an assumption of free individual women, or parents on behalf of children, who are coerced or egregiously misled to be smuggled across borders and then continuously pressured and abused to engage in sex work. It is assumed that such women were not and would not engage voluntarily in sex work, that other employment options exist or are not exploitive, and that trafficking is uniquely harmful due to its nature. Recognizing transnational forms of slavery and sexual violence is a necessary but not sufficient response to trafficking and the wider spectrum of sexual abuse and transnational labor exploitation; this initial response corresponds more to our own cultural norms than the moral equality and self-determination of the victims. More specifically, the coercive model of trafficking dodges a deeper analysis of globalization’s structural pressures on decision making in households, and the social delegation of authority over women to households rather than state authorities in a kind of embedded second-class citizenship (Brysk 2005). Policies based on these neoliberal assumptions of coerced victims who can be freed for other viable choices do not serve even the preponderance of their intended beneficiaries: victims of transnational sexual exploitation . First, anti-trafficking policies framed to protect “innocent” women from sexual slavery ignore or slight prior sex workers, or other women who migrate voluntarily to engage in sex work but are subsequently exploited—often the most vulnerable populations. Second, international policy and especially American policy focuses disproportionately on culturally recognizable European victims of east-west traffic, when the vast majority of victims are intraregional in the global south. Third, policies often aim to stop commercial sex rather than the violence, exploitation, Rethinking Trafficking 75 and other harms associated with it—and with other forms of labor and migration. The disproportionate emphasis on trafficking within migration policy also slights the wider set of persons exploited and abused across borders. The individualistic emphasis and sexual focus of anti-trafficking efforts fails to address the wider issue of structural violence and economic determinants of all forms of trafficking, labor abuse, and exploitive smuggling. Such policies also fail to recognize the much broader sexual abuse of women integral to many forms of exploitive globalized labor, such as sexual harassment and rape in sweatshops and the “maid trade.” Finally...