ABSTRACT
Traffi cking in people, and particularly traffi cking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation (“sex traffi cking”), has been widely referred to as “modern-day slavery” [Bales, 1999; Bertone, 2000; Hughes, 2001; Jeff reys, 2002; Boyd, 2003; King, 2004; van den Anker, 2004; Roby, 2005] and “the dark side of globalization” [Sanghera, 2005:6], and described within the rhetoric of “evil” [U.S. Department of State, 2004; Abrams, 2005; Kwon, 2005]. Th is phenomenon re-emerged on the international agenda in the early 1990s, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and a period of increased mobility from the global south to the global north [Rijken, 2003:91; Saunders and Soderlund, 2003:16; Tyldum et al., 2005:9]. A range of actors across the developed and developing world, from international organizations, state and nonstate institutions, politicians, and the media, to academics, feminists, civil rights activists, and the clergy, warned of the “dramatic increase” in traffi cking [Rijken, 2003:101; O’Connell Davidson, 2006], particularly women and children, portraying “sex slavery” as a peril that threatens basic values of modern civilization. Th is “21st century abolitionist movement” [U.S. Ambassador John Miller, U.S.
