I was disappointed to read the introduction to the feature currently coming out on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery – “Ten Years On, Have We Moved Beyond Trafficking and Slavery?” Instead of using the occasion of BTS’s 10th anniversary to issue a renewed call to reassert the importance of rigorous critique, its authors committed a wilful act of self-harm under the guise of self-reflection.
They begin by asking “why, from our vantage point, does it seem like the world has made so little progress on moving beyond trafficking and slavery?” This framing not only signals disillusionment, but risks undermining decades of critical scholarship, insulting the publication’s author base, and chilling future work.
Then they frame anti-trafficking’s critics as “killjoys” and place them alongside what they call a “parasite problem”. This legitimises long-standing views of what they frame as the “establishment” – as evidenced in a recent interview with Nick Grono, CEO of the Freedom Fund – namely that critique of anti-trafficking is reactive, dependent and even parasitic to the work they do.
