scholarly journals Framing the Mother Tac: The Racialised, Sexualised and Gendered Politics of Modern Slavery in Australia

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 192
Author(s):  
P. G. Macioti ◽  
Eurydice Aroney ◽  
Calum Bennachie ◽  
Anne E. Fehrenbacher ◽  
Calogero Giametta ◽  
...  

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offender, as well as definitions of slavery, are racialised, gendered, and sexualised and rely on the victims’ subjective accounts of bounded exploitation. By documenting these and other limitations involved in a criminal justice approach, the authors reveal its shortfalls. For instance, while harsh sentences are meant as a deterrence to others, the complex and structural roots of migrant labour exploitation remain unaffected. This research finds that improved legal migration pathways, the decriminalisation of the sex industry, and improved access to information and support for migrant sex workers are key to reducing heavier forms of labour exploitation, including human trafficking, in the Australian sex industry.

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-224
Author(s):  
Inga K Thiemann

Abstract This article explores under which circumstances a labour law approach could make a meaningful contribution to combatting human trafficking into the sex industry. In this, I critique the existing criminal law approach to human trafficking and its policies, which focus on trafficked persons as idealised victims in need of protection, rather than on their rights as workers, migrants and women. Furthermore, I also challenge the exclusion of sex workers from arguments for a labour law response to human trafficking, as they maintain the construction of trafficking for sexual exploitation and trafficking for labour exploitation as separate phenomena. Instead, this article advocates an alternative labour law approach to human trafficking, which incorporates wider interdisciplinary issues of gender equality and societal exclusions for women and migrants, and particularly female migrant sex workers, within a labour response. My focus is therefore on exclusions maintained by existing labour legislation, which are based on the standard employment contract and amplified by barriers to labour protections faced by workers in female-dominated service jobs in general and by sex workers in particular. As sex workers’ embodied feminised labour is deemed not to be ‘real work’, they seem to be unworthy of labour protections. My proposed labour response to human trafficking into the sex industry therefore combines some of the strengths of the existing labour rights-focussed anti-trafficking and exploitation discourse with arguments from feminist labour law theory in order to tackle the intersectional dimension of human trafficking into the sex industry.


Politics ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 026339572096240
Author(s):  
Nick Turnbull ◽  
Rose Broad

Rhetoric is a way to explain policy problem framing by recognising the practical necessity to persuade audiences in contextual situations. Modern slavery and human trafficking is a complex and emotive problem, simplified through rhetorical demands to motivate an audience of supporters. This article analyses rhetoric by 212 UK anti-trafficking and anti-slavery non-government organisations (NGOs) to uncover rhetorical practices and their effects on policy framing, supplemented by archival research to compare past and present anti-slavery oratory. Our data show NGOs use rhetoric to motivate supporters and promote a humanitarian problem frame, in opposition to a state-driven security frame. Findings confirm other research in identifying an emphasis on female victims and on sexual over labour exploitation. Past and present rhetoric are equivalent in terms of liberal, Christian values (ethos) and appeals to pathos through sympathy for victims. Historical rhetoric is distinctive in arguing for the equal human status of slaves, whereas contemporary activists argue victims are denied agency. Contemporary rhetoric represses the question of migration, whereas past rhetoric is more deliberative. Rhetoric varies with the requirements of persuasion related to contextual distance, between unlike humans in the past, but in regard to geographical distance today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin O'Brien

Consumers are the new activists in the fight against modern slavery, with awareness campaigns urging citizens to use their consumer power to demand an end to labour exploitation. The contribution of political, or ethical, consumerism campaigns to the trafficking narrative is examined in this article through an analysis of the characterisation of consumers and corporations in campaigns from SlaveryFootprint.org, Stop the Traffik UK, and World Vision Australia. This article argues that campaigns urging political consumerism depict consumers as the heroic rescuers of enslaved victims, and embed solutions to modern slavery within a culture of unquestioned capitalism. This approach may have the unintended consequence of sidelining victims from the trafficking story as the focus of the narrative becomes the product, rather than the victim, of labour exploitation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 653 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandré Gould

This article examines the complex arrangements within which women working in prostitution in South Africa find themselves, and documents their resilience in a hazardous work environment. Findings are drawn from a survey and in-depth interviews with sex workers in Cape Town that investigated the nature and extent of human trafficking in the sex industry, and from a separate survey of sex workers during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. The findings provide the basis for a critique of Western rescue missions and the larger antitrafficking movement.


Temida ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Siegel

On 1 October 2000, the Netherlands became the first European country to legalize prostitution as a profession, with its rights and duties. On the other hand, this new Dutch law excluded those sex workers, who come from outside the EU. The majority of women working in the sex industry, who are considered illegal migrants in the Netherlands, had two choices: either leaving the country or disappearing into the illegal criminal circuit. For law enforcement and assistant services, it became extremely difficult to control the sector. In this paper, the consequences of the 'Brothel Law' are presented. What happens with illegal non-European sex workers in the Netherlands, how the problem of human trafficking is constructed in Dutch media and combated in the country, what could be learned from the 'Dutch case'? The paper aims to answer these questions and contribute to the general study on human trafficking and voluntary prostitution in Europe.


Author(s):  
Inga K. Thiemann

Human trafficking is considered one of the key humanitarian crises of our time. Public opinion and policymakers alike call for meaningful responses to human trafficking and modern slavery as criminal law problems, which can be remedied through tougher border controls. This chapter argues that human trafficking cannot be solved through border-focused anti-immigration measures, but needs to be approached as a gendered migration problem, which requires greater protections for vulnerable workers, particularly for female workers in private households and in the sex industry. Therefore, this chapter discusses root causes of human trafficking and migrants’ exploitability in gendered immigration and emigration policies, as well as in insufficient labor protections for vulnerable workers. In doing so, it also challenges the role of states in creating migrants’ precarious statuses through insufficient safe migration routes and labor protections in destination countries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Amy L Huang

This qualitative study illuminates a controversial perspective of sex work arguing that it should be treated as a legitimate occupation. The article draws on a series of interviews with sex workers, social workers and experts working in areas of support for sex workers in Sydney, New South Wales. Sex workers, social workers and experts’ perception is that sex work was perceived as empowering for sex workers. Contrary to the common images of sex workers as drug users, victims of violence or glamorous women, most of the sex workers in this study did not fit any of the common stereotypes. Sex workers also preferred to obtain support from other sex workers rather than more ‘powerful’ professionals. These findings have implications for social work and appear to demand greater support for opportunities for sex workers to have peer-to-peer interactions and support and understanding from professionals to provide them optimal support if they wanted to remain in the sex industry.


Author(s):  
Sam Scott

This chapter outlines the various forms of labour exploitation that exist. At the extreme end of the ‘continuum’ there is worker fatality both at work and through work. There are then extreme forms of non-fatal harm, including: chattel slavery; modern slavery; forced labour; human trafficking; and child labour. All of these extremes have criminal–legal frameworks associated with them that are designed to minimise their prevalence. Often, however, these criminal–legal frameworks are either inadequate or are not enforced, and so extreme forms of exploitation and harm go unpunished. Moreover, a great deal of exploitation and harm, as argued in the introduction, goes on above these criminal–legal baseline definitions. This book, is particularly interested in the labour exploitation continuum that includes, but is certainly not limited to, illegal employer practice.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasti Montiel

This paper analyzes the contemporary global anti-trafficking regime and discusses the destructive influence this regime has had on the lives of migrant sex workers. Through the use of public documents and academic literature, I deconstruct the global anti-trafficking discourses and argue in favour of more viable rights-based solutions (e.g., labour rights, immigration rights, and sexual rights) for combating human trafficking. Within this analysis, I explore the Canadian government’s gradual commitment to combat human trafficking through the gradual discontinuation of the exotic dancer visa, and eventual implementation of the migrant sex worker ban. In formalizing its commitment to combating trafficking, the Canadian government has implemented restrictive policy measures terminating migrant women’s ability to legally access the Canadian sex industry. While this type of employment was problematic in many ways, the Canadian government should have addressed these issues through rights-based policy initiatives instead of prohibiting access as part of its anti-trafficking campaign


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasti Montiel

This paper analyzes the contemporary global anti-trafficking regime and discusses the destructive influence this regime has had on the lives of migrant sex workers. Through the use of public documents and academic literature, I deconstruct the global anti-trafficking discourses and argue in favour of more viable rights-based solutions (e.g., labour rights, immigration rights, and sexual rights) for combating human trafficking. Within this analysis, I explore the Canadian government’s gradual commitment to combat human trafficking through the gradual discontinuation of the exotic dancer visa, and eventual implementation of the migrant sex worker ban. In formalizing its commitment to combating trafficking, the Canadian government has implemented restrictive policy measures terminating migrant women’s ability to legally access the Canadian sex industry. While this type of employment was problematic in many ways, the Canadian government should have addressed these issues through rights-based policy initiatives instead of prohibiting access as part of its anti-trafficking campaign


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