Erin O’Brien

Human Trafficking Heroes and Villains Representing the Problem in Anti-Trafficking Awareness Campaigns

Since the declaration by the United Nations that awareness raising should be a key part of efforts to combat human trafficking, government and non-government organizations have produced numerous public awareness campaigns designed to capture the public’s attention and sympathy. These campaigns represent the ‘problem’ of trafficking in specific ways, creating heroes and villains by placing the blame for trafficking on some, whilst obscuring the responsibility of others. This article adopts Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ framework for examining the politicization of problem representation in 18 anti-trafficking awareness campaigns. It is argued that these campaigns construct a narrow understanding of the problem through the depiction of ‘ideal offenders’. In particular, a strong focus on the demand for commercial sex as causative of human trafficking serves to obscure the problematic role of consumerism in a wide range of industries, and perpetuates an understanding of trafficking that fails to draw a necessary distinction between the demand for labour, and the demand for ‘exploitable’ labour. This problem representation also obscures the role governments in destination countries may play in causing trafficking through imposing restrictive migration regimes that render migrants vulnerable to traffickers.

The Cairns abortion trial: Language, deviance, and the ‘spoiled identity’

In 2009 a couple in Cairns were charged, and later found not guilty, of illegally obtaining a medical abortion through the use of medication imported from overseas. The court case reignited the discussions surrounding the illegality and social acceptance of abortion in Queensland, Australia. Based on a discourse analysis of 150 online news media articles covering the Cairns trial, this article critically examines the language and key words relied upon by media when covering the Cairns trial. It argues that, despite popular support for the decriminalisation of abortion, emotive language that aligns with a pro-life ideology is still being employed which has the power to shape perceptions of deviance and stigma surrounding abortion. This is useful to demonstrate how media discourse surrounding abortion needs to further align with a pro-choice ideology for women to be empowered for their choices.

Prostitution Ideology and Trafficking Policy: The Impact of Political Approaches to Domestic Sex Work on Human Trafficking Policy in Australia and the United States

Debates over the legitimacy and legality of prostitution have characterized human trafficking discourse for the last two decades. This article identifies the extent to which competing perspectives concerning the legitimacy of prostitution have influenced anti-trafficking policy in Australia and the United States and argues that each nation-state’s approach to domestic sex work has influenced trafficking legislation. The legal status of prostitution in each country and feminist influences on prostitution law reform have had a significant impact on the nature of the legislation adopted.

Stories of Trafficking

The scope of the problem of human trafficking is consistently disputed among government departments, non-government organisations and international agencies. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, tasked with monitoring the world’s response to human trafficking, declared in the 2009 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons that the magnitude of the problem of trafficking on the international scale is still ‘one of the key unanswered questions’ (UNODC 2009, 12). The International Labor Office has also reported difficulties in establishing a robust estimate on the number of trafficking victims (ILO 2006, 16). In the absence of reliable data, anti-trafficking activists have consistently relied upon the telling of stories in an effort to educate decision-makers about the ‘realities’ of trafficking. Lazos (2007) argues that the difficulties in obtaining reliable data in the ‘research, study and understanding of trafficking leaves two polar choices or orientations open: generalization or “true stories from the field”’ (Lazos 2007, 101). During the development of anti-trafficking legislation in Australia and the United States, interest groups played an important role in educating decision-makers about the nature of human trafficking, often relating true ‘stories from the field’ to illustrate their arguments. Stolz (2007) describes this as the ‘educative role’ of interest groups, who helped to set the agenda through their description of trafficking worldwide.

A Moral Geography

The politics of sex trafficking is, in the simplest terms, an old war being fought on a new battlefield. In both Australia and the United States of America, the development of trafficking legislation has been the new setting for a persistent debate about the asserted harms of sex work and the legitimacy of the sex industry. In this book, we have explored and compared the policy discourse in these two nation states with divergent approaches to domestic sex work, to find that despite some differences in policy, the discourse reflects similar value judgements about the selling of sex. Throughout the debates, abolitionist activists worked to characterise the problem of sex trafficking as one rooted in the existence of the sex industry and the demand for commercial sex. Others argued that sex work should be viewed in the same way as any other industry in which trafficking occurs and that it is the demand for exploitable labour, not sexual labour per se, which fuels trafficking.

Perspectives and Players

Considering sex work is often claimed to be the ‘oldest profession’, it is surprising how much debate continues to surround its legitimacy as a form of labour. Contemporary scholarly literature abounds with many arguments for and against legalising, decriminalising or abolishing sex work. Such diverse understandings can roughly be divided into those grounded in value judgements and those focusing on moral judgements, where ‘value judgement’ refers to the worth of a thing and subsequently the disposition to seek that thing, and ‘moral judgement’ to an imperative to act (Gaus 1999). For example, we make a value judgement when we say that someone is not living up to their potential. A moral imperative, on the other hand, would be ‘People are morally obligated to live up to their potential’. We can exhort others to pursue what we value, but if we fail, then we have no recourse because a value judgement only reflects what we believe is valuable. For example, person A may value high social status, while person B may not, and while person A may wish that person B would give due recognition to their high social status, she has no legal or moral recourse to force person B to do so. It is up to person B whether they choose to recognise high status or not. When we issue a moral imperative, on the other hand, we are not giving others a choice; the moral imperative is to act according to what is right.

Causes of Trafficking

Causes of trafficking are typically characterised as either ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors. Socio-economic factors in source countries such as poverty, gender inequality and lack of employment opportunities (Farr 2005) are seen as ‘push’ factors that not only encourage the migration of women, but also support a profitable market for a trade in human labour. ‘Pull’ factors in destination countries typically include the promise of a more affluent lifestyle, the availability of employment opportunities and the demand for cheap labour. ‘Demand’ is often highlighted as a major ‘pull’ factor for trafficking, with Article 9 of the UN Trafficking Protocol calling upon nation states to reduce demand for trafficked labour. Abolitionist activists perceive this as a call to reduce demand for sexual services. They argue that it is not the demand for ‘trafficked sex’ that is the problem, but demand for commercial sex per se.

The Politics of Sex Trafficking

At the turn of the twenty-first century, interest in human trafficking exploded, with activists, scholars and policy makers rushing to understand the causes of and solutions to this problem, broadly characterised as a ‘modern form of slavery’. Such concerns centre primarily on the fear that vulnerable women from developing countries are being lured to developed countries with false promises of a better income and a better life; where the use of deceptive and coercive methods is dominant; and where women are recruited, transported and exploited for their labour. Growing panic about women and children being traded as commodities in sexual slavery has challenged the international community to act.