Problematizing Trafficking in Women: In the Absence of Security

Abstract

‘Some 2.5 million people throughout the world are at any given time recruited, entrapped, transported and exploited — a process called human trafficking’, repeated a press release by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2007). As a political problem of such urgency and magnitude, human trafficking has been a recent addition to the European and international political agenda. Although concerns with human trafficking have also surfaced earlier — as academic research, especially feminist literature, has drawn attention to practices of sex tourism and trafficking in different regions of the world (Enloe, 1989; Moon, 1997; Pettman, 1996) — in Europe the issue of trafficking has been quasi-invisible until the 1990s. After the 1949 United Nations (UN) Protocol prohibiting human trade, trafficking disappeared from the political agenda. More recently, the visibility of human trafficking has been raised as a problem of numbers. Millions of people were reported to be enslaved, forcefully moved across borders and exploited. Yet, numbers were felt to be misleading, insufficient and incapable of speaking the truth about trafficking. ‘How do you count something that is all underground?’ asks Kristiina Kangaspunta, Chief of UNODC’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit. ‘We can’t go to official statistics because nobody knows about these crimes’ (quoted in UNODC, 2007).