Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders ... - Springer Link

Fem Leg Stud (2012) 20:227–244 DOI 10.1007/s10691-012-9210-0

Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking Sharron A. FitzGerald

Published online: 10 November 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Abstract In this article, I interrogate how the UK government constructs and manipulates the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant. Specifically, I analyse how the government aligns aspects of its anti-trafficking plans with plans to enhance extraterritorial immigration and border control. In order to do this, I focus on the discursive strategies that revolve around the UK’s anti-trafficking initiatives. I argue that discourses of human trafficking as prostitution, modern-day slavery and organised crime do important work. Primarily, they provide the government with a moral platform from which it can develop its regulatory capacity overseas. It is not my intention to suggest that the government’s anti-trafficking plans are superficial, and that extraterritoriality is the sole driver. On the contrary, I argue that complex interrelationships exist and while the government’s interest in protecting vulnerable women from sexual exploitation may seem to be paramount, I assert that in fact it intersects with other agendas at key points. I consider how government action to protect vulnerable women in trafficking ‘source’ and ‘transit’ countries such as development aid and repatriation schemes relate to broader legal and political concerns about protecting the UK from unwanted ‘Others’. Keywords

Women Vulnerability Trafficking Borders Extraterritoriality

Introduction Human trafficking constitutes a contemporary feminist battleground on issues relating to women’s mobility, labour relations and the regulation of sexuality (Munro 2005). Prostitution is the point of principle contention in this debate. Prosex worker lobbyists believe that prostitutes should have the same legal rights as S. A. FitzGerald (&) Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

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other workers (Doezema 2005). They argue that it is their marginalised status that makes them vulnerable and not the work per se. Conversely, the anti-prostitution lobby argue that prostitution is evidence of continued patriarchal cultures of violence against women (VAW) and it must be abolished (Hughes 2000). Within this framework, any woman who migrates for prostitution is a victim of human rights violations (O’ Connell Davidson 2002). This polarised circularity has prevented feminists from devising anti-trafficking policies that can transcend this schism, and deal with other aspects of this complex phenomenon (Sullivan 2010). In this article, I wish to contribute to the effort to transcend the schism between pro and anti prostitution camps. In order to do this, I want to highlight an aspect of the feminist’s preoccupation with prostitution that I suggest has had consequences for geo-specific populations of female migrants. Specifically, I refer to the international governmental preoccupation with human trafficking and the attendant issue of transborder prostitution as a violation of women’s human rights issue (Miller 2004). Commentators observe that this governmental concern demonstrates a trend among western governments, namely a tendency to manipulate what they define as trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm to advance other political agendas at key points (Goodey 2004). I examine this trend in a very specific way, namely I interrogate how the UK interprets the idiom of the trafficked woman and her vulnerability to sexual harm. In order to do so, I engage with and extend upon previous work where I examined how the UK government constructs trafficked women’s vulnerability as a distinct category of meaning in domestic antiimmigration agendas (FitzGerald, 2010). In earlier work, I provide a feminist reworking of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics arguing that in the context of governmental attempts to regulate human trafficking, it represents another aspect of neoliberal governmentality.1 In this article, I leave aside an analysis of the biopolitics of human trafficking. Instead, I interrogate how the UK government instrumentalises the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant to extend its border and immigration control capacity overseas. By focusing on the connections between human trafficking and extraterritorial border and immigration control in the UK, I highlight an important trend in some other European Union (EU) Member States, such as Denmark and Germany, where these nations intertwine regulating illegal migration with external border and immigration control (Geddes 2005). Before proceeding, I wish to make clear that my reference to other EU Member State’s anti-trafficking strategies is to contextualise the UK response. I draw on other jurisdictions not so much to provide a detailed comparative analysis as to support my argument that the UK response maps onto broader agendas of a sort that operate in other EU nations (Peers 2004). That said, I want to stress that I do not wish to suggest that the UK’s, or any other EU Member State’s, anti-trafficking plans are all veneer and that extraterritoriality is their sole driver. I argue, rather, that complex interrelationships drive 1

Foucault defines governmentality as: ‘‘the ensemble of institutions, procedures … and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific power that has population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and the apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument’’ (2009, 108). He argues that governmentality works through the regulatory technologies of discipline of power over life, namely biopolitics.

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human trafficking and women’s presence in trafficking circuits (Askola 2007). Therefore, while the UK government’s interest in protecting vulnerable women from sexual harm and exploitation may seem to be paramount, I assert that this objective intersects with and develops other national and international political agendas at strategic points (Kapur 2005). In highlighting this trend, therefore, I do not want to suggest that governments should refrain from interfering where sexual harm and exploitation occur. Rather, I claim that in the context of human trafficking we must be alert to any governmental attempt to deploy discourses of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm to pursue other political interests. Governmental framing and manipulation of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm provides my focus for a number of reasons. The language of vulnerability proliferates in governmental and academic contexts (see also in this collection, Scoular and Munro; Carline). Critics argue, however, that the use of the concept ‘‘has been loose’’, and ‘‘entailed neither the theoretical rigour nor the degree of elaboration necessary to illustrate its practical usefulness’’ (Kirby 2007, 3–4). A broad examination of a variety of literatures across the social sciences and humanities reveals that no one definition of vulnerability exists. Analysts of globalisation in international relations, for example, use the concept of vulnerability to question how increased internationalism has impacted upon the organisation of human affairs, and the trajectory of global social change (Held and McGrew 2002). Others focus on how risk is key to modernity but ‘‘in the current period risk assumes a new and peculiar importance’’ (Giddens 1999, 25). They argue that previously we used our vulnerability to manage the future and attempt to control it. Now, ‘‘our attempts to control the future tend to rebound upon us, forcing us to look for different ways of relating to uncertainty’’ (Giddens 1999, 26). Vulnerability exemplifies what Ulrich Beck defines as ‘‘the social birth of a kind of word risk society’’ (2002, 20). He suggests that in the contemporary moment, governments deploy risk management schemes to allay our vulnerability to a suite of real and predicted ‘threats’ to humanity. The upshot of which, he explains, is that they compound our inability to cope with risk. Thus, risk management schemes and not process of globalisation per se make us vulnerable (Beck 2002). Scholarship on natural hazards compliments the above-cited literature by approaching the concept of vulnerability from a different perspective. Scholars claim that it is society’s socio-spatial order and our ‘place’ in it that exacerbates the individual’s experience of vulnerability (Manzo 2010).2 Research notes that our location in the world combined with our position on a hierarchy of categories of class, race, age, sexuality and gender determines how we tolerate our vulnerability (Hewitt 1997). Meanwhile, interdisciplinary feminist research on vulnerability defines it as a fundamental aspect of human life (Beasley and Baachi 2007). Echoing this sentiment, Selma Sevenhuijsen (2003) draws on the feminist ethics of care paradigm, which views women’s capacity for care as a human strength. Through this lens, she examines what it means to be vulnerable. She does this by interrogating the power relationships that underpin those defined as vulnerable and those entrusted with their care. In this regard, Iris Marion Young (2002) notes that the rights and 2

By ‘socio-spatial order’, I refer to the intersection of a range of economic, political, social and cultural processes that characterise the world and the contexts in which they occur.

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dignity of individuals should not be diminished because they are vulnerability. To this end, she points out the importance of challenging the assumption that vulnerability is more exceptional than normal (Young 2002). Extending this debate, feminist legal scholar, Martha Fineman (2008), acknowledges that vulnerability is a universal human condition. She argues, however, that it possesses transformative possibilities for positive social change. Fineman suggests that by placing vulnerability at the centre of all law and policy-making decisions, governments would empower women to transform their socioeconomic and political circumstances. Elsewhere, feminist philosopher, Judith Butler (2004), uses the concept to interrogate US state violence in the post 9/11 world order. She cautions that in considering vulnerability we must be sensitive to how the state possesses the power ‘‘to exploit and thwart its meaning and significance’’ (Butler 2004, 33). She asserts that this process demonstrates how ‘‘vulnerability takes on different meaning at the moment it is recognised, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability’’ (Butler 2004, 43). Taken together, I suggest that the above literature is vital to the arguments that I pursue in my analysis below. Specifically, it will assist me to interpret the discursive strategies that revolve around the UK government’s use of the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant.3 Despite these insights, I assert that feminists have been slow to develop a critique of how governments instrumentalise discourses of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm to re-organise the limits of state power. Taking my inspiration from Butler’s theorisation of the geopolitics of vulnerability, I want to explore the UK’s ability to thwart, manipulate and strategically redeploy notions of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm in its plans to extend its border and immigration control capacity in ‘‘cooperating third countries’’ (Sammers 2004). Moving to consider specifically the question of international governmental concern with human trafficking, I turn to the 2000 UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (hereafter the Trafficking Convention),4 and the ‘Optional Protocol on People Trafficking’ (hereafter the Palermo Protocol).5 In certain quarters, feminists argue that the Palermo Protocol compounds the imprecision that underpins the tension between addressing trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm, and curbing transborder prostitution by introducing a loose definition of ‘abuse of vulnerability’ into contemporary discourse around human trafficking (Aradau 2004). Elsewhere, evidence of the ambiguous concept of ‘abuse of vulnerability’ exists in other international legal mechanisms such as the 2005 Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention.6 As Vanessa Munro reminds us, the problem is that this uncertainty ‘‘permits scope for domestic countries to impose a narrow conception of … 3

Following Michel Foucault, I understand discursive strategies to be: ‘‘systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subject and the worlds of which they speak’’. Foucault’s concept of discourse is traced in a broader social process of power, highlighting the structure of modern ‘truths’. According to Foucault: ‘‘discourse is controlled by objects, what can be spoken of; rituals, where and how one may speak; and the privileged, who may speak’’ (Foucault 2009, 140).

4

United Nations. 2001. Convention against Transnational Organised Crime.

5

United Nations. 2003. The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children.

6

Council of Europe. 2005. Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. Warsaw, 16.V.

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vulnerability (2005, 99). In this paper, I interrogate how this ambiguity structures the UK’s anti-trafficking measures as a tool to justify extraterritorial border and immigration control. Since 2000, when the UN released the Trafficking Convention and the Palermo Protocol for signature and ratification, successive UK governments grappled with how to regulate human trafficking and transborder prostitution (Scoular 2004). In order to meet its international obligations, the government introduced the 2003 Sexual Offences Act7 with reformulated versions of pre-existing soliciting and ‘pimping’ offences in England and Wales. The Act created the offence of moving a person into, out of or within the UK for commercial sexual exploitation (Scoular and O’ Neill 2007). The government followed this by reviewing prostitution, and its regulation, in a proliferation of governmental proposals, consultations, and legislative initiatives—e.g. Paying the Price (2004), A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy (2006). In 2007, the government released the UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking, and subsequent ‘Updates’ in 2008 and 2009. Most recently the government released the UK Strategy for Human Trafficking (2010). These developments notwithstanding, some feminists remain uneasy with what they perceive as a contradiction in the UK’s continued use of the 1957 Wolfenden Committee Report on homosexuality and prostitution to inform anti-trafficking policy (Kanatola and Squires 2004). After its three-year long inquiry, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain came to the conclusion that outlawing homosexuality impinged upon civil liberties. The Committee said society and the law should respect individual freedom of actions in matters of private morality, and stressed it was neither condoning nor condemning homosexual acts. Interestingly, while the Committee upheld that private morality or immorality was ‘‘not the law’s business’’ (Kanatola and Squires 2004, 79). It is clear that in the UK, unlike other EU Member States such as Germany, Greece, Austria and the Netherlands where prostitution is legal and regulated ‘‘the condemnation of ‘prostitution as work’ model’’ continues to inform how the government responds to and attempts to regulate human trafficking (Munro 2005, 103). Against this backdrop, in this article I focus on two key areas of concern identified by successive UK governments in their anti-trafficking initiatives, namely, (1) prevention and (2) extraterritorial capacity building. In considering the UK government’s framing of human trafficking, I suggest that discourses relating to prostitution, slavery and organised crime have particular cultural and political weight. In particular, I argue that these discursive strategies do important work, and as such they merit closer consideration for the role they play in the UK government’s justification of extraterritorial border and immigration control.

Prevention An examination of official government documents suggests that the UK incorporates and manipulates discourses of human vulnerability in support of its antitrafficking schemes. Within this framing, the UK legal and political engagement, 7

Sexual Offences Act 2003, c.42, ss 57-59.

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similar to other EU Member States such as Austria, Italy and Spain, continues to understand and attempt to regulate human trafficking as a problem linked to geospecific populations of women’s vulnerability to sexual harm (Goodey 2004). In their consideration of the politics of mobility, researchers influenced by ‘the mobilities paradigm’ in the social sciences, highlight how categories of difference such as race and gender shape individual migrants experiences of mobility (Blunt 2007). As Tim Cresswell explains, ‘‘difference is inscribed on migrant’s bodies and reveals hierarchies of mobility and power that permit mobility for some, and serve to exclude ‘Others’’’ (2006, 736). This framing is persuasive and I share Cresswell’s belief that governments have the power to allocate ‘‘particular meanings to practices of mobility’’ (2006, 736). Moving to look specifically at the issue of how the state ascribes meaning and constructs a narrative around trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm, I rework Cresswell’s idea, I suggest that this narrative is grounded in racialised and gendered discourses. My principle aim is to map out the discursive mechanisms through which the UK government justifies extraterritorial border and immigration control. I begin by examining this processes in the context of one of the most politicised aspects of the relationship between women and human trafficking, namely prostitution. Trafficking as Prostitution In order to demonstrate this process, I turn to the Home Office’s 2002 White Paper, Secure Border, Safe Haven. In this document the government stated: ‘‘women … are at far greater risk of being trafficked than men, particularly for sexual exploitation’’ (HMSO 2002, 89). Over time, we can see that the government solidified this framing to create a geo-specific understanding of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm (Kapur 2005). We see evidence of this progression in the following quotation: [P]eople trafficking from abroad is a known route into prostitution in this country. The effect of economic and political disruption in Eastern Europe and beyond creates markets in wealthy countries and people willing to supply those markets. Primarily young women but also teenage girls looking for a better life are promised work in the European Union (HMSO 2004, 75). Elsewhere, the government claimed: ‘‘foreign women are the most vulnerable members of our communities … trafficked from abroad for the purposes of prostitution’’ (HMSO 2006, 60). The discourses around the connections between human trafficking and prostitution articulate established stereotypes of sexually vulnerable non-western women. Through this the government foregrounds a geospecific understanding of human trafficking that validates increased governmental intervention to stop the problem. I suggest that this in one place where we can identify when and how the government begins to construct human trafficking as a problem the originates ‘out there’, and as such require an extraterritorial remedy. As the government indicates: ‘‘the majority of trafficked victims originate from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, or from the Far East, especially China and Thailand’’ (HMS0 2007, 90). It is interesting to note how the government retains discourses of trafficked

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women’s vulnerability to sexual harm around male demand for women’s sexual services: ‘‘trafficking for sexual exploitation disproportionately impacts on women, with the abusers (those who use the services of sexually exploited women) predominantly male’’ (HMSO 2007, 99). Unpacking the racialised and gendered logic underpinning these statements, it is necessary to consider the other important work that these discourses do. I suggest that highlighting the connection between human trafficking and prostitution introduces a range of other attendant issues. In doing so, I do not wish to suggest that the government should ignore these problems, or deny that trafficking women’s sexual exploitation. I submit, rather, that in an attempt to highlight how the UK government instrumentalises the idiom of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant to expand its regulatory capacity overseas, it is necessary to demonstrate how this discursive strategy segues into another racialised and gendered domain, namely human trafficking is modern-day slavery. Trafficking as Slavery One place where we can catch a glimpse of how the government deploys this discourse is in the 2007 UK Action Plan. It is important to note that the government’s decision to release its national anti-trafficking plans in 2007 was not random. It coincided with the two hundred year anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of Slavery Act. Importantly for the purpose of this paper, it against the debate on the rights of ‘man’ and the ‘citizen’ that a parallel debate raged concerning the white slave trade or the transportation of white prostitutes to British India. Whatever its precise symbolic terrain, morality campaigners derived the bulk of their rhetoric by modifying the logic of abolitionism ‘‘in which the degraded black slave was replaced by the demoralized white women’’ (Irwin 1996, 2). It is within this historical context that the UK government released its trafficking Action Plan. This tactic situated the government’s human trafficking response within a secure moral and cultural landscape (Doezema 2000). Thus framed, the government began the work on framing human trafficking as modern-day slavery. An important element of this framing is its discursive reliance upon the image of modern-day slavery as a crime that has its origins ‘out there’. The effect is to construct an argument that helps the government to justify extraterritorial border and immigration control. Discursive strategies around human trafficking as modern-day slavery assist the government to shape the ‘reality’ of trafficked women’s experiences, and to justify its extraterritorial interventions to protect them for further sexual harm (FitzGerald 2008). Excerpts from the 2007 Action Plan and its subsequent ‘Updates’ in 2008 and 2009, I believe illustrate this point well. For example, the government stated: ‘‘our message is clear. The criminal trading in people … as commodities has no place in the United Kingdom’’ (HMSO 2007, 2). An examination of the government’s policy documents reveals that over time it mobilised a similar figuring of human trafficking. For example it claimed: ‘‘the government’s primary aim is to secure the protection and safety of the individuals that are exploited as commodities for a profit by criminals’’ (HMSO 2008, 25). Elsewhere is asserted that: ‘‘human trafficking is a horrendous crime. It reduces people to commodities to be exploited’’ (HMSO 2009, 2).

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That said, what interests me here is not so much whether or not this is slavery but how the government deploys the discourse to argue as human trafficking as ‘‘something that no civilised country should tolerate. We need to do more to stop this horrific crime’’ (HMSO 2010, 3). There can be little doubt that human trafficking incorporates levels of coercion and exploitation. It is critical that the government continues to try to identify these elements and stop it. Moving this question to one side, I suggest that when the government combines discourses of trafficking as prostitution with discourses of trafficking as modern-day slavery what emerges is a justification for excluding human trafficking and trafficked women from the UK ‘for their own good’ (FitzGerald 2010). Beyond this, these racialised and gendered stereotypes do other important organising work. They justify the government in its argument that heinous ‘foreign’ crimes such as this have ‘‘no place in the United Kingdom or a modern world’’ (HMSO 2007, 3). It is at this juncture that the government introduces the third discourse, namely human trafficking is organised crime conducted by gangs (read male and foreign) who enslave foreign women for financial gain (FitzGerald 2010). It is to this discursive strategy that I now turn. Trafficking as Organised Crime In framing its anti-trafficking initiatives, organised crime gangs provide the government with evidence to justify stricter extraterritorial border and immigration controls. The government explains that this is the case because ‘‘the vast majority of people who are brought here illegally are brought by organised crime groups. This organised immigration crime includes ‘people trafficking’’’ (HMSO 2002, 75). Elsewhere, a similar image of organised crime figures. The government noted that: [P]eople trafficking can be highly lucrative and is often linked to other forms of organised crime. It is both a global and a local trade, with people trafficked internationally and also from place to place within countries for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation (HMSO 2004, 75). Further examples of thus tactic appear in the following statement: ‘‘human trafficking may be considered to be a low risk, lucrative business often controlled by organised crime groups. This is not acceptable’’ (HMSO 2007, 3). It is interesting to consider that underpinning the government’s plan to tackle human trafficking as a form of organised crime lies an ambition to increase the UK’s regulatory response. We get a flavour of this discursive strategy in the following statement: [H]uman trafficking is a serious organised crime and we remain committed to using the full range of our powers and capabilities to interdict, arrest and prosecute traffickers (HMSO 2009, 9). But at the same time, the government has always been quick to modify this strategy, suggesting that it is forced to adopt a law and order response because: ‘‘predatory organised criminal groups is something that no civilised country should tolerate. We need to do more to stop this horrific crime’’ (HMSO 2010, 3). This, in turn, does important bordering work. In this instance, by directing the public ‘gaze’ onto the bodies and behaviours of foreign men who engage the ‘‘a truly international crime’’

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of transporting vulnerable women for sexual exploitation, the government sets the limits of what is ‘in place’ in the UK (HMSO 2010, 3). Operating through racialised and gendered discourses, the government identifies foreign organised crime gangs as the locus of all trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm. Specifically, racialised and gendered discourses solidify the government’s argument that to solve the problem of human trafficking, and the criminality that sustains it, is necessary that the government adopts ‘‘a renewed focus on prevention overseas’’ (HMSO 2010, 3). It is to this issue that I turn now.

Extraterritorial Capacity Building Moving to look specifically at how the UK government deploys discourses that revolve around its construction of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant in its plans to enhance its border and immigration control, I consider Nick VaughanWilliams (2010) examination of contemporary UK border control. He critiques what he perceives as a process whereby ‘‘the UK border is increasingly projected overseas and across UK territory’’ (2010, 1071). Vaughan-Williams explains that the government no longer views the border as ‘‘a static, physical border’’ but a ‘‘more electronic, invisible and impalpable global network of border security’’ (2010, 1072). In other words, the government exports the border ‘‘so that it is physically transported to territory overseas through ‘juxtaposed control’ whereby the UK monitors mobility in other states and vice versa’’ (Vaughan-Williams 2010, 1073). Importantly, juxtaposed control is not just about having immigration officers at airports. UK border control now comprises more dispersed and fluid forms of regulation identified by ‘‘the gradual implementation of a system of migration management … in third countries’’ (Sammers 2004, 43). This de-territorialised and dispersed form of border and immigration control is not unique to the UK. It comprises an important element of the EU’s 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam (Geddes 2005).8 The Treaty compels all Member States to redirect their immigration control to external borders in ‘‘cooperating third countries’’ to prevent ‘‘irregular migration at its source’’ (EC 1997). In support of the Treaty, in the 1999 Common Policy on Illegal Immigration, the European Council identified extraterritorial border and immigration control as vital for all Member States (Guiraudon 2000). We see evidence of the persistence of this strategy in a recent joint statement presented to the EU Commission in March 2012 by delegates representing Belgium, Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria and the UK.9 These nations argued that links between illegal migration such as human trafficking and organised crime: ‘‘challenge the effectiveness of EU migration systems and create financial burdens for Member States’’ (EC 2012, 11). The delegates lobbied for a ‘‘concerted engagement beyond the external borders of the borders of the EU, including particular cooperation with countries of origin and transit … to prevent and combat 8

European Commission. 1997/ Treaty of Amsterdam O.J. (C 340) 1, 37 I.L.M. 56.

9

The Council of Europe. 2012. ‘Common responses to current challenges by Member States most affected by secondary mixed migration flows’. 7431/12.

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illegal immigration’’ (EC 2012, 5). Against this backdrop, trafficking ‘source’ and ‘transit’ countries have become the focus of EU extraterritorial border and immigration control. As the above statement suggest, the UK has been at the forefront of this initiative. In what follows, I examine how racialised and gendered discourses of trafficked women’s vulnerability buttress the UK government’s ambition to build border and immigration capacity overseas. Source and Transit Countries It is clear that ‘‘preventing people trafficking and smuggling in source and transit countries’’ is key to the UK border and immigration policy (HMSO 2002, 107). The government gives its initiatives political weight by invoking the connection between organised crime and illegal migration. Consider the following extract: Organised criminal groups do not respect national boundaries, and immigration crime is international. Effective action against it therefore requires close co-operation with … source and transit countries to tackle immigration crime through a wide range of preventative measures and by operational co-operation … aimed at preventing illegal immigration (HMSO 2002, 85). Perhaps most instructive in terms of demonstrating how the government justifies its extraterritorial border and immigration control ambitions appears in its use of government agents in source and transit countries. For example, the UK government places International Liaison Officers (ILOs) who act as its representatives overseas. Specifically, ILOs advise domestic migration authorities and airlines in ‘cooperating third countries’. A significant aspect of their job is to identify and stop trafficked migrants leaving their countries of origin (Goodey 2004). Evidence of the centrality of this strategy to the UK’s extraterritorial trafficking plans appears in the following quotation: Alongside effective enforcement in the UK lies the need to develop intelligence and undertake joint operations against trafficking networks in transit and source countries. The government has established an international network of Immigration Liaison Officers (ILOs) in the key countries through which traffickers transit en-route to the UK. Their purpose is to encourage and support action to disrupt the activities of criminal gangs (HMSO 2004, 79). Importantly, these plans continue to demonstrate how notions of racialised and gendered vulnerability continue to frame and justify the UK’s interventions. For example, government documents reveal that the UK deploys ILOs in China to reduce the exploitation of women and children ‘‘in the Greater Mekong region. This project has also supported activities in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Yunnan in China’’ (HMSO 2008, 38). Again, it is important here to highlight that the UK is not alone in its use of ILOs overseas as part of its border and immigration control initiatives. For example, EU Member States situated on Europe’s southern and eastern perimeter such as Spain, France, Portugal, Malta and Italy all deploy ILOs overseas. In addition to these, nations such as Denmark and Germany post ILOs at their consulates and embassies

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abroad ‘‘in order to establish and maintain contacts with the authorities of those countries with a view to contributing to the prevention and combating of illegal immigration, the return of illegal immigrants and the management of legal migration’’ (EC 2003, art.1, para. 1).10 An example of this kind of work occurs in the Maghreb region where cross European ILOs work in conjunction with FRONTEX, the EU border control unit, to prevent illegal migrants including trafficked migrants, from reaching EU territory (De Haas 2008). Unlike these other EU Member States, however, the UK has gone further to enhance its extraterritorial anti-trafficking capability. Since 2006, it uses dedicated agencies such as Reflex, a task force chaired by the National Crime Squad (NCS), to liaise with overseas law enforcement agencies: ‘‘to raise awareness of trafficking amongst our visa issuing posts overseas so that suspected traffickers and their potential victims are not issued with visas to travel to the UK’’ (HMSO 2007, 29). More recently, the government announced that in 2013 it will launch a new National Crime Agency (NCA): ‘‘which will give a renewed focus on prevention overseas’’ (HMSO 2010, 4). Rather than focusing primarily on preventing women’s exploitation in trafficking circuits, the government argues the NCA will contain ‘‘a dedicated Border Policing Command to strengthen our borders and help prevent human trafficking and other serious crime’’ (HMSO 2010, 3). What is striking about this strategy is that the UK Border Agency’s (UKBA) Risk and Liaison Overseas Network (RALON), which operates in over 50 locations worldwide ‘‘to prevent threats reaching the UK shores’’, is key (HMSO 2010, 13). An examination of recent government documents reveals that the government is now more explicit in defining its anti-trafficking measures as part of its wider border and immigration control programme. For example, we see this when the government argues that: ‘‘these controls, which are immigration controls performed outside the UK by UK immigration staff, are key to reducing the number of illegal migrants travelling to the UK (HMSO 2010, 20). While I think that aspects of this work is important. I submit that it is also important to recognise that projects to prevent exploitation overseas also provide the UK government with a physical presence to influence and manage border and immigration control in nations where it does not have jurisdiction. As we have seen, over the past decade, another way that the UK government attempts to strengthen its extraterritorial border and immigration control by blurring distinctions between domestic and foreign jurisdictions. As Alice Miller (2004) reminds us, government actors use the image of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm to justify a humanitarian ‘presence’ in trafficking source and transit countries. I suggest that humanitarian interventions such as these render the question of jurisdiction ambiguous. As we shall see below, this has serious implications for how and with what effect the UK can extend its border and immigration controls extraterritorially. We can see how extant anti-trafficking legislation in England, Wales and the six counties of Ulster in Northern Ireland that come under UK jurisdiction, maps on to the government’s externalising programme in sections 60(1) and (2b) of the 2003 10 European Commission. 2003. Reference Document for Financial and Technical Assistance to Third Countries in the Area of Migration and Asylum, AENEAS Programme 2004–2006. Brussels: EC.

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Sexual Offences Act. The Act defines trafficking as a ‘‘relevant offence’’ when ‘‘anything done outside England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is not an offence, … would be if done in England and Wales or Northern Ireland’’ (2003, s 60(1)). This legislation has generated considerable extraterritorial powers of governance, extending the government’s ability to prosecute criminals extraterritorially, and thereby to regulate who enters the UK. The state refined its extraterritorial powers of governance in the 2007 UK Borders and Immigration Act.11 Sections 31(2) and (4) of the Act reiterate that regardless of jurisdiction, trafficking offences ‘‘apply to anything done whether inside or outside the United Kingdom’’. We see further evidence of these plans in the 2007 Trafficking Action Plan. In that document the government states: ‘‘we are also using this opportunity to extend the extraterritorial application of trafficking offences to cover acts of facilitation carried out overseas, irrespective of the nationality of the person carrying out the acts’’ (HMSO 2007, 34). On the other hand, however, when we view these legal provisions as a vector for extraterritorial border and immigration control, then, they assume a different hue. An examination of recent Home Office policy reports supports the argument that preventing trafficking at source is at the heart of the UK government’s desire to extend its border and immigration control capacity overseas. For example: ‘‘disrupting criminal networks abroad stops the problem before it reaches our borders’’ trumps all other issues (HMSO 2010). The desire to contain unwanted migrants in their countries of origin is so strong that it has prompted the UK to invest in a series of development programmes in source and transit countries. While again I recognise the important work that these aid agencies do in the area of human trafficking. There is, however, evidence to prompt an evaluation of the broader geopolitical issues driving these schemes. It is to this question that I turn now. Development Aid Recent work by Andrijasevic and Walters (2010) reminds us that international aid agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become a vehicle for western governments to influence border and immigration control extraterritorially. Indeed, the EU Commission stipulated that: ‘‘cooperating with third countries … in their efforts on migration and asylum matters’’ would be part of the EU’s Global Approaches to Migration Programme (EC 2006, Para. 13).12 This programme prioritises financial assistance to the developing world. The plan addresses the EU’s need for effective border controls ‘‘to reduce illegal migration, encourage legal migration, and better protect victims of human trafficking’’ (EC 2011, 15).13 It is interesting to note that the European Commission’s programme for integrating 11 Home Office. 2007. Securing the UK Border: Our vision and strategy for securing the future. London: Stationary Office. 12

EU Commission 2007 (Regulation (EC) No 1905/2006 for establishing a financing instrument for developing cooperation on migration (DCI) regulation. 13 EU Commission. 2011. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European economic and social Committee and the committee of the regions. The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility. COM(2011) 743 final.

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development into migration in the 2004–2008 period had an overall expenditure of 250 million Euros (De Haas 2008). Among its specific aims are plans ‘‘to address the root causes of migratory movements’’, to forge ‘‘a partnership on migration stemming’’, and ‘‘specific and concrete initiatives to help these countries to increase their capacity in the area of extraterritorial migration management’’ (EC 2006, 2).14 In short, the EU encourages Member States to use development aid as a vehicle to externalise border control and contain its vulnerability to illegal migration like human trafficking to third countries. As previously mention, in March 2012, delegates on behalf of Sweden, The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany and the UK made a submission to the European Commission. The statement illustrates the current feeling among certain Member States with regard to the important work that development aid can do to prevent illegal migrants from entering EU territory. Importantly, they stress that the EU must continue to prioritise external border and immigration control. Countries of origin and transit should be the strategic focus of the EU’s external migration policy in line with the Global Approaches to migration and mobility, which offers significant opportunities for comprehensive measures also when it comes to prevent and combat illegal immigration. These measures should include capacity building, the strengthening of borders (EC 2012). It is against this backdrop of a concerted EU policy towards extraterritoriality and a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to migration that the UK government uses overseas development aid via agencies such as the Department for International Development (DFID) to enhance its overseas capacity building. Since 2002, we can see that the government deployed development aid as a means to tackle human trafficking. We get a flavour of the UK’s approach in the following statement: The UK, through the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, already funds a range of projects in source and transit countries. We are encouraging and supporting states in implementing the UN Protocol on Trafficking, which provides a template for co-ordinated international action to suppress and punish trafficking (HMSO 2002, 89). An examination of government documents reveals how, over time, the government has enmeshed trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm with a regulatory agenda focused on preventing unwanted populations of illegal migrants fetching up in the UK. It is interesting to note that organised crime and the government’s desire to prevent it looms large in the UK’s development plans. The Department for International Development (DlFD) is already playing a leading role, in the fight against poverty and social injustice through support for our long-term development programme and we will continue with this 14 EC Thematic Programme is based on Regulation. No 1905/2006. Establishing a financing instrument for development cooperation (DCI Regulation).

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work. Another element to our strategy is to work through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to support projects designed to build capacity in source and transit countries to deal with organised immigration crime issues and to support awareness raising projects (HMSO 2007, 8). Elsewhere the government sets out the work that these government agencies will conduct in the name of preventing trafficking overseas. Its objectives include: ‘‘the development of knowledge and understanding of organised immigration crime in the key source and transit countries that impact on the UK’’ (HMSO 2008, 9). Importantly, these documents give us a sense of the scope of these projects. For example, SOCA manages 140 liaison officers overseas based in 40 countries worldwide’’ (HMSO 2008, 9). More specifically, we can see of the geographical scope of these capacity building plans appears in the 2009 Update to the ‘Action Plan’. The document sets out how important aid agencies such as DFID cooperate with the FCO in conjunction with SOCA the government operates trafficking initiatives in ‘‘the Caribbean, West Africa, China and Afghanistan’’ (HMSO 2009, 6). While we get a sense of the continued significance of overseas aid in recent government policy, this comes into sharp relief when, against a backdrop of the harshest funding cut backs since the post second world war era, in 2010 the UK ring-fenced its development budget. One of the possible reasons is that the current Conservative-led coalition government has made the connections between dealing with human trafficking and border control unambiguous. As previously mentioned, in 2013 the government will launch the NCA. One of the NCA’s key roles will be to consolidate anti-trafficking initiatives and border control at home and abroad in conjunction with the UKBA, the FCO and DFID. These organisations will ‘‘work with international partners to tackle and disrupt criminals, including human traffickers, who target the UK from overseas’’ (HMSO 2010, 12). What work does this framing do? The idea that women are sexually exploited for gain is abhorrent to most people. Consequently, the government’s attempts to protect them find little or no public resistance. Indeed, in many ways it is right and proper that the state take some responsibility for the plight of these women. However, what I want to highlight here is subtler than this. If we de-centre this view and consider the UK’s plans to protect women as another facet of its border and immigration control policies, then, we glimpse how government actors can thwart protecting vulnerable women in the service of an embodied form of border control. In the case of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant, the possibility that she has been coerced and deceived in her journey to the UK means that government actors are well within the law to introduce the question of repatriation. The EU’s ‘Directive on Returns’ demands that Member States assist in this process.15 How this repatriation functions as a form of embodied border control connected to broader and extraterritorial forms of regulation is the issue to which I now turn.

15

Directive on return of illegal immigrants. 2008/115/EC.

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Repatriation In 2008, the European Council and the Parliament adopted a Directive setting out rules to provide for a return policy of illegal migrants staying illegally within the territory of any Member States.16 While the Directive is clear that its removal and repatriation policy must deal with migrants ‘‘in a humane manner and with full respect for their fundamental human rights and dignity’’ (EC 2008 para. 2). The Directive promotes and encourages the ‘voluntary return’ of illegal migrants. That said it is also clear that the fundamental purpose of this Directive is to enhance the EU’s ‘managed migration policy’ (EC 2008). As I noted earlier, in 2005, the EU Commission has begun the process of enacting agreements with third countries to re-admit failed asylum seekers, and all other illegal migrants such as trafficked migrants (De Haas 2008). Readmitting irregular migrants to their countries of origin has taken on increased significance as a method of border and immigration control in the context of human trafficking. This is exemplified in the 2010 Council of Europe Resolution 1741 Readmission agreements: a mechanism for returning irregular migrants.17 The EU believes that Agreements such as these ‘‘facilitate and expedite the enforcement of return decisions in respect of irregular migrants and may also function as an incentive for countries of origin or transit to enhance their migration control’’ (EC 2010). Since 2002, however, the UK government similar those of Denmark and Austria, wished to ensure it had the option to repatriate all illegal migrants, including trafficked migrants if necessary. The then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, stated: ‘‘if it is not appropriate to let [trafficked migrants] stay, they must be returned to their own country’’ (HMSO 2002, 85). We should not underestimate the significance of this statement since it remains a key aspect of the UK’s anti-trafficking plans. We get a flavour, here, of the nature of the UK repatriation policy as part of its extraterritorial border and immigration schemes. We recognise the importance of providing assistance and support to victims of trafficking that wish to return home and there are several voluntary return programmes that can support individuals through this process. The Assisted Voluntary Return for Irregular Migrants (AVRIM), run in partnership with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), is in many ways particularly targeted at vulnerable groups such as victims of trafficking (HMSO 2007, 59). In keeping with the letter and spirit of international law, especially in the area on non-refoulement, the government is keen to stress that it will not force anyone to return home, if they have a well-founded fear of persecution in so doing. Indeed, as a signatory of the EU’s 2005 Trafficking Convention, the UK is forbidden by Article 12 to so do. Furthermore, Article 16 on repatriation states categorically that Member

16 Directive 2008/115/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on common standards and procedures in Member States for returning illegally staying third-country nationals. 17 Council of Europe. 2010. Doc. 12168 Readmission agreements: a mechanism for returning irregular migrants. Strasbourg: EC.

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States may repatriate trafficking victims with ‘‘due regard for the rights, safety and dignity of that person…and shall preferably be voluntary’’ (EC 2005, 16(1)). Indeed, it is an accurate assessment of reality that some migrants may wish to return home because they have been deceived or worse. I am not suggesting that the UK government should not repatriate individuals when it complies with their wishes. Rather, I am claiming that criticism of repatriation polices that takes into account broader political agendas such as border and immigration control can be more compelling. For example, research by the UN suggests that many victims of trafficking do not wish to be repatriated because they fear reprisals against themselves and their families from traffickers and others. These fears may stem from threats of violence from traffickers if they cooperate with the police (UN 2006).18 Or they may not wish to return home because in many societies the stigma associated with prostitution may mean that a woman is marginalised, thus making her even more vulnerable. In these instances, she is at high risk of being retrafficked, which some argue defeats the logic of repatriation in the first instance (Goodey 2004). Therefore, the debate on repatriating vulnerable trafficked women is far from settled. On this point, it is interesting to note that the government admits that after repatriation has happened: ‘‘it is not possible to guarantee the safety of all victims’’ (HMSO 2007, 57). Here is an issue that demands feminist intervention to ensure that the state upholds its commitments to protect vulnerable women. As feminist research on trafficking shows, all women’s experiences in trafficking circuits are different (Scoular 2004; Doezema 2005). Furthermore, their level of agency will vary and their personal circumstance will determine whether it is safe for them to return home. These contradictions should serve as a warning about any governmental attempt to issue blanket assertions about trafficked women, and then use it to justify other political ends. Contrary to the UK government’s stated intended outcome—to re-settle exploited and vulnerable women in their countries of origin—it appears that a significant aspect of assisting trafficked women has been to remove those unwanted bodies, even when it is clear that it may be dangerous to do so. What emerges is that the needs of the vulnerable nation-state eschew those of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant.

Conclusion In this article, it has never been my intention to deny or undermine the valuable work that a variety of UK government agents do in dealing with human trafficking. It has been my aim to activate a conversation about how discourses of trafficked women’s vulnerability to sexual harm intersect with other political agendas at key points. As a feminist, I have tried to show why it is important that feminists develop a critique of any governmental attempt to instrumentalise trafficked women experiences of sexual exploitation for other geopolitical objectives. In this, I have attempted to demonstrate how the UK government has incorporated global concerns with protecting trafficked women’s vulnerability into its international political plans enhance border and 18

UN. 2006. Trafficking in Persons: Global Patterns. Vienna.

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immigration control. Against this backdrop, I have attempted to demonstrate how externalising anti-trafficking measures to ‘cooperating third countries’ is part of the UK government’s plan to re-organise its borders extraterritorially. Operating under the guise of humanitarian interventions, I have argued that the government aligns its antitrafficking initiatives overseas with a range of extraterritorial ventures designed to extend the UK’s borders overseas. Thus, I have attempted to illustrate how the discursive and institutional reframing of the vulnerable female, trafficked migrant has provided multiples spaces where governments can extend their ability to regulate their borders extraterritorially. Acknowledgments With the usual caveats, I wish to thank Vanessa E. Munro for her help with earlier drafts of this article. I wish to extend my thanks to my two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments strengthened this piece. Finally, I wish to thank the Editorial Board of Feminist Legal Studies for their editorial assistance.

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