Human trafficking is now associated, and sometimes used interchangeably, with slavery and forced labour. As this issue highlights, this shift in how we use these terms has real consequences in terms of legal and policy responses to exploitation. Authors – both academics and practitioners – review how the global community is addressing forced labour and trafficking. In 2014 governments across the globe committed to combat forced labour through a new international agreement, the ILO Forced Labour Protocol. Assessing recent efforts and discourse, the thematic issue looks at unionsstruggling to champion the protection of migrants’ labour rights, and at governments fighting legal battles with corporations over enactment of supply chain disclosure laws. At the same time, authors show how regressive policies, such as the Kafala system of ‘tied’ visas for lower paid workers, are eroding these rights. This issue features short debate pieces which respond to the question: Should we distinguish between forced labour, trafficking and slavery?
‘Trafficking Representations’ Call for Papers, Anti-Trafficking Review Thematic Issue |
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| Deadline for Submission: 8 January 2016 The Anti-Trafficking Review calls for papers for a themed issue entitled ‘Trafficking Representations.’ Work that migrants do in the sex industry and other irregular employment sectors is increasingly characterised as exploitation and trafficking. Representations of trafficking and forced labour are pervasive within media, policymaking, and humanitarian debates, discourses and interventions. Of late, the notion of ‘modern slavery’ is on show in campaigns aiming to raise funds and awareness about anti-trafficking among corporate and local enterprises and the general public. Celebrity interventions, militant documentaries, artistic works and fiction films have all become powerful vectors of distribution of the trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ rhetoric. These offer simplistic solutions to complex issues without challenging the structural and causal factors of inequality. They also tend to entrench racialised narratives; present a narrow depiction of an ‘authentic victim;’ and confuse sex work with trafficking. Such representations play a key role in legitimising oftentimes problematic rescue operations that can involve criminalisation, detention and arrest of both non-trafficked and trafficked persons as well a justifying restrictive labour and migration laws that exacerbate migrants’ precarious living and work situations. |
Abstract: This Essay responds to an article by Hila Shamir previously published in the UCLA Law Review, in which she suggests that human rights has failed as a framework for addressing human trafficking and that instead a labor model would be more successful. Although her article identifies potentially important benefits of a labor perspective, the binary framework it establishes, pitting human rights and labor against each other, is counterproductive. Her article mischaracterizes the current antitrafficking framework and undervalues the importance of rights to a robust response to human trafficking. This Essay discusses the value of Professor Shamir’s labor paradigm and the role of human rights in antitrafficking responses. It then suggests that labor–based and human rights–based responses are not mutually exclusive, and that, ultimately, a successful response to human trafficking will need to incorporate strategies and methodologies from a range of perspectives.
This article can be accessed at: http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/discourse/60-10.pdf
]]>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
]]>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.
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