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With Prabha Kotiswaran, Chantal Thomas And FROM THE INTERNATIONAL TO THE LOCAL IN FEMINIST LEGAL RESPONSES TO RAPE, PROSTITUTION/SEX WORK, AND SEX TRAFFICKING: FOUR STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY GOVERNANCE FEMINISM Janet Halley Prabha Kotiswaran Hila Shamir ∗ Chantal Thomas Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 336 Part One: Describing Governance Feminism .................................... 340 Janet Halley................................................................................ 340 Chantal Thomas .......................................................................... 347 I. Governance Feminism and Sex Trafªcking........................... 349 II. Governance Feminism and Sex Trafªcking in the United Nations and United States Contexts........................ 352 A. The International Stage ................................................ 352 B. The United States Stage ................................................ 356 C. The Outcomes and the Aftermath.................................. 358 Hila Shamir ................................................................................... 360 ∗ Janet Halley is Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prabha Kotiswaran received her S.J.D. from Harvard Law School. Hila Shamir is an S.J.D. candidate at Har- vard Law School. Chantal Thomas is professor of law at Fordham University School of Law and visiting professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School. We want to thank Duncan Kennedy for reading the manuscript, Karen Engle for com- ments on Halley’s contributions, Mary Lou Fellows for comments on Thomas’s contribu- tions, and Nomi Levenkron for comments on Shamir’s contributions. Janet Halley acknowl- edges particular debt to Engle's articles Feminism and its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 99 Am. J. Int'l L. 778 (2005) [hereinafter Engle, Feminism and its (Dis)contents] and Liberal Internationalism, Feminism, and the Suppression of Critique: Contemporary Approaches to Global Order in the United States, 46 Harv. Int’l L. J. 427 (2005). We also thank all the participants in the Governance Femi- nism Seminar sponsored by the Harvard Law School Program on Law and Social Thought in March 2006. Last-minute research assistance from Elizabeth Lambert, Naomi Ronen, and Janet C. Katz saved us. All errors of fact and judgment are ours. 336 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender [Vol. 29 Prabha Kotiswaran......................................................................368 Governance Feminism and the Postcolonial Predicament ..............368 Part Two: Developing Methods for Studying Governance Feminism ..377 Janet Halley.................................................................................377 Chantal Thomas ...........................................................................385 I. Governance Feminism as “Global Governance”..................385 II. Distributional Consequences................................................388 III. By Way of Conclusion............................................................393 Hila Shamir ...................................................................................394 I. Three Regulatory Regimes of Commercial Sex......................395 A. Abolitionism—The Swedish Model.................................396 B. Legalization—The Dutch Model....................................398 C. A Hybrid Regime—Israel...............................................401 II. Methodology—Distributive (Cost-Beneªt) Analysis ..............405 A. The Empirical Problem..................................................405 B. Assessing Legal Reforms—Beyond the Prohibitive/ Permissive Vision of Law of Governance Feminism .......406 Prabha Kotiswaran......................................................................409 I. From Injury to Redistribution: The Blind Spots of Governance Feminism ........................................................411 II. From Injury to Redistribution: Legal Realism in the Study of Sex Industries.........................................................414 Conclusion ........................................................................................419 Introduction Feminist advocacy projects on rape and prostitution have, by now, a signiªcant track record of achievement in international law. Feminists have scored important advances in international humanitarian law gov- erning rape in armed conºict and have helped to devise international pro- tocols and aid/sanctions schemes governing sex trafªcking. We came to- gether in this conversation in order to ªgure out whether feminist achieve- ments have become sufªciently institutionalized to warrant our describing them and the advocacy networks that produced them Governance Feminism (“GF”). Our answer: Yes. And we wondered whether, by comparing our different projects on sexual violence and prostitution/trafªcking, we could ªnd any common features in GF. We kept comparing the legal results, the legal attitudes taken by the feminists who prevailed, the strands of feminism that “docked” most effectively in GF or the legal results it helped to pro- duce, and the situation of feminists operating in the First or the develop- ing world: were there any patterns? Our answer: Yes. This Article is the result of an intense series of text and telephone exchanges among the four of us, taking place from December 2005 to April 2006. Each of us has her own project which forms the basis of her con- 2006] Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism 337 tribution to this conversation. Janet Halley is working on new rules gov- erning wartime sexual violence in international humanitarian law, speciª- cally the place of rape and sexual slavery in the decisions of the Interna- tional Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Chantal Thomas has published widely on the law of trade;1 one of her papers examines the feminist debate over the 2001 U.N. Trafªcking Protocol.2 Hila Shamir and Prabha Kotiswaran have studied emergent national regimes addressing the connection between local prostitution markets and international “sex trafªcking” in Holland, Sweden, and Israel (Shamir) and in India (Koti- swaran). Shamir compares legal regimes for governing sex trafªcking and the related prostitution industry within national borders; Kotiswaran studies the highly local negotiations between stakeholders in the sex industry in India through ªeld work in Tirupati and Kolkata. Shamir and Koti-swaran take special note of the striking but very different impact of the 2001 Proto- col and the United States’ Victims of Trafªcking and Violence Protection Act (the VTVPA)3 in Israel and India. Halley introduces our concept of GF in Part One below, providing some examples from her study of feminist achievements in International Hu- manitarian Law (“IHL”). The rest of Part One presents Thomas’s, Shamir’s, and Kotiswaran’s understanding of GF in the evolving sex trafªcking re- gime. Part Two presents some thoughts by all four of us on the methodologi- cal implications of thinking about legal feminism in this way. Before getting underway, a few terminological and methodological mat- ters need a moment’s attention. First, it hardly seems coincidental that the legal regimes we examine center on criminal prohibition. We take it as a given, for a distributively focused legal analysis, that punishing conduct as a crime does not “stop” or “end” it, as governance feminists (“GFeminists”) sometimes seem to imagine. Rather, it enables a wide range of speciªc institutional actors to do a wide range of things. Prosecutors can indict actual violations as well as perfectly legal conduct; courts can convict defendants who are guilty as well as those who are per- fectly innocent; the criminal system will almost always leave some actual violations unsanctioned—producing what Duncan Kennedy helpfully terms the “tolerated residuum of abuse.”4 In sex work settings, police and land- lords can extract bribes from legally “guilty” and legally “innocent” ac- tors; prohibited conduct can “go underground” and become regulated by means that are not speciªcally legal. In addition, we assume that the objects 1 See, e.g., infra note 32. 2 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafªcking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Or- ganized Crime, G.A. Res. 25, Annex II, U.N. GAOR, 55th Sess., Supp. No. 49, at 60, U.N. Doc. A/45/49 (Vol. I) (2001) [hereinafter 2001 Trafªcking Protocol]. 3 Victims of Trafªcking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106-386, § 106, 114 Stat. 1464 (2000) [hereinafter Victims of Trafªcking and Violence Protection Act]. 4 Duncan Kennedy, Sexy Dressing, in Sexy Dressing Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity 126, 137 (1993). 338 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender [Vol. 29 of criminal attention, including “victims” real or putative, are not passive, but engage actively in “bargaining in the shadow of the law”:5 shifts in the rules create the possibility for shifts in bargaining power among vari- ous stakeholders in the criminalized social world; and we assume ªnally that these can be quite complex.6 All of those observations (and many more) bear on the feminist goal of criminalizing sexual violence and rape in war through international hu- manitarian law. We also note a wide range of regulatory modes speciªc to sex trafªcking regimes, differently affecting the players we see as the key “stakeholders” in the regime: the sex
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