ABSTRACT
Human trafficking is a complex phenomenon, not least because there is no common understanding of what it actually is. Local women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for victims of domestic violence found their already scarce resources stretched even further as they struggled to cope with the needs of victims of trafficking. However, human rights have something of a chequered history when it comes to the human rights of women, especially in the arena of violence against women where they have been 'long on rhetoric but short on decisive action' in tackling the causes and consequences of trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence and discrimination. The 'global agenda of high politics' has not served women well as the counter-trafficking strategies of the West become ever more conflated with migration control, the policing of state borders and the violent exclusion of unwanted migrants.
