Shelters are an important part of the slim segment of the anti-trafficking industrial complex that can be deemed a human rights project.  They present the opportunity to give genuine aid to victims.  But what is genuine aid?

A recent report to the U.S. State Department by law professor Daphna Hacker and social work professor Orna Cohen provides a rich account of how difficult it can be to answer that question in theory and in practice.  Hacker and Cohen were commissioned to study the two shelters for trafficking victims in Israel – one, Ma’agan, for women and the other, Atlas, for men.  They interviewed shelter residents past and present and professionals involved in the system, from government officials to social workers in the shelters; met with shelter and hot line staff; and did comprehensive research into the history of anti-trafficking efforts in Israel generally and of the shelters in particular. The Report gives detailed assessments of the characteristics of the shelter populations over time; the degree to which the shelters meet the basic needs of trafficking victims; the shelters’ policies and practices on rehabilitation; the specific problems presented by victims with children; the challenges posed by the polyglot character of the shelters’ populations; the relationship between the service orientation of the shelter and legal proceedings, including criminal enforcement against traffickers, trafficked persons’ civil actions for damages, and the processes for granting and denying stay and work permits of Israeli immigration law; and the experiences and problems faced by shelter residents when they leave the shelter, whether for work in Israel or through repatriation. The Report concludes with a series of carefully crafted recommendations.   Among those, the discussion of rehabilitation is to my knowledge an absolute novelty in the massive literature on trafficking: anyone who thinks they know now what trafficking victims need would benefit from reading these daunting but hopeful pages.

This Report provides a crucial empirically grounded basis for thinking about anti-trafficking in terms of the geopolitics of labor migration; the economics of low-wage work; the psychology of human suffering and recovery; the contradictions between the criminal enforcement and human rights elements of the trafficking system; and much more.  It is so comprehensive that it could be the centerpiece of a short course at the undergraduate or professional school level on anti-trafficking.  In this post, however, I’m going to focus on the ways in which the Report’s findings and analysis illuminate the many problems raised by the gradual realization that the international definition of trafficking is not limited to sex trafficking; that prostitution itself is not trafficking; that men can be trafficked; and that trafficking occurs in all labor sectors.  The Report is, approached from this angle, a superrich account of the gendered aspects of the anti-trafficking regime that has burst into existence globally in the last thirteen years.

The names alone tell a story: Ma’agan in English means  “harbor” or “dock”; Atlas was the mythological figure so terrifically strong that he could hold the entire world on his shoulders.  And indeed, the Report’s history of the two shelters shows how each of them is deeply and problematically gendered.  Ma’agan was established when the Israeli anti-trafficking effort was entirely focused what Hacker and Cohen carefully describe as women trafficked for prostitution – what I would call trafficked sex workers — and was modeled originally on shelters for battered women.  It maintains restrictions on the women’s movements designed to protect them but also patronizing and un-freeing them; an emphasis on psychological rehabilitation and attitudinal empowerment; and a certain resignation to the fact that the women will not be getting work visas but instead will be repatriated.  Hacker and Cohen show in painstaking detail how many of these orientations became increasingly inappropriate when the population in the shelter plummeted following the huge crackdown on foreign prostitutes in the mid-oughts (my own sources in Israel tell me that sex work in Israel has effectively been reclaimed by Israeli sex workers) and when the trickle of trafficking victims became, increasingly, legal migrants into service work and desperate refugees from Africa via the Sinai.  Meanwhile the men’s shelter facilitates the men’s eager desire to return as soon as possible to the agricultural work for which they entered Israel, even back into the employment of their traffickers (none of whom have been sanctioned by the Israeli state).  Far from attempting to be psychological counselors, Atlas staff act as employment brokers.

The basic attitude of Ma’agan seems to be that the women need fixing; while that of Atlas is that the men need work.   Hacker and Cohen’s carefully reasoned plea for a new theory of rehabilitation is at least in part, in my view, a response to these strongly gendered differences and a sense that the women might not be so different from the men as the original anti-prostitution emphasis of Israeli anti-trafficking assumed.  The Report thus offers an opportunity to rethink the victim orientation to which anti-prostitution feminists and evangelicals seek to limit anti-trafficking policy and practice.

Meanwhile, the Report makes clear that the priors of the system are ill-prepared for the needs of the intensely trafficked refugees entering Israel from the Sinai.  These are the hyper-victims in this story, and Israeli anti-trafficking can barely touch them in deference to border control policies.  Anyone concerned about the potentially bad fit between anti-trafficking criminal enforcement and refugee protection should read these sections.     And finally, though unmentioned in the report, the closure of Israel to Palestinian workers now trapped in Gaza and the West Bank provides the grim geopolitical context for the labor migration/border control/security state complex in which Israeli anti-trafficking uneasily sits.

Hacker and Cohen’s report is painstaking and nearly exhaustive but never dull: for anyone concerned about trafficking and anti-trafficking, it is as gripping reading as War and Peace.   An amazing accomplishment.  Highly recommended.

From online journal Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left

In Caring for Justice, Robin West argues that patriarchy operates by harming women on every conceivable dimension but especially in sexuality and reproduction; that women nevertheless gain access in both domains to an ethic of care that is redemptive for the world; and that bringing that ethic fully to bear as the sublime mode of justice will turn law to the remedy of harm and the promotion of care. West’s aim is to redeploy women’s experience of harm into an ethic of care that will—through law—“heal the world” (280).

Read full article here.

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal–the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of sex and gender–we might need to take a break from feminism.

Halley also invites feminism to abandon its uncritical relationship to its own power. Feminists are, in many areas of social and political life, partners in governance. To govern responsibly, even on behalf of women, Halley urges, feminists should try taking a break from their own presuppositions.

Halley offers a genealogy of various feminisms and of gay, queer, and trans theories as they split from each other in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. All these incommensurate theories, she argues, enrich thinking on the left not despite their break from each other but because of it. She concludes by examining legal cases to show how taking a break from feminism can change your very perceptions of what’s at stake in a decision and liberate you to decide it anew.

Read more here.

When transnational law looks at sex, gender, and sexuality today, what does it identify as “the problem”? I think it is safe to say that the answer is “male domination, in, through, and as sexuality”—that is, the core idea of Catherine A. MacKinnon’s structuralist sexual-subordination feminism (“SSSF” for purposes of this Essay)—complexified somewhat by some cultural feminist inputs, such as the idea that women’s maternal role gives them access to redemptive strategies that men cannot be counted on to understand. The papers collected in this Symposium suggest, however, that this delimitation of “the problem” is itself a problem—that at the very least, the remedial imaginary of transnational law needs to add a concern for the dominations that occur in and as gender (and thus to add a more positive project on behalf of men and masculinity as sites of deprivation and injury) and in and as the repression of nonnormative sexuality (and thus to work on behalf of sexual minorities and erotic liberation generally). I think that many Symposium contributors have the intuition that the SSS feminists “got there first” with their ideas about sexuality as domination, and that we are in a deep game of catch-up. I believe the alliance between structuralist feminists working against male domination through sex and sexuality, on one hand, and social conservatives working to enforce their ideas of sexual morality, on the other, makes us feel outnumbered, outgunned.

Read article here.

The specific criminalisation of sexual violence in war has made immense strides in recent years and feminists engaged with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwanda and the Rome Statute processes have proposed– and often won– a wide range of new legal rules and prosecutorial practices. This essay briefly describes some of these feminist achievements, in particular the reframing of rape and other sexual violations as a freestanding basis for charging serious humanitarian crimes and as the sole predicate act in particular prosecutions; and the demotion of consent-based defence to charges of rape. The essay then turns to an anonymously published account of one woman’s experiences during the fall of Berlin to Soviet Army in 1945, published in English as A Woman in Berlin: A Diary. By analysing the Diary’s ideologically saturated reception in Germany and analysing the text itself, the essay proposes that rape in war is not merely either ignored and condoned or prosecuted and punished, but intrinsically problematically related to our evaluations the badness of rape and the badness of war. The essay derives from its reading of a A Woman in Berlin a war-rape antimony: the literary achievement of the Diary, the author argues, is that it keeps the badness of war and badness of rape in mutual suspension; and the pathos of its typical repsection is that this antimony collapses in ways that ratify some of the most problematic ideological investments linking rape to war. The essay concludes by deriving from the literary-critical excursion some hard policy questions for law-makers deciding how to criminalise rape and other sexual violence in International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Law: what are the costs of ignoring the ideological discourses that surround rape? What are the downsides of ratifying the idea that rape in war in a fate worse than death? Could the special condemnation of rape weaponise it? How should criminal law handle the problematic of consent under coercive circumstances when those curcumstances are armed conflict? And how might the new feminist-inspired rules entrench nationalist differentiation and antagonism? It concludes that the intrinsic dilemma-like structure of our answers to these questions cannot be transcended, and that international policy-makers should temper triumphalist excitement about the new feminist-inspired rules in order to take these problematics on board.

Read essay here:  Rape In Berlin

This Article examined the work of organized feminism in the formation of the new international criminal tribunals over the course of the 1990s. It focuses on the statues establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, (ICTR), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). It offers a descriptions of their reform agenda read against the outcomes in each court establishing statute. At each stage, the Article counts up the feminist victories and defeats, giving (I hope) a clear picture of “feminist” the resulting codes really are.

Read the full article here.