Perversions in Anti-Trafficking

This book examines anti-trafficking practices in which mechanisms of punishment may be framed as protection or rehabilitation, carceral measures may be packaged as humanitarianism, victims may be treated as offenders, and interventions may hurt more than they help. The anti-trafficking industry seems to require a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance when harms produced by law enforcement and migration control are reframed as protective or preventive measures for persons who have been trafficked, sex workers, and migrants. In this collection, we hone in on a couple of processes that are central to anti-trafficking – perversion and contortion. By perversion, we refer to the process by which something comes to be framed as its inverse, for example, forms of help that produce harm, carcerality couched in the language of community and care, and empowerment initiatives that may feel extractive. By contortion, we refer to the process by which someone or something has to be reframed in order to fit within the categories defined by anti-trafficking stakeholders. We argue for a more rigorous interrogation of these ‘carceral illogics’ that are often referred to as contradictions, paradoxes, or tensions in anti-trafficking. In using the language of perversion and contortion, we hope to expand attention from (contradictory or unintended) harms to processes that evince thought, labour and manoeuvring. Our objectives are to understand how ‘bait and switches’ in anti-trafficking occur, and to explore how these perversions or contortions might be mitigated. This book will be a useful resource for scholars, practitioners, social workers, and policymakers working at the intersections of anti-human trafficking, sex work studies, migration, criminal justice, and human rights.