The Myth of Maria and the imagining of sexual trafficking in Brazil

Abstract

Based upon the contradictory definitions of the crime, the Brazilian movement against trafficking in persons situates itself as a “struggle against modern slavery.” Within this moralistic context, the movement has frequently utilized invented statistics and apocalyptic declarations regarding trafficking in order to achieve greater “advocacy value” among members of the Brazilian public. A key component of this discursive formation has been the creation and promulgation of a mythological view of a “typical” trafficking victim’s experience: what we call “The Myth of Maria, an exemplary trafficking victim.” The present article seeks to follow the history of the Myth of Maria, developing an initial chronology mapped out and analyzed by Adriana Piscitelli in 2004 and extending this into the post-2006 period when Brazil established its first national policies and plans to combat trafficking in persons. We then analyze how the myth ignores many of the realities revealed by the past decade of ethnographic research into trafficking in Brazil. Finally, we conclude with a structuralist hypothesis (drawn from the field of feminist anthropology) regarding the Myth’s continuing unabated popularity among almost all actors in the political field of anti-trafficking policy.