ABSTRACT
Globally, a large share of convicted human trafficking offenders are women; yet little is known about their victimisation experiences and the socio-economic structural constraints that may impact their choices. Even less is known about the way these experiences are constructed by judges within a patriarchal legal system. In Australia, since 2005, ten women have been convicted of human trafficking-related offences involving adult commercial sexual exploitation. An analysis of sparse available data, including sentencing remarks and appeal transcripts, highlights that four of these women were also trafficked victims. This chapter argues that Australian Judges have constructed an oversimplified narrative, which has resulted in a view these women ‘should have known’ AU: Please confirm if the quotes have been set correctly here.
better. This narrative sees women’s’ experiences of victimisation intensifying their status of ‘offender’, rather than mitigating it. This chapter discusses the similarities between these four criminalised women and their victims, as acknowledged by the sentencing judges. It uses a critical legal feminist framework, incorporating Giddens’ (Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, London: Macmillan, 1979; The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984) theory of structuration, to understand the relationship between agency and structure in women charged with acting in offender roles in Australian cases of human trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation.
