Celebrity experts, anti-immigrant agendas and burnout undermine hopes of getting anti-trafficking back on track

I have been part of the anti-trafficking field since the mid-1990s, when I joined other colleagues to alert the world to the fact that UN and INGO staff and contractors were engaging in human trafficking in Bosnia.

Since then, as a human rights lawyer and later as a professor of law, I have experienced how the world’s response to trafficking has evolved. Despite three decades of learning, it continues to suffer from a multitude of problems.

The primary, overarching problem is the extent to which tangential political agendas drive law and policymaking on human trafficking. But here I’d like to discuss four other dynamics that also stand out as undermining progress. These are:

The response continues to treat sex and labour trafficking as separate issues, despite their substantial overlap.

The response has increasingly shifted from trafficking of migrants to trafficking of citizens, facilitating an anti-migrant political agenda. This supports regressive political regimes and is increasingly weaponised by those regimes.

The response remains enamoured with celebrity intervention, prioritising the opinions of dilettantes over both academic and lived expertise.

The response is pushing competent and passionate people into burnout and out of the field.

The list could go on. The anti-trafficking field is also, for example, donor driven, attracted to shiny new technologies, and lax in its approach to evaluation. And, given that I live and work in the United States, it must be acknowledged that the current decimation of trafficking-related programmes and laws by the Trump administration is both devastating the field and creating scepticism toward advice coming from the US.

Nevertheless, it remains true that these four dynamics ensure that a lot of anti-trafficking work is structured to fail from the outset.

The Venn diagram of sex and labour trafficking

In law and in practice, human trafficking responses tend to artificially segregate trafficking for sex from trafficking for labour. This split framework does not accurately represent the problem, and interventions break down because protections considered appropriate for one group aren’t necessarily applied to the other.

Data clearly indicates that many people trafficked for their labour are also subjected to sexual assault. It also shows that many people trafficked for sex have their labour exploited as well. We know there is a strong overlap here. There is no empirical reason why policymakers and activists should continue to treat these as unrelated issues, particularly when addressing prevention and protection. Yet they do – for political reasons.

Citizen or migrant?

One reason why many actors are unresponsive to the overlap between sex and labour trafficking is that it intersects with a second bifurcation: the distinction between citizens and migrants.

At least in the US, citizens are more likely to be trafficked primarily for sex than for labour. For migrants it’s generally the opposite. This strongly affects how the two types of exploitation are framed and how much attention they get, exacerbating the artificial split by making one a domestic problem and the other an immigration problem.

Consistent lobbying by prostitution abolitionist groups has been opportunistic, in that the organisations lobbying for the change have also profited from the concomitant reallocation in funds

The lawmakers drafting the US Trafficking Victim Protection Act (TVPA) in the late 1990s knew about both citizen and migrant victims of trafficking. In early documents, Senator Wellstone and others pointed to both hearing-impaired migrants forced to sell trinkets on the street and migrants forced into sexual servitude as reasons for enacting the TVPA. Drafters were also motivated by the 1988 case United States v. Kosminski, which involved two men, both US citizens with limited cognitive function, trafficked to do farm labour and effectively held in servitude.

But despite lawmakers being firmly aware of trafficking among both groups, the exploitation of migrants was the focus when the law came into force in 2000.

That focus has now changed. Consistent lobbying over the past 20 years by prostitution abolitionist groups, which often hold no strong opinions on labour trafficking, has steadily shifted the focus away from migrant trafficking and toward protecting citizens from sex trafficking. This has been opportunistic, in that the organisations lobbying for the change have also profited from the concomitant reallocation in funds.

But it has also benefitted political leaders who foster and exploit rising anti-immigrant sentiment to justify building walls and tightening border policies. They cloak regressive political objectives in anti-trafficking rhetoric, law and policy, stoking narratives that depict citizens as victims of trafficking and migrants as traffickers. And they do this in spite of ample evidence that passing restrictive immigration laws increases human trafficking by forcing the desperate to rely on traffickers.

Denying expertise

When it comes to human trafficking, policymakers and the media fail far too often to consult the experts.

In 2014, I wrote an article for Beyond Trafficking and Slavery critiquing the fascination that the public, the media, legislative bodies (particularly in the US but also elsewhere), and UN agencies have for seeking celebrity opinions, and framing them as expert witnesses within the anti-trafficking sphere.

They had invited Asthon Kutcher – again – to deliver the equivalent of expert witness testimony

In 2018, for example, staffers from the Senate Judiciary Committee requested that I provide “talking points” for discussions on the forthcoming Reauthorization of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act. I provided several, but then asked for whom the talking points were being prepared. The response was “for Ashton Kutcher”. They had invited him – again – to deliver the equivalent of expert witness testimony on where he thought anti-trafficking policy and funds should be directed.

Since the trafficking Protocol and the TVPA were enacted 25 years ago, a tremendous amount of expertise has developed. Yet those in a position to create law and policy still regularly turn to those without expertise, or lived experience, or both for advice. This helps no one.

Feelings of futility

I know many colleagues who are so sick of the field that they are leaving it. The sentiment has only grown further in recent months. As funding is cut and entire departments and agencies are eliminated in the United States, the calculation to remain, no matter how devoted to it one is, is beginning to feel futile. If one manages to not get fired, without reliable funding and support is there anything to count on or work towards?

Human trafficking thrives in isolation. The political retaliation in the US and other regressive countries is not only driving people out of the field, but leaving trafficked people more isolated and more unlikely to report their treatment. The situation has gotten so bad that an increasing number of human rights defenders have themselves been accused of trafficking because they have stood in solidarity with migrants. They have also seen their work twisted to create more precarity for the people they have been trying help.

Some recent efforts to incorporate survivors into policy advising groups show promise. Yet, within those efforts, many of those called upon to share their experiences have suffered the same harassment and ultimate burnout that many early experts in the field have suffered. They have chosen to disengage because their efforts to improve things were met with vitriol, including from within the anti-trafficking movement.

This field is chewing people up and spitting them out. It also doesn’t reflect nearly enough about what does and does not work to make sustained progress, and as a result it’s constantly reinventing the wheel. That is, when it’s not actively moving backwards because funds are drying up and politicians are once again using human trafficking as a wedge issue.

Be careful what you wish for

One concluding observation that can be made, perhaps as advice to those elsewhere in the world, is that some aspects of human trafficking work that were easy to criticise – the State Department’s Trafficking in Persons reports, or USAID’s funding of non-profits and national programs, for example – are likely to be missed now they are gone. It may be a cliché to say that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but there is often some truth in clichés.

From the vantage point of a person situated in the US with no current options to leave, it is extremely difficult to see a way forward. Many of us have for years been pointing out the potential problems accompanying the capture of human trafficking by extremely right-wing interest groups. Now we have been proven right. There is little pleasure in that, but it can at least serve as a warning.

Conservative political, social, and economic interests will continue to distort data and capture narratives around human trafficking to serve their own interests. Don’t let them.