On May 11, 2009, the doors of “City of Hope,” a United Arab Emirates (UAE) based women's shelter, were closed following almost two years of public controversy. Beginning in late 2007, Cheryl,1 the founder and director of the shelter, was locked in an almost constant battle with locals, the government, and other activists that was staged at the global level through the use of media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the BBC. An American woman who had married an Emirati and created the organization “in her living room,” Cheryl was a very vocal and outspoken activist in Dubai who began with domestic violence as her primary cause, but became passionate about “fighting trafficking” when trafficking became part of a sensationalized media and political frenzy following the passage of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 and, later, its international component, the Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) (U.S. Department of State 2001). Through conversations with reporters, researchers, and antitrafficking advocates in EuroAmerica, Cheryl publicly castigated the UAE for what she viewed as major governmental shortcomings in the “war on trafficking.”
In early 2007 Cheryl partnered with the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a development initiative founded and funded by the Cheney family, which only heightened the negative attention she had been receiving from locals and locally based grassroots activists. Throughout the course of her work with City of Hope, Cheryl worked with several antitrafficking groups from the United States and secured funds from a variety of American development agencies. In 2008 Cheryl was accused of abusing the women in her shelter, selling their children, and often subcontracting their services. Though she dismissed the claims as defamation, several reporters and researchers (myself included) who spoke with the women from her shelter confirmed reports of abuse. In May of the following year she was exiled from the UAE and told that she could never return. Subsequently, the shelter was abandoned abruptly leaving the residents without electricity or running water, in search of a new shelter and assistance.
As one Middle Eastern women's rights activist told me in 2011 reflecting on the story of City of Hope, “Cheryl and her organization are a classic example of the problem with American approaches to development. As an American who had moved to the Emirates and was working to ‘save’ the women there, she fit the script perfectly. So perfectly, that no one thought to look for accountability, to see what she was doing, and what she was doing was wrong. I agree with the locals who feel that the U.S. supported the wrong woman for the job.” City of Hope, which Cheryl promoted as the “first” women's shelter in the Gulf, and a leader in the “fight against trafficking” in the UAE, is a striking example of development efforts constructed from a position of “privilege” or U.S. hegemony and empire, gone terribly wrong. Locals and activists in the UAE agree that not only did Cheryl perpetuate the gendered and racialized rhetoric embedded in the “war on trafficking,” but she actually harmed the people she purported to help.
Migrant women face multilayered and multifaceted challenges. On the one hand, they must confront the reality that women who move across borders for employment are often underpaid compared to their male counterparts, and more likely to face abuse in migration (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2008). Beyond the obvious gender stratification in employment demands and compensation, is the fact that women face increased scrutiny in the form of policies, discourses, and development strategies that aim to “help” or “rescue” them, highlighting the discursive, physical, and structural violence they can be exposed to. The story of Suri, a domestic worker from the Philippines who had migrated to Morocco, exemplifies these myriad challenges in a powerful way.
“I left Morocco because there was no work at home, and my husband had left me with four children and a lot of debt,” she recalled. Because of increased scrutiny the Moroccan women had leveraged on migrant women, however, Suri could not migrate legally due to the increased bureaucracy the Moroccan state had enacted. She had decided to migrate to Dubai to work in the sex industry because she had heard through friends that wages for Moroccan women were high in the sex industry and that she could make a large sum of money quickly and return home. “For me, it was about making money as fast as possible so I could get back to my kids. That was it,” she explained. But one night, after working in Dubai only one month, not long enough to pay back the debt her husband had accrued, she was rounded up on a “rescue mission” that an American based antitrafficking group enacted. She was arrested, raped, and abused in jail, before being deported, still in high debt, and now facing exile from her family.
My research examines the production of race, ethnicity, and sexuality through deeply flawed and highly privileged developmentalist efforts to address “human trafficking” in the UAE. The field of “development,” development studies, and more recently, development anthropology has raised red flags for many anthropologists and been the topic of much commentary and controversy for at least the past two decades (see Escobar 2001). Scholars have critically examined the role of development in the furthering of empire in the neoliberal world order (Agustín 2007, 2008; Escobar 2001; O'Connell Davidson 2006), pointing to ways in which development efforts operate from a presumed position of privilege. While some foreground their concerns in the complicated responses and results of economic development, others focus on the role of “charity,” or as Laura Agustín has labeled outreach efforts, as “the social” (Agustín 2007).
In the wake of the global “War on Terror” there has been increasing examination of the role of “development,” “outreach,” and “charity,” especially as it pertains to the racialization of the Muslim world in the recent climate of Islamophobia.2 The “War on Trafficking,” which could arguably be seen as the feminized antidote to the hypermasculinized “War on Terror,” has also generated much controversy, especially within the fields of anthropology, sociology, and geography. Scholars such as Denise Brennan (forthcoming), Carole Vance (2011), and Julia O'Connell Davidson (2006) have pointed out the shortcomings of the trafficking debate and the over-determination of the word trafficking.
The widespread panic about transnational female labor, especially in the commercial sex industry has resulted in an elasticity of the term human trafficking especially as it is marshaled and deployed in policy and international conventions. As many have noted, it is a term that at once claims too much and too little (Constable 2010; Davidson 2006). Like a rubber band, the term trafficking stretches wide enough to encompass all forms of commercial sex work (whether by force, fraud, coercion or not),3 but then shrinks to exclude forced labor outside the sex industry. Born out of an understandable sense of indignation regarding the types of abuse and exploitation that seem all too common in migrant women's worlds, the concept has been expanded beyond reasonable or feasible limits, becoming both conceptually and juristically obtuse, while narrowly gendered, sexualized, and racialized at the same time. Specifically, the misunderstanding that human trafficking refers only to women who are kidnapped by men and forced into the sex industry has, problematically, become the functional definition of the term in policy, media, and discourse. This has altered the way in which trafficking is represented, pursued, and prosecuted. The paradigm of human trafficking as it exists today, and critically, the disjuncture between the legal ambiguity and popular specificity with which trafficking has been defined, offers uncomfortable insight into the complex ways that gender and race permeate popular understandings of victimhood, vulnerability, and power. The wars on “terror” and “trafficking” conspire to produce moralizing rhetoric about those in need of policing and those in need of rescue, carving the world into victims and villains, both of whom require intervention from EuroAmerican forces.4
In this paper I aim to show how antitrafficking discourses constructed in EuroAmerica are raced, gendered, and sexualized while both operating and leading to a moralized type of development or outreach in the name of combating the war on trafficking. This antitrafficking type outreach, produced from a supposed position of privilege (as rehearsed through the rescue rhetoric5 that involves “us,” EuroAmericans, saving “them,” the backwards global South) reproduces a racialized morality6 on multiple levels.
First, it produces the UAE (and other Muslim majority countries) as “hotbeds” of illegal activity including smuggling, terror, and trafficking, which legitimates EuroAmerican intervention in the name of rescue, force, protection, or invasion. The second result, which can be seen worldwide but which has particular ramifications in constructing the geography of sex work in the UAE, is the production of women as either victims in need of rescue or villains who should be criminalized. Consenting female migrants who may or may not work in the sex industry are cast as villains deserving any fate that might befall them, while “victims” are those whose agentive capacity must be ignored or refuted.
In the case of the UAE, consent and agentive capacity are constructed along racialized and classed lines. Women's perceived complicity in determining their status (one that is assumed rather than based on actual accounts) correlates with the ability to script their subjectivities into programmatic paradigms of “victimhood.”7 A closer look at the developmentalist logic that undergirds antitrafficking initiatives reveals the production of gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies within specific locales but also in the broader construction of empire. The antitrafficking script, constructed within a development framework, casts a trope of appropriate victims and villains which contributes to the production of these very categories.
Four years of extended trips to the Gulf framed ethnographic research with migrant men and women in the UAE (including sex workers, domestic workers, construction workers, and others), as well as those that provide services to them, and assessed the experiences of migrant women and sex workers, labeled as “trafficked” by the international community. Fieldwork in the Gulf was supplemented by nine months of fieldwork in Washington, DC interviewing policymakers and migration activists about discourses, laws, and policies relevant to trafficking, sex work, and migrants’ rights globally.
This essay looks at how racialized and sexualized bodies are produced through the developmentalist logic of antitrafficking initiatives. Building on Foucaultian notions of biopolitics and biopower (Foucault 1978), I show how antitrafficking efforts, as a type of development response in conversation with the “War on Terror,” have produced a kind of “development discipline” wherein certain bodies need to be disciplined through development efforts. I have found Mahmood Mamdani's (2002) concept of the production of the dichotomous “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” in the post-9/11 climate of discourses on terror and trafficking useful in framing these analyses. I begin with an examination of racialized and gendered discourses about trafficking and the “rescue industry” these have generated, and then move to a discussion of the reverberations of antitrafficking discourses, policies, and development efforts in the UAE. By contrasting discourses about trafficking in the UAE with actual lived experiences and local grassroots efforts, I highlight the shortcomings of discourse, policy, and development, and the ways that the figures of victim and villain are constructed through hegemonic discourses. I conclude with ethnographic narratives of my interlocutors who describe the negative impacts of development efforts on their lives and experiences in the Gulf.
The first time I met Ziya she was living with a group of Indonesian and Australian real estate agents in the Jumeirah Beach Residences, a high end housing complex located in the southern, newer part of Dubai that has emerged as the more affluent part of town. “Here, I love. JBR very good,” Ziya told me, referring to her current housing situation. “Me, I'm not liking Bur Dubai. Living on street, living in bus station. Bur Dubai dark, bad. Marina, nice,” she said, contrasting the two very different parts of town she had inhabited since migrating to Dubai in 2007. She walked out to the balcony of her current home to show me the breathtaking view of the Persian Gulf and the accompanying Palm Islands as she settled in to tell her story.
Ziya migrated out of Addis Ababa in 2007 after her husband left her with two children and deeply in debt. Having heard from friends that there was an abundance of work in the Middle East and “a lot of money there,” as she said, she decided to migrate to Dubai to pursue domestic work. When she arrived, however, she was placed with a family that was highly abusive toward her. “They burn my clothes, throw cups at me, very difficult,” she explained. Domestic workers in the Gulf States fall outside the protection of labor laws, and due to the sponsorship system in the UAE (kefala) legal residency in Dubai is dependent on the sponsor-employers (problematically collapsed into the same category) who often retain employees’ passports and legal working papers.8
When Ziya made the decision to run away from her abusive employers, she not only absconded from her job, but automatically became an illegal alien. “I run away, but no passport, no place to go,” she explained, reflecting on a tumultuous time in her life not six months earlier. Without her passport (which her former employers still retain), legal work permits, or any money, Ziya entered the informal economy, working as a sex worker and sleeping in airport terminals, bus stations, or on the streets of Bur Dubai, the older part of town which is now somewhat of a working class neighborhood populated mostly by migrant workers of South and East Asian origin.
Lining the wide streets of the southern part of Dubai and the Marina area, gleaming skyscrapers are often spaced miles apart to allow for breathtaking views of the Gulf, the Palm, and the Marina. This urban planning contrasts sharply with the narrow winding streets of Old Dubai in the north, which is home to the neighborhoods of Deira, Bur Dubai, and the Bastakiya (or old fishing village) quarter. When making the drive from south to north on Sheikh Zayed road (the main highway connecting most of the seven Emirates), drivers can witness the spaces between buildings narrow incrementally the further north one moves.
After six months of living and working on the streets of Bur Dubai, where she faced regular abuse from clients, police, and sometimes others in the business, Ziya found an informal organization, supported by locals and expats alike,9 that provided outreach to street-based sex workers and “trafficked”10 persons. The members of this informal group mobilized to provide housing assistance for Ziya while they worked to sort out her legal paperwork so that she could procure a new working visa. When I last spoke with her in September of 2009 she had found a job as a nanny for a family in the same building as her temporary home. She laughed as she said, “I am happy to make money now like this to send home to my family. Next time I go home to Ethiopia, I am happy and proud.”
The first time I met Maryam, a high end call girl from Tehran, she was also living in a modern high rise skyscraper overlooking Dubai Marina. By the time I left Dubai in 2009, however, Maryam was sleeping in a half built metro terminal in Bur Dubai (the metro system in Dubai was under construction during the summer of 2009 and had been slated to open the following fall) and trying her best to avoid the authorities, who had a warrant for her arrest. “I guess I'm a rags to riches story, but in reverse,” Maryam told me when I talked with her on the phone shortly before my departure from the field that summer. “Remember when we first met? I was making thousands of dollars a night, living the good life. Now look at me. I can't stay here (in Dubai), I am in debt because of my legal cases, and I can't even go back to Iran. Worse yet, no one wants to help me here,” she lamented. I had initially heard about Maryam through her friends and colleagues in Iran, while conducting field research for a book on sexuality in postrevolution Iran. I had met her friends in Tehran and followed them to Dubai in 2004, where they would make repeated visits to engage in transactional sex.
Women from Iran and Morocco belong to the two highest paid nationalities of sex workers and in highest demand in Dubai, consequently these women earned up to 12,000 Dhs (about $3,000) per night. Many of them lived in luxurious apartments paid for by their regular clientele, while others financed their own accommodations in more expensive parts of town with their high salaries. Maryam used the semiprivate space of the Internet to attract her customers, and up until 2009 had a steady flow of clients that allowed her to make more money than most of the businessmen I met while in Dubai. She and her friends enjoyed the relative safety provided by the discretionary nature of their work. “No one is going to find us here, and if they do, they can't prove anything, can't prove we are prostitutes so it's ok,” Maryam had told me in 2005. When I asked about physical safety, she pointed to a series of cameras in her apartment and indicated that she and her friends had hired a full-time guard who would provide assistance should any problems arise. “We are living the life,” her friend Sayeh told me in 2008 when I visited their five bedroom apartment, marveling at the view and prime real estate location near the Palm Islands.
In 2009, however, all of this changed when the jealous wife of one of Maryam's customers found out about her husband's activities and called the police. Maryam was arrested immediately, and spent most of one year's income on legal fees and posting bail. She was permitted to leave her holding cell in early 2009 but was told she could not leave the country while her case was pending. She was charged with the crime of adultery. When another client's wife found out about her, she charged her with a series of crimes ranging from espionage to theft. This time, however, the authorities couldn't find Maryam. She had lost her apartment when her friends had rented her room out to another young woman from Tehran in her absence and told Maryam not to return home due to unwanted attention she or her clients’ wives might bring. Maryam was relegated to working in hotel lobby bars and clubs, and occasionally turned to street-based sex work to make ends meet. She began sleeping at the homes of clients or in airport or metro terminals. When she sought out assistance from informal outreach groups, she was turned away.
Why the discrepancy? Why was Maryam turned away, unable to access services and assistance while Ziya was taken in? The answers to these questions have everything to do with perceptions of female sex workers11 based on their countries of origin, and the spaces in which they work. While women who work in street based sex work (located at this spectrum of the sex industry because of demand tied to perceived race) are seen as vulnerable and innocent, higher end sex workers such as Maryam are viewed as predatory, guilty, and a threat to the moral fabric of society by those who provide outreach in the form of social support and services. Their perceived complicity in determining their status (one that is assumed rather than based on actual accounts) correlates with the ability to script their subjectivities into programmatic paradigms of “victimhood.”12
In addition to the construction of the ideal “antitrafficking” initiative, is the script of the ideal victim. The ideal “trafficked person” typically is a woman, usually working in the sex industry, often young, and in the UAE, usually street based and from sub-Saharan Africa. In Dubai, sex work is both racialized (or more appropriately, ethnicized, but locals refer to these various ethnic groups as “race” and thus I will deploy a similar vernacular, though cognizant of the social construction and problematic use of the term) and spatialized.
In recent years, the sex industry in Dubai has grown to include women from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Africa. The increase in sex workers of different nationalities has produced a form of racism embedded in spatialized structures of desire constructing specific locations. In other words, the raced hierarchy of demand both structures and is structured by the locations within the city in which sex workers perform their labor. Women from Iran, Morocco, and some parts of Eastern Europe (described as lighter skinned women and labeled as “white”) command the highest price, and thus invariably work in the higher paid, more comfortable environments of expensive bars in Jumeirah, Dubai Marina, and inside luxury apartments in wealthier parts of town. Women from East Asia, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan (perceived as “brown” women) form a middle tier (based on earnings) and often work in lower end bars and clubs in Deira or Bur Dubai, or else in brothels and massage parlors throughout the city. Finally, women from Africa (specifically sub-Saharan and East Africa—perceived as “black”) are still conspicuously overrepresented in the poorest and most dangerous sectors of the trade, namely in street work. That each group is located in various imagined and physical spaces is a product of their racialization within the discourse, but is also caused by the construction of hierarchical demand. Causality between race, space, place, and demand is thus multidirectional. Ideal “victims” are typically those in street based sex work, while those working in higher end arenas of the sex industry are viewed as having consented and are cast as criminals, regardless of abuses faced or actual level of consent structuring employment situations.
“You can't win either way,” said a Moroccan sex worker/activist I met in 2008. “If you are considered a trafficked person, usually the Ethiopians or Nigerians who work the streets or low end bars, then you get raided and rounded up by the police or people who are trying to ‘help you,’ supposedly. If you aren't, if you are someone like me, considered a criminal, you'll still get arrested by the police. Sometimes we all end up in jail cells together,” she explained. The antitrafficking developmentalist discourse constructs appropriate “victims” who are painted as lacking in agency, and are in need of rescue, though rescue efforts can feel like abuse for many women I spoke with. Furthermore, the solution put forth for these “victims” is to send them “home,” which for many women is not considered help. “What people don't understand is that we have often left our homes because ‘home’ is not a good place to be,” said one Eritrean woman who fled threats of violence in her home country. “I cannot go back there, I cannot,” she added. Others noted that they did not want to return home empty handed to face debts or questioning family or friends, while still others felt that deportation was a terrifying experience. Many of the local activists I spoke with indicated frustration at the way in which the trafficking rhetoric sought to create and produce categories.
“If you don't fit the idea of trafficking and you are a sex worker you are a criminal, and if you aren't a sex worker but you are an African woman, you are seen as a criminal,” said Suad. If a migrant woman outside the sex industry experiences force, fraud, or coercion, she is often not considered “trafficked,” and if she is, the outreach given to her is either deportation or detention. If a man experiences force, fraud, or coercion and seeks out-reach in the name of having been trafficked, he is emasculated and often has no avenues to turn to.13
The rhetoric seeks to discipline bodies and this discipline is at the level of the state, outreach efforts, and migrant workers. The result of “development discipline” is that migrant women feel under increased scrutiny, and often fear the after effects of “rescue.” Men are no longer considered a risk category, regardless of the myriad abuses they face. The UAE government is also put in a precarious position in that they need to perform a certain way in order to be perceived as being in adherence with U.S. antitrafficking policies. To conform to American expectations they have to show increased prosecutions of “sex traffickers” and demonstrate a commitment to fighting “sex trafficking” by increasing law enforcement and “tightening borders,” regardless of whether this may increase challenges migrant workers face, or the fact that this eclipses the larger issue of migrants’ rights.
Over the past decade14 there has been a growing moral panic (Cohen 1972) about the movement of female bodies across borders that feeds rhetoric about the need to rescue “victims of human trafficking.” Around the world today, conversations about labor, migration, sex work, and trafficking have been on a collision course. Policy makers, academics, and activists working within these fields of concern have conflated issues of authoritarianism, race, class, and gender in ways that have served to marginalize the populations most affected by policies and portraits painted about their lives. Most notably, migrant Gulf residents, and particularly women, foreign residents, and “trafficked” persons have been excluded from the opportunity to contribute their own narratives to the programmatic paradigms that they have been scripted into. This research seeks to ameliorate this gap in our understanding while responding to the development efforts that deploy outreach in the name of “antitrafficking activism” to regulate and restrict the movement of certain bodies (gendered and racialized) in certain spaces and discuss ways in which existing narratives about the Gulf mask the complexity of the messy intersections of race, class, nationality, and gender in the rapidly changing urban and institutional spaces of the post petro-dollars Gulf states.
The constructions of “trafficked victim” and “sex worker” are highly gendered, raced, and sexualized. Labels such as “migrant” and “trafficked victim” are often placed on various populations without interrogation. It is for these reasons that many scholars (such as Denise Brennan 2013;Laura Agustín 2007; and Kamala Kempadoo, 2005) argue for a larger conceptualization of trafficking within a broader framework of forced labor and migration, while recognizing the race, class, and gender biases that may accompany such labels. It is useful to interrogate the terms we use to describe the experience of moving to work abroad. As we enter the 21st century, we find ourselves in an era where the movement of bodies, ideas, and discourses occurs rapidly. While the term trafficked is mistakenly used mostly to refer to women, usually in the sex industry, the term migrant, especially in the Gulf, has a very masculine connotation, and one that is classed as well. In the UAE, “migrant” typically refers to unskilled, low-wage male workers.
Unskilled female workers in the formal economy are referred to as housemaids (khaddamah) or nannies, or more commonly as “the help.” So too the concept of “laborer” is often gendered, used to refer primarily to low-wage male workers, while women are viewed as “helping” in the domestic sphere. The concept of “laboring” should be expanded to include women's work as well. In the UAE, the term migrant is never used for workers of Western backgrounds, who are exclusively referred to as “expatriates.” The term expat implies highly skilled, Western guest workers in the Gulf and can be applied to people of both genders who come from a certain class and country of origin.
The “War on Terror” and the “War on Trafficking” have both contributed to the production of gendered, racialized bodies perceived to be in need of protection/monitoring/control. As Junaid Rana notes, “the ‘War on Terror’ exacerbated migrant control, regulation and discipline to create deportable subjects racialized through notions of illegality and criminality” (Rana 2011, 137). The “War on Trafficking” is also racialized, gendered, and sexualized, and quite fixated on prosecution and criminalization. As many scholars have noted, the trafficking protocol is “framed within the convention on transnational organized crime … packaged within a protocol on smuggling, [and] reflects a preoccupation with illegal immigration as part and parcel of a supposed security threat posed by transnational organized crime as opposed to a concern with the human rights of migrants” (Davidson 2006).15
Similar to the raced but faceless “terrorists,” “trafficked” persons, migrant laborers, and sex workers have been problematically excluded from the opportunity to contribute their own narratives to the programmatic paradigms that they have been scripted into. Additionally, global rhetoric about human trafficking is markedly focused on sex trafficking and has constructed the issue (in the minds of the public and policy makers alike) in specifically gendered, raced, and classed ways. The archetypal trafficking victims are women, minors, or female minors who have been tricked or forced into “human slavery,” often for the explicit purpose of sexual exploitation. Men, or women outside the sex industry, are not imagined as trafficked within the discourse that paints the image of a woman, victimized by her own circumstances. Most recently, this image has taken on a postcolonial, racialized dimension: women from the developing world, willing to take extreme measures in the face of dire poverty, make the “irrational” choice to expose themselves to risky migratory methods and partners (e.g., Bales 1999; Kara 2009; Hughes 1979; Barry 1996). Individuals, particularly women from the global south, have been scripted in the trafficking framework as duped, or “victims of their global southness” (Shah 2011), a phrase that paints these women as lacking in agency.
Kemala Kempadoo astutely points out that the types of racism that function both within sex work and in framing sex work take two forms: that of “racisms embedded in structures and desires within specific local industries (i.e. the fact that the demand for sex workers for example in Dubai is based on their race/ethnicity) and that of cultural imperialism refracted through international discourses on prostitution” (Kempadoo 2005). Kempadoo and Mohanty go on to note that this second type of racism is less obvious, yet more dangerous. It has become embedded in neo-liberal feminist discourse about non-Western women who are, according to Kathleen Barry, in desperate need of “saving” (Barry 1996).
Thus these non-Western women who migrate, possibly to engage in sex work, or who employ transactional sex as a survival or supplemental strategy and may or may not be exploited or trafficked, are constructed as lacking agency and are bearers of a distinctly unmodern subjectivity. The developmentalist logic framing this image, which operates from a position of privilege, excludes the space for self-representation by women from the developing world, and this absence is then cited as evidence of their helplessness and inferiority in comparison to Western female counterparts.
The human trafficking rhetoric, as explicated through policies such as the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), a global scorecard ranking nations throughout the world according to their perceived responses to trafficking, calls for commercial sex work to be acted on by the state, often in conjunction with EuroAmerican development efforts (U.S. Department of State, 2001). As others have noted (see Soderlund 2002; Agustín 2008; Bernstein 2010), a “rescue industry” has been crafted whereby members of the developed world mobilize efforts to ostensibly “rescue” or “save” “trafficked women”—usually in the developing world—contributing to the production of what Longva has called an “ethnocracy” (Longva 1995). A few examples of “rescue” efforts16 that have their origins in the United States but now work to “save women” in countries around the world include the International Justice Mission (IJM) as well as the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) whose mission is to “work internationally to combat sexual exploitation in all its forms, especially prostitution and trafficking in women and children, in particular girls (www.catwinternational.org). Evident in this mission statement is the focus on women (and the repetition of the phrase women and children, which as other scholars have noted has entered the global lexicon as womenanchildren to the point where women are seen as children), the desire to mobilize international efforts, and the focus on sexual exploitation.
There is a dramatic disconnect between policies on human trafficking, and the realities of lived experience. As a result, “antitrafficking” initiatives (most often originating in EuroAmerica) are having a detrimental effect on the lives of migrant men and women in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and are contributing to a discourse about those in need of “rescue” and those who fall outside the “rights” paradigm. Only those whose narratives fit the “script” of trafficking deserve outreach, and often this outreach or “rescue” comes in the form of raids, arrests, and unwanted deportation.
In her description of the global moral panic about human trafficking and sex work which fuels the production of a rescue industry, Laura Agustín identifies a category of “the social” as those whose “jobs, whether paid or voluntary, are dedicated to improving the condition of society in a wide range of ways” (Agustín 2008, 4). She is critical of this category, however, arguing that “those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalization they condemn” (Agustín 2007, 5) and in this way notes ways in which “the social” functions to harm those they purport to protect, while simultaneously fueling a racialized, gendered, and moralized discourse. In her book, Sex at the Margins (2007), she chronicles a history of gendered and classed relations wherein the figure of the “prostitute” was constructed as demonized in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in a deliberate attempt to create victims that needed “charity.” Women of upper and upper middle classes then were able to create jobs and a “charity” industry to “save” the fallen women and the destitute, and this marked the beginning of the “rescue industry” which operates on a much more commercialized and commodified level today. Agustín notes that the “helpers” rely on a particular construction of “the victim” in order to legitimate their authority and work. As she notes, “the victim identity imposed on so many in the name of helping them makes helpers themselves disturbingly important figures” (Agustín 2007, 8). Nowhere is this more evident than in the construction of the trafficked person who is both portrayed as needing help or rescue and protection, while also needing to be controlled as a threat to morality and sovereignty. Agustín traces a genealogy of the rescue industry to follow Judith Butler's concept of genealogy as an investigation of “the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effect of institutions, practices and discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin” (Butler 1990, ix). In constructing and tracing this genealogy, Agustín shows how those involved in charity work, outreach, and development specifically vis-à-vis sex work and migrants were actually active producers of identity categories of victims and thereby produced tropes of fallen women as victims and racialized men as villains. She concludes that “the social invented not only its objects, but the necessity to do something about them, and thereby its (the social) own need to exist” (Agustín 2007, 107).
As I have shown, the global trafficking rhetoric which is often constructed within a privileged EuroAmerican framework, is raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized thereby producing (while simultaneously being produced by) outreach, policies, development, or “charity” that are similarly sexualized, raced, and gendered. These efforts are disconnected from the needs of migrant workers and trafficked persons, and are functioning to the detriment of those in need while fueling Islamophobic rhetoric about certain countries’ nefarious tendencies as hotbeds of illegal activity. As I will elaborate in the next section, antitrafficking initiatives such as the IJM (mentioned above) and to some extent the TIP are examples of the social operating to the detriment of migrant workers in the UAE. In my fieldsite, it was not just trafficked women who needed to be saved, but a “morally impaired” (read: backwards, unmodern) Muslim country that needed to be told how to manage the large influx of migrants within its borders, reflecting concerns about “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” a type of racializing and moralizing rhetoric operating at the state level.
Throughout the 1990s, a movement had been building in the UAE to address the issue of migrants’ rights. Groups of coethnics or coworkers began coming together to lobby the government for a reform of kefala, the sponsorship system that regulates all migrant work in the UAE.17 Migrants’ rights groups came together pushing for more rights and an eventual overhaul of the sponsorship system that they indicated was the root of impingements upon migrants rights. The kefala system ties all migrant workers to an employer/sponsor, problematically collapsed into the same figure, rendering the experience of working in the host country entirely dependent on one individual. For women who work as domestic workers, they are subjected to the rules outlined by kefala but enjoy none of its protections and many workers become illegal aliens in the instance of a dispute with their employer/sponsor leading them to abscond. Grass-roots efforts to modify the sponsorship system had just begun receiving government attention when the war on trafficking took center stage. In 2005 the UAE was given a low ranking in the TIP report. Unlike its neighbors such as Iran, the UAE was vested in its international reputation, especially vis-à-vis one of its major trading partners, the United States. With the creation of the TIP report, a chain of events, cyclical and simultaneous at points, was put into motion. Apart from the racialized morality inherent in the crafting of the TIP report as discussed above, the TIP, with its focus on sex trafficking and prosecution, shifted governmental attention away from migrants’ rights (which is the heart of what trafficking is about), and onto hyperscrutiny of the sex industry. Sex workers became the target of raid and rescue campaigns, and antitrafficking initiatives from the United States started making their way into the Emirates at the level of discourse as well as action. The TIP was very clear in its directives toward the UAE:
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of labor and commercial sexual exploitation … government authorities continue to interpret the anti-trafficking law to exclude some who have been forced into commercial sexual exploitation of labor … (r)ecommendations for the UAE: continue to increase law enforcement efforts to identify, prosecute and punish acts of sex trafficking (U.S. Department of State, 2008)
A snowball became an avalanche, escalating with its own momentum. Most importantly, perhaps, is that attention was directed away from reforming kefala and migrants’ rights (which is at the heart of trafficking) and focus was placed exclusively on the sex industry. A secondary result was that U.S. antitrafficking efforts began to direct their attention toward “saving” the “poor women in the Gulf” as one Los Angeles based activist told me in 2008. Organizations such as City of Hope also began taking on a new mandate (with American support) to “fight trafficking.” Locally, the Emirati response was to create a vice squadron within the police department to focus on “trafficked women.” These police officers were imported most often from neighboring Bangladesh or Sri Lanka18 and not trained to work with sex workers or trafficked persons. The result, as many sex workers told me, was increased abuse from police officers who conducted raids in the name of rescue. “What we needed were more labor inspectors, but the trafficking issue, when it took center stage, it was all about arresting women,” explained a local migrants’ rights activist in Dubai. “And when they increased police and increased raids, they actually increased abuse,” added another volunteer who had herself experienced the abuses she discussed at the hands of imported police officers.
The conflicted and at times negative role of “the social” was evident on multiple levels within my fieldwork. Many migrant women I spoke with complained of hyperscrutiny on “trafficking” as producing a category of criminals to be prosecuted or victims necessitating rescue (and sometimes both simultaneously). More specifically, they noted that this “rescue” came in the form of raids, arrests, and deportation, which for some caused more problems and led to more abuse than the conditions under which they were working. Anya, a sex worker from Eritrea noted that “the police come, they say they come to save us, but they hurt us. So many of us have bruises from the police. But seeing bruises is good, because maybe then they let you go, you are lucky. The not lucky ones have to go home.” Other women complained that the rescue rhetoric created a script, and if a woman sought outreach and was complicit in her migration, that she was not deemed a “trafficked person” and thus not seen as deserving assistance. Gloria, a domestic worker from the Philippines, was an example of a woman seen as outside the trafficking paradigm and thus ineligible for outreach or assistance from her Embassy. “I went to my embassy, I said, I am being abuse, I showed them the burn marks all over my body from where my boss put out his cigarettes on me,” she explained lifting her shirt to show her wounds which have still not healed despite the fact that over a year has passed. When Gloria went to her Embassy, she was asked if she had contracted her job through the Ministry of Labor. “When I said yes, and when I said I am a domestic, he just looked at me and said, can you believe this? He said ‘well, I'm sorry miss, there isn't much I can do for you because you weren't trafficked.’ So because I contracted and I'm a domestic, I don't deserve rights?” she asked rhetorically.
Perhaps one of the most harrowing side effects of the trafficking discourse was the way in which local grassroots organizations such as migrants’ rights groups and smaller organizations run by groups of three or four migrant workers were eclipsed in favor of American style antitrafficking development efforts. Not only did the antitrafficking discourse provide a script about appropriate victims and villains, but it also painted a picture of the ideal organization (with one series of negative after effects) to combat trafficking. A cascading series of missteps ensued from privileged U.S. based antitrafficking discourses (in the form of the TIP) and initiatives. The creation of a vice squadron within the UAE police department led to unwanted raids on street based and brothel based sex workers who reported abuse at the hands of imported, untrained police officers. American-supported efforts such as City of Hope actually increased challenges that migrant women were facing. And grassroots, smaller efforts that had been working with migrant women and men were eclipsed and ignored. The experience of Sama, a local grassroots activist who works with migrant women illuminates both of these after effects quite well:
In a café off of Sheikh Zayed Road, facing the soaring twin towers of the Dubai Financial Center, Sama sits at the table, takes a sip of her mint tea, and lets out an exhausted sigh before burying her face in her hands. She has brought a young woman named Meskit with her to the café this morning, and Meskit is accompanied by her son, a three-year-old boy named Karim. Karim tears around the café while his mother smiles at him and adjusts her head scarf.
“I am tired,” Sama says. “Not just today, but tired because this work is taking its toll on me, and it feels like my job is getting harder and harder to do.” She clenches her hennaed hands into fists. Meskit slides over to Sama and puts her arm around her. “This woman is the reason I'm alive,” she says. Meskit proceeds to tell her story, how she left Addis Ababa to work in Dubai as a domestic worker and was abused and raped by her employer. When her employer found out she was pregnant, he kicked her out of the house and she ended up in jail. After three weeks, Meskit found Sama's number and called for her assistance. Over the next three months Sama was able to persuade the authorities to let her out of jail and helped her to procure a new working visa. Today, Meskit is working as a nanny and lives in Dubai with her son. “She has helped so many Ethiopian women like me, but she is exhausted, it's getting harder and harder to do her kind of work.”
Sama is tired from battling the global and local notions about human trafficking that combine to put undue pressure on female migrants in the UAE, while also eclipsing her efforts. She is tired because international policies as championed in the Trafficking in Persons Report have hindered her efforts to create and mobilize a civil society in the UAE to meet the needs of migrant workers, trafficked or not. Sama was born in Ethiopia and raised in refugee camps in Somalia and Italy. As an adult, she lived in Canada briefly before moving to Dubai in 2003. She says that it was her experience being a refugee and then a migrant worker in Italy and Canada that made her interested in forming an ad hoc social support group to help African women who have become migrant workers around the world. A tall woman with kind eyes, she speaks seven languages fluently and uses her linguistic skills to help translate for women who are facing legal troubles or are mired in court cases.
“The problem is that your George Bush and the Americans made trafficking so political. On top of that they made it so that all trafficking is sex trafficking, so what does that do? It makes people racist, it makes people think that any Ethiopian woman here is a sex worker, or has been trafficked, and is a criminal,” she explained. Every day Sama works with Ethiopian women who have been arrested for absconding from their jobs, overstaying their visas, accruing debt, or working as sex workers. She says that the pointed focus on sex trafficking within the TIP and in United Nations documents such as the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (2003) (which operates under the umbrella of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime) has constructed the trafficking issue as a criminal matter in the minds of locals and UAE law enforcement. Sama is frustrated that members of law enforcement assume that women from certain nationalities must all be guilty. She is angered that local and international authorities articulate and reproduce local racialized and gendered hierarchies rather than approaching labor and migration issues within a human rights framework. She is also angered by international policies, such as those advocated in the TIP report, that consider all abused migrant women to be sex workers and, by default, criminals. Thus any migrant worker seeking assistance is first taken to jail for questioning. “The worst part is that they don't even get good translators for these women. They— the police, or the judges—they have made up their minds about Ethiopian women, and they get people to translate for them into words that they want to hear, that they are guilty, that they are criminals. They don't even get a fair shot, that's why I insist on doing the translations, because it's just not fair,” she explained.
Sama pulls out a photograph from her purse and hands it to me. In it, a frail Ethiopian woman not weighing more than ninety pounds is lying in a hospital bed. The woman is hooked up to an IV drip, but her arms are also handcuffed to the bed. I look up in confusion. Sama continues, raising her ordinarily soft voice for the first time: “Yes, can you believe it? She is handcuffed to the bed! She ran away because her employer was abusing her, she was a housemaid. She ran away and as she was doing so she was hit by a car and was taken to the hospital. When she woke up, she was chained to the bed. They assume that because she ran away, and because she is an Ethiopian woman, she is a criminal. Now how do you handle that kind of racism?”
Her voice once again becomes soft as she tells me that things weren't always this way; that people didn't used to be this harsh toward migrant women, and that doing her job used to be much easier. She acknowledges that there has been a long history of labor rights violations in the UAE, but stresses that in the late 1990s, migrant advocacy groups were beginning to make progress vis-à-vis the state; progress that was stunted, in her opinion, with the politicization of the trafficking issue. She emphasizes that it was only when the issue became political, when the UAE was put on the TIP watch list that female migrant workers became synonymous with sex workers and, as sex workers, became labeled as trafficking victims and seen as a dangerous, politically damaging population that demanded what some would call protection in the form of observation and surveillance. While Sama was one of my first interviewees to name the negative effect of international policy mandates on building civil society, she was not the only one to do so. As a result of the TIP, the individuals and organizations providing public services and raising awareness about the circumstances of migrants in need have come under harsh scrutiny by the government.
Local grassroots activists in Dubai also complain of the EuroAmerican desire to “rescue” morally impaired populations in the Middle East. The political potency of migration and human trafficking disrupted local out-reach efforts in the UAE in three main ways: (1) through the pointed politicization of the issue of human trafficking, which brought migrant women under levels of increased scrutiny not previously experienced; (2) through the creation of the TIP report, which placed the UAE and other Arab countries onto a watch list and spurred unanticipated state involvement in what was developing as an organic, resident-directed movement to address the egregious lack of social support systems; and (3) through the strategic use of literature on the “absence” of civil society in the Arab world and in the Gulf in particular, that, in labeling/explaining how and why the UAE was “unable” or “noncompliant” in dealing with the trafficking issue, erased and silenced the activism that had been taking place for a number of years, while enabling the state's co-optation of the issue. “What bothers me most about the TIP,” said Randa, a Palestinian lawyer who now lives in Dubai and works to advocate for domestic workers’ rights in the UAE, “is that one of the things the Bush Administration was after was this bilateral trade agreement (here she is referring to the ‘1,2,3 Agreement’—a nuclear weapons agreement),18 an agreement that would get them a better trading deal with the UAE, so they strategically used the trafficking issue to negotiate a better deal.” Becoming more animated and agitated, she added,
well, it also really bugs me that it seems like the TIP has an imperialist agenda. I mean it's a good thing to have human rights standards, but we must take into account how people come to those organically. In order for neoliberal feminists in the West to have their rhetoric, they must understand that neoliberal rhetoric is based on Western experiences and this rhetoric can be very condescending!
Heba and Maysoun, two Emirati women who donate money to various informal groups working with migrants, took Randa's sentiments a step further. When I interviewed them at a cafe in Abu Dhabi, the conversation began quietly enough. The quiet tones dissipated, however, once we began talking about civil society and the role of EuroAmerica in helping or hindering a civil society movement in the UAE. Pushing back the sleeves of her long black abbaya so she could gesture emphatically with her hands, Heba began talking about the reasons she believed that people in EuroAmerica react to Dubai the way they do;
It's like this, like they couldn't conceptualize an Arab Muslim country doing so well, developing so rapidly and so successfully, and even having civil society, like it didn't fit into their little box that they had drawn about us. Now with things going a bit differently, they are so excited to point to us and our problems and say, “see, I knew they couldn't be doing that well, or if they were, they did it in a sneaky and backward way.” Like it's because since they didn't anticipate it, and that it didn't fit into their box, they are doubly happy to see us struggle. They point to us and say that we have a trafficking problem, that we don't have civil society. They want to see us fail. They want to keep us down somehow.
Her friend Maysoun continued, also becoming very animated to the point where her head scarf actually began slipping off:
They want to blame everything on Islam, they want to use something, to find something to point to the fact that us Muslims, there is something wrong with us, like that we need to learn to be better, like that we can't figure out our own way forward. I'm so tired of people trying to save us. Like save us from whom? And from what? Oh the poor Muslim women, you know what? I feel sorry for the poor Western women who don't know anything. Tell them to get off our backs!
Maysoun passionately conveyed her frustration at the way she felt that the UAE and Arab Muslim world in general had been painted in the academic and political discourse generated by EuroAmerica—or certain types of EuroAmerican “feminists.” She felt it was unfair that the UAE was accused of having a “trafficking problem” that it supposedly did not know how to deal with when she knew from personal experience that there had been a push for civil society to address these issues, but that it was co-opted by the state, precisely because of the rhetoric as laid out in the TIP.
Antitrafficking rhetoric and initiatives that operate from a position of privilege seek to discipline certain bodies through development efforts. The result is a racialized morality and a series of tragic missteps that have rendered lived experiences of migration, forced labor, and sex work more challenging. Moralized development produces raced, classed, gendered and sexualized discourse, policy and intervention. It also feeds into rhetoric about the “moral decay” of the Muslim world, fueling “clash of civilizations” type rhetoric (Huntington 1996). Beyond xenophobic and misogynistic rhetoric, moralized development also mobilizes and supports efforts that operate to the detriment of migrant workers such as City of Hope while eclipsing the efforts of those people, like Sama, who are actually working to improve migrants’ lives at the grassroots level. Privileged outreach efforts, operating as “the social,” further harms migrant workers by creating categories that question migrant worker subjectivity. It is not clear who is being served by these efforts, other than the “rescuers.” When establishing a moral sphere of regulation, it is important to interrogate what populations are being served and what the reverberations are to those most in need.
I am grateful to the Pomona College faculty research grant, the American College of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for their support of this project. I would also like to thank my research assistants including Christine Sargent, Sarah Burgess, Abby DiCarlo, and Justin Gutzwa. I am also grateful to France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener, the editors of this volume for their inspiring work on this exciting project. Finally, I wish to thank my interlocutors who opened their hearts, homes, and lives to me.
Parts of this chapter have been published as an article entitled “Race, Space, Place: The Racialization and Spatialization of Sex work in Dubai.” In Culture, Health and Sexuality. A few parts also appear in P. Mahdavi, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai (2011, Stan-ford University Press).
1. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the respondents.
2. For an excellent discussion of racializing Muslims, see Rana (2010).
3. The official definition of trafficking as outlined by the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children is: Colloquially, trafficking is defined as instances of force, fraud, or coercion.
4. For an in-depth discussion of ways in which the wars on terror and trafficking conspire to produce racialized Muslims requiring intervention, see Rana (2010) or Mahdavi (forthcoming).
5. For an excellent discussion of the rescue industry please see Agustín (2007, 2008) or Sodurlund (2002).
6. Ibid.
7. I place “trafficking victims” in particular in quotations to indicate the arbitrary nature of “victimhood.” I do not deny that trafficked persons are often subjected to unscrupulous and criminal figures, and that migrants, trafficked or not, often are victim of macro-and microinstances of violence and exploitation. I am wary, however, of the term victim, because of the unequal power dynamic that is implied. By positioning trafficked women as “victims,” the attention and power is then shifted to “rescuers,” who set the terms for who gets to “count” as a victim and what they are understood to be a victim of. For an in-depth explication of the politics of the rescue industry see Soderlund (2005).
8. Dubai is not the only place where the kefala or sponsorship system governs the rules and experiences of guest workers. In fact, many of the Gulf countries have this same system in place. In these countries, the kefala system is problematic in that residence in the country is predicated on the sponsor-employer. Scholars such as Andrew Gardner have argued successfully that this system imposes a type of structural violence on migrant workers in the Gulf (see Gardner 2010). For domestic workers, the kefala system presents particular challenges in that while they are held to the rules of the sponsorship system, they cannot benefit from the protections of said system as their work is relegated to the “private realm” and there exists a specific clause in UAE labor laws that domestic workers are not protected by labor laws that protect construction or other migrant workers (http://www.uae-embassy.org/uae/human-rights/labor-rights). Domestic workers in many parts of the world face the dilemma of what scholar Rhacel Parrenas has termed “partial citizenship” (Parrenas 2001). However, domestic workers and many other members of the informal economy in the Gulf experience added challenges of not being able to seek out recourse for challenges incurred during their time as domestic workers due to a lack of formal structures in place to protect their rights. For an excellent discussion of domestic work in the Gulf see Longva (1999), Silvey (2004), or Gamburd (2000).
9. Note that the population of Dubai consists of only 8% Emiratis or locals (Government of Dubai, Statistical Center 2009). The remainder of the population is made up of noncitizens. Of these noncitizens, it is estimated that 70% are unskilled laborers from Asia and Africa, but most commonly from South Asia (for more statistics on demographics in the Gulf please see Andrzej Kapiszewski 2001). Male unskilled workers are typically labeled “migrants,” female unskilled workers are referred to as “help” or “caretakers” while skilled workers, mostly of Western origin earn the more melodious term expat according to my interlocutors.
10. I use quotes to indicate the contested nature of a term that has no universal definition, rather various actors define the term trafficked in ways that are most convenient for their policies, academic discourses, or activist procedures. There has been an increasing amount of debate about the definition of trafficking, which is most often used to refer to the movement or transport of illegal contraband, specifically arms and drugs. “Trafficking in people” is defined as the transportation of people across long distances (which may or may not include crossing an international border) through some form of deceit, coercion, or force. It is for these reasons and more that it is important not to conflate the often sliding definitions of terms such as trafficking, migration, or labor. For an in-depth discussion of the strategic deployment of the term trafficking in the Gulf, please see Mahdavi and Sargent (2011).
11. Though several interlocutors described the presence of male sex workers in Dubai, I was unable to find any men during my time in the field. Therefore, while I acknowledge the presence of male sex workers in Dubai and the Gulf more broadly speaking, in this article I am focusing on women who work in the sex industry.
12. I place “trafficking victims” in particular in quotations to indicate the arbitrary nature of “victimhood.” I do not deny that trafficked persons are often subjected to unscrupulous and criminal figures, and that migrants, trafficked or not, often are victims of macro-and microinstances of violence and exploitation. I am wary, however, of the term victim, because of the unequal power dynamic that is implied. By positioning trafficked women as “victims,” the attention and power is then shifted to “rescuers,” who set the terms for who gets to “count” as a victim and what they are understood to be a victim of. For an in-depth explication of the politics of the rescue industry, see Soderlund (2005).
13. For a full discussion of gendered trafficking paradigms please see Mahdavi and Sargent (2011).
14. Though as Kempadoo (2009) notes, much of this panic can be traced back to panics over “white slavery” as well as controversy about sex work across borders that have their roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
15. For an in-depth explication of the problems inherent with the EuroAmerican framing of the “rescue industry” please see Agustín (2007).
16. For further information about the kefala system and its shortcomings please see Longva (1995) or Gardner (2010).
17. In Dubai only 8% of the population are local Emiratis, therefore they do not have enough manpower to staff infrastructure such as law enforcement, and thus must import this labor.
18. For more information about the “1,2,3 Agreement” please see http://articles.cnn.com/2009-01-15/world/us.uae_1_nuclear-non-proliferation-treaty-nuclear-cooperation-nuclear-power-plants?_s=PM:WORLD
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