Stories of Trafficking

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The scope of the problem of human trafficking is consistently disputed among government departments, non-government organisations and international agencies. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, tasked with monitoring the world’s response to human trafficking, declared in the 2009 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons that the magnitude of the problem of trafficking on the international scale is still ‘one of the key unanswered questions’ (UNODC 2009, 12). The International Labor Office has also reported difficulties in establishing a robust estimate on the number of trafficking victims (ILO 2006, 16). In the absence of reliable data, anti-trafficking activists have consistently relied upon the telling of stories in an effort to educate decision-makers about the ‘realities’ of trafficking. Lazos (2007) argues that the difficulties in obtaining reliable data in the ‘research, study and understanding of trafficking leaves two polar choices or orientations open: generalization or “true stories from the field”’ (Lazos 2007, 101). During the development of anti-trafficking legislation in Australia and the United States, interest groups played an important role in educating decision-makers about the nature of human trafficking, often relating true ‘stories from the field’ to illustrate their arguments. Stolz (2007) describes this as the ‘educative role’ of interest groups, who helped to set the agenda through their description of trafficking worldwide.