Biopolitical Management, Economic Calculation and “Trafficked Women”
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00615.x |
| Published date | 01 August 2010 |
| Date | 01 August 2010 |
| Author | Jacqueline Berman |
Biopolitical Management,
Economic Calculation and
‘‘Trafficked Women’’
Jacqueline Berman, PhD*
ABSTRACT
Narratives surrounding human trafficking, especially trafficking in women
for sex work, employ gendered and racialized tropes that have among
their effects, a shrouding of women’s economic decision-making and state
collusion in benefiting from their labour. This paper explores the oper-
ation of these narratives in order to understand the ways in which they
mask the economics of trafficking by sensationalizing the sexual and
criminal aspects of it, which in turn allows the state to pursue political
projects under the guise of a benevolent concern for trafficked women
and ⁄or protection of its own citizens. This paper will explore one
national example: Article 18 of Italian Law 40 (1998). I argue that its
passage has led to an increase in cooperation with criminal prosecution
of traffickers largely because it approaches trafficked women as capable
of making decisions about how and what they themselves want to do.
This paper will also consider a more global approach to trafficking
embedded in the concept of ‘‘migration management’’, an International
Organization for Migration (IOM) framework that is now shaping EU,
US and other national immigration laws and policies that impact traf-
ficking. It will also examine the inherent limitations of both the national
and global approach as an occasion to unpack how Article 18 and
Migration Management function as forms of biopolitical management
that participate in the production of ‘‘trafficking victims’’ into a massified
population to be managed, rather than engender a more engaged discus-
sion of what constitutes trafficking and how to redress it.
* Principal Analyst, Berkeley Policy Associates Kensington, CA.
2010 The Author
Journal Compilation 2010 IOM Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
International Migration Vol. 48 (4) 2010 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK,
ISSN 0020-7985 and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00615.x
MIGRATION
Edited by Elzbieta Gozdziak, Georgetown University
INTRODUCTION: FOREIGNERS AND FANTASIES
A nefarious underworld populated by ‘‘dark,’’ haunting criminals;
hundreds of thousands of young, innocent, ‘‘white’’ girls kidnapped and
violated; sovereign borders transgressed under cover of night – these are
the images that dominate media expose
´s of the transnational phenome-
non of trafficking in women, images that have, by now, hardened into
stereotypes of globalized crime syndicates ‘‘out of control’’.
1
These
sensational images populate practically every public representation of
trafficking in women, from books, television programmes, and films, to
the campaigns of national governments and international non-govern-
mental organizations.
2
They register a heightened level of panic about
the massive numbers, extreme exploitation, and utter innocence of the
victims of this ‘‘illicit and barbaric industry’’. These lurid accounts
simultaneously announce shock and excite panic about both individual
‘‘women and girls …rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a
time, dozens of times a day …[or] sold outright to other traffickers and
sex rings …[where] if they try to escape they are often beaten and some-
times killed,’’ and 40,000 women trafficked into Germany to work ‘‘as
prostitutes against their will’’ for World Cup fans (Landesman, 2004;
Feminist Daily News Wire, 2006).
This alarm over trafficking in innocent, violated, white girls, often from
eastern Europe, is accompanied by a concomitant anxiety about being
overrun by dark, menacing, foreign criminals who threaten ‘‘our’’ fami-
lies, ‘‘our’’ homes, indeed, ‘‘our’’ way of life – a fear closely aligned with
the anti-immigrant sentiments that informed everything from the 2005
Dutch and French ‘‘no’’ votes on the EU draft constitution and calls for
the criminalization of immigrants in the 2006 US Congress, to bans on
prostitution as a means of combating trafficking in European countries
such as Finland, Bulgaria, and Sweden (Kulish, 2007), and the October
2007 riots in Switzerland.
3
Indeed, many Europeans believe that the
May 2004 EU accession of new member states has ‘‘allow[ed] the mafias
of central and eastern Europe to tighten their grip on organized crime
across the continent’’ (Minder, 2004). It would seem that trafficking in
women has become a site marked by phantasmatic fears of foreigners,
immigrants, criminals, terrorists and globalization, so much so that it is
often difficult to disentangle these fears from actual concern over the
fate of trafficked women themselves.
These incendiary accounts of exploited ‘‘white’’ women and dangerous
foreign criminals also function as a global public spectacle: media love
Biopolitics and trafficked women 85
2010 The Author
Journal Compilation 2010 IOM
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