Abstract
The rise of transnational, market-based anti-trafficking organisations has expanded the anti-trafficking domain to include Western corporations and consumers. In an effort to improve living conditions for survivors of trafficking, these organisations sell commodities produced by former victims or women at risk of human trafficking and brand them as symbols of a new and better life after anti-trafficking. Thus, life after anti-trafficking is not isolated to the locations of the trafficking victims, but occurs in distant areas and among diverse groups of people. This article investigates how representations of life after anti-trafficking engage consumers, corporations and NGO workers in New York City through the sale and purchase of ‘slave-free’ products made by Southeast Asian women deemed ‘survivors of trafficking’. The ethnographic data illustrates how life after anti-trafficking unfolds in the context of US corporate and consumer culture and intersects with capitalist discourses of freedom, consumer ethics and politics of market-based aid. Consequently, life after anti-trafficking creates new consumer identities, anti-trafficking aid strategies and business opportunities detached from the actual victims of human trafficking.
Highlights
The rise of transnational, market-based anti-trafficking organisations has expanded the anti-trafficking domain to include Western corporations and consumers
What makes consumers engage in life after anti-trafficking? And how does life after anti-trafficking emerge as a business opportunity for corporations and people otherwise unrelated to the cause of human trafficking? This article uses ethnographic data collected among sellers and buyers of anti-trafficking commodities in New York City to elucidate how life after anti-trafficking forms and takes place in the growing sector of marketbased anti-trafficking NGOs
I introduced this article with the argument that through the emergence of transnational, market-based antitrafficking organisations, life after anti-trafficking increasingly plays out in sites removed from the trafficking victims
Summary
The representation of life after anti-trafficking has travelled remarkably well and increasingly been integrated into contemporary trends of ethical consumption and cause-related marketing. Consumers are offered the chance to engage in humanitarian causes through shopping, or what has been termedshopping for a better world‘.17 Scholars claim that this development correlates with a recent shift from conscious consumption to compassionate consumption, which relies less on information and labels and more on celebrity mediation and emotional appeals. On the one hand, purchasing anti-trafficking products is marketed as a sustainable and ethical alternative to traditional consumption and similar to the Fairtrade movement; market-based anti-trafficking relies on the idea that consuming innicer‘ ways will solve the problems caused by global consumption. Instead of improving an existing market exchange, marketbased anti-trafficking seeks to establish new and rather unrelated markets for slave-free soap, jeans and purses These campaigns do not advocate for the establishment of fair labour and trade conditions for the work people are already doing, but for the rescue and removal of people from sex industries. I will discuss how it emerges in the domain of New York consumers
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