ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, “human trafficking” has come to be seen as one of the most urgent ethical issues facing an increasingly globalized world. Described as “a modern slave trade” worth billions of dollars to transnational criminal groups, it has figured prominently in policy debate on immigration (B. Anderson 2008), and has been a focal point for the activities of a wide range of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), NGOs, charities and political lobby groups. It has also attracted extensive research and media attention, and featured in numerous television dramas, Hollywood films and best-selling novels. Trafficking is now popularly perceived as a global problem of immense proportions. As soon as talk of trafficking emerged as an issue of public and policy concern, critical
scholars and activists started to question the assumptions about gender, race, prostitution and mobility that underpinned it (Chapkis 1997, Kempadoo & Doezema 1998, Kempadoo 1999). Today, there is a substantial body of literature that critically deconstructs trafficking discourse, pointing to its role in encouraging and legitimating more restrictive immigration policies and tighter border controls; advancing extremely conservative moral agendas on prostitution, gender and sexuality; and promoting an approach to independent child migration in the developing world that penalizes rather than protects poor children (for example, Anderson & O’Connell Davidson 2003, Chapkis 2005, Kapur 2005, Weitzer 2007, Agustin 2007, Aradau 2008, Hashim & Thorsen 2011, O’Connell Davidson 2011). Focusing on prostitution in particular, this chapter reviews the definitional, theoretical and
political problems presented by the idea of trafficking. It argues that dominant discourse on trafficking serves to dis-embed the suffering it describes from its basis in what is in reality a more pressing ethical issue in the contemporary world, namely the human cost of states’ efforts to control irregular migration. It is, as a number of other commentators have remarked, a discourse of depoliticization (Anderson & Andrijasevic 2008, Aradau 2008, Jacobsen & Stenvoll 2010).
