Labour Migration and Human Trafficking: An Introduction

Abstract

Anti-trafficking initiatives grew exponentially since the United Nations passed the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter the UN Trafficking Protocol) in 2000. This book contributes to the growing critique of the anti-trafficking agenda by exploring the ways in which the UN Trafficking Protocol has been taken up by policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies in Southeast Asia. This region is recognized internationally as a ‘hotspot’ for human trafficking, but there have been few attempts to critically evaluate the vast numbers of anti-trafficking programs and projects or counter-trafficking laws and regulations in operation in the region. Instead, much of the literature has focused on documenting the role that international agencies and NGOs have played in counter-trafficking programs; the development of anti-trafficking laws and policies; or empirical studies of human trafficking cases and/or trends.2 In order to address this gap, the authors in this collection focus their attention at the local level and pay careful, systematic attention to the ways that anti-trafficking initiatives have been taken up and translated by different stakeholders at different scales. As these cases show, anti-trafficking initiatives include rescue and repatriation programs for ‘victims’; education programs about the dangerous habits of smugglers and traffickers; development programs aimed at improving economic livelihoods in ‘hotspots’; and international and bilateral policing efforts aimed at securing borders and arresting people smugglers and traffickers. Associated with the rise of a strong discourse of transnational crime prevention, these initiatives have been accompanied by numerous anti-trafficking laws and protocols passed at local, national and regional levels.