Executive Summary:

The attached article explores the ways in which the private sector can help address trafficking
and exploitation of persons, including children. It examines how the private sector’s (1) position
in relation to streams of commerce, (2) focus on innovation, and (3) access to resources, position
it as a potentially valuable partner in combating trafficking and exploitation of human beings.
The article examines each of these three key features of the private sector. It does not suggest
that other entities are devoid of these traits (non-governmental organizations can and do
innovate, for example). Rather, it argues that these features are core characteristics of private
sector entities, and the fact that businesses possess all three traits simultaneously uniquely
situates them in a way that is of significant value to anti-trafficking efforts. The research for this
article focused in particular on the trafficking and exploitation of children.
This research finds that the private sector can play a particularly important role in advancing
efforts to prevent such exploitation of children. Law enforcement and social services engaged in
combating child trafficking and exploitation frequently encounter the problem after the harm has
occurred. The private sector’s unique position enables it to prevent some of these harms from
occurring in the first place.
The article also discusses legal responses to the problem. It finds that, in responding to
human rights and social justice issues, states frequently focus solely on criminal sanctions.
Criminal law is necessary but not sufficient. The article discusses ways in which states parties
can use law and policy to incentivize the private sector to take positive steps to prevent
trafficking and exploitation of children. It highlights one recent example from the State of
California that requires certain businesses to disclose their policies on, and measures undertaken
to, combat forced labor and trafficked persons in their supply chains. This new law has the
potential to provide human rights organizations, consumers, and investors with important
information about the practices of businesses that can inform not only human rights advocacy but
also purchasing and investment decisions. In summary, this article helps identify ways in which
States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols can foster
private sector engagement in protecting and ensuring children’s rights.

This article can be accessed at: http://www.californialawreview.org/assets/circuit/Todres_3-80.pdf

Theories of coercion exist across multiple disciplines to explicate the ability of one actor, the coercer, to diminish the free will of another, the coercee, in the absence of overt physical force. A valid claim of coercion places legal blame on the coercer or relinquishes the coercee from legal responsibility for a coerced act or omission. Defining the point at which coercion occurs, however, is the conceptually more difficult task. Recently, coercion has emerged as a significant source of analytic concern in a developing area of the law—contemporary involuntary labor or human trafficking. It is in this setting where coercion is explicitly codified as a fundamental legal element in human-trafficking crimes. However, the laws addressing human trafficking continue to struggle with delineating the dimensions of coercion. Legal scholars, moreover, have not yet engaged in a focused exploration of this issue to bring efficacy and substantive meaning to coercion within the human-trafficking framework. This Article examines the empirical and normative scope of coercion in the laws addressing contemporary involuntary labor. Incorporating perspectives from modern philosophy, this Article critiques older standards of coercion within Thirteenth Amendment doctrine and advances a new theory of coercion sensitive to the intricate power dynamics that characterize many humantrafficking cases. Called “situational coercion,” this new paradigm recognizes that instead of experiencing coercion through direct threats of harm from their traffickers, many trafficked workers comply with abusive working conditions due to circumstances that render them vulnerable to the exploitation, such as a lack of legal immigration status and poverty. By more accurately capturing the sociological realities of human trafficking, which victimize workers in subtle ways, the situational coercion framework advances the Thirteenth Amendment’s aim to ensure free labor and protect a broad category of coerced workers. Read the full article here: The Coercion of Trafficked Workers

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.

As evidenced by international treaties dating back to the early twentieth century, the problem of trafficking in women is by no means a new phenomenon. However, it has only been in recent years that the problem of trafficking has again drawn world-wide concern, partly in response to reports of the sexual enslavement of Muslim women in Serbian brothels during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and partly in response to the increasing prevalence of the trafficking of children for sexual purposes.

Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women- Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts