ABSTRACT
The post-colonial perspective can provide a framework for understanding and informing the criminology practices in the Caribbean. The perspective demonstrates that the Caribbean’s judicial including the penal system is an extension and reproduction of Eurocentric colonial and post-colonial structures. This reproduction serves to perpetuate hegemonic, neo-colonial discourses of Western universality. Embedded in Caribbean criminology theories and practices are racialised discourses that produce knowledge and practice about crime and race, and thus the inherent inferiority of indigenous people and cultures. If we take this stance, we also take on the tasks of challenging and destabilizing meanings, definitions, and understandings about crime, the criminal, and the fixities of stereotypes within the criminology discourse. Drawing on secondary sources including newspaper articles, internet sources, and reports, this chapter reflects on the ways in which issues of sovereignty, mobility, and post-coloniality are linked and constructed within a discourse on sexual trafficking women in the region. It further demonstrates that the criminological approach by Caribbean governments and policy makers in linking migrant sex work and sexual trafficking, undermines the plurality of perspectives in understanding migrant sex work, and ignores the ways in which Caribbean women respond to poverty and opportunity in the current global political economy.
