Rethinking Trafficking: Patriarchy, Poverty, and Private Wrongs in India

Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Aditee Maskey has worked with the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the area of child rights and humanitarian assistance. She currently works at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Human trafficking is a large and growing problem, and sex trafficking is a particularly egregious form of contemporary enslavement of the most vulnerable: women and children. The United States Department of State estimates that up to 820,000 men, women, and children are trafficked internationally each year, while the International Organisation for Migration cites a rough figure of 800,000. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that at least 1.39 million people are victims of commercial sexual servitude worldwide, though this includes both transnational and domestic trafficking. United Nations standards, US aid conditionality, and human rights network campaigns have inspired dozens of countries to prohibit trafficking in persons. There are educational, law-enforcement, and victim-assistance efforts in sending and receiving countries, via regional programmes in North America, Europe, and South-East Asia, and through global bodies such as the International Organisation for Migration, the ILO, and UNICEF. Yet a decade of anti-trafficking programmes has done little to reduce the phenomenon, and may even have diverted attention from some of the root causes of trafficking, the large numbers of victims in the developing world, and equally harmful practices of labour exploitation beyond prostitution and within national borders.¹

Globalisation’s Victims

Contemporary slavery, including human trafficking, is best understood as a particular form of human rights abuse by non-governmental perpetrators—“private wrongs” in which the state fails to protect its citizens and/or outsources its authority to abusive businesses, families, and criminals. While the enslavement of tens of millions of Africans in the Americas was state-sanctioned and sometimes state-sponsored, modern slavery operates in the gaps of governance: in rural backwaters, failed states, and the freefall of illicit migration. The victims of most current forms of exploitation are second-class citizens and “disposable people”—women, children, outcastes, and the marginalised poor.² Contemporary slavery is a predatory strategy of commodification of fellow human beings in a privatising world. In this “race to the bottom”, traditional inequities and stigmas are brands, signalling who can be exploited and how. Women are especially vulnerable to the sex trade—but they are also vulnerable to exploitation in the “maid trade”, and any other traditional role where domestic disempowerment meets globalised displacement.

Globalisation creates “people out of place” who are unable to enjoy the resources of citizenship, whether or not they cross borders. Since capital is mobile but labour is fixed in place, those who cross borders become illegal migrants denied the protection of sending or host states, and vulnerable to all forms of abuse by smugglers, employers, and governments. On the other hand, those who stay at home are often displaced by globalising forces from their former productive niche, traditional community relations, or physical location within the country. In most of the developing world, people who are unemployed, landless, work in the informal sector, single mothers, street children, rural–urban migrants, and ethnic minorities are also all second-class citizens subject to exploitation and enslavement.³

Anti-trafficking policies are based on an assumption of free individual women, or parents on behalf of children, who are coerced or egregiously misled to be smuggled across borders, and then continuously pressured and abused to engage in sex work. It is assumed that such women would not engage voluntarily in sex work, that other employment options do not exist or are not exploitative. The coercive model of trafficking evades a deeper analysis of globalisation’s structural pressures on decision-making in households, and of the social delegation of authority over women to households rather than state authorities in a kind of embedded second-class citizenship.

First, anti-trafficking policies framed to protect “innocent” women from sexual slavery ignore or slight prior sex workers, or other women who migrate voluntarily to engage in sex work but are subsequently exploited—often the most vulnerable populations. Second, international policy, and especially American policy, focuses disproportionately on culturally recognisable European victims of East–West traffic, when the vast majority of victims are inter-regional or within borders in the global South. Third, policies often aim to stop commercial sex rather than the violence, exploitation and other harms associated with it—and with other forms of labour and migration. Lastly, this perspective often inspires a response of rescue rather than empowerment of victims, often followed by a return to the unrecognised abuses that began in the home community.

The international abuse of women grows from pre-existing domestic practices of commodification of female reproductive labour, such as prostitution, forced marriage, and domestic service, and from the patriarchal control of women’s movement, education, and employment—enforced by gendered violence. The supply-side factor of gender inequity is a better predictor of exploitative trafficking within and across borders than either general problems of globalisation or prostitution policy, and shows when and where women will be especially vulnerable to sexual forms of contemporary slavery. Yet most of the debate focuses on generic problems of poverty and the legal treatment of prostitution, without incorporating specific attention to power and patriarchy.

Contemporary Slavery in South Asia

Asia has a long history of the exploitation of labour, indentured servitude, and unpaid labour. Contemporary slavery in South Asia can be attributed to traditions of debt bondage in the agricultural sector, of society’s tolerance of sexual exploitation, of girls being “offered” to religious deities via clergy and worshippers, and to the entrenched caste system that compels lower-caste groups to perform hard physical labour in slavery-like conditions, often over generations. Advocacy groups estimate that up to sixty-five million people are in bondage in India alone. A study commissioned by India’s National Commission for Women found that 62 per cent of women in commercial sex work were from scheduled (untouchable) castes.⁴ Inter-generational prostitution also keeps successive generations of its victims in the sex trade.

According to ILO estimates, there are 21.6 million child labourers aged from five