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Joint civil society recommendations for the trialogue negotiations on the revision of the EU ‘Anti- Trafficking Directive’ (2011/36/EU on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and...
22nd November, 2023
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GAATW International Secretariat and members stand in solidarity with Bangladeshi garment workers who are protesting the new minimum wage proposed by the Labour Department, which...
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GAATW organised a panel at the IWRAW virtual Global South Women’s Forum(GSWF) on 29th October 2023. GAATW organised it with its members and partners from South East Asia and Latin America. They are...
Berlin, July 2023
1. Background and Context
Over the last three years GAATW, together with ten partners from Southeast Asia and Europe, has used a feminist participatory action research methodology to learn about the experiences of 259 Southeast Asian women migrants who were...
In 2023, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) together with ten partner organisations from Southeast Asia and Europe researched Southeast Asian migrant women’s experience of migration to Europe, and of their reintegration at home...
International migration has become a ‘mega trend’ of our times, with more than 260 million migrants living outside their country of origin in 2017. Some move in search of better livelihood opportunities, others flee conflict, environmental degradation or natural disasters, and yet others are deceived or coerced into exploitative work. At the same time, the categories developed by the international community for people on the move—such as smuggled migrants, refugees, or trafficked persons—are increasingly inadequate to capture today’s complex migration flows. Yet the label that a person is given by authorities can mean the difference between assistance and protection, or arrest and deportation.
This special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review examines migratory categories and their use among authorities and humanitarian actors. Contributions from Indonesia/Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR, Italy, Peru and the United States explore the overlaps between categories such as ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘smuggled migrant’, ‘irregular migrant’ and ‘victim of trafficking’ and their impact on migrants’ human rights. In the debate section, four authors discuss the statement ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons’.
Media, policymakers and NGOs typically focus on the horrors of life in trafficking and ‘rescuing’ trafficked persons, but much less attention is paid to life after trafficking. This special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review documents the challenges that people face after exiting situations labelled as trafficking, as well as those whose exploitation garnered no legal protections or service provision.
It introduces cases of life after trafficking in countries with robust anti-trafficking legal and care regimes, as well as in countries that offer little or no assistance. Contributions from countries as diverse as India, Thailand, Azerbaijan, the United States, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Denmark, United Kingdom and Switzerland highlight the lack of appropriate and comprehensive support for survivors after trafficking, as they struggle with family reunification, legal recognition and compensation, and long-term assistance. However, this issue also shows that ultimately, by taking back control of one’s life, and tending to ordinary tasks and chores of resettlement, formerly trafficked persons move beyond the extraordinary cruelty of exploitation.
In the past two decades human trafficking has been increasingly termed ‘modern slavery’ and anti-trafficking work likened to nineteenth century efforts to abolish slavery. NGOs, politicians and the media make heavy use of visual tropes alluding to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, and it is often said that human trafficking is ‘modern slavery’. But are such historical references really warranted?
This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review explores some of the histories that created and continue to shape the phenomena discussed under the rubric of human trafficking, and the contemporary discourse of trafficking itself. It highlights the ways in which simplistic analogies between wrongs past and present can hamper, rather than facilitate, efforts to secure rights and protections in the contemporary moment. Contributions from Africa, Europe and the Americas focus on the race politics of ‘modern slavery’ campaigns, the history of indentured and ‘coolie’ labour, the legacies of anti-white slavery legislation and the restrictions on labour migration that can exacerbate human trafficking. Ultimately, they reveal that more critical engagement with the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism and their afterlives can teach us a great deal about the forms of violence, injustice and oppression that are tolerated today in the dominant liberal world order.
Despite increasing interest in human trafficking and related exploitation, a great deal of anti-trafficking work still appears to be based on assumptions that are not well-proven or adequately questioned. Policy formations, advocacy campaigns, concrete interventions and popular understandings of trafficking have all been accused of making exaggerated claims and resting on thin, if any, evidence. There is an almost obsessive desire to know the scale, proportion, size, major sectors and geographical concentrations of human trafficking. Similarly, the monitoring and evaluation of interventions prioritise numbers of people reached rather than any significant change in knowledge or behaviour. This focus on quantification has come at the expense of quality and a true understanding of the lives of the migrants and trafficked persons it is supposed to benefit.
This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review explores the role of evidence, research and data in anti-trafficking work and how they influence our understanding of the issue and responses to it. Contributors examine the evidence used—or rejected—in the formation of national anti-trafficking policies in Northern Ireland, Canada and India, as well as the role of statistics, and monitoring and evaluation of anti-trafficking interventions. In the debate section, four authors take turn defending or rejecting the proposition 'Global Trafficking Prevalence Data Advances the Fight against Trafficking in Persons'.
Guest Editors: Rutvica Andrijasevic and Nicola Mai
Representations of human trafficking, forced labour and ‘modern slavery’ are pervasive within media, policymaking, and humanitarian interventions and campaigns. This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review explores the ways in which some representations erase the complexity in the life trajectories of people who have experienced trafficking, as well as those who are migrants, women, sex workers and others labelled as victims or ‘at-risk’ of trafficking.
Contributions in this issue examine visual material and narratives through which trafficking and its victims are represented in film, TV, newspapers and public discourse. The articles investigate representations in Australia, Cambodia, Nigeria, Serbia, Denmark, UK, and USA. Ultimately, this special issue highlights the fact that stereotypical trafficking representations conveniently distract the global public from their increasing and shared day-to-day exploitability as workers because of the systematic erosion of labour rights globally. Crucially, the issue also discusses positive alternatives and how to represent trafficking differently.
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