La Strada Documentation Center

The Rumour of Trafficking - Migration Policy in the face of Moral Panic and Migrant Agency

Document number
2053
Date
2007
Title
The Rumour of Trafficking - Migration Policy in the face of Moral Panic and Migrant Agency
Author/publisher
Dr Diana Wong. Fellow, Social Science Research Council, New York
Availability
View/save PDF version of this document
Document type(s)
Meeting Documentation/Conference Reports,
Keywords
Palermo protocol; Definition of (trafficking), Root Causes, Risk Groups, Vulnerability, Pull factors, Push factors, Sending/Receiving countries,
Summary

"...The phrase "rumor of trafficking" is of course meant to be provocative. What I shall argue is that a "hyper-discourse" on trafficking started to emerge in the early 1990s in Europe - traceable in fact to an IOM conference held shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This discourse drew on migration "research" as well as media "journalism", and had a profound impact on migration policy - both at the national and international levels. I shall draw the parallel to a similar instance of a hyper-discourse on migration at the beginning of the 20th century - the White Slave Trade, which was also about the trafficking of women, and also had a profound impact on UK and US policy. With hindsight, serious research has shown that there was very little substance to the charges of white slave trafficking then, and that it was largely symptomatic of a "moral panic" associated with the extraordinarily high levels of migration obtaining then. I shall argue that the same applies today. The contemporary hyper discourse on trafficking misreads migration realities by overlooking migrant agency. That is the act of omission. As, if not more, disturbing is that it criminalizes the act of migration. Migration policy based on these two errors - of omission and commission - cannot be good or effective policy. Both society - receiving and sending, as well as migrants, pay a heavy price."

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