A farm in Sicily. SarahTz/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Anti-trafficking measures have long focused on women’s exploitation in sex work, downplaying that fact that trafficking occurs in diverse types of work and also involves men. In so doing, they have overlooked the sexual vulnerability of people who are exploited in sectors other than sex work. While most policies today recognise that women, men, transgender people and children can be trafficked into diverse forms of exploitative labour, the gendered and sexualised victimisation of migrant women is still a dominant paradigm in the field. More specifically, as Julia O’Connell Davidson has pointed out, while men are generally viewed as active subjects capable of making independent and voluntary decisions, women are seen as passive and powerless agents who are vulnerable to exploitation. Accordingly, exploited migrant women are more commonly viewed as ‘victims of trafficking’ whereas exploited migrant men are frequently deemed irregular migrants or, such as in the case of migrant EU citizens, often do not receive assistance and protection.
The distinction between ‘sex trafficking’ and ‘labour trafficking’ in diverse legal instruments and policies has fostered the centrality of the sexualised victimisation of women. In addition to suggesting that sex work cannot be deemed work, this distinction erroneously conveys the idea that sexual exploitation does not amount to forms of forced labour. It also leads to overlooking the diverse human rights violations that women involved in the sex industry may experience and the right protections to which they should be entitled. Moreover, this distinction has prompted the adoption of different strategies to address trafficking in the sex industry sector than in other sectors. In particular, while in the latter case more attention has been given to the development of measures aimed at protecting the rights of migrant workers and improving their working conditions, in the sex industry repressive and assistance-based approaches are still prevalent.
