Sex
tra
fficking
Full Text
Listen
Sex
trafficking
is a form of slavery in which a person is forced in
to
prostitution
for
little or no money. Victims can
be of either
sex
, but young women mostly comprise the industry. Many times victims know their traffickers, who
lure them into the industry through various deceptions. They then are held captive. Most are threatened with
viol
ence, so they do not leave. Some are force
–
fed drugs to keep them in the industry.
Sex trafficking
is tied
to
human
trafficking
, which is the act of trading people illegally and forcing them to work in the labor or sex
industries. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by because of the hidden nature of the industry,
but the
International Labour Organization estimated that in 2016, 4.8 million people around the world were caught in forced
sexual exploitation, the overwhelming majority of them women and girls.
Prostitutes in front of a gogo bar in Pattaya, Thailand. Kay
Chernush for the U.S. State Departme
nt [Attribution], via
Wikimedia Commons
NGO RealStars’ model for addressing the trafficking issue By
Eran9010 (Own work) [CC BY
–
SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by
–
sa/3.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
Overview
Sex trafficking has existed in one form or another since ancient times. Both children and adults were sold and traded
as sex slaves. The term, however, has been in use since the 1980s when feminists used it to protest the sexual
exploitation of women and g
irls in the commercial sex industry, which includes prostitution and pornography.
The United States addressed this worldwide problem in 2000 when Congress passed the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA), which defined sex trafficking as the recruitmen
t of an adult or a minor (person under the
age of eighteen) and forcing, tricking, or coercing the person to perform sex acts against their will. Also in 2000, the
United Nations drafted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and
Children, which includes provisions against both human and sex trafficking.
For an incident to be considered a sex trafficking crime, it has to involve a commercial sex act, which means it must
be related to the sex industry. For example, a person who is kidnapped and forced to work as a prostitute and
perform sexual acts for mone
y is a victim of sex trafficking. A person who is kidnapped and forced to perform a
sexual act on their perpetrator is a victim of
kidnapping
and rape, not sex trafficking. Sex trafficking does not only
include prostitution, however. Victims can be forced to perform at strip clubs or in pornographic films. They can be
sold as
–
order
brides
or forced into the
sex
tourism
industry, in which people travel to engage in sexual acts.
Perpetrators, or traffickers, t
ypically use several tactics to coerce their victims. First, they need to gain the victims’
trust. Usually they look for vulnerable victims, such as runaways or young people with few friends, poor family
lives, low self
–
esteem, or drug problems. They befri
end them and court them, for as long as it takes. This phase,
sometimes called “seasoning” or “grooming,” can take months. The traffickers shower potential victims with gifts
and affection. They make their victims believe they are loved and cared for—usually feelings the victims are lacking at home.
Once the traffickers gain their victims’ trust, they begin manipulating and controlling them. Sometimes they trick their victims and offer them false promises, such as well-paying jobs or marriage proposals. Most often, however, they use violence and drugs. If victims refuse to obey the perpetrators’ demands, they may be beaten, whipped, raped—anything to make them comply. Victims who are addicted to drugs are promised more drugs. Sometimes victims are drugged against their will. The traffickers psychologically damage their victims and make them believe that no one else cares about them. They make the victims fear for their lives or the lives of loved ones if they try to retaliate or leave.
In some instances, perpetrators prey on poor families or those addicted to drugs and trick them into selling their children, spouses, or other family members. This is very common in impoverished countries such as Cambodia. Traffickers make up stories about having children work for them in return for money or drugs, but in reality, they sell the victims into the sex industry. It is often too late by the time families learn the truth. The families are forced to continue the deal or face violence or poverty. In some cases, family members willingly sell their children or spouses into the sex industry to resolve debts or complete drug deals.
Topic Today
Sex trafficking is an ongoing issue worldwide, not only in impoverished or underdeveloped countries but also in industrialized nations such as the United States. Millions of victims are lured into the industry each year. Although women—mostly young women and underage girls—account for the majority of victims, a growing number of young men, boys, and transgender individuals are being targeted. The exact number of victims affected by sex trafficking is difficult to estimate because many victims are afraid to speak up to police officers and other officials when they are arrested on various crimes, such as drug possession or prostitution. Many countries have task forces devoted to breaking up sex trafficking rings, yet it is impossible to know the scope of the issue since it usually crosses international lines and jurisdictions.
The sex trafficking industry of the twenty-first century is very organized and encompasses numerous countries. Traffickers come from every socioeconomic and racial background. They are not only men, as many women—some of whom were trafficked themselves—run their own trafficking rings. Rings typically are organized in a hierarchy system, with the trafficker at the top and various associates and victims below them. Victims who have earned a trafficker’s trust are usually higher up in the hierarchy and have more freedom than others have.
The industry is also very violent. Many victims suffer from severe abuse and are abducted, terrorized, raped, and drugged. They fear for their lives, and intimidation has caused many of them to resign themselves to this life; they stop trying to escape or thwart their traffickers. Because of the physical and mental abuse suffered over an extended period, some victims begin to experience
Stockholm syndrome
, a condition in which they begin to care for and become attached to their traffickers. The traffickers are experienced in manipulating victims, making them feel loved and needed, which in turn makes it difficult for victims to break free of perpetrators.
Victims who are able to get away from their traffickers usually have no way to support themselves. Victims from other countries may not have identifying documents, such as birth certificates, passports, and drivers’ licenses. These circumstances—among others—may lead the victims to return to their traffickers and the sex trafficking cycle. Many times, traffickers severely punish the victims for leaving. The victims may be subjected to horrific abuse, such as gang rape, death threats, beatings, and other violent acts.
The global
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
pandemic declared in early 2020 has had such a pervasive impact on societies and economies that experts monitoring the issue of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, observed that victims had only become more vulnerable. Reports, such as that conducted by the US Department of State in 2021, found that as local and federal resources, including both financial and personnel, were shifted to focus on combating the pandemic, sex traffickers had taken advantage of the chaotic environment, interrupted anti-trafficking efforts (including decreased protection), and negative economic effects such as job loss due to virus-control measures to conduct operations more freely and to expand their influence. The State Department report also indicated an increase in traffickers’ use of online methods to locate and manipulate younger victims, as everyone had an even greater online presence under pandemic conditions, including school closures that led to more virtual learning.
Bibliography
Alvarez, Priscilla. “When Sex Trafficking Goes Unnoticed in America.” The Atlantic, 23 Feb. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/how-sex-trafficking-goes-unnoticed-in-america/470166/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
Collins, Amy Fine. “Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door.” Vanity Fair, May 2011, www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/sex-trafficking-201105. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
Coorlim, Leif, and Dana Ford. “Sex Trafficking: The New American Slavery.” CNN, 21 July 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/us/sex-trafficking. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
“Forced Labour, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.” International Labour Organization, www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang–en/index.htm. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.
Hughes, Donna. “Combating Sex Trafficking: A History.” Fair Observer, 6 Oct. 2013, www.fairobserver.com/region/north‗america/combating-sex-trafficking-history. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
“Human Trafficking.” Administration for Children and Families, www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/fact-sheet/resource/fshumantrafficking. Accessed 16 Dec. 2021.
Hume, Tim, Lisa Cohen, and Mira Sorvino. “The Women Who Sold Their Daughters into Sex Slavery.” CNN, www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/12/world/cambodia-child-sex-trade. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
“Sex Trafficking.” Polaris, polarisproject.org/sex-trafficking. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
“2021 Trafficking in Persons Report.” US Department of State, June 2021, www.state.gov/reports/2021-trafficking-in-persons-report/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2021.
Walker-Rodriguez, Amanda, and Rodney Hill. “Human Sex Trafficking.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Mar. 2011, leb.fbi.gov/2011/march/human-sex-trafficking. Accessed 6 Jan. 2017.
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Item: 119214137
Sex tra
fficking
Full Text
Listen
Sex
trafficking
is a form of slavery in which a person is forced into
prostitution
for
little or no money. Victims can
be of either sex, but young women mostly comprise the industry. Many times victims know their traffickers, who
lure them into the industry through various deceptions. They then are held captive. Most are threatened with
viol
ence, so they do not leave. Some are force
–
fed drugs to keep them in the industry. Sex trafficking is tied
to
human
trafficking
, which is the act of trading people illegally and forcing them to work in the labor or sex
industries. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by because of the hidden nature of the industry,
but the
International Labour Organization estimated that in 2016, 4.8 million people around the world were caught in forced
sexual exploitation, the overwhelming majority of them women and girls.
Prostitutes in front of a gogo bar in Pattaya, Thailand. Kay
Chernush for the U.S. State Departme
nt [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons
NGO RealStars’ model for addressing the trafficking issue By
Eran9010 (Own work) [CC BY
–
SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by
–
sa/3.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
Overview
Sex trafficking has existed in one form or another since ancient times. Both children and adults were sold and traded
as sex slaves. The term, however, has been in use since the 1980s when feminists used it to protest the sexual
exploitation of women and g
irls in the commercial sex industry, which includes prostitution and pornography.
The United States addressed this worldwide problem in 2000 when Congress passed the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA), which defined sex trafficking as the recruitmen
t of an adult or a minor (person under the
age of eighteen) and forcing, tricking, or coercing the person to perform sex acts against their will. Also in 2000, the
United Nations drafted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Especially Women and
Children, which includes provisions against both human and sex trafficking.
For an incident to be considered a sex trafficking crime, it has to involve a commercial sex act, which means it must
be related to the sex industry. For example, a person who is kidnapped and forced to work as a prostitute and
perform sexual acts for mone
y is a victim of sex trafficking. A person who is kidnapped and forced to perform a
sexual act on their perpetrator is a victim of
kidnapping
and rape, not sex trafficking. Sex trafficking does not only
include prostitution, however. Victims can be forced to perform at strip clubs or in pornographic films. They can be
sold as
mail
–
order
brides
or forced into the
sex
tourism
industry, in which people travel to engage in sexual acts.
Perpetrators, or traffickers, t
ypically use several tactics to coerce their victims. First, they need to gain the victims’
trust. Usually they look for vulnerable victims, such as runaways or young people with few friends, poor family
lives, low self
–
esteem, or drug problems. They befri
end them and court them, for as long as it takes. This phase,
sometimes called “seasoning” or “grooming,” can take months. The traffickers shower potential victims with gifts
Sex trafficking
Full Text
Listen
Sex trafficking is a form of slavery in which a person is forced into prostitution for little or no money. Victims can
be of either sex, but young women mostly comprise the industry. Many times victims know their traffickers, who
lure them into the industry through various deceptions. They then are held captive. Most are threatened with
violence, so they do not leave. Some are force-fed drugs to keep them in the industry. Sex trafficking is tied
to human trafficking, which is the act of trading people illegally and forcing them to work in the labor or sex
industries. Reliable statistics are difficult to come by because of the hidden nature of the industry, but the
International Labour Organization estimated that in 2016, 4.8 million people around the world were caught in forced
sexual exploitation, the overwhelming majority of them women and girls.
Prostitutes in front of a gogo bar in Pattaya, Thailand. Kay
Chernush for the U.S. State Department [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons
NGO RealStars’ model for addressing the trafficking issue By
Eran9010 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
Overview
Sex trafficking has existed in one form or another since ancient times. Both children and adults were sold and traded
as sex slaves. The term, however, has been in use since the 1980s when feminists used it to protest the sexual
exploitation of women and girls in the commercial sex industry, which includes prostitution and pornography.
The United States addressed this worldwide problem in 2000 when Congress passed the Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (TVPA), which defined sex trafficking as the recruitment of an adult or a minor (person under the
age of eighteen) and forcing, tricking, or coercing the person to perform sex acts against their will. Also in 2000, the
United Nations drafted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children, which includes provisions against both human and sex trafficking.
For an incident to be considered a sex trafficking crime, it has to involve a commercial sex act, which means it must
be related to the sex industry. For example, a person who is kidnapped and forced to work as a prostitute and
perform sexual acts for money is a victim of sex trafficking. A person who is kidnapped and forced to perform a
sexual act on their perpetrator is a victim of kidnapping and rape, not sex trafficking. Sex trafficking does not only
include prostitution, however. Victims can be forced to perform at strip clubs or in pornographic films. They can be
sold as mail-order brides or forced into the sex tourism industry, in which people travel to engage in sexual acts.
Perpetrators, or traffickers, typically use several tactics to coerce their victims. First, they need to gain the victims’
trust. Usually they look for vulnerable victims, such as runaways or young people with few friends, poor family
lives, low self-esteem, or drug problems. They befriend them and court them, for as long as it takes. This phase,
sometimes called “seasoning” or “grooming,” can take months. The traffickers shower potential victims with gifts
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION:
SETTING THE SCENE
“With this picture, I reverse the voodoo onto my trafficker. I am not afraid
anymore.”
Trafficking st
ories
This book is about women’s stories of agency in lived trafficking
experience. According to the United Nations “Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and
Children”,1 the definition and benchmarks of trafficking
“shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt
of persons; by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of
coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a
position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or
benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another
person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a
minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of
sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar
to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs (UN, 2000a: 3a)”.2
The Protocol’s multi-barrelled definition and legal benchmarks provide
the framework for exploring women’s narratives as trafficking stories
within the book. They also serve to ensure integrity between UK domestic
research and scholarship conducted at an international level. In line with
the Protocol’s criteria, women’s narratives are researched on the act of
their recruitment and movement using a benchmark of consent. The means
or force deployed is addressed under a benchmark of coercion, and
exploitation is examined for women’s experiences across sexual, labour,
and slavery-like practices as in forced marriage. This recognised process
supplies a defensible framework against which trafficking stories can be
included, understood, and analysed in order to reveal women’s own
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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 2/15/2022 9:14 PM via COLORADO COMMUNITY COLLEGE ONLINE
AN: 1155153 ; De Angelis, Maria.; Human Trafficking : Women’s Stories of Agency
Account: ns215574.main.eds
Chapter One 2
perspectives on their experiences of victimisation and agency.
Given the breadth and depth of complexities embraced in the Protocol,
women’s stories are the conduit best placed for reaching the experiences
of persons who have lived through some form of social trauma.3 Within
feminist enterprise, an additional value of the story is one of a naturalistic
means of researching women’s lives. Stories exist to be told and lived
wisdom relays more than just chronicles or tradition. It conveys what
women think, feel, mean and achieve through being experts in their own
experiences (Oakley, 1979; 1989; 1992; Sered, 1992). Consequently, the
ability of “story” to collect experience without causing undue harm to
women is ideal for a social research enterprise with trafficked women.
Agency
Given the unscrupulous acts and exploitative practices which define
trafficking, the idea of agency is a difficult concept to fathom. Widely
understood as a person’s individual or collective capacity for self-directed
and purposeful action (Williams and Popay, 1999; Morash, 2006), the
exercise of agency is mediated by environmental and social structures
which can limit or de-limit the degree of agency a person may realise
(Archer, 1995; Lister, 2004). Set against the inherently abusive practices
defining Human Trafficking, the idea of ascribing agency to a trafficked
person seems almost inconceivable. Consequently, it comes as little
surprise that the imagery of a Victim of Trafficking (the VoT) is most
easily understood as the involuntary and un-consenting victim of a
trafficking crime. In this popular construction of the VoT, agency exists in
a linear and timeless discourse of disempowerment where all agency is
removed whatever a woman’s economic, cultural, sexual, or social
context. This is exampled in media reporting of sex trafficking as sexual
slavery (MacShane, 2010; Butler-Sloss, 2011; Skrivankova, 2011;
Townsend, 2011). It also informs awareness-raising, as exampled in the
Blue Blindfold campaign against modern day slavery. Launched by the
UK Human Trafficking Centre in December, 2007, and rolled out under a
“Crimestoppers” mantle, the campaign asks the public to protect victims
by alerting the appropriate authorities to the crime of trafficking. In such
popular constructions depicting the victim as totally enslaved for
economic exploitation and totally controlled for criminal gain, any actions
displayed by women are positioned in opposition to their victimhood,
generating an artificial binary between victimhood and agency. This
binary has been heavily critiqued for dividing the involuntary and un-
consenting person – the innocent and deserving “Madonna” in trafficking
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 3
from the willing and consenting – guilty and undeserving “whore”
(typically migrant sex workers), who may have been proactive in (and
profited from) their illegal movement (Doezema, 1998: 47). Under such
oppositional construction, any autonomy granted to women is understood
in negative properties of criminality (Hales and Gelsthorpe, 2012) and / or
threats to border security (Bosworth, 2007).
In order to explore the attribution of agency for trafficked women
(outside of total absence or wholly negative ascriptions), it is necessary to
adopt a theoretical framework allowing a relationship to exist between
these two opposites. In other words, agency in the context of trafficking
requires a framework capable of embracing victimhood and agency as
existing in tandem with one another. In this respect, Sen’s (1985; 1992:
57; 1999) political theorising of women’s agency provides a working
paradigm fit for meeting this challenge. As Sen observes, women’s agency
under patriarchal rules and systems is fundamentally constrained in ways
that male freedom is not. This constraint is twofold and affects what Sen
defines to be women’s “well-being freedom” (that is, their physical safety
and economic security), and also women’s “agency freedom” (that is, their
capacity to define choices and to construct the conditions affecting
choice). This theorisation of gendered constraints lends itself to the study
of agency for several reasons.
Firstly, an appreciation of agentic constraints brings with it an
opportunity to explore trafficking experience for signs of victimisation,
signs of agency, and the two as existing in relationship to one another. In
other words, it leads inquiry into subjective spaces where consent is
exacted from women, given by women, and positioned by them as
somewhere in-between a totally forced experience or a completely free
choice to leave their home and country of origin. This relational stance
across victimhood and agency enables consent to surface in less absolute
categories “for” or “against” its existence, allowing women to discuss
degrees of trickery, choice, involvement, and knowledge over their own
actions. Secondly, an acknowledgement of agentic constraints encourages
a more sophisticated examination of women’s global journeys – as
motivated by economic and political necessities, as prompted by new
opportunities for a better life and, equally, as precarious and risky
undertakings on their part – aspects more fully explored in Chapter 4. This
relational prism better reflects the dynamic, fluid and at times intersecting
nature of gendered global movements, enabling aspects of control and
choice to surface at different times in a trafficking experience. For
example, studies have researched experience at the intersection of sex
trafficking and migrations for sex work (Andrijasevic, 2003; 2010;
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Chapter One 4
Agustin, 2005), at the nexus of economic migration and trafficking for
forced labour (Bastia, 2005;4 Skrivankova, 2006), and on transnational
marriage in the context of trafficking (Stepnitz, 2009; Tyldum, 2013; De
Angelis, 2014). Thirdly, a woman’s requirement for physical safety and
economic security (her well-being freedom) resonates with well-being for
trafficked persons, as set out in the Council of Europe’s (2005)
Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings5. Under Article
12.1, well-being is described as a package of measures and protections to
subsistence standards of living (accommodation, psychological and
material assistance), emergency medical treatment, any necessary
translation and interpretation services, counselling and rights based
information, legal help, and access to education for children. (CoE, 2005:
Article 12). Since implementing the Convention on 1st April, 2009, any
victim presumed to have been trafficked into the UK is entitled to claim
this well-being assistance. By viewing women’s stories through a
relational prism of trafficking agency and victimisation, women are free to
reflect on both positive and negative experiences of trafficking support
(affecting their well-being freedom), and also to express their own
autonomy, resourcefulness, and actions in overcoming trauma and
rebuilding their lives post trafficking (their agency freedom).
Lived trafficking experience
The term lived trafficking experience is used extensively throughout
the book. It replaces a trafficking context since it better reflects the
diversity and complexity of women’s gendered global movements. It is
now well established that global movements follow socio-economic and
political drivers which both push and pull a woman’s movement from
home. Within trafficking, these push factors typically include political
instability and civil wars (Aiko, 2002; Kligman and Limoncelli, 2005),
unemployment (Kelly and Regan, 2000; Kligman and Limoncelli, 2005),
poverty and debt (Ejalu, 2006; Viuhko, 2010), patriarchal oppression and
gendered violence (Demleitner, 2001; Bales, 2003; Parmentier, 2010), and
inequalities between developed and developing countries (Bales, 2005).
Common amongst the pull factors attracting women to leave home are
excitement and adventure (Salt, 2000), marriage and independence
(Kabeer, 2007), funding a project through migrant working (Berman,
2010), and aspirations of a better life-style for women and their children
(Skilbrei and Polyakova, 2006). Under these push/pull conditions
reflecting women’s needs and desires for movement, migratory flows
often intersect with one another (Salt and Stein, 1997; Salt, 2000; Bastia,
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 5
2005). Well established migratory networks are reported to attract
traffickers who prey on vulnerable migrations for criminal gain and,
conversely, economic migrants are known to use the services of trafficking
groups to facilitate the movement of regular migrants (Kempadoo, 1998;
Andrijasevic, 2003). These intersections provide valuable explanation for
the growing presence of trafficked women within population flows of
smuggling, asylum, and economic migration (IOM, 2008a: TIP, 2013).
Intersections also add weight for adopting trafficking experience over a
trafficking context, since they better encompass the fluidity, precarity, and
reality accompanying many women’s movements into and out of an initial
migratory situation. As Berman (2010: 94) observes for her own migrant
research with sex workers in Eastern Europe and that of colleagues in her
field:
“My own fieldwork and that of a number of others suggest that a
significant portion of the foreign women who work in European sex
industries enter the EU with the assistance of smugglers in order to pursue
a specific economic goal – to earn money to escape stagnant economies,
start a business, supplement existing incomes, or support children of
elderly parents back home (Minder, 2004). Migrants often ‘have some
agency in arranging an often long and highly expensive journey’ through
smugglers; while the smugglers may turn out to be traffickers and thus
deceive and harm these migrants, their situations equally involve decisions
they themselves have made (Black, 2003: 40)”.
This intersectionality – present in women’s lived experience – is by no
means problem free. Crossovers in population flows can and do make it
difficult to distinguish trafficked persons from exploited migrants and to
accurately determine where a free migration ends and a forced migration
begins. In spite of separate Protocols delineating trafficking and
smuggling, movements legally conflate where the smuggled person (a
voluntary and consenting adult) becomes exploited during the process of
recruitment, transit and arrival at their end destination. Legally, an
experience of exploitation at any stage from recruitment through to final
destination entitles the smuggled person to claim a victim of trafficking
(VoT) status (Goodey, 2008). In lived reality, the legal rights and
protections associated with trafficking come secondary to the political
agendas of organised crime and border security framing illegal entry and
work in the UK. Encapsulated in a “migration-crime-security” nexus
(Lindstrom, 2007), women’s movements and actions come in for criminal
and immigration scrutiny over missing, expired, and fake documentation,
bringing sanctions of detention and deportation according to the
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6
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 7
Persons trafficked, not unlike asylum seekers and smuggled individuals,
are hard to access. As Brennan (2005: 43) observes for victims in the
United States:
“…they have been voiceless for different reasons: because of fear of
reprisals from their traffickers, their stage in the recovery process, and
concern that their community of co-ethnics will stigmatize them. Given
these obstacles, it is possible that few ex-captives will ever step out from
the anonymity of their case managers’ offices, to give interviews to
researchers, let alone public presentations or press conferences as part of
anti-trafficking movement activities”6.
In terms of clarifying empirical research with trafficked persons,
helpful distinctions exist based upon three possible research positions –
persons at risk from trafficking, current victims of trafficking, and former
victims of trafficking (Tyldum and Brunovskis, 2005: 21). The majority of
empirically-led research tends to be conducted with former victims. As
Brennan (2005: 38) explains, survivors of trafficking source researchers
with subjects and “ex-captives” with researchers, since formerly trafficked
victims exist in a “golden middle”7 between Police rescue and assimilation
within the host community. Former victims tend to display less immediate
and acute need for sanctuary and respite care compared with recently
rescued women and, in contrast to fully resettled women, remain
identifiable through their ongoing contact with a statutory organisation
(typically Health, Education, Social Services, Police) or an anti-trafficking
project or network (Kelly, 2002). In spite of a golden status, if researching
persons exploited or in pain is seen as secondary exploitation (Glesne and
Peshkin, 1992; ATMG, 2012), why is researching women’s story so
critical in trafficking?
One explanation is that it enables a degree of movement beyond what
is typically known and claimed for trafficking victims in the trafficking
discourse. Women possess knowledge which remains hidden precisely
because it is not sought after by the Police and Border Agencies.
Reflecting on her counter-trafficking research with women supported by a
housing association8 Dickson (2004: 1) observes:
“Many of these experiences will not have been raised by women in any
other setting because these are not the experiences that are useful to
statutory services in terms of prosecution”.
Where personal accounts are sought, women have built knowledge on
specific aspects in trafficking experience. For example, women have
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Chapter One 8
developed understanding of their physical and psychological health needs
(Zimmerman et al, 2003; 2006), between trafficking and bonded labour
(Kalayaan and Oxfam, 2008; Wittenburg, 2008), across trafficking and
migrant domestic work (Lalani, 2011) and, more recently, on the
experiences of trafficked women who end up in custody (Hales and
Gelsthorpe, 2012).
Another compelling reason for accessing experiential stories is that
women – as the largest consumers of trafficking services both globally
(UNODC, 2012) and locally (SOCA, 2012; NCA, 2015a; 2015b) – better
connect policy development with victim-related needs. How one conducts
interviews with women may be contested (Oakley, 1981; 2005), but
interviewing women is long recognised for reaching subjective experience
valuable for socio-political improvement of one kind or another (Reinharz,
1983; 1992; Mies, 1983; Oakley, 1989; 1992; Kelly, Burton and Regan,
1994). As Gozdziak (2008: 153 – 155) observes for policy development in
the United States:
“The US Government’s resources for combating human trafficking have
been earmarked almost exclusively for provision of services to trafficked
persons and technical assistance to service providers assisting
them…However…assistance to victims has been provided without the
benefit of empirical research aimed to identify their service needs or to
evaluate rehabilitation programmes implemented to integrate survivors of
human trafficking into the wider society and prevent repeat
victimization…Limited knowledge impedes identification of trafficked
victims, obstructs provision of culturally appropriate and effective services,
and limits prevention of repeat victimization”.
Beyond this, and more critically, Morris (1997: 29) outlines a far
greater harm in denying a voice to survivors of suffering compared with
harms caused by giving survivors a voice. As Morris explains:
“Voice is what gets silenced, repressed, pre-empted, denied, or at best
translated into an alien dialect, much as clinicians translate a patient’s pain
onto a series of units on a grid of audio-visual descriptors. Indeed, voice
ranks among the most precious human endowments that suffering normally
deprives us of, removing far more than a hope that others will understand
or assist us. Silence and the loss of voice may eventually constitute or
represent for some who suffer a complete shattering of the self”.
All of the narratives in this book belong to women situated in-between
immediate rescue and long-term resettlement, and the majority were
known either to a statutory organisation or to an anti-trafficking network
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 9
or charity during the fieldwork. In presenting their narratives of trafficking
exploitation and agency, this book can be read as adding some absent
voices to the discursive gap in empirical trafficking scholarship (Brennan,
2005; Kelly, 2005; Davies, 2009; De Angelis, 2014).
Limitations and strengths of the collection
In the pursuit of adding women’s voices to trafficking scholarship, this
enterprise carries clear limitations as well as significant strengths. Starting
with focus, this collection of stories is gathered solely from female former
victims, who have been moved across international borders with an
element of coercion, into an exploitative situation here in the UK. The
collection hails from a qualitative and small-scale doctoral project
(completed in 2012) which explored agency through the stories of former
victims. It features the stories of twenty-six women whose journeys to the
UK include trafficking, a mixture of smuggling and trafficking, or a forced
migration. Women with a forced migration are economic migrants whose
journeys cross other forms of movement ending in slavery-like practices.
For example, one woman sought help from a smuggler to escape
persecution in her home country and arrived in the UK without
documentation and in debt bondage. Within this participant group,
trafficking exploitations fall into three categories – sexual exploitation,
forced marriage,9 and forced labour – though, as with movement, some
women experience more than one form of exploitation. For example, one
participant was trafficked into a forced marriage at home and for labour
exploitation in a factory. Another woman was trafficked for forced
marriage and sold into sexual exploitation amongst her husband’s
acquaintances. Given the homogeneity contained within a “golden middle”
status and the heterogeneity evidenced in a personal story, it is not
possible to generalise the findings on well-being freedom and agency
freedom to women outside of this collection. Nor is it possible to make
meaningful comparisons between participants’ experiences of agency and
the experiences of women on either side of this golden middle. In contrast
to participant women, current victims of trafficking may well exhibit signs
of far greater trafficking trauma, while resettled survivors may well
display a far greater degree of post-trafficking independence.
Additionally, as most of these former victims were known either to a
statutory body or a non-statutory project, the benefit and bias affiliated
with gatekeepers should also be acknowledged. As Watts (2006) suggests,
researchers with insider knowledge of the community or subjects of their
research may find it easier to access and recruit research participants.
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Chapter One 10
Without insider status, researchers are reliant upon the services of
gatekeepers. Within this enterprise, anti-trafficking professionals from
several organisations and networks were the insiders, often sharing an
aspect of socio-cultural or trafficking experience in common with survivors
of trafficking. These gatekeepers created the conditions conducive for
naturalistic story collection by harnessing their own relationship with
clients to foster trust towards me – the outsider lacking any lived
experience or professional role in trafficking. These gatekeepers fielded
women’s initial doubts over trust and went through the research contract
with them, checking participants’ rights to anonymity, confidentiality,
privacy and withdrawal of consent. Several unexpected offers to use the
in-house services of counsellors and bi-lingual interpreters provided
participants with quality support and post-interview care beyond my
expertise and personal capacity to gift. A full discussion of feminist ethics
and methods are provided in Chapter 2, along with vignettes of
participating women and anti-trafficking professionals.
Gatekeepers’ generous support of story collecting, however, creates its
own bias. Women rescued and supported by particular programmes reflect
the profiles of their supporting projects (Tyldum and Brunovskis, 2005).
This explains the sample biases in sexual exploitation and forced marriage
since participating projects target these facets of trafficking. As such the
over-representation in sexual exploitation cannot be generalised out, for
example, to inform a discourse on gendered UK trends in trafficking over
the course of the fieldwork. As Bosworth et al (2011: 776) suggest,
exploring alternate ways of accessing trafficked women – for example
through direct correspondence and phone calls – opens an alternate
gateway into trafficking experience which could alleviate this aspect of
gatekeeper-related bias10.
Before closing this snapshot of limitations and strengths, a significant
success factor in accessing women’s stories was a shared goal of feminist
praxis. Feminist praxis is an approach which connects research and lived
practices, generating knowledge which mediates public policy.11 As
Tyldum (2008: 36) observes, the trafficking concept is blurred by political
difference on how to treat politicized issues (such as prostitution,
immigration, security and crime) which directly influence how trafficking
is governed. Given that these political agendas drive the funding released
for trafficking research, the relationship between funding and new
knowledge production is a volatile one:
“…the very sensitive issues, and the risk of reactions from various
agencies and funders if politically unwanted definitions are used, seem to
discourage even some knowledge producers from describing how they see
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 11
relationships – for instance, between prostitution and trafficking – as they
fear this may have impact on their possibilities for future funding”.
As an independent and self-funded researcher, this collection of stories
escapes such institutional and financial expectations for a particular and
disembodied representation of the trafficking experience. Women who
came forward volunteer a breadth of experience in trafficking spanning a
range of exploitations and intersecting a number of migratory flows. Many
amongst them voice a hope that their stories will improve the social milieu
for other trafficked women who follow them. By engaging in the research
process and sharing their subjectively rich experiences with an empirical
researcher, women enter praxis – as their perspectives on safety, health
care, economic security, legal and rights based information, social
integration and community belonging, build experiential social and policy
understanding of well-being freedom. Moreover, as women exercise
agency and adapt to life in the community, their actions create socio-
political understanding of the structural barriers and opportunities open to
former victims (their agency freedom).
The legal and policy context
The decade which frames the study – 2000-2010 – is widely regarded as
“golden” in terms of international-UK cooperation in human trafficking.
The Protocol (UN, 2000a: Article 2) introduced a “3-P” anti-trafficking
paradigm in the form of “prevention”, “protection” and “promotion” of
cooperation among state parties, as well as providing an internationally
accepted definition and set of legal benchmarks for discerning trafficking.
The Council of Europe (2005) Convention went on to supply the
machinery needed to protect human rights and support the victims of
trafficking crime by, simultaneously, investigating its commission and
prosecuting the perpetrators (CoE, 2005: Article 1). In compliance with
international obligations, the UK Government launched two human
trafficking initiatives following the Protocol’s ratification on 9th February,
2006, and ratification of the Convention on 17th December, 2008.
First, in response to the Convention’s requirement for a “Competent
Authority” (CA) – a named organisation with approved powers of decision
making over trafficked persons – the Government opened the Human
Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) on 3rd October, 2006, as its Competent
Authority or legal decision making body. The UKHTC mandate was to
become a multi-agency centre for excellence in human trafficking. During
the study, the Centre had an operational team of thirty-five staff, top-
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Chapter One 12
weighted with Police personnel, followed by administrators, three
seconded staff (one from another statutory agency and two from leading
anti-trafficking projects), as well as invited representatives from the civil
sector. This brought in other temporary partners from academia, research,
and community fora – whose advice and expertise informed a spectrum of
working parties12.
Second, in compliance with Article 10 of the Convention (which
requires the Competent Authorities to implement a formal system to help
staff identify and support victims) the Government implemented a
National Referral Mechanism (the NRM), on 1st April, 2009, as the official
system for accessing VoT status and services. With two entry points into
the NRM, the UKHTC is the gatekeeper of one route: that of a presumed
victim rescued as a result of a police raid or referred by any agency other
than the UK Border Agency (UKBA). The UKBA (which operated as an
Immigration-led Competent Authority during the study) was the
gatekeeper in the other route: that of a presumed trafficked person who
appears in the Immigration and Asylum systems. At the time, the UKBA
had nine or ten Competent Authorities (spread across the country and
based amongst other business units), who effectively work part time on a
trafficking brief. In theory, they are positioned to deal with trafficking
cases as and when they arise out of normal immigration business. During
the fieldwork, the UK Border Agency had an estimated staff of 25,000
people, located in over 130 countries, but an approximate staff group of
only 40 case holders occupying such part time roles within the UK.13
Unlike the UKHTC, which remains the hub for human trafficking
expertise within the broader National Crime Agency (NCA), the UKBA
became two units in March 2013: one responsible for visas and
immigration (UKVI) and one in charge of immigration enforcement.
Together they form a new Home Office CA – replacing the old Competent
Authority: the UKBA. Unlike the UKHTC which works exclusively with
trafficking cases, UKVI and Immigration Enforcement retain duties of
border security and control.
Whichever Competent Authority route a trafficking case enters, the
consent of a “victim” is required before making a referral to the NRM.
Anyone withholding consent is unable to gain a victim of trafficking status
or to access state funded trafficking support. Women who consent to an
NRM referral receive a “recovery and reflection” period which may result
in a residence permit to temporarily remain in the UK for an additional 12
months (Home Office, 2007: 57).
In terms of victim support, the United Kingdom’s NRM arrangements
can be read as surpassing the rights and safeguards prescribed by the
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 13
Convention. For example, whilst Article 13 stipulates a “Recovery and
Reflection” period of 30 days (in which victims have the legal right to
remain in the identifying country and decide if they wish to cooperate with
law enforcement agencies), the Home Office “Action Plan on Tackling
Human Trafficking” (2008: 3) raises this to 45 days. Similarly, whilst
Article 14 obliges Competent Authorities to renew victim residence
permits where criminal investigations or personal needs dictate, the UK
grants twelve month permits as opposed to the recommended six months
(Home Office, 2008: 3). The explanation behind this points to a balancing
of victim and law enforcement needs “enabling victims to cooperate in
criminal investigations and provide greater security for them” (Home
Office, 2009a: CM 7465: 36).
However, it could also be argued that no matter how well the needs of
victims and the demands of law enforcement are balanced, any official
system servicing these two needs is inherently conflicted. A victim-
centred approach requiring protection does not sit easily with a law
enforcement approach requiring timely intelligence and robust
prosecutions. As Goodey (2008: 431) observes of these two systems, a
victim centred response “indirectly” provides a means of addressing crime
through the medium of victims. Where this happens, the interests of social
justice and the requirements of criminal justice effectively compete, for
example, as happens when women’s right to recovery is infringed by a
Police or Immigration-led interview within the protected 45 day
recuperation period (ATMG, 2010). Located within the “migration-crime-
security” nexus marking contemporary trafficking activity, Goodey
reasons:
“Policy responses to human trafficking, unlike many other areas of
organised crime, do focus on victims through programmes that address
prevention and protection. However, it is debatable whether the current
focus on trafficking has yet reached a ‘socialisation of criminal policy’.
Rather, one could argue that the move towards a ‘victim centred’ focus is
well on its way –” (Goodey, 2008: 433).
New improvements to victim’s rights, including initiatives contained in
the European Union Directive (EUP, 2011) are evaluated by the European
Commission. In respect of this story collection, substantial benefits derive
from the extended coverage of trafficking protections to women trafficked
for forced marriage and criminal activity (EUP, 2011: paragraph 11)14.
Beyond this, the EU Directive sustains the momentum for placing victims
at the centre of human trafficking crime responses. Consequently, whilst
women’s experiences predate UK endorsement of the EU Directive in
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Chapter One 14
April, 2011, the book addresses its impact on women because it accords
with women’s lived experiences and suggestions for praxis.
Outline of the book
This final section explains how the focus on agency, in a context of
trafficking oppression, is set out in the book. Given an empirical interest in
women’s stories, each chapter takes a different aspect of trafficking
experience and develops insight into women’s agency. The decision to
present information thematically is based on the potential to create deeper
insights, given the diversity in women’s experiences.
Chapter 2: Methodology and Participants
This chapter presents the feminist and qualitative underpinnings of this
social research. It explains the epistemological rationale and the choices in
methodology, methods, and analysis of empirical data. Methods privilege
the “social and personal relations” within a semi-structured interview for
being a rich source of knowledge creation between the researcher and the
researched (Oakley, 1981: 231). Similarly, the “social moments” (Jowett
and O’Toole, 2006: 458) in a focus group are favoured for their fluid and
naturalistic properties for uncovering opinions and meaning (Wilkinson,
1998a). In acknowledgement of empirical knowledge building as a
“practical production” between the researcher and the researched (Fontana
and Frey, 2000: 664), care is taken in subsequent chapters to highlight the
influence of extant trafficking knowledge (from media, research, policies
and the researcher) on women’s experiences, and the impact of women’s
experiences on dominant discourses surrounding contemporary movement,
trafficking victimhood and understanding of women’s agency. In essence,
the methods and data analysis are chosen for generating co-created
knowledge – an integral element of praxis.
Centrally, the chapter reflects back on the practical and ethical
problems of accessing hidden populations and reaching hard-to-tell
narratives, and introduces the women and their stories. The perspectives of
anti-trafficking professionals, interviewed as part of the original doctoral
research, are also added to various discussions throughout. Staff inclusion
is intended to compliment (and not to validate) women’s perspectives,
since the collection is ostensibly a celebration of women’s agency. Staff
classifications can also be found in this chapter, alongside the Focus
Group profile.
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 15
Chapter 3: Trafficking Identity
This chapter engages with how trafficking identity is viewed by the
women subjects in trafficking. It assesses the VoT imagery for its positive
and negative connotations, and critiques the management of trafficking for
its reifying effects on identity. It centrally connects with how women
convey a sense of their trafficked and pre-trafficking personas to others, as
well as the role played by the trauma story (Kleinman and Kleinman,
1997) in promoting and hindering the well-being and agency freedoms of
trafficked women.
Chapter 4: Trafficking Benchmarks
This chapter explores how trafficking benchmarks are experienced by
subjects with a lived experience of trafficking. It locates trafficking
movement in the nexus of migration, crime and security, addressing push /
pull factors and posing a challenge for the construction of easy duals
across motivations and movement. By raising some of the definitional and
lived complexities within the three benchmarks of consent, coercion and
exploitation, women’s stories depict truer narratives embracing elements
of agency and victimisation. These truer stories embracing opportunity,
constraint and transgression pose difficulty for official assessments of
trafficking.
Chapter 5: Well-being Freedom and Agency Freedom
This chapter celebrates the ways in which women with a trafficking
experience come to realise some well-being and agency freedoms. It
foregrounds the criticality of voice for sustaining the self under suffering
(Morris, 1997), and reframes women’s power in their capacity to survive
and adapt.
A trafficked women’s well-being freedom is legally understood and
practically set out as a policy package of trafficking protections and
services. Under the Council of Europe (2005) Convention (Article 12: 1a-
f), VoTs are entitled to six well-being measures – secure accommodation
and an adequate standard of living, emergency access to medical
treatment, any necessary translation and interpretation services,
counselling and rights based information, legal help, and education for
children. Women and anti-trafficking professionals talk about the positive
and negative experiences of service delivery surrounding women’s rights.
Set against this, women rebuild and refashion their lives post-
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Chapter One 16
trafficking in a variety of imaginative ways. Principally, women celebrate
survival as the exemplar in achieving agency. Following refugee and
asylum scholarship (Hunt, 2008; Vervliet et al, 2013), the actions of
women in rebuilding social belonging, independent living, consumer, and
gendered / sexual freedoms are examined for signs of adaptation and
agency freedoms. The chapter closes on some of the ways in which anti-
trafficking professionals assist and resist the expertise of women.
Chapter 6: Collecting Story – Shaping Praxis
Under a relational lens on victimisation and agency, this chapter
connects issues raised by participants in preceding chapters with wider
anti-trafficking policy and practice developments. In addressing policing
(in particular of the prostitute subject in trafficking), the chapter explores
prostitution as violence against women and as a sex work discourse. This
comparison highlights the risks to presumed victims of trafficking and sex
work migrants from the UK’s lack of a sex work agenda. The chapter also
examines marriage in a context of trafficking, linking to assessments and
developments concerning forced, sham and transnational marriages, the
criminalisation of forced marriage, and limitations in the Domestic
Violence Immigration Rule. The chapter closes on the efficacy of an
advocacy model in trafficking, presenting women as experts of their own
experience and professional attitudes towards this. The lens on praxis
exhibits policy, research, and practice conundrums significant to the
women and anti-trafficking professionals within this story collection.
Notes
1 This legislation is also referred to as the Palermo Protocol or the Trafficking
Protocol or, simply, the Protocol.
2 According to the definition, children (under the age of eighteen) cannot consent
to be trafficked, but adult consent is negated only where the act, means, and
exploitations in trafficking apply (Article 3b).
3 For an example in narrative work with Holocaust survivors, see Bar-On, 1995;
Bar-On and Chaitin, 2001; De Vries, et al, 2005.
4 Bastia’s paper addresses teenage migration but is included for its contribution on
intersectionality and voice.
5 This legislation is commonly referred to as the Convention.
6 Co-ethnics refer to persons of the same ethnicity. Given the stigma attached to
trafficking for sexual exploitation and / or prostitution, co-ethnic migrants and
refugees often disassociate themselves from trafficked co-ethnics.
7 This term was first coined by the anthropologist Elzbieta Gozdziak.
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Introduction: Setting the Scene 17
8 The Poppy Project and Eaves Housing provide accommodation and support
services to women trafficked for sexual exploitation into the UK.
9 Forced marriage in the context of trafficking is one where a process of deceit or
coercion is used to move a woman away from home for sexual / domestic servitude
as a wife. In trafficking for marriage, the terms forced and servile are
interchangeable. This book uses both terms.
10 Two women in this collection were sourced via direct correspondence and phone
calls – this is fully discussed in Chapter 2.
11 Maggie O’Neill has written extensively about praxis and includes a descriptor of
praxis as “purposeful knowledge” (O’Neill and Harindranath, 2006: 46).
12 This information was gleaned over the course of 2 official visits to the original
and new office premises. For the current staff composition, see ATMG (2013: 15).
13 As per the UKHTC, this information was gleaned during an approved visit to
UKBA premises.
14 The UK Government is now outside the EUD transposition phase deadline of the
6th April, 2013. To view the EU Directive in full, go to:
http://eurlex.europa.eu/legalcontent/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32011L0036&fro
m=EN (accessed 09.03.2015).
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CHAPTER TWO
A REFLEXIVE ACCOUNT OF THE RESEARCH
PROCESS1 AND AN INTRODUCTION
TO PARTICIPANTS
Introduction
This chapter2 explains the feminist design and methods which are used
to research women’s stories of trafficking agency and introduces the
women and professionals featured within the book. The decision to
research from a feminist perspective derives from the research aim of
understanding trafficked women’s experiences of victimisation and agency
(Duelli Klein, 1983; Weston, 1988; Reinharz and Chase, 2003) and
making it visible in order to improve the situation of women (Reinharz,
1983; Kelly, Burton and Regan, 1994; Hill, 2003; Allen, 2011). These two
feminist principles of visibility and liberation are at the heart of feminist
standpoint – a position privileging research from the position and
perspective of women for their amelioration and emancipation.
The research intent was to build an experiential understanding of
trafficking in areas influencing how women are perceived and treated:
namely around identification and identity (Chapter 3), subjective choices
and the socio-economic-cultural dynamics behind movement (Chapter 4),
and opportunities and constraints in rebuilding lives post-trafficking
(Chapter 5). Since feminist researchers privilege the women subjects of
oppression and struggle as best placed for giving their identities and
experiences meaning (Fonow and Cook, 1986; Davis, 1986; Reinharz,
1992), the research aim drives the research methods of a women’s focus
group and semi-structured interviews with women and participating
professionals. This is not to suggest that these research methods are
intrinsically feminist but rather that they are adaptable for qualitative
feminist inquiry. The focus group is picked for its capacity to generate
naturalistic knowledge of women’s meanings (Wilkinson 1998a; 1998b;
1999; Madriz, 2000) and the semi-structured interview (SSI) for its co-
creative qualities in knowledge building (Fontana and Frey, 2000). As
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AN: 1155153 ; De Angelis, Maria.; Human Trafficking : Women’s Stories of Agency
Account: ns215574.main.eds
A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 19
Mies (1983:124) observes for feminist inquiry:
“The ‘truth’ of a theory is not dependent on the application of certain
methodologies and rules but on its potential to orient the processes of
praxis towards progressive emancipation and humanisation”.
In this study, both participant women and anti-trafficking professionals
express the hope that their involvement will improve the future reception
and treatment of women trafficked into the UK (Chapters 5 and 6). In this
way, participants can be seen as actively building praxis – influencing
public policy through research into lived experience (O’Neill and
Harindranath, 2006).
Producing knowledge
Although the book is referred to throughout as a collection of women’s
stories, the term “collection” describes the end product of a book which
houses their lived experience and perspectives on trafficking. The methods
used are picked for their ability to generate new and vibrant knowledge, as
opposed to simply gathering up information waiting to be collected (Dey,
1993). Within feminist enterprise, the production of knowledge has been
and remains a deeply contested issue. The paradigm war between
quantitative and qualitative knowledge production may have gendered
these approaches into a male and a female way of knowing about the
social world (Mies, 1983; Graham, 1983; Hammersley, 1992; Oakley,
1997; 1998). However, as feminism has moved on from suffrage (equal
rights to vote and own property), through a “second wave” of sociological
inquiry (concerned with family, sex rights and work) into a “third wave”
fixed on the body (pornography and sexuality), feminist enterprise has met
with competing truth claims for knowledge of, on, and about women
(Smith, 1974; Haraway, 1991; Reinharz, 1992; Oakley, 1981; 2000)3.
According to Olesen (2000: 217), the descriptor which best captures
qualitative feminist research since the second wave is one of
“complexity”, adding:
“And, indeed, if there is a dominant theme in this growing complexity, it is
the question of knowledges. Whose knowledges? Where and how obtained
and by whom, from whom, and for what purposes”?
These central questions are addressed in the sections below.
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Chapter Two 20
“Where obtained”: gaining access and finding
participants
This study commenced in a decade when asylum and refugee agencies
were experiencing high levels of fatigue over researcher requests to access
displaced, exiled, and trafficked persons known to them (Robinson, 2002;
Poppy Personal Communication, 2007; Clark, 2008). The study also
followed the widely publicised opening of the UK Human Trafficking
Centre (UKHTC) in Sheffield (England) in 2006: a Police-led multi-
agency initiative tasked with prosecuting traffickers and co-ordinating the
European Convention agenda on protecting and assisting the victims of
trafficking crime (CoE, 2005). Given the demands for researcher access
and attendant levels of intrusion to projects and their clients, snowball
sampling was chosen based on its success in finding other invisible and
displaced persons (Bloch, 1999; Atkinson and Flint, 2001). This snowball
search reached 76 agencies supporting trafficked women, asylum seekers,
victims of gendered crime (rape, forced marriage and domestic violence)
and female sex workers, generating sufficient numbers for a focus group
and semi-structured interviews (SSIs). Out of twenty four women who
came forward, two expressly stated from the start that they had no
trafficking experience and their qualitative stories do not feature in this
collection. In contrast, all other narratives are told, since to deny these
women a voice on trafficking is tantamount to denying them their lived
experience. For the qualitative feminist researcher, a fundamental goal of
researching women is precisely one of making her experiences visible
(Harvey, 1990; Reinharz and Chase, 2003).
Two women without the formal support of a project corresponded
directly with me on hearing about it through their networks. As Bosworth
et al. (2011: 776) suggest, a correspondence approach to researching “the
direct experience of those we wish to understand” provides researchers
with another means of sourcing participants. Both these women agreed to
an SSI – one following two months of email exchange and the other after
numerous mobile-phone conversations. This brought the total of women
participants back up to twenty four. Both the focus group composition and
the pen portraits of SSI women are provided in the “from whom” section
at the end of this chapter.
In contrast to the snowball strategy with women, purposive sampling is
better suited for finding participants of relevance to the research topic
(Bryman, 2004). The fieldwork stretched from December, 2008, through
to the end of February, 2010, by which time the National Referral
Mechanism (NRM) for identifying and supporting victims of trafficking
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 21
had been operational for ten months. Purposive sampling secured fifteen
interviews with anti-trafficking professionals who, for research purposes,
are divided into three categories.
The first category – Government Enforcement Organisations (GEOs) –
includes interviews with staff in the UKHTC, Border Agency, NRM,
Police, Social Services and a policy advisor. These professionals carry
responsibility for an aspect of service development within trafficking. The
second category – Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) – includes
interviews with six staff working for churches and charities or employed
by specialist projects supporting trafficked women. These professionals
are involved in the day to day running of services for trafficked women
and all, but one, had been in formal case discussions with either the
Police-led UKHTC or the immigration-led UKBA. The three remaining
professionals have been categorised under Partnership Organisations since
all are tasked by their employer with a specific remit in community
building. Partner A liaises with the Police and Criminal Justice
representatives, Partner B with migration, asylum and refugee agencies,
and Partner C with local politicians, civic dignitaries and faith leaders. The
categorisation of professionals can be found in the “from whom” section at
the end of this chapter.
The extent of the two searches was such that, by the end of the
fieldwork, the research had acquired enough legitimacy to open doors to
stakeholder meetings. Had I been conferred this “insider” credential
sooner, I may have gained access to women rescued and hidden within the
NRM process. Towards the end, I was granted access to two case studies
of trafficked women in custody and, though not ideal, was able to unravel
issues of identity, journeys, opportunities and constraints from their Police
statements, Probation Service interviews, Pre-sentence Reports, Court
transcripts, and face-to-face interviews with their case manager. The
stories of these women are also in the “from whom” section at the end of
this chapter4, producing a total of 26 lived accounts of trafficking.
“How obtained and by whom”
Methods for producing knowledge
The challenge for methodology was to find a way of researching
agency as subjective, experiential, and visible in trafficking without
producing “partial” and “distorted accounts” of women’s experiences
(Harding, 1993: 56). Fieldwork is partial and situated both in terms of the
women it reaches and their individual socio-cultural locations. It is also
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Chapter Two 22
partial and distorted according to the agencies reached. Women rescued
and supported by particular programmes reflect the profiles of their
supporting projects (Tyldum & Brunovskis, 2005). This helps to explain
the high rates of trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced marriage in
this collection which, in turn, make these exploitations appear more
representative of trafficking experience than might be the case had projects
with other remits taken part. The production of knowledge is further and
additionally influenced by the researcher’s own subjectivity. Whilst social
scientists agree on a link between social location and personal subjectivity
– in other words, that factors of gender, class and race inform individual
identity, values and experience – there is disagreement on whether
sameness or difference aids the exchange of information between
researchers and researched. Framed in feminist inquiry terms of “insider”
for sameness and “outsider” for difference, I have no real idea of the
extent to which participants’ stories might have been different were I a sex
worker, a migrant to the UK, or had my own marriage been transnational
or forced. My interest was that of an outsider, with a modicum of
professional insider knowledge into the disadvantage posed to these
women from legislative and social policy shortfalls. If, as feminists argue,
all research is in some way subjective, then one way of addressing this
methodological dilemma is for the researcher to provide analysis of the
interview as a social relation (Oakley, 1981), and of herself as a subject in
her own research (Olesen, 2000). Fontana and Frey (2000; 664) refer to
this process of knowledge generation as a “practical production”. These
three concepts are followed through into the methods of data collection
presented below.
Focus Group
Seventeen women in this collection volunteered for a focus group,
reputed to be a naturalistic approach to data collection (Wilkinson, 1998b).
This focus group was situationally generated, as opposed to researcher
constructed, since focus group volunteers were also members of an
existing Black Minority Ethnic (BME) women’s group. These women
knew one another well and many shared bonds as women trafficked for
forced marriage, or as spouses made illegal by the subsequent break-down
of their marriage5. The fact that these women had informed opinions based
on subjective experience significantly enriched the co-production of
knowledge. Their breadth of knowledge created a freer climate of
exchange (beyond anything I could have planned for) across difficult and
contested issues of agency and victimhood. These women felt less obliged
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 23
to agree with myself as the group leader, and less pressured to agree with
the three most outspoken women within the group (Carey, 1994). Such a
demonstrable show of power is, in itself, a testimony to the women’s
agentic capacities and of their considerable expertise in trafficking matters.
For my part, their comfort and enthusiasm instilled confidence in the focus
group as a feminist qualitative method suited to researching women’s
imposition of meaning on gendered experience (Wilkinson 1998a; 1999;
Madriz, 2000).
A number of researchers extol the focus group as empowering of
groups further marginalised through their ethnicity (Chiu and Knight,
1999; Madriz, 2000). In spite of all my preparatory correspondence and
planning to create the optimal conditions for success [Barbour and
Kitzinger (1999) advise having ten to twelve participants], seventeen
women from ten different nationalities, and requiring the services of three
multi-lingual interpreters, turned up for the focus group. Chairs were lined
up against three of the four walls, providing extra seats to the oblong table
seating ten, with a trestle table of food and drinks along one side. The
buffet table formed a focal point where women congregated and chatted
informally about the food, the weather, their children, and their week.
Such social interactions – begun at the buffet table – can be seen as
transforming the focus group into a “social moment” (Jowett and O’Toole,
2006: 458), where hearing someone’s story can trigger a shared
appreciation in another’s experience and encourage more women to share
their thoughts and experiences in a naturalistic way.
Reflecting on my inexperience with this particular research method,
my unfamiliarity with focus groups may have worked to my advantage in
two ways. In complete contrast to my fears of over-regulating the group
and producing researcher-led findings, I found myself in Jowett’s (2006)
position when interviewing young women on feminism, of running to keep
pace with them. I, too, frequently found myself chasing the tail ends of
discussion, rather than influencing its threads. One example where control
gave way to process regards an outbreak of mirth, following a long pause
and then rapid admissions that no one, inclusive of interpreters, had
understood what two members speaking in a local dialect had said! The
other advantage relates to the issue of a white researcher interviewing an
all BME group. Pollack’s experience of this within a focus group on race
and power in black women’s experience of prison demonstrates the space
this dynamic creates for different and alternate narratives – which she
terms “counter-narratives” – to emerge.
“With marginalised and oppressed groups, particularly when the researcher
is a member of the dominant group, focus group methodology may be most
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Chapter Two 24
appropriate for countering dominant myths and discourses that construct
marginalized people as deviant and deficient” (Pollack, 2003: 471).
Unlike Pollack, my own approach to this power imbalance was to
actively model sensitivity to the victim discourse by dressing down (to
neutralise power) and purposely removing items of jewellery (suggestive
of affluence, success or status). In stark contrast, most of the focus group
women dressed up (many in ethnic dress or westernised clothing
accessorised with ethnic jewellery) to meet and greet me – displaying a
powerful degree of autonomy and individuality. This visible composition
of a lone white researcher and a commanding Black and Asian participant
group served to re-position power in unforeseen ways. From a position of
strength in numbers, women identified their own barriers to well-being
and agency freedoms citing, for example, unequal access to work via EU
membership. Similarly, women also felt empowered to share personal
examples of risk-taking, hoped-for profits, and end gains in leaving home
– the “counter-narratives” to a prevailing victimhood discourse.
Women’s semi-structured interviews
A total of seven women volunteered for an SSI. Creating the
conditions for truth-telling within a semi-structured interview poses a
different set of challenges from the focus group. If as Fontana and Frey
(2000; 664) suggest – the semi-structured interview is a “practical
production” of meanings resulting from the interactions of researcher and
researched – then, creating the right research relationship seemed a
productive place to start. As a woman interviewing other women, Oakley
(1981) advocates replacing the masculine text book approach with a social
and personal relationship supporting dialogue. In looking to facilitate a
dialogue on a difficult trafficking story, I tried Socratic or open style
questioning (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000) to unpack and explore issues of
choice, autonomy, agency, power, control, exploitation and pain.
Examples of these are: Can you tell me why you came to this country?
Can you tell me about the way in which this was arranged? What were
your thoughts and feelings during this journey? What happened to you
when you arrived in the UK? Can you describe what your living-working
conditions or marriage ceremony was like? How would you describe your
situation to me now? What would make life better for yourself and your
family? Can you tell me what I should have asked you? The latitude in this
line of questioning allows women to ascribe their own meanings to
experiences and stay in control of their personal stories, whilst allowing
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 25
the interviewer to probe for dynamics and processes beyond the common-
place.
In creating the best conditions for qualitative responses, feminists
openly urge researchers to invest something of themselves in the process,
either through self-disclosure (Oakley, 1981; Reinharz, 1992) or via the
provision of much needed information to women (Oakley, 1979). This can
balance power particularly when research is conducted with vulnerable
persons (Bergen, 1993; Dickson-Swift et al, 2007; 2008). Often – when
women were closest to breaking down – they would ask me questions like:
“Did I ever feel that helpless”? “Did my husband treat me bad”? Whilst I
could not share insider examples of trafficking, I was able to make myself
“vulnerable” (Stanley and Wise, 1983: 181) by disclosing some outsider
examples. For instance: a personal story of labour exploitation, an
experience of bullying in the workplace, and a marital mix of funny and
embarrassing anecdotes. Such disclosure, albeit outside of trafficking,
builds trust and rapport which encourages a rich and forthright exchange
(Maynard, 1994). This “social relation” dynamic increased as I answered
women’s questions on “no recourse” (NRPF, 2006)6 and (though no
expert) did my best to advise them on domestic violence rules in
immigration cases (Home Office, 2014a).
In this collection, interviews held with and recorded for the two case
study women were similarly perceived as practically produced through the
interactions of the interviewer and the interviewee. Although the
similarities and differences in case analysis have produced their own set of
complimentary and competing discourses (Ragin and Becker, 1992), case
interviews and transcripts contain first-person accounts of an individual’s
actions, experiences and beliefs, which can be interpreted and given voice
by the qualitative researcher. This qualitative interpretation of their stories
was triangulated with case holder interviews for insights into possible
researcher bias over meanings. Viewed as the product of interplay between
insider and outsider knowledge, case study materials can usefully be
explored for an additional perspective on lived identity, movement,
exploitation and agency.
Professional semi-structured interviews
A rounded appreciation of how agency and victimhood is experienced
by women calls for interviews with anti-trafficking professionals. As Hunt
(2008) observes for the asylum process, all professional actors have some
impact on agency both independently and through their job roles. Some
individuals employed in a sector also cut across sector boundaries. For
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Chapter Two 26
example, some senior Police and Immigration personnel have an active
presence within the CAs, provide training jointly with NGO staff, and
chair community fora. Similarly, one NGO with charitable status was a
recipient of government funding during the fieldwork. In spite of such
overlap, staff allocations to a particular sector are defensible since they are
based upon primary roles.
In faithfulness with the feminist goal of revealing women’s meaning
(Du Bois, 1983; Duelli Klein, 1983) for social improvement (Kelly,
Burton and Regan, 1994) and praxis (Maynard and Purvis, 1994),
professional perspectives provide a complimentary as opposed to a
validatory lens on women’s standpoint. Questions posed to staff focussed
on what they look for in a victim of trafficking; how they assess the signs
of trafficking; what needs do survivors present; what happens to women
whose experience differs from official guidelines; what aspects of their
role do they find most challenging and most rewarding? As with women
survivors, care is taken to minimise the portrayal of anti-trafficking
professionals as a reified group. A conscious decision was made to learn
something about each of them as individual workers, along the lines of
what motivates and what most upsets them in their line of work. In
keeping with feminist concerns over representation and meaning, each was
asked what their “one anti-trafficking wish” might be.
“Whose knowledges and for what purpose”
Ethics
Gatekeepers were vigilant in protecting trafficked women from
research-related harms7. Prior to face-to-face meetings with participants,
gatekeepers relayed women’s anxieties over consent, confidentiality and
anonymity. Gatekeepers went through the research contract with women,
which they signed in advance of interviews. The contract gave women
permission to withdraw at any point or to refuse to answer a particular
question, and all without need for explanation. It allowed SSI women to
choose an alias and / or be classified as SSIs, and preserved the anonymity
of focus group women through their identification as focus group
members. The contract provided a further guarantee that women’s case
histories would not be disclosed to any other agency. A page-long
questionnaire gathered demographic information on age, gender, ethnicity,
class, marital status, number of children, qualifications and employment,
pertinent for context.
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 27
Whilst interpreters and after-care support were central to the granting
of ethics approval by the University of Hull, Watts (2006) theorises the
research interview as a therapeutic opportunity making counselling skills a
pre-requisite in good ethical practice. In light of my lack in counselling
skills, unforeseen offers from gatekeepers to refer women to in-house
counsellors and use their bilingual interpreters (Thomson et al, 1999),
raised the quality of communication and post-interview care beyond my
single capacity to gift. Knowing that women had access to these
professional services eased my “ethical hangover” with using exploited
people for research (Lofland & Lofland, 1995:28). Both of the women
who corresponded directly with me – one following two months of email
exchange and the other after numerous mobile phone conversations – had a
good command of spoken English. Neither requested a formal interpreter
or brought a friend along to interpret for them. In terms of their after-care,
the first had access to support through her volunteering work and the
second to pastoral care from her college, although all participants were
offered an after-care phone call from me. All SSI women exercised choice
over interview venues, choosing a project room or a coffee house where
they felt safe and in control of the research process. The focus group took
place in premises housing numerous social and charitable projects, where
women could also feel safe.
As with the focus group and SSI women, professionals were asked to
choose the location of their interviews and some also chose external venues
serving teas and coffees. As with women participants, no professional is
identifiable to safeguard anonymity, respect confidentiality and protect
staff from organisational repercussions. These privacy measures also serve
to differentiate individual opinions from organisational stances on
trafficking. In this way, the research adopts a morally responsible position
towards agencies and their staff within social policy research (Clifford,
2010).
Handling data
Given feminist concern for researching the social world from the
position and perspective of women (Weston, 1988), feminist researchers
face a complex challenge in representing the views of others as research
data. Accuracy may be the goal of transcription (Sandelowski, 1994) but
transcribing is an interpretive as opposed to a neutral exercise (Bailey,
2008). Under this lens, typing transcripts verbatim is a valuable strategy
for monitoring the integrity of representations, since verbatim transcripts
maintain the data “fresh” for the researcher to review time and again
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Chapter Two 28
(Bertrand et al, 1992: 201). Another stratagem is to transcribe all
recordings oneself, especially when handling sensitive transcripts. Warr
(2004) strongly discourages employing transcribers from outside of the
study. Her argument is that hearing a recorded voice can be traumatising
for the outside listener, as well as subjecting the voice to the dangers of an
emotive and different interpretation outside of the interview. Being the
sole transcriber of recordings in this study placed me in an enviable
position of knowing each woman’s story “by heart”, and this familiarity
informed the choice of a grounded theory approach to data handling.
Grounded theory researchers often rely on concepts shaped by their
respective disciplines (Clarke, 2005; Dunne, 2011; Tummers and Karsten,
2012) to inform both their study and the subsequent coding process. In this
study, four trafficking concepts (identity, journey, exploitations, and
independent actions) shaped the interview schedules whilst open codes –
based on the four concepts – proved helpful in organising the data. A
subsequent selective coding on responses brought commonalities,
differences, and intersections – as present in women’s narratives – to the
fore. Adopting an analytical strategy of re-coding and retrieving enabled
concepts to be refined and regrouped (for example, identity into trafficking
identity, pre and post-trafficking personas) which better reflected lived, as
opposed to text-book, accounts of trafficking.
Within grounded analysis, a deeply disputed area concerns the timing
of literature and the role of existing theory in building knowledge.
Researchers opposing prior reading and theorising do so on the basis that
it introduces bias, adds distortion, and limits insight to preconceived ideas
and mind-sets. Glaser and Strauss (1967), Hickey (1997) and Glaser
(1998; 2001; 2012) feature amongst those favouring a traditional grounded
theory position on this issue. Researchers favouring a more relaxed
approach recognise a reality in which many professionals and researchers
begin their studies pre-equipped with knowledge of literature and theories
in their chosen areas (Morse, 1994; Dunne, 2011; Tummers and Karsten,
2012). Since the qualitative feminist researcher is already squarely located
in the knowledge process, and an active collaborator in the co-creation of
knowledge, the research data can usefully be interrogated by prior
knowledge (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; 1998). From this standpoint, the
feminist challenge in handling the data becomes one of synergy – how to
use what is known to expand emergent theory and how to utilise emergent
theory to problematise what is known about trafficking experience. This
synergy compliments the interview process as a practical production of
researcher-researched knowledges and explains the interplay of literature
and research ideas within upcoming chapters.
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 29
Disseminating research
Feminist concerns over representation extend to the dissemination of
research. Feminist researchers tread a fine line between building valid
experiential knowledge and converting it into valuable social justice
improvements for women (Gottlieb and Bombyk, 1987). The dissemination
of personal material for public consumption is a risky undertaking.
Opening women’s personal and private lives to the public gaze runs the
risk of patriarchal and sexist distortions, over and beyond those already
brought to the process by an external researcher (Ribbens and Edwards,
1998). There is further pressure in public presentation to homogenise
women’s individual and diverse experiences for the purpose of social
change. As Page (2001: 17) reflects:
“The defining of any phenomenon as a social problem implies that this is
an occurrence that requires some form of collective response, rather than
individual resolution”.
In the public domain, any effective challenge to the dominant victim
narrative in trafficking may well disadvantage individual women whose
lives do not fit the accepted social model. Conversely, any effective social
challenge may not reach those victims who choose to remain outside of
the official NRM framework of services. These costs will need to be
weighed and evaluated against praxis – the benefits to survivors from
politicising personal experiences of trafficking.
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Chapter Two 30
Table 2-1: The acts, means and exploitations in trafficking
Process + Way/Means + Goal
Recruitment
or
Transportation
or
Transferring
or
Harbouring
or
Receiving
A
N
D
Threat
or
Coercion
or
Abduction
or
Fraud
or
Deceit
or
Deception
or
Abuse of Power
or
Position of
Vulnerability
A
N
D
Prostitution
or
Pornography
or
Violence/Sexual
Exploitation
or
Forced Labour
or
Involuntary
Servitude
or
Debt Bondage
(with unfair wages)
or
Slavery/Similar
practices
or
Organ Removal
“From whom”
This section introduces the research participants through vignettes and
a composition profile of the focus group women and anti-trafficking
professionals
Vignettes8
Laila (semi-structured interview)
Laila is the only SSI participant born in the UK. At the time of her
interview, she was twenty-six years of age and the youngest woman
interviewed. Laila stood out for combining westernised dress with an
ethnic, brightly patterned headscarf, which was knotted neatly beneath her
chin. She presented as a bright and socially astute individual. During her
adolescent years, Laila had attended college and worked in the family
business. She described her upbringing as middle class. When Laila turned
eighteen, she discovered by chance that her family had arranged for her to
be married to her cousin in Pakistan – a young man she had never before
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 31
met and who was three years her junior. Not wanting to be parted from the
boyfriend she was in love with, she ran away from home. Laila was found
after ten days on the run and forcibly flown to Pakistan, accompanied by
one of her brothers. Once in Pakistan, Laila’s passport was taken away
from her, with the threat of her never again returning to Britain unless she
took part in a marriage ceremony. In describing her marriage day to me,
Laila portrays it as if living a nightmare. She was unable to speak the
words, hindered by her limited knowledge of the language and in protest at
being forced to take part. “I was his passport not his bride”. Laila
remained married to him for seven years, spending the first part of this
period in Pakistan, learning how to be a “good” wife. The second half was
lived back in the UK. Throughout her marriage, Laila described herself as
his family’s unpaid servant and her husband’s sex slave. She was subject
to episodes of domestic violence. Following bouts of depression, eating
disorders, and an attempted overdose from a cocktail of drink and pills,
Laila escaped with her daughter to a women’s refuge and was placed in a
safe house away from the area. Laila has slowly rebuilt a life for herself
and for her daughter, but exists outside of any supportive networks
traditionally available to other Muslim women.
Laila’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking (UN,
2000a: 3a) – her story being one of marriage in a context of human
trafficking (UN General Assembly, 2007; EUP, 2011: paragraph 11). Her
story shows evidence of transportation and receipt (consistent with the acts
in trafficking), threats and coercion (consistent with the means in
trafficking), as well as exploitation experienced as a forced marriage
involving domestic and sexual servitude (the trafficking purpose)9.
Tamara (semi-structured interview)
Tamara was born in the Ukraine. At the time of her interview, she was
thirty-three years of age and a widow. Tamara looked immaculate – her
hair was styled, her nails were manicured and her outfit was
complemented by her matching shoes, bag and accessories. I could easily
picture her in her former role as a young bridal designer back home.
Tamara described her upbringing as upper class, citing the fact her family
ate both black and red caviar as evidence of this. As we drank coffee
together, Tamara carefully unwrapped a chocolate “Baci” she had in her
handbag and read out the romantic caption to me: “The world may be one
but you are one in the world”. This caused her to reflect on how sad her
own marriage to a violent, alcoholic man, frequently in and out of prison,
had been. Additionally, his recidivism caused both financial and social
restrictions on Tamara as sole parent and provider for their three children.
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Chapter Two 32
Whilst he was serving one such prison term, Tamara decided to leave the
children with a relative and take up the dual opportunity to travel to
Turkey and earn some steady money working in a factory producing
leather goods. Here, Tamara was persuaded by a female workmate to pay
the workmate’s boyfriend and join her in upgrading to a casino croupier in
Moldova. On the day of travel, her friend fell ill, leaving Tamara to
undertake the journey accompanied by her workmate’s boyfriend. It was
during this journey that Tamara realised she had been “tricked” and found
herself sold on by him at the Turkish border. This was a practice which
was repeated time and again, across various borders, wherein Tamara
would be sold on to other women (and sometimes men), for the purpose of
working as a prostitute. Her traffickers controlled her with threats and
actual violence. By the time Tamara arrived in the UK, she was in a
situation of extensive debt bondage, having had the proceeds from sex
work withheld as payment for accommodation and food and now owing
her traffickers for the cost of her overland travel and her work clothes.
During her second attempt to escape from her trafficker, Tamara was
successfully referred by the Police to the Poppy Project for help and
support as a trafficked woman. Tamara has been granted indefinite leave
to remain in the UK (Home Office Immigration Rules: Part 11) and is now
accommodated in the community, where she is studying for a new career.
Tamara likes the UK for being a “human” country, but cannot properly
settle or fully recover until she is reunited with her three children who are
now in Ukrainian state care.
Tamara’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking – her
story being one of repeated trafficking for the purposes of sexual
exploitation. Her story shows evidence of repeated recruitment,
transportation, and receipt (consistent with the acts in trafficking),
deception and force (consistent with the means in trafficking), as well as
debt bondage (involving withholding earnings and unfair payment) and
sexual exploitation as a prostitute (the trafficking purposes).
Nina (semi-structured interview)
Nina was born in the Punjab region of India and although thirty-two
years old appeared much younger than her years. Being of slight build and
extremely softly spoken, Nina had an air of fragility about her. I was
surprised when she volunteered her name for interview and felt anxious
that she might not be strong enough for the ordeal. Nina spent the better
part of our interview in floods of tears.
Growing up in the Punjab, Nina received a basic school education but
regarded her upbringing and life experience as sheltered, having neither
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 33
attended college nor worked outside of the family home. At the age of
twenty-three, her parents agreed a match and Nina was given a lavish
wedding with a reception in a big hotel. Nina described this marriage as
forced on her part and steeped in deception. She met her husband for the
first time seven days before the wedding and repeatedly voiced a concern
that he never spoke with her. Her future mother-in-law attributed this to
her son’s inability to speak Punjabi and Nina’s total lack of English
language, promising she would enrol her in English classes once they were
married. Following the wedding ceremony, she discovered her husband’s
disability – he was born deaf and mute – and his family had been unable to
arrange his marriage from within the resident UK / Indian community to
whom they were known.
When Nina migrated to join her husband and in-laws in the UK, she
realised the full extent of the deception. Her marriage had been a trade for
her physical and emotional labour as his carer, and also for the purpose of
forced labour. Upon arrival, all her documentation was removed and Nina
was kept under constant surveillance. She was transported from home to
work in a nearby sweatshop without pay and, inside the home, she took
care of her husband and was the domestic servant for the entire extended
family. Davina described her relationship with her husband as being his
“sex slave” and described her overall situation as one of “slavery”. This
situation continued for two and a half years.
Nina ran away with her sixteen-month-old daughter after learning that
her in-laws meant to keep the child, but trade her back for forced labour in
India. With the help of a women’s project, Nina and her daughter have
been free from trafficking control for three years.
Nina’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking – her
story being one of forced marriage in a context of trafficking and forced
labour. Her story shows evidence of recruitment, transportation, and
receipt (consistent with the acts in trafficking), deception and the abuse of
power (consistent with the means in trafficking), for the combined
purposes of a marriage involving domestic and sexual servitude (within
the home), and labour exploitation (outside the home) – the purposes of
trafficking.
Luul (semi-structured interview)
Luul was born in Somalia and had just turned twenty-nine years of age
when I met her. Although registered as single, and despite losing contact
with her partner during her journey over to the UK, Luul saw herself in a
long-term relationship and was liaising with the Red Cross to find him.
Luul was educated to secondary school level and considered herself to be
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Chapter Two 34
middle class. She had undertaken considerable work experience across
several continents in order to fund her mother’s treatment for cancer.
Perhaps the most lucrative amongst these jobs was making mink blankets
in a factory in China. During an outbreak of civil war in Somalia, Luul
migrated to Kenya, but being a witness to police corruption and becoming
a target of police violence, paid for herself and her baby to be smuggled
out of East Africa on a fake passport. During the journey, her smugglers
threatened to take her baby and she was forced to make further payments
for the child’s upkeep and continued safety, rendering her destitute on
arrival in the UK. Luul did not choose the route or her end destination, and
although Luul had heard of the UK, she did not know where it was on a
map. On arrival in the UK, Luul’s documents were withheld by her
handler and she was handed over to another person of Somali origin. Upon
seeing her and her baby as more of a burden than a potential asset, they
were quickly abandoned on the streets with a fake passport and no means
of survival. At the time of interview, Luul was awaiting a decision on her
asylum claim.
Luul’s story fits into the mixed population flow which crosses
smuggling and trafficking. By legal definition, “smuggling becomes
trafficking once a person who is smuggled experiences exploitation at any
point from recruitment through to arrival at their destination” (Goodey,
2008: 422). Luul experienced exploitation (extortion of further monies en
route and a withholding of pre-paid papers en route and arrival), exercised
through fear, control, and threats of harm.
Fatuma (semi-structured interview)
Fatuma was born in the Gambia and was thirty-six years of age when
interviewed. Fatuma was a striking woman who came dressed in bright
ethnic clothing. She was tall and, having good posture made a strong first
impression. Fatuma described her family circumstances when growing up
as very poor. Fatuma described a forced marriage in her own country in
her early teens as slavery – becoming the property of her husband without
any rights or say over her life. This union produced a son. As the extended
family’s ability to eke out an existence declined with the addition of an
extra mouth to feed, Fatuma was sent to the nearest town to work as a
“house girl” (house maid). During this period, she met the man who she
referred to as her second “husband” and they had a daughter together.
Unable to return to her village, the elders traded her to her second husband
and made clandestine arrangements for her and her daughter (but not the
son) to travel to the UK to be with him. The UK was chosen by the village
elders for having “colonised us” (Africa). When she arrived in the UK
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 35
(without her daughter who was to follow once they were settled), she
remained unmarried but was told to describe herself as his wife. Her
passport was taken away and her “husband” rarely lived in the same flat
with her, returning only for sex. He also sent other men (his “friends”)
over to her for sex (for which she wasn’t paid), arranging cash in hand
payments to her for cutting black women’s hair as a means of supporting
herself. When she confronted him for keeping her “as a prostitute in my
home and in my marriage”, he became violent towards her, threatening to
have her killed, keep her daughter away, and make sure she never saw her
son again. Following a particularly savage assault in which he cut off all
of her hair, the Police were anonymously called out to the flat and
arranged for her to be placed in a safe house. By the time I interviewed
her, Fatuma had been granted “Humanitarian Protection” (Home Office
Immigration Rules: Part 11) and had been living in the UK for a total of
five years. She remains deeply distressed by her continued separation from
her mother, her son (now aged 15) and her daughter back in the Gambia.
Her father has since died.
Fatuma’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking – her
story being one of human trafficking for the purposes of sexual
exploitation. Her story shows evidence of recruitment and transportation
(consistent with the acts of trafficking), deception via a false promise of
marriage (consistent with the means in trafficking), as well as a
combination of debt bondage and sexual exploitation through marriage
and prostitution (the trafficking purposes).
Cemile (semi-structured interview)
Cemile was born in Turkey and, at age forty, was the most mature of
all my participants. Growing up with a teacher for a father and having four
sisters, all of whom turned out to be artists of one kind or another (artist,
painter, interior designer, art teacher) Cemile chose dance as her genre of
creative expression.
This choice, coupled with a comfortable middle class upbringing,
introduced her to competitions and travel abroad from a relatively early
age. Whilst performing and travelling as a professional folk dancer over a
period of eight years, Cemile learnt to speak English and developed an
interest in other cultures and in travel. At the age of thirty, Cemile entered
university to study fashion design and on graduating met the man she was
eventually to marry. This decision to marry was a surprise to Cemile
herself, as she was still mourning the tragic loss of her lover in a traffic
accident. Despite the speed with which she consented to marry, Cemile
was at pains to relate how carefully and honestly she had discussed
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Chapter Two 36
marriage – her expectations, her virtues and vices – with her prospective
husband. Although sharing a Turkish background, he had lived all his life
in the UK, so Cemile reluctantly agreed to migrate once they were
married.
Cemile relates how she struggled with her mother-in-law’s “total
control” over her both before and after the marriage and how married life
rapidly declined into one of domestic servitude, sexual objectification
within his circle of friends, and control exercised as emotional abuse.
When I interviewed Cemile, what struck me most was how sad and
changed her whole life had become since her marriage and migration. At
the time of her interview, she was separated from her husband and had
sole care of their young son. Although Cemile has leave to remain in the
country permanently, the UK is not her country of choice. However,
Cemile feels she cannot return to Turkey for fear of shaming and
dishonouring the family name back home.
Cemile’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking –
which negates consent when the act, means and exploitations in trafficking
apply (UN, 2000a: 3b). There is evidence of act and means consistent with
trafficking in the form of recruitment through false promise and deception,
as well as an abuse of power (the exercise of control over her by another
person – her mother-in-law), and an abuse of her position of vulnerability
(by her husband and mother-in-law). Additionally, trafficking exploitation
exists as domestic servitude (slavery or similar practices). However, in
terms of professional recognition and fit, Cemile’s story of marriage in a
context of trafficking presents complication. Although consent and
exploitation are legally complex issues which carry some latitude in
professional decision making, Cemile’s retention of her documents make
her story vulnerable under official scrutiny. Cemile’s story is included –
first and foremost – as its omission from this collection would be a denial
of her lived experience of trafficking. Beyond this, it is helpful for the
insights it provides into the “swampy lowlands” of lived experience and
professional practice – from where imaginative praxis often derives
(Schön, 1983: 42)10.
Aarti (semi-structured interview)
Aarti was born in India and being thirty-eight years old was the second
eldest of my participants. Aarti presented as a confident and worldly-wise
woman who held informed social and political opinions on all manner of
controversial issues, including trafficking, crime, and social welfare. She
had attained her degree, her Masters and a PhD in the field of Chemistry
and had agreed to an arranged marriage to a “non-Indian friend” of her
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 37
sister and brother-in-law, living in the States. With her family originating
from the Punjab (one of India’s wealthiest regions) and being from an
“upper class background”, Aarti accepted some risks in marrying this man.
This was partly in response to family pressure to secure the perceived
benefits in a professional and westernised union, and partly to enhance her
own life opportunities beyond what would have been possible at home
despite her upper class situation. So, based upon a long distance telephone
relationship, Aarti’s family organised a wedding and arranged a meeting
with him fifteen days before the ceremony was due to take place. The
prospective husband arrived in India two days before the wedding
ceremony causing Aarti to question the wisdom of marrying. However, at
this late stage in proceedings, Aarti felt outmanoeuvred by family and
married him in a lavish wedding followed by a forty-dish banquet.
Following the wedding, Aarti migrated to join her husband and start
married life firstly in the States and then in the UK. Aarti described her
subsequent reception from her husband (within the home and marriage)
and her treatment from her employers as exploitative and degrading. The
details of this are given in the findings chapters, but the financial and
social poverty she experienced, combined with the personal
misrepresentation she encountered, led Aarti to tell me “I thought I am
modern slavery”. At the time of interview, Aarti was already divorced, but
as the couple shared custody of their son, starting a new life for herself and
her son was proving difficult.
Placing Aarti’s story within the official definition of trafficking raises
dilemma and centrally connects with discourse, explored in subsequent
chapters, over what experience does and does not qualify for UK
trafficking help and support (particularly around marriage). Aarti’s story
shows trafficking means and exploitation (deception, emotional-
psychological coercion, and descent into a servile marriage). However,
there is no clear evidence of act (between the two families) and, without
this, Aarti’s transnational marriage does not qualify her for official victim
of trafficking (VoT) status, trafficking protections, or trafficking support.
Given women’s patriarchal disadvantage and migrant women’s secondary
status in refugee scholarship (Bloch et al, 2000), dismissing any woman’s
story once collected felt at best disrespectful, and at worst exploitative.
Aarti’s experience is, therefore, included for her story’s insight into the
intersections between free and forced migrations, and also for its praxis
insights into thorny issues of consent, coercion and exploitation – the
benchmarks defining experience as trafficking.
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Chapter Two 38
Sofia (case study)
Sofia is one of two case studies I was given access to. Sofia was born
in Moldova and aged thirty when she was arrested by the UK Police and
remanded in custody. She had been separated from her husband for a
period of two years when interviewed and had no children of her own
following a miscarriage during the marriage. She held a diploma and was
qualified to work as a radiologist. Her family were of working class origin
and her parents, brother, and two sisters had undergone considerable
hardship to put her through University. Sofia had also doubled up jobs to
help finance her studies in support of the family’s collective effort to raise
their standard of living. Her jobs were blue collar in nature and included
shop work, farm hand, and selling goods to see her through university.
Sofia decided to seek ways of travelling to the UK for work when her
local hospital closed and the family needed money to pay for her mother’s
cancer treatment. A friend arranged her travel to Brussels, where she was
to pay a female contact 500 euro for a false Lithuanian passport. This
woman arranged Sofia’s overland passage and travel agents at borders
between Brussels and the UK, promising Sofia hotel work en route and a
live-in hotel post once she reached her destination country. By the time
Sofia arrived in the UK, she was in considerable debt bondage and was
handed over to a group of men who took her documents and put her to
work in a sauna, forcing her to have sex and perform other entertainment
services. Her pay was taken at source to pay off her debt and Sofia was
only allowed out of the sauna when accompanied by a member of staff to
buy clothes for work. She was controlled through fear that her traffickers
would harm her family back home. Sofia was apprehended during a police
raid on the brothel and detained for having used a false passport to enter
the country. Sofia received a twelve month custodial sentence, which she
served in a women’s prison, where she remained post-sentence awaiting
deportation. Sofia has since been deported and all contact with her has
ceased.
Sofia’s story fits into the mixed population flow which crosses
smuggling and trafficking. Whilst it is not clear at which precise stage
Sofia was recruited (the act), she was deceived and her family in Moldova
threatened with physical harm during the course of her journey (the
trafficking means). Sofia was exploited via a combination of debt bondage
en route and forced prostitution on arrival (the trafficking exploitations)
legally entitling her to trafficking recognition.
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 39
Tijana (case study)
Tijana is the second case study I was given access to. Tijana was born
in Nigeria and aged twenty-four when convicted by a UK criminal court.
Tijana was orphaned at age two when her parents were killed in a car
accident. She was taken in by a friend of her mother but lost contact with
her two older siblings as a result of this. She remained in school until she
turned eight and was then treated as the house servant and sent to sell food
on the streets for her keep. When in her teens, Tijana was befriended by an
Italian woman who offered to take her to Italy and send her to school, in
return for acting as a live-in nanny to her children. Once in Italy, Tijana
was put to work as a prostitute and routinely beaten by her pimps to keep
her under control and dissuade her from escaping. Whilst street working,
Tijana formed a friendship with another Nigerian woman, who in turn
brought her over to the UK on false documents with the promise of a better
quality of life. Tijana was handed over to “friends”, whom she was told
would look out for her. These people retained her documents and kept her
prisoner within the house. On the third day, Tijana felt under enormous
pressure to perform a task for these people, which involved cashing some
travellers’ cheques in the local post office using a false passport. She was
accompanied there but went in alone. The transaction failed and the Police
were alerted. Two official processes came into play and Tijana was
detention fast tracked (DFT) through the system. An immigration check
recommended “automatic deportation” but gave way to allow for an
eighteen-month term of imprisonment to be served, concurrently, on two
charges of false representation and possession of false documents. Whilst
appealing her deportation towards the end of her prison sentence, Tijana was
reclassified as trafficked and transferred to a trafficking safe house. The
outcome of her asylum claim and her whereabouts are presently unknown as
the trafficking project operates a strict policy of non-disclosure.
Tijana’s story fits with the international definition of trafficking – her
story being one of two episodes of human trafficking; the first for sexual
exploitation and the second for the purpose of criminal activity (EUP,
2011: paragraph 11). Her story shows evidence of recruitment and
transportation (consistent with the acts in trafficking), force and deception
(consistent with the means in trafficking), as well as sexual exploitation as
a prostitute (the trafficking exploitation). During the field work, the
trafficking of persons for the commission of criminal offences was
recognised as taking place but not embedded in any domestic or
international policies. The EU Directive (EUP, 2011: Paragraph 11) now
endorses a trafficking purpose in forcing an individual to commit a
criminal act for another’s financial gain.
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Chapter Two 40
Table 2-2: Composition profile: focus group
Focus Group Composition
Number of women 17
Age range Between 22 and 42.
Nationality
Algerian 2
Bangladeshi 2
British born Pakistani 1
Chinese 1
Gambian 1
Indian 3
Iraqi 2
Pakistani 3
Sudanese 1
Turkish 1
Interpreters present 3 – each multi lingual
Reason for coming to the UK
Forced transnational marriage
Sexual exploitation
Labour exploitation
Length of time resident within the UK between 1 and 7 years
Contributions made 48
Time Frame 95 minutes and 16 seconds
Focus group observations: Given the focus group’s BME identity and
experience of forced marriage, there is obvious representational bias. This
noted, all participants bar three (the Algerian, Turkish and British-born
woman of Pakistani ethnicity) hailed from the ten top sending countries
for UK trafficking at the time of the fieldwork (SOCA, 2009 /10: 42).
Subsequent statistics provided by the NRM for 2013 highlight some
changes: China remains in the top ten as the 7th principal country of origin
for adults trafficked into the UK, but Pakistan and India exit the top ten
occupying 14th and 17th place respectively (NCA, 2014: 4)
During the fieldwork, China and Pakistan also featured in the top ten
asylum producing countries, with Iraq occupying the second top producing
country for the UK in 2008 (Asylum Support Partnership, 2009).
Currently, Pakistan hosts the highest number of refugees globally
at 1.6million (UNHCR, 2013) and remains the highest producer of
Asylum Seekers in the UK (3, 343 persons), with Bangladesh in 7th place
(1,123 persons) and India in 9th place (965 persons: Home Office, 2014b).
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A Reflexive Account of the Research Process 41
Table 2-3: Composition profile: anti-trafficking professionals
Research Categories Participants
Competent Authorities
Senior Government Enforcement Officer 1
Senior Government Enforcement Officer 2
Senior Government Enforcement Officer 3
Government Enforcement Officer 4
Government Enforcement Officer 5
Government Enforcement Officer 6
Non-Governmental
Organisations
NGO Information Officer
NGO Programme Co-ordinator
NGO Outreach worker
NGO Support worker
NGO Project Manager
NGO Education Officer
Partnership Organisations
Partner A (Police and CJS link)
Partner B (Asylum and Refugee link)
Partner C (Civic and Faith Leaders link)
Notes
1 Olesen (2007:432) defines reflexivity as “the manner and extent to which the
researchers present themselves as embedded in the research situation and process”.
A reflexive researcher should not only explain how practical and analytical issues
are handled, but also reflect on how her own background and emotions affect
representations in the “practical production” of knowledge (Fontana and Frey,
2000: 664).
2 This chapter moves between the first and third person in solidarity with feminist
calls on the researcher to reveal her investment in the research process (Oakley,
1981; Reinharz, 1992).
3 As example, Dorothy Smith argues a feminist standpoint informed by women’s
sex-class location; Donna Haraway argues a standpoint of all knowledge (both
male and female) as partial and situated knowledge; Shulamit Reinharz calls for
women’s meaning for women’s improvement; Ann Oakley critiques the gendering
in methods and knowledge production.
4 Access to case studies required ethical clearance from additional parties, in
addition to ethics approval granted by the University of Hull.
5 Women – who are trafficked into a forced marriage and thrown out (once their
usefulness for bearing children, caring for a disabled husband, or earning from
prostitution wane) – face deportation without a spousal or work visa proving their
eligibility to be in the UK.
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Chapter Two 42
6 “No Recourse to Public Funds” (NRPF) is a State classification implemented by
the UK Border Agency and denies welfare benefits (including income support,
child benefit, disability allowance), Local Authority housing, and asylum support
to any person deemed unlawfully present in the UK (NRPF, 2006).
7 For wider discussion of institutional gatekeepers in trafficking, see Bosworth
(2011).
8 Following NGO protocols on protecting the anonymity of women research
participants, all individual SSIs have been re-named for publication.
9 The finer details and individual complexities in women’s stories form the
empirical findings presented in subsequent chapters.
10 Schön (1983: 42) famously describes “the swampy lowlands” as professional
areas “where situations are confusing messes incapable of technical solution and
[which] usually involve problems of greatest human concern”.
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CHAPTER THREE
TRAFFICKING IDENTITY
Introduction and outline
This chapter explores trafficked women’s lived experiences of identity.
It is the first of three practical applications – applying what is known in the
trafficking discourse to women’s experience and harnessing lived
experience to challenge existing knowledge of trafficking. The chapter
opens with the dominant imagery of a victim of trafficking as portrayed
through media and awareness raising campaigns, before looking at what
trafficked women say both about their trafficking selves and as survivors
with a pre-trafficking persona. The chapter centrally explores the gains
and losses contained within the victim imagery and the “trauma story” for
women’s agency and, in so doing, also considers how professionals assist
and resist women’s right to express agency within trafficking.
The imagery of a victim of trafficking (VoT)
Human Trafficking is unequivocally defined and legislated for as a
criminal activity. The United Nations “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and
Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children” provides
the internationally recognised definition under the criminal frame of the
Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (2000). According to
this definition, human trafficking is a criminal process involving
“the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons;
by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of
abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the
purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the
exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual
exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to
slavery, servitude or the removal of organs” (UN, 2000a: 3a)
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AN: 1155153 ; De Angelis, Maria.; Human Trafficking : Women’s Stories of Agency
Account: ns215574.main.eds
Chapter Three 44
This overarching legislative frame conceptualises trafficking as the
illegal trade in persons (reframed as modern-day slavery – Slavery
Working Group, 2013) and the perpetrators as involved in serious and
organised criminal activity. Set against this frame, the claim to a VoT
status by the presumed victim of trafficking becomes susceptible to
properties and characteristics ascribed to a victim of crime. The closer a
woman’s fit to established victim of crime norms, the easier she is to
identify and accept as a genuine victim of trafficking crime. The crime
norms of an ideal victim and the right sort of victim are now considered
for their effects on women’s agency.
The ideal crime vic
tim
Aradau (2004:262) observes that the distinguishing mark of a
trafficked woman is her “raw physical suffering”. This is fixed in physical
imagery depicting the trafficked woman as the “body in pain: pierced,
bleeding and defenceless”. This imagery is widely perpetuated via the
media in films such as “Lilya 4-ever” (2002), “Taken” (2008), “Cargo”
(2011), “Eden” (2012) and through television movies, for example, “Sex
Traffic” (2004), “Human Trafficking” (2005), and “I Am Slave” (2010).
Figure 3-1 below serves as a pictorial example of this.
This visual imagery in trafficking victimhood is also utilised in other
fora of media and public information exchange. A London march led by
Emma Thompson on 19th September, 2007, involved “mourners” filing
behind a horse drawn hearse, imaging Human Trafficking in pain,
suffering, victimhood and death1. A walk in art installation “Journey” –
which toured capital cities between 2007 and 2008 – invited members of
the public to walk through seven transport containers deploying sensory
stimuli to recreate the violence in sex trafficking. Containers labelled
“Uniform”, “Bedroom” and “Customer” used puppets and props to
graphically portray the brutal abuse of women trafficked for sexual
exploitation. For example, a stained bed alongside one container wall was
piled high with bodies enacting acts of rough sex2. This descriptor of
physical injury resulting from assault or other controlling measures tops
the list of trafficking indicators rolled out to front-line staff by the Home
Office (2013a).
The popularity and power of such VoT descriptions can be both
understood and explained as residing in their ability to connect with
unconditional public sympathy. These victims of human trafficking are
Christie’s (1986) “ideal” crime victims – women so vulnerable, blameless,
unambiguous and uncomplicated as to embody their victim status. This
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ideal and ab
and readily
trafficking.
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Chapter Three 46
with other trafficked (but not physically broken) women and with other
criminally and ethically exploited migrants alike. As Aradau (2004: 262)
explains
“Where their trajectory might have coincided with that of a migrant or
prostitute, suffering is redeeming. Trafficked women are disidentified from
categories of migrants, criminals or prostitutes by the emphasis on raw
physical suffering”.
This powerless, broken and defeated portrayal of the VoT is instrumental
in segregating women who eschew any consent to prostitution from those
choosing to work and remain in the entertainment and sex industries
(Doezema, 1998; 2000; Chapkis, 2005). Diametrically positioned in the
trafficking discourse as the pure “Madonnas” deserving of protection, as
opposed to the guilty “whores” (complicit in sex work and undeserving of
help: Doezema, 1998: 47), these constructs cloud professional judgements
(O’Connell Davidson, 2006) and impact both on VoT identifications
(Kelly, 2002; 2005) and immigration assessments (Chapkis, 2003)3. For
Skeldon (2000), this gendered and powerless embodiment carries an
unintended consequence for men. The emphasis on passivity and
deservability serves to deny a place for men in the trafficking discourse,
since men are typically imagined as agentic beings within global
movements and as less susceptible than women and children to sexual
victimisation and prostitution. This gendered perception of a male absence
in trafficking, particularly for sexual exploitation, is unconsciously
reinforced by men’s reluctance to disclose instances of sexual assault
within sex work (Connell and Hart, 2003) or to express their vulnerability
in forced marriages (Samad, 2010).
This dominant and populist victim imagery is also harnessed by anti-
trafficking campaigns targeting trafficking as modern-day slavery. In line
with the Protocol’s aims of prevention, protection, and promotion of
cooperation among state parties (Article 2) – the “3-P”s for combatting
trafficking crime – awareness campaigns engage the eyes and ears of
actors in civil society to curb the international and domestic trade in
human beings. These campaigns hold merit for disseminating information
regarding the dynamic and fluid nature of human trafficking activity (ILO,
2012). For example, the latest awareness raising campaign (rolled out by
the Home Office in August, 2014, via the media) shows perpetrators
emerging into an everyday situation following their respective roles in
scenes of sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and forced rural
labour4. These scenes reflect evidential concerns for the presence of
trafficking victims in these areas both internationally and within the UK
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Trafficking Identity 47
(Skrivankova, 2006; UNODC, 2009; 2012; UKHTC, 2011; GRETA,
2012; SOCA, 2012). Although it is imperative to recognise that forced
labour and human trafficking are not the same, they overlap when labour
exploitation is the purpose in human trafficking (Skrivankova, 2014: 4).
Under the rhetoric of modern slavery, the exploitations in forced labour
have arguably gained a new lease in public consciousness and social
disapprobation.
The problem with being asked to recognise the signs in contemporary
slavery, however, is that they also rely on indicators describing how we
should perceive this victim in human trafficking. Aside from physical
injury, some of the other indicators in trafficking are:
a woman’s appearance – does she look fearful, depressed or under-
nourished?
her papers – does she have hold of her own passport or work or
marriage visa?
is she able to speak for herself?
is she in contact with friends and family? and
is she escorted to and from her place of work? (HO, 2013a; HO,
2013b; Salvation Army, 2013).
By promoting such official indicators, awareness campaigns reinforce
a subjugated and unagentic view of a trafficked woman, one who is
homogenised in victimhood. As Hitchcox (1993: 157) observes for official
perceptions of asylum seekers, naturalising any diverse social grouping to
a category of persons with identical circumstances, problems and needs
serves as a “process of reification that is inclined to equate the individual
with the state of being a refugee”, or in this instance – a trafficking victim.
Scholars raise particular critiques of this rescue campaign in sex
trafficking precisely because it homogenises trafficked women with
migrant sex workers and conflates sex work with involuntary prostitution
(Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Outshoorn, 2005; Doezema, 2005). For
Agustin (2003), not all movements involving sex are related to trafficking
and need to be explored as a combination of demand for sexual services
and women’s supply of services. A woman’s involvement and response
towards sex services is, in some measure, dependent upon her personal
and sexual identity. Without this subjectivity, anti-trafficking campaigns
run the risk of homogenising and stigmatising women’s diverse
experiences – as an individual, a migrant, or as a worker – in trafficking
victimhood5.
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48
Figure 3-2: P
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Trafficking Identity 49
surfacing solely in the criminal actions of the traffickers – the “doers” of
crime. The “Blue Blindfold” anti-trafficking campaign – launched in 2007
under a Crime Stoppers agenda by the Home Office and Police-led Human
Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) – illustrates this passive victim / criminally
agentic trafficker to good effect. The “Don’t Close Your Eyes to Human
Trafficking” awareness campaign deploys a series of posters, each
featuring members of the public wearing a blue blindfold – symbolising
their obliviousness to the crime of human trafficking taking place in their
communities. The posters deliver a message that the Police require
members of the public to work with them in rescuing victims, who may be
reluctant or too frightened to come forward themselves6. In light of
populist constructions depicting the VoT as totally passive, naive and
enslaved, any knowledge or participation on the part of women in the
trafficking process runs the risk of attracting criminal justice or
immigration sanctions. As Mai (2009: np) suggests:
“Tackling demand as solely criminal and reducing women’s varied
trajectories within global movements (especially for sex work) to a
singular victim narrative, effectively drives women’s agency underground,
creating a hostile environment for the trafficked as well as for the
traffickers”.
This hostile environment for agency carries real consequences for
women seeking a VoT status. In order to gain this status, women have to
enter the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) and pass two tests. The
first “reasonable grounds” test triggers a low level threshold to credibility,
along the lines of “Is this trafficking claim likely to be true”? The second
and conclusive decision rests on a “balance of probabilities” test,
indicating “reasonable likelihood” that trafficking has taken place.
Officially rolled out in the UK on 1st April, 2009, the NRM relies on
caseworkers in two Competent Authorities (CAs) to administer these tests,
in accordance with Article 10 of the Convention on Action Against
Trafficking in Human Beings (CoE, 2005). The Police-led Competent
Authority (the UKHTC) gatekeeps presumed VoTs referred by any agency
other than the UK Border Agency (UKBA), and the UKBA7 acts as the
gatekeeper to presumed trafficked persons appearing in the Immigration
and Asylum systems. A positive reasonable grounds finding, from either
Competent Authority, creates eligibility to state funded support and a 45
day recovery and reflection period, and a positive conclusive decision may
result in an initial one year residence permit (Home Office, 2008: 3). A
negative trafficking decision, again from either CA, results in a person’s
re-referral to their original project for support and could open the
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Chapter Three 50
floodgates to detention and eventual deportation of the unsuccessful
applicant, based on assessments of culpability, criminality and illegality
surrounding entry and activity in the UK (GRETA, 2012).
According to the nearest NRM data for this period of story collection,
referrals received between 1st April, 2009, and 30th June, 2011, totalled
1,664. Of these, 1192 (72%) were female, although it is not stated how
many females were minors. Within this category, 692 females (58.1%) are
recorded as gaining a reasonable grounds decision and 375 (31.5%) as
gaining conclusive grounds. A negative reasonable grounds decision is
recorded against 399 females (33.5%) and a negative conclusive decision
against 180 females (15.1%) referred for protection and help. The
remainder are accounted for as suspensions or withdrawals, or as
undecided or negative outcomes (SOCA, 2011). This dual function of
prosecuting the perpetrators (the doers in trafficking) and rescuing the
sufferers (the done to in trafficking), embedded within some trafficking
awareness campaigns, reaffirms the unagentic victim demeanour contained
in the “doer-sufferer” model of criminal interaction.
New campaign tools, old images?
The introduction of cartoon imagery in anti-trafficking work was
instigated by the Council of Europe to help promote awareness of the
Convention (2005) amongst member States8. Under the “You’re Not for
Sale” campaign, the cartoons depict four stories – Talina; two sisters
named Anna and Sofia (one of whom is a youth; all of whom are
trafficked for sexual exploitation); Fabia (trafficked into domestic
servitude); and Yvo (a male trafficked into rural exploitation). The cartoon
frames shown below portray this iconography in the stories of Talina and
the two sisters named Anna and Sofia9.
Introduced with the goal of extending identifications of trafficking
victims to newer and younger audiences, the use of “visual art” has
become a recognised and established tool for engaging with the hidden
and complex nature of “difficult to reach” and “difficult to tell” narratives
within the Social Sciences. For example, it has been successfully used in
participatory action research with sex workers10. Within asylum and
refugee contexts, art has conveyed the experiences of new asylum arrivals
in the UK (see O’ Neill et al, 2004), and remains instrumental in building
understanding of how refugee women recreate belonging in a new
country11. In comparison, the use of artistic visuals within human
trafficking (as in “Journey” and the Council of Europe cartoons) have been
more conventionally deployed to cascade prevailing messages in
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trafficking,
Amongst sc
and its usag
reproducing
organised cr
Figure 3-3: In
rather than
holars holding
ge in such ca
g standard tra
riminals.
nternet cartoon
Trafficking
to construc
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artoons as Ta
afficking me
“You’re Not fo
Identity
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lina, Anna an
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or Sale” – Talin
wledge of tra
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nd Sophia (be
ex slaves and
na: ©Council of
51
afficking.
the genre
elow) for
d violent
f Europe
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52 Chapter TThree
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Trafficking
Identity 53
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54
Figure 3-4: In
Europe
nternet cartoon
Chapter T
“You’re Not fo
Three
or Sale” – Annaa and Sofia: ©CCouncil of
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Trafficking Identity 55
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56 Chapter TThree
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Trafficking Identity 57
An artistic theatre production “Fair Trade” – an Edinburgh Fringe
Festival show about two women tricked into sexual slavery in the UK – is
similarly critiqued for reinforcing, rather than challenging, prevailing
populist perceptions. According to Fringe Review (2010: np), the case in
sexual victimisation is convincingly made but, in doing so, “Fair Trade”
reduces Elena from Albania and Samai from Darfur (the two central
characters) to “black-and-white caricatures” of the persons they represent.
An awareness raising tour in the state of Florida (2014) provides
further example of this trend and its ongoing popularity. “Walking in their
Footsteps” is designed as an interactive theatre experience in which
audience members are given an identity and taken through the indicative
processes of trafficking – starting with the recruiter and ending in a Border
Police interview. The intention is for ordinary members of the public
(albeit in a controlled way) to experience being trafficked and its negative
effects on their humanity. All of these innovative and creative art works
play a vital role in educating the public on trafficking harms. However, the
new tools are also in danger of re-energising the familiar and unagentic
VoT imagery despite theorisations of contemporary trafficking as a subset
of migration (Andrijasevic, 2003; Agustin, 2005; 2006; Berman, 2010).
Set against this media and campaign backdrop of the “ideal” and “right
sort” of trafficking victim, the next section explores how women in this
collection identify themselves.
Women’s sense of a trafficked self
The women in this study display an awareness of having been
trafficked. Most refer to themselves as “victims” and when asked if they
have been trafficked, the majority say “yes”. This process of self-
identification suggests women own a sense of their trafficked selves. For
many women, this self-awareness hails from a specific event and
corresponds with trafficking indicators within official guidelines and
toolkits. One of the top ways women describe a victim of trafficking
identity is through the loss of visas and passports. Laila – who was forcibly
taken out of the UK to Pakistan – communicates her sense of a trafficking
self in this way:
“I had to stay there [Pakistan] and was told after about 3 to 4 months that if
I didn’t get married, I wouldn’t be able to return to the UK. I had my
passport taken away from me so I couldn’t prove who I was… He knew
from day one I didn’t wanna marry him. Mmm, he knew that very well and
I even spoke to him before, without anyone knowing, I said I don’t want to
marry you, please, you know, if anyone can stop it, at least maybe the guy
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Chapter Three 58
has a say, the girl doesn’t, no! But he wanted to come to the UK, didn’t he,
and I was his passport”. (Laila)
Nina – who is deceived into a fake marriage within the home and
exploited for labour outside of the home – comes to a similar realisation of
her trafficked self through the removal of her papers:
“My mother-in-law just told me pack my luggage, go with them to the
airport and when I came to Heathrow, my British husband and his brother
and his sister came to met me and when I got my bags I just get in car. My
sister-in-law say where your passport? I was really shocked and I give it to
her – I was thinking what happen to my mum and dad. When I arrived, my
mother-in-law say same thing, where is your passport? You know, now I
know, this is really important. At that time, I didn’t realise how much,
what it means to give over your passport…to give away who you are”.
(Nina)
Another way women self-identify as trafficked is through one of the
three processes defining trafficking – “movement; by means of threat or
use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, or fraud, of
deception, of the abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability or of the
giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a
person; for exploitation” (UN, 2000a: Article 3). For Sofia, her sense of
being a victim of trafficking stems from the fraudulent transactions
marking her debt bondage:
“My friend had managed to get a passport and she introduced me to these
people. It was explained that I would go to Brussels and meet a Lithuanian
woman who would provide me with a passport. I had to pay so much up
front for the passport – about 500.00 euro. I arrived in Brussels and my
expectation was to have work in a hotel, where I would get a wage to send
money [remittances] to my family back home. This [working abroad] was
meant to be temporary… but from starting, travelling across Europe, to
arrival in the UK – it took almost a year! I hadn’t the money to pay for this
travel, my food, or accommodation”. (Sofia)
Cemile’s sense of a trafficked self is located in the deception and
abuses of power surrounding her vulnerability within transnational
marriage:
“I told him before marriage the kind of woman I am. I was honest and open
with him. I can do this, this and this, but I can’t do this, this and this. And I
got my visa after 3 months and travelled here [to the UK] with my box
[luggage]. I was worried at the time because I was alone. Your husband
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Trafficking Identity 59
knows everywhere and everything and you don’t know anything. It was
bad from the beginning. I tried to excuse and keep waiting…but I don’t
know what he was like in his first marriage. He married a British woman
and she left him for another man. I think I am paying the bill [the price] for
that. I had a shock”! (Cemile)
Another descriptor used by women to self-identify as a VoT is that of
slavery – “modern day” and “sex” slave. During interview, many women
apply the language of slavery to themselves. For example, Aarti refers to
herself as a “modern slave”, Tamara as “a victim of human slavery”, Laila
as having been “held in slavery”, Nina as having been “treated as a slave”
and Fatuma uses the term “prostitute slave”. Several women in the focus
group refer to living and working in conditions akin to a “slave”. In
describing their experiences, women use recognised “slavery-like
practices” of not being paid for their labour, having little say in decision
making, having their movements curtailed, and generally lacking control
over their own lives (Bales, 2005).
Such appropriation of a recognised benchmark – be it a trafficking
indicator, a process constitutive of trafficking, or a slavery descriptor –
poses an interpretational challenge for women’s agency. Their usage
suggests women are clearly aware of trafficking talk as configured by the
State and rehearsed through media and public campaigns, and of its capital
for accessing trafficking help. Slavery identifications in particular
highlight the power of victim constructions despite evidential challenges
to the contrary12. Significantly, the vast majority of women in this
collection do not apply known identifiers to demonstrate their fit with the
“ideal” victim (one who is physically broken); the “right sort” of victim
(one who is totally passive); or with slavery per se (defined as “total
control of one person by another for economic exploitation”: Bales, 1999:
6). Women’s usage can be traced to two specific dynamics considered
below.
Firstly, women’s deeply moving and disturbing identifications with
known trafficking indicators and descriptors proves helpful in conveying a
sense of their trafficked selves to the interviewer. This becomes clear in
their use of introductory phrases like: “If I say to you that…” and “if I
show myself as…” then the interviewer (the outsider within) would be able
to understand their personal and often painful stories. Using the example
of slavery, women draw on available knowledge to help them make sense
of what has happened to them, and to convey this subjective awareness to
others. Fatuma uses the term “prostitute slave” to express her sense of
being trafficked into sexual exploitation:
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Chapter Three 60
“He was keeping me in a flat for sex, anytime he just wants me, he just
come to me and give me those £40.00 and calling me a wife – that’s not a
wife! It’s like he just want to sexually dominate me because he know my
background and that I can never go back. I trusted him, to be with him and,
in the beginning, he used me as a prostitute slave in the marriage, and soon
he kept me as a prostitute slave for sell to his friends”. (Fatuma)
Secondly, many women use the language of slavery in relation to
unfulfilled personal hopes and dreams and not as relative to slavery-like,
“ideal”, or “right sort” of victim properties. Fatuma’s description of
herself in the language and imagery of sexual slavery is measured
against her pre-trafficking aspirations for independence via a second
marriage based on Western ideals of love and friendship. This had been
promised to her by her trafficker (the man she referred to as her second
husband).
“Reason for coming to this country was marriage and, as part of that
marriage, I was promised my dreams would come true and I would have a
good life and be safe… When we came, we were in a flat and he said to me,
if anyone asks you, you say you are my wife. He didn’t give me my
passport. He was keeping it. He said I have to hold it for you as I am now
your guardian [responsible for you]. All these things, you know if your
husband tells you, you tend to believe them and you want to make life
smoother and not harder for yourself. I trusted him then… It was like a
bombshell in my face! They just come to you in the middle of the night.
There is no life, no love. I have no opinion to speak. I would call it slavery
in this life”. (Fatuma)
Nina draws her comparison with slavery against expressed hopes and
promises received of a better lifestyle, both for herself and her family back
home.
“I speak to my mother-in-law and she say, ok, when you come over [to the
UK], you can learn English, we can help you. My mother-in-law say, do
you want to send money to your parents? [in the form of remittances to
family back home in India]… They sent me to work in a factory for sewing,
eight till six. My husband take me to the temple to learn English and, after
2 weeks, my mother-in-law stopped this. She said you make friends; you
have no time to do the housework after temple, blah, blah, blah! I lived to
work (cries)…They treat me just like a slave”. (Nina)
Aarti’s perception of herself as a “modern slave” is fostered and
measured against her pre-trafficking hopes of furthering her social status
through marriage to an educated and Western male. Aarti, who holds a
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Trafficking Identity 61
doctorate in organic chemistry, explains:
“I wanted to marry a professional who would give me a decent life, that’s
all. My family, like his, has a sound background. His father was a highly
posted engineer in Boeing – a very big company – and his mother, a child
psychiatrist. All Western educated… I was told by my teachers that the
biggest asset I could have in life was my education – it’s the real treasure.
This asset, and everything that goes with it, has been snatched away from
me and I feel this sense of loss for my identity. When a woman has no
education, she is helped. But when a woman with education can’t make it,
people think she is useless, a failure. Now I work like a modern slave and
my family ask me, Aarti, what did we not do?” (Aarti)
Whilst all of the experiences above illustrate victimisation and
exploitation, women’s hopes and dreams challenge popular and official
conceptualisations of a VoT as someone forcibly removed, singularly
passive, and physically brutalised. Women’s aspirations share little in
common with Bales’ (1999) representation of the “new slave” as someone
wholly subjugated and without choice. If anything, women’s identifications of
being trafficked display a closer affinity with trafficking, as a subcategory
of global migration, in which choices can quickly go wrong and
movements have the potential to separate from expectation and turn bad
(Agustin, 2006). In voicing the variables that lead them to accept a victim
label, these women empower themselves against falling into the reification
trap of being only a victim of trafficking, and a passive, enslaved, and
physically defeated VoT at that, “and little else” (Hitchcox,1993: 157).
Women’s pre-trafficking persona
Women with a trafficking experience face challenges to their personal
identities on another front. Not only do women face being placed into the
homogenised grouping of a VoT, but this reduction threatens to strip
women of a real and enduring sense of who they are – before and outside
of their trafficking experience. In the same way that women possess a
sense of their trafficked selves, women in this collection also maintain a
pre-trafficking persona, which they communicate in a variety of ways.
One way women display their pre-trafficking persona is by identifying
themselves through the jobs they performed pre-trafficking. Sofia, for
example, sees herself as a professional health worker, albeit one struggling
to find opportunities of practicing radiography under Moldova’s
crumbling hospital infrastructure. As her case holder explains:
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“It took 5 years to gain this Diploma, which she got just as things started to
break down in the Balkans. One of the hospitals in her capital city had just
closed and was not taking any new trainees and the second closed down for
lack of equipment. The door on her career was just about closed…she
needed to re-invent herself as a radiographer elsewhere”. (GEO 5)
Tamara describes herself to me, before being trafficked, in the detail of
her occupation as a bridal dress designer, and Luul defines herself as a
skilled labourer. Luul’s personal identification is one she continues to
make for herself both during her movement and after her classification by
UK Immigration authorities as an asylum seeker.
“During my journey from Somalia to Nairobi, I was given work making
mink blankets. This work is difficult to come by and do, and not everyone
can do it. It’s skilled unlike factory or farm work which needs manual
workers. Now I work as a volunteer for [a named voluntary agency] who
need someone with my sort of skills”. (Luul)
For other women in this collection, who they are is fashioned in their
pre-trafficking achievements; most commonly expressed in educational,
travel and life experiences outside of their local districts and / or countries
of origin.
“I am highly educated. I am a person with three degrees – a Bachelor of
Science (combined chemistry, botany, zoology), a Master of Science in
physical chemistry, and a PhD in organic chemistry. So I started teaching
in a school… I was very happy”. (Aarti)
“We are all artists. Mother teach art to students preparing for University in
Istanbul. One sister is a painter, another – an interior designer. I dance. My
father always say: why nobody takes his side as he is a musician!”
(Cemile)
Further on in her interview, Cemile adds:
“I am a folk dancer in my country and was dancing professional for eight
years and with my folk dance company, we travelled most of my country
during summer. Invited for dance festivals, we visited many other
countries – it was very cultural life”. (Cemile)
Still other women draw meaning for their pre-trafficked personas from
their role and responsibilities within the family. As Surtees (2003) and
Bales (2003) note, many Asian cultures impose a gendered role
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Trafficking Identity 63
expectation upon female children – wherein daughters repay a debt of
gratitude to mothers for having brought them up. Nina accepts this dutiful
daughter identity and feels its impact in her mother’s attempts to trade her
for marriage and work abroad. Sofia – motivated more from a sense of
moral duty rather than cultural expectations – also identifies herself
through her obligations to her family. From her position as the family’s
strongest provider, her caseworker describes Sofia’s moral responsibilities
to her family in this way:
“Her current stress is born from a person wondering how she will be able
to repay her family…The family struggled to put her through University,
where she trained to be a radiographer. She now faces unemployment
when deported, at a time when her mother is seriously ill with cancer”.
(GEO 5)
A woman’s pre-trafficking persona is also helpful for understanding
women’s holistic and complex appreciation of identity. In Sofia’s case, her
pre-trafficking persona is fully conveyed as a combination of three
elements: professional health worker, dutiful daughter, and primary
provider. Likewise, Luul’s sense of her pre-trafficked persona is defined
by her abilities as a skilled labourer, but also through her relationship as a
mother to her three-year-old daughter. Tamara, too, defines her sense of
self outside trafficking as a bridal designer and as the mother of three
young children. This is not to suggest that all individuals with a trafficking
experience escape a life lived in victimhood. Where someone is trafficked
from a very young age and many times over, there is little possibility of
developing a sense of self outside of trafficking. This is relevant to
Tijana’s story. As someone orphaned at age two, used as a child labourer
to sell food on street corners by age eight, trafficked from Nigeria to Italy
for prostitution at thirteen, and re trafficked to the UK in her early
twenties, it is impossible to gain any impression of Tijana outside of a
victim of trafficking identity. Tijana’s story corresponds with the extreme
end of trafficking rooted in criminal victimisation and exploitation.
In stark contrast nowhere is identity – as situated in the pre-trafficking
persona – stronger and more transparent than in the focus group. The focus
group women maintain and communicate a keen sense of their pre-
trafficking personas in two significant ways. One of these is through the
preparation and production of ethnic dishes and cuisine (which
supplemented the formal buffet donated by a charity). In keeping with
Lewis’ (2007) ethnographic findings for UK asylum seekers and refugees,
tasting a favourite cake or type of bread, especially one made with the
correct spices, flour or fruit, reconnects women with events and roles lived
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Chapter Three 64
outside of trafficking. The bringing of parathas (Indian flat bread), loubia
(an Algerian bean and almond salad), bishbosa (a Sudanese semolina
cake) and many more food items act as powerful and tangible reminders of
life back home. By keeping culinary cultural traditions alive in this way,
the focus group women are able to sustain and nourish vivid memories of
a pre-trafficking persona. The other very tangible way of connecting to life
outside of trafficking is through ethnic dress. Women turned up for the
focus group wearing saris (traditional Indian dress), hijabs (a Muslim
headscarf which covers the head and neck but leaves the face free) and a
mussor (a Gambian head dress cut from vividly dyed cloth). Such
practices serve to tie women to life pre-trafficking, and to ascribe it
meaning drawn from cultural identity and traditions forged in their pre-
trafficking memories. As Buijs (1993: 3) observes for female migrants and
exiles:
“It is the already lived that saves the living. If familiar places are
sometimes able to leave us, they are also able to come back to our notice,
and to our great comfort, to retake their original place”. (Buijs’ translation
of Poulet, 1983: 163)
In her research on refugee communities, Lewis (2007: 119) observes a
place for food in creating a safe and positive sense of community amongst
refugees dispersed to unfamiliar and often hostile environments:
“Sharing food was an area where community was constructed as practice –
actualised in social relations rather than imagined. In comparison to the
contested domain of RCO [Refugee Community Organisation] discourse,
eating together was a practice where communality precluded contestation,
adopting the “feel-good” factor of community”.
In much the same way, a focus group setting – offering women greater
ownership of the interview process coupled with the aforementioned
tangible and powerful factors of food and dress – forged the focus group
into a safe communal space. From a position of collective strength, the
focus group women act as supports and prompts for each other,
encouraging the extent of their entrepreneurial abilities and talents to
surface. This reveals women in pre-trafficking personas not typically
shared by others outside the safety of the focus group. Several focus group
members witnessed to being “grey market” traders (sellers on the fringes
of illegal trading), others to being a sex worker, a self-taught midwife, and
a distiller of homemade spirits. In the shared safety of the focus group
community, women are able to recall private and transgressive memories
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Trafficking Identity 65
of their past and of home. In this uncontested domain away from external
sanctions, women appear freer and happier to define themselves outside of
gendered and tradition-bound roles of dependency and respectability.
The gains and losses in a victim narrative
So why do women so readily express their stories of trafficking
through the victim narrative? This section goes on to explore this question.
Kleinman and Kleinman (1997: 9-10) explain the effects that
successful media and campaign constructions have upon policy issues they
seek to expose and redress in this way:
“When those whose suffering is appropriated by the media cross over to
places of refuge and safety, they often must submit to yet another type of
aggregation. Their memories (their intimately interior images) of violation
are made over into trauma stories. These trauma stories then become the
currency, the symbolic capital, with which they enter exchanges for
physical resources and achieve the status of political refugee. Increasingly,
those complicated stories, based in real events, yet reduced to a core
cultural image of victimization (a postmodern hallmark), are used by health
professionals to rewrite social experience in medical terms”.
Applied to a trafficking context, all women with a trafficking experience
possess their own personal trauma story, often individually couched in
terms of loss, exploitation, deception, violence, captivity, and fear.
Potentially, all these women (as well as their supporting organisations)
have the ability to derive some benefit from a trauma story. Taylor (1999)
locates this benefit in consumerism, since victims have the power to be
both patrons and producers of victim services. Anti-trafficking
professionals openly acknowledge this, often referring to their work as a
“business” (Senior GEO 3), as “stakeholder rich” (Senior GEO 2) and as
providers in a “service intense” economy (NGO Project manager).
Criminologists outside of trafficking also note the gains for female
offenders in complying with a victim identity (Williams, 2004; Davies,
2007). In amongst them are the benefits of sympathetic treatment, more
lenient penalties, women orientated community programmes, and an
approach to policy development which is gender friendly and “needs-led”.
For women with a trafficking experience, the Kleinmans’ trauma story
converts into a “currency” qualifying her to access state controlled
protection and trafficking assistance. As internationally prescribed and
NRM regulated, these protections take three vital forms. Firstly, as a
presumed-trafficked person, victims of trafficking gain access to state
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Chapter Three 66
funded and specialist VoT services. At a minimum, these include access to
safe accommodation and a basic standard of living, emergency medical
treatment, translation and interpretation services, counselling and rights
based information, legal help, and education for children (CoE, 2005:
12.1). Secondly, it provides women with a minimum reflection period of
30 days and a 6 month temporary residence order, raised by the UK
Action Plan to 45 days and 12 months respectively for UK victims of
trafficking (Home Office, 2008: 3; 2009b: 50). Thirdly, under UK
ratification of the Convention in December, 2008, women are given the
safeguard that, whatever their immigration status at the point of discovery,
women will not be deported before a conclusive outcome has been
reached:
“…if the competent authorities have reasonable grounds to believe that a
person has been a victim of trafficking in human beings, that person shall
not be removed from its territory until the identification process as victim
[as defined by the Protocol] has been completed by the competent
authorities and shall likewise ensure that that person receives the assistance
provided for in Article 12, paragraphs 1 and 2” (CoE, 2005: Article10.2)13.
In welcoming the introduction of the NRM, senior GEOs responsible
for its implementation and GEOs involved in its day to day running voiced
a similar hope that these protective measures would dispel traffickers’
threats (as illustrated in Tamara’s interview) that rescue brings certain
imprisonment.
“When I was here in this country, they [the traffickers] told me for three to
five years, I would be in jail because I come here illegally. That’s what I
knew. That people like me would get beaten up in jails and die”. (Tamara)
Whilst the telling of a trauma story affords women access to much
needed safeguards and services, some women (and their supporting
agencies) highlight the constraints contained within it for agency. A
central and negative complaint for the trauma story is its impact on
autonomy. In submitting to any formal process offering protection
(whether pre or post introduction of the NRM), women give consent to
external decision makers, who form opinions on the credibility of their
stories and on their status as VoTs. In describing their interviews with
official gatekeepers (typically the Police, immigration case holders, Police
doctors, health visitors, and social workers) women say they cannot be
themselves or properly tell their stories for fear of giving decision makers
the wrong impression. Women describe this loss of self-determination as
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Trafficking Identity 67
trading the constraints of traffickers for a fresh set of controls at the hands
of official actors, leaving them feeling equally “scared”, “on my own”,
“very lonely”, “tricked” and “betrayed”. This loss of autonomy to an
external body, as in the NRM, is equally bemoaned by previously
independent providers of services for these women.
“When we first started off, it was our decision who we took and supported
from referrals made directly to us…Our agenda reflected our experience of
trafficking – that, in itself, limits the kind of input we can contribute to
policy development… Now our funding is such that women have to
become part of the NRM, if they want the chance to be supported by us as
a key refuge service for trafficked women”. (NGO Project manager)
The importance women ascribe to re-gaining control is evidenced in
Luul’s story. As someone smuggled into trafficking, Luul has a choice
between applying for a VoT status and seeking asylum. Luul chose asylum
based on the agency it imbues to the actions of an exiled person compared
to the victim of trafficking. In light of all she had already lost of her
identity and life in Somalia, regaining some measure of control over her
actions was critical to her overall well-being – a factor widely
acknowledged in migration literature on exiled women (Eastmond, 1993;
Tribe, 2002; Khan and Watson, 2005).
The criticality in reclaiming control is complemented in NGO accounts
of why some trafficked women refuse a referral to the NRM despite the
help on offer.
“The impact of being a victim in the NRM is that, once more, women’s
lives are again in someone else’s hands”. (NGO Project manager)
“There is a complex response from women to this whole idea of being
identified as a victim. If you submit to the label you get services which go
with the categorisation. But, we’ve seen survivors here who never want to
talk about it again, want to move out in to the community and don’t want
anything special or different to mainstream services. They just want to
control their own lives again. It’s about letting women choose. That’s what
we try to do here”. (NGO Support worker)14
Scholars highlight additional concerns in embracing the victim
narrative. For Davies (2007: 187), this caution resides in its capacity to
reproduce “prescriptive notions”, as in pre-existing and gendered
stereotypes of a victim. Although Davies directs this warning towards
women’s own use of a victim narrative, it also has poignancy for the way
professionals apply a victim narrative to the identification of trafficked
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Chapter Three 68
women. Tamara’s first encounter with UK police provides an example of
the dangers inherent in prescriptive notions of a sex trafficked VoT.
Reflecting back on her personal memory, Tamara adds the following
valuable insight on her misidentification:
“They never asked me what I think. Only told me what they think!
Eventually, they let me go. Told me to go to Home Office for asylum! Told
me there was no reason to keep me. I think they saw me walk into the
police station on my own, dressed for sex, and thought I was foreign
prostitute… I never made it to go [to the Home Office]. As soon as I leave
police station, I was found by men and returned to my owner [trafficker].
The police knew nothing”. (Tamara)
This particular prescription is sustained by the ongoing moral rift
between prostitution as violence against women (Jeffreys, 1997) and sex
as legitimate work with rights to health and safety, including union
protection (Doezema, 2005; Lopes, 2006)15. As previously raised, on one
side of this rift, trafficked women eschewing any consent to prostitution
become “Madonnas”- innocent of blame and worthy of trafficking
protection and support. On the other, trafficked migrants – often sex
workers in their country of origin and with no design to exit prostitution –
become the guilty and undeserving “whores” in trafficking-related
assessments and provision (Doezema, 1998: 47). Since selling sex is
illegal in the UK (Sanders and Campbell, 2007; Home Office, 2011a),
VoTs face questioning and sanctions over their consent in prostitution
related activity (as happens when victims are discovered during raids on
brothels and massage parlors). The new strict liability offence of
purchasing sex from a trafficked woman does not assist in de-constructing
this deserving / undeserving victim prescription. Introduced under the
Policing and Crime Act (2009: 1416), “paying for the sexual services of a
prostitute subjected to force” is a strict liability offence ensuring clients
will be prosecuted even if unaware that the woman has been made to
perform sex. The lack of distinction drawn between trafficking for sexual
exploitation and migrant sex work homogenises all women viewed as
choosing sex work and all men who purchase sexual services as equally
deviant and culpable for the consequences.
Kelly (2002), Bales (2003) and Brennan (2005) raise a further danger
specific to trafficked women from publicly voicing a victim narrative.
Once again, this danger arises from public misconceptions over sexual
exploitation, sex work and prostitution, which create dilemmas for
trafficked women. On the one hand, remaining silent precludes women
from sharing their victimisation in the public domain, reproducing old
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Trafficking Identity 69
patterns of keeping “men’s secrets” in domestic violence and sexual
assault. On the other hand, opening women’s sexual exploitation to public
scrutiny may endanger their reputation and lives in cultures operating
strict moral and sexual codes. Brennan suggests such dilemmas demarcate
community as a contested space in which responses reflect moral attitudes
towards prostitution and personal decision making.
“Although similarities emerge between refugees and trafficked persons…
groups often diverge on the issue of community support. Trauma
counsellors who work with trafficked persons in the United States report
that the larger community of immigrants where trafficked persons settle
(usually composed of co-ethnics) often stigmatizes and rejects trafficked
persons” (Brennan, 2005: 42-43)17.
Interestingly, stories in this collection show aspects both of
confirmation and challenge for a contested community. Although Tamara’s
story presents a perfect fit with text book understandings of sex trafficking,
and despite recognising her own experience as trafficking, Tamara chooses
not to identify herself publicly as a VoT. Tamara prefers a range of other
terms to describe her situation. Primary amongst these are “bondage”,
“debt bondage”, being “bought and sold on” and a “victim of human
slavery”. Tamara explains that her preference for terms other than
trafficking are connected to her first experience in a UK police station
(raised above) and to the backlash she fears from Ukrainian state officials
from carrying a label of trafficked for sexual exploitation. Principally,
Tamara is fearful that any connection with prostitution or sex work will
harm her application to remove her children from State care back home.
Tamara’s fear of disapproval is similarly echoed by women trafficked
for marriage. When placed in a safe house after escaping her forced
marriage, Laila reports being ostracised from the supportive networks
traditionally available to other Muslim women. Samad and Eade (2003)
and Samad (2010) ascribe BME communities’ suspicions of any outsider
interest in forced marriages (whether by government, media, organisations
or research) to a number of factors. One of these is mistrust of cultural
difference, which fosters racial and orientalist stereotypes of facilitated or
arranged marriage practices as singularly forced. Another relates to the
rise in Islamophobia, wherein negative cultural traditions, as in honour
killings, are wrongly associated with the religious practice of Islam. A
further important factor concerns the politicization of transnational brides
and forced marriage in the discourse of immigration (Hester et al, 2008).
According to Samad and Eade (2003:100) the collective effect of such
factors is “a legacy of suspicion”, wherein “relatively uninfluential” co-
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Chapter Three 70
ethnic communities close ranks over topics they regard as delicate and
sensitive.
Aarti’s sense of exclusion is so strong, that she prefers to tough it out
rather than return home to India in defeat.
“I did not want to go back at the time, I must say. I didn’t want to go back
because I would have been stigmatised. People would know (I come from
a big family. I have 25 cousins) and I am the only one divorced. And still
my extended family doesn’t know I’m divorced. It was a shame for me to
go back. And my family were saying to me, you are bringing shame on us.
We cannot tell people you are divorced”. (Aarti)
Several anti-trafficking professionals support women’s fears of a poor
reception by co-ethnic communities, explaining the reasons for their
rejection as attracting “unwanted interference”, “bringing shame on
communities” and “tarring everybody with the same brush”. The fear of a
community backlash is such that, in addition to operating a strict vetting of
interpreters, most participating organisations are now refusing to
accommodate a women’s own choice of translator.
“Interpreters are a really difficult one and many agencies lack a budget for
this. I used to ask women if there is an interpreter she really likes, but now
I don’t take this at face value. She may not have thought through what the
consequences of that might be for people getting to her, by going through
the community and putting pressure on the interpreter”. (NGO Information
officer)
Other women, by comparison, had very positive things to say about
their neighbours, both co-ethnic and indigenous of the local community.
Below are some examples given by SSI and Focus Group women of
neighbours helping them flee abuse and exploitation and find new homes:
“When my daughter was 16 -17 month old, an Indian neighbour, she asked
me if I was alright and she told me my mother-in-law planning to send me
back to India and keep my daughter here. She said where your passport? I
say I don’t have my passport. What about your visa. I say I don’t know
anything about that. She said, then I could be sent back and my daughter
kept here. I cry. And this neighbour, she told me about place I could run
away to. She told me they could help me”. (Nina)
“I waited for my son’s first birthday. Then an Indian woman, who used to
baby sit with me, took me in her car… We found a one bedroom bedsit
with a shared bathroom and she helped me with everything, so I could
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Trafficking Identity 71
move in”. (Focus group member)
“I was too scared to go to anyone for help. I was so scared. Then one of my
[British] neighbours helped me, erm, she took me to a woman’s refuge….I
was frightened to leave everything I knew behind, but I felt I needed to do
this or my life would be ruined and that of my daughter”. (Focus group
member)
“I’d be lying if I said I’d done it all on my own. My [British] neighbour
and me, we became friends. I was very depressed at the time and she was a
rock to me”. (Luul)
Professional actions
This chapter closes by exploring two ways in which anti-trafficking
professionals mediate the dual process of having to protect women and vet
their potential in criminal justice proceedings. This is no way diminishes
professional conviction and support for the effective investigation and
prosecution of traffickers (CoE, 2005: 1), particularly salient for senior
GEOs in this collection.
“First and foremost, trafficking is a crime”. (Senior GEO 1)
“If you really have been trafficked, you’ve got information to give to the
Police. If you’re going to act as a witness, brilliant, we want you to stay
here and I make no apology for that, because part of the reason for all these
[trafficking] arrangements is to increase the risk to traffickers. And one
way of doing that is by securing cooperation from their victims. It’s not
just about prosecutions. It’s also about securing the intelligence that
improves our knowledge of what they’re doing, so that we can disrupt their
activity or prevent the activity. So it is useful to have that”. (Senior GEO 2)
However, as Hunt (2008: 290) observes for actors in the asylum process,
all agents possess the human agency to bring about “some independent
effects” by their participation in the process. In this collection, GEOs
cushion women against the effects of the Criminal Justice System by “job
crafting”, which is outsourcing to staff holding specific skill sets. This is
viewed as positive and desirable in terms of fulfilling the trafficking brief,
as illustrated by citing the same two professionals above:
“The CPS has also greatly improved on the ways in which women should
give their evidence in Court and to the non-punishment clause governing
the content of their evidence. Women have a full say within the Victim
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Chapter Three 72
Personal Statements they give and they’re provided with support in doing
this from the partnership agencies”. (Senior GEO 1)
“It’s been really interesting, really rewarding to engage with such a diverse
field of people and use that sort of tension between those different views to
help develop skills and policy. That’s been a really positive thing…There
was massive suspicion before. It’s frustrating that they [NGO groups] still
criticise us, but it’s all part of that good tension I referred to earlier on”.
(Senior GEO 2)
A further way in which anti-trafficking professionals soften the
intelligence gathering aspect of their brief is by actively engaging with
difference. This is especially visible in the actions of professionals with a
partnership remit. Partnership professionals appreciate how austerity
measures detract from the human face of suffering. Partner C – who liaises
with Civic and Faith leaders – explains how partnerships negotiate this
tension in very practical ways, for example, by sourcing ethnic musicians
and dancers for fundraisers. Another way of mitigating women’s
experience of institutional oppression is by supporting migrant businesses
when catering for meetings. For example, a Turkish café owner is hired to
cater at several community consultation meetings with new arrivals.
Whilst such practices can be accused of an uncomfortable tokenism,
professional explanation for these practices reflects commonality with the
views of women.
“A Human Rights approach in trafficking provides for the basics – safety,
clothing and food – but food is more than mere survival. It’s about giving
the exploited and displaced their cultural values and traditions back; a
sense of self-worth; and ultimately restoring that person’s well-being”.
(Partner C: liaising with Civic and Faith Leaders)
Chapter summary
This chapter has centrally addressed aspects pertinent for
understanding women’s lived experience of identity in a trafficking
context. The chapter argues how dominant and populist constructions of
the trafficking victim are ones singularly lacking in agency. Significantly,
the women in this collection regard themselves as victims, though not for
reasons suggested in dominant discourses, and challenge agency and
victimisation as mutually exclusive states of being and feeling. This co-
existence of autonomy and victimisation brings problem for the trauma
story – women’s gateway to state protection and services – and can turn
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Trafficking Identity 73
communities into contested spaces for women with experience of
prostitution and sexual exploitation. Professional responses which enhance
women’s well-being freedom recognise the individuality of a woman’s
trafficking experience and the need for connections to life pre-trafficking.
Having explored aspects of agency in women’s formal and subjective
identification as VoTs, the next chapter moves to examine questions of
agency in the decision making surrounding women’s journeys and
experiences.
Notes
1 Coverage of this march appeared in the Metro Newspaper on 19th September, 2007.
2 “Journey” is the creation of actress Emma Thompson and activist Sam Roddick and
is designed to highlight the work of the Helen Bamber Foundation in supporting
survivors of cruelty. Each container is individually designed by an artist; amongst
them – production designer: Michael Howells; costume designer: Sandy Powell;
and Turner Prize sculptor: Anish Kapoor.
3 For wider discussion of border criminology, see Bosworth (2007) and Aas and
Bosworth (2013). For borders and citizenship, see Aronowitz (2003) and
Andrijasevic (2010).
4 To access this campaign, go to:
https://modernslavery.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQjw06GfBRCR9tDI4t6n5_MBEiQAFo6
kuJ4NZWFACSjuQTaOmw73LecQbSIA9lshkrqzO7h2gasaAgRh8P8HAQ#home
(accessed 11.08.2014).
5 For wider discussion see Agustin (2007) Sex at the Margins. Migration, Labour
Markets and the Rescue Industry. London and New York: Zed books.
6 To access the current version of the Blue Blindfold Campaign, go to
http://jmfinalproject.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/current-campaigns-the-blue-
blindfold/ (accessed 12.08.2014).
7 Now – UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) and Immigration Enforcement.
8 The Convention is now in force in 42 States. For full details on membership go
to:
http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT=197&CM=8&DF
=13/08/2014&CL=ENG (accessed 13.08.2014).
9 To access full coverage of all stories, go to:
http://www.coe.int/t/dg2/trafficking/comics/Source/notforsale_en_x1a
(accessed 15.08.2014).
10 Images of the art work were displayed at the New Art Gallery in Walsall (UK) in
2001. To access the exhibition, go to:
http://www.http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/art_and_design/safetysoapbox/
(accessed 15.08.2014).
11 To access the “Towards a Sense of Belonging” exhibition launched in 2009 and
shown in the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester (UK), go to:
EBSCOhost – printed on 2/15/2022 9:15 PM via COLORADO COMMUNITY COLLEGE ONLINE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
Chapter Three 74
http://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2009/jan/13/sense-of-belonging-
exhibition?picture=341562670 (accessed 15 August 2014).
12 See O’Connell Davidson’s letter to the Guardian (Sex Slaves and the Reality of
Prostitution, 28th December, 2007) and Davies’ report for the Guardian (Inquiry
Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody into Prostitution, 20th
October, 2009).
13 For an evaluation of UK performance in the aforementioned areas of responsibility,
see the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group (2010) Report and GRETA (2012),
which review the UK’s delivery of protections for victims.
14 Brunovskis and Surtees (2007; 2010) provide an additional perspective on
women’s disengagement. They link women’s refusal of victim assistance to the
presence of positive family support and relationships.
15 See also the Global Alliance Against Trafficking (GAATW) website:
www.gaatw.org (accessed 15 May 2015).
16 To access the Act, go to: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/26/contents
(accessed 18 June 2015).
17 As previously stated, co-ethnics refer to persons of the same ethnicity. Given the
stigma attached to trafficking for sexual exploitation and / or prostitution, co-ethnic
migrants and refugees often disassociate themselves from trafficked co-ethnics.
EBSCOhost – printed on 2/15/2022 9:15 PM via COLORADO COMMUNITY COLLEGE ONLINE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
<
p
>Module
2 Discussi
on
2
:
Source Ev
a
luation
an
d Comparison
In
research writing
,
you
r
own credibility rests on
the
credibility
of
the
sources
you consult
.
If you use unreliab
le research,
your
own writing
will be viewed as unreliable. In this discussion, you will
ev
aluate sources
for
your research.
You should spend
approximately 3 hours on this assignment.
Instructions
1.
Research the same topic you began researching in Discussion
1.
Access the
CCCOnline
Library
Databases
,
and search for
two
sources with differing perspectives on your chosen
topic that you
believe will be useful to your research project. (You may use
sources from your Source Scavenger Hunt.)
I already
attached
them so
don’t
worry about findin
g them!
2.
Think
:
Use
the resources from the
Exploration
p
age
to help you
ev
aluate
each
source.
Use the
CRAAP
test
.
3.
Write
: In your
initial
post,
write
a
short
evaluation
paragraph
for each source.
Then,
write an
additional
paragraph
where
you
compare
the two sources
based
on your
evaluations
of the
sources.
4.
Include a
correctly formatted
Works
Cited
entry for each source.
Need help with
MLA
? Please refer to the
CCCOnline MLA
Citation
Toolkit
, or consult the Purdue OWL for how to create a
correctly formatted
MLA Works Cited page
.
5.
Post one original post, and
reply to at least two of your
classmates. In your replies to peers, compare your evaluations on
your chosen
sources.
Discuss your findings and what elements
you consider most
importa
nt in a source. Discuss why it is
importa
nt to pay attention to the credibility of your sources. Try
to further the discussion in your replies by asking thoughtful
questions, adding interesting information, or connecting your reply to the material we are discussing.
6. Don’t forget that your initial posting is due by the date listed in the Course Schedule. Please post over several days. Points will be lost if you post on only one day of the module.
See the Course Schedule and Course Rubrics sections in the Syllabus module for due dates and grading information. See the Grading and Evaluation section in the Syllabus module for general discussion expectations.
Sources will Be attached!!!
Respond to 2 Peers:
Peer 1:
Module 2 Discussion 2: Source Evaluation
and Comparison
In research writing, your own credibility rests on the credibility of the
sources you consult. If you use unreliab
le research, your own writing
will be viewed as unreliable. In this discussion, you will evaluate sources
for your research.
You should spend
approximately 3 hours on this assignment.
Instructions
1.
Research the same topic you began researching in Discussion
1.
Access the
CCCOnline
Library
Databases
,
and search for two
sources with differing perspectives on your chosen
topic that you
believe will be useful to your research project. (You may use
sources from your Source Scavenger Hunt.)
I already
attached
them so
don’t
worry about findin
g them!
2.
Think
: Use the resources from the
Exploration
page to help you
ev
aluate each source.
Use
the
CRAAP
test
.
3.
Write
:
In
your
initial
post,
write
a
short
evaluation
paragraph
for
each
source.
Then,
write
an
additional
paragraph
where
you
compare
the
two
sources
based
on
your
evaluations
of
the
sources.
4.
Include a correctly formatted Works Cited entry for each source.
Need help with MLA? Please refer to the
CCCOnline
MLA
Citation
Toolkit
, or consult the Purdue OWL for how to create a
correctly formatted
MLA
Works
Cited
p
age
.
5.
Post one original post, and
reply to at least two of your
classmates. In your replies to peers, compare your evaluations on
your chosen sources. Discuss your findings and what elements
you consider most important in a source. Discuss why it is
importa
nt to pay attention to the credibility of your sources. Try
to further the discussion in your replies by asking thoughtful
Module 2 Discussion 2: Source Evaluation
and Comparison
In research writing, your own credibility rests on the credibility of the
sources you consult. If you use unreliable research, your own writing
will be viewed as unreliable. In this discussion, you will evaluate sources
for your research.
You should spend approximately 3 hours on this assignment.
Instructions
1. Research the same topic you began researching in Discussion 1.
Access the CCCOnline Library Databases, and search for two
sources with differing perspectives on your chosen topic that you
believe will be useful to your research project. (You may use
sources from your Source Scavenger Hunt.) I already attached
them so don’t worry about finding them!
2. Think: Use the resources from the Exploration page to help you
evaluate each source. Use the CRAAP test.
3. Write: In your initial post, write a short evaluation paragraph for
each source. Then, write an additional paragraph where you
compare the two sources based on your evaluations of the
sources.
4. Include a correctly formatted Works Cited entry for each source.
Need help with MLA? Please refer to the CCCOnline MLA
Citation Toolkit, or consult the Purdue OWL for how to create a
correctly formatted MLA Works Cited page.
5. Post one original post, and reply to at least two of your
classmates. In your replies to peers, compare your evaluations on
your chosen sources. Discuss your findings and what elements
you consider most important in a source. Discuss why it is
important to pay attention to the credibility of your sources. Try
to further the discussion in your replies by asking thoughtful
Resp
on
d
to
2 peers en
g
a
g
in
g
w
it
h
t
he
peer
and
as
king
questions
.
Peer 1:
(
Nadia S
)
Konrad
Szocik
,
a
certified
space
philosopher
at
Yale
University
released
th
is
article
in
2020
talkin
g
about
the
challenges
of
Space
Exploration,
one
of
them
being
space
coloni
zation
.
T
his
article is
biased
but
backed
with
properly
sourced
research
and
experiments
from
previo
us
scientists.
The
majority
of his article
specific
ally
the
topic
of space colonization is
trying
to
create
a
new
opening
conversation
with the challenges of space
exploration
and
its
effect
on
humans.
Konrad Szocik
also
opened
a conversation about
possible
solutions
and
other
questions with space exploration
using
sources
that
clash
with previous and other sources in
perspective
.
.Though
this
second
source,
a
book
from
2012
features
the
problems
of space
exploration,
it also
highlight
s
the
necessity
of it as
well
,
especially
space
colonization.
It
contrast
s
well with
my
first
chosen
article.
S.V.
Krichevskiy
is a
Doctor
philosopher,
a
professor
at the
Institute
for
the
History
of
Science
and
Technology
in
Moscow,
Russia.
He
is a
reliable
professor with
credible
sources to his
name.
Within
his research
article,
he
proved
many
credible sources from his
own
research.
It
was
difficult
to
find
two
sources that contrast
each
other,
especially
finding
a specific
subtopic
of space
exploration.
These
two
articles
work
well
because
they
both
highlight the
contrasting
perspective of space exploration that many of us
don’t
crit
ically
think
about through philosophy and research. The first article talks about how hard space exploration will be for humans while the second one also introduced why it is necessary.
Work Cited
Szocik, Konrad, et al. “Ethical Challenges in Human Space Missions: A Space Refuge,
Scientific Value, and Human Gene Editing for Space.” Science & Engineering
Ethics, vol. 26, no. 3, June 2020, pp. 1209–27. EBSCOhost,
https://doi-org.ccco.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00131-1.
Krichevskiy S. V. “Space Colonization: Problems and Prospects.” Философия и
Космология, vol. 11, no. 1, Apr. 2012, pp. 135–43. EBSCOhost,
https://search-ebscohost-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eds
oj&AN=edsdoj.1a5da8c483004183841a622bd6f971d5&site=eds-live&scope=site
less
Peer 2: Brennen M)
The first article I found is from New York Times. It was posted in 2018, so its fairly recent, and is recent enough for my topic. This source shows 5 different maps that show the opinions of U.S. citizens on various climate change topics. This article was written by Nadja Popovich, a journalist who has worked for various other newspapers before. This article is mostly fact, with no bias or persuasion at all.
The second article I found comes from the British Journal of Politics & International Relations. The article was posted in 2020, so it’s only a few years old, which works well for my topic This source uses a lot of different types of information, such as surveys, graphs, other articles, and more. It also includes references to the data and quotations it uses. This article was written by Sam Crawley, Hilde Coffee, and Ralph Chapman, and all three have a background in environmental topics. I would say that BJPIR is a good source of information. It takes quite a few steps to even have a paper that can be published, so nobody can easily put false information onto the articles. The source is factual, provides a lot of evidence, and has very little bias.
I feel that these articles work fairly well together. Some people may question the true credibility of the first article, but it works for the topic being discussed. They are both credible sources that show two different topics about climate change. One talks about how people feel about climate change, while the other talks about how the government isn’t doing much about climate change, and why people lose awareness of climate change.
Works Cited
Crawley, Sam, et al. “Public Opinion on Climate Change: Belief and Concern, Issue Salience and Support for Government Action.” British Journal of Politics & International Relations, vol. 22, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. 102–21. EBSCOhost, doi-org.ccco.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/1369148119888827.
Popovich, Nadja. “Where Americans (Mostly) Agree on Climate Change Policies, in Five Maps.” New York Times, vol. 168, no. 58135, 3 Nov. 2018, p. A13. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ccco.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=132831623&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
less
Respond to 2 peers en
gaging with the peer and asking questions.
Peer 1:
(
Nadia S
)
Konrad
Szocik,
a
certified
space
philosopher
at
Yale
University
released
this
article
in
2020
talkin
g
about
the
challenges
of
Space
Exploration,
one
of
them
being
space
colonization.
This
article
is
biased
but
backed
with
properly
sourced
research
and
experiments
from
previous
scientists.
The
majority
of
his
article
specifically
the
topic
of
space
coloni
zation
is
trying
to
create
a
new
opening
conversation
with
the
challenges
of
space
exploration
and
its
effect
on
humans.
Konrad
Szocik
also
opened
a
conversation
about
possible
solutions
and
other
questions
with
space
exploration
using
sources
that
clash
w
ith
previous
and
other
sources
in
perspective.
.Though
this
second
source,
a
book
from
2012
features
the
problems
of
space
exploration,
it
also
highlights
the
necessity
of
it
as
well,
especially
space
colonization.
It
contrasts
well
with
my
first
chosen
article.
S.V.
Krichevskiy
is
a
Doctor
philosopher,
a
professor
at
the
Institute
for
the
History
of
Science
and
Technology
in
Moscow,
Russia.
He
is
a
reliable
professor
with
credible
sources
to
his
name.
Within
his
research
article,
he
proved
many
credible
sources
from
his
own
research.
It
was
difficult
to
find
two
sources
that
contrast
each
other,
especially
finding
a
specific
subtopic
of
space
exploration.
These
two
articles
work
well
because
they
both
highlight
the
contrasting
perspective
of
space
exploration
that
many
of
us
don’t
crit
ically
think
about
Respond to 2 peers engaging with the peer and asking questions.
Peer 1:
(Nadia S)
Konrad Szocik, a certified space philosopher at Yale University released this article in
2020 talking about the challenges of Space Exploration, one of them being space
colonization. This article is biased but backed with properly sourced research and
experiments from previous scientists. The majority of his article specifically the topic of
space colonization is trying to create a new opening conversation with the challenges of
space exploration and its effect on humans. Konrad Szocik also opened a conversation
about possible solutions and other questions with space exploration using sources that
clash with previous and other sources in perspective.
.Though this second source, a book from 2012 features the problems of space
exploration, it also highlights the necessity of it as well, especially space colonization. It
contrasts well with my first chosen article. S.V. Krichevskiy is a Doctor philosopher, a
professor at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia.
He is a reliable professor with credible sources to his name. Within his research article,
he proved many credible sources from his own research.
It was difficult to find two sources that contrast each other, especially finding a specific
subtopic of space exploration. These two articles work well because they both highlight
the contrasting perspective of space exploration that many of us don’t critically think about