For almost two decades, Helmut Sax has straddled the boundary between research and practice around anti-trafficking. He has long sat ‘on the inside’ of official international anti-trafficking bodies and yet is widely and publicly critical of the ways in which anti-trafficking efforts often fail. BTS caught up with him in the context of this twentieth anniversary debate.
Neil Howard (BTS): Helmut, you have nearly two decades of experience as both an anti-trafficker and a scholar of anti-trafficking. In this series, we’re looking at the concept of ‘exploitation’ and taking stock of where the field has gotten to in its fight against it. What’s your take on where the field is at?
Helmut Sax: The ultimate goal of anti-trafficking is not the prevention of trafficking, but the prevention of exploitation. Conceptually, trafficking should be regarded as no more than a preparatory act, something that creates or maintains situations of dependency which make people vulnerable to being exploited. The added value of making trafficking a criminal offence is precisely that it enables us to address these situations – what I call the ‘logistics’ of dependency. But doing so means working much more closely with wider efforts to end exploitation. For example, when it comes to supply chains, we shouldn’t just be focussing on monitoring but instead need to address poor working conditions, weak labour rights, and all the underlying cause factors that lead to a need for monitoring in the first place.
