Responding to Human Trafficking: Sex, Gender, and Culture in the Law

by Alicia W. Peters

Overview

Signed into law in 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) defined the crime of human trafficking and brought attention to an issue previously unknown to most Americans. But while human trafficking is widely considered a serious and despicable crime, there has been far less consensus as to how to approach the problem—owing in part to a pervasive emphasis on forced prostitution that overshadows repugnant practices in other labor sectors affecting vulnerable populations. Responding to Human Trafficking examines the ways in which cultural perceptions of sexual exploitation and victimhood inform the drafting, interpretation, and implementation of U.S. antitrafficking law, as well as the law's effects on trafficking victims.

Drawing from interviews with social workers and case managers, attorneys, investigators, and government administrators as well as trafficked persons, Alicia W. Peters explores how cultural and symbolic frameworks regarding sex, gender, and victimization were incorporated into the drafting of the TVPA and have been replicated through the interpretation and implementation of the law. Tracing the path of the TVPA over the course of nearly a decade, Responding to Human Trafficking reveals the profound gaps in understanding that pervade implementation as service providers and criminal justice authorities strive to collaborate and perform their duties. Ultimately, this sensitive ethnography sheds light on the complex and wide-ranging effects of the TVPA on the victims it was designed to protect.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812291612
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	08/31/2015
Series:	Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Alicia W. Peters is Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated faculty in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of New England.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

The inspiration for this research came to me as I was traveling around Italy during the summer of 2003 researching the movement and migration of Albanian women into sex-related labor in Italy. As it turned out, the migration of Albanian women to Italy, which had been increasing throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, dramatically dropped off in the year leading up to my fieldwork there. A number of factors were responsible for this shift, including a recently signed bilateral agreement between the two nations, increasing awareness by Albanian women of Italy as a destination site for "trafficking," and growing opportunities for cheap labor in other parts of Europe. However, the point that struck me most as I spoke to service providers and government bureaucrats about their work with these women (particularly those who qualified for social services as trafficking victims) was the prominence of Italy's new antitrafficking law, known as Article 18, in forming their understanding of "trafficking" and responses to it. I quickly realized that although my planned study was not going to evolve as I intended it to, a more interesting question had formed in my mind: how does the formation, interpretation, and application of law and policy contribute to the social construction of a socially, morally, and legally loaded issue such as trafficking, and vice versa?

The U.S. Congress had recently passed antitrafficking legislation of its own, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, and similar issues were arising in cities throughout the U.S. as service providers, prosecutors, law enforcement agents, and government bureaucrats struggled to understand the significance of the law. My research quickly changed course, and I set out to learn all I could about the law and those involved in its implementation, as well as advocacy efforts around the issue of "trafficking." As a result, I developed the questions driving the research that ultimately became this book and conducted fieldwork between May 2006 and November 2008.

This issue of trafficking is an ideological minefield, and my intention is not to engage in the ideological debates around it. Rather, my goal is to illustrate the ways in which ideology and other cultural and symbolic frameworks are incorporated into the cultural text of the law, through its drafting, interpretation, and implementation. It would be easy to take an ideological stand on the issue, but I believe the more important insights that I offer highlight how the various actors involved conceptualize and talk about the issue, the factors that contribute to their understandings, and the effects on implementation of U.S. antitrafficking law and policy. My goal from the beginning of this research has been to fairly represent all of my informants, not to say which of them is right.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction

PART I. TRAFFICKING ON THE BOOKS
Chapter 1. A Dichotomy Emerges

PART II. THINKING, ENVISIONING, AND INTERPRETING TRAFFICKING
Chapter 2. The Experts Make Sense of the Law
Chapter 3. "Things That Involve Sex Are Just Different"
Chapter 4. Defining Trafficking Through Survivor Experience

PART III. THE LAW IN ACTION
Chapter 5. Intersections on the Ground
Chapter 6. Moving the Antitrafficking Response Forward

APPENDICES
A. Data Archiving Requirements and Threats to Confidentiality
B. Interviewees Quoted in the Text

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Alicia Peter's ethnography provides the most lucid analysis of the immensely contested operations of human trafficking response that I have ever read. It illuminates how cultural beliefs and values about gender, sexuality, and victimization have fractured the interpretation and implementation of the law in different sites."—Sealing Cheng, author of On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea

"Responding to Human Trafficking is an important contribution to the literature on human trafficking. Alicia W. Peters successfully takes us inside the maze of the anti-trafficking regime, illustrating conflicts in priorities, challenges in advocacy work, and the continued need to design a victim-centered system."—Rhacel Parrenas, University of Southern California

"Alicia W. Peters illustrates the ways in which ideology is incorporated into U.S. anti-trafficking law. With unprecedented access to service providers working with victims of trafficking in New York City, federal officials, and a number of victims, Peters suggests how to utilize survivors' stories to frame future research and how to use their voices in the policy debates."—Elzbieta Gozdziak, Georgetown University

From the Publisher

"Responding to Human Trafficking is an important contribution to the literature on human trafficking. Alicia W. Peters successfully takes us inside the maze of the anti-trafficking regime, illustrating conflicts in priorities, challenges in advocacy work, and the continued need to design a victim-centered system."

University of Southern California Rhacel Parrenas

"Alicia W. Peters illustrates the ways in which ideology is incorporated into U.S. anti-trafficking law. With unprecedented access to service providers working with victims of trafficking in New York City, federal officials, and a number of victims, Peters suggests how to utilize survivors' stories to frame future research and how to use their voices in the policy debates."

Georgetown University Elzbieta Gozdziak

"Alicia Peter's ethnography provides the most lucid analysis of the immensely contested operations of human trafficking response that I have ever read. It illuminates how cultural beliefs and values about gender, sexuality, and victimization have fractured the interpretation and implementation of the law in different sites."

author of On the Move for Love: Migrant Entert Sealing Cheng

"Responding to Human Trafficking is an important contribution to the literature on human trafficking. Alicia W. Peters successfully takes us inside the maze of the anti-trafficking regime, illustrating conflicts in priorities, challenges in advocacy work, and the continued need to design a victim-centered system."

Universityof Southern California Rhacel Parrenas