On the affective governmentality of anti-trafficking efforts: an ethnographic exploration

ABSTRACT

The state cannot be conceived as an apparatus of purely rational decision-making, as we argue in this paper using the case of governing human trafficking. We used a state ethnographic approach to reveal the three functions borne by affects in the governing of trafficking prevention projects. First, in affective displays used by police officers to regulate and govern the clients they encounter in their everyday practices. Second, the role of affective displays in boundary-making. And third, we will illuminate the epistemological function of affects in assessing the behaviour and the features of potential victims of trafficking.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective governmentality
• state ethnography
• policing
• human trafficking
• sex work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We collected 25 interviews in Germany with state agents and non-state service providers working in the field of anti-trafficking over a 2-year period. We also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the form of participant observation in courts of law, at public round tables on sex work, and spent six months at a police department informally called ‘vice squad’, an obsolete term in official nomenclature. Four raids (lasting 7–12 hours each) in the red-light district were observed. A comparison with the French case is published elsewhere.

2. The term ‘milieu’ is often used by vice squad police officers for these districts that might not be geographically easy to pinpoint, but refers to a space that is ‘outside’ police officers’ private world, a sphere the vice squad must engage with only ex officio. The ‘milieu’ ‘needs’ police forces and measures of control, because it carries with it connotations of disorderliness and criminality (Löw and Ruhne 2011) .

3. Hunt specifies that sex, sexuality and sexual conduct have rarely been far from the centre of attention – to such an extent that for at least the last 200 years sex and morals have been virtually synonymous. This fusion of sex and morals has resulted in its being taken for granted that sex is paramountly a moral question – so much so that it seems to be important to ask the seemingly naive question: why is sex so important? This issue constitutes an important element in one of the significant developments in the recent past, namely, the discovery that sex and sexuality have a social history. Spearheaded by Foucault, this realisation has stimulated an outpouring of historical scholarship and a deepening of political debate“ (Hunt 1999, p. 21). Drawing on Foucault’s The history of sexuality (Foucault 1978 [1976]), Judith Walkwowitz has traced the origins of moral regulation projects of prostitution to the 19^th century, when ‘medical and police supervision […] created an outcast class of ‘sexually deviant’ females’ (Walkowitz 1991, p. 5). Since then, the relation between police and sex work has been shaped in a particular manner. For contemporary analyses on the subject, see Scoular (2010) and Sanders and Laing (2018).

4. We here talk of ‘affects’ because we focus on the social display of emotions, rather than on what is actually felt by the individuals – there might or might not be a congruence between the two.

5. Client here refers to persons who are being processed by street-level bureaucrats.

6. The names of all participants have been changed in order to respect their anonymity.

7. This finding is, in comparison to similar empirical studies on the topic, not surprising. Inquiries into the effectiveness of the raid as a policing strategy in regard to the identification of trafficking victims in countries other than Germany come to the same conclusion, among them Farrell and Pfeffer (2014, p. 47–8): ‘These investigators employ routine vice tactics to identify human trafficking cases that are not particularly successful at identifying victims and make labor trafficking seem largely nonexistent.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and the French National Agency for Research (Agence nationale de la recherche, ANR) under Grant 246481356, ‘Institutionalizing Human Trafficking. A French-German Comparison’ (2014–2017).

Notes on contributors

Julia Leser

Julia Leser holds a PhD in Political Science from Leipzig University and currently works as a researcher in the BMBF-funded project ‘Strangers in their own land?’. In her PhD thesis, she examined affect management techniques in policing agencies. Her research and teaching focus lies on the politics of policing, the politics of affects, national security and migration control, nationalism, populism, political ethnography, and state theory.

Rebecca Pates

Rebecca Pates is a professor in Political Theory at Leipzig University. She holds a BA Honours in Philosophy and Modern Languages from Oxford University and a PhD in Philosophy from McGill University. Her research and teaching focus is on political anthropology, theories of state and the organisation of gender. She is the author of several monographs, among them The Regulation of Prostitution (in German: Die Verwaltung der Prostitution, Transcript, 2009), and coordinator of the German National Research Council funded project ‘PROSCRIM: Institutionalizing Human Trafficking.’