ABSTRACT
Politicians, governmental organizations and anti-trafficking non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claim that “trafficking” is a hugely profitable business in which organized criminals transport millions of human victims around the globe in the modern-day equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade. As U.S. President George W. Bush put it in an address to the UN General Assembly in 2003:
We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.
(cited in Bravo, 2011: 563) Nobody is in favor of slavery, and if “trafficking” is a modern slave trade then everyone must agree on the need to combat it. Given that by 2012 there were 153 State Parties and nine Signatories to the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (2000) (hereafter the Trafficking Protocol), it may appear that there is indeed consensus on the issue (UNODC, 2012). But what exactly is it that all these states have signed up to prevent, suppress, and punish? The Trafficking Protocol identifies “trafficking” as a process (recruitment, transportation, and control) that can be organized in a variety of different ways, involve different types and degrees of compulsion (all of which are undefined—What kind of threats? How much deception? Which types of vulnerability?), and lead to a variety of very different outcomes, linked only by a common purpose, “exploitation,” which itself is undefined. This definition does not equip us with a standard, universal yardstick against which an individual’s status as “trafficked” or “not trafficked” can be assessed, for both “exploitation” and “force” are slippery and context-dependent notions (Anderson & O’Connell Davidson, 2003). Certainly the forced/voluntary dichotomy that informs the imagined distinction between “trafficking” on the one hand, 154and “smuggling” and legally sanctioned systems of labor importation on the other, disregards the well-documented fact that there are “elements of both compulsion and choice… in the decision making of most migrants” (Turton, 2003, p. 6).