ENG122 HELP

CHAPTER THREE

TRAFFICKING IDENTITY

Introduction and outline

This chapter explores trafficked women’s lived experiences of identity. It is the first of three practical applications - applying what is known in the trafficking discourse to women’s experience and harnessing lived experience to challenge existing knowledge of trafficking. The chapter opens with the dominant imagery of a victim of trafficking as portrayed through media and awareness raising campaigns, before looking at what trafficked women say both about their trafficking selves and as survivors with a pre-trafficking persona. The chapter centrally explores the gains and losses contained within the victim imagery and the “trauma story” for women’s agency and, in so doing, also considers how professionals assist and resist women’s right to express agency within trafficking.

The imagery of a victim of trafficking (VoT)

Human Trafficking is unequivocally defined and legislated for as a criminal activity. The United Nations “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children” provides the internationally recognised definition under the criminal frame of the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (2000). According to this definition, human trafficking is a criminal process involving

“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” (UN, 2000a: 3a)

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 6 . C a m b r i d g e S c h o l a r s P u b l i s h i n g .

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Chapter Three 44

This overarching legislative frame conceptualises trafficking as the illegal trade in persons (reframed as modern-day slavery – Slavery Working Group, 2013) and the perpetrators as involved in serious and organised criminal activity. Set against this frame, the claim to a VoT status by the presumed victim of trafficking becomes susceptible to properties and characteristics ascribed to a victim of crime. The closer a woman’s fit to established victim of crime norms, the easier she is to identify and accept as a genuine victim of trafficking crime. The crime norms of an ideal victim and the right sort of victim are now considered for their effects on women’s agency.

The ideal crime victim

Aradau (2004:262) observes that the distinguishing mark of a trafficked woman is her “raw physical suffering”. This is fixed in physical imagery depicting the trafficked woman as the “body in pain: pierced, bleeding and defenceless”. This imagery is widely perpetuated via the media in films such as “Lilya 4-ever” (2002), “Taken” (2008), “Cargo” (2011), “Eden” (2012) and through television movies, for example, “Sex Traffic” (2004), “Human Trafficking” (2005), and “I Am Slave” (2010). Figure 3-1 below serves as a pictorial example of this.

This visual imagery in trafficking victimhood is also utilised in other fora of media and public information exchange. A London march led by Emma Thompson on 19th September, 2007, involved “mourners” filing behind a horse drawn hearse, imaging Human Trafficking in pain, suffering, victimhood and death1. A walk in art installation “Journey” – which toured capital cities between 2007 and 2008 - invited members of the public to walk through seven transport containers deploying sensory stimuli to recreate the violence in sex trafficking. Containers labelled “Uniform”, “Bedroom” and “Customer” used puppets and props to graphically portray the brutal abuse of women trafficked for sexual exploitation. For example, a stained bed alongside one container wall was piled high with bodies enacting acts of rough sex2. This descriptor of physical injury resulting from assault or other controlling measures tops the list of trafficking indicators rolled out to front-line staff by the Home Office (2013a).

The popularity and power of such VoT descriptions can be both understood and explained as residing in their ability to connect with unconditional public sympathy. These victims of human trafficking are Christie’s (1986) “ideal” crime victims - women so vulnerable, blameless, unambiguous and uncomplicated as to embody their victim status. This

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ideal and ab and readily trafficking.

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Chapter Three 46

with other trafficked (but not physically broken) women and with other criminally and ethically exploited migrants alike. As Aradau (2004: 262) explains

“Where their trajectory might have coincided with that of a migrant or prostitute, suffering is redeeming. Trafficked women are disidentified from categories of migrants, criminals or prostitutes by the emphasis on raw physical suffering”.

This powerless, broken and defeated portrayal of the VoT is instrumental in segregating women who eschew any consent to prostitution from those choosing to work and remain in the entertainment and sex industries (Doezema, 1998; 2000; Chapkis, 2005). Diametrically positioned in the trafficking discourse as the pure “Madonnas” deserving of protection, as opposed to the guilty “whores” (complicit in sex work and undeserving of help: Doezema, 1998: 47), these constructs cloud professional judgements (O’Connell Davidson, 2006) and impact both on VoT identifications (Kelly, 2002; 2005) and immigration assessments (Chapkis, 2003)3. For Skeldon (2000), this gendered and powerless embodiment carries an unintended consequence for men. The emphasis on passivity and deservability serves to deny a place for men in the trafficking discourse, since men are typically imagined as agentic beings within global movements and as less susceptible than women and children to sexual victimisation and prostitution. This gendered perception of a male absence in trafficking, particularly for sexual exploitation, is unconsciously reinforced by men’s reluctance to disclose instances of sexual assault within sex work (Connell and Hart, 2003) or to express their vulnerability in forced marriages (Samad, 2010).

This dominant and populist victim imagery is also harnessed by anti- trafficking campaigns targeting trafficking as modern-day slavery. In line with the Protocol’s aims of prevention, protection, and promotion of cooperation among state parties (Article 2) – the “3-P”s for combatting trafficking crime – awareness campaigns engage the eyes and ears of actors in civil society to curb the international and domestic trade in human beings. These campaigns hold merit for disseminating information regarding the dynamic and fluid nature of human trafficking activity (ILO, 2012). For example, the latest awareness raising campaign (rolled out by the Home Office in August, 2014, via the media) shows perpetrators emerging into an everyday situation following their respective roles in scenes of sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and forced rural labour4. These scenes reflect evidential concerns for the presence of trafficking victims in these areas both internationally and within the UK

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Trafficking Identity 47

(Skrivankova, 2006; UNODC, 2009; 2012; UKHTC, 2011; GRETA, 2012; SOCA, 2012). Although it is imperative to recognise that forced labour and human trafficking are not the same, they overlap when labour exploitation is the purpose in human trafficking (Skrivankova, 2014: 4). Under the rhetoric of modern slavery, the exploitations in forced labour have arguably gained a new lease in public consciousness and social disapprobation.

The problem with being asked to recognise the signs in contemporary slavery, however, is that they also rely on indicators describing how we should perceive this victim in human trafficking. Aside from physical injury, some of the other indicators in trafficking are:

a woman’s appearance - does she look fearful, depressed or under-

nourished? her papers - does she have hold of her own passport or work or

marriage visa? is she able to speak for herself? is she in contact with friends and family? and is she escorted to and from her place of work? (HO, 2013a; HO,

2013b; Salvation Army, 2013). By promoting such official indicators, awareness campaigns reinforce

a subjugated and unagentic view of a trafficked woman, one who is homogenised in victimhood. As Hitchcox (1993: 157) observes for official perceptions of asylum seekers, naturalising any diverse social grouping to a category of persons with identical circumstances, problems and needs serves as a “process of reification that is inclined to equate the individual with the state of being a refugee”, or in this instance – a trafficking victim. Scholars raise particular critiques of this rescue campaign in sex trafficking precisely because it homogenises trafficked women with migrant sex workers and conflates sex work with involuntary prostitution (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Outshoorn, 2005; Doezema, 2005). For Agustin (2003), not all movements involving sex are related to trafficking and need to be explored as a combination of demand for sexual services and women’s supply of services. A woman’s involvement and response towards sex services is, in some measure, dependent upon her personal and sexual identity. Without this subjectivity, anti-trafficking campaigns run the risk of homogenising and stigmatising women’s diverse experiences – as an individual, a migrant, or as a worker - in trafficking victimhood5.

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48

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Trafficking Identity 49

surfacing solely in the criminal actions of the traffickers – the “doers” of crime. The “Blue Blindfold” anti-trafficking campaign – launched in 2007 under a Crime Stoppers agenda by the Home Office and Police-led Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) - illustrates this passive victim / criminally agentic trafficker to good effect. The “Don’t Close Your Eyes to Human Trafficking” awareness campaign deploys a series of posters, each featuring members of the public wearing a blue blindfold - symbolising their obliviousness to the crime of human trafficking taking place in their communities. The posters deliver a message that the Police require members of the public to work with them in rescuing victims, who may be reluctant or too frightened to come forward themselves6. In light of populist constructions depicting the VoT as totally passive, naive and enslaved, any knowledge or participation on the part of women in the trafficking process runs the risk of attracting criminal justice or immigration sanctions. As Mai (2009: np) suggests:

“Tackling demand as solely criminal and reducing women’s varied trajectories within global movements (especially for sex work) to a singular victim narrative, effectively drives women’s agency underground, creating a hostile environment for the trafficked as well as for the traffickers”.

This hostile environment for agency carries real consequences for women seeking a VoT status. In order to gain this status, women have to enter the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) and pass two tests. The first “reasonable grounds” test triggers a low level threshold to credibility, along the lines of “Is this trafficking claim likely to be true”? The second and conclusive decision rests on a “balance of probabilities” test, indicating “reasonable likelihood” that trafficking has taken place. Officially rolled out in the UK on 1st April, 2009, the NRM relies on caseworkers in two Competent Authorities (CAs) to administer these tests, in accordance with Article 10 of the Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings (CoE, 2005). The Police-led Competent Authority (the UKHTC) gatekeeps presumed VoTs referred by any agency other than the UK Border Agency (UKBA), and the UKBA7 acts as the gatekeeper to presumed trafficked persons appearing in the Immigration and Asylum systems. A positive reasonable grounds finding, from either Competent Authority, creates eligibility to state funded support and a 45 day recovery and reflection period, and a positive conclusive decision may result in an initial one year residence permit (Home Office, 2008: 3). A negative trafficking decision, again from either CA, results in a person’s re-referral to their original project for support and could open the

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floodgates to detention and eventual deportation of the unsuccessful applicant, based on assessments of culpability, criminality and illegality surrounding entry and activity in the UK (GRETA, 2012).

According to the nearest NRM data for this period of story collection, referrals received between 1st April, 2009, and 30th June, 2011, totalled 1,664. Of these, 1192 (72%) were female, although it is not stated how many females were minors. Within this category, 692 females (58.1%) are recorded as gaining a reasonable grounds decision and 375 (31.5%) as gaining conclusive grounds. A negative reasonable grounds decision is recorded against 399 females (33.5%) and a negative conclusive decision against 180 females (15.1%) referred for protection and help. The remainder are accounted for as suspensions or withdrawals, or as undecided or negative outcomes (SOCA, 2011). This dual function of prosecuting the perpetrators (the doers in trafficking) and rescuing the sufferers (the done to in trafficking), embedded within some trafficking awareness campaigns, reaffirms the unagentic victim demeanour contained in the “doer-sufferer” model of criminal interaction.

New campaign tools, old images?

The introduction of cartoon imagery in anti-trafficking work was instigated by the Council of Europe to help promote awareness of the Convention (2005) amongst member States8. Under the “You’re Not for Sale” campaign, the cartoons depict four stories – Talina; two sisters named Anna and Sofia (one of whom is a youth; all of whom are trafficked for sexual exploitation); Fabia (trafficked into domestic servitude); and Yvo (a male trafficked into rural exploitation). The cartoon frames shown below portray this iconography in the stories of Talina and the two sisters named Anna and Sofia9.

Introduced with the goal of extending identifications of trafficking victims to newer and younger audiences, the use of “visual art” has become a recognised and established tool for engaging with the hidden and complex nature of “difficult to reach” and “difficult to tell” narratives within the Social Sciences. For example, it has been successfully used in participatory action research with sex workers10. Within asylum and refugee contexts, art has conveyed the experiences of new asylum arrivals in the UK (see O’ Neill et al, 2004), and remains instrumental in building understanding of how refugee women recreate belonging in a new country11. In comparison, the use of artistic visuals within human trafficking (as in “Journey” and the Council of Europe cartoons) have been more conventionally deployed to cascade prevailing messages in

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52 Chapter TThree

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Trafficking

Identity 53

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Trafficking Identity 55

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56 Chapter TThree

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Trafficking Identity 57

An artistic theatre production “Fair Trade” – an Edinburgh Fringe Festival show about two women tricked into sexual slavery in the UK – is similarly critiqued for reinforcing, rather than challenging, prevailing populist perceptions. According to Fringe Review (2010: np), the case in sexual victimisation is convincingly made but, in doing so, “Fair Trade” reduces Elena from Albania and Samai from Darfur (the two central characters) to “black-and-white caricatures” of the persons they represent.

An awareness raising tour in the state of Florida (2014) provides further example of this trend and its ongoing popularity. “Walking in their Footsteps” is designed as an interactive theatre experience in which audience members are given an identity and taken through the indicative processes of trafficking – starting with the recruiter and ending in a Border Police interview. The intention is for ordinary members of the public (albeit in a controlled way) to experience being trafficked and its negative effects on their humanity. All of these innovative and creative art works play a vital role in educating the public on trafficking harms. However, the new tools are also in danger of re-energising the familiar and unagentic VoT imagery despite theorisations of contemporary trafficking as a subset of migration (Andrijasevic, 2003; Agustin, 2005; 2006; Berman, 2010).

Set against this media and campaign backdrop of the “ideal” and “right sort” of trafficking victim, the next section explores how women in this collection identify themselves.

Women’s sense of a trafficked self

The women in this study display an awareness of having been trafficked. Most refer to themselves as “victims” and when asked if they have been trafficked, the majority say “yes”. This process of self- identification suggests women own a sense of their trafficked selves. For many women, this self-awareness hails from a specific event and corresponds with trafficking indicators within official guidelines and toolkits. One of the top ways women describe a victim of trafficking identity is through the loss of visas and passports. Laila - who was forcibly taken out of the UK to Pakistan - communicates her sense of a trafficking self in this way:

“I had to stay there [Pakistan] and was told after about 3 to 4 months that if I didn’t get married, I wouldn’t be able to return to the UK. I had my passport taken away from me so I couldn’t prove who I was... He knew from day one I didn’t wanna marry him. Mmm, he knew that very well and I even spoke to him before, without anyone knowing, I said I don’t want to marry you, please, you know, if anyone can stop it, at least maybe the guy

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has a say, the girl doesn’t, no! But he wanted to come to the UK, didn’t he, and I was his passport”. (Laila)

Nina - who is deceived into a fake marriage within the home and exploited for labour outside of the home - comes to a similar realisation of her trafficked self through the removal of her papers:

“My mother-in-law just told me pack my luggage, go with them to the airport and when I came to Heathrow, my British husband and his brother and his sister came to met me and when I got my bags I just get in car. My sister-in-law say where your passport? I was really shocked and I give it to her - I was thinking what happen to my mum and dad. When I arrived, my mother-in-law say same thing, where is your passport? You know, now I know, this is really important. At that time, I didn’t realise how much, what it means to give over your passport…to give away who you are”. (Nina)

Another way women self-identify as trafficked is through one of the three processes defining trafficking – “movement; by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, or 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; for exploitation” (UN, 2000a: Article 3). For Sofia, her sense of being a victim of trafficking stems from the fraudulent transactions marking her debt bondage:

“My friend had managed to get a passport and she introduced me to these people. It was explained that I would go to Brussels and meet a Lithuanian woman who would provide me with a passport. I had to pay so much up front for the passport - about 500.00 euro. I arrived in Brussels and my expectation was to have work in a hotel, where I would get a wage to send money [remittances] to my family back home. This [working abroad] was meant to be temporary... but from starting, travelling across Europe, to arrival in the UK - it took almost a year! I hadn’t the money to pay for this travel, my food, or accommodation”. (Sofia)

Cemile’s sense of a trafficked self is located in the deception and abuses of power surrounding her vulnerability within transnational marriage:

“I told him before marriage the kind of woman I am. I was honest and open with him. I can do this, this and this, but I can’t do this, this and this. And I got my visa after 3 months and travelled here [to the UK] with my box [luggage]. I was worried at the time because I was alone. Your husband

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knows everywhere and everything and you don’t know anything. It was bad from the beginning. I tried to excuse and keep waiting...but I don’t know what he was like in his first marriage. He married a British woman and she left him for another man. I think I am paying the bill [the price] for that. I had a shock”! (Cemile)

Another descriptor used by women to self-identify as a VoT is that of slavery - “modern day” and “sex” slave. During interview, many women apply the language of slavery to themselves. For example, Aarti refers to herself as a “modern slave”, Tamara as “a victim of human slavery”, Laila as having been “held in slavery”, Nina as having been “treated as a slave” and Fatuma uses the term “prostitute slave”. Several women in the focus group refer to living and working in conditions akin to a “slave”. In describing their experiences, women use recognised “slavery-like practices” of not being paid for their labour, having little say in decision making, having their movements curtailed, and generally lacking control over their own lives (Bales, 2005).

Such appropriation of a recognised benchmark – be it a trafficking indicator, a process constitutive of trafficking, or a slavery descriptor – poses an interpretational challenge for women’s agency. Their usage suggests women are clearly aware of trafficking talk as configured by the State and rehearsed through media and public campaigns, and of its capital for accessing trafficking help. Slavery identifications in particular highlight the power of victim constructions despite evidential challenges to the contrary12. Significantly, the vast majority of women in this collection do not apply known identifiers to demonstrate their fit with the “ideal” victim (one who is physically broken); the “right sort” of victim (one who is totally passive); or with slavery per se (defined as “total control of one person by another for economic exploitation”: Bales, 1999: 6). Women’s usage can be traced to two specific dynamics considered below.

Firstly, women’s deeply moving and disturbing identifications with known trafficking indicators and descriptors proves helpful in conveying a sense of their trafficked selves to the interviewer. This becomes clear in their use of introductory phrases like: “If I say to you that...” and “if I show myself as...” then the interviewer (the outsider within) would be able to understand their personal and often painful stories. Using the example of slavery, women draw on available knowledge to help them make sense of what has happened to them, and to convey this subjective awareness to others. Fatuma uses the term “prostitute slave” to express her sense of being trafficked into sexual exploitation:

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“He was keeping me in a flat for sex, anytime he just wants me, he just come to me and give me those £40.00 and calling me a wife - that’s not a wife! It’s like he just want to sexually dominate me because he know my background and that I can never go back. I trusted him, to be with him and, in the beginning, he used me as a prostitute slave in the marriage, and soon he kept me as a prostitute slave for sell to his friends”. (Fatuma)

Secondly, many women use the language of slavery in relation to unfulfilled personal hopes and dreams and not as relative to slavery-like, “ideal”, or “right sort” of victim properties. Fatuma’s description of herself in the language and imagery of sexual slavery is measured against her pre-trafficking aspirations for independence via a second marriage based on Western ideals of love and friendship. This had been promised to her by her trafficker (the man she referred to as her second husband).

“Reason for coming to this country was marriage and, as part of that marriage, I was promised my dreams would come true and I would have a good life and be safe... When we came, we were in a flat and he said to me, if anyone asks you, you say you are my wife. He didn’t give me my passport. He was keeping it. He said I have to hold it for you as I am now your guardian [responsible for you]. All these things, you know if your husband tells you, you tend to believe them and you want to make life smoother and not harder for yourself. I trusted him then... It was like a bombshell in my face! They just come to you in the middle of the night. There is no life, no love. I have no opinion to speak. I would call it slavery in this life”. (Fatuma)

Nina draws her comparison with slavery against expressed hopes and promises received of a better lifestyle, both for herself and her family back home.

“I speak to my mother-in-law and she say, ok, when you come over [to the UK], you can learn English, we can help you. My mother-in-law say, do you want to send money to your parents? [in the form of remittances to family back home in India]... They sent me to work in a factory for sewing, eight till six. My husband take me to the temple to learn English and, after 2 weeks, my mother-in-law stopped this. She said you make friends; you have no time to do the housework after temple, blah, blah, blah! I lived to work (cries)...They treat me just like a slave”. (Nina)

Aarti’s perception of herself as a “modern slave” is fostered and measured against her pre-trafficking hopes of furthering her social status through marriage to an educated and Western male. Aarti, who holds a

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Trafficking Identity 61

doctorate in organic chemistry, explains:

“I wanted to marry a professional who would give me a decent life, that’s all. My family, like his, has a sound background. His father was a highly posted engineer in Boeing - a very big company - and his mother, a child psychiatrist. All Western educated... I was told by my teachers that the biggest asset I could have in life was my education - it’s the real treasure. This asset, and everything that goes with it, has been snatched away from me and I feel this sense of loss for my identity. When a woman has no education, she is helped. But when a woman with education can’t make it, people think she is useless, a failure. Now I work like a modern slave and my family ask me, Aarti, what did we not do?” (Aarti)

Whilst all of the experiences above illustrate victimisation and exploitation, women’s hopes and dreams challenge popular and official conceptualisations of a VoT as someone forcibly removed, singularly passive, and physically brutalised. Women’s aspirations share little in common with Bales’ (1999) representation of the “new slave” as someone wholly subjugated and without choice. If anything, women’s identifications of being trafficked display a closer affinity with trafficking, as a subcategory of global migration, in which choices can quickly go wrong and movements have the potential to separate from expectation and turn bad (Agustin, 2006). In voicing the variables that lead them to accept a victim label, these women empower themselves against falling into the reification trap of being only a victim of trafficking, and a passive, enslaved, and physically defeated VoT at that, “and little else” (Hitchcox,1993: 157).

Women’s pre-trafficking persona

Women with a trafficking experience face challenges to their personal identities on another front. Not only do women face being placed into the homogenised grouping of a VoT, but this reduction threatens to strip women of a real and enduring sense of who they are – before and outside of their trafficking experience. In the same way that women possess a sense of their trafficked selves, women in this collection also maintain a pre-trafficking persona, which they communicate in a variety of ways.

One way women display their pre-trafficking persona is by identifying themselves through the jobs they performed pre-trafficking. Sofia, for example, sees herself as a professional health worker, albeit one struggling to find opportunities of practicing radiography under Moldova’s crumbling hospital infrastructure. As her case holder explains:

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“It took 5 years to gain this Diploma, which she got just as things started to break down in the Balkans. One of the hospitals in her capital city had just closed and was not taking any new trainees and the second closed down for lack of equipment. The door on her career was just about closed...she needed to re-invent herself as a radiographer elsewhere”. (GEO 5)

Tamara describes herself to me, before being trafficked, in the detail of her occupation as a bridal dress designer, and Luul defines herself as a skilled labourer. Luul’s personal identification is one she continues to make for herself both during her movement and after her classification by UK Immigration authorities as an asylum seeker.

“During my journey from Somalia to Nairobi, I was given work making mink blankets. This work is difficult to come by and do, and not everyone can do it. It’s skilled unlike factory or farm work which needs manual workers. Now I work as a volunteer for [a named voluntary agency] who need someone with my sort of skills”. (Luul)

For other women in this collection, who they are is fashioned in their pre-trafficking achievements; most commonly expressed in educational, travel and life experiences outside of their local districts and / or countries of origin.

“I am highly educated. I am a person with three degrees - a Bachelor of Science (combined chemistry, botany, zoology), a Master of Science in physical chemistry, and a PhD in organic chemistry. So I started teaching in a school... I was very happy”. (Aarti)

“We are all artists. Mother teach art to students preparing for University in Istanbul. One sister is a painter, another - an interior designer. I dance. My father always say: why nobody takes his side as he is a musician!” (Cemile)

Further on in her interview, Cemile adds:

“I am a folk dancer in my country and was dancing professional for eight years and with my folk dance company, we travelled most of my country during summer. Invited for dance festivals, we visited many other countries - it was very cultural life”. (Cemile)

Still other women draw meaning for their pre-trafficked personas from their role and responsibilities within the family. As Surtees (2003) and Bales (2003) note, many Asian cultures impose a gendered role

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expectation upon female children – wherein daughters repay a debt of gratitude to mothers for having brought them up. Nina accepts this dutiful daughter identity and feels its impact in her mother’s attempts to trade her for marriage and work abroad. Sofia - motivated more from a sense of moral duty rather than cultural expectations - also identifies herself through her obligations to her family. From her position as the family’s strongest provider, her caseworker describes Sofia’s moral responsibilities to her family in this way:

“Her current stress is born from a person wondering how she will be able to repay her family...The family struggled to put her through University, where she trained to be a radiographer. She now faces unemployment when deported, at a time when her mother is seriously ill with cancer”. (GEO 5)

A woman’s pre-trafficking persona is also helpful for understanding women’s holistic and complex appreciation of identity. In Sofia’s case, her pre-trafficking persona is fully conveyed as a combination of three elements: professional health worker, dutiful daughter, and primary provider. Likewise, Luul’s sense of her pre-trafficked persona is defined by her abilities as a skilled labourer, but also through her relationship as a mother to her three-year-old daughter. Tamara, too, defines her sense of self outside trafficking as a bridal designer and as the mother of three young children. This is not to suggest that all individuals with a trafficking experience escape a life lived in victimhood. Where someone is trafficked from a very young age and many times over, there is little possibility of developing a sense of self outside of trafficking. This is relevant to Tijana’s story. As someone orphaned at age two, used as a child labourer to sell food on street corners by age eight, trafficked from Nigeria to Italy for prostitution at thirteen, and re trafficked to the UK in her early twenties, it is impossible to gain any impression of Tijana outside of a victim of trafficking identity. Tijana’s story corresponds with the extreme end of trafficking rooted in criminal victimisation and exploitation.

In stark contrast nowhere is identity - as situated in the pre-trafficking persona - stronger and more transparent than in the focus group. The focus group women maintain and communicate a keen sense of their pre- trafficking personas in two significant ways. One of these is through the preparation and production of ethnic dishes and cuisine (which supplemented the formal buffet donated by a charity). In keeping with Lewis’ (2007) ethnographic findings for UK asylum seekers and refugees, tasting a favourite cake or type of bread, especially one made with the correct spices, flour or fruit, reconnects women with events and roles lived

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outside of trafficking. The bringing of parathas (Indian flat bread), loubia (an Algerian bean and almond salad), bishbosa (a Sudanese semolina cake) and many more food items act as powerful and tangible reminders of life back home. By keeping culinary cultural traditions alive in this way, the focus group women are able to sustain and nourish vivid memories of a pre-trafficking persona. The other very tangible way of connecting to life outside of trafficking is through ethnic dress. Women turned up for the focus group wearing saris (traditional Indian dress), hijabs (a Muslim headscarf which covers the head and neck but leaves the face free) and a mussor (a Gambian head dress cut from vividly dyed cloth). Such practices serve to tie women to life pre-trafficking, and to ascribe it meaning drawn from cultural identity and traditions forged in their pre- trafficking memories. As Buijs (1993: 3) observes for female migrants and exiles:

“It is the already lived that saves the living. If familiar places are sometimes able to leave us, they are also able to come back to our notice, and to our great comfort, to retake their original place”. (Buijs’ translation of Poulet, 1983: 163)

In her research on refugee communities, Lewis (2007: 119) observes a place for food in creating a safe and positive sense of community amongst refugees dispersed to unfamiliar and often hostile environments:

“Sharing food was an area where community was constructed as practice - actualised in social relations rather than imagined. In comparison to the contested domain of RCO [Refugee Community Organisation] discourse, eating together was a practice where communality precluded contestation, adopting the “feel-good” factor of community”.

In much the same way, a focus group setting - offering women greater ownership of the interview process coupled with the aforementioned tangible and powerful factors of food and dress - forged the focus group into a safe communal space. From a position of collective strength, the focus group women act as supports and prompts for each other, encouraging the extent of their entrepreneurial abilities and talents to surface. This reveals women in pre-trafficking personas not typically shared by others outside the safety of the focus group. Several focus group members witnessed to being “grey market” traders (sellers on the fringes of illegal trading), others to being a sex worker, a self-taught midwife, and a distiller of homemade spirits. In the shared safety of the focus group community, women are able to recall private and transgressive memories

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of their past and of home. In this uncontested domain away from external sanctions, women appear freer and happier to define themselves outside of gendered and tradition-bound roles of dependency and respectability.

The gains and losses in a victim narrative

So why do women so readily express their stories of trafficking through the victim narrative? This section goes on to explore this question.

Kleinman and Kleinman (1997: 9-10) explain the effects that successful media and campaign constructions have upon policy issues they seek to expose and redress in this way:

“When those whose suffering is appropriated by the media cross over to places of refuge and safety, they often must submit to yet another type of aggregation. Their memories (their intimately interior images) of violation are made over into trauma stories. These trauma stories then become the currency, the symbolic capital, with which they enter exchanges for physical resources and achieve the status of political refugee. Increasingly, those complicated stories, based in real events, yet reduced to a core cultural image of victimization (a postmodern hallmark), are used by health professionals to rewrite social experience in medical terms”.

Applied to a trafficking context, all women with a trafficking experience possess their own personal trauma story, often individually couched in terms of loss, exploitation, deception, violence, captivity, and fear. Potentially, all these women (as well as their supporting organisations) have the ability to derive some benefit from a trauma story. Taylor (1999) locates this benefit in consumerism, since victims have the power to be both patrons and producers of victim services. Anti-trafficking professionals openly acknowledge this, often referring to their work as a “business” (Senior GEO 3), as “stakeholder rich” (Senior GEO 2) and as providers in a “service intense” economy (NGO Project manager). Criminologists outside of trafficking also note the gains for female offenders in complying with a victim identity (Williams, 2004; Davies, 2007). In amongst them are the benefits of sympathetic treatment, more lenient penalties, women orientated community programmes, and an approach to policy development which is gender friendly and “needs-led”.

For women with a trafficking experience, the Kleinmans’ trauma story converts into a “currency” qualifying her to access state controlled protection and trafficking assistance. As internationally prescribed and NRM regulated, these protections take three vital forms. Firstly, as a presumed-trafficked person, victims of trafficking gain access to state

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funded and specialist VoT services. At a minimum, these include access to safe accommodation and a basic standard of living, emergency medical treatment, translation and interpretation services, counselling and rights based information, legal help, and education for children (CoE, 2005: 12.1). Secondly, it provides women with a minimum reflection period of 30 days and a 6 month temporary residence order, raised by the UK Action Plan to 45 days and 12 months respectively for UK victims of trafficking (Home Office, 2008: 3; 2009b: 50). Thirdly, under UK ratification of the Convention in December, 2008, women are given the safeguard that, whatever their immigration status at the point of discovery, women will not be deported before a conclusive outcome has been reached:

“…if the competent authorities have reasonable grounds to believe that a person has been a victim of trafficking in human beings, that person shall not be removed from its territory until the identification process as victim [as defined by the Protocol] has been completed by the competent authorities and shall likewise ensure that that person receives the assistance provided for in Article 12, paragraphs 1 and 2” (CoE, 2005: Article10.2)13.

In welcoming the introduction of the NRM, senior GEOs responsible for its implementation and GEOs involved in its day to day running voiced a similar hope that these protective measures would dispel traffickers’ threats (as illustrated in Tamara’s interview) that rescue brings certain imprisonment.

“When I was here in this country, they [the traffickers] told me for three to five years, I would be in jail because I come here illegally. That’s what I knew. That people like me would get beaten up in jails and die”. (Tamara)

Whilst the telling of a trauma story affords women access to much needed safeguards and services, some women (and their supporting agencies) highlight the constraints contained within it for agency. A central and negative complaint for the trauma story is its impact on autonomy. In submitting to any formal process offering protection (whether pre or post introduction of the NRM), women give consent to external decision makers, who form opinions on the credibility of their stories and on their status as VoTs. In describing their interviews with official gatekeepers (typically the Police, immigration case holders, Police doctors, health visitors, and social workers) women say they cannot be themselves or properly tell their stories for fear of giving decision makers the wrong impression. Women describe this loss of self-determination as

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trading the constraints of traffickers for a fresh set of controls at the hands of official actors, leaving them feeling equally “scared”, “on my own”, “very lonely”, “tricked” and “betrayed”. This loss of autonomy to an external body, as in the NRM, is equally bemoaned by previously independent providers of services for these women.

“When we first started off, it was our decision who we took and supported from referrals made directly to us...Our agenda reflected our experience of trafficking - that, in itself, limits the kind of input we can contribute to policy development... Now our funding is such that women have to become part of the NRM, if they want the chance to be supported by us as a key refuge service for trafficked women”. (NGO Project manager)

The importance women ascribe to re-gaining control is evidenced in Luul’s story. As someone smuggled into trafficking, Luul has a choice between applying for a VoT status and seeking asylum. Luul chose asylum based on the agency it imbues to the actions of an exiled person compared to the victim of trafficking. In light of all she had already lost of her identity and life in Somalia, regaining some measure of control over her actions was critical to her overall well-being – a factor widely acknowledged in migration literature on exiled women (Eastmond, 1993; Tribe, 2002; Khan and Watson, 2005).

The criticality in reclaiming control is complemented in NGO accounts of why some trafficked women refuse a referral to the NRM despite the help on offer.

“The impact of being a victim in the NRM is that, once more, women’s lives are again in someone else’s hands”. (NGO Project manager)

“There is a complex response from women to this whole idea of being identified as a victim. If you submit to the label you get services which go with the categorisation. But, we’ve seen survivors here who never want to talk about it again, want to move out in to the community and don’t want anything special or different to mainstream services. They just want to control their own lives again. It’s about letting women choose. That’s what we try to do here”. (NGO Support worker)14

Scholars highlight additional concerns in embracing the victim narrative. For Davies (2007: 187), this caution resides in its capacity to reproduce “prescriptive notions”, as in pre-existing and gendered stereotypes of a victim. Although Davies directs this warning towards women’s own use of a victim narrative, it also has poignancy for the way professionals apply a victim narrative to the identification of trafficked

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women. Tamara’s first encounter with UK police provides an example of the dangers inherent in prescriptive notions of a sex trafficked VoT. Reflecting back on her personal memory, Tamara adds the following valuable insight on her misidentification:

“They never asked me what I think. Only told me what they think! Eventually, they let me go. Told me to go to Home Office for asylum! Told me there was no reason to keep me. I think they saw me walk into the police station on my own, dressed for sex, and thought I was foreign prostitute… I never made it to go [to the Home Office]. As soon as I leave police station, I was found by men and returned to my owner [trafficker]. The police knew nothing”. (Tamara)

This particular prescription is sustained by the ongoing moral rift between prostitution as violence against women (Jeffreys, 1997) and sex as legitimate work with rights to health and safety, including union protection (Doezema, 2005; Lopes, 2006)15. As previously raised, on one side of this rift, trafficked women eschewing any consent to prostitution become “Madonnas”- innocent of blame and worthy of trafficking protection and support. On the other, trafficked migrants – often sex workers in their country of origin and with no design to exit prostitution - become the guilty and undeserving “whores” in trafficking-related assessments and provision (Doezema, 1998: 47). Since selling sex is illegal in the UK (Sanders and Campbell, 2007; Home Office, 2011a), VoTs face questioning and sanctions over their consent in prostitution related activity (as happens when victims are discovered during raids on brothels and massage parlors). The new strict liability offence of purchasing sex from a trafficked woman does not assist in de-constructing this deserving / undeserving victim prescription. Introduced under the Policing and Crime Act (2009: 1416), “paying for the sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force” is a strict liability offence ensuring clients will be prosecuted even if unaware that the woman has been made to perform sex. The lack of distinction drawn between trafficking for sexual exploitation and migrant sex work homogenises all women viewed as choosing sex work and all men who purchase sexual services as equally deviant and culpable for the consequences.

Kelly (2002), Bales (2003) and Brennan (2005) raise a further danger specific to trafficked women from publicly voicing a victim narrative. Once again, this danger arises from public misconceptions over sexual exploitation, sex work and prostitution, which create dilemmas for trafficked women. On the one hand, remaining silent precludes women from sharing their victimisation in the public domain, reproducing old

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patterns of keeping “men’s secrets” in domestic violence and sexual assault. On the other hand, opening women’s sexual exploitation to public scrutiny may endanger their reputation and lives in cultures operating strict moral and sexual codes. Brennan suggests such dilemmas demarcate community as a contested space in which responses reflect moral attitudes towards prostitution and personal decision making.

“Although similarities emerge between refugees and trafficked persons... groups often diverge on the issue of community support. Trauma counsellors who work with trafficked persons in the United States report that the larger community of immigrants where trafficked persons settle (usually composed of co-ethnics) often stigmatizes and rejects trafficked persons” (Brennan, 2005: 42-43)17.

Interestingly, stories in this collection show aspects both of confirmation and challenge for a contested community. Although Tamara’s story presents a perfect fit with text book understandings of sex trafficking, and despite recognising her own experience as trafficking, Tamara chooses not to identify herself publicly as a VoT. Tamara prefers a range of other terms to describe her situation. Primary amongst these are “bondage”, “debt bondage”, being “bought and sold on” and a “victim of human slavery”. Tamara explains that her preference for terms other than trafficking are connected to her first experience in a UK police station (raised above) and to the backlash she fears from Ukrainian state officials from carrying a label of trafficked for sexual exploitation. Principally, Tamara is fearful that any connection with prostitution or sex work will harm her application to remove her children from State care back home.

Tamara’s fear of disapproval is similarly echoed by women trafficked for marriage. When placed in a safe house after escaping her forced marriage, Laila reports being ostracised from the supportive networks traditionally available to other Muslim women. Samad and Eade (2003) and Samad (2010) ascribe BME communities’ suspicions of any outsider interest in forced marriages (whether by government, media, organisations or research) to a number of factors. One of these is mistrust of cultural difference, which fosters racial and orientalist stereotypes of facilitated or arranged marriage practices as singularly forced. Another relates to the rise in Islamophobia, wherein negative cultural traditions, as in honour killings, are wrongly associated with the religious practice of Islam. A further important factor concerns the politicization of transnational brides and forced marriage in the discourse of immigration (Hester et al, 2008). According to Samad and Eade (2003:100) the collective effect of such factors is “a legacy of suspicion”, wherein “relatively uninfluential” co-

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ethnic communities close ranks over topics they regard as delicate and sensitive.

Aarti’s sense of exclusion is so strong, that she prefers to tough it out rather than return home to India in defeat.

“I did not want to go back at the time, I must say. I didn’t want to go back because I would have been stigmatised. People would know (I come from a big family. I have 25 cousins) and I am the only one divorced. And still my extended family doesn’t know I’m divorced. It was a shame for me to go back. And my family were saying to me, you are bringing shame on us. We cannot tell people you are divorced”. (Aarti)

Several anti-trafficking professionals support women’s fears of a poor reception by co-ethnic communities, explaining the reasons for their rejection as attracting “unwanted interference”, “bringing shame on communities” and “tarring everybody with the same brush”. The fear of a community backlash is such that, in addition to operating a strict vetting of interpreters, most participating organisations are now refusing to accommodate a women’s own choice of translator.

“Interpreters are a really difficult one and many agencies lack a budget for this. I used to ask women if there is an interpreter she really likes, but now I don’t take this at face value. She may not have thought through what the consequences of that might be for people getting to her, by going through the community and putting pressure on the interpreter”. (NGO Information officer)

Other women, by comparison, had very positive things to say about their neighbours, both co-ethnic and indigenous of the local community. Below are some examples given by SSI and Focus Group women of neighbours helping them flee abuse and exploitation and find new homes:

“When my daughter was 16 -17 month old, an Indian neighbour, she asked me if I was alright and she told me my mother-in-law planning to send me back to India and keep my daughter here. She said where your passport? I say I don’t have my passport. What about your visa. I say I don’t know anything about that. She said, then I could be sent back and my daughter kept here. I cry. And this neighbour, she told me about place I could run away to. She told me they could help me”. (Nina)

“I waited for my son’s first birthday. Then an Indian woman, who used to baby sit with me, took me in her car... We found a one bedroom bedsit with a shared bathroom and she helped me with everything, so I could

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move in”. (Focus group member)

“I was too scared to go to anyone for help. I was so scared. Then one of my [British] neighbours helped me, erm, she took me to a woman’s refuge....I was frightened to leave everything I knew behind, but I felt I needed to do this or my life would be ruined and that of my daughter”. (Focus group member)

“I’d be lying if I said I’d done it all on my own. My [British] neighbour and me, we became friends. I was very depressed at the time and she was a rock to me”. (Luul)

Professional actions

This chapter closes by exploring two ways in which anti-trafficking professionals mediate the dual process of having to protect women and vet their potential in criminal justice proceedings. This is no way diminishes professional conviction and support for the effective investigation and prosecution of traffickers (CoE, 2005: 1), particularly salient for senior GEOs in this collection.

“First and foremost, trafficking is a crime”. (Senior GEO 1)

“If you really have been trafficked, you’ve got information to give to the Police. If you’re going to act as a witness, brilliant, we want you to stay here and I make no apology for that, because part of the reason for all these [trafficking] arrangements is to increase the risk to traffickers. And one way of doing that is by securing cooperation from their victims. It’s not just about prosecutions. It’s also about securing the intelligence that improves our knowledge of what they’re doing, so that we can disrupt their activity or prevent the activity. So it is useful to have that”. (Senior GEO 2)

However, as Hunt (2008: 290) observes for actors in the asylum process, all agents possess the human agency to bring about “some independent effects” by their participation in the process. In this collection, GEOs cushion women against the effects of the Criminal Justice System by “job crafting”, which is outsourcing to staff holding specific skill sets. This is viewed as positive and desirable in terms of fulfilling the trafficking brief, as illustrated by citing the same two professionals above:

“The CPS has also greatly improved on the ways in which women should give their evidence in Court and to the non-punishment clause governing the content of their evidence. Women have a full say within the Victim

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Personal Statements they give and they’re provided with support in doing this from the partnership agencies”. (Senior GEO 1)

“It’s been really interesting, really rewarding to engage with such a diverse field of people and use that sort of tension between those different views to help develop skills and policy. That’s been a really positive thing…There was massive suspicion before. It’s frustrating that they [NGO groups] still criticise us, but it’s all part of that good tension I referred to earlier on”. (Senior GEO 2)

A further way in which anti-trafficking professionals soften the intelligence gathering aspect of their brief is by actively engaging with difference. This is especially visible in the actions of professionals with a partnership remit. Partnership professionals appreciate how austerity measures detract from the human face of suffering. Partner C - who liaises with Civic and Faith leaders - explains how partnerships negotiate this tension in very practical ways, for example, by sourcing ethnic musicians and dancers for fundraisers. Another way of mitigating women’s experience of institutional oppression is by supporting migrant businesses when catering for meetings. For example, a Turkish café owner is hired to cater at several community consultation meetings with new arrivals. Whilst such practices can be accused of an uncomfortable tokenism, professional explanation for these practices reflects commonality with the views of women.

“A Human Rights approach in trafficking provides for the basics - safety, clothing and food - but food is more than mere survival. It’s about giving the exploited and displaced their cultural values and traditions back; a sense of self-worth; and ultimately restoring that person’s well-being”. (Partner C: liaising with Civic and Faith Leaders)

Chapter summary

This chapter has centrally addressed aspects pertinent for understanding women’s lived experience of identity in a trafficking context. The chapter argues how dominant and populist constructions of the trafficking victim are ones singularly lacking in agency. Significantly, the women in this collection regard themselves as victims, though not for reasons suggested in dominant discourses, and challenge agency and victimisation as mutually exclusive states of being and feeling. This co- existence of autonomy and victimisation brings problem for the trauma story – women’s gateway to state protection and services - and can turn

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communities into contested spaces for women with experience of prostitution and sexual exploitation. Professional responses which enhance women’s well-being freedom recognise the individuality of a woman’s trafficking experience and the need for connections to life pre-trafficking. Having explored aspects of agency in women’s formal and subjective identification as VoTs, the next chapter moves to examine questions of agency in the decision making surrounding women’s journeys and experiences.

Notes

1 Coverage of this march appeared in the Metro Newspaper on 19th September, 2007. 2 “Journey” is the creation of actress Emma Thompson and activist Sam Roddick and is designed to highlight the work of the Helen Bamber Foundation in supporting survivors of cruelty. Each container is individually designed by an artist; amongst them - production designer: Michael Howells; costume designer: Sandy Powell; and Turner Prize sculptor: Anish Kapoor. 3 For wider discussion of border criminology, see Bosworth (2007) and Aas and Bosworth (2013). For borders and citizenship, see Aronowitz (2003) and Andrijasevic (2010). 4 To access this campaign, go to: https://modernslavery.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQjw06GfBRCR9tDI4t6n5_MBEiQAFo6 kuJ4NZWFACSjuQTaOmw73LecQbSIA9lshkrqzO7h2gasaAgRh8P8HAQ#home (accessed 11.08.2014). 5 For wider discussion see Agustin (2007) Sex at the Margins. Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London and New York: Zed books. 6 To access the current version of the Blue Blindfold Campaign, go to http://jmfinalproject.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/current-campaigns-the-blue- blindfold/ (accessed 12.08.2014). 7 Now – UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) and Immigration Enforcement. 8 The Convention is now in force in 42 States. For full details on membership go to: http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/ChercheSig.asp?NT=197&CM=8&DF =13/08/2014&CL=ENG (accessed 13.08.2014). 9 To access full coverage of all stories, go to: http://www.coe.int/t/dg2/trafficking/comics/Source/notforsale_en_x1a.pdf (accessed 15.08.2014). 10 Images of the art work were displayed at the New Art Gallery in Walsall (UK) in 2001. To access the exhibition, go to: http://www.http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/art_and_design/safetysoapbox/ (accessed 15.08.2014). 11 To access the “Towards a Sense of Belonging” exhibition launched in 2009 and shown in the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester (UK), go to:

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http://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2009/jan/13/sense-of-belonging- exhibition?picture=341562670 (accessed 15 August 2014). 12 See O’Connell Davidson’s letter to the Guardian (Sex Slaves and the Reality of Prostitution, 28th December, 2007) and Davies’ report for the Guardian (Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody into Prostitution, 20th October, 2009). 13 For an evaluation of UK performance in the aforementioned areas of responsibility, see the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group (2010) Report and GRETA (2012), which review the UK’s delivery of protections for victims. 14 Brunovskis and Surtees (2007; 2010) provide an additional perspective on women’s disengagement. They link women’s refusal of victim assistance to the presence of positive family support and relationships. 15 See also the Global Alliance Against Trafficking (GAATW) website: www.gaatw.org (accessed 15 May 2015). 16 To access the Act, go to: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2009/26/contents (accessed 18 June 2015). 17 As previously stated, co-ethnics refer to persons of the same ethnicity. Given the stigma attached to trafficking for sexual exploitation and / or prostitution, co-ethnic migrants and refugees often disassociate themselves from trafficked co-ethnics.

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