In a section called “Debunking Common Trafficking Myths” Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2009 makes a some helpful distinctions about who becomes trafficked and when. (Italics mine.)
Initial Consent: A person may agree to migrate legally or illegally or take a job willingly. But once that work or service is no longer voluntary, that person becomes a victim of forced labor or forced prostitution and should accordingly receive the protections contemplated by the 2000 UN TIP Protocol. Once a person’s work is recruited or compelled by the use or threat of physical violence or the abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process, the person’s previous consent or effort to obtain employment with the trafficker becomes irrelevant.
A person may agree to work for an employer initially but later decide to stop working because the conditions are not what they agreed to. If an employer then uses force, fraud, or coercion to retain the person’s labor or services, the employer becomes a trafficking offender and the employee becomes a victim.
In April 2008, this type of misplaced reliance on a worker’s initial consent led to the deportation of three Thai victims from a European country because, according to the head of the anti-trafficking police unit in that country, the victims had consented to the employment and had arrived voluntarily in that country as guest workers. The victims in this case discovered their employment conditions were vastly different from what they expected when they initially accepted their jobs and traveled to Europe; further, their employers retained their passports, forced them to sometimes work without compensation, and threatened to turn them over to police if they did not work as they were told.
Prior Work History: Previous employment choices also do not exclude the possibility that a person may be a victim of trafficking. Some government officials fail to identify victims of sex trafficking because they may have willingly worked in the sex industry prior to being trafficked. Law enforcement may fail also to identify victims of labor trafficking because they are migrant workers and may have previously worked in difficult conditions, either legally or illegally. Whether a person is a victim of labor trafficking turns on whether that person’s service or labor was induced by force, fraud, or coercion.
It’s good to hear acknowledgement that neither sex work nor migration are synonyms for trafficking (despite neocons and conservative feminists to make them so.) Instead “trafficked” is something sex workers and migrants can become.
In a nod to a particular bugaboo of mine (and other people who wonder WTF with the vestigial “k”) there’s a clarification of what, exactly, is meant by the word “trafficking,” in a section on how it translates in different languages. (Italics again mine.)
Finding the right words to describe the crime remains a persistent challenge in combating human trafficking. Most formulations used to describe trafficking focus on the trade or buying and selling of people, or they mean something closer to “smuggling,” which relates specifically to movement over borders. These words, including the word trafficking in English, may not adequately capture the most important aspect of the practice: exploitation.
Now you’d probably be right if you thought using “exploitation” to clarify “trafficking” wasn’t exactly a step up. For instance Karl Marx pointed out (in a strictly technical sense) that the CEO of a corporation can be considered “exploited” if his or her labor nets her or his company more in revenue that it pays in salary, wages, stock options and other perqs. And thus someone (in the case of sex-workers even conservatives become Marxists) that any sex-worker or migrant who creates more value from their labor than they are provided in compensation is exploited. Similarly (as Jill né Twisty) points out PETA (sexually) exploits women in its pursuit of… killing and eating organism (or, in the case of Che Guevera’s grandaughter’s carrot bandolier, killing organisms for use as decoration) that are genetically less rather than more related to us.
But in this case the term doesn’t just mean “brings in more that you’re being paid out” or even “do something you’d otherwise rather not do but you’re doing for work.” Instead it means “applying leverage to get people to do something whether they want to or not, while not compensating them for what other, free individuals could reasonable expect to be compensated for.”
And if you put the first quote (common myths) with the second (trafficking is “exploitation”) you see something that isn’t expressly mentioned, delved into, analyzed, discussed, or debated in the Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2009: the leverage that’s most often applied in the exploitation of sex workers and migrants is that if the exploited individual tries to get help from the authorities the authorities will instead jail and/or deport them because both migration and sex work tend to be far more illegal than trafficking.
Don’t get me wrong — trafficking can happen for forms of work that strictly speaking don’t involve transnational migration or sex work — the egregious trafficking of children into sweatshop and agricultural labor in India and parts of Asia come to mind. But there’s not much the State Department, or the United States government, or governments of so-called “First World” countries in general can do about that. But the bulk of exploitation through trafficking that happens in the U.S. and other “first world” countries is about transnational migration and sex work. And it is within those countries’ power do do something about it.
Don’t know why the report, authored by people from here, wouldn’t get into that, since the illegality of undocumented migration and sex work are the key ingredients of exploitation here. But there you go.
