White Supremacy, Racism and The Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking

White Supremacy, Racism and the
Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking
Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and reference

particular ideas about unfreedoms, suffering, and rescue. The discourse
has, however, a distinct racialized legacy that is lodged specifically in fears
about “white slavery,” women in prostitution and migration, and the defile-
ment of white womanhood by the criminal and racialized Other. White
Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking centers the legacies
of race and racism in contemporary anti-trafficking work and examines
them in greater detail.
A number of recent arguments have suggested that race and racism are
not only visible, but vital, to the success of contemporary anti-trafficking
discourses and movements. The contributors offer recent scholarship
grounded in critical anti-racist perspectives that reveal the historical and
contemporary racial working of anti-trafficking discourses and practices
globally—and how these intersect with gender, citizenship, sexuality, caste
and class formations, and the global political economy.
Kamala Kempadoo is Professor of Social Science at York University, Canada.

She has published extensively on the Caribbean sex trade, global sex workers’
rights, and hegemonic anti-trafficking discourses, including the books Global
Sex Workers (edited with Jo Doezema, Routledge 1998), Sexing the Caribbean
(Routledge 2004), and Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (edited with
Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana Pattanaik, Paradigm 2005/2011). More recently,
she is co-editor, with Halimah A. F. DeShong, of the collection Methodologies in
Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality (Ian Randle Press 2021).
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and

Ethnic Studies at Brown University in the U.S., where she directs a human
trafficking research cluster through Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery
and Justice. Her research focuses on the impact of anti-trafficking programs
on the policing of migration, sex work, gender, and poverty. She is the
author of Manufacturing Freedom (University of California Press 2023), a
global ethnography of anti-trafficking rehabilitation in China, Thailand,
and the U.S.
White Supremacy, Racism
and the Coloniality of
Anti-Trafficking
Edited by
Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih
Cover image: “Abstract landscape with Japanese wave pattern vector”, by Marukopum
(Shutterstock)
First published 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kempadoo, Kamala, editor. | Shih, Elena, editor.
Title: White supremacy, racism and the coloniality of anti-trafficking /
edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021059877 | ISBN 9780367753504 (hbk) |
ISBN 9780367753498 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003162124 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Human trafficking. | Human smuggling. |
Sex workers. | Crime and race.
Classification: LCC HQ281 .W45 2022 | DDC 364.15/51–dc23/eng/20220225
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059877
ISBN: 9780367753504 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367753498 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003162124 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124
Typeset in Adobe Garamond
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction: Rethinking the Field from Anti-Racist and

Decolonial Perspectives 1
KAMALA KEMPADOO AND ELENA SHIH
PART I
White Supremacy and Imperialism in
Anti-Trafficking 15
1 Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Smuggling Campaigns in West

Africa as New Racialised Migration Deterrence Efforts 17
SAM OKYERE AND PETER OLAYIWOLA
2 Trafficking, Terror and their Tropes 33

PARDIS MAHDAVI
3 The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus has a Racial Justice Problem 47

LYNDSEY P. BEUTIN
4 Exploring the Role of Race and Racial Difference in the

Legislative Intent of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 64
ARIFA RAZA
5 Global White Supremacy and Anti-Trafficking: Race,

Racism, and the Politics of Human Trafficking 79
ELYA M. DURISIN
vi Contents
6 To Trip the White Fantastic: The Road from White

Supremacy to Sex Trafficking Safaris 92
GREGORY MITCHELL
PART II
Colonialism and Racialization in
Anti-Trafficking 101
7 Whore’s Passport: Racialism, National Identity, and the

Trafficking of Brazilian Women 103
THADDEUS BLANCHETTE AND ANA PAULA DA SILVA
8 Anti-Trafficking and Settler-Colonial Discourses of

Protection: The Coloniality of Racialized Interventions 119
JULIE KAYE
9 The Jaula and Racialization of the Amazon: Reflections on

Racism and Geopolitics in the Struggle Against Human
Trafficking in Brazil 136
JOSÉ MIGUEL NIETO OLIVAR AND FLÁVIA MELO
10 Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial

Figure of “The Gypsy” 154
MARLENE SPANGER
11 “Is It Because I’m Not Young and White with Blue

Eyes?”: Canadian Police Response to Sex Workers of Colors’
Experiences of Exploitation and Trafficking 170
MENAKA RAGUPARAN
12 Trafficking Indianness by Legislating Settler

Sexual Logics 187
APRIL PETILLO
13 Imperial Anti-Trafficking in India: Producing Racialized

Knowledge Regimes over the Longue Durée 195
MISHAL KHAN
Contents vii
PART III
Migrant and Sex Worker Resistance to
Anti-Trafficking 203
14 Resistance of Butterfly: Mobilization of Asian Migrant

Sex Workers Against Sexism and Racism in Canadian
Anti-Trafficking Measures 205
ELENE LAM, JADEN HSIN-Y UN PENG AND COLY CHAU
15 The Aesthetic of Migrant Sex Work: Creation of White

Identity and Perceived Moral Superiority 228
NADA DECAT
16 Sex Work in Jamaica: Trafficking, Modern Slavery, and

Slavery’s Afterlives 237
JULIA O’CONNELL DAVIDSON AND
JACQUELINE SANCHEZ TAYLOR
17 Migrant Domestic Workers, Asylum-Seekers and

Premonitions of Anti-Trafficking in Hong Kong 253
JULIE HAM, IULIA GHEORGHIU AND ENI LESTARI
Index 267
Acknowledgments
The idea for this collection sprang up in late 2018 out of our shared real-
ization that powerful, yet nascent, discussions of racism and colonialism
within anti-trafficking discourse were often isolated. So we set out to
give them a home, organize opportunities for collaborative thinking, and
create a platform to build momentum towards our collective resistance.
Collaborative to its core, this book could not have materialized without all
types of support, feedback, friendship, and collegiality.
We’d like to thank the many scholars who initially responded to the call
for submissions, including those whose work could not make it into these
pages. We know that there are multiple ways of thinking and writing about
racism and coloniality, and were excited to learn of how many people are
grappling with these in relation to critical thinking about anti-trafficking
interventions. We remain grateful for the contact with authors around the
world—from New Zealand, to Denmark, to England, Italy and the USA—
and for the opportunity to learn of their work and interests. We regret
that our choice to publish in English caused us to miss texts from non-
English speaking authors, and remain grateful to authors who translated
their pieces into English so we were able to include them.
Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice’s (CSSJ)
Human Trafficking Research Cluster was an institutional anchor for this pro-
ject. Thanks to Tony Bogues, Shana Weinberg, and Maiyah Gamble-Rivers
for offering deep and enthusiastic support of the research cluster since its
birth in 2015, and in particular, of the 2017 Whitewashing Abolition con-
ference that first brought some of these authors to the university and laid
the groundwork for these conversations. Enduring friendship and round
the clock conversations with Lyndsey Beutin, Elene Lam, Sarath Suong,
and Samuel Okyere, who presented at that conference, have foundationally
shaped the volume. Our work received additional support from Brown’s
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas (CSREA),
which supported an October 2019 workshop between us and contributors.
This vital meeting allowed us to workshop initial papers, and would not
Acknowledgments ix
have been possible without the incredible planning and facilitation of

the CSREA team: Tricia Rose, Stephanie Larrieux, and Caitlin Murphy.
Thanks to Katherine Chin for taking minutes at that meeting, and for
always inserting brilliant annotations. Thanks also to the Brazil Initiative
and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) of the
Watson Institute at Brown for supporting the participation of various
contributors in the 2019 workshop, and to CLACS for hosting Kamala as
the Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor in 2021. CLACS’ Patsy Lewis and
Kate Goldman have offered wonderful friendship and intellectual commu-
nity alongside the Center’s support for this project. York University also
provided funding that enabled authors to meet for the workshop at Brown,
which, too, is gratefully acknowledged.
Our decision to publish this book with this press came about because of
a prior knowledge about Dean Birkenkamp’s editorial interest in critical
studies of race and racism and his established track record in independent
publishing. It is disappointing that Paradigm Publishers no longer exists
but we are pleased we could work with Dean and the editorial team at
Routledge, and are grateful for their guidance and support. We’d espe-
cially like to thank the publishers’ anonymous reviewer who carefully read
each chapter and gave very enthusiastic, yet critically thoughtful feedback.
We’d like to thank our families and life partners, for providing the space
and love that is needed for the completion of a project such as this. Andy
Taitt is not only a great companion and a wise consultant on manuscript-
editing matters but did an amazing job of wrestling through lost-in-trans-
lation theoretical meanings in one chapter. We and the authors of the piece
can’t help but chuckle when the subject of the language of that chapter is
brought up. We hope we can all continue to detangle academic language
with such good humour.
Alongside this journey, two babies, Rui Ocean and River Xue, joined
this project. Elena thanks the babies and their papa Eric Larson for their
cheeks, laughter, and for a refrigerator full of leftovers. Throughout the
pandemic, the four of us were lucky to be able to chase childcare across sev-
eral states, and, without that care, this book would not have been possible.
Thanks to Don and Joyce Larson for nourishment, laughter, and teaching
us how to grow and fix things; and to my parents Ruby Shih and Davi Shih
for cultivating equal parts oppositional consciousness and desire for har-
mony to give me the fortitude to ask these pressing questions.
Elena thanks Kamala for decades of her thinking, writing, and organ-
izing at the intersections of anti-racist and decolonial sex workers rights
and resistance. It’s been over 20 years since Kamala and Jo Doezema
first published Global Sex Workers, and 15 years since Kamala, Jyoti
Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik first published Trafficking and Prostitution
Reconsidered. As an undergraduate student in the early 2000s, I read these
books, and Kamala’s prolific solo-authored publications, as cornerstones to
x Acknowledgments
help me rifle through the terrain of anti-trafficking studies. They say you
should never meet your idols, and yet, somehow the biggest fangirl has had
the unthinkable opportunity to edit a volume together. Her mentorship,
generosity, and trust, has modeled what scholarly collaboration can be.
And last but not least, thanks from Kamala to Elena for giving so much
time and energy at a time in her life when so much more was going on.
It was a remarkable journey with her through the Covid-19 pandemic,
the decision-making processes, the birth of her two adorable children, and
on our travels around the Americas. Whether in Barbados or Toronto, in
Arizona, North Dakota, Mexico City, or at Brown University where we
conceived of this project, we stayed in touch and worked closely through
multiple revisions of the manuscript. Her enthusiasm and staying power
are heartfelt, and help hold this book together.
Contributors
Editors
Kamala Kempadoo is Professor of Social Science at York University,

Canada. She has published extensively on the Caribbean sex trade,
global sex worker’s rights, and hegemonic anti-trafficking discourses,
including the books Global Sex Workers (edited with Jo Doezema,
Routledge 1998), Sexing the Caribbean (Routledge, 2004), and Trafficking
and Prostitution Reconsidered (edited with Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana
Pattanaik, Paradigm, 2005/2011). More recently, she is co-editor, with
Halimah A. F. DeShong, of the collection Methodologies in Caribbean
Research on Gender and Sexuality (Ian Randle Press, 2021).
Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic
Studies at Brown University in the United States, where she directs
a human trafficking research cluster through Brown’s Center for the
Study of Slavery and Justice. Her research focuses on the impact of anti-
trafficking programs on the policing of migration, sex work, gender,
and poverty. She is the author of Manufacturing Freedom (University
of California Press, 2023), a global ethnography of anti-trafficking
rehabilitation in China, Thailand, and the U.S.
Contributors
Eni Lestari is an Indonesian migrant domestic worker and the chairperson

of the International Migrants Alliance, a global alliance of grassroots
migrants, immigrants, refugees, and displaced people with membership
from 32 countries. She is also currently the spokesperson for the Asian
Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB), the Network of Indonesian
Migrant Workers –Hong Kong (JBMI-HK), and Coordinator of United
Indonesian Migrants Against Overcharging (PILAR-HK).
xii Contributors
Lyndsey P. Beutin is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at

McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research focuses on the
racial politics of communication, social justice, and the relationships
among public and collective memory of slavery and demands for
reparations and redress. Her book Trafficking in Antiblackness (Duke
University Press, 2023) explores how campaigns against human
trafficking reproduce antiblackness in the name of ending “modern day
slavery.” She earned her PhD in Communication from UPenn and was
a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-
American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.
Thaddeus Blanchette is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor
at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has researched
race, immigration, and sex work in Rio de Janeiro and southeastern
Brazil since 2004. Author of the book Cidadãos e Selvagens, a study of the
scientifically planned genocide of U.S. Native Americans, his research
focuses on how systems of bio-and necropower combine with legal
structures and cultural prejudices in perennial attempts to eliminate
“inconvenient populations.”
Coly Chau has a Master of Education in Social Justice Education from the
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her
research interests include race, gender, sexuality, migration, and spiritu-
ality. She is often working, organizing, and learning in her communities.
Nada DeCat is a student of Politics and Philosophy at Deakin University,
Melbourne, specializing in critical research on international law and lib-
eralism. She has more than 20 years of experience in sex work and lived
as an undocumented migrant most of her life. Her work includes advo-
cacy for the rights of Asian migrant sex workers.
Elya M. Durisin holds a PhD in Political Science from York University,
Canada. Her dissertation research focused on whiteness, nationalism,
and discourses of “sex trafficking” in Canada.
Iulia Gheorghiu is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Hong
Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include sociology of
migration, and sociology of morality and consumption.
Julie Ham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and
Associate Director of the Centre for Criminology at The University of
Hong Kong. Her research centers knowledge production with migrant
and minority communities and the criminology of mobility (www.
mmmk.hku.hk). Her research on the criminology of mobility, gender,
and migration has been published in Anti-Trafficking Review; The British
Journal of Criminology; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Critical Social
Policy; Culture, Health & Sexuality; Emotion, Space & Society; Gender, Work
Contributors xiii
& Organization; Sexualities; Sociology; Theoretical Criminology; and Work,

Employment and Society.
Julie Kaye is an anti-colonial scholar working in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan. She works alongside relations
and grassroots organizers of missing and murdered Indigenous women,
girls, two-
spirit, plus (MMIWG2S+ ) and decolonial, anti- violence
organizing and research with Indigenous-led responses to colonial gen-
dered violence. Her book, Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession,
Colonial Violence, and Resistance Among Indigenous and Racialized Women
published by University of Toronto Press, critically examines responses
to human trafficking in Canada.
Mishal Khan is a sociologist focusing on histories of labor regulation after
the abolition of slavery in South Asia and the British Empire. Her work
reflects on connections between abolition, modern slavery issues, and
early twentieth century labor governance norms enshrined in inter-
national institutions such as the League of Nations and the International
Labour Organization. Khan is currently a research fellow at University
of California, Hastings College of Law working on a study of the gig
economy as a member of the Oxford University’s global Fairwork team.
Elene Lam, LLM, MSW, is a social justice scholar, community organizer,
educator, and human rights defender. She is the founder and Executive
Director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network).
She has used diverse and innovative approaches to advocate social justice
for migrant sex workers, for example leadership building, community
mobilization, and action research. She has been involved in sex workers,
racial justice, gender, migrant and labor movements for over 20 years.
She has conducted training and presentations to community members,
services providers, and policy makers on sex work, migration, anti-
oppressive practice, and human rights in Canada, US, Asia, Europe, and
Australia. She is completing her PhD in the School of Social Work at
McMaster University. She is the recipient of the Constance E. Hamilton
Award for Women’s Equality (City of Toronto).
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, is the Provost and Executive Vice President at
the University of Montana. Previously, she was Professor and Dean of
Social Sciences at Arizona State University, and prior to that was Acting
Dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of
Denver (2017–2019), after spending eleven years at Pomona College
where she most recently served as Professor and Chair of Anthropology
and Director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College as well
as Dean of Women. Her research interests include gendered labor,
human trafficking, migration, sexuality, human rights, transnational
feminism, and public health in the context of changing global and
xiv Contributors
political structures. She has published four single authored books and
one edited volume in addition to numerous journal and news articles.
She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has
been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American
Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars. For more information, please visit
www.pardismahdavi.com.
Flávia Melo holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of
São Paulo (USP) and is Professor at the Federal University of Amazonas
(UFAM). She works in the areas of Gender Studies, Violence, Public
Policy, and Borders in the Amazon region, mainly in Alto Rio Solimões
and Alto Rio Negro. She is coordinator of the Graduate Program in
Social Anthropology (UFAM) and a member of the Human Rights
Commission of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology.
Gregory Mitchell is Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender
& Sexuality Studies at Williams College. He is the author of Tourist
Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy
(University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Panics without Borders: How
Global Sporting Events Drive Myths about Sex Trafficking (University
of California Press, 2022). His work has also appeared in American
Ethnologist, GLQ, SAQ, Brasiliana, and numerous other journals and
edited volumes. He has received awards/ grants from the National
Science Foundation, ACLS, Mellon Foundation, and various sections of
the American Anthropological Association.
Julia O’Connell Davidson is Professor in Social Research at the University
of Bristol. Her research and publications have focused on work and
employment and sex work, and critically interrogated the concepts of
“trafficking” and “modern slavery.”
Sam Okyere is a socio-anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Sociology
at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS),
University of Bristol. He is primarily interested in the linkages between
human and child rights, power, class, ethnicity, (un)freedom, inequality,
globalization, and the legacies of slave trade and colonization, mainly
but not exclusively in African contexts. Over the past decade, he has
explored these issues through extensive field research on child and youth
labor (in agriculture, mining, fishing, and other sectors) migration, arti-
sanal mining, sex work, forced labor, trafficking, and other phenomena
popularly labeled as “modern slavery.”
Peter Olayiwola, PhD, is Lecturer in the politics of Immigration, Anti-
trafficking, and Modern Slavery at the University of Liverpool. His
Contributors xv
research interests include qualitative research methods, childhood

studies, poverty, inequalities, migration, and trafficking.
José Miguel Nieto Olivar was born in Colombia and is a social anthro-
pologist. He is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health at
the University of São Paulo (Brazil). His work is focused on gender and
sexuality, with intersectional and de/anticolonial perspectives, espe-
cially in the field of sexual markets and, in recent years, with special
interest in the Amazon area. Currently, he is interested in discussions
on care, cosmopolitics and worlds, and their ends.
Hsin-Yun Peng (Jaden) is the project coordinator of Butterfly: Asian
Migrant Sex Workers Support Network. Her work focuses on human
rights, migrant worker and sex worker rights, and migrant queer
women support. Jaden leads an outreach team to support migrant sex
workers who are marginalized due to their immigration status, race,
and gender. In addition to conducting workshops, gatherings, and
training sessions to support migrant sex workers, she has also connected
community resources to help allies and social service providers better
understand the issues migrant sex workers face. Before immigrating
to Canada in 2015, she was involved in the LGBT community in
Taiwan and advocated for LGBT rights for more than a decade. Her
current work involves providing support and facilitating connections
with local services and resources for migrant sex workers and Chinese
queer women migrants. Jaden founded LesBond: Asian Queer Women
Migrants Support Project in 2019 and created a community for queer
women migrants to share their stories. Her background includes a
Master’s in Gender Studies and a Bachelor’s in Clinical Psychology.
She is currently pursuing her PhD at York University and her MSW at
Wilfred Laurier University.
April Petillo is Assistant Professor of Public Sociology at Northern
Arizona University. She concentrates on gender, sexuality, race/ethni-
city, political status, and culture, weaving together Native American/
Indigenous, comparative/critical ethnic, gender and sexuality, socio-
legal, critical trafficking, feminist, and queer studies. April mainly
focuses on exploitation originating in settler-colonial and conquest
logics and how targeted communities embody and harness resistant
joy. Her primary projects highlight legally encoded racial politics
and multifaceted coalition-building. April has published articles in
Frontiers, Feminist Anthropology, and Women’s Studies in Communication and
written chapters for Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global
Responses, Local Practices (2015) and Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in
Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies (with Jan Eggars, 2021). April’s
xvi Contributors
recent work includes Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and

Intersectional Approaches (summer 2022), co-edited with Heather Hlavka,
and articulating “slaving culture” as a statecraft byproduct of state-
produced racial violence.
Menaka Raguparan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology
and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
As a feminist socio-legal scholar, she studies women’s involvement in the
sex industry and the legal and social response to women’s participation
in the sex industry. Raguparan’s current research program examines the
structure and process of Human Trafficking Courts (HTC) in the United
States. This interdisciplinary and intersectional project aims to under-
stand the legal concept of “victim” and how moral reasoning is used to
establish, maintain, and reform laws relating to human trafficking in
the United States. Raguparan is also the founder and co-chair of “Sex,
Work, Law and Society,” a collaborative research network (CRN 6) at
the Law and Society Association (LSA).
Arifa Raza, JD, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University.
Her current research examines the racialization of immigrants through
immigration laws, focusing on humanitarian relief for victims of
human trafficking. Her scholarship is grounded in her prior experience
as a non-profit immigration attorney, where she practiced before the
Los Angeles and El Paso immigration courts as well as the Board of
Immigration Appeals.
Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor is Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway London
University. She has researched and published on sex tourism and cos-
metic surgery tourism with a particular interest in the intersections of
race, gender, and sexuality.
Ana Paula da Silva is Adjunct Professor at the Fluminense Federal
University (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro. She is also a permanent pro-
fessor at the Graduate Program in Justice and Security (PPGJS/UFF).
She participates in research in the areas of race relations, genders, and
sexualities and in groups working on the topics of sex tourism, pros-
titution and international human trafficking, with Thaddeus Gregory
Blanchette. She is a researcher at LeMetro / UFRJ and is part of the
extension project “Observatory of Prostitution.”
Marlene Spanger is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics
& Global Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. Spanger’s research
fields include ethnographic fieldwork and discursive formations within
newgenprepdf
Contributors xvii
the policy fields of prostitution and human trafficking with a special

attention to gender, sexual, and racial issues. Furthermore, she researches
how the migration infrastructures condition migrant workers’ (im)
mobility. From 2019 to 2021 she worked on a Nordic project about
court cases on human trafficking and labor migration. She is the co-
author (with May-Len Skilbrei) of the volumes: Understanding Sex for
Sale and Prostitution Research in Context. Methodology, Representation and
Power (Routledge 2019 and 2017).
Introduction
Rethinking the Field from Anti-R acist and
Decolonial Perspectives
Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih
Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and refer-

ence particular ideas about unfreedom and abject suffering in ways that
have justified rescue for decades. The discourse has a distinct racialized
legacy that includes a history of fears about “white slavery,” sex work and
commercial intimacy, migration from non-western countries, Blackness,
and Indigeneity. This collection centers the legacies of white supremacy,
colonialism, and racism in contemporary anti-trafficking work and pays
particular attention to how they manifest uniquely in different global
contexts. The scholars and activists in this collection challenge the racism
and coloniality apparent in anti-trafficking from various social, political
and geographical locations, calling for a re-envisioning of the global anti-
trafficking paradigm.
Evident from much of the work for this book and in numerous other
studies, is that anti-trafficking has racialized effects and enables or supports
racial and ethnic profiling, racial discrimination, and racial or ethnic
othering. This is part of the “collateral damage” that has been so power-
fully described and analyzed for nearly two decades.1 In the following
chapters we learn of new and enduring racialized subjectivities that are
mobilized in the name of combating trafficking. We see Romanian men
in Demark profiled by police as deviant, vagrant, and criminal; Asian and
Indigenous women in Canada perceived by NGOs and the police as in need
of raid and rescue; Black men and Black lesbians identified as traffickers
and Black women as their victims under the US prison industrial complex;
Nigerian women defined as simultaneously vulnerable and threatening in
Hong Kong and Ghana; Asian women in New Zealand depicted as either
depraved or incapable of self-representation; Brazilian women as “whored”
against their will across international borders; and global South migrants
in the US codified as “illegals” and criminalized for their migration status.
In such instances, ethnic or national difference –shaped by gender, labor,
and sexuality –is equated with criminality and innocence, repeating long-
standing tropes of the racial or ethnic Other. As the studies here show,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-1
2 Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih
anti-trafficking has heightened and justified the discrimination and pro-

filing of non-white people throughout the world.
A number of studies included here point to another effect of anti-
trafficking, namely the harm it causes through restricting or deterring
mobility. Anti-trafficking laws around the world have carved out newly
“exceptional” categories of citizenship, narrowly legislating trafficking
victims deserving of citizenship, while excluding the vast majority of
irregular migrants today. This harm follows a racial/ethnic logic, and in
the following chapters we see multiple dimensions of how governments
and the rescue industry alike have relied on the cause of trafficking to
secure borders, and criminalize irregular migration. Samuel Okyere and
Peter Olayiwola analyze how migration deterrence practices instigated by
Western European states through anti-trafficking policies prevent Black/
African women’s mobility. Despite their “humanitarian” claims, these pol-
icies force women to stay in conditions that they sought to move away
from, in their desire to access opportunities for livelihood. Anti-trafficking
programs in Africa, the authors point out, are backed by substantial
funding in Western Europe, the majority of which is spent on deterrence
of migration.2 The international mobility of the Brazilian woman is also
under close scrutiny and surveillance, Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula
da Silva explain in their chapter, whereby the historically imagined figure
of “the racially mixed, sexually exuberant, naive mulatta” positions her as
a suspected victim of sex trafficking. She is thus repeatedly interrogated
at borders or hindered when travelling internationally –in the eyes of the
state, the Brown and Black Brazilian woman should “stay at home.” A cor-
ollary to migration deterrence is deportation, discussed here in the cases of
Nigerian, Filipina, and Indonesian women in Hong Kong and for Asian
women in Canada but also established more broadly, where anti-trafficking
is a tool for securing national borders and regulating transnational flows
of goods, labor, and “illegal” immigration. The deportation of migrants –
irregular or not -fails to address abusive working conditions or deceptions
that migrants might face as low-wage, domestic or sex workers in the
receiving countries but, as importantly, fails to take into account conditions
they left in their home communities.
In cases of migration deterrence and deportation, the “stay at home”
message embedded in anti- trafficking programs conveys a distinction
between, on the one hand, Black and other racialized populations of the
world who are to remain immobile and in place, and on the other, those
migrants who are welcomed around the world as “nomads,” backpackers,
transnational corporate executives, “expats,” or international aid and
humanitarian workers, who are predominantly white and western. Such
directives serve to limit access to the “development” of the global North/
the west3 and to the benefits of globalization, which rely on the plunder
and extraction of human and natural resources in the global South.4
Introduction 3
“Stay at home” messages and policies are not simply a migration man-
agement issue or a matter of security or economics, but also, as Okyere
and Olayiwola note, a reflection of deep-seated and age-old antiblack racist
fears in Europe. Similar racist fears are articulated on the other side of the
Atlantic in the travel bans in the US against Muslims and Africans, and
the type of sentiments expressed by the Trump administration and white
nationalist agendas that maintained that immigrants from Haiti and parts
of Africa should “go back where they come from” and remain in their “shit-
hole” countries. Anti-trafficking through the mobilization of migration
deterrence and deportation policies, whether from Europe, Hong Kong,
New Zealand, Brazil or North America, helps to cement racial logics and
(antiblack) racism worldwide.
Anti-trafficking also often ignores the violence that citizen and migrant
sex workers face, as various chapters herein address. Elene Lam, Jaden
Hsin-Yun Peng and Coly Chau, drawing from first-hand organizing with
Asian massage workers in Canada through the work of Butterfly in Toronto,
demonstrate that anti-trafficking campaigns have endorsed the heightened
policing, and criminalization of migrant massage workers. In Jamaica, Julia
O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor discuss the “extraor-
dinary high level” of violence that sex workers, especially trans sex workers,
experience from the public, customers, some intimate partners, and the
police. Critically, they remind us that this violence is a consequence of the
precarious social and legal position that sex workers occupy, and not from
the compulsion to take up sex work in the first place, as many anti-sex
trafficking advocates often claim. Menaka Raguparan’s chapter examines
police responses to harm and violence experienced by sex workers of color
in Canada. Her data reveals how the women often come to be deemed by
the police as unworthy of state protection after surviving situations that,
if read through Canadian law, would be classified as human trafficking.
From New Zealand, Nada DeCat writes about the racism that inheres in
not only anti-sex work trafficking discourse but, as importantly, in pro-
sex work initiatives. She points out that the call for decriminalization
of sex work advocated by many sex worker organizations, seeks to assimilate
sex workers into neoliberal racial capitalism and does little to contest the
criminalization of cross-border movement or to abolish the prison indus-
trial complex, both of which target racialized bodies. In all these instances,
sex workers are perceived by the state and the public alike, as “bad,” “nasty,”
“loose,” or “illegal” women. They do not neatly fit the anti-trafficking rhet-
oric of helpless innocent victims in need of rescue from violence and abuse.
The harm described in these studies points squarely to state structured
violence against Black, Asian, and other women of color in sex work, which
anti-trafficking either fails to address or is complicit with.
Anti-trafficking is shown in this collection to distort or ignore conditions
of forced or hyper-exploited labor of racialized communities to the point
that they may be excluded from or denied assistance under anti-trafficking

programs. In a chapter on India, Mishal Khan argues that the conflation
of people of African descent with slavery ignores the long and varied his-
tory of the migration and settlement of Africans in South Asia and locates
human trafficking as irrelevant to the condition of this community, known
as shidis (Indians and Pakistanis of African descent, also identified as siddis).
Non-Black Indians and Pakistanis, on the other hand, might be read as
servants, trafficked persons, or dependents, but always defined as free
subjects. Khan points out that this antiblack, racialized history of legi-
bility by the state continues to inform ideas about who is considered in
need of rescue from slavery and human trafficking, while underpinning
processes of exclusion from the nation-state and of shidi identity formation.
For Denmark, Marlene Spanger discusses the racialization of the migrants
from central and eastern Europe through the figure of “the gypsy” –a figure
that is historically seen as a non-white, non-citizen in western Europe.
This racialization, she argues, serves to further the exploitation and vul-
nerability of Central Eastern European migrant working men in Denmark,
and removes them from considerations of being victimized. Julie Ham,
Iulia Gheorghiu, and Eni Lestari describe how, in Hong Kong, Filipino
migrant domestic workers are racialized as suitable for domestic work,
characterized as docile, obedient, and nurturing, while asylum seekers
from Africa are constructed as dangerous, and social and security threats.
Based on extensive participatory action research with domestic workers,
the authors document that while there is evidence of abuse, deception,
and fraud in the working conditions of asylum seekers, the Hong Kong
state does not recognize them as human trafficking victims. Instead, the
state relies on immigration laws and policing efforts that target the women
migrants rather than those perpetrating the harms. In Denmark, India,
and Hong Kong then, as in the case presented by Menaka Raguparan for
sex workers of color in Canada, stereotypes about specific racialized groups
remove them from consideration as “trafficked victims” and undermine
support these communities might gain from being designated a victim
of human trafficking. Racialized categories such as shidis, Romanians,
migrant (sex) workers, and even asylum seekers in these studies of anti-
trafficking regimes are systematically deemed unworthy of “rescue” from
harms and abuse.
The authors of the following chapters, whether analyzing anti-trafficking
for mobility restrictions, stereotyping of specific groups, or state violence,
demonstrate how this harm sustains racialization and does little to address
the conditions of existence of the subaltern, the marginalized, and the
oppressed in our contemporary world. We thus witness in this collection
how anti-trafficking regimes fortify structures of state sanctioned racialized
inequality through overlooking the violence and abuse that migrant (sex)
Introduction 5
workers, Brown and Black women, and Indigenous, and Muslim commu-
nities endure around the world.

To better understand such effects and impacts, we need to examine how
anti-trafficking imperatives stem from colonial investments and uphold
global white supremacy. Describing human trafficking, Pardis Mahdavi
likens the concept to a rubber band, so “conceptually and juristically
obtuse” that it can expand to include so much of the popular imagin-
ation around trafficking, while reinforcing punitive measures. It is this
malleability that draws several authors to reflect on how racism is not
simply an effect, or an unintended outcome of anti-trafficking policies and
interventions, but is instead central to the formulation of the very idea
of “human trafficking.” This collection makes the case that the discourse
of human trafficking is ontologically located within western knowledge
systems and epistemologies, which themselves are shaped by notions of
“race” (Robinson 1983; Mills 1997; Wynter 2003), and this is easily traced
from its inception as a discourse about white slavery to its present-day
formulations. The very idea of human trafficking emerged from within
Western Europe and North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
produced within colonial and imperial relations of power around a concern
about the safety and sexual morality of white European women migrants.
Anti-trafficking has, from its inception, been advocated by radical western
feminists in order to save their “fallen” sisters and has been expanded by
western(ized) states seeking to curb the migration of racial and ethnic
Others. Allying a diverse set of stakeholders, anti-trafficking has also
gained the vociferous support of evangelical Christian neoliberal as well as
white leftist anti-slavery crusaders who are eager to rid the world of what
is increasingly referred to as a “modern day slavery” problem.5 Not only
has human trafficking been conceptualized within an imperial racialized
episteme, but those who adhere to combating it claim it to be a universal
reality, a universal “truth,” a Fact. This white westernized/global North
discourse has circulated globally and is at times mobilized by local actors,
thus masking its geo-political epistemic location.
Human trafficking and all the solutions that have been envisaged to stop
it, are strapped tightly to the political and economic hegemony of western
Europe and the United States, to western liberal notions of modernity,
democracy and (un)freedom, and to “philanthrocapitalism,” venture cap-
italism and market-based solutions (Shih and Chuang 2021; Dotteridge
2021). The human trafficking discourse and its associated values have
colonized a great part of the world, especially since the establishment of
the UN Protocol on Trafficking and the US Trafficking Victims Protection
Act (TVPA) in 2000, carrying with them a racial logic and order. Many
years ago, legal scholar Janie Chuang pointed to the US response to human
trafficking as one that embodies a “global sheriff” character (Chuang 2006).

The US State Department’s Trafficking in Person’s report along with other
global North ranking mechanisms have emerged, seeking to measure
human trafficking according to global North paradigms. This book extends
the global sheriff metaphor to understand how white supremacy, racism,
and coloniality fortify US and global North empire.
White supremacy offers a toolkit to show how nation states, inter-
national organizations, religion, the police, border control, extra-legal
law enforcement bodies, and, most importantly, anti-trafficking NGOs,
are deeply embedded within racial and racist logics, without needing to
point to the presence or absence of white persons doing its bidding (see
also, Gabay 2018). We find over and over again the threatening banality
of whiteness that seems to confer expertise and funding to anti-trafficking
causes – often at the exclusion of migrant, gender, and racial justice. Angela
Bruce-Raeburn, in explaining how racism shows up in the development
aid sector, writes
the “helpers” and “do-gooders” arrive in places such as Sierra Leone

oozing natural confidence and bravado buttressed by their titles as
expatriates, holding advanced degrees from elite schools in Europe and
the United States and earning significantly higher salaries than their
local counterparts
(Bruce-Raeburn 2019; see also Ali 2019)
Additionally, understood as part of a global white savior industrial com-

plex (Cole 2012), the uncontested authority of whiteness has enabled the
proliferation of new forms of racial vigilantism (Hing 2001; Shih 2016)
masked as anti-trafficking rescue.
In this collection, Lyndsey Beutin, Arifa Raza, Gregory Mitchell, Pardis
Mahdavi, Marlene Spanger, Elya M. Durisin, and Nada DeCat expli-
citly locate white supremacy as generative of the dominant discourses of
human trafficking. Durisin pays particular attention to white women’s
engagement and the ways that the “rescue” of “not-quite-white,” Black,
and Brown women’s bodies through anti- slavery and anti- trafficking
movements co-constitutes white women’s subjectivity and identity, and
points to the deep entanglement of white feminism with carceral politics.
Adding to this analysis of the intersectionality of white supremacy with
anti-trafficking, Mitchell argues that the idea of noblesse oblige underpins
contemporary anti-trafficking “voluntourism” –adventure travel with the
aim of helping/“uplifting” local communities.6 From 19th century anti-
white slavery crusades, to Christian missionizing projects, to university
study-abroad programs, Mitchell illustrates how the savior-based model
of anti-trafficking, rooted in whiteness and white supremacy, is attached
to a carceral politics and feelings of self-righteousness, thus recreating the
Introduction 7
colonial encounter. Raza examines the founding connection between the key
US anti-trafficking law –the TVPA –with a racialized regime of immigra-
tion, starting in the mid-1990s. She demonstrates, through a close reading
of government debates, reports, and legal hearings around the creation of
a special visa for trafficking victims –the T-visa –that distinctions were
made between European women and children as victims of human rights
violations and deserving of protection, and global South migrants as illegals,
criminals, and traffickers worthy of prosecution and punishment. This dis-
tinction, she argues, reveals the racialized intent of anti-trafficking legis-
lation, and upholds a long-standing racist immigration system in the US.
Drawing on experiences as a prison abolitionist organizer with the
Southerners On New Ground (SONG) Black Mama Bailout Action in the
US, Beutin takes a close look at The Trap, a documentary film that claims to
link human trafficking to US prisons. Beutin argues that the film’s claims
obfuscate structural inequalities of the current justice and incarceration
system and not only reproduces racialized and gendered tropes of traffickers
and victims but serves to undermine racial justice organizing that especially
seeks to support some of the most marginalized in the criminal justice
system. Beutin observes that the film calls for tighter control and regu-
lation of prisoners such as further limiting conditions for inside-outside
communications, support, bail, and freedom from prison, all of which
severely impact Black women prisoners’ lives. Thus, she concludes, rather
than providing a critical analysis of structural racial injustice, corrupt bail
systems, and mass incarceration, The Trap is yet another example of white
supremacy enacted through discourses of anti-trafficking and modern-
day slavery. Mahdavi expands this picture by detailing the suturing of
the “war on terror” and the “war on trafficking” in the US, which reflects
an intertwining of Islamophobia and white, western supremacy, and the
racialization and sexualization of Muslims. Her chapter details how the
dual discourses co-constitute a new raced, gendered, and sexualized para-
digm that furthers Islamophobia and results in militarized responses that
harm specific populations globally.
Perhaps the most extreme example of the entanglement of white
supremacy and anti- trafficking rhetoric can be found in the way in
which QAnon –the alt-right conspiracy theory –organized its “Save the
Children” campaign in the US in response to what was seen as an elite child
sex trafficking ring comprised of Democratic politicians and celebrities,
who among other things they believed ran the “deep state” and wanted
to “mongrelize the white race.” Primarily concerned with saving children
from a “satan-worshipping cabal” that “kidnaps white children, keeps them
in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eats them to gain power
from the essence in their blood,” the QAnon phenomenon revealed how
easy it was for a white power movement to claim the discourse of human
trafficking to aid its cause.7 Such manifestations of anti-trafficking expose
the very foundations of the discourse as simplistic fabrications about very

complex realities of (sex) working, Indigenous, and migrant peoples’ lives
that feed a white supremacist agenda and racialized relations of power.
However, white supremacy and racism do not stand alone, and in this
collection we see additional intersections with coloniality, which we refer
to as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of coloni-
alism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and know-
ledge production” (Maldonado-Torres 2007). One of the major empirical
effects of this power was “the rise of Europe and its construction of the
‘world civilization’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslave-
ment, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.” (Wynter 2003,
263). Yet, coloniality endures beyond colonial administrations and colo-
nialism, and is “maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic
performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of
peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern
experience” (Maldonado-Torres 2007). It infuses modernity, liberalism,
and global capitalism, and holds in place a global power structure –with
race as one of its cornerstones of power (Quijano 2007). Through its per-
meation of all aspects of social life, Maria Lugones (2008) reminds us that
coloniality not only produces new social, cultural, and racial identities,
but within those, gendered identities. And coloniality’s development
imperatives have underscored the need for a variety of missions which,
since the latter half of the 20th century, have included (sexual) humani-
tarianism (see, e.g. Kotiswaran 2014; Kempadoo 2015; Maldonado-Torres
2017; Mai 2018). In short, “as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the
time and everyday” (Maldonado-Torres 2017; see also Kamugisha 2019).
Here then, we widen our gaze from a focus on white supremacy to include
the coloniality of anti-trafficking and take into account some of the logics
of coloniality in specific nation states. The studies included here, about the
treatment of migrant domestic and sex workers in Hong Kong, Ghana,
and New Zealand, Indigenous women in Canada, the US, and Brazil, sex
workers in Jamaica, and shidis in India, provide us with important insights
into the operations of coloniality through anti-trafficking policies and
interventions. The chapter by José Miguel Nieto Olivar and Flávia Melo, for
example, powerfully demonstrates how anti-trafficking becomes a neocolo-
nial tool of governance that instils fear in, and immobilizes, the Amazonian
population in Brazil. Through a colonizing, paternalistic, and racializing
focus on local culture, gender, and ethnicity, women of this “vulnerable”
region are targeted as particularly helpless victims and as most likely to
be trafficked or to end up in “the cage.” Julie Kaye, through an exam-
ination of the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,
Girls, Trans and Two-spirit persons in Canada, traces how the emphasis
on increased police interventions, including ramped-up anti-trafficking
policies, which were aimed to “protect,” not only failed to recognize and
Introduction 9
address the colonial and gendered state violence that Indigenous people
face, but reproduced that violence though such campaigns as Operation
Northern Spotlight. April Petillo’s essay mandates that readers contend
with the setter colonial undercurrents of anti-trafficking legislation in the
US. Her essay argues that anti-sex trafficking laws and interventions must
be understood as a form of colonial violence, particularly because they
legislate Native dependency on the US government.
The coloniality question also demands that we reflect upon prevailing
research methodologies of studying human trafficking and its responses.
Since many of the contributions to this book place the anti-trafficking
regime within existing paradigms of policing, surveillance, exclusion, and
exceptionalism, they urge us to be attentive to not only the repetitions
and creative adjustments of coloniality and racism that are made through
modern “development,” humanitarian, and philanthropic projects, but
also to the epistemic location of the researcher. Through whose eyes,
perspectives or lenses, and from which political legacy is research and the-
orizing being done? Which intellectual traditions are we drawing from to
counter the racism and coloniality of anti-trafficking and to produce crit-
ical thought about anti-trafficking? And what implications does that hold
for the decolonization of knowledge about human trafficking?
This collection is then, not just about including the voices of the
marginalized –this has been repeatedly done, even within critical anti-
trafficking work –but to position those voices as authorities and knowledge-
bearers in global debates around trafficking. As Ramon Grosfoguel notes,
a decolonization of knowledge “would require to take seriously the epi-
stemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the global
South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and
bodies” (2007, 212). Moreover, “a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a
broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left
Western canon)” (ibid.). From this point of view, diversity, inclusion, and
development –for instance, the anti-trafficking movement’s recent celebra-
tory tokenization of successful “survivor voices” –which often inform anti-
trafficking initiatives, are forms of coloniality that need to be distinguished
from anti-racist praxis (see also Bruce-Raeburn 2021; Shih 2023).
This collection grows from a commitment to scholarly organizing. As
co-editors, our personal orientations towards anti-trafficking work are
grounded in our organizing with sex worker, migrant worker, and racial
justice organizations. This orientation has revealed to us one more reason
why anti-trafficking “interventions” are futile: because they seek to re-
invent the wheel, proposing brazen new fundraising pitches for projects
that center rescue, raids, and rehabilitation. The audacity of anti-trafficking
interventions causes them to overshadow the longstanding, grueling,
mundane, day-to-day work and strategies of the workers, activists, and
organizers who are fighting for justice, including, against anti-trafficking
regimes, globally. Featured in this volume is the resistance of the grassroots

organization Butterfly –located in Toronto, Canada –that works closely
with a sister organization, Red Canary Song in New York, both of which
are developing tools of migrant and sex worker centered expertise in
order to speak back to the negative impacts of anti-trafficking projects.
Likewise, the chapter from Hong Kong is rooted in work conducted with
International Migrants Alliance, a domestic worker-led organization whose
worker organizer, Eni Lestari, is a co-author. Several other authors in this
book are closely affiliated with similar organizations, through which they
are engaged critically with debates about anti-trafficking.
We have deliberately privileged the research and work of such sex
workers’ rights, migrant rights, domestic worker, and anti-racist scholars
and activists, in an effort to contest existing relations of power in the pro-
duction of knowledge. In so doing, this book takes a small step towards
flipping the paradigm and offering a counter-point to the global North,
often white dominated, research on anti-trafficking. While the “white
savior complex” in anti-trafficking interventions is apparent to many crit-
ical scholars, what is also troubling is that too often the funds for such
academic scholarship, the publications, the expertise, and academic know-
ledge is secured, produced, and held by white, western, global North
scholars, who take for granted their own positionality within the know-
ledge production enterprise. As DeCat notes in her chapter here, many aca-
demic projects are complicit in this racism and colonialism in that they are
more likely than not undertaken by white researchers who mine migrant
and racialized sex workers’ experiences and position themselves as migrant
sex worker representatives and authorities. The bulk of the intellectual and
material resources for critical anti-trafficking studies remain then, in the
possession of white, western scholars, and this extractive process enables
the construction of academic success and reputation.
Racism and coloniality are obscured in much of the critical anti-
trafficking research being undertaken around the world, for while it depends
on abstractions and extractions from the experiences and perceptions of
racialized and sexualized workers, Indigenous people, and global South
migrants, there remains an overvaluing of activities, intellectual produc-
tion, and discourses from the western/colonial world. This book then, is
an effort to make space for anti-racist and decolonial knowledges about
anti-trafficking, as produced by and through racialized, colonized, and
marginalized subjects. The majority of the scholars and activists in this
collection not only challenge the racisms and coloniality apparent in anti-
trafficking from various geographical locations, but in realizing the deep
entanglements with state violence and westernized development, add their
weight to the wider call for a re-envisioning of the anti-trafficking para-
digm. It is a first collection of its kind to bring together such scholarship. In
Introduction 11
recognition of its inevitable gaps, we hope readers welcome these chapters as

a first step, and not the last.
We wrapped up this edited volume at the height of a global pandemic,
which has laid bare how life and death are negotiated around the axes
of race, ethnicity, gender, labor, and sexuality. The pandemic has also
brought to light how an ethic of community care is vital to the sustenance
of migrant, sex worker, and racial justice organizing. Throughout the pan-
demic, calls for racial justice have reached a fever pitch. Mainstream anti-
trafficking organizations are beginning to rehearse the language of “racial
justice” in their own marketing materials. We are being warned that the
way anti-trafficking organizations have espoused the #BlackLivesMatter
hashtag reveals a gross appropriation (e.g. Beutin 2023). So, this intro-
duction ends with a warning that many of the inequalities exposed in
these chapters cannot be solved by anti-trafficking organizations them-
selves. This volume is not a call for anti-trafficking organizations to
engage in a cursory diversity, equity, and inclusion makeover. Rather,
any reflection that should come from this book should consider how to
turn over the reins and upend their power of anti-trafficking in a mean-
ingful way.
Notes
1 See for example GAATW’s 2007 publication Collateral Damage: The Impact
of Anti-Trafficking Measures on Human Rights around the World, as well as the
2005 collection Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered edited by Kempadoo,
Sanghera, and Pattanaik).
2 See also the 2020 OpenDemocracy publication, “How Europe works to keep
Africans in Africa” which notes, “the European Union (EU) and individual
EU member states have devoted large amounts of resources to trying to keep
people in Africa.”
3 Here, “the west” and “global North” are taken as a project, not a place (see for
example, Glissant, in Kamugisha 2019, 178), that is, “western” and “northern”
signify a colonial impetus not a geo-political space. Or as Boaventura de Sousa
Santos (2014) notes, “The global South is not a geographical concept, even
though the great majority of its populations live in countries of the Southern
hemisphere. The South is rather a metaphor for the human suffering caused by
capitalism and colonialism on the global level, as well as for the resistance to
overcoming or minimising such suffering.”
4 Scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney have since the mid-
1960s captured this global dynamic as resulting in the underdevelopment of
respectively Latin America and Africa, a dynamic that has not been reversed,
even while areas of the global South have since become more integrated into
global capitalism.
5 Bernstein 2007; for an in-depth discussion of the anti-Black undercurrents of

“Modern Day Slavery” discourse, see, for example, Beutin 2017.
6 Such a critique of voluntourism is not isolated, nor reducible to anti-trafficking
work. For example, a young woman who had experience as a volunteer for
the Canadian charity “WE” (formerly Free the Children) as part of her under-
graduate study in International Development, describes a reality of white
saviorism as an extension of white privilege and primarily beneficial to white
subjectivity (Klaassen, 2020).
7 www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
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Part I
White Supremacy
and Imperialism in
Anti-Trafficking
Chapter 1
Anti-Trafficking and
Anti-S muggling Campaigns
in West Africa as New Racialised
Migration Deterrence Efforts
Sam Okyere and Peter Olayiwola
Introduction
West Africa has witnessed a surge in anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling
advocacy over the last two decades, comprising sensitisation campaigns,
new legislation, establishment of anti- trafficking and anti- smuggling
units, training events and other initiatives by national governments, the
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International
Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Union (EU), the US State
Department, and a multitude of non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
and civil society organisations (CSOs). The bulk of these activities have
been focused on Nigeria in light of the often-repeated claim that people
trafficking and smuggling is endemic in this country (see, e.g., Kara 2017;
TIP Report 2017).
The objective of this chapter is to provide an evaluative analysis of
the ongoing anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns in Nigeria
and the wider West African region, drawing on research with a group of
Nigerian women who have taken up sex work in Ghana as part of their
efforts to find opportunities for migrating to Europe. First, it looks at the
context within which Nigerian migration to the EU occurs, measures to
address aspects of such movements as forms of trafficking and smuggling,
and the ensuing anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns’ strong
financial, ideological and functional linkages with EU migratory deter-
rence activities against Africans. It then goes on to show a major disson-
ance between the women’s narratives and experiences on the one hand and
the campaigns’ humanitarian claims on the other. The argument is that
far from the often-stated benevolent ambitions, anti-trafficking and anti-
smuggling campaigns in this region should be first understood as continu-
ities of long-standing racialised discourses and practices which facilitate
the immobilisation of Black Africans and thus obstruct their equal access
to the opportunities of globalisation.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-3
18 Sam Okyere and Peter Olayiwola
Anti-Trafficking Discourses and Campaigns in

Nigeria
In mainstream human trafficking and human smuggling discourses,
Nigeria is presented as a “special case” country or one facing pervasive
“sex trafficking”, people smuggling and criminality (Okojie et al. 2003;
Triandafyllidou and Maroukis 2012; Mancuso, 2013, Dunkerley, 2018).
This rhetoric has largely informed the proliferation of anti-trafficking and
anti-smuggling campaigns within Nigeria and targeted at Nigerians over
the last two decades.
Recent and notable examples of these are the “I am Priceless” campaign
from 2012 to 2015 (see UNODC 2012) and, capitalising on Nigeria’s
popular movie industry, Nollywood, The Missing Steps anti-trafficking
and anti-smuggling TV series in 2017. The staggering 13-part TV series
features an impressive cast of Nollywood actors and was screened on tele-
vision channels across Nigeria to a potential audience of over 100 million
people. To further expand its reach, 200,000 DVD copies of the series were
made for distribution by the Nigerian immigration office and the National
Youth Service Corps (NYSC).
Additionally, in 2018, Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of
Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) launched a mobile app called iReport to
“allow victims of human trafficking as well as eyewitnesses to make detailed
reports to the agency” as stated in the description of the app on the Google
Play store.1 That same year, human trafficking and human smuggling were
designated as mandatory lessons in Nigeria’s primary and secondary school
curricula. They are taught in English Language, National Values, Basic
Science and Technology, Physical and Health Education lessons at the pri-
mary school level and in English Language, Civic Education, Government
and Health Education lessons in secondary schools.2 In April 2019, a new
anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking campaign “I am not for sale”3 had been
launched to encourage Nigerian women to build a life in their country
instead of seeking to migrate to the United Kingdom.
The central message conveyed by all these campaigns is that Nigerians
should “stay home” and try to build a life in their own country. If they wish
to migrate, it should be via regular means because “irregular migration”
risks making them victims of trafficking and other adverse circumstances.
At one level, these are sensible arguments which support the humanitarian
badge attached to these campaigns. And yet, as the chapter discusses later,
these messages also conveniently overlook the fact that “regular migration”
opportunities are also routinely denied Nigerians who try to access them.
Moreover, the messages’ emollient tone also obscures the fact that they are
largely rooted in an agenda to which humanitarian concerns are secondary.
Over the last three decades the European Union has made fervent
attempts to reduce the number of Africans who make it to European shores
Anti-Trafficking Campaigns as Deterrence 19
through messaging cloaked in such humanitarian terms (EU Observer

2018; Kingsley 2018). Anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling initiatives
have been central to this migration deterrence objective, as re-affirmed by
the European Agenda on Migration 2015. The EU and European coun-
tries have spent more than US$1 billion promoting anti-trafficking and
anti-smuggling campaigns which centre the “stay home” message and thus
complement their migration deterrence agenda.
For instance, the TV series The Missing Steps was produced with
US$415,000 of Swiss government funding. Also, since 2003, NAPTIP
has received over US$11 million from the EU and European nations for
anti-trafficking and smuggling initiatives such as the iReport app. The lar-
gest chunk of funding for these initiatives in Nigeria has been awarded to
implementation partners such as UN agencies, domestic and international
organisations whose ostensibly neutral characters serve to obscure the key
reason for the EU’s seeming benevolence or generosity: immigration deter-
rence and prevention from Nigeria and Africa. Since 2011, the IOM and the
UNODC alone have received over US$23 million of EU funding for anti-
trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns and programmes in Nigeria.4
As of 2019 the EU and 11 individual European countries were spending
about US$77 million on anti-trafficking activities in Nigeria (Vermeulen
et al. 2019). This figure was part of a colossal amount of approximately
US$870 million that the same actors had committed to 50 active migra-
tion projects in the country. Notable among these was the creation of an
electronic national identity card (project costing over US$230 million and
containing holders’ names, addresses, all ten fingerprints and other bio-
graphical details) intended to help curb “sex trafficking”, among other
agendas.5 Approximately US$426 million had been devoted to job cre-
ation, improving governance, supporting development and humanitarian
activities, but only in so far as these could be used to dissuade Nigerians
from seeking to migrate to Europe (Vermeulen et al. 2019).
As Vermeulen et al. (2019) similarly observe, the main essence of the
colossal expenditure on anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns
and other migration programmes by the EU is “to ensure that potential
African migrants do not become real migrants.” Hence, it is instructive
to note that only US$337,000 of the US$870 million or approximately
0.09% of the EU’s spending on programmes in Nigeria is devoted to the
creation of safe or legal opportunities for Nigerians to migrate to Europe
or elsewhere.
In sum, the surge in anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns
in Nigeria has taken place in the context of expansive funding for these
initiatives by the EU and European countries. As Nwogu’s (2014) ana-
lysis shows, recipients of such funding are obliged to focus on messages or
programmes which have the effect of preventing or dissuading Nigerians
from migrating or repatriating from Libya, and elsewhere those stuck on
the perilous journeys they are compelled to attempt to make in pursuit of

their EU migratory efforts. The campaigns, projects and other modalities
prioritise the message that staying put or staying home is the sole solution
or panacea to African migrant deaths on precarious routes or their labour
exploitation in Europe. They fail to challenge the systems which derogate
Africans’ rights to safe migration, illegalise their existence in Europe and
render them susceptible to diverse forms of exploitation.
This chapter argues therefore that far from being “neutral” or unwilling
agents, anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigners actively adopt
this as a political strategy in exchange for continued EU patronage. Their
messaging does not only wilfully advance the EU’s migration deterrence,
but it also confuses public understanding of the reality of Nigerians’ and
other Africans’ migration to Europe, further extending their racialised
anti-immigration effects.
Putting Africa-E U Migration in Context: Is Africa

Emptying into Europe?
Media reportage of African migration tends to emphasise mass movements
of people fleeing wars, famine and natural disasters or the archetype
boats trying to make the Mediterranean crossing into Europe. These
representations fuel the widely held belief that the entire African continent
is trying to migrate to Europe. However, migration from Africa to Europe
and African migration in general terms is one of the most misunderstood
and misrepresented topics in global migration debates, as the IOM (2017)
observes.
Africans, like other peoples, value opportunities to see the world and
many repeatedly indicate a desire to travel to Europe, USA and other places
glamorised by popular culture. However, most prefer and do migrate to
other African countries rather than Europe or outside the continent. Data
from the African Union, the IOM and other organisations show that over
80% of African migration occurs within the continent, not outside it (see
results of AFROBAROMETER survey of 2019 for example). And, des-
pite the popular portrayal of Africa as a continent of mass emigration, the
proportion of African emigrants relative to the continent’s population is
presently one of the lowest in the world (IOM 2017).
It is hardly surprising that Nigeria may top the proportion of Africans
who emigrate to Europe and elsewhere given that it is the most populous
country in Africa. Its national population of over 200 million6 people far
exceeds that of all the other 14 West African states combined, and the
estimated population of Lagos State alone, approximately 15 million, is
higher than that of at least 30 of the 54 African countries. The point here
is that claims of “mass migration” from Nigeria to Europe often show a
failure to take these demographics into account, just as they also show
ignorance of the fact that with the estimated 392,698 Nigerians living in
the EU, according to the most recent census conducted by Eurostat at the
time of writing this paper, Nigerian is not even within the top 20 non-EU
nationalities living in the EU (Eurostat 2017). No sub-Saharan African
country makes the top 20 (Eurostat 2017).
Eurostat data from 2015 to 2020 (see Table 1.1) similarly shows that
Nigerians are outside the top ten non-EU citizens found to be illegally
present in 28 EU territories. Except for Eritrea and Somalia (where many
are fleeing totalitarian rule and war) no other sub-Saharan African country
makes this list. Indeed, Naudé’s (2010) research on net migration for 45
Table 1.1 Top 20 countries of citizenship of non-EU citizens found to be illegally

present in the EU, 2015–2020
2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Share Change

in the 2019–
EU 2020
total,
2020
Number %
Total 2085465 924035 563825 572195 627900 557455 100.0 −11.2
Syria 856485 211875 38960 31025 40210 45680 8.2 13.6
Afghanistan 406025 148640 33120 30320 56200 34125 6.1 39.3
Iraq 182440 88975 33180 35870 31810 17780 3.2 44.1
Morocco 41515 39210 37835 38525 41535 41220 7.4 −0.8
Ukraine 23375 29405 33240 37115 41350 50415 9.0 21.9
Albania 46395 32350 36415 31230 33285 30870 5.5 −7.3
Pakistan 73640 40410 28030 21985 24925 20055 3.6 −19.5
Algeria 18795 23145 24390 26735 30545 38465 6.9 25.9
Iran 41790 30020 11285 15910 17290 9315 1.7 −46.1
Eritrea 37905 22080 16685 12675 15655 15950 2.9 1.9
Turkey 9515 9220 12110 20130 22080 15165 2.7 −31.3
Nigeria 14580 16390 15120 14460 13650 7995 14 −41.4
Tunisia 13315 11680 15845 13310 13545 14065 2.5 3.8
Kosovo* 49895 9605 6485 4730 4270 3670 0.7 −14.1
Serbia 12830 10200 13905 12310 12955 16355 2.9 26.2
Moldova 4040 7615 8730 11195 16480 24610 4.4 49.3
Unknown 37845 9150 5700 3710 3455 2400 0.4 −30.5
Guinea 4775 6625 10390 17240 10730 3625 0.7 −66.2
Somalia 17910 12370 7040 5690 6795 4255 0.8 −37.4
Bangladesh 17125 6870 4975 6210 9370 8510 1.5 −9.2
Source: Eurostat (2021): https://bit.ly/2YE0f9r (online data code: migr_eipre)
Note: the selection of the top 20 countries is based on the cumulative number of persons for
the entire period covering 2015–2020 (subject to data availability).
* This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSCR-1244/1999 and
the IJC Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence.
African countries for ten 5-year periods, from 1960 to 2005, showed that
international migration from Africa is largely due to socio-political con-
flict. People usually move because they have to.
On the issue of trafficking, figures are hard to compile and the existing
data can be deemed “guesstimates” at best. One of such estimates by the
IOM in 2017 stated that trafficking from Nigeria to Europe had reached
“crises levels”. This was premised on a claim that 80% of 11,009 Nigerian
women and girls who arrived in Italy by sea in 2016 were potential victims
of trafficking (IOM 2017). The operating word “potential” obviously
means unproven and it may well be that instead of the projected 80% none
of these women and girls was a trafficking victim. But, without seeking
to suggest that dehumanisation of even one person is acceptable, even if it
is assumed that every instance of the “crises levels” 11,000 was proven to
be an actual case of trafficking, it would still be questionable to describe
Nigeria as a site for “pervasive” trafficking taking the national population
into account.
The point here is that the dynamics of Nigerian and African migration
to Europe are far more complex than the media reportage, anti-trafficking,
anti-smuggling and popular migration rhetoric show. Such representations
should thus be understood as new mutations of the long-standing anti-Black
rhetoric, policies and practices whose core function is to derogate the rights
of people of colour to travel to or live in Europe and North America. Whether
by intent or consequence, these misrepresentations maintain long-standing
racist beliefs about those who belong or do not belong in these spaces.
Anti-Trafficking and Anti-S muggling Advocacy as

Tools for Racist Migration and Citizenship Agendas
A curious aspect of the “stay home” anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling
campaigns is that they are targeted mainly (though not exclusively) at
majority-Black African spaces such as Nigeria. Anti-trafficking campaigns
in European countries such as Britain or France, for example, mainly ask
audiences to be vigilant and report cases. They do not tell those seeking to
embark on backpacking holidays to “exotic” lands or seeking to experience
life on another continent to stay home because they risk being trafficked and
forced to become “sex slaves” in these countries. At their destination points,
European travellers are rarely faced with stigmatising anti- immigrant
campaigns telling them to “go home”, as was the case in the UK where gov-
ernment policy of hostility towards migrants resulted in the mass arrest and
deportation of people of colour tagged as overstayers and criminals, many of
whom were British citizens (de Noronha 2018; Taylor 2018).
The “go home” message is a corollary of the “stay home” message and is an
aspersion which is frequently cast at people of colour in Europe and North
Figure 1.1 “Go Home” campaign material.

Source: Operation Valken evaluation report, Home Office, UK. https://assets.publishing.ser-
vice.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/254411/Operation_
Vaken_Evaluation_Report.pdf
America. For example, President Trump told American Congresswomen

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley,
all US citizens, to “go back where they came from”7as if they do not have
the same right as he does to be in the country.
The umbilical cord for the “stay home” and “go home” messages is
connected to white supremacist ideology that people of colour do not
belong in Europe and America; an ideology which was formulated with
the racialisation of slavery through the transatlantic slave trade (Forbes
1990; Foner and Alba 2010). Black people were regarded as “aliens” whose
presence in Europe and North America could only be justified by their
enslavement or use for profit-making ventures. This thinking in part drove
the American Colonization Society’s efforts to resettle freed Black slaves
outside the United States (Forbes 1990), just as it informed Jim Crow,
other forms of racial social segregation and racialised indentured labour
systems such as “coolie” labour (Lake and Reynolds 2008; Sell 2017). The
notion of non-white European or American citizens with equal rights to
those of their white compatriots troubled and continues to trouble sections
of European and American societies, who therefore persist with rhetoric,
policies and practices intended to present people of colour as “invaders” or
“people out of place” and thus curtail their socio-spatial mobility (Yuval-
Davis et al. 2019; Sharma 2020).
In Britain, a façade of egalitarianism was initially promoted through the
British Nationality Act of 1948, which provided that people from British
colonies were all British subjects or Commonwealth Citizens and could,

therefore, travel to Britain without any hindrance (Carter et al. 1987).
However, at the very outset members of both Labour and Conservative
governments sought to protect the “racial character” of Britain through
measures that discouraged emigration to Britain by Black members of the
commonwealth. Concerns about how mass migration would affect crime,
education, housing and unemployment in Britain, were nothing but a
fig leaf for racist commentary which portrayed Black people as unassim-
ilable and a threat to British society. The veneer of egalitarianism thus
soon slipped, and the last 70 years have witnessed immigration controls
and citizenship practices which largely disadvantage people of colour
(Anderson 2013; Taylor 2018).
In the UK and across Europe and North America migration practices
and commentaries are replete with anti-Black racism and xenophobia.
For example, amidst a litany of racist and Islamophobic proclamations by
Hungarian President Viktor Orban himself, a speaker at a campaign event
of Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, opposed the entry of Nigerians into
Hungary with the claim that 80% of Nigerians had HIV/AIDS (Korosi
2018). A similarly racist association between Black African migrants and
disease was cited by Italian authorities attempting to seize the migrant
rescue ship the Aquarius in 2018. They stated that clothes worn by
migrants from Eritrea, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and elsewhere who had been
saved from drowning in the Mediterranean by this ship were potentially
contaminated by HIV, meningitis and tuberculosis. In the aftermath of the
drowning of 680 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in the Mediterranean,
Katie Hopkins, a UK political commentator, gleefully compared the
deceased to “cockroaches”, while urging the EU to patrol the Mediterranean
with gunboats instead of rescue ships (Lind 2015; Martin 2015).
These messages are also inherent even in “progressive” or humanitarian
agendas such as anti- trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns. The
American Colonization Society’s initiatives were not necessarily born of
benevolence despite their claims to the contrary, and contemporary anti-
trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigns appear much the same when
their advice to Nigerian and African migrants to pursue “regular migration
channels” to Europe or stay home is critically unpacked. As already noted,
many of these campaigns are a direct outcome of EU migration deterrence
measures against Africans. But even if they were not, scrutiny of their mes-
saging shows that their advice to Africans to pursue “regular migration” to
Europe overlooks the monumental obstacles which have been put in place
to deny Africans access.
In the UK, immigration lawyers have claimed that due to under-
lying racism at the Home Office, applicants from Africa and the Indian
sub-continent are routinely denied on very flimsy and sometimes illegal
grounds even when they meet and exceed the most stringent bars set for
securing a visa (Hill 2018). West African nationals (together with Iranians
and Pakistanis) consistently have the highest visa refusal rates and visa
application outcomes (Home Office 2017). Nigerians are on average the
most likely to be refused a UK visa among all nationalities worldwide
(Home Office 2017). They are also fourth on the list of countries most
likely to be denied a Schengen visa and deported from the EU (ENAR
2015,18), particularly in Italy and Germany where Nigerians are increas-
ingly targeted with expulsion orders (Bagnoli and Civillini, 2017).
It is for these reasons that Akinwale (2018) laments that Nigerians have
become “the rejects of the world”, a melancholic observation that was
also echoed by the women who took part in this study as discussed in the
following sections.
Interviews with Nigerian Women in Ghana

This chapter also draws on data from an exploratory study with a group
of Nigerian women involved in prostitution in Kumasi (the capital city
of the Ashanti Region of Ghana), while trying to use Ghana as a transit
point for their plans to travel to Europe. A total of 16 women comprising
2 smugglers, 2 fixers and 12 women who were using the smugglers’
and fixers’ services to facilitate their travel took part in the study. All of
the participants were involved in sex work at the time of the fieldwork.
Data was collected using unstructured interviews and interpretative phe-
nomenological analysis (IPA), two qualitative approaches which allow
participants to provide in-depth accounts of their experiences in their own
words and on their terms instead of being guided to do so (Palmer et al.
2010, 99).
In planning and conducting this study, due consideration was given to
the fact that although all participants and researchers were Black Africans,
we had different nationalities, cultures, languages and other social iden-
tities. The interviewer was also a relatively privileged male seeking to
engage with female migrant sex workers in a comparatively marginalised
position. Their marginalisation was also partly formed by “the privilege
afforded, and oppression rooted in masculinity” (May 1998, 136) of which
the researchers were beneficiaries, to various extents. Thus, in addition to
the usual ethical guarantees of informed consent, privacy, confidential,
harm avoidance and others, emphasis was also placed on how the power
differentials and different positions shaped the interactions. Measures were
put in place to address or minimise adverse aspects. For instance, each par-
ticipant was engaged in a pre-interview discussion to ascertain aspects of
their lives that they were not willing to include in our interactions. This
was to underscore the fact that while the interviewers may be asking the
questions, the women still had control over the interview in terms of the
extent to which they chose to share their lived experiences, if at all.
Anti-Trafficking and Anti-S muggling Campaigns as

Obstacles to Women’s Mobility
A major aspect of the ongoing anti-trafficking modalities in Nigeria is
increased security checks at the country’s airports. The women’s responses
to questions on the factors underpinning their presence in Ghana were
that in the wake of the anti-trafficking campaigns in their country, women
(especially) were increasingly being stopped by police and immigration
officials, questioned and detained at Nigeria’s two international airports
(Abuja and Lagos) if suspected of either being a trafficking or smuggling
victim or perpetrator. Those who rely on third parties to facilitate their
journey were most at risk of having their travel plans jeopardised in this
way as they were deemed to be being trafficked even if they denied this
was the case.
The decision to take the circuitous option of travelling from Nigeria,
through Togo and Benin to Ghana in the hope of using that country as a
transit point was thus made in this context. It came with added costs and
risks such as the need to take up sex work in Ghana to support themselves
and pay off costs associated with the West African leg of the journey while
waiting for the necessary arrangements to be made for the next step. The
women desired to travel and see other parts of the world, for reasons such
as that articulated by Bertha, one of the participants:
Everyone wants to go to London, Germany, Italy, Spain and other coun-

tries…if you live there and come back home everybody respects you.
For these women as with many other migrants, travelling outside one’s
country not only presents expanded life opportunities, but is a source
of prestige or higher social status. Against this background, the women
were highly bitter about the ongoing anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling
initiatives. They argued that the campaigns were not only to blame for the
challenges they were facing but that the “stay home” message trivialised
their life plans. And, from their accounts, it was evident that the campaigns
greatly underestimated their audiences’ desire to travel. The women were
all familiar with the ongoing campaigns, but they stated that they did not
consider the “stay home” advice persuasive, as Pearl and Amy articulated
in separate conversations. When asked of her knowledge of trafficking and
the ongoing campaigns, Pearl curtly responded
Yes but forget that one…even in Ghana here we hear about trafficking
on the news all the time…. It’s all over Naija [Nigeria] also…. But
who wants to stay in Nigeria…you can traffick me with you to the UK
if you want”! [Laughs]. Why will we come to this Ghana?…. It is all
because of this story about trafficking so we can’t go through Naija.
Similarly, Amy responded as follows when asked whether she knew of

the campaigns and the meaning of trafficking
AMY: Yes, I know of trafficking. There is a big notice at the junction

leading to our compound. Also, they talk about it on the radio and TV
a lot… Erm…how do I say it even…. For example, if someone takes
you to go to someplace to do like…ashawo [prostitution]…I know
what it means but I don’t really care about it because I know myself
that I want to travel. Honestly if you want to travel, even though
you’re scared, you don’t think about trafficking.
INTERVIEWER: I see. As you are doing ashawo here right now and maybe
when you get to Germany, are you a victim of trafficking?
AMY: It depends…(she laughs)
INTERVIEWER: How? On what?
AMY: If you are the police, then I will say I am. But as I told you before, we
need the help of Grace and Priscilla (the smugglers) and we all know
whatever must be done to pay them their money…you know what I’m
saying now…. Any person on the radio who says Amy don’t travel because
of trafficking, that person is a hypocrite…. Every Nigerian knows you
have to pay anyhow if someone takes you to abroad. Even if you apply for
a visa you have to pay the embassy so are they trafficking you?
Per Amy’s assertion, it is clear that the anti-trafficking campaigns have

influenced not only how the women had been compelled to travel but also
how they present themselves to various audiences. The campaigns have
produced an understanding that telling the police or authorities that one
was a victim of trafficking, if arrested, might elicit a degree of sympathy
that might not be forthcoming if one were instead labelled as an “economic
migrant”. This was one of several ways in which the women felt they could
instrumentally usurp or disrupt the rhetoric which persistently singled out
their country as an especially bad case. The plan to adopt the victim label
as and when needed was also an act of desperation. Many of the women
felt that they had very little chance of being able to access safer migra-
tion and legal protections via more regular channels, based on their pre-
vious experiences. This was evident in conversations such as the following
example with Charity, whose intentions to obtain a visa to visit her sister
in the UK were in her eyes thwarted by the construction of Nigeria and
Nigerians as people who could not be believed.
INTERVIEWER: Have you applied for a UK visa before?

CHARITY: Two times! It is a waste of money. I supplied
them with every-
thing they wanted. The lawyer who was helping me even advised that
I should go to court and get something called… [pauses]… I can’t
even remember the name now…but we went to swear at the court that
everything was original… I did a brand with my finger [fingerprint]

on the paper and swore everything was true.
INTERVIEWER: Affidavit?
CHARITY: Bam! That’s the one. We went to get it at the court, but after
doing everything they wanted, they refused me two times.
INTERVIEWER: What explanations did they give for the refusal?
CINDY: Something stupid…. Look, they don’t believe us Nigerians, what-
ever we say. The lawyer said it and its true. Even if you are telling the
truth, they think you are lying.
As discussed earlier, Nigerians are more likely to be refused visas to the

UK and other European nations than most other nationalities due to a cul-
ture of disbelief towards Black African applicants in general and Nigerians
notably and also as an outcome of long-standing racist interests in keeping
people of colour out of Europe. Most of the participants had resorted to
the services of smugglers following repeated unsuccessful UK and EU visa
applications. And contrary to the mainstream presentation of smugglers as
committed hardcore criminals, one of the participants, Evelyn, had only
become a “travel facilitator” (as she saw herself) following her frustration
with her attempts to migrate via regular means as anti-trafficking and
anti-smuggling advocates advise. As she bitterly explained:
…I tried for all the visas, but I did not get it, even Japan visa they did
not give it to me…the only time I managed to leave Nigeria was by
following that man [her previous smuggler] to Libya.
Evelyn spent two months in Libya trying to find a boat to make the
crossing to Italy, but she was arrested by the Libyan authorities and
detained for nearly three months before being repatriated by the IOM back
to Nigeria. She was one of the approximately 10,000 Nigerians who have
been flown back home from Libya, Mali and elsewhere since April 2017.
She explained that she had received advice on the perils of irregular migra-
tion from the IOM, NAPTIP and other actors, during the repatriation
process and upon their arrival in Nigeria. Yet barely a year later she was
trying to make the journey again, with other women now under her wing.
Discussion and Conclusion

The testimonies of the women who took part in this study demon-
strate that the “stay home or seek regular migration” advice is farci-
cally removed from their realities of trying to access regular migration
opportunities to Europe. The women’s decision to rely on smugglers’
services and more precarious travel arrangements is an outcome of painful
setbacks with visa applications. To use Martin Luther King’s analogy,
anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling campaigners have signed Nigerians
a “bad cheque”. Those working in Nigeria and other African countries

are conversant with the frustration which awaits the majority who seek
to access regular migration. They know that the effect of their message is
that many Nigerians will never get the chance to travel, but they amplify
this message, nonetheless.
The campaigns are therefore as duplicitous as they are punitive, for even
those who manage to secure visas also have to run the gauntlet of heightened
airport security checks which form part of the trafficking and smuggling pre-
vention efforts. This has created an ironic situation where Nigerians now seek
passage through other West African nations to avoid being “rescued” as poten-
tial trafficking or smuggling victims and made to “stay home” in either case.
The instrumental way in which they plan to use the trafficking victim label
reflects an attempt to “pay back” campaigners for the stigmatising narratives
of criminality which are used to justify anti-trafficking preventative efforts as
Agustin (2007), Ahmed (2014) and Kempadoo (2015) have observed.
For Nigerians, just as any other nationalities, migration can be an oppor-
tunity for social and geographical mobility. Being able to see the world out-
side one’s community or country is a marker of success, self-actualisation,
and an opportunity to help one’s family (Ratia and Notermans 2012). It is
also tied to national development agendas. In some contexts, remittances
from African diasporas are a more reliable source of funds for African coun-
tries than aid and loans which often come with parasitic terms (Naudé
and Bezuidenhout 2012). Deprivation of travel opportunities, therefore,
minimises access to these benefits of globalisation.
Anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling discourses which cast Nigeria as “a
centre of trafficking in human beings” (UNODC 2006, 11), and Nigerians
as “probably the most threatening to society as a whole” (EUROPOL 2011,
11) among other totalising and racist narratives which foster racialised
anti-migration measures should, therefore, be challenged.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the European Research Council (ERC)-funded pro-
ject, Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the
Contemporary World (ERC ADG 788563). The lead author’s involve-
ment in this project has been instrumental to finding the time and ideas to
develop this chapter.
Notes
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ng.gov.naptip.app.android
1
2 https://leadership.ng/2018/06/27/trafficking-in-persons-now-in-nigeria-scho
ols-curricula-naptip/
3 https://baronessj.com/dont-come-to-the-uk-stay-at-home-government-warns-
nigerian-women/
4 https://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/morocco/56140/promoting-better-man
agement-migration-nigeria_sq
5 www.id4afr i ca.com/ 2 01 9 _ e v e nt/ p resen t ati o ns/ I nF7/ 1 - Tunji- D urod o la-
NIMC-Nigeria.pdf
6 www.worldometers.info/world-population/nigeria-population/
7 www.politico.eu/article/trump-tells-congresswomen-go-back-where-you-
came-from/
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Chapter 2
Trafficking, Terror and

their Tropes
Pardis Mahdavi
Fieldnotes, September 1, 2009 –Washington D.C.

“Why is Iran on Tier 3 of the Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP)?” I ask the
group of state department officials gathered in the conference room of the U.S. Office
to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. Silence descends on the room as
the question hangs in the air. I repeat my question, hoping that one among the five
top level officials who have been appointed to “combat trafficking” has an answer
that explains why a particular country has received the lowest possible ranking in
the TIP report, a global scorecard ranking 180 countries around the world based
on American perceptions of responses to the “war on trafficking”. I have long been
frustrated at the opaque compilation of the reports that make presumptions and draw
on under-researched evidence –sometimes rumors even –to paint a picture of what
trafficking entails.
“I think, I think maybe it’s because of their involvement in terrorism,” one official
finally answers, looking around the room at his colleagues. “That, and it’s probably
easier to leave them there given their track record on other things like terror and
such,” adds the woman sitting to his right.
“But what do those have to do with trafficking?” I press further. “How is it that
a country could receive the lowest ranking in the TIP, be subjected to sanctions based
on this ranking, and the reasons behind it remain opaque?” I add.
“You are probably right in that we should re-think our Iran stance, but we know
that it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, trafficking and terror, and those
countries, they are notorious for being involved in both,” the official sitting to my
right answers curtly. I have obviously touched a nerve, and my accusations that the
“war on trafficking” has been drawing on and perpetuating Islamophobia have not
been –unsurprisingly –well received. I am ushered into the corridor, handed a card
and thanked for my time.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-4
34 Pardis Mahdavi
The “Terror” of Trafficking

The year 2016 marked the 15th anniversary not only of the September
11th attacks on the World Trade Center –arguably resulting in the begin-
ning of the U.S. “war on terror” –but also the 15th anniversary of the
U.S. Trafficking in Persons report (TIP), demarcating the re-emergence
of the global “war on trafficking”.1 Almost two decades into two of
America’s most elusive wars presents a time for reflection about the global
ramifications of the furthering of U.S. Empire. The “war on terror” and
the “war on trafficking”, two seemingly separate initiatives, have become
interwoven in recent years and conspire to castigate Muslim majority
countries as sites of depravity, difference and danger, fueling Islamophobic
rhetoric about the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Both
discourses are raced, classed and gendered, producing distinct tropes of
victims and villains, while the intersection of these two “wars” presents
a confluence of moral panics, or public anxieties pertaining to “immoral”
behavior, about sexuality, Islam and immigration (Cohen 1972). The
discourses about trafficking and terror are becoming hegemonic and
inescapable. More disconcertingly, these discourses are resulting in a series
of policies and sometimes militarized responses that are hurting vulner-
able populations globally. Each “war” seeks to marshal rhetoric about the
other to further bolster its cause and justify the creation of harsh policies
suffused with overt condescension. Beyond a comparison between the two
wars, however, I seek to interrogate the conceptual sutures between the
two that have resulted in a new raced, gendered and sexualized paradigm
that furthers Islamophobia during a time of intense scrutiny of Muslim
populations.
Rhetoric about race, class and sexuality feeds into the construction of a
“traffickingandterror” paradigm. Similar to ways in which the trafficking
discourse has wedded women and children to the point where the turn
of phrase has entered the lexicon as “ ‘womenandchildren”, so too do we
see a similar suturing of trafficking and terror to the extent where the
two are seen as one, with discursive slippages between the two becoming
de rigueur. Following Cynthia Enloe’s construction of womenandchildren
as a paradigm that enters common parlance, I have put together
traffickingandterror to indicate the discursive turn of phrase following the
suturing of the wars on terror and trafficking. Anthropologists have been
instrumental in highlighting the shortcomings of the war on terror para-
digm, and I seek to add to their important work by examining trafficking
and terror together. Here, I draw on the critical work of Jasbir Puar whose
Terrorist Assemblages (2007) delineates the links between race, sexuality,
militarism and the U.S. war machine. Ratna Kapur’s work (Kapur 2005)
on the intersections of the war on terror and women’s transnational migra-
tion contours this work as well. I also look at Junaid Rana and Mahmood
Trafficking, Terror and their Tropes 35
Mamdani’s constructions of “good Muslims”, “bad Muslims” (Mamdani

2002) and “terrifying Muslims” (Rana 2011), before turning to an exam-
ination of policy reforms that might be enacted to mitigate the extremely
high costs of both the war on terror and the war on trafficking. By yoking
the two “wars” and examining the yoking that has occurred silently, it
becomes possible to analyze the damaging effects of policy in each of the
wars separately. The analysis is foregrounded in a combination of ethnog-
raphy, discourse analysis and policy review.
The traffickingandterror paradigm forces us to look at the artificial con-
ceptual and political sutures between the wars on terror and trafficking.
I argue that discourses inform policies and vice versa, and that both dis-
course and policy have damaging effects on Muslim populations (by per-
petuating Islamophobia), as well as on migrants, laborers and trafficked
persons. Moreover, the hyper scrutiny on sexuality within both discourses
is resulting in increased monitoring and surveillance, calling for a mili-
tarization or securitization of sexuality –specifically Islamic sexualities.
These discursive/political linkages inadvertently foster illegality through
legal processes. Laws and policies that are enacted to mitigate abuses of
human rights oftentimes lead to increased dependency on middlemen
and increased underground activity because restrictions foster a climate
of illicitness and unaccountable behavior. The linkages of discourse and
politics, in other words, are exacerbating the problem, leading more people
into potentially abusive situations. Through a close examination of the
production of discourse about the wars on terror and trafficking, I will
detail examples and instances of the legal production of illegality and the
negative effects of stereotypes, tropes and policies pertaining to the wars
on terror and trafficking.
Between 2008 and 2011, I spent several months conducting research in
the United Arab Emirates and Washington D.C., examining the effects
of the wars on terror and trafficking. This was supplemented by spending
six months as a Fellow at Google Ideas, Google Inc.’s “think/do tank”,
working on an initiative interrogating the construction of the illicit
networks of trafficking and terror. Though each of these “wars” has been
separately examined in detail over the past decade, the intersection of the
two has largely gone unnoticed. In this essay I draw on fieldwork with
persons affected by both the wars on terror and trafficking in the Middle
East and U.S., juxtaposing transnational field research in the Middle East
with 14 months of fieldwork with policy makers in Washington D.C.,
New York and Northern California. I show ways in which America’s largest
“wars” of the past decade have conspired to produce discourses, policies and
interventions that are not only raced, classed and gendered, but are also
serving to increase and exacerbate inequality and oppression. I examine
how the discourses about issues such as trafficking and terrorism have led
to policies, which not only are disconnected from lived realities, but also
36 Pardis Mahdavi
are actually increasing challenges and human rights violations for Muslims
worldwide.
Producing Panic, Problematic Paradigms

The “war on terror” is a phrase first used by George W. Bush to denote a
military, legal and ideological struggle against regimes and organizations
that were labeled as “terrorists”. More conceptually, the war on terror is
about separating “good Muslims” from “bad Muslims” (Mamdani 2002),
and producing a category of “terrifying Muslims” (Rana 2011) requiring
intense surveillance at best and more often harsh responses such as interven-
tion and detention. Used to justify intervention and military occupation of
countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the term has also become emblem-
atic of a witch-hunt wherein it is not clear when or how this war would be
won, and when or how it would end. Perhaps one of the more damaging
effects of this military and discursive war is the portraiture of Muslims
as dangerous, potential members of terrorist organizations. In his book
Terrifying Muslims, Junaid Rana connects moral panics (Cohen 1972) to
“Islamic peril” by looking at how “the Muslim” becomes a category of race
and how this category has been racialized for many years, dating back to the
early formation of the concept of race during the Age of Conquest (Rana
2011). The category of “the Muslim” has been constructed historically as a
threat to Christian supremacy. Thus, while the figure of the “Muslim” has
been racialized historically, the new construction of the category within the
war on terror links criminality and terror to the construction of “dangerous
Muslims”. As Mahmood Mamdani notes, linking “Islam” and “terrorism”
is part of “ ‘culture talk’…turning religious experience into political cat-
egory” (Mamdani 2002, 766). “Culture talk,” Mamdani critically points
out, is “the predilection to define cultures according to their presumed
‘essential’ characteristics, especially as regards politics” (Mamdani 2002,
767), though the major shortcoming of culture talk is that it is a-historical,
eclipsing the larger social and historical context within which these pol-
itics and power are born. In this case, “culture talk” refers to the produc-
tion of “the Muslim” as a dangerous, threatening, typically male force
which has grown in a pre-or anti-modern environment, lacks creativity
and has a high capacity for destruction. This essentialization has led to an
atmosphere of Islamophobia that can restrict the agency of the individuals
about whom these stereotypes have been constructed.
The war on trafficking could arguably be viewed as the hyperfeminized
antidote to the hypermasculinized war on terror, though this is the exact
problem with the discursive turn of the anti-trafficking stance. The wide-
spread panic about transnational female labor, especially in the commercial
sex industry, has resulted in an elasticity of the term “human trafficking”,
specifically as it is marshaled and deployed in policy and international
conventions. As scholars such as Nicole Constable and Julia O’Connell

Davidson note, it is a term that claims too much and too little.2 Like a
rubber band, the term “trafficking” stretches wide enough to encompass
all forms of commercial sex work (whether forced, frauded, coerced or not),
but then shrinks to exclude forced labor outside the sex industry. Born out
of an understandable sense of indignation regarding the types of abuse and
exploitation that seem all too common in migrant women’s worlds, the
concept has been expanded beyond reasonable or feasible limits, becoming
both conceptually and juristically obtuse, while narrowly gendered,
sexualized and racialized at the same time (Brennan 2004; Vance 2011;
Constable 2010).
Bad Guys vs. Good Guys

Concerns about both Islam and immigration connect moral panics with the
threat of “Islamic peril” and fears about migration in general. In racializing
Muslim migrants, “migration in turn is imagined as part of a shadowy
global underground economy of trafficking and illicit activity in which
laborers become commodities, like drugs, arms and other contraband”
(Rana 2011, 54). While female migrants must be “protected” and placed
under surveillance, Muslim male migrants must also be under surveillance
because of their links to the war on terror. This rhetoric made a resurgence
in the era of President Trump and Brexit. Trump’s Muslim Ban legisla-
ture, and European Islamophobic calls to keep out migrants from Syria and
other war-torn Muslim majority countries echo the initial Islamophobia
that undergirded the power of the war on terror. Legislature proposed by
leaders in the U.S. and Europe post 2016 aims to regulate Muslim men
as villains while articulating discomfort with the arrival of other Muslim
bodies who could threaten what is seen as a western way of life that is
juxtaposed as undermined by Islamic values.
While the war on trafficking turns female migrants into victims, a
label denying agency and failing to recognize the production of subject-
ivity within migration (Kim 2006, Osella and Osella 2011), the war on
terror turns Muslim male migrants into villains –both categories inspiring
panic, fear and distrust. Racializing and sexualizing the “Muslim”
homogenizes all Muslims, rendering all cultures where Islam is practiced
both monolithic and static. Discourses of the war on terror and Islamic
peril perpetuate fear through threats of “sleeper cells connected by illicit
transactions of money, goods and people across borders” (Rana 2011, 69),
which can be seen in popular films such as Syriana or the hit television
show Sleeper Cells.3 Equally problematic is the gendering of Muslim men
in the war on terror as simultaneously hypermasculinized in their capacity
to destruct and oppress women, and feminized and emasculated, such as in
the case of Abu Ghraib. As Rana notes, the “male subject is feminized in
38 Pardis Mahdavi
a heterosexual framework in which figures of the immigrant, the terrorist

and the Muslim are deemed to have abnormal sexualities, deviant gen-
dered relations, and failed domestic lives” (Rana 2011, 71). Thus, both
the war on terror and the war on trafficking seek to produce gendered,
raced subjectivities and tropes about migration, labor and the movement of
bodies, goods and ideas. These tropes have been developed along different
avenues, but also often collide to reinforce images, discourse and policy.
The war on terror and the war on trafficking share numerous commonal-
ities which construct the foundation for discourses that rely on a slippage
between the two terms, resulting in a new traffickingandterror paradigm
that carves the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”, who are deemed
a threat to women everywhere. This paradigm is rooted in a particular
constructed “bad guy” image: dark skinned men often with Middle Eastern
accents (for a pop culture example of this consider films such as Taken, Call
and Response, and Human Trafficking4). Traffickingandterror conceptually
sutured results in policies further castigating and racializing Muslim men
as the source of the problem while painting women in Muslim majority
countries as lacking in agency and distinctively un-modern. In fact, as
many scholars have noted (Abu Lughod 2002, Mahmood 2004, Spivak
2006), the figure of the Muslim or Brown woman who needs to be saved
from Brown/Muslim men by White women was a central tenet of the dis-
course to promote the war on terror and eventual invasion of Afghanistan.
In 2021 when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took
over a few days later, the American discourse about the catastrophic take-
over of the Taliban remained heavily centered on a need to “save Afghan
women”. This was also evident in the number of outreach programs aimed
at women vs men in Afghanistan. The conceptual framings of “fighting
terrorism” and “saving the poor oppressed women in burqas” have been
fused in U.S. discourse to construct the trope of the villainous Muslim man
who needed to be attacked/punished/detained. Both the wars on terror and
on trafficking ascribe the source of the problem to individuals or rings of
crime, but both respond with policies or violence aimed at entire countries.
Discourses about terror and trafficking become intertwined through racial-
izing and sexualizing Muslims. In turn, these discourses further produce
policies and other narratives that not only perpetuate Islamophobia, but
also damage the countries and populations made most vulnerable by
trafficking and terror.
Sexual Politics of the Muslim Body

The second function of the traffickingandterror paradigm is the por-
traiture of the “other” as hyper-sexualized and deviant. In her brilliant
piece, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag”, Jasbir Puar argues that part of framing
certain Muslims as terrorists or possible terrorists is the construction of
their sexualities as deviant and in need of control or monitoring (Puar and

Rai 2002). Puar points to the Abu Ghraib incident, wherein American
military personnel attempted to sexually shame Arab prisoners publicly,
as an example of a hypersexualization of the “other”. Furthermore, Joseph
Massad and others have shown that the discourse about homosexuality in
the Middle East feeds into this same rhetoric of wanting to “otherize” or
prove Middle Eastern sexualities as deviant, fetishized, lacking and pos-
sibly dangerous.5 The tropes about human trafficking have focused on the
sex industry. Therefore, collapsing terror and trafficking castigates the
sexualities of “terrorists” or possible terrorists as deviant. Assuming that
trafficking is a problem particularly tied to networks of organized crime
involved in terrorism racializes the issue, and sexualizes those presumed to
be terrorists. This sexual “othering” further fuels Islamophobia.
Colliding Wars
On April 27, 2012, Google Ideas, the “think/do tank” arm of Google Inc.
hosted a roundtable in conjunction with the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR). The theme of the roundtable was “Illicit Networks: Mafia States
and Nonstate Actors” and was part of a larger initiative investigating the
question of “Illicit Networks” and the role technology plays in fueling or
fighting four areas of illicit networks, namely: human trafficking, arms
smuggling, drug trafficking and organ trafficking. The initiative focusing
on illicit networks culminated in a summit held in July of the same year.
The “Mafia States” roundtable focused on the role of what participants
and organizers called “weak states” in fueling trafficking. Many of the
participants were counter terrorism experts who drew on rhetoric about
terrorism to bolster their arguments about certain states exacerbating the
problem of trafficking. “Weak” or “failing” states such as Afghanistan,
Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Tunisia were all named as pockets
of danger for the speakers who pointed to these weak states as sources of
the problem of illicit networks. Some analysts pointed to the possibility of
organized crime syndicates taking over entire states and encouraging illicit
activities such as human, arms and drug trafficking. Others spoke of the
corruptibility of the governments of these “weak” states, thus resulting
in a need to monitor these governments closely. Embedded in their
conversations about “weak states” was also an accusation of a weak morality
that fosters hyper-sexuality –a hyper-sexuality that needs monitoring. Two
participants specifically contended that the governments of weak states
were members of organized crime and illicit networks due to their lack
of morals and problematic Islamic values. Three other participants could
not resist linking trafficking and terror, arguing that “mafia” states are
breeding grounds of both terrorism and trafficking, and that the same
networks that fund one, often fund the other.
40 Pardis Mahdavi
Two days earlier, Google Ideas hosted a different panel with the Tribeca
Film Festival, its other partner on the “Illicit Networks” project. The pur-
pose of the Google/Tribeca panel was to understand role of film and docu-
mentaries in framing the issues bound up in “Illicit Networks”. The panel
was comprised of survivors of different types of illicit networks, including a
survivor of forced labor, a former arms smuggler, a former child soldier and
a survivor of sex trafficking. The survivors spoke to the disconnect between
film portrayals of their lives and the realities of the lived experiences of
these networks. It was a powerful moment for members of the audience
who were organizers of the Tribeca Film Festival, actors, directors, produ-
cers and other members of the film industry. Putting the issues of “Illicit
Networks” on the table was an important strategy, particularly for the audi-
ence present, who began to think differently about their overly simplistic
depictions and conceptions of human trafficking and arms smuggling.
Several things bear mentioning about these two events, and the timing,
location and composition of the panels speaks to the way in which the
traffickingandterror paradigm has been constructed not only in policy
circles, but in places such as Silicon Valley as well. To begin, the organ-
ization and convening of the panels shows the involvement of several dis-
course leaders (which I will refer to as sectors) in these issues surrounding
trafficking, namely: Washington (the CFR and many participants on the
“mafia states” roundtable), Hollywood (Tribeca and other members of the
film industry), Wall Street (the investors and capital behind the events),
and most recently Silicon Valley (Google). That these different sectors
have all sought involvement in “illicit networks” has been cause for alarm
for some, and celebration for others. And, in fact, the reality is that this
involvement is probably a cause for both. What is important to recognize,
however, is that whether or not we agree with the involvement of these
various sectors, they have all decided to engage with the topic, and they
are each discourse makers in their various ways. We need to understand the
power of each sector, and the ways in which these discourse leaders have
structured paradigms in order for us to deconstruct the easy slippage of
trafficking and terror, victims and villains, and problematic paradigms that
these sectors construct. Furthermore, the power of these sectors to under-
score a hyper-sexualization of Muslim bodies that is insinuated by the wars
on terror and trafficking must be analyzed.
Though it is true that these four sectors (Washington, Hollywood, Wall
Street and Silicon Valley) are not each monolithic and have significant
overlap and partnerships, it is important to note that each has contributed to
the construction of the paradigms that have sutured trafficking and terror.
While these are not the only, nor primary stakeholders in structuring the
discourses around trafficking and/or terror (and indeed Elizabeth Bernstein
(2007) and others have written extensively about the role of right wing
and Christian Evangelical organizations in attempting to frame both the
trafficking debate and outcomes), I feel that the nexus of these sectors, and
the way in which each contributes to the traffickingandterror discourse
merits close examination.
Collapsing the Wars on Terror and Trafficking into a traffickingandterror
paradigm results in several stereotypes and oversimplification of the actors
involved. First it further reifies the “othering” process, or the construc-
tion of an “other” who is not “us”, but different, and possibly dangerous,
which legitimates intervention.6 As demonstrated by the fieldnotes at the
start of this chapter, as well as the images from Hollywood, collapsing
terror and trafficking constructs the image of a particular “other” or
“bad guy” who needs monitoring and surveillance (though what form
this surveillance takes is deliberately left opaque). When the discourse
presumes that a person involved in terror could and would no doubt be
involved in trafficking (without any interrogation of whether this is in
fact true), a particular bad guy is constructed who appears capable of all
nefarious activities ranging from terror to kidnapping and trafficking
persons globally.
The discourses and policies on traffickingandterror connect the
racialization and sexualization of Muslims to migrants. The tropes are raced,
gendered and sexualized, and result in policies to secure the nation from the
“other”, a tenebrous designation of sexually voracious Muslim villains who
use trafficking to fund terrorism. As of late, the U.S. Empire’s topmost pri-
orities and projects are 1) defeating terrorism and 2) controlling migration
to U.S. soil. Examples of this failure to recognize the different natures of
the two wars include the recent series of articles insisting that terrorists use
trafficking. In this case, journalists rely on the trafficking trope of buying
and selling women across borders to finance terror (examples can be found
in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times). This linkage is then tethered
to the construct of “the Muslim” within EuroAmerican “culture talk”
(Mamdani 2002). Both “wars” conspire to feed into Islamophobic rhetoric
about a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996), which then exacerbates
“migrant control, regulation and discipline to create deportable subjects
racialized through notions of illegality and criminality” (Rana 2011, 137).
In the wars on terror and trafficking, moral panics about race, religion,
(im)migration and trafficking collide and fuel a weighted discourse and
sense of deportability (De Genova and Peutz 2010). Muslims are racialized
as dangerous, and sexualized as either villainous and voracious consumers
of sex (as the TIP would suggest by ranking Muslim countries on Tier 3
according to perceived severity of sex trafficking), masterminds of global
trafficking rings (as in films like Taken), or in the case of Muslim women,
truncated and without agency with regards to their sexuality –easily
ripped from their homes and acted upon.
To return to the “Mafia States” roundtable. While human trafficking
was discussed extensively, the inadvertent slip to terrorism proved too
42 Pardis Mahdavi
tempting for the panelists. The two terms were conflated, and “weak” or
“mafia” states were blamed. No one initiated a clarification of the terms
“weak” or “mafia” state. And no one acknowledged that trafficking, and
in fact illicit networks writ large, take place all around the world, regard-
less of the “type” of state. Furthermore, the conversation focused on
illicit networks as an inherently modern-day problem, intensifying each
day, largely due to the presence of terrorism. However. this focus on the
“new” and threatening phenomenon of illicit networks obscures the fact
that informal economies and illicit trade has occurred across the globe
throughout history. As noted scholar Peter Andreas (2011) has exten-
sively documented, all forms of illicit exchange from humans to drugs
have transpired since at least the 1400s if not further back in history. As
Andreas notes, Charles Dickens complained for many years that publishers
in the U.S. were illegally selling his books without his permission because
the copyright laws in the U.K. did not extend outside national borders.
To further the point, Andreas pointed to the British East India Company
as a type of transnational organized crime conglomerate that monopolized
the production and trade of opium throughout the 18th century. When
counterterrorism experts in Washington claim, in an ahistorical fashion,
that trafficking is a problem today because of terrorism, they neglect the
important fact that trafficking –and organized crime –has long existed,
and therefore cannot be the fault simply of these particular “weak” or
failing states. The logic undergirding the “mafia” states nomenclature is
the slippage between trafficking and terror. Furthermore, perhaps the most
distressing aspect of the construction of panic over “mafia” states who per-
petuate traffickingandterror, was the fact that each participant, at the end
of the panel, admitted to a lack of data on the topic and agreed that their
statements were mostly speculation. The creation of a racialized paradigm,
therefore, was based not on ethnography or actual data, but conjecture and
the creation of a false threat.
Conclusion
In this era of globalization and postcolonial shifts, the larger public dis-
course and policy makers seem to be interested in oversimplified solutions to
complex problems. In a recent conversation with a Washington D.C. based
policy maker working on human trafficking, I wondered aloud why the
tropes cast by the U.S. wars on terror and trafficking were so powerful.
“Because they are simple,” was his response. “Because they show the public
clearly who are the bad guys and who are the good guys, and they make
our (U.S.) case for why we need to go after the bad guys really well,”
he added. But the problem is that these discourses are not aligned with
reality; they conspire to castigate a large segment of the world’s population
as either villains to be persecuted or victims to be saved. In doing so, both

constructed categories necessitate U.S. intervention.
Both the wars on terror and trafficking deploy a hypersexualized,
homonationalist portraiture of Muslim countries as the source of all evil
and a threat to the Euro-American way of life. This rhetoric was taken
up again through the fear mongering of former President Trump and his
European allies as justification for increased surveillance of Muslim bodies.
With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ushering in a new era, there is hope for
more nuanced approaches to understanding the complexities of the nexus
of migrations, mobilities and sexualities. While there is new light at the
end of this long, dark tunnel, the Islamophobic discourses suturing terror
and trafficking have such a long history in this country, that we still have
much work to do on the road ahead.
Notes
1 I place these terms in quotes to indicate their contested nature and social con-
struction within current paradigms of U.S. Empire. The “war on trafficking”
has been deployed by policy makers as an aggressively needed response to the
movement of female bodies in particular across borders. It has resulted in legis-
lature, such as that discussed in this paper, focused on women who migrate
forcibly into the sex industry. This myopic focus generates a gendered response
that has been used to implement hyper-border regulations.
2 Constable 2010, O’Connell Davidson 2006. Official definition of trafficking
from UN Palermo Protocol.
3 Both Syriana and Sleeper Cells portray images of Muslim men who are linked
by two interlocking passions: love of Islam and a passion for inciting terror.
Muslim men are portrayed as scheming masterminds who are at once every-
where through the depth and breadth of their networks, thus striking fear into
the hearts of their audiences. These “terrifying” Muslims are shown speaking
in hushed voices with harsh Arabic accents in darkened scenes. The images on
screen are constructed to inspire shock and fear of the villains who could strike
any victim next.
4 In these films, Arab men are shown as villains who prey on the flesh of inno-
cent, white, young women. For example, in the film Taken, one of the main
characters is a young, white, American woman who is traveling to Paris for
a study abroad type experience. Her father, an ex-CIA agent, played by Liam
Neeson, becomes involved when his daughter is taken by a group of men in
black masks. Throughout the film, the actual kidnappers are portrayed talking
to men with Arabic accents on the phone. In the final plot twist of the film,
the character played by Liam Neeson (or the father/ex-CIA agent) tracks his
daughter across multiple countries to finally find her, drugged, handcuffed and
hooded, aboard the yacht of a wealthy Arab sheikh who is bidding a high price
44 Pardis Mahdavi
for her virginity. The villains are depicted as sex hungry, deranged, Muslim
men who use their wealth and their problematic value system to threaten the
way of life of this good American family.
5 The portraitures of Middle Eastern sexualities can be curiously in contradic-
tion with one another; their deviance (read: dangerous tendencies in need of
western control) is characterized as either submissive/homosexual, or as lech-
erous/hypersexualized. Both depictions are “other”ing and both depictions
are linked with a justification and a moral obligation for the west to inter-
fere in Middle Eastern political as well as personal life. At Abu Ghraib, Iraqi
prisoners were forced and humiliated to portray submissive and homosexual
acts by U.S. forces, which reinforced the trope of Middle Eastern deviance and
the depiction of terrorists as homosexuals (in contrast to the U.S.’s mascu-
line forces); it also resulted in a reactionary discourse by journalists and others
that pointed to the torture as exceptionally humiliating for Middle Eastern
men because the Middle East was host to a repressed society with “perversity
bubbling just beneath the surface” (Puar 2007, 525). Thus this discourse
surrounding the scandal reinforces the trope of hypersexualized Middle Eastern
men in need of control. As Puar writes, “at the heart of Orientalist notions of
sexuality is the paradoxical view that the Orient is both the space of ‘illicit and
dangerous sex’ and the site of carefully suppressed animalistic instincts” (Puar
2007, 526). The Middle Eastern terrorist, also conflated with the “brown” traf-
ficker, is constructed as dangerous through these depictions of sexual perversity,
which include “failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a
certain queer monstrosity” (Puar and Rai, 2002, 117). The western discourses
about homosexuality in the Middle East are just as conflicted as the discourses
surrounding the hypersexualized and lecherous side of the construct. On the
one hand, the Middle East is cast as deviant for its lack of tolerance towards
homosexuality (pitting the “backward” Middle East against the “progressive”
and “tolerant” west), but on the other hand, men’s gender performativity,
if slightly outside the paradigm of male gender performativity in the west,
becomes pointed to as homosexuality, in a homophobic way. As Massad (2007)
points out, the main flaws with western conceptualizations of Middle Eastern
sexuality are that they are 1) ahistorical, 2) painted as monolithic across the
region, and 3) presuppose a western binary of “gay”/“straight” when this binary
does not necessarily translate. For further information please see Puar (2007),
Makarem (2006), Mahdavi (2010).
6 If an “other” can be constructed and fetishized, as in Edward Said’s (1979)
Orientalism, then violence against an “other”, constructed as a “bad guy”, seems
less obtrusive.
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and ‘Migrating’ White Western Masculinity.” Social Problems, 53(4): 519–536.
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46 Pardis Mahdavi
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages. Duke University Press.

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Chapter 3
The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus

has a Racial Justice Problem
Lyndsey P. Beutin
In June 2018, The Guardian published a documentary film about sex

trafficking within U.S. prisons. An article describing the exposé begins
with the following epigraph:
Caught in a recurring pattern of prostitution and incarceration, they

are among the most vulnerable women in the US. Yet gaps in the
criminal justice system, ruthlessly exploited by sex traffickers, make
escape almost impossible
(June 29, 2018)
The film, The Trap: The Deadly Sex Trafficking Cycle in American Prisons (Kelly
and McNamara 2018), was advertised amid an intensive period of activism
to protest the racial inequities of the U.S. carceral system, most prom-
inently, the lead up to the 2018 nationwide prison strike and the Black
Mamas Bail Out Actions led by Southerners on New Ground (SONG).
I came across The Trap because I research the racial implications of anti-
trafficking rhetoric and the video was posted on The Guardian’s “Modern-
day Slavery in focus” platform, a philanthropic journalism site funded by
the anti-trafficking foundation Humanity United. I was alarmed by the
framing of the exposé because of my involvement in anti-prison and racial
justice organizing, including helping to coordinate the Black Mamas Bail
Out actions in Charlottesville, VA. Prison abolition organizing starts from
the idea that reforming the so-called “gaps” of prison –what are narrated
as the minor aberrations to an otherwise appropriate, fair, and humane
system –will not adequately address the anti-Black and racialized violence
of the prison system itself (Davis 1998a; Gilmore 1998/99, 2007; Kaba
and Hayes 2018; Palacios 2019), will not end violence in communities
(Critical Resistance and Incite! 2006), and will not lead to collective lib-
eration. If there is one thing we know for sure in anti-prison organizing
circles, it is that reforming the types of “gaps” that the film suggests are
the problem will not be sufficient because the criminal legal system is itself
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-5
48 Lyndsey P. Beutin
part of what makes escape from cycles of violence and victimization nearly
impossible (Richie 2012, Kaba 2019, 2017).
In what follows, I unpack how The Trap’s claim, that it is traffickers who
make women unsafe in jail, legitimizes the erroneous idea that the car-
ceral system is a helpful and protective state service aimed at redeeming
troubled women. The film is by no means anti-trafficking advocates’ first
foray into “carceral feminism,” which, as a theoretical framework, names
how anti-trafficking strategies –across conservative family values and lib-
eral feminism –attempt to achieve gender and social justice through “a
politics of incarceration” rather than by redistributing power and resources
(Bernstein 2010, p. 47). Such strategies “focus on punishment rather than
on prevention of violence” (Richie 2012, p. 15) and build from the 1990s
white feminist anti-violence movement’s embrace of carceral solutions,
which legitimated the cause in the eyes of the state while compounding
the effects of state violence on the most marginalized women (Richie 2012,
see also Bumiller 2008). I argue here that what is notable about The Trap’s
instance of anti-trafficking carcerality is that it discursively protects the
state from allegations of racial injustice amid widespread public scru-
tiny of the anti-Black structure of the criminal legal system. In so doing,
this case study reveals how the terms of the anti-trafficking discourse are
mobilized in ways that undermine contemporaneous racial justice organ-
izing. I aim to help clarify why problematic anti-trafficking campaigns
have not gone away despite two decades of critical feminist scholarship and
activism against them: the anti-trafficking discourse functions as a state-
sanctioned political response to the threat to state order posed by grassroots
organizing. Indeed, what could be more threatening to states ordered upon
the logic of white supremacy than multiracial, multi-issue organizing for
racial justice?
The Trap: The Deadly Sex Trafficking Cycle in American Prisons is an inves-
tigative report and documentary film produced by Annie Kelly and Mei-
Ling McNamara. The Trap purports to reveal a cycle of violence that
exploits women. The cycle is represented in the film as beginning when
girls experience violence in the home, which leads to young adult drug
dependency, then selling sex for drugs, being criminalized, getting caught
up in the criminal legal system, serving time in prison, and then being
supported inside prison by men represented as “traffickers.” The film
claims that the women are released from prison into the homes of those
same exploitative men who immediately re-addict them to drugs, which
forces or coerces them back into street-based sex work economies that, as
portrayed in the film, the women have little control over or agency within.
The documentary claims this cycle of violence is caused by several “gaps in
the criminal justice system.” The film identifies three gaps: (1) the public
availability of information about arrestees, which the film claims traffickers
use to identify victims; (2) the lack of oversight regarding who can write
The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus has a Racial Justice Problem 49
to who inside, who can deposit funds on whose commissary accounts, and
who can pick up who upon being released from jail and prison, which the
film claims traffickers use to woo and coerce potential victims; and (3) the
bail bond system, which the film claims is “flawed” because it does not
adequately regulate “corrupt bondsmen” who supposedly knowingly allow
traffickers to bail women out of jail. The first two gaps that the film blames
for encouraging trafficking also happen to be the few remaining avenues
for establishing inside-outside communication and support networks for
women inside. The third “gap” –bail –does not hinge on a few corrupt
individuals as the film suggests, but is a racialized system of disenfran-
chisement. It also happens to be a key target of recent prison abolition
organizing: we do not want to reform bail procedures; we want to end
bail (and all related forms of pre-trial detention) altogether. How might
such narrow renderings of the causes of violence lead to counter-productive
prison reforms?
The Trap comes to its diagnosis of the problem by following two white
women who survived and escaped the purported cycle, one Black woman
who escaped the cycle with the help of support services inside and who now
works for the Cook County Sherriff, two incarcerated Black men serving
time for facilitating sex work, one incarcerated Black lesbian serving time
for facilitating sex work, and two concerned white correctional officers
who are advocating for anti-trafficking trainings for prison employees. The
documentary never once mentions race, racial identity, racial profiling, his-
tories of racial injustice, the racialization of crime, the racialization of the
criminalization of drug use, the racial foundations and inequities of the
criminal legal system, or racial disparity in police contact, in arrest, in sen-
tencing, and in meeting money bail conditions.1 It never once mentions
that anti-trafficking policies have increased the criminalization of sex work
and have disproportionately negatively affected communities of color in the
U.S. and abroad (Musto 2016, Kempadoo et al 2012, Shih 2016). It never
once mentions that ending the bail system is a racial justice project with a
mass movement behind it. It never once mentions that abolishing prisons
would solve all of these problems and more (Kaba and Hayes 2018, Berger
et al. 2017, McLeod 2015). Instead, viewers are left with a recurring anti-
trafficking story: the universal woman victim (predominately represented
as white with gestures here to multicultural inclusion) is exploited by
Black men (with gestures here to lesbian inclusion) and is failed by a state
that is designed to protect her, prompting the need for harsher regulations
of women’s lives for their own protection (both inside jail and outside it).
The Trap was researched over the 2016–2018 period that coincides
with several high-profile campaigns to end mass incarceration and to
end cash bail led by racial justice organizations. While the August 2018
prison strike was underway –mobilizing under the language of ending
prison slavery and ending modern day slavery –the landing page for The
Guardian’s Modern-day slavery in focus platform featured The Trap docu-

mentary. Despite sharing the “modern day slavery” language of the plat-
form, the prison strike was not covered. In its stead, viewers saw footage of
a Black man being arrested for “enslaving” women into sex work.
This stunning confluence of events offers an opportunity to unpack what
happens when anti-trafficking discourse, which has made itself synonymous
with “ending modern day slavery,” crosses paths with other Black political
claims and racial justice movements that draw on the presence of the slave
past. I suggest that the trafficked-out-of-prison narrative arises to challenge
racial justice-based indictments of the state as a literal and metaphorical
enslaver of Black women in the past and in the present. In other words,
The Trap undermines racial justice anti-prison organizing by suggesting
that it is not the prison system that is exploiting people, it is the Black
men and Black lesbians that are exploiting the prison in order to prey upon
helpless victims. In this narrative, not only are women being exploited
by Black men and Black lesbian “traffickers,” an idealized protective state
itself becomes a victim of Black (queer) criminality. The documentary jus-
tifies tightening policy restrictions on supporting women inside to protect
the carceral system from the Black male and lesbian enemy, a particularly
striking choice in the wake of a highly successful Black queer led effort to
get Black mamas –lesbians, queers, trans, non-binary, and gender non-
conforming among them –free from the state’s cages (Southerners on New
Ground 2017). Making it harder to write to women inside or to bail them
out of jail in the name of protecting them from traffickers inflicts add-
itional violence on women living inside. It rhetorically legitimizes the
idea that the prison system is fair in the face of racial justice campaigns’
challenge to the history and present of carcerality’s racial inequities. The
suggested reforms would make it harder to organize and support women
across the barriers of the prison’s walls. Why would The Trap advocate for
such things?
The White Supremacy of Anti-Trafficking’s

Investigative Reporting
The Trap is an example of investigative reporting about trafficking that
is promoted on a philanthropic journalism platform, The Guardian’s
“Modern day slavery in focus,” that conforms to, and advances, the goals
of the anti-trafficking apparatus. The anti-trafficking apparatus is the con-
stellation of governments, philanthropists, NGOs, media representations,
news outlets, public institutions and academic research centers, and trans-
national policies that propose solutions to ending trafficking that uphold
the status quo. By status quo I mean not only “the ways things are” but
also the underlying histories that shaped the structures of power that con-
tinue to govern the current state of affairs that we inherit and inhabit.
The contemporary unequal distribution of resources and power has been

unequivocally structured through the violent forces that shaped European
liberal modernity: transatlantic slavery, settler-colonialism, and the inven-
tion of secularized empiricism to hierarchically order civilizations based on
phenotypical difference (Wynter 2003; Silva 2007; Lowe 2015; Walcott
and Abdillahi 2019). These violences, which inhere in the contemporary
order of states, have been rhetorically obscured through the coeval dis-
course of liberalism’s freedoms (Lowe 2015) –rights, reason, and the rule
of law.
The anti-trafficking apparatus preserves the status quo through how it
diagnoses the problem of trafficking and which solutions it advocates to
end trafficking. Seeing trafficking as a problem caused by the backward-
ness of cultural practices in Africa and Asia, a problem caused by corrupt
governments and weak rule of law in the global South, or a problem caused
by family dysfunction within low income and racialized communities in
the U.S. reasserts both the justifying logics and the racial hierarchy that
European liberal modernity crafted. Figuring the problems as such leads
to proposed solutions that shore up the legitimacy of the existing power
structure: increased criminalization of traffickers (in the U.S. and abroad),
increased anti-trafficking training for police and social workers, increased
NGO aid to end corruption in countries where “slavery is worst,” and key
to my point here, philanthropists’ use of journalism’s claim to neutrality to
raise a partial and particular type of awareness about trafficking.
The philanthropists –billionaires who make their fortunes through the
operations of racial capitalism –get an outsized role in determining the
terms of the narratives within the investigative reports and news platforms
they sponsor.2 The logics of humanitarian aid and international develop-
ment, of which philanthropic journalism is a part, try to rectify the resource
devastation that colonialism and slavery wrought but do so without reallo-
cating decision making power, redistributing who owns the means of pro-
duction globally, nor altering the narratives of the hierarchy of civilization/
morality.3 Those narratives are based in white supremacy; they were used
to justify who was entitled to freedom in the 15th–19th centuries and they
continue to underpin ideas about who is capable of self-governance and
who is entitled to self-determination. White supremacy’s raciality can be
a self-concealing discourse; it has been masked in modernity’s narratives of
civilization, rationality, worthiness, and deservingness. The stories that the
news tells about trafficking, including The Trap, uphold these dynamics.
Chief among the humanitarian news genre stereotypes is the recur-
ring narrative within anti-trafficking advocacy that Africans and African
diasporic subjects enslave their own racial or continental kin. This narrative
repeats across the various special investigations on The Guardian’s Modern-
day slavery in focus. For instance, Black Ghanaian mothers sell their children
to fishermen on Lake Volta (Ubelong 2016).4 Mauritania still suffers from
hereditary slavery (Kousmate 2018). And, in The Trap, Black American

men and lesbians enslave white and Black women into sex work. My larger
research project analyzes the anti-Black origins of the “Africans enslave
their own” frame with particular attention to the history and present of
the pathologization of Black mothers within anti-trafficking discourse, but
I flag it here for how it contextualizes the narrative that it is Black sexuality
that enslaves women into sex work. Several scholars have done an excellent
job of comparing the racial and sexual anxieties of anti-trafficking to the
1910 White Slave Traffic Act and social panic (Doezema 2010, Kempadoo
2015, O’Connell Davidson 2015, Pliley 2014); I would like to contribute
to that conversation by suggesting the figure of the “Black pimp” is also
part of a much longer anti-Black, pro-slavery American ideology that
names and blames Africans and African diasporic subjects as an originary,
pre-transatlantic source of self-enslavement and therefore the rightful target
of blame for Black inequality.
Annie Kelly, one of the co-producers of The Trap, is also the editor of
The Guardian’s Modern-day slavery in focus platform. She has produced or
co-produced several trafficking investigations, of which two stand out as
particularly problematic. In 2009, she reported on Ugandan child sacrifice,
linking it to police reports of increased organ trafficking in the region. In
2017, she reported on a “juju curse that binds trafficked Nigerian women
into sex slavery” (Tondo and Kelly 2017). Both stories sensationalize Black
Africans as inheritors of barbaric, backward, and still-existing practices
that enslave their own kin. Those old narratives are now re-legitimized
through anti-trafficking discourse and the interventions of anti-trafficking
NGOs (specific NGO interventions are cited as evidence in both articles).
While the racist structures (including aid economies and the philanthropic
journalism that helps legitimize them) and implications of the anti-
trafficking apparatus are far deeper and far bigger than Kelly’s own jour-
nalistic and editorial choices, her representations demonstrate how “well
intended” humanitarian projects can have detrimental effects on securing
Black futures. Even more so when a documentary project aimed to protect
women in prison from exploitation suggests prison reforms that further
restrict successful inside-outside support structures for women of color,
such as letter writing campaigns and community fundraising for bails and
commissary accounts.
Inside-O utside Prison Organizing, 2016–2 018

In order to understand the harm that The Trap’s suggested reforms would
inflict on incarcerated women, it is important to understand how they
directly intersect with tried-and-true methods of communicating and
organizing across prison walls. The Trap suggests three reforms: stricter
control over who can contact who inside, stricter control over who can
put money on prison accounts, and stricter control of who can post
someone’s bail bond. All of the suggested reforms would make it harder
to establish inside-outside communication. All would erect additional
barriers to maintaining and enacting community- based and queer
kinship networks across walls. All appear to directly respond to recent
anti-prison campaigns and strategies. That is quite a coincidence, espe-
cially considering the anti-trafficking apparatus has been noted to be
“devoid of solidarity with Black lives and politics” (Maynard 2018, 286;
see also Woods 2013, 2014).
Amidst larger-scale campaigns like the 2018 prison strike or the 2013
hunger strike in California prisons, local and regional inside-outside prison
organizing happens every day through a variety of tactics: letter writing,
prison radio (with Mumia Abu-Jamal), prisoner rights newsletters and
zines (such as Amplify Voices Inside in Durham, NC), LGBTQ pen pals
programs (such as Black and Pink), sending books and reading materials
inside (such as Books through Bars), coeducational activities (such as Inside
Out programs), campaigns to end Death by Incarceration (such as CADBI
in Philadelphia, PA), court support and monitoring bail hearings for evi-
dence of racial bias (such as Charlottesville Community Court Watch in
VA), speak-ins to protest prisoner silencing laws by reading prisoner letters
to legislators (Decarcerate PA), and participatory defense models (such as
De-Bug in Silicon Valley, CA).
Inside-outside communication is already heavily surveilled and
can be very challenging. Phone calls from inside jails and prisons are
extremely expensive (up to $5.70 per 15 minute in Kentucky, according
to the Prison Phone Justice campaign), hard to coordinate, and recorded.
Letters may be opened and read by prison staff, sometimes destroyed
altogether, often cannot contain photographs or drawings in marker or
crayon, and usually cannot be on colored paper or written in colored pen.
Prisoners face the threat of retaliation if they receive newsletters or other
printed materials from anti-prison organizations. Books may be censored
or returned. There are extreme limits and specifications on the types and
number of goods that prisoners can receive in packages, increasing the
need to rely on the prison-run commissaries that charge higher prices for
personal necessities not supplied by the prison, such as sanitary pads and
underwear. I list these banalities of inside-outside communication and
lifemaking because letter writing and commissary accounts are two of the
lifelines for dignity, respect, solidarity, and community building across
the bars of the cage; they are also two of the areas that The Trap seeks to
have more tightly regulated in the name of protecting women from sex
traffickers.
Alongside the prisoner-led strikes and grassroots inside-outside coali-
tion building within this period, the movement to frame the money bail
system as racial injustice has gained visibility. In 2017, Southerners on
New Ground (SONG) co-director Mary Hooks proposed to the Movement

for Black Lives (M4BL) Policy Table a bail eradication campaign that
would center on getting Black women free. SONG’s Black Mamas Bail
Out Action raised money to pay the bails of Black women who were being
held in jail simply because they could not afford to pay the fee to be released
until their trial began (Southerners on New Ground 2017). SONG is a
grassroots multi-racial queer liberation organization that is explicitly pro-
Black and organizes campaigns across the U.S. South. The focus on Black
mamas was designed to draw attention to the myriad caretaking roles that
Black women, lesbians, trans, and gender non-conforming people play in
creating and sustaining resilient communities, as well as the dispropor-
tionate scrutiny, with far-reaching effects across families, they face from
the state and the criminal legal system. Money bail is a mechanism that
separates Black mamas from communities, to great detriment to us all.
SONG framed the action in the tradition and legacy of ancestral Black lib-
eration movements against slavery:
our goal is to be able to free our people from these cages, using the
traditions from our ancestors that bought each other’s collective
freedom, to get our folks back home and to highlight the crisis around
the cash bail system, put pressure on all of these institutions who are
making money off of our people’s suffering, but, most importantly,
restore the life that this cash bail system has taken from our people
(Hooks, interview on Democracy Now! 2017, May 12)
Money bail is a system that disproportionately impacts low-income

communities of color. If a person is arrested, a judge or magistrate will
set the conditions of their release while they await their trial. Judges
and magistrates can choose from a variety of pre-trial release conditions.
Some require only a signature and no payment; cash bail bonds require
defendants to either pay in full or through a bail bondsman. If paid in
full, payment will be returned once the defendant has completed all trial
proceedings, which can sometimes mean the money is tied up for years.
If paid by bail bondsmen, families lose the non-refundable fee (generally
10% of the bail amount), regardless of whether the accused shows up in
court. While bail bonds companies often think of themselves as providing
a service for the community (it is easier to raise $100 for the $1,000 bond
than a full $1,000, for instance), for the most part, bail bonds companies
are considered predatory, with some activist rhetoric referring to them as
“modern day slave catchers.” The slave catcher imagery comes from the
notion that if people don’t show up for court in order to “escape prison
slavery,” it is the bondsman who will do the state’s (i.e. slave owner’s)
bidding by chasing the defendant down in order to collect his reward and
return the defendant to state captivity. It bears noting, though, that many
people who fail to appear are not attempting to escape the court system;
rather, it is more common that they could not get childcare, a ride to court,
or the day off work for their court date (Gouldin 2018, Corey and Lo 2019).
If a defendant cannot raise the money for the full bail bond or for the
bail bondsman’s 10% fee, they must remain in jail until their trial ends
and sentencing is complete. This situation means that many people who
cannot afford their bail are being held in jail before their trial begins and
thus before they have been convicted of a crime. Money bail dispropor-
tionately keeps low-income residents in jail because of an inability to pay.
Being held in jail –without ever being convicted of a crime –can have
detrimental ripple effects: defendants can lose public housing (or their
place in line on a public housing waitlist) within 24 hours, can be fired
from jobs immediately, can be put into deportation proceedings, and can
lose custody of their children to Child Protective Services within days.
Compounding these effects is racial disparity in police contact leading to
arrest (and thus money bail conditions) in the first place: racialized sus-
picion and assumption of criminality, stop and frisk policies, the racial
profiling of drivers and public behavior. In short, the problem is not a few
corrupt bondsmen knowingly selling bail bonds to sex traffickers that is
keeping incarcerated women trapped in cycles of dispossession, as The Trap
suggests; it is the bail system itself.
The broad coalition of racial justice organizations working on trans-
formative bail reform, including SONG and National Bail Out, has raised
nationwide awareness of the cruelty of money bail, built grassroots organ-
izing capacity in local communities across the country, and freed over
450 people who were sitting in jail before ever being convicted of a crime
(NationalBailOut.org). The coordinated and strategic collective action
was widely publicized and has significantly contributed to longstanding
decarceration and prisoner rights campaigns. By focusing on Black
women’s freedom and role in community resilience and resistance, the
bail out actions have successfully framed bail reform as a racial justice
issue while simultaneously demonstrating, through specific policy targets
and action, how placing Black queer women’s freedom at the center of
our movements can make everybody freer. Recognizing how reforms to
end cash bail might counter-intuitively result in new bond denials for
Black women, increased use of predatory electronic home monitoring pre-
trial, or the implementation of racially biased risk assessment scores, the
campaigns avoided further entrenching structural violence against Black
women by seeking to end pre-trial detention altogether. Contrast this
holistic analysis and approach with the one suggested by The Trap: minor
reforms to the bail rules that will make it much harder to bail out women
without transforming the underlying racialized structure of the bail
system.
Reforms to Undermine Racial Justice Movements

The premise of The Trap centers on the idea that corrupt bondsmen allow
traffickers to manipulate the bail system in order to traffic women out
of prison and into “debt bondage.” This use of the term “debt bondage”
draws on the paradigmatic anti-trafficking figure of the innocent South
Asian woman trapped in generational debt cycles by backward local
forces. This victim-figure, like white American women, is assumed to
garner more public sympathy than Black American women, in part
because the narrativization of both the South Asian suffering woman
abroad and the white American suffering woman at home blame corrupt
men of color, rather than state and market systems, for the suffering
incurred. Consider a mainstream documentary that narrativized the story
of a low-income woman of color in the U.S., who because of the lack of
other economic opportunities built by generations of state-sanctioned
racial and economic dispossession, gets by with or is susceptible to check
or credit card fraud schemes (of which there is a thriving predatory
industry in the U.S.). The woman gets caught, is arrested, cannot pay her
bond, sits in jail, and loses her housing and other benefits owed to her.
How unimaginable it would be for a mainstream documentary to tell the
story that this woman was trapped in debt bondage engineered by the
U.S. government. Such a narration of “debt bondage” is hardly imagin-
able, and yet, this is an actually existing cycle of violence that women in
prison are exposed to.
According to The Trap’s framing, the debt bondage cycle entrapping
women in jail results from the “gap” that since anyone can post bail for
anyone else, traffickers pay bails for women they have identified through
public arrest records as sex workers or otherwise coercible into sex work.
Once the women are out on bail, the traffickers force them to work off the
debt of their bail bond through sex work. If a woman refuses, the exploiter
will forfeit the woman’s posted bond, sending her back to jail.5 The Trap
corroborated its narrative of debt bondage by citing people incarcerated
on trafficking charges who asserted that bail bonds companies knowingly
sell bonds to men known to be sex traffickers. The Trap diagnoses this as
a matter of corrupt bondsmen and a gap in the bail system that allows
anyone to post anyone else’s bail bond.
There is no doubt that the bail bonds industry is predatory. There
is no doubt that the bond system is unfair and negatively impacts the
most marginalized within it, especially very low-income defendants. Yet
The Trap’s representation distorts how the bond system works and, more
importantly, suggests reforms to the system that pose a legitimate threat
to getting people free. Narrowing attention to who posts bails directs
attention away from the ways that the bail system operates through, and
on top of, layers of structural oppression, thereby exacerbating the trap of
racial and income inequality. The real “bail trap” for low-income women
of color might look something more like: a woman faces increased risk of
arrest because of racial profiling and retail surveillance, gets arrested for
a petty crime or a crime of poverty, she has her bail conditions set before
her trial, faces an inability to pay her bail bond, and then she is forced to
reside in jail pre-trial before ever being convicted of a crime. While inside,
she will face limited access to outside support, potentially lose her job or
housing, and will face an increased risk of being convicted of the crime for
which she is awaiting trial, often because of an inability to pay for outside
counsel (see Rabuy and Kopf 2016). If she is convicted, she will then serve
her sentence, get released, potentially struggle to get a job or housing or
both because of her criminal record, and then face (even more) limited
economic choices. If this cycle more accurately describes the women-in-
prison-money-bail-trap than The Trap’s version, making it harder to post
someone’s bail bond helps no one get out of this trap.
The film proposes to fix the system with tighter restrictions on posting
bail, writing letters, and contributing to commissary funds –three key
avenues of building inside-outside support, keeping kinship networks
connected, and decreasing state- imposed isolation and alienation of
women inside. The Trap suggests that traffickers “groom” women by
writing them letters with promises of love and life on the outside. The
traffickers prove they are serious by donating to women’s commissary
accounts. Upon release, the traffickers pick up the women from the jail or
prison and the women are immediately re-entered into the cycle of vio-
lence. The film frames these avenues of exploitation as existing because
they are open to anyone. It is not hard to imagine that reforms motivated
by a desire to end trafficking out of prisons will make it harder for women
to be bailed out, written to, or financially supported inside. Such reforms
will only make women’s lives inside harder. More drastic still, it is not
hard to imagine sex workers being denied bond altogether for their own
protection from sex traffickers. Once again, prison reform strengthens
the prison and adversely affects the most marginalized within it (Gilmore
1998/99).
In reality, keeping women trapped behind bars is the reason that women
cannot escape prison. Criminalizing poverty and criminalizing informal
labor markets contribute to reasons why women struggle to escape cycles
of structural, state, and interpersonal violence. Reducing access to the very
few mechanisms of inside-outside support that currently exist will only
make women’s lives inside harder, it will make inside exploitation easier for
the state to enact and invisibilize, and it will make it harder for family and
friends on the outside to draw attention to the horrible conditions and sys-
tematic violence enacted by carcerality itself. Why, then, would the anti-
trafficking apparatus propose reforms with such disastrous effects on the
women it aims to serve, when there exists another highly visible paradigm
that uses a structural racial justice analysis to end mass incarceration and
bail systems? Precisely because this is the political agenda of the anti-
trafficking apparatus: to undermine racial justice organizing by naming
and then proposing reforms to end “modern slavery” through solutions
which uphold the status quo of the uneven distribution of resources and
power, a distribution which has been produced, and reproduced, through
global white supremacy.
Notes
1 Vast literatures and scholarly traditions document the veracity and complex-
ities of each of these phenomena. I list some key texts in each area to serve
as an entry point to these discussions for readers. On the construction of the
criminality of Blackness, see Muhammad 2010. On race and the War on
Drugs, see Alexander 2010. For history and perspectives on how antiblackness
has shaped the structure of the US criminal legal system, see Higginbothom
1978; Marable 1999 [1983]; Davis 1998a, 1998b; Martinot and Sexton 2003;
Singh 2012; Gross and Hicks 2015; Hinton 2016; Camp 2016; Sutherland
2019; with specific attention to U.S. Reconstruction and the Progressive Era,
see LeFlouria 2015; Hicks 2010; Bailey 2017. For a helpful literature review
of how safety and policing are racialized concepts, see McDowell 2019. For
statistics on racial disparities in policing, see Nellis 2016.
2 Across philanthropic journalism ventures, news outlets maintain editorial pol-
icies that verify that content is editorially independent. However, research into
these funding models have shown that so-called editorial independence does
not prevent donor agendas from being prioritized because those agendas deter-
mine what types of stories count as examples of “trafficking,” and what types of
investigations proposed by freelancers get funded. See Scott et al 2017; Chuang
2015; Powers 2016; Conrad 2015.
3 Many scholars have documented how aid economies remake imperial global
relations. In the immediate postcolonial period in Ghana, see Kwame
Nkrumah’s 1963 speech at the Organization of African Unity, available
at: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/read-kwame-nkrumahs-iconic-1963-
speech-on-african-unity. Walter Rodney’s ground- breaking How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa (1972) continues to inspire and resonate with newer
work in the anthropology of development, global health, and human rights.
See Ferguson 1994; Bernal and Grewal 2014; Hua 2011; Williams 2010;
Englund 2006; Clarke and Thomas 2006; Pierre 2013; Biruk 2018; Beliso-
De Jesús and Pierre 2019.
4 Similar narrative and imagery from this investigation recently appeared on
CNN’s philanthropic journalism news site “Freedom Project: Ending Modern-
day Slavery” for its trafficking exposé about enslaved children in Ghana’s
fishing industry, published in February 2019 (during Black History Month,
no less!)
5 Note that this is an opportunistic misrepresentation of how bail works. Private

citizens do not have the ability to revoke a bail bond once paid. It is more likely
that the court would revoke the bail bond if the released person is re-arrested
for sex work while out on bail.
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Chapter 4
Exploring the Role of Race

and Racial Difference in the
Legislative Intent of the
Trafficking Victims Protection Act
Arifa Raza
As an immigration detention attorney, I have witnessed many victims of trafficking

unable to access protections ostensibly afforded to them. Among them, one man I screened
was an asylum seeker who upon entering the US was held in captivity and forced to work
under threats of violence until he was able to escape. Upon his escape he was apprehended
by immigration authorities, and rather than be seen as a trafficking survivor was instead
placed in detention and expeditiously deported. The T-visa was not intended for him.
(Author reflection on a typical screening conducted while working
as an immigration attorney providing legal service and education
to detention centers in New Mexico from April 2019 until
June 2021 [2019])
The 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA or Act) addresses the
issue of human trafficking through a three-pronged approach of preven-
tion, prosecution, and protection. Among the protections laid out in the
Act include the creation of immigration relief for survivors of trafficking.
Having broad bipartisan support, the Act was passed on October 28, 2000.
Notably, as the TVPA was drafted, debated, and enacted, calls for restrictive
immigration measures were being advanced by members of Congress. Yet
even in this restrictive immigration environment, lawmakers were able
to create an entirely new immigration benefit for trafficking survivors—
the T-visa. This chapter examines the legislative history of the TVPA in
order to understand how the TVPA, including the T-visa provision, was
able to become a law in a regressive immigration climate. Through a close
reading of the legislative history of the TVPA, I argue that the passing of
the TVPA, and specifically the creation of the T-visa, was possible due to
an ideological convergence by both political parties around racial logics.
Though there is significant overlap between immigration and human
trafficking, as academic fields they have generally developed in parallel to,
but not in explicit dialogue with, one another. This is particularly the case
in scholarship that examines the role of race. Immigration scholars have
traced how race played a central role in the history of US immigration laws
(Ngai 2005), and how it continues to structure current immigration laws
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-6
Race and Racial Difference in the TVPA 65
through color-blind racism (Manges et al. 2015). Research on immigration

has further shed light into the racializing process immigration laws have
on communities of color within the United States (see, e.g., Romero 2006).
On the other hand, the development of human trafficking as a field of study
emerged out of the global context of trafficking and rise of international
human rights law. Within this scholarship feminist scholars have shown
how the discourse around human trafficking, in particular sex trafficking,
relies on racialized and gendered colonial tropes, reifying global division
between the global South and North (Kempadoo 2001; Sharma 2005).
Domestically, the discourse around human trafficking and the development
of anti-trafficking laws are rooted in the United States’ history of slavery,
anti-miscegenation laws, and racial difference (Doezema 2000; Donovan
2006; Hua 2011). Within the legal field, scholarship around human
trafficking has largely risen out of international human rights law and has
expanded to analyze federal and state laws fighting against various forms of
trafficking, as well as analysis regarding the immigration implications of
such federal laws.1 However, within this body of literature discussions on
race and racism are largely distanced from anti-trafficking laws outside a few
critical legal scholars (see, e.g., Chacón 2006). This chapter explores how
immigration, human trafficking, and to larger extent human rights laws
work together in the racialization of immigrants and reification of racial
hierarchies in the United States. Racialization is understood as “the social
process by which a racial group comes to exist and understand its position
in the racial hierarchy as superior or inferior, and by which others in society
come to understand that racial hierarchy as natural” (Gómez 2007, 2).
I begin by providing the immigration context surrounding the TVPA.
I then examine the legislative history of the TVPA to show how the dis-
course of trafficking allowed for both parties to ideologically converge in
their articulation of trafficking. Through a close reading of the legislative
history of the bills that would result in the TVPA, it becomes apparent that
lawmakers relied on the ideal trafficking victim—European sex trafficked
women—to advance the protection prong of the Act and position the law
as a human rights law. At the same time, it used non-white trafficking
victims to advance the punishment prong of the Act. Through this discur-
sive distinction, I argue that both Republican and Democratic lawmakers
used racial difference, understood as the use of racial categories to advance
exclusion, to effectively pass the TVPA and create the T-visa, which in turn
upholds the racial regime of immigration (see, Goldberg 1993).
Immigration Context of the TVPA

In 1996, following mounting outcry over “illegal” immigration and state-
led nativist initiatives such as California’s Proposition 187, which sought
to deny publicly funded social services to undocumented immigrants,
66 Arifa Raza
Congress passed two sets of laws that worked to punish immigrants.

The Illegal Immigration Reform, and Immigrant Responsibility Act
(IIRIRA), combined with the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act (AEDPA) significantly altered the immigration regime, taking a puni-
tive approach towards both legal and illegal immigrants. Focusing on
crimes committed by immigrants, AEDPA expanded the types of crimes
that would qualify for deportation of an immigrant. Additionally, IIRIRA
removed discretionary relief from deportation for immigrants convicted of
certain crimes and implemented bars to reenter the country. IIRIRA also
provided technological upgrades to the U.S.–Mexico border, further mili-
tarizing it.2 Lastly, IIRIRA increased the immigration enforcement regime
by authorizing the training of local and state police in enforcing federal
immigration laws through the 287g program. Taken together, AEDPA
and IIRIRA worked to make an unprecedented number of immigrants
deportable for crimes, while making it much more difficult to fight deport-
ation by eliminating forms of relief. Overwhelmingly racialized in imple-
mentation, these laws largely affect Latino, specifically Mexican men,
through racial profiling, and at the same time link Latino immigration to
criminality (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013).
Three years later Congress went on to draft, debate, and enact the
TVPA, and its corresponding immigration benefit. The trafficking visa,
or T-visa, provides nonimmigrant status in the United States to victims
of human trafficking. Once approved, the T-visa is valid for four years,
and allows survivors to adjust to permanent residence status at the end of
the visa term (8 Code of Federal Regulations §214.11(p)(2)). While the
TVPA was being debated in Congress, so was immigration. In the House
of Representatives, Congressman Lamar Smith, a longtime anti-immigrant
politician from Texas and chair of the Subcommittee on Immigration and
Claims, introduced a series of weekly oversight hearings focused on immi-
gration. These hearing largely focused on the “negative” and “destructive”
impact of immigration policies. Topics included the “negative impact
of immigration on native-born Black and Hispanic low-wage workers,”
“alien smuggling,” and “criminal aliens” (Cong. Hearing March 11, 1999;
Cong. Hearing, February 25, 1999; Cong. Hearing June 10, 1999). Rep.
Smith used these hearings as a platform to call for restrictive immigration
policies. Notably, Rep. Smith voted in favor of the TVPA, and the T-visa.
At first blush the creation of the T-visa appears remarkable given the
restrictive immigration context it was created in. However, these results
can be explained through analyzing the legislative history of the TVPA
which reveals the racial logics embedded in the law.
The Legislative History of the TVPA

The TVPA was based on three bills introduced during the 106th
Congress: HR 3244 and the Senate companion bills S 2414 and S 2249.
While ultimately HR 3244 was signed into law, debates over the three
bills taken as a whole provide insight into the congressional intent driving
the TVPA. Legislative histories are key to understanding congressional
intent behind a bill and include floor debates, hearings, conference reports,
and committee reports. These collections are frequently looked to by both
practitioners and legal scholars to understand the legislature’s reasoning for
creating a law.3 Floor debates in particular provide insight into Congress’s
concerns on a legislation and how representatives frame and argue either
for or against a bill. Through a close reading of the legislative history,
specifically the proceedings of debates as recorded in the Congressional
Record, themes emerged which were categorized and used to inform
further coding. Through this process the following overarching themes
emerged as points of emphasis during debates on the TVPA: human rights
versus immigration law; the TVPA as human rights for European women
and children; and racialized others as recipients of the punishment prong
of the TVPA.
TVPA: A Human Rights rather than Immigration Bill

Two Senate bills were introduced as companions to the House bill HR
3244, which would become the TVPA. When introducing one of them,
S. 2414, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota framed the bill
as a human rights legislation stating:
I am here today to introduce legislation to help end the horrific

trafficking in persons, particularly women and children for the
purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. This egregious human
rights violation—and we must acknowledge trafficking in persons as
the gross human rights abuse that it is—is a worldwide problem that
must be confronted in domestic legislation as we continue to fight it
on the international front
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 46: S2631)
The main focus of the bill is squarely human rights and is defined through
the sexual exploitation of women and children. This framing of human rights
in terms of women and children continued with remarks by Republican
Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas when he introduced his own, separate,
trafficking bill. On April 13, 2000 Senator Brownback introduced his
companion trafficking bill S. 2449 framing human trafficking as “one of
the most shocking and rampant human rights abuses worldwide” affecting
women and children who are “forced into the sex trade against their will”
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 47: S2768). The emphasis on women and
children ultimately made it into the purposes and findings section of the
published law: “The purposes of this chapter are to combat trafficking
in persons, a contemporary manifestation of slavery whose victims are
68 Arifa Raza
predominantly women and children, to ensure just and effective pun-

ishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims” (Trafficking Victims
Protection Act of 2000, 22 U.S. Code § 7101 (a)).
The TVPA takes a three- pronged approach to trafficking, focusing
on prevention, protection, and prosecution. The primary strategy for
protecting survivors of human trafficking is through the T-visa. Focusing
on the immigration benefit that is created through the proposed bill, there
is a conscious attempt to distance it from immigration law. After HR 3244
was introduced, it was referred to the Committee of the Judiciary where the
bill was altered in regards to the T-visa. The Committee report proposed
capping the T-visa to 5,000 annually. The debate over the cap became a
site of contention for those who viewed the bill as advancing human rights
over immigration. Proponents of the cap, particularly Republican Rep.
Lamar Smith of Texas, the contemporaneous chair of the Subcommittee
on Immigration and Claims, argued it was necessary to safeguard against
fraud stating:
…[W]‌e need to have that cap to avoid people being tempted to take
advantage of the system and abuse the privilege…whenever a new form
of immigration relief is created, many aliens apply for that relief. Too
often, those applications do not contain bona fide claims of relief…
this cap will prevent large numbers of aliens from falsely claiming to
be trafficking victims
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 108: H7629)
Rep. Smith argued that immigrants are fraudulent in seeking ways to

obtain status. By framing immigrants as fraudulent he criminalizes them
and contrasts them from genuine trafficking victims. By criminalizing
immigrants, he argues victims of human trafficking must be protected from
immigrants who will surely try to take their visas. In this way, Rep. Smith
used the call to protect trafficking victims to criminalize immigrants and
to narrow the immigration benefits of the human rights law.
The main counter to Rep. Smith’s cap was that trafficking is a human
rights issue and any cap would be detrimental to women and children who
are the primary victims of trafficking. For example, Democrat Rep. Melvin
Watt of North Carolina framed the bill in the context of human rights
violations. He stated, “Of all human rights violations currently occurring
in our world, the trafficking of human beings, predominately women and
children, has to be one of the most horrific practices of our time.” In arguing
that a visa cap is unnecessary he compared the trafficking bill to refugee
and asylum law: “We have no arbitrary limit on the number of asylees who
can enter this country, and in my judgement, it is beneath our dignity as
a nation to use an arbitrary cap to shut our doors to victims of slavery and
trafficking” (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 108: H7628). Similarly, Democrat
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California compared trafficking to refugees and asylum

seekers stating:
…Congress has granted similar discretion to increase refugee caps and

there are no caps for asylum candidates. So it is my view that we have
room in this vast, wonderful, prosperous country for victims of sex
trafficking and slavery… We have already in this country women who
have been brought here and really held in virtual slavery, sometimes as
victims of sexual oppression. When those women break free we want
to make sure that they found refuge in this country of freedom
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 108: H7629)
Representatives Watt and Lofgren relied on framing human trafficking

protections in light of refugee and asylum laws at the time. By doing so
they implicated immigration, but also placed it squarely in the frame-
work of international human rights law since both human trafficking and
refugee and asylum law are rooted in it. They further qualified it by talking
exclusively of women and children who are the victims of human rights
violations. By situating the immigration benefit produced by the T-visa
in light of human rights violations, these lawmakers not only distanced
the bill from immigration law, but they reinforced a gendered notion of
human rights.
Significantly, both proponents and opponents of the immigration cap
relied on human rights arguments. While human rights were the reason
for removing the cap to provide more victims with benefits, it was also used
to argue for the protection of human rights for victims, through guarding
immigration benefit from illegal immigrants. Implicit in these arguments
regarding human rights is who is the intended beneficiary of said rights.
From the legislative history it is made explicit that women and children
are the intended target of the TVPA, revealing a gender dimension to the
law; however, implicit in the law is a racial dimension.
TVPA as a Bill to Protect European Women and Children

The drafting of the TVPA began with the Helsinki Commission hearings on
sex trafficking in 1999. In the House of Representatives Rep. Christopher
Smith, the sponsor of HR 3244, relied on the testimony at the Helsinki
Commission hearings on sex trafficking when debating the need for the bill.
Rep. Smith shared a story provided by Dr. Lederer (then Director of the
Protection Project of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard
Kennedy School of Government and known prostitution-abolitionist fem-
inist) during the commissions hearings.4 The story is “an amalgamation
of several true stories of women and girls who have been trafficked in
Eastern Europe in recent years” (Cong. Rec. 2000, no. 56: H2683). The
70 Arifa Raza
story depicts how young European women fall prey to human traffickers.
As Rep. Smith states, the story takes place in “you can fill in the name
of the country here, the Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Lithuania, the Czech
Republic” (Cong. Rec. 2000, no. 56: H2683). He goes on to recount a visit
he took with his wife and other members of congress to St. Petersburg where
he met with Russian women who shared their stories of sexual exploit-
ation at the hands of traffickers. Echoing similar sentiments regarding the
impact of meeting with European trafficking victims is Senator Wellstone
who recalled meeting “with women trafficked from the Ukraine to work
in brothels in Western Europe and the United States” at the urging of his
wife (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 126: S10167). Both lawmakers make clear
the TVPA is a result of the impact European sex trafficking victims made
on them.
During floor debates considering a conference report Senator Brownback
begins the debate with the story of Irina. Originally appearing in a
New York Times article, the story of Irina describes a sex trafficked victim
from Ukraine. As Senator Brownback explained “I think Irina’s story tells
in graphic detail why this [trafficking] is a problem and why the Senate
needs to Act” (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 126: S10164). He proceeded to
request that the full text of the article be included in the record of debate.
The article follows Irina who was from a small village in Ukraine and was
trafficked into Israel after answering a vague ad in a Ukrainian newspaper
to become a topless dancer.
While the New York Times article was written by a journalist and not a
lawmaker, the fact that Senator Brownback found the article exemplary of
the purpose of the bill that he formally incorporated the contents of the
article into the legislative history points to the centrality of the Eastern
European trafficking victim. No other story is given as much attention or
importance in the legislative process of the TVPA.
In addition to revealing lawmakers’ desire to protect Eastern European
women through the TVPA, the legislative history reveals how lawmakers
understand the trafficking phenomenon of these women. Lawmakers
situated the trafficking of European women squarely in geopolitical forces,
criminal organizations, and poverty. For example, in his discussions of
why trafficking of European women was occurring at the time, Senator
Wellstone specifically cites the fall of the Soviet Union which led to an out-
growth of crime. He points to “the ascendancy of the mob…that destroyed
the lives of the youngest and most vulnerable in their home countries”
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 126: S10167). The Senator further recounts
how “Albanian women were kidnapped from Kosovo refugee camps and
trafficked to work in brothels in Turkey and Europe,” and how “Russian
and Latvian trafficking victims were told, “if they refused to work in
sexually exploitive conditions, the Russian Mafia would kill their fam-
ilies” (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 126: S10167-S10168). Poverty was
also referenced as another consequence of the fall of the Soviet Union and
the rise of human trafficking. Democrat Rep. Sam Gejdenson stated this
clearly when commenting that “… the poverty that has enveloped many of
those former Soviet countries, the poverty in countries around the world,
that [sic] ought not be an excuse for allowing people’s lives to be enslaved”
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 56: H2684).
These examples are illustrative of lawmakers’ desire to protect Eastern
European women through the TVPA, while at the same time creating
the parameters for attaining protections under it. Not only does the law
become associated with European women, but it also becomes linked to
structural forces out of these women’s control. Ultimately, the violation of
European women becomes linked to geopolitics and resulting crime and
poverty in the region.
While trafficking of Asian and African women was well known, it was
not until Eastern European women became the primary target of traffickers,
that human trafficking become an international phenomenon necessitating
international and domestic solutions (see Durisin 2017). Barbara Stolz’s
research on policy behind the TVPA found the:
recognition of the trafficking problem and desire to do something

about it can be attributed to the restructuring of the perception of
the problem…interviewees noted the correlation between the recogni-
tion of human trafficking as a problem and its association with women
from the former Soviet Union-Caucasian women.
(Stolz 2005, 422)
Stolz maintains that the “resemblance of women and girls trafficked to

the wives and daughters of many policymakers may have been one factor
in arousing attention to the trafficking issue” (2005, 423). Her research
is supported by the legislative history of the TVPA. For one, both Rep.
Smith and Senator Wellstone note that their trips to Eastern Europe and
meeting European trafficking victims propelled them to action. Further,
both lawmakers acknowledge the role their wives played in urging them
to work on this issue. However, Stolz does not contribute race to the
newfound attention towards trafficking; rather, she argues that changing
perceptions of those trafficked, from criminal to victim, and distinguishing
trafficking victims from smuggled illegal immigrants was key in convin-
cing policymakers to take up the cause of trafficking. Stolz argues that rather
than race, differences between trafficking victims and illegal immigrants
led to the creation of the TVPA. This argument ignores the centrality
of race in immigration policy and the racialization of undocumented
immigrants. By emphasizing the distinction between trafficking victims
and undocumented immigrants, policymakers reinforce the racialization of
immigrants. As we saw with the debates around the immigration benefit
72 Arifa Raza
proposed in the bill, lawmakers attempted to shift the debate towards

protecting the human rights of women and children. Because the women
and children intended to be protected are European, the intent of the bill
clearly relies on racial difference even when on the surface the debate is one
of human rights versus immigration.
TVPA as a Bill to Punish Non-W hite Traffickers

Within the legislative history of the TVPA, stories of Asian and
Mexican trafficking victims came to the forefront when discussing the
need for increased penalties for human traffickers. Senator Wellstone
provided examples of Asian and Mexican nationals being trafficked into
the United States in order to underscore the need to increase penalties
against traffickers. In his words, “a review of the trafficking cases showed
that the penalties were light and did not reflect the multitude of human
rights abuses perpetrated against these women” (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146,
no. 126: S10168). Senator Wellstone proceeded to give examples where
penalties against traffickers were inadequate. Examples included a Thai
sweatshop in El Monte, California, sex trafficking of Thai women in
New York, sex trafficking of Chinese women in Los Angles, deaf mute
Mexican nationals trafficked in New York, and United States v. Hou5 which
involved the forced labor of several Mexican men (Cong. Rec. 2000, 146,
no. 126: S10168, S10181).
These cited examples show the range of trafficking situations and
victims. However, the strategic use of non-white victims in the examples is
problematic. In my analysis of the congressional record, Mexican and Asian
trafficking victims were overwhelmingly used when discussing the need
for stronger penalties against human traffickers, in comparison to mentions
of European criminal organizations in this context. These examples ultim-
ately fall into the trope of migrant criminality. While the traffickers’
nationalities and ethnicities are not discussed, it is implied they are non-
citizens. This is supported by the prevalent understanding of trafficking.
As legal scholar Jennifer Chacón points out,
A significant number of traffickers are noncitizens. That is inevitable

given the international nature of the industry and the fact that many of
the vulnerable populations subject to exploitation live in developing
countries. Moreover, some traffickers operating in the United States
are noncitizens—including coethnics who exploit individuals in their
own communities who lack legal status.
(Chacón 2010, 1629)
Thus, by using examples of Asian and Mexican victims to promote the

third prong of the TVPA, prosecution, lawmakers relied on established
tropes of migrant and noncitizen criminality. Juxtaposed to how European

women were discussed, the legislative history suggests that the purpose
of the TVPA was to protect European women trafficking victims while
punishing racialized groups, namely Asian and Mexican immigrants.
In perpetuating the criminality of foreigners, legislators provided
examples of Mexican trafficking victims whose victimization came
at the hands of smugglers. For example, both Republican Senator Tim
Hutchinson and Republican Rep. Joseph Pitts told stories of Mexican
women who sought better lives in the United States just to be trafficked
into sexual slavery by their smugglers. Both lawmakers made clear these
women were seeking “legitimate work” but through the course of their
smuggling they were sexually enslaved. Senator Hutchinson noted that
the smuggling debt resulted in the forced sexual slavery of a victim, while
Rep. Pitts recounted the familiar narrative of smugglers hiding migrants
in “dirty trailers” just to sexually exploit migrant women (see, Cong. Rec.
2000, 146, no. 126: S10217 statements by Sen. Hutchinson; Cong. Rec.
2000, 146 no. 56: H2684 statements by Rep. Pitts). In these narratives,
the sexual trafficking of Mexican women is linked to the criminal activ-
ities of human smugglers. While they do not offer information on these
smugglers, they are presumed to be Mexican men.
In addition to emphasizing the criminality of Mexicans, lawmakers
invoked narratives of cultural and religious backwardness to show how
pervasive the trafficking of women and children is in the global South.
Senator Brownback discussed trafficking of South Asian women as a long-
held practice in the eastern world. In his argument to pass the Conference
Report in the Senate, he couched the bill in the tradition of British anti-
slavery abolitionists stating:
Amy Carmichael was a British missionary to India at the turn of the

last century, in the early 1900’s. upon arrival, she was mortified to dis-
cover the routine practice of forced temple prostitution. This was and
continues to be a practice wherein young girls, from age six onward,
are dedicated to the local temple, and are then forced into prostitution
against their will to generate income. Upon this morbid discovery, Amy
Carmichael began to physically steal the girls away from this incred-
ibly degrading form of slavery, hiding the girls to escape the inevitable
backlash of violence. Eventually, the government outlawed this practice
of forced temple prostitution, as a result of her efforts. However, it bears
noting that this terrible practice continues today, in a lesser degree, in
rural villages throughout South Asia, including India.
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 126: S10167)
By presenting the TVPA as a legacy of Britain’s colonial endeavors in India,

Senator Brownback invokes the orientalist discourse that legitimized
74 Arifa Raza
British imperialism.6 The practice of local temples enslaving young girls

is noted to have existed during colonial times and claimed to continue
presently. This statement points to the cultural and religious traditions of
India which were used to justify Britain’s colonization of the nation. In the
context of the TVPA, this narrative of cultural and religious backwardness
is taken as a cause of the sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of Indian
women and girls.
Statements such as these were not limited to Senator Brownback.
Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, among the most progressive
members of Congress, echoed this narrative when she recounted a trip she
made to South Asia:
I saw a young girl named Nurjahan in Bangladesh. She was about

15 years old. All she knows for sure is that she thinks she is about
15 years old, but she knows for sure that at 8, she was bought by a
brothel in Pakistan probably for between $200 and $1,500. She finally
escaped from a life as a sex slave. I met her and eight other girls at
the headquarters of an organization called Action Against Trafficking
and Sexual Exploitation of Children in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They all
looked like the children they were, except for the acid scars borne by a
few of them. The invisible scars one can hardly bear to imagine. Many
of these girls could not go home because even if their families would
accept them, their communities would not.
(Cong. Rec. 2000, 146, no. 56: H2686)
Like Senator Brownback, Rep. Schakowsky highlights the young age at

which children are trafficked in South Asia and emphasizes how young
the victims look. She also discussed how the families and communi-
ties of these victims are likely to reject them if they escape and return
to their homes. By framing the survival of these victims in term of the
intolerances that disallow for their incorporation back into their commu-
nities, Rep. Schakowsky implicates these communities in the continued
trafficking of young girls, pointing to their cultural, and arguably moral,
underdevelopment.
Taken together, the use of Asian and Mexican trafficking examples
in advancing stronger penalties, reveals colorblind arguments made by
lawmakers in advancing the TVPA. Colorblind racism as articulated by
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “composes an ideology whites use to explain ration-
alize, and defend their racial interest” (Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich 2011,
192). This form of racism differs from direct racism, such as Jim Crow, in
that rather than directly attributing race to inferiority, colorblind racism
relies heavily on the use of cultural deficiencies to advance and justify
racial inequality (Bonilla-Silva 2010). The legislative history of the TVPA
characterizes European trafficking as a result of international criminal
organizations gaining strength after the fall of the Soviet Union and accom-
panying crime and poverty, while trafficking in the global South is cultur-
ally engrained implying cultural deficiencies within these communities.
Conclusion
A growing body of scholarship exists that maps out race within human
rights discourse (see, for example, Williams 2010 and Mutua 2000); this
study adds to the literature by illuminating the complex relationship
between human rights and immigration, specifically the ways in which
these two systems of law contribute to racial formation in the United
States. By analyzing the legislative history of the TVPA, what is found is
an emphasis on European women as victims deserving of human rights pro-
tection. This stands in contrast to the stories of non-European trafficking
victims who exemplify the need for stronger punishments under the TVPA.
This framing of the TVPA by lawmakers suggests the intended benefi-
ciaries of the TVPA are European women. By framing the TVPA as a bill
to protect European women, lawmakers were able to distance the bill from
the discourse of immigration and place it within human rights. By doing
so, it highlights the use of human rights in reifying and reinforcing racial
logics in the United States. By distancing the TVPA from immigration,
the bill ultimately reinforced racial stereotypes of non-white immigrants.
Moreover, by relying on the differences between genuine human trafficking
victims, read as European women, and fraudulent non-white immigrants,
lawmakers perpetuated racial hierarchies which contributes to projects of
racialization. This has implications for human rights legislation in the
United States, as it demonstrates how human rights can be deployed in
the maintenance of particular racial projects. In the case of the TVPA, the
legislative history shows how a domestic human rights law can work to
uphold a racist immigration regime.
Notes
1 The scope of legal scholarship on anti-trafficking law is vast and incudes topics
ranging from labor, sex trafficking, and child exploitation for example, while
also discussing anti-trafficking laws’ effect on the criminal and civil system for
penalties. For a bibliography that describes the body of legal literature around
human trafficking see Matter (2004).
2 Militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border began in 1994 with Operation
Gatekeeper and intensified following 9/11. For more on the militarization of
the border see Nevins (2002).
3 Legislative histories in legal scholarship and in legal practice are tradition-
ally used in statutory interpretation and the development of jurisprudence.
However, even within the legal field the effective use of such histories in
76 Arifa Raza
statutory interpretation is debated. For more on the debate around legislative

histories see Gluck and Schultz Bressman (2013) and Nourse (2012).
4 This type of abolitionist feminism, a form of radical feminism, is rooted in
the debates surrounding prostitution. Positioning patriarchy and sexual dom-
ination over women as the foundational division in society, such abolitionists
believe all sex work is coercive and oppressive over women, and that human
trafficking is an expression of this sexual domination. See Dixon (2008),
MacKinnon (1989) and Crowley (1991).
5 Although the Senator cited this case I was unable to find and cross reference it,
indicating a potential error in the case name.
6 Orientalism, coined by Edward Said, is a concept to explain how stereotypes
and exaggeration of difference by western cultural and intellectual traditions
was used to position the Middle East and Asia as inferior to the west, justifying
western imperialist endeavors in those regions. See Said (1979).
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the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham: Rowman and
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Color-Blind Racism in Obamerica.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political
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Chacón, Jennifer. 2006. “Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S.
Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking.” Fordham Law Review 74.
Chacón, Jennifer. 2010. “Tensions and Trade-offs: Protecting Trafficking Victims in
the Era of Immigration Enforcement.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 158.
Crowley, Ethel. 1991. “Third World Women and the Inadequacies of Western
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Dixon, Rosalind. 2008. “Feminist Disagreement (Comparatively) Recast.”
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Durisin Elya M. 2017. “White Slavery Reconfigured: The ‘Natasha Trade’ and
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Minnesota Press.
Kempadoo, Kamala. 2001. “Women of Color and the Global Sex Trade:
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MacKinnon, Catharine. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge:
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Manges Douglas, Karen, Rogelio Saenz, and Aurelia Lorena Murga. 2015.
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Matter, Mohamed Y. 2004. “Trafficking in Persons: An Annotated Legal
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Mutua, Makau. 2000. “Critical Race Theory and International law: The View of
an Insider-Outsider.” Villanova Law Review 45: 848–849.
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Legislation and Congressional Records

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US Statutes at Large 110 (1996) 1214.
The Illegal Immigration Reform, and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,
Public Law 104-208, US Statutes at Large 110 (1996): 309-546.
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78 Arifa Raza
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US Congress. Congressional Record. 2000. 106th Cong., 2nd sess. Vol.
146, No. 108.
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and Hispanic Citizens. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Immigration and
Claims, 106th Cong. 1st sess., March 11, 1999.
US Congress. Illegal Immigration Issues. Hearing before the Subcommittee on
Immigration and Claims, 106th Cong. 1st sess., June 10, 1999.
US Congress. Immigration and Naturalization Service decision impacting the agency’s
ability to control criminal and illegal aliens. Hearing before the Subcommittee on
Immigration and Claims, 106th Cong. 1st sess. February 25, 1999.
Chapter 5
Global White Supremacy and

Anti-Trafficking
Race, Racism, and the Politics of
Human Trafficking
Elya M. Durisin
Over the past decades, tensions developing within western, liberal dem-
ocracies appear to have reached a crisis point. Widespread inequalities
and shifting migration patterns in states of the Global North, Global
South, and post-socialist countries have stoked fear and nativist impulses,
fomenting nationalist sentiments that draw firm boundaries around
notions of identity and belonging, and giving rise to anti-democratic and
fascist impulses. Misogyny, racism, ethnic nationalisms, and other forms of
hatred are reasserting themselves and a new form of populism, one shoring
up the interests of wealthy elites through the appropriation of frustrations
of common people, is giving form to a new social and political reality in
the western world (Radwanski and Morrow 2018).
Twenty-first-century international legal responses to human trafficking
take form in a context that is hostile to those experiencing poverty and dis-
possession in globalized neoliberal capitalism where societies in all parts
of the world evidence protracted inequality (Piketty 2020). In the United
States, the fight against sex trafficking advances an anti-immigrant, law
and order agenda while engendering new regimes of racial surveillance
and criminalization. Anti- trafficking approaches in Canada similarly
create conditions for racial profiling and surveillance of “risky” populations
(Chuang 2014; Millar and O’Doherty 2020). The outcomes of state-based,
criminal justice approaches to preventing trafficking –those endorsed by a
range of liberal and conservative policy makers, evangelical Christians, and
anti-prostitution feminists (Bernstein 2010) –have resulted in the surveil-
lance, criminalization, and detention of sex workers, migrants, and others
outside the dominant social and economic order (ICRSE 2016; NSWP
2019a). Globally, prostitution laws in general have been reformulated to
intensify the penalization of markets in sexual labor, including the crimin-
alization of the purchase of sexual services itself, permitting the penal arm
of the state to intrude into many aspects of private life.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-7
80 Elya M. Durisin
Unlike many bottom-up social justice projects,1 such as Black Lives

Matter or Indigenous sovereignty movements, dominant anti-trafficking
discourses and policies are highly palatable to states seeking to securitize
their borders, international governmental organizations, corporations, and
wealthy donors (O’Connell Davidson 2015). Ever-increasing numbers of
activist-journalists, celebrities, and NGOs are busy convincing affluent, lib-
eral audiences in wealthy western states that they have the power to save the
“slaves” of the world. Too often lost among these broad appeals are the human
rights violations and other forms of violence inflicted upon marginalized
persons, particularly sex workers, through policing and anti-trafficking
tactics (Amnesty International 2016; Empower 2012; ICRSE 2016).
Contemporary debates on human trafficking have been dominated by
concerns over the “sex trafficking” of girls and women. In what follows,
I argue for the need to base our analysis of trafficking in persons on an
understanding of race and racism as a modern project based in global white
supremacy. Discourses on human trafficking have their foundation in racist
and imperial thought and, today, remain suffused with racism. I suggest
that anti-trafficking discourses and politics serve to further entrench white
supremacy while fueling the development of carceral institutions and
militarized approaches to gender and racial justice (see, Alexander, 2020;
Bernstein 2010; Davis 2003). Owing to the history of white slavery that
produced “trafficking” as a knowable phenomenon, along with racist ideolo-
gies involved in historical (colonial, imperial) and contemporary cultural
and political processes (neoliberalism, war on terror, war on trafficking),
I propose that “trafficking in persons” is inadequate for addressing contem-
porary forms of severe economic exploitation.
Human Trafficking and Global White Supremacy

White supremacy refers to the continued historical entrenchment of white
political and economic domination and the practices that sustain it, as well
as its symbolic meanings and values (Christian 2019). The forms white
supremacy takes in the twenty-first century are shifting and permit persons
in white, multicultural, and non-white spaces to participate in expressions
of whiteness (Ibid.), albeit to differing degrees. Michelle Christian (2019)
explains that what is key to comprehending global whiteness today is an
appreciation of how dominant material and symbolic relationships of white
supremacy reproduce themselves yet also produce new spaces for white
signification. Because of the malleability of both white supremacy and
conceptualizations of human trafficking, human trafficking discourses and
politics have become a vehicle for the reinforcement of white supremacy
despite the ostensive concerns with eradicating slavery-like conditions and
with racial justice.
Global White Supremacy and Anti-Trafficking 81
Contemporary concerns over human trafficking have arisen alongside the

ascendency and entrenchment of neoliberalism and have been shaped by its
logics, rationalities, and interests. In addition to a political and economic
ideology, neoliberal governance produces specific subjects and subjectivities
that encourage an identification with global power and a global elite
(Arat-Koç 2014; Christian 2019). Neoliberal whiteness involves the cul-
tural connotation of belonging to capitalist modernity (Arat-Koç 2014),
and represents “status, desirability, development, [and] global power”
(Goldberg 2009, in Christian 2019 p. 179). Whiteness, in this way, is
flexible and enables those who are non-white, have less privileged forms
of white identity, or in non-white geographies to “buy-in” to the projects
of global whiteness (Christian 2019). This permits, for instance, those in
middle-income countries to “whiten” themselves through purchasing the
(devalued) labor of white-but-not-quite female domestic and sex workers
(Agathangelou 2004) or for young people from post-socialist countries to
earn money abroad in sex work and “perform it” at home through the pur-
chase of luxury goods (Mai 2013).
Contemporary discourses on trafficking in persons are a site for white
identity formation and for securing subjective investments in whiteness.
This, in addition to its usefulness to the state, may explain why this dis-
course is deeply entrenched and rapidly reproducing despite the lack of
social scientific evidence and persistent issues with quantification (Merry
2015; Weitzer 2007). Postcolonial and critical race scholars locate the
emergence of white identity in colonial and imperial power relations that
order relations between peoples, geographies, and temporalities along a
linear, implicitly racialized, progress narrative that distinguishes between
“civilized” and “uncivilized” (Dyer 1997; McClintock 1995; Razack
1998). Without an objective basis, whiteness is constituted through doing
what is “right” (Jiwani 2009) such that “right makes white” (Heron 2007,
p. 9, emphasis in the original). White bourgeois women, denied the same
status as their male counterparts, enhance claims to bourgeois subjectivity
through the performance of “goodness” and attendant claims to a superior
morality (Heron 2007, 7). According to Barbara Heron (2007), for white
feminine subjects, “helping” is about a profound desire for subjectivity,
identity, and for self.
The subject constituted through dominant discourses on human
trafficking is one that claims a subjective investment in whiteness; that
is, one who experiences himself or herself as ethical, free (as opposed to
enslaved), empowered, who knows what to do, and is on the “right” (pro-
gressive, enlightened) side of history. The extensive celebrity humanitar-
ianism and related cultural production (films, journalistic exposés, books),
political discourses disavowing the “scourge of modern day slavery,” and the
abundance of official recognition and funding available to anti-trafficking
82 Elya M. Durisin
projects work to affirm a privileged status and an implicit knowledge of

one’s rightness while allowing those on the inside of capitalist modernity
to experience themselves as innocent and as saviors in systems that sustain
white political and economic domination. Such structures of feeling are
the hallmarks of empire (Said 1993) and are a contemporary manifestation
of the historical white man’s burden in which white, western feminine
subjects are also heavily involved (Kempadoo 2015). “Trafficking” has such
purchase because it performs important work for the identity of dominant
classes.
The subjective and symbolic effects of anti- trafficking discourses
are complemented by the material effects of anti- trafficking policies.
Campaigns against human trafficking collude with the state to curtail
the self-determination of migrants (Sharma 2005) while the language of
humanitarianism disguises the racial ideology implicit in the prosecu-
torial anti-trafficking infrastructure and the functioning of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is built upon racist assumptions about “cultural backward-
ness” and underdevelopment that reinforce a hierarchical relationship
between people and countries (Christian 2019, 175). Those groups or geog-
raphies that are seen to be lacking in discipline, are unruly, whose welfare
is too costly, who threaten the order of the state and economy are excluded
as threats and contaminants (Goldberg 2009). David Theo Goldberg
(2009) describes the outcome in terms of shifting modalities of movement,
whereby the neoliberalizing state undertakes novel arrangements of popu-
lation management geared toward exclusionary practices with increased
support for institutions of control –police, prisons, border security,
and so on.
Neoliberal policies and the wide reach of global capital have produced
severe economic dislocations and at the same time have made migration
to highly capitalized societies increasingly difficult (Goldberg 2009).
Nandita Sharma (2005) characterizes this situation as a regime of global
apartheid, whereby immigration is highly criminalized and migrants who
do not arrive through (limited) legitimate avenues are unable to make any
claims against the state. The threat of immigration is likewise racially
indexed, where those from the Global South threaten to take “our” jobs,
to plot terror attacks, to bring contagious disease, or to bring “backward”
cultural values (Goldberg 2009). Thus, “the health and well-being of the
racially prosperous are uniformly protected by cordoning them off against
the various viral pollutants of the racially precarious and degraded” (2009,
359). The effects of these dislocations lead to increasing levels of xeno-
phobia and racism (Macedo and Gounari 2006) and work to position non-
white, poorer migrants in a subordinate position relative to white majority
populations (Sharma 2005).
White Feminine Subjectivity, Racism, and Trafficking

in Women
A critical assessment of contemporary discourses and politics of trafficking
asks that we explore the historical relationship between white women,
empire, and early anti-slavery activism.
Early defenders of women’s rights and Victorian feminists in Britain and
the United States were deeply involved in the quest for abolition of the trans-
atlantic slave trade. The movement to end the slavery was a radical, inter-
racial, democratic movement grounded in slave resistance (Sinha 2016). In
emphasizing “[b]‌lack resistance to slavery [as] the essential precondition to
the rise of abolitionism” (2016, p. 10), Manisha Sinha highlights the his-
toric centrality of enslaved persons that are lost in narratives centering the
activities of white abolitionists. He writes, “slave resistance, not bourgeois
liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement” (2016, p. 1).
Many white women anti-slavery activists espoused a radical politic,
questioned the enslavement of labor, conventional gender roles, and
marriage (Sinha 2016). It was involvement in anti-slavery activism and all
it entailed that led to the emergence of the women’s movement. While the
history of slavery and anti-slavery is vast and generalizations are difficult
to make, it can be instructive to look closely at the particularities of white
women’s efforts to free the slave during the early nineteenth century and
how race and gender intersected at the time that saw the emergence of a
feminist politics. As contemporary “neoabolitionist” feminists often make
problematic historical connections between nineteenth- century aboli-
tionism and what they see as present-day women’s sexual slavery, efforts to
examine discourses from early abolitionism illustrate how race and empire
were implicated in how the violence of slavery was understood as well as
white women’s subjective investments in anti-slavery activism.
Vron Ware’s (1992) scholarship explores the particularities of women’s
anti-slavery activism in the early nineteenth century through cultural pro-
duction (published communications, written materials, etc.) from British
women’s anti-slavery associations. Ware shows that white women were
encouraged to empathize with female slaves through specific meanings
associated with white womanhood. She proposes that women identified
the oppression of slaves through their own subjective sensibilities, which
included elements of moral responsibility, Christian duty, and “civilized”
values. Anti-slavery associations appealed to white women in a manner that
located the specific oppression experienced by female slaves as that of being
objects of lust or sexual violence for their white male owners and belonging
to a system that denied them a “normal” familial life (Ware 1992). The
violence of slavery as defined by white, Victorian feminists reflected their
bourgeois feminine subjectivity and concerns over sexual respectability.
84 Elya M. Durisin
Today’s emphasis on sexual servitude as the hallmark of trafficking

neglects more common and mundane experiences of economic exploitation
involving men and women as well as protracted racialized violence that
Saidiya Hartman (2007) calls the “afterlife of slavery.” It is important to
consider to what extent this history informs how we determine what is seen
as violence or slavery and what is seen as work (i.e. acceptable limits of eco-
nomic exploitation). For many Victorian feminists, anti-slavery activism
was an acceptable part of white women’s civilizing duty and did not pose a
fundamental challenge to racism, imperialism, or patriarchy.
White womanhood was central to empire and to nation, and white
women were seen as guardians of the family and also as critical civilizing
agents (Devereux 2000; McClintock 1995). The dismantling of slavery
in Britain and the United States occurred in a period of imperial expan-
sion when there were powerful ideas about racial and cultural superiority
supported by “racial science.” Eugenics later emerged as a progressive
science and was supported by a range of women’s groups (Ziegler 2008).
Nineteenth- century anti-trafficking efforts were concerned with the
protection of white femininity –from prostitution, miscegenation, and
sexual encounters with “undesirable” Others –as the group responsible for
reproducing the white nation. This is important to exposing the ideolo-
gies enlivening today’s trafficking discourses; concerns over trafficking in
women have become perceptible in relation to the historical preoccupa-
tions of nineteenth-century women –women’s sexual respectability –and
specifically fears about sexual harm to white femininity. Whiteness, and
white femininity in particular, remain salient ideological components
informing dominant understandings of human trafficking even while
silent in today’s discourse that emphasizes racialized and colonized female
subjects (Durisin 2017).
Between the late 1970s and 1990s, migration for sex work in Europe
was mainly from South Asia, Latin America, and North Africa (ICRSE
2016), and it was Third World feminists who first raised concern about
the trafficking in women in the context of development projects in Asia
centering on the leisure and sexual entertainment industries (see, Lim
1998; Truong 1990). However, the global response to human trafficking
only evolved after the fall of socialist projects in Central and Eastern
European nations when white women were being found in large numbers
in the sex industries (Kempadoo 2002; Suchland 2015) and the dominant
understanding that emerged centered on sexual violence rather than eco-
nomic exploitation (see, Barry 1979; Barry et al. 1984). Western feminists
have been successful in positioning themselves as experts on questions
relating to women and sexuality, have achieved significant political power,
and are themselves involved in governance processes (Halley 2006). Janet
Halley (2006) points out that while feminism in its governance form has
produced many wins for women’s rights, it also has “blood on its hands”
(32–33). Sex workers and those outside of neoliberal capitalist modernity

pay the price for hegemonic feminism’s wins with respect to the anti-
prostitution and anti-trafficking measures.
The dominant trafficking discourse, genealogically connected to the
historical white slavery panic (Doezema 2010) that evolved during the
height of European imperialism, mirrors patterns of knowledge that
remain largely unchanged since the nineteenth century. The contemporary
narrative emphasizing the sexual servitude of Black, brown, and colonized
women permits affluent westerners to exert a civilizing influence over
others deemed lacking, backwards, or vulnerable. My interest in revisiting
this history is to provoke questions surrounding the contemporary anti-
trafficking movement and the interests of the bourgeois (implicitly white)
subjects. If the white, bourgeois subject is at the center of anti-trafficking,
then there are very likely to be harmful consequences to persons positioned
as being “at risk” of human trafficking –whom today are largely non-
white people. Dominant anti-trafficking discourses, shaped by western,
Eurocentric feminism, are congruent with the dominant interests and
power structures found in modern, western democracies and do not pose a
threat to global whiteness.
War on Trafficking, War on Sex Workers

“Sex work” refers to sexual-economic exchanges where sexual labor is
fully or partly commodified;2 sexual labor reproduces physical bodies,
subjectivities, and satisfies emotional and sexual needs (Truong 1990).
Most sanctioned human relationships involve both intimacy and eco-
nomics (see, e.g., Zelizer 2005); the relationship between intimacy and
economics is best seen as a continuum and, it follows, the bracketing-
off and targeting of sex work from other human relationships should be
problematized more broadly than it is. Sex sectors act as a secondary labor
market absorbing those who cannot or choose not to find a place or make
their way in the legitimate economy. The criminalization, lack of employ-
ment standards, over regulation in some cases and under regulation in
others, prime this as a location where economic exploitation and other
abuses in different forms –from mundane to violent –can occur, particu-
larly for those with precarious citizenship statuses, and for which workers
have no recourse.
Sex workers frequently work in precarious conditions that make them
vulnerable both to mundane and extreme forms of economic exploitation,
symbolizing at once both the trope of the undisciplined worker and the
ideal of the self-reliant entrepreneur. The war on sex workers is a war on all
those who are positioned in structurally similar ways, particularly working
class Black, brown, and colonized women. Sex workers, like so many
other workers in similar socio-economic circumstances, are often women
86 Elya M. Durisin
working in precarious conditions, without job security or contracts, are

heavily stigmatized, and experience various forms of structural barriers
that disadvantage them in various ways. For sex workers, however, the pen-
alization of sex work together with the anti-trafficking legal infrastructure
intensify these structural burdens. The criminal justice approach with its
reliance on raids and rescues to identify victims of trafficking serves to
place poorer people, people of color, and migrants in conflict with the law
where detention, imprisonment, or another form of confinement are likely
outcomes. As one organization concluded:
In a global environment of growing xenophobia and conservatism,

as well as increasing pressure from fundamental feminist and aboli-
tionist groups, the vague, ambiguous language of [international anti-
trafficking legislation] and its emphasis on arrest and prosecution,
enable laws and policies that target sex workers, third parties, clients
of sex workers, and migrant communities generally in the name of
ending trafficking.
(NSWP 2019a, 3)
The criminalization of migration and anti-trafficking policies have increased

migrant sex workers’ vulnerability to abuse and violence, including deten-
tion and deportation (ICRSE 2016).
The U.N. Protocol and the United States Trafficking Victims Protection
Act (TVPA) are the two major pieces of legislation governing human
trafficking internationally. The United States’ TVPA has shaped anti-
trafficking policies on a global scale and endorses a militarized, criminal
justice “3-Rs” approach; that is, raid, rescue, and rehabilitation (Chuang
2006). Both are fundamentally criminal justice-oriented and with a heavy
emphasis on prosecutions. Several countries have reformulated their pros-
titution laws to criminalize the purchase of sex, reflecting a shift to a new,
transnational regime. International and country-specific laws aimed at
human trafficking and sex work combine to render sex workers’ migration
experiences difficult and more dangerous (NSWP 2019b). The misplaced
emphasis on client violence, rescue, and the law enforcement/white knight
figure in the dominant discourse elides police and state-based violence that
sex workers say is the greatest threat to their well-being (Crago 2015).
The recent rise in racist and anti-immigrant sentiments and social
formations in Europe and North American has occurred alongside the
expansion of anti-trafficking policies which work to curb migration more
broadly. Sweden’s move to criminalize the purchase of sex in the late 1990s
was a response to the presence of Central and Eastern European sex workers
and other non-European immigrants and the “un-Swedish” cultural values
they supposedly brought with them (ICRSE 2016; Kulick 2005). In
Canada, trafficking was initially understood as an external threat brought
by foreign Others or foreign ideas that did not reflect (superior) Canadian
cultural values, those regarding treatment of women in particular (Durisin
2017). While speaking in support of a Private Member’s Bill condemning
sex trafficking, Member of Parliament Joe Comartin commented that:
… We also have to get back to the root causes of why women in par-
ticular are able to be exploited so efficiently. That means going back
to root causes, such as poverty, cultural mores and the acceptance, for
instance, of violence in sexual relations. Those are the vast majority of
the root causes in other countries.
(Joe Comartin, NDP MP, House of Commons Debates.
Canada, 8 December 2006, 5876)
While discourses surrounding human trafficking are lodged in concerns

over human rights, a closer look at their logic and function suggests they
carry ethnic and racial biases and disproportionately target racialized and
migrant communities.
Anti-trafficking tactics and repressive immigration regimes adopted by
industrialized, western states could be viewed as an attack against those
who pose threats to the dominant, neoliberal order. At the same time, anti-
trafficking discourse and politics bolster investments in white subjectivity
and global whiteness, allowing the affluent to intervene in the lives of
others they do not know, and to envision themselves as ethical saviors in
the process. Teju Cole (2012) captured this dynamic in his discussion of the
white savior industrial complex, whereby “helping” others exists as a way
to satisfy sentimental needs and validate privilege.
Conclusion
Zygmunt Bauman (2004) explains that, as modernity has become the
condition of all humankind and every aspect of human activity has been
commodified and monetized, large numbers of people have been deprived
of previously adequate livelihood strategies for physical and cultural sur-
vival. As an outcome of modernization and economic progress, “some
parts of the extant population [are positioned as] ‘out of place,’ ‘unfit,’ or
‘undesirable’ ” (2004, 5). The “insiders” of globalized modernity are often
spatially segregated from those on the margins of neoliberal capitalism
(Arat-Koç 2014), and such segregation leads to subjective identification
with globalized, elite tastes and desires and the invisibilization of those
who are struggling on the outside and who are seen as threats and risks
(Ibid.). Human trafficking policies act as a form of governance to manage
a highly heterogeneous population understood simultaneously as victims
and criminals. Such policies protect dominant classes and leave the dom-
inant, racial order intact.
88 Elya M. Durisin
Rising white nationalism and xenophobia in Europe and North America,

the advent of Brexit in the UK and the ongoing construction of the
southern border wall in the United States, speak to the violent reaction
of whiteness to conditions it experiences as threatening. Anti-trafficking
discourse and policy comprise an ideological and material component for
the basis of global whiteness. The continued and intensifying concern with
eradicating human trafficking that is leading to heavy penalization of the
sex sector and of migration can be viewed from the perspective of global
whiteness as producing structures that allow for its reproduction. The anti-
trafficking criminal justice infrastructure can be considered as an extension
of systems of mass incarceration (Wacquant 2002) that have emerged in
the United States and whose logics are applied to other contexts and other
purposes, though their effects are similar. Prison and institutions of incar-
ceration (immigration detention, confinement for rehabilitation, refugee
camps) serve to contain and exclude primarily poor people of color from
their social and civic rights (see, Alexander, 2020). Human trafficking pol-
icies and politics, despite concerns with racial justice and the eradication of
forced labor, have made circumstances more difficult for those they purport
to help and have become a vehicle for the reinforcement of white supremacy.
Julia O’Connell Davidson (2015) observes that one of the defining features
of chattel slavery was a limitation on mobility and confinement; on a global
scale this is exactly what anti-trafficking has helped to accomplish.
Notes
1 Social movements that arise from specific communities demanding social
transformation.
2 For a discussion of partial commoditization of sexual labor, see Cabezas 2009.
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Chapter 6
To Trip the White Fantastic

The Road from White Supremacy to
Sex Trafficking Safaris
Gregory Mitchell
Take up the White Man’s burden—

And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
(Rudyard Kipling. The White
Man’s Burden. 1899)
Come, and trip it as ye go

On the light fantastic toe,
And in thy right hand lead with thee,
The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty
(John Milton. L’Allegro. 1645)
The anti-sex trafficking movement has always had a fleshy white under-
belly. Its secret vulnerability to critique is that historically it wedded itself
to white supremacy ideologically and white supremacists individually. The
contemporary anti-sex trafficking movement has, instead of confronting
these past entanglements, attempted to whitewash over its antiblackness
by adopting the language of “abolitionism” and “modern slavery,” a rhet-
orical move that is in and of itself a worrying de-racialization of these
historically situated terms (Woods 2013). When we read the history of
anti-trafficking, however, we are reading a history of white supremacy
that has always intertwined itself knottily within white US feminism.
This essay places the current trend of anti-trafficking tours, study abroad
programs, and “experiential learning” within this genealogy of white
supremacy. Specifically, I link that history of anti-Black violence mas-
querading as concern for white women’s safety to a different history –that
of white condescension toward “native others” in the developing world
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-8
White Supremacy and Sex Trafficking Safaris 93
whom westerners transform into spectacles of suffering for primarily

white consumption.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a disparate coalition of anti-
prostitution forces coalesced into a crusade against “white sex slavery.”
This alliance was eerily similar to the one today in that it brought together
feminists, advocates for “women’s issues,” businessmen, and religious
conservatives. These early crusaders included the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union Movement (who linked drinking with domestic vio-
lence), early feminists, the Ku Klux Klan, police commissions, socialists,
anarchists, and wealthy philanthropists (Donovan 2010, 2). This litera-
ture has been well-documented by scholars such as Jo Doezema (2010)
and Mark Thomas Connelly (2018) as well as other authors in this edited
volume, but I’d like to discuss the intertwined legacies and effects of this
history on the antiblackness of contemporary anti-prostitution, anti-sex
trafficking, and “neo-abolitionist” alliances.
The contemporary anti-sex trafficking movement has not reconciled
itself to the fact that it began as racist. And I mean that not just as racist
in the garden variety “racism-is-the-water-we-all-swim-in” sort of preju-
dice, but as an overtly white supremacist movement for whom the deg-
radation and death of Black bodies was foundational, not incidental. Nor
has the anti-sex trafficking movement’s predominantly white leadership
today recognized that this ideology –from racist invocations of pimps to
neocolonial foreign aid policies to the condescending desire to “give voice
to the voiceless” prostitutes and victims in the third world whom it seeks
to rescue and rehabilitate –continues to undergird its assumptions and
actions, thereby causing harm to sex workers.
The so-called “abolitionist” movement of today sprang forth from the pro-
lynching white women of the temperance movement and the xenophobes of
first wave feminism who spread ideas about “yellow peril” and the imagined
epidemic of “white slavery.” The common thread for all of the groups (both
religious and secular) in the modern coalition against sex trafficking (which
for them encompasses all prostitution) is that they are invested in a par-
ticular fantasy that positions them as able, willing, and called by some moral
purpose to rescue, to uplift, and to empower. An increasingly popular way
to manifest and perform these desires is the “mission trip,” “voluntourism,”
and (on the secular side) “experiential learning” during study abroad. This
orientation toward suffering is also a longstanding aspect of liberalism with
its own racist underpinnings: that of noblesse oblige.
Noblesse oblige (literally “nobility obliges”) refers to the concept that those
with wealth, power, and status have an affirmative obligation to help their
social inferiors. Early feminists such as Jane Addams, the founder of Hull
House, advocated a feminist version of this position in calling on middle-
and upper-class women with leisure time to devote themselves to philan-
thropy and volunteering to help less fortunate women. At a glance, this
94 Gregory Mitchell
may seem like not only an obviously good thing but an easily granted
ethical requirement. (Men no less than Winston Churchill and Spiderman’s
Uncle Ben have, after all, observed that with great power comes great
responsibility.) And yet the attitude of noblesse oblige was also rooted in
ethnocentrism, colonialism, and white supremacy. Rudyard Kipling
became closely associated with this tradition because of his 1899 poem,
“The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,”
which made a forceful argument that the United States had a duty to col-
onize and rule over Filipinos (Kipling 1929 (1899)). Colonial projects
across the global South were rationalized using the idea that white people
had, by virtue of their more “advanced” civilizations and levels of educa-
tion, an obligation to rule. This idea still creeps into popular liberal human
rights projects such as voluntourism, NGOs focused on “empowering” or
“uplifting” locals, micro-lending initiatives, and study away programs
wherein students from wealthy countries receive course credit at home
for helping unfortunate souls abroad. Many such projects are religious in
nature and combine mission trips with voluntourism. Such initiatives may
have positive outcomes and provide some meaningful experiences (prob-
ably more profoundly for the helpers than the “helped”), but they must be
understood in light of the history of ethnocentrism in whose lineage they
reside.
The spirit of noblesse oblige fused with adventure travel thanks in part to cul-
tural anthropologists in the 19th century. Travel writers and ethnographers
had wowed western readers with tales of exotic natives and “the sexual lives
of savages” (see Malinowski 1987). Safaris to see animals in Africa emerged
in the 1850s, in part popularized by famous travelers such as Sir Richard
Burton. Soon intrepid white travelers were visiting not only animals, but
native people. The safari “came home” during World’s Fairs, which fam-
ously included people of various indigenous heritage living in enclosures
similar to zoo exhibits whom guests could observe (Rydell 2014). Later in
the 20th century, affordable and mainstream companies came to offer a var-
iety of related activities such as amateur wildlife photography tours, cultural
tourism, diasporic heritage tourism, and forms of eco-tourism that involve
visiting natives to watch or even participate in indigenous rituals. Another
popular form of modern safari is the “favela,” “slum,” or “township” tour in
which tourists visit poor neighborhoods, orphanages, and schools in places
like Brazil, India, or South Africa. (Freire-Medeiros 2014; Larkins 2015).
When understood as descended from the tradition of the safari, it is easy
to understand why activists accuse these kinds of tours as the “zooification”
of poverty (Frenzel 2016). Nonetheless, tour organizers point to the idea
that such tours uplift the local community and raise awareness about social
inequality among the foreigners’ privileged peers, though this rhetoric is
nearly identical to that heard from adherents of noblesse oblige.
Today there are dozens if not hundreds of anti-sex trafficking programs

that grow out of this tradition of noblesse oblige. Houston offers not one,
but two driving tours: Children at Risk’s Human Trafficking Bus Tour
focused on learning to spot the signs of trafficking and Elijah Rising’s van
tours which also offers a Human Trafficking 101 class with visuals as you
go. Destiny Rescue charges $3,500 (not including airfare) to join their
two-week trip in Thailand and Cambodia to “see the issue of child sex
trafficking” and “visit Red Light districts to see what the commercial sex
industry looks like.” But it also includes a visit to “Destiny Café and other
quaint coffee shops” and an opportunity to “visit local tourist interactions.”
Destiny Rescue has 13 trips slated for the next year, some in private part-
nership with religious universities (Destiny Rescue 2020).
Rahab’s Rope charges $3,450 (not including airfare) for an 11-day trip
in Mumbai, India to “travel with us to our center in the heart of the Red
Light District,” urging customers to “come help us on the front lines as
we work to rescue those trapped in sexual slavery by… sharing the love
of Christ.” It also informs them that “You will also enjoy shopping and
taking a tour of Mumbai’s historical sites” (Rahab’s Rope 2020). The same
organization also does a trip in Bangalore, India where they provide oppor-
tunities outside of the sex industry.
You will join with our aftercare programs and help these women and
children learn their identity is in Christ alone, and that they can do
and be anything with Him by their side. You will have the oppor-
tunity to shop and visit Bangalore’s ancient palaces or gardens.
(ibid.)
Also in India is Crossroads Church’s anti-sex trafficking program, which

charges $3,400 to “be on the relief team” for the church’s outreach workers,
giving “them space to retreat and kick back, and bring some extra hope
from the other side of the world” (Crossroads Church 2020). It also informs
them they will “take part in an immersive prayer walk through the red
light district” (ibid.), which does sound a lot like the zoo-ification of a red
light area and pestering women while they’re working. It also promises
that “you’ll introduce the girls to playing in the wild, rappelling/rock
climbing, rafting rivers, and finding meaningful new levels of friendships”
(ibid.). Other mission trips are on offer from various groups going to
Guatemala, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia as well as Thailand and Cambodia.
There’s even a “See Human Trafficking Photography Expedition” in
Thailand (see Bernstein and Shih 2018, 101).
Not to be outdone, on the secular liberal side is the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, whose College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
offers a study abroad course called “University of Wisconsin Global
and Human Rights Training in Spain and Morocco to Combat Sex
96 Gregory Mitchell
Trafficking.” The program description insists that of the “hundreds of

women and girls” who make the dangerous trip from Nigeria to Spain via
Morocco, “most of them are already caught up in sex trafficking networks”
(University of Wisconsin 2020). The program, which costs $6,450 (but
does include airfare), will teach students to do things like “understand
and analyze the demand side” and “through collective narratives (visual
arts, theater, music, body movement among other techniques) assist staff
of organizations, and also victims and survivors to find their previously
silenced voice” (ibid.). One imagines what the Nigerian woman and
ostensible sex trafficking survivor must think after her rescue when she is
handed over to a fresh-faced college student from Wisconsin bidding her
to lift her voice in song and trippingly dance that she may be “silenced”
no more. I suspect she would rather the student had just sent her the
$6,000 instead.
Armed with a minimum cumulative GPA (grade point average) of 2.0
and an optional elective related to Global Health prior to their visit, these
intrepid students
…will arrive in one of the major trafficking and migration transit

cities and, using a theory of self and mutual care, we will gather voices,
narratives, and discourses from a variety of stakeholders involved in
the migration-trafficking process at the destination country.
(ibid.)
The outcome is that “we will take these messages to organizations and
individuals in the transit settings, gathering more information and take it
back to the destination country closing the circle of communication and
care” (ibid.). The mix of social justice terminology (self-care, silencing) and
neoliberal idioms (stakeholders) is remarkable. So, too, is the peculiarly
condescending notion that what the “stakeholders” in Morocco and Spain
really need is students from the US to “close the circle of communication”
by relaying information back and forth between groups in Morocco and
Spain in some sort of NGO-ified game of telephone.
All of these churches, organizations, and programs described above
are part of a common rescue industry (see Agustín 2007). The migrant
women become a product in this chain while the university (and student
loan providers) and NGOs make money, get grants, pay professor salaries,
and professionalize themselves in relation to the women. The sociologists
Elena Shih and Elizabeth Bernstein, intrigued by the increasing popu-
larity of such voluntourism, mission trips, and service learning programs
focused on sex trafficking, traveled to Thailand (Shih’s longtime fieldsite)
to take part in one. Their tour cost only $1200 per person (excluding air-
fare), had 15 participants, and was run by two organizations, the secular
Global Exchange and the Christian Not for Sale. Citing Kimberly Kay
Hoang’s work on sex tourism in Vietnam, they note that western tourists
enjoy the sense that “virtuous third world poverty” is appealing to visitors
because it highlights their own helping capacities, which are fundamental
to the encounter. Ironically, this instrumentalization of virtuous pov-
erty –spectacularized and performed for the traveling westerners –is just
as essential to the experience for the anti-prostitution activists as it is for
the sex tourists (Bernstein and Shih 2018, 109).
Bernstein and Shih describe the other participants as having been inspired
by popular movies about sex trafficking such as the Oscar-winning white
savior epic Born into Brothels (about a woman who gives cameras to the
children of sex workers in India to photograph their daily lives in the red
light district). Another popular source of inspiration was the Liam Neeson
action-thriller Taken. The tour organizers reported to the sociologists that
visitors were frequently disappointed by the realities they saw, feeling both
unimpressed with the level of suffering and also a sense of “not feeling
needed” (Bernstein and Shih 2018, 112).
I contend that the savior-based tourism model described above is rooted
in the same logic and genealogy as the white feminist volunteerism that
early leaders of the movement positioned as a matter of noblesse oblige. While
the exact racial makeup of these well-off foreigners is unclear, the phenom-
enon of fighting anti-sex trafficking as a leisure activity vis-à-vis tourism
is rooted in whiteness no matter the race of the participants. (The same is
true of all European and US colonial endeavors regardless of the complicity
of some smaller number of people of color.) The tourists and students must
imagine their presence was somehow beneficial to the locals and experience
disappointment when they are not made to feel enough like the rescuers
they imagined themselves to be and when the lives of sex workers do not
adhere to the expectations set by popular media like Born into Brothels and
Taken. In short, what the visitors long for is more melodramatic titillation
in the spectacle they have come to behold.
Titillation has always been an important aspect to spectacle. Gone are the
days when women’s rights advocates –even the whitest of them –advocate
for the lynching of Black men. Yet what binds together the 19th century
advocates for women’s rights and the contemporary 21st century anti-sex
trafficking movement is their mutual fixation on the carceral –the appeal
to violence, punishment, imprisonment, and shaming (see Bernstein and
Shih 2018). Lock up the pimps. Lock up the johns. Lock up the traffickers
and third-party facilitators. Lock up the taxi drivers who take women to
clients. Lock up the motel owners who turn a blind eye. Their continued
recourse to the carceral framework is disturbing for its consistency.
Self-righteousness is a pleasurable feeling. The evangelicals and anti-
prostitution feminists are not just sex negative, but titillated by the sal-
acious spectacle of anti-trafficking. This is why their documentaries, their
Hollywood movies, their TV specials, and talk shows always focus on the
98 Gregory Mitchell
most melodramatic examples in which victims are innocent and unsus-

pecting, kidnapped, raped, and suffer unspeakable horrors. In terms of sen-
sationalism, they have not progressed an inch since the yellow journalism
that produced the white slave trade panic nor from the pulp fiction of the
mid-20th century. For the anti-trafficking movement, there is often a fet-
ishistic enjoyment in recounting and circulating imagined sex trafficking
scenarios, which they paint in their videos, documentaries, and speeches
with lurid detail. And yet the tellers of these tales can revel in the intel-
lectual distancing provided by self-righteous disavowal of the sex act and
positioning of one’s own erotic subjectivity as firmly opposed to –but
always curiously alongside of and inseparable from –the sexual depravity
they spend their days obsessing over.
The abolitionist movement’s turn toward the scopophilic explains why
the anti-trafficking safari is an ideal form of activism. It is rooted in an
economy of affects –outrage, disgust, indignation, pleasure, guilt –that
requires no meaningful intervention beyond looking. For the Christians,
the rhetoric of “bearing witness” provides strong cover. The gaze of these
safaris is crafted from a white western standpoint and actively constructs
the “third world” Other as an object for visual consumption, to be gawked
at, furtively glanced at, photographed, or videoed on iPhones. This
allows the recreation of the colonial encounter in which the tourist of sex
trafficking can return home to their church or university with documen-
tary evidence of suffering and the ability to narrativize their travel, socially
misremembering it as somehow equally meaningful to the object of their
gaze while simultaneously furthering demand among their western peers
to go and witness such spectacles of suffering for themselves.
References
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Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, written by Elizabeth Bernstein,
98–127. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Connelly, Mark Thomas. 2018. The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era.
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Crossroads Church. 2020. “India: Mumbai.” Accessed February 22, 2020. www.
crossroads.net/reachout/go/india/november-mumbai-2020/
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London: Zed Books.
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The Philippine Islands.” Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition. Garden City,
New York: Doubleday.
Larkins, Erika Robb. 2015. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil.
Oakland: University of California Press.
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absrope.com/venture-india/
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Racial Hierarchies at America’s World’s Fairs.” In The Invention of Race: Scientific
and Popular Representations, edited by Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David and
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Woods, Tryon. 2013. “Surrogate Selves: Notes on Anti-trafficking and Anti-
blackness.” Social Identities 19, no.1: 120–134.
Part II
Colonialism and
Racialization in
Anti-Trafficking
Chapter 7
Whore’s Passport
Racialism, National Identity, and the
Trafficking of Brazilian Women
Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva
Your Papers, Please?

We could tell the immigration officer was not happy. His hair was mussed,
his tie crooked, and he frowned.
“Good evening,” said Ana.
The officer stuck out his hand for Ana’s documents. Smiling, she passed
them over.
The officer looked her over. Then he evaluated Thaddeus. He sneered
and flicked Ana’s ID with a finger.
“This is unacceptable,” he said.
“What?!”
“You cannot leave Argentina with this. It is too worn around the edges.
How can I tell that they aren’t false?”
“By looking at the photo, the signature, and the official stamps?”
Thaddeus suggested.
This didn’t help.
“You must go to the Brazilian consulate and acquire adequate
documents,” the officer declared.
We blew up. How had Ana’s documents been acceptable for entrance
into Argentina, but were now unacceptable for egress? We pleaded. We
flashed our academic credentials. We produced papers showing that we
had attended a conference, that we were, in short, somebodies. After several
minutes of this, the officer stood up.
“Shhhh!” He hissed, as if we were raucous children.
He stalked off. Ten minutes later, he came back. He hammered Ana’s
documents with his stamp, but offered no word of explanation. Then he
started in on Thaddeus…
It took us a half hour to clear immigration, something that normally
takes two minutes. Given the fact that we were traveling as a couple, how-
ever, we were not surprised. Ana is a Black Brazilian woman and Thaddeus
is a white American man. Argentina is experiencing a moral panic over
trafficking in persons and this has resulted in heightened surveillance of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-10
104 Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva
“suspicious types” (Varela 2018). One such type is the Black Brazilian
woman, especially if she is accompanied by a white foreign man.
In many ways, we appear to be the perfect trafficking-in-persons stereo-
type, as this has been presented by campaigns that have elevated racial pro-
filing to the status of a “best practice”. It is a rare voyage where we aren’t
stopped for something.
As historian Craig Robertson points out (2010), the belief that iden-
tity can be documented by the State and that states should verify these
documents before allowing individuals to cross borders underlies today’s
international passport system. But in our experience, it is not doubts
about identity that create barriers to migration, but rather certainties
anchored in understandings of what identity means, especially when this
is intersectionally constituted by axes of differentiation such as race, class,
nationality, and gender.
In Kimberlé Crenshaw’s famous formulation of intersectionality (1989),
two axes of differentiation (gender and race) collide and make a certain form
of social exclusion legally illegible. As Brazilian intersectional theorists
have pointed out, however (Piscitelli 2008; Moutinho 2004; Simões et al.
Figure 7.1 Suspect couple. Photo by the authors, Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula
da Silva.
2010), identity markers can collide and combine in varied ways, creating
as well as destroying; making visible as well as erasing. It is precisely the
combination of class, race, gender, and national markers, read together as
a set, which makes Ana Paula legible as a problem to migration officials.
Black Brazilian women1 are increasingly subject to surveillance and interro-
gation at borders, not because they are associated with terrorism or because
they are notoriously criminals. Rather, it is because Brazilian women are
thought to embody a moral category that the passport system has long
sought to identify and control for as long as there have been passports.
To not put too fine a point on it, Brazilians –and again, especially Black
Brazilian women –are imagined to be whores.2 Today, the Brazilian pass-
port is red-flagged across the world as a whore’s passport.
The present article seeks to understand this attribution of Brazilian
whorishness in the global idea-, ethno-and mediascapes (Appadurai 1990)
by focusing on the constitution of Brazilian national identity as imbued
with a racialized sexuality transcending the limits of “European” mor-
ality. We argue that notions of “Brazilianess” that were predominant in
the early 20th century provide a structure for today’s understandings of
Brazilians’ places in the world. In the formulations of early 21st century
anti-trafficking panic, the specter of “racial inferiority” haunts (in Avery
F. Gordon’s sense (2008)) Brazilian projects for advancement on the global
stage. Rather than confront this phantasm, Brazilians have chosen to
emphasize personal respectability in the face of foreign suspicion, casting
“trafficking victims” in race, class, and moral terms designed to safeguard
“respectable” Brazilians’ mobility.
This is an attempt to come to grips with some of the forces of longue durée
(Braudel and Colin 1987) which structure State policies towards migra-
tion, particularly as these interact with national identity in the context
of the post-modern “-scapes” described by Appadurai (1990). The ideas
explored here should be understood as a preliminary exploration, but –as
recent work by our colleague Samuel Okyere shows3 –they are hardly spe-
cific to Brazil alone.
The Whore and the State

The rapidity with which white slavery tropes have been reworked a century
after their initial formation, almost word for word, in discourses regarding
human trafficking is remarkable. This is not surprising, says Jo Doezema
(2010), if we understand these panics as (en)gendered responses to group
boundary crises created by cultural stress. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis
(1997) and Frederick Grittner (1990),4 Doezema observes that communi-
ties whose boundaries are threatened limit the range of behaviors among
their members to redefine symbolic frontiers. Women are overdetermined
subjects when it comes to carrying this representational labor.
It is thus no surprise that in times of instability, increased female

mobility and the weakening of traditional family structures generate fears
of “our women” being despoiled by foreigners. As Yuval-Davis points out,
women are constructed as the symbolic bearers of collectivities’ identity
and honor: “Women, in their ‘proper’ behavior, their ‘proper’ clothing,
embody the line which signifies the collectives’ boundaries” (Yuval-
Davis 1997, 45–46). It is thus not surprising that female respectability
(Higginbotham 1993) becomes more imbricated with collective prestige
in times of instability.
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner links the fetishization of female sexual
purity to representations of group status and the consolidation of com-
plex societies centered on states. According to Ortner, this phenomenon is
based upon hypergamic structures in which lower status groups ally with
higher status groups by giving wives. Within these systems, a woman’s
sexual purity symbolizes her value for hypergamic exchange: “virginity is a
symbol of exclusiveness and inaccessibility, non-availability to the general
masses, something, in short, that is elite” (Ortner 1996, 56).
If we accept Ortner’s insight, we should enquire about the meanings of
whorishness. If a “virgin is an elite female… withheld, untouched, exclu-
sive” (ibid., 56), then the whore represents a woman who is accessible,
touched by everyone, belonging to no one. If the offer of a virgin represents
a lower status group’s honor, then the revelation of a whore represents proof
of disgrace. Historian Gerda Lerner’s work on the Bronze Age origins of
patriarchy supports this symbolic reading (1980; 1989).
When sexual/affective exchanges occur within the symbolic bounds of
one socio-cultural system, it is relatively easy to determine who is and who
is not “pure”. When alliances occur between social-cultural systems, how-
ever, “readings” of purity become more complicated. Nationality, race, or
ethnicity may stand-in for female “quality”. Reflect, for example, that the
word “French” became synonymous with sexual license in the late 19th
century. A similar process is occurring with “Brazilian” today.
It is thus not surprising that, in modern competitions for global status
in a world where boundaries are increasingly felt to be threatened, one of
the State’s responsibilities is standing vigil over the “purity” of the women
who cross its borders. This vigilance may intensify in moments when a
given society seeks to increase its status in the world because, as Ortner
points out, female purity doesn’t represent a group’s current status:
I would argue that women are not, contrary to native ideology,

representing and maintaining a group’s actual status, but are oriented
upwards and represent the ideal higher status of the group. One of
the problems with the purity literature, I think, has been a failure
to get beneath native ideology; the natives justify female purity in
terms of maintaining the group’s actual status, as a holding action for
that status in the system, when in fact it is oriented toward an ideal

and generally unattainable status. The unattainability may in turn
account for some of the sadism and anger toward women expressed in
these purity patterns, for the women are representing the over-classes
themselves
(Ortner 1996, 57)
Ortner’s insight can explain the recurrent savageness of States’ reactions

towards women they claim to be victims of trafficking. Savage in the sense
of fierce, ferocious, cruel, and brutal, but also in the sense that, when
dealing with whores, States routinely ignore what they identify as the
civilized constraints that constitutions place upon behavior.
“What Is it About Brazilian Women?”

In Brazilian discussions of migration and trafficking, the populations the
State classifies as being “able” to leave the country and those that “should
stay at home” are associated with social constructions of race, class, and
gender whose intersections reproduce historical Brazilian hierarchies.
Anti-trafficking policies have steadily increased in Brazil since 2002,
the year the country ratified the Palermo Protocol. A set of representations
has been formed regarding what is trafficking and its likely victims. We
have discussed elsewhere (Blanchette and Silva 2018) the categories that
are mobilized in anti-trafficking campaigns, but the most important of
these is the “Brazilian woman”. Until recently (around 2014), trafficking
was presented in Brazil as almost exclusively affecting women. We must
thus ask “Who is this Brazilian woman who is vulnerable to trafficking?”
This question is entangled in historical representations formed over the
last three centuries, which are alive and well today wherever Brazilians
meet to discuss trafficking.
Foremost is the image of the racially mixed, sexuality exuberant, naive
mulatta. As the most famous symbol of mestiço Brazilianness (Moutinho
2004), the mulatta incarnates the historic contradictions and consistencies
of the racial discourses that underpin Brazilian national thought (Correa
2010), celebrated in literature, painting, and music as the quintessential
representation of Brazil.
This association of Brazilian women with sexuality is not a recent cre-
ation, in spite of claims that it was empowered by tourism in the 1970s
(Afonso 2006). For centuries, foreign and Brazilian men have long enthused
about the mixture of races in Brazil that has supposedly produced a sui
generis femininity that is exceptionally sexually active (Blanchette and
Silva 2010).
According to Lilia Schwartz (2008), the construction of Brazil as
exotic has roots in the first contacts between Europeans and Natives.
Figure 7.2 Artistic images of mulattas and prostitution, 1. Carybé: The Big Mulatta (1980).
National Museum of Art Brazil (image in the public domain).
Figure 7.3 Artistic images of mulattas and prostitution 2. Di Cavalcanti: Mulatas (1927);

O Mangue (1929). National Museum of Art Brazil (image in the public
domain).
This was further reified by the stories of travelers over the following cen-
turies. Exoticism was enhanced through the Portuguese colonial policy of
declaring the country off-limits to foreigners. Reliable information about
Brazil was hard to come by until the 19th century and Brazil’s isolation
helped create fantastic readings of the country.
Portrayals of Brazil as simultaneously paradisiacal and infernal also

underpin determinisms regarding its human diversity. Racialist the-
ories regarding Brazil focus on the supposed effects that miscegenation
and sexual license have worked upon the “Brazilian national character”.
This view was most famously presented in Paulo Prado’s 1925 “Essay
on Brazilian Sadness”, which situates lust as the key factor in the cre-
ation of Brazil. According to Prado, contact between “disciplined”
Europeans and the “burning temperaments, amorality of customs and
lack of civilized shame” of the Indians amidst the “tumescent volup-
tuousness of virgin nature” created a “land of all vices and crimes”,
codified in the Brazilian body. This racially mixed Brazilian “type”
was understood by Prado to be inherently vulnerable to moral vice and
physical disease (Prado 1928).
These understandings are a constituent part of mestiçagem as national
ideology in Brazil. Prado’s views became codified into policies promoting
the “whitening” of Brazil as a condition for the country’s establishment as a
“proper” nation (Schwartz 1993). European immigrants were to “eliminate
the vices of color”, producing an increasingly lighter and “more civilized”
Brazilian people.
In this variant of social Darwinism, “race” was to be eliminated by elim-
inating Black and Brown Brazilians. As anthropologist Giralda Seyferth
remarks, however, whitening theories were inherently ambiguous, seeing in
miscegenation both the evil that needed to be expurgated and the solution
to Brazil’s “dilema” (Seyferth 1985). This created a new thesis: mesticagem
was a necessary evil that needed to be closely controlled so that its “nega-
tive” aspects could be avoided.
As the 20th century wore on, other readings of Brazilian history came
to the fore. Even as these moved away from racialism, however, they
maintained the primacy of the “mesticagem –tropics –lust” triad as key
to understanding Brazil. This was famously reworked in Gilberto Freyre’s
The Masters and the Slaves (1946), which reified a geographical determinism
focused upon an exuberantly sexual mestiçagem in the formation of Brazil,
carried in the bodies and habits of mixed-race Brazilian women almost as
if it were a venereal disease.
Freyre followed Prado’s lead, linking degeneration to lust via syph-
ilis, which he thought explained Brazilian’s physical and moral degrad-
ation. Syphilization originated in the power masters had over slaves –a
better thesis than Prado’s, certainly. However, Freyre also shared the earlier
author’s belief that Brazilians’ sexual appetites were excessive (Freyre 1946,
402–407, 323–324).
Freyre consecrated the mulatta as the national “mark” of Brazil. His
work became the foundational stone for a mythology of “racial democracy”,
wherein sexual/ affective contact eliminates racism. This view became
internationalized and is still au courant. Here is how one of our Canadian
sex tourist informants employs it:
In the 16th Century the Jesuits successfully converted Brazilians to

Catholicism. However the colonialists had other ideas and who [sic]
enslaved and interbred the natives and brought in cheap labour from
Africa. The women also served other needs of the male colonialists.
Also over the years waves of immigrants from Italy, Germany,
Portugal and Japan (mainly in Sao Paolo) have come to Brazil. Mixed
in with these are the blacks brought from Africa and the native Indians.
There has been a lot of racial genetic mixing which have combined in
ways to create a very diverse population.
The result is a female specimen that is wondrous, breathtaking and
pseudo-utopian…. Sexually speaking, these women are peerless. I have
been with a fair bit of women from around the world, but none com-
pare to the Brazilian women. It is almost as if they are breaded [sic] to
be sexual animals.
Such sentiments are hardly confined to foreign men. Glaucia Oliveira

de Assis shows that the reputation of Brazilian women as exceptionally
sexual is employed by female Brazilian immigrants in their search for U.S.
American husbands (Assis 2011). In her study of middle-class Brazilian
dancers in New York, Suzana Maia highlights how these women employ
discourses of mestiçagem even as they attempt to distance themselves from
the category mulatta (Maia 2012). And, of course, anthropologist Laura
Moutinho illustrates the decisive role “color” plays in the construction of
erotic hierarchies in modern Brazil (Moutinho 2004). There is a longue durée
imagining of Brazil linking racialized alterity, mixing, tropicalism, and
sexual liberty/depravity, centered on the Black/Brown female body.
In recent decades, the mulatta has been returning to a status similar to
that which she held during the late 19th century, once again associated
with poverty, degradation, and danger. She is often portrayed as escaping
the bounds of the family and inadequately disciplined in terms of her sexu-
ality. She appears as a teenage generator of babies, a transmitter of ven-
ereal disease, and as the Brazilian particularly vulnerable to trafficking in
persons.
Many members of Brazil’s Black movement, disenchanted with the
myth of miscegenation, still share commonalities with this myth. In
particular, they have a hard time grasping realities of Black and Brown
women engaged in sexual behavior outside what Gayle Rubin describes as
the “charmed circle” of monogamous reproductive heterosexuality (Rubin
1984). These women are understood as affectable subalterns, inhabiting
that space which Afro-Brazilian philosopher Denise da Silva (2007; 2014)
describes as necessitas, needing to be tutored or controlled lest they fall
into savagery. Brazil’s white racists and Black antiracists thus approach
consensus regarding the mulatta. Both groups cast her as a creature who
must be controlled so that her fundamental ambiguity, constructed

through a dangerous sexuality, does not contaminate collective projects
for respectability.
In the field of anti-trafficking policy in Brazil today, the mulatta is thus
overdetermined as an object of surveillance and tutelage with regards to
her possibilities for international (and even national) mobility. As there is
really no such thing as a mulatta (at least as a constant biological type), this
means that pretty much any Brazilian woman who is relationally5 valenced
as less-than-white (i.e. theoretically any Brazilian woman, particularly in
North American and Western European contexts) becomes signified as a
potential whore and/or trafficking victim.
Thoroughly Modern Maria

Popular and political discourses revolve around a largely mythological
reading of trafficking in Brazil, which we have unpacked elsewhere
(Blanchette and Silva 2014; Blanchette et al. 2013). Briefly, what we have
come to call “The Myth of Maria” is still reported as unvarnished fact. This
repeats in blackface the ur-myth of trafficking that has been present in the
global mediascape since the early 20th century, lampooned by the comedy
Thoroughly Modern Millie. A young woman, eager to make her way in the
world, is lured by the siren song of bright lights far from her home, where
she is enslaved by racialized Others.
In the modern Brazilian version of this myth, the woman is portrayed
as Black or Brown, while her “recruiters” are cast as foreign men, inevit-
ably white, perceived as “princes” by the honest but innocent heroine of
the tale. Arriving overseas, “Maria” (the most generic of Brazilian female
names is often used to highlight this woman’s commonness) discovers that
her “prince” is a pimp and that she is now his sex slave.
The problems with this myth are legion. What concerns us in the context
of this chapter, however, is its racialized content and the contexts in which
it is enunciated. As members of the Rio de Janeiro state and Brazilian
federal anti-trafficking committees, we have sat through numerous public
recitations of the Myth of Maria in the seminars, conferences, congresses,
and workshops dedicated to managing Brazil’s National Anti-Trafficking
Policy.
Two things have stood out on these occasions:
1) The majority of the people at these events are “white”,6 university-

educated, middle-class, and globally mobile.
2) They generally portray the victims of trafficking as the diametric
opposite of themselves: Black or Brown, lower class, with a low degree
of formal education, and inexperienced with international travel.
During these events, race-and class-charged messages are presented using

neutral terminology. Because of Brazil’s history, these do not usually refer
to the need to keep the country white and Others out, as they so often do
in the Global North. Instead, they reference the need to carefully manage
and restrain “non-whiteness” so that Brazil might successfully project itself
as a “civilized” nation.
The Myth of Maria provides a sketch of those Brazilian women who
are understood as being inadequate for representing Brazil on the global
stage. These women are cast as Black or Brown, poor, uneducated, and
engaged in the sale of sex. The neutral term used to describe them is vul-
nerable. Vulnerability is presented as a series of essentialist, reductionist
characteristics including color/race, class, gender, educational, and other
markers indicating who should not leave Brazil “for their own good”. The
explanatory power of vulnerability is thus confused with subjacent historical
racialized prejudices (Blanchette and Silva 2014).
The belief of many Brazilians that immigration to Europe might create
socio-economic ascension is ridiculed in the Brazilian anti- trafficking
movement as a “Cinderella story”. Anti-trafficking agents cast themselves
as the adult voice of reason demystifying this “fairy tale”, explaining to
Brazil’s Black and Brown Marias that they cannot travel overseas until
they are adequately prepared. “Adequate preparation”, in this context, is
presented as having a middle-class level of socio-economic status. In gen-
eral, the solution to the problem of socio-economic mobility is presented as
“hard work” and “sober habits” in Brazil. Not being Cinderella, poor Black
and Brown women should content themselves with hard work at home and
not dream of attending foreign balls.
Whore’s Passport: Respectability Politics Under

Surveilled Globalism
The Myth of Maria’s domination over the imagination of Brazil’s anti-
trafficking movement has resulted in a national anti-trafficking policy
that seeks to discourage vulnerable (poor Black or Brown) women from
migrating. This can be seen in the numerous federal and state educational
campaigns which focus on impressing upon women the dangers of inter-
national travel rather than educating them with regards to their rights as
Brazilian citizens (Blanchette and Silva 2014).
In the context of Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, where all Brazilians
are considered to be “mixed”, one can apprehend the anti-trafficking debate
as a peculiar form of what Patricia Hill Collins (following Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham, 1993) describes as the “politics of respectability”. As
Collins points out in the context of the African-American experience, this
has been historically characterized by cleanliness of person, temperance,
thrift, manners, and sexual purity. “In this context, many middle-class
Black women viewed the behavior of Black women migrants as socially

dangerous”:
Those who embraced a politics of respectability aimed to provide

dignity for working-class African-American women migrants who
led hard lives, yet the actual programs targeted towards working-
class women clearly advised them to emulate the respectability of
middle-class female role-models. Despite being embedded in racially
segregated communities, the politics of respectability basically aimed
for White approval. Achieving respectability pivoted on adhering to
standards of White femininity… Not only were these standards dif-
ficult for Black female industrial and domestic workers to achieve,
to the dismay of many middle-class reformers, many working-class
women rejected them.
(Collins 2004, 70–71)
Collins’ description recalls the attitudes of Brazilians (especially lighter

Brazilian women) caught in the ambiguities created by white supremacy,
Brazil’s ideology of mestiçagem, and foreign inability to recognize and inter-
pret the class and color markers which Brazilians employ to signify respect-
ability (whiteness).
Brazilians are not white in foreign eyes, an ideology which the myth of
racial democracy echoes. However, while Brazilian racial ideology is rooted
in white supremacy, it is not entirely congruent with Euro-American
notions of the same. Brazilians employ a panoply of social markers to estab-
lish social status though while the color line might be blurred in Brazil, it
exists. Again, a parallel might be drawn with “colorism” among African-
Americans, a comparison made by Brazilian sociologist Oracy Nogueira
in 1954: while no one is “really white” in Brazil, no Brazilian doubts that
there are lighter and darker Brazilians.
These nuances are not perceived by foreign border officials when
Brazilians pull out their passports, however. Or rather, while it is true that
skin colors are indeed perceived, the marker “Brazilian” is often louder
than any of the other markers Brazilian women employ to indicate respect-
ability. Thus, when the time comes to look at passports and separate the
“good women” from the “whores”, foreign migration officials often simply
toss Brazilian women into the latter category.
The result is the kind of experience which happened to our colleague,
Dr. Michelle Agnoleti, during a trip to Italy.
A police officer stopped me, asked for my passport and began to bom-
bard me with questions… Even though I had complied with all the
recommendations for travel –carrying enough money to cover my
expenses, a valid international credit card, a return ticket, paid hotel
reservations, and even a copy of my health insurance policy –I was vis-
ibly nervous. I said that I was a public employee in Brazil, on holiday
and that I wanted to see the land my ancestors came from. The police
officer then asked where I worked. When I responded, he asked if I could
prove it, dragging my suitcase over to the inspection area. I showed him
my Federal Police Employee ID card and he called over another officer
and showed the card to him. The second officer was more cordial and,
reading my name out loud, asked if I had an Italian passport and was
I a police officer? I said that I didn’t and wasn’t. The first officer then
asked what my job was with the Brazilian Federal Police? I responded,
with a mixture of poorly contained anger and fear, that I in fact issued
passports! He then asked me if I had made my own.
(Agnoleti 2014, 54–55)
Michelle’s baggage was then thoroughly reviewed by the officers who, in

the course of their investigations, discovered her diplomas (some in French
and English) and remarked with surprise on the fact that she was a doctoral
candidate for a sociology PhD.
Before returning my books to the bag, one of the officers brought them
up to his nose, one at a time, and blew across them. He finally said
I was free to go after an hour of vexing interrogations in Italian, with
me answering in English. Because I am a woman and a Brazilian, trav-
elling alone, he probably confused me with a prostitute and/or a drug
“mule” (Agnoleti 2014).
It should also be noted, in this context, that Dr. Agnoleti, although valenced
as “white” in Brazil, is almost certainly not seen that way overseas, being a
young woman with light brown skin and long black hair (see Figure 7.4).
Ever-increasing numbers of Brazilians are being stopped and interrogated
in this fashion, feeding a sense of revolt among white middle-class Brazilian
women regarding what they then term “foreign sexual objectification”.
Unfortunately, as was the case with African-American respectability pol-
itics in the early 20th century, this “revolt” is often translated into the
belief that the root of the problem lies in the fact that “too many women of
the wrong sort” are migrating.
This, then, is the Brazilian dilemma in a nutshell: in a world where
increased surveillance and racially engendered paradigms inform border
guards as to who can freely move across frontiers, wealthy and white
Brazilians are not perceived as such. Ironically, by adopting the anti-
trafficking paradigm pushed by the EU and U.S., which fixes “non-
whiteness”, femaleness, and southern hemispheric origins as “markers of
vulnerability to trafficking”, the self-same Brazilian elites who have been
at the forefront of the capillarization of the anti-trafficking struggle in
Brazil have ended up marking themselves. The resulting situation echoes
Dr. Michelle Agnoleti, Brazilian sociologist. Image courtesy of Michelle

Figure 7.4
Barbosa Agnoleti.
a shocking scene from the 2019 Brazilian hit film Bacarau, where two
Brazilian Federal police agents from “the developed south” are murdered
after failing to convince a band of U.S. Americans and Europeans of their
right to be considered as “white”. We would thus like to finish here with
the dialogue from that scene –a post-textual epigraph, if you will –as a sin-
cere warning to our Brazilian colleagues in the anti-trafficking movement;
a meditation on what their good intentions are helping create in a post-
liberal, necropolitical world, where south–north migrants are criminalized,
children caged, borders militarized, and walls built.
b1: We’re like you guys.

g1: Like us? They’re not white, are they? How could they be like us? We’re white.
You’re not white. They’re not white. Right…?
g2: I dunno, they… [lifts binoculars to look at agents on other side of table] well,
you know, they kinda look white. But they’re not. [Points at female agent.] Her
lips and her nose give it away, you know? More like white Mexicans, really.
….
[Gunfire.]7
Notes
1 Both cis-and trans-, but particularly transwomen.
2 In the present article, we use sex worker and prostitute more or less interchange-
ably to indicate women who openly sell sexual services. Whore has a more
complicated etymological history (see Blanchette and Silva 2018). Here, we
use it in its traditional sense to indicate “difficult women” and, in particular,
those women who claim their sexuality and behavior for themselves, as individ-
uals, and not merely as integral parts of reproductive units (i.e. families).
3 Presentations at “Migração, Tráfico, Trabalho Sexual e a Lei”, Campinas, São
Paulo, June 30th to July 4th 2019 and “Modern Marronages?” Project Opening
Seminar, Bristol, UK, May 17th 2019.
4 Doezema properly situates the root of Grittner’s ideas in Kai Erikson’s (1969,
cited in Doezema, 2010) notions of boundary crises.
5 As Laura Moutinho (2004) points out, race/color is relational in Brazil: circum-
stantial categories constantly (re)created in relation to other people.
6 For Brazilian values of “white”. This means that they will cheerfully claim
“mixed” ancestry when and if it interests them.
7 This is an edited version of the scene, which can be seen in its entirety, here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9u75ASrikc
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Chapter 8
Anti-Trafficking and Settler-

Colonial Discourses of Protection
The Coloniality of Racialized Interventions
Julie Kaye
Introduction
Leading up to the 43rd National Election in Canada, Conservative Party
leader, Andrew Sheer, engaged in a face-to-face interview with a family
member of the missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, trans,
and two-spirit persons, plus (MMIWG2S+). The family member, Meggie
Cywink of Whitefish River First Nation, raised questions about the
candidate’s plans for providing services for marginalized communities and
the Conservative Party’s commitment to supporting the grassroots fam-
ilies and communities facing the ongoing crisis of MMIWG2S+. In his
response, Andrew Sheer indicated,
[reconciliation] is something I think all governments, regardless of

political stripe [agree on] –we may disagree on how, but we all agree on
the why: we must as a federal government do more to raise the quality
of life for Indigenous Canadians; recognize the mistakes that were
done in the past. Our party supports things like the recommendations
from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry, on com-
bating human trafficking, and making sure our police services have the
resources they need to investigate.
(CBC News 2019)
His response points to a generalized consensus about the importance of rec-

onciliation in Canada, but also suggests the continued political palpability
of anti-trafficking discourses that are situated beyond party politics, yet
simultaneously placed alongside enforcement-oriented interventions.
The discursive linking of the National Inquiry into Missing and
Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), anti-trafficking, and
calls for increased resourcing of policing exemplifies the ongoing mapping
of anti-trafficking onto settler-colonial and racialized interventions in
Canada. Post-colonial examinations rightfully underscore the coloniality of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-11
120 Julie Kaye
humanitarian interventions (e.g. Maldonado Torres 2017); yet theorizing

about settler-colonialism (e.g. Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2016; Arvin et al.
2013) further contextualizes the foundational narrative of attempted geno-
cide and erasure alongside ongoing relations of resisting coloniality and the
continuation of structured dispossession.
The slippery nature of anti-trafficking is evident in settler-colonial
contexts wherein multiple forms of marginalization become discursively
linked with trafficking; in doing so, they elide the systemic transform-
ations required to address ongoing structural inequalities. This ability to
elide is precisely the concern of critical theorists of anti-trafficking studies
(Musto 2016, 261). This chapter explores how varying forms of systemic
inequality are read as trafficking in settler-colonial contexts and work to
reinforce settler-colonial interventions; in particular, how MMIWG2S+
becomes read as domestic trafficking, rather than as state-created violence
or genocide.1 In turn, it unearths how such approaches uphold the police
as benevolent and protective intervenors, while erasing the coloniality of
policing in the violence Indigenous and racialized women disproportion-
ately face in settler-colonial contexts.
Examining anti-trafficking campaigns in Canada, such as Operation
Northern Spotlight, and related settler-colonial legal interventions into
the lives of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two- spirit persons,
makes visible the intersections between racialized policing, discourses of
protecting Indigenous women and preventing the ongoing targeted vio-
lence of MMIWG2S+, and the role of anti-trafficking in policing the lives
of Indigenous and racialized women in settler-colonial contexts.
Settler-C olonialism and the Coloniality of

Anti-Trafficking
Characterized by structured dispossession through interrelated forms of
domination along the lines of economic, gendered, racialized, and state-
centric power (Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2016), settler-colonialism in
Canada reproduces violence against Indigenous people from the forcible
removal and confinement of Indigenous children in residential schools to
its reproduction in a stark overrepresentation of Indigenous and racialized
people criminalized and incarcerated in Canada (Monture 2006). According
to Arvin et al. (2013, 12), settler-colonialism “is a persistent social and pol-
itical formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place,
claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous
peoples that are there.” The state, in this ongoing action of “disappearing,”
is conceived as both the provider of humanitarian support and of carceral
intervention, enacted in a context of neoliberal retrenchment of social ser-
vices and welfare provisions, thereby fueling increased criminalization of
marginalized persons that correspond with the law and order functions
Coloniality of Racialized Interventions 121
of a “culture of control” (e.g. Balfour and Comack 2014; Bird and Kaye
2020). In such contexts of scarce social supports, social interventions fur-
ther exacerbate and reinforce rescue-driven dependencies that (re)produce
settler-colonial systems. Government and police interventions, in par-
ticular, continue to rely on recognition politics and discourses of protection
in ways that reproduce racialized patterns of policing and criminalization
and maintain a continued state of overrepresentation in criminalizing
institutions.
The discursive shift to emphasize “domestic trafficking,”2 for example,
corresponded with the advancement of an anti-trafficking framework that
renders all people who trade or sell sex as victims of sexual exploitation
and aims to criminalize all forms of prostitution, specifically targeting
Indigenous women and girls who trade and sell sex (Hunt 2015/16; Roots
and de Shalit 2016; Maynard 2016). This targeted approach, in turn,
reinforces rescue-driven interventions into the lives of Indigenous women
and girls involved in trading and selling sex and perpetuates settler-colonial
relations of power that position Indigenous bodies as objects of intervention
and white saviours as necessary interveners (de Shalit et al. 2014). As Hunt
(2015/16, 26) further details, “the trafficking framework reinforces power
relations that represent Indigenous women as dependent on the colonial
government and law to be ‘saved’ and ‘protected’ from physical and sexual
violence.” In turn, such dependency reinforces settler-colonial oppression
and the reproduction of violence in the lives of Indigenous women, girls,
trans, and two-spirit persons.
In this context, sexual exploitation and “domestic trafficking” have
become largely synonymous descriptors of Indigenous women involved in
a range of activities related to trading or selling sex. In de Shalit et al.’s
(2020, 6) analysis, they found Ontario-based organizations had “a per-
vasive trend … of viewing human trafficking synonymously with sexual
exploitation.” In this context, Canada’s National Action Plan to Combat
Human Trafficking, alongside a number of related reports (e.g. Standing
Committee on the Status of Women 2007; Native Women’s Associate
of Canada 2010; Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada 2017), specifically
identified Indigenous women and youth as a particularly “at risk” popula-
tion for human trafficking (Public Safety Canada 2012a); thereby making
Indigenous women specific targets of anti-trafficking efforts. At the same
time, such efforts remain predominately grounded in enforcement-based
interventions and the reproduction of claims for additional resourcing in
support of law enforcement (Maynard 2016). Anti-trafficking discourses
are thereby legitimized as community groups, activists, and academics
take up this framework in effort to make the varying forms of violence
faced by Indigenous women matter to the state and Canadians (Hunt
2015/16). As Hunt (2015/16, 25) details, anti-trafficking forms “one of
many efforts to recategorize violence against Indigenous women as worthy
122 Julie Kaye
of legal response.” However, in line with Hunt’s analysis, such efforts to

make the lives of Indigenous women matter to the Canadian state conceal
the role of the state in its enactment of ongoing colonial gendered violence,
including the violence of human trafficking.
Scholars taking their lead from Indigenous feminisms have shifted
attention to understanding violence against Indigenous women, as well
as rescue-driven anti-violence interventions, as sites of coloniality where
continuations of policies and processes of disappearing become visible (Dean
2015; Hunt 2015/16; Kaye 2017). Theorizing about settler-colonialism
and settler-colonial nation-building projects challenges assumptions of
state benevolence and neutrality. In Canada, such theorizing particularly
challenges portrayals of the nation as a liberal, multicultural, humani-
tarian, and democratic society (Thobani 2007). Rather, foregrounding
settler-colonialism emphasizes the continuities between early doctrines
of discovery and associated conceptions of the land as “empty” (i.e., terra
nullius) and the genocidal intent and coloniality of ongoing settler policies
and targeted efforts towards the erasure of Indigenous peoples, particularly
Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two-spirit persons.
By placing ongoing colonial gendered violence against Indigenous people
as the focal point, the role of the Canadian state as a trafficker of human beings
becomes visible, as does the problematic nature of anti-trafficking efforts that
seek increased powers of the state and greater legal authority to intervene in the
lives of Indigenous persons. Although Canada “says it is an anti-trafficker by
adding a sense of urgency to a long-standing anti-trafficking discourse” (Roots
and de Shalit 2016, 68), the nation-building project of settler-colonial Canada
was and remains premised on the activities underpinning human trafficking –
force, fraud, and manipulations. As Hunt (2008, 27) argues: “Forced migra-
tion, confinement in residential schools and facilitated sexual abuse has the
characteristics of what we now call human trafficking, although it is not
recognized as such” (also see Deer 2011; Bourgeois 2015; Kaye 2017). In
turn, anti-trafficking interventions that situate trading and selling sexual ser-
vices in relation to patriarchy and colonial legacies elide the coloniality of
anti-trafficking in the context of ongoing settler-colonial relations that affect
all aspects of gendered and racialized lives.
Theories of settler- colonialism and decolonial thought alongside
Indigenous refusal (Simpson 2016; Flowers 2015) and urban Indigenous
life and policing (Dhillon 2017) unsettle efforts to make Indigenous lives
matter to settler-colonial systems. Such theorizing identifies that recog-
nition efforts, often enacted through discourses of protection and rescue,
reinforce systemic forms of dehumanization and reproduce state-based
criminalization of Indigenous and racialized bodies. The pervasiveness of
settler-colonial enforcement-based and carceral interventions remains evi-
dent in examinations of anti-trafficking efforts and the coloniality of anti-
trafficking interventions.
The Discursive Linking of MMIWG2S+ and

Anti-Trafficking in a Settler-C olonial Context
Analyzing anti-trafficking discourses in the context of settler-colonial legal
systems underscores the ongoing perpetuation of colonial gendered violence
through legal interventions, particularly in the treatment of Indigenous
women and two-spirit persons who trade or sell sex (Hunt 2015, 16; Kaye
2017; Maynard 2016) as well as other areas facing the ongoing effects of
stigmatized marginalization and criminalization. In the context of the
emergence of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Canada, the testimony included in
the National Inquiry emphasized law enforcement perspectives of anti-
trafficking, and the exclusion of sex working voices and the experiences of
criminalized women. Although the crisis of MMIWG2S+came to light
as a direct result of the longstanding advocacy of persons who trade or sell
sex and their allies (Dean 2015) as well as advocacy from family members,
survivors, and grassroots mobilizers, there was little engagement in the
National Inquiry processes with Indigenous women with lived experience
of trading or selling sex.
The initial movement that alerted Canadians to the ongoing
MMIWG2S+crisis grew from individuals in Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside who aimed to draw attention to the “disappearing” of members
of their families and communities as well as highlight the compli-
city and failings of police in addressing the targeted violence. In par-
ticular, as Ferris (2015, 1) discusses “from 1975 until 2001, at least 65
women –more than half of whom were Aboriginal, and many of whom
were street-involved –disappeared from Vancouver, British Columbia.”
In spite of consistent advocacy from MMIWG2S+families, loved ones,
and people who trade and sell sex, police and government continually
ignored and, in doing so, naturalized the targeted violence. The report
following the British Columbia Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
further details how a “ ‘prevailing spirit of dismissal’ and ‘culture of dis-
interest’ explains how scores of marginalized women could ‘disappear’
without raising a deafening public outcry” (Oppal 2012). As the report
highlights, 33% of the cases of murdered and missing women reviewed
were Indigenous women, while Indigenous women comprised only 3% of
the province’s population. Although pointing towards systemic bias and
the role of police within a context of ongoing settler- colonial vio-
lence, the British Columbia Inquiry was similarly critiqued for failing
to adequately engage with individuals involved in trading and selling
sex and for not addressing the systemic racism and sexism underlying
the role of law enforcement in naturalizing the targeted violence. Many
MMIWG2S+families, loved ones, and advocates hoped a National
Inquiry would rectify this shortcoming.
124 Julie Kaye
After decades of advocacy from family members, survivors, and grassroots

mobilizers, formalized institutions began to take note of MMIWG2S+.
Political discourses surrounding the eventual launch of a National Inquiry
emphasized the importance of making Indigenous lives matter to Canadians
and, in turn, to colonial legal systems. Widespread grassroots mobiliza-
tion efforts solidified in a context of contesting numerous statements that
disregarded the ongoing crisis of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two-
spirit persons being disappeared and murdered in Canada. For example,
then Prime Minister Steven Harper’s approach to a National Inquiry
reinforced a “tough on crime” political agenda and reproduced Indigenous
people as problems to be solved through police and government interven-
tion. When asked about a National Inquiry in December of 2014, Harper
said, “Um it, it isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest … Our ministers
will continue to dialogue with those who are concerned about this.” He
further urged Canadians away from understanding MMIWG as a “socio-
logical phenomenon.” Significantly, Harper suggested Canadians “view it
as a crime” (Kaye and Béland 2014).
Viewed as a crime, efforts to address the crisis would require reinforce-
ment of police interventions. As Harper further suggested, “we’ve as you
know, taken strong laws to prevent and to punish, ah, criminal activity
which a lot of this is. We’ve taken, ah made significant investments into
ah preventative measures, particularly involving family violence measures
on reserves and elsewhere” (CBC News 2014). As the quote suggests, the
emphasis on responding to crime reinforces individualized culpability that
disproportionately result in the criminalization of Indigenous persons.
Kappo clearly responded with the analysis that Harper’s government was
“committed to making Canadians believe the violence is attributed only
to First Nation men, on reserves” (CBC News 2014). Indeed, Aboriginal
Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt suggested that unreleased Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) data indicates that Indigenous men
were responsible for 70% of cases of murdered Indigenous women (Barrera
2015) –a statement that was later reinforced by RCMP Chief Commissioner
Paulson (Galloway 2015). In addition to being based on unreliable data
that emphasizes solved homicides (Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence
Against Indigenous Women 2015), such an approach effectively removes
culpability from the Canadian state and deflects attention from the geno-
cidal nature of the MMIWG2S+crisis. In spite of such efforts to relocate
the problem as an “Indigenous problem,” international human rights
bodies, including the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights
(IACHR) (2014) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW) (2015), made clear Canada’s violation of
international human rights obligations towards Indigenous women and
reinforced the need for a comprehensive response from the Canadian gov-
ernment, including the establishment of a National Inquiry into missing
and murdered Indigenous women and girls as part of addressing ongoing

violence against Indigenous women and girls.
At the same time, the Conservative Government of Canada released
a National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking, which similarly
adopted a “tough on crime” policy agenda. As Vic Toews indicated in the
2012 plan,
As part of our Government’s longstanding commitment to protect the

vulnerable, tackle crime and safeguard Canadians and their families in
their homes and communities, we are taking action against these ter-
rible crimes … to be successful, governments must also work closely
with law enforcement, civil society, and others.
(Public Safety Canada 2012a)
The plan specifically connected human trafficking to MMIWG2S+under

the efforts at “detection, investigation and prosecution of traffickers” (25).
In particular, the plan called for “funding for the National Police Support
Centre for Missing Persons and the National tip website for Missing
Persons to ensure that law enforcement and the justice system meet the
needs of Aboriginal women” (26). Although such efforts point to a recog-
nition of the under-protection of Indigenous women in Canada and police
failures in cases of MMIWG2S+, such recognition remains problematic
in a context where Indigenous women are also over-criminalized and face
ongoing targeted violence in their relations with police.
As calls for a National Inquiry grew, police violence and the failures of
police to respond to cases of MMIWG2S+remained a constant theme and
continued consistently throughout the pre-Inquiry process. In February
of 2015, then Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, contested the conservative
approach to MMIWG2S+by making an appearance at an MMIWG2S+
family gathering with promises of a National Inquiry if he were elected.
These were welcomed promises after a period of continuous devaluation of
the existence of the crisis. In September 2016, the Government of Canada
launched a National Inquiry under Part of the Inquiries Act.
However, as the National Inquiry took shape, a stark omission of a
strong mandate to examine the role of police in the crisis became evident.
As Amnesty International (2016) noted, even though it violated Canada’s
international human rights obligations, there remained “no explicit man-
date to review policing policies and practices” and no explicit mandate
to “report on police and justice system practices related to the racialized
and sexualized violence that Indigenous women and girls experience.” The
Legal Strategy Coalition on Violence Against Indigenous Women (LSC)
(2018, 16) further indicated “the omission of a strong mandate to examine
police behaviour is very concerning given persistent and recognized failings
of police to protect Indigenous women.” In this, both police violence and
126 Julie Kaye
failures of police to protect Indigenous women and girls were elided by

Inquiry processes.
When it came to discussions of trafficking, the focus of expert testi-
mony admitted into the National Inquiry was almost entirely on police-
based resourcing and enhanced funding needed for police data collection
on human trafficking. This included testimony from RCMP Assistant
Commissioner Joanne Crampton who emphasized the “necessity of col-
laboration across multiple police jurisdictions in tackling trafficking
cases” (McKenzie-Sutter 2018), as well as pleas for additional resourcing
for Canadian policing services and the collection of policing data. The
Final Report of the National Inquiry into MMIWG delivers 231 Calls for
Justice for governments, social service providers, industries, institutions,
and Canadians in general (National Inquiry 2019). Although the Calls for
Justice put forward by the National Inquiry included the importance of
creating a “specific complaints mechanism about police for those in the
sex industry,” the calls on the whole advance an expanded role of police
(National Inquiry 2019, Calls for Justice 9.11, 22). These calls emerged
in a context where trafficking was conflated with all forms of trading
and selling sex while failing to adequately include the voices of individ-
uals engaged in the sale and trade of sex. In the context of excluding the
experiences of criminalized persons, anti-trafficking discourses and the
expert testimony of police representatives serve to mobilize more resources
for police-based responses while eliding the role of police in producing coer-
cive practices of colonial gendered violence and, particularly, trafficking of
Indigenous women.
Significantly, trafficking is directly referenced alongside sexual exploit-
ation in the Calls for Justice for “social workers and those implicated in
child welfare.” In particular, Call 12.12 states:
Engage in recruitment efforts to hire and promote Indigenous staff, as

well as to promote the intensive and ongoing training of social workers
and child welfare staff in the history of the child welfare system in the
oppression and genocide of Indigenous peoples, anti-racism and anti-
bias training, local culture and language training, sexual exploitation
and trafficking training to recognize signs and develop specialized
responses.
(National Inquiry 2019, Calls for Justice 12.12, 24)
There is an important discursive slip in this Call for Justice whereby the
Call implicates the state for perpetuating “oppression and genocide,” yet the
emphasis on trafficking and sexual exploitation is directed towards the devel-
opment of proper training in identification tools and formulating targeted
responses. By emphasizing the inclusion of Indigenous staff and training,
the focus of the Call is on recognition and inclusion in existing social work
and child welfare practices. By this logic, trafficking is read as a symptom
or legacy of historical oppressions rather than ongoing violence perpetrated

through a colonial state. In turn, such approaches lend themselves to the
identification of “at risk” individuals requiring intervention that invisibilize
ongoing structures of oppression that produce such risk, including the role
played by existing child welfare systems and structures of policing.
In Edmonton, for example, the Edmonton Police unit responsible for
prostitution related offences (previously the VICE Unit) made the discur-
sive shift to name themselves the “Human Trafficking and Exploitation
Unit.” Far from foregrounding the role of “state-sanctioned racism and
colonial violence in populating the survival sex industry” (Ferris 2015,
136), the shift reinforces notions of victimized women dependent on the
rescue of police and partner organizations. The Human Trafficking and
Exploitation Unit describes two key types of “sting operations” whereby
officers target purchasers of sexual services on the street and sex workers
advertising sex for sale online (Edmonton Police Service [EPS] 2015). The
approach reinforces conceptions of human trafficking as individual (at risk)
victims living (risky) lifestyles. In the words of Staff/Sergeant Dale Johnson,
the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Unit, the unit plays more than
an investigative role: “we want to be part of her leaving this lifestyle and
exiting this lifestyle for good” (EPS 2015). These discourses of settler-
colonial protection directly shape police interventions in the lives of those
trading and selling sex, particularly in determining who is deserving and
in need of saving, compared with those who are not. Missing and murdered
Indigenous women and girls are constructed as simultaneously “at risk”
while also remaining “forsaken” when it comes to police protection.
Given the dominance of enforcement-based interventions, the call to
justice points towards police–social worker partnerships. Of note, such
calls are explicitly identified in the Calls for Police Services. As Call to
Justice 9.7 indicates, police should “partner with front-line organizations
that work in service delivery, safety, and harm reduction for Indigenous
women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people to expand and strengthen police
services delivery.” In doing so, the role of child welfare, policing, and the
Canadian state elides critical inquiry. Moreover, the settler-colonial state
is reinforced as the primary intervention site for responding to human
trafficking. In this context, some organizations have initiated calls for a
national plan of action on trafficking of Indigenous women and girls in
order to address the ongoing crisis of MMIWG, resulting in the continued
conflation of the disappearing of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and two-
spirit persons with anti-trafficking discourse (ONWA 2019).
Settler-C olonial Interventions and the Coloniality of

Policing Anti-Trafficking
Police, alongside other criminal legal actors, have been implicated in con-
tributing to and perpetuating violence against Indigenous women and
128 Julie Kaye
girls, but are still positioned as the primary and appropriate responses to
such incidents (see Human Rights Watch 2013). Racialized policing and
police violence, particularly violence against Indigenous persons in the con-
text of settler-colonialism in Canada, have been well documented. While
positioning Indigenous women as “vulnerable,” what remains starkly
unaddressed is police accountability to the voices of the women who locate
the violence they experience in police-based practices and ongoing sys-
temic discrimination. Human Rights Watch (2013), for example, reported
the extent to which systemic bias has created impunity for police abuse of
Indigenous women in northern British Columbia. The report, Those Who
Take Us Away, documents violations of the rights of Indigenous women,
detailing experiences of
young girls pepper-sprayed and Tasered; a 12-year-old girl attacked by

a police dog; a 17-year-old punched repeatedly by an officer who had
been called to help her; women strip-searched by male officers; and
women injured due to excessive force used during arrest.
(Human Rights Watch 2013, 7–8)
The report further documents experiences of sexual assault by RCMP

officers, “including from a woman who described how in July 2012 police
officers took her outside of town, raped her, and threatened to kill her
if she told anyone” (Human Rights Watch 2013, 8). Although human
trafficking labels continue to elide such practices, the report specifies the
need for civilian-led accountability and questions the common practice of
police controlling the responsibly to investigate allegations made against
fellow members of the police.
The role of settler-colonial policing in reproducing violence against
Indigenous women remains particularly evident in many cases of
MMIWG2S+. As the Human Rights Watch report further indicates,
“the failure of law enforcement authorities to deal effectively with
the problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in
Canada is just one element of the dysfunctional relationship between
the Canadian police and Indigenous communities” (2013, 7). Alongside
such dysfunction, the report documents “not only how Indigenous
women and girls are under-protected by the police but also how some
have been the objects of outright police abuse” (Human Rights Watch
2013, 7). Such abuse requires attention in settler-colonial contexts where
the crisis of MMIWG2S+becomes increasingly discursively conflated
with human trafficking and corresponding pleas for increased funding
of enforcement- based responses. Beyond mistrust, reinforcing colo-
nial police systems and reproducing systemic violence as mechanisms
of protecting Indigenous women read as trafficked remains deeply
problematic.
In spite of recommendations for police accountability and oversight, in

2015, Indigenous women in the town of Val d’Or, Quebec went public
about numerous incidents of abuse, including sexual assault, by provincial
police between 2001 and 2015. In total, 21 Indigenous women and seven
Indigenous men filed complaints of sexual assault, excessive use of force,
and shared their experiences of ongoing practices of forced dislocation by
the police. After an initial investigation, the Crown prosecutors angered
observers by determining they would not lay any charges. The message
remained clear as the National Inquiry positioned enforcement responses
as expert witnesses in the areas of violence and human trafficking, while
omitting the role of a systemic examination of police systems in producing
such violence.
MMIWG2S+ and Coordinated Anti-Trafficking

Policing Projects
The testimony of RCMP Assistant Commissioner Joanne Crampton at the
National Inquiry into MMIWG advocated for more police-based resources
to address the “huge under-reported number” of trafficked Indigenous
women and girls. The testimony identifies the growth of the Human
Trafficking National Coordination Centre (HTNCC) in Canada. Initially
founded in 2005, the HTNCC was located within the Immigration
and Passport Branch. Canadian anti-trafficking efforts shifted focus to
“domestic” trafficking alongside extensive efforts at awareness raising
across sectors. As Crampton’s testimony indicates, “in recent years, the
national coordination centre conducted several mass distributions of the
‘I’m not for sale’ awareness campaign, and provided training and awareness
sessions to law enforcement officials, prosecutors, government employees,
non-governmental organizations, youth, and Indigenous communities.”
The campaign, including a video detailing sexual exploitation recruit-
ment scenarios, was launched alongside Canada’s National Action Plan
to Combat Human Trafficking and was particularly targeted towards
the sexual exploitation of youth in an effort to “help protect our children
from falling victim” (Vic Toews, cited in Public Safety Canada 2012b).
Alongside awareness raising sessions, the RCMP also completed a threat
assessment, called Project Safekeeping, that further identified domestic
human trafficking for sexual exploitation in Canada as the primary threat
requiring anti-trafficking intervention. This finding paved the way for
coordinated anti-trafficking policing efforts in Canada.
Responding to the identified threat of domestic trafficking, police
interventions emphasized identification through coordinated policing
operations. Testifying to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human
Rights (JUST), the Assistant Commissioner classified how anti-trafficking
efforts are coordinated through the HTNCC and are exemplified by
130 Julie Kaye
multiple editions of Operation Northern Spotlight. According to her tes-

timony, the operation provided “a coordinated law enforcement outreach
operation to proactively engage vulnerable persons who are in the sex
industry, in an effort to identify and assist those who are being exploited
or at risk of human trafficking” (JUST 2018). The coordinated nature of
such interventions points further to how enforcement-based approaches are
reinforced by social intervention efforts (also see Musto 2016). Operation
Northern Spotlight, among others, specifically includes policing
partnerships with social and victim serving agencies. As Crampton’s testi-
mony further identifies, police coordinate
…with victims’ service, various social services, including housing,

and various departments, even through the identification of sex trade
workers who are at risk as well … We work with partners during that
project to make sure that the supports are there for anyone who does
self-identify as a victim, or as being trafficked.
Of note, the Operation emphasizes identification of trafficked persons

through rescue-orientated operations that target sex trade industries and
approach individuals involved in trading and selling sexual services to self-
identify as victims.
In settler-colonial contexts of over-policing and under-protection, such
coordinated anti-trafficking investigations have been denounced as a form
of violence against individuals who trade and sell sex. In particular, the
Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform (2018) describes Operation
Northern Spotlight as form of deceptive entrapment whereby an officer
poses as a client and then appears with several colleagues “ostensibly to
ensure that no coercion is taking place, but with the impact of intimi-
dating sex workers, violating their right to privacy and putting their con-
fidentiality and safety at risk.” In this way, the Operation is presented
as a form of rescue, yet enacts such efforts through an arbitrary form of
detention and deception that serves to reinforce distrust of enforcement
personnel. The Alliance details that “sex workers across Canada who are
victims to this Operation also report feeling confused, frightened, stressed
and traumatized after these interactions with police, followed by feelings
of mistrust in the overall police system” (Canadian Alliance for Sex Work
Law Reform 2017). As is clear, the rescue operations produce many of the
described effects of human trafficking violations.
Nonetheless, through such coordinated efforts, a self- reinforcing
system of ongoing settler-colonial intervention enables the prioritization
of targeting of individuals who trade and sell sexual services and the sex
industry in general under the auspices of the identification of trafficked per-
sons. In particular, social service agencies rely on enforcement interventions
and coordinated efforts, while also remaining severely underfunded as
anti-trafficking resources are predominately directed towards enforcement-

based interventions (de Shalit et al. 2014). Diane Redsky highlights this
cycle in her testimony to the National Inquiry into MMIWG:
Sex trafficking is becoming more profitable for more people and that’s
getting back to that sex industry again. Probably a really important
impact is a lack of money now available for people on the frontlines
doing the work with survivors of sexual exploitation, survivors of sex
trafficking and there’s almost no money available specifically through
the National Action Plan and probably the largest lost opportunity is
national coordination.
(National Inquiry 2019)
Although social serving agencies also require critical decolonial analysis,

enforcement-based coordination currently relies on social service agencies
who remain underfunded and incapable of challenging the reproduction
of violence experienced through interventions in addition to frontline ser-
vices on a day-to-day basis.
Conclusion
Although an in-depth, systemic examination of policing was omitted from
the processes adopted by the National Inquiry into MMIWG, the Calls for
Justice include recommendations paralleling numerous previous reports that
point to systemic racism upholding the coloniality of Canadian policing
and legal systems in general. In particular, Call 9.11 for police services aims
to “develop and implement guidelines for the policing of the sex industry
in consultation with women engaged in the sex industry, and create a spe-
cific complaints mechanism about police for those in the sex industry.”
Even though National Inquiry processes were unable to adequately develop
recommendations with individuals engaged in trading and selling sex, the
Call for Justice remains an important action for addressing ongoing settler-
colonial violence and genocide in Canada. As the LSC (2018) identify, “vio-
lence against Indigenous women and girls cannot be properly addressed
without a sustained and concerted effort to reconfigure the basic assumptions
upon which our institutions, and the individuals that constitute them,
operate.” Beyond exemption from the “to serve and protect” mandates of
police services, Indigenous women face disproportionate violence and exces-
sive force from settler-colonial police forces that were founded on mandates
of elimination and continue to operate towards erasure of Indigenous per-
sons from white, Canadian spaces. Critical explorations of anti-trafficking
require ongoing attentiveness to the (re)production of colonial interventions,
such as the prioritization of enforcement-based interventions. As the discur-
sive linking of MMIWGT2S+with anti-trafficking attests, anti-trafficking
132 Julie Kaye
discourses and interventions continue to elide the systemic transformation

necessary to stop the perpetuation of genocide in contexts of ongoing settler-
colonial and gendered violence.
Notes
1 The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls (2019) describes the targeted and systemic violence
Indigenous women and girls face from Canada as genocide.
2 Since the implementation of Canadian anti-trafficking laws in 2005, discursive
emphasis on the trafficking of migrant women has shifted to emphasize the
trafficking of Indigenous women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploit-
ation (Hunt 2015/16; Kaye 2017).
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Chapter 9
The Jaula and Racialization

of the Amazon
Reflections on Racism and Geopolitics
in the Struggle Against Human Trafficking
in Brazil
José Miguel Nieto Olivar and Flávia Melo
Introduction
The present chapter deals with the capillary forms of Brazilian anti-
trafficking policies in the Amazon and their possible relationships to the
practices and dynamics of racism. Our argument is that these policies
actively participate in the performative updating of a legacy of colonial
governance technology related to the racialized management of Amazonian
territory. This technology of governance we refer to is old and multidi-
mensional. It has been going through a process of irregular construction,
revision and reinvention from the times of the first European colonization
of the Amazon (16th century). From then until now, in different forms, its
principal agents have been the strategic relations between the State (colo-
nial, imperial or republican, national or transnational), diverse armed and
explorational forces, different mercantile and commercial agents focused
on the exploration of natural resources, and, very important in our case,
Christian institutions (mainly the Catholic Church) (Andrello 2006;
Zárate 2008; Wright 2005).
So here, race and racism refer to “white”/neocolonial management of
structurally unequal relations with “indigenous,” “local” and certain “for-
eign” peoples, since the Amazon is at one and the same time the terri-
tory with the greatest presence of indigenous peoples and territories in
Brazil and a huge Brazilian international border with seven other countries
(including France, as Guyane is still a French colonial territory). Those
relations are within the framework of a historical process, constituted by
multiple forms and layers of colonialism, frontierization (Grimson 2003;
Albuquerque 2015) and some particular version of “human rights” man-
agement, that has had indigenous populations and Amazonian territory
itself as its primary targets. In terms of Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work, it
could be thought of as part of the overrepresentation of the Man and his
actualizations in (post)colonial territories. In this paper colonial refers both
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-12
Racialization of the Amazon 137
to a certain “coloniality” of power and of social relations (Quijano 1991;

Wynter 2003), and to effective, contemporary and localized processes
of neocolonial governmentality. Those processes, in the Amazon, are
composed of at least three levels of colonial experiences: first, a military,
exploitative and extractive experience; second, a religious, civilizatory and
paternalistic one; and, finally, one with more liberal, secular and humani-
tarian characteristics.
We employ race in its Brazilian sense: the combination of more or
less contingent and variable historical, biological, cultural, chromatic,
phenotypic and stylistic symbols and, especially in this case, their inter-
section with provincial or regional origins, and structurally based in
diverse forms of racism arising from a very cultural and localized idea of
“whiteness” (Gonzales 1984; Schucman 2010; Sansone 1996; Carneiro
2017) and humanity (Wynter 2003). For the purpose of this analysis
we put this idea of race and its associated racisms into a dialogue with
the idea of commodity racism mobilized by McClintock in her analysis of
the British Empire. “Commodity racism –in the specifically Victorian
forms of advertising and photography, the imperial Expositions and the
museum movement… –converted the narrative of imperial Progress into
mass-produced consumer spectacle” (1995, 33). According to McClintock
(1995), on top of the practices of scientific racism the Empire mobilized
an emergent but powerful propaganda to transform race into a special
item of mercantile exchange and to transform whiteness into cleanness
and civilization (particularly associated with soap marketing, the subject
studied by McClintock), and then in a kind of ontological fetish/com-
modity. Commodity racism would go beyond scientific racism, expanding
its possibilities through commercial and domestic consumption of
things and images throughout the Empire. In the case of the contem-
porary Amazon, this dialogue is only possible if we think of the march
of post-colonial governments and neocolonial and humanitarian tech-
nologies of governmentality. That is, the images of the racialization of
the Amazon that are created and consumed by the anti-trafficking cam-
paign are related to the specific economic circuit and the public arenas
of Christian-based “white” humanitarianism. It is the old merchandising
of “nature,” “culture” and “civilization” associated with the Amazon, not
biological or sociological discourses, that nourishes the field of race and
racism in the anti-trafficking campaign.
As a narrative strategy, our analysis unfolds from an ethnographic scen-
ario that took place in 2015 in one of the cities, which leads us directly
to the fetish-image of the jaula (the cage). From this, we move to out-
lining some of the elements of an extensive retrospective on how trafficking
in persons arrived in the Amazon. We will pay special attention to the
Catholic Church, because acts and actors related to this institution have
been leading the anti- trafficking campaign in the Amazon. We will
138 José Miguel Nieto Olivar and Flávia Melo
show how regional history, local culture, stereotypes about the sexuality
of Amazonian women, and a range of prefabricated and self-reiterative
conclusions have been mobilized in this “struggle.” Finally, in close dia-
logue with earlier analysis, we analyze the racist configurations and effects
of a certain approach to Amazonian history and culture.
The data, reflections and analyses that make up this chapter combine
and cross-fertilize experiences produced by different modes of insertion
and temporalities experienced by the authors in the Amazonian cities of
Tabatinga and São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Both cities are located in the
northwest Amazon, the first on the upper Amazonas/Solimões River, the
second on the upper Negro River; they mark the borderland region of
Brazil with Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. The most specific ethnographic
data on the subject come from these cities and from the 2010–2016 period,
the time when José Miguel conducted interrupted ethnographical field-
work on transborder sexual markets (including specific work on anti-
trafficking in 2013; see Piscitelli 2015) and when Flávia Melo was living
in the region, teaching on and researching gender violence and public pol-
icies at the Federal University of Amazonas. Reviewing field notes and
returning to the Brazilian literature on trafficking in persons, we seek to
offer new contributions to the debate, set in the Amazonian context and
mobilizing racism as a category of analysis.
The Cage
Our starting point is a conversation that took place in September 2015.
Arriving in one of the cities where we conducted our fieldwork, we met
Dona Graça. She is not indigenous, but could be: she is “cabocla,”1 or a
“daughter of the land,” born in a riverside community along the Upper
Rio Solimões. Dona Graça was wearing a t-shirt from the 2014 Catholic
Church of Brazil’s Brotherhood Campaign,2 the theme of which was human
trafficking. She is a catechist for the Church and tells us that the campaign
and her participation in it were important to her understanding “this”
problem. “Which problem?” one of us asks. “Ah … the people who leave
and are arrested there… Or who are taken elsewhere.” At no point does
she mention the word “trafficking,” nor exploitation. She talks about jail,
about leaving. We want to know more about this question, but Dona Graça
says that as she had recently become employed, she could no longer attend
the courses. She tells us that Socorro, the Catholic missionary who leads the
courses, might be able to tell us more.
Dona Graça tells us that she participated in the march for the Campaign’s
launch: “I went to the cage, along with my daughter.” We thought that
we hadn’t understood what she had said. We ask again and she confirms.
“Yes, there was a cage and my daughter and I went inside it.” The cage
was carried on the shoulders of some local men along the main avenue of
the city, an avenue lined with small trees, part of the aesthetics of 1970s
Brazilian military colonization. The men carried the cage along the asphalt
road under the fierce Amazon afternoon sun for over an hour.
According to Dona Graça, the purpose of the cage was to feel the “drama
of the people who get stuck like that when they leave the country….” It
was a very strong feeling, she confirms, and insists that “we were supposed
to feel what these people go through… The thirst, the heat.”
“And you’ve met someone who has been in a cage like this or something
similar?”
“No.”
“But does a lot of this… ‘trafficking’ –we said –happen here?”
Dona Graça “believes” so, because traveling and “getting out” of the city
is very easy, even if one doesn’t have documents. In spite of all the military
and police controls, and of the customs at the airport, these are very “open”
borders, as people say. It is actually a large transborder region, with many
cities and communities of each country, and a network of dry and fluvial
paths and roads. To explain this Dona Graça says that her own daughter,
the one who went with her into the cage, “disappeared” when she was 13.
She went to Manaus without saying anything to her mother. “She traveled
on a document that was not hers!” The daughter called saying that she
was in Manaus, that her mother was not to worry, and that she would be
back soon.
How did the cage come into the anti-trafficking propaganda in a very
“open” borderland with no systematized data of “human traffic” or unoffi-
cial caging? The cage was not only in Tabatinga, and it was not just a cage
(see Blanchette and Silva, Chapter 7, in this volume).3 Those symbols of
imprisonment became a strong fetish in the anti-trafficking propaganda
to translate, paradoxically, what people do and say about mobilities, about
exploitative forms of work and of migration, about violence in the context
of migration. But when the propaganda arrives at the local level, when it
is sited in specific places, bodies and relations that we can identify ethno-
graphically, and is linked with narratives and memories as was expressed
by Dona Graça, other questions arise. Who goes to the fetishist cage, and
how? Who does not?
The conversation takes place in the apartment we rented in the city.
Dona Graça occasionally helps us with housework. She serves herself cold
water, walking between the kitchen and the pantry, clearly uneasy with
the conversation about her daughter’s “disappearance.” There is silence.
A little while later, Dona Graça gets even more restless. “She was taking
drugs to Manaus… Now can you imagine my anguish? I told her to come
back soon! Oh, my daughter, I walk around in this city with my head held
high and you do that to me?” Was that story known by the missionary
Socorro? Was this story important or significant to the decision to put
them in the cage and put on that public display on trafficking?
Political Arrangements Locating Trafficking in

the Amazon
Olivar (2016) has shown how the effective arriving of anti-trafficking in
the Brazilian Amazon borderlands was forged over the second decade of
the 21st century and was the result of the articulation of at least three
forces: the growth and expansion of the national and transnational lobby
of the anti-trafficking campaign; the gradual intensification of defense and
security discourses over Brazilian borderlands; and the particular civilizer
disposition of diverse agents of governmentality in thinking/imagining
the geographic alterity made up of borders-and-the-Amazon. These forces
connected in the impressive capillarity4 and multi-level interests of the
transnational Catholic Church.
To understand how borders-and-the-Amazon were linked with human
trafficking at the national political level it is important to understand the
capillary arrival of the anti-trafficking campaign in a specific borderland,
and to consider the associated colonial racialization process. Here are some
pieces.
In the referential Survey on Trafficking in Women, Children, and
Adolescents in Brazil -PESTRAF (Leal and Leal 2002), Brazil’s “borders”
and its “northern region” (the Amazon) are situated as areas of primary con-
cern in terms of public security.5 It lists (but does not describe or analyze)
some 76 national, international and transcontinental “trafficking routes”
in the northern region of Brazil, out of the 241 that it claims exist in the
country. The report also mentions the “geographical and cultural features
of the Amazon, their history and the plans for their development” (Leal and
Leal 2002, 77–78) as determinants that “favor” trafficking:
In the Amazon Region, migration in search of temporary and fast-

earning job opportunities is for, many people (and especially for poor
women, via the sex market) one of the few options available to escape
poverty. With the high profits involved and fragile state presence and
corruption, organized crime has moved into the region through the
smuggling of gold, weapons, drugs and other operations. A scenario
has thus been constructed in which trafficking was being incorporated into the
discourse and local culture as inevitable.
(LEAL 2002, 80 emphasis ours)
Following this, the Brazilian NGO Sociedade de Defesa dos Direitos

Sexuais da Amazônia (SODIREITOS), together with the Global Alliance
Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) and Rede Latino- americana e
Caribenha da Aliança Global Contra Tráfico de Mulheres (REDLAC),
conducted the Trinational Survey on Trafficking in Women from Brazil and
the Dominican Republic for Suriname (SODIREITOS-GAATW/REDLAC
2008). The fundamental concern of these NGOs was “trafficking in women

for sexual exploitation,” particularly in the state of Pará (East Amazon).
This trinational research report does not problematize ethnic-racial issues
and, when it vaguely mentions them, employs them to reiterate a historical
antecedent that sees poverty and slavery as the origins, not of trafficking,
but of mobility itself, generically designated in the report by the category
migration and originally associated with “difficulties and the lack of oppor-
tunities (…) wars, slavery and the use of women as sexual objects. During
colonial times, Indigenous and African women were trafficked as slaves
to provide free labor, slave reproduction, and to serve as sexual objects”
(SODIREITOS-GAATW/REDLAC 2008, 156, our emphasis).
Many things can be analyzed in this piece as part of the construction
of a discursive and imaginative context about borders, the Amazon and
trafficking. Particularly, we can see the formative entanglement that
mutually creates “trafficking” and “Amazonia.” We also see the ideo-
logical association of migration with violence (including sexual in terms of
“objectification of women”) and the (a)historic equivalence made between
the processes of enslavement of African and indigenous people.
The framework of the construction of trafficking as an issue associated
with the Amazon and the borders is related, too, to the reinvigoration of
Brazil’s concerns over its international borders in both state and federal
governments during the first decade of the 21st century (Brasil 2010;
Hirata 2015). This reinvigoration gave the Amazon pride of place in the
discursive and logistic strengthening of defense and public security forces,
and employed trafficking of persons as one of its key arguments in this
endeavor.
As part of the National Strategy for Public Border Security (ENAFRON)
and in concordance with Brazil’s Plans for Confronting Human Trafficking,6
the National Secretariat of Justice (SNJ), together with the European
organization the International Centre for Migration Policy Development
(ICMPD) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),
prepared the Inquiry into Trafficking in Persons in Border Areas (Nacional
Secretariat of Justice Brasil 2013). The methodology employed had been
earlier used by the ICMPD in Europe and was based on research in the capital
cities of states with international borders, not in border towns or frontiers,
and relied almost exclusively on secondary sources, which it treated like
primary sources: journalists, researchers, NGOs, state agents and others.
Scholars with relevant work on the themes were originally contacted firstly
to develop the survey but, understanding the unnegotiable methodology
and the predetermined conclusions of the proposal, they refused to partici-
pate. Members of organizations who were interviewed during the research
and researchers who participated in the diagnosis leveled harsh criticisms,
in private, at the “unethical” ways in which information was managed in
order to reaffirm the discourse of trafficking and the “vulnerability” of
Brazil’s border regions and populations. Despite all this, the research paper
was quickly released, used for “training” and became a required reference
in government policy networks.
On this empirical path, where trafficking and the Amazon intersected
substantially, it is essential to pay attention to agencies associated with
confronting violence against women. The National Pact to Confront
Violence against Women (Brasil 2007) was an intersectoral policy plan led
by the Secretariat of Policies for Women of the Presidency of the Republic.
The Pact was initially structured across four areas: (1) the implementation
of Law 11340/2006 (known as the Maria da Penha Law); (2) the protec-
tion of sexual and reproductive rights and coping with the feminization
of AIDS; (3) the promotion of the human rights of women in prison; and
(4) the struggle against sexual exploitation and trafficking in women.
As we can see, human trafficking –restricted, in policy terms, to trafficking
in women –was considered one of the key forms of gender-based violence that
Brazil then faced and the struggle against it was understood to be the struc-
turing axis of national policy (Forum de Mulheres de Manaus 2009, 11). In
the states of Pará and Amazonas the effects of this policy were quickly revealed
over the following years, mainly through international seminars, the creation
of service posts, and the publication of booklets on the subject of human
trafficking. In 2009, as part of this process, the Permanent Forum of Women
of Manaus, a congregation of 36 women’s rights groups “founded on fem-
inist principles,” developed the project Connection Manaós –Articulation
of the Network to Combat the Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking of Girls,
Adolescents and Women in Manaus/AM (FMM 2009), including the border
cities of Tabatinga and São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The Forum de Mulheres de
Manaus had a close connection with Caritas, an important Catholic organiza-
tion that, in the following years, subsidized a series of trafficking prevention
projects throughout Brazil.
It was thus through the linkage of public security, borders, the Amazon,
trafficking and violence against women that the “incorporation” of human
trafficking into “local culture” in the Amazon took place. The book Tráfico
de Mulheres na Amazônia (Trafficking in Women in the Amazon: Torres and
Oliveira 2012), according to the authors, consisted of a survey of ten closed
questions carried out among 171 people who participated in a public
hearing on trafficking of persons in Manaus. The book attempts to affirm
the Amazon’s (and Amazonian women’s) special and particular vulner-
ability to trafficking based on “social determinants,” among which gender
and the “ethnic origin” of the Amazonian population in relation to colo-
nial asymmetries stand out, with the author’s emphasizing the desires of
the “conquistador hosts” regarding the indigenous “maidens” (Torres and
Oliveira 2012, 95–97).
The book updates an entire mythological- conceptual perspective
regarding the Amazon (Serje 2005), which idealizes/ dehumanizes the
women of the region. These –fundamentally described as indigenous,

naive and “maidenly” –are situated between two stereotypes: that of the
helpless victim of sexual objectification (as if the time of conquest had
dragged on, unchanged, to the present day) and the mythically heroic and
superior Amazonian warriors (as if the social organizations and cosmol-
ogies of the Amazon owed some debt to Latin mythologies) (Torres 2016;
Torres and Oliveira 2012). For a few years, the Tráfico de Mulheres… was
widely publicized and used in awareness-raising anti-trafficking activities
in the Amazon. One of its authors actively participated in the training
process and also wrote media articles and took part in other forms of social
dissemination, becoming a “specialist.” More recently, she has become an
important reference on the subject for high Catholic Church officialdom
and is nowadays representing the country in events organized by the
Vatican, including the very important Synod of Bishops of 2019, focused
on the Amazon.7 So today this perspective of traffic and the region is part
of the Vatican’s official statements about the Amazon.
From The Preparatory Document for the Synod:
The most recent migratory displacements within the Amazon region

have been characterized, above all, by the movement of indigenous
people from their native lands to the cities. (…) This, furthermore,
leads to the exploitation of Amazonian populations, who become
victims of the changing values of the global economy, for which profit
has higher value than human dignity. One example of this is the dra-
matic increase in trafficking in persons, especially women, for the
purpose of sexual and commercial exploitation. They thus lose their
leading role in their communities’ processes of social, economic, cul-
tural, ecological, religious, and political transformation.8
Colonial Racism, Humanitarianism and

Capillarity: Upgrading Missionary Power in
the Amazon
Between late 2013 and early 2014, the anti-trafficking struggle gained
discursive, institutional and practical space in small and medium-sized
Amazonian cities in states such as Pará and Amazonas (Olivar 2016;
Piscitelli 2015). The key to this insertion was the link between women’s
organizations, actors and institutions in the justice and social assistance
sectors and, in particular, the Brazilian Catholic Church, via the 2014
Fraternity Campaign (Brotherhood and Human Trafficking).
This is the point in time when the public performance of Christian
atonement of the “cabocla” Dona Graça and her “missing” [suspected]
daughter took place. The spectacle was coordinated by Socorro, a 50-year-
old “white” intellectualized member of the urban middle classes, a former
leftist political leader in a major city of southeast Brazil who decided to

spend some time as a Catholic missionary in a city in inner Amazonas.
Socorro was not in the cage, nor were any “white” or foreigner women.
They were the ones who kept elevated the ideals of “being/power/truth/
freedom” (Wynter 2003). During 2013 and 2015 Socorro created local and
cross-border networks to combat human trafficking. These networks had
their nexus in, and fed into, the Rede Um Grito Pela Vida (the Scream for
Life Network (RGPV)).
According to the description of itself, the RGPV is an inter-congregational
network composed of “over 250 Catholic religious congregations.” It is
part of the “Talitha Kum –the International Network of Consecrated Life
Against Trafficking in Persons” and it is present in 23 of the 26 Brazilian
states. Based on the Palermo Protocol guidelines and PESTRAF data,
RGPV considers human trafficking to be “an assault on human dignity,
a serious violation of human rights, a crime that undermines freedom,
commodifies and kills lives.” Its mission is to “raise awareness, empower
multipliers, inform, mobilize, denounce, build partnerships, and fight for
public policies to prevent and combat trafficking in persons.”
In recent years, the Network has been a major player in combating
trafficking in persons throughout Brazil and particularly on the Amazonian
border –its geopolitical and economic base. The Network has a leading role
in promoting training activities, producing informational and pedagogical
materials (pamphlets, videos, booklets, games), and has political impact
on the Government of the State of Amazonas (especially the Secretariat of
Justice and Human Rights).9
In an apocryphal text published on the organization’s website, we
find an exemplary excerpt on the relationship produced by the intersec-
tion of concepts such as human trafficking, sexual exploitation, prosti-
tution and nature, which, in the case of the Amazon, acquires special
relevance:
In this text, we will examine the mode of trafficking in women for

the purpose of sexual exploitation, because we understand that just as
nature is exploited, violated and disrespected in its rights, so too the
woman trafficked for sexual exploitation is offended in her dignity as
a creature.10
Explicitly assuming a feminist perspective (in a so-called “ecofeminist

approach”), the text reiterates an important Catholic discursive strategy
employed from Pope Benedict XVI to Pope Francis (2015).11 The protec-
tion of both nature and women, as part of divine creation, is a mission of
the Church that understands as an “integral ecology,” part of its responsi-
bility for caring for and protecting the divine legacy on Earth. Nature is
then mobilized along with “history,” “geography,” “culture” and “women”
to compose this complex device of geopolitical and colonial determination

called “human trafficking.”
The increasing prominence of the Network has facilitated a change of
focus and the sharpening of new targets and strategies. In other work (Olivar
et al. 2015; Olivar 2016) we have shown some of the effects of the local
activities of the Fraternity Campaign in Tabatinga in terms of national and
ethnical segregation, and intensification of control, surveillance and repres-
sion over young, local, poor and indigenous peoples, especially women and
LGBT people. The focus was on specific foreigners (Peruvians) and sexual
practices and economies of local young people. Over the last four years it
had been possible to see two specific ways in which “this problem” was
posed and “culturally” situated, mainly through the work of the RGPV: in
disappearances and servitude.
The “disappearances” of young women occupied an important space
in the capillary discourses against trafficking, as can be seen in Dona
Graça’s story and in the booklet O Sumiço de Carolina (“Carolina’s
Disappearance”), published by the RGPV. Created and funded by the
RGPV through multiple donations from (among others) private cath-
olic schools in the city of Manaus, the booklet tells the story of a poor
“cabocla” girl (probably ten years old), who “disappears.” Her “dis-
appearance,” which mobilizes a series of explanations about what human
trafficking is, turns out to be just a childish misconception (she was
hiding inside a piece of furniture), but creates “visibility” for a supposed
case of “sexual exploitation.”
According to what we were told by some people who participated in the
preparation of the booklet, the story was written in such a way as to main-
tain significant ambiguity in its possible interpretations, thus going beyond
trafficking. In the booklet, no consolidated data on trafficking in persons
in the Amazon was provided by RGPV. In this way, it would be possible
to use the booklet to encourage people to identify –and emotionally link
with trafficking –any kind of violence or misfortune involving the bodies
of girl-children, related to mobility, sexuality, kinship arrangements, or
other practices of “local culture.” The tripod that supports the primer is the
same that has been consolidated as the Brazilian and capillary version of the
fight against human trafficking: trafficking –sexual exploitation –sexual
abuse. This tripod, intensely racialized and obviously gendered, becomes
complete (as can be seen in photographs taken by the RGPV team12) when
taken in conjunction with the prevailing European whiteness among the
missionaries. Finally, the primer was massively circulated and used in the
Brazilian Amazon, and was even translated into Spanish. However, in 2019
it was completely deleted from RGPV’s social networks, and is no longer
available for download.
The strategic use of “disappearances” by the RGPV connects with
social dynamics in some cities of the Amazon. As in the case of Dona
Graça’s daughter, we would see during our fieldwork in these cities that
“disappearances” generally involved short trips by adolescent women,
without prior permission from their parents, to cities in the region, with
the girl returning at a later date, without large amounts of money and
without visible signs of violence or abuse. Certainly, in some cases, we
know of explicit narratives of short trips to nearby villages or towns for
“parties” or on invitation, which resulted in sexual assaults (we also heard
reports of such violence in the city and even at “home”).
The active and discreet participation of young people aged 15 and over
in drug trafficking is one reason for such “disappearances.” The north-
west Amazon is a very important region for the transnational traffic of
cocaine. Some cities are strongly marked by this commerce and the “war on
drugs” (including the massive presence of military), and the flow of small
or medium amounts of drugs (and money) have been constitutive of the
cities from the 1980s. In the case of some Brazilian cities of the Amazonian
border, the participation of young people in the transportation of small
amounts of drugs is not primarily forced, mistaken nor violent. The same
thing is true regarding the participation of young cis-and trans-women
and gay men who take short trips to engage in beauty contest circuits,
prom shows or economically mediated sexual encounters.
The other concept we find in this recent construction of trafficking is
“domestic servitude.” This notion is the object of another RGPV primer,
Na Trilha da Maria: Armadilhas Invisíveis (“On the Trail of Mary: Invisible
Traps”13). In it, the RGPV presents a new political and economic agenda
for human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Maria is similar to Carolina,
but with markedly darker skin and more indigenous features. She is an
absolutely passive and victimized subject, sent by her mother (an under-
nourished pregnant woman with many children to care for) with her drunk
father’s approval to work in the house of an unknown family in the capital,
following the direction of Lena, a young white woman, described as slim
and “seductive.” After some time and multiple abuses, Maria is rescued by
the compassion of another white woman who, “sensitized” by an RGPV
march, calls the state authorities to report the girl’s situation. In an abso-
lutely unlikely ending (as is the case with Carolina’s story), the end of the
tale shows Maria being returned home by two state officials in a climate
of plenty and general happiness, without any planning for resolutions, nor
any legal action being taken against her parents and without any disrup-
tion in her family.
The device of “domestic servitude” is therefore different from the pre-
vious device of “disappearance.” The “disappearances” device has to do
with a big problem for a moralistic Catholic campaign: sexual and/or eco-
nomic agency on the part of adolescents. Too much demonic humanity, to
use the logic of Wynter (1990; see Krishnan 2019). The idea of “domestic
servitude” mobilizes oppressive structures and furthers the logic of
victimization as culturally/historically defined. It is more effective because

it is always associated with conditions of misery, racial inequality, very
young girls and domestic sexual violence. It concerns trafficking in rela-
tion to local kinship or family groups to be exploited in domestic labor in
the capitals or larger cities of the Amazon. To this extent, “servitude” is
“cultural,” “colonial” and “historical”: it is thus more real. Many people
know stories like that of Maria, and girls in domestic service populate
the Amazonian and, indeed, the entire Latin American memory/imagin-
ation (see the novels by Brazilian writer Milton Hatoum about the Amazon
city of Manaus, or the character Cleo in the recent film Roma by Antonio
Cuarón). Those girls also constituted during the 20th century, in the guise
of “students,” an important part of the labor force created by convents
and religious boarding schools in the region (as is the case of the Salesian
mission).
Unfortunately, our own research has had very little to do with these
mobilities, economies and forms of violence, and our contribution to the
analysis of this second modality is therefore limited.
Final considerations
Piscitelli (2008) and Blanchette and Silva (2012; 2018), among others,
have been systematically analyzing anti-trafficking policies in Brazil for
more than ten years on several levels and scales. In these analyses, the racial
issue has been fundamental, showing how anti-trafficking policies in Brazil
have been built based on moral economies that fundamentally target the
sexualities and displacements of poor, rural and afro-Brazilian or darker
skin women.
These sexualities and displacements are analyzed in relation to the sexu-
alities and displacements of white men, mainly foreigners from the global
North. Within the framework of policies and actions to combat trafficking
in Brazil, the last seven years have seen these discourses strongly emerge in
discussions regarding populations that are nationally, racially and ethnic-
ally marked (Haitians, Africans of various nationalities, Chinese, Bolivian,
Colombian, Peruvian, indigenous, among others), situating them as being
“trafficked” into or out of Brazil (Lowenkron 2019; Olivar 2016). In other
words, in spite of some changes (Blanchette and Silva 2018), it seems to be
a constant that anti-trafficking policies in Brazil actively participate in the
production of a political, legal and social imagination that is engaged with
the effects and practices of racial segregation and linked to engendered and
sexualized practices.
This is the sense in which we turn to McClintock’s (1995) reflections on
“commodity racism.” The scene of the caged “cabocla” woman, coordinated
by the missionary Socorro, has many versions in the propaganda in the
media pieces of the national and transnational campaign (Blanchette and
Silva 2018). At Eduardo Gomes International Airport in the city of Manaus

(capital of Amazonas), for example, in July 2015, two cages were exposed
in the Arrivals Hall as a “conscientization strategy” of the Blue Heart
Against Trafficking campaign.14 During the same campaign in 2018,
a similar scene was played out in northeastern Brazil (in Pernambuco),
where the bodies of Amazonian women were replaced by a Black woman
chained to a shopping cart. The chained Black woman, depicted in the
center of the photo taken by a local newspaper, was surrounded by three
white (and smiling) women and one federal police officer who, at the end of
the little morality play, “releases the victim.” Here then we see the effects
of a new kind of humanitarian and neocolonial commodity racism, an effect
of the colonial underpinnings, the overrepresentation of the (white-like,
European, liberal and even feminine) Man (Wynter 2003), and the stra-
tegic inability to take seriously reflections upon history and racism in con-
temporary Amazonia.
A constant appears, at the global level, in the elaboration of anti-trafficking
speech/propaganda: the dangerous (mis)use of history, especially through
notions of “disappearance” (Varela and Gonzalez 2015), and “modern
slavery” and “abolition” (O’Connell Davidson 2017; Kempadoo 2017).
In the context analyzed here, what is mobilized is a historical continuity
(discretional and selective) of nature, colonial processes and amalgamated
mythical times that produced the Amazon region. In this way the insistent
image of an Amazon that repeats history, that is dominated by rivers, the
forest and its own size, and that is defined by the presence of essentially
naive generic native populations who are victims of “conquistador hosts,”
is replicated again and again. Actually, it is interesting to pay attention to
the use and appropriation of an almost-empty decolonial discourse about
the Amazon that, focusing its critique on military, extractive, masculine
and super-developmental projects, obliterates the whole dimension of reli-
gious and humanitarian colonial experience.
This kind of approach, as explained by O’Connell Davidson (2017),
produces a story without history, told any which way, based more on iden-
tical continuities and repetitions than changes, transformations or updates.
This his/story denies the huge and meticulous historical, sociological and
anthropological scholarly production on and from the Amazon. It repeats
the hegemonic perspective regarding the area, casting it as a homogeneous,
dangerous and lawless land, inhabited by beardless, victimized, exploited
and feminized indigenous peoples or threatened by suspect and (mostly)
barbarian foreigners (Olivar et al. 2015; Olivar 2016). This perspective,
above all, unfolds in terms of gender and sexuality, having as the main
focus the anguish of white and (pro)European Catholic religious women,
driven by desire for civilization and redemption.
And it is exactly by this later comprehension that we can arrive at a

particularly important point. Since history is narrative (Ricoeur 1994)
and propaganda, it is important to understand who is telling the story
and how; what they are selling. This discretional and selective rewriting
of history as a function of anti-trafficking has an enormous capacity to
mobilize an entire accusatory colonial discourse that in no way includes
in its perspective the agent that enunciates it: the Catholic Church. In
its official acts of propaganda (academic papers, promotional material,
awareness-raising sessions, public interviews, rituals with cages, etc.) the
role of the Church is magically removed from the colonial history of the
Amazon.
How would it be possible to imagine the Amazon without the history of
alliances between Church and people, merchants, and products of colonial
states? It is the history of four centuries of European missionary action; the
history of transcontinental mechanisms of mobility and labor force regu-
lation, including “rescue troops,” that affected thousands of indigenous
people for more than 200 years (Wright 2005); the state policy of massive
church-run boarding schools throughout the 20th century (those “camps
for work and study” filled with indigenous children and youth (Cesar
2015); the history of violence (sexual, too) carried out by priests and nuns
that populates the memory and imagination of today’s indigenous peoples
who were “educated” by the boarding schools. To remove this history of
the Church is to violently trivialize the history of racism and “civilization”
in the Amazon.
In this way, empowered and actualized by the ongoing Synod on the
Amazon, the history of colonization and governmentality of the Amazon
is re-invented without the well-known process of “civilization and catech-
esis.” In this new history “civilization” is no longer a historically situated
and brokered political elaboration, but rather a strategically natural gram-
matical base that its protagonists continue to employ (and sell) for their
own ends. It seems to be an effect of the colonial and racial overrepresenta-
tion of the Man as human, as Wynter (2003) has shown.
This leads us to the last implication. In the production of this new his-
tory without perspective, discourse makes “cultural” and “natural” what
should be political and complexly social. The obliterated alliances between
morals, nature and people (particularly indigenous women) sustains
this contemporary Catholic perspective, from the analysis of Oliveira to
the Synod. That is, a form of fetish (McClintock 1995) is created and
maintained in which the use of history operationalizes a notion of an abso-
lutely naturalized, territorialized and essentially perverse culture. In the
words of Torres (2016), “in the Amazon, the ethnic idea of lewd Indian
women makes society see trafficking as a matter of course.”15 That is, the
historical approach leads to a homogenized and essentialist reading of “cul-

ture” and the Amazon as racialized “nature.”
“[T]‌hen the struggle of our times, one that has hitherto had no name, is
the struggle against this overrepresentation,” wrote Wynter (2003, 262),
understanding that:
all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orien-
tation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming,
severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s
resources— these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass
[European, liberal] Man vs. Human struggle.
(260–261)
We inhabit a world of tangled and ambiguous trafficking of the polit-

ical (Varela and Gonzalez 2015), in which ignoring historical processes of
racism and desubjectivation of entire groups and places produces effects.
In the words of the important Brazilian anthropologist and pro-indigenous
activist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (2012, 22):
Through bad conscience and good intentions, the notion ruled for
a long time that the Indians were just victims of the world system,
victims of a policy and practices exterior to them outside and which
destroyed them. This view, in addition to its moral foundation, had
another, theoretical one: that history, moved by the metropolis, by
the capital, would only have nexus in its epicenter. The periphery
of capital was also the rubbish of history. The paradoxical result of
this “politically correct” stance was to add to the physical and ethnic
elimination of the Indians their elimination as historical subjects.
Notes
1 An expression commonly used to designate non- indigenous Amazonian
natives. In general, caboclas are “mestizos” and have indigenous and Black or
white ancestry.
2 The Fraternity Campaign is an initiative of the International Church
Organization, the Vatican and the International Union of Superiors General,
which exemplifies the actualization of the large alliances between the State,
non-religious organizations and Christian transnational humanitarianisms.
3 See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAid_pt0ulA
4 Capillarity, in this text, refers to the micro-level workings of power and the
ways in which it is produced and exercised from below, entangled in daily life,
desire, the body, the truth of knowledges; this is in opposition to centralized,
external and vertical interpretations of power (see Foucault 1980: 39, 96,
201, 255).
5 This research has been the subject of major and wide-ranging criticism due to
its empirical and methodological poverty and the ethical suspicions it raises
regarding its management of data and sources (DAVIDA Group 2005;
Piscitelli 2008; Blanchette and Silva 2012).
6 The First National Plan to Combat Trafficking in Persons (2008) was prepared
by an inter-ministerial group under the coordination of the Ministry of Justice.
The first plan was structured along three axes: prevention, education and
repression. The Amazonian or Northern Region of Brazil are not mentioned
in the text and the only mention of the “border” refers to “international
cooperation for the suppression of trafficking in persons” (Brasil 2008, 16). In
2013, the second plan was published and, in 2018, the third National Plan to
Combat Trafficking in Persons was approved by President Michel Temer (who
took over the government after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff).
7 Available at www.vaticannews.va/Accessed June 25, 2019.
8 Available at www.sinodoamazonico.va/content/sinodoamazonico/en/docume
nts/preparatory-document-for-the-synod-for-the-amazon.html Accessed
March 16, 2020.
9 We thank the scientific initiation student Natália Farias (University of São
Paulo, School of Public Health) for the survey of journalistic reports and other
sources used in this article.
10 Available at www.slideshare.net/RedeUmGritoPelaVida Accessed June
25, 2019.
11 Encyclical Laudato si. Available at https://Laudato-Si-ES.pdf Accessed June
25, 2019.
12 Available at http://gritopelavida.blogspot.com Accessed June 25, 2019.
13 Available at https://issuu.com/a_maria_trilha Accessed June 25, 2019.
14 Coordinated by the Department of Justice and Human Rights of the Amazon,
mobilized by the UNODC.
15 Available at http://amazonia.org.br/ Accessed June 25, 2019.
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Chapter 10
Constructing Victims and

Criminals through the Racial
Figure of “The Gypsy”
Marlene Spanger
Introduction
Anti-trafficking is a fast growing field in Denmark since 2002 that has
turned into a proliferating policy field. Whereas attention was initially
solely focused on migrant women from Thailand, Africa, Latin America,
and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) selling sex, policy in 2009 began
to regard the migrant men and women from CEE who were working in
cleaning, construction, agriculture and horticulture as potential victims
(Danish Government action plans 2002, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2018).
A branch of human trafficking literature demonstrates how “the excep-
tional victim” and “the savior” are stereotypically represented in terms
of poor brown and Black women from the Global South being rescued
by white middle class women from the Global North (Bernstein 2010;
Kempadoo 2015; Agustin 2010; Spanger 2011), which tends to ignore
and silence migrant men (Kaye 2019; Surtees, 2008). While these studies
remain pertinent, developments in the policy field of anti-trafficking in
certain European states, including Denmark, have led to an expansion
of the search for potential victims within the formal labor market (Ollus
2016; Heinick 2018; Jahnsen 2014). Already in 2009 the Danish Center
against Human Trafficking (CaHT) discussed how the empirical field
could be expanded to include forced labor within the formal labor market.
The inclusion of forced labor meant that CaHT: “…needed to cultivate
completely new cooperative relationships… first and foremost among
public authorities” (interview with employee, CaHT). With its national
action plan to combat human trafficking of 2011, the Danish Government
focused attention on the formal labor market (Danish Government 2011).
This chapter takes its point of departure from the perspective of CEE
migrants in the construction industry, when they ask for help because of
labor exploitation and when they undergo processes designed to identify
the victims of human trafficking. Zooming in on how they experience their
encounters with the police force, the CaHT and the trade union, I argue
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-13
Constructing Victims and Criminals 155
that a white hegemony reflects new racialized representations of human

trafficking victims produced within Danish anti-trafficking. Inspired by
what Stumpf (2006) terms “crimmigration,” state border controls mean
that migrants without residence and/or labor permits become synonymous
with criminals. The aim of the chapter is to demonstrate how this group
of migrant workers experience being defined as both victims of human
trafficking and criminals, and that “the victim” and “the criminal” in this
case are racialized in particular ways in particular spaces. Thus, there is
a delicate balance between being identified by the Danish authorities as
a “victim” and as a “criminal.” Starting with East European migrants,
in particular Romanians, and how they are defined as “criminals” by the
Danish police, I analyze how “the racialized Other” European is constructed
through the intersection of nationality and mobility articulated as “the
gypsy.” The term “gypsy” is likened to the Roma, who are the second lar-
gest minority today in Romania, but are also dispersed throughout Europe.
The Roma is one of the discriminated and stigmatized ethnic groups in
Europe and Roma newcomers in Western Europe are accused of a rise in
criminal activity (Thornton 2014). I argue that the racialized European
historical figure of “the gypsy” reflects a strong symbol on who belongs and
who does not belong in European states representing the west, and that in
a Danish context a conflation between the categories of “Roma,” “gypsy”
and “Romanians” exists in cases about CEE migrant workers. Following
Samaluk (2016) a neocolonial binary logic creates the demarcation between
east and west Europe and reproduces an internal racism in Europe related
to labor mobility. Focusing on the close entanglement of the empirical
categorizations of “the victim” and “the criminal” during the identification
process of CEE victims of human trafficking, I analyze the nexus of human
trafficking, racialization and racism by asking: What kind of racialized victim
and criminal representations do CEE migrant workers experience within the field
of anti-trafficking? And how do these racialized representations stem from institu-
tional racism?
I take as my point of departure the empirical example of a young
Romanian worker David and his experiences of his encounter with the
Danish authorities and the trade unions. However, it is not the person of
David that is the object of analysis. Rather, his narrative about working
conditions (including exploitation and fraud), and his encounter with the
Danish system, including the police force, CaHT and the trade union,
reflect a perfect example of how practices of othering of CEE migrants,
in particular Romanians, identified as victims of human trafficking,
takes place and how it is based on racialized power relations. Besides
two interviews with David, I have participated in trade union meetings
about his situation. As these factors recur in the narratives of the other
migrants that I interviewed, I have chosen only his narrative as repre-
sentative of the others. The choice of Romanian migrants working in the
156 Marlene Spanger
Danish formal labor market was the result of two considerations. First,
Romanian migrants working as non- professionals within the Danish
labor market constitute one of the larger group of migrants from the CEE
countries (Jobindsats 2019). Second, it was Romanians working in the
cleaning industry who were at the center of four court cases (from 2012 to
2013) concerning migrants who were forced to work and who were sub-
sequently identified as victims of human trafficking by CaHT (Spanger &
Hvalkof 2020, Hansen & Halskov 2019).1
Before presenting the story of David, I outline the methodology and the-
oretical framework adopted, and I introduce the historical European figure
of “the gypsy” in the Danish setting. After the story of David, I explore
this figure as a racialized masculine subject position that Romanian
labor migrants meet in their encounter with the Danish police force. In
my exploration of what Goldberg (2006) calls “institutionalised racism”
manifesting itself in racial encounters between Romanian migrant workers
and the white Danish hegemony, attention is focused on the Danish police
force, and in addition the trade unions. The chapter concludes by arguing
how racialized categories eclipse the labor exploitation of migrant workers
within the anti-trafficking field.
Methodology
The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork (Hasse 2002; Gupta &
Ferguson 1997) carried out from 2016 to 2019, consisting of partici-
pant observations, interviews and informal talks with authorities, CaHT,
employees from the trade union, and migrant workers. I have followed
employees from the trade union in their outreach work among migrants,
and participated in internal meetings and seminars organized by the trade
union. At these activities, the police and CaHT participated. The ethno-
graphic fieldwork gave me an insight into how the employees of the trade
union and the authorities approach migrants and what kinds of issues the
migrants present towards the trade union. Besides the fieldwork, the chapter
also relies on official and internal documents produced by representatives of
the Danish anti-trafficking policy field. Interviews were conducted with 11
men and five women from Romania working in horticulture, construction
and the service industry. Contact with the interviewees was established
through various trade union branches. For instance, it was an employee
from the trade union who introduced me to David, as the employee had
assisted David before and during the victim identification process. Not all
interviewees were members of the trade union; not all trade union branches
do outreach work to migrants who experience exploitation. Even if they
are not members of a trade union, some migrants are advised by other
migrants or peers to turn to the trade unions for help. As the data does
not include interviews with migrants who were not in contact with the
trade union or the Danish authorities, I cannot rule out the occurrence of
other forms of labor exploitation, fraud and enforcement related to work, or
racism in the Danish formal labor market. Each interview lasted between
45 minutes and two hours. In addition, I conducted interviews with
authorities representing the police, the CaHT, the Danish Immigration
Service and the Danish Working Environment Authority as well as with
11 employees from the trade union representing three local departments
and the confederation. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and
anonymized with respect to names, places and other identifiable markers.
The research adheres to the ethical guidelines for the social sciences spe-
cified by the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (Ministry of
Higher Education and Science 2014).
Racialization, Whiteness and Institutional Racism

Race refuses to remain silent because it isn’t just a word. It is a set of conditions,
shifting over time. Never just one thing, it is a way (or really ways) of thinking,
a way(s) of living, a disposition.…a passion released or charged (up) and put
in gear by events, concerns, troubles. ..it is both prompt and product of social
tensions and catastrophes.
(Goldberg 2006, 337)
This chapter is informed by literature on postcoloniality and racialization.

First, a branch of critical race theory includes whiteness as a racialized
process (e.g. Ahmed 2012; Erel et al. 2016; Meer 2014; Myong 2008;
Hübinette & Lundström 2015; Keskinen & Andreassen 2017). In line with
Goldberg, the term racialization refers to a constant complex historical
sedimentation process of “doing race” that classifies and sets boundaries
(Myong 2008, 199). The category of race, including whiteness, establishes
racial boundaries and hierarchies, which, in various subtle or obvious ways,
favor or exclude particular groups, such as migrants, according to the inter-
section of their nationality, gender, class and profession (Erel et al. 2016).
Foregrounding whiteness as a racial category in the Nordic setting enables
us to study how the invisibility of whiteness takes place in societies (e.g.
Denmark) that are dominated by the idea of being antiracist and equal
(Hübinette & Lundström 2015). Studying discourses of whiteness show
us how privileging of certain groups takes place through an extremely
powerful mechanism of “invisibility” as Riemsdijk (2010, 121) points
out: “The invisibility of whiteness is a key part of what makes the oper-
ation of whiteness discourses so powerful, permitting dominant whites to
deny their own position of privilege and power.” A number of scholars (e.g.
Samaluk 2016; Suchland 2011; Riemsdijk 2010; Böröcz & Sarkar 2017)
address the post-socialist subject from a postcolonial lens questioning the
westernized thinking; the colonial binary logic, that for instance produces
158 Marlene Spanger
the post-socialist figure in the Western European imagination as the

European Other. Thus, this body of literature rethinks dichotomies of first/
third world or first/second world referring to the binary logic of “obsolete
socialism and modern capitalism” (Samaluk 2016, 102). Samaluk argues
that the EU enlargement reflects a neocolonialism where,
“CEE” was reinvented in the process of EU enlargement, with the

selective aggregation of facts and fiction drawing on the familiar ideo-
logical Cold War divide and on the selective assessment of applicants’
economic and political development with regard to an idealized EU
state.
(Samaluk 2016, 102)
Inspired by these branches of literature I understand how Danish

(white) institutions in different situations position CEE migrants as the
“other European,” and racialize them as “the other white” or “brown.”
Thus, processes of inclusion and exclusion in terms of institutionalized
racism take place in the Danish society based on racialized hierarchies
conditioned not only by the brown or the white body, but also by different
forms of whiteness. The Romanian male migrant workers in Denmark
experience being constructed as racialized subjects in their encounter with
the Danish authorities in terms of what Butler calls becoming a subject.2
In this case, “the criminal” and “the victim” become the predominant
subject positions made available by the Danish anti-trafficking field for
Romanian construction workers in a white space, for example represented
by the Danish police. The criminalization of the labor migrant and the
victim of human trafficking can be understood in terms of “institutional
racisms,” which are subtle rather than overt, as these racisms are produced
through the establishment or “respected forces in society” (Meer 2014,
128), for instance in the police force, in anti-trafficking policies and in
the legal system.
The European Historical Figure of “The Gypsy”

In Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, the social health
authorities argued that biological inheritance explained “the gypsy” as
deviant. This articulation drew upon a combination of medical crim-
inal discourses. In 1943 one of the leading international authorities in
eugenics studies, Danish M.D. Tage Kemp,3 classified “the gypsy” as
degenerated (Koch 1996, 181; Kemp 1936 and 1943): “a population
group that seems clearly recognizable from their physical appearance and
language, their way of life and their overall spiritual character… with
peculiar names, a distinctive physical appearance and often with no fixed
abode” (Kemp 1943).
The intersection of transnational mobility, termed “rootlessness” and

“vagrancy,” unemployment or not having a regular job, and phenotype
(skin color, hair, cranium, etc.) became a sign of the deviance that was used
to explain anti-social behavior and criminal practices, which constituted
the racial othering:
They have little social adaptability and lack perseverance; they are not
lazy, but in the long run they are not capable of keeping a job and
a permanent place of residence. Some unreliability is inevitable4….
They would not settle or take up regular work, but made a living by
begging, fraud, and petty theft, if they did not commit more serious
crimes. The governments of various countries tried make them stable
and law-abiding citizens.5
(Kemp 1943)
It is no longer a biological or medical discourse that classifies the migrant

worker as a racial deviant, as it was in the 19th century and the beginning
of the 20th century, but a cultural or ethnic essentialist logic. Kemp (2007,
270) argues that “race” and “biology” are replaced with “immigrants” “cul-
ture.” However, in the current case of Romanian migrant workers, the his-
torical figure of the gypsy recurs in the production of the contemporary
racial otherings as we will see in the story of David’s encounter with the
police force. Moreover, the figure of “the gypsy” is also a production of an
internal European racism that reflects a Europeanization process emanating
from a “colonial logic of contemporary neoliberalism” (Samaluk 2016,
101). Despite the differences in the discourses that have established the
racial figure of the gypsy, this race category still serves, as in former times,
to establish power hierarchies. One of the main mechanisms of the race cat-
egory is the production of racism: the exclusion of groups of human beings
in both subtle and overt ways. These are processes that take place not just
in Denmark but in Europe.
The History of David

David is a slim, tall, black-haired young man in his mid-20s who comes
from Romania. I met David after CaHT had identified him as a victim of
human trafficking. He offered a vivid description of his employers, the police
and his working experiences in Denmark prior to the identification process.
Experiencing Exploitation and Fraud in the

Danish Labor Market
Through a Facebook group for Romanian migrant workers in Denmark
David got in contact with a Danish construction company who hired
160 Marlene Spanger
him in 2015. He worked 11 hours a day, six days a week, building

houses in Denmark. The company arranged accommodation for David
and his colleagues, Mikael and Fabrian, who also came from Romania.
Furthermore, his employer told David that he would register him with
the fiscal authorities and set up a bank account for his wages. Later,
David realized that his job was paid cash-in-hand and, as he had not
received payment for all his working hours, he contacted the local trade
union asking for help. However, the trade union needed evidence of
missing wages and therefore could not help him. One evening, the com-
pany dismissed David and his colleagues and put them out on the street.
David contacted the local police for help: “We were told that we had
12 hours to leave the apartment.. I laughed a little bit.. and then I told
him [the employer] that I will call the police. I called the police and
they came…” Instead of helping David, the police helped the employer
evict them. Together with Mikael and Fabrian, David was homeless for
a while, spending nights in the nearby park. After their dismissal, they
started collecting bottles. While living on the street, they met the police,
who asked for their identification papers. The migrants asked for help,
but the police told them that they could not help them. Being members
of a Facebook group of Romanians working in Denmark, however,
David, Fabrian and Mikael found new jobs in construction. As before,
the employers provided housing for them, this time sharing with 14
other labor migrants from Romania and Pakistan. Once again in the new
job, they faced exploitation: no payment for all their working hours, fake
employment contracts, poor housing, and exposure to force and threats.
As before, the employer paid David cash-in-hand, emphasizing that the
company had already taken care of taxes. One day at the construction
site, the workers were told that the authorities were about to pay the
workplace a visit to check up on working conditions:
We were called together… handed out an employment contract. When

I saw my contract, I could see they wrote 125–140 DKK per hour
(17–19 euro).6 The signature on the contract was not my signature.
Everything was fake… for all Romanians. A police officer came to me
and asked for my contract … he asked for the conditions of accommo-
dation and how long I have worked [there] and took a picture of the
contract and then he went off. After the control they [the employers]
took away the employment contracts.
David undertook various construction tasks all over Denmark for this
company. Sometimes, when renovating private houses, he received a far
smaller amount for each task than a monthly salary, and sometimes, instead
of paying him, his employer merely promised him that he would be paid
later on:
[They] put a pressure on us…we should work more and more. We

did not have any money for food or cigarettes. I went on the street
collecting bottles, like I do now. So I made some money and bought
some food. Also, my ex-wife stressed me because I did not send any
money to the child… because she knew that I was working. For me it
was really stressful.
He and his colleague often slept on sites to save time and money, as they
did, for instance, when they were renovating an apartment owned by a
police officer.
They [the police officer and his father] kept an eye on us, how we
conducted our work. The first time we slept in the apartment. We had
nothing. We went to a recycling container for clothes … we had neither
bedclothes nor blankets or anything… At five o’clock [in morning]
the police officer came. The young one… he is looking at us, how we
were sleeping. It was cold. He said nothing, he was looking around in
the apartment and said “really, really good…” and then he left.
David was surprised that the owner of the apartment, his partner and his
father, all three of whom were police officers, were involved in what were
obviously criminal activities. Working in another region in Denmark,
David contacted a new local trade union to ask for help. He immediately
became a member of the union, and its local division assisted him to report
his employer to the local police. Nonetheless, the local police never filed
the report.
Identified as a Victim of Human Trafficking

Now familiar with their working conditions and with how David and his
colleagues were being systematically exploited, the trade union reported
the company to the police, accusing the company of tax fraud, of violation
of the Danish Working Environment Act and of exploiting the migrant
workers. Furthermore, the trade union informed CaHT and the tax author-
ities about the violations.
Central actors in combating human trafficking within the formal labor
market include the police, the Danish Immigration Service, the trade
unions and the unit under the jurisdiction of the National Board of Social
Services, CaHT. These actors carry out anti- trafficking interventions,
including the identification and repatriation of victims of human trafficking
and the prosecution of perpetrators. Together they represent a disparate
policy field deriving from uneven logics and practices (Spanger & Hvalkof
2020). There exist no formal collaborations between the authorities on
the one hand and the trade unions in Denmark on the other hand, only
162 Marlene Spanger
a more formalized network between the different groups of authorities.

Nevertheless, informal networks and relations between the police force,
the Danish Working Environment Authorities, CaHT, the trade union and
NGOs exist at a local level. Thus, the opportunities of the migrants to
receive help from the authorities often depend on how the local police col-
laborate with other local authorities and the local trade union.
CaHT and the police interviewed David as part of the identification
process for victims of human trafficking. It is CaHT’s task to decide
whether migrants with CEE citizenships are victims. CaHT identified
David, Mikail, Fabian and a handful of other migrants as victims of human
trafficking. Despite police participation in the identification process, the
officers treated him as a criminal. David found that the work he had done
at the police officer’s apartment complicated his identification process as a
victim of human trafficking. According to David, the police harassed him
by detaining him for 8–9 hours the first time, even though CaHT had
identified him as a victim of human trafficking and a witness to fraud and
exploitation on the part of the company: “…nothing was all right as soon
as I entered into the police station. Because they asked me to undress, they
took my phone… I was perceived as a criminal.” During the interrogation,
the police copied his text messages, told him not to contact any journalists
or the trade union, and accused him of seeking cash-in-hand jobs. They
claimed that this was his main reason for travelling to Denmark. David
continued: “I told them that I have not stolen anything, I have not beaten
anyone… and I have told them that I search in the garbage cans for bottles,
but I have not committed any crime.” During David’s various encounters
with the police he could not pass as a victim of exploitation or a citizen
who needed help. Rather, “the figure of the criminal” stuck to his body,
precluding his subject position as a victim of exploitation. In this way,
David transgressed the Danish anti-trafficking binary categories of “the
victim” vs. “the criminal.”
Out of Place – Criminalizing the Victim of Human

Trafficking
When David and his colleague called the police for help because their
Danish employer had thrown them out, they were treated as criminals and
not as victims. This situation is not exceptional. In two other cases, one
in 2011 and the other in 2018, Romanian and Lithuanian migrants asked
for help from the Danish police, only to be treated as criminals by the
police. In a case of human trafficking in 2012, a group of Romanians who
were being kept in a cellar managed to escape to a nearby gas station,
where the sales clerk called the police to ask them to help the migrants.
When the police arrived, they instead arrested the Romanians because they
were not carrying any identification. Besides keeping them captive, their
employer had retained their ID papers. The police contacted the employer,
who promptly provided the missing documents. Subsequently, the police
handed over the Romanians to the employer, and the exploitation of the
migrants continued until they managed to contact the Romanian embassy.7
Similarly, in 2017, eight Lithuanians who had been working for a Danish
construction company suffered the same working conditions to which
David had been exposed. In this case, the employer, who had also provided
them with housing, put them on the street and denied them access to
the house to pick up their belongings. The owner called the police, who
searched the Lithuanians without any permission and confiscated their cell
phones, which the employer claimed were stolen. According to the police
report, the police officers assumed that the Lithuanians were Romanian
thieves.8 From a postcolonial perspective, differences, be it physical or
national, are erased. Instead, the “CEE migrant” represents “the Other
European.” In accusing the East European workers of committing crime,
the criminal body is associated with the category of “the Romanian” that
guides the way in which the police officers approach the workers. This is an
example of how a white institution reproduces racialized representations.
Seen as a group of male bodies from Romania working in Denmark who
wish to be rescued from their white Danish employers (the perpetrators),
these migrants cannot break with the figure of the racialized CEE crim-
inal and be seen as victims in their interaction with a white institution
such as the Danish police. Rather, David, his peers and the other migrant
workers from East Europe are what Ylva Habel (2012) calls “out of place.”
Sara Ahmed reminds us that “institutions being white, we point to how
institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and
not others: white bodies gather and create the impression of coherence”
(Ahmed 2012, 35). Interpreting the Danish police force as representing
a white space, the confrontation between the intersection of language,
nationality and skin color (represented by the migrant workers) and the
white Danish-speaking body (represented by the Danish employer), a
white space is reproduced through the gathering of the white bodies (of
the police officers and the employer). Within this white space a coherence
by silencing the markers of violation of the law related to labor exploit-
ation and fraud is created. This silence is possible because criminality and
theft intersecting with migration “stick” to the bodies of David, his peers,
the Romanians who fled to the gas station and the Lithuanian workers.
Thus, it becomes difficult for the CEE migrant workers to be positioned
as the victims of human trafficking. This impossibility complies with the
dominant discourse of anti-trafficking, which produces the stereotype of
the “exceptional victim of human trafficking” as the brown female body
from the global South forced into prostitution (Sharar 2018, 48, Spanger
2011, Sanghera 2005). As Kerwin Kaye (2019) also points out, the melo-
dramatic requirements of anti-trafficking discourse make it undesirable
164 Marlene Spanger
to reveal men and boys as victims of sex trafficking and to identify the
help needed and the issues faced by the vast majority of male sex workers.
Although the case of the male Romanian victims of human trafficking is
related to documented labor migration rather than the sex industry, the
post-socialist, brown or white, male body forced into labor does not fit the
narrative of the female body forced into sex trafficking, which, as Kaye
stresses, “becomes a melodramatic and horror-filled enactment of the racist
captivity narrative” (Kaye 2019, 184).
The Conflation of “Romanian,” “Romany” and

“Gypsy”
If we want to understand why the Romanians are positioned “out of place”
as a part of institutional racism in Denmark, we need to zoom in on how
the police speaks about race. Although David and his colleague were not
referred to as “Gypsies” by the police officers, the contemporary figure of
the gypsy is nevertheless pertinent because this figure sticks to the brown
male migrant body from CEE as a racial marker of “othering” in a white
space representing west Europe. The racial space is not just limited to
the institution of the police, but is much more widespread. For instance,
it exists in other (white) institutions such as the trade unions. As Sharar
(2018, 45) stresses in her study on Danish anti-trafficking, the categories
of “Romanian,” “Roma” and “gypsy” are rather fluent and conflate into the
racialized East European stereotype9 within the institutions of the police
force and the trade union when it comes to Romanian migrant workers.
Romanian migrants connote the Roma that are associated with the figure
of the gypsy, as gypsy is the derogative term for the Romany peoples. As
mentioned above, the contemporary figure can be traced back to the histor-
ical racialized figure described by Danish physicians. What recurs is how
the criminal is constructed through the intersecting markers of the racial
body, temporary employment, transnational mobility and working class
that also confirm one of west Europe’s imaginations of the CEE migrant
worker produced through a neocolonial logic.
In relation to one of the police investigations into human trafficking,
a police officer describes a group of Romanians who were under suspi-
cion of usury and tax-evasion: “We (the police) realized that our notorious
Gypsies were beginning to drive around in big cars. They were showing
off. They had simply got hold of money.” On the one hand, the police
officer distinguishes between Gypsies and Romanian migrants, stating
that it was the Gypsies who recruited and exploited the Romanian
migrants in Denmark. On the other hand, he describes both groups in
rather similar terms, emphasizing their criminal nature: “We were used
to Romanians; when we saw them, it was not as the injured party, but
as beggars or thieves or something like that…”. Thus, the conflation
of “the Romanian” and “the gypsy” connotes the CEE criminal subject.
What confuses the Danish authorities is the complex relations among the
migrants, problematizing the distinction between the exploited migrant
and the migrants that cooperate with the employers (traffickers). Likewise,
the same problem occurs in the trade unions when it comes to the exploit-
ation of Romanian migrants by other Romanian migrants in Denmark.
The Romanians who exploit other Romanian migrants are articulated
as the Romanian mafia in Denmark (Sharar 2018, 44). Thus, the ideal
victim of human trafficking does not align with either the categories of
the Romanian or the CEE migrant worker who experience exploitation,
fraud and/or enforcement.
Conclusion
David and his peers’, and the Lithuanians’ encounter with the Danish
institutions, their nationality, language and bodily markers are wiped out.
Instead, the intersection of worker, migration and East European belonging
position them as “the other” Europeans. David’s story is an example of how
eastern labor migrants experience being identified as both the victim of
human trafficking and the criminal by the Danish authorities. His story
reflects a particular racialized variation of the Other European.
Even while CaHT identified David as a victim of human trafficking,
the Danish police criminalized him in different situations or rejected his
requests for help. Thus, David is an example of how institutional racism
eclipses the subject position of the victim of human trafficking with an
image of the criminal. Due to the intersecting markers of transnational
mobility, employment, nationality, gendered and racialized bodily signs
that stick to his body and that of the historical figure of the gypsy, he
passes as “the criminal” in the white space of the Danish police. In add-
ition, due to his gender, work and European identity he does not represent
the ideal victim of human trafficking; the brown woman from the global
South forced into the sex industry still predominates the Danish field of
anti-trafficking. Thus, the binary categorization of the “victim vs. crim-
inal” that structures the anti-trafficking field is challenged. I argue that
the historical racialized figure of “the gypsy,” connoting criminality and
disorder, constitutes institutional racism in Denmark. In former times “the
gypsy” was established through the discourses of biology and medicine,
legitimizing the Danish state’s classification of migrants from East Europe.
Today this racialized figure of the gypsy is still alive and used as a racialized
mechanism maintaining poor male migrant workers from Romania in vul-
nerable positions within the Danish labor market. Different from former
times, “the gypsy” is in present time established through the logic of cul-
ture. Thus, “the criminal” sticks to the brown, eastern male body when the
(white) Danish state engages with them.
166 Marlene Spanger
Notes
1 The Danish Prosecution Service filed preliminary charges of human trafficking
against the employers. However, the charges were changed and the trials
resulted in convictions of usury.
2 The subject is produced within an ambivalent process of power, compulsion and
reproduction conditioned by the discourse of heterosexuality that constitutes
and dissolves the very same subject (Butler 1997, 2). In this case I focus on
racialization and not heterosexuality.
3 Through his membership of a number of state committees and his public office
as medical consultant for the Ministry of Social Affairs M. D. Tage Kemp was
an authority within the Danish social policy field and within social and health
services in the interwar period and during the 1950s (Spanger 2007). The
Danish eugenic study on “the gypsies” was a continuation of Kemps’ study
of “the prostitutes” perceived as degenerate. This scientific approach to “the
gypsy” and “the prostitute” predominated western eugenics in the inter-and
the post-war times. Similar studies were conducted internationally (Koch
1996, 181).
4 My translation of the quote.
5 My translation of the quote.
6 Once migrants move to Denmark and are registered in the Danish National
Register they need to apply for a Danish tax card, informing the tax authorities
about the approximate annual income and any other income, deductions and
allowances they expect to have. www.skat.dk/skat.aspx?oid=2246935&lang=
us&ik_navn=transport (accessed February, 17 2019).
7 Unpublished document: Lea Linstow. 2016. Transskription af udvalgte steder
(internal document 3F).
8 Unpublished document: Oversigt Net Construction Fag 2017-10-00240-005
(internal document 3F).
9 In Danish Rumæner (romani), Roma (Romany) and Sigøjner (gypsy).
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Chapter 11
“Is It Because I’m Not Young and

White with Blue Eyes?”
Canadian Police Response to Sex
Workers of Colors’ Experiences of
Exploitation and Trafficking
Menaka Raguparan
Introduction
According to the 2018 United Nations Global Report on Trafficking in
Persons, North American countries have been inundated with cases of
domestic trafficking, particularly of women and girls trafficked for the pur-
pose of sexual exploitation (UNODC 2018). In North America, the report
states that more than 70% of victims detected in 2016 were trafficked for
sexual exploitation, with women comprising 68% of these victims and
underage girls accounting for 25% (ibid.). Furthermore, more than eight
in ten victims in North American countries are trafficked domestically
(ibid.). Consistent with the United Nations’ claim that highlights the
prevalences of domestic trafficking cases in North America, the Canadian
Government has identified that human trafficking is mainly a domestic
problem, with domestic human trafficking accounting for over 90% of all
federal cases (Public Safety Canada 2012). Citing data from the Human
Trafficking National Coordination Centre (HTNCC) in Canada, the Global
Slavery Index concluded that between 2005 and 2017, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police (RCMP) identified 455 instances of human trafficking
(GSI 2018). Of these, 433 were identified as domestic trafficking, where
Canadian or foreign citizens were exploited within Canada, primarily for
the purpose of sexual exploitation (ibid.). Under these circumstances,
responding to domestic sex trafficking/exploitation has become a priority
and a hot-button policy issue for the Canadian Government. Officially,
Canadian anti-trafficking strategies emphasize protecting and empowering
trafficked victims (see Public Safety Canada 2012, 2018; Ratansi 2007;
RCMP 2013); in reality, however, their implementation is inconsistent –
especially for sex workers of color. This chapter unpacks some of the incon-
sistencies between policies and practices when sex workers of color are
subjected to sexual exploitation.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-14
Police Response to Sex Worker Experience 171
This chapter focuses on the lived experiences of two Canadian sex

workers of color who were subjected to sex trafficking/exploitation in
Canada. Analyzing their cases, I illustrate how law enforcement officers’
response to these women’s experiences contradicts Canada’s anti-trafficking
policies and policing protocol. That is, women in my study who reached
out to local police officers to report instances of sex trafficking were not
believed, their victim status was questioned, and they were not awarded
state protection. Based on their interactions with police officers and their
personal experiences of everyday racism, these women insisted that even
though the victimizations they endured met the Canadian Criminal Code
definitions of exploitation (ss. 279.041) and trafficking (ss. 279.012), their
race disqualified them from suitable victimhood of domestic trafficking
and positioned them as being undeserving of state protection. To con-
textualize these women’s perceptions of being subjected to differential
treatment through law enforcement practices, I draw upon the analytical
frameworks of everyday racism (Essed 2001) and controlling narratives
(Collins 2000). In doing so, I illuminate how the hegemonic racist, sexist,
and heteropatriarchal inequalities that underpin Canadian society, both
directly and indirectly, affect the lives of sex workers of color who experi-
ence victimization. Exploring police officers’ reactions to these two cases
through the perspectives of my participants emphasizes racial and occu-
pational biases towards sex workers of color while also highlighting the
extent to which these biases are informed by historically constructed con-
trolling narratives about deviant womanhood/femininity and the ideal
imagery of the prostituted/trafficked victim.
Theoretical Framework and Literature Review

Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) discussion of controlling images highlights
how negative representations of Black womanhood/ femininity –
constructed as binary opposites through the figures of the “mammy” and
the “Jezebel”/“Sapphire” –continue to oppress Black women. Extending
Collins (2000), we can understand socially constructed stereotypes of
Indigenous and other women of color. In public discourse and popular
media, racialized women have long been narrativized as inherently and
pathologically sexually deviant, and thus not only as prone to promis-
cuity but as willing participants in prostitution, which has repeatedly
been used to justify relationships of superiority and inferiority, including
race-, gender-, and class-based hierarchies/oppressions (see Collins 2000;
Ritchie 2017). Canadian scholarship that focuses on people of color and
sex workers’ experiences with law enforcement draws attention to these
populations’ differential treatment.
Adversarial relationships between police officers and racialized com-
munities in Canada –evident through policing practices such as racial
172 Menaka Raguparan
profiling, over-policing communities, under-protecting victims, and abuses

of power –are well documented (Comack 2012; Ontario Human Rights
Commission 2003, 2017; Hodgson 2001; Maynard 2017; Wortley 2006;
Wortley and Owusu-Bempah 2009). Furthermore, anti-racist activists and
scholars such as Robyn Maynard (2017) and Sherene Razack (2002) have
examined Black and Indigenous women’s experiences with police officers
to establish the manifestation of structural racism in policing practices.
Based on stories of lived experiences, these authors argue that contem-
porary policing patterns and paradigms that harm Black and Indigenous
women in Canada are shaped by the continuing operation of controlling
narratives of Black and Indigenous women that are rooted in colonialism
and slavery.
Similarly, the complex relationships between Canadian police officers
and female sex workers are well recognized by critical Canadian sex work
scholars (Benoit et al. 2016; Bruckert and Hannem 2013b; Krüsi et al.
2014; Krüsi et al. 2016; Socias et al. 2015). Scholarship on these dynamics
draws attention to police officers’ dual roles as benevolent protectors and
social control agents whose actions are influenced by ongoing controlling
narratives of gender. Thus, sex workers are often denied state protection as
punishment for transgressing or deviating from the social ideals of gender
roles and sexual standards. As Andrea Krüsi et al. (2016) point out, vio-
lence against sex workers is not only normalized by claiming that violence
is an inherent part of their occupation, but the blame for sex work-related
violence is also “shifted to sex workers themselves for continuing to engage
in this dangerous practice” (1142–1143). In addition to the stigmatizing
factors of transgressing social norms and viewing sex work as inherently
dangerous, the perception that Indigenous sex workers are socially dis-
reputable, and therefore disposable, further alleviates police responsibility
in protecting their civil rights (Hunt 2013; Pratt 2005). Given these
conditions, critical sex work scholars have argued that denying sex workers
the status of victimhood when warranted becomes a coercive form of
state violence that infringes upon the human rights and socio-economic
mobility of sex workers (Hunt 2015/2016; Kempadoo et al. 2017; Krüsi
et al. 2016). Such denial also increases sex workers’ structural vulnerability
to violence, as they must operate outside of societal protections that other
citizens can take for granted (Hunt 2015/2016; Kempadoo et al. 2017;
Krüsi et al. 2016). In fact, Krüsi et al. (2016) further emphasize this by
stating that “denial of [participants’] citizenship rights for police protec-
tion and legal recourse by virtue of their ‘risky’ occupation” not only leads
to normalizing “their experiences of violence as an inherent part of selling
sex” but also to feeling like seeking police protection is a form of everyday/
symbolic violence (1142).
Critical trafficking scholars point out that historically rooted controlling
narratives operate within contemporary trafficking discourse and policing
practices within the international context. The controlling image of the

prostituted/trafficked victim, constructed in binary terms during the nine-
teenth-and early-twentieth-century White Slave Trade panic, implicitly
defines the inherent/fundamental qualities of victimhood: either one is a
blameless “involuntary prostitute,” a good vulnerable victim who deserves
state protection and is worthy of being rescued, or one is a “voluntary
sinful deviant prostitute,” an undeserving victim who is responsible for
their own victimization and is thus barred from accessing state protections
(Balgamwalla 2016; Doezema 2000, 28; Faulkner 2018; O’Connell
Davidson 2010; Valverde 2008). Within contemporary discourse that
conflates sex work with sex/human trafficking, the “ideal” or “iconic”
victim of domestic trafficking continues to operate among binary thinking
in political and legal realms (Farrell and Cronin 2015; Srikantiah 2007).
With the sex industry considered to be inherently violent (Public Safety
Canada 2012; NWAC 2014; Ratansi 2007), women who voluntarily par-
ticipate are classified as “risky-subjects” whose actions and behaviors pose
a threat not only to themselves but also to society at large; they are thus
excluded from state protection (Bruckert and Hannem 2013a; Kaye 2017;
Krüsi et al. 2016; Sanders 2009). In contrast, those who are perceived to be
vulnerable and innocent are assumed to be forced into the sex industry and
are categorized as blameless “at-risk subjects” who are, accordingly, seen as
worthy of state protection and rescue (ibid.).
Leslie Jeffrey (2005) argues that Canadian state-led anti-trafficking (and
anti-prostitution) initiatives maintain “a particular gendered and raced
neo-colonial identity” (33). Jeffrey’s claim is supported by other critical race
and sex work scholars who draw attention to the ways in which Indigenous
and other sex workers of color in Canada are excluded from the category of
“ideal victim.” Through the lens of controlling narratives, they are denied
the state protections and emotional sympathies that are usually awarded to
good victims. For example, Sarah Hunt (2015/2016, 2010, 2013) focuses
on how Indigenous girls and women who come forward to report sexual
exploitation and/or trafficking are denied the status of trafficked victim.
She argues that contemporary, state-led anti-trafficking initiatives operate
similarly to the historical legal categorizations that have dehumanized
Indigenous peoples. In this manner, legally excluding Indigenous girls and
women from contemporary legal classifications of “trafficked victim” both
fixes Indigenous women’s marginal status as lacking in agency and choice
and fails to consider systemic factors that exacerbate the vulnerabilities
of Indigenous girls and women working in the sex industry (Hunt 2015/
2016).
It is well-documented that law enforcers who take on the benevolent
role of protectors and rescuers use gendered and racialized stereotypes
to determine who is considered to be a plausible or believable “victim”
(Balgamwalla 2016; O’Brien et al. 2013; Soderlund 2005). In this sense,
“Women coming from Asian countries are often characterized as being

very passive, very innocent, sweet village girls who don’t know any better”
(Brock et al. 2000, 6), and “Asian women who do sex work are still
perceived to be the default trafficking victim regardless of their citizenship
status or length of time in the country” (Kempadoo et al. 2017, 10). The
consequences of such controlling images of Asian victims and misguided
attempts to rescue them, according to Julie Kaye (2017), naturalizes
“structural violence against gendered and racialised bodies” (40). In other
words, anti-trafficking investigations conducted by the RCMP, muni-
cipal police forces, and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) have
overwhelmingly targeted racialized and migrant sex workers, subjecting
them to surveillance, harassment, arrest, detainment, and deportation,
even when there is no evidence that the women have experienced abuse or
coercion (Clancey et al. 2014; Lam 2016, 2018; Lepp 2013; Kempadoo
et al. 2017).
The police–sex worker interactions featured in this chapter illuminate
the extent to which racist and sexist controlling narratives of women
of color shape police officers’ interpretations and operationalizations of
victimhood. These cases highlight the consequences of trafficking dis-
course that uses binary oppositional thinking to define the identity and
behaviors of trafficked/prostituted victims. Further, they underscore
how police officers’ decisions to award or deny the legal and emotional
classification of “victim” to sex workers of color are deeply entrenched
in the intersections of structural heteropatriarchy and representational
politics.
Method and Participants

The qualitative interviews used in this chapter are part of a larger research
project in which I ask a very broad question: How do racialized and
Indigenous women experience the indoor sectors of the Canadian sex
industry? As part of this research, I interviewed forty sex workers from
nine different cities in Canada between August 2014 and April 2015.
Participants were recruited through a targeted snowball sampling tech-
nique. I first circulated the call for research participants on social media
and through my own social and academic networks. I also directly reached
out to sex workers of color who advertised their services online. Interested
women contacted me directly through email, text, or phone call, and
those who met the study parameters were interviewed. While I recruited
women who already knew each other and/or who knew people within my
social network, I did not personally know any of the women I interviewed.
Following a feminist practice of reflexive qualitative research (see Letherby
2003), I informed each participant of the voluntary nature of the study
and obtained consent to engage in one in-depth interview, ranging from
40 minutes to 2.5 hours. Participants received a $75.00 honorarium for

their time. All participants were assigned pseudonyms to protect their
confidentiality.
Of the forty participants, thirty- eight individuals self- identified as
women, while two identified as gender non-binary but worked as women
in the sex industry. All participants identified as Canadian citizens or
permanent residents, except for one participant who held a student visa.
Participants identified as being over 18 years old and belonging to the
following groups: Arab (n=2), Black (n=14), East Asian (n=4), Indigenous
(n=3), mixed- race (n=11), and South Asian (n= 6). Because the term
“racialized” is preferred among Canadian academics and policymakers to
refer to people of color and visible minority populations, my recruiting
materials used the term “racialized women” to refer to women of color.
However, when interviewing my participants, I found that none of them
referred to themselves as “racialized;” instead, they used either the general
term “people/women of color” or a specific race/ethnicity to identify them-
selves. Following my participants, in this chapter, I have adopted the gen-
eral term “people/women of color” to refer to my participants.
Sex Workers of Colors’ Interactions with Police

Officers
Twenty-four of the forty participants in this study reported having had
interactions with police officers. Of these, four women reported being
criminalized under anti-prostitution laws; eight participants stated that
their complaints of criminal victimization were ignored or trivialized;
seven participants said that they were harassed, or physically and/ or
sexually abused by police officers; and two participants reached out for
police protection in instances of exploitation and coercion. Although this
chapter’s focus is on the personal accounts of two participants who identi-
fied as having experienced labor exploitation and control by a third party,
all participants who had interacted with police officers were confident that
they were subjected to racial prejudice. The following quotations exem-
plify participants’ perceptions of racial discrimination:
Being a person of color, without them knowing I’m a sex worker, is crazy awful.
I’ve been arrested for nothing. I’ve received tickets for being mouthy.
(Liya)
It doesn’t make me immune because at the end of the day I’m just like
everybody else, they see you as another Black person. They will haul you in
like every Black boy or every Black man, just another potential suspect for
something.
(Vicky)
Sex workers of color in this study draw attention to the ways in which they
are confronted with cultural, institutional, and individual racism in everyday
contact with members of more powerful groups (see Essed 1990). Everyday
racism, Philomena Essed (1991) argues, is a cumulative process whereby
marginalized individuals’ experiences of racism are “shaped vicariously,
through friends, family members and other [racial minorities], through the
media, and cognitively through their general knowledge of racism in the
system” (5). Essed (1991) notes that individuals’ experiences of racism are
interpreted and evaluated against the background of earlier personal

experiences, vicarious experiences and general knowledge of racism in
society. The more experiences one has in dealing with racism, the more
elaborate and organized one’s knowledge becomes about the nature
of racism in the system, and the more effectively one can use gen-
eral knowledge of racism to understand its specific manifestations in
everyday life.
(Essed 1991, 8–9)
From this position, my research participants’ experiences of everyday

racism are “a special form of political knowledge” (Essed 1991, 9). In
what follows, I explore two women’s interactions with police wherein they
reported instances of criminal victimization involving sexual exploitation
and sex trafficking. In each of these cases, participants conceptualized the
responding officers’ attitudes and behaviors towards them to be racially
prejudiced. In my analysis, I establish how my participants’ perceptions of
law enforcement have been shaped by their general knowledge of everyday
racism, which includes past personal experiences and experiences of others
in their racialized and sex working communities, and also by the structural
and interactional forms of racism that are evident within the “ethos” of
law enforcement. Here, I argue that the socio-cultural environment of law
enforcement is informed by the culturalization of racism (see Essed 1991,
1990); accordingly, historically constructed racialized and gendered con-
trolling narratives of Black and Asian femininity are used to rationalize
micro-levels of racial domination.
Case #1: Self-R eported Victimization by an Escaped,

Black Sex Worker
Kaali is a Black independent escort. During her tenure in the sex industry,
she worked for a third party as a webcam performer and was subjected to
coercion and exploitation. She explains,
When I was 18, I answered an ad in the paper, and there was a man [looking]
for {a} webcam model and [was filming] out of his house. At that time, my
home situation was horrible, and it seemed like a good idea for providing
housing and a job, and I took it. Then, when I got there, he never let me leave,
he kept me there, he controlled my every movement. If I want to go anywhere,
I needed permission, but my whole life was still horrible. But I didn’t want to
go into a shelter, so I stayed there till I realized how bad it was and found a
way of getting out of it.
Kaali referred to her circumstances as an “abusive situation of being held

captive.” However, even after this participant found a way out, the third
party showed up at her apartment to try to bring her to work. Frustrated
with the situation, Kaali decided to seek police protection, but several
of her complaints to police were ignored. To be taken seriously by law
enforcement, Kaali had to lie, alluding to the possibility of her abuser
harboring minors:
When I was leaving my abusive situation of being held captive, and I was
going to the police for it, they didn’t want to even hear me. The only reason they
did hear me is because I mention that the person may have minors in the house.
I am not sure if it was true or not, but it was enough to get noticed. When
I think about it, if I didn’t say that, I don’t think they would have helped
me. They were thinking that it’s not even an issue that they need to check for
[because] I am just a Black girl who’s, you know, in trouble, and that’s it.
Although the police officers in this case did not set out to personally pro-
tect Kaali, their efforts to protect potential underage victims of sexual
exploitation were enough for Kaali to get rid of the harassing third party.
Given that victims of color and sex workers have both historically been
under-protected by policing practices in Canada, Kaali was not surprised
by the non-responsive officers in this case.
The police officers’ behaviors, in this case, show subtle micro-levels of
oppression rather than overt racism that can be read as police misconduct.
For example, Kaali’s status as a consenting, adult sex worker who will-
fully engaged in sex work for a third party compromised her credibility as
a reliable witness in a sexual exploitation case. Within the contemporary
controlling image of the ideal victim, Kaali’s voluntary participation in
the “risky” business of prostitution, her status as an adult rather than a
minor, and her ability to exit her living situation further decreased her
chances of receiving adequate state protection or response (Doezema 2010;
Balgamwalla 2016; Ricciardelli et al. 2020).
It has been established that police officers are skeptical of victims of
human trafficking who self-report: self-reports do not allow police officers
to witness the state of complainants’ victimization, and law enforcement
officers are not well-equipped to believe a crime has taken place when they
must rely solely on the word of a sex worker (Almodovar 2010; Haynes
2010; Sherman et al. 2015). It has also been documented that criminal
justice personnel are generally reluctant to take on cases that do not meet
the “extreme version of human trafficking commonly found in awareness
campaigns” (Millar et al. 2015, 62). To this end, cases involving an adult
and that show evidence of “victim consent to either commercial sex or
exploitative working conditions,” “freedom of movement,” and a “lack of
physical violence” are perceived to be weak cases that result in acquittals
or stays of proceedings (Millar et al. 2015, 62; Musto 2013; also see
Ricciardelli et al. 2020).
Under these circumstances, the responding officers’ actions (or, more fre-
quently, their non-actions) can be rationalized as following protocols, such
that any sex worker in this situation, regardless of race, would purport-
edly receive the same police response. Given historical tensions between
the Canadian Black community and the criminal justice system, how-
ever, race relations cannot be ignored in an analysis of responding officers’
behaviors. In Kaali’s case, the responding officers’ actions highlight micro-
level racial domination that is influenced by cultural determinism or the
culturalization of racism (see Essed 1991). The micro-dominations Kaali
experienced are based on the subtle ideology of cultural deficiency and
social inadequacy that continues to blame Black people for their own mar-
ginalization and inequality in society (see Essed 1991). In other words, the
twinned controlling images of Black femininity as hypersexual and deviant
and voluntary prostitutes as creating their own troubles are thoroughly
integrated into the attitudes and socio-cultural practices of the criminal
justice system; the responding officers, in this case, do not have to worry
about justifying their inaction to higher authorities when the victim is
“just a Black girl.”
Case #2: Awarding Victim Status to a South Asian Sex Worker

The second case featured in this chapter also shows how racial domin-
ation, through ideas of cultural deficiency and social inadequacy, filters
into policing practices and protocols. After much hesitation from officers,
Kajal, a South Asian independent sex worker, was awarded the victim
classification. Unlike Kaali, Kajal was deemed worthy of criminal justice
redress about a week after her victimization. Despite the outcome, law
enforcement’s response to Kajal’s victimhood, including their hesita-
tion, deserves attention –this case not only draws attention to the ordeal
experienced by Kajal, but it also emphasizes how such painful experiences
shape sex workers of color’s profound and sophisticated knowledge about
the reproduction of gendered racism. With this understanding, it is thus
unsurprising that many sex workers in general, and sex workers of color in
particular, hesitate to seek police protection when warranted.
According to Kajal, she reached out to police protective services when

she realized that she was being harbored, against her will, by an organized
crime group, which was also forcing her to consume alcohol and engage in
sexual activities. In the quotations below, Kajal explains the circumstances
of the incident that led to her police complaint. It is important to note that
Kajal was not a member of this organized crime group.
I was taken from my room by a client, who was in the same […] Tamil gang.
There were many of them. They had taken me to a hotel room out of the city.
They told me we were going downtown. Then they took me up into [name of
region], which is north of [city name], to go into a hotel that doesn’t have
CCTVs. They had four rooms, two of the rooms were dope rooms, one was
a sleeping room, and the other one was the party room. I was being sexually
assaulted […]. They stole my phone; I couldn’t call the police. I was so fed up.
I went to the front reception and tried to get them to call [the police].
The following quotation captures Kajal’s ordeal with forced alcohol

consumption:
I didn’t really drink willingly. They were forcing it down my throat. And any
chance I could get, whenever it looked like I was putting makeup on or getting
dressed pretty, they’d let me stand by the vanity, and I could fill a cup of water
and drink the water because I needed to stay sober when there’s like 30 plus
men there. I need to stay sober. I cannot fall asleep; I cannot get drunk. I have
to be awake.
During my interview with Kajal, as she was recounting this story, I heard
the quiver and fear in her voice. This fear is evident in the accounts above,
such that in her efforts to describe the chain of events as quickly as pos-
sible, her language became stilted as she combined strange phrases. It was
clear in our interview that Kajal was still feeling the effects of the incident.
I also heard and felt a lot of anger –anger about the way the police officers
responded (or failed to respond) to her complaint. The quotation below
highlights Kajal’s feelings of disrespect, dehumanization, unworthiness,
humiliation, and revictimization:
The police eventually came […] the way that the detective was interviewing
me, “did you drink alcohol?” […] “was there any penetration?” And I said
well no, but I was sexually assaulted, and I know that there are four levels of
sexual assault. And he kept focusing on the fact “well was there any penetra-
tion.” And I said well no. […] They did not send me to the hospital to do rape
kits […]. And the most humiliating and traumatizing and victimizing thing
they could have done was when they removed me [from the hotel]. When the
police finally came to get me out of the building […], they took me back down
the hall, where the men were sitting on the floor handcuffed. […] That was so
shameful, and I was frightened for my life because one, you don’t call the police
[on an organized crime group], and I just did. And now I have to walk in
front of them as they sit in handcuffs after a night of fuckery.
Kajal also felt exposed and unprotected by the responding officers:
They are the ones that told me that I was being trafficked […]. I told [the
officer] that I’m scared, and I don’t want to go home. He didn’t give a shit.
He took down all my information, but then from there, it was like nothing
happened with the 30 men in the room. […] They sent me back to my home.
My home was broken into; my place was tossed around. […] I called the police,
and [asked them] how could they let me go back. Was it because I’m a woman
of color? Is it because I’m not young and White with blue eyes? Is it because
you’re not going to be able to do media attention because I’m not marketable? Is
that why you don’t want to help me ’cause you think you can’t get a conviction?
[…] or that it wasn’t serious? […] Like a week and a half later […], they
connected me with a human trafficking case manager who came and tried to
explain to me that I was involved in human trafficking.
There are many similarities between Kaali’s and Kajal’s accounts, but
even where they differ, it seems there is no winning. For Kaali, her ability
to extract herself from the situation and self-report counted against her. On
the other hand, even though Kajal’s experience of violence meets the cri-
teria of human trafficking, she was “rescued” by the police officers from the
site of the incident and there was evidence at the scene, her identity as a sex
worker and her perceived willful engagement in sex and alcohol consump-
tion appeared to compromise her credibility as a “good” witness. These,
in turn, negated her claims to ideal victimhood, of both sexual assault and
sex trafficking, thus apparently justifying responding officers’ hesitation to
provide her with the classifications (Gotell 2002; Randall 2010; Srikantiah
2007; Ricciardelli et al. 2020). Furthermore, Kajal’s age, agency, Canadian
citizenship (as opposed to being a non-national), and her insubordination
(rather than passivity) towards law enforcement officers all seemed to
reduce her legitimacy as a “good witness/victim” (Balgamwalla 2016; Hua
and Nigorizawa 2010; Musto 2013). Finally, the kind of suffering/victim-
ization that Kajal endured (i.e., non-penetrative sexual assault) appeared
to be an essential factor that led to police officers’ hesitation in granting
her the classification of victim. Jennifer Musto (2013) argues that, in add-
ition to their age, gendered and heteronormative assumptions of the type
of suffering victims undergo are crucial in their eligibility for classifica-
tion as “trafficked victim.” Ultimately, in this case, Kajal’s suffering was
normalized as a virtue of her risky occupation and thus she became respon-
sible for her own harm.
Part of this can be explained through historical narratives. Sabrina

Balgamwalla (2016), for instance, argues that the construction of the
contemporary trafficking victim is very similar to the one fashioned
during the White Slave Trade panic –“she is female, trafficked for sex,
and blameless for her plight because of her youth or lack of education
[…] Her passivity and blamelessness conceptually separate her from the
illegal immigrant or prostitute and render her worthy of legal protec-
tion” (16). Extending this line of thinking, I suggest that as a South
Asian woman, if Kajal had performed passivity, enacted blamelessness,
and appeared to be uneducated, she might then have shaped police
officers’ impression of her differently, in ways that conceptually separated
her from voluntary prostitutes and rendered her worthy of legal protec-
tion without any hesitations.
As it stands, both Kaali and Kajal are convinced that their responding
officers’ minimalist approaches to investigating their cases were a
direct result of their intersecting identities as women of color and sex
workers –because they are not white, young, with blue eyes. Such
adverse experiences further solidify Kaali’s and Kajal’s mistrust of
Canadian police officers’ ability to save and protect sex workers and
racial minority communities.
Conclusion
Kaali’s and Kajal’s interactions with police officers draw attention to
the harms caused by subtle forms of racial domination. These women’s
experiential knowledge not only reflects the experiences of other research
participants but is also consistent with the findings of other studies,
including those regarding Indigenous sex workers reported in Krüsi et al.
(2016). These experiences bring to light the Canadian law enforcement
system’s structural ethos that increasingly relies on historically constructed
racialized and sexualized controlling narratives of womanhood/femininity
and victimhood to rationalize their discretions in awarding or denying state
protection to victimized sex workers of color. Within the anti-trafficking
policies and protocols, the conflation of sex work with sex trafficking fur-
ther facilitates subtle forms of racial domination that increasingly use
cultural deficiency and social inadequacy to blame sex workers for any vic-
timization that they experience while working in the industry. As Kamala
Kempadoo et al. (2017) have argued, classifying all sex work-related activ-
ities as inherently violent stands in the way of recognizing actual instances
of violence and coercion in the industry when they occur. As we see from
Kaali’s and Kajal’s experiences, culturalizing violence as a normal part of
sex work prevents officers from looking into or investigating structural
elements that might be responsible for the victimization that sex workers
endure.
Kaali’s and Kajal’s personal stories also provide strong evidence of how
sex workers of color rely on personal experiences and the experiences of
their racialized and sex working communities to develop knowledge of
everyday racism within the criminal justice system. With such knowledge,
many sex workers, especially sex workers of color, are reluctant to reach out
to police/state protection when needed (Krüsi et al. 2016). The gendered
racism that sex workers of color experience in their everyday encounters
provides an understanding of the matrix of injustices that are at play in
these women’s lives. In this regard, Kaali’s and Kajal’s lived experiences
point out the intrinsic need to develop practical techniques to combat sex
trafficking that will also allow systemic repair to the political disenfran-
chisement that is carried out through state-led initiatives against prostitu-
tion and trafficking.
Notes
1 Section 279.04 (Exploitation) states:
For the purposes of sections 279.01 to 279.03, a person exploits another
person if they (a) cause them to provide, or offer to provide, labour or a
service by engaging in conduct that, in all the circumstances, could rea-
sonably be expected to cause the other person to believe that their safety or
the safety of a person known to them would be threatened if they failed to
provide, or offer to provide, the labour or service.
(Public Safety Canada 2012, 22)
2 Section 279.01 (Trafficking in Persons) states that
Every person who recruits, transports, transfers, receives, holds, conceals
or harbours a person, or exercises control, direction or influence over the
movements of a person, for the purpose of exploiting them or facilitating
their exploitation is guilty of an indictable offence.
(Public Safety Canada 2012, 22)
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(3): 64-87.
Srikantiah, Jayashri. 2007. “Perfect Victims and Real Survivors: The Iconic Victim
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Chapter 12
Trafficking Indianness
by Legislating Settler
Sexual Logics
April Petillo
Restrictive understandings of transactional sex rely on compulsory settler

sexual logics embedded in U.S. anti-trafficking law. Legislatively, Native
borders remain sites of states of exception and “queering.” Settler vio-
lence exercised through compulsory heteronormative sexuality requires
both Native community infantilization and U.S. disregard for Native
borders. Despite the diverse activities in anti-trafficking legislation,
implementation generally conflates these activities into prostitution
(Peters 2015), especially in Indian Country (Petillo, 2015). Settler logic
suggests that transactional sex is always without choice or that, con-
versely, strange/deviant places where transactional sex includes choice are
beyond cisheteropatriarchy and unavailable for protection. This concep-
tual contradiction grafts exploitation onto specific borders, maintaining
precarity by assigning “Indianness” while erasing potential safety. This
erasure simultaneously compels “citizens’ ” compulsory settler sexuality
across borders in exchange for protection from the exploitation reserved
for “Indianness.”
Many feminist responses to communities of color’s sexual endangerment
focus on carceral interventions, presupposing state investment in equit-
able, fair treatment through mutually palatable course correction. Is a fair
carceral response possible when the state benefits from continued control
of these communities?
Pervasive abolitionist preoccupation with “law and order” as “capture and
removal” abounds. A danger of this preoccupation is socially and legally
rendering Native peoples as child-like victims—a white supremacist idea
underlying many responses to Indian Country. Interventions created for
“poor, unfortunate Indians” ultimately stymie systemic Native action.
Additionally, where trafficking is considered gang activity, familiar racial
tropes rendering Black and Latino men hypersexual, hyper- masculine,
deviant gang-bangers permeate Indian Country service provider and pol-
icymaker stories about perpetrators that must be “captured and removed”
(Petillo 2015). This is the case even when Native members outnumber Black
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-15
188 April Petillo
or Latino members. Though minimal research exists on the impact of the

“Black/Brown criminal endangering Indigenous victims” trope, this adver-
sarial positioning persists. U.S. nativist fears about men of color emerge
from the specter of animal-like criminality and sexually predatory behavior
endangering white women (DuVernay 2016), although indicators show that
sexual violence neither occurs only among specific communities or to certain
people (Black et al. 2011) nor is perpetrated mainly by men of color (Planty
et al. 2016, 5). As demonstrated by attempts to assimilate Native peoples
as white, rendering Native women as sexually wanton and easily victimized
is strategic (Williams 2012). Such racialized narratives further complicate
relationships between peoples according to social/racial status.
Thus, while Native and similarly racialized others navigate social factors
increasing community vulnerability, coloniality informs status- related
legal interventions: capturing “poor alien” victims, returning them to
“safely remote locations,” and throwing “devious Black/ Brown alien”
bullies in jail, “where they belong.” Myopic tunnel vision originating in
colonial racial hierarchies creates particular harms for one community,
negatively impacting another. Therein lies the importance of decolonized
policy approaches that consider Indian Country-specific realities while pri-
oritizing Native perspectives.
Applying decidedly different imaginaries (Perez 1999) encourages
solutions beyond policing people to fit within “respectable” settler norms.
Even those originating from marginalized, colonialized communities
internalize colonialism then recreate and adapt coloniality without this
imaginary shift. Internalized colonial imaginaries can inform refusals to
exercise political will originating beyond the state—because of distrust or
a sense that there’s no reason to act differently. For example, in 2015, only
two of more than 550 tribal codes specifically addressed trafficking. Both
resembled U.S. law, relied on nation-state intervention/enforcement, and
centered Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) principles—blending
elements of the International Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, with U.S.-spe-
cific interstate commerce concerns (Petillo 2015). Neither code seemingly
reflected the specific tribe, something Indigenous legal scholars like Sarah
Deer, Robert A. Williams, and Lynda Snyder note as challenging for Native
communities with differing traditional governance models (Petillo 2015).
Communities placing higher social value on laws framed by observable
life transitions instead of extra-communal commerce look/feel different.
While discussing the need for a tribal code template nimble enough to
incorporate regional realities shaping local trafficking concerns, one scholar
wondered how vital a radical sense of freedom is to realize this goal (Petillo
2015). The sense of freedom to determine one’s own story is likely required
since laws can function as stories of people’s lived realities converted into
rules. Stories about trafficking and Indianness are no different.
Legislating Settler Sexual Logics 189
Whose “Law and Order?”

Instead of individual vulnerabilities exploited by nefarious “others,” the
broad blueprint for trafficking began before the U.S. nation-state—with
Indigenous peoples’ capture/containment then forced movement purport-
edly to protect a burgeoning citizenry. This violence—equal parts colonial,
gendered, and spatial (Goeman 2013)—combined exploitative, terrorizing
sexual and labor practices with Indigenous dispossession clearing “excess”
land, ensuring that incoming settlers could live “free.” Thus, racialized,
colonized, classed people experienced “trafficking” for settler purposes
before the contemporary language.
Historically, U.S. policy has rendered Indigenous people excessive
through accepted psychosocial ideas about male savagery, female subser-
vience, and general sexual wantonness attributable to settler framing their
differences as “animal-like.” U.S. logics anchor Indigenous life, defined
as “outside of civilized citizenship,” as impossible to protect. Such pol-
itical positioning marks undesirability and ungrievability, encouraging
two psychosocial rationalizations to justify harm: a) protection lies outside
the system’s capability; or b) those perceived/rendered deviants are “the
problem.” Thus, Native separation from their homeland and/or traditional
territory is a politically justified social benefit. This rendering process is
a model still used for political imagery in Nativist, xenophobic policy-
making. The marking alchemy spotlights the dangers of not belonging
to the nation-state (as a citizen), which keeps citizens “in line.” This
double-speak efficiently communicates the exclusionary boundaries of
safety and control: “Some are trafficked/used without recourse” and “This
behavior, not that, earns protection.” Thus, U.S. trafficking interventions
continue settler violence by relying on sexualized norms and borders,
generating spectacles, warning citizen-observers, and terrorizing targets
simultaneously—especially where Native peoples are concerned.
There are numerous tribal criminal justice formats, but all share con-
sistent tension with U.S. criminal jurisdiction, a colonizing tool that
criminalizes Indigenous sociolegal practices while limiting sovereignty
(Garrow and Deer, 2015, 1). Tribal justice systems sometimes work and
clash with U.S. jurisdiction covering bodily injury and property crimes
committed by Natives in Indian Country, as with the Major Crimes Act
(1885), and Indian Country crimes without specifying Native-against-
Native violations, as with the General Crimes Act (1817). Such decidedly
non-Native legislation has limited tribal laws and codes grounded in
Native-defined justice.
The same is generally true around trafficking. Legal trafficking discourse
emerged centuries after Native dispossession began in what is now called
the U.S. and relies on, codifies, and reifies cultural notions about gender,
sexuality, and victimization (Peters 2015). These embedded norms reframe
190 April Petillo
interpretation and implementation of laws like the TVPA. As the U.N. has
suggested,1 embedded norms continue if left unnamed and unexamined.
This continuation is partially true; U.S. law builds on precedent before
re/invention. Before considering amendments or other legal adjustments,
U.S. legal systems first address current problems with constitutionally
defined solutions in place for over 230 years. As the “interest convergence
principle” explains, the law “repairs” harm-producing tears in the legal
fabric only when nation-state interests converge with requested change
(Bell 1980, 523).2 Thus embedded norms flow from the original legislation
into subsequent reauthorizations in a system slow to change. “Reification”
includes the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthoriza-
tion, despite its nods to tribal criminal jurisdiction through the Special
Domestic-Violence Criminal Jurisdiction (SDVCJ) process. SDVCJ neither
“creates nor eliminates” federal or state criminal jurisdiction over Indian
Country, and reauthorization includes no other language acknowledging
Native sovereign borders.
While numerous rhetorical connections exist between Missing and
Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S+)
and sexual violence, few investigations consider trafficking specifically.
Indian Country reports, and discourse 15 years post-TVPA conflated trans-
actional sex into trafficking to discuss sexual violence. Two notable reports,
Shattered Hearts: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women
and Girls in Minnesota (Pierce 2009) and Garden of Truth: The Prostitution
and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota (Farley et al. 2011), encouraged
Indigenous approaches, prioritizing place and local experiences, but did
not offer comprehensive solutions without centering the nation-state. The
reports were service organization produced, focused on specific types of
solutions for participants, and reliant on law enforcement. They also lacked
critical analysis of the nation-state’s production and benefit from the land-
scape where trafficking could thrive, especially involving people of color.
A notable earlier exception is Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous
Women from Sexual Violence in the USA (Amnesty International 2006), which
did both while relying heavily on carceral feminist frameworks and demands
that the existing U.S. criminal justice system “do better.” That reliance
ignores 1) how historically mismatched definitions of safety impact legal
practicalities in Indian Country or other similarly concentrated ethnoracial
enclaves; and 2) the colonial racializations undergirding anti-trafficking
policy. More recent reports focused explicitly on trafficking, such as Human
Trafficking & Native Peoples in Oregon: A Human Rights Report (Weedn et al.
2014), are more critical but focus primarily on better U.S. justice responses
and erase sex work.
“Trafficking,” defined in U.S. law, is relatively new even though the
practice is not and ill-fits Indian Country. The TVPA definition implies
“movement,” which is challenging to apply legally in Native life. The
implicit legal understanding suggests that traversing state or national

borders is more violative than crossing reservation or otherwise sovereign
Native borders. Since the TVPA’s only explicit guidance about Indian
Country applicability concerns trafficking children, this is applicable
according to age.
Cultural perceptions of sexual exploitation also skew TVPA interpret-
ation and application in Indian Country. Biases about people located along
and outside settler-coded gender with differing sexualities and relationships
to sex work influence how people interpreting and implementing the
law wield it. These biases imbue trafficking with particular ideas about
race and ethnicity grounded in U.S. legal designations. The current law’s
vagueness necessitates interpreting when and how to apply it. As well,
the law’s breadth encourages flattening the control/protection possible
due to ethnorace and sociolegal response to certain peoples’ endanger-
ment. In these instances, systemic “Indianness”-related vulnerabilities and
hypersexual tropes imposed according to race and Native political status
are necessarily part of both the legal definition and implementation.
Settler Logics of Sexual Excess

As colonial violence, anti-trafficking discourse consolidates U.S. authority—
protecting people who “fit” (i.e., citizens) from exploitation while clearing
the “excess” via dispossession and racialized legal caveats. Relationships
between the U.S. and many Native nations (recognized or not) involve cre-
ating a system wherein Native peoples must eschew community-relevant
social control and safety to depend on the U.S. government. This require-
ment ignores the U.S.’s frequent endangerment of Native peoples. For
example, SDVCJ designation implies that protecting tribal citizens from
coercion is beyond local (tribal) jurisdiction except where the U.S. determines
Native appropriateness to exercise jurisdiction. Here, “appropriate” means
“U.S. like” in judicial processes, procedures, and structure. This poten-
tial jurisdictional impasse of Native-identified legal authority and effective
U.S. mimicry demonstrates a pillar of settler violence where statecraft
zones of exception emerge through rights codified for “good Natives” while
conscripting Native sovereign authority generally. Pitting Native Nation
against Native Nation for U.S. approved exceptionalism, establishing
SDVCJ identity also reifies state-developed tropes of racial paternalism.
Legal diminishment of Native sovereignty marks U.S.-defined borders—
as geographically applied political will—indicating U.S.-defined safe (or
conquered) land and authority/recognition (or sameness) via jurisdictional
approval (Petillo 2019). While feminist in scope, a carceral “capture and
remove” strategy may minimally support anti-colonial Native political
goals but also clearly benefits a nation-state without vested interests in an
Indigenous future.
192 April Petillo
Conversely, anti-sex trafficking tropes and current legislation, including

the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA)/Allow States and Victims
to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), illustrate continued legal
investment in settler sexuality, reinforcing the “need” for these laws.
Addressing trafficking that relies on state-created community vulnerabil-
ities through state imprisonment is coloniality performed via jurisdiction
that ensures consumptive sociolegal death.
Conclusion
In numerous ways, current trafficking discourse continues colonial leg-
acies of gendered and spatial violence, using the law and lack of polit-
ical will to encode Native precarity so that settler-citizens can continue
to “live free.” Racialized, colonized, classed people continue to experience
“trafficking” for settler purposes. Interrogating state-sanctioned racialized
harm reflected in anti-trafficking discourse leaves us with more to consider.
This exploration marks only some of the erasures in the discourse while
suggesting how a colonizing legal code of settler logics and fears assign
precarity to specific types of bodies. What is clear is that without a per-
spective shift, we will continuously cycle back to familiar signposts with
anti-trafficking interventions that only minimally address the racist and
anti-Native undertones that persist.
Notes
1 See comments about sociocultural gender discrimination “unequivocally”
influencing sexual violence (U.N. Secretary-General 2006). Rashida Manjoo,
former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its causes and
consequences, extended this to include considerations of trafficking (2014,
33–34).
2 The principle, an integral part of critical race theory, rests on the paradox that
the American status quo believes in the legitimacy of racial equality only when
and if it advances or at least does not impair or shift the societal status of
whites.
References
Amnesty International. 2007. Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous
Women from Sexual Violence in the U.S.A. New York: Amnesty International U.S.A.
Bell, Derrick A., Jr. 1980. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-
Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law Review 93(3): 518–533.
Black, Michele Kathleen Basile, Matthew Breiding, Sharon Smith, Mikel Walters,
Melissa Merrick, Jieru Chen, Mark Stevens. 2011. National Intimate Partner
and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary Report. National Center for Injury
Prevention and Control, Division of Violence Prevention.
DuVernay, Ava, dir. 2016. 13th [film]. Los Gatos, CA: Global Originals.
Farley, Melissa, Nicole Matthews, Sarah Deer, Guadalupe Lopez, Christine Stark,
and Eileen Hudon. 2011. Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of
Native Women in Minnesota. Minnesota: Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual
Assault Coalition, Prostitution Research & Education and the William Mitchell
College of Law.
Garrow, Carrie E. and Sarah Deer. 2015. Tribal Legal Studies: Tribal Criminal Law
and Procedure. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Goeman, Mishuana. 2013. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations.
Manjoo, Rashida. 2014. “Trafficking of Women: Norms, Realities and Challenges.”
Albany Government Law Review 7(1): 33–62.
Perez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peters, Alicia. 2015. Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the
Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Petillo, April. 2019. “Marking Embodied Borders: Compulsory Settler Sexuality,
Indigeneity, and U.S. Law.” Women’s Studies in Communications Journal.
41(4): 329–334.
Petillo, April. 2015. By Force or by Choice: Exploring Contemporary Targeted Trafficking
of Native Peoples. PhD diss., University of Arizona.
Pierce, Alexandra (Sandi) and the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center.
2009. Shattered Hearts: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian
Women and Girls in Minnesota. Minnesota: Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource
Center.
Planty, Michael, Lynn Langton, Christopher Krebs, Marcus Berzofsky, Hope
Smiley-McDonald and U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.
2016. Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994– 2010. Revised. Washington,
DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
United Nations Secretary-General. 2006. In-Depth Study on all Forms of Violence
Against Women: Rep. of the Secretary General, ¶ 31, U.N. Doc. A/61/122/Add.1
(July 6, 2006).
Weedn, Hayley, Joseph Scovel and Jason Juran. 2014. Human Trafficking & Native
Peoples in Oregon: A Human Rights Report. Salem, OR: Willamette University
College of Law.
Williams, Robert A., Jr. 2012. Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Cited Legislation
Communications Decency Act of 1996, (C.D.A.), Pub. L. No. 104-104 (Tit. V),
110 Stat. 133 (Feb. 8, 1996), codified at 47 U.S.C. §§223, 230.
194 April Petillo
Public Law 280 (Pub. L. 83-280, August 15, 1953, codified as amended at 18
U.S.C. § 1162; 28 U.S.C. § 1360; and 25 U.S.C. §§ 1321–1326.
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Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization of 2013
Chapter 13
Imperial Anti-Trafficking in India

Producing Racialized Knowledge Regimes
over the Longue Durée
Mishal Khan
Throughout the nineteenth century agents of the British Empire patrolled

the oceans and borders of their imperial possessions seeking to stamp out
the slave trade. Particularly at port cities across the Indian Ocean, agents
of the crown “rescued” men, women, and children who appeared to them
to have been enslaved. However, not all transported people were seen as
“slaves” and freed. Looking specifically at British India, British agents
singled out members of the African diaspora –Afro-Asians colloquially
known as Shidis –as targets of their anti-slave trading activity. In doing so
they cast a blind eye towards Indian men, women, and children who were
being transported for a variety of productive and reproductive purposes
across and beyond the limits of the British Empire.1
This example provides insight into an early iteration of state-driven
anti-trafficking regimes and their consequences.2 Abolitionist pressures to
eliminate the slave trade played a significant role in driving these efforts.
However, interventions in slave trading were also part of larger attempts
to control the movement of peoples across imperial borders by designating
some circuits of movement as suspect and others as legitimate. Like anti-
trafficking regimes of today, these anti-slave trade measures adopted racial
categories to characterize social relationships –to demarcate the bound-
aries between coercion and consent. Drawing on this historical example,
I ask: what are the long-term consequences of state-led anti-trafficking
regimes that rely on racial categories to police bodies as they cross borders?
What dynamics and inequalities do these regimes with their concern for
“slavery” or “modern slavery” direct our attention away from?
Nineteenth-century anti-trafficking systems set in motion processes that
were both resilient and pernicious. Foreshadowing surveillance regimes of
today, state agents relied on racial categories to render subjects legible as
victims or accomplices, dependants or slaves, free or unfree. This chapter
asks us to reflect on the longue durée –to think carefully not only about the
present, but also about the futures being forged through anti-trafficking
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-16
196 Mishal Khan
policies that rely on racially inflected slippages and conflations. We live

in an era of short-term thinking even while we remain locked in patterns
of behavior shaped by knowledge structures forged in distant pasts. The
example of imperial attempts to clamp down on the traffic in slaves does
more than offer an instructive historical parallel. Understanding this
era also gives us insight into early forms of state-driven anti-trafficking
that have only been sharpened and perfected over time –with the added
power of science and technology. Anti-trafficking interventions –old and
new –fail to apprehend the complex and contingent lived experiences of
the men and women they target. Indeed, they were not designed to do so.
Uncritically adopting racial categories to mark people as trafficked or not
sets into motion complex processes that constrain and shape the limits of
identity formation and inclusion in the modern nation state.
This reflection is particularly important in light of the surge of legis-
lative and policy attention towards combating human trafficking driven
by governments in the global North. A formidable literature has emerged
questioning the efficacy, motivations, and consequences of these regimes.
From highlighting the racial logics that permeate distinctions drawn
between sex worker and sex traffic victim (Lam and Lepp 2019; Ham 2017;
Kempadoo et al. 2015; Spanger 2018), to refocusing attention on the larger
capitalist structures that force people to migrate in the first place (LeBaron
2015; O’Connell Davidson 2010), to pointing out how these regimes mark
entire communities as suspect while others remain invisible (Liew 2020).
A critical mass of evidence now exists to demonstrate that gendered and
racial lenses are so ingrained in anti-trafficking surveillance regimes that
they have become common-sense truths –ways of “seeing” (Beutin 2017;
Farrell and Pfeffer 2014).
After the East India Company (EIC) abolished slavery in India in 1843,
ports, borders, and transit hubs became sites of enhanced scrutiny and con-
trol. Since the British Empire abolished the slave trade in 1807 the EIC
issued a series of edicts to limit and ultimately prohibit the slave trade
within their colonial possessions. Intercepting and “freeing” Shidis came
to dominate British anti-slavery activities especially in the coastal regions
in British India. If Shidi men, women, or children were encountered in
boats, in retinues of elites, or travelling with merchants, colonial agents
intervened to “liberate” them –even when subjects themselves insisted
that they were not slaves.
Agents relied on their sight to determine who was, and who was
not, a slave. These decisions were not reached through legal reasoning,
but were rather immediate, off-the-cuff judgements. Slavery was either
“self-evident” or not. Sorting between peoples both relied on and further
imprinted the category of slavery onto particular subjects in colonial India.
For a time women that looked distinctly European such as Circassians and
Georgians were singled out and intercepted as slaves if colonial authorities
Imperial Anti-Trafficking in India 197
found them in the entourages of local elites. However, over the course of
the nineteenth century there was an intensification of the frequency with
which colonial agents used the term slavery only when the transaction
involved individuals who phenotypically presented as African.
While anti-slave trafficking regimes relied on racial categories to distin-
guish between free and unfree, genres of unfreedom too were assigned in
racialized and gendered terms. The labels used to describe specific types of
illicit transactions in people were bifurcated along racial and gendered lines.
Africans were not the only people stopped at borders. Indian women and
children were sometimes suspected of being trafficked or kidnapped when
they travelled with merchants or elites. However, if these merchants or
elites argued that they were being transported for the purposes of marriage
or adoption, the women and children were often allowed to pass. If they
were intercepted, it was because they were either suspected of prostitution
or they matched a description provided by a parent or husband making an
abduction or kidnapping claim. Significantly, Indian men do not feature
in these transactions at all. Indian women and children could sometimes
be seen as trafficked, kidnapped, or abducted but Shidis –whether men,
women, or children –were always seen under the specific category of slaves.
The archive reveals flashes of conflict where historical actors refused
the categories imposed on them by the colonial state –rejecting attempts
to be “freed.” Yet these traces of alternative realities are mere footnotes,
overwhelmed by a vast administrative apparatus that continued to churn
out and reiterate narratives around Shidis as slaves and Indians as servants,
dependants, or wives.
These repetitive acts of freeing Shidis from slavery from over a cen-
tury ago continue to influence the construction of group boundaries and
the self-understandings of communities in South Asia today (Loveman
2014; Bourdieu 1993; Wimmer 2013; Brubaker 2004). This colonial dis-
course has now become part of the historical consciousness among South
Asians. Today the history of slavery in South Asia has come to be told
through Shidis and the presence of Shidis has come to be viewed as evi-
dence that the slave trade was carried out in India. Despite the many paths
that Afro-Asians may have taken to come to India –as soldiers, scholars,
traders, merchants, or royalty –these diverse histories have been erased
and simplified.
These legacies have impacted the Shidi community’s full inclusion in the
modern nation state –in both India and Pakistan. In the early days after
colonial Independence, observers sometimes commented on the presence
of African origin groups, noting them as racially distinct outsiders. These
groups were seen as visible reminders of exotic histories of slavery in South
Asia rather than as native to the Subcontinent with legitimate claims to
the new nation state. As the Subcontinent transitioned from imperial
possession to nation, the vital importance of claims of belonging to the soil
198 Mishal Khan
only intensified. Anti-trafficking and anti-slavery regimes can thus per-

manently mark subjects as having come from somewhere else.
Reflecting on the rise of contemporary state support for anti-trafficking
measures, scholars have noted that these efforts have been little more
than red herrings (Blackett and Duquesnoy 2021; Butler 2015). Looking
at the United States today, Blackett notes how the public preoccupation
with anti-trafficking has shifted policy attention away from the racialized
forms of oppression and legacies of slavery that continue to exist in
American society. Anti-trafficking thus acts as a diversion, averting our
gaze away from the full range of problematic social relationships that con-
tinue uninterrupted. In a similar way, in colonial India, by focusing on
preventing the traffic in slaves, attention was drawn away from the most
egregious forms of inequality pervasive on the Subcontinent –from caste
violence to a variety of historical traditions of gendered and kinship-based
servitude. While Shidis were racialized as slaves, Indians were racialized
as a category of “free” labor –or at least something other than enslaved.
Domestic slavery and agrarian forms of bondage which made up the vast
majority of social and laboring relationships in India were not legible in
slavery terms and were left mostly untouched (Major 2009; Kumar 1965;
Chatterjee 1999; Viswanath 2014). These multiple forms of subordination
continue today.
In the contemporary era anti-trafficking measures are bound up with
attempts by the modern state to reclaim control over its borders in the
face of successive waves of globalization. This connection between anxie-
ties over state authority and border control measures were also present in
the era of colonial anti-slave trade activity (Sharma 2020; Mongia 2018;
Major 2009; McKeown 2008). In addition to classifying and controlling
the movement of peoples, colonial authorities monitored the circulation of
illicit goods, arms, and commodities (Matthew 2016; Norton 2014; Cohn
1996). Sovereignty was thus enacted and performed by the colonial state
claiming the authority to control, tax, and regulate who and what passed
through its borders.
In the contemporary era powerful nations in the global North accumu-
late moral capital by promoting anti-trafficking efforts on a global stage.
Similarly, British agents and abolitionists created a spectacle out of the
image of the emancipated African body. Vivid celebrations of the poor
souls freed by agents of the crown were frequently circulated in the press
both in India and the metropole. This commandeering of the rhetoric and
imagery of rescuing Africans garnered symbolic authority for the empire
in the eyes of the public in London, India, and rival powers. These displays
were linked to the growth of the modern state –a form of what Loveman
has called the “primitive accumulation of symbolic power” (Loveman,
2005; Brown, 2006). Freeing slaves generated moral capital –both for the
ambitious officers who manned the empire and the crown as a whole.
Contemporary bureaucratic structures created to identify human

trafficking and modern slavery, for all their growing sophistication util-
izing the latest advancements of technology and science, still rely on the
ability to distinguish between human bodies. Using visible markers to
identify and classify was fundamental to the surveillance regimes that
emerged from imperial milieus where alien colonizers were called on to
manage the bewildering diversity of their subjects. The modern state con-
tinues to name and classify subjects with labels that sit uneasily with the
subjective experiences and complex lived realities of the individuals under
its aegis. Interventions range from the violent incarceration of “criminals”
based on problematic racial profiling, “neutral” acts such as classification
in a census, and finally to “benign” acts of freeing, whether from slavery,
modern slavery, or trafficking. The assumptions and easy correlations that
anti-trafficking regimes –old and new –deploy to render subjects legible,
set into motion complex social processes that constrain and shape the
limits of identity formation lasting well beyond the political and ideo-
logical imperatives of the moment.
Notes
A fuller version of this piece appears in Khan (2021).
1
2 Anti-slavery legislation in India did not always use the term “trafficking,”
opting instead for terms such as “disposing of,” “purchase and sale,” or “slave
trading” specifically. However, in official communications and in commen-
taries on this legislation “trafficking” was used either interchangeably with or
addition to these terms –for instance the “traffic in slaves” was often used –
to indicate a broader category of illicit transport of people across borders. In
this chapter I reflect on measures to curtail the slave trade specifically, rather
than the domestic institution of slavery, as a specific form of state-driven
anti-trafficking.
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Part III
Migrant and Sex

Worker Resistance
to Anti-Trafficking
Chapter 14
Resistance of Butterfly
Mobilization of Asian Migrant Sex Workers
Against Sexism and Racism in Canadian
Anti-Trafficking Measures
Elene Lam, Jaden Hsin-Yun Peng and Coly Chau
Introduction
「遷蝶是一個著重於亞洲遷移性工作者群體，給她們一些支
助，遷蝶主張性工作是一份工作，不應該受到歧視，應該有平
等的待遇，亞裔性工作者來到加拿大，是絕對的弱勢群體，本
來這份工作就有一定的不同，又面臨語言的壓力，所以在生活
和工作當中就面臨困難重重，遷蝶就搭起了一個橋梁和紐帶，
與各位姐妹一起解決困難。」
Butterfly is a network that focuses on Asian migrant sex workers, to give them
support and assistance. Butterfly states that sex work is work, that should not
face discrimination, rather should face equal treatment. Asian sex workers come
to Canada, as a vulnerable group engaging in work that is seemingly different,
on top of added stresses of language barrier, life and work is extremely difficult.
Butterfly serves as a bridge and tie, connecting sisters to collectively address
challenges.
(Lisa, Butterfly outreach worker)
Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network was formed by
sex workers, social workers, legal, immigration and health professionals,
activists and allies in 2014. Butterfly is the first self-mobilized Asian and
migrant sex workers grassroot organization in Canada. The network was
founded upon the belief that sex workers are entitled to respect, dignity,
safety, protection, justice and basic human rights. Butterfly asserts that,
regardless of immigration status, Asian and migrant sex workers should be
treated like all other workers. The network works to provide support and
advocates for the rights of Asian and migrant sex workers.
The work of Butterfly necessitates understandings that Asian migrant
women and sex workers have historically been constructed as victims
through racist, sexist and imperialist laws and policies, since early migra-
tion to Canada and the United States in the nineteenth century. The his-
tories of domestic and global projects that stressed moral panic and an
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-18
206 Elene Lam, Jaden Hsin-Yun Peng and Coly Chau
urgency of rescue of Asian migrant women, particularly those engaged in

sex work, have left legacies that continue to discriminate, oppress, mar-
ginalize, target and criminalize Asian migrant sex workers. Contrary to
the beliefs of victimization, Asian and migrant sex workers have agency
to determine their own fates. Networks in Canada like Butterfly: Asian and
Migrant Sex Worker Support Network exist precisely to challenge contem-
porary perceptions created through historical and ongoing sexism, racism
and imperialism. Further, the networks support migrant sex workers, and
fight harmful laws, policies and measures that target them. In the mobil-
ization of this community, Asian sex workers use different methods to
make their voices heard and to challenge the stereotypes that have and
continue to be made against them.
This chapter explores both why and how Asian migrant sex workers
in Canada continue to resist oppressive anti-trafficking measures in the
present day. Through the organizing that takes place within Butterfly and
in the coalitions that Butterfly co-build and work alongside, we can come
to see why and how Asian migrant sex workers confront and disrupt the
underpinning sexist and racist structures in contemporary anti-trafficking
measures.
Histories and Legacies of Constructed Victimization

We start by examining and locating particular histories of early Chinese
migration to the U.S. and Canada that helped produce Asian women as
victims. It is important to iterate that historical racial, gendered and
sexualized depictions of colonial and imperial projects, not only impacted
Chinese and other Asian women, but also affected Indigenous, Black
and non-white women and communities in different but interconnected
ways. Historically, anti- trafficking initiatives and policies oppressed,
marginalized and harmed racialized and migrant women; these measures
further targeted and criminalized migrant sex workers. Understanding the
legacies of these histories allows us to understand why Butterfly, a grassroots
sex workers organization, has been challenging prevalent and harmful
misconceptions about the victim labels of Asian women, pushing back the
anti-trafficking discourses and stopping the harm of anti-trafficking dis-
course and policies in Canada.
Sex and Migration in Nation and Empire Building

Prior to the introduction of Asiatic labor in the west, sexual abhorrence and
immorality were persistently attributed to Indigenous and Black women
and communities, to justify the theft of land, enslavement and ownership
of bodies and labor, domination and degradation. Sex and migration have
Mobilization of Asian Migrant Sex Workers 207
always been crucial to nation and empire building. White settlers often
utilized intimacies and relations with Indigenous women for opportun-
ities and connections to build colonies and settlements (Hall 2006), while
Indigenous women were seen as illegitimate. Enslaved Black women who
had been forcibly transported to the west through the transatlantic slave
trade, were wanted for their fertility and the ability to reproduce during
the slave economy, but post-Civil War, Black women were seen as sexu-
ally deviant (Davis 1982). Alongside and building on other Black fem-
inist writers, Adrienne D. Davis’s (2002) framing of the “sexual economy
of slavery” explains how Black women’s sexuality and reproduction were
never afforded to them, but it has always been central in white pleasure and
production of white nations and empires.
The transition from African enslaved chattel slavery towards “free”
labor brought large amounts of Asian migrants to the west. Through the
indentured “coolie” labor trades that began in the nineteenth century,
Chinese men and South Asian families were introduced into the western
empires, colonies and newly independent nations. In the U.S. and Canada,
early migration of Chinese men and women was fundamental to nation and
empire building, through the construction of railroads that would solidify
the nations geographically; the building of industries like sugar and
mining; and the provision of domestic work to support heteropatriarchal
white families. Sex and migration have been and continue to be crucial to
and deeply intertwined in nation and empire building.
Orientalizing Narratives of Trafficking and

Sexual Slavery
By the late nineteenth century, moral panic around trafficking and sexual
slavery surrounded Chinese and Oriental “races” in the U.S. and Canada.
The threat of Chinese and Oriental races developed alongside notions of
“yellow slavery” and “white slavery” globally. “Yellow slavery” portrayed
what was believed to be an inclination of the “yellow races” to enslavement
and human trafficking, while “white slavery” was a narrative about sexual
slavery and sex trafficking of white women, and later non-white women
and children. Scholars note that conditions of “trafficking” were produced
by the coercive nature of the indentured “coolie” labor trade, established by
the west (Cho 2009). Meanwhile attachment of immorality to the “yellow
races” was an attempt by the west to absolve and distance themselves from
histories of the slave trade (Cho 2009), as well as to create categories of
sexual slavery.
Missionary and cultural productions were crucial in producing the
legacies of these narratives of trafficking and sexual slavery. Within the
U.S. and Canada, they produced Chinese “bachelor societies” as a result of
mass migration of Chinese male laborers and restrictive immigration pol-

icies that prevented entry of Chinese women, further producing narratives
around the trafficking and sexual slavery of Chinese women. Missionary
work in Asia that dates back to the seventeenth century often spoke of
the backwardness of Chinese societies and the victimization and helpless-
ness of Chinese women. In the networks of mission homes built across
the U.S. and Canada, missionaries continued to depict Chinese women as
victims in need of rescue. Chinese American women were often described
by missionaries as “living highly regulated, cloistered lives, tightly con-
trolled by male kin, employers, and owners” (Voss 2018, 122). The
Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home was established in San Francisco,
United States (Pascoe 1990), and in 1886, the Chinese Rescue Home was
built in Victoria, British Columbia, to rescue Chinese women and girls
from prostitution and slavery, later to be renamed the Oriental Home and
School to include Japanese girls and women. These examples deemed that
Oriental women and girls, regardless of their situations, were more suitable
in the custody of white women missionaries (Pascoe 1990; Ikebuchi 2015).
Meanwhile many cultural productions also depicted Chinese women as
helpless and infantilized, “thrown aside” by men (Sueyoshi 2018, 90). In
sensationalized portrayals, Chinese sex workers, girls, women and wives
alike were all transformed into images of helpless “slaves” and any Chinese
marriages themselves were equated to guises for selling Chinese women
into sexual slavery (Cho 2009). Attempts by Chinese women and sex
workers to escape or refuse rescue were attributed to their racial and cul-
tural “backwardness”, rather than an acknowledgement of their agency
(Cho 2009; Ikebuchi 2015; Voss 2018). Often these missionary or cultural
depictions spoke of the immorality of the “backwardness” of Asian races
and societies and disregarded the social, economic and political conditions
that produced it.
Orientalizing narratives of trafficking and sexual slavery has been and
remains crucial to justify conquest, control and imperial goals. The roots
of Asian migrant labor as tools for American and Canadian settler-colonial
expansion explains how sex work itself is delegitimized and criminalized,
when it is not on the terms of the settler-colonial state. Given that sex is an
important element, often framed as risks, problems and dangers of women
migrating through border crossing as labor trade (Mai and King 2009),
Pickering and Ham (2014) indicate how borders and immigration pol-
icies are used to sort people through profiling and stereotyping of women,
sex work and their vulnerabilities. The notion of “sexual slavery” has been
imposed on women who provide sex services, enhancing the produced
imagination of particular women as subordinated, abused and exploited
(Weitzer 2007). Further, the “immoralities” and “backwardness” of the
trafficking and sexual slavery of Chinese and Oriental races, enables “rescue”
work on their bodies and lands.
Early Anti-Trafficking and Anti-P rostitution Measures

Politically and legally, many laws and measures were created to target early
migrant Chinese women and sex workers as a result of the moral panic
around trafficking and sex work. Anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution
laws targeted, criminalized and created unsafe conditions for the women.
In San Francisco, 1854, the city passed Ordinance No. 546 that targeted
and was enforced on mostly Chinese and Mexican women who were all
deemed to be immorally engaged in sex work and a violation to public
decency (Tong 1994; Cho 2009; Wong 2015). In 1870, hearings led to “An
Act to Prevent the Kidnapping and Importation of Mongolian, Chinese,
and Japanese Females for Criminal and Demoralizing Purposes” in the U.S.
(Mohanty 1991). By 1875, the U.S. passed the Page Act, which denied
entry of Chinese women based on their prostitution and their degraded
states as a result of being trafficked. In 1882, the U.S. followed the Page
Act with the Chinese Exclusion Act, attempting to restrict entry of all
Chinese. Similarly, following the completion of the railroad in Canada,
the government brought forth the 1885 Royal Commission on Chinese
Immigration. The Commission persisted with depictions of the immor-
ality, criminality, inhumanity and the predisposition to captivity and pros-
titution, of Chinese societies (Anderson 1991). Canada introduced the head
tax system and later the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923. By 1910, following
a global moral panic around “sexual slavery” the International Convention
for the Suppression of the Whites Slave Traffic was signed by the League
of Nations. And in 1932, the League of Nations commissioned an Enquiry
into Traffic in Women and Children in the East, that reiterated the global
moral panic about the trafficking and sexual slavery of Oriental races. Many
of these laws and measures were attempts to conflate the migration of
Chinese women, whether involved in sex work or not, as victims of human
trafficking and sexual slavery, and to institutionalize codes of morality.
The Chinese Exclusion Acts existed alongside national and racial based
quotas. Lifting of these Acts took place post-World War II; meanwhile
American imperialism and militarism continued to proliferate throughout
Asia and globally. Within the U.S., Canada and globally, these desires to
see Asia and Asians as the “Other”, different and backwards, are deeply tied
to settler-colonial and imperial conquests and interests.
Discourse of Anti-Trafficking and Current Policies

in Canada
Discourses of trafficking and anti-trafficking measures have re-emerged in
the past decades in Canada, the United States and globally. Scholars have
problematized the conflation of sex work and trafficking (Jaggar 1997;
Kempadoo 2007; Sanghera 2005; Chapkis 2003; Weitzer 2007). The
myths and discourses regarding human trafficking construct sets of know-

ledge, and result in actions that have negative impacts on the everyday lives
of sex workers—particularly migrant, racialized, Black and Indigenous
peoples—and exacerbate their marginalization and vulnerability (Centre
for Feminist Research 2017; Kaye 2017; Maynard 2017). As mentioned in
the previous section on the histories of constructed victimization, sex and
migration have been and continue to be crucial in colonial and imperial
projects. In this section, we explore how these discourses have played out
through the Canadian context and the manifestations of laws and policies
that target Asian migrant women.
Contemporary Views on Sex Work and Trafficking

Contemporary dominant anti-trafficking perspectives argue that human
trafficking and sex work are forms of “modern day slavery”. They posit that
sex work is violence against women and inherently exploitative (Weitzer
2007). Much like the histories of the construction of trafficking and sexual
slavery, presently, migrant women engaged in sex work, especially women
of color, are defined by expressions of patriarchy and gendered violence.
These framings illustrate the control of women’s body and sexuality, as
well as seeing sex migration as harmful (Kempadoo 2001). Sex work
prohibitionists argue that “exploitation, subjugation and violence against
women are intrinsic to and ineradicable from sex work” (Weitzer 2007,
5). These processes continue the recognition and construction of migrant
sex workers as criminals and illegal migrants (Brock et al. 2000; Chapkis
2003; Lam 2018b; Lepp 2002; Sharma 2005). Migration controls and the
attempts to eliminate sex work continue to be advocated and adopted by
the mainstream as part of the contemporary anti-trafficking paradigm
(Sanghera 2005; Sharma 2005).
Contemporarily, Asian and migrant sex workers are represented as vul-
nerable and innocent trafficked victims who need to be protected and
rescued (Agustín 2006; Centre for Feminist Research 2017; Chapkis 2003;
Kaye 2017; Kempadoo 2001; Luibhéid 2002; Maynard 2017; Sharma
2005; Weitzer 2007; Zheng 2009). Through these framings, sex work
prohibitionists argue that it is impossible for sex workers to consent to sell
sexual services since sex work is intrinsically violent and exploitative. Myths
about sex workers include that they are not able to act as agents and, as a
result, are coerced to engage in sex work (Chapkis 2003; Doezema 2010;
Kempadoo 2004; Sanghera 2005; Weitzer 2007). The trafficked victims
discourse continues to be successfully imposed on racialized, migrant and
third-world women because they are regarded as “the Other”, who fit the
image of “perfect victims” (Doezema 2010; Uy 2011). Historical and con-
temporary anti-trafficking campaigns and policies continue to construct
migrant sex workers as “the Other” who present a danger and threat
(Sharma 2005). To see migrant sex workers as always racialized women
and “Others” also indicates that the government has a role “in maintaining
a particular gendered and racial neo-colonial identity” through border
controls (Jeffrey 2005, 33).
Victimization and Criminalization of Sex Workers in Canada

The victimizing narratives of sex work continue to inform the policy
of sex work and trafficking. Sex work has for long been criminalized in
Canada. But, in 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the third
Criminal Code provisions related to sex work, which included commu-
nication, living off the avails, and bawdy house offences, on the grounds
that they endanger the safety and security of sex workers, in violation of
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Bedford v. Canada). The previous
Conservative government party in power further criminalized sex work by
introducing the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA)
in December 2014, which framed all sex workers as victims, and aimed
to abolish sex work through criminalizing clients, third parties and other
sex work-related activities (e.g. through communication in certain areas,
and advertising sexual services). Despite this, sex workers in Canada have
challenged and pushed back against victimizing discourses. Sex worker
organizations, such as the Canadian Alliance of Sex Worker Law Reform argue
that criminalization negatively affects and harms all sex workers (Canadian
Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform 2017).
Further, the Canadian government has consistently adopted inter-
national and national instruments and policies that align with the
continued victimization of sex workers through attempts to fight against
trafficking. Canada was one of the first countries to ratify the United
Nations’ Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, espe-
cially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nation Protocol Against
Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo Protocol) in 2002. Such examples
are demonstrated through the adoption within the Criminal Code of
Canada of provisions that implicate those deemed as “traffickers,” specific-
ally through four indictable offences, namely, sections 279.01 (Trafficking
in persons), 279.011 (Trafficking of a person under the age of eighteen
years), 279.02 (Material benefit), and 279.03 (Withholding or destroying
documents) (Public Safety Canada 2012). Moreover, alongside the Criminal
Code, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) also aims to address
human trafficking and to prohibit all forms of trafficking. In 2013, the
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was amended to reflect global trends,
by prohibiting those deemed as knowingly organizing one or more persons
into the entry of Canada through means of abduction, fraud, deception, or

use or threat of force or coercion (section 118).
Further, all temporary residents (including temporary workers, inter-
national students, refugee claimants and those who are under sponsorship)
are prohibited from working in sex work or a related industry.
The Canadian government has also developed anti- trafficking pol-
icies at the federal, provincial and municipal levels, such as the National
Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking (National Action Plan) to address
the issues of human trafficking. Prevention, protection, prosecution and
partnerships are described as the core areas of this national anti-trafficking
policy (Public Safety Canada 2012). Through the National Action Plan,
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have adopted and implemented raid
and rescue operations, such as Operation Northern Spotlight, to investi-
gate trafficking across the nation. Operation Northern Spotlight aims to
identify and apprehend those they deem as both trafficked victims and
traffickers. However, sex workers report that operations such as Operation
Northern Spotlight in reality increase surveillance and the targeting of
certain sex workers, particularly racialized sex workers, which further
endangers sex workers by impacting their ability to work in conditions
that are safe and non-detrimental to their health (Lepp 2018). In Canada,
these harmful measures towards Asian and migrant sex workers are
backed by partial research and reports that continue to socially frame
them as victims of trafficking. In 2010, the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police released a report, Human Trafficking in Canada: A Threat Assessment,
that described Asian and Eastern European women involved in the sex
industry as “linked to organized criminal activities,” part of “organized
crime” and/or “prostitution rings” (1). Further, in Public Safety Canada’s
National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking (2012) it states that
“non-Canadian victims are often brought to Canada from countries in
Asia…” (6).
These reports, which are used to uphold policies and laws, perpetuate
the victim discourses of Asian migrant women. The intentions are to dis-
tort, essentialize and deny the complex and multiple experiences of migra-
tion. Further, these narratives deny the agency of Asian migrant women
in making choices and controlling their lives and fates. The centering
and perpetuation of narratives of victimization continue to deny entry,
put at risk and adversely affect the lives and working conditions of sex
workers. Moreover, despite the need for migrant sex workers to rely on
working alongside other sex workers, agents, managers and/or bosses to
support and sustain their work and livelihoods, sex workers themselves and
their working relationships remain criminalized. Often third parties and
members of their communities are penalized, and framed and criminalized
as “traffickers” by present-day sex work and trafficking laws, based solely
on their association to a sex worker.
The introduction of legal measures is seen as necessary to allow for sur-

veillance, control, domestication and deportations. In migration studies,
migrants continually demonstrate their agency, not only through their
journeys and arrivals, but as diasporic subjects who impact everyday
encounters and national relations (Mainwaring 2016; Kaya and Erez
2018; Gutiérrez and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2008). However, raced and gen-
dered discourses on the movement of women’s bodies prevail in inter-
national discourses on sex work and trafficking. The usage of the language
of trafficking is problematic in its implications that women were only
“duped” into sex work in another country (Mahdavi 2010, 534). Scholars
argue that, contrary to this, migration and sex work in the transnational
context actually reveal emancipatory forms of movement through physical,
corporeal border crossings (Mai and King 2009). Martin F. Manalansan
(2006) mentions that female sex workers are in fact creating and manipu-
lating situations, which allows them to gain material and cultural capital
through relationships with men.
Resistance of Butterfly: Disturbing the System

through Organizing
「我不是被販賣！我有工作權！」
I am not trafficked! I have the right to work!
Tropes of Asian migrant women as victims are a continued denial of their

agency, and thus denial of their humanity and access to rights. The his-
torical and contemporary victimization of Asian and migrant sex workers
remains central to Butterfly’s work and organizing. Butterfly’s organizing
at the grassroots level fights back against these harmful narratives and
the material repercussions and impacts. Through collective efforts with
and alongside other organizations, networks and movements, Butterfly
challenges the label of victim, as Butterfly knows the act of resistance is not
an isolated act or process. In this section we explore Butterfly’s resistance to
discourses of anti-trafficking and current policies, and the organizing and
mobilization required to disturb oppressive systems.
Butterfly: Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network

in Canada
For more than 40 years, sex workers have been organizing across the world
in a fight for their human and labor rights, as well as to push back against
the discrimination and policies that oppress them (GAATW 2018; NSWP
2019). Kempadoo and Doezema (1998) highlight that it is not only
“western sex workers” who have organized to advocate for their rights.
Sex workers from the global South and migrant sex workers also have a
long history of organizing and mobilizing for their rights. The knowledge,
experiences and voices of migrant sex workers are essential to challen-
ging and changing the victim discourse, as well as to resist oppressions by
presenting their life experiences and agency. Challenging the victim dis-
course and resistance to oppressive treatment is crucial in bringing justice
to racialized and migrant sex workers. Globally, migrant sex worker groups
such as Scarlet Alliances’ Migration Project in Australia, Empower in Thailand,
Project X in Singapore, X Talk Project in London and TAMPEP in Europe
continue to engage in this work. Butterfly resists alongside these groups as
a part of a larger network and movement of global migrant sex workers.
As previously mentioned, Butterfly is a grassroots organization that
provides support to, and advocates for, the rights of Asian and migrant sex
workers in Canada. In line with and as part of the larger global sex worker
movement, Asian migrant sex workers have been organizing to resist
oppression and discrimination toward sex workers and migrant workers,
to make their voices heard and to advocate for their rights in Canada. At
the beginning, Butterfly approached migrant and sex workers in Toronto
through reaching out to sex workers in massage parlors, apartments, hotels
and other settings. Through this, outreach workers from Butterfly were
able to hear the stories of migrant sex workers, understand their struggles
and the issues they were facing, and were able to co-create a network for
migrant sex workers to connect with the resources to support their fight
against the systemic sexism, racism and injustice.
Butterfly recognized and identified the harms caused by historic and
current anti-trafficking policies toward migrant sex workers. The silencing
and attempts to erase their experiences have pushed the network to docu-
ment the stories of the Asian and migrant sex workers who are arrested,
detained and deported to reveal how the anti-trafficking initiatives racially
target, profile and abuse Asian and migrant sex workers, rather than
“rescue” them.
The following exemplify the experiences of migrant sex workers and the
realities of sexist, racist and violent anti-trafficking measures:
It was very clear that [the police] were only looking for us as non-white
workers. There were other women working in the same hotel who were
white, and the police didn’t bother them or even talk to them at all.
(Fanny, an Asian migrant sex worker who was arrested and deported.)
(Lam 2018a, 4)
Such statements demonstrate the targeting of Asian women as trafficked

victims and the continued denial of agency of racialized and migrant
women. The inability to see beyond victimizing discourses increases the
surveillance and policing of Asian and migrant sex workers. The next tes-
timonial demonstrates the harm and violence of policing:
The police … he came to check my shop every day. Our shop was not
in his jurisdiction. I had a fight with him … I offended one of the cops,
and he checks on me all the time. I knew he is a police when he came
to my shop, he requested an extra, such as blow job. I refused. Then
he got pissed off. So this guy began to check up on me all the time…
(Malla et al. 2019, 6)
Asian and migrant sex workers are subjected to and harmed by surveillance
and policing, but often these anti-trafficking measures further serve the
purpose of maintaining borders. The following reveals experiences with
immigration detention:
I was locked by chains and weights, on my wrists and legs… I felt

like I was being treated as a murder suspect. They did not allow me to
make a phone call or contact other people. (Mimi, who was detained
for three months in an anti-trafficking investigation as a suspected
victim, then deported)
(Lam 2018a)
Butterfly’s work with sex workers to document experiences of Asian

and migrant sex workers, speaks back to the realities of anti-trafficking
measures. They speak back against the victim narrative. Further, these
initiatives are part of advocating for human rights and the promotion of the
decriminalization of sex work in the global context. Through its outreach
and front-line case support, Butterfly’s efforts to listen to and recognize the
experiences of Asian and migrant sex workers are attempts to co-create
networks of support and solidarity among these workers. Butterfly’s work
is grounded in its desire to eliminate racism, stigma and discrimination
against Asian and migrant sex workers.
The existence of Butterfly relies heavily on peer-supports and education.
For example, Butterfly conducts workshops and trainings for migrant sex
workers, on topics such as “Immigration laws, criminal laws, and your
rights,” “Learning English in workplace,” “Self- defence”, “Work and
health safety”, and “Sex work is work” to promote safety and dignity
for all sex workers. These workshops are also meant to enhance access to
health, social, labor and legal rights and services. Through workshops and
trainings, migrant sex workers are enabled to gain access to resources that
allow them to feel confident about their work, and further empowers them
collectively to manage and address the challenges that arise from every
aspect of their daily lives, including facing racism, racial profiling, dis-
crimination, oppression and/or threats/abuses of power.
To ensure an adequate knowledge of rights for Asian and migrant

sex workers, Butterfly has also developed legal and community resource
materials in the native languages. These tools include “Who is
Who: Identifying Law Enforcers” (Butterfly 2017b), “Immigration Status
and Sex Work” (Stella and Butterfly 2015a), and “Working Without
Canadian Citizenship” (Stella and Butterfly 2015b). These legal and com-
munity resources work towards minimizing the barriers sex workers face
in order to access current services, as well as to empower them to resist the
harms produced by current legal and immigration mechanisms and the
criminalization of sex work.
Beyond the Victim Label: Speaking Out as Resistance

Butterfly believes that migrant sex workers’ agency is not only expressed
when working within the sex industry. Migrant sex workers’ experiences
particularly exceed contemporary understandings of agency that rest on
a binary of voluntary versus coercion. Through using a lens that exceeds
the dualistic understanding of voluntary versus coercion, Butterfly’s team
is able to oppose human trafficking discourses that assume women were
“duped” into sex work, and to show how migrant sex workers’ agency is
contingent, fluid and changes over time. Kaya and Erez (2018) indicate
that agency is shaped by economic and cultural considerations, polit-
ical conditions and legal reforms, all of which affect migrant women’s
conditions of work, their decision of picking a destination country, the
degree of freedom at work, and their desire for life outside the home-
land, through the lenses of sexual desires and pleasures. Instead of being
a passive agent waiting to be saved by others or institutions, Asian
migrant sex workers have used and continue to use different ways to
resist the oppressions they face (Lam 2016), which shows how their
individual survival strategies and resistances express unessentialized
notions of agency.
The articulation of migrant sex workers’ agency is best exemplified
in how Butterfly incorporates expressions through community-based cre-
ative arts and exhibitions to call for the public to eliminate the racism
and criminalization toward Asian migrant sex workers. Butterfly Voices took
place at the Whippersnapper Gallery in Toronto, Ontario in May 2016,
as part of the Mayworks Festival. Butterfly Voices, through documenting
the experiences, lives, thoughts and belongings of the Asian migrant sex
workers, aimed to address the need to disrupt the current discourses and
representation that enable anti-trafficking laws, restrict movement and
continue to produce precarity of status.
In May 2019 the interactive multimedia art show Power in Our Hand
took place at Tea Base in Toronto, Ontario, utilizing photographs of
massage parlor workers and their hands, to fight back against encroaching
municipal by-laws in the City of Toronto that targeted migrant workers.
Both Butterfly Voices and Power in Our Hand exemplify how Asian migrant
sex workers resist victimized discourses through visual and multimedia
art. By utilizing art work to create and share knowledges about sex workers
themselves, Asian migrant sex workers were able to show the diversity in
their stories. Moreover, through community-based art projects, migrant
sex workers shared their realities that defied tropes of their vulner-
ability or coercion in the sex industry. Those stories addressed the sys-
temic oppression, inequality, policing and institutional surveillance, and
mistreatment they face, but further exemplify their agency and ability to
challenge stereotypes of victimization that Asian women have experienced
since the nineteenth century.
Through art and storytelling, the exhibit addressed the multidimension-
ality of different sex workers. Some Asian migrant sex workers showed how
sex work is an important form of resistance to oppression through their
art exhibition in Butterfly Voices. For instance, the exhibit had butterflies
hanging along the wall and near the window of the gallery, with texts in
different languages of thoughts and expressions from migrant sex workers,
including:
As a trans woman who already transitioned, being a butterfly became

a big challenge. To do sex work was my decision just as that moment
when I decided to be free and fight against gender oppression,
transphobia, exclusion and discrimination, and the possibilities to lose
important relationships.
(Betty)
In such, Betty articulates how sex work exists (Butterfly 2017a).

In the Butterfly Voices exhibit one of the quotes that accompanied artwork
states:
I wish for good health and an income, brin[g]‌ing no burden to society.

I hope to provide good services to my clients and society with my
strengths –May, Toronto.
(Butterfly 2017a)
Further, Butterfly has conducted research and numerous surveys to amp-

lify the voices of Asian migrant sex workers and to make the realities of
their lives visible to the mainstream public. Through reports, articles and
stories that make the research and surveys accessible to the public, instead
of narratives that paint sex work as oppressive, sex work is shown as a
powerful method for the migrants to resist racism, sexism and other kinds
of oppression. The following are statements from some of the research and
survey participants:
I don’t know English and have no education. I don’t have any qualifications.
Where can I find another job and who will hire me? What else can I do
besides doing this? Survival is the most important! (Ding Ding)
(Butterfly 2019, 2)
I can rely on myself. I have a job and I take care of my family, I con-
tribute to the economy. It’s a blessing. It doesn’t matter what industry
I work in, I don’t embarrass myself or others. (Anonymous)
(Butterfly 2017a, 1)
If you want to make more money, you don’t want to work in a factory.
You will feel free when you do massage job. You don’t have to work 8
hours straight like working in a factory, you can take a break if there’s
no customers. When I worked in the factory, the chicken piled up if
your speed is not fast enough…
I feel I am happy, and enjoy the job… I don’t let them feel I really enjoy
the sex though… Sometimes if I don’t have the mood, I won’t provide
good service. I will watch TV and have sex with the customer… or I
will kick him out in less than 10 mins.
The documented statements reveal how sex workers have agency to

choose sex work, sex work that enables their survival in a society that
invalidates their existence. But further, sex work is beyond survival, it
empowers them to take care of themselves, their families, contribute to
society, it gives meaning and purpose, it allows for freedom, it allows for
them to negotiate and determine their working conditions, as well as self-
define their desires, work and success. These statements rupture the bin-
aries of voluntary and coercion.
Through community-based creative arts and exhibitions, research and
surveys, Butterfly is a platform to share the lived realities and experiences of
migrant sex workers, ones in which they make their own choices, thrive and
survive the realities of policing. In the mobilization of the community, this
process also shows that Asian sex workers use different methods to make
their voices heard and to challenge the stereotypes against them. Different
community events, forums and art exhibitions, where Asian workers in
massage parlors and the sex industry can center their experiences, allow
the opportunity to speak out and change discourses about themselves and
their lives.
Challenging the Discourse of Anti-Trafficking as

Resistance: External Allyship Building
Since fundamentalist feminists and sex work prohibitionists assume that
all women who sell sex services are victims of sexual exploitation, they
view all women who sell sex as being coerced and sexually exploited; and
they define prostitution as sexual harassment, sexual abuse and sexual vio-
lence. In this way, it is impossible for women to consent to sell sexual ser-
vices (Doezema 2010; Kempadoo 2007; Sharma 2005; Uy 2011; Weitzer
2007). In Canada, the anti-trafficking measures developed at municipal,
regional, national and international levels have disproportionately focused
on sex work. Weitzer (2007) argues:
the issues of trafficking coalesced into a moral panic about danger of

migration and sex work. The moral crusade has transformed the “condi-
tion” into “problem”. Conservative religious and radical feminists groups
build up alliance and use the moral crusades against sex trafficking
although they are “exaggerated, unverifiable or demonstrably false”.
(459)
Due to the harms of anti-trafficking policies, Butterfly has committed con-

siderable labor, and uncovered stories and harms of anti-trafficking rescue,
in an effort to push back against anti-trafficking discourses. Butterfly allies
with other researchers, scholars and sex workers rights’ organizations,
continually criticizing the conflation of sex work and trafficking in anti-
trafficking initiatives. They argue that current anti-trafficking policies and
initiatives are harmful to sex workers, in that the criminalization of sex work
increases surveillance, arrests, detentions and deportations of sex workers.
Such racist and discriminatory immigration measures create moral panic
against migrants and sex workers which further marginalizes them and
endangers their safety, and prevents them from seeking and accessing ser-
vices and support (Butterfly 2018a; CASWLR & PIVOT 2016; Lam 2018a;
Lepp 2018; Centre for Feminist Research 2017; Maynard 2015; Jeffrey
2005; Kaye 2017).
Butterfly and allies assert that, instead of protecting sex workers, the
PCEPA, IRPA and other policies have become tools to investigate, target
and prosecute sex workers, particularly migrant sex workers. Racialized
and migrant sex workers are especially targeted and harmed as a result
of these anti-trafficking policies. Migrant sex workers—particularly Asian
migrant sex workers—are assumed to be trafficked victims without agency
or capacity to make decisions about themselves. These centuries-old stereo-
types of Asian women as victims, ignorant, passive, helpless, lacking all
agency and self-determination, are, as discussed earlier, rooted in racist and
sexist beliefs that stem from larger colonial and imperial interests.
Butterfly has also found that anti-trafficking investigations often turn

into racist anti-migrant and anti-sex work investigations, which transform
migrant sex workers into criminals and illegal migrants. For example, 11
Asian women were deported in an anti-trafficking investigation in Ottawa
in 2015 (Hempstead 2015), and 28 members of Butterfly were arrested
between 2015 and 2018, while most of them were deported. This shows
that current immigration regulations prohibit migrants from working in
the sex industry, even for those who have a work permit, such as inter-
national students, refugee claimants or those under sponsorship. It
brought other individuals and scholars who care about migrant workers
and sex workers’ rights as well as non-profit organizations serving different
populations into allyship for the further discussion of the anti-trafficking
regime. Due to the understanding that Asian and migrant sex workers
face multiple and varied oppressions because of their intersection of iden-
tity, including race, gender, class and migration status, it is crucial that
Butterfly builds coalitions with allies from different movements (including
sex worker rights, labor rights, migrant rights, racial justice movements,
queer and trans liberation). The need for coalitions across both similar and
distinct identities, experiences and demands is linked to an understanding
of collective and interconnected oppressions, but also towards collective
and interconnected liberations.
Internal Mobilization as Resistance: Sex Work is Not Human

Trafficking
More recently, there have been attempts to increasingly regulate and place
limitations on licensed establishments, particular strip clubs and massage
parlors, in alignment with anti- trafficking measures at the national,
provincial and municipal levels in Canada. The increasing amount of
repressive by-laws and measures by law enforcement, under the guise of
anti-trafficking, have resulted in peaks of racial profiling and racial attacks
on Asian workers in massage parlors. Municipal by-laws are being used to
harass and target Asian workers in massage parlors and the sex industry,
which ultimately infringe on their fundamental rights, endanger their
safety and disrupt their livelihoods (Lepp 2018).1
In 2013, the City Council of Toronto passed the motion to have “more
vigorously prosecuted charges to the massage parlors (including body
rub parlors and holistic center) as an initiative to address trafficking”
(Toronto City Council 2013). Since then, Asian-run holistic centers have
been targeted by police and by-law enforcement officers. There are around
400 holistic centers and 2,200 holistic practitioners, particularly those
of Asian descent, that have been disproportionately and unfairly targeted
by excessive investigations. Workers at massage parlors were investigated
over 4,300 times.2 Workers and activists argued that the investigations
were excessive and discriminatory. “Since the majority of the holistic

practitioners are racialized, particularly from Chinese and other Asian
backgrounds, the excessive practices of law enforcement officers towards
holistic centers and practitioners amounts to racial profiling and discrim-
ination” (Butterfly 2018b). Thirty-three per cent of holistic practitioners
said that they had experienced abuses of power, as well as human rights
violations from law enforcement, sexual misconduct, humiliating and
dehumanizing treatment, arbitrary arrest and unwarranted searches of
their personal items (Lam 2018b). The repressive approaches not only
violated the rights of the workers, but also increased the vulnerabilities
of the workers, by instilling fear and distrust of law enforcement among
workers, discouraging them from reporting abuse and violence at work
and, furthermore, forcing them to work underground.
Butterfly has mobilized more than 300 workers to meet politicians and
policy makers to reflect their concern. However, their experiences are often
unrecognized and unheard. In order to legitimize the experiences, Butterfly
has conducted a number of studies with workers to ensure that their voices
are being heard. In 2017, Butterfly produced “Beyond Tales of Trafficking: A
Needs Assessment of Asian Migrant Sex Workers in Toronto” (Malla et al.
2019) to research and recount the realities of how migrant sex workers in
Toronto’s massage parlors, spas, apartments and other indoor sex industry
workplaces address their health and safety needs. The study sought to
understand the barriers migrant sex workers face when trying to access a
range of health, social and community supports, and the results showed that
none of the women in the study reported having experienced debt bondage
or trafficking. From this report and the feedback from Butterfly’s outreach
team, most of the participants working in the sex industry indicated that
sex work was preferable for them as it provided greater pay, more flex-
ible working hours and offered other social benefits. Contrary to popular
narratives that represent most or all Asian migrant sex workers as victims
of trafficking, many participants reported unpleasant or unsafe experiences
with law enforcement officers, including feeling discriminated against and
harassed in their workspaces, as well as receiving fines and tickets for ques-
tionable infractions (Malla et al. 2019, 6).
In 2017, the City of Toronto, through the Municipal Licensing &
Standards Division (MLS), published “The 2017 Auditor General’s Report
on the review of holistic centre”. The city council and licensing committee
had also passed an array of harmful decisions, based on the false allegations
made by by-law enforcement that construed holistic centers as sources of
increased risk to public health, community and safety, particularly around
concerns related to exploitation and human trafficking. Harmful decisions
were made based on false allegations that one in four holistic centers
provided “unauthorized services”, and thus allowed for a push for strin-
gent requirements on body-rub parlors and holistic practitioners, which
harshly restricted their work opportunities and mobility. These restrictions

took various forms, including: higher costs in annual licensing fees (over
CAD$13800); a limitation of only 25 body-rub parlors in all of Toronto;
and restrictions on body-rubbers to work in only one parlor, all in the
name of “anti-human trafficking” measures (Butterfly 2018b). The call for
more regulation and increased limitations corresponded with moral panics
within the city, nationally and globally. The excessive restrictions and
inspections, as well as the enforcement of unreasonable fining, since 2013
has led to a significant lack of trust between law enforcement and Asian
migrant sex workers in Toronto. Furthermore, there have been a significant
number of human rights violations by by-law enforcement officers, where
migrant sex workers have reported to Butterfly inappropriate treatment
by the officers during inspections, including prohibiting practitioners
from using the washroom, demanding workers to undress to reveal
undergarments, photographing without consent, and demanding workers
to sing for the entertainment of the officers.
Due to the increasing stigmas and the risks associated with the imple-
mentation of these by-laws, the Holistic Practitioners Alliance was formed
to provide a platform for workers to express their voices. Some of the
following statements were released by the alliance:3
Licensing inspects us too many times. It has caused a lot of stress

to the female workers. The inspection also harasses the customers.
The licensing bylaw official authority people stay very long time
and they abuse their own power to the extreme. If they’re in a good
mood, they don’t issue you a ticket. Otherwise, they will find fault
with you.
They are very unreasonable and disrespectful. A female officer asked
my co-worker to take off her clothes and show her underwear. The
by-law enforcement officers then took photos of her and gave her a
ticket for clothing (having unprofessional clothing).
They search my place without a warrant, take out my underwear,
and touch the items one by one. It is really insulting. I made a com-
plaint, but they took revenge. They came back and issued tickets to
me, and ordered my clients to leave.
As a result of the encroachment of the by-laws and the experiences

and responses, such as those that came out of the Holistic Practitioners
Alliance, Butterfly launched and mobilized holistic practitioners and sex
workers from massage parlors and body rub parlors to fight against the
violations of their rights and to resist. In 2019, Butterfly mobilized over 300
Asian migrant massage parlor workers and sex workers to participate in
consultations with the City of Toronto and in various committee meetings.
The workers packed the consultation and committee meeting rooms to

speak out against and to stop harmful policies and by-laws being placed
on them. Through showing up, their powerful presence allowed for their
voices and experiences to be heard. Butterfly’s work and internal mobiliza-
tion of migrant workers were successfully allowing the voices of migrant
sex workers to be heard and to actively resist labeling as trafficking victims,
which has a significant influence on contemporary policy change and the
sex work movement. Despite the fact that 300 workers participated in the
City meeting, their voices continued to be undermined; thus, Butterfly fur-
ther mobilized over 100 allies to participate in the city’s consultation and
committee meeting. Since the campaigns to mobilize, the City of Toronto
has made amendments to stop the implementation of some of the harmful
policies; however, city councillors and city staff continue to target the
workers.
Sex worker resistance is crucial to combat anti-trafficking discourses and
measures, and their oppressive effects. It is an ongoing process; thus out-
reach and mobilization are central to Butterfly’s work. Butterfly recognizes
the need to continue to mobilize and engage other workers in the fight for
rights and liberation together.
Conclusion
Dedicated and sensible, not really, butterflies can be resilient and
brave.
(Betty)
Asian women have been framed as victims of trafficking and “yellow

slavery” since the nineteenth century in the U.S. and Canada. Their
constructed victimization which continues into the present has meant
that they have become victims of surveillance, criminalization, deten-
tion, restricted mobility and deportation. Contemporary discourses, pol-
icies and measures on trafficking reinforce a stereotype of victimization
that in reality harms Asian and migrant sex workers, along with others.
Rather than being the stereotyped victims who are in need of saving
by others or the very institutions that oppress them, Asian migrant
sex workers and Butterfly continue to resist harmful narratives, policies
and laws by centering their voices. Butterfly, along with other migrant
sex worker networks and movements globally, continually organize to
make their voices heard, to show their resilience, to mobilize power to
fight back, as well as to express their agency. Lastly, this is only possible
by mobilizing within and among Asian and migrant sex workers, and
establishing community. The resistance of the Butterfly is an ongoing
and collective process.
Notes
1 “Brief to the House of Commons Committee on Justice and Human Rights on
the Consultation of Human Trafficking” submitted by Butterfly, 2018.
2 “Take Action –Sign Petition: An Open Letter to Toronto City Council,”
Butterfly 2018.
3 “The Voices of Holistic Practitioners,” Holistic Practitioners Alliance, 2018.
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Apartheid.” NWSA Journal, 17, no.3 (Fall): 88–112.
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org/en/stellibrary-publications/immigration-status-sex-work/
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zstella.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Working-In-Canada-Without-Canad
ian-Citizenship.pdf
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American “Oriental”. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Tong, Benson. 1994. Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-century
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Toronto City Council. 2013. Initiatives to Address Human Trafficking, City
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University of Minnesota Press.
Chapter 15
The Aesthetic of Migrant

Sex Work
Creation of White Identity and Perceived
Moral Superiority
Nada DeCat
Titillating and racialised imagery of sexual servitude by damsels in dis-

tress simultaneously arouse disgust and saviourism—creating opportun-
ities for NGOs, researchers, politicians, artists, and other opportunists.
The self-proclaimed “abolitionists” utilise virile aesthetics of sexual slavery
to benefit from schemes that purport to assist victims of sex trafficking
and migrant sex workers. As Kempadoo (2007) states, this image of sexual
slavery is appropriated and divorced from the historical suffering of the
African peoples. Further, the image supports the creation of whiteness by
constructing the perception of the west’s moral superiority during colo-
nialism (Levine 2003). Pro-sex work organisations similarly perpetuate
western- centric narratives by assimilating migrant issues into neo-
liberalism through the display of diversity in what Spivak (1993) calls
“re-presentation”. Both sides of the sex work debate thus co-opt racialised
aesthetics to reassert dominant ideologies of western imperialism and neo-
liberalism and ignore the political issues faced by migrant sex workers.
This essay offers critiques on both pro-and anti-sex worker tactics from the
perspective of peer advocacy for migrants in sex worker activism. Herein,
I discuss activism for over a decade in the movement as someone who has
lived as an undocumented sex worker for most of my life. Yet, that should
not be the main factor for the validity of my analysis. Despite this, I hope
my first-hand experience in sex work and activism may provide informa-
tion and perspective unavailable to most academics.
Media and research on sex trafficking often focus on the image of helpless
Asian women when there is very little evidence of trafficking (Pell et al.
2006). Instead, the imagery is historically a colonialist construct that
institutes the moral superiority and leadership of the west. The negative
imagery of sex trafficking often lacks a concrete subject (Weitzer 2012).
This is not to deny the existence of trafficking, but to force a closer exam-
ination of how and why such a racialised image of trafficking emerged
despite the lack of concrete grounds. The strong anti-sex work movement,
which emerged in 1976 (Bronstein 2011, 17), precedes the formation of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-19
Aesthetic of Migrant Sex Work 229
current reactionary anti-trafficking narratives. The movement itself was

built upon western morals, as established through alliances between
Christians and white feminists in the 1800s (Levine 2003, 133) and inter-
national activist interventions led by white feminists in 1927 (Levine 2003,
89). As early as 1857, legislation in the United Kingdom targeted sex
workers through “Contagious Diseases Laws”, which required the regis-
tration of sex workers and compulsory health checks only for sex workers
and not the clients (Levine 2003, 40). These “Contagious Disease Laws”
were extended throughout the British empire, and regulation focused
on overseas ordinances, due to the assumption that Asian women in the
overseas British territories were depraved and shameless, and thus more
likely to self-register (Levine 2003, 53). The British-led surveillance, dis-
cipline, and control of women through “Contagious Diseases Laws” both
within and outside of its borders later evolved into the language of anti-
trafficking, when white feminists involved in international British imperi-
alism began advocating for the abolition of sex work through narratives of
trafficking and sexual slavery (Gorman 2012, 54). Despite the adoption
of new policies, the underlying motivations and understandings of sexu-
ality and morality remained constant. As did the image of the racialised,
depraved, female subject requiring a white moral saviour.
The aesthetic of the migrant sex worker as mobilised by “anti-trafficking
abolitionists” then, does not qualify as being a representation abstracted
through a subject. Rather, it is pure propaganda—aestheticising white
feminist and Christian fundamentalist politics, first under the umbrella of
British imperialism and later through the United States’ attempt at global
governance through the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the United
Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Protocol. In crafting the image of the depraved
migrant sex worker as needing surveillance, discipline, control, and moral
saving, white feminists were also able to form the perception of the west’s
moral superiority and international leadership. Unfortunately, the colonial
white feminist narratives and image of Asian sex workers as trafficking
victims is largely unchanged to this day. In popular media, the same
imagery of trafficked and murdered Asian migrant sex workers floating
in water (Levine 2003) is still being used by the popular Australian tele-
vision show Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017). Anti-trafficking hysteria
is historically propaganda that bolsters western imperialism, white iden-
tity creation, and white moral superiority by racialising others as inferior
and immoral. The white feminist movement perpetuates such images so
as to ensure their own position in the racial, patriarchal, and capital class
hierarchy.
However, white feminists and anti- trafficking abolitionists are not
the only actors who use the racialised image of female sex workers to
advance their own political agenda. On the opposing side, pro-sex work
advocates also utilise migrant sex worker representation for the purposes
230 Nada DeCat
of advancing sex work decriminalisation or for sex work researchers’ indi-

vidual gain, without a serious consideration of migrant issues. Migrant
sex workers in this writing are used to signify and draw attention to the
historical control of racialised subjects, particularly migrant sex workers,
by the west. However, these sex worker activists typically advocate for
a model of decriminalisation that is assimilationist and, similarly to the
anti-sex work crusaders, does not centre the political history of colonialism
and role of race creation as essential to address the prison industrial com-
plex, border policies, and criminalisation of sex work around the world.
Decriminalisation primarily treats sex work as a labour and economic issue,
demanding that sex workers are normalised into the current neoliberal
racist capitalist system without understanding that many racialised people
are unable to assimilate into the current system.
Reformist tactics often have no effect or negatively affect people of
colour. For instance, the New Zealand model of sex work legislation crim-
inalises migrant sex workers even with work visas (DeCat 2019). Yet des-
pite this explicit exclusion of migrants from the model, peer and non-peer
sex worker organisations promote the New Zealand model as being against
trafficking and pro-sex workers. An information pamphlet by Open Society
Foundation (2015, 7) states that the New Zealand model is effective against
trafficking and this was shared by large sex worker organisations such as
the NSPW (2015). The image of anti-trafficking is thus appropriated into
a model that directly criminalises migrants. This signals to other advocates
to betray migrants in order to “decriminalise” just the privileged and
often white sex workers, since the task of decriminalisation is more easily
achieved. When migrants are criminalised, it demonstrates that we are
only human enough to warrant symbolisation, but not human enough to
question the status of decriminalisation reserved for the “general” white
sex worker movement. To this day, no large and funded sex worker NGOs
that I know of has made a clear public statement against the New Zealand
model. Rather, they see the criminalisation of migrants in the legislation
as merely a small flaw (NSWP 2015, 5, 5), but not something that calls
for outright questioning of the New Zealand model’s claim of decriminal-
isation (NSWP 2015, 8, 6). These peer sex worker organisations continue
to advocate for the model as constituting decriminalisation while simul-
taneously denouncing criminalisation of migrants—creating a cognitive
dissonance.
Pro-sex work organisations’ racism is also evidenced in the use of
migrant sex workers as object of study. Many pro-sex work organisations
have allowed non-peer researchers to invade our spaces for the benefit of
the researchers. For example, the SEXHUM researchers that I encountered
in Australia made this mistake despite their efforts to counter the negative
imagery of migrant sex workers. The white researchers, granted 1.6 million
euros from the European Research Council (Kingston University 2016),
collected migrant sex worker stories around the world to construct a film
that retells migrant sex worker interviews that are supposedly representa-
tive of the country in which the interviews took place. In Australia, this
meant that white researchers mined Asian sex workers’ stories and claimed
ownership of our experiences, resembling the methodology from coloni-
alist studies of the exotic “other” (Tuck and Yang 2014). Moreover, the
researchers were then invited to numerous events to speak about migrant
sex work, not only as experts, but as activists. They are largely accepted into
the space of dominant white sex worker activism as authorities to speak on
the experience of migrant sex workers, while migrants have less capacity
and authority to walk into activist and academic spaces to speak on their
own behalf. Further, the SEXHUM researchers did not invite the migrants
that participated in their research to their symposium of initial findings
in an academic space. Thus, while the research seemed to recreate migrant
representation, the SEXHUM researchers were simultaneously perpetu-
ating institutional racialised hierarchy. In both the re-presentations by the
SEXHUM researchers and the propaganda of anti-sex work opportunists,
migrant sex workers are voiceless and represented as an essentialised iden-
tity. Cultural and social capital are accumulated by the re-presentation of
migrant sex workers and trafficking victims for the benefit of those cre-
ating the imagery, who do not have any significant experience in the sex
workers’ or racial justice movements. This process of abstraction from
actual migrant sex workers to mere representational image, to be exploited
by researchers, pro-sex work activists, and anti-trafficking abolitionists,
must be understood more widely.
The creation of a representation of migrant sex workers happens through
abstraction and essentialising the identity of migrant sex workers. As
Spivak (1993) states, this is due to the confusion of personal identity and
desires with that of a political representative group formation. Migrant
sex worker activists form as a group due to the necessity of political action
against dominant oppressive systems. For instance, our migrant sex worker
action against SEXHUM researchers, which resulted in apologies from peer
sex worker organisations (Kim and Cox 2019), originated from various
migrant complaints against SEXHUM and difficulties with voicing these
complaints to existing peer sex worker organisations. (Incidentally, there
are no other organisations I know of that are critical of SEXHUM—let alone
that have issued an apology to the migrant community.) There is no gen-
eral commonality to how we collectively experience, as individuals, current
or past migrant sex work. The formation of migrant sex worker activism
groups does not constitute or construct a coherent set of personal desires
and experiences among its subjects, which are too varied to singularise. It
is impossible to have one representative personal experience for all migrant
sex workers in a nation. Moreover, the creation of such a representation is
not driven or expressed by migrant sex worker themselves. Not only is the
232 Nada DeCat
multitude of experiences of migrant sex workers collapsed and essentialised

into a singular, abstract identity, but migrant sex workers do not have any
agency in developing or crafting that identity. Instead, the representation
of migrant sex workers is created by researchers and NGOs through their
methodology and ideology.
For example, the film Plan B, produced by SEXHUM researchers,
claims to be a self-representation of migrant sex workers that supports
migrant sex worker activists. In these films, the authorship of the film
and the representation it creates is hidden; it is invisible to the audience
that researchers created the methodologies, picked the participants, and
recreated the representation of migrant sex workers. The project is pre-
conceived and comes through the hierarchical structure of academia and
NGOs. It was not instigated initially by migrant sex workers nor are the
initial methodologies designed in consultation with its subjects, and as
such, serves first the goals and objectives of academia, not those of migrant
sex workers. The film is a work of research, dictated in a top-down model
by researchers utilising western educational institutions without critical
analysis of such institutions and methods as having a historical role in the
cultural control of and racism against the very subjects the film studies.
Through the methods of film, the academic researchers establish them-
selves as authors of an essentialised representation of migrant sex workers
and appoint themselves as political representatives or experts of migrant
sex worker activism. This form of representative domination is allowed
in western sex worker activist spaces due to significant lack of care and
awareness about racism and the singular commitment to “decriminaliza-
tion”. In contrast, a peer sex worker organisation in Thailand, Empower,
informed me that they declined SEXHUM researchers from the start. The
organisation produces its own media out of sex workers’ own volition and
does not require fully funded academics and film makers to “help” them.
To be clear, even when the people in the film feel sufficiently represented,
it is still the researchers who are getting fully paid and the film makers
who are getting credit for the film making. It is still the white SEXHUM
researchers who are invited to speak about racialised migrant sex workers
in activist spaces. It is through such mechanisms that migrant sex workers’
experiences are abstracted and essentialised to create a representational
image to be exploited. As racialised migrants, we might be used to being
told to be grateful for the crumbs distributed by the white researchers.
Even without an analysis of race, a class analysis will reveal the discrep-
ancy in economic and social capital distribution between the academics
and the researched subjects.
Researchers, NGOs, and creators asserting themselves as the authorita-
tive helper, defining the identities, issues, and solutions for migrant sex
workers only exacerbate the problem. This process of authoring others’
identities allows non-peer and often white researchers and artists, in both
the pro-and anti-sex work coalitions, to use the aesthetic and established
representation to further their own cultural and social capital or assert their
own agendas. Here, Noys’ (2010) theory of the negative might be helpful
in revealing the abstractive processes. The current politics of representa-
tion is already institutionalised and assimilated into neoliberalism. Noys
argues that the creation of a positive representation as being more real
instigates a (perceived) perpetual revolution that is appropriated into ideas
of difference implicit in capitalism and its neoliberalism without challen-
ging the system. The negative approach in migrant sex worker activism
might mean refraining from creating the representational subject. Instead,
the already abstracted identity and the way identity operates might expose
the institutional and structural issues that perpetuate racialised capit-
alism within academia. For example, the historical role of academia and
NGOs and their function in colonialism and its racialised national border
creations are directly connected to and revealed by issues in trafficking
and migrant sex work. Through this negative framework, the processes
of representation are reversed and revealed. This also engages the idea
that the apparent failure of academic researchers to support the needed
radical changes may not be a mistake made with good intentions. Rather,
institutions of academia and NGOs are historically and inherently tools of
colonial oppression. This tactic refrains from creating another positive aes-
thetic such as the “good” and “correct” researcher or the “proper, nuanced,
and empowered” migrant sex worker narrative that may be assimilated
into the system and re-establish itself in the racialised social hierarchy.
Such a tactic works against the very institution of academia that gives the
researchers credibility.
For sex worker activism, there is no simple solution such as the call for
self-representation. Self-representation fails when there are many individ-
uals with various desires and experiences, and representatives are chosen
and promoted by dominant white collectives with their own agendas. As
Spivak (1988) states, the leaders and representatives of movements are
often not in the same racialised class as the represented and carry out their
own self-interests, often through institutions and funding. This should not
negate the need for the strategic first-hand accounts to understand and
address the issues faced by migrants. However, it is better to not use such
accounts to assert a representation and to instead focus on the political
necessities of migrant sex workers. The need for a migrant sex worker voice
is not due to mere want of diversity, representations, differences, nor inclu-
sion. Rather, it is fundamental to social justice and understanding issues
faced by migrant workers. This is to understand and centre the history of
colonialism, racism, and the impact they have had on the creation of crim-
inalisation, nations, and border policies. The sex worker’s movement must
address racism and colonialism for it to be more than decriminalisation for
“some”, only to assert questionable claims of the trickle-down approach of
234 Nada DeCat
human rights for those lower on the racialised, class hierarchy. Both anti-
sex work and pro-sex work activists might pay more attention to the issues
migrants face, including but not limited to lack of job security and oppor-
tunities, racist border security violence, and limitation of movement, and
their lack of basic rights that are otherwise afforded to citizens.
Unfortunately, even without the direct criminalisation of migrants such
as that outlined in the New Zealand model, migrants cannot benefit from
decriminalisation. Migrants must still acquire visas, which is a monu-
mental task that often requires risky tactics such as borrowing money from
agents, enrolling in universities to pay outrageous international fees, or
marrying someone who might be abusive. Further, racist raids on Asian
brothels persist (Reilly et al. 2011) even where there is no explicit exemp-
tion of migrants from decriminalisation. Baldry et al. (2015) state that, in
the context of prison abolition, reformist tactics without radical long-term
strategies to eliminate institutional structures result in the legitimation
of current dominant structures. This is reflected in the prison abolition
movement in Australia, which was co-opted by reformist activism and
resulted in policies that actively work against Aboriginal women in prisons
(Baldry et al. 2015). “Abolition” should be about confronting the racist
institution of criminalisation itself, and not just the criminalisation of
sex work. Both pro-and anti-sex work communities should organise to
abolish the concept of work and criminalisation as capitalist concepts born
through history of racism and colonialism. To clarify, I am arguing for
abolition—not just of sex work but of all work and not just of the prison
industrial complex but governing nations and all their systems as we now
understand them.
Full decriminalisation of sex work is indeed the best model if we are to
continue our engagement with the system. Yet, it is insufficient and may
even exacerbate the current situation. Making the current system a little
better for a few by incremental reformism directly opposes the necessity for
a revolution. I hope this analysis assists in imagining a more revolutionary
tactic than the one that currently exists. In my perfect world, everyone is
undocumented and no one is left behind.
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nswp.org/resource/the-real-impact-the-swedish-model-sex-workers-advocacy-
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Chapter 16
Sex Work in Jamaica

Trafficking, Modern Slavery, and Slavery’s
Afterlives
Julia O’Connell Davidson and
Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor
The Caribbean region has been “drawn into participating in [the] global
panic” about human trafficking by US government policy, Kamala
Kempadoo observes (2007, 80). The United States’ Trafficking in Persons
(TIP) Office claims that the region’s “main problem is either internal or cross-
border movements of women and girls for the ‘purpose of sexual exploit-
ation’,” and has used the threat of economic sanctions to pressure Caribbean
governments into taking action against this alleged problem (Kempadoo,
2007, 81). Jamaica was ranked Tier 3 (the lowest possible ranking) by the
TIP Office in 2005, and though successive Jamaican governments have
complied with TIP Office demands for more and tougher legislation and
law enforcement, subsequent TIP Reports have continued to portray the
country as having a rampant problem with “child sex tourism” and “sex
trafficking” (Cruz et al. 2019). The latter are both increasingly discussed as
forms of “modern slavery” in dominant policy discourse (Kempadoo 2015;
O’Connell Davidson 2015). For instance, Walk Free’s 2018 Global Slavery
Index claimed that Jamaica is home to some 7,000 “modern slaves,” and
government ministers have recently proclaimed their commitment to “the
struggle against modern slavery” (Smith 2018).
Depictions of Jamaica as a hotbed of “sex trafficking” and “modern
slavery” over the past two decades have surprised us. We undertook
ethnographic research on tourism and sex commerce in Jamaica and the
Dominican Republic between 1998 and 2000. The project focused pri-
marily on the worldview and practices of European and North American
tourists and expatriates involved in sexual- economic exchanges with
locals (O’Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor 1999). However, we did
also interview local and migrant adults and teenagers who participated in
such exchanges, and developed a rudimentary understanding of the organ-
ization and social relations of the sex sector in those countries. In Jamaica,
whether they sold services in the formally organized sex sector, or on the
streets, or entered into more informal sexual-economic exchanges with
tourists, our local interviewees were involved in sex work for economic
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-20
238 Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor
reasons, not because a third party used violence or its threat to compel
them to do so.
Other, more systematic research on sex work undertaken around the same
time (Campbell et al. 1999) and later (PANCAP 2009), also suggested
that while there may have been individual cases in which violence was
used to force persons into sex work, the compulsion experienced by most
Jamaican sex workers, whether aged above or below 18, was economic.
Even an International Labour Organization study of child sexual exploit-
ation published in 2001 stated that it found no evidence “of children who
were physically forced into prostitution, although there was ample evi-
dence of several who felt forced by their economic circumstances to engage
in prostitution or other forms of sexual activity to survive economically”
(Dunn 2001, 16). When a research call for projects on “tackling modern
slavery in modern business” was circulated by the British Academy in
2017, we therefore decided to apply for funding to revisit our research
in Jamaica, this time working with a colleague from Law, Katie Cruz,
and the Sex Work Association of Jamaica (SWAJ). The application was
successful, and between 2017 and 2019, we conducted mixed methods
research, which entailed a combination of ethnographic observation; a
survey of 82 tourists; biographical narrative interviews with 25 adults
who, as children, experienced one or more of the following: labor exploit-
ation, physical violence, rape, and trading sex for material and/or financial
benefits; in-depth interviews with ten tourism employers and employees;
background interviews with 15 police officers, academics, and civil society
actors; two focus group interviews and awareness raising materials pro-
duction workshops with sex workers (15 participants in total). SWAJ also
gathered survey data from 165 sex workers.
Neither Slavery nor Freedom

This research, undertaken nearly two decades after our first study,
again found nothing to suggest that the sex sector in Jamaica relies on
“traffickers” or “slavers” to coerce or deceive people into sex work, or to
force them to remain in the sex trade. However, our research participants
did describe lives blighted by violence, a lack of access to resources and
fundamental rights, and heavy restrictions on freedom. This chapter is
concerned with the conundrum presented by that simultaneous absence of
“modern slavery” and of freedom in the lives of Jamaican sex workers. That
conundrum is considered in relation to two very different political and the-
oretical understandings of slavery’s unique and defining wrong. The first,
which informs the mainstream, dominant discourse on “modern slavery”
that is promulgated by new antislavery NGOs (Free the Slaves, Walk Free,
CNN Freedom Project and many more) continues a liberal tradition of
abolitionist thinking derived from classical social contract theory. In this
Sex Work in Jamaica 239
model of antislavery thought, freedom is equated to self-ownership and

the right and capacity to voluntarily enter into contracts. Slavery ceases,
John Locke argued, where compact enters (Lott, 1998, 111). For many
nineteenth century American antislavery thinkers, “Contract marked the
difference between freedom and coercion”: In order to surrender rights
and accept duties, parties to contracts had to be sovereigns of themselves,
possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor and faculties. It
was an axiom of Enlightenment philosophy that contract derived from and
governed individual will and that free will was intimately connected to
rights of proprietorship (Stanley 1998, 2–3).
Through this lens, the treatment of human beings, or “persons,” as
objects rather than subjects of exchange, as mere “things” to be bought,
used and discarded, was the core and defining evil of slavery. In the words
of George Bourne, a nineteenth century founder of the American Anti-
Slavery Society, the singular wrong of slavery is that it makes “free agents,
chattels –converting persons into things –uncreating A MAN to make
room for a thing!” (1845, 7–8, original emphasis). Today, this emphasis on
slavery’s wrong as the reduction of human beings to “things” and objects
of ownership makes it possible to disengage from questions about race and
racism. Anybody can be treated as a “thing,” and according to the gurus of
the new antislavery movement, “modern slavery” is “color blind” (Bales,
2004, 11).
The second tradition of thinking with which this chapter is concerned has,
by contrast, located slavery’s particular wrong in its treatment of the enslaved
as both persons and things. For although the enslaved were transacted as
property in the Atlantic world, as Frederick Douglass (Douglass and Logan
2003, 275) noted, they were also always acknowledged “as moral, intellec-
tual and responsible beings” in laws that deemed them criminally culp-
able human agents. Attending to what Hartman (1997) terms the “double
character” of the slave (both person and thing) encourages analytical and
political attention to the role of the state and law in slavery as a system of
domination, and to slavery as a condition of disfigured personhood, not
merely, or even necessarily, of commodification (Best and Hartman 2005;
Mills 2000; Bhandar 2014).
This second approach illuminates the relationship between slavery,
freedom, and race, and so helps make visible the continuing presence of the
past. It reminds us that through the history of transatlantic slavery, freedom,
as well as slavery, was racialized –it was coded as white. The variant of lib-
eralism that triumphed globally was racial liberalism (Mills 2017). Only
those of white European descent were seen as fit for the rights and freedoms
of citizenship. Those racialized as Black were imagined as too brutish and/
or childlike for this estate. The racial coding of freedom did not end with
the legal abolition of slavery. As scholarship on the afterlives of racial chattel
slavery shows, the anti-Black racism spawned by transatlantic slavery, with
its vision of Blackness as implying criminality, animality, irrationality and

dependence (and therefore unfitness for freedom), continued and continues
to disfigure, and often prematurely and violently end, Black lives (Davis
2003; Hartman 2007; Sexton 2010; Kendi 2016).
Setting our research participants’ experience against these two visions
of slavery’s wrong, we discuss the fact that, because it ignores the “racial
contract” that has historically denied “equal personhood to people of
color” (Mills 2008, 1380) and simply reads contract as freedom, current
anti-trafficking discourse (like liberal antislavery thought more gener-
ally) leaves “little room for understanding the complexities of consent”
(Brace 2013, 478). It is therefore often forced to deny the ethnographic
realities of phenomena it dubs “modern slavery.” We conclude that a focus
on what it means to live in the wake of racial slavery, “to occupy and to be
occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unre-
solved unfolding” (Sharpe 2016, 13–14), offers a more useful lens through
which to analyze the restraints on freedom experienced by Jamaican sex
workers today.
Framing Jamaican Sex Workers as Victims of

“Trafficking and Modern Slavery”
“Human trafficking” is said to be a market in which “the commodity is
human life and the exchange results in modern-day slavery” (Miller 2006).
Anti-trafficking and modern slavery campaign materials routinely feature
visual imagery of women and girls as slabs of meat, or packed in jam jars or
sardine tins, or with bodies barcoded ready for sale, or as inanimate objects
such as puppets (Aradau 2004; Andrijasevic 2007), reflecting and repro-
ducing an understanding of slavery as grotesque because it reduces human
beings to anonymous, suffering bodies –objects to be transported, traded,
driven and used. Trafficking and modern-day slavery are cast as the exem-
plar of unacceptable commodification because they disregard the distinc-
tion between persons and things that should be held inviolable (O’Connell
Davidson 2015).
The persons/things dichotomy maps onto other conceptual binaries
that are central to the liberal imaginary, in particular the subject/object
and associated agential/non-agential and consent/force binaries. Through
this lens, the voluntarily contracting subject is the opposite of the slave,
and there is a clear line between those who actively choose and consent
to a given type of work in given conditions in a given location, and those
who have been tricked, cheated, bullied and trapped. In other words, it
conceives of a sharp distinction between willing selves, who act on the
basis of their own freely made choices, and individuals who are forced to
submit to the will of another. Some campaigners even describe “victims of
trafficking” as having “lost” their agency along with their freedom (Bales
2004). It follows that for individuals to qualify as “victims of trafficking”

or “modern slaves,” they need to be perceived as hapless, helpless and
lacking in agency, as either not having consented, or being incapable of
consenting, to the arrangements in which they are found. Those seeking
to represent sex workers as victims of trafficking and modern slavery are
therefore at pains to portray them as objects controlled by the will of
others.
One of the main international NGOs active in the field of trafficking in
Jamaica is Shared Hope International (SHI), and its publications provide
a good illustration of such a portrayal. SHI was among a number of US
Evangelical groups that put pressure on the Bush administration in the
early 2000s to take up the anti-trafficking cause, and it has benefited from
the millions of dollars subsequently allocated by Attorney General John
Ashcroft in grants to faith-based anti-trafficking groups (Soderlund 2005,
76). Though TIP reports provide little or no detail about the sources of
the information upon which they rely (Esarey 2015), it seems likely that
SHI is amongst the “NGOs and other local observers” that have provided
the TIP office with “evidence” on trafficking and child sex tourism in
Jamaica.
SHI publications paint a picture of Jamaica as a country where “the pros-
titution of minors… is extensive” (SHI 2007, 40); where human trafficking,
including “familial trafficking” of children and trafficking of women into
the sex trade “is highly prevalent” (SHI 2007, 77); and where “rampant
sex tourism… compromises youth safety” (SHI 2012). Repeated assertions
that minors and adult women are “trafficked” into the “market for sexual
exploitation” are bolstered by statements about girls and women being
moved (as opposed to moving) to and from tourist areas, and descriptions
of commercial sex markets in Jamaica as entailing “the transaction of selling
women and children for sex” (SHI, 2007, 33–4, emphasis added). SHI also
asserts there is a problem of women and children being trafficked out of
Jamaica and into sexual exploitation on other Caribbean islands and else-
where in the world.
The representation of women and teenagers who sell sex as objects of
trade manipulated and controlled by “traffickers” frames out the fact that
the vast majority of those who sell sex in Jamaica actively elect to enter and
remain in sex work (Campbell et al. 1999; Dunn 2001; PANCAP 2009;
Kempadoo 2016; Cruz et al. 2019). It also deflects attention from the
fact that this choice is unsurprising given the economic context in which
they live. Having been fundamentally shaped by more than 400 years
of colonization, Jamaica continues to lack economic autonomy post-
independence. Like the Caribbean region more generally, it today “remains
deeply affected, materially and culturally, by colonial exploitation, which
manifests itself in many forms: foreign investment, globalization, trans-
national corporations, tourisms, and cultural production, among others”
(Nixon 2015, 3). In particular, since 1977, it has continuously been

heavily dependent on financial assistance from the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) to stabilize its economy (which has grown on average less
than 1 percent a year for the last three decades; CIA 2020). The neoliberal
structural adjustment packages tied to IMF loans have had a devastating
impact on ordinary people’s lives in Jamaica (Jubilee Debt Campaign
2013). Indeed, Johnson and Montecino (2012, 2) state that “Jamaica offers
a stark example of the long-term costs that an excessive debt burden can
impose on a developing country” (see also Jubilee Debt Campaign 2013).
As a result, some 19 percent of Jamaicans were living below the official
poverty line in 2017 (Cucagna and Johnson 2020), and many ordinary
Jamaicans struggle to survive, supplementing paid work (if they can get
it) with informal earning activities in an economy of makeshifts. The situ-
ation is unlikely to improve soon, given that Jamaica’s real GDP is fore-
cast to decrease by 9 percent due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic
(Cucagna and Johnson 2020).
The population of sex workers on the island is estimated to include
around 16,000 female workers and 400 male and trans women workers.1
Though we recognize that club bosses sometimes do use violence or its
threat against workers, and that in Jamaica (as in the US, the UK and other
global North countries awarded Tier 1 TIP rankings) intimate partner vio-
lence can include coercion into sex work, sex commerce does not rely exclu-
sively or even primarily on “pimps” or “traffickers” for a supply of workers.
Sex work can generate as much JMD 10,000 per night. Though not every
sex worker achieves this regularly, or even ever, in the economic context
outlined here, the possibility of earning this sum is inducement enough to
create a supply of adults and teenagers who actively consent to sell their
sexual labor.
The Enigma of Consent

The fact of adults’ and teenagers’ consent to sex work represents a puzzle
for those who view the world through the prism of the liberal binaries that
insist people are either abject, passive objects and slaves or freely contracting
subjects, and who take the fact of consent, and the capacity to “walk away”
from any given arrangement as signifying “freedom.” Of course, liberal
theory provides a get-out clause in relation to children, whose faculties are
assumed to be too immature to equip them with the capacity to consent
(even though the term “child” is applied to persons up to the age of 18),
and the same clause was traditionally also applied to women. Moreover, for
many religiously inspired and radical feminist thinkers, sex is so intimately
connected to selfhood that a woman can no more consent to sell herself in
prostitution than she can consent to sell herself into slavery (Barry 1984).
These arguments have been extensively and effectively countered elsewhere
and we will not rehearse the critique again here. Moreover, even if women
and teenagers’ consent is theorized as coerced, manipulated or otherwise
inauthentic, it remains a real and practical problem for anti-trafficking
NGOs in Jamaica, since the people they seek to protect and assist do not
necessarily want the type of help that NGOs offer (see e.g., Soderlund
2005; Ahmed and Seshu 2012; Parmanand 2019 on this phenomenon else-
where in the world).
Though our research did not focus on anti-trafficking actors, we did
converse with two staff members at organizations that worked to provide
employability skills to youth deemed “potential victims of trafficking.”
These organizations focus on equipping young people with the skills and
“attitude” necessary to take up low paid housekeeping work in hotels
(employment contracts that, unlike sex work contracts, they are deemed
perfectly able to consent to). In line with the findings of Elena Shih’s
(2018) study of American anti-trafficking rescue projects in China and
Thailand, these staff members spoke of sex work as something outside the
public sphere of the market, contract and labor, casting it as an extension
or consequence of domestic familial abuse. This led to a preoccupation
with vetting the moral character of the young people they worked with,
and surveilling them to ensure they were redeemable and not of a “type”
that might corrupt fellow “potential victims” by encouraging them into
sex work. Meanwhile, an American woman interviewee who had under-
taken voluntary work with one such organization explained that she had
been charged with organizing IT training for teenage girls and young
women “at risk of trafficking” on the assumption that IT skills would help
them to secure “respectable” employment:
So we did the training in my internet café, and I hadn’t realised

what we were assisting in doing. Because the girls would con-
stantly come in, because in the internet café the girls could run
four messengers, they could be telling one guy to do Western
Union, another to do whatever. In many ways, the working girls
here they’re really skilled. And then they would want photos. And
then the penny dropped with me, and I was like, “So what do you
want this photo for?” and they were like “Oh, we’re going to go and
dance in Barbados” or something. And then I realised like, how did
I not get this before?
Since anti-trafficking actors in Jamaica are in no position to offer viable

economic alternatives to those they would “rescue” from sex work, their
efforts at salvation can be thwarted by the will of the individuals they seek
to save.
However, while our study leads us to strongly reject the notion that
our research participants can be understood as abject, passive objects and
victims, we find the opposite pole of the liberal binary equally unsatis-
factory with regard to their experience. Data from the survey of 165 sex
workers (including cis women and men and trans women) undertaken by
SWAJ, as well as our interview data, show that violence is a routine feature
of respondents’ working lives. Many had indeed experienced violence or its
threat from bosses and/or intimate partners, but the most pervasive threat
came from members of the public (94 percent of survey respondents had
experienced this at some point during their working lives and 60 percent
experienced it “all the time”); customers (98 percent had ever experienced
threats or violence from customers, 52 percent reported experiencing this
“all the time”); and the police (95 percent had ever experienced threats or
violence from the police, 40 percent experience this “all the time”). The
data also confirm what other research has found, namely that some police
officers use physical violence against sex workers, and/or rape them, and/
or demand sexual favors, and/or extort money from them (Campbell et al
1999; SWAJ 2016; Amnesty International 2016; see also Cabezas 2009 on
the same phenomenon in Cuba and the Dominican Republic).
The survey and our interview research suggest that most of the vio-
lence routinely experienced by sex workers is perpetrated against them
because they are sex workers, rather than to compel them to take up or
remain in the work. Moreover, the very high risk of violence from police,
passersby and customers that street sex workers face is one reason why
some women and girls prefer to work in clubs (Cruz et al. 2019). For
all the restrictions that may be associated with employment in a club,
club bosses (some of them) at least provide what states normally pro-
vide worker-citizens but fail to provide sex workers, namely a means
of enforcing limits on contracts with customers and protection from
random violence. Through this lens, when sex workers agree to third
party involvement in their sex work, they do so in pursuit of precisely
the kind of self-ownership that has been celebrated as freedom by liberal
thinkers (Stanley, 1998; Brace, 2018).
Yet given the extraordinarily high level of violence our Jamaican research
participants faced, and the economic need behind the choice to enter
sex work, trying to imagine their consent as “freedom” only highlights
the flawed and ideological nature of liberal contractarian thinking. By
emphasising “the centrality of individual will and consent,” that thinking
“voluntarizes and represents as the result of free and consensual agreement
relations and structures of domination about which most people have no
real choice, and which actually oppress the majority of the population” as
Charles Mills (2000, 441) puts it. In the Jamaican context, those relations
and structures of domination are very much linked to slavery and colon-
ization, and not merely in the sense that the latter continues to undermine
Jamaica’s economy.
The Afterlives of Slavery: Criminalization,

Stigma and Violence
Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and

living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought
forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/
status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status
is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black
women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means
living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations,
Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African
migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International
Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and more
(Sharpe 2016, 14)
Christina Sharpe’s observations provide a powerful insight into the forces set
in motion by slavery that continue to shape our research participants’ lives.
Through the lens of the anti-Black racism that developed with trans-
atlantic slavery, the legal abolition of slavery presented a dilemma even
for those white abolitionists who decried the cruelties of slavery and the
immorality of buying and selling human beings as chattel. In the white abo-
litionist imaginary, the enslaved “were figured as lacking in industry and in
interest in their own labour… [which] in turn meant that they lacked the
prerequisites to make them eligible for freedom, and for belonging to the
state” (Brace 2018, 139). What if, freed from slavery’s shackles, they did
not choose to enter the free wage labor contracts that marked the difference
between freedom and coercion?
In the British Caribbean, such concerns led colonial officials and planters
to devise a variety of methods to deprive newly emancipated people of
“sources of subsistence which competed with employment on” plantations
(Williams 1970, 329; Hall et al. 2014). They also fed into efforts to
“reform,” “civilise” and “educate” the enslaved before and after emancipa-
tion. Such efforts were guided by European ideals of gender and domesti-
city, and aimed to promote Christian marriage with husbands as heads of
household and wives their dutiful helpmeets (Green, 2006). Post eman-
cipation, the criminal law was increasingly used to discipline and control
those who failed to behave “appropriately to their ‘station’ as workers, as
men and women, and as Christians” (Paton 2004, 133). Efforts to live inde-
pendently were one particular focus of control and punishment, but sexu-
ality was another. Indeed, when flogging was reintroduced into Jamaica’s
penal system in 1850 (having been removed following the legal aboli-
tion of slavery), the crimes for which the lash could be administered were
mostly sexual, and included sodomy and assault with intent to commit
sodomy (Paton 2004, 140).
As post-colonial feminist scholarship has shown, because Blackness
had been constructed as implying criminality and animalism, distancing
from Blackness, or what Blackness was taken to signify, became central
to citizenship and belonging for the formerly enslaved (Alexander 1994,
2006; Kempadoo 2004; Sheller 2012). Even before abolition in Jamaica,
for free men of color, “part of the challenge of claiming citizenship was
recasting representations of the free community of colour as respect-
able and masculinized,” which they sought to do by highlighting “their
socio-cultural and moral affinity to a British Christian and middling
class respectability” (Ono-George 2017, 358). In the post-emancipation
British Caribbean conformity to the highly gendered ideals of respect-
ability promoted by colonial officials and evangelical missionaries was a
way in which those racialized as Black and brown could assert claims to be
fitting subjects of freedom. For men, this meant fulfilling their duties and
obligations to undertake paid work, to marry, to financially support their
families, and to take an active part in politics; for women, it meant domes-
ticity, modesty, chastity and religiosity (Sheller 2012, 103).
These strong associations between freedom, rights and citizenship on the
one hand, and “respectability” and conformity to gender norms on the other,
are relevant to the particular forms of violence that are perpetrated against
sex workers in Jamaica today, and so also central to the work of SWAJ. For
example, street sex work in Jamaica is criminalized through soliciting and
loitering laws, and female sex workers stigmatized as “nasty girls.” This makes
them potential targets for abuse and violence not only from police officers,
but also passing members of the public. Meanwhile, laws criminalising
homosexuality that were introduced by the British colonial authorities in
the nineteenth century still remain virtually unchanged (Gaskins Jr 2013).
The criminalization of homosexuality and widespread, extremely negative
responses to LGBTQ people (West and Cowell 2015; Logie et al. 2017),
played a driving role in our cis male and trans women interviewees’ entry
into sex work and their experience of violence while working.
The survey found trans women were significantly more likely than either
cis men or cis women to report facing constant police brutality. Almost
90 percent of trans women reported that when doing sex work, they experi-
ence threats or violence from members of the public all the time. Because
trans women are targets for violence on the streets, and also face discrimin-
ation in housing and job markets, they are often dependent on an intimate
partner for a place to stay and economic support. With that dependency
comes a risk that the partner will seek to control their sex work and sub-
ject them to violence. Trans women respondents were also the group most
likely to report constant violence from an intimate partner or pimp.
The heavy emphasis on sexual respectability as a core criterion of citizen-

ship and belonging also connects to violence from customers. If only the
“respectable” are imagined as subjects of freedom, as possessive individuals
entitled to their own persons, labor and faculties, then only the “respect-
able” have the capacity to contract. The “unrespectable”/dishonored indi-
vidual is beyond and outside contract, rendering their consent irrelevant.
Several interviewees –cis men and women and trans women –reported
experiences of gang rape that had occurred when, having agreed to go to a
hotel room for business with one customer, they found two to five people
waiting in the room.
In such cases, sex workers have no recourse to law. Some 80 percent of
survey respondents had been raped while working, yet more than 95 per-
cent stated that they would not turn to the police for help if raped. Our
interviews with five police officers, two very senior, suggest they are correct
to assume the police would offer them no protection or access to justice.
Asked what their response would be if an adult sex worker approached
them to report being raped, all five officers replied that sex workers commit
a crime when they sell sex, and “cannot be raped.” When sex workers com-
plain of rape, the officers said, they simply mean they have not been paid.
Two senior officers laughed aloud at the question.
Enslaved people were “things” in the sense of being objects of property
and “persons” in the sense of being criminally culpable. For these police
officers, sex workers are criminally culpable persons when they agree to
“prostitute,” but not persons when it comes to rights to set limits upon or
freely withdraw from the contract. It seems that for those who perpetrate
or connive with violence against sex workers (and we should note that this
is not all customers or all police officers), the relationship between cus-
tomer and sex worker is not imagined as bound by the rules of consent,
voluntarism and mutuality that govern “legitimate” contractual relations
between putatively equal subjects. Rather than encouraging us to attend
to the way in which the personhood of sex workers is disfigured, and how
their standing in relation to law leaves them open to predation, dominant
discourse on “trafficking and modern slavery” focuses “on the sex industry
as a site of criminal activity and ‘wrong’ sex,” and in so doing “plays
into long-standing, religious-inspired, colonial bourgeois ideologies of
respectability that surround Caribbean women’s sexuality” (Kempadoo
2016, 23).
Though the organization lacks the resources and funding to make
sustained and large-scale interventions, SWAJ seeks to counter the con-
tinuing association between rights and “respectability” and gender con-
formity through actions to sensitize the police, and trainings on human
rights for peer educators in the sex work community, as well as by calling
for decriminalization.
Conclusion
Criminalization and marginalization are social forces that have been critical
to the application of colonial and post-colonial state power (Scraton 2007).
In this respect, Jamaicans like our research partners at SWAJ who are
fighting for the decriminalization of consensual acts of same-sex intimacy
and of sex work are part of a wider and ongoing struggle both to undo
colonialism and to transform oppressive practices adopted or maintained
by post-independence states. That struggle is hindered, not helped, by
the dominant global North discourse on “trafficking and modern slavery,”
which extends sexual state politics and is overwhelmingly preoccupied
with criminal law and law enforcement (Shih 2016). Moreover, in speaking
of “trafficking and modern slavery” as a scourge that robs victims of agency
and will, this discourse deflects attention from the history and afterlives of
actual racial chattel slavery (Beutin 2017), and so from the relations and
structures of domination, rooted in slavery and colonialism, that actually
constrain our research participants’ choices and underpin the violence they
face. In the Caribbean context, colonial notions of respectability in relation
to sexual praxis are amongst these relations and structures, especially for
women racialized as Black (Kempadoo 2004).
For all these reasons, we would argue that our research participants’ experi-
ence is disavowed in the discourse of “modern slavery,” but becomes visible and
intelligible through the lens of scholarship on the wake of racial chattel slavery.
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to the British Academy for funding the project on which
this chapter is based (“Revisiting child sex tourism, rethinking business
responses,” Award Ref: TS170020), to our co-investigator Katie Cruz, and
our research partners at SWAJ, especially Miriam Haughton and Joel Levy,
and to Kamala Kempadoo and Elena Shih for extremely helpful comments
on drafts of this chapter. Julia O’Connell Davidson is also grateful to the
European Research Council for funding a project that has helped to inform
the discussion in this chapter (Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice
of Freedom in the Contemporary World, ERC ADG 788563).
Note
1 Figures from SWAJ, based on Ministry of Health estimates.
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Chapter 17
Migrant Domestic Workers,

Asylum-S eekers and
Premonitions of Anti-Trafficking
in Hong Kong
Julie Ham, Iulia Gheorghiu and Eni Lestari
Introduction
For researchers and advocates who are all too familiar with the impact of
the anti-trafficking framework in North America and Europe, it can be
unsettling to see the enthusiastic promotion of a nascent anti-trafficking
framework by NGOs and donors in Hong Kong in recent years. This is
ostensibly driven by Hong Kong’s Tier 2 Watch List ranking in the US
State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report from 2016 to 2018
(US Department of State 2019). This is despite the fact that the US TIP
report has been critiqued for its methodology and its use as a political tool
rather than a methodologically or empirically sound assessment of human
trafficking trends (e.g. GAATW 2007). Trafficking in persons (as defined
in the Palermo Protocol)1 is not explicitly criminalized in the legislation of
the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, although specific related
offences are prosecuted under various sections of Hong Kong law.
The contours of anti-trafficking are shaped by the deployment of racist
logics in the management of migration. The construction of race in Hong
Kong is shaped by its history of British colonialism (1842–1997), and
partially evinces the White/ Black dichotomization central to western
conceptualizations of race. However, race in Hong Kong also reveals
the need for theorization beyond Blackness and Whiteness and beyond
the primacy of skin colour differences (e.g. Lan 2003; Paul 2011; Lowe
and Tsang 2017). This chapter focuses on the experiences of Indonesian
domestic workers and African female asylum-seekers, but a brief sketch
of the demography of racialization in Hong Kong illuminates overlaps
and divergences from western understandings of race. As of 2016, Hong
Kong’s population was 92% ethnically Chinese and 8% non-Chinese (or
584,383 of a population of 7.34 million) (Race Relations Unit 2018).
Racialization varies across the groups that are most commonly marked or
visibilized through difference: Mainland Chinese; ethnic minorities (which
technically includes anyone who is not of Chinese descent; however, this
DOI: 10.4324/9781003162124-21
254 Julie Ham, Iulia Gheorghiu and Eni Lestari
term is commonly used informally to refer to people of South Asian des-

cent2 who were born or raised in Hong Kong); migrant domestic workers
(386,075 as of 2018; Census and Statistics Department n.d.); asylum-
seekers (approximately 6,000 as of 2017 and less than 300 as of September
2020; Immigration Department 2020); and White “expats” (Kapai 2015).
The racialization of migrant domestic workers and asylum-seekers is the
focus of this chapter, but a brief note about the racialization of Mainland
Chinese may best illustrate different forms of racialization beyond a Black/
White dichotomy.
Hong Kong poses an intriguing site for decolonial thinking about
race. The political decolonization of Hong Kong, or the handover from
Great Britain to China in 1997, played a crucial role in the racialization
of Mainland Chinese as a people distinct from Hong Kongers (Lowe and
Tsang 2017), in response to concerns of a coercive renationalization by the
Mainland Chinese government (Choi 2010). Lowe and Tsang argue that
“the identity of Hong Kong’s citizenry is predicated on the boundedness
of an imagined consciousness of who they are relative to Mainlanders
who are constructed as politically corrupt, degenerate and less civilized”
(Lowe and Tsang 2017, 147). The racialization of Mainland Chinese
relies on ideas of cultural inferiority and “dangerous ‘unequal others’,
guilty of exploiting Hong Kong’s dwindling public and social welfare
resources” (Lowe and Tsang 2017, 138). Although these stereotypes
may be wearily familiar to minorities in other contexts, the construc-
tion of Mainland Chinese as racially different from the “local” (Cantonese
speaking, Chinese) Hong Konger population challenges phenotype and
skin colour as the primary basis for racial difference. Rather, the construc-
tion of racial difference of Mainland Chinese in Hong Kong is grounded
in ideas of political, cultural and linguistic difference (Lowe and Tsang
2017; also see Lan 2003) rather than “directly along biological lines or
phenotype” (Paul 2011, 1069) or a positioning of Whiteness as a proxy
for privilege or supremacy. Through a Black/White lens, the tensions
between local Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese may appear to be a
matter of ethnic difference rather than racial difference. The Hong Kong
government appears to ascribe to this lens, given the explicit exclusion of
Mainland Chinese in the Race Discrimination Ordinance (RDO) despite
evidence of substantial discrimination (e.g. Chan 2005; Lowe and Tsang
2017) and given that
the sameness of the race or ethnicity between the perpetrator and the
victim of an act of racial discrimination or harassment does not make
the act any less based on race or ethnicity. Racial discrimination occurs
on account of the victim’s race or ethnicity (actual or perceived), and
not of whether his race or ethnicity is the same as the perpetrator’s.
(Chan 2005,602)
Anti-Trafficking in Hong Kong 255
Similarly, the experiences of Indonesian domestic workers and female

African asylum-seekers in Hong Kong speak to racialization through eth-
nicity and migration policy, rather than solely through phenotypical diffe-
rence. The following sections offer (1) an activist-informed reflection of the
analyses developed by domestic workers on human trafficking and (2) an
empirical analysis of asylum-seekers’ experiences of trafficking.
Migrant Domestic Workers and the Illegibility of

Trafficking
This section starts from the work of organizations led by migrant domestic
workers. We do so to position migrant domestic workers as knowledge
producers in the anti-trafficking sector and to shift the dynamic between
those who have traditionally been centred as “experts” in anti-trafficking
discourses (e.g. criminal justice practitioners) and those who have trad-
itionally been positioned as targets for anti- trafficking interventions
(e.g. migrant domestic workers). Designating this positionality reveals
trafficking issues that remain unnoticed in mainstream anti-trafficking
discourses. The second case study in the section below, co-authored by Eni
Lestari of the International Migrants Alliance, illustrates this in a discussion
of migrant worker-led efforts to access justice for Erwiana Sulistyaningsih.
The two case studies below suggest a routinization of trafficking elements
in labour migration infrastructure that may at least partially stem from the
racialized construction of migrant domestic workers, and challenges the
notion of trafficking as an easily identifiable anomaly.
Notions about racial and ethnic difference have been key in entrenching
expectations for gendered labour in domestic work. In Hong Kong,
this has largely concerned workers from the Philippines (206,281 as of
2018) and Indonesia (165,620 as of 2018), who comprise the two largest
groups of migrant domestic workers (Census and Statistics Department
n.d.). The research literature has interrogated the assumed ethnic or cul-
tural characteristics that purportedly make Filipina and Indonesian women
a “natural fit” for domestic work (Lan 2003; Guevarra 2014; Lee et al.
2018). In particular, the construction of racial difference between different
Southeast Asian ethnicities (such as the differences between Indonesian and
Filipino domestic workers) continues to be fueled by labour recruitment
agencies in order to foster a competitive labour market (Lan 2003; Paul
2011). Building on Lan’s (2003) argument, employers would need to be
sold on the idea of racial difference between Indonesian and Filipino that
would rationalize Indonesians’ greater “suitability” to domestic work, in
order for Indonesian workers to pose a competitive threat to the Filipino
domestic labour workforce. The process of racialization further aids in
positioning labour recruitment agencies as “experts” in domestic labour
(Lan 2003; Paul 2011), as a gatekeeper for racialized “knowledge” that is
constructed and imparted about different groups of workers. Lastly, the

attribution of particular characteristics (such as docility, obedience, nurt-
uring) to race rather than to the demands of agencies and employers may
leave workers open to accusations of trouble-making if they are perceived
to step outside of the racial role prescribed to them. As will be discussed
in the following, we aim to go beyond listing the meanings ascribed to
female Southeast Asian bodies and offer an activist-informed reflection on
the challenges faced by the migrant worker-led movement in visibilizing
trafficking through (1) the criminalization of identification and (2) the rec-
ognition of harm.
The Routinization of Trafficking Factors and the Criminalization

of Identification 3
The criminalization of identification in Hong Kong adheres to the simul-
taneous hyper-visibility (e.g. surveillance) of migrant domestic workers and
invisibilization of trafficking factors; that is, the use of fraud, deception and
coercion in the recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers for employ-
ment. In January 2015, the Indonesian government initiated a biometric
passport system for Indonesian passport holders in Hong Kong and Macau,
which requires the synchronization of all identification documents. Since
then, Indonesian domestic workers in the process of synchronizing and rec-
onciling identification documents have run the risk of criminal penalties
(e.g. arrest, detention) by the Hong Kong Immigration Department. In
the transition to this system, 11 Indonesian domestic workers were jailed
in 2015–2016 and more have been investigated for administrative discrep-
ancies between their previous and current identification documents. This
includes falsification or modification of applicants’ identification documents
by recruitment agencies, such as changing the dates of birth across
documents in order to make applicants eligible for overseas work, or slight
variations in name in order to speed up the process of deployment. This
has placed Indonesian migrant domestic workers at risk of criminal pun-
ishment in Hong Kong for identification documents that they are legally
required to obtain through third parties, such as recruitment agencies. By
law, Indonesian migrant workers are only permitted to work abroad if they
apply through a recruitment agency and are required to obtain their travel
identification documents (such as a passport) through an agency or training
centre. Correcting errors or discrepancies may incur fees from the agency or
exclude applicants from overseas work opportunities. Using identification
documents with discrepancies may facilitate work placement but, with the
introduction of the biometric passport system, places domestic workers at
risk of being charged with immigration fraud in Hong Kong.
Since 2016, organizations led by Indonesian domestic workers such as
the Network of Indonesian Migrant Workers (JBMI) have been working
to prevent domestic workers from being criminalized for identification

documents falsified by recruitment agencies. Migrant domestic worker-
led organizations in Hong Kong have implemented extensive training for
domestic workers, such as the intricacies of avoiding criminalization while
sorting out one’s identification, the risks and advantages of correcting
particular documents in Hong Kong or in Indonesia, the order in which
documents should be corrected in order to minimize investigation, and
their legal rights during this process. This extensive training has been
supplemented by the strategic use of political visibility in lobbying for
greater coordination between the Indonesian Consulate General and the
Hong Kong Immigration Department.
The falsification of identification documents by recruitment agencies
to accelerate the movement of Indonesian workers to households abroad
relies on factors such as fraud, coercion and deception (Palmer 2012).
The practices of labour recruitment agencies in falsifying identification
parallels the construction of racial difference between Southeast Asian
ethnicities –both practices are done to fashion and discipline the desired
worker. The most visible party in these processes, the migrant domestic
worker, bears the cost of racialization and identification falsification,
Figure 17.1 Forum for Indonesian domestic workers held at the University of Hong
Kong, August 2016. Photo by author, Julie Ham.
whereas labour recruitment agencies continue to benefit from a protective

invisibility.
Erwiana Sulistyaningsih and the Recognition of Harm

The case of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih against her employer, Law Wan-tung,
brought international attention to the abuse of domestic workers, but
it is also instructive in illustrating the effort needed in seeking justice for
migrant domestic workers. Erwiana arrived in Hong Kong as a migrant
domestic worker in 2013. She had been informed by her recruitment agency
in Indonesia, PT. Graha Ayu Karsa, that she would receive HKD 3,920 per
month (or about USD 505) and holiday pay as the prospective employer
prohibited her from having a weekly day off. Her salary would be deducted
for six months to pay for her placement fees. She received her passport and her
employment contract on the morning of her departure to Hong Kong, which
were immediately confiscated by the Chan Asia Employment Agency upon
her arrival. Her employer, Law Wan-tung, soon sought to extract as much as
labour from her as possible and to deny her the basic means for survival:
I worked 20 hours a day, sleeping from 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm, and

was given four slices of bread and half bowl of rice for food everyday.
My employer did not allow me to use toilet more than twice so my
drinking water was limited to 450 ml only. I slept in the storage room,
on the floor with no mattress, pillow or blanket.
Erwiana tried to escape after a month and called the Chan Asia Employment
Agency for help. The agency denied her assistance and told her to return
to her employer’s house so that she could complete the six months of work
required to pay back her placement fees. Upon returning, her employer
began to torture her physically and threatened to kill her family if Erwiana
reported the abuse. She was hit, kicked, pushed against the wall, pulled from
ladders and punished with cold water during the winter. After Erwiana’s
ability to move deteriorated, her employer arranged for Erwiana’s return to
Indonesia. More than seven months of work had not been paid. Photos of
her injuries went viral after being posted by a fellow domestic worker who
had discovered her at the airport.
Despite evidence of obvious abuse and exploitation, the Hong Kong
Police Force (HKPF) was initially indifferent. Law Wan-tung was only
arrested in 2015 after another domestic worker who was previously
victimized, stepped forward, supported by extensive advocacy by migrant
worker-led networks such as the Network of Indonesian Migrant Workers
(JBMI) and Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB).4 After a year of
investigation, Law Wan-tung was sentenced in February 2015 to six years
imprisonment for physical assault, criminal intimidation, and unpaid wages
and denial of holidays (Lau 2015). Migrant worker advocates have taken
care to clarify that these constitute a portion of the full range of violations
that occurred. Her employer was not punished for forcing Erwiana to work
around the clock, confining her physically, providing inadequate food and
accommodation, and denying access to water and a toilet. The agency that
coerced Erwiana to return to an abusive employer has not faced any crim-
inal charges.
Erwiana’s case and the criminalization of identification in Hong Kong
illustrate clear yet under- recognized trafficking narratives and reveal
the dissonance between the hyper-visibility of western anti-trafficking
discourses and the invisibilization of trafficking-related practices in the
domestic work sector. In Erwiana’s case, the Chan Asia Employment
Agency used threat, coercion and the abuse of power or a position of vul-
nerability to ensure that Erwiana did not escape an exploitative situation.
On the one hand, Erwiana’s case demonstrates a very strategic and powerful
visibility by migrant worker-led organizations (e.g. Lau 2015) as a means
of seeking justice. Yet the extensive advocacy also speaks to the immense
effort required to break through expectations for racialized labour, even
for a clear case of brutality and exploitation. The construction of the racial
inferiority of Southeast Asian workers permits employers to exercise or nor-
malize a superiority bolstered by labour recruitment agencies and the crim-
inal justice system in Hong Kong. Notable examples include the actions
of the Support Group for Hong Kong Employers with Foreign Domestic
Helpers and the Taskforce on Foreign Helper’s Problems, represented by
Michael Lee, a district councillor and member of the pro-business Liberal
Party in Hong Kong. These actions have included calls to restrict air-
conditioning for domestic workers and halt a ban on dangerous tasks for
domestic workers, such as cleaning exterior windows (e.g. Leung 2016;
AFP 2017). Erwiana’s case also reveals a very selective recognition of harms
in domestic work, between harms that are legally recognized (e.g. physical
assault, non-payment of wages) and harms that are not (e.g. exhaustion,
denial of basic needs, physical confinement). The latter may be legible as
harms under an anti-trafficking lens but currently remain legally illegible.
The utility of the emerging anti-trafficking framework in Hong Kong
would partly depend on its effectiveness in visibilizing trafficking factors
that are currently routinized in labour migration infrastructure.
In March 2018, the Hong Kong government adopted the “Action
Plan to Tackle Trafficking in Persons and to Enhance Protection of
Foreign Domestic Workers” (Government of the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region 2018), which defines offences related to trafficking
in persons and strategies for victim identification, but has been critiqued
for the lack of transparency regarding screening and prosecution charges,
the ineffectiveness of victim identification, and failure to offer potential
victims immunity from prosecution of trafficking offences. The document
does state that it will grant identified victims immunity “depending on

the facts and circumstances of the case and subject to pre-conditions being
satisfied” (Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
2018, 18). However, the language remains vague and does not ensure
that individuals in exploitative situations would be protected should they
decide to cooperate in the prosecution of offenders.
Asylum-S eekers, Trafficking and Precarious Mobility

Strategies
Stakeholders keen on promoting anti-trafficking in Hong Kong would
do well to heed the lessons learned from the racialization of asylum-
seekers in Hong Kong. The racialization of predominantly African and
South Asian asylum-seekers is perhaps more recognizable within western
conceptualizations of race, given visible social differences such as skin
colour or phenotype. The racialization of asylum-seekers is intimately
tied to gender, as evinced by the public fixation on the supposed risks
presented by African and South Asian men seeking asylum (Vecchio 2014;
Ng et al. 2019). The amplification of racialized tropes through masculine
bodies permits a shift from a recognition of vulnerability to the construc-
tion of social threat through the coded meanings assigned to Black and
Brown male bodies (e.g. Amoah 2020), as evident in, for example, “stop
and search” policing practices (e.g. Ng 2017).
This particular process of racialization has permitted the Hong Kong
government to minimize their international obligations to asylum seekers
under the Convention against Torture and the Refugee Convention. Hong
Kong has one of the lowest rates of asylum claim substantiation in the
world at 0.8% (Immigration Department 2020), compared to the global
average of 27% (United Nations 2014). The Unified Screening Mechanism
(USM) screens claims lodged under the Convention against Torture and the
Refugee Convention. The Immigration Department screens applications
and the rare substantiated claims are referred to UNHCR Hong Kong for
resettlement to third countries, as Hong Kong is not a signatory to the
1951 Refugee Convention. Race is not overtly brought up in discussions on
the potential threat asylum claimants might pose; rather, country of origin,
as mentioned above, is crucial to the government’s management of precar-
ious migrant others. The administration rejects the labels “asylum seeker”
and “refugees” for non-refoulement claimants and, instead, refers to them
in official documents as “illegal immigrants and foreigners who smuggled
themselves in” and asserts its longstanding tradition of not granting asylum
(Hong Kong Legislative Council Panel on Security 2015, 1).
In this context, it is perhaps easier to speculate why female African
asylum-seekers’ experiences of being trafficked remain invisibilized, as this
would likely disrupt racial tropes of the “dangerous” asylum-seeker. In this
section, we consider the experiences of eight African women asylum-seekers

interviewed in 2017–2018 for a research project on the experiences of non-
Chinese women in sex work. This group of women shared experiences that
reflected the international definition of human trafficking, even if women’s
entry into sex work did not reflect mainstream anti-trafficking narratives
and even if women did not necessarily label their experiences as trafficking.
A common narrative that emerged involved facilitated travel to China by
agents who secured visas, plane tickets and initial accommodation, which
the women had to reimburse with interest. Four of the six interviewees on
tourist visas in Hong Kong (during visa runs for Mainland China) shared
similar stories of knowing that they would be travelling to Asia to engage
in sex work. Two other women on tourist visas shared stories of deception
and coercion, where they had been persuaded to travel to China with the
promise of jobs teaching English. Upon arrival in China, they learned that
there was no job and they were told they would have to work in sex work
to pay off their debt. After paying off their debt, they continued to work
in sex work independently. Three women who were asylum-seekers were
promised jobs that did not exist upon reaching their destination, Mainland
China, and were coerced into sex work to pay off their debt. Upon finishing
off their debt, they continued working in the sex industry in China up
until the time when they could no longer renew their visas and ended up
claiming asylum in Hong Kong.
The hyper-visibility of Black and Brown male asylum-seekers operates
in parallel with an invisibilization of the needs and concerns of asylum-
seekers more broadly, who comprise a more diverse population than the
racialized masculinities that remain a preoccupation for policy-makers.
Marta’s experiences offer a detailed account that reflects commonalities
with other narratives that were shared. Marta is an East African sex worker
in her late 20s whose asylum claim had been under review for almost two
years at the time of the interview in 2017. She had initially been recruited
by an agent with a fraudulent offer of a job teaching English in China. Her
travel had been arranged for her, including travel documents, plane tickets
and initial accommodation. Upon arriving at her destination, she realized
the promised job was non-existent. She began working in the sex industry
as the only viable option to pay off the debt accrued for her travel and
to support herself. After repeated visa runs for more than a year between
China and Hong Kong, she was unable to renew her visa for Mainland
China. By then, she had established some acquaintances in Hong Kong
and was faced with a choice between returning to her home country and
staying in Hong Kong. She opted for the latter and filed a non-refoulement
claim with the Immigration Department.
[L]‌et me first tell you that I don’t like this [sex] work because I think
it is dirty, but I was forced by the situation….I came here with an
organization, they told me they were recruiting English teachers…The

man who brought me here…was an agent bringing people from Africa
to China…I met other African women who worked for him and they
became my friends, they told me about prostitution. They said I can
make some money, I don’t have to work for too long, that if I work for
a while, I can earn enough to pay my debt and go back home…I have
Immigration paper [pending non-refoulement claim]. I could not get
a new visa for China, so I had to stay in Hong Kong because I didn’t
want to go back [to my country]. But I am only staying until the end
of the year and I am going back…
For Marta, seeking asylum in Hong Kong presented a strategy that would
permit her continued mobility after she had been trafficked into a precar-
ious economic and legal situation in Mainland China. What remains clear
is her firm commitment to ensuring that her mobility, however precarious,
produced dividends. As mentioned earlier, government representatives in
Hong Kong have attempted to frame precarious migration as a “security
threat”. Yet Marta’s story illustrates the dissonance between these govern-
ment narratives and migrants’ economic and mobility ambitions. Marta’s
experience reflects other shared narratives in that both sex work and seeking
asylum provided less than desirable but still viable means to rectify the
consequences of being trafficked. The decisions to seek asylum and engage
in sex work were made in order to continue one’s mobility and to ensure
that one would be able to continue earning income after being trafficked,
albeit clandestinely. This was evident even if the process of seeking asylum
has been noted for restrictions on individual autonomy (Vecchio 2014;
Vecchio and Ham 2018).
Any attempt at understanding the refugee status determination pro-
cess in Hong Kong and its linkages with anti-trafficking needs to recog-
nize the absence of legal alternatives for migrants with precarious legal
statuses, including migrants who have been trafficked. The aim of quickly
re-establishing agency and control over one’s migration and income, in
some ways runs counter to mainstream anti-trafficking measures that con-
tinue to prioritize rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation (Civil Society
Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force Hong Kong 2018). Marta’s experi-
ence disrupts the emerging anti- trafficking narrative in Hong Kong,
given her involvement in sex work as an anti-trafficking strategy. Anti-
trafficking efforts by civil society actors in Hong Kong by and large have
not challenged the historical conflation between human trafficking and
sex work but rather appear to implicitly encourage expanding its defin-
ition to permit further policing of the sex industry. The research literature
on anti-trafficking overwhelmingly suggests that many anti-trafficking
measures have reinforced the surveillance and control of “Other”-ed bodies
(e.g. GAATW 2007). The continual re-framing of asylum-seekers’ needs as
security threats could be read as a premonition of what a criminal justice-

oriented anti-trafficking framework in Hong Kong might produce for
migrant bodies.
Conclusion
Any anti-trafficking efforts will ultimately remain ornamental unless they
address the lack of regular migration channels for precarious migrants and
the routinization of deception, fraud and exploitation in domestic labour
recruitment. It may be that Hong Kong’s reluctance to engage with anti-
trafficking speaks to an unspoken recognition of how much labour migra-
tion relies on elements of trafficking to ensure the flow of cheap labour
into the city. There may be potential to use an anti-trafficking lens to,
for example, re-structure labour migration infrastructure, but this would
entail centring the experiences and concerns of migrants, even when such
experiences contest common understandings of what trafficking is and
is not. Doing so would reveal mutations of trafficking practices as they
emerge and encourage an ethical approach to anti-trafficking, rather than
replicating dominant narratives that may bear little resemblance to most
migrant realities.
This would entail a significant disruption of racial hierarchies in Hong
Kong, but the potential exists. The city is notable for its dynamic and
internationally lauded domestic worker rights movement which includes
many organizations and networks led by domestic workers (e.g. Hsia
2009). The burgeoning asylum-seeker movement has also seen the cre-
ation of a refugee-led organization, Refugee Union (Vecchio and Ham
2018). The efforts of domestic workers and asylum-seekers also reveals
that moving towards racial justice may not necessarily require focusing
on race as the determinative variable, and that a critical analysis of race
in anti-trafficking also includes gauging the potential of migrant rights
frameworks in contributing to racial justice. Addressing the lack of regular
migration channels for precarious migrants and the normalization of decep-
tion, fraud and exploitation in migrant labour recruitment may not focus
explicitly on race. However, requiring accountability from labour recruit-
ment agencies may lessen their capacity to position themselves as racial
experts or specialized managers of racialized Others and shift the public
focus from supposed inherent racial differences between workforces to the
mechanics of power in labour migration infrastructure.
However, recent anti-trafficking efforts in Hong Kong suggest that
migrants’ experiential knowledge will continue to be marginalized in
favour of further entrenching the reach and discretion of the criminal
justice system (Civil Society Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force Hong
Kong 2018). Globally, there is increasing resistance to the anti-trafficking
industry by the very groups that are purportedly meant to be helped by
it, including migrants (GAATW 2007). If the experiences of other coun-

tries are anything to go by, the emergence of an anti-trafficking industry in
Hong Kong may well result in a parallel sector to assist persons who have
been “anti-trafficked” (i.e. those who have experienced harms from anti-
trafficking measures) alongside organizations offering assistance to persons
who have been trafficked.
Notes
1 www.ohchr.org/ e n/ p rofe s sio n ali n ter e st/ p ages/ p roto c olt r aff i cki n gin p ers
ons.aspx
2 South Asian communities encounter significant discrimination in Hong Kong
(e.g. Kapai 2015).
3 This section has been adapted from a news story (Ham 2016).
4 www.facebook.com/Justice-for-Erwiana-and-All-Migrant-Domestic-Workers-
Committee-644008498993582/
Funding Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the University Grants Committee, Research
Grants Council Early Career Scheme in Hong Kong.
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Index
Africa: anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling Network) (RGPV) 143–45; sex

campaigns 2, 17, 18–20, 22–25, 26–28; working, and migrant opportunities
European migration, and representation for 140–41; Survey on Trafficking in
of 20–22, 21, 24–25; HIV/AIDS, and Women, Children, and Adolescents in
view of Africans 24; migration within Brazil 140–41; violence against women,
Africa 20–21; national identities, and and trafficking prevention 142; women,
stereotypes 51–52; regular migration view of and violence against 137, 142,
channels, and issues with 24; sex 143
workers, and movement between anti-trafficking laws 2; in Amazonian
Nigeria and Ghana 17, 25–28; ‘stay territories 136–37; Brazilian policies
at home’ messaging and deterrence and laws 107, 147–48, 151n6; Canada,
practices 2–3, 18–19, 22, 29; trafficking and settler-colonial contexts 1, 119–22,
figures from 22; women’s mobility, and 206, 209, 211–13; and categories of
restrictions of 2, 26–28 citizenship 2, 4, 107; challenges to 10,
Agnoleti, Michelle (Dr) 113–14, 115 205–06, 213–16, 219–20; Denmark,
aid sector, and ‘white savior’ complex 6, policies and laws 154; Hong Kong,
94, 97–98 polices and laws 259–60, 262–63;
Amazon (Brazil): anti-trafficking policies, Indigenous peoples, and treatment
and treatment of Indigenous peoples of 8–9; Jamaica, and anti-trafficking
136–37, 147–48, 151n6; Brotherhood legislation 3, 237–38; New Zealand,
Campaign (Church of Brazil), and and anti-sex work trafficking discourse
caged symbolism 138–39, 143–48; 3, 230; Palermo Protocol (UN) 107,
Catholic Church, and anti-trafficking 144, 253; and sex working 3, 86–87,
campaigning 137, 138–39, 140, 211–13; Trafficking Victims Protection
144–47, 148–50; colonialism, and Act (2000, USA) 5, 7, 64–75, 86,
missionary actions 136–37, 148–50; 188, 190, 229; T-visas, and provision
‘disappearances,’ and links to trafficking of (USA) 64, 66, 68–69; UN Protocol
145–46; domestic service, and to Prevent, Suppress and Punish
trafficking linked to 146–47; Inquiry Trafficking in Persons 5, 86, 188,
into Trafficking in Persons in Border 211, 229; USA, laws and policies 5, 7,
Areas (Nacional Secretariat of Justice 64–75, 86, 188, 190–91, 229; women’s
Brasil, 2013) 141–42; mobility and mobility, and restrictions of 26–28
migration 139, 140; national identity, Asia: anti-trafficking laws and policies,
and view of women 137, 143; O Sumiço North America 209; migration to North
de Carolina (‘Carolina’s Disappearance’), America, and treatment of 205–08;
booklet (RGPV) 145–46; Rede Um missionary work and the Church in 207;
Grito Pela Vida (the Scream for Life sex workers from, and treatment of 10,
268 Index
174, 205–06, 208, 213–18; ‘yellow working 10, 205–06, 210–11, 213–18;
slavery,’ and human trafficking from Butterfly (Toronto) 10, 205–06, 213–18;
207, 223 Chinese immigrants, and treatment
of 206; criminal victimization, and
Bacarau (2019) 116 racialized sex trafficking 170, 175–81,
Black Mamas Bail Out Actions (USA) 7, 211–13, 219–20; domestic trafficking
47 121, 129–30, 170–71; Holistic
Brazil: Amazonian territories, Practitioners Alliance 222–23; Human
anti-trafficking policies in 136–37; Trafficking and Exploitation Unit
anti-trafficking laws and policies 127; Human Trafficking National
107, 147–48, 151n6; Brotherhood Coordination Centre 129, 170;
Campaign (Church of Brazil), and caged Indigenous peoples, and treatment of
symbolism 138–39, 143–48, 150n2; 120–22, 206; Legal Strategy Coalition
class and color markers, and significance on Violence on Indigenous Women 125;
of 112–13; ‘Essay of Brazilian Sadness’ MMIWG2S+(Missing and Murdered
(Prado, Paulo) 109; female sexuality, and Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans, and
view of women in 107–11, 108; First Two-Spirit Persons, plus) and National
National Plan to Combat Trafficking in Enquiry 8, 119–20, 123–27, 129–31;
Persons (2008) 151n6; miscegenation, National Action Plan to Combat
and Brazilian national character 109; Human Trafficking 121–22, 125, 212;
national identity, and view of 103–05, Operation Northern Spotlight 120, 130,
112–16, 137; Rede Um Grito Pela Vida 212; policing of anti-trafficking, and
(the Scream for Life Network, RGPV) racialized violence 127–31, 170–74,
144, 145–46; sexual tourism 109–10; 222–23; policy and law, sex work and
Socorro (Catholic Missionary, Brazil) trafficking 119–22, 206, 209, 211–13,
138, 139, 143–44, 147; trafficking of 220–23; Power in Our Hand (multimedia
women from, and sex work 1, 111–12; art show, Tea Base, Toronto) 216–17;
women, status and female respectability settler-colonialism, and treatment of
105–07, 112–13 Indigenous peoples 120–22, 206–07;
Britain: British Nationality Act (1948) sex working, migrants and Indigenous
23–24; Commonwealth citizens, and peoples 123, 126–27, 130–32, 170,
migration of 24; ‘Contagious Disease 171, 175–76, 181–82, 213–18
Laws’ (19th C.) 229; migrant policy Center against Human Trafficking (CaHT)
and hostile environment of 22–23, 23, (Denmark) 154, 162
24–25; visa applications and outcomes Christianity and the Church: and
24–25, 27–28 anti-trafficking debate 40–41, 79;
Brotherhood Campaign (Church of Brazil) Brotherhood Campaign (Church
138–39, 143, 150n2 of Brazil) 138–39, 143, 150n2;
Brownback, Sam (Senator, Kansas, USA) Christian behaviour and morals
67, 70, 73 245, 246; colonialism, and ‘white’
Butterfly (Toronto, Canada) 10, 205–06, humanitarianism 136, 137, 229; Islam,
213–18; anti-trafficking laws and and religious conflict 36; missionizing
policies, and resistance to 221–23; and savior-based projects 6, 94, 207;
Butterfly Voices 216; Power in Our Hand Women’s Christian Temperance Union
216–17; victim criminalization, and Movement 93
challenges to 214, 219–20; voluntary colonialism 8; Amazonian territories
versus coercion, sex working and (Brazil), and impact on 136–37;
discourses relating to 216, 218 American Colonization Society 23,
24; Canada, and settler-colonialism
Canada: anti-trafficking, and settler- 120–22, 206–07; and European ‘world
colonial contexts 119–22, 206, 209, civilization’ ideals 8, 94, 189, 245–46;
219–23; Asian migrants, and sex homosexuality, and criminalisation of
Index 269
246; Hong Kong, and impact on 253; ‘gypsies’: Central and Eastern Europeans,
Indigenous peoples, and treatment of and racialized stereotypes 164–65;
8–9, 120–22, 187–89; Jamaica, and European view of 4, 155, 158–59; Roma
impact on 241–42; missionary work people, and view of 1, 155–56, 159–64
and the Church 6, 94, 207; and racial
hierarchies 120–22, 187–88; USA, and Harper, Steven (Prime Minister, Canada)
settler colonialism 187–89 124
Cromatin, Joe (MP, Canada) 87 HIV/AIDS in Africa 24
Holistic Practitioners Alliance (Canada)
decriminalization (sex-working) 3, 230, 234 222–23
Denmark: anti-trafficking laws and policies homosexuality: criminalisation and
154; Center against Human Trafficking colonial rule 246; deviance, and the sex
(CaHT) 154, 162; Central and Eastern industry 39; Middle East, and view of
Europe, migrants from and treatment 39, 44n5
of 1, 4, 154, 164–65; criminalization Hong Kong: anti-trafficking laws and
of migrants, and racialized view of 155, policies 259–60, 262–64; colonialism,
164–65; forced labor, in formal labor and impact on 253; demography of
market 154–55, 159–64; ‘gypsy’ and racialization in 253–54; Hong Kongers,
Roma migrants, and treatment of national identity and ethnicity 254–55;
155–56, 158, 159–64; police response Indonesian migrants, treatment
to migrant workers 159–64 and control of 256–60; Mainland
domestic workers 4, 8; Amazon (Brazil), Chinese, and national stereotyping
and trafficking linked to 146–47; 254–55; migrant domestic workers,
Filipino workers, and view of 4; and treatment of 255–56, 258–60;
Hong Kong, migrant workers, and mobility and migration 262; Network
racialization of 255–56 of Indonesian Migrant Workers (JBMI)
Dona Graça (of the Amazon territories, 256–57; racialization of asylum-seekers
Brazil) 138–39 260–63; sex workers, asylum-seekers
and trafficking 261–63; Trafficking in
educational campaigns on human Persons Report (TIP), ranking of 253
trafficking (Nigeria) 19 human rights: and racialization of
Europe: African migration, and immigrants 64–66; Trafficking Victims
representation of 20–22, 21, 24–25; Protection Act (2000, USA), as
and European ‘world civilization’ 8; consideration of 67–69
migration, deterrence practices and human trafficking: African self-
funding of 17, 19, 24, 29 enslavement, and anti-Black views of
European Union: African migration, 51–52; Amazonian territories, anti-
deterrence practices and funding of trafficking policies in 136–37, 142,
17, 19; citizenship of non-EU citizens 144; anti-trafficking discourse, and
illegally present in 21; European racialization of 79–80, 82, 87–88,
Agenda on Migration (2015) 19; 92–93, 190–91, 195–96, 220–23; as
trafficking figures (African migration), a concept, and development of 5; and
and view of 22 global white supremacy 80–82; ‘gypsy’
and Roma migrants, and forced labor
Ghana: 25–28; as European transit point 159–64; neoliberalism, and approach to
17, 25, 26; national identity and 81–82; policing of anti-trafficking, and
stereotypes 51–52; and sex workers from racialized violence 127–31, 170–74;
Nigeria 17, 25–28 race, class and gender considerations
Guardian, The (newspaper, UK): ‘Modern (in Brazil) 105–07; settler-colonialism,
Slavery in Focus’ platform 47, 49–50; and domestic trafficking (in
Trap, The (documentary film, 2018) Canada) 120–22, 123–27, 129–31;
47–50 ‘traffickingandterror’ 34, 35, 38, 40–42;
270 Index
UN Global Report on Trafficking violence, and sex working 243–44;

in Persons (2018) 170; victim voluntary and economic sex working
criminalization 162–64; ‘voluntourism’ 237–38, 240–42, 243–45; white
and tourism, and ‘rescue’ industry abolitionism, and European ‘civilising’
93–98; western liberal notions of 5; and ideals in 245–46
white slavery 5; ‘yellow slavery,’ and journalism and reporting: editorial policy
human trafficking from Asia 207, 223 and independence 58n2; investigative
Hutchinson, Tim (Senator, USA) 73 reporting, and white supremacy 50–52;
Trap, The (documentary film, 2018) 7,
‘Illicit Networks: Mafia States and 47–52
Nonstate Actors’ roundtable (Council on
Foreign Relations, USA) 39–42 labor market: forced labor, in formal
Indigenous peoples: Amazonian territories labor market 154–55, 159–64; ‘gypsy’
(Brazil) 136–37; anti-trafficking and Roma migrants, and treatment of
policies, and treatment of 8–9, 190–91; 155–56, 158, 159–64; migrant workers,
Canada, and settler-colonialism 119–22, and treatment of 155–56, 159–64;
127–31, 170–71; criminalization, trade unions, and treatment of migrant
and racialized view of 189; Native workers 156–57, 161–62
dispossession and homeland separation Lofgren, Zoe (Senator, California, USA) 69
(USA) 189; racialized policing and
police violence 128–29, 171–74; Masters and the Slaves, The (Freyre,
transactional sex, and settler sexual Gilberto) 109
logics (USA) 187–88, 191–92 massage workers 3, 214, 216–218,
International Migrants Alliance (Hong 221–23; Power in Our Hand (multimedia
Kong) 10 art show, Tea Base, Toronto, Canada)
Islam and Islamophobia: Christianity, and 216–17
religious conflict 36; ‘culture talk’ and migration 18–20; of Africans in South
cultural stereotypes 36, 43n3–4; Asia 4; asylum-seekers, and racialization
female migrants, as trafficking victims of 260–63; Brazilian national identity,
37–38; Islamic sexualities 35, 38–39, and view of 103–05, 112–16; Britain,
44n5; Muslim migrants, and male and hostile environment relating to
‘Islamic Peril’ 37–38; terrorist portrayals 22, 23; and categories of citizenship
of 36; trafficking and terror discourse, 2–4; Central and Eastern Europe,
and view of Muslim countries 34–38, and migrants from 154, 163–64;
41–42; ‘war on terror’ (USA) 7, 34–38 criminality, racial bias of and links to
72–75, 79, 155, 259; and deportation 2;
Jamaica: anti-trafficking legislation 3, deterrence practices and ‘stay at home’
237–38; colonialism, and impact on messaging 2–3, 4, 18–19, 22–23, 29;
241–42; consent to sex work, and domestic workers, categorization and
economic necessity 243–45; economy of treatment of 4, 8, 258–60; Europe, and
241–42; modern slavery, and personal anti-Black racist fears 2–3; European
freedoms 237, 238–39; police violence Agenda on Migration (2015) 19; ‘gypsy’
and abuse 244; sex tourism and child and Roma migrants, and treatment
exploitation 237–38, 241–42; Sex of 155–56, 158; identity and race,
Work Association of Jamaica (SWAJ) and judgements on 103–05, 157–58;
238, 244, 246, 247; sex workers, as immigration law (US), and racialization
trafficking victims 3, 240–42; Shared of 64–66; immobilisation of Black
Hope International (SHI), and work of Africans, and practices of 17; Muslim
in 241; Trafficking in Persons Report migrants, and ‘Islamic Peril’ 37–38; sex
(TIP), ranking of 237; trans women, workers, categorization and treatment
and treatment of 246–47; transatlantic of 3, 8; slavery, and impact on 23;
slavery, and anti-Black racism 245; trade unions, and treatment of migrant
Index 271
workers 156–57; T-visas, and provision prison and prison reform 52–55;
of (USA) 64, 66, 68–69; undocumented anti-prison campaigning 53–55; bail
migrants 65–66, 71–72; United States payments and ‘debt-bondage,’ and
of America, and laws relating to 64–67 campaigns against 49, 53–55; Black
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Mamas Bail Out Actions 7, 47; inside-
Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, Plus outside communications 53–54;
(MMIWG2S+) 8, 119–20, 123–27, prison strike (USA, 2018) 47, 49–50;
129–31 and racial justice (USA) 7, 47–48;
Missing Steps, The (TV series) 18, 19 Southerners on New Ground (SONG) 7,
missionary work and the Church: in 47; Trap, The (documentary film, 2018)
Asia, and impact of 207; ‘white savior’ 7, 47–50, 52–53; women, and racial
complex 94, 207 justice 48–50
National Agency for the Prohibition QAnon, ‘Save the Children’ campaign 7
of Trafficking in Persons (Nigeria)
(NAPTIP) 18; funding of 19 Red Canary Song (New York, USA) 10
Network of Indonesian Migrant Workers Rede Um Grito Pela Vida (the Scream
(JBMI) (Hong Kong) 256–57 for Life Network, RGPV) (Brazil):
New Zealand: anti-trafficking legislation 144, 145–46; ; O Sumiço de Carolina
230; Asian women, and view of 1; sex (‘Carolina’s Disappearance’), booklet
work and trafficking, and discourse 145–46
related to 3, 230, 234
Nigeria: anti-trafficking and anti- Schakowsky, Jan (Senator, Illinois, USA) 74
smuggling campaigns in 2, 17, 18–20, Sex Work Association of Jamaica (SWAJ)
22–25, 26–28; deterrence practices and 238, 244, 246, 247
‘stay at home’ messaging 18–19, 22, sex workers 8; academic research, and
29; educational campaigns on human representations of 232–33; Amazon
trafficking 19; European migration (Brazil), and migrant opportunities
20–22, 21, 24–25; European Union, for 140–41; from Asia, and view of
migration deterrence and funding of 174, 205–06, 208, 213–18; bail bond
19; ‘I am Priceless’ campaign (2012– industry and ‘debt-bondage’ 56–58;
2015) 18; Missing Steps, The 18, 19; Brazil, and trafficking of women from
National Agency for the Prohibition of 111–12; Canadian Indigenous peoples,
Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) 18, 19; and treatment of 123, 126–27,
sex workers, and relocation to Ghana 17, 130–32; colonialism, and racialized
25–28; trafficking figures from women anti-trafficking discourse 79–80, 82,
from, and treatment of 1; 22; UK visa 87–88, 92–93, 190–91, 228–30,
applications, and data for 24–25, 27–28; 232–34; ‘Contagious Disease Laws’ (UK,
women’s mobility, and restrictions of 19th C.) 229; criminal justice approach
26–28 to, and impact of 86–87, 228–29, 230,
234; decriminalization, and calls for 3,
O Sumiço de Carolina (‘Carolina’s 230, 234; domestic trafficking 170–71;
Disappearance’), booklet (RGPV) exploitation and coercion 85–86, 208,
145–46 219; legal protections for 247; Jamaica,
Operation Northern Spotlight (Canada) and treatment of 3, 240–42; massage
120, 130, 212 workers 3, 221–23; as modern-day
slavery 210–11; Nigerian women in
Palermo Protocol (UN) 107, 144, 211, Ghana 17, 25–28; police response to 3,
253 175–81, 244; prison, and penal system
Pitts, Joseph (Senator, USA) 73 49–50, 56–58; pro-sex work advocates
Power in Our Hand (multimedia art show, and activism 229–31, 233–34;
Tea Base, Toronto, Canada) 216–17 saviourism, and white moral superiority
272 Index
228–29; sex tourism and child Smith, Christopher (House of

exploitation (Jamaica and the Caribbean) Representatives Rep., USA) 69–70
237–38, 241–42; SEXHUM, and pro- Smith, Lamar (US Congressman) 66;
sex work research 230–32; and sexual Subcommittee on Immigration and
respectability 246–47; trans women, Claims, role in 68
and treatment of 246–47; transactional Socorro (Catholic Missionary, Brazil) 138,
sex, and settler sexual logics (USA) 139, 143–44, 147
187–88, 191–92; transnational female Southerners on New Ground (SONG) 7,
labor, and human trafficking 36–37, 47, 54; Black Mamas Bail Out Actions
85–87; UN Global Report on (USA) 7, 53–54
Trafficking in Persons (2018), and
evidence for 170; US Trafficking ‘traffickingandterror’ paradigm 34, 35, 38,
Victims Protection Act (2000), and 40–42
protections for 69–72; as victims or Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) 33, 34;
criminals 173–74, 176–81, 211–13, Hong Kong, ranking of 253; Jamaica,
240–42; and violence against 3, 244, ranking of 237
247; voluntary and economic sex Trafficking Victims Protection Act
working 216, 218, 237–38, 240–42, (2000, USA) 5, 7, 64–75, 86, 188,
244–45; voluntary versus coercion, 190, 229; approach of 68; European
sex working and discourses relating to women and children, and protection
216, 218; ‘voluntourism’ and tourism, for 69–72; Helsinki Commission on
and ‘rescue’ industry 93–98; white sex sex trafficking (1999), references to
slavery, and early 20th C. activism 93; 69–70; and human rights considerations
white women (Eastern Europe) 84 67–69; immigration context of 65–66;
SEXHUM 230–32; Plan B (film) 232 legislative history of 66–67; migration
Shared Hope International (SHI) 241 and criminality, race and references
Sheer, Andrew (Conservative Party Leader, to 72–75; non-white traffickers, and
Canada) 119 punishment of 72–75; sex workers, and
Shidis/Siddis (Afro-Asians): community criminalization of 86–87
identity and citizenship in South Asia trans women, and treatment of 246–47
197–98; migration and settlement 4; Trap, The (documentary film, 2018) 7,
transportation and slavery, and Imperial 47–50; investigative reporting, and
anti-trafficking 195, 196–97 white supremacy 50–52; prison and
slavery: abolition movement and anti- prison reform, reporting on 52–53
slavery activism 83; African self- Trudeau, Justin 125
enslavement, and anti-Black views
of 51–52; and anti-Black racism undocumented migrants 65–66,
244, 245; colonialism, and European 71–72
‘world civilization’ 8; Jamaica, United Nations: Global Report on
modern slavery issues 237, 238–39; Trafficking in Persons (2018) 170;
migration, and impact of 23, 206–07; Palermo Protocol 107, 144, 211, 253;
people as property, and chattel slavery Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and
238–39; and racial liberalism 239–40; Punishing Trafficking in Persons 5, 86,
racialisation of, and transatlantic slave 188, 211, 229
trade 23, 239–40; transportation and United States of America: American
slavery, and Imperial anti-trafficking Colonization Society 23, 24; anti-
195–99; white abolitionism, and trafficking laws and policies, and
European ‘civilising’ ideals 245–46; colonial racialization 190–91, 206,
women’s rights, and anti-slavery 209; Black Mamas Bail Out Actions
campaigning 83–84; ‘yellow slavery,’ 7, 47; ‘illicit networks,’ and the
and human trafficking from Asia 207, ‘trafficandterror’ paradigm 34, 35,
223 38, 40–42; immigrants from China,
Index 273
and treatment of 206; immigration Wellstone, Paul (Senator, Minnesota, USA)

law, and racial bias 64–66; Indigenous 67, 70, 72
peoples, and settler colonialism 187–89; ‘white savior’ complex 6, 10, 87, 228–29;
prison and prison reform 7, 47–50; missionaries, and religious conversion
Southerners on New Ground (SONG) 7, 6, 94, 207; ‘voluntourism’ and the aid
47, 53–54; Special Domestic-Violence sector 6, 94, 97–98
Criminal Jurisdiction (SDVCJ) 190, women: Amazon, view of and violence
191; trafficking and terror discourse, against 137, 142, 143; Black women,
and view of Muslim countries 34–38; prisons and racial injustice 48–50; in
Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) Brazil, mulatta and view of 107–11,
33, 34, 237, 253; Trafficking Victims 108; female sexuality, and view of
Protection Act (2000) 64–75, 86, 188, women in 107–11, 108; prison, and
190, 229; transactional sex, and settler carceral feminism 48–49; status and
sexual logics 187–88, 191–92; T-visa female respectability 105–07, 112–13;
provision 64, 66, 68–69; ‘war on terror’ trans women, and treatment of 246–47;
7, 34–38 transnational female labor, and human
trafficking 36–37; women’s mobility,
‘war on terror’ 7, 34–38 and anti-trafficking and smuggling
Watt, Melvin (Senator, North Carolina, campaigns 26–28; women’s rights, and
USA) 68 anti-slavery campaigning 83–84, 93–94

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White Supremacy, Racism and the

Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and reference

Kamala Kempadoo is Professor of Social Science at York University, Canada.

Elena Shih is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and

Introduction: Rethinking the Field from Anti-​Racist and

1 Anti-​Trafficking and Anti-​Smuggling Campaigns in West

2 Trafficking, Terror and their Tropes 33

3 The Anti-​Trafficking Apparatus has a Racial Justice Problem 47

4 Exploring the Role of Race and Racial Difference in the

5 Global White Supremacy and Anti-​Trafficking: Race,

6 To Trip the White Fantastic: The Road from White

7 Whore’s Passport: Racialism, National Identity, and the

8 Anti-​Trafficking and Settler-​Colonial Discourses of

9 The Jaula and Racialization of the Amazon: Reflections on

10 Constructing Victims and Criminals through the Racial

11 “Is It Because I’m Not Young and White with Blue

12 Trafficking Indianness by Legislating Settler

13 Imperial Anti-​Trafficking in India: Producing Racialized

14 Resistance of Butterfly: Mobilization of Asian Migrant

15 The Aesthetic of Migrant Sex Work: Creation of White

16 Sex Work in Jamaica: Trafficking, Modern Slavery, and

17 Migrant Domestic Workers, Asylum-​Seekers and

have been possible without the incredible planning and facilitation of

Kamala Kempadoo is Professor of Social Science at York University,

Eni Lestari is an Indonesian migrant domestic worker and the chairperson

Lyndsey P. Beutin is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at

& Organization; Sexualities; Sociology; Theoretical Criminology; and Work,

research interests include qualitative research methods, childhood

recent work includes Researching Gender-​Based Violence: Embodied and

the policy fields of prostitution and human trafficking with a special

Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and refer-

anti-​trafficking has heightened and justified the discrimination and pro-

that they may be excluded from or denied assistance under anti-​trafficking

trafficking as one that embodies a “global sheriff” character (Chuang 2006).

the “helpers” and “do-​gooders” arrive in places such as Sierra Leone

Additionally, understood as part of a global white savior industrial com-

the very foundations of the discourse as simplistic fabrications about very

regimes, globally. Featured in this volume is the resistance of the grassroots

recognition of its inevitable gaps, we hope readers welcome these chapters as

5 Bernstein 2007; for an in-​depth discussion of the anti-​Black undercurrents of

Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-​

Anti-​Trafficking Discourses and Campaigns in

through messaging cloaked in such humanitarian terms (EU Observer

the perilous journeys they are compelled to attempt to make in pursuit of

Putting Africa-​E U Migration in Context: Is Africa

Table 1.1 Top 20 countries of citizenship of non-​EU citizens found to be illegally

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Share Change

Anti-​Trafficking and Anti-​S muggling Advocacy as

Figure 1.1 “Go Home” campaign material.

America. For example, President Trump told American Congresswomen

colonies were all British subjects or Commonwealth Citizens and could,

Interviews with Nigerian Women in Ghana

Anti-​Trafficking and Anti-​S muggling Campaigns as

Everyone wants to go to London, Germany, Italy, Spain and other coun-

Similarly, Amy responded as follows when asked whether she knew of

AMY: Yes, I know of trafficking. There is a big notice at the junction

Per Amy’s assertion, it is clear that the anti-​trafficking campaigns have

INTERVIEWER: Have you applied for a UK visa before?

everything was original… I did a brand with my finger [fingerprint]

Introduction: Rethinking the Field from Anti-Racist and

1 Anti-Trafficking and Anti-Smuggling Campaigns in West

3 The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus has a Racial Justice Problem 47

5 Global White Supremacy and Anti-Trafficking: Race,

8 Anti-Trafficking and Settler-Colonial Discourses of

13 Imperial Anti-Trafficking in India: Producing Racialized

17 Migrant Domestic Workers, Asylum-Seekers and

recent work includes Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and

anti-trafficking has heightened and justified the discrimination and pro-

that they may be excluded from or denied assistance under anti-trafficking

the “helpers” and “do-gooders” arrive in places such as Sierra Leone

5 Bernstein 2007; for an in-depth discussion of the anti-Black undercurrents of

Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2007. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-

Anti-Trafficking Discourses and Campaigns in

Putting Africa-E U Migration in Context: Is Africa

Table 1.1 Top 20 countries of citizenship of non-EU citizens found to be illegally

Anti-Trafficking and Anti-S muggling Advocacy as

Figure 1.1 “Go Home” campaign material.

Anti-Trafficking and Anti-S muggling Campaigns as

Per Amy’s assertion, it is clear that the anti-trafficking campaigns have

Eurostat. 2017. “People in the EU –statistics on origin of residents.” https://

Fieldnotes, September 1, 2009 –Washington D.C.

The Anti-Trafficking Apparatus

Guardian’s Modern-day slavery in focus platform featured The Trap docu-

The White Supremacy of Anti-Trafficking’s

Inside-O utside Prison Organizing, 2016–2 018

New Ground (SONG) co-director Mary Hooks proposed to the Movement

Money bail is a system that disproportionately impacts low-income

Palacios, Lena. 2019. With Immediate Cause: Intense Dreaming as World-

Woods, Tryon. 2013. Surrogate Selves: notes on anti-trafficking and antiblackness.

through color-blind racism (Manges et al. 2015). Research on immigration

TVPA as a Bill to Punish Non-W hite Traffickers

Unlike many bottom-up social justice projects,1 such as Black Lives

(32–33). Sex workers and those outside of neoliberal capitalist modernity

The criminalization of migration and anti-trafficking policies have increased