The Palermo Protocol was established twenty years ago. A supplement to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, it aims to “prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons,” with a specific focus upon “women and children.” Despite receiving numerous expressions of official support in the years that have followed, the protocol has not proved to be especially effective. This is, in part, because it fails adequately to articulate the nature of the problem to be addressed. Our particular concern here is the vague and ambiguous use of two key terms, “exploitation” and “vulnerability,” which lead to ineffective and even harmful solutions. In this article, we argue that a better formulation of the problem will yield more effective solutions.
The protocol defines trafficking in terms of the means that an actor uses, including force or fraud, and the purpose for which the person is trafficked, namely exploitation. Rather than formally defining exploitation, it instead offers a list of examples: “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”
These examples are presented as a ‘minimum’, yet they also represent exploitation as an exceptional problem: immoral and illicit profiting from the victimisation of others, especially, as the language makes clear, women and children performing sexual labour. If, as the protocol suggests, the problem is a matter of criminal individuals, then its preferred solution of rescuing the victims and prosecuting the perpetrators might make some kind of sense. But, as we will see, the underlying problem needs to be understood more clearly before an appropriate solution can be found.
