1 research outputs found
Imaginary penalities: reconsidering anti-trafficking discourses and technologies
The antithesis between a criminalisation and a human rights approach in the context of
trafficking in women has been considered a highly contested issue. On the one hand, it is
argued that a criminalisation approach would be better, because security measures will be
fortified, the number of convictions will inevitably increase, and states’ interests will be
safeguarded against security threats. On the other hand, it is maintained that a human rights
approach would bring more effective results, as this will mobilise a more ‘holistic’
approach, bringing together prevention, prosecution, protection of victims and partnerships
in delivering gendered victim services. This antithesis, discursively constructed at an
international level, cuts across a decentralised reliance on the national competent
authorities.
To investigate this powerful discursive domain, I set these approaches within the larger
framework of a tripartite ‘anti-trafficking promise’ that aims to eliminate trafficking
through criminalisation, security and human rights. I ask how clearly and distinctively each
term has been articulated, by the official anti-trafficking actors (police and service
providers), and what the nature of their interaction is within the larger whole. In grappling
with these questions, I undertake both empirical and theoretical enquiry. The empirical part
is based on research I conducted at the Greek anti-trafficking mechanisms in 2008-2009.
The theoretical discussion draws, in particular, on the concept of ‘imaginary penalities’
introduced in the criminological work of Pat Carlen. I consider what it might mean to bring
this concept to bear in the context of anti-trafficking. In my analysis, criminalisation is
linked to a ‘toughness’ rhetoric, an ever-encroaching and totalising demand for criminal
governance. Security is shown to express the contemporary grammar of criminalisation,
crafting a global language of risks and threats as core elements of the post 9/11 ideological
conditions in the area of crime control. Finally, human rights are figured as tempering or
correcting the criminal law for the sake of victims’ protection. Together, these three
elements constitute a promise that, once they are balanced and stabilised, trafficking can be
abolished.
Yet it is not only trafficking that is at stake. My study shows how anti-trafficking
discursive formations also produce particular forms of subjectivity and conceptions of
class, sex, ethnicity and race. The upshot is to bring into focus the imaginary penalities at
the centre of anti-trafficking discourses and technologies, while also suggesting the
possibilities for contesting and transforming their subjects and fields of operation. The
thesis opens up the conceptual map of future critical engagement with the relation of
structural inequalities and imaginary penalities