The Walk Free Foundation claims to fight ‘modern slavery’ by measuring its extent, but is its index not just an exercise in political hypocrisy? Español
Journalists and researchers writing about sex workers do long-lasting damage to their sources when they treat sex work as an area of exception to their journalistic ethics.
‘Modern-day abolitionists’ frame their activities as part of a shared global struggle, but there is no single anti-slavery or anti-trafficking movement. Español
The strain of feminist thinking that promotes the rescue industry and the criminalisation of sex work springs from a small but vocal community of activists. Treating it as the voice of feminism silences competing voices, especially those outside of America and Europe.
‘Sex at the margins’ and ‘Understanding global slavery’ are, on the surface, markedly different treatments of modern trafficking. However, their common undercurrent is their defence of the market and neoliberal agendas.
Movies glorifying the ‘rescue’ of sex workers by men posing as clients are erotic fantasies, not daringly realistic representations of modern sex-trafficking.
Despite efforts to automatically label teen and youth sex workers as ‘victims’ of trafficking, and thereby prevent their prosecution, their often extensive interactions with the legal system continue to leave lasting marks.
The conflation of trafficking and prostitution in antitrafficking discourses not only frames all sex workers as victims in need of rescue, but elides the reasons many include sex work as part of their complex livelihood strategies.
Wildly different numbers circulate about the number of trafficking victims and modern-day slaves. Victims are hard to count because they are hidden and definitions are ambiguous, yet efforts to quantify them shape what we know and do about trafficking.
RasTafari reject the clear-cut distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery put forward by ‘white abolitionism’, as this only gives absolution to formally slave-trading European publics where there should be none. They demand reparations because justice has not yet been served.
Ghanaian football academies have been accused of exploiting talent and promoting trafficking in search of profit, but the quest for social mobility in a time of economic liberalisation is what drives young footballers into the industry in the first place.
The conflation of indentured servitude with chattel slavery in the ‘Irish slaves’ narrative whitewashes history in the service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes. Its resurgence in the wake of Ferguson reflects many Americans’ denial of the entrenched racism still prevalent in their
