Here’s how the United Nations officially defines “human trafficking”:
(a) “Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;
(b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used;
(c) The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered “trafficking in persons” even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article;
(d) “Child” shall mean any person under eighteen years of age.
Part (a) isn’t awful, though “the abuse of power or of a position or vulnerability” could mean almost anything. Does charging a full year’s wages to help a poor farmer cross the border constitute “abuse of power or of position of vulnerability”? Most people would probably say yes – especially if the farmer desperate needs a smuggler’s help to flee famine or war.
It is part (b), however, that renders the whole definition a mockery of justice. Consent is “irrelevant”?! This is bizarre enough for sex work; whatever you think about prostitution, isn’t it far less evil than rape? The glaring question, though, is: If you accuse someone of imposing “forced labor or services” or “slavery,” how can consent not be a defense? How?!
Parts (c) and (d) go further by pretending that even the most scrupulous smuggler – a smuggler dutifully acting with full parental approval – automatically “exploits” any children he serves. If it wouldn’t be child abuse for your parents to help you cross the border, how is it child abuse for your parents to hire someone to do so on their behalf?
Basic economics reminds us that the creation of victimless “crimes” fosters actual crime. After all, once the law labels peaceful behavior “criminal,” even a peaceful participant in such “crimes” will fear to alert the authorities if they happen to be the victim of fraud, violence, or slavery.
Still, this hardly means that blacks markets typically yield bad results. Black markets endure because they’re a lot better than doing without. Indeed, shrewd black marketeers often make great efforts to build reputations for good customer service. The U.N. willfully ignores these truisms.
What’s behind all this? My best story: The U.N.’s Orwellian abuse of language is a rhetorically effective way to advance the anti-immigration agenda to which, regardless of their public postures, almost all governments subscribe. Rather than directly blame desperate migrants, the U.N. strategically demonizes the businesses that serve their needs. If international elites really cared about migrant abuse, they’d push for legalization so immigrants could freely report abusive treatment – not legal trickery to equate consensual trade with “abuse.”
Update: Two friends with a lot of legal training tell me I’m misreading the U.N.’s definition. Most importantly, they say that consent to exploitation is only irrelevant if the original transportation was non-consensual or otherwise tainted. That’s definitely what I would argue if I were the lawyer for an accused trafficker. But the type of scenario my friends envision still seems rather fanciful to me. Something like: X forcibly abducts you, then consensually hires you. Then when he’s arrested, he claims no wrong-doing on the grounds that you voluntarily worked for him after you arrived. Can that really be the legal tactic that (b) is trying to prevent?
READER COMMENTS
WMF
Jul 5 2018 at 11:02pm
This doesn’t seem quite right. Section C doesn’t seem to expand the scope of “exploitation.” Rather, it expands the scope of “trafficking.”
Lawrence Ator
Jul 6 2018 at 12:25am
I think you’ve misread this. (b) says consent will be relevant if any of the ‘means’ mentioned in (a) are used. (a) describes both means and ends. The means in (a) are:
“… by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person…”
The phrase following that (“… for the purpose of…”) is the segue from means to ends. The ends in (a) are the list of things it defines as ‘exploitation’, which includes prostitution and slavery.
So (b) is not saying that consent is irrelevant in all cases of prostitution or slavery, only in those cases where the above quoted means are used to bring about the prostitution or slavery.
Evan Smiley
Jul 6 2018 at 11:03am
”Exploitation” is such a weasel word (as Marxists we’ll know.)
There’s nothing wrong IMO with “exploiting” the fact that someone is in a bad situation, so long as you’re not doing anything to cause or perpetuate that situation.
David J
Jul 6 2018 at 11:11am
I think there is a very important clause toward the end of the first sentence of section (a):
That, to me, would make the desperate farmer example unworkable since the point of the trafficking at then becomes the fulfillment of an obligation to render services the farmer paid for, assuming that the “trafficker” lets the farmer go free once they reach their intended definition. Where I see this being problematic is that it specifically calls out prostitution as an unacceptable occupation for recipients of moving services. If someone wants to work as a prostitute in another location, why is it a crime to transport them there? Does this make transportation companies (e.g. United Airlines) guilty of “human trafficking” whenever they sell tickets to sex workers? Will we have to agree not to prostitute ourselves at our destination whenever we ride a city bus or hop on a plane?
Michael Stack
Jul 6 2018 at 4:35pm
This is all unfortunately quite predictable. I remember when i first heard the term “human trafficking” thrown around regarding sex work. People conflate voluntary prostitution with trafficking (I suspect sometimes on purpose, to hide the distinction of consent). Often in the news you’ll read reports of trafficking, but read closely and you’ll see that it was simply voluntary prostitution. Of course, the average person isn’t concerned with the U.N. definition of trafficking, he’s only thinking about what it means in laymen’s terms; when reading reports of trafficking, he reasonably concludes that there must not have been consent.
It reminds me a bit of ‘poverty’, where the definition of poverty that academics use doesn’t match the intuition most people have of poverty, and activists use this to their advantage (“60 million Americans are living in poverty!”)
I see frantic Facebook posts about sex trafficking in the United States, but if you dig into the FBI crime records, you’ll find that true trafficking in the US is very rare (which makes sense).
Mark Z
Jul 8 2018 at 8:31pm
It’s seriously doubtful that the UN is taking these positions to buttress anti-immigration polices (just look at the politics of the UN on migration). Rather, this seems to be about prostitution, and the UN is taking the feminist position that prostitution is inherently non-consensual and exploitative.
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