Sex Trafficking

Of Vulnerability and Coercion: A Study of Sex Trafficking in Assam

Citation:

Ray, Sawmya. 2015. "Of Vulnerability and Coercion: A Study of Sex Trafficking in Assam." Sociological Bulletin 64 (3): 305-24.

Author: Sawmya Ray

Abstract:

This paper discusses the political, economic, and socio-cultural context within which trafficking of women and girls take place for commercial sexual exploitation in Assam. Specifically, it examines the relation between existing gender norms, prevailing conflict, and sex trafficking. It is based on data collected from rescued trafficked women, state and non-state anti-trafficking personnel, and case studies collected from NGOs. It argues that gendered norms intersect with existing political economy factors to doubly disadvantage women vis-à-vis trafficking, both during times of normalcy and conflict.

Keywords: Assam, gender norms, sex trafficking, sex work, violence

Topics: Economies, Conflict, Gender, Women, Girls, NGOs, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2015

Peacekeeping, Human Trafficking, and Sexual Abuse and Exploitation

Citation:

Vandenberg, Martina. 2018.  "Peacekeeping, Human Trafficking, and Sexual Abuse and Exploitation." In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, edited by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Nahla Valji. Oxford University Press. 

Author: Martina Vandenberg

Abstract:

This chapter provides an overview of human trafficking and other forms of sexual abuse committed by peacekeepers and civilians employed in peacekeeping missions. It opens with a historical review of violations committed by peacekeepers and the current international response to the issue. The chapter introduces relevant international legal instruments, including the UN Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, and examines the United Nations’ response to various instances of misconduct. Focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina and the MINUSCA mission in the Central African Republic, the chapter details the consistent failure of national courts to prosecute offenders and the inability of the UN to take action beyond repatriating the offenders. The chapter closes with recommendations for the UN to move beyond prevention work to improve enforcement of peacekeeper conduct policies.

Keywords: human trafficking, sexual abuse, peacekeepers, peacekeeping mission, UN Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Central African Republic, MINUSCA

Topics: International Law, International Organizations, Peacekeeping, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Africa, Central Africa, Europe, Balkans, Eastern Europe Countries: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Central African Republic

Year: 2018

Gendered Legacies of Peacekeeping: Implications of Trafficking for Forced Prostitution in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Citation:

Koester, Diana. 2020. "Gendered Legacies of Peacekeeping: Implications of Trafficking for Forced Prostitution in Bosnia-Herzegovina." International Peacekeeping 27 (1): 35-43.

Author: Diane Koester

Abstract:

A growing body of research shows that peacekeeping missions are ‘gendered’, both in terms of composition and organizational cultures. However, studies have tended to focus on more immediate consequences of these characteristics. This short contribution on effects of trafficking for forced prostitution in Bosnia–Herzegovina suggests that gender norms can also significantly influence longer-term legacies of peace operations. It briefly highlights connections between large-scale peacekeeping and the emergence of Bosnia–Herzegovina as a sex-trafficking destination and discusses enduring implications of these trends for regional, local and human security. This case suggests that considering the role of gender norms and women’s specific experiences can help develop the wider research agenda outlined in this forum: the study of peacekeeping legacies.

Topics: Gender, Women, Peacekeeping, Security, Human Security, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Europe, Balkans, Eastern Europe Countries: Bosnia & Herzegovina

Year: 2020

Globalisation Masculinities, Empire Building and Forced Prostitution: A Critical Analysis of the Gendered Impact of the Neoliberal Economic Agenda in Post-Invasion/Occupation Iraq

Citation:

Banwell, Stacy. 2015. “Globalisation Masculinities, Empire Building and Forced Prostitution: A Critical Analysis of the Gendered Impact of the Neoliberal Economic Agenda in Post-Invasion/Occupation Iraq.” Third World Quarterly 36 (4): 705–22.

Author: Stacy Banwell

Abstract:

Adopting a transnational feminist lens and using a political economy approach, this article addresses both the direct and indirect consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq, specifically the impact on civilian women. Pre-war security and gender relations in Iraq will be compared with the situation post-invasion/occupation. The article examines the globalised processes of capitalism, neoliberalism and neo-colonialism and their impact on the political, social and economic infrastructure in Iraq. Particular attention will be paid to illicit and informal economies: coping, combat and criminal. The 2003 Iraq war was fought using masculinities of empire, post-colonialism and neoliberalism. Using the example of forced prostitution, the article will argue that these globalisation masculinities – specifically the privatisation agenda of the West and its illegal economic occupation – have resulted in women either being forced into the illicit (coping) economy as a means of survival, or trafficked for sexual slavery by profit-seeking criminal networks who exploit the informal economy in a post-invasion/occupation Iraq. 

Keywords: globalisation masculinities, post-colonialism, neoliberalism, gender-based violence, transnational feminism, political economy

Topics: Armed Conflict, Occupation, Economies, Informal Economies, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Globalization, Infrastructure, Livelihoods, Sexual Livelihoods, Political Economies, Security, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iraq

Year: 2015

Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking

Citation:

Suchland, Jennifer. 2015. Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author: Jennifer Suchland

Annotation:

Summary:
Recent human rights campaigns against sex trafficking have focused on individual victims, treating trafficking as a criminal aberration in an otherwise just economic order. In Economies of Violence Jennifer Suchland directly critiques these explanations and approaches, as they obscure the reality that trafficking is symptomatic of complex economic and social dynamics and the economies of violence that sustain them. Examining United Nations proceedings on women's rights issues, government and NGO anti-trafficking policies, and campaigns by feminist activists, Suchland contends that trafficking must be understood not solely as a criminal, gendered, and sexualized phenomenon, but as operating within global systems of precarious labor, neoliberalism, and the transition from socialist to capitalist economies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. In shifting the focus away from individual victims, and by underscoring trafficking's economic and social causes, Suchland provides a foundation for building more robust methods for combatting human trafficking. (Summary from Duke University Press) 
 
Table of Contents: 
1. Sex Trafficking and the Making of a Feminist Subject of Analysis
 
2. The Natasha Trade and the Post-Cold War Reframing of Precarity
 
3. Second World/ Second Sex: Alternative Genealogies in Feminist Homogenous Empty Time
 
4. Lost in Transition: Postsocialist Trafficking and the Erasure of Systemic Violence
 
5. Freedom as Choice and the Neoliberal Economism of Trafficking Discourse
 
6. Conclusion: Antitrafficking Beyond the Carceral State

 

Topics: Economies, Feminisms, Feminist Political Economy, Gender, Women, International Organizations, NGOs, Political Economies, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking

Year: 2015

Heroines of Gendercide: The Religious Sensemaking of Rape and Abduction in Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean Migrant Communities

Citation:

Mutlu-Numansen, Sofia, and Ringo Ossewaarde. 2015. “Heroines of Gendercide: The Religious Sensemaking of Rape and Abduction in Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean Migrant Communities.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (4): 428-442. 

Authors: Sofia Mutlu-Numansen, Ringo Ossewaarde

Abstract:

This study seeks to understand a diaspora community narrative of rape and abduction suffered during the genocidal massacre of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. Based on interviews with 50 Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrants in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, whose families are from the village of Bote, known as one of the ‘killing fields’ in southeast Turkey, the article explores the ways in which descendants remember the ‘forgotten genocide’ of Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean communities in 1915. The research reveals that the descendants of survivors make sense of the sexual violence experienced in Bote mainly through a religious narrative and that, for them, the genocide is, in spite of all the sufferings the males had to go through, a feminized event. In their gendercide narrative, the abducted and raped women are identified as the ‘heroines’ of the genocide.

Keywords: Armenian genocide, feminization, gendercide, migration, narrative, post-genocide, sexual violence

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Ethnicity, Gender, Women, Conflict, Genocide, Post-Conflict, Sexual Violence, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Sexual Slavery, SV against Women, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: MENA, Asia, Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Turkey

Year: 2015

Who Is Worthy of Protection?: Gender-Based Asylum and U. S. Immigration Politics

Citation:

Nayak, Meghana. 2015. Who Is Worthy of Protection?: Gender-Based Asylum and U. S. Immigration Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/who-is-worthy-of-protection-9780199397624?cc=us&lang=en&.

Author: Meghana Nayak

Abstract:

A surprisingly understudied topic in international relations is gender-based asylum. Gender-based asylum offers protection from deportation for migrants who have suffered gender violence and persecution in their home countries. Countries are increasingly acknowledging that even though international refugee law does not include "gender" as a category of persecution, gender violence can threaten people's lives and requires attention. But Meghana Nayak argues that it matters not just that but how we respond to gender violence and persecution.  Asylum advocates and the US government have created "frames," or ideas about how to understand different types of gender violence and who counts as victims. These frames are useful in increasing gender-based asylum grants. But the United States is negotiating the tension between the protection and the restriction of non-citizens, claiming to offer safe haven to persecuted people at the same time that it aims to control borders. Thus, the frames construct which migrants are "worthy" of protection. The effects of the asylum frames are two-fold. First, they leave out or distort the stories and experiences of asylum seekers who do not fit preconceived narratives of "good" victims. Second, the frames reflect but also serve as an entry point to deepen, strengthen, and shape the US position of power relative to other countries, international organizations, and immigrant communities. Who Is Worthy of Protection? explores the politics of gender-based asylum through a comparative examination of US asylum policy and cases regarding domestic violence, female circumcision, rape, trafficking, coercive sterilization and abortion, and persecution based on sexual and gender identity.
(Oxford University Press)

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Refugees, Gender, Women, Gender-Based Violence, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women, Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sex Trafficking, Violence Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2015

Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms

Citation:

Hesford, Wendy. 2011. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/spectacular-rhetorics.

Author: Wendy Hesford

Abstract:

Spectacular Rhetorics is a rigorous analysis of the rhetorical frameworks and narratives that underlie human rights law, shape the process of cultural and legal recognition, and delimit public responses to violence and injustice. Integrating visual and textual criticism, Wendy S. Hesford scrutinizes “spectacular rhetoric,” the use of visual images and rhetoric to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners, chiefly Americans. Hesford presents a series of case studies critiquing the visual representations of human suffering in documentary films, photography, and theater. In each study, she analyzes works addressing a prominent contemporary human rights cause, such as torture and unlawful detention, ethnic genocide and rape as a means of warfare, migration and the trafficking of women and children, the global sex trade, and child labor. Through these studies, she demonstrates how spectacular rhetoric activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations, consolidates identities through the politics of recognition, and configures material relations of power and difference to produce and, ultimately, to govern human rights subjects.

(Duke University Press)

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Discourses, Genocide, International Law, International Human Rights, Rights, Human Rights, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking

Year: 2011

Investigating Outcomes of a Limited Gender Analysis of Enslavement in Post-Conflict Justice Processes

Citation:

Mibenge, Chiseche. 2010. “Investigating Outcomes of a Limited Gender Analysis of Enslavement in Post-Conflict Justice Processes.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 5 (3): 34–46. doi:10.1080/15423166.2010.213451362255.

Author: Chiseche Mibenge

Abstract:

The image of women sex slaves or sexually violated women in armed conflict has begun to dominate and shape international interventions, including justice, peacebuilding and development processes in post-conflict societies. Such interventions respond to women as 'rape victims' when in fact women have more complex narratives of their wartime experiences – experiences that may indeed include rape but also embrace community leadership, anti-war protest, military training and economic profit from wartime livelihoods. Furthermore, an exclusive focus on 'sex crimes' precludes an analysis of femininity(ies) and masculinity(ies) and the ways these gender identities shape modes of violence and victimisation. This article provides a comparative overview of interdisciplinary research representing both narrow and broad gender analyses of enslavement as well as emerging legal definitions of enslavement provided by the case law, indictments and statutes of contemporary international tribunals in The Hague, Tokyo and Freetown respectively.

Topics: Development, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Justice, Peacebuilding, Post-Conflict, Sexual Violence, Sexual Slavery, SV against Women, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Africa, West Africa, Asia, Central Asia, Europe, Western Europe Countries: Japan, Netherlands, Sierra Leone

Year: 2010

Mental Health of Female Survivors of Human Trafficking in Nepal

Citation:

Tsutsumi, Atsuro, Takashi Izutsu, Amod K. Poudyal, Seika Kato, and Eiji Marui. 2008. “Mental Health of Female Survivors of Human Trafficking in Nepal.” Social Science & Medicine 66 (8): 1841–47. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.12.025.

Authors: Atsuro Tsutsumi, Takashi Izutsu, Amod K. Poudyal, Seika Kato, Eiji Marui

Abstract:

Little is known about the mental health status of trafficked women, even though international conventions require that it be con- sidered. This study, therefore, aims at exploring the mental health status, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), of female survivors of human trafficking who are currently supported by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Katmandu, the capital of Nepal, through comparison between those who were forced to work as sex workers and those who worked in other areas such as domestic and circus work (non-sex workers group). The Hopkins Symptoms Checklist-25 (HSCL-25) was administered to assess anxiety and depression, and the PTSD Checklist Civilian Version (PCL-C) was used to eval- uate PTSD. Both the sex workers’ and the non-sex workers’ groups had a high proportion of cases with anxiety, depression, and PTSD. The sex workers group tended to have more anxiety symptoms (97.7%) than the non-sex workers group (87.5%). Regarding depression, all the constituents of the sex workers group scored over the cut-off point (100%), and the group showed a significantly higher prevalence than the non-sex workers (80.8%). The proportion of those who are above the cut-off for PTSD was higher in the sex workers group (29.6%) than in the non-sex workers group (7.5%). There was a higher rate of HIV infection in the sex workers group (29.6%) than in the non-sex workers group (0%). The findings suggest that programs to address human trafficking should include interventions (such as psychosocial support) to improve survivors’ mental health status, paying attention to the category of work performed during the trafficking period. In particular, the current efforts of the United Nations and various NGOs that help survivors of human trafficking need to more explicitly focus on mental health and psychosocial support.

 

Keywords: human trafficking, women, Nepal, mental health, sex work, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression

Topics: Gender, Women, Health, Mental Health, PTSD, Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Nepal

Year: 2008

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