This chapter returns us to new abolitionist attempts to define and combat modern slavery in the context of recasting trafficking as a form of modern slavery. It looks in particular at how this discourse relies on particular conceptions of property and of violence that reinscribe the individual, private character of slavery and the idea of slavery as a place of no return. Once again, freedom shows itself to have different shades, and we find ourselves inside the complex, cross-institutional, cross-discursive world of politics at the border. The new abolitionist approach to trafficking as slavery alerts us to the risks associated with regarding the body as property, and to what Anne Phillips calls ‘the pervasive individualism in the claim to a property right’ (Phillips 2013, 137). Understanding trafficking as a new form of slavery (or as a form of new slavery) often involves an intense focus on the narrative of the victim and on the circumstances of the female body. The woman trafficked into slavery has become the paradigmatic chattel of the new slavery. This brings us back to the discourses of ‘unhumanising’ and ‘debasement’ that haunted the antislavery writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and reanimates the idea that slavery is a process of converting people into things (O’Connell Davidson 2016, 230). At the same time, it pushes into the background more complicated questions about labour, and about citizenship and belonging. Antislavery discourse continues to be structured around the question of who is eligible for freedom. What gives the production of a victim through a narrative of excessive dependence such traction in the current context of trafficking and migration? How is that traction related to the new abolitionism and its own investments in the role of the state, the veneer of humanitarianism and sexualised xenophobia?

THE PROPERTIES OF SLAVERY

This chapter seeks to interrogate what it means to claim that the brutally exploited and the radically excluded are the property of others. Modern slavery discourse focuses on ‘the individual lived experience of enslavement’ (O’Connell Davidson 2016, 248) where slavery ‘at its most essential is about control’. In 2012, Kevin Bales and others in the Research Network on the Legal Parameters of Slavery produced the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery.