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A Crossroads in the Fight against Human Trafficking? Let’s take the Structural Route: A Response to Janie Chuang

Part of: Janie A. Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Karen E. Bravo
Karen E. Bravo*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law
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Even ten years ago, the phrase “human trafficking” might have evoked blank stares in many circles. Today, the existence of a contemporary trade in human beings has blossomed fully into public awareness. Discussion of and expositions about human traffickingappear not only in sensationalist media reports, but also in many other arenas, such as film dramas, documentaries, books and articles by scholars from a variety of disciplines, activist NGO websites, and legislative chambers across the globe.

However, some legal scholars as well as other scholars in the human trafficking sphere admit to a growing unease. Why? There is the sense that the label is a mushrooming monster that encompasses or swallows up all forms of human exploitation, identifies or creates stereotypical bad guys and innocent victims, and yet leaves relatively untouched the root causes of the exploitation.

Type
Symposium: Janie A. Chuang, “Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law”
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 108 , 2014 , pp. 272 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2014

References

1 Janie Chuang, Exploitation Creep and the Unmaking of Human Trafficking Law, 108 AJIL 610 (2014).

2 For example, Chuang notes that: “What was once a peripheral tool to garner popular support for the anti-trafficking cause is now—by U.S. government design—the central framing device: recasting forced labor and trafficking as nothing short of slavery.”Id.at 20.

3 Id.at 33.

4 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, GARes. 55/25 (Nov. 15, 2000), art. 3 [here in after U.N. Trafficking Protocol]. According to Chuang: “For the sake of achieving consensus, however, the Protocol drafters left key aspects of the legal definition intentionally vague.” Id. at 2.

5 See Karen E. Bravo, Exploring the Analogy between Modern Trafficking in Humans and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,25 B.U.Int’l L.J. 207 (2007) [here in after Bravo, Exploring the Analogy] and Karen E. Bravo, The Role of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Contemporary Anti-Trafficking Discourse, 9 Seattle J. For Soc.Just. 555 (2011) (each challenging the superficiality and emotional exploitation of these uses).

6 I flagged the potential danger of “neo-abolitionism” in Bravo, Exploring the Analogy, supra note 5, at 240-43.

7 Chuang cites the limited number of prosecutions worldwide and the “over 20 million victims yet to be identified.” Chuang, supra note 1, at 4. (These numbers apply to 2013 alone.)

8 Yes, but who is more likely to be trafficked, based on structural vulnerabilities?

9 See Bravo, Exploring the Analogy, supra note 4, at 292. (“States may be said to be complicit in creating and enforcing the vulnerability of some populations. That accusation is not negated by the mobilization of state resources against human trafficking.”)

10 SeeKaren E. Bravo, Interrogating the State’s Roles in Human Trafficking, 25 Ind. Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 9 (2014) (explaining that states play a role in facilitating human trafficking).

11 Karen E. Bravo, Free Labor! Toward a Labor Liberalization Solution for Modern Trafficking in Humans, 18 Transnat’l L.& Contemp.Probs. 545, 548 (2009) [hereinafter, Bravo, Free Labor!]: Modern trafficking in humans flourishes within four systemic tensions: (1) the gaps between the rhetoric and reality of trade liberalization undertaken thus far through multilateral and regional international instruments; (2) the gap between the conceptualization of humans as rights-bearing persons and as economic actors—both con-sumers and labor (an economic input or commodity); (3) the tension between the transnationalization unleashed by trade liberalization and Westphalian concepts of statehood; and (4) the tension between the recognition and enforcement of human rights (and individual personhood) and state sovereignty and control over constituent pop-ulation and territory.

12 Chuang, supra note 1, at 36.

13 See Bravo, Free Labor!, supra note 11.

14 Evidence of this view includes references to “human capital” as afungibleasset which is deployed in production activities at the discretion of states and the owners of capital.

15 See Bravo, Free Labor!, supra note 11, at 553.

16 See Bravo, supra note 10.

17 Examples include the African migrants who cross the Mediterranean in leaky boats and the children who flee to the United States in dread of gang-related violence.

18 The governments of the Philippines and Pakistan, for example actively assist their nationals in finding work in the Gulf States. Once they are there, their states are unable to protect them from many of the worst types of abuse.