What we talk about when we talk about trafficking

Almost 20 years since the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and promulgation of the United Nations Trafficking Protocol, modern anti-trafficking efforts and U.S. leadership in the global effort to combat modern slavery must be understood in the context of American enforcement efforts dating back to Reconstruction under the labels of peonage, involuntary servitude, and slavery, and now human trafficking. The modern anti-trafficking frame of the 3Ps of prevention, protection, and prosecution was rooted in civil rights and human rights concepts of slavery and freedom rather than concepts of commerce, migration, or regulation of prostitution. That new approach, however, has been limited by unresolved cultural and legal legacies of a competing anti-trafficking framework based on commerce and morality – the “White Slave Trafficking” effort of the early 1900s. At its best, the 3P framework of the modern U.S. and UN instruments and policies drives best practices in critical reporting and implementation standards, criminal and civil enforcement, victim identification, supply chain transparency, and worker-led social responsibility while capturing and incorporating the voices and lived experiences of survivors. Continued implementation of this modern rights-based approach is at risk, however, given the rhetorical and cultural strength of the competing sex trafficking lens. ³

Learning Objectives

At the end of the chapter, readers will be able to:

Understand the development of the issue area currently defined as “human trafficking”;

Identify the historical uses of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which ended chattel slavery and prohibited subsequent forms of slavery and involuntary servitude but was limited in its efficacy by systemic evasion and lack of resources;

Understand how contradictory legal regimes added to confusion in the anti-trafficking space in the twentieth century and left some victims of compelled service unprotected by the law, most notably through the dominance of the “White Slave Trafficking Act” approach in the sex trafficking arena;

37Identify the conceptual and historical underpinnings of both rights-based anti-trafficking efforts and commerce or morality-based anti-trafficking efforts, as well as the policy approaches that flow from each;

Understand the modern history of the U.S. government’s involuntary servitude and slavery program and how it became cast as “human trafficking” in the 1990s;

Examine how different presidential administrations have approached modern slavery since the promulgation of the United Nations protocol and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, both in rhetorical approaches and policy/enforcement actions;

Interrogate how and to what extent the rhetoric and implementation of the modern slavery/trafficking movement are correlated; and

Identify best practices that deliver on the “3P” paradigm, such as multidisciplinary task forces, victim identification and protection, and worker-led social responsibility (WSR) efforts.