Slavery is the great test question of our age and nation. It, above all others, enables us to draw the line between the precious and the vile, whether in individuals, creeds, sects, or parties.
—Frederick Douglass (1859)
I am a Southern man and a slaveholder. A kind and merciful one, I trust, and none the worse for being a slaveholder. I say, for one, I would rather meet any extremity upon earth than give up one inch of our equality, one inch of what belongs to us as members of this republic! What! Acknowledged inferiority! The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority!
—John C. Calhoun (1847)
Advocacy on trafficking and slavery has generated sustained popular interest over the past fifteen years.
1 Although academic types were talking about human trafficking before 2000, general attention to the topic has taken off in the intervening years. Media attention has followed the same exponential growth. The antitrafficking sector has followed suit. While it is nearly impossible to quantify the number of small associations, campus chapters, church groups, collective-action campaigns, issue websites, and formal organizations dedicated to the issue, the number of each has increased exponentially.
States, intergovernmental agencies, and private donors in the United States and Australia have contributed more than one billion dollars to antislavery efforts (Weitzer 2014).
2 While it is always the case that more could be done, this is a relatively large amount of money. These funds are channeled through a truly global network of advocacy groups. Some organizations, such as Anti-Slavery International and Free the Slaves, are dedicated exclusively to ending slavery. Other groups, such as the International Justice Mission, have antislavery as a critical component of their broader portfolio of issues. These purpose-built groups are increasingly joined by massive organizations interested in adding slavery to their portfolios and fundraising efforts. The antislavery movement has also triggered the global spread of a relatively consistent regulatory regime. The United States pioneered legislation in both Congress (the Trafficking Victim Protection Act in 2000) and in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (the Palermo Protocol in 2000). Political will and diplomatic pressure have resulted in the near-total diffusion of antitrafficking laws modeled off the American precedent.
The rush to make up for lost time has led to certain compromises. Early tradeoffs involved prioritizing individual rescue over broader structural reform. This has led to strategic decisions about whether to prioritize women and children or
all victims, and whether to prioritize trafficking for sexual exploitation or
slavery in all its forms. To be successful, emancipation must be sustainable. To rescue someone in the late afternoon and call it a day is not freedom. Sustainable emancipation requires transformations in the broader systems and structures connected to an individual’s political, economic, and social life. This is no easy task. Individuals do not live in isolation but are embedded in larger sets of norms, broader social dynamics, and longstanding communities. Sustainable emancipation requires a society-centric approach. This means taking rights violators seriously. Lawsuits are critical, but they cannot be the only tool, especially when perpetrators think they are upholding an intimate moral order rather than breaking a remote secular rule. What are we to make of such a situation? I believe an answer to this question comes from a broader perspective about the historical moment in which we live. This chapter makes three distinct arguments: first, that the current antislavery movement has a history and that this history bears directly on how we think of slaveholders; second, that an exclusive focus on victims has led to general ignorance about perpetrators; and third, that a combination of faulty perspectives on and ignorance about perpetrators leads to a thin understanding of emancipation.
THE RESURGENT ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT
Slavery is perhaps the oldest human rights violation. Antislavery is certainly the modern world’s oldest form of collective action for human rights. It is only with this perspective that we may appreciate the ways in which slavery assumes different forms at different points in time and how civil society organizes itself in response. The earliest antislavery movements in England, and later in America, pioneered what are now industry-standard forms of contentious politics—petitions, banners, slogans, pamphlets, safehouses and sanctuary, economic sanctions, boycotts, buycotts legislative challenges, lawsuits, and the like.
In the United States and the United Kingdom—and indeed the Anglo-American world is the focus of this chapter
3—there have been four discernible waves to what Joel Quirk (2011) has called the Anti-Slavery Project.
4 Together they represent not only the first global social movement but also the modern world’s oldest and longest-running series of interlinked social movements.
5 The sudden explosion of activity starting in 2000 is unique, but not for the reasons many assume. After all, lots of issues gain sudden popularity. But not all issues are historically linked in this way. From the late eighteenth century onward, norm entrepreneurs have worked continuously to expand notions of human dignity, rights holders, and definitions of slavery. The links are both thematic and institutional.
The first wave of the abolitionist movement in the Anglo world emerged in eighteenth-century England. In 1787, Quakers and evangelical Anglicans formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Walvin 2003). Several decades later, Thomas Clarkson, an English abolitionist who helped form the society, started the Anti-Slavery Society. The Anti-Slavery Society, more recently known as Anti-Slavery International (ASI), has operated ever since. The social-movement mobilization that took place in this first wave pioneered the use of the petition and divestment from slaveholding firms (Hochschild 2005) and introduced two diplomatic devices: peacetime economic sanctions and the multinational oversight committee (Nadelmann 1990). The movement’s contributions were ethical, tactical, and institutional.
The second wave of movement activity occurred in the United States in the early to mid–nineteenth century. A vast debate gripped the nation in a social movement that continued up through the Civil War, after which a botched emancipation set former slaves on a track of exploitation and marginalization that would continue unabated for another one hundred years (Bales 2004, Blackmon 2009). Together, these two movements triggered a wave of domestic and international antislavery activity that saw slavery outlawed in much of the world by the beginning of the twentieth century. The third movement wave was international and focused on ending King Leopold’s rule over the Congo, which relied on slavery and forced labor.
6This brief overview brings us to the present outpouring of popular and legislative attention to this issue. The most recent wave of social-movement efforts to end slavery emerging in the United States and the United Kingdom bears some of the hallmarks of earlier eras, including petitions, economic boycotts, the passage of public policy, a touch of moral panic, and the like. But in other ways the current wave is happening under significantly altered circumstances. The roots of the fourth movement lie in the surge of migration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. As the USSR came apart, millions were on the move—not only in the former Soviet states and satellites but also in regions that had previously been frozen in Cold War rivalries. With so much migration, and with the United States and Russia each reassessing their role in the world, exploitation flourished along migratory routes the world over.
7Those journalists and activists who first noticed this exploitation increasingly applied the term “human trafficking” to it. As globalization accelerated both economically and culturally, new opportunities for migration emerged. People were pushed by post-1989 dislocations, and they were pulled by the opportunity to work in new places, some of which appeared considerably better than the place they were leaving. This combination of push factors—fleeing from a failing home or a collapsing economy—with pull factors—the desire for honest work and a better life elsewhere—was cemented during the 1990s and has become central to our understanding of trafficking. This understanding has some merit but is also incomplete and ahistorical.
While there have been four waves of antislavery efforts in the Anglo-Saxon world, it was ASI that remained active throughout the intermovement periods. In 1890, the organization championed the Brussels Act, which addressed the slave trade in colonies and protectorates around the world. In addition, an ASI campaign from 1904 through 1913 rallied the public against the extractive slavery practiced in the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium. In the 1920s, the agency advocated for the end of indentured labor in the British colonies, pushed for the end of slave labor in Peruvian rubber production, and lobbied the League of Nations to produce the 1926 Slavery Convention. This work continued into the 1950s (the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery), through the 1970s and 1980s, during which ASI released a series of reports on child and bonded labor, and into the 1990s, with the organization of the 1998 Global March Against Child Labor, the push for the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, and the establishment of the Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour in 1999. ASI has simultaneously published the
Anti-Slavery Reporter for a century and a half.
8 The duration of these efforts—advocating, educating, pressuring, informing, investigating, lobbying, and raising awareness—is unparalleled in the history of social movements.
The sociologist Verta Taylor (1989) has observed that the lulls between movement waves represent critical periods of abeyance—a state of disuse or suspension. Taylor’s work has shown that abeyance structures—institutions or organizations that carried the flame and kept the faith, however quietly, during lulls in the women’s movement—made all the difference in providing a vital spark when the moment was right. It is reasonable to argue that ASI has served as a critical abeyance structure during multiple eras of issue decline and dormancy. ASI has provided an important institutional thread for comparative-historical analysis of the movement. Likewise, a handful of scholars have emphasized the fact that the term slavery provides a similar analytical thread.
The work of scholars such as Jean Allain and Kevin Bales (2011; Allain 2012, 252) points to the persistence of slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” While the world has changed and styles of exploitation have evolved, slavery’s core attributes have remained relatively stable for thousands of years. Human trafficking may have picked up steam after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the system of slavery has been a key feature of human relations throughout the twentieth century as well as the millennia preceding it. Anti-Slavery International’s heritage has served as a movement structure that has allowed the antislavery movement to survive in the doldrums between the waves. This history deserves retelling. The rhetorical utility of earlier movements was on full display in 2007, when England celebrated the second centennial of abolition on its soil. Likewise, much was made—in the United States and United Kingdom—over the role of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce around the same time.
There are many lessons to learn from an assessment of these waves. One lesson involves the changing nature of the slaveholder. If an earlier era was marked by the ownership of one person by another, it made sense to speak of slave
owners. At present, it makes more sense to speak of slave
holders, both for reasons of legal ownership—it is no longer possible to own another person—as well as reasons of temporality. Many contemporary forms of enslavement see victims held for shorter periods of time, as lower exploitation costs mean initial investments may more easily be recouped and the period of exploitation may be reduced dramatically, when compared to earlier eras of slavery (Kara 2009, Bales 2012). While contractual relations were clear, linear, and legally enforceable in the past, relations in contemporary slavery are more fraught. The use of threats and violence to control another person takes many forms. In cases of international human trafficking, relations are often complex, as a village recruiter hands a victim off to a transporter, who deposits the victim of trafficking into the charge of an unscrupulous and abusive employer. In the end, exploitative relations are social relations, regardless of their form or duration.
DEFINING PERPETRATORS
Up to this point, exploitative landlords have been discussed as social movement targets. Yet, they are also perpetrators of contemporary slavery. By
perpetrator, I mean
any individual directly or indirectly benefitting from the enslavement of another. This would include recruiters, transporters, enforcers, and management, the direct net beneficiaries, and the indirect net beneficiaries. Direct net beneficiaries include, by way of example, a factory owner, a brothel owner, or a direct user, as in the case of a john using a victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Indirect net beneficiaries include a much larger ring of individuals and institutions that benefit from this exploitation. For example, you and I benefit from the lower prices we pay for our clothes as a result of Uzbekistan’s use of forced labor to harvest cotton. In some instances, we may find a sole proprietor who has outsourced the task of finding cheap labor. In others we may find that a complex system of plausible deniability ensures that the lowest-paid workers generate the maximum revenue to corporate entities with the minimum possible legal exposure—this describes the sort of agricultural practices that are targeted by advocacy groups such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (Drainville 2008). For example, a village recruiter hands a victim off to a transporter, who deposits the victim of trafficking into the charge of an unscrupulous and abusive employer, as suggested earlier. This unscrupulous employer either pockets the profits (direct net economic beneficiary), shares them with investors (indirect net economic beneficiaries), or passes them along to customers (indirect net economic beneficiaries). It is safe to say that we know the most about recruiters, transporters, enforcers, and users in human trafficking but far less about these other categories of beneficiaries.
9FINDING PERPETRATORS
Before turning to what little we do know, I would like to take a moment to explain why we know so little. Slaveholders (and traffickers) have been generally overlooked for two important reasons. The first reason is normative; the second reason is logistical. Upon first learning that slavery still exists, most people, and a good number of institutions, want to just do something. The reality of the issue contradicts a longstanding and nearly global consensus on individual freedom and dignity. We are offended, we want to act, and my experience with advocacy and outreach suggests that people want to act by rescuing the victim. Since trafficking for sexual exploitation continues to be the highest-profile example of this exploitation, and since the “poster child” cases for trafficking are actual children, the response to any perpetrator, real or imagined, is fast and final. Perpetrators are “animals,” “inhuman,” and “criminals of the worst sort.” These are understandable and appropriate human reactions to gross injustice, and they motivate triage responses for the victim and immediate incarceration for the perpetrator. Incarceration might be the best response, but it should not be the only one.
The second reason slaveholders have been overlooked is logistical. The sequencing of responses is somewhat understandable in an age of triage: rescue victims and pass new laws. This early response left little room for nuanced approaches to perpetrators. It is only recently that more work has been done on corporate accountability, labor trafficking, and other seemingly second-order issues. An additional logistical issue is related to access. Since many perpetrators are knowingly involved in lawbreaking activities, they may be unwilling to serve as research subjects. Now might be the right time for researchers to reach out and talk to perpetrators, but there probably is no ideal time for perpetrators to sit down and talk to us. I say “probably” because it is not immediately clear whether perpetrators are unwilling to talk to researchers or researchers are unwilling to talk to perpetrators. A number of new studies suggest that, under the right conditions, perpetrators are willing to tell their stories.
10When slaveholders do open up, a number of issues immediately present themselves. The first is the nature of the data. Scholarship covering slaveholders and traffickers comes in two varieties: data
on perpetrators and data
from perpetrators.
11 Data on perpetrators come from legal proceedings, arrest records, newspaper reports, and any other secondary data source. Data from perpetrators themselves come from interviews conducted in prison or in society. My sense is that, in societies where slavery practices are widely accepted, as in rural India, interviewees are willing to be relatively honest, since the likelihood of arrest is near zero. In societies with high penalties for trafficking, however, arrestees may be willing to speak more freely from jail. While I leave it to others to confirm these hypotheses, the reality is that most emerging scholarship on perpetrators comes from conversations with arrestees. Prisoners are often the only accessible sample of a generally inaccessible perpetrating population, though we should carefully consider the possibility that arrestee data tell us more about the people our societies ask the police to arrest than it does about who is actually deserving of incarceration. Social inequality patterns arrests. Many recruiters, transporters, and enforcers find themselves in jail while many direct and indirect beneficiaries are protected by police.
12UNDERSTANDING EMANCIPATION
Slavery is simultaneously a legal, mental, and physical category and for this reason has been the site of much debate among scholars. Abolitionist feminists, conflating prostitution and trafficking, argue that false consciousness and internalized oppression explain the “choice” to enter a lawbreaking, rights-violating, and soul-crushing social practice.
13 Both abolitionist and nonabolitionist feminists—the latter advocating a clear difference between free and forced prostitution—might find comfort in the argument advanced by Anne Gallagher (2012), that the “exploitation of the vulnerability of another” constitutes a critical leverage point for oppressors.
14 What is emancipation if vulnerability is a slippery slope to slavery? Should interventions be pursued if we do not agree on the nature of exploitation? Is the sustainable path out of sex trafficking paved by collective bargaining or laws and enforcement? Some of these debates appear intractable to me, rooted as they are in fundamentally irreconcilable philosophical differences between a camp that sees the body as a temple and another that sees it as a resource.
Changing the way we think about perpetrators should change the way we think about intervention, emancipation, and freedom. Contemporary systems of slavery, and especially international networks of human traffickers, require a host of actors operating with a range of profit motives. The nature and meaning of emancipation, then, is complicated exponentially. If the primary route out of chattel slavery was death, this appears no longer to be the case. It is safe to assume that there are more paths out of slavery than usually discussed in antitrafficking circles. These include raids and rescues, community mobilization, rebellion, voluntary manumission, self-emancipation and escape, the discharging of one’s debt, being discarded, and death. It is impossible to determine the exact prevalence of these paths, since several disappear into the dark.
Public policy and organizational tactics rest on implicit assumptions about emancipation. Some organizations have opted for top-down strategies that rescue victims through raids while targeting high-visibility perpetrators with criminal prosecution. This approach rests on the assumption that high-profile cases have a demonstration effect that dissuades future abuse, whether by the defendant or others employing bonded laborers. Other organizations have instead opted for more grassroots and bottom-up approaches that challenge the balance of power between vulnerable workers and dominant employers. This approach rests on the assumption that the most important factor is the protection of individual workers and that the experience of challenging employer dominance will have a knock-on effect at the individual level. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by American and European donors, both public and private.
15 These monies go toward a range of activities, including raising awareness, reducing vulnerability, prosecuting perpetrators, and, significantly for our study, bringing individuals out of exploitation through a number of activities, including rescues.
Rescues, rather obviously, are most often instances in which law enforcement officials, ideally in collaboration with victim advocates, identify a site of exploitation for a targeted intervention that removes some or all individuals from exploitative conditions.
16 The target is, therefore, the slaveholder as well as the enslaved or trafficked individuals, and the trigger for the intervention is usually a tip from activists or the community or a cry for help from victims themselves (Free the Slaves and Berkeley Human Rights Center 2004). This is the most widely recognized and recommended form of intervention, as it promises the immediate extraction of trafficked or enslaved individuals and the immediate apprehension of slaveholders.
Community mobilization is a hybrid intervention strategy used by human rights groups working with communities to address slavery and trafficking alongside other community issues. This approach to collective-action interventions emphasizes community organizing in which the formerly oppressed engaged in “blended social action.” Rather than substantive and widespread social movements to end bonded labor, organizing takes the form of self-help groups, collective savings, group boycotts, and other efforts that “combine public claims making with civic forms of behavior” (Sampson et al. 2005, 673).
Using community-organizing strategies in some contexts and labor-organizing strategies in others, this approach encourages communities to bargain collectively for specific human rights, including the right to paid labor, the right to political participation, freedom of mobility, freedom of assembly, and access to economic markets and political spheres. The target and claim, therefore, vary from intervention to intervention. The trigger for this type of effort is often the conscientization of an existing group member or the efforts of a social movement or nonprofit organization. Since collective action tends to develop over longer periods of time than do rescues, there is often more time to plan for nonviolent confrontations with slaveholders. This is not always possible, as some slaveholders may respond in the short or medium term with repression or countermobilization.
In some cases, relations between enslaved individuals and slaveholders results in rebellion. This was an infrequent but high-profile form of resistance to slavery during the era of transatlantic trade, and it is similarly uncommon in contemporary slavery. However, it is not unheard of, as seen in the Sonbarsa uprising (Bales 2012). That case provides a clear example of an enslaved community taking up arms against their oppressors. A member of the slaveholding class was killed during community-organizing efforts, escalating the event from community mobilization to an insurrection. Rebellions tend to be short and violent confrontations that ultimately lead to either movement victory or repression. In practice, the relationship between rebellion and community organizing may become blurred, as the case of Sonbarsa demonstrates.
The first two intervention types—rescue and community mobilization—are the strategies most frequently and deliberately pursued by international and domestic human rights groups. The other paths out of slavery—rebellion, voluntary manumission, escape, discharging debt, and discarding—are all pursued by slaveholders or enslaved individuals. The same may also be said of death, if it is from something other than natural causes.
Preferences for particular interventions are patterned by differences in opinion about the precise nature of the problem and appropriate solution (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014). For second- and third-wave feminists the primary problem is the sexual abuse of women, but the desired solution is subject to intense debate. Abolitionists advocate for an end to prostitution and “sex trafficking” and the rescue of victims; risk reductionists call for the proper regulation of sex work together with collective bargaining and unionization. For those focused on migration, the primary concern is the rights and safety of people on the move and the desired intervention involves rescuing people so they may be repatriated to their point of origin. For criminal justice enforcers, the primary concern involves the enforcement of laws, and the desired intervention is the rescue of victims. Those promoting a human rights approach focus specifically on the human rights of the trafficked person, and intervention primarily takes the form of rescues or community organizing (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2015a).
Advocates of a human rights approach have long suggested that raids and rescues undermine the self-determination and human rights of individuals who have chosen to work in prostitution while also inserting them into a legal system that is more interested in using their testimony than in letting them choose their own paths forward. Advocates of a criminal justice approach and the abolitionist wing of the prostitution debate are more likely to advocate for raids and rescues, which bring exploitation to an abrupt halt, remove victims from abusive conditions, and bring perpetrators to jail and justice (Bernstein 2010). Both are important.
I have focused on three approaches—rescue, community mobilization, and rebellion—because they are the most visible. The reason for this visibility is the presence of outside actors in each, whether they are law enforcement, advocacy groups, or the media. While each of these three approaches was used in the collective-action efforts described earlier, six additional exit routes exist.
Broad changes reported by interviewees point to the fact that rescue, countermobilization, and rebellion are not the only important paths out of slavery. Such changes in the political economy and shifts in the means of production may slowly undermine the importance and utility of slavery.
17 Ethan Nadelmann (1990, 496–497) has observed that that “the waning political and economic power of slaveholders proved crucial to the success of local abolitionist groups” in earlier abolitionist waves. This gradual erosion is important but difficult to measure because in many cases, Nadelmann argues, slavery may be replaced by forms of labor and systems of relations that closely resemble slavery (497).
Very little is known about voluntary manumission and debt repayment, but perhaps the least is known about escape, discarding, and death, largely because these tend to lack witnesses. Examples of voluntary manumission are to be found in India, as with one powerful kiln owner mentioned earlier. He released two bonded laborers, blamed their condition on a subordinate, and used the incident to demonstrate his trustworthiness in a kiln owner–NGO collaboration to draft employment policies for his industry.
18 Anecdotally, my fieldwork with bonded laborers in India suggests they are now far more likely to discharge their debt at some point in their lives than they were when I first spoke with workers fifteen years ago. This observation is supported by studies that have noted a similar transformation in the kiln sector (Gupta 2003). The same cannot be said of escape, being discarded, and death, about which almost nothing is known and for which there are rarely any witnesses, unless a survivor self-identifies to social service providers or law enforcement officials.
Just because little is known about these routes does not mean they are not heavily traversed. A simple but illustrative thought experiment suggests that a certain number of survivors exit exploitation along routes not captured by official estimates. If five thousand people are being trafficked into the United States each year, and this random but presumably low number had been constant for the decade since the United States passed a law against trafficking, then a decade after the law’s passage there would have been fifty thousand people living in slavery in the United States. If this many people lived in slavery in the United States, then advocates would have likely identified far more trafficked persons. In reality, while five thousand special visas have been set apart for survivors of trafficking each year, fewer than five thousand of these visas have been distributed in the subsequent
decade, and this number included the visas issued to survivors’ family members as well. The total number of trafficking visa applications from trafficking survivors at that point was fewer than three thousand (see U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2010, Kishin and Wyler 2010, and USimmigration.com n.d.). There is a gap between the anticipated and actual size of the problem.
TABLE 7.1 ELEVEN PATHS OUT OF SLAVERY
Note: An earlier version of this table appeared in Choi-Fitzpatrick (2016b).
* “Slaveholder” should be interpreted to mean “slaveholder directly or indirectly” because slaveholders often employ intermediaries.
** Since so little is known about this category, it is difficult to explicate thoroughly. Here I have indicated slaveholder responsibility in those cases where, directly or indirectly, enslavement plays a role in the death of an enslaved person.
There are two possible explanations for this gap. The first is the very real possibility that the magnitude of the human-trafficking problem in the United States is not as large as originally thought. This explanation strikes me as very plausible.
19 The second reason is that no matter the actual number, victims eventually exit their exploitative condition and likely do so in greater numbers than captured by official estimates. The accuracy of these two hypotheses is difficult to determine, however, as these routes are nearly invisible.
TIME FOR A FRESH APPROACH
This book has taken a unique approach to an issue most commonly referred to as human trafficking. The first major difference lies in my emphasis on the lived experience of
slaveholders rather than traffickers. Since this is the topic of the book, I will only reiterate my belief that slavery is a relationship best understood if we listen to the parties involved. While law enforcement approaches generate high-profile cases that may have a pronounced demonstration effect, the longer-term challenge remains: finding new livelihoods and transforming social relations. A human rights approach to emancipation must have alternate livelihoods for survivors
and perpetrators, and it must posit credible alternative social structures. Some will scoff at my naiveté, and others will accuse me of indifference to
justice, but I believe there is also a role for reconciliation.
The second major shift is in the topic at hand, which I consider to be
contemporary slavery rather than human trafficking. Most attention in the antislavery sector is focused on a single aspect of contemporary slavery: human trafficking. This bias persists despite the fact that the majority of those held in slavery—the vast majority, if we accept the calculations provided by experts in the field
20—are never trafficked internationally but are instead exploited in their home countries or local communities. Even more constricting is the fact that various communities deal with slavery as if it were the most recent instance of the phenomenon of greatest interest to them: advocates for women’s rights tend to focus on prostitution, migration experts tend to focus on migration, law enforcement focuses on crime, international institutions focus on forced labor, and historians and sociologists are more likely to focus on slavery (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2015a). While advocates may focus on domestic trafficking and while slavery may take new forms, these must be understood as an “extension and/or reconfiguration of enduring historical themes, rather than as distinctively modern developments” (Quirk 2012, 41).
21 This historical theme is slavery. Thinking in terms of slavery significantly broadens our historical horizons, allowing us to compare and contrast the present moment with more than two hundred years of advocacy. Thinking in terms of slavery also allows us to think about slavery in all of its forms—from chattel and bonded labor to trafficking for sexual or labor exploitation.
The third major shift lies in this book’s emphasis on
emancipation rather than on slavery. Alison Brysk and I have argued that, since contemporary victims of slavery are simply the weakest link in larger systems of exploitation, protecting them requires more robust solutions for
all women,
all men,
all workers,
all migrants (Brysk and Choi-Fitzpatrick 2012b). Rights-based protection and empowerment should be the norm, regardless of citizenship, gender, type of labor, legal status, and even perpetrator status. Sustainable emancipation in places like India requires sophisticated plans for victims and perpetrators and broad development-oriented benchmarks for both. Some of the perpetrators I interviewed, for example, were net beneficiaries of development programs from well-respected nonprofit agencies.
It is clear that all emancipations are not created equal, as botched attempts make painfully clear (Bales 2007, Blackmon 2009, Quirk 2011). A human rights approach to sustainable emancipation requires access to paid work, financial savings, basic services, active integration into development projects, and the option to continue working the earth, necessitating land reform (Bales and Choi-Fitzpatrick 2012). More must be done to prepare enslaved individuals to integrate into the political and economic systems that will serve not only as bulwarks against reexploitation but also as foundations for a stronger society. To put this into the language of the U.S. Trafficking in Persons Office, the “three P’s” of prevention, protection, and prosecution are important, but survivors must be trained in politics, profit, and power as well. Rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration are critical, but so is representation in political, economic, and cultural spaces.
22 Such an approach will help ensure that slaveholders are unable to regain lost ground through repression and rejuvenated exploitation strategies.
