Since at least the late 1990s, the news media, NGOs, and the entertainment industry have raised alarms about human trafficking by circulating a “rescue narrative.” In this story, predominantly nonwhite/foreign men and criminal networks force (predominantly white) girls and women to work in the sex industry, where they are eventually rescued by state agents or NGOs, which also apprehend their traffickers. Even though this narrative has fueled the contemporary anti-trafficking movement, it also fostered discursive and ideological distinctions between those focused on the sex trafficking of women and girls and those concerned with labor trafficking in a range of other industries with multigendered victims.
These divisions were reflected in many of the movement’s major legal gains across the globe: measures ranging from the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking and Persons, Especially Women and Children to the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act distinguish between sex and labor trafficking. However, a growing chorus of scholars, advocates, and international organizations have questioned this distinction, arguing that the disproportionate focus on sex trafficking in public and political discourse has obscured the far higher rates of trafficking in non-sex industries and the victimization of men, boys, and transgender persons. As a result, human trafficking remains underinvestigated, and victims remain underserved.
In Sex Trafficking and Human Rights, Heather Smith-Cannoy, Patricia C. Rodda, and Charles Anthony Smith acknowledge the limits of the dominant rescue narrative, but they focus on sex trafficking because, they argue, it disproportionately affects women and girls, “robbing them of their dignity, autonomy, and basic human rights” (p. 5). Therefore, their goal is to “shed light on factors that make some women and girls more susceptible to traffickers than others and highlight representative stories of victims to give readers a sense about how victimization unfolds” (p. 4). To this end, they ask who is likely to become a sex trafficking victim, what factors predict vulnerability to sex trafficking, and whether national anti-trafficking legislation prioritizes a criminal justice approach that emphasizes prosecuting and deterring traffickers and protecting victims, or a victim-centered, rights-based approach characterized by lower prostitution arrests, special trafficking visas, and consistent funding for victim shelters and services.
Working within a feminist global political economy and security studies framework (outlined in chap. 1) and drawing from a range of qualitative and quantitative data sources, the authors argue broadly that sex trafficking will occur at higher rates in countries where women’s human rights are not protected and that countries where women are more integrated into the legislative process are more likely to prioritize a rights-based approach to sex trafficking. To illustrate this argument, they provide an overview of global trafficking trends in chapter 2 to suggest that “poor, populous countries with weak protections for women’s economic rights are particularly susceptible to becoming major source countries for trafficking victims” (p. 10).
The case study chapters illustrate these trends and the factors that shape a nation’s response to sex trafficking, including the caste system, gender dominance, and failing to enforce relatively strong anti-trafficking legislation in India (chap. 3); Buddhist ideology and discrimination against the Hill Tribe minority in Thailand (chap. 4); collapsing social welfare systems and Vladimir Putin’s hypermasculine, antiwoman ideology in Russia (chap. 5); poverty and the conditions in refugee and displaced persons camps in Nigeria (chap. 6); and income inequality and poor legal protections for racial minorities in Brazil (chap. 7). The concluding chapter reviews the central arguments and broader thematic findings and proposes related policy recommendations.
Sex Trafficking and Human Rights draws attention to an important issue, noting the complexity of human trafficking and its conflation with a range of other practices, such as human smuggling, debt bondage, and migration. The book also usefully distinguishes between sex trafficking and consensual sex work, and its case studies detail a range of factors that constrain individual agency and create vulnerabilities to trafficking. Most importantly, the book critiques the long-standing gendered and racist rescue narrative. Mobilized by a coalition of elite, predominantly Western-based white women and neoconservative governments and Christian fundamentalists united in their desire to abolish sex work, this narrative has conflated human trafficking, sex trafficking, and sex work and marshaled support for criminal justice approaches to human trafficking, rather than the “social, cultural, and economic reform[s], which could help prevent future sex trafficking” (p. x).
Yet even as the authors critique contemporary anti-trafficking politics, a more robust engagement with the vast body of critical trafficking scholarship would have enriched their analysis. This diverse and multidisciplinary body of research, developed by the likes of Elizabeth Bernstein, Melissa Ditmore, Elena Shih, Svati Shah, Alexandra Lutnick, Nicola Mai, Alicia Peters, and many others, has challenged dominant trafficking discourse and data. Although critical trafficking scholars do not deny that sex trafficking is a significant problem, they caution against overemphasizing it in analyses of human trafficking: doing so reifies the separation of sex trafficking from other forms of coercive labor and the investigative practices that have sustained the rescue narrative. These critical trafficking scholars find that because human trafficking investigations have disproportionately targeted venues where women and girls offer sexual services to a male clientele, they are overrepresented in current human trafficking statistics, whereas men, boys, and transgender persons in the sex industry—and women and girls in other industries—are far less likely to be identified as victims, represented in global trafficking statistics, and targeted for service provision.
The book would also benefit from a more robust conception and analysis of key actors in anti-trafficking politics other than women legislators and NGO advocates. Critical trafficking scholarship has long highlighted sex workers’ anti-trafficking efforts, which are important because sex workers are more likely to be targeted first as criminals in trafficking investigations, and they have long argued for sex worker rights. Although the book does briefly mention the Davida Collective and Rede Trans (two sex worker rights’ groups in Brazil), it would have been interesting to hear more about other grassroots, sex-worker–led anti-trafficking groups, especially because some of the regions featured in the book are home to some of the world’s most significant examples, such as the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in India. As the world’s largest sex-worker–led organization, DMSC leads global efforts to help children and youth in poverty, fights the criminalization of sex work, and challenges the rescue politics espoused by so many anti-trafficking groups from the Global North. It would have been interesting to hear more in the book about how other organizations like DMSC work to reduce vulnerabilities to human trafficking and shape related legislation.
Even as Sex Trafficking and Human Rights engaged with a seemingly limited selection of contemporary trafficking scholarship, it does reach similar conclusions as others who have studied this topic for many years: human trafficking is “largely an economic story” (p. 51), not a story of bad men and innocent girls, and to fight it, we need “to center equal rights for women at the national level and the non-criminalization of trafficking victims” (p. 205). Certainly, this proposal would help address human trafficking and a range of other social problems rooted in multiple and intersecting forms of inequality.
