How images of sex trafficking produce notions of race, sex, and citizenship

Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates how state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, and economic rights afforded women. This book is a call to understanding and to action: If the international community is to effectively combat human trafficking, they must center the equality of women in national policy.

The recognition of women’s human rights to migrate and work as sex workers is disregarded and dismissed by anti-trafficking discourses of rescue in the latest United Nation’s definition of trafficking. This volume explores the life experiences, agency, and human rights of trafficked women in order to shed light on the complicated processes in which anti-trafficking, human rights and social justice are intersected. In these articles, the authors critically analyze not only the conflation of trafficking with sex work in international and national discourses and its effects on migrant women, but also the global anti-trafficking policy and the root causes for the undocumented migration and employment. Featuring case studies on eleven countries including the US, Iran, Denmark, Paris, Hong Kong, and south east Asia and offering perspectives from transnational migrant population, the contributors rearticulate the trafficking discourses away from the state control of immigration and the global policing of borders, and reassert the social justice and the needs, agency, and human rights of migrant and working communities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, gender studies, human rights, migration, sociology and anthropology.

It has been widely accepted that trafficking of human beings is a human rights issue. However, it has been difficult to address the human rights aspects of the phenomenon in practice, because a comprehensive analysis of applicable human rights norms and principles has not been fully developed, and therefore the nature of obligations imposed upon States is not entirely clear. The purpose of this book, then, is to establish a human rights framework to promote better understanding of the multi-faceted problems inherent in trafficking of human beings, articulate obligations imposed upon States, and facilitate a holistic approach. The book also contains chapters on case studies at the national, regional, and international levels, thereby combining the theory and practice.

Women's International and Comparative Human Rights is a collection of materials that provide information and insight into the complex issues of international human rights and the laws and customs that specifically impact women in countries all over the world. These materials include: excerpted cases, statutes, treaties, newspaper articles, law review articles, books, U.N. treaty organs and committee reports, and cases emanating from regional and international tribunals. By applying an interdisciplinary approach, Professor Tiefenbrun looks into the history of the global human rights movement, the structure of the United Nations and its human rights system, and the relationship of international law to the development of international human rights laws that relate specifically to women. The book examines women's civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights, women's human rights in armed conflict; women's fundamental right to manifest their religion; their right to be free from slavery and sex trafficking; the rights of women with disabilities; and the right of women to be free from institutionalized female infanticide, sex selection abortion, child soldiering, sexual violence and torture. The Appendix contains the major international human rights treaties protecting women and children. This book is a useful and convenient book for courses in international human rights, women and the law, and women's international human rights. "Tiefenbrun (Thomas Jefferson School of Law) successfully guides readers through the volume and presents a very complex subject in a clear manner. This important work argues that the human rights needs of women are not and should not be assumed to be identical to those of men. The author not only provides evidence but also places it in theoretical frameworks, such as feminist theory. Case study comparisons of laws in different countries meld the facts and theories and act as helpful examples. ...This book is an especially useful introduction to the limits of current international and domestic human rights laws for the protection of women." -- CHOICE Magazine, L. E. Lyons, Northwestern University

This book explores women’s stories of agency in a lived experience of trafficking. The idea of agency is a difficult concept to fathom, given the unscrupulous acts and exploitative practices which define trafficking. In response to the ‘3-P’ anti-trafficking paradigm – to prevent and protect victims and prosecute traffickers – official discourse constructs agency in singular opposition to victimhood. The ‘true’ victim of trafficking is reified in attributes of passivity and worthiness, whereas signs of women’s agency are read as consent in their own predicament or as culpability in criminal justice and immigration rule-breaking. Moving beyond the official lack or criminal fact of agency, this collection of stories adds knowledge on agency constructed with, on, and by, women possessing a trafficking experience. Based on the stories of twenty-six women, agency is seen to exist in relationship to women’s victimisation under trafficking. Exploring well-being agency (women’s physical safety and economic needs), and agency freedom (women’s capacity to construct choices and the conditions affecting choice), women demonstrate agency in their identity, decision making, and actions. Acknowledging the existence of a migration-crime-security nexus in contemporary human trafficking, the narratives of fifteen anti-trafficking professionals highlight how official actions mediate women’s achievement of well-being and agency freedoms. This book will be of interest to students undertaking courses in modern slavery, human trafficking, human geography, police studies, social work, and criminology.

Focusing on the trafficking of women and girls from a feminist perspective, this book examines how social structures and gender influence human trafficking. While women and girls are not the only victims of trafficking, they tend to be disproportionally represented. Structural inequities – including poverty, gender-based violence, racism, class and caste-based discrimination and other forms of oppression and marginalization – place some individuals at substantially greater risk to be trafficked. The contributors explore topics including trauma-informed assessment of, and therapy with, survivors of human trafficking; issues facing children of trafficked women when they are reintegrated into their communities post-trafficking; the intersection of trafficking with racial and cultural oppression; critical aspects of international sex trafficking; and commercial sexual exploitation of children. The book concludes with a discussion of how human trafficking intersects with both intracountry adoption and brokered marriages. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women & Therapy.