'#DCFerguson Solidarity With Baltimore' march. Stephen Melkisethian/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
A longer version of this piece along with all the articles from the Anti-Trafficking Review’s special issue ‘The lessons of history’ may be read for free on the journal’s website.
The transatlantic slave trade has been used since the turn of the millennium as the primary touchstone of the anti-trafficking movement. It is the great historical comparative that gives campaigns against human trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ their evocative power. These campaigns have played a significant role in shaping public and political discourse around these issues, and their liberal use images and texts recalling the transatlantic slave era have served to emphasise the severity of these phenomena as human rights violations. The message has been communicated so effectively that, although slavery is seen in international law as only one possible outcome of trafficking, by this point few policy agencies and NGOs strongly differentiate between the two – trafficking is now frequently said to be ‘modern slavery’. As the anti-trafficking NGO Free The Slaves puts it, human trafficking is “the modern day slave trade—the process of enslaving a person”.
