How images of sex trafficking produce notions of race, sex, and citizenship

This book explores women’s stories of agency in a lived experience of trafficking. The idea of agency is a difficult concept to fathom, given the unscrupulous acts and exploitative practices which define trafficking. In response to the ‘3-P’ anti-trafficking paradigm – to prevent and protect victims and prosecute traffickers – official discourse constructs agency in singular opposition to victimhood. The ‘true’ victim of trafficking is reified in attributes of passivity and worthiness, whereas signs of women’s agency are read as consent in their own predicament or as culpability in criminal justice and immigration rule-breaking. Moving beyond the official lack or criminal fact of agency, this collection of stories adds knowledge on agency constructed with, on, and by, women possessing a trafficking experience. Based on the stories of twenty-six women, agency is seen to exist in relationship to women’s victimisation under trafficking. Exploring well-being agency (women’s physical safety and economic needs), and agency freedom (women’s capacity to construct choices and the conditions affecting choice), women demonstrate agency in their identity, decision making, and actions. Acknowledging the existence of a migration-crime-security nexus in contemporary human trafficking, the narratives of fifteen anti-trafficking professionals highlight how official actions mediate women’s achievement of well-being and agency freedoms. This book will be of interest to students undertaking courses in modern slavery, human trafficking, human geography, police studies, social work, and criminology.

Focusing on the trafficking of women and girls from a feminist perspective, this book examines how social structures and gender influence human trafficking. While women and girls are not the only victims of trafficking, they tend to be disproportionally represented. Structural inequities – including poverty, gender-based violence, racism, class and caste-based discrimination and other forms of oppression and marginalization – place some individuals at substantially greater risk to be trafficked. The contributors explore topics including trauma-informed assessment of, and therapy with, survivors of human trafficking; issues facing children of trafficked women when they are reintegrated into their communities post-trafficking; the intersection of trafficking with racial and cultural oppression; critical aspects of international sex trafficking; and commercial sexual exploitation of children. The book concludes with a discussion of how human trafficking intersects with both intracountry adoption and brokered marriages. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women & Therapy.

Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics. Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement's feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its universal goal and gradually gave way to nationalist concerns over "undesirable" migrants and state control over women themselves. Addressing an issue that is still of great concern today, this book sheds light on the ability of international non-governmental organizations to challenge state power, the motivations for state involvement in humanitarian issues pertaining to women, and the importance of gender and sexuality to state officials engaged in nation building.

This book examines the traffic in women for marriage, a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in international efforts to address the problem of human trafficking. In contrast to current international and state-based approaches to trafficking, which tend to focus on sex trafficking and trafficking for forced labour, this book seeks to establish how marriage as an institution is often implicated in the occurrence of trafficking in women. The book aims firstly to establish why marriage has tended not to be included in dominant conceptions of trafficking in persons and secondly to determine whether certain types of marriage may constitute cases of human trafficking, in and of themselves. Through the use of case studies on forced marriage, mail-order bride (MOB) marriage and Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, this book demonstrates that certain kinds of marriage may in fact constitute situations of trafficking in persons and together form the under-recognised phenomenon of ‘marriage trafficking’. In addition, the book offers a new perspective on the types of harm involved in trafficking in women by developing a framework for identifying the particular abuses characteristic to marriage trafficking. It argues that the traffic in women for marriage cannot be understood merely as a subset of sex trafficking or trafficking for forced labour, but rather constitutes a distinctive form of trafficking in its own right. This book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduates working in the fields of human rights theory and institutions, political science, international law, transnational crime, trafficking in persons, and feminist political theory.

One million people are trafficked into the sex industry each year. In this timely and provocative study, Kathryn Farr documents the macro and micro impact of trafficking women and children into this industry on a global scale. Farr looks not only at the victims themselves, but also at the sex trade's main players, organized crime structure, economic conditions, and role in which various militaries perpetuate its demand. Sex Trafficking can be incorporated into a variety of courses in sociology, social problems, culture and sexuality, history, and women's studies.

How images of sex trafficking produce notions of race, sex, and citizenship