Parties for ten year olds are popular in the anti-trafficking world right now. The Freedom Fund celebrated a decade last May, the UK’s Modern Slavery Act in March. Closer to home, we at Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) also just entered double figures. It was either throw a party as well or take a long, hard look in the mirror. We’ve opted for the latter.
Today we’re launching a new, ten-year anniversary feature which does two main things. It takes stock by asking how the anti-trafficking field has evolved and where it looks to be heading in the future. And it turns the microscope on ourselves, by offering up a critique of anti-trafficking’s critics – including BTS – over the last decade.
We asked our contributors to tell us about our preoccupations, blind spots, and prejudices. We asked them to be frank about how we undermine our messages and where else we get it wrong. And we asked them how we could do it better.
Because, after ten years of work, we really want to know: why, from our vantage point, does it seem like the world has made so little progress on moving Beyond Trafficking and Slavery?
Running in circles or moving forward?
When BTS was founded in 2014, our primary goal was to amplify the voices of activists and researchers who were trying to chart a course away from criminal justice responses to exploitation. We united around a shared suspicion of the anti-trafficking ‘mainstream’, which we regarded as self-serving and superficial, and a shared concern that anti-trafficking campaigns were displacing collective struggles for migrant and worker rights.
We believed that moving beyond trafficking and slavery required focusing upon economic and political systems, rather than individual criminals. That meant facing up to the elephant in the room: neoliberal capitalism.
As far as BTS was concerned, labour exploitation was a predictable outcome of the regular operations of the global economy. It was a mistake to reduce cases of abuse to isolated events or criminal schemes, as the criminal justice response does. Arrests only target symptoms, not causes, so that would never create real progress. Change the system, however, and you change the game.
BTS also drew inspiration from social movements and activists whom we admired. Our core political ethos reflects many of the refrains that have animated collective struggles for migrant and worker rights for decades now: workers not slaves; rights not rescue; save us from saviours; no one is illegal; nothing about us without us.
This was never a balanced agenda. We have always favoured left-wing positions and politics, just as we have always been suspicious of ‘solutions’ championed by right-wing politicians and corporate interests.
Anti-trafficking was a dinner just waiting to be upset
We have now spent over a decade trying to change how people respond to human trafficking. But despite our best efforts, all the things we hoped to move beyond remain foundational to anti-trafficking policy and activism today. We sometimes feel like a hamster on a wheel. No matter how fast we run, we keep seeing the same kinds of talking points, policies, and arguments show up. We know many of our readers and writers share this frustration.
That said, we suspect the despair we feel in our darker moments overstates the case. Policy paradigms change direction like supertankers: slowly and with great difficulty. It took decades of work before some governments finally accepted that criminalising marijuana was a bad idea, and even now only a few have made the leap. Moving the anti-trafficking field in more productive direction is a similar kind of challenge.
We should not expect topline anti-trafficking policies to immediately change just because they’re shown to have flaws. It’s also a mistake to look at the most hackneyed political speeches, news stories, and executive summaries, and to then conclude that nothing has changed anywhere.
Anti-trafficking is not one thing, but many things. And making the case for reform is not a one-time event. It’s a long-term struggle.
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The anti-trafficking killjoy
BTS was created to throw rocks at the anti-trafficking establishment. We were small. We were angry. We were sick of misleading statistics, celebrities pretending to be experts on TV, and interventions being lauded despite causing harm. Human trafficking was attracting levels of interest that most human rights causes could only dream of, yet very little of this attention appeared to be pushing in a productive direction.
We wanted to be the killjoys at the party. In her book, the Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed says that:
You become a feminist killjoy when you get in the way of the happiness of others, or when you just get in the way, ruining that dinner, also the atmosphere. You become a feminist killjoy when you are not willing to go along with something, to get along with someone, sitting there quietly, taking it all in. You become a feminist killjoy when you react, speak back, to those with authority, using words like sexism because that is what you hear. There is so much you are supposed to avoid saying or doing in order not to ruin an occasion. Another dinner ruined, so many dinners ruined!
For us – the seven people who started BTS – anti-trafficking was a dinner just waiting to be upset.
We wanted to ask uncomfortable questions about sensationalised and eroticised pain, the white saviour industrial complex, the ‘rescue’ industry, corporate power and self-regulation, neo-colonial adventure stories, and co-optation by far-right conspiracy theorists.
We wanted to call foul when dodgy methodologies produced dodgy evidence, when anti-trafficking became a pretext for abusing migrants, and when sex work abolitionists manipulated anti-trafficking to advance their agenda.
Perhaps most importantly, we wanted to make absolutely clear that good intentions are not enough. Many anti-trafficking initiatives over the years have been ineffective at best and harmful at worst. We saw no reason for such initiatives to continue, even if the people involved were acting in good faith.
But telling people who are trying hard to address extreme exploitation that they need to stop what they are doing and rethink their deepest convictions was never going to be popular. When you throw rocks at houses, you cannot expect to be warmly welcomed inside.
The establishment vs. the killjoys: two different worlds
Much of the driving energy and policy direction behind anti-trafficking has come from within the political and economic establishment. People born into power and privilege. Numerous princesses and first ladies are prominent anti-trafficking patrons, as are business magnates. The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery was started by a former vice president of ExxonMobil.
Modern anti-trafficking has been indelibly shaped by ‘ultra high net worth’ individuals who may want to rock the boat a little, but show no appetite for directly challenging the current status quo. Part of the reason these establishment figures feel able to back this cause is because they see it as politically safe. Narrowly targeting exceptional cases of extreme exploitation is an area where it’s hard to be criticised and easy to find cross-party agreement.
Historically, anti-trafficking has been about “rescuing” (white) helpless victims from sexual violence at the hands of (non-white) criminals. But as the focus has shifted toward labour exploitation in recent years, trafficking has increasingly been framed in terms of identifying and reducing risk. Search for “risk of modern slavery” on the internet, and you’ll be flooded by countless tools, templates, guidelines and consultancies claiming expertise on at-risk goods, risk assessment, risk factors, risks to value chains, supplier risk, risk identification, and so on.
In this world, trafficking is largely a managerial challenge. Meeting it requires technical adjustments to the design and operation of established business practices, and if other corporations choose to remain ‘at risk’ that is entirely their problem. The goal is to reduce risk by tinkering with existing systems. It is not to end systemic exploitation.
Blaming the anti-trafficking establishment for any and all problems has become an un-reflexive ritual
Anti-trafficking killjoys – at least the ones working in the labour space – live in a different political universe to the establishment. They’ve never believed that corporations care about decent work in their supply chains. They instead start with the premise that deregulation, outsourcing, and subcontracting are designed to ensure that workers are vulnerable, exploited, and unable to organise. Labour abuses must be regarded as intended effects, rather than isolated events, and the only way to end them is to fundamentally change the economic system.
Such drastically different starting points make it hard for the two halves to talk to each other. Openness to self-reflection during those conversations is even more difficult.
Anti-trafficking killjoys are constantly frustrated with the anti-trafficking establishment. They have effectively spent years of their lives trying to convince practitioners and policymakers to transform into Marxist radicals, only to get increasingly upset when they stubbornly prefer to work within the system as it stands, rather than trying to smash it into bits.
The latter, meanwhile, tends to experience this harping from the corner as unkind, unhelpful and unrealistic. They take a look at their resources and programmes, and wonder when the critics will notice that they’re the only ones getting things done.
Shooting for the stars doesn’t always mean landing on a cloud. All too often, it means landing on nothing at all.
Killjoy confessions
Blaming the anti-trafficking establishment for any and all problems has become an un-reflexive ritual. Indulging this, however, ignores two inconvenient facts: 1) the anti-trafficking field is not one thing, but many different things, and 2) the field is constantly evolving in ways that mean that past critiques may not align with present circumstances.
The establishment undoubtedly deserves criticism, but it is a mistake to reduce the anti-trafficking field to a black and white universe where the establishment is always assumed to be on the wrong side of things.
No one has all the answers, and being an anti-trafficking killjoy can lend itself to being hypercritical of others without applying similar kinds of scrutiny to oneself. Identifying as critical tends to happen in opposition to ‘the mainstream’, which is assumed to be uncritical and lacking wisdom and understanding (otherwise they’d be critical).
This too easily becomes an exercise in self-flattery, rather than a considered argument. Critics have to be open to the proposition that intelligent, knowledgeable people have engaged with the critiques, understood the positions, but nonetheless decided that there are good reasons not to follow the advice. They also have to be open to the idea that there are establishment actors who have valuable knowledge as well, and from which they could benefit.
Finally, they must recognise that being a killjoy is not an all or nothing proposition. While many critics focus their identity and energies on contesting anti-trafficking from the outside, there are plenty of actors inside anti-trafficking spaces who are also advocating for better policy and practice. These insider killjoys are outspoken about potential harms at office meetings and conferences. But rather than quitting in protest, they hold onto the value they see in their work and show up the next day to do it all again.
With these imperatives in mind, we have a few confessions to make. Many of these we were confronted with while in dialogue with the contributors to this series. This doesn’t mean we are backing down on everything, but we want to show that killjoys also have to learn and adapt to avoid becoming stale and repetitive.
Roses, by any other name, still prick
Language is important, but terminological debates don’t solve real-world problems. For many years now we have been trying our best to move away from ‘modern slavery’ and trafficking as political and legal starting points. We stand by our arguments for why the term is counterproductive, but we have to confess to having overestimated the practical stakes of the debate. It has become clear to us that phasing it out would probably have a modest – at best – impact.
Too many advocates and critics incorrectly assume that finding the right terminology – modern slavery, human trafficking, forced labour, labour exploitation, etc. – unlocks the power to completely transform the rules of engagement. It doesn’t. We need to stop pretending that these discussions are more influential than they really are, and focus on what’s most important: actually addressing exploitation.
No field is a monolith
Anti-trafficking is not one thing. This irritates us as editors, as collapsing a complex set of actors and actions into a single, convenient punching bag makes for cleaner prose. But it can also mean that your readers tune out your arguments because you indiscriminately condemn their entire field.
A wide variety of work gets done within the broad rubric of anti-trafficking. A lot of equally relevant work gets done outside of it. Killjoys too often focus on the worst examples – the low hanging fruit – to support their denunciations of anti-trafficking as a whole.
They also overly generalise who is involved in this work. We did this a bit ourselves earlier on, when we talked about ‘the anti-trafficking establishment’. Such a framing suggests that all actors within this space come from the same place and use the same political lens. They don’t.
Both the killjoys and the anti-trafficking establishment have a choice to make
There are organisations like Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, the Freedom Network and Focus on Labour Exploitation with a strong worker rights and migrant rights footprint. There are numerous lefty lawyers engaged in strategic litigation – frequently against their own governments. There are Marxist-inspired activists from the landless workers movement in Brazil who are engaged in direct action against farmers and landowners. In Mauritania, which did not abolish slavery until 1981, Biram Dah Abeid has been repeatedly detained and tortured for his activism against slavery and its legacies.
Anti-trafficking is many different things. This applies to both the people and organisations taking action, and the diverse range of issues and problems that have been thrown into the same pot. Anti-trafficking killjoys need to stop focusing upon the worst examples and reducing anti-trafficking to singular monolith. There needs to be a much greater effort to be precise about specific issues with specific interventions and actors at specific times.
All solutions are partial
Migrant and labour rights are not enough to end exploitation. Criminal justice (and other prescriptions) have roles to play as well.
BTS has long been guilty of a lie by omission. For ten years we have unceasingly advocated for a rights-based paradigm of addressing exploitation. As part of this, we’ve argued that criminal justice’s pursuit of criminals and ‘protection’ of victims has wrecked countless lives and is unfit for addressing fundamentally political problems.
In doing so, we have – with very few exceptions – only talked about topics where this holds water. We’ve conveniently ignored areas where increased labour and migration rights are not effective solutions. Child sexual exploitation and the use of children for selling drugs, for example, are areas where labour rights cannot practically reach and where other forms of interventions are necessary.
Acknowledging this, we confess that our purely rights-based prescription only works where it works. That is many places, but it does not encompass the full spectrum of what gets called trafficking or ‘modern slavery’. Policy prescriptions need to be more closely calibrated to specific conditions. There is no one size fits all.
We’re dependent on the problem
It was wrong to place trafficking at the centre of our analysis. This is our last and most consequential confession. It was a mistake to try to argue for an alternative politics by critiquing the limitations and problems of the current anti-trafficking agenda. To put wind into the sails of a different paradigm, we should have grounded ourselves in a whole different set of starting points.
We know why we did it of course. Trafficking and slavery were high on the political agenda in 2014 and opportunities for funding were everywhere. By framing our project as we did, we paid our bills, inserted ourselves into high-profile conversations, and drew more readers to our site. But in exchange, we ceded too much ground to what we were against. We allowed anti-trafficking to set the terms of the debate – to make us permanently reactive – and we’ve been tied to it ever since.
Many killjoys have this problem. They exist to expose the problems and limitations associated with anti-trafficking interventions, which makes them hostage to the decisions taken by others regarding where anti-trafficking is going next.
When a decision was made to treat anti-trafficking as development, as per Alliance 8.7, the killjoys followed this trend to show why it won’t work. When the UK’s Modern Slavery Act was applied to the use of children in drug sales (referred to as county lines in the UK), killjoys again followed along behind to catalogue new problems. Wherever the anti-trafficking agenda goes next – climate, tech, survivor engagement – the killjoys must invariably follow in the slipstream. Or they cannot do their job.
At our most uncharitable we refer to this internally at BTS as the “parasite problem”, and we include ourselves among it. Anti-trafficking killjoys live in a dependent relationship to the anti-trafficking host. This ultimately undermines their ability to champion a wholly different, positive vision for the future.
Everything is not ok
Things are really not ok. There was a global pandemic. Climate change is already here. There are more horrors raging than we can keep track of – if you can remember Congo, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and Gaza you are doing better than most. Meanwhile, anyone who tries to take action to address these problems faces relentless trolling and abuse. The world is a complete shit show, and things are only getting worse.
For anti-trafficking, the most consequential act of recent times was the shuttering of USAID. At least $500 million have been cut from child labour and anti-trafficking programmes. Overall funding is set to erode even more than that, as key philanthropic funders like Open Society Foundations are pulling back and other states are reducing their budgets as well.
The systems that have been set up over decades to deal with the issues facing the world are crumbling, and the problems are stacking up. There’s every reason to think that exploitation a going to rise as a result.
Both the killjoys and the anti-trafficking establishment have a choice to make. It’s either continue to talk past each other and assume conversation is neither possible nor worth it, or work to find new ways of speaking to each other that enable productive disagreement. That doesn’t mean compromising moral boundaries in an effort to get along with everyone. But it does mean being open to learning and actively seeking out alliances you can live with, in the hopes of building something different. Or we won’t get beyond any of this.
