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DOI: 10.1177/1363460709359234
2010 13: 153 Sexualities
Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel
Sex Trafficking as the 'New Slave Trade'?

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Abstract This article analyzes the United Nations media
branding of sex trafcking as the New Slave Trade. The
association of forced sex with migrant women as slavery
galvanizes a broad contingency against trafcking and broadens
the power of the state to intervene in sexual activity under the
jurisdiction of national security. Under the guise of national
security, the media campaigns focus on slavery moralizes
stronger border protection and the surveillance of migrants in
order to prevent criminal networks and regimes of slavery from
penetrating the pure boundaries of the USA nation-state.
Keywords criminality, media, migration, sex trafcking, slavery
Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Sex Trafcking as the
New Slave Trade?
Heightened media attention to sex trafcking launched by the United
Nations, non-governmental agencies, lms, and documentaries over-
whelmingly warn viewers of this global epidemic popularly labeled the
New Slave Trade. While various political parties and organizations, as
well as the nation more broadly, are split on the issue of migration to the
USA, the branding of sex trafcking as modern day slavery strategically
galvanizes these very same politically divergent constituencies.
1
Trafck-
ing campaigns inadvertently shift the focus from the masses of migrants
who are exploited as cheap laborers, to the duped female migrants
shuttled into underground prostitution (Nathan, 2005). US corporate
and state complicity in trafcking including accounts of corporations
such as Wal-mart and Tyson Foods who exploit undocumented workers
or even US defense contractors who encouraged trafcking workers into
Iraq in 2005 and then conscated their passports to further exploit their
labor fall out of the focus on sex trafcking (Simpson, 2005). By manu-
facturing the crisis onto the most egregious cases, these horric accounts
of feminized abuse normalize the lack of rights and criminalization
Symposium
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Vol 13(2): 153160 DOI: 10.1177/1363460709359234
attached to other migrant workers and situates this calamity onto non-
western regions and peoples.
2
The spectacle of enslaved bodies repeated in media accounts creates a
national panic over the movement of people across borders more broadly.
This anxiety generates collective support for an increase in state power and
in the states budget (in militarizing the border, building more prison
detention centers, and deporting more immigrants) needed to apprehend
and return subjects at the border. By raising fears over womens mobility
through images of sexualized violence, the media works in tandem with
heightened border surveillance to slow down or even halt migration rather
than opening up safe avenues for women to nd employment.
In this article, I explore the following questions: First, how does the
emphasis on slavery shift our attention from domestic cases of migrant
exploitation to racially marked male migrant criminals outside the nation?
And then, how does the focus of the problem from the nation to the
foreign in media campaigns sponsored by the US State Department and
the United Nations justify an increase in the states budget, sovereignty,
and power? At stake in eradicating trafcking is the protection of innocent
women and children and, by extension, the nation from the onslaught of
barbaric forms of rule and violence by organized crime that subverts the
hegemony of the law and modernity itself.
An emphasis on crime and violence across the border led to strength-
ened ties between federal, state, and local police with immigration, health
ofcials, NGOs, and everyday actors. Under the guidance of the UN
Ofce on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Department of
Homeland Security, the goal is to bring down the culprits who trafc
women across borders, justifying heightened surveillance of migrants at
the border. Furthermore, consolidating local, state, and federal bodies
against the trafcking trade broadens the scope of federal power to
intervene in sexual activity under the jurisdiction of national security, a
capacious framework increasingly entangled with the criminalization of
cross-border migration. At the same time, the USA is heavily invested in
consolidating strong international compliance against trafcking and
unwanted migration more broadly. The US State Department submits a
yearly Trafcking in Persons (TIP) report to Congress that details foreign
governments efforts to eradicate human trafcking. TIP rates foreign
government compliance and serves as a tool to publicly shame countries
into action. It acts as a moral force for the USA to enact sanctions against
non-compliant countries including the loss of US military and economic
assistance such as support from the World Bank and the IMF.
3
Contemporary policies against sex trafcking, beginning with the
Trafcking Victims Protection Act of 2000, wield support through
campaigns that correlate sex trafcking with an archaic form of slavery. So
Sexualities 13(2)
154
heinous a crime is sex trafcking that the website of the United Nations
Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafckings (UN.GIFT) brands this
phenomenon in bold black letters stretched across the yellow tape one
would nd at the scene of a crime: Human Trafcking: Crime that
Shames us all (UN.GIFT, 2010). Trafcking is a crime and a morally
shameful act. One can immediately conjure many social norms that
warrant shame the treatment of detainees in prison, the death and
destruction wrought about by the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the
death of migrants crossing the border, among others. Even the use of
shame, a moral technique that relies on social surveillance, normalizes
ones sense of outrage and disgust against sex trafcking, foreshadowing
the dramatic tone that sets this crime at a tenor above the rest. It is the
toxic mixture of sex and slavery that are meant to moralize and educate
the viewer-as-patriot to take necessary action to end this form of exploi-
tation encroaching across US borders and seeping into cities and neigh-
borhoods. Thus, the range of media campaigns targeted towards
eradicating sex trafcking, educate the viewer as to how trafcking works,
how to determine who is involved, and how to do something about it.
Everyday viewers are implored not only to participate in an ideological
battle over migration, but also to actively engage in the apprehension and
surveillance of migrants.
To associate sexual exploitation with trafcking presumes that this new
form of human slavery is imported from elsewhere, that migrants who
come to the USA threaten to demolish our way of life.
4
The association
of trafcking with slavery invokes a pre-capitalist era of highly exploitative
labor conditions that wreak havoc on the national fantasy that slavery can
be contained to the past, rather than a practice and ideology at the heart
of capitalist expansion. Furthermore, the reference to slavery is necessary
in isolating capitalism within a progressive and democratic trajectory born
in the West, while locating barbaric practices of authoritarian rule else-
where.
5
Ambassador Mark Lagon, the Senior Advisor of the Trafcking
in Persons (TIP), defends the absence of the USA from the Special Watch
List of international countries and their status in ghting trafcking:
You know, the United States is not only in a position to point ngers. We need
to say we had our legacy of slavery, we had our legacy of segregation, we had
our legacy of discrimination. Serious democracies have evolved. (US Department
of State, 2007b)
Slavery, segregation, and discrimination are relegated to the past. As the
moral leader in this ght, the inltration of sex trafcking racially pollutes
the West as tainted with exploitation and threatens its modern status.
Since slavery coincides with this pre-capitalist past, it must be purged as
incompatible with current forms of capitalism and democracy. For
Schaeffer-Grabiel Sex Trafcking as the New Slave Trade?
155
example, during a statement to a group in Florida on efforts to combat
sex trafcking, President George W. Bush justied the eradication of
socialism and the transition to democracy in Cuba by critiquing Cubas
dictator, Fidel Castro, who openly welcomed sex tourists when he
bragged, Cuba has one of the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in
the world (White House Press Release, 2004). The status of women,
especially their sexual exploitation via prostitution, represents a nations
alignment with, or inability to achieve sovereignty and democracy, as well
as their modern status alongside the human rights of women.
In the documentary lm by Michael Corey Davis, Cargo: Innocence
Lost, trafcking is characterized as a form of barbarian violence and
authoritarian rule imported from outside the USA. A coordinator of the
NGO, Polaris Project (an NGO funded by the UN and supported by
Mark P. Lagon who accepted the position as Executive Director in
February 2009) outlines the coercive chart used by criminal networks
today that resonates, he argues, with the method of control wielded by
fascist regimes and gulags, or Russian penal labor camps. The psychologi-
cal prole is equivalent: perpetrators isolate victims from support networks
to break their will, necessary for individuals to allow themselves to be
penetrated. The states moral authority in the battle against sex trafck-
ing is so erce that an attorney from Houston, Texas (and father of two
girls) nds this crime to be so barbaric that any man found in this situ-
ation should be strung up in town square and hung-up by his testicles.
The reference here to public lynching is historically chilling and a sober
reminder of the moral ground that justies counter violence targeted
towards trafckers and clients alike. These fantasies of revenge against the
villain who tortures innocent women are deeply engrained in US popular
culture, sanctioning sentiments of national victimization and counter
violence. These western (cowboy) plots validate and normalize a state of
exception similar to authoritarian regimes that empower heightened
governmentality, including everyday citizens to take the law into their own
hands (Dawson and Schueleer, 2007).
The challenge today is how to distinguish the innocent victims from
those who knowingly break the law. One of the governments strategies
to save victims and catch trafckers has been to pay a global public
relations corporation, Ketchum, to launch an advertising campaign to help
spread knowledge of this crisis. The CEO of Ketchum states on their
website: At Ketchum, were inspired by the belief that one can use
communication to change the world and the way it responds to brands,
reputations and ideas (Ketchum, 20032010). This global corporation
commenced an advertising campaign around the world based on their
logo: Look Beneath the Surface: Rescue & Restore Victims of Human
Trafcking.
6
In collaboration with the UN and the Ricky Martin
Sexualities 13(2)
156
Foundation, Ketchum spread sex trafcking campaigns to nearly 200
million media impressions on primetime television networks, newspapers,
and radio networks (Ketchum Case Study, 20032010). Their main
website advertisement depicts a young, attractive Latina looking down
with her handcuffed hands folded in front of her mouth as if in prayer.
She is voiceless and in need of rescue. Under the photo it reads: The next
prostitute, stripper, illegal immigrant, runaway youth, domestic servant,
or migrant worker you encounter or take into custody may be a victim of
human trafcking. Each advertisement depicts Latina, Asian, or young
white women in scenes of bondage, either crouched down in a dark corner
of a room or in prison-like surroundings. It is not their undocumented,
and thus hidden labor that is the cause for their potential exploitation, but
their potential for sexualized abuse that is of concern. Beneath the 1800
number it reads: Helping trafcking victims can help you shut down the
real criminals. These misrecognized feminized gures are not the culprits.
Womens fear takes us to the trafckers who lurk in the dark spaces beyond
the frame of the advertisement. It is precisely the instability of visual
evidence the hidden force of this crime and the difculty of relying on
bodily cues that challenge anti-trafcking strategies. In absence of clues
on the culprits, the advertisements rely on already formulated knowledge
of the typology of the criminal that haunts the frame of the innocent
victim. The prole of the victim comes into focus via photos of young,
mostly Latina, Asian, and white migrant women who are immobile
and helpless.
Everyday individuals too, are given guidelines on how to detect victims
in Ketchums pamphlets and websites: A person who is trafcked may
look like many of the people you see daily, but asking the right questions
and looking for small clues will help you identify those people who have
been forced or coerced into a life of sexual exploitation or forced labor
[italics mine].
7
Questions they suggest asking when faced with suspicious
migrants include: whether they are forced to work; whether they speak
English; whether they were recently brought from Eastern Europe, Asia,
Latin America, Canada, Africa, or India; whether they lack a passport,
immigration or identication documentation; and whether they are held
against their will. Since the lines between undocumented migrants and
those trafcked are fragile, if not impossible to differentiate, one could
surmise that these forms of civic surveillance coincide with the increase in
immigrant deportation raids since the INS was taken over by the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security after 9/11 in 2001. There are hotline
numbers for everyday citizens to turn in undocumented migrants, just
as new trafcking media campaigns splatter their own 800-hotline number
for citizens to call if they witness behavior that may tip off trafcking.
Citizenship is enacted through everyday participation in an increasingly
Schaeffer-Grabiel Sex Trafcking as the New Slave Trade?
157
broad rubric of issues that relate to national security. Zones where subjects
take the law into their own hands usually ourish in frontier zones, such
as the USAMexico border, where the state is powerless or ineffective
(Das and Poole, 2004).
While sex trafcking is a serious problem around the world that
warrants attention, the saturation of the media towards this cause is more
effective in rendering invisible the USAs participation in contemporary
forms of exploitation, slavery-like labor conditions and the increase in
criminalizing undocumented migrants. The global scope of the problem
is pulled into a hierarchical mapping by the media that continues to purge
the nation of memory, history, and suffering. Repeated in various media
campaigns as a hidden epidemic, the Bush administration labeled sex
trafcking a crime and a threat to national security that must be made
visible and then purged from the nation. Ketchums media campaign, UN
websites, and media productions by global celebrities transform the trans-
national image of the USA and other states from the perpetrator of
aggressive displacement of populations to the heroic force paving the way
in the global ght for human rights. The equivalence between sexual
abuse, criminal cross-border networks and slavery, targets male migrants
from Russia, Asia, and Latin America whose antiquated governance and
aberrant sexuality must be prevented from penetrating the nation. The
racialization of abuse to the past and as spatially aligned with the non-
West is critical to manufacturing broad-based support for anti-
immigration sentiment and nativism. During a time when the state is
facing a threat to its power and sovereignty, media attention against sex
trafcking reinvigorates a state of exception by strengthening the arm of
the law and the militarization of the border to implement domestic and
international compliance of US anti-immigration policies.
Notes
1. Some of the groups actively ghting sex trafcking include abolitionist
womens organizations such as the Coalition Against Trafcking in Women
(CATW) and Equality Now; Christian organizations including the National
Association of Evangelicals, Concerned Women for America, the Salvation
Army, Focus on the Family; and thousands of local and international NGOs.
2. Wendy Chapkis argues that the emphasis on sex trafcking elides the fact that
the Trafcking Victim Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 protects the few
innocent women while criminalizing the broader masses of migrants who
presumably choose to break the law by crossing illegally into the USA. See
Soft Glove, Punishing Fist (Chapkis, 2005).
3. US Department of State, 2005: 5, George W. Bush, President Announces
Initiatives to Combat Human Trafcking, (White House Press Release
16 July 2004).
4. Migrants have been depicted alongside various threats to the nation as an
Sexualities 13(2)
158
invasion through feminized discourses of fertility (see Leo Chavez, 2001),
and as a health threat (Stern, 1999; and Jonathan Xavier Inda (2007).
5. For example, Kamala Kempadoo (1998) identies the neo-colonialist
framework of sex trafcking in Kathleen Barrys book, The Prostitution of
Sexuality (1995). Barry situates the trafcking of women in anachronistic
time and space as it prevails in pre-industrial and feudal societies that are
primarily agricultural and where women are excluded from the public sphere
and where women, she states, are the exclusive property of men. At the other
end the post-industrial, developed societies feature women who achieve the
potential for economic independence (see Kamala Kempadoo, 1998: 11).
6. For an array of posters in English, Spanish, and various Asian languages see
the Administration for Children and Families, 2009.
7. See the Administration for Children and Families (2008).
References
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identify_victims.html
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Biographical Note
Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel is an Assistant Professor in the Feminist Studies
Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently she is a Ford
Postdoctoral fellow nishing her book manuscript, The Erotics of Citizenship:
Cyber-brides Across the Americas. Her research interests include borderlands
and transnationalisms, sexuality and migration, affect and capitalism, race, tech-
nology and subjectivity, and Chicana/Latina cultural studies. Her publications
include: Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity and Mobility across the
Americas, American Quarterly, Special Issue: Rewiring the Nation: The Place
of Technology in American Studies, 58(3): 891914, September 2006, and
Planet-Love.com: Cyberbrides in the Americas and the Transnational Routes of
U.S. Masculinity, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31(2):
33156, Winter 2006. Address: 1128 King Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, USA.
[email: fsg@ucsc.edu]
Sexualities 13(2)
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