GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 14 ● Number 2 ● Summer/Autumn 2012—Slavery Today Absolving the State: The Trafficking–Slavery Metaphor
The fight against a phenomenon presented as the modern equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade has enormous popular appeal. No votes will be lost by politicians who condemn slavery, and plenty of funds are likely to be raised by organisations that pledge themselves to combat it. Nobody is in favour of slavery, and the struggle against it therefore appears as a simple and straightforward moral imperative, a project that stands outside and above politics. And yet, as this article will argue, there are significant differences between the contemporary phenomenon described as “trafficking” and the transatlantic slave trade, differences that—if acknowledged—muddy the moral waters and dissolve all semblance of political consensus on the nature and causes of the problem of trafficking, as well as the remedies for it. The metaphor of slavery depoliticises what is actually a highly political issue, and in so doing, renders invisible the role of the state in constructing the conditions under which some groups become vulnerable to various forms of abuse and exploitation. Trafficking and Slavery: Some DifferencesThe most obvious contrast between contemporary “victims of trafficking” (VoTs) and Africans who, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, were forcibly transported to the Americas is that whereas the latter had no pre-existing desire or ambition to move to the New World, the people who are currently described as VoTs almost invariably want to move to another region or country, and almost invariably have excellent reasons for wishing to do so. In some cases, the decision to leave home is based on the belief that poor life-chances and earning opportunities will be greatly improved through migration. In other cases, the decision to migrate is made in a context of more acute forms of human insecurity. Either way, it is also made in the context of immigration regimes that have become ever more restrictive over the past two decades, something that has prompted the development of a growing market for clandestine migration services, including smuggling across borders, the faking of travel documents, and the arranging of marriages.
In this criminalised, concealed and so entirely unregulated market, migrants are open to a variety of forms of abuse, some of which may place their lives in jeopardy or lock them into extremely violent and exploitative situations at the point of destination. And yet their experience is not necessarily one of violence, exploitation and abuse. Some irregular migrants are assisted by third parties who do not cheat or harm them in any way, and even when they do experience elements of abuse or exploitation, it may be that they nonetheless consider this preferable to remaining at home, where threats to their security in the form of violence or straightforward starvation may be far greater. The fact that exploitation at the point of destination can be experienced as the lesser of two evils and viewed as preferable to conditions obtaining back home is a second sense in which the movement of people occurring today differs markedly from that in the transatlantic slave trade. It explains why rescued VoTs are rarely eager to be returned home; and it (rather than the often-cited Stockholm syndrome) also explains why, instead of kneeling in gratitude to their “liberators”, VoTs sometimes go to great lengths to escape from those who have “rescued” them.1
A third crucial difference between the transatlantic slave trade and “trafficking” is that those who were historically transported from Africa to the Americas were moved into societies where slavery was one of the established and recognised statuses used to define employment relations. A “slave” was readily identifiable in the sense that s/he was legally defined as such, and it is therefore possible to speak of and study slaves in the Americas from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as a specific, bounded group (even if what such research actually reveals is that this legal category encompassed a diverse range of experience, with significant overlap between that of slaves and that of many non-slaves).
Today, by contrast, people are not being transported into societies where slavery is legally recognised and regulated as a judicial category. VoTs are not people who have been formally assigned the legal status of “slave”, and because today, as in the past, the experience of unfreedom and exploitation ranges along a continuum, this generates real confusion about whom, precisely, we mean when we speak of “trafficked” persons. The definition of “trafficking” provided in the UN Trafficking Protocol (2000) does not actually allow us to distinguish clearly the experience of VoTs from that of other groups of migrants. To begin with, the protocol frames trafficking as a subset of “illegal” immigration and as a phenomenon quite distinct from “smuggling”. And yet people whom states would regard as “smuggled” or as “immigration offenders” can also end up in the situations of exploitation listed in the protocol. Meanwhile, workers who move through perfectly proper channels to work legally in the formal economy are also sometimes subject to extensive rights violations, including confinement, passport confiscation, non-payment of wages, and physical violence or its threat. In other words, though framed as a problem of transnational organised crime, all of the elements of “trafficking” deemed reprehensible can and do occur within systems of labour import and export that are legally sanctioned by states. Who Are the ‘Trafficked’?Further problems arise from the fact that although all existing definitions posit that “trafficking” takes place for purposes of exploitation, “exploitation” remains undefined. And as the philosopher Julius Moravcsik points out in a discussion of slavery, “exploitation”—and also “force”—are slippery notions:
What constitutes inappropriate economic exploitation depends partly on what alternatives were or could have been envisaged within a given situation … [Similarly,] what counts as force … and what restrictions any society might have to invoke under certain circumstances are left to be determined in context.2
“Trafficking” is used as an umbrella term for a process that can lead to a variety of outcomes and that in theory intersects with an array of other markets, institutions and practices (labour markets, prostitution, marriage, benefit fraud, organ trading, child adoption, and independent child migration, to name but a few); some of these are socially tolerated and legally regulated, others are illegal, stigmatised and/or socially contested. To ring-fence “trafficking” in such a way as to be able to distinguish clearly between “trafficked” and “non-trafficked” persons would therefore require us to make a judgement about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate exploitation, and what counts as force, in a huge number of vastly different contexts. Throw in the fact that social norms pertaining to these markets, institutions and practices differ from country to country, and the task looks even more hopeless.
These problems are compounded by the fact that in the real world there is no easy opposition between, on the one hand, migrants who enjoy total choice over all aspects of their lives, and on the other, individuals who have been kidnapped and transported in shackles to settings where they are imprisoned, starved, and forced to labour under the lash of a whip. Instead, people’s experience of exploitation, abuse, powerlessness and unfreedom ranges along a continuum. This means that those seeking to make operational the concept of “trafficking” have to judge where along that spectrum “appropriate” exploitation/force ends and “inappropriate” exploitation/force begins. How badly must a young man recruited into agricultural work abroad be treated to qualify as a VoT? If he is paid less than he had been led to believe he would earn, and/or required to work longer hours than the recruiter suggested, and is unable to quit because he has no money to return home, would this be enough? Or must he have been refused payment altogether and prevented from leaving by threat of violence? What about a woman who migrates to become a prostitute or a domestic worker? If she was deceived about earnings and working conditions and had her documents removed to prevent her from quitting, but was not raped or beaten, would she count as a VoT?
And what of children’s migration for private fostering? This can—whether it take place through legally sanctioned or irregular channels—have disastrous consequences, but it does not necessarily harm the children concerned and may even enhance their wellbeing and life-chances. Even if arranged illegally and for a third party’s financial gain, distinguishing between “trafficked” and “smuggled” children is no simple matter given that expectations regarding the amount of unpaid labour that children will provide within households vary cross-nationally and within nations, as do social norms regarding the powers that adults may properly exercise over children. Precisely how bad must a child’s experience be in order for the people who facilitated her movement to be viewed as “traffickers”? Certainly, it is impossible to state categorically that anyone who organises or facilitates a child’s movement for adoption or fostering is, ipso facto, moving that child “for purposes of exploitation”, or automatically guilty of any legal or moral transgression.
Even when migrant children are involved in criminal activities, determining whether or not they are being exploited involves relative judgements. How ruthlessly must a sixteen-year-old migrant involved in pick-pocketing or drug cultivation be treated by a third party to be considered an exploited VoT rather than a mere criminal? Difficult questions about consent and agency arise here, for people below the age of eighteen who break the law are not popularly imagined as unambiguous “victims”; indeed, the age of criminal responsibility is as low as ten in many countries. Nor has the UN Trafficking Protocol’s assertion that consent to their own exploitation is irrelevant where children are concerned been fully incorporated into the domestic law of all countries. UK law, for example, “still requires proof of some element of deception or coercion that has been exercised over the child”, and children who some would describe as “trafficked” have been prosecuted in the United Kingdom for cannabis cultivation as well as for other crimes.3
Distinguishing a VoT from other categories of migrant requires a series of judgements, and these judgements can only be made through reference to political and moral values about which there is no consensus, and to social norms which vary across and within regions. It follows that “trafficked persons” do not actually exist as some kind of prior, objective or legal category of persons that can form the object of research or policy. To be sure, “victim of trafficking” exists as an administrative category in some countries. It is a status assigned to those migrants who are considered deserving of protection and assistance on the grounds that they have experienced the particular constellation of coercive and exploitative practices during the migratory process and at the point of destination that the authorities understand as “trafficking”. However, if anti-trafficking campaigners focused only on those who are actually afforded the status of VoT, the numbers involved would be so small as to make any comparison with the transatlantic slave trade appear almost ludicrous. (US authorities, for example, managed to identify just 1,362 VoTs brought into the United States between 2000 and 2007.)4
This is one of the reasons why all claims about the scale and profitability of “human trafficking” should be taken with copious quantities of salt.5 It is also why glib statements about trafficking as a form of modern slavery that “we” all have an obligation to fight serve to depoliticise what is actually a hugely contentious political issue. Old Abolitionism and the Problem of DemandThe historian Thomas Haskell points out that people do not normally feel morally responsible for phenomena or events that they perceive as natural, inevitable or beyond their sphere of influence, and observes that through the lens of the dominant moral conventions of eighteenth-century English and North American society, slavery did not appear an absolute wrong in which individual slave-holders were personally implicated. Even Europeans and Americans who pitied slaves normally did so in a passive, fatalistic way, with no sense of being personally implicated in their tragedy. Haskell uses the example of the early Quaker abolitionist, John Woolman, to show the steps that had to be undergone to move “intellectually from a world in which slave misery provoked only … passive sympathy … to a world in which remaining passive in the face of such misery seemed unconscionable”.6
A crucial aspect of the case Woolman made against slavery was that moral responsibility was not limited in time or space. The fact that a slave-owner had legally purchased a slave from another slave-owner at a fair market price did not entitle him or her to property in that slave as this was “wrong from the beginning … If I purchase a man who hath never forfeited his liberty, the natural right of freedom is in him”. Furthermore, the geographical and temporal remoteness of “the scene of initial enslavement”, the original sin against the slave (or her foremothers and fathers), was no defence: “Great distance makes nothing in our favour. To willingly join with unrighteousness to the injury of men who live some thousands of miles off is the same in substance as joining with it to the injury of our neighbours.”7 And Woolman also identified a causal relationship between the slave trade and the demand for slave labour:
Whatever nicety of distinction there may be betwixt going in person on expeditions to catch slaves, and buying those with a view to self-interest which others have taken, it is clear and plain to an upright mind that such distinction is in words, not in substance; for the parties are concerned in the same work and have a necessary connection with and dependence on each other. For were there none to purchase slaves, they who live by stealing and selling them would of consequence do less at it.8
Abolitionists subsequently extended this association between supply and demand to consumer demand for the products of slave labour. As Laura Brace notes, the English campaign for abstention from sugar in the 1790s (which followed Parliament’s defeat of Wilberforce’s first motion to abolish the slave trade) highlighted a chain of connections that linked the seemingly innocent English consumer of sugar to the brutality of the slave system of the West Indies. Abolitionists employed “the rhetoric of pollution, and the trope of cannibalism” to motivate people to change their consumer behaviour (sugar was described as so steeped in the blood, sweat and tears of the slaves who produced it that those who ate it were in effect consuming human flesh). The campaign created “a powerful vision of the consumer’s moral agency”: in the face of the government’s refusal to act to abolish the slave trade, customers for sugar could resist slave-trading by changing their consumer behaviour, boycotting sugar from the West Indies.9
Similar arguments about the links between supply and demand and the moral responsibility of the consumer have resurfaced in contemporary discourse on trafficking and modern slavery. The UN Trafficking Protocol directs states party to it to “adopt or strengthen legislative or other measures, such as educational, social or cultural measures, including through bilateral and multilateral cooperation, to discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”. Governments have subsequently commissioned studies of “the demand side of trafficking”, and many NGOs have pressed for action to combat it. But what does “tackling the demand side” really mean? The Demand Side of Trafficking?Even if it were possible to agree on a precise and workable definition of “trafficking”, the notion of demand for the labour/services of trafficked persons would present another set of problems. The transatlantic slave trade served a specific demand for slaves, i.e., human beings who were legally constructed as commodities—“things” to which an exchange value was attached. But the process described as “trafficking” does not meet a similarly specific demand for VoTs, or even for the labour/services of trafficked persons. An unscrupulous plantation manager, sweatshop owner or brothel keeper may want workers who are unprotected, vulnerable and unable to quit or resist severe exploitation, but is hardly likely to turn down the opportunity to subject a worker to forced labour or slavery-like practices simply because in the eyes of the state s/he would be cast as a “smuggled person” or an “illegal immigrant” rather than a “VoT”. The same point applies with regard to those who cheat, abuse and exploit migrant children, wives and domestic workers in private households. The niceties of international and national law on trafficking, and the particular details of a person’s journey into vulnerability and bondage, are irrelevant to those who exploit or consume their labour/services.
Another analytical problem arises from the fact that a “trafficked” person’s labour/services can be exploited in many and very different sectors and settings—private households, mines and factories, agriculture, construction, street begging, drug running, and the sex industry, to name but a few of the most obvious. What, then, is the object of enquiry and intervention in research and policy on “the demand side of trafficking”? Questions that appear obviously important in relation, say, to the problem of trafficking into textile sweatshops or the sex industry seem less so in relation to trafficking for marriage or fostering, and quite irrelevant in relation to begging or street crime, for instance. The notion of demand for the labour/services of a “trafficked” person can span a vast and diverse hotchpotch of motivations and interests, ranging from the desire of employers for cheap and docile labour, to the interest of criminals in vulnerable individuals who can be compelled to carry out crimes for them, to consumer demand for cheap goods and/or services, to the demand for household labour or subsistence labour, or to any or all of these.
For anti-slavery activists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections between a supply of slaves and the transatlantic slave trade, and between consumer demand for commodities that were produced in slave societies and the oppression and exploitation of people who were legally held as slaves, were reasonably straightforward. The idea of a “demand side of trafficking” today is anything but. There are no countries with economies that depend wholly or primarily on “trafficked labour” in the way that the slave societies of the Americas depended on slave labour, and although there are some sectors and settings in which forced labour and slavery-like practices are believed to be more common, there is no product, service, form of employment, or practice that rests exclusively and unambiguously on the use of what can universally be agreed to constitute force or exploitation. In the eighteenth century, William Fox could urge the English people to abstain completely “from the use of sugar and rum” until the slave trade was abolished or “till we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood”.10 But no similarly simple appeal can be made to contemporary consumers. Feminist CritiquesIt is true that some feminist groups (such as the Coalition against Trafficking in Women, CATW) believe that prostitution is always and necessarily connected with slavery. They draw on a particular tradition of feminist thought, radical feminism, that leads them to insist that it is the body, self and person of the woman that is sold in prostitution, not her sexual services. They therefore believe it impossible for a woman ever to consent genuinely to prostitute herself, and they recognise no distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution. Through this lens, all women and girls in prostitution have been trafficked into “sexual slavery” and questions about “the demand side of trafficking” are simple. Such feminists regard the end consumer of sexual services (“the sex buyer”) as directly implicated in the process of trafficking, just as the Quaker abolitionist Woolman held that those who purchased slaves were directly implicated in the slave trade. Thus, in her 2006 annual report, Sigma Huda, UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking, insists that “Unlike the purchaser of consumer goods produced through trafficked labour, the prostitute-user is simultaneously both the demand-creator and (by virtue of his receipt of the trafficked person) part of the trafficking chain”.11 Hence, she regards the criminalisation of those who buy sex as an “anti-trafficking measure”. In this, as in other matters, her report is in line with the position adopted by CATW (an organisation to which Ms Huda belongs).
However, this position is unacceptable to many people who actually work in prostitution and regard it as an earning opportunity that they have chosen from the options available to them, just as other workers choose jobs. There is an extensive research literature on prostitution which demonstrates that while it can be associated with forced labour and slavery-like practices, and is often undertaken in poor conditions, it is not necessarily associated with violence or third-party exploitation. For feminists and others who adopt a liberal or libertarian stance on sex commerce, the idea that the entire commercial sex market should be eradicated in order to tackle the problem of trafficking for prostitution is as draconian and wrong-headed as the idea that the demand for carpets should be eliminated in order to address the problem of forced and child labour in the carpet industry. From this perspective, questions about “the demand side of sex trafficking” are about the demand of unscrupulous employers for forced labour, and not about consumer demand for commercial sex per se. Indeed, far from viewing abstention from consumption as the solution to the problem of forced labour in prostitution, some activists for sex-worker rights would argue that consumers have an important role to play in rooting such abuses out of the market by, for example, reporting to the police suspicions that workers are being held against their will (such reports are, in fact, sometimes made). Boycotts versus Ethical ConsumptionLeaving these debates about prostitution aside, the idea of consumer boycotts is less appealing to modern-day abolitionists than it was for their forebears. It would be difficult to ask consumers to abstain completely from the use of all of the goods, services and practices that may be associated with “trafficking” until such time as “trafficking” is abolished. This is partly because of the length of the list of products and services concerned, and their overlaps with markets and practices that are viewed as socially desirable, and partly because it is widely believed that everything the consumer wants can already be provided by another mode, “unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood”, as William Fox put it.
Modern-day abolitionism is not born out of a critique of capitalism and the consumer culture it spawns, any more than was eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionism. With the possible exception of prostitution, modern abolitionists do not ask consumers actually to stop consuming anything at all. They merely ask them to consume more “ethically”. Consumers are invited to choose between ethical fair-trade products that are sold at a profit and other (presumably unethical, unfair-trade) products also sold at a profit by the same retail outlet; or to choose between purchasing from shops that declare a commitment to ending slavery or from shops that make no statement on slavery, for example. These individual acts are presented as a form of moral agency that can be encouraged by, and exercised in alliance with, capitalist enterprises.12
However, the chains of connection that link contemporary consumers to workers subjected to forced labour and other forms of abuse are in reality founded on, and underpinned by, structures that cannot be transformed by the individual acts of consumers. An American consumer may elect to buy a fair-trade cotton T-shirt produced in the United States and pat herself on the back for having avoided giving succour to modern “slavers”, for example. But the exploitation of migrant and child labour in cotton production in the poor and developing world is not simply a result of global consumer demand for cheap cotton. It is, as Neil Howard’s research in Benin clearly illustrates, also a result of US government subsidies to domestic cotton producers that artificially deflate the price of cotton worldwide, pushing those in poor cotton-producing regions deeper into poverty, and so also to work in ever-worsening conditions.13 To address such problems, however, would require us to forego the easy moral consensus in which states, big business, NGOs and consumers in affluent countries can all unite in condemning modern slavery. It would mean engaging in political arguments about development aid, World Trade Organisation agreements, protectionism by affluent countries, and other similarly knotty issues. Again, the metaphor of “slavery” serves to depoliticise what is in reality highly political terrain. The Desire to MigrateFinally, dominant discourse on “trafficking as modern slavery” distorts perceptions of what is possibly the most significant aspect of “the demand side of trafficking”, namely, the demand for opportunities to migrate. When “trafficking” is imagined as the modern equivalent of transatlantic slavery, the potential victim’s need or desire to migrate is either invisible or looks irrational. Thus, instead of thinking about how to make migration safer, the solution appears to be to educate people in “sending” countries about the horrors of trafficking/slavery, so that they will be wary of those who try to lure them into the trap of travelling abroad. This allows anti-trafficking campaigns to side-step what would otherwise be highly charged and controversial political territory, namely, the relationship between immigration regimes and serious violations of human and child rights.
“Trafficking as modern slavery” discourse identifies mafia thugs, hardened criminals, slave-holders, and flesh-peddlers as posing the threat to vulnerable migrants. And yet immigration policy and the state actors that enforce it appear to present an equal if not greater risk to the health, wellbeing, and even the lives, of irregular migrants. Thousands of people—adults and children—have died at borders while attempting to make unauthorised crossings into Europe or the United States, and their deaths are a predictable and inhumane outcome of border-security policies. Thousands more are held in immigration detention centres, often in harsh conditions, and are sometimes subjected to violence therein. But state-sponsored violence is not on the “anti-trafficking” agenda, even though efforts to avoid such violence are often what force migrants into dependency on potentially abusive and exploitative third parties. If state-sponsored violence were on the agenda, the project of fighting trafficking as modern slavery would no longer be endorsed across political lines in liberal societies. A Dangerous MetaphorIn the eyes of most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century free white Americans and Europeans, chattel slavery appeared an inevitable, natural, phenomenon. The abolitionist movement shifted this perception, but it is important to remember that it did not simultaneously de-naturalise poverty or racial inequality. Slave emancipation did not automatically mean freedom or rights for African Americans, and nineteenth-century abolitionists like O. B. Frothingham could still describe the evils of pauperism as “providential”, growing out of the “inevitable condition of things”—“Pauperism, from its nature involves no direct Guilt. Slavery is essential Guilt”, he remarked.14
The phenomenon described as “trafficking” is inseparable from the broader phenomenon of migration in which it is embedded, which in turn is inseparable from global political and economic inequalities, uneven economic development and poverty. To date, however, anti-trafficking campaigners’ impassioned pleas for “us” to restate our opposition to slavery have done nothing to challenge the idea of poverty and inequality as providential. Nor have the campaigners demanded a transformation of the attitudes adopted by the privileged towards the death or suffering of irregular migrants—passivity in the face of their misery remains entirely conscionable. If anything, talk of “trafficking as modern slavery” has actually lent legitimacy to state efforts to strengthen border controls and restrict immigration in ways that make many groups of migrants more vulnerable to a range of human-rights violations.
Slavery is an extremely powerful metaphor. Divorced from any analysis of the specific historical, global, social and economic contexts that lead to large-scale violations of the rights of those described as “slaves”, of the role that states play in producing those contexts and why they do so, it is a very dangerous metaphor. Dominant discourse on “trafficking as modern slavery” and the policy responses it has (and has not) engendered illustrate these dangers very clearly.
2. Julius Moravcsik, “Slavery and the Ties That Do Not Bind”, in Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy, ed. Tommy Lott (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 173.
3. Aarti Kapoor, “A Scoping Project on Child Trafficking in the UK”, Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, London, June 2007, p. 48.
4. Jerry Markon, “Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence”, Washington Post, 23 September 2007.
5. See David A. Feingold, “Trafficking in Numbers: The Social Construction of Human Trafficking Data”, in Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, ed. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 46–74.
6. John Woolman, “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes” (1746), quoted in Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 277.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., pp. 278–9. (Haskell’s italics.)
9. Laura Brace, “The Opposites of Slavery? Contract, Freedom and Labour” (keynote lecture at the Human Rights, Victimhood and Consent seminar, Rokkan Centre, Bergen, June 2010).
10. William Fox, quoted in Brace, “The Opposites of Slavery?”
11. Sigma Huda, “Integration of the Human Rights of Women and a Gender Perspective”, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Aspects of the Victims of Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, February 2006.
12. See, for example, the anti-trafficking blog, ShoptoStopSlavery.com, and Claire Provost, “Could an iPhone App Help in the Fight against Slave Labour?”, Guardian (London), 3 December 2010.
13. Neil Howard, “Spinning the Threads of Poverty: Cotton Subsidies and the Political Economy of Trafficking in Southern Benin”, Rights Work, 9 August 2024 [http://tinyurl.com/ck7a924].
14. O. B. Frothingham, quoted in Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality, p. 287.
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