ABSTRACT

Governments of the Global North cast themselves as the heroes of the human trafficking narrative, enacting legislation and pursuing foreign policy to rescue victims abroad and to secure borders at home. This contrasts with the depiction of governments of the Global South as villains, characterised as negligent or complicit in the crime of human trafficking. This villainous framing is reinforced by the United States’s policing of other governments’ efforts to combat trafficking through the annual Trafficking in Persons Report. This chapter questions the heroic characterisation of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, arguing that restrictive migration regimes contribute to the vulnerability of trafficking victims. Immigration officials also appear in trafficking stories as either failed heroes negligent in protecting victims, or as proxy villains, invoked by traffickers as a threat against irregular migrants. Despite these challenges to the dominant narrative, governments of the Global North are ultimately insulated from responsibility for causing the problem of human trafficking, relying instead on metanarratives of border security and Western exceptionalism to justify government responses.