talk till morning
For the Love of Ideas
- By Liam Monsell
how human trafficking enslaves us: rochdale, orientalism and the white sex-slave narrative
supposedly, only the backward values of islam can allow for the exploitation of young white girls, and only white-male westerners can stop them.
While international focus toward human trafficking has increased in recent years, action toward the issue has been slow and selective. This is because the way human trafficking is discussed tends to reify cultural norms and biases, which constrain interpretations to only look at a small part of the problem, whilst additionally reinforcing social narratives that sustain prejudice and structures of domination. Because of this, critical reflection on human trafficking discourse is very much needed, and many areas of research continually fail to challenge popular representations of trafficking offenders and their victims. In doing so there is a lack of reflection on what interpretations of trafficking are favoured by contemporary discussions, in addition to which symbols and language they consist of, and what impact they have on wider society.
Stop the Traffick; Faces of Freedom painting at HeavenFest 2016. Source: Xnatedawgx
When it comes to the discussion of human trafficking in the United Kingdom, this critical awareness is especially needed. Ever since the infamous Rochdale case, popular narratives of human trafficking and sex gangs have been dominated by the discourse of the “white-sex slave” and the “evil barbaric Muslim trafficker”. Here, public awareness is narrowed toward a discourse that constructs human trafficking as a cultural issue, particularly one concerning the supposed threat of the backward Islamic “Other” and the danger they present typically white British sexual purity and innocence. Not only does this discourse enable an Orientalist culture-talk that feeds into the construction of national identity and fuels inter-ethnic hostility and islamophobia, this way of framing also under appreciates the many forms of trafficking worldwide and in the UK, and ignores the breadth of its victim base in terms of ethnicity, age and gender.
This short article offers a preliminary insight into the new critical research uncovering the main cultural and discursive constraints on the UK’s understanding of human trafficking, with particular focus on the “human trafficking as sex-slavery” narrative. By becoming aware of these constraints, we can unburden ourselves from the myopia that makes public awareness of human trafficking slow and selective, whilst endowing ourselves with a reflexive and critical mindset that pushes beyond latent biases in how we discuss the problem.
Why Consider Social Discourse when Attempting to Understand Human Trafficking?
“[L]anguage is not an organism or a passive reflection, but a social institution, deeply implicated in culture, in society, in political relations at every level.”
(Cameron, 1990: p92).
The way society talks about an issue isn’t always reflective of how that issue exists. Whilst the material elements and actions of such issues may possess some form of stable existence, the wider meaning and significance it possesses in society is usually more politically contrived, contextually unstable and culturally contingent, instead of being inherent in and of itself.
Critical theorists such as Michel Foucault taught us that the use of language and the construction of social meaning is instead historically and culturally determined, and constrains what can be articulated about a topic, embellishing one interpretation over another, whilst giving it the authoritative veneer and currency of truth. Under the guise of truth, these prevailing interpretations set the boundaries of how the issue is discussed, and can subsequently govern how it is approached politically. Culture and history flows through language and symbols to construct our everyday reality, rather than serving as a mirror that reflects such reality in any transparent or straightforward way. What we think constitutes a social problem may therefore not always be as it seems.
We take for granted the social meanings that circulate among us, and in doing so forget the very histories and experiences that created such meaning – leading people to often view the terminology and definitions describing social issues as a mirror reflection of some kind of knowable and objective reality about what constitutes that problem, when it could have in fact been very different. When taking this critical stance, attention is diverted from what an issue is (what it entails, who it concerns and what can be done about it), and instead becomes focused on how that issue is talked about and presented as a problem, and what histories are embedded in its prominent understandings, in addition to what interpretations they promote and which ones they oppress.
How Human Trafficking Is Commonly Framed and Discussed
Of primary interest to new critical researchers is how human trafficking in the West is often framed by the rhetoric of white sexual purity and female victimhood, as well as in regards to Orientalist notions of the dangerous, barbaric and foreign trafficker.
The mainstream discourses around trafficking in the United States for instance, reinforce traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality. Carrie Baker of Smith College noted how U.S pamphlets, adverts and policy media – in addition to famous Hollywood films such as Trade (2007), and Taken (2008) – portray trafficking in a way that presents female sexual purity under attack, where girls and women need to be protected and rescued by heroic males. This frame is enabled by a focus in popular discourse on the narrative of the “sex slave”, and the need to rescue them and restore them to their normal lives. Even though forced commercial sexual exploitation is undoubtedly a huge part of human trafficking, Robert Uy wrote in 2013 that the prevalence of the perception of trafficking as only encompassing sex slavery “does a disservice to the overall movement and to the victims of human trafficking who were not forced into the sex trade” and risks reifying gender stereotypes about women’s purity and helplessness.
In addition to reinforcing damaging gender stereotypes, the sex slave discourse of human trafficking can also serve an ulterior political purpose. Sharron FitzGerald of Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany that the UK government’s interest in countering trafficking by way of protecting vulnerable women from sexual exploitation in fact intersects with other political and cultural agendas. Government policies building on the sex-slave approach to human trafficking aim to protect vulnerable women in trafficking countries through development aid and repatriation schemes, which derive from wider legal and political insecurities about protecting the UK from unwanted “Others”. Externalising anti-trafficking measures to “cooperating third-world countries” is considered by FitzGerald as part of the UK government’s plan to re-organise its borders extraterritorially under the guise of humanitarian interventions. This illustrates how the discursive and institutional reframing of the “vulnerable female” and “trafficked migrant” has provided several political spaces in which governments extend their ability to regulate their borders. Whilst this article isn’t solely focused on the discursive dimension of the UK’s foreign policy, FitzGerald’s research is relevant in that it demonstrates the political currency of the sex-slave narrative, and how it is utilised for ulterior political goals outside of those specific to human trafficking.
This does not argue that the UK government’s focus on sex-slavery, or its schemes to prevent it abroad through development aid are at all misguided or trivial (Ibid). Instead, by way of showing the intersection between narratives of trafficking and other areas of politics, such as border control and foreign policy, such research postulates the plasticity of human trafficking discourses as political tools. In addition, it asks whether there are other such intersections, and therefore prompts an exploration into whether any other policies and attitudes are constructed or reinforced by prevalent discourses and interpretations of human trafficking.
An example of this can be found in the concerns regarding how the reference to and application of the sex-slave narrative can be ethnically-selective, serving additional functions in the realms of national identity and culture-talk. Whilst reaffirming patriarchal norms - in that men are the saviours and women are the weak feeble victims - the common white-ness of the female victims and the foreign ethnicity of their captors in popular media portrayals of trafficking, reasserts additional relations of power based on race and nationality.
Particularly in the U.S, discourses on sex trafficking regularly portray traffickers as dangerous dark-skinned men as the evil and barbaric “others” who threaten innocent femininity, presenting whites and the virtues of western culture to be the heroic rescuer. For Baker, the tendency to focus on sex trafficking over other types is connected to the political and cultural work of bolstering the US’s position as a leader in human rights during a time when this status is being called into question following the fallout of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the “War on Terror” Here, only the supposedly backward values of Islam can allow for the exploitation of young white girls, and only white-male westerners can stop them. Not only does this entrench negative cultural assessments of Islam, but it also overlooks the occurrence of sex slavery and other forms of exploitations not only by other ethnicities, but from specifically white males in the west. The double standard it sets up is disconcerting.
In the UK, the “white female sex-slave” and the “dangerous foreign trafficker” narrative may also serve additional social functions brought about by the effects of the “War on Terror”. In the aftermath of 9/11 in the U.S and the 7/7 bombings in the UK, much of the west has engaged in a serious “culture-talk” about Islam, its relationship with violence and its supposed incompatibility with western democratic values. Waves of terrorism from militant-Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have provoked fearful evaluations of national identity that construct a clear in-group in opposition to a locatable foreign out-group, which ought to be feared and combatted in the fashion of Edward Said’s fabled dynamic of “Orientalism”.
Events such as the 2012 Rochdale case in the UK have subsequently built on and fed into these insecurities, becoming a symbol often used by the country’s far-right to argue that white British culture, and particularly white-female sexual purity and innocence, is especially prone to violation from evil foreigners who subscribe to a culture seen as abhorrent and uncivilised. The Rochdale case has installed this idea that sex-grooming and trafficking is a problem specific to the Asian-Muslim community, disregarding the true breadth of the issue, and the true diversity among the ethnicity of its perpetrators and its victims in a wider context.
Source: majedsblog
Drifting slightly further from the mainstream media, some group’s responses have been much more inflammatory, but no less indicative or representative of how some people have come to respond to the issue of human trafficking in a way that places sole focus on Islam, using it as a way of expressing cultural antipathy and islamophobia. For example:
Source: kafircrusaders
Source: barenakedislam.com
To see further example of this “white sexual purity” under threat, you need only take a look at some of the UK’s best-selling novels on the subject of trafficking to get an insight into how Rochdale has inspired a dialogue that depicts human trafficking as an issue centred solely around young, vulnerable and specifically white girls. To name but a few:
Source: here
Source: here
Source: here
Source: here
To reiterate some points made earlier, none of this is to say that the sexual exploitation of young-white girls at the hands of minority groups in cases like Rochdale is in anyway insignificant, untroubling or un-worthy of controversy. The actions of these men were abhorrent in every sense of the word, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine the pain they’ve caused the poor girls at the centre of the case.
However, it out of this total appreciation for the severity of the Rochdale case that I drive the undeniably pertinent point that the activity of sex-slavery and human trafficking reaches far beyond Asian men and white-British girls, in ways totally underappreciated by the discourses that myopically essentialise the horrific actions of these men to their culture and religion, and subsequently used as a political tool to try and demonstrate Islam’s incongruence with British society. Additionally, the victimhood of trafficking transcends age, gender and ethnicity in such that warrants the questions of why are we only concerned with that which involves just white-British girls? This issue effects many in society, all of whom deserve equal consideration in the eyes of public worry and legal and political decision making. However, given the predominant focus on the discourse of the white-victim and the Muslim trafficker, public awareness prevents due attention toward all areas of society where trafficking is a pressing problem.
Thankfully, emerging critical discussions are beginning to pick apart the way we think about human trafficking, which will hopefully engender an eventual social reaction unhindered by the ulterior purposes of current discourses that seek to use cases like Rochdale to spark debates about white sexual purity, Britishness and Islam.