The Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) project on openDemocracy has been documenting and directing discourse around the counter-trafficking and anti-slavery movement for a decade. During that time, it helped bring about several key changes to the field.
These include: moving the discussion beyond criminal justice to focus attention on the structural issues underpinning human exploitation. Shifting perceptions of trafficked people from passive victims of fate to active survivors shaping their own stories. And modernising conceptions of ‘slavery’ to capture the systems exploiting those downstream for the profit of those upstream.
These are all important achievements. Stakeholders are right to celebrate the widening of the conversation to also focus on labour rights. But there is a risk of the pendulum swinging too far in this direction, if BTS is suggesting that criminal justice is never the right response to trafficking.
