Trafficking Report: Less Sensationalism, More Reality

Last Wednesday, the US released the 2009 Trafficking In Persons Report. The significant differences between this year's report and reports missed under previous administrations offer insight into the ways Obama's State Department may address trafficking in persons.

The U.S.'s attempts to address human trafficking have typically been based on emotional reactions to horrific situations and events, rather on research showing what works. The tendency in the past to focus exclusively on "sex trafficking," while neglecting labor trafficking, illustrates the U.S.'s willingness to allow emotional issues to override concerns about workplace abuses that are less sensational but no less grave. The focus on sex has led to many examples of misguided efforts to protect "women and children," while men, women and children who experience force, fraud and coercion, the hallmarks of trafficking, in other kinds of work are too often overlooked.

This year's TIP Report addresses forced labor and debt bondage in greater detail than earlier reports. US government efforts under Bush emphasized sex trafficking, and anti-trafficking task forces in the US were criticized by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children for their near-exclusive focus on brothel raids while ignoring trafficking in other workplaces, including those workplaces where there were immigration raids. This year's report cites men trafficked into construction work in Russia and the Gulf States, agricultural workers in Africa, domestic workers in Asia, and fishermen in Asia.

The 2009 TIP Report criticizes numerous examples of anti-trafficking efforts restricting women "for their own good." For one, Cambodia was influenced by the Bush administration to pass legislation addressing, and Cambodia has made it illegal for its women citizens to marry foreign nationals, lest they be trafficked. But restricting people's movement forces determined migrants to seek assistance to travel, sometimes from others who take advantage of their positions of relative power.  In other words, it may contribute to the very problem it seeks to resolve.

Efforts to protect people by preventing them from going where they want to go are not unique in the history of trafficking.  For example, in the US, the people most often prosecuted by the US White Slave Traffic Act, passed in 1910, were women who crossed US state lines to visit men, many of whom they later married.  To this day, women who travel from countries associated with trafficking or sex work may not be permitted to leave their own countries and have difficulty securing visas for other countries, forcing them to use the services of people who may procure falsified travel documents or guide undocumented migrants as they cross borders.

Another poor response to trafficking is the detention and imprisonment of people who have been victims of crime. The new TIP Report chastised governments including Cambodia, Gabon and others for imprisoning people who have been trafficked, including children, but the US also imprisons trafficked persons, usually as a result of raids on brothels and places where immigrants work. I wrote a report for the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center documenting the ways raids discourage people in the US from cooperating with the government's prosecution efforts.  Raids deter people from cooperating with investigations--people who have been rounded up in raids do not trust the agents who have detained them--and so people who may be effective witnesses or who are victims of crime may be deported.

Media figures have engaged in sensational stunts while covering trafficking. For example, a century ago, publisher William Stead set out to "buy" a young girl to prove that sex trafficking was occurring in Victorian London. The girls' parents and other Londoners protested and their daughter was returned to them from France, where Stead had taken her. He served no jail time, but his assistant did. Nicholas Kristof, op-ed contributor to The New York Times, recreated this stunt when he "bought" two girls out of prostitution in Cambodia. The new TIP Report states, "By ‘purchasing' a victim's freedom, well-intentioned individuals or organizations may inadvertently provide traffickers with financial incentive to find new victims."

The critiques offered in the TIP Report reflect the intentions of the Obama administration. I'm encouraged by the greater recognition of trafficking into a wide variety of workplaces, the concern for people who have been unjustly imprisoned, and the lack of sensationalism when discussing sex work. The emphasis on effective responses gives me hope that change is already underway. The Sex Workers Project documented that people who left trafficking situations without law enforcement - leaving on their own, with the help of colleagues and friends. Service providers and trafficked persons described the ways that leaving situations of force, fraud and coercion without law enforcement intervention were better because people chose to move, exercising self-determination after having been coerced into their situations. Enforcing existing labor laws such as wage and hour provisions is one way to address abuses in many workplaces, particularly in factories and agriculture. Expanding these provisions to address domestic workers (they are not offered such protections now) would benefit maids and nannies and other live-in employees. Obama emphasized evidence and efficacy in his inauguration speech - these are a few examples of opportunities to act.