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Victims, perpetrators, and the limits of human rights discourse in post-Palermo fiction about sex trafficking

2015; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13642987.2014.980404

1744-053X

Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg,

Sex work and related issues

AbstractThis article explores the figure of the perpetrator in fictional and testimonial representations of sex trafficking, situating its analysis in the context of broader conversations about the figure of the perpetrator within human rights discourse; of feminist debates about victimisation and agency in the trafficking scenario; and of discussions in literary and cultural studies about how cultural representations contribute to understandings and treatment of victims and perpetrators of sex trafficking. We demonstrate that, rather than depending upon a single criminal figure or syndicate, a range of perpetrators from all walks of life manifest the trafficking of persons for sex. Investigating the broad spectrum of responsible parties to or beneficiaries of the sex trafficking scenario, the article argues for a more complex understanding of culpability which will, in turn, intervene in debates about trafficking that are built upon and recapitulate reductive terms of responsibility, agency, and victimhood.Keywords: human rightssex traffickingperpetratorsliterature Notes on contributorsAlexandra Schultheis Moore, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, works in postcolonial studies and human rights. She is the author of Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis, and the Nation as Family, and co-editor of Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, both with Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights with Sophia McClennen. Moore's current monograph is on embodiment, vulnerability, and security in contemporary human rights literature and film.Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Ph.D., is Professor of English and Chair of the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College. Author of Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights, she is co-editor of Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, both with Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Dr. Goldberg directs the Women's Entrepreneurial Development Laboratory at Babson College, an innovation space dedicated to testing models for economic empowerment and the restoration of lives for women who have been trafficked or who have experienced other forms of marginalization and exploitation. Dr. Goldberg gratefully acknowledges support for this article from the Babson Faculty Research Fund.Notes1. For an informative overview of recent scholarship on this debate, see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Maria Celia Hwang, and Heather Ruth Lee, 'What Is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37, no. 4 (2012): 1015–1029.2. Ratna Kapur, 'Gender, Sovereignty, and the Rise of the Sexual Security Regime', Melbourne Journal of International Law 14, no. 2 (2013): 332.3. The third Palermo Protocol, adopted along with the others, is the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, their Parts and Components and Ammunition. The adoption of instruments that address sex trafficking, labour smuggling, and the illicit trade in firearms clearly positions sex trafficking within larger narratives of states' economic interests and military security.4. Nandita Sharma develops this argument in 'Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid', NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 88–111.5. James A. Levine, The Blue Notebook (New York: Spiegel and Grau Trade Paperbacks, [2009] 2010).6. Chris Abani, Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006).7. Wendy Law-Yone, The Road to Wanting (London: Vintage, 2011).8. Prabha Kotiswaran, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 242. For a more in-depth analysis of the range of meanings embedded in the concept of 'exploitation', see Vanessa E. Munro, 'Exploring Exploitation: Trafficking in Sex, Work, and Sex Work', Demanding Sex: Critical Reflections on the Regulation of Prostitution, ed. Vanessa E. Munro and Marina Della Giusta (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 83–97.9. Ratna Kapur, Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties (New Delhi and Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 8.10. For an informative discussion of the relationship between the two protocols, see Jacqueline Bhabha, 'Trafficking, Smuggling, and Human Rights', Migration Information Source (1 March 2005), http://www.migrationinformation.org. Bhabha notes that the differences between trafficking and smuggling are often difficult to ascertain, especially given the conditions of 'forced labor' which may make smuggled migrancy 'forced but chosen opportunities'.11. Anne Gallagher, 'Human Rights and the New UN Protocols on Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling: A Preliminary Analysis', Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2001): 976.12. Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 6.13. Hannah Arendt, 'We Refugees', in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 55.14. Roberto Esposito, 'Biopolitics', in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham and London: Duke University Press: 2013), 330.15. Ibid., 343.16. Kapur, Makeshift Migrants and Law, 8. Kapur also discusses the far-reaching effects of the US Trafficking Victims Prevention Act (TVPA 2000, reauthorised in 2003 and 2005), includes an international monitoring system. The system subjects other countries to various levels of scrutiny and the threat of economic sanctions in order to leverage the adoption of stricter anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution laws in other countries (ibid., 116–117).17. See Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (London: Zed Books, 2010); Alison Murray, 'Debt-Bondage and Trafficking: Don't Believe the Hype', in Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998), 51–64; and Ronald Weitzer, 'The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade', Politics and Society 35, no. 3 (2007): 447–475.18. Amar, The Security Archipelago, 15.19. Although we highlight some of the more extreme rhetoric through which advocates stake their positions, we also note that these different positions have been subject to much excellent analysis. See, for instance, Kamala Kempadoo et al.'s volume, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005) for a nuanced discussion of the ways in which the focus on sex trafficking, and the threat to normative gender roles it represents, masks neoliberal predilections of the global labour market.20. Victor Malarek, The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It (New York: Arcade, 2009), xiv.21. Weitzer, 'The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking', 448.22. See, for instance, Jo Doezema, Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (New York: Zed Books, 2010), 10.23. Murray, 'Debt-Bondage and Trafficking', 419.24. Patrick Crough, quoted in Malarek, The Johns, 25.25. Kotiswaran, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor, 223.26. Malarek, The Johns, xiii.27. Ibid., xiv–xv.28. Amar, The Security Archipelago, 206.29. Tristan Anne Borer, 'A Taxonomy of Victims and Perpetrators: Human Rights and Reconciliation in South Africa', Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2003): 1088.30. Isabell Lorey, 'Governmental Precarization', trans. Aileen Derieg, Transversal: EIPCP Multilingual Webjournal, January, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/lorey/en (accessed 15 September 2013).31. Kapur, 'Gender, Sovereignty, and the Rise of the Sexual Security Regime', 345.32. James A. Levine, 'The Street of Cages' (Originally published in The Times of London, 11 July 2009), in The Blue Notebook (New York: Spiegel and Grau Trade Paperbacks, 2010), 223.33. The same year the Palermo Protocols were adopted, the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) became law, which included the establishment of a ranking and reporting system – tied to economic sanctions – of individual countries' efforts to address trafficking. For an excellent overview of the TVPA and the TIP Reports, see Anne Gallagher, 'Human Rights and Human Trafficking: A Reflection on the Influence and Evolution of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report', in From Human Trafficking to Human Rights, ed. Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 172–194.34. Julietta Hua, Trafficking Women's Human Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 62–63.35. Ibid., xxvii.36. Ibid., 57–58.37. Ibid., 61–62.38. Donna M. Bickford, '"We All Like to Think We've Saved Somebody": Sex Trafficking in Literature', Journal of International Women's Studies 13, no. 3 (2012): 134.39. Ibid., 134.40. Levine, The Blue Notebook, 141.41. Ibid., 179.42. Kapur, Makeshift Migrants and Law, 46–47.43. Levine, The Blue Notebook, 98.44. Ibid., 103.45. Abani, Becoming Abigail, 62.46. Law-Yone, The Road to Wanting, 238.47. Ibid., 104, 105, 111.48. Ibid., 126, 128.49. Ibid., 158.50. Ibid., 221.51. Amar, The Security Archipelago, 209.52. Ibid., 186.