Duplicitous Freedom: Moral and Material Care Work in Anti-Trafficking Rescue and Rehabilitation

Abstract

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and “caring” interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas’ typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global “anti-trafficking” rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.

Modern Slavery in Business: The Sad and Sorry State of a Non-Field

“…However, some scholars and activists reject the term modern slavery, seeing it as a nebulous, poorly and inconsistently defined catch-all term with little explanatory power. They note that those who use this term frequently misrepresent the nature of the problem of severe labor exploitation (Beutin, 2019; LeBaron, 2018; O’Connell Davidson, 2015) and may even unwittingly reinforce the problems they claim to challenge (Bunting & Quirk, 2017; Shih, 2015).…”

Sheltering as a destabilising and perpetuating practice in the migration management architecture in Mexico

“…It is therefore important to understand how these discourses articulate both facilitating and controlling elements of the migration architecture (Riemsdijk, Marchand, and Heins 2020), and how these corresponding power relations of care and discipline cement the humanitarian aid that shelters provide. Ambivalent and contradictory characteristics of sheltering practices and work related to NGOs have been identified in the scholarship (eg Agustín 2007;Hernández-León 2012;Shih 2018). Moreover, and evidently so, the contradictory nature of care and hospitality is not exclusive to migration, as widely elaborated by Michel Foucault (1979Foucault ( , 2003Foucault ( , 2006, who discussed how different institutions discipline and control particular populations.…”

Familial Moralities: Moral (Re)source of Commitment in the Immigrant Rights Movement in El Paso, Texas

“…The most prominent leader of this movement, Jane Addams, held a pragmatic view of a democratic social ethic which she advanced, arguing for the “identification with the common lot” through the experience of working with marginalized peoples (Addams 1905 : 11). Elena Shih’s (2018) work illustrates the impacts of Western women’s morality taken to a global scale. She documents the “moral care work” of white women activists in the anti-trafficking movement in China and Thailand.…”