Trafficking Harms

Amid the proliferating scholarship and often sensational public campaigns, Trafficking Harms offers fresh insights and critical analyses. The collection’s four thematic areas — Discourses and Representations; Law and Prosecutions; Policing and Surveillance; Migrant Labour Exploitation — examine an array of issues, including the contested definitions of human trafficking, the application of trafficking law and policy, the conflation of sex work and trafficking, the impacts of anti-trafficking frameworks on racialized communities, questions around “victims” and “traffickers” and much more. Showcasing a mix of scholarly research, public advocacy and first-person narratives, this book is the first of its kind in Canada. The authors include a diverse group of academics, legal advocates, frontline activists who work with migrant and sex-working communities, individuals who have been charged and/or convicted of trafficking offences and those who are directly impacted by trafficking law and policing, such as domestic and migrant sex workers.

This book brings together a stellar collection of scholars, activists and affected individuals who offer a much-needed critical perspective on Canada's ever-expanding anti-trafficking efforts and their wide-ranging impacts, including on migrant, sex-working and racialized communities.

This book expands the literature on social harm by applying the concept of zemia to international human trafficking. It draws attention not only to various structurally imbedded harms, but also to the wider consequences of such harms.

Responding to Human Trafficking is the first book to critically examine responses to the growing issue of human trafficking in Canada. Julie Kaye challenges the separation of trafficking debates into international versus domestic emphases and explores the tangled ways in which anti-trafficking policies reflect and reinforce the settler-colonial nation-building project of Canada. In doing so, Kaye reveals how some anti-trafficking measures create additional harms for the individuals they are trying to protect, particularly migrant and Indigenous women. The author’s critical examination draws upon theories of post- and settler-colonialism, Indigenous feminist thought, and fifty-six interviews with people in counter-trafficking employment across Western Canada. Responding to Human Trafficking provides a new framework for critical analyses of anti-trafficking and other rights-based and anti-violence interventions. Kaye disrupts measures that contribute to the insecurity experienced by trafficked women and individuals affected by anti-trafficking responses by pointing to anti-colonial organizing and the possibilities of reciprocity in relationships of care.

This book provides a short, comprehensive, critical analysis of trafficking in human beings. Despite the size and scope of this criminal activity, there remains a need for an accurate, objective, contemporary examination of this threat as the nature of this crime and the strategies developed to counter it are fluid. Trafficking harms not only the lives of those trafficked but equally families and communities, as well as national economies and social cohesion. As this crime spans the spectrum of social science disciplines and fields of study, together with its increasing exposure in the media, this has led to a sharp increase in interest in this topic within the academic community and amongst policy makers, criminal justice practitioners and the wider public. This book draws on current research, the authors’ expert knowledge and insight into current counter-trafficking practices to provide a critical analysis of the crime and strategies to counter its prevalence.

This book offers a unique insight into the moral politics behind human trafficking policy in Australia and the USA, including rare interviews with key political actors, and a critical account of Congressional and Parliamentary hearings.

"Following the rise of the zemiological movement, the concept of social harm has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Using this perspective, a number of scholars have sought to remove the constraining brackets surrounding criminological investigation in order to broaden its legitimate parameters of study and incorporate a wider range of un-criminalized and hidden harms. This book expands the literature on social harm by applying the concept of zemia to human trafficking investigations in Europe, North America, and Africa. This book draws attention not only to various structurally imbedded harms, but also to the wider consequences of such harms. Drawing on a range of international legal cases on trafficking, this book offers a new direction in criminological and zemiological thinking and a reimagining of criminal justice responses to harm"--

What is human trafficking? Despite legislative developments and national and international interventions, we still lack firm definitions, estimates of its full extent, effective responses to perpetrators and sound survivor care. This volume critically examines the competing discourses surrounding human trafficking, the conceptual basis of global responses and the impact of these horrific acts worldwide.