Suchergebnisse

Prostitution is still the subject of intense controversy among feminists but theoretical and political analyses are often only loosely grounded in empirical research. This book offers new perspectives on prostitution based on wide-ranging research in nine countries and extensive work with prostitute users.

This article aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work that critically deconstructs dominant discourse on 'trafficking' and to the literature that documents and theorizes the gap between states' spoken commitment to children's rights and the lived experience of migrant children in the contemporary world. It contrasts the intense public and policy concern with the suffering of 'trafficked' children against the relative lack of interest in other ways that migrant children can suffer, in particular, suffering resulting from immigration policy and its enforcement. It argues that discourse on 'child trafficking' operates to produce and maintain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively a child. These conceptions of the normative child then inform policy and practice that often punishes, rather than protects, children who do not conform to the imagined norm, and that simultaneously reinforces children's existing vulnerabilities and creates new ones.

"Die Debatte über Prostitution und Menschenhandel ist von zwei gegensätzlichen Positionen geprägt. Für Abolitionisten ist Prostitution per se eine Ausbeutung der Frau. Sie fordern, die Vermittler oder sogar die Kunden von Prostituierten zu bestrafen, um so Sexsklaverei und Menschenhandel auszurotten. Ihre liberalen und libertären Gegner betrachten hingegen Sex als eine Ware wie jede andere. Sie erhoffen sich von der gesellschaftlichen Anerkennung und staatlichen Regulierung der Prostitution eine Verbesserung der Arbeitsbedingungen von Prostituierten. Beide Positionen sind verkürzt. Prostitution und Migration können freiwillig und selbstbestimmt, aber auch mit Gewalt und Ausbeutung verbunden sein. Eine Politik, die wirklich die Menschen in den Herkunftsländern im Auge hat, muss sich nicht um Bekämpfung des 'Menschenhandels', sondern um die Reduzierung der Armut in den Herkunftsländern der Migranten kümmern." (Autorenreferat)

This issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review is concerned with some of the histories that created, and that continue to shape, both the present-day phenomena discussed under the rubric of trafficking, and the contemporary discourse of trafficking itself. One such history is that of transatlantic slavery. Since the millennium, numerous NGOs have been founded in the US, Australia and Europe with a mission to end what they call 'modern slavery'. Their campaigns have overlapped with, and played a significant role in shaping, the development of media, NGO, policy and political discourse on human trafficking, which is, according to the antislavery NGO Free the Slaves, 'the modern day slave trade—the process of enslaving a person'.1 In this discourse, the history of transatlantic slavery is invoked by means of visual as well as textual references in order to emphasise the severity of trafficking (and other phenomena included under the umbrella of 'modern slavery') as a human rights violation. The message has been communicated so effectively that although in international law slavery is held to be only one of several possible outcomes of trafficking, in the anti-trafficking rhetoric emanating from national and international policy agencies, as well as NGOs, trafficking is now frequently said to be 'modern slavery'

Despite growing popular and policy interest in 'new' slavery, with contemporary abolitionists calling for action to free an estimated 40 million 'modern slaves', interdisciplinary and theoretical dialogue has been largely missing from scholarship on 'modern slavery'. This edited volume will provide a space to reinvigorate the theory and practice of representing slavery and related systems of domination, in particular our understandings of the binary between slavery and freedom in different historical and political contexts. The book takes a critical approach, interrogating the concept of modern slavery by exploring where it has come from, and its potential for obscuring and foreclosing new understandings. Including contributions from philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and English Literature scholars, it adds to the emerging critique of the concept of 'modern slavery' through its focus on the connections between the past of Atlantic World slavery, the present of contemporary groups whose freedoms are heavily restricted (prisoners, child labourers in the Global South, migrant domestic workers, and migrant wives), and the futures envisaged by activists struggling against different elements of the systems of domination that Atlantic World slavery relied upon and spawned. Revisiting Slavery & Antislavery will be of indispensable value to scholars, students, policy makers and activists in the fields of human rights, modern history, international politics, social policy, sociology and global inequality.

In this interview for the TCS website, Angelo Martins Jr interviews Professor Julia O'Connell Davidson about her recent book, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (2015). The interview further discusses some of the most prominent (and often controversial) topics examined by O'Connell Davidson's book, such as her understanding of modern slavery and her critique on (and consequences of) how anti-slavery movements, NGOs and right-wing and social democratic media and politicians have mistakenly appropriated and used the term. The interview further considers some of the global contemporary social, political and economic issues, such as 'the refugee crisis', border control, citizenship and global socio-economic inequalities.