ABSTRACT
While international anti-traffi cking policies have traditionally been confi ned to the protection of women traffi cked for prostitution, in 2000, the UN Traffi cking Protocol also recognized overseas domestic workers (ODWs) as unskilled female labor migrants vulnerable to slavery and similar practices. 2 This was a response not only to the large volume of female labor migration for domestic work identifi ed in recent decades but also to the myriad reports and publications on exploitation by employers and traffi ckers. The traditional anti-traffi cking principle of rescuing, reintegrating and repatriating the victim was thus extended to apply to female ODWs. The effi cacy of this victim-based principle, however, has increasingly been shown to have more relevance in legitimizing increased protection for receiving countries’ borders than for the migrant worker (see Doezema 2000, 2002; also Dewey and Zheng in this volume). Despite more recent advances in foregrounding migrant women’s agency and rights as workers, efforts remain hampered by both increasing inequality within the global economy and tightening immigration policies. From poor countries with very limited livelihood options, these migrant women choose overseas domestic work, often at the expense of their human rights. As migrants, they are outsiders whose rights are superseded by the rights of the sovereign, receiving-state while unenforceable by the sending state (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997 ). The agency-rights approach has thus done little to change the historical course of anti-traffi cking policy.
