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Abstract
This essay considers the rhetorical and discursive logics that underpin the history, philosophy and programme strategies of International Justice Mission (IJM), a US Christian non-profit organization that has pioneered the use of ‘raid and rescue’ (partnering with law enforcement to raid places of work) as a strategy for addressing trafficking in the Global South. Emancipation from bondage is the conceptual and moral imperative that undergirds IJM's mission, along with many other anti-trafficking organizations that, like IJM, imagine themselves as ‘new abolitionists’ fighting trafficking as a modern-day form of slavery. By drawing on commonly held assumptions about the nature of slavery and freedom, IJM offers a problematic vision of what the liberated subject of rescue should look like: a non-white woman who literally moves from darkness to light because she has been rescued by IJM. This vision of emancipation enables IJM to enact a particular set of strategies and programmes that are carceral and coercive (such as indefinite holding in government remand homes) in the name of saving victims of trafficking. By way of contrast, the essay examines the programming and mission of SANGRAM-VAMP, a non-profit advocacy organization and sex workers' union in Maharashtra, India. By analysing the various conflicts members of SANGRAM-VAMP have experienced with the IJM field office in Maharashtra, this essay concludes by describing a transformation of the ground on which anti-trafficking initiatives could potentially base the project of doing justice. In placing the radically different politics of SANGRAM-VAMP and IJM in tension, the essay asks whether a counter-discourse is possible by reimagining emancipation as a project that foregrounds collaborative processes of action that are decoupled from the action of a single emancipator.
Notes
1 Despite the controversy it generated, Hathaway (Citation2008) is an excellent source for understanding the simultaneous separation and conflation of the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘trafficking’ on the stage of international law and activism.
2 I use ‘sex work’, ‘sex worker’, ‘the sex industry’ and ‘trafficking into forced prostitution’ to indicate my own position that the sex industry involves many different forms of agentive and coerced labour, but cannot be described or defined as exploitative unless shown to be so in a specific context. When referencing IJM's own positions, I will use the terms ‘slave’, ‘sex trafficking’ and ‘prostitution’.
3 I will refer to IJM as an abolitionist organization as that is its self-description, although that label, with its overtones of moral certainty and resonances with the anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century, has been strongly contested by feminist and legal scholars.
4 In 2004 George W. Bush introduced Sharon Cohn Wu, director of anti-trafficking operations for IJM, during a speech in which he announced the United States’ new commitment to fighting a new global enemy, ‘sex slavery’ (Capous Desyllas Citation2007: 69).
5 ‘VAMP is like a branch office … It is independent and runs on its own, but gets its life sustenance from SANGRAM’ (www.sangram.org, accessed 7 August 2013).
6 Cheng's (Citation2010) ethnography of Filipina migrant entertainers on US military bases in south Korea describes women who embrace the mantle of victimhood strategically: ‘They do not see themselves as “professionals”, “prostitutes” or “victims of sex trafficking”, but rather in terms of their multiple subjectivities and possibilities in migration, encapsulated in their sense of “self”’ (95).
7 www.sangram.org (accessed 7 August 2013).
8 ‘We believe that a woman's sexuality is an integral part of her as a woman, as varied as her mothering, domestic and such other skills. We do not believe that sex has a sacred space and women who have sex for reasons other than its reproductive importance are violating this space’ (www.sangram.org; accessed 7 August 2013).
9 www.freedom.firm.in (accessed 7 August 2013).
10 www.ijm.org (accessed 7 August 2013).
11 Not every person who exchanges sexual services for goods or other valuables views themselves as a ‘sex worker’. ‘The identity issue is crucial … Many migrants who sell sex do not consider themselves sex workers’ (Agustín Citation2007: 158).