In 2000, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) signed the

Trafficking Protocol as part of the Convention Against Transnational Organised

Crime. Three years later, on 31 December 2003, the Convention came into force

internationally. This event has heralded a global flurry of interest and activity

around the problem of human trafficking amongst governments, non-government

organisations (NGOs), human rights activists, feminists (of various orientations),

the popular media and, belatedly, academics in the social sciences and related

disciplines. Nonetheless, perhaps more so than other seemingly related areas of

social science research – such as development, HIV/AIDS and migration – we

believe that trafficking research, with some notable ethnographic exceptions (for

example Cheng 2010; Molland 2012; Parrenas 2011) is comparatively ‘thin’.

Some scholars have already commented on the potential of some trafficking

research – academic and commissioned – to perpetuate damaging trafficking

‘myths’ (Andrasvic 2007; see also Chapter 6). Others have noted the ways in

which anti-trafficking stakeholders uncritically accept and reproduce certain

‘truths’ about human trafficking in their own work (Yea 2013; Molland 2010;

Lindquist 2011).