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Can progressives re-capture anti-trafficking from the right? [1]
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Date: 2025-06
I have been part of the anti-trafficking field since the mid-1990s, when I joined other colleagues to alert the world to the fact that UN and INGO staff and contractors were engaging in human trafficking in Bosnia.
Since then, as a human rights lawyer and later as a professor of law, I have experienced how the world’s response to trafficking has evolved. Despite three decades of learning, it continues to suffer from a multitude of problems.
The primary, overarching problem is the extent to which tangential political agendas drive law and policymaking on human trafficking. But here I’d like to discuss four other dynamics that also stand out as undermining progress. These are:
The response continues to treat sex and labour trafficking as separate issues, despite their substantial overlap.
The response has increasingly shifted from trafficking of migrants to trafficking of citizens, facilitating an anti-migrant political agenda. This supports regressive political regimes and is increasingly weaponised by those regimes.
The response remains enamoured with celebrity intervention, prioritising the opinions of dilettantes over both academic and lived expertise.
The response is pushing competent and passionate people into burnout and out of the field.
The list could go on. The anti-trafficking field is also, for example, donor driven, attracted to shiny new technologies, and lax in its approach to evaluation. And, given that I live and work in the United States, it must be acknowledged that the current decimation of trafficking-related programmes and laws by the Trump administration is both devastating the field and creating scepticism toward advice coming from the US.
Nevertheless, it remains true that these four dynamics ensure that a lot of anti-trafficking work is structured to fail from the outset.
The Venn diagram of sex and labour trafficking
In law and in practice, human trafficking responses tend to artificially segregate trafficking for sex from trafficking for labour. This split framework does not accurately represent the problem, and interventions break down because protections considered appropriate for one group aren’t necessarily applied to the other.
Data clearly indicates that many people trafficked for their labour are also subjected to sexual assault. It also shows that many people trafficked for sex have their labour exploited as well. We know there is a strong overlap here. There is no empirical reason why policymakers and activists should continue to treat these as unrelated issues, particularly when addressing prevention and protection. Yet they do – for political reasons.
Citizen or migrant?
One reason why many actors are unresponsive to the overlap between sex and labour trafficking is that it intersects with a second bifurcation: the distinction between citizens and migrants.
At least in the US, citizens are more likely to be trafficked primarily for sex than for labour. For migrants it’s generally the opposite. This strongly affects how the two types of exploitation are framed and how much attention they get, exacerbating the artificial split by making one a domestic problem and the other an immigration problem.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/can-progressives-re-capture-anti-trafficking-from-the-right/
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