Traffic Counts, Symbols & Agendas: A Critique of the Campaign Against Trafficking of Human Beings

Abstract

Today's international campaign against the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation is examined from a critical and a historical perspective. Descriptions of the nature and magnitude of the problem are questioned, as is the accuracy of the campaign's central image of the nice girl forced into sexual exploitation. Available data suggest that the campaign is a long way from meeting its instrumental goals of preventing trafficking, prosecuting traffickers or protecting victims. However, today's phase of the campaign has had important symbolic successes, winning broad political support; providing leverage for feminists to push for improving the status of women and promoting conventional morality with its anti-prostitution orientation as the globally accepted norm. The conflicts among the moral entrepreneurs that have driven the campaign are described. The campaign's continued viability is said to rest upon whether its central image can be sustained, something that has become problematic as the result of the challenge to conventional morality by politically organized sex workers and by the accumulation of better empirical research.