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Abstract
Today’s antitrafficking movement situates the crimes against which it struggles as invisible and possibly unknowable, even as anti-antitrafficking skeptics question the reliability of widely cited trafficking prevalence estimates. Behind this controversy, an important question has been omitted: If verifiable data are lacking, how has a sense of urgency been built around modern slavery’s alleged omnipresence? The websites of leading new abolitionist organizations provide a basis for a critical reading of today’s antislavery discourse. Expositions of the wrongs toggle between narrative-based/emotive and evidence-based/rational modes. The first evokes the hiddenness and hence unknowability of the wrongs. The second exhorts readers/viewers to ignore doubt and support antislavery action in spite of not knowing against what. More than sheer ambivalence, then, an imagetextual art is built by new abolitionist websites, capitalizing on the esthetic principle that not knowing is more alluring to the eye than is knowing.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to all the audiences and readers who have commented on this article in earlier versions, I am particularly beholden to Anne Mae Duane, Jane Gordon, Thomas Meacham, Annemarie Samuels, and Tryon Woods for their comments, as well as the participants in the 2017 Caribbean Philosophical Association Summer School, and a University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute Luncheon Colloquium and an Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research short course, both also in 2017. I also sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers. The permission of the copyright holders to reprint the images published with this article is also gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1 An example is the major research initiative, “Confronting Root Causes: Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains,” led by members of the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery study group (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/confronting-root-causes/).
2 Sex worker rights advocates’ message, that worker empowerment is more effective than law enforcement, has gotten through to influential deliberative bodies in a few instances, as when Amnesty International’s (AI’s) policy-setting International Council voted in 2015 to follow the lead of Human Rights Watch (Citation2014, p. 47) in advocating the decriminalization of sex work (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/08/global-movement-votes-to-adopt-policy-to-protect-human-rights-of-sex-workers/).
3 On its “Human Trafficking Myths and Facts” page (https://web.archive.org/web/20210324185407/https:/polarisproject.org/myths-facts-and-statistics/), the Polaris Project distances its vision of trafficking from sensationalist media, warning that “[H]uman trafficking Hollywood-style looks a lot like kidnapping. The reality is much more complicated.”
4 Free the Slaves is a notable exception: Its website photos include no obvious reenactments.
9 “Immigrant victims [of human trafficking] are often arrested and held in detention without being identified as trafficking victims,” said Jean Bruggeman, executive director of Freedom Network USA, the largest coalition serving human trafficking victims in the United States. “Detained immigrants are held in prisons in remote locations with limited access to attorneys, making it unlikely that they will be identified as a victim, and are therefore likely to be deported” (Dilawar, Citation2019).
10 See https://web.archive.org/web/20190220212833/https://humantraffickinghotline.org/human-trafficking/recognizing-signs; https://web.archive.org/web/20190212125947/https://humantraffickinghotline.org/obtenga-ayuda.
13 It may involve fake news—such as the “Pizzagate” rumor, according to which Hillary Clinton advisor John Podesta ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria (Kang & Frenkel, Citation2020)—or be based on false suppositions—as when British journalists jumped to the conclusion that 20 trafficking victims had been freed by a police raid on a massage parlor sex shop in the British West Midlands, only for it later to emerge that none of the women had been held against her will (Hill, Citation2016). Also worthy of study is the overlap between anti-trafficking and the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that demon-worshiping liberal politicians and Hollywood glitterati run a vast child sex trafficking ring. QAnon’s belief in a hidden epidemic of child sex trafficking has at times been confused with mainstream new abolitionist messaging (Roose, Citation2020).
14 In Northern Ireland, trafficking research commissioned by the Department of Justice was similarly “ignored and derided” by members of Parliament after it became known that the research questioned whether criminalizing demand would be effective in reducing sex trafficking (Huschke & Ward, Citation2017, p. 17). Criminal justice scholars Millar and colleagues (Citation2017, p. 35) concluded likewise for Canada, saying anti-trafficking laws “are not based on rigorous empirical evidence demonstrating the nature and prevalence of trafficking. Instead, they are a by-product of Canada’s international commitments and bilateral pressure from the United States of America (USA) through its annual Trafficking in Persons Report.” As they summarized, “[R]esearch on human trafficking comprises a ‘rigour free zone’ of frequently unsubstantiated claims … which then form the basis of political calls for action; in particular, for increasingly expansive and punitive law reforms and enforcement actions” (p. 35).
15 Britain’s modern slavery minister, Karen Bradley, told the BBC, in connection with the Home Office’s 2014 announcement that there were an estimated 13,000 slaves in Britain, “It’s a hidden crime, it’s going on in streets, in towns, in villages across Britain and we need to help people find the signs of it so we can find those victims and importantly then find the perpetrators” (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30255084).
16 On the basis of interviews with T Visa recipients, Denise Brennan (Citation2014, p. 13) concluded, “Trafficked persons typically are not physically restrained; thus, as they pick tomatoes or wash dishes or sew clothes alongside other migrant workers, they appear to be working under the same conditions as their coworkers.” “[C]oercion does not always take the form of threats of physical harm [but] may take more subtle, nonviolent forms … creat[ing] conditions under which workers cannot leave their jobs … for example, through insurmountable recruitment fees or control over immigration status” (Chuang, Citation2014, p. 640; see also Haynes, Citation2009; Kim, Citation2011).
17 Presentation at the conference, “Whitewashing Abolition: Race, Displacement, and Combating Human Trafficking,” Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, March 16, 2018.
19 The story of the conflicts exposed in the drafting of the Palermo Protocol is well-known (Ditmore & Wijers, Citation2003), as is that of the coalition forged between Evangelical Christians and anti-pornography feminists around the aim of making the suppression of sexual commerce the main focus of anti-trafficking (Soderlund, Citation2005).
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Samuel Martínez
Samuel Martínez is a Cuban-born cultural anthropologist. At UConn, Martínez is director of El Instituto: Institute for Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. His main area of research expertise is the migrant and minority rights mobilizations of undocumented Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Martínez contributed an extensive expert affidavit in support of the landmark case of Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic presented before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2005. He is the author of two ethnographic monographs and several peer-reviewed articles on the migration and labor and minority rights of Haitian nationals and people of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic. He is also editor of a contributory volume, International Migration and Human Rights (University of California Press, 2009), and coeditor of three journal special issues. In his current research and writing, he brings critical scrutiny to the writings of Northern human rights monitors, journalists, and social scientists about Haitian-ancestry people in the Dominican Republic. He is also writing a book on the discourse and visual culture of antislavery in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.