The Politics of Sex Trafficking: A Moral Geography (Critical Criminological Perspectives)
Erin O'Brien, Sharon Hayes, Belinda Carpenter
Language: English
Pages: 237
ISBN: B01K0T62H0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book offers a unique insight into the moral politics behind the making of human trafficking policy in Australia and the United States of America. As governments around the world rush to meet their international obligations to combat human trafficking, a heated debate has emerged over the rights, wrongs, and harms of prostitution, and its relationship to sex trafficking.
The Politics of Sex Trafficking identifies and challenges intrinsic notions of moral harm that have pervaded trafficking discourse and resulted in a distinctly anti-prostitution agenda in trafficking policy in recent decades. Including rare interviews with key political actors, this book charts the competing perspectives of feminist, faith-based, and sex-worker activists, and their efforts to influence policy-makers. This critical account of the creation of anti-trafficking policy challenges the sex trafficking narrative dominant in US Congressional and Australian Parliamentary hearings, and demonstrates the power of a moral politics in shaping policy.
This book will appeal to academics across the fields of criminology, criminal justice, law, human rights and gender studies, as well as policy-makers.
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Although CATW was involved in coalition activities from time to time, it was one of several organisations not always included in the coalition (Soderlund 2005, 72). This does not, however, mean that they opposed the work of the coalition. Stolz argues that much of the lobbying work undertaken by abolitionist faith-based and feminist groups was done not in strict coalition, but in tandem: Perspectives and Players 39 Feminist groups, religious groups, labor groups, working through members of
who were trafficked into brothels. These included the experiences of Anita Sharma Bhattaria (US Congress, House of Representatives 14 September 1999, 35–36), a survivor of trafficking working with the IJM; ‘Inez’ (US Congress, Senate 22 February 2000), a contact of the Protection Project; and ‘Maria’ (US Congress, House of Representatives 29 November 2001). The majority of the stories told during the Congressional hearings were recounted by activists and service providers. However, these three
and a draft resolution on Illegal Migrants and Trafficking in Persons in 1998 (Ollus 2002, 4). In December 1998, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Resolution on Transnational Organised Crime, establishing an ad hoc committee with the responsibility of drafting a new treaty on human trafficking (Schloenhardt 2009a, 2). Between January 1999 and October 2000, the committee held a series of 11 meetings at the UN International Crime Prevention Centre in Vienna, where country delegations
referred to the AFP, with just 10 prosecutions by the Department of Public Prosecutions (Phillips 2008, 9, 14). Between 2004 and 2011, 184 suspected victims of trafficking were referred by the AFP to receive trafficking victim support services while they assisted with investigations (Australian Institute of Criminology 2012). Fiona David, reporting on trafficking for the Australian Institute of Criminology, argues that investigation and prosecution statistics do not necessarily provide an
taken from media sources, where much of the information is anecdotal, is particularly unreliable as ‘the validity of sources may be difficult to control’ (Di Nicola 2007, 54). Some organisations may even have an interest in supporting false statistics, even when they are aware that these estimates may have been exaggerated or inflated. Di Nicola suggests that this occurs because sometimes ‘the main goal of those presenting these numbers is to feed figures to the press or to 94 The Politics of
