Ryan Brown for UN Women/Flickr. Creative Commons.
As we at BTS launch a month of articles focusing on gender, one only needs to turn to an unsuspecting neighbour or family friend and drop the term ‘trafficking’ to appreciate the indelible nexus between anti-trafficking discourse and gender. You are likely to hear the perfect conjuring up of everything that trafficking was and has been associated with for a very long time, namely the deception of a young girl or woman into prostitution in a foreign land against her will. The location might change and the means of deception will assume a contextual tone, but the daily drip feed of media will ensure the production of the stock image of the innocent, young, female victim of trafficking.
At the policy level, there is no better testament to the deep association of trafficking with prostitution than the negotiations that led to the 2000 Palermo Protocol, officially known as the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Indeed the centrality of the victimisation of women and children—which is reflected in the sub-title to the protocol—and the perceived urgency of addressing their sexual exploitation has been a significant driver for the protocol’s extraordinary ratification and translation into domestic law over the past fifteen years.
