Re-Framing Exploitation Creep to Fight Human Trafficking: A Response to Janie Chuang

DOI

10.1017/S2398772300009387

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Publication Title

AJIL Unbound

Volume

108

First Page

264

Last Page

267

Abstract

Janie Chuang discusses important shifts in the way that American policy makers and activists have defined and fought human trafficking. As she shows, key aspects of the 2000 UN Protocol's definition of trafficking have been whiplashed by changing political winds emanating from the Bush and Obama administrations. In the Bush years, a strange bedfellows network of feminists, evangelicals, and neo-conservatives directed American trafficking policy primarily toward sexual exploitation, pushing for prohibitions not only on forced but also on voluntary prostitution. Other types of trafficking were neglected. The Obama administration and its own set of civil society associates gusted other ways. Among other moves, it reduced the focus on sex, dropped the view that voluntary prostitution constituted trafficking, enlarged the trafficking concept to include all forced labor (whether or not involving movement), and rebranded the expansive new notion as slavery.

Open Access

Gold

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