Issue 9, September 2017 ISSN: 2286-7511 EISSN: 2287-0113 Special Issue–The Lessons of History Editorial: The Presence of the Past: Lessons of history for anti-trafficking work Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy ‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as protection in the regime of immigration controls ‘Bound Coolies’ and Other Indentured Workers in the Caribbean: Implications for debates about human trafficking and modern slavery Anti-White Slavery Legislation and its Legacies in England Historicising ‘Irregular’ Migration from Senegal to Europe ‘Shock and Awe’: A critique of the Ghana-centric child trafficking discourse ATR #9 First Page---01.pmd 1 1/1/2545, 3:44 review GUEST EDITOR EDITOR JULIA O’CONNELL DAVIDSON BORISLAV GERASIMOV EDITORIAL BOARD RUTVICA ANDRIJASEVIC, University of Bristol, United Kingdom JACQUELINE BHABHA, Harvard School of Public Health, United States URMILA BHOOLA, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences, South Africa XIANG BIAO, Oxford University, United Kingdom LUCIANA CAMPELLO, Panamerican Health Organization, Brazil MIKE DOTTRIDGE, Independent Human Rights Consultant, United Kingdom JOY NGOZI EZEILO, University of Nigeria; Former UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children, Nigeria ANNE GALLAGHER, Independent scholar and legal advisor, Australia JOHN GEE, Transient Workers Count Too, Singapore CHANDRE GOULD, Institute for Security Studies, South Africa SUZANNE HOFF, La Strada International, The Netherlands KRISTIINA KANGASPUNTA, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Austria KAMALA KEMPADOO, York University, Canada ANNALEE LEPP, University of Victoria, Canada MARIKA WEN MCADAM, Independent Consultant, Australia SVERRE MOLLAND, The Australian National University, Australia REBECCA NAPIER-MOORE, Independent Consultant, Thailand MARINA NOVAES, Secretariat of Human Rights and Citizenship of Sao Paulos City Hall, Brazil VICTORIA IJEOMA NWOGU, United Nations Development Programme, Somalia JULIA O’CONNELL DAVIDSON, University of Bristol, United Kingdom PIA OBEROI, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Switzerland SAM OKYERE, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom ELAINE PEARSON, Human Rights Watch, Australia NICOLA PIPER, University of Sydney, Australia NIVEDITA PRASAD, Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, Germany CAROLINE ROBINSON, Focus on Labour Exploitation, United Kingdom JYOTI SANGHERA, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Switzerland MARIE SEGRAVE, Monash University, Australia ELENA SHIH, Brown University, United States KENDRA STRAUSS, Simon Fraser University, United States REBECCA SURTEES, NEXUS Institute, United States SALLIE YEA, Independent scholar and consultant, Australia CATHY ZIMMERMAN, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom ATR #9 First Page---01.pmd 2 1/1/2545, 3:44 ANTI-TRAFFICKING REVIEW Special Issue THE LESSONS OF HISTORY Issue 9 September 2017 The Anti-Trafficking Review (ISSN 2286-7511) is published by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), a network of over 80 NGOs worldwide focused on advancing the human rights of migrants and trafficked persons. The Anti-Trafficking Review promotes a human rights-based approach to anti-trafficking. It explores trafficking in its broader context including gender analyses and intersections with labour and migration. It offers an outlet and space for dialogue between academics, practitioners, trafficked persons and advocates seeking to communicate new ideas and findings to those working for and with trafficked persons. The Review is primarily an e-journal, published biannually. The journal presents rigorously considered, peer-reviewed material in clear English. Each issue relates to an emerging or overlooked theme in the field of anti-trafficking. Articles contained in the Review represent the views of the respective authors and not necessarily those of the editors, the Editorial Board, the GAATW network or its members. The editorial team reserves the right to edit all articles before publication. ATR #9 First Page---02.pmd 1 1/1/2545, 1:48 The Anti-Trafficking Review is an open access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The Anti-Trafficking Review promotes the sharing of information, and we therefore encourage the reproduction and onward dissemination of articles published with us. ATR #9 First Page---02.pmd 2 1/1/2545, 1:48 ANTI-TRAFFICKING REVIEW Issue 9, September 2017 1 Editorial: The Presence of the Past: Lessons of history for anti-trafficking work Julia O’Connell Davidson Thematic Articles: The Lessons of History 14 Black Suffering for/from Anti-trafficking Advocacy Lyndsey P. Beutin 31 ‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as protection in the regime of immigration controls Nandita Sharma 48 ‘Bound Coolies’ and Other Indentured Workers in the Caribbean: Implications for debates about human trafficking and modern slavery Kamala Kempadoo 64 Anti-White Slavery Legislation and its Legacies in England Laura Lammasniemi 77 Historicising ‘Irregular’ Migration from Senegal to Europe Stephanie Maher 92 ‘Shock and Awe’: A critique of the Ghana- centric child trafficking discourse Samuel Okyere ATR #9 First Page---02.pmd 3 1/1/2545, 1:48 ATR #9 First Page---02.pmd 4 1/1/2545, 1:48 J O’Connell Davidson Editorial: The Presence of the Past: Lessons of history for anti-trafficking work Julia O’Connell Davidson Please cite this article as: J O’Connell Davidson, ‘Editorial: The Presence of the Past: Lessons of history for anti-trafficking work’, Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 9, 2017, pp. 1—12, www.antitraffickingreview.org This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review is concerned with some of the histories that created, and that continue to shape, both the present-day phenomena discussed under the rubric of trafficking, and the contemporary discourse of trafficking itself. One such history is that of transatlantic slavery. Since the millennium, numerous NGOs have been founded in the US, Australia and Europe with a mission to end what they call ‘modern slavery’. Their campaigns have overlapped with, and played a significant role in shaping, the development of media, NGO, policy and political discourse on human trafficking, which is, according to the antislavery NGO Free the Slaves, ‘the modern day slave trade— the process of enslaving a person’.1 In this discourse, the history of transatlantic slavery is invoked by means of visual as well as textual references in order to emphasise the severity of trafficking (and other phenomena included under the umbrella of ‘modern slavery’) as a human rights violation. The message has been communicated so effectively that although in international law slavery is held to be only one of several possible outcomes of trafficking, in the anti- trafficking rhetoric emanating from national and international policy agencies, as well as NGOs, trafficking is now frequently said to be ‘modern slavery’.2 1 Free The Slaves, ‘About Slavery: Frequently Asked Questions’, Free the Slaves, https://www.freetheslaves.net/faq. 2 BBC, ‘UN Forum Aims to End Trafficking’, BBC News, 21 February 2008, http:// newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7242180.stm; UNODC, ‘Transnational Organized Crime: Let’s put them out of business’, UNODC, 2015, https://www.unodc.org/ toc/en/crimes/human-trafficking.html; T May, ‘Theresa May: The abhorrent evil of human trafficking taking place on London’s streets’, Metro Blogs, 14 October 2013, retrieved 10 January 2015, http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/14/theresa-may-the-evil- of-modern-day-slavery-taking-place-on-londons-streets-4144671/. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Under the CC-BY license, the public is free to share, adapt, and make commercial use of the work. Users must always give proper attribution to the authors and the Anti-Trafficking Review. 1 ATR #9-2017---08-Film.pmd 1 1/1/2545, 7:19 ANTI-TRAFFICKING REVIEW 9 (2017): 1–12 The primary lesson contemporary antislavery actors draw from the history they reference concerns the importance of antislavery activism. Today, as in the past, they say, activists can play a central role in educating the public about the horror of slavery, mobilising communities against it, and pressing states to take action to end it. They devote very little attention to the historical details of Atlantic World slavery. Indeed, though it makes for powerful rhetoric, the discourse of ‘traffick- ing as modern slavery’ displays a fairly spectacular disregard for historical reality. The large-scale, profitable, and legally sanctioned business of shipping human beings from Africa into chattel slavery in the New World that flourished between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries relied on overwhelming physical force at every stage—from the moment of kidnap, through the journey to the West Afri- can coast, detention in the dungeons of fortresses and castles prior to shipment, during the Middle Passage itself, and on arrival.3 It is true that in the contemporary world, some cases have been documented in which people have been snatched from home or street, forcibly moved across borders or to other regions of their home country, then brutally exploited. But if the term ‘human trafficking’ was applied only to such cases, it would be a numerically small phenomenon, far removed from the estimates of hundreds of thousands or even millions that are routinely touted by state and non-state