Two decades in, Anti-Trafficking Review’s editor says maybe activists still don’t understand social change

To mark our tenth anniversary, we are releasing a new feature which reflects on how the anti-trafficking field has evolved, and where it might be – or should be – going in the future. As part of this project we sat down with Borislav Gerasimov, editor of the Anti-Trafficking Review, published by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. The conversation focused on what’s changed – and what hasn’t – in the last two decades, and opportunities for radical future transformation.

Joel Quirk (BTS): You’ve worked in anti-trafficking for over 20 years. What was the field like when you started?

Borislav Gerasimov: I started working as a technical officer for a women’s rights organisation in Bulgaria in 2001. The organisation was working broadly on domestic violence, sexual violence and trafficking.

In Bulgaria in 2001, communism had ended more than a decade earlier. We had transitioned to a market economy, and while unemployment, organised crime and thuggery were subsiding, they were still common. Amidst all this, there were cases of women being tricked into taking jobs overseas and suffering awful abuse.

Some of them were Roma women, who have long been marginalised and discriminated against in Bulgarian society. But there were also white, middle class, young women who were being duped into taking fake offers of work or study abroad.

We can look at these cases now and say our understanding of them was oversimplified, but the problem was real. Relatively organised criminals were trafficking women for sexual exploitation, chaining them to radiators, burning them with cigarettes, and branding them with tattoos. This situation later evolved, of course. But this is where I started.

Joel: Global interest in trafficking exploded at the start of the 21st century, but my impression is that a lot of the people who joined the sector back then didn't have much foundational knowledge and expertise. Is that your sense of it?

Borislav: Animus was one of the first women’s rights NGOs in Bulgaria. It was established in 1994 to help female victims of violence with psychological and social assistance. When I started, there were relatively few NGOs of this kind. There wasn’t any real government assistance either for victims of violence, let alone trafficking.

By around 2005, a few actors had gained expertise in the topic by speaking with survivors and exchanging best practices with foreign organisations. But there were also some NGOs set up by famous people who heard about trafficking, or saw a movie about it, and wanted to “do something about it”. They didn’t have any knowledge of the topic, but would run simplistic awareness campaigns and do media appearances without any real impact. These NGOs usually fizzled out in a year or two.

Joel: How much learning has there been within anti-trafficking? Can you point to things that are now done differently, and better? Or is the field constantly reinventing the wheel, as critics often accuse it of doing?

Borislav: The learning is slow, but it’s definitely there.

When I started in 2001, our organisation was trying not to scare people. Our message was that if people decided to go abroad, they should inform themselves and be prepared. Our materials told them how to stay safe and whom to contact if they need help.

Others went down a very different route. Their campaigns essentially said, “don't go abroad because it's dangerous”. These groups used a lot of sensationalised images in their work – all chains and bruises. That has changed since.

Intersectional feminism, MeToo and Black Lives Matter all had a big impact on the acknowledgement of different intersections

Over time there has also been more attention paid to migrant workers and the links between migration and trafficking. To be sure: organised crime was very much part of the reality for exploited people leaving Bulgaria in the early 2000s. But when Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, free movement became easier and many people chose to enter work that until then had been considered inherently exploitative – like sex work.

So the cases became more nuanced. The sector learned that trafficking doesn’t only come from organised crime or only relate to sex work, but can happen in all sorts of labour fields. And it learned that not everybody who enters something like sex work is being trafficked.

More recently, the understanding deepened again. I think BTS and the Anti-Trafficking Review (ATR) can claim some credit for this learning. In the last decade, there’s been a more nuanced, intersectional understanding of trafficking. It acknowledges the connections between exploitation and economic systems, migration policies, and weakened labour rights.

Intersectional feminism, MeToo and Black Lives Matter all had a big impact on this as well. More anti-trafficking organisations are, at least on paper, acknowledging these different intersections, as are other NGOs, UN agencies and academics. Governments less so.

Joel: How did you come to work for the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW)?

Borislav: After seven years working for Animus in Bulgaria, I joined La Strada International, the European NGO Network Against Trafficking. Seven years after that, I moved again to work at GAATW. My career is a progression from the national, to the European, to now the global level.

All GAATW members are independent, so there's no pressure from the top to do things a certain way. But everyone accepts the same values and principles, such as not to discourage migration, not to conflate sex work and trafficking, and to always take a human rights and victim-centred approach.

Joel: How would you describe GAATW’s work and impact in the early 2000s?

Borislav: I’m part of the team, so I guess I’m biased. But I can say that we’ve moved the conversation around trafficking in the right direction.

There are many actors working in this field and individual NGOs have relatively little power by themselves. But in the 90s, when GAATW started, there was no international anti-trafficking legislation. There were anti-trafficking organisations working at the national level. As a result, GAATW and our respective networks of national partners filled some key gaps at the UN and nationally.

In the early years, we pushed hard for the government to put structures, policies and funding in place. But when that actually happened, we saw the state wasn’t doing it right.

I'm inclined to think GAATW also deserves some credit for the final shape of the international trafficking protocol. We pushed hard for broadening the definition of trafficking to apply to fields beyond sex work; to recognise that it's not only women who can be victims of trafficking; to include the means (force, coercion, etc.) in the definition of trafficking; and to include some human rights protections.

The trafficking sector would be a very different place today if those elements hadn’t been included. So if nothing else, that’s some impact for GAATW.

Joel: Things were in flux in the early 2000s – systems are more fixed now. Do you think that increase in stability has made further change more difficult?

Borislav: It does feel like we had more flexibility back then. NGOs in Eastern Europe were mostly funded by foreign donors, philanthropists, and foreign governments in the 2000s. From the 2010s onward, organisations started to receive more national government funding.

That brought with it a lot of rules about who is eligible for assistance, how long they can receive it for, what kind of assistance they can receive, and how much the organisation would be paid for it. Having the national government get involved was very constraining.

There’s an irony there. In the early years, we pushed hard for the government to put structures, policies and funding in place. As an NGO, your goal is to not be necessary anymore. You hope that one day the state will take responsibility for the work you're doing.

But when that actually happened, we saw the state wasn’t doing it right. They didn’t allocate enough money. They had all these rules and procedures that restricted support. Added to this, many NGOs felt they couldn’t criticise the government for it, because they themselves were getting government funding.

This isn’t a problem only in Eastern Europe – I've seen it in lots of countries. But our success in getting the state’s attention created a whole new set of issues to deal with.

Joel: GAATW’s 2007 report, Collateral Damage, is a really important milestone in this narrative because it opened up the idea that the solution could actually be worse than the disease in some contexts. GAATW’s work on the role of funders was also a milestone. Can you tell us about that?

Borislav: I think Collateral Damage was a wakeup call for a lot of people. It was really radical at the time. Many people asked us how we could be criticising anti-trafficking when we are an anti-trafficking organisation ourselves.

The idea for the report emerged in 2004 when GAATW was celebrating its 10th anniversary. The UN Trafficking Protocol had been in force for a couple of years by that point, and people were beginning to see the damage it was doing, especially to sex workers and low wage migrants. GAATW wasn’t the first to raise these issues – academics like Nandita Sharma were already crying foul – but the report did have an impact.

The special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review on following the money in 2014 was also groundbreaking. Funding levels were increasing but there was little accountability, and hardly any evaluations. Donors were also starting to restrict various operations. The US anti-prostitution pledge is a good example of this – it effectively conditions US federal funding on condemning sex work. Some NGO members of GAATW were discussing whether they could accept money with those sorts of strings attached.

Joel: In 2011 GAATW launched the Anti-Trafficking Review. What’s ATR’s origin story?

Borislav: There were two main impetuses for the journal. The first was related to a newsletter GAATW was publishing at the time, called Alliance News. It featured in-depth, critical analyses of trends written by member organisations. These offered valuable insights from on the ground, but they weren’t being circulated widely.

At the same time, GAATW’s advocacy officer Caroline Robinson was attending UN meetings. She reported back to us that national policymakers and international agencies often complained about the lack of robust, peer-reviewed evidence gathered all in one place. Many told her that such a central repository would help them with policy decisions.

What we took from that was that it’s not enough for research to just physically exist. There were already plenty of robust, peer-reviewed articles. But they were scattered across journals in criminology, sociology, anthropology, feminist studies, and so on, and many were behind paywalls. They weren’t accessible enough for non-academics to use easily.

There was an obvious gap, and GAATW decided to fill it by creating ATR. The aim was to provide an outlet for GAATW members, academics, and other interested actors to publish evidence and advocate for policy changes. It was also supposed to create a bridge between academics and practitioners by producing robust, well-argued articles which were relatively short and written in simple language.

Joel: You've edited most of ATR’s issues. How has the journal evolved, and what's its relationship to conversations on the ground?

Borislav: It’s become more professional over time. In the first few issues, a mixture of academics, NGO workers, independent consultants and researchers wrote for us. But relatively quickly, people started contacting us to ask if ATR was included in Scopus, a major academic article database. You need to have very academically written articles to do that, and we worked hard to get our articles indexed by both Scopus and Web of Science.

As that happened, more academics and fewer NGOs submitted articles to us. The language of the journal became more academically heavy. This has been a challenge for me, since one of my roles as editor has been to help authors make their work understandable for a global audience, as well as for practitioners and policymakers.

The ATR publishes special issues, and it takes around two years to produce an issue from start to finish. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve, or to focus on an emerging topic, when you have such a long editorial process. But we’re bringing in new critical perspectives to existing conversations and we’re definitely shaping thinking and, I hope, policy and practice along with it.

Joel: How do you see BTS and ATR fitting together? BTS started up three years after ATR, and has quite a different format. Does it feel like they overlap?

Borislav: Absolutely. We both publish the same kind of critical analyses. They’re intersectional and look at the root causes and structures that enable trafficking and exploitation. Neither of us focuses much on trafficking as a crime isolated from larger socioeconomic and political systems and processes.

Perhaps we activists don't really understand how governments and social change work. Maybe we want things to happen too quickly

We've worked together many times to help authors of ATR articles to publish their work with BTS. Those shorter articles on BTS tend to get a lot of attention, often more so than the original ATR articles. That’s because of the length and style of BTS pieces, which are less theoretical and more accessible to the general public.

Joel: Do you ever feel like you’re screaming into the void?

Borislav: Like I said earlier, there has been a lot of learning in the sector. More NGOs are speaking about intersectional oppression and so on. Some large, mainstream organisations remain hesitant, but systemic issues are generally recognised much more across anti-trafficking than they once were.

But governments still don’t seem to want to listen to the evidence. Even the previous UN special rapporteur on trafficking in persons was very critical of how states are approaching trafficking. In her last report to the UN General Assembly, she highlighted issues with the criminal justice system and migration policies, and stated a need for holistic responses. But it’s like states didn’t hear her.

I remember thinking at the time, “okay, she is basically the highest authority on trafficking in the world – so why are states ignoring her? And if they can ignore her, what chance do the rest of us have?” In these moments, it does feel like we’re screaming into the void.

But perhaps we activists don't really understand how governments and social change work. Maybe we want things to happen too quickly. Governments are listening to someone, and they put much more stock in the concerns coming from their voter base than from activists and appointed experts. That’s why worries about migrants and security, while unfounded, generally stick. So it’s possible we’re missing something – or at least being unrealistic – about how change comes about and takes hold.

Joel: Do you think the critical approach to anti-trafficking might also be part of the problem? Much of the dialogue is now very ambitious and transformative, but a downside of that is that it can be disconnected from the political times we live in.

Borislav: Yes, possibly. Because the critics see trafficking as a logical outcome of the current socio-economic political system, the only solution we can offer is to completely end patriarchy, capitalism, racism and colonialism. Those are very big aims.

I think it's our fault for demanding the hugely ambitious, end goal straight up front, rather than breaking things down and offering constructive steps that would eventually get us there. We need smaller steps.

Joel: Where should anti-trafficking be going? Should it be radically transformed?

Borislav: One option would be for the sector to be dismantled, and for each area to focus on its own niche – whether that’s migrant rights, sex worker rights, violence against women, education, or sexual and reproductive health and rights. But I don't think that will happen.

In which case, I’d like to see more organisations speaking about the systemic issues at the roots of trafficking. I’d like them to consider what small steps can be taken to address those oppressions – and to integrate those into their recommendations. Many NGOs and UN agencies recognise these systemic issues, but they leave them out of their recommendations for governments.

I'd also like to see more viable solutions being proposed. It's easy to critique the problems, but we don’t get anywhere if we don’t suggest a way forward.

Joel: Is it the case that we don't have solutions, or is it that we don't have sufficient political power as a movement to make those changes?

Borislav: I don't see anti-trafficking as a movement. When I see the phrase ‘the anti-trafficking movement’ in ATR articles, I usually ask the author to reconsider if they want to call it that.

A movement implies people coming together in pursuit of a shared goal. We have a shared goal of ending exploitation. But we have such different ideas about what exploitation is or how it should be ended that we’re certainly not coming together.

So I suppose it’s both. We can’t agree on the solutions and that’s why we don’t have sufficient political power.