The Poet, the Wise Men, and the Chorus:
Omissions in the Netherlands’ Anti-Trafficking Field
Neske Baerwaldt (5958598)
Research Master Social Sciences
Supervisor: Julien Jeandesboz
Second reader: Barak Kalir
Weatherfield@riseup.net
Amsterdam | August 17, 2015
Summary
This monograph sets out on a journey to discover what it is about the trafficking field in the Netherlands that allows anti-trafficking professionals to omit the question of immigration controls when discussing labor exploitation. In an institutional ethnography of the National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking, I attempt to explore the many mechanisms, some more subtle than others, driving this selectivity in the production of official narratives. The analysis reveals a field-dynamic requiring the field’s participants to accept an amazing variety of arbitrary customs and rules, omissions and categories of thought, very often without them ever being spoken of out loud. What emerges is a narrative in which fixed qualities are attributed to those involved before specific cases are discussed (evil and cunning traffickers, reactive and crime-fighting states, “victim-centered” and unprofessional NGOs, objective and disinterested experts, innocent and passive victims, “illegal” and scrounging fake-victims), despite the incredible diversity of actors involved in the anti-trafficking field, the complexity of the trafficking problem, and the diverse settings within which trafficking and the “fight” against it take place. This narrative brings into existence a specific reality: that of an agentic, disinterested and unified Dutch state fighting a problem outside of itself — a reactive rescuer working in the interest of all, whose powers are kept in check by a wide range of societal partners with whom it cooperates. Underlying these observations lies the failure of the field to investigate whether trafficked persons and those affected by anti-trafficking efforts actually feel helped by their efforts, independent of the documents they have or the sector they happen to work in.
Table of Contents
Introduction
...1Methods... 7
Approach...7
Preparation for the field (September/October 2014)...8
Participant observation/Internship (27th of October - 27th of January 2015)...8
Interviews (November 2014 – March 2015)...9
Access...10
Thesis structure...10
Chapter One: Trafficking Pudding
...12The Trafficking Definition...13
Beginnings...14
Palermo... 15
The Netherlands: Migrant Labor Regimes...18
Implementing Palermo: Trafficking in the Netherlands...20
The chain partner approach...21
The National Rapporteur...21
Definitional Problems...22
Academic Contribution...24
Chapter Two: What you see is what you… See
...35Nothing Really Disappears...26
Police Reports...29
Why do victims not know they are victims?...29
Chapter Three: Unique Independency
...36The Law...37
Listening like a Wolf...40
Viewpoint on Viewpoints...44
On Independence...45
The Rapporteur as a Commission
...48Chapter Four: Theaters of Trust
...55The Narrative and the Chain...55
Public Stages / Public Poets: Part 1: TEDx...56
Deconstructing the Chain...62
Office Magic...66
Break... 69
Celebrations of the Self...71
Chapter Five: Reality
...82Raising Concerns...82
Being Realistic...85
Conclusion // Discussion
...89Introduction
About eight months ago, I started as an intern with the National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking and Sexual Violence against Children (from now on referred to as “Rapporteur,” “National Rapporteur” or “bureau”). I think I could not have found a better place to study what I was interested in, as a participant observer, from the inside out. While there, I got a glimpse of the daily lives of those working high up in the field “fighting” trafficking.1 By the time the internship came to an end, walking around the Ministry of Security and Justice felt as mundane as it had felt bizarre when I first started.
The sheer thickness (Geertz, 1994) of the field in comparison to what I feel I will ever be able to put into words — experienced by many an anthropologist before me, I imagine — really hit home. Walking around the ministry I felt the mundaneness with which people up in the hierarchy exert power, by simply living their everyday lives. I understood how in the eyes of the researchers at the bureau, their “bird’s-eye view”2 over the landscape of trafficking justifies their push for increased
surveillance over those deemed vulnerable to trafficking (such as certain groups of migrants, sex-workers, beggars, and precarious workers). I felt flattered when my superiors were impressed with me and trusted me with responsibilities beyond my level, independent of what I thought of them or the tasks I was supposed to undertake. I felt shame when I was kindly ordered to drop my work to make the Rapporteur a cup of tea, or when I was “asked” to sit at the receptionist’s desk when she fell ill. I felt a constant temptation — and sometimes indulged it — to repeat the much repeated. To dress the way others dressed. To write emails, assignments and drafts of official texts in a style that matched the bureau’s. I experienced how some things seem better left unsaid, and when I actively pushed myself to address these topics I encountered the subtle yet forceful structures that prevent people from doing exactly that — socio-psychological structures (the fear of being thought of as uninformed, unsophisticated, naive), as well as more crude ones (actual exclusion). Throughout the fieldwork process I was truly taken aback by the density of everyday life, of habit and normalcy in the ministry, as I started to get a sense of how resilient the mechanisms of reproduction are that keep structures of domination in place.
Thousands of people work continuously on the issue of trafficking in the Netherlands in diverse organizations and institutions, including the justice department, police, military police, foreign police, immigration service (IND) and deportation service (DT&V), various ministries, anti-trafficking
1 I use scare quotes here to signal I am adopting the language which is prevalent in the field. For similar reasons, I
will also do so when introducing words such as “illegal” and “victim centered” for the first time.
NGOs, research bodies such as the National Rapporteur, Inspection Social Affairs and Employment (Inspection SZW), the Expertise center on Trafficking and Smuggling (EMM), Regional Information and Expertise Centers (RIECs), Security Houses, the Tax office and its Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), the Task Force on Human Trafficking (Task Force), criminal investigation departments, and municipalities. The field’s daily contacts extend further into the political arena and into society: to politicians, parliamentarians, the health and care sector, specific interest groups, unions, media, academia and private companies (most notably private security firms, hotels, bus companies and airline companies). These professionals go to some office every day where they devote their brain power and physical energy to “the team,” get excited and bored, get promoted and fired, feel pride and shame, make friendships, drink, laugh, compete, and fall in love. It is their daily practices that sculpt the way they view the world, that they come to embody, and that interact with the structures around them that make up the field of anti-trafficking. It is these people who define what trafficking
is, and arguably, this is where you’ll find some of the field’s most indoctrinated internalizers.
Ultimately, the outcome of their interaction translates back to the people whose lives are profoundly shaped by anti-trafficking practices: traffickers, smugglers, trafficked persons, and a wide swath of migrants, prostitutes and other workers, increasingly policed by state and non-state actors in the process of “fighting” trafficking.
The idea of studying Dutch anti-trafficking efforts first occurred to me while I was attending a meeting two years ago. All of us attending representeda group or organization somehow concerned with immigration detention in the Netherlands. At the time I was regularly visiting migrants inside these prisons as part of a semi-improvised foreign detention-visiting group that some of my friends and I had set up the year before. Umbrella meetings of this kind took place regularly. I attended them representing our group.
During the meeting, we heard from a guest-lecturer of an NGO called Fairwork, who had been invited to present the organization’s work on human trafficking. She explained that while the authorities in the Netherlands have for a long time been, and still are, primarily focused on the exploitation of women and minors in the sex industry, Fairwork raises awareness on labor exploitation, exploitation taking place in “other” sectors.3 To realize “the twin goals” of protecting victims of trafficking while assisting the authorities in their bid to prosecute traffickers, she explained, Fairwork teaches courses to law enforcement agencies, immigration services and detention personnel on how to recognize victims of labor exploitation. In the setting of a detention center this means teaching authorities how to distinguish between victims of human trafficking and undocumented migrants.
3 Within the trafficking field, work outside of the sex industry is categorically referred to as “other work,” as
Two years before I attended this meeting one of my close friends had been detained in an immigration detention center. Up until then, I had been completely unaware of the Netherlands imprisoning thousands of migrants each yearfor not having (the right) papers (Amnesty International 2013). Hearing him speak about what he had been through, and what this experience had done to him, prompted me to write my bachelor thesis on the topic. But it left me feeling uneasy. What did I know about these coercive structures? I didn’t have a clue who these people were, busy enacting the policies I had become so critical of. I had no idea of how these coercive structures come about, who is involved in thinking them up, and how those affected experience them. I had never had to hide from the authorities myself. On all those occasions that I had been asked to show my identity I had never once felt shame, fear or panic. To me, these moments represented a kind of meaningless transaction, like showing a discount card at the grocery shop. I increasingly felt the thesis I wrote was woefully inadequate. It floated in some abstract space where it simply missed the point.
I decided to take a year off from university and started working for an Amsterdam-based organization that offers legal assistance and shelter to failed asylum seekers and other undocumented migrants. People in need of help knocked on our doors every day looking for a place to sleep. It was autumn, turning to winter, so it was cold out. Virtually all of those asking for help looked exhausted, and some were visibly sick. Many spent part of their lives in the Netherlands sleeping outside on the streets, hiding from the police, in order to avoid being handed over to the foreign police and put into foreign detention. A damaged sticker was pasted askew our front door’s mailbox, reading something like “no junk mail, undocumented people welcome.” But more often than not, I sent those asking for help back into the cold, especially young, non-white males. Our organization’s few sleeping spaces were almost always occupied, and if there was a spot available it was generally reserved for migrants whose vulnerability was easily demonstrable to the city council (which controlled our funds), or migrants with “legal perspective” as we (euphemistically? cynically?) called it, who we could assist in their bid to obtain legal status in the Netherlands. Besides a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of tea I often had very little to offer.I quit my work and started visiting migrants imprisoned in detention centers with a few friends.
It was with these experiences in mind that I listened to the Fairwork representative. As she continued to explain how she had recently travelled to a nearby immigration detention facility to teach prison personnel how to distinguish “victims” from “illegals,” a strange (yet wearisomely familiar) mood dawned upon me. I increasingly felt like I had been launched into a Kafka story. How was it that she appeared to sincerely not perceive the cruel irony of her organization’s humanitarian efforts devoted
to protecting victims of labor exploitation, displayed right in the epicenter of the punitive regime geared at excluding the very migrants at risk of being exploited: a detention center?
I decided to write my master thesis on the relationship between anti-trafficking efforts and the status of undocumented migrants in the Netherlands. I had set up my research questions and corresponding theoretical lines in such a way as to direct my attention to this strange collaboration described above, between the state and non-state partners. This time around I was determined to avoid floating exclusively in the space of documents. So I looked for a place that would allow me to study the producers of these documents. I applied for an internship at the National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking: an independent research bureau advising the state on how to deal with trafficking. I hoped to emerge out of the process of this research with a better understanding of how the daily lives of the people working to “fight” human trafficking are connected to the marginalization of the people I encountered in immigration detention centers and on the streets of Amsterdam.
Soon after entering the world of anti-trafficking, however, I started to doubt whether I was in the right place to answer my questions. I was grasped by something else, something I could not yet put into words despite feeling it everywhere I went. It was there in the written texts of internal police reports, in people’s facial expressions and body language when taking part in “expert meetings,” in the early morning train from Amsterdam to the Hague, at conferences, meetings, and evaluations, and during after-hour drinks. And it had been there two years ago, when the speaker from Fairwork had given her presentation. While I did not yet know exactly what it was, it made me feel confused, sad and unstable. But I was also intrigued by it; whenever this ominous feeling surfaced, my senses sharpened.
At first, these moments of alleviated attention appeared as relatively unrelated to one another. From the outset, though, I felt that it was the way in which people spoke and the way in which people acted that triggered me. I started noting someone’s sudden whisper, when apparently she felt the situation did not permit free speech, someone’s surprise at something apparently out of the ordinary, someone’s half-hearted acceptance when an apparent compliment was not perceived as such. Finally, I started noting things that were not said in certain contexts, or simply not said at all — cases of the unmentionable or the unthinkable.
A few weeks into the research, I do not remember exactly when, I started to connect some of the dots. I realized that what perplexes me most (and drives me absolutely crazy) about the professional anti-trafficking world is not how anti-anti-trafficking efforts and “illegality” are perceived to be related, but that this relationship is hardly discussed. Worse still! The reality I describe above, of undocumented
migrants (and other precarious people) living on the streets, looking for work in the shady corners of the labor market, restrained by marginalization, discrimination and a state of detainability and deportability (de Genova 2002
),
is not a given backdrop against which prosecution of traffickers, protection of victims and prevention of trafficking are thought of. More often than not, the undocumented trafficked person is simply not thought of at all in terms of the precarity resulting from her or his legal status. Despite much discussion on the complexity of the problem of trafficking, and the variety of situations referred to by the word trafficking, trafficked persons are uniformly imagined as people falling victim to the lies of cunning, evil perpetrators, not as rational-emotional beings negotiating their way through life given the constraints they experience, constraints that are different for every person, but that include structural constraints set by the Dutch state and society.I met many undocumented migrants — most of whom were young, non-white males — with whom I talked about the difficulties they faced looking for work. Some spoke of doing 12 to 16 hour shifts in dirty places, with few breaks, nastily authoritarian bosses and low and/or non-regular pay. I asked them about their reasons for taking on such jobs. They pointed towards their struggle to make ends meet, and to make it in such a way as to minimize their chances of being detected by the authorities. I do not know if the specific work conditions they were in would meet the definition of trafficking, but that is not of primary interest here. As Anderson and Andrijasevic (2008) note, the line between “trafficking” and “just your regular type of exploitation” is blurry. Just like you and me, the migrants I spoke to know about worst-case scenario types of exploitation, and express fear for ending up in such situations, but some take the risk nevertheless. The question that is side-stepped by trafficking professionals is what the role of immigration controls is in changing these migrants’ considerations when assessing whether to take on a job or not, and similarly, in changing employers’ considerations when hiring, harboring, paying and firing workers (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008).
I presumably met specifically precarious migrants at especially precarious moments in their lives — while in detention centers or while roaming the streets looking for help. So I would not claim to have spoken to a “representative sample.” But aren’t those exactly the people trafficking professionals should be interested in speaking to? The more I have thought about it, the crazier it seems. In the months as an intern with the National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking I met intelligent, caring, morally driven people who work on human trafficking and labor exploitation every day. They have presumably thought about trafficking for many more years than I have. How, then, is it possible that they do not discuss the punitive migration regime geared at a substantial slice of those at risk of being trafficked? And how is it possible they seem not even interested in speaking to them?
The troubles, I realized, extend far beyond the non-discussion of “illegality” as a marginalizing structure. Rising unemployment levels, the cutting of welfare provisions, the de-funding of homeless shelters, and discrimination in the labor market;the ways in which we — the Dutch state and society — contribute to the poverty, exclusion and lack of opportunity driving people into forms of exploitative labor are not explored or addressed. Nor did I witness a serious discussion on the effects of anti-trafficking efforts (police raids, increased surveillance, mediatized victim rescue operations) on the people targeted for scrutiny in the process. The monotonous and endlessly repeated and recycled narrative, in which the Dutch state is essentially presented as a benevolent, crime-fighting rescuer, remained virtually unchallenged throughout the fieldwork process. In fact, trafficking professionals seem to attribute roles to all actors involved in the trafficking field before specific cases
are discussed, for example, evil and cunning traffickers, reactionary and crime-fighting states,
“victim-centered” and unprofessional NGOs, objective and disinterested experts, innocent and passive victims, “illegal” and scrounging fake-victims. This uniform framing of who the actors involved in trafficking and the “fight” against it are, and what trafficking is, is truly startling, given the sheer amount and diversity of actors involved in the anti-trafficking world, the complexity of the problem, and the diverse settings within which trafficking takes place.
I began to reformulate my web of research questions. Why is it that the people I met don’t explore the effects of migration policies on trafficking? Why is it that they do not seriously consider the effects of anti-trafficking efforts on victims of trafficking and, crucially, the wider swath of migrants, prostitutes and other precarious workers affected in the process? Why did I experience such limited freedom to discuss obviously important considerations, and what forces shape the boundaries of what I felt could and could not be said? Why are fixed qualities attributed to the main figures in trafficking stories?
What is it about the field of anti-trafficking in the Netherlands that allows this uniform representation of trafficking to pertain, despite the diversity of actors involved?
Naturally, as my understanding developed throughout the research and writing process, so did my endless stream of questions. I will discuss these changes throughout the monograph. All of my enquiries, however, led me to explore the conditions that make possible the sidestepping of politically uncomfortable discussions — discussions that would require basic critical self-reflection.
So the central theme of this monograph deals with a vacuum. But a social scientist cannot look straight into the eye of absence (Graeber 2015) — unlike a poet or artist, who does not need to make explicit the conditions that allow for this absence to exist. So I decided to embark upon a much more subtle and reflexive path than I was used to in academics.4
The simple answer to the research problem is excruciatingly simple. It is a one-sentence answer that explains why this insanity can continue and continue: the experts who recommend anti-trafficking
efforts and evaluate their “effectiveness” hardly ever (if not never) meet the people most effected by their recommendations. The latter are simply not asked what they think about anti-trafficking efforts.
This is the fundamental condition of possibility. It is really extreme once you give it some thought, but we do not see it as such. In fact, we are accustomed to it precisely because it is not specific to the trafficking field at all.
The more complex answer deals with two spheres of questions that allow seeing strange this extreme exclusion that we have come to see as normal. First, the people I met during the fieldwork process do not spend their days conjuring up ways to deceive the Dutch public on issues of trafficking. If only they did! Breaking the chains of selectivity would be so much easier. We could overthrow them and move on. But we need to dig further. If there is no uniform or centrally coordinated “they,” how, then, is it possible that vast swaths of social reality are blocked from view, and blocked from view so systematically? This extreme observation led me to investigate the normal, as I attempted to gain an understanding of the everyday dynamics of the field (e.g., its power structures, inter-institutional dependencies) and the people within it (e.g., how they got there, how they relate to each other, how they understand trafficking). Second, why is it that we (you, me, field actors, law-makers, parents, the Dutch people — whoever happens to be the audience of a particular public political struggle at hand) tend to intuitively lean towards accepting the stories emerging from the field? Why did I have to fight so hard to keep clear to myself that I was not crazy, that analyzing how we chase down the unwanted Other matters when thinking about her exploitation? This led me to explore why we so often accept systems of domination and authority as not worth fighting, justified or simply natural — systems that are, on close examination, mind-bogglingly arbitrary and coercive.
Methods
Approach
This thesis aims to unmask and explore some of the conditions that make this official selectivity possible. To do so, I deploy four methods. First, I go back to the period around the year 2000, when trafficking came to be defined internationally and when the Dutch field fighting trafficking emerged. Going back to the field’s “birth” shows us that what is taken for granted now could have been different. Following Bourdieu (2014) I refer to this moment as the beginning, or “genesis.” Bourdieu refers to this method as a structuralist approach to historical sociology (or sociological history), which is an approach that constitutes the present as a particular case amongst possible cases. It is an
“instrument of rupture” (Bourdieu 2014, 105) designed to break with the thinking installed in us. Second, I offer detailed descriptions of events and encounters, carefully selected for their ability to reveal aspects of how trafficking professionals understand, create, internalize and give meaning to the world around them. Third, I compare what people say they do with what they actually do, how people portray themselves with how they act and how people discuss their work in an interview setting with how they instructed me on the work floor. This method reveals the discrepancy between public presentations and the private universe, a discrepancy which encounters its reflection on the field level where the public face of the Netherlands’ approach to trafficking mismatches the private settings of the field. Finally, I explore the pressures to conform, adjust, select and omit as I experienced them myself. Here, I rely on methods of reflexive ethnography and sociology, inspired by authors such as Bourdieu (2014), Bourdieu and Waquant (1992), Sanford and Angel-Ajani (2006), and Bertaux (1981).
Preparation for the field (September/October 2014)
I spent about six weeks preparing intensively for the internship. In this period I read sections of the Rapporteur’s extensive reports covering their assessment of the problem of trafficking in the Netherlands, their policy evaluations and their policy recommendations. I watched various speeches by, and public interviews with, the Rapporteur. I studied how parliament debates human trafficking, and what role the Rapporteur’s reports play in that debate. I read newspaper articles, opinion pieces and reports of pilot projects on the field’s approach to trafficking, and watched interviews and documentaries on trafficking in the Netherlands. I read relevant academic articles and books on trafficking (most notably: Andrijasevic 2007; Anderson 2010; Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008; Aradau, 2004, 2008; Doezema 2010; Kempadoo 2005). Finally, I read ethnographies and sociological work on the field surrounding the state (Bourdieu 2014; Mitchell 1991; Sharma and Gupta 2009; Shore, Wright, and Però 2011).
Participant observation/Internship (27th of October - 27th of January 2015)
I spent three months as an intern with the bureau. I was hired to assist one researcher in particular whom I was supposed to assist with a quantitative study on the occurrence of trafficking in the prostitution sector. For this study, we were to use a specific internal police registration database that we ended up spending months negotiating access to. During this negotiation process we corresponded intensively with different police contact persons, including the top of the National Police. It was not until the beginning of January that we were granted access to the specific database of interest. In the end, there was no time left for me to analyze the data.
At first, I spent my time getting a feel for the Rapporteur and the field in preparation for the research I was supposed to undertake. Since the research never took place, the bureau mostly required me to read and summarize public and classified police reports as well as relevant academic and non-academic publications on human trafficking and prostitution in the Netherlands. I also spent much time working on a separate report, which a different researcher at the bureau was working on, and which also required me to read and summarize literature on human trafficking and prostitution in the Netherlands. Moreover, I was often asked, and volunteered, to take notes during meetings, both inside and outside of the National Rapporteur. Finally, I attended congresses, lectures, and parliamentary debates to take notes for the bureau.
Notably, before starting the internship, I was asked to sign a secrecy agreement with the Rapporteur, which requires me not to speak of specific data on trafficked persons. I believe that I have fully lived up to this agreement.
Interviews (November 2014 – March 2015)
In addition to the data gathered through participant observation, I conducted fourteen semi-structured interviews, two of which were follow-up interviews. Eight of the interviews were recorded; the other six were not recorded, either because the interviewee preferred not to be recorded or because the setting did not allow for recording, for example, when the interviewee preferred to meet in a noisy public space. I contacted seven of the interviewees via my work at the bureau, by approaching them after meetings or at conferences. These interviewees connected me to the remaining five. The interviewees worked for a diverse set of institutions, namely: the police (2), NGO’s (2), the EMM (1), a research institute (1), health/social sector (3), the National Rapporteur (2), and one regional chain-approach director (1). The interviews were conducted in Dutch.
All interviews but one have been conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement. Regardless of sex, I will refer to all interviewees as female (accept for the one interview that was not conducted in confidentiality). Likewise, within the setting of the bureau I refer to all researchers as female. I am aware of the potential distortion this might cause but given the political sensitivity of some of the topics at hand, I believe it to be preferable over the alternative.
Researchers at the bureau work closely with people from all organizations operating in the anti-trafficking field.5 I met them formally (during meetings, for example) and informally (while having a
drink at a conference, for example). The internship opened doors for me that would have never been opened had I approached these actors by other means.
Naturally, however, the researchers at the bureau simultaneously functioned as gatekeepers. This is something that only really dawned upon me over time, as I started to get a feel for the shape of the field and became increasingly aware of the specific role the Rapporteur plays in it and the role I played within the bureau. These are reflections I will return to in the course of the thesis. For now, it is enough to note some basic limits of what I was able to observe. For instance, while I attended most internal office meetings, the researchers controlled whether I went to meetings with partner organizations, which emails they let me read, which congresses I went to and so on. Their motives for
not taking me presumably varied from case to case, but I expect rank (intern) and pragmatism (e.g.,
travel costs, alternative uses of my time) to have played an important part. Importantly, I did not attend private or semi-private meetings involving the National Rapporteur herself, apart from a few exceptions. Finally, while the researchers’ influence on what I saw and experienced was significant, it was simultaneously limited. At a congress, for instance, I approached whomever I wanted.
Thesis structure
The main thread of this monograph follows my own process of discovery as I moved deeper into the field in time. It is divided into five main chapters, corresponding to different phases in the fieldwork process: the preparation phase (chapter 1), the first fieldwork discoveries (chapter 2), the middle months (chapter 3 and 4) and my final experiences at the bureau (chapter 5).
The first chapter should be read as an introductory chapter that lays out some of the field’s core features, connects these features to the field’s emergence, relates the field to the international legal framework that stood at its birth, locates it within the larger administrative field surrounding the Dutch state, and positions my research in relation to two specific bodies of critical academic work that I draw from throughout the thesis. The remaining four chapters follow three storylines, each representing a sphere of social life that I came to understand more thoroughly as the research process unfolded. The first storyline follows my increasing understanding of the Rapporteur, the people working at the bureau, their interaction, the process leading up to the reports produced, and the ways
5 These partners include the Task Force Human Trafficking, police, military police, foreign police, justice
department, IND, DT&V, CoMensha, inspection SZW (Inspection Social Affairs and Employment), EMM (Expertise center Trafficking and Smuggling), LIEC/RIECs (National/Regional Information and Expertise Centers), ‘Security Houses’, the FIU (Financia Intelligence Unit), the Tax office, academics, various anti-trafficking NGO’s, private companies (such as
in which the Rapporteur engages with the anti-trafficking field surrounding it. This storyline explores the research problem by juxtaposing the way the Rapporteur presents itself in public with its everyday functioning. This storyline is explored most thoroughly in the second and third chapters. The second storyline follows how I engaged with the Rapporteur and the field myself, first as someone encountering the field as a relative outsider, then as an intern learning how to operate within the office and the field, and finally as a person emerging from the field, with a different idea of how the social world works. While this storyline relies heavily on reflections upon my own thoughts and behavior, it also includes analysis of how I perceived other people dealing with the field, or how people told me they deal with the field. It is a transformative storyline, reflexive in nature, and centers on the question of how individuals manage what they say and don’t say, do and don’t do, and think and don’t think in specific situations, given their positions in relation to the field. This storyline is expanded upon most in the fourth chapter. The third storyline follows what I learned about the field — its relations of dependency, competition and domination, the resources struggled over, and the rules played by and suspended. This storyline is elaborated upon most extensively in the final chapter. The tone of the monograph changes as the storylines progress. This is a reflection of my own growing understanding of the field and my role within it.
The separation of these storylines is, of course, academic and completely mistaken. Only by examining them together, as they unfold within the setting of everyday life, can we begin to unravel the many mechanisms, some more subtle than others, driving selectivity in the production of official narratives as well as the acceptance thereof (a condition for the productions’ continued relevance) — which is the main reason a time-line approach fits this thesis. Taken together, these storylines allow me to explore most adequately why some things are structurally omitted, why others are emphasized, why data is censored, why people self-censor, why some things are not even perceived as relevant by those involved, and why some things are regarded as given. Perhaps by undertaking these explorations together we may begin to understand the bizarre observation that is my research problem: the non-discussion of “illegality,” and the experiences and hardships of undocumented migrants as a whole, by thousands of people moving around a diverse anti-trafficking field who, in uncoordinated unison, seem to sing as a unified choir.
Chapter One: Trafficking Pudding
When I first learned about trafficking, I was struck by how difficult it was for me to get a sense of what the concept “trafficking” actually means. I felt as though it shifted from underneath my feat — as though I was slipping. This is nothing outrageously uncommon; there’s hardly any term in the social sciences or in political discourse with an even remotely clear definition once you think about it for more then a few seconds — “democracy,” “state,” “culture,” “liberalism.” But trafficking is an especially treacherous patchwork concept that builds upon a variety of terms and ideas themselves vaguely defined and deployed for a wide range of causes, interventions, and rationalizations. These kinds of concepts only start to mean something once they are embedded in a theory of some explanatory sort and scope. If this theory is missing you can expect to find a strong ideological component (Chomsky 2015). When reading about trafficking you need to understand who is speaking and from which platform (Bourdieu 2014). Without this specification you don’t know what you are reading. Trafficking cannot be approached technically.
But of course, approaching ideologically laden concepts technically is exactly what professional experts do — especially those who walk around the spheres of state. The trap here lies not so much in the presentation of falsehoods as in what is omitted (Zinn 1999). How do we guard ourselves from unknowingly absorbing and copying omissions if we don’t know from which platforms experts speak? And how do we trace the expert’s words back to her after she’s been cited and cited and cited? Assuming we are not as informed as these experts are on the subject — which is usually the case — this is an endeavor both necessary and impossible.
So when I stepped into the world of trafficking I was not in the position to understand what the people around me were saying, despite thorough preparation. Of course, this is also the beauty of ethnographic fieldwork! Not being able to locate those we meet is what enables us to see strange in the first place. As we move deeper into the field, we learn how they make sense of the world around them, enabling us to discover the world around us with a pair of new eyes — and to do so explicitly, and hopefully critically. As Bertaux (1981) brilliantly argues, our sole great advantage as compared to the people we study (whose field-skills will always be more fluent than ours will ever be) is our ability to position what we observe within a wider sphere of social space. This chapter is all about orientation, about positioning.
As I explained in the introduction, the thesis roughly follows my own process of discovery. But unfortunately last year did not present itself in logically coherent chapters and sections (Hammersley
and Atkinson 2007). Some of the material presented in this chapter I had gotten acquainted with before entering the field, and some later on. So this chapter diverges from the timeline approach and should be read instead as an introductory chapter, offering a detailed analysis of the concept of trafficking, the field’s related emergence and the critical academic debate on the contradictions permeating it. The chapter has four functions. First, it provides the reader with background information so that she is in the position to understand the rest of the thesis. Second, it approaches the current trafficking field in the Netherlands as a specific national context in which the international legal framework regulating trafficking has acquired its own meaning. Third, it offers an idea of how the Rapporteur and the field present themselves to the outside world (which can be compared further on to the way the field works as observed from the inside). Fourth, I show how my thesis contributes to the critical debate on trafficking.
The Trafficking Definition
Max Kaase once said that defining the concept political culture is not unlike “trying to nail pudding to a wall.” This metaphor illustrates, perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, the difficulties with which one is confronted when specifying the concept political of culture in relation to the overarching concept of culture. On the other hand, there is nothing particularly special about these kinds of difficulties in the social. There are a great many pudding-like concepts.
Becker 2006, 58
Human smuggling is often conflated with human trafficking, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, modern-day slavery, organ trafficking and labor exploitation. This conflation is alarming considering the imagery these concepts link up to on an almost daily basis. The distinction between smugglers, who help people cross borders illicitly with their consent, and traffickers (defined below), is lost or glossed over. When you follow the news, you hear horrific stories of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to reach European shores. These stories are often linked to the terms listed above. In the narrative that emerges, states are often portrayed as outraged, clean, reactive managers, in despair over the threatening tragedy they face. Meanwhile, migrants are put forth as either “illegals” or victims (Aradau 2008; Kempadoo 2005). Some go as far as to call these “traffickers/smugglers” the new slave traders, apparently to be likened to the old slave traders. This is a dangerous perversion of history, as a letter signed by over 300 slavery and immigration scholars eloquently explains (Open Democracy 2015). Whether evoking pity (poor migrants) or fear (of either the migrants themselves or of the traffickers), the narrative that emerges allows for deep interventions
(Aradau 2004, 2008), apparently even military intervention, as the absurd freshly proposed plan of the EU to bomb migrant boats in Libya stipulates6.
Soon after I started reading about trafficking I encountered a vast body of research critical of this conflation. To me, the most exhaustive and comprehensive criticism is formulated by a number of feminist scholars, most notably Aradau, Kempadoo, Andrisavic, Doezema and Anderson. While some of these scholars focus mainly on trafficking in women, it is insights developed in their work that I am much indebted to and that my thesis takes as a starting point.
Beginnings
When analyzing the origin of the conflation plaguing the trafficking concept, two structures stand out in particular. The most immediate source of trouble seems the signing of the Palermo Protocol7 in the
year 2000. I believe that the signing of Palermo, and the period leading up to it, signifies the beginning (in the Bourdieusian sense) of the specific selectivity plaguing the trafficking field today: it was the moment in time when a number of things vital to understanding what is now taken for granted were first made thinkable (such as the Ministry of Security and Justice becoming the ministry responsible for dealing with labor exploitation in the Netherlands).
We can trace ideas about trafficking even further back to the late 19th century, when public concern
mounted over what was called the white slave trade (Rijken and Koster 2008; Doezema 1999). While the meaning of the concept of trafficking as well as common understandings of how to deal with it have since changed, parallels between the political debate on white slavery then and human trafficking today are many (Doezema 1999).
In the context of the internationalization of wage labor and the abolition of slavery, working-class men and women moved across national borders and beyond, looking for work and futures away from home (Kempadoo 2008). Women moved either independently or through organized channels, commonly as domestic or sexual partners servicing the migrant labor force. Situated in the low end of the labor wage system, many lived under rough conditions. Others experienced new freedoms they had not known before, obtained through non-marital sexual relations and waged work — including sex work. Their experiences, as always, varied (Kempadoo 2005).
As moral panic over women’s promiscuous behavior and concern over migration intersected in time, campaigns emerged portraying sex-workers as either dangerously loose or lured by evil men into sexual slavery (Doezema 1999). The victimization of trafficked women and the criminalization of
sex-workers married up to further ingrain a deeply conservative understanding of women’s proper role in society.
In the Netherlands, too, concern concentrated on women “sold abroad as so-called white slaves” (National Rapporteur 2002, 12). In 1902, the Netherlands signed the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade, or the Paris Protocol. The Dutch adoption of this Protocol laid down a number of important agreements in the field of inspection, information gathering, and repatriation of victims. The convention also stated that participating governments should appoint a separate authority with the task of collecting information on trafficking in women. The Netherlands fulfilled this obligation in 1908 by setting up the National Bureau for Collecting Data on the
so-called Trafficking in Women and Girls (National Bureau). The National Bureau’s main purpose was
to monitor populations at risk: sex-workers. However, in practice it focused particularly on lewd publications that also fell within its scope (Ibid.). The National Bureau was not a great success and was abolished after the Second World War. What is important to note, however, is that the National Rapporteur sees it as its historical predecessor (Ibid.).
If we would like to find the “true” beginning of some of the trafficking field’s most bizarre contradictions, including the role of the Rapporteur in it, perhaps it is the late 19th century we should
direct our attention to. However, back then, moral outrage, fear and intervention primarily focused on the promiscuous behavior of women working as sex-workers, while my thesis engages primarily with the intersection between trafficking and migration. So in terms of the selectivity this thesis addresses, I believe an analysis of Palermo provides us with the crucial insights necessary for understanding the field. Meanwhile, the white slave trade may be thought of as an historical predecessor that functioned according to a logic of its own, despite displaying many, sometimes striking, similarities (Rijken and Koster 2008; Doezema 1999; Kempadoo 2005).
Palermo
In December 2000, over 80 countries, including the Netherlands, signed the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. The stated purpose of the convention is to “eliminate safe havens” for, and to promote interstate cooperation in signatories’ “joint fight” against, transnationally organized crime. Three protocols supplement the convention. The first concerns smuggling of migrants, the second (Palermo), trafficking in persons, and the third, trafficking in firearms (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008).
The Palermo Protocol included the first internationally agreed upon definition of trafficking in persons. This definition is important to understanding the trafficking field today, for it is used as a legal reference point in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Its formulation and interpretation lies at the heart of some of the contradictions signifying the trafficking concept and the field.
In Palermo, human trafficking is defined as an action (e.g., recruitment, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons). It involves means (e.g., methods of force or deceit, including the use of force or the threat thereof, coercion, deception, abuse of power). Finally, it is undertaken for the purpose of exploitation, including‚ “at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs” (Rijken and Koster 2008, 2).
While the term trafficking suggests movement, a person does not actually have to cross borders to be trafficked. Most understand exploitation to be the core of the Palermo Protocol. However, because the Protocol does not criminalize actual exploitation, it is also where the definition is at its weakest. Strictly following the definition, its focus lies in the intention to exploit (“for the purpose of exploitation”) and therefore on the recruitment rather than on the exploitation (Rijken and Koster 2008). What constitutes exploitation is of course a discussion in itself. I will return to this point later.
While the Protocol recommends that its signatories put in place a system of victim assistance programs, the binding elements of the Protocol focus exclusively on the prosecution of traffickers and the right of nation-states to defend themselves from unauthorized border-crossings, for which specific measures are listed. The agreement, then, links the protection of trafficked persons to the legitimized crackdown on those not worthy of protection, constructed as threatening the unity (territorial, societal, moral) of signatory nation-states. Protection as stipulated by Palermo is something states should think about providing if they wish to approach the national security problems they face in a humanitarian way, not as a right that persons subjected to labor exploitation are entitled to, independent of how many borders were crossed or how.
So, at its core, the Palermo Protocol is not a human rights instrument in any meaningful sense. Nor does it mention labor protections, migrant integration or even specific programs assisting trafficked persons (despite stating that such programs would be desirable). “Border controls and police cooperation, not human rights protections, lie at the heart of both the Smuggling and Trafficking Protocol” (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008).
This endpoint of the negotiation process reflects the balance of forces at the negotiation table. In the two-year period leading up to the signing of Palermo, factions struggling for workers’ and migrants’ rights were completely disenfranchised. In fact, people working towards any sort of transformative change of the present-day functioning nation-state system became increasingly marginalized within the setting of these negotiations. An analysis of this development can be found in the work of Doezema (2010), who describes in detail the struggles within the feminist faction in relation to the ultimate formulation of the Protocol.
The moment we look beyond the formal, legalistic, official appearance of the Palermo framework, a whole world opens. Once we see who was influential and who was not, and what was talked about and what was not, we should not be surprised that protection against labor exploitation regardless of legal status did not take up a more central role in the final formulation (even though it is in fact surprising). It is interesting to imagine what the Protocol could have looked like if, for instance, emancipatory factions had been more influential. Perhaps these factions could have blocked the simultaneous negotiation of these three protocols, and the negotiation over exploitation could have been pulled out of a conference centered on fighting the threat of “illegal” border crossers. If negotiation on how to legally deal with labor exploitation could have been taken up in a different context, the space of possibilities for those struggling to improve migrants’ and workers’ rights could have been radically different. Perhaps a discussion on what to do with the kidnapping of people for the purposes of organ removal could have been kept completely separate from a discussion on how to deal with labor exploitation. And perhaps labor exploitation could have been the central concept in what we now know as the Trafficking Protocol, with trafficking taken up as a sub-article of exploitation, instead of the other way around. From the perspective of a Martian, framing trafficking as a specific form of exploitation (that happens to involve border crossing) would have certainly made more logical sense. But these legal frameworks cannot be understood in terms of bird’s-eye logics. We are looking at an important snapshot in time of the historical development of an idea, the interpretation of which was struggled over vigorously by players who were “dealt” different hands, mostly by history (not magic).
In short, if we want to understand the dynamics of the trafficking field in the Netherlands today, Palermo is incredibly important because it integrated the concept of trafficking within a web of the previously securitized regulatory spheres of international organized crime, “illegal” migration and prostitution. This framing set up who the most powerful players dealing with trafficking and labor exploitation in the Netherlands would likely turn out to be.
The Netherlands: Migrant Labor Regimes
In the Netherlands, the trafficking concept gathered momentum in the late 1990s. In this same period, three dramatic shifts occurred in the administrative fields within which trafficking would come to be integrated: the criminalization of unauthorized migration, the legalization of prostitution and the
securitization of the polity in the name of fighting international crime. Given the focus of my thesis I
will discuss the criminalization of migration here while briefly outlining the legalization of prostitution further on. Securitization is a theme I return to throughout the thesis.
The discussion around foreign labor and the presence of migrants has a long history in the Netherlands. Engbersen and van Leun (2001) distinguish three phases of this interaction since the Second World War.8 In the post-war era, foreign labor was actively imported. Like in many other
European countries, few restraints were placed on immigration, especially from the colonies, “as long as migrants accepted a marginal status and harsh exploitation” (Fassin 2011, 216). These foreign workers were regarded as labor that could be used or disposed of in times of economic fluctuation. Indeed, during the 1967 recession, about seven thousand of them were “exported [back] to the countries of origin” (Castles 1986, 765). Meanwhile, migrants without documents also came into the country. As the economy grew, they were seen as an indispensable source of low-skilled labor and generally referred to as “spontaneous migrants” or “spontaneous guest laborers” (Engbersen and van Leun 2001). These undocumented migrants easily obtained residency permits via work in sectors such as the mining, textile and shipbuilding industries, but they were expected to leave the country when no longer needed (Castles 1986).
In the second phase, lasting throughout the 1970s and 1980s, their presence continued to be “silently tolerated” as a necessary workforce for certain economic sectors, despite a decreasingly liberal policy climate. After the 1973 oil crisis and the restructuring of the Dutch economy, guest-worker programs were terminated completely, but many of the migrants stayed and brought over their families. The migration process “could not easily be reversed” (Castels 1986, 766).
In the third phase, from the 1990s onwards, a policy turnaround can be observed with the signing of the Compulsory Identification Act (1994), the Marriages of Convenience Act (1994), the Linking Act (1998), and the Aliens Act (2001). In this phase — leading up to the present — we see a dramatic increase in external border control expenditure, immigration detention capacity and application, and the introduction of police “performance-quota” rewarding police departments for arresting specified
8 This is a typical genealogical starting point that surgically cuts off the Netherlands’ history in dealing with foreign
numbers of undocumented migrants (van der Leun and De Ridderz 2013; Broeders 2009; Kalmthout 2007).
Additional to this physical creation and maintenance of borders, border control expanded in two directions: outward (outsourcing of border practices to agencies in transit countries surrounding the EU and to private companies such as airline and security companies (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen 2013), and inward (societal exclusion from welfare provisions and the regular labor market through processes of identification) (Broeders 2009). From 2013 onwards, detention capacity decreased for the first time in decades (Ministry of Security and Justice, 2015). In the same period, however, the criminalization process directed at unauthorized migrants’ societal exclusion seems to have deepened (Staring 2014; van der Leun and De Ridderz 2013).
The more traditional border practices aimed at physically selecting people are radically different from those aimed at identification, required for managing people’s access to welfare institutions and the regular labor market. While borders keep the unwanted out, identification techniques exclude people from institutions while keeping people in (Broeders 2009). This shift to a focus on identification is still in development, and requires deep transformations in the functioning of bureaucratic organizations that are not implemented easily. It also requires forging coalitions that extend beyond the sphere regulating unauthorized migration into spheres such as human trafficking. The upcoming chapters establish this connection more thoroughly.
Contrary to what we would expect if we take the proliferation of border control at face value, many undocumented migrants are not excluded from the territory (van der Leun and Staring 2014; Kalmthout 2007). In a legal climate in which undocumented migrants are, however, formally9
excluded from the regular labor market, and the need to avoid detection and attention from the police is a continuous fact of life, migrants’ possibilities for survival are often determined by their social networks and their access to the irregular labor market. Research suggests irregular employment of undocumented migrants in the Netherlands is, indeed, common (Smit, 2011; van der Leun and Staring 2014), and “silently accepted by many” (Kromhout, van der Leun, and Wubs 2010, 241), although estimates in this area can easily be clouded by unreliable information, (self)-censorship, research bias and myths.
Just like trafficking, then, “illegality” as it exists in the Netherlands today is not straightforward. It is a legal category that plays out in ways dependent upon its interpretation and enforcement. It is a fuzzy
9 The extent to which this formal exclusion is implemented, or even implementable, is a discussion in itself (see, for
container concept that segregates and categorizes persons with different migratory histories and legal statuses, who in varying degrees, for varying reasons and for varying periods of time rely on “illegal” existence strategies rather than formal paid employment or social security (Kubal 2013). Over time, different migrant labor regimes have evolved into what we have come to accept as the status quo today: workers segregated into a layered legal system that differentiates political and practical access to a decent existence.
Implementing Palermo: Trafficking in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the criminalization of trafficking was first taken up within the legal framework legalizing and regulating the prostitution sector, in article 250a. This article stipulated situations in which prostitution was punishable, including involuntary prostitution and prostitution involving minors or cross-border migrants, situations roughly translatable to those of sex trafficking. Trafficking, then, exclusively dealt with exploitation taking place in the sex industry. It was not until 2005 that the legal framework dealing with trafficking was reformulated under article 273f, which is still in place today. This article closely follows the definition of trafficking as formulated by the Palermo Protocol, which meant that the concept of trafficking was expanded to include exploitation taking place outside of the sex industry, referred to as labor exploitation (Smit 2011). This history explains to some extent why field actors refer to “other” exploitation when meaning exploitation taking place in any sector other than the sex sector. In general, the field’s historical focus on the sex sector is important for understanding the way it functions today, including the biases produced and reproduced by it.
The regulation of victim protection, meanwhile, is taken up under the Dutch Trafficking Victims Protection Act (also referred to as the B8 regulation, previously known as the B9 regulation). The B8 regulation offers identified potential trafficked persons a reflection period during which they have the time to decide whether to formally file charges. If charges are filed, this reflection period may be extended for the duration of the criminal proceedings. Temporary housing is provided on the condition that identified victims cooperate with juridical investigations. Undocumented trafficked persons who are willing to cooperate with law enforcement are granted temporary legal status.
The inclusion of the B8 regulation in combination with the expansion of the trafficking concept seemingly opened up a window of opportunity for those concerned with labor and migrant rights to cooperate with the Dutch state on increasing labor protections. However, in line with the spirit of the Palermo Protocol, the same B8 article binds protective measures to trafficked persons’ cooperation with law enforcement and therefore on the duration of criminal investigation. When criminal
investigation ends (when a court case is either completed, suspended or not pursued) protective measures are suspended and the previous victim of trafficking regains his or her “illegal” status. “At the end of this process, the permit to remain in the Netherlands will be withdrawn and the victim will receive a notice to depart, unless there are exceptional circumstances such that the Ministry of Justice considers it appropriate to allow further or permanent residence on humanitarian grounds” (Munro 2006, 320).
The Netherlands is among the most progressive signatories of Palermo in terms of victim protection. In fact, in the international realm, the Netherlands positions itself, and is widely regarded as, a front-runner in terms of taking on a “victim-centered” approach. This makes the Netherlands an extremely interesting case to investigate, for it shows what the most humane interpretation and implementation of the Palermo Protocol look like. Meanwhile, Dutch delegations travel around the world to export the Netherlands’ approach to trafficking to other countries, an approach that is viewed as an exemplary case of how one could deal with trafficking in a humanitarian way (at least within the international circle of trafficking professionals with which the Dutch trafficking delegation keeps in touch). In methodological terms, then, the Netherlands is an “extreme case” as well as an “influential case” within the universe of possible cases (Seawright and Gerring 2008).
The chain partner approach
The Netherlands’ international humanitarian reputation is often credited to the state’s willingness and ability to cooperate with a variety of societal partners in what has come to be known as the
chain-partner approach to trafficking in human beings (from now on simply referred to as the chain
approach or the chain). Where the chain approach was originally merely a way of talking about inter-institutional cooperation, it has grown over time into an important tool shaping the way partners meet and share information. By now, the chain has come to symbolize the Dutch approach: an approach that includes societal partners in what is traditionally viewed as the state’s realm. The National Rapporteur is one such chain-partner.
The Dutch Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings, established in the year 2000, is another institution that gives the Netherlands its progressive reputation. I will expand upon the birth of the Rapporteur further on in this thesis, where I explore her specific function in relation to the freshly legalized prostitution sector. But here, I will already provide some basic information on the bureau, which corresponds roughly to how it presents itself on its website.
The National Rapporteur
worked for years as a judge, most recently as vice-president of the district court at The Hague. Her husband’s family founded the largest neoliberal, right-wing party of the Netherlands (VVD), whose members currently hold most ministerial positions, including that of Prime Minister and Minister of Security and Justice.
The Rapporteur’s formal tasks are to report on the nature and extent of trafficking in human beings1 in the Netherlands, to report on the effects of government policies, and to offer a critical reflection on these policies. To complete these tasks, the Rapporteur is required to regularly publish reports, which are presented to the Dutch government and debated upon in parliament. Besides these core reports, the Rapporteur is allocated time and resources to study topics and themes that she feels deserve attention (National Rapporteur 2014).
Other activities the bureau engages in include organizing and participating in meetings and conferences, and taking part in diverse task forces and expert meetings. Finally, the Rapporteur is active internationally where she “advises within a network of rapporteurs on the European policy to be conducted in the fight against human trafficking” (National Rapporteur 2014, 7).
The Rapporteur is supported in her work by a manager, a team of highly educated researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds (masters and postdocs) and interns, such as myself, who assist the researchers. While the researchers assisted by the interns write the reports, the Corinne Dettmeijer is responsible for their content.
Finally, “the National Rapporteur” or “the Rapporteur” can refer to either Corinne Dettmeijer or the entire organization. This is significant and I return to this observation in the final chapter of this thesis. It also causes writing difficulties. While usually the context tells which of the two I refer to, if it is not I will refer to Corinne Dettmeijer if I wish to distinguish her from the organization she represents.
Definitional Problems
When thinking about the opportunities Palermo and its Dutch counterpart offer to those concerned with labor standards, another problem immediately comes to light. What is actually meant by exploitation? Here we enter an even deeper sphere of definition problems that haunt the trafficking field (Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008).
