ABSTRACT
The international gaze on sex trafficking has been primarily focused on the experience of exploitation suffered by women, either en route to or when in the destination country. Women’s experiences of physical, emotional and psychological exploitation have seen concern coalesce around violence against women which has been amenable to neoliberal agendas of control (Kapur 2005; Bumiller 2008). The violence against women (VAW) agenda has demonstrated far less interest in the conditions of globalisation that require/make possible complex migrations, and the multitudinous reasons for women’s migration. The limitations of the VAW framework in conceptualising sex trafficking and anti-trafficking efforts have become increasingly plain when the complexity of women’s experiences of trafficking, as well as the accounts of officials and advocates working in this area, are taken into account. Regardless of how sexual violence, gender and sex work are viewed, the VAW agenda is only part of the picture. Responding to sex trafficking requires a more sophisticated account of women’s needs and their desires to move around the world. In fact, it is our argument that the criminalisation approach spawned by the VAW agenda in relation to sex trafficking suffers a serious legitimacy deficit for its failure to engage theoretically, and in policy and practice, in increasing women’s access to cross-border movement on their own terms, including for the purposes of participating in the globalised sex industry. There is a form of sexual violence in women’s economic, social and cultural exclusion metered out in the almost total absence of legitimate transnational migration options, and realised through diverse and almost total border enforcement both at the border and beyond. The enhancement of border enforcement driven by concerns over sex trafficking is particularly insidious in its
broader impact on women from the Global South. There is a nascent body of research documenting how the increased fortification of borders disproportionately impacts on women’s mobility and their methods of border crossing. It is the hegemonic violence that occurs beyond the border – which is also embedded to varying degrees in the processes of criminal justice, welfare and immigration – that this book has been concerned with and which must be accounted for, prior to turning our attention to future challenges and ways ahead.
