Julia O'Connell Davidson

will the real sex slave please stand up

This paper critically explores the way in which ‘trafficking’ has been framed as a problem involving organized criminals and ‘sex slaves’, noting that this approach obscures both the relationship between migration policy and ‘trafficking’, and that between prostitution policy and forced labour in the sex sector. Focusing on the UK, it argues that far from representing a step forward in terms of securing rights and protections for those who are subject to exploitative employment relations and poor working conditions in the sex trade, the current policy emphasis on sex slaves and ‘victims of trafficking’ limits the states obligations towards them.

Prostitution and the Contours of Control

Feminist thinkers have long been concerned to explore parallels between marriage, prostitution, slavery and wage labour, as well as the sexual, political and economic relations that underpin these institutions (see Jackson, 1994). For those radical feminists who foreground the sexual domination and political subordination of women by men in their analyses of gender inequality, prostitution is the unambiguous embodiment of male oppression. It reduces women to bought objects, it allows men temporary, but direct, control over the prostitute, and increases their existing social control over all women by affirming their masculinity and patriarchal rights of access to women’s bodies (Barry, 1979, 1984; Dworkin, 1987; Pateman, 1988). Prostitution is, for such commentators, a form of slavery: ‘Free prostitution does not exist … prostitution of women [is] always by force … it is a violation of human rights and an outrage to the dignity of women’ (Barry, 1991, quoted in Van der Gaag, 1994, p. 6). Since no person willingly volunteers to have their human rights and dignity violated, it follows from radical feminist analyses that the decision to exchange sex for money is always and necessarily forced and irrational. The logic of such arguments, combined with the liberal use of military metaphors, produces self-contradictory, but equally unpleasant and patronising, visions of the prostitute woman. One moment she is a tragic, front-line casualty, the next she is a self-serving collaborator betraying her sisters.

Sex at the Margins: Migration, labour markets and the rescue industry

Since the early 1990s, popular credence has increasingly been given to several claims about ‘human trafficking’: that it is an immensely profitable criminal business taking place on a vast scale all around the world; that it mostly involves the transport of women and children into sexual slavery; and that virtually everywhere, prostitution now almost exclusively involves the abuse and exploitation of ‘trafficked sex slaves’. Though such ideas have come to exert a powerful influence on national and international policymaking, they have not gone unchallenged. Indeed, for over a decade, scholars and activists have been publishing books and articles that – in a variety of ways – critically deconstruct policy, media and popular discourse on trafficking, question the victimization rhetoric that it rests upon and reproduces, demonstrate its role in legitimating increasingly repressive immigration regimes, and/or present research findings that illuminate the complex and highly variable relationship between migration, sex work and coercive employment relations (Chapkis, 1997; Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2001, to name but a few of the pioneers). Claudia Aradau and Laura Agustin are among those who have contributed to this critical literature on trafficking, and the books under review here build on their previously published work.