Absolving the State: The Trafficking–Slavery Metaphor

Julia O’Connell Davidson is professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham.

For over a decade, politicians and governments have been joining with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to decry “human trafficking”, a phenomenon purported to be a hugely profitable business in which criminals transport millions of victims around the globe for purposes of exploitation, and which is routinely described as a “modern slave trade”. As Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, put it at a major UN conference on human trafficking held in Vienna in February 2008, “Two hundred years after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, we have the obligation to fight a crime that has no place in the twenty-first century. Let’s call it what it is: modern slavery.” When matters are 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 transatlantic slave trade has enormous popular appeal. No votes will be lost by politicians who condemn slavery, and plenty of funds are likely 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 transatlantic slave trade, differences that—if acknowledged—muddy the moral waters and dissolve all semblance of political consensus on the nature and causes of the problem of trafficking, 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 role of the state in constructing the conditions under which some groups become vulnerable to various forms of abuse and exploitation.

Trafficking and Slavery: Some Differences

The most obvious contrast between contemporary “victims of trafficking” (VoTs) and Africans who, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, were forcibly transported to the Americas is that whereas 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 want to move to another region or country, and almost invariably have 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, the faking of travel documents, and the arranging of marriages.

In this criminalised, concealed and so entirely unregulated market, migrants are open to a variety of forms of abuse, 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 or harm them in any way, and even when they do experience elements of abuse or exploitation, it may be that they nonetheless consider this preferable to remaining at home, where threats to their security in the form of violence 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 obtaining back home is a second sense in which the movement of people occurring today differs markedly from that in the transatlantic slave trade. It explains why rescued VoTs are rarely eager to be returned home; and it (rather than the often-cited Stockholm syndrome) 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.¹

A third crucial difference between the transatlantic 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 fifteenth to nineteenth centuries as a specific, bounded group (even if what such research actually reveals is that this legal category encompassed a diverse range of experience, with significant overlap between that 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 whom, precisely, we mean when we speak of “trafficked” persons. The definition of “trafficking” provided in the UN Trafficking Protocol (2000) does not actually allow us to distinguish clearly 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 whom 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 proper channels to work legally in the formal economy are also sometimes subject to extensive rights