Women working in a sweater factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Asian Development Bank/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
In the summer of 2009, when I first arrived at one of the most well-known ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ centres for women and girls in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I was immediately struck by the iron bars on all the doors and windows. A number of female security guards paced up and down the dark hallways. The atmosphere in the building was a far cry from what the NGO staff at the main office had described as an “oasis of freedom from violence and degradation”. I had learned about this organisation long before setting foot in Bangladesh. Its reputation as an organisation committed to women’s economic empowerment nationally was widely acknowledged by national and international funding agencies. Since the 1980s, its stated mission has been to end violence and discrimination against women at home and in the workplace. Inspired by its history of struggle for women’s rights rooted in Bangladeshi culture, I was eager to come on board as a volunteer.
In the weeks and months that followed, my conversations with the young women whom the shelter labelled as ‘trafficking survivors’ revealed that, for them, ‘trafficking’ was not a single event that ‘happened’ to them. Rather, they had experienced a series of complex, interrelated events that involved varying degrees of coercion. Likewise, their emancipation was not simply achieved at the moment of ‘rescue’. Instead, their ‘rescue’ had frequently led to another series of experiences of coercion and disempowerment, this time perpetrated, if perhaps unwittingly, by their ‘rescuers’.
