This essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human

Since the adoption of the UN Trafficking Protocol, most of the efforts dedicated to eliminating exploitation of migrant workers have focused on human trafficking. Yet, there is limited evidence to show that this approach has been effective at reducing the scale or severity of abuses they experience. This article presents the case for increasing attention to a range of labour rights abuses falling under

Technology is enabling new forms of coercion and control over workers. While digital platforms for labour markets have been seen as benign or neutral technology, in reality they may enable new forms of worker exploitation. Workers in precarious conditions who seek employment via digital platforms are highly vulnerable to coercion and control via forms of algorithmic manipulation. This manipulation

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating natural disaster that changed the landscape of the United States' Gulf Coast This was followed by a human-made disaster of failed policies, poor governmental oversight, and rampant labour abuse This article compares how the anti-trafficking and labour rights movements responded to the widespread labour abuse following Katrina It examines how the worker rights movement

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

Based on innovative, mixed-methods research, this article examines the entry of on-demand platform models into the domestic work sector in South Africa. This sector has long been characterised by high levels of informality, precarity, and exploitation, though recent regulatory advances have provided labour and social protections to some domestic workers. We locate the rise of the on-demand economy

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

This article traces the trajectory of different initiatives to address unfree labour and their impact on workers’ capacity to aspire to and exercise their rights in India. We attempt to understand the dimensions and effects of different ‘ways of seeing’ precarity and exploitation within the larger context of economic policies, social structures such as caste-based discrimination, gender-based violence

Organised waste pickers in Colombia are formally recognised as subjects of special protection and as providers of the public service of recycling. As a consequence, they now receive remuneration for their work, but this was not always the case. This article highlights the strategies waste pickers used to successfully demand their rights while exploring the tensions and contradictions surrounding the

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

This article introduces a special issue on economic systems and everyday abuses of labour rights. In recent decades, neoliberal policies have transformed both the world economy and the world of work. Hard-won rights and protections have been eroded by deregulation, outsourcing, and subcontracting. New forms of unstable, isolated, and insecure work have emerged. This introduction examines the driving

This short article two NGO workers’ experience providing legal and social support to twenty Venezuelan women who were trafficked through the use of social media and chat apps. It shows how the digital evidence from online interactions between the women and their traffickers was used in the investigation and successful prosecution of the case. The article concludes, however, that this does not apply

This short article presents in brief the findings of a community-based, sex worker-led survey that asked sex workers about their experiences since the closure of Backpage and adoption of FOSTA. It shows that the financial situation of the vast majority of research participants has deteriorated, as has their ability to access community and screen clients. It concludes that FOSTA is just the latest example

Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2003 decriminalisation of sex work has reduced the exploitation of sex workers, as well as the health and safety risks in the industry. Nevertheless, United States-driven criminalising policies still influence sex workers abroad. The Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts (FOSTA-SESTA) effectively criminalised websites where sex workers advertise

Among the many policies implemented to eradicate trafficking in the sex industry, US government agencies have targeted online platforms that market and facilitate sex work. In this paper, I consider two instances of this activity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2014 raid and subsequent closing of MyRedbook.com, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2015 raid and closing of Rentboy.com. Drawing

Current US rhetorical strategies of imagining a future of the homeland have led to the creation and utilisation of new technologies to contain and manage the border. These responses to the US border and immigration impact anti-trafficking efforts, sustaining a ‘homeland futurity’. Homeland futurity draws on and extends discourses of emergency that solidify borders as dangerous and risky. This article

Multinational businesses are facing mounting pressure to identify and address risks of exploitation, trafficking and modern slavery in their supply chains. Digital worker reporting tools present unprecedented opportunities for lead firms to reach out directly to hard-to-reach workers for feedback on their working conditions via their mobile phone. These new technologies promise an efficient and cost-effective

Among the market-based strategies being used to fight trafficking for labour exploitation are apps aimed at encouraging ethical consumption. Such apps have surfaced in tandem with the increased involvement of businesses in anti-trafficking efforts and the promotion of social entrepreneurism. In this article, I describe and critically analyse three apps aimed at individual consumers, arguing that they

This paper analyses relations between human trafficking, modern slavery, and information communication technology. It looks at the history of the technology-trafficking nexus and flags some key advances in the counter-trafficking discourse in the last two decades. It provides an overview of how technology has been framed as both a part of the problem and part of the solution in the trafficking/slavery

This short article describes how some victims of human trafficking in the sex industry in the United States are prosecuted alongside traffickers and put on sex offender registries. The result is both a criminal record and an indefinite digital mark that limits their ability to find a job, settle in a new community, and see their children. The article concludes with a call for a careful, critical look

Whatever meaning, however fraught, was attached to the notion of 'business (and we would add politics and life) as usual before the spread of the virus has been indefinitely suspended, and global public attention daily trained to tracking confirmed cases, tallying death counts, and taking stock of the virus's disruptive social, political, and economic effects People who endure structural vulnerabilities

In Trafficked Children and Youth in the United States: Reimagining Survivors, Elzbieta M. Goździak (2016) not only explores the experiences of children and youth who have been exploited by their traffickers, but she also addresses the system in the United States that seeks to intervene and assist them. In order to understand this apparent process of victimisation, Goździak articulates the need to deconstruct

This paper focuses on the modern slavery statements of three major UK high street retailers who are known for their relatively pro-active approach to the debate on corporate responsibility for ethical trading. Drawing on our earlier research in relation to metaphors in British newspaper reporting of modern slavery and human trafficking since 2000, we explore the metaphors that recur across the statements

In recent years, digital games have emerged as a new tool in human trafficking awareness-raising. These games reflect a trend towards ‘virtual humanitarianism’, utilising digital technologies to convey narratives of suffering with the aim of raising awareness about humanitarian issues. The creation of these games raises questions about whether new technologies will depict humanitarian problems in new

Past studies have indicated that the British public consider human trafficking to be remote from their personal experiences. However, an increase in local press reporting, alongside the emergence of locally co-ordinated anti-modern slavery campaigns, is starting to encourage communities to recognise the potential for modern slavery and human trafficking to exist in their own localities. In this article

Child domestic work is one of the issues often connected with human trafficking in popular discourses. The idea of ignorant and unsuspecting parents and children being tricked into situations of trafficking for domestic labour is rife and has driven education and awareness campaigns as keys to addressing trafficking. This paper offers a critique of awareness creation as an anti-trafficking strategy

This article provides a summary of research undertaken to investigate public awareness and understanding of human trafficking in Great Britain, Hungary and Ukraine. Responding to the lack of reliable empirical data on this issue, the research relies on representative national opinion surveys to assess the extent of public awareness of what constitutes human trafficking, the sources of knowledge underpinning

A large body of scholarship has described the narrow set of media narratives used to report trafficking for sexual exploitation to the public. This article examines US media coverage of human trafficking in relation to the Super Bowl, American football’s championship game. Available empirical evidence does not suggest that major sporting events cause trafficking for sexual exploitation. Yet, we find

The focus of this issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review—public perceptions and responses to human trafficking—reflects the growing unease and disagreements among anti-trafficking practitioners and scholars about the current state of public awareness of human trafficking: how and by whom such awareness is produced and manipulated, whom it is targeting, and whether it leads, or can lead, to any meaningful

This article presents a case study of how sex worker and anti-trafficking organisations and activists in San Francisco, California, worked together to develop and pass the ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy’. This policy, as enacted by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department, creates a legal environment where people can come forward and report to

Drawing on ethnographic work with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a grassroots sex worker organisation in Sonagachi, the iconic red-light district in Kolkata, India, this paper explores the politics of the detritus generated by raids as a form of state violence. While the current literature mainly focuses on its institutional ramifications, this article explores the significance of the raid

The Philippine Sex Workers Collective is an organisation of current and former sex workers who reject the criminalisation of sex work and the dominant portrayal of sex workers as victims.nBased on my interviews with leaders of the Collective and fifty other sex workers in Metro Manila, I argue in this paper that a range of contextual constraints limits the ability of Filipino sex workers to effectively

This article challenges the notion that the organised sex worker movement originated in the Global North. Beginning in Havana, Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, sex workers in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region have been organising for recognition and labour rights. This article focuses on some of the movement’s advances, such as the election of a sex worker to public office in the

Sex workers are subjects of intrigue in urban and creative economies. Tours of active, deteriorating, or defunct red-light districts draw thousands of tourists every year in multiple municipalities around the world. When cities celebrate significant anniversaries in their histories, local sex worker narratives are often included in arts-based public offerings. When sex workers take up urban space in

I remember my first self-organised donor panel well. It was at the Global Social Change Philanthropy Conference in Washington, DC in 2013. I had just started work as the first coordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund—the newly established fund for and by sex workers. I organised a session that would clarify the distinction between sex work and human trafficking and emphasise the need to fund sex worker

While the American Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (FOSTA) has been heavily criticised by researchers and activists for the harm it inflicts on sex workers, many of these critics nevertheless agree with the Act’s goal of fighting sex trafficking online. This paper, however, argues that in American legal discourse, ‘sex trafficking’ refers not to human trafficking

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing body of excellent academic and community-based literature on sex workers’ lives, work, and organising efforts, and on the harmful effects of anti-trafficking discourses, laws, and policies on diverse sex worker communities. Importantly, a significant portion of this work has been produced by sex workers and sex worker organisations.[1] When we decided

This article focuses on the political debates that led to the adoption of the sex purchase ban (commonly referred to as the Swedish or Nordic model) in France in April 2016. It examines the convergence of French mainstream feminists and traditional neo-abolitionist actors in the fight against prostitution, and its impact on sex workers’ rights and wellbeing. We argue that there is continuity between

On 11 April 2018, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) was signed into law in the United States. FOSTA introduced new provisions to amend the Communications Act of 1934 so that websites can be prosecuted if they engage ‘in the promotion or facilitation of prostitution’ or ‘facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.’ While supporters of

Drawing on knowledge gleaned from over four years of community organising and from the ongoing compilation of the experiences of Asian and migrant sex workers in Canada, this article presents a case study of the work of Butterfly, a migrant sex worker-led and sex worker-focused organisation. It explores how Butterfly, through various mediums, has sought to challenge the discourses, laws, and policies

This article examines the working conditions in sex and entertainment work in Thailand using the Unacceptable Forms of Work (UFW) Framework. Criminalisation of sex work and insufficient oversight of labour conditions increase the vulnerability of sex workers to police harassment; prevent sex workers from accessing legal and social protections; and contribute to the decent work deficit in the sector

In South Africa, the conflation of sex work with human trafficking means that migrant/mobile sex workers are often framed as victims of trafficking while arguments for the decriminalisation of sex work are discounted due to claims about the risks of increased trafficking. This is despite the lack of clear evidence that trafficking, including in the sex industry, is a widespread problem. Sex worker

In Responding to Human Trafficking: Dispossession, Colonial Violence, and Resistance among Indigenous and Racialized Women, Julie Kaye offers a critical examination of how Canadian state and non-state actors understand human trafficking and implement anti-trafficking measures. Kaye examines Canada’s anti-trafficking policies and the efforts of non-government organisations (NGOs) through one-on-one

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons.’ Whether a person is given a loaded label like ‘irregular’ migrant, refugee or trafficked person, can make the difference between arrest and protection, or between deportation and asylum, or between return to an uncertain fate and assistance

In the context of recent large-scale migratory flows from North Africa to the European Union, significant convergence and overlap has been observed between human trafficking and migrant smuggling, and between ‘economic’ and ‘forced’ migration. This paper draws on the case of Nigerian women asylum seekers, most of whom are identified as potential victims of human trafficking, to illustrate the problems

This article reflects on the construction and application of different migratory categories in the Peruvian context, including irregular migrants, refugees, victims of trafficking, and smuggled migrants. Through legal analysis and interviews with key migration actors in the country, the paper explores the ways in which Peru responds to migrants in these different categories, in view of the recent changes

This article explores how competing and overlapping legal classifications such as ‘victim of trafficking’, ‘smuggled migrant’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘refugee’ play out in the United States (US) immigration system. In particular, it focuses on the repeated failure of US authorities to identify and protect survivors of human trafficking who were victimised by the smugglers they voluntarily employed in

In Mexican child protection circles the term ‘circuit children’ has been used to designate people under the age of 18 who cross the US-Mexico border irregularly and cyclically for the purpose of smuggling drugs or irregular migrants. Young people of the border region have historically been involved in these markets. Yet their activities have become more visible in recent years in the context of increased

The corridor linking Indonesia with Malaysia is particularly rife with transborder mobility, including large-scale labour migration. While irregularity has long been a major feature of these flows, much of the movement now falls under the migration regimes adopted by Malaysia and Indonesia. Long-established casual migration flows collide with recently codified norms and, as a result, oscillate between

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons.’ The image of rubber dinghies densely packed with people floating precariously in the Mediterranean Sea has become a symbol of our times. Among those in peril are persons who may have fled conflict, others who have left poverty and many who

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons.’ The international community has recently taken steps to agree two intergovernmental compacts, which together are intended to revitalise the global governance of migration and asylum. The Global Compact on Refugees seeks to strengthen international

In spring 2017, New York Times correspondent Patrick Kingsley went to Turkey to cover the lives of Syrian refugees. In Istanbul, Kingsley met Abu Mohammed, a former surgeon’s assistant from Syria, who between 2015 and 2016 had helped to facilitate the passage of refugees from his home country into Greece. After narrowly escaping death in his own failed attempt to reach Europe, Mohammed had earned some

Family reunification is a complex part of a survivor’s journey; its processes long, arduous, and unassured. This article seeks to examine the intricacies of human trafficking and family separation in migration, and intergenerational trauma following family reunification. The authors apply theoretical frameworks and concepts established by literature on migration and trauma, and provide a case study

Spectacular stories of life in trafficking saturate the media, politicians’ speeches, and non-governmental organisations’ fundraising campaigns. With so much focus on stories of brutality, or of dramatic escapes and rescues, there has been little attention to what happens after trafficking. This special issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review shines a light on trafficking outcomes—both for those who have

This article, based on nine months of ethnographic data from a reintegration shelter for survivors of trafficking in Bangladesh, examines the tensions between claims of empowerment and the disempowering practices that undermine an organisation’s liberatory objective. The author documents how the leadership and other staff of an anti-trafficking NGO engage in regulating survivors’ desires, directing

Assisting survivors of trafficking is considered one of the pillars of a human rights-based response Shelter, medical, psychological and legal assistance in the short term and job placement, accommodation and reunification with family and community in the long term are critical steps for helping them recover and feel in control of their lives and futures. This paper examines survivors’ experiences

Despite the significant international attention to human trafficking in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia, victims continue to experience poor outcomes after their return to Thailand. The Labour Rights Promotion Network (LPN) has assisted many returned fishermen in the difficult journey that begins after their rescue and repatriation. In this paper, we argue that the poor outcomes are the product

Large numbers of Indonesian men migrate each year for work in construction, in factories and in agriculture, on plantations and on fishing boats. Many of them end up exploited in ways that constitute human trafficking, suffering violence, deprivation, restricted freedom and severe exploitation as well as long periods of separation from their families. This article explores the challenges faced by forty-nine