Absolving the State: the Trafficking-Slavery Metaphor Julia O’Connell Davidson GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 14 ● Number 2 ● Summer/Autumn 2012—Slavery Today For over a decade, politicians and governmental organisations have been joining with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to decry “human trafficking”, a phenomenon that is purported to be a hugely profitable business in which organised criminals transport millions of victims around the globe for purposes of exploitation, and that is routinely described as a “modern slave trade”. In the words of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, at a major UN conference on human trafficking held in Vienna in 2008: “200 years after the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, we have the obligation to fight a crime that has no place in the 21st Century. Let’s call it what it is: modern slavery”. BBC News, 2008: ‘UN forum aims to end trafficking’, 21/02/2008, http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7242180.stm Framed in this way, anti-trafficking campaigners appear to be continuing in the tradition of the abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and calls for governments to adopt and enforce legal and other measures against trafficking seemingly resemble nineteenth century calls for governments to outlaw the slave trade and slavery. The fight against a phenomenon presented as the modern equivalent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade has enormous popular appeal. No votes stand to be lost by politicians who stand up and condemn slavery, and plenty of funds stand to be raised by organisations that pledge themselves to combat it. Nobody is in favour of slavery, and the struggle against it therefore appears as a simple and straightforward moral imperative, a project that stands outside and above politics. And yet, as this article will argue, there are significant differences between the contemporary phenomenon described as “trafficking” and the trans-Atlantic slavery, differences that – if acknowledged - muddy the moral waters it occupies and dissolve all semblance of political consensus on the nature and causes of the problem, as well as the remedies for it. The metaphor of slavery depoliticises what is actually a highly political issue, and in so doing, renders invisible the state’s role in constructing the conditions under which some groups become vulnerable to various forms of abuse and exploitation. Trafficking and Trans-Atlantic Slavery: Some Points of Difference The most obvious contrast between contemporary “Victims of Trafficking” (VoTs) and Africans who, between the 15th and 19th Centuries, were forcibly transported to the Americas is that where the latter had no pre-existing desire or ambition to move to the New World, the people who are currently described as VoTs almost invariably wanted to move to another region or country, and almost invariably had excellent reasons for wishing to do so. In some cases, the decision to leave home is based on the belief that poor life-chances and earning opportunities will be greatly improved through migration. In other cases, the decision to migrate is made in a context of more acute forms of human insecurity. Either way, it is also made in the context of immigration regimes that have become ever more restrictive over the past two decades, something that has prompted the development of a growing market for clandestine migration services, including smuggling across borders, faking travel documents, and arranging marriages. Sanghera, J. (2005) ‘Unpacking the trafficking discourse’, in K. Kempadoo, J. Sanghera and B. Pattanaik (eds.) Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered. London: Paradigm. In this criminalised, concealed and so entirely unregulated market, migrants are open to a variety of forms of abuse and exploitation, some of which may place their lives in jeopardy or lock them into extremely violent and exploitative situations at the point of destination. And yet their experience is not necessarily one of violence, exploitation and abuse. Some irregular migrants are assisted by third parties who do not cheat them or harm them in any way, and even when they do experience elements of abuse or exploitation, it may be that the individuals concerned nonetheless consider this preferable to remaining at home, where threats to their security in the form of violence, exploitation or straightforward starvation may be far greater. The fact that exploitation at the point of destination can be experienced as the lesser of two evils and viewed as preferable to conditions that obtained back home is a second sense in which the movement of people occurring today differs markedly from the movement of people that took place under the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It explains why rescued VoTs are rarely eager to be returned home, and it (rather than Stockholm syndrome as so often claimed) also explains why, instead of kneeling in gratitude to their “liberators”, VoTs sometimes go to great lengths to escape from those who have rescued them. Soderlund, G. (2005) ‘Running from the rescuers: New U.S. crusades against sex trafficking and the rhetoric of abolition’, NWSA Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 64-87. Also, Marshall, P. and Thatun, S. (2005) ‘Miles away: the trouble with prevention in the Greater Mekong Sub-region’, in K. Kempadoo, J. Sanghera and B. Pattanaik (eds.) Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered. London: Paradigm. A third crucial difference between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and “trafficking” is that those who were historically transported from Africa to the Americas were moved into societies where slavery was one of the established and recognised statuses used to define employment relations. A “slave” was readily identifiable in the sense that s/he was legally defined as such, and it is therefore possible to speak of and study slaves in the Americas from the 15th to 19th centuries as a specific, bounded group (even if what such research actually reveals is that this legal category encompassed a diverse range of experience, and that there was significant overlap between the experience of slaves and that of many non-slaves). Today, by contrast, people are not being transported into societies where slavery is legally recognised and regulated as a judicial category. VoTs are not people who have been formally assigned the legal status of “slave”, and because today, as in the past, the experience of unfreedom and exploitation ranges along a continuum, this generates real confusion about who, precisely, we mean when we speak of “trafficked” persons. The definition of “trafficking” provided in the United Nations’ Trafficking Protocol (2000) does not actually allow us to clearly distinguish the experience of VoTs from that of other groups of migrants. To begin with, the Protocol frames trafficking as a subset of “illegal” immigration and as a phenomenon quite distinct from “smuggling”. And yet people that states would regard as “smuggled” or as “immigration offenders” can also end up in the situations of exploitation listed in the Protocol. Meanwhile, workers who move through perfectly legal channels to work legally in the formal economy are also sometimes subject to extensive rights violations, including confinement, passport confiscation, non-payment of wages, and physical violence or its threat. In other words, though framed as a problem of transnational organised crime, all of the elements of “trafficking” that are deemed reprehensible can and do occur within systems of labour import and export that are legally sanctioned by states. Further problems arise from the fact that although all existing definitions posit that “trafficking” takes place for purposes of exploitation, exploitation remains undefined. And as Moravcsik points out in a discussion of slavery, “exploitation” - and also “force” - are slippery notions: What constitutes inappropriate economic exploitation depends partly on what alternatives were or could have been envisaged within a given situation… [and similarly] what counts as force… and what restrictions any society might have to invoke under certain circumstances are left to be determined in context. Moravcsik, J. (1998) ‘Slavery and the ties that do not bind’ in T. Lott (ed.) Subjugation and Bondage, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 173. “Trafficking” is used as an umbrella term for a process that can lead to a variety of outcomes, and that in theory intersects with an array of other markets, institutions and practices (labour markets, prostitution, marriage, benefit fraud, organ trading, child adoption, independent child migration to name but a few), some of which are socially tolerated and legally regulated, others of which are illegal, stigmatized and/or socially contested. To ring fence “trafficking” in such a way as to be able to clearly distinguish between “trafficked” and “non-trafficked” persons would therefore require us to make a judgement about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate exploitation, and what counts as force, in a huge number of vastly different contexts. Throw in the fact that social norms pertaining to these markets, institutions and practices differ from country to country, and the task looks even more hopeless. These problems are compounded by the fact that in the real world, there is no easy opposition between on the one hand, migrants who enjoy total choice over all aspects of their lives, and on the other, individuals who have been kidnapped and transported in shackles to settings where they are imprisoned, starved, and forced to labour under the lash of a whip. Instead, people’s experience of exploitation, abuse, powerlessness and unfreedom ranges along a continuum. This means that those seeking to operationalise the concept of “trafficking” have to make a judgment about the point on that spectrum at which “appropriate” exploitation/force ends and “inappropriate” exploitation/force begins. How badly does a young man recruited into agricultural work abroad need to be treated in order to qualify as a VoT? If he was paid less than he had been led to believe he would earn, and/or required to work longer hours than the recruiter suggested, and was unable to quit because he had no money to return home, would this be enough? Or must he have been refused payment altogether and prevented from leaving by threat of violence? What about a woman who migrates to work in prostitution or domestic work? If she was deceived about earnings and working conditions and had her documents removed to prevent her from quitting, but she was not raped or beaten, would she count as a VoT? And what of children’s migration for private fostering? This can – whether it takes place through legally sanctioned or irregular channels - have disastrous consequences, but it does not necessarily harm the children concerned and may even enhance their well being and life chances. Even if arranged illegally and for a third party’s financial gain, distinguishing between “trafficked” and “smuggled” children is no simple matter given that expectations regarding the amount of unpaid labour that children will provide within households vary cross-nationally and within nations, as do social norms regarding the powers that adults can properly exercise over children. Precisely how bad does a child’s experience need to be in order for the people who facilitated her movement to be viewed as “traffickers”? Certainly it is impossible to state categorically that anyone who organises or facilitates a child’s movement for adoption or fostering is, ipso facto, moving them ‘for purposes of exploitation’, or automatically guilty of any legal or moral transgression. Even when migrant children are involved in criminal activities, determining whether or not they are being exploited involves relative judgements. How ruthlessly does a 16 year old migrant involved in pick pocketing or drug cultivation need to be treated by a third party to be considered an exploited VoT rather than a mere criminal? Difficult questions about consent and agency arise here, for people below the age of 18 who break the law are not popularly imagined as unambiguous “victims”, indeed, the age of criminal responsibility is as low as 10 in many countries. Nor has the Trafficking Protocol’s assertion that consent is irrelevant where children are concerned been fully incorporated into all countries’ domestic law. UK law, for example, “still requires proof of some element of deception or coercion that has been exercised over the child”, and children who some would describe as ‘trafficked’ have been prosecuted in the UK for cannabis cultivation as well as for other crimes. CEOP (2007) A Scoping Project on Child Trafficking in the UK. London: Home Office and Border and Immigration Agency, p48. Distinguishing a VoT from other categories of migrant requires a series of judgments, and these judgements can only be made through reference to political and moral values about which there is no consensus, and social norms which vary across and within regions. It follows that “trafficked persons” do not actually exist as some kind of prior, objective or legal category of persons that can form the object of research or policy. To be sure, “Victim of Trafficking” exists as an administrative category in some states. It is a status assigned to those migrants who are considered deserving of protection and assistance on grounds that they have experienced the particular constellation of coercive and exploitative practices during the migratory process and at the point of destination that the authorities understand as “trafficking”. However, if anti-trafficking campaigners focused only on those who are actually afforded the status of VoT, the numbers involved would be so small as to make any comparison with the trans-Atlantic slave trade appear almost ludicrous. (In the United States, the authorities managed to identify just 1,362 VoTs brought into the United States between 2000 and 2007, for example. Markon, J. (2007) ‘Human trafficking evokes outrage, little evidence’, Washington Post, September 23.) This is one of the reasons why all claims about the scale and profitability of “human trafficking” should be taken with copious quantities of salt. See Fiengold, D. (2010) ‘Trafficking in numbers: The social construction of human trafficking data’, in Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill (eds) Sex, Drugs and Body Counts. Ithica and London: Cornell University Press, pp. 46-74. It is also why glib statements about trafficking as a form of modern slavery that “we” all have an obligation to fight serve to depoliticise what is actually a hugely contentious political issue. Old Abolitionism and the Problem of Demand The historian Thomas Haskell points out that people do not normally feel morally responsible for phenomena or events that they perceived as natural, inevitable or beyond their sphere of influence, and observes that through the lens of the dominant moral conventions of eighteenth century English and North American society, slavery did not appear as an absolute wrong in which individual slave holders were personally implicated. Even Europeans and Americans who pitied slaves normally did so in a passive, fatalistic way, with no sense of being personally implicated in their tragedy. Haskell uses the example of the early Quaker abolitionist, John Woolman, to show the steps that had to be undergone to move “intellectually from a world in which slave misery provoked only… passive sympathy… to a world in which remaining passive in the face of such misery seemed unconscionable”. Woolman, J. 1746, “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes”, cited in Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 277. A crucial aspect of the case Woolman made against slavery was that moral responsibility was not limited in time or space. The fact that a slave-owner had legally purchased a slave from another slave-owner at a fair market price did not entitle him or her to property in that slave as this was “wrong from the beginning… If I purchase a man who hath never forfeited his liberty, the natural right of freedom is in him”. Furthermore, the geographical and temporal remoteness of “the scene of initial enslavement”, the original sin against the slave (or her foremothers and fathers) was no defence: “Great distance makes nothing in our favour. To willingly join with unrighteousness to the injury of men who live some thousands of miles off is the same in substance as joining with it to the injury of our neighbours”. Ibid, p. 277. And Woolman also identified a causal relationship between the slave trade and demand for slave labour: “Whatever nicety of distinction there may be betwixt going in person on expeditions to catch slaves, and buying those with a view to self-interest which others have taken, it is clear and plain to an upright mind that such distinction is in words, not in substance; for the parties are concerned in the same work and have a necessary connection with and dependence on each other. For were there none to purchase slaves, they who live by stealing and selling them would of consequence do less at it.” Ibid, pp. 278-9. Abolitionists subsequently extended this association between supply and demand to consumer demand for the products of slave labour. As Laura Brace notes, the English campaign for abstention from sugar in the 1790s (which followed Parliament’s defeat of Wilberforce’s first motion to abolish the slave trade) highlighted a chain of connections that linked the seemingly innocent English consumer of sugar to the brutality of the slave system of the West Indies. Abolitionists employed “the rhetoric of pollution, and the trope of cannibalism” to motivate people to change their consumer behaviour (sugar was described as so steeped in the blood, sweat and tears of the slaves who produced it that those who ate it were in effect consuming human flesh). The campaign created “a powerful vision of the consumer's moral agency” - in the face of the government’s refusal to act to abolish the slave trade, customers for sugar could resist slave trading by changing their consumer behaviour, boycotting sugar from the West Indies. Laura Brace, “The opposites of slavery? Contract, freedom and labour”, paper presented to Similar arguments about the links between supply and demand and the moral responsibility of the consumer have resurfaced in contemporary discourse on trafficking and modern slavery. The UN Trafficking Protocol directed states parties to “adopt or strengthen legislative or other measures, such as educational, social or cultural measures, including through bilateral and multilateral cooperation, to discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”. Governments have subsequently commissioned studies of “the demand-side of trafficking”, and many NGOs have pressed for action to combat it. But what does “tackling the demand-side” really mean? The Demand-Side of Trafficking? Even if it were possible to agree on a precise and workable definition of “trafficking”, the notion of demand for trafficked persons’ labour/services would present another set of problems. The trans-Atlantic slave trade served a specific demand for slaves, i.e., human beings who were legally constructed as commodities - “things” to which an exchange value was attached. But the process described as “trafficking” does not meet a similarly specific demand for VoTs, or even for trafficked persons’ labour/services. An unscrupulous plantation manager, sweatshop owner or brothel keeper may want workers who are unprotected, vulnerable and unable to quit or resist severe exploitation, but is hardly likely to turn down the opportunity to subject a worker to forced labour or slavery-like practices simply because in the eyes of the state, s/he would be cast as a “smuggled person” or an “illegal immigrant” rather than a “VoT”. The same point applies with regard to those who cheat, abuse and exploit migrant children, wives and domestic workers in private households. The niceties of international and national law on trafficking, and the particular details of a person’s journey into vulnerability and bondage, are not relevant to those who exploit or consume their labour/services. Another analytical problem arises from the fact that a “trafficked” person’s labour/services can be exploited in many and very different sectors and settings - private households, mines and factories, agriculture, construction, street begging and drug running, and the sex industry, to name but a few of the most obvious. What then is the object of enquiry and intervention in research and policy on “the demand side of trafficking”? Questions that appear obviously important in relation to say, the problem of trafficking into textiles sweatshops or the sex industry seem less so in relation to the problem of trafficking for marriage or fostering, and quite irrelevant in relation to begging or street crime, for instance. The notion of demand for the labour/services of a “trafficked” person can span a vast and diverse hotch-potch of motivations and interests, ranging from employers’ desire for cheap and docile labour, to criminals’ interest in vulnerable individuals who can be compelled to carry out criminal acts on their behalves, to consumer demand for cheap goods and/or services, to demand for household labour or subsistence labour, or to any or all of these. For anti-slavery activists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the connections between a supply of slaves and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and between consumer demand for commodities that were produced in slave societies and the oppression and exploitation of people who were legally held as slaves, were reasonably straightforward. The idea of a “demand side of trafficking” today is anything but this. There are no countries with economies that depend wholly or primarily on “trafficked labour” in the way that slave societies of the Americas depended on slave labour, and although there are some sectors and settings in which forced labour and slavery-like practices are believed to be more common, there is no product, service, form of employment, or practice that rests exclusively and unambiguously on the use of what can universally be agreed to constitute force or exploitation. In the eighteenth Century, William Fox could urge the English people to abstain completely “from the use of sugar and rum” until the slave trade was abolished or “till we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood.” Cited in Laura Brace ibid. But no similarly simple appeal can be made to contemporary consumers. It is true that some feminist groups (such as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, CATW) believe that prostitution is always and necessarily connected with slavery. They draw on a particular tradition of feminist thought, radical feminism, that leads them to insist that it is the body, self and person of the woman that is sold in prostitution, not her sexual services. They therefore believe it impossible for a woman to ever genuinely consent to prostitute, and they recognise no distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution. Through this lens, all women and girls in prostitution have been trafficked into “sexual slavery” and questions about “the demand-side of trafficking” are simple. Such feminists regard the end consumer of sexual services (“the sex buyer”) as directly implicated in the process of trafficking in just the same way that Woolman held those who purchased slaves were directly implicated in the slave trade. Speaking of the demand side of trafficking in the 2006 report of UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights aspects of the victims of trafficking in persons, Sigma Huda thus insists that “Unlike the purchaser of consumer goods produced through trafficked labour, the prostitute-user is simultaneously both the demand-creator and (by virtue of his receipt of the trafficked person) part of the trafficking chain”. Hence she regards the criminalisation of those who buy sex as an “anti-trafficking measure”. In this, as in other matters, the report is in line with the position adopted by CATW (an organisation to which Ms Huda belongs). Raymond, J. (2001) Guide to the New UN Trafficking Protocol. North Amherst, MA: CATW. However, this position is unacceptable to many people who actually work in prostitution and regard it as an earning opportunity that they have chosen from the options available to them just as other workers choose jobs. There is an extensive research literature on prostitution which demonstrates that whilst it can be associated with forced labour and slavery-like practices, and is often undertaken in poor conditions, it is not necessarily associated with violence or third-party exploitation. For feminists and others who adopt a liberal or libertarian stance on sex commerce, the idea that the entire commercial sex market should be eradicated in order to tackle the problem of trafficking for prostitution is as draconian and wrong-headed as the idea that it is necessary to eliminate demand for carpets in order to address the problem of forced and child labour in the carpet industry. From this perspective, questions about “the demand side of sex trafficking” are about unscrupulous employers’ demand for forced labour, and not about consumer demand for commercial sex per se. Indeed, far from viewing abstention from consumption as the solution to the problem of forced labour in prostitution, some sex worker rights’ activists would argue that consumers have an important role to play in rooting such abuses out of the market by, for example, reporting suspicions that workers may be being held against their will to the police (something that does, in fact, sometimes happen). Leaving these debates about prostitution aside, the idea of consumer boycotts is less appealing to modern-day abolitionists than it was for their forebears. It would be difficult to ask consumers to abstain completely from the use of all of the goods, services and practices that may be associated with “trafficking” until such time as “trafficking” is abolished partly because of the length of the list of products and services concerned, and its overlaps with markets and practices that are viewed as socially desirable, and partly because it is widely believed that everything the consumer wants can all already be provided by another mode, “unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood”. Modern day abolitionism is not born out of a critique of capitalism and the consumer culture it spawns, anymore than was eighteenth and nineteenth century abolitionism. With the possible exception of prostitution, modern abolitionists do not ask consumers to actually stop consuming anything at all. They merely ask them to consume more “ethically”. Consumers are invited to choose between ethical fair trade products that are sold at a profit and other (presumably unethical, unfair trade) products also sold at a profit by the same retail outlet; or to choose between making purchases from shops that state a commitment to ending slavery rather than from shops that make no statement on slavery, for example. These individual acts are presented as a form of moral agency that can be encouraged by, and exercised in alliance with, capitalist enterprises. See for example, Shop to Stop Slavery http://www.shoptostopslavery.com/modern-day-abolitionists-pave-the-way-for-responsible-consumerism-2235.html, or Not For Sale’s new iPhone app to combat slavery, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/dec/03/iphone-slavery-app However, the chains of connection that link contemporary consumers to workers who are subject to forced labour and other forms of abuse are in reality founded on, and underpinned by structures that cannot be transformed by the individual acts of consumers. An American consumer may elect to buy a fair trade cotton T shirt produced in the United States and pat herself on the back for having avoided giving succour to modern “slavers”, for example. But the exploitation of migrant and child labour in cotton production in the poor and developing world is not simply a result of global consumer demand for cheap cotton. It is, as Neil Howard’s research in Benin clearly illustrates, also a result of US government subsidies to domestic cotton producers that artificially deflate the price of cotton worldwide, pushing those in poor cotton producing regions deeper into poverty, and so also to work in ever worsening conditions. Howard, N. (2011) ‘Spinning the Threads of Poverty: Cotton Subsidies and The Political Economy of Trafficking in Southern Benin’, Rights Work, http://rightswork.org/2011/08/spinning-the-threads-of-poverty-cotton-subsidies-and-the-political-economy-of-trafficking-in-southern-benin/?utm_source=RWI+Contacts&utm_campaign=236345456a-Neil_Howard_Benin8_10_2011&utm_medium=email To address such problems would require us to forego the easy moral consensus in which states, big business, NGOs and consumers in affluent countries can all unite in condemning modern slavery, however. It would mean engaging in political arguments about – among other things - development aid, world trade organisation agreements, and the protectionism practiced by affluent countries. Again, the metaphor of slavery serves to depoliticise what is in reality highly political terrain. Finally, dominant discourse on “trafficking as modern slavery” distorts perceptions of what is possibly the most significant aspect of “the demand-side of trafficking”, namely the demand for opportunities to migrate. When “trafficking” is imagined as the modern equivalent of trans-Atlantic slavery, the potential victim’s need or desire to migrate is either invisible or looks irrational. The solution thus appears to be to educate people in “sending” countries about the horrors of trafficking/slavery, so that they will be wary of those who try to lure them into the trap of travelling abroad, rather than to think how to make migration safer. This allows anti-trafficking campaigns to side-step what would otherwise be highly charged and controversial political territory, namely, the relationship between immigration regimes and serious violations of human and child rights. “Trafficking as modern slavery” discourse on ‘trafficking’ identifies mafia thugs, hardened criminals, slave-holders, and flesh-peddlers as posing the threat to vulnerable migrants. And yet immigration policy and the state actors that enforce it appear to present an equal if not greater risk to irregular migrants’ health and well-being, even life itself. Thousands of people – adult and child – have died at borders as they have attempted to make unauthorised crossings into Europe or into the United States, and their deaths are a predictable and inhumane outcome of border-security policies. Thousands more are held in immigration detention centres, often in inhumane conditions, sometimes subject to violence therein. But state-sponsored violence is not on the “anti-trafficking” agenda, even though efforts to avoid such violence is often what forces migrants into dependency on potentially abusive and exploitative third parties. If it were on agenda, the project of fighting trafficking as modern slavery would no longer be endorsed across political lines in liberal societies. Conclusion Through the eyes of most 17th and18th Century free white Americans and Europeans, chattel slavery appeared to be an inevitable, natural, phenomenon. The abolitionist movement shifted this perception, but it is important to remember that it did not simultaneously de-naturalise poverty or racial inequality. Slave emancipation did not automatically mean freedom or rights for African Americans, and 19th Century abolitionists like O. B. Frothingham could still describe the evils of pauperism as “providential”, growing out of the “inevitable condition of things” - “Pauperism, from its nature involves no direct Guilt. Slavery is essential Guilt”, he remarked. Cited in Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 277. The phenomenon described as “trafficking” is inseparable from the broader phenomenon of migration in which it is embedded, which in turn is inseparable from global political and economic inequalities, uneven economic development and poverty. To date, however, anti-trafficking campaigners’ impassioned pleas for “us” to restate our opposition to slavery has done nothing to challenge the idea of poverty and inequality as providential. Nor has it demanded a transformation of the attitudes adopted by the privileged towards the death or suffering of irregular migrants - remaining passive in the face of their misery remains entirely conscionable. If anything, talk of “trafficking as modern slavery” has actually lend legitimacy to states’ efforts to strengthen border controls and restrict immigration in ways that make many groups of migrants migrants more vulnerable to a range of human rights violations. Slavery is an extremely powerful metaphor. Divorced from any analysis of the specific historical, global, social and economic contexts that lead to large scale violations of the rights of those described as “slaves”, of the role that states play in producing those contexts and why, it is a very dangerous metaphor. Dominant discourse on “trafficking as modern slavery” and the policy responses it has (and has not) engendered illustrates these dangers very clearly. PAGE 10