Human Rights, Anti-Trafficking Funding, and the Discourse of Prevention

• In Event: Human Rights and Sex Trafficking

Abstract

Governments and inter-governmental organizations such as the United Nations and European Union expend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on activities to “combat” human trafficking. However, surprisingly little research exists on how these funds are being allocated. Funding decisions offer evidence of the correspondence between the stated and actual policy priorities of governments and international organizations. This project therefore seeks to fill a gap in the literature on human trafficking through the compiling and analyzing of original databases that break down the domestic and international anti-trafficking activities funded by the United States, the world’s largest donor of anti-trafficking funds by a wide margin. The U.S. government’s anti-trafficking funding, and its annual ranking of every country in the world based on U.S. anti-trafficking standards, arguably enables the U.S. to influence the anti-trafficking priorities of governments globally more so than any other state or entity.

The U.S. government approaches all anti-trafficking activities as being preventive in some sense. Building on a systematic review of the detailed “Attorney General’s Annual Report to Congress on U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons” for fiscal years 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2018, however, my analysis shows that activities that either target the factors that exacerbate precarity and the associated risks of being trafficked or practices that enable traffickers and other beneficiaries of trafficking to profit from the exploitation of precarity remain among the least supported. When projects do prioritize primary prevention, they often focus on increasing public awareness of trafficking or educating migrants of the dangers associated with migration. There is little evidence, however, that increased public knowledge of trafficking alone contributes to primary prevention, while projects aimed at educating potential migrant workers puts the onus on the migrants themselves to prevent their own exploitation rather than targeting the institutions that are designed to benefit from their exploitation.

With implications for government efforts to combat human rights violations more generally, this paper argues for the importance of intersectional bottom-up rights advocacy grounded in a substantive notion of freedom and a recognition of the interdependence of human rights if the root causes of trafficking are to be addressed – specifically, the structural, differential distribution of inequalities and the socio-political norms that deny some the right to visibility, respect, and protection.

Author

• Laura A. Hebert, Occidental College