Theorising human trafficking through slow violence

Human trafficking is predominantly framed as a criminal justice issue with sensationalised, highly visible violence. Stereotypical figures of young women in danger, passively poised to be rescued by figures of the state or vigilante justice, animate public discourse and policy. Yet the reality of trafficking is often far more complex than the linear narratives presented in the mainstream. In this article, I argue that human trafficking is more readily accessible as slow violence, the accumulation and accretion of the consequences of systematic oppression over time. I use Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor to articulate a stance against the flash of trafficking's ‘master narratives’. Slow violence offers three key elements for theorising human trafficking, i.e. that the harms are so gradual or delayed they: become imperceptible; compound over protracted durations of time; and may be so mundane and unspectacular to not even register as ‘violence’ in our vernacular. Aligned with a critical trafficking studies approach that draws attention to power dynamics and imbalances, slow violence focuses on the forms of exploitation and precarity that are taken for granted or assumed to be static. I use a collection of artifacts and examples from dominant anti-trafficking organisations and media to demonstrate the urgency required to both rethink trafficking against these flattening overgeneralisations and recommit to a transformative practice that makes more lives liveable. In the tradition of feminist anti-violence scholarship, I conclude by shifting from the micro-level examples of trafficking that fuel misinformation campaigns to the systems that perpetuate violence, exploitation and extraction – and must be eradicated if we are committed to ending human trafficking locally and globally.