The perspectives of criminal justice and human rights offer distinct conceptual and policy frameworks for understanding and addressing trafficking, its causes, and possible solutions to the problem. At the risk of oversimplification, I will briefly outline their differences before discussing my research on ‘trafficked women’ in South Korea that shows how the human rights language has served as the “soft glove” for the “punishing fist” of the criminal justice system in anti-trafficking measures, and how most migrant workers and migrant wives avidly avoid the trafficking framework in their fight for better protection of their rights.
A criminal justice framework understands human trafficking as a problem caused by ‘bad guys’ who abuse the labour of innocent people. The criminals need to be stopped, and the state is obliged to mobilise the full strength of the law enforcement apparatus to punish the criminals. The victims need to be rescued and reintegrated into either their home or host country. If sufficient resources are invested in police, border control, and information campaigns about the dangers of falling victim to the crime, and if heavy enough penalties are imposed, then human trafficking can be controlled if not erased. Abusive and violent employers and recruiters preying on the dreams and labour of poor people are therefore the main cause of trafficking, while the state intervenes to halt such abuse and restore order. As the problem of human trafficking grows, the state needs to expand its regulatory and punitive powers accordingly. This perspective focuses on the visible violence perpetrated by clearly identifiable agents (the traffickers and their auxiliaries) on the victims. Trafficking is therefore a disruption of the normal order of things.
The human rights approach draws on international agreements and national legal provisions to go beyond the direct violations of human rights by traffickers in order to examine trafficking as a failure of states to protect and to fulfil the full spectrum of human rights—for migrants or otherwise. Human trafficking is thereby seen as rooted in global and national inequalities, regulatory regimes that make unsafe migration necessary, and the lack of adequate protections for migrants and labourers. Trafficking is thus considered a product of the current global political economic order, and the state bears partial responsibility for the range of human rights violations included within its definition.
