Citation

Mahdavi P. Asian Popul. Stud. 2015; 11(2): 111-114.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/17441730.2015.1027044

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Since the year 2000, a global 'anti-trafficking' discourse has emerged that has taken centre stage in conversations about migration and migrants' lives. In particular, 'human trafficking' as a framework for understanding migration has eclipsed the complexities and realities of challenges and opportunities experienced by migrants living and working abroad.1 The human trafficking discourse and its attendant responses seek to categorise migrants not as people but as products of their labour or circumstances, functioning to erase migrant subjectivity. In so doing, this flattening of migrants' lives also functions to legitimate unwanted 'rescue' campaigns wherein migrant women in particular are removed from their employment locales, presumed to be 'trafficked', and taken to 'safe houses'. After they are 'rescued' they are often cut off from their family members, made to work long hours without pay, and forced to reside in locales against their will. These unwanted gifts of rescue create situations of precarity for migrants as well as their families. This is due in part to the fact that transnational families' livelihoods depend on the 'rescued'--but now without income-generating possibilities--migrant women. Furthermore, the human-trafficking discourse, particularly as it pertains to the Middle East, is raced, gendered and classed, creating racialised and gendered victims and villains requiring outside 'surveillance' which can come in many problematic forms. Migrating in an era of panic around human trafficking is complicated for migrants not necessarily because of an increased risk of being trafficked, but because of the violence of the human trafficking discourse and resulting outreach and policy strategies.
Conversations about sex work, human trafficking, labour, and migration in the Middle East have been on a collision course over the last two decades. Policy makers, academics and activists working within these fields of concern, have conflated these issues within tropes of race, class, and gender in ways that have served to marginalise the populations most affected by policies and portraits painted about their lives.

Language: en