My recent news-update post, at the excellent Interdisciplinary Project on Human Trafficking website led by Janie Chuang from American University, talks about the new human trafficking courts in NY state.
What to make of the growing anti-trafficking infrastructure? Without question, the vulnerability of people who either have been trafficked, or are susceptible, demands a sustained and effective policy response nationally and internationally. And yet I'm not sure that ramping up police enforcement activities is the way to do it. I worry that anti-trafficking initiatives legitimate a larger growth of the carceral, penal dimensions of government. I worry about unintended consequences of a punitive approach.
Anti-trafficking policy is now divided into "prosecution, protection and prevention," and I'd much rather see more emphasis on the last two of those three goals. In particular, I'd support reforms in labor and immigration laws that reduce the vulnerability of people to trafficking in the first place. Along those lines, one danger of anti-trafficking as a high-visibility policy is that it may well be distracting attention from "ordinary" abusive migrant labor, even though the latter undoubtedly represents the more frequent occurrence.
The problem of trafficking is multifaceted and the solutions are equally so, and so I don't condemn anti-trafficking but rather would caution that it be applied with rigorous attention to the interests of the "victims," as opposed to those of the state or of law enforcement.
For example, I am critical of anti-trafficking laws that cause victims to be repatriated to their home countries or, alternatively, required them testify against their traffickers in order to obtain residency in the US: either of these scenarios arguably amplify the victims' vulnerability.
I'll be discussing anti-trafficking law in an upcoming lecture for Cornell's International Law/ International Relations colloquium series; in 2006 I co-authored an article with Janet Halley, Hila Shamir and Prabha Kotiswaran in which I described the emergence of the current anti-trafficking framework and critiqued some of its "blind spots."
What to make of the growing anti-trafficking infrastructure? Without question, the vulnerability of people who either have been trafficked, or are susceptible, demands a sustained and effective policy response nationally and internationally. And yet I'm not sure that ramping up police enforcement activities is the way to do it. I worry that anti-trafficking initiatives legitimate a larger growth of the carceral, penal dimensions of government. I worry about unintended consequences of a punitive approach.
Anti-trafficking policy is now divided into "prosecution, protection and prevention," and I'd much rather see more emphasis on the last two of those three goals. In particular, I'd support reforms in labor and immigration laws that reduce the vulnerability of people to trafficking in the first place. Along those lines, one danger of anti-trafficking as a high-visibility policy is that it may well be distracting attention from "ordinary" abusive migrant labor, even though the latter undoubtedly represents the more frequent occurrence.
The problem of trafficking is multifaceted and the solutions are equally so, and so I don't condemn anti-trafficking but rather would caution that it be applied with rigorous attention to the interests of the "victims," as opposed to those of the state or of law enforcement.
For example, I am critical of anti-trafficking laws that cause victims to be repatriated to their home countries or, alternatively, required them testify against their traffickers in order to obtain residency in the US: either of these scenarios arguably amplify the victims' vulnerability.
I'll be discussing anti-trafficking law in an upcoming lecture for Cornell's International Law/ International Relations colloquium series; in 2006 I co-authored an article with Janet Halley, Hila Shamir and Prabha Kotiswaran in which I described the emergence of the current anti-trafficking framework and critiqued some of its "blind spots."
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