In the 1990’s and 2000’s Israel was a destination country for sex worker migration and trafficking. Every year since the early 1990’s thousands of women entered Israel for the purpose of prostitution, many of whom were trafficked. Trafficking in women into Israel was first documented by a report of Israeli NGOs in 1997, yet it can be dated to the collapse of the Soviet Union, when transnational crime networks took advantage of the waves of migration of Soviet Jews to Israel, to smuggle mainly non-Jewish sex workers into the country. Trafficked women and migrant sex workers from the early 90’s arrived with false documentation, either as tourists or using falsified documents of Jewish immigrants. Due to tightening regulation, migration routes have changed. Since 2000 women were mostly smuggled/trafficked in through the Egyptian border, crossing the Sinai desert, in harsher conditions.

Given this grim backdrop it is surprising that today, and for the past several years (approximately since 2006), there is wide agreement among both the police and women’s groups that sex trafficking of non-Israeli women was successfully combated.  How did this happen? In a short and fascinating new essay, that was published earlier this year at the Swedish Magazine Neo, Israeli political scientist Gadi Taub explains why and how “it became increasingly difficult to employ trafficked women, or for foreigners to find employment in prostitution in Israel.” Taub’s main thesis is that the Israeli anti-trafficking policy was effective due to a combination of strict immigration policy and a tolerance of brothels.

The key to Israel’s effective policy, Taub argues, was slack enforcement of the criminal code’s formally abolitionist approach. Instead of closing brothels, police monitored them, and raided them on a regular basis, focusing its attention mostly on under-aged girls and on non-Israelis working at brothels. Police activity affected the economy of the Israeli sex industry. As Taub puts it

“forced labor and kidnapping require a complicated illegal organization – security, housing, enforced discipline, secret premises and probably bribery – and therefore finds it hard to compete economically with regular brothels. This is not to say that the regular brothels are entirely free of criminal elements, which often extort protection money. But they are not underground, and the regular police raids and relative visibility, have made them generally safe for the prostitutes themselves: they are free to enter or leave the profession, they can choose their shifts and clients, and many of these places have private security personnel. Not least, owners and prostitutes can call the police in case of emergency.”

Taub’s account suggests that while it is often argued that harsher enforcement and deeper criminalization is an effective method of combating trafficking, in fact, in the Israeli case, it was the opposite the brought about significant change. Some Israeli Sex workers suggest that an aspect missing from Taub’s story is the importance of their collaboration and trust relations with the police. They argue that in an attempt to improve working conditions in the sex industry (and fend off competition) Israeli sex workers used to call the police and disclose where undocumented migrants worked. They claim that their inside information was crucial in changing the Israeli sex industry.

It is interesting to note that the “eradication of sex trafficking” brought about a new emphasis on prostitution in policy discussions. As soon as trafficking and migration of migrant women into the sex industry subsided, Israeli NGOs moved to emphasize the perfectionist goal of eradicating the sex industry as a whole, suggesting that all prostitution is trafficking. This radical/dominance feminist position now provides steam to a Swedish style “end demand” bill that is being considered by the Israeli parliament. Moreover, the Parliamentary Committee on Human Trafficking operating since 2001 changed its name and is now titled “The Committee for the Combat Against Trafficking in Women and Prostitution.” Unfortunately, as the name suggests, the sole focus of Israeli anti-trafficking activity remains dedicated to exploitation within the sex industry, while trafficking into other industries is mostly ignored. Finally, in response to all this, Israeli sex workers are organizing for the first time. Earlier this year a group of sex workers established the “Association for the Regulation of Sex Work” that seeks to de-criminalize sex work. It remains to be seen whether the voices of sex workers themselves will be heard in a political arena over-crowded with feminist organizations who claim they speak on their behalf.

I recently published an article  in which I call for a paradigm shift from a human rights to a labor paradigm to human trafficking. In the article I argue that current efforts to combat trafficking, that view trafficking predominantly as a crime or as a human rights violation, end up helping an alarmingly small number of individuals out of the multitudes currently understood as falling under the category of trafficked persons, and even in these few cases, the assistance provided is of questionable value. I therefore suggest that a labor approach to trafficking is required to deal with the phenomenon’s underlying causes. I argue that because individual and collective labor and employment rights emerged in the attempt to bring about structural changes to labor markets that would strengthen workers’ bargaining positions and, eventually, lead to the redistribution of wealth between capital and labor, they are better suited than the traditional human rights tools for addressing the institutional aspects of the labor market exploitation on which trafficking is structured.

In the article I explore five factors that have led to the absence of a labor orientation in anti-trafficking efforts. One such factor, I propose, is that the traditional focus on sex trafficking makes the introduction of a labor discourse highly controversial because of deeply rooted disagreement over the nature of prostitution and its regulation as work. Another factor is the overall decline of the labor movement and its recent attempt to revive its legitimacy and currency by adopting human rights–like absolute and universal proclamations, akin to the human rights–based approach to trafficking. These trends have meant that the movement’s relevant bodies, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and trade unions, have not introduced or pushed for a Labor Paradigm for Human Trafficking labor-based framework in the global anti-trafficking campaign. This last factor is, hopefully, about to change.

The 2012 International Labor Conference (ILC) adopted conclusions requesting that the ILO conduct a “detailed analysis … to identify gaps in existing coverage of ILO standards with a view to determining whether there is a need for standard setting to: (i) complement the ILO’s forced labour Conventions to address prevention and victim protection, including compensation; and (ii) address human trafficking for labour exploitation.”

These conclusions provided the impetus for the Office’s development of a background report, and for the convention of a meeting of experts that took place in February 2013. One outcome of the meeting of experts was a decision to place a possible new forced labor instrument on the ILC agenda for 2014.

This is indeed an exciting development. The new instrument, if adopted, will hopefully be able to offer a more effective framework to combat trafficking – one that  seeks not only to assist victims of trafficking after they are removed from the exploitative environment but also to transform the structure of labor markets that are particularly susceptible to trafficking. Such an instrument has the potential to reach significantly more individuals vulnerable to trafficking by providing them with legal mechanisms for avoiding and resisting exploitation, and by shifting the focus away from individual harms to the power disparities between victims and traffickers and the economic and social conditions that make individuals vulnerable to trafficking.  The ILO will most likely turn to utilizing instruments of change such as strategies of collective action and bargaining, protective employment legislation, and contextual standard setting in labor sectors susceptible to trafficking.

It will be interesting to see whether the ILO stirs away from merely adopting the existing anti-trafficking framework as it appears in the Palermo Protocol and the TVPA and succeeds in drafting and adopting an instrument that develops a labor paradigm. This is not an easy task. There are an array of economic interests pushing against the adoption of a labor framework. On the one hand, national protectionist economic interests work to curb migration in order to protect local workers in certain sectors from competition. To this end, various anti-immigration policies are promoted that exacerbate migrant workers’ vulnerability to exploitation and trafficking. On the other hand, there are rent-seeking interests that benefit from flexible, deregulated labor markets. Such interests may be served by worker migration, but need labor to remain informal, thereby reducing the cost of labor and weakening workers’ protections and bargaining power while increasing their vulnerability to exploitation. These two sets of economic interests stack up against adopting a labor paradigm to trafficking. Moreover, even if this new instrument is adopted, and it succeeds in offering an alternative paradigm, the ILO’s relative marginality in the international arena, and the low rate of adoption of ILO Conventions may still suggest that much more work is required by stakeholders “on the ground” to effectively bring about change.

To view the original article in Hebrew, click here.

Co-authored with Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran,  Chantal Thomas

Feminist advocacy projects on rape and prostitution have, by now, a signiccant track record of achievement in international law. Feminists have scored important advances in international humanitarian law governing rape in armed conflict and have helped to devise international protocols and aid/sanctions schemes governing sex trafficking. We came together in this conversation in order to figure out whether feminist achievements have become sufficiently institutionalized to warrant our describing them and the advocacy networks that produced them Governance Feminism (“GF”). Our answer: Yes. And we wondered whether, by comparing our different projects on sexual violence and prostitution/trafficking, we could find any common features in GF. We kept comparing the legal results, the legal attitudes taken by the feminists who prevailed, the strands of feminism that “docked” most effectively in GF or the legal results it helped to produce, and the situation of feminists operating in the First or the developing world: were there any patterns? Our answer: Yes.

From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution and Sex Trafficking

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