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Twenty years of slow progress: Is anti-trafficking changing? [1]

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Date: 2025-05

I'm inclined to think GAATW also deserves some credit for the final shape of the international trafficking protocol. We pushed hard for broadening the definition of trafficking to apply to fields beyond sex work; to recognise that it's not only women who can be victims of trafficking; to include the means (force, coercion, etc.) in the definition of trafficking; and to include some human rights protections.

The trafficking sector would be a very different place today if those elements hadn’t been included. So if nothing else, that’s some impact for GAATW.

Joel: Things were in flux in the early 2000s – systems are more fixed now. Do you think that increase in stability has made further change more difficult?

Borislav: It does feel like we had more flexibility back then. NGOs in Eastern Europe were mostly funded by foreign donors, philanthropists, and foreign governments in the 2000s. From the 2010s onward, organisations started to receive more national government funding.

That brought with it a lot of rules about who is eligible for assistance, how long they can receive it for, what kind of assistance they can receive, and how much the organisation would be paid for it. Having the national government get involved was very constraining.

There’s an irony there. In the early years, we pushed hard for the government to put structures, policies and funding in place. As an NGO, your goal is to not be necessary anymore. You hope that one day the state will take responsibility for the work you're doing.

But when that actually happened, we saw the state wasn’t doing it right. They didn’t allocate enough money. They had all these rules and procedures that restricted support. Added to this, many NGOs felt they couldn’t criticise the government for it, because they themselves were getting government funding.

This isn’t a problem only in Eastern Europe – I've seen it in lots of countries. But our success in getting the state’s attention created a whole new set of issues to deal with.

Joel: GAATW’s 2007 report, Collateral Damage, is a really important milestone in this narrative because it opened up the idea that the solution could actually be worse than the disease in some contexts. GAATW’s work on the role of funders was also a milestone. Can you tell us about that?

Borislav: I think Collateral Damage was a wakeup call for a lot of people. It was really radical at the time. Many people asked us how we could be criticising anti-trafficking when we are an anti-trafficking organisation ourselves.

The idea for the report emerged in 2004 when GAATW was celebrating its 10th anniversary. The UN Trafficking Protocol had been in force for a couple of years by that point, and people were beginning to see the damage it was doing, especially to sex workers and low wage migrants. GAATW wasn’t the first to raise these issues – academics like Nandita Sharma were already crying foul – but the report did have an impact.

The special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review on following the money in 2014 was also groundbreaking. Funding levels were increasing but there was little accountability, and hardly any evaluations. Donors were also starting to restrict various operations. The US anti-prostitution pledge is a good example of this – it effectively conditions US federal funding on condemning sex work. Some NGO members of GAATW were discussing whether they could accept money with those sorts of strings attached.

Joel: In 2011 GAATW launched the Anti-Trafficking Review. What’s ATR’s origin story?

Borislav: There were two main impetuses for the journal. The first was related to a newsletter GAATW was publishing at the time, called Alliance News. It featured in-depth, critical analyses of trends written by member organisations. These offered valuable insights from on the ground, but they weren’t being circulated widely.

At the same time, GAATW’s advocacy officer Caroline Robinson was attending UN meetings. She reported back to us that national policymakers and international agencies often complained about the lack of robust, peer-reviewed evidence gathered all in one place. Many told her that such a central repository would help them with policy decisions.

What we took from that was that it’s not enough for research to just physically exist. There were already plenty of robust, peer-reviewed articles. But they were scattered across journals in criminology, sociology, anthropology, feminist studies, and so on, and many were behind paywalls. They weren’t accessible enough for non-academics to use easily.

There was an obvious gap, and GAATW decided to fill it by creating ATR. The aim was to provide an outlet for GAATW members, academics, and other interested actors to publish evidence and advocate for policy changes. It was also supposed to create a bridge between academics and practitioners by producing robust, well-argued articles which were relatively short and written in simple language.

Joel: You've edited most of ATR’s issues. How has the journal evolved, and what's its relationship to conversations on the ground?

Borislav: It’s become more professional over time. In the first few issues, a mixture of academics, NGO workers, independent consultants and researchers wrote for us. But relatively quickly, people started contacting us to ask if ATR was included in Scopus, a major academic article database. You need to have very academically written articles to do that, and we worked hard to get our articles indexed by both Scopus and Web of Science.

As that happened, more academics and fewer NGOs submitted articles to us. The language of the journal became more academically heavy. This has been a challenge for me, since one of my roles as editor has been to help authors make their work understandable for a global audience, as well as for practitioners and policymakers.

The ATR publishes special issues, and it takes around two years to produce an issue from start to finish. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve, or to focus on an emerging topic, when you have such a long editorial process. But we’re bringing in new critical perspectives to existing conversations and we’re definitely shaping thinking and, I hope, policy and practice along with it.

Joel: How do you see BTS and ATR fitting together? BTS started up three years after ATR, and has quite a different format. Does it feel like they overlap?

Borislav: Absolutely. We both publish the same kind of critical analyses. They’re intersectional and look at the root causes and structures that enable trafficking and exploitation. Neither of us focuses much on trafficking as a crime isolated from larger socioeconomic and political systems and processes.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/twenty-years-of-slow-progress-is-anti-trafficking-changing/

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