Ricky Martin
Ricky Martin has been a recent favorite of both the Executive and Legislative branches of the US government. He has been the recipient of substantial US government anti-trafficking funding, and has been a frequent celebrity witness before Congress.
How does Martin’s work relate to human trafficking? Martin is a Goodwill Ambassador to UNICEF, and through this humanitarian interest in children, created his own NGO, the Ricky Martin Foundation, which specifically works with child victims of human trafficking and those children he identifies as being at risk. Among other efforts, the Foundation partnered with the International Organization for Migration to create “Llama y Vive,” a Spanish language campaign “aimed at the prevention of human trafficking, protection of the youngest victims of child trafficking, and prosecution of the traffickers.”
Martin has had a bit of a mixed career as an activist, and under the loose heading of his interest in “helping children,” he has engaged in some ill-advised faux diplomacy. For example, in 2005, he traveled to Jordan where he met with teenagers to whom he vaguely offered to “become a spokesperson on your behalf.” He then posed for photos with Palestinian youth while wearing a keffiyeh bearing the inscription ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ in Arabic.
Despite acknowledging that he did not even know the issue of human trafficking existed five years earlier, in 2006, Martin was invited by Congress to testify before the House Committee on International Relations as an expert witness on human trafficking. Describing his motivation to work on the issue, Martin told members of Congress that his ”commitment and passion for this issue was born from . . . [travel] to Calcutta, India,” where he “met three little girls that were living on the streets, maybe days away from being sold into prostitution, trembling beneath plastic bags.” He knew then that he had to “do something.”
Martin’s testimony before Congress exemplifies many of the problems with celebrity activism in the arena of human rights:
1) celebrities tend to overly focus attention on the stereotypes of human trafficking (“I heard amazing. . . I mean horrible. . . stories about this issue, like the story of a 12-year-old boy from El Salvador . . . [who was kept] in a small room for weeks and sexually exploited. . .”);
2) they make emotional appeals that arrest a more nuanced interrogation into how best to approach the problem (“When we listen to the story, I mean if we have a soul, we have to feel the pain but sometimes we also feel the hopelessness. But in the face of hopelessness action can bring hope [sic],”);
3) they oversimplify the ‘solutions’ to the problem.
For example, Martin advised Congress that the way to end human trafficking was as follows:
“First of all, we must prevent exploitation by educating children and families about the dangers of human trafficking. Step two, we must protect the victims by providing resources to reintegrate and rehabilitate. And number three, we must prosecute and punish those who make a living out of this illegal activity from traffickers to consumers.”
These are, of course, the same three steps already set forth in the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of 2000 and each of its subsequent Reauthorizations. But the larger problem jhere, which should not go unremarked, is that members of Congress asked him to state what he would do, were he a member of Congress, to eradicate human trafficking. This abdication of responsibility on the part of legislators continues to be troubling. When the persons to whom they abdicate responsibility are celebrities with whom they enjoy rubbing elbows, Congress’ mode of attending to this matter leaves much to be desired.
To his credit, Martin did use some of his time before the House Committee on International Relations to challenge it mildly, recommending, for example, that the US ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Martin is a good example of a celebrity with tremendous goodwill but a modicum of expertise on human trafficking, who has nevertheless been thrust into (but also willingly accepted) a policy role through repeated invitations to hold forth on the topic by both US lawmakers and UN policy makers.
]]>Ricky Martin has been a recent favorite of both the Executive and Legisative branches of the US government. Through his Foundation, he has been the recipient of substantial US government anti-trafficking funding, and has been a frequent celebrity witness before Congress.
How does Martin’s work relate to human trafficking? He was drawn to human trafficking through his interest in children, expressed through his work as a Goodwill Ambassador to UNICEF and his own NGO, the Ricky Martin Foundation, Among other efforts, the Foundation partnered with the International Organization for Migration to create “Llama y Vive,” a Spanish language campaign “aimed at the prevention of human trafficking, protection of the youngest victims of child trafficking, and prosecution of the traffickers.”
Martin has had a bit of a mixed career as an activist. Under the loose heading of his interest in “helping children,” he has engaged in some ill-advised faux diplomacy. In 2005, for example, he traveled to Jordan where he met with teenagers to whom he vaguely offered to “become a spokesperson on your behalf.” He then posed for photos with Palestinian youth while wearing a keffiyeh bearing the inscription ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ in Arabic.
Despite acknowledging that he did not even know the issue existed five years earlier, in 2006, Martin was invited by Congress to testify before the House Committee on International Relations as an expert witness on human trafficking. Martin told members of Congress that his ”commitment and passion for this issue was born from . . . [travel] to Calcutta, India,” where he “met three little girls that were living on the streets, maybe days away from being sold into prostitution, trembling beneath plastic bags.” He knew then that he had to “do something.”
Martin’s testimony before Congress exemplifies many of the problems with celebrity activism in the arena of human rights: 1) celebrities tend to overly focus attention on the stereotypes of human trafficking (“I heard amazing. . . I mean horrible. . . stories about this issue, like the story of a 12-year-old boy from El Salvador . . . [who was kept] in a small room for weeks and sexually exploited. . .”); 2) they make emotional appeals that arrest a more nuanced interrogation into how best to approach the problem (“When we listen to the story, I mean if we have a soul, we have to feel the pain but sometimes we also feel the hopelessness. But in the face of hopelessness action can bring hope [sic],”); 3) they oversimplify the ‘solutions’ to the problem. For example, Martin advised Congress that the way to end human trafficking was as follows:
“First of all, we must prevent exploitation by educating children and families about the dangers of human trafficking. Step two, we must protect the victims by providing resources to reintegrate and rehabilitate. And number three, we must prosecute and punish those who make a living out of this illegal activity from traffickers to consumers.”
These are, of course, the same three steps already set forth in the Trafficking Victim Protection Act of 2000 and each of its subsequent Reauthorizations. But the larger problem is that members of Congress asked him to state what he would do, were he a member of Congress, to eradicate human trafficking. This abdication of responsibility on the part of legislators continues to be troubling. When the persons to whom they abdicate responsibility are celebrities with whom they enjoy rubbing elbows, Congress’ mode of attending to this matter leaves much to be desired.
To his credit, Martin did use some of his time before the House Committee on International Relations to challenge it a bit, recommending that the US ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Martin is a good example of a celebrity with tremendous goodwill but a modicum of expertise on human trafficking, who has nevertheless been thrust into (but also willingly accepted) a policy role through repeated invitations to hold forth on the topic by both US lawmakers and UN policy makers.
]]>In Part II of this posting I begin to detail the involvement of particular celebrities in human trafficking activism, policy making and general influence.
1. Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie was recently promoted from Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, to Special Envoy. Inspired to become an “ardent, persistent and well-briefed humanitarian activist” after filming Tomb Raider in Cambodia, her humanitarian travels for UNHCR to places like Sudan, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Chad, and Pakistan, receive tremendous press coverage. Asked what she hoped to accomplish meeting with refugees and internally displaced persons in more than 20 countries, she stated, “Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon.”
Now considered a power player among celebrity humanitarians, she has morphed into a celebrity diplomat of sorts, speaking to world leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum, before Congress, and becoming a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jolie’s interest in and relationship to the issue of human trafficking comes through her work with refugees and displaced persons, a population very vulnerable to human trafficking. Jolie partnered with Microsoft to create Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), an NGO on a mission to provide pro bono legal counsel to unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States, ensuring that they are treated fairly and compassionately in the immigration system. KIND also specializes in assisting trafficked children in the U.S. in obtaining immigration status.
On the whole, Jolie’s involvement in human trafficking is measured and intelligent. She made an early misstep by hiring Trevor Nielson as her advisor, but she has since fired him and made better decisions. Although she does not claim expertise on human trafficking, in creating and funding KIND, Jolie identified a need gap (legal assistance to unaccompanied minors, a group vulnerable to trafficking) and has attempted to apply a nuanced solution that builds capacity within the legal community. Furthermore, Jolie claims to cover her own travel expenses when doing humanitarian work, uses her wealth to support her causes, and does not appear to use her activism to sell movies or augment her celebrity status.
]]>Celebrities, people “known for [their] well-knownness,”[1] now regularly engage in and effect human trafficking policy and practice. As a result, celebrities are not only raising public awareness about the existence of these problems, but influencing people, policy objectives, and ameliorative schemes in the public and private sectors. While criticizing people purporting to help other people can sound like sour grapes, it is important to critique one-dimensional, oversimplified, appeal-to-the-masses (and -funders) approaches to human trafficking, especially when the persons engaging in it have such tremendous access to and influence over the public and political spheres. This six part blog, condensing a full discussion set forth in a forthcoming publication, looks at the ways in which certain celebrities have engaged with human trafficking, raising the question – is celebrity involvement a “good thing”?
The involvement of celebrities in human trafficking discourse obviously benefits some parties and aspects of the issue, otherwise celebrities would not be utilized as widely as they are, speak as loudly as they do, or dictate policy and response with such certitude. Celebrities are a benefit to policy makers––government entities, international organizations (IOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)––personally, in that policy makers get to rub elbows with celebrities, and professionally, in that constituents then view them as important for meriting the celebrity relationship. Celebrities also benefit from relationships with policy makers: they gain publicity and exposure for something other than entertainment value (although their entertainment value is also enhanced).
Some have argued that there are real advantages to celebrity human rights activism. For example, celebrities may have the potential to be more neutral than politicians or politically motivated NGOs,[2] and some celebrities use their celebrity to help activists gain access to policy makers and the public that they would otherwise never attain.[3] More ubiquitous are critics of celebrity involvement, especially when that involvement veers from mere endorsement into diplomacy and policy recommendation. The primary drawbacks to celebrity diplomacy and legislative involvement are the lack of accountability of celebrities and the unrefined, reductive (and, sometimes, uninformed) narratives that even the most well intentioned celebrities often present.
The reductive spin in turn dilutes the public’s willingness to intellectually engage and earnestly attend to the issues and to the people who are suffering.[4] Furthermore, it can detract from learning the solutions that those afflicted by human rights violations would propose for themselves. [5] In shifting the focus away from engagement with those most impacted, celebrity human rights activism risks rendering those people “victims” as opposed to “actors,”[6] and can shift realistic depictions of human rights issues away from the truly gruesome, complex, or boring, toward the more palatable, tangible, or exciting.[7]
While human trafficking is not unique in having attracted celebrity attention, it neatly fits into the type of issue to which celebrities are attracted. It is a sexy issue with visceral appeal; it is “of the moment”; [8] it can be reduced to a simplistic victim–rescuer narrative for those inclined to view it that way; its victims are often foreign and are, therefore, easily essentialized and othered. Furthermore, multiple and conflicting viewpoints exist on many aspects of human trafficking. For example, there are disagreements as to the extent of the problem, the precise definition of the problem, who is victimized, how best to support victims, and how to combat the problem. In addition, statistical data on human trafficking is wildly inconsistent because it lacks rigorous empirical support. Celebrities then lend their voices to this morass of disagreement and inconsistent data.
Celebrities can be especially desirable to those who would venture forth even where data is lacking. Whereas experts are inclined to qualify and question discrepant data,[9] celebrities may be more comfortable using unverified statistics and suggesting untested “solutions” so as not to muddle the visceral and emotional appeal of the issue.[10] There are no easy solutions to human trafficking. Experts often recommend large, expensive, and politically challenging approaches.[11] Celebrities, on the other hand, can be more willing to abridge experts’ detailed, ambitious, and costly proposals.[12] This is enticing to policy makers and the public, both of whom are interested in “doing something,” so long as that “something” is neither too complicated nor expensive. In sum, celebrity voices, conflicting expert opinions, and inconsistent data together induce susceptibility in audiences to a reductionist message about human trafficking. Choosing the path of least resistance, audiences then accept the reductionist narrative to “become aware,” and seek additional celebrity input to determine what should be done to combat human trafficking.
This concludes Part One of a six part series, the remainder of which will each detail the particular work of six celebrities currently engaged in activism addressing human trafficking.
________________________________________
[1] Neil Gabler, Toward a New Definition of Celebrity, THE NORMAN LEAR CENTER, http://www.learcenter.org/pdf/Gabler.pdf (last visited Aug. 11, 2012) (internal quotation marks omitted) (citing DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, THE IMAGE: A GUIDE TO PSEUDO-EVENTS IN AMERICA 57 (2d ed. 1992) (lamenting that people used to become famous for their greatness and accomplishments).
[2] Paul ‘t Hart & Karen Tindall, Leadership by the Famous: Celebrity As Political Capital, in DISPERSED DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP: ORIGINS, DYNAMICS, AND IMPLICATIONS 259, 271 (John Kane, Haig Patapan & Paul ‘t Hart eds., 2009) (“Where legislatures and other institutional watchdogs are sometimes fully co-opted by executive dominance, celebrity-led initiatives can help ‘keep the bastards honest.’”).
[3] David S. Meyer & Joshua Gamson, The Challenge of Cultural Elites: Celebrities and Social Movements, SOC. INQUIRY, May 1995, at 186-87.
It is important to notice not only that celebrities affect a framing shift within a movement action, but that their participation is driven toward an issue that will allow them an insider’s claim—that is, an issue that can be framed so that anyone and everyone can “speak out” from equal ground.
Id. at 199-200.
[4] See, e.g., Starstruck, supra note 5.
[5] Id. (“[C]elebrity-focused publicity tends to gloss over crucial facts and complexities . . . [a]nd the strong amplification that celebrity voices receive in the public discourse may crowd out the perspectives provided by other, less famous interlocutors.”); accord DAMBISA MOYO, DEAD AID: WHY AID IS NOT WORKING AND HOW THERE IS A BETTER WAY FOR AFRICA 26-27 (2009).
Scarcely does one see Africa’s (elected) officials or those African policymakers charged with the development portfolio offer an opinion on what should be done, or what might actually work to save the continent from its regression [because t]his very important responsibility has, for all intents and purposes, and to the bewilderment and chagrin of many an African, been left to musicians who reside outside Africa.
Id. at 27. But see Michael Gerson, Dambisa Moyo’s Wrongheaded ‘Dead Aid’, WASH. POST, Apr. 3, 2009, (critiquing Dambisa Moyo for oversimplifying the issues, getting her facts wrong, and being a “darling” of the right).
[6] See Andrew F. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy and the G8: Bono and Bob As Legitimate International Actors 12-13 (Ctr. for Int’l Governance Innovation, Working Paper No. 29, 2007), available at http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CEkQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fkms1.isn.ethz.ch%2Fserviceengine%2FFiles%2FISN%2F39553%2Fipublicationdocument_singledocument%2F09bba3df-bb5f-4650-9a4e-b23b8587dccd%2Fen%2FWP_29.pdf&ei=QAkHUPK4DoTw0gHltuWiCA&usg=AFQjCNGdvjB0lnCH0t6ajc99hWL1jt89sg&sig2=XUgOr9i3mSABze5hzGVyng [hereinafter Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy and the G8]. For example, in all of his concerts to “relieve hunger in Africa,” Bob Geldof had only one African performer. Id.; see infra note 60 and accompanying text.
[7] Cf. Hart & Tindall, supra note 9, at 171.
[Celebrity endorsement and activism] can exacerbate the pathology of politics as a popularity contest, which greatly disfavours social problems and groups that celebrities choose not to pay attention to or shy away from (unpopular, controversial, or unglamorous causes). In-depth analysis and careful deliberation may give way to star power, clever marketing, rock concerts and cleverly made but ultimately shallow docu-pics and blogs.
Id.
[8] See, e.g., Tracy Clark-Flory, The New Celebrity Cause: Sex Trafficking, SALON (Apr. 11, 2011, 1:53 PM), http://www.salon.com/2011/04/11/child_slavery/ (dubbing anti-child-sex-trafficking campaigns––as opposed to other types of human trafficking––“the hip new celebrity-endorsed cause”).
[9] See, e.g., Chuang, supra note 192, at 1707; Haynes, Eye of the Beholder, supra note 195.
[10] See, e.g., Statement of Ricky Martin, Enhancing the Global Fight to End Human Trafficking, supra note 97, at 6 (“[T]he facts . . . speak for themselves. Each year 2 million people are victims of human trafficking. Of those, 1 million children are forced into the sex trade each year.”); see supra notes 116-25 and accompanying text.
[11] See, e.g., Dina F. Haynes, Exploitation Nation: The Thin and Grey Legal Lines Between Trafficked Persons and Abused Migrant Laborers, 23 NOTRE DAME J.L. ETHICS & PUB. POL’Y 1, 55-71 (2009) [hereinafter Haynes, Exploitation Nation] (recommending tackling poverty, liberalizing immigration, and rethinking adherence to the free market).
[12] See, e.g., Statement of Ricky Martin, Enhancing the Global Fight to End Human Trafficking, supra note 97, at 11 (describing Martin’s foundation’s “Call and Live! Program” in response to Rep. Smith’s query about how Congress should respond to human trafficking).
[W]e created PSA’s [public service announcements] Call and Live. Well, it says it all. You call and you live. . . . People will call when they are being trafficked, when they believe they are being trafficked or when they witness a case, and that moment you will be safe.
Human trafficking is not unique in having attracted multiple and conflicting points of view on everything from the extent of the problem, the definition of what the problem is precisely, and who are its victims to how to best to support them. Like “sexy” and “of the moment” human rights issues of earlier decades, such as female genital mutilation (FGM) and genocide and perhaps like morally intractable issues such as abortion, there are advantages and disadvantages to the level and diversity of attention currently focused on the issue. The advantages are evident: more attention on a still little understood phenomenon should work to bring more funding, more activism, more legal teeth and more assistance to bear in supporting persons who are victims of the problem. But multiple disadvantages exist as well, although often more subtle and harder to discern. The level of interest means that a few experts are perpetually called upon to explain the fundamentals to relative newcomers; accordingly, the level of discourse necessary to tackle this complex issue does not advance rapidly. Too, there is a sort of brain drain, in that those who do gain expertise, particularly among law enforcement and policy makers, are quickly promoted (as there is considerable funding and attention on this issue) and their successors start over again with little or no knowledge. Furthermore, with so much interest even across otherwise uncooperative political divides, high level politicians and policy makers want to be involved and so funding is diverted to “High Level Working Groups” and away from those most likely to encounter a victim “in the field.” Human trafficking then becomes a top down issue, when it needs to be bottom up – driven by the real needs recognized by victim service providers (and specifically including those victim services providers who are not soliciting federal funding, to provide objective data), and voiced by the victims themselves.
One of the most cumbersome issues stymieing anti-trafficking efforts over the past twelve years since the adoption of the Palermo Protocol and the subsequent US Trafficking Victim Protection Act (TVPA) is that far too much of the discussion has centered on sex. Media, politicians, movies, celebrities, prosecutors, law enforcement and even academics have focused their attention almost exclusively on human trafficking for sex.
So much discussion of human trafficking now centers around sex, most audience members attending a talk or reading about human trafficking expect that sex trafficking will be the focus of discussion, even when the discussion is specifically slated to center on human trafficking into domestic servitude, for example. Because the audience has been primed by the media focus on trafficking for sex, they envision an entirely different sort of “victim” when experts talk to them about human trafficking. The audience is prepared for (and expects to hear about) sex and so other areas of human trafficking are ignored, regardless of the fact that the varieties of ways in which humans have been exploited by traffickers abound. In the United States, for example, victims of human trafficking have been forced into severely exploitative labor (domestic service, nannies, agriculture, factory work; cleaners and maintenance crews); misled about the work that would be available and then trapped by their debt and/or lack of immigration status or visa portability (teachers, welders,); adult sex workers deprived of their earnings and coerced or forced into work that they do not wish to do and children forced into sex work and other types of indentured or forced labor (hair braiding). Internationally, people are trafficked from their countries of origin to countries of destination for all of the foregoing reasons, as well types of forced and indentured labor as yet unknown in the United States (camel jockeys, massage on the beach, inherited servitude). People are also trafficked within the interior of their own countries.
In fact, the ILO estimates that 12.3 million people, possibly a majority of whom are women, are in forced labor at any given time. About one and a half million of these may be forced specifically into sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is horrific, to be sure, and must be addressed. But the foregoing figures would suggest that about thirteen percent of forced labor involves sex. Although not all exploitative labor would rise to the level of human trafficking (which requires that one be severely exploited), most forced labor arguably would. Even if more conservatively viewed, much of the world’s human trafficking market is focused on forced labor for work other than sex, while most of the discussions (and assumptions, and funding) focus on trafficking in humans for sex. It is also important to note here, as an introduction to the trouble with statistics which will be covered further below, that the most verifiable figures (those collected by organizations working with victims of human trafficking; IOM, UNODC, ILO), conclude only that they assist more victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Assisting more victims of sexual exploitation and knowing that there therefore are more people exploited for sex than for other forms of labor are two different things. It is also important to know that the US government overlooks involuntary servitude when calculating the number of trafficked persons. Since involuntary servitude would qualify as labor trafficking, were it counted, it is possible that this is another way in which labor trafficking is being underestimated, while sex trafficking is being over-estimated.
Worse still, a growing number of “experts” and politicians perpetuate the uncertain statistics and the conflation between human trafficking and prostitution, and these are shaping anti-trafficking policy. Some of them believe that ending prostitution will actually eradicate human trafficking, while others have the primary objective of abolishing prostitution, and merely use the attention and funding currently available to human trafficking as a vehicle by which to achieve their objective.
Because this chapter is about multiple points of view currently focused on the topic of human trafficking, and because I argue that it is imperative for those purporting to work on human trafficking to be transparent with regard to their agendas so that the audience has a fair chance of understanding the objectives the expert might hold and how that might impact their point of view, it is appropriate at the outset to set forward my own views on the contentious aspects of the issue. I will begin by stating that I take no position on whether or not prostitution should be legalized or abolished. I believe that there are many women who engage in sex work willingly and consensually, and many more that likely would opt for work other than selling sex were it available to them and well paid. I believe that all sex workers should be protected against disease, abuse and horrible working conditions and that sex workers can be raped, deprived of their wages by middlemen, exploited and abused. Because sex workers can be raped, exploited and abused (a view contrary to the position held by some abolitionists, discussed further below), I hold that conflating all sex work with “human trafficking” (or rape, as some of them argue), and arguing that sex work can never be consensual, undermines the ability to protect sex workers from the aforementioned harms. If all prostitution is rape, as some radical feminists argue, then how can those who actually do rape a prostitute be criminally charged? If all prostitution is exploitative, as some also argue, then how can a sex worker recoup wages of which she has been deprived? The available data, such as it is, on the correlation of legalized prostitution to human trafficking has not convinced me one way or the other. While I do appreciate the argument that women should have actual access to other well-paying jobs in order to ascertain whether their choice of sex work is actually a free and consensual one, I do not agree with the “false consciousness” arguments, and find it offensive that some people purporting to work on behalf of victims of human trafficking are so free in stripping them of their individual agency and substituting it with their own. While we may wish it to be so that all women everywhere have a real choice between selling their bodies for sex and electing to become, say, teachers or policewomen, most currently do not have that choice. We can (and should) work toward that goal, but that would require that our anti-trafficking efforts be directed to eradicating poverty and global economic disparity, as I argued in the opening sentences of this chapter, not prostitution. It is simply repugnant for western women to tell women from other parts of the world that, although they may think they have chosen sex work in order to feed their children, this belief is only their ignorant “false consciousness” leading them astray.
I view mine as somewhat of a centrist position, but not aligned with the “neo-abolitionists” — those who characterize their anti-prostitution campaigns as anti-trafficking campaigns, purposely using the terms “abolition” and “modern day slavery” to link their prostitution abolition agenda to the unassailable earlier efforts to end slavery. Finally, and most important to me, I find it deeply problematic that so many discussions of human trafficking devolve immediately into agitation to end prostitution, because this detracts and distracts us from delving into the hard work of eradicating trafficking in human beings. And even more problematic that so much funding and political attention allocated towards human trafficking is directed towards the abolition of prostitution – particularly when it employs bad research to substantiate the correlation.
]]>Organized crime rings exploit 700,000 to 4 million new victims of human trafficking each year, typically luring them across borders where they are more vulnerable to abuse. Trafficking in Southeastern Europe is a relatively new phenomenon, fueled by the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, as well as the presence of international peacekeepers who have sometimes exacerbated the problem. The two main anti-trafficking models emphasize the prosecution of the trafficker or the protection of the victim, but neither adequately addresses immigration options that could serve to protect the victim and provide better evidence with which to prosecute the traffickers for their crimes.
]]>Gender oppression has been a feature of war and conflict throughout human history, yet until fairly recently, little attention was devoted to addressing the consequences of violence and discrimination experienced by women in post-conflict states. Thankfully, that is changing. Today, in a variety of post-conflict settings–the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Northern Ireland –international advocates for women’s rights have focused bringing issues of sexual violence, discrimination and exclusion into peace-making processes.
In On the Frontlines, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Naomi Cahn consider such policies in a range of cases and assess the extent to which they have had success in improving women’s lives. They argue that there has been too little success, and that this is in part a product of a focus on schematic policies like straightforward political incorporation rather than a broader and deeper attempt to alter the cultures and societies that are at the root of much of the violence and exclusions experienced by women. They contend that this broader approach would not just benefit women, however. Gender mainstreaming and increased gender equality has a direct correlation with state stability and functions to preclude further conflict. If we are to have any success in stabilizing failing states, gender needs to move to fore of our efforts. With this in mind, they examine the efforts of transnational organizations, states and civil society in multiple jurisdictions to place gender at the forefront of all post-conflict processes. They offer concrete analysis and practical solutions to ensuring gender centrality in all aspects of peace making and peace enforcement.
]]>Co-authored with Fionnuala Ni Aoláin and Naomi Cahn
A fairly substantial amount of literature has been generated over the years regarding the forms of masculinity that emerge in times of armed conflict and war (Goldstein 2001; Yuval- Davis 1997). This war-focused literature (which links to, among other things, masculinities studies) has drawn from broader theoretical research identifying an organic link between patriarchy, its contemporary manifestations, and various forms of masculinity as they arise within societies and institutions (Connell 2005; Cohen 2009). It builds on, and extends, the more general scholarship that has deepened our understanding of how masculinities are constructed and differentiated (Chodorow 1994; Connell 1987; Dowd, Levit, and McGinley this volume). While the war literature has made significant conceptual and practical use of the term “masculinity” to explore the impacts and effects of conflict, the concept has been less applied and understood to be relevant in post-conflict and transitional contexts, as societies attempt to move away from conflict. We argue that masculinities theory and its practical implications have been significantly under-utilized as a lens to explore and address the ending of hostilities in violent societies (Connell 2005; Kimmel 2005). This Chapter suggests that with some notable exceptions (Theidon 2009), little attention has been paid to masculinities in conflict-ending contexts. Moreover, throughout the negotiation, reconstruction, mediation, and intervention phases, masculinities studies concepts and theorization have been underutilized and under-applied to the range of post-conflict actions and actors. Bringing masculinities into view in post-conflict settings provides a more thorough means and framework for addressing the complex social and political problems faced by societies seeking to move beyond violence.
]]>In Bosnia and Herzegovina,1 there is a vast and sprawling marketplace that sprang up just as the peace accords were going into effect, bringing to some conclusion three-and-a-half years of bloody ethnic fighting. The place is called Arizona Market, and it was created, fostered, and supported by the international community (IC)2—hyped as a shining example of capitalism and evidence of the positive impact of the particular type of political and economic engineering that takes place with internationally assisted postwar reconstruction. But even while Arizona Market was supported by the IC, it was also a place where men from the region would bring women to be bought and sold like chattel alongside drugs, weapons, bootleg media, and knockoff athletic gear.
Harm to Women in Neoliberalized Postconflict Reconstruction Process
]]>In the year 2000, Congress proudly signed into law the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), with one goal in mindprotecting victims of human trafficking by working to eliminate human trafficking in the United Stated and around the world. Fully eight years after the passage of the TVPA, while the law itself has the potential to be quite effective, it remains to be effectively implemented. Put simply, human trafficking appears to be increasing as traffickers discover how lucrative and easy it is to enslave another human being, and while prosecutions of traffickers in human beings have increased, that slim risk of punishment has not been enough to make a dent in the phenomenon, touted in the media as modern day slavery.
]]>