Sex Trafficking’

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università di Palermo UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PALERMO Dottorato di ricerca in DIRITTI UMANI: EVOLUZIONE, TUTELA E LIMITI XXII ciclo Trafficking in Women in Europe: Revisiting Feminist Perspectives on ‘Sex Trafficking’ Letizia Palumbo Tesi di Dottorato IUS 20 Coordinatore del Dottorato Tutor Chiar.mo Prof. Aldo Schiavello Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Isabel Trujillo Perez Anno Accademico 2010/2011 1 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 7 1. Trafficking in Human Beings in the UN Trafficking Protocol and European Legal Instruments 20 1.1 International Legal Developments in Trafficking before UN Trafficking Protocol 22 1.1.1 Early Conventions on Trafficking 22 1.1.2 The 1949 Convention 24 1.1.3 Trafficking in Women in the CEDAW 27 1.2 UN Trafficking Protocol Negotiations 29 1.2.1 The UN Convention against Trasnational Organised Crime 30 1.2.2 The UN Trafficking Protocol 34 1.2.2.1 UN Definition of Trafficking in Persons 35 1.2.2.2 Human Rights Protections for Trafficked Persons and Repatriation 40 1.2.2.3 Law Enforcement and Border Controls 45 1.2.2.4 Trafficking and Smuggling: a Controversial Distinction 48 1.3 European Legal Instruments against Trafficking in Human Beings 50 1.3.1 The Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings 50 1.3.2 EU Legal Instruments against Trafficking 55 1.4 Conclusion 59 3 2. Sex trafficking’ and Prostitution/Sex Work from Feminist Perspectives 62 2.1 Exploring the Concept of Agency 65 2.1.1 Radical Feminist Critiques of Liberalism 65 2.1.2 The Complexity of Agency: Feminist Critiques of Radical Feminism 71 2.2 Neo-abolitionist Feminist Perspectives 77 2.2.1 Prostitution as a Construction of Male Power 77 2.2.2 Consensual Dilemmas 81 2.2.3 Banning Prostitution to Prevent Sex Trafficking 86 2.3 Sex workers Rights Feminist Perspectives 90 2.3.1 The Voices of Sex Workers 90 2.3.2 Sex Workers Strategies 95 2.3.3 Migrant Sex Workers and Trafficking 100 2.4 Conclusion 104 3. ‘Sex Trafficking’, Labour and Migration from Feminist Perspectives 110 3.1 Slavery and Exploitation 112 3.1.1 Slavery, Coercion and Freedom 112 3.1.2 The Spectre of White Slavery 116 3.1.3 New Forms of Slavery 121 3.1.4 Trafficking and Measuring Exploitation 125 3.2 Female Mobility and Labour Mobility 128 3.2.1 Birds of Passage are also Women 128 3.2.2 The Feminisation of Migrations 131 3.2.3 The Confinement of Female Mobility in the Service Sector 134 3.2.4 Gendered Roles and Transnational Bonds 138 3.3 Feminist Studies on Sex Trafficking from the Perspective of Migration and Labour 141 4 3.4 Conclusion 147 4. ‘Sex Trafficking’, Human Rights and the ‘Rescue’ Operations in Anti Trafficking Interventions 153 4.1 Human Rights and Womens Rights 155 4.1.1 International Networking for Womens Rights 155 4.1.2 The Suffering Subjects of Rights 160 4.2 Rescue and Rehabilitation Operations in Anti-Trafficking Interventions 166 4.2.1 The Italian Exceptional Model 174 4.3 Saviours and Helpers 179 4.3.1 Militarized Humanitarism and Carceral Feminism 179 4.3.2 The Contradictions of Helping and Empowerment Strategies 183 4.4 Claiming Rights 188 5. Conclusion 195 References 212 5 6 INTRODUCTION Research Issues and Aims In recent years, increasing public and political attention has been directed toward the issue of sex trafficking. Images and episodes of women recruited by use of force or deception for exploitation in the sex industry have been presented as dangerous manifestations of global gendered inequalities. While media accounts have recounted similar stories of coercion, transport and forced sexual labour of women, social activists and policy makers have put forth new legislation and policies at local, national and transnational levels. In this political scenario, feminist scholars and activists in a variety of ways and from different approaches have expressed and theorized diverse conceptions of sex trafficking, revealing different views on gender violence, sexuality and womens agency and rights. This research aims to examine the issue of trafficking in women for the sex industry in European Union (EU) countries, critically exploring the ways this topic has been conceptualized and addressed by feminist scholars and activists. In so doing, it also investigates anti-trafficking interventions in Europe and suggests some alternative rubrics for intervening in the different forms of gender violence contained within trafficking as a political frame. Drawing from a wide array of ethnographic and theoretical texts, as well as activists writings and policy and legal documents, this study considers questions such as the following: How do feminist interpretations and responses to sex trafficking shift in response to broader cultural and geopolitical interests? Do feminists have a vocabulary that is adequate to theorizing trafficking in women in all its complexities? What are the challenges to a feminist critique of trafficking? And, how does the issue of trafficking require us to reframe the notion of gender justice? Far from being a simple narrative of victims or autonomous subjects capable of agency, the research addresses the complex material and symbolic issues that 7 characterize the topic of trafficking in women in the sex industry. Such an approach allows an exploration of trafficking both as an empirical phenomenon associated with global capital and successive waves of gendered migration and as a political rubric. In this light, dealing with trafficking in women involves examining the issue of sexuality,1 labour migration, citizenship and access to justice in Europe. Specific attention in this study is thus dedicated to critically analysing concepts such as agency, victimhood and (sexual) exploitation and their relation with the issue of human rights. The use of the expression feminist perspectives in the title of this research is intended to do justice to the different positions, voices and approaches of feminism. Indeed, when we talk about feminism or feminist thought it is impossible to reduce it to a singular and unified theoretical corpus. Since its origin2 feminism has characterized itself as a variety of theoretical practices3, that is a plurality of practices and theoretical elaborations, strategies of resistance and political reflections. This choice of not distinguishing clearly between intellectual and practical/militant approaches can be indirectly identified in the feminist aim of challenging the binary oppositions mind/body, reason/emotion, etc. on which the dominant male vision has based its claim to hegemony by suppressing the second aspect of these dichotomies (the supposedly female aspect). This was made explicit in the 1970s with the famous slogan the personal is political, which states that what is related to the privacy, emotions and the bodies of women has an immediate political value. In this sense, there is no separation between the concrete forms of activism and resistance and the theoretical reflections and awareness that accompanies them.4 The constant attention to the concrete dynamics of real life and to the forms of discrimination against women, explains the variability of feminist analysis and interpretations and their sensibility to the diversity of the contexts historical, geographical and cultural of reference. This awareness, which has strongly emerged since the early 80s thanks to the circulation of materials from non-Western women, has also led to the deconstruction of what, in previous years, had emerged as the hegemonic 1 In using the term sexuality, I am referring to socially-constructed meanings, expectations, practices and identities related to sex. 2 According to the Western periodization, the origin of feminism can be identifiable, at least for its first organised expression, in the mid nineteenth century, with the suffragettes movement. 3 The expression theoretical practices is taken from Louis Althusser. 4 Therefore, for example, it is difficult to separate analytically the theoretical justification of the right to vote from the political campaigns that were carried out in Britain in those years; or to separate analytically postcolonial feminist reflections from the contexts of resistance and struggle in which they originate. 8 form of feminism (white, Western and middle class feminism). The result has been the recognition, both in theory and in practice, of the existence of various feminisms, and therefore of different theoretical analyses and strategies of political organization. However, what characterizes the various feminisms, from an epistemological point of view, is their capacity to challenge from different disciplines and approaches mainstream knowledge. They do this by showing how power relations are embedded in discourse and, at the same time, by identifying categories and practices which pose insightful questions by women and about women, to document the experiences of their socio-political oppression and marginalization. On the basis of these considerations and being aware of the impossibility of offering a comprehensive overview of all feminist positions on the issue of trafficking in women in Europe, this study employs the expression feminist perspectives to indicate the feminist theoretical reflections and practices which, in my opinion, offer from different approaches and with diverse emphasis important analyses and conceptualizations of the topic of sex trafficking. It is worth highlighting that the phenomenon of trafficking is not limited to the sex industry, although this is a common belief, and not all prostitution involves trafficking. Trafficking can apply to other sectors such as agriculture, domestic work, manufacturing, construction and can also affect children, men and transgender people.5 However, despite their limitations,6 international sources estimate that between 68% and 87% of the entire volume of trafficking victims is involved in sexual labour and that the majority of trafficked persons are women and children.7 This research focuses on trafficking in women in the sex industry in EU countries.

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