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Security, Equality, and the Clash of Ideas: Sweden's Evolving Anti-Trafficking Policy

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Abstract

Seeking to explain the emergence of anti-trafficking initiatives, scholars have explored two sets of ideas—national security and gender equality—thought to shape policy. In this study, we examine whether such ideational influence accounts for Sweden's evolving anti-trafficking policy over the past decade. As powerful domestic ideas about gender inequality informed the adoption of an abolitionist prostitution policy in the 1990s, one would expect similar ideas to influence domestic responses to the related issue of cross-border trafficking.

However, our case study shows that the policy area of trafficking has largely followed a different ideational path. Gendered ideas, periodically nested in a human rights discourse, have been salient in the public debate on trafficking in human beings, especially during the campaign to boycott the 2006 FIFA World Cup. However, they have exerted substantially less influence on Swedish legislative initiatives to combat trafficking, with security concerns still holding sway.

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Notes

  1. The term trafficking itself is a matter of contention in political debates. Notably, when the United Nations adopted the Palermo Protocols in 2003, it defined trafficking as having the purpose of exploitation, including “the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation.” However, the term “sexual exploitation” was left undefined, as parties could not agree on a definition. Since we are interested in precisely how policy agents construe and construct the phenomenon of trafficking, we stipulate no particular definition of the term. For the remainder of this article, we use the term trafficking as shorthand for “trafficking in women and children for sexual purposes.” We do not focus on other forms of trafficking in human beings, such as for the purposes of employment.

  2. These provisions were enacted in conjunction with the 2006 government bill ensuring that Sweden was in compliance with the European Community's 2004 directive on temporary residence permits for victims of trafficking for sexual purposes (Government of Sweden 2007).

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Acknowledgments

Research for this article was funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK

    Gregg Bucken-Knapp & Karin Persson Strömbäck

  2. Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 6706, St. Olavs plass 5, N-0130, Oslo, Norway

    Johan Karlsson Schaffer

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  1. Gregg Bucken-Knapp
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  2. Johan Karlsson Schaffer
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  3. Karin Persson Strömbäck
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Correspondence to Gregg Bucken-Knapp.

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Bucken-Knapp, G., Karlsson Schaffer, J. & Persson Strömbäck, K. Security, Equality, and the Clash of Ideas: Sweden's Evolving Anti-Trafficking Policy. Hum Rights Rev 13, 167–185 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-011-0214-y

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