So how are we to understand issues of consent, coercion and

Mythen (2007:466) observes of experience that

“Being or becoming a victim is not a neat or absolute journey. Acquiring the status of victim involves being party to a range of interactions and processes, including identification, labelling and recognition”.

The building blocks for recognising experience as trafficking derive from the definition of trafficking provided in the Protocol supplementing the UN (2000) Convention against Transnational Organised Crime. The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, locates consent, coercion and exploitation as central to any understanding of women’s experience as trafficked. Although the International Community

8

For accounts of exploitation in the performance of sex work see Kempadoo and Doezema (1998), Andrijasevic (2003), Aronowitz (2003); for other forms of labour see Anderson (2000; 2007), Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2002), Anti-Slavery International (2003),

Skrivankova (2010); and for bride trafficking and the plight of imported wives, see Wang and Chang (2002),Thai (2003), Dickson (2004a), Long (2004), Poppy (2009) and Barry (2010).

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embraced the adoption of a common definition of trafficking (as movement involving force for exploitation), a major problematic survives in the lack of definitional clarity surrounding the relevant markers in comprehending an experience as trafficked.

The Protocol states that a woman’s consent is “irrelevant” where any of the controls - ranging from force to abusing vulnerability – are present (UN, 2000: 3a). However, legislating for consent is complex within the discourse of women’s movements. Munro (2006) privileges engagement with power and, specifically, differentials in power, as crucial to any allocation of consent across trafficking and smuggling activities. Citing her own and others’ research, Munro (2006: 328) suggests the mere presence or absence of consent, for distinguishing contemporary movement as trafficked or smuggled, for example, has become too simplistic.

“Empirical work in this area indicates that the majority of those persons identified as having been brought illegally into a country to work in exploitative conditions have given their initial consent to this process”. Munro observes several complications for initial consent when viewed through the lens of power. One is women’s inability to withdraw early consent at some later stage down the movement chain. How is a woman who becomes subject to psychological controls or bonded to debt, able to take back her agreement and seek assistance to move elsewhere? Another reservation for consent resides in the context in which it may be given (Bales, 2003; Munro, 2006; Truong, 2006). For example, how free is consent, when it is borne of circumstances such as poverty, a sense of filial duty, lack of material and social opportunities, or an escape from violence? A further consequence of power surrounds the meaning placed on consent by authority figures tasked with screening and protecting victims. As raised in the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group report (2010), the dual function of the National Referral Mechanism is to vet and protect potentially trafficked persons. In performing this dual role, women’s experience is scrutinised and officially labelled in one of three ways; either as victimisation at the hands of their traffickers, as criminally agentic in their own predicament, or as party to an immigration breach. This lack of definitional clarity extends to exploitations classed as inherent in a trafficking experience. Provided in Article 3(a), the Protocol states

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“Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs”.

Yet, there is no internationally agreed definition of exploitation (O’ Connell Davidson, 2006), and considerable latitude surrounding the boundaries of sexual exploitation. The dilemma of defining sexual exploitation in a trafficking context is perhaps best illustrated by the schism between prostitution and sex work. As Doezema (2005) notes in the lead up to the UN (2000) Convention and its protocol on trafficking, feminists adopted opposing positions in relation to prostitution and sex work. As previously rehearsed - on the one hand, abolitionists (such as CATW) perceive the act of prostitution as inherently exploitative and, on the other, the International Human Rights Law Group (including GATW) recognises prostitution as sex work. Since no one consents to exploitation (Jeffries1997), CATW constructed a platform on which all prostitution (including migrations for sex work) was deemed forced and eligible for inclusion as trafficking; Conversely, the sex work caucus, concerned with challenging the working conditions of the sex trade, viewed the prostitution ‘contract’ as consensual and therefore outside the remit of a trafficking framework. This schism triggered a dualism within sexual exploitation, whereby the experience of women deprived of their consent achieved victimhood status, whilst the experience of women displaying consent did not. Whilst Chapter 2 addressed the forced / free schism for other socially constructed duals between innocent victims and guilty prostitutes, deserving ‘Madonnas’ and undeserving ‘whores’, passive third world women versus autonomous Western sex workers, it is raised again here as example of the definitional problems plaguing ‘exploitation’, particularly for sexual purposes. In other words, how are we to comprehend the trafficking experience of women who knew something but not everything about their situation? And, how should we comprehend the variation in experience, ranging from sexual servitude to Western tourism operating across the global sex industry? 9

9

For detailed commentary on this range, see Kempadoo, 1998a, 1998b; Kempadoo, 2001; Thorbek and Pattanaik, 2002; and Brennan, 2003.

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Professionals’ anti-trafficking understanding of the building blocks of experience is further mediated by the legal ‘transnational organised crime’ frame, which defines the criminal controls in trafficking as

“…the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation” (Article 3a).

But what qualifies for vulnerability or the abuse of power and where are thresholds on force and coercions drawn in complex and ambiguous situations involving aspects of consent and illegal status?

The Protocol’s attachment to the UN (2000) Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, and its alignment with a second supplementary protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air (UN, 2000b), has allowed a criminal lens favouring border security and crime control, to overshadow other considerations in the movement chain. Under this criminal frame, the threshold of vulnerability is positioned against statutory responsibilities for “protecting” victims, by “preventing” the occurrence of crime and “prosecuting” the crimes (and criminals) in question (CoE, 2005: 4).This criminal framework has often worked against the interests of trafficked women caught in complex and ambiguous situations. For example, how are we to comprehend trafficked women who end up in the UK illegally, or assisted migrants arriving in the UK as ‘legal’ and quickly becoming ‘illegal’, where employment and marriages break down?

Documented research of these harms are provided by Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2002), Doezema (2002), Adams (2003), Chapkis (2003), Bloch (2003), O’Connell Davidson (2010), Barry (2010) and the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group (2010). These emphasise the risk of detention and deportation faced by migrant sex workers and trafficked women possessing irregular or illegal immigration status. The ATMG additionally stress how official preoccupations with immigration and crime actively discourage women from raising their trafficking experience with officials, by endorsing traffickers’ threats that discovery brings imprisonment and removal. The ATMG further found for professional misunderstanding and bias, in comprehending instances of

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agency, consent and force in VOT behaviour, resulting in women’s unfair exclusion from victim protection and services.

In performing this dual function of protecting VOTs by preventing and prosecuting acts of trafficking, the old ‘doer-sufferer’ threshold of forced victim or free agent remains an attractive option for making sense of unclear and contradictory cases. Victim experience – clothed in injustice and profiling the extent and severity of injuries – fares well under a threshold tasked with bringing traffickers to justice. Experience displaying signs of consent is problematic for crime and convictions, as consent equates with choice, autonomy, decision making and, hence, woman’s responsibility over her situation. If women are to be kept safe from unintentional legal harms, then feminist calls for more nuanced and integrated understanding of policy is needed across the breadth of women’s trafficking and migratory experiences (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2002; Agustin, 2006a, 2007a; Berman, 2010).

Having acknowledged some of the definitional issues in policy deriving from the Protocol, the influence of external funding on women’s subjective experience is also an important consideration. According to Agustin (2010:25), research funding into women’s global movements remains heavily invested in the moral appeal of the victim story, especially where sex is involved.

“If the research proposal does not reflect one of the existing research frameworks regarding migrant prostitution – ‘AIDS prevention, ‘trafficking’, or ‘violence against women’ – it will be hard if not impossible to find funding”.

Agustin (2010:26) suggests that if women’s stories could be differently researched, then

“quite a number of injustices, most of them structural, would be revealed, and researchers could be satisfied to have brought them out. But also the aspect of these women’s lives that we never hear about would be brought out: their leading role in their own life stories, complete with making decisions about taking risks in order to get ahead in life – their agency”. Applying this to trafficking, as the world’s third most profitable crime (Fichtelberg, 2008), the ‘facts’ of a trafficking experience tend to gather around

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the immoral actions of the trafficker and women’s victimisation at the hands of these criminals. Reflecting Agustin’s claim that ‘outsider’ understanding of women’s stories is constructed in the moral position of the researcher and funding body, women’s trafficking experience is routinely fashioned in moral meaning as criminal victimhood. Research conducted into criminal practices, for example, forms one source for comprehending women’s experience as victims of trafficking. Recruitment practices published in the Trafficking in Persons Report (US Department of State, 2008) singularly rehearse the deceptions and false promises made to women over marriage, work, education and other life advantages. These practices expose the debt bondage incurred and kept hidden from women, as agents arrange their journeys and work abroad (Viuhko, 2010). They typically engage with the language of imprisonment, abduction, kidnap and removal of papers, to highlight restrictions placed upon women’s freedom. From this morally informed standpoint, the women subjects of trafficking can be little other than victims in and of trafficking.

The extensive interest in researching trafficking exploitation provides another route by which ‘outsider’ knowledge of women’s trafficking experience is morally fashioned as victimhood. Trafficking exploitations are uniformly framed as overtly criminal actions, taking the form of rape, physical beatings, psychological threats of violence to families back home, and slavery-like practices of long hours, little food and no pay (Poppy Project, 2004; Anti-Slavery International, 2006; Zimmerman et al, 2006; Eaves, 2009). There is little public or policy call for less sensational and more controversial feminist inquiry, for example, into how exploitations might be differently experienced or actively managed by women. One of the first fieldwork conversations with a senior government enforcement officer illustrates this to good effect. When briefed on the intention to research agency within trafficking experience, he replied “there is no agency in trafficking!” As I continued to make a case for agency, by referencing women’s survival strategies within domestic violence, he queried “You do know trafficking isn’t the same as DV?” In a final effort to explain myself, he presented me with a copy of ‘Stolen Smiles10_{’ (Zimmerman et al,}

2006) and suggested I “go away and read it” (senior GEO 1). During the course of the fieldwork, professional sensitivity to the idea of agency, led me to

10

Stolen Smiles documents findings, funded by the European Commission’s Daphne Programme, into the physical and psychological toll on women’s health from trafficking.

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research their opinions in more creative ways. One of these re-framings probed for their views on trafficked women, as experts in their own experience. Anti- trafficking professionals were asked for their views on involving formerly trafficked women in policy forums and in delivering professional training programmes.

Personnel in the Government Enforcement Sector tended to phrase their replies in one of two ways. Those opposed to any role for trafficked women saw women’s inclusion as secondary exploitation. Those who agreed ‘in principle’, went on to qualify their agreement in some way, for example, by introducing limits or conditions to full involvement. The following two quotes from GEOs eloquently capture this:

“Yeah ! Why not? In principle, if there is a woman whose been formally trafficked, who was able to contribute, I’d welcome it in terms of either victim identification or victim care…I don’t think I’d go as far as to suggest sharing in the decision making”. (senior GEO 2)

“I think probably the way that help was provided would be to channel the contribution through an established victim organisation or a reputable NGO, such as Poppy. In the right circumstances, the UKHTC might also offer a potential home for a contribution like that.” (GEO 6)

This qualified granting of an expert role to trafficked women, by officers within the GEO sector, was not widely shared amongst the NGOs and partnerships interviewed. These latter groups prioritised the benefits, to both women and support services, from ‘real’ and ‘full’ inclusion of women’s voices and physical presence in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Their views are given in 6.5 and 6.6.

In bringing this research and policy critique to a close, O’Connell Davidson (2006:8) provides the final and alternate reading of the Trafficking Protocol.

“The Protocol definition of the term ‘trafficking’ does not describe a single, unitary act leading to one specific outcome, but rather refers to a process (recruitment, transportation and control) that can be organised in a variety of ways and involve a range of different actions and outcomes”. (Author’s italics)

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Read as a ‘package’, room is created for accommodating the possibility of degrees around levels of consent, force and coercion, as well as shades of exploitation ranging from total to relatively minor abuses. Anderson (2007:11) conceptualises this definitional wriggle room in terms of a ‘continuum of experience’ – with people held at gunpoint at one end of this spectrum, with others receiving fair and equitable treatment at the other, and a range of experience sandwiched between the two. Agustin (2007b) provides further complementary argument across trafficking and migration, conceding the possibility both of a free and an enslaved person, but the probability of an individual somewhere in the middle.

Applying a more nuanced and integrated reading to both women’s movement and to the definitional building blocks of trafficking, creates space for agency and for women’s subjective and often contradictory experiences to emerge. Participant women’s personal accounts of motivations and agency, as well as victim exploitations and injustices, are now presented below for their insights and contribution to comprehending a lived trafficking experience.

5.5 Women’s stories of subjective trafficking experience – personal