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’.
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Notes
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.
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.
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).
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EC Thematic Programme is based on Regulation. No 1905/2006. Establishing a financing instrument for development cooperation (DCI Regulation).
Directive on return of illegal immigrants. 2008/115/EC.
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.
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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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FitzGerald, S.A. Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and Human Trafficking. Fem Leg Stud 20, 227–244 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9210-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9210-0