UN Agency Involvement and Impact

In 1999 the Office of the UN High Commissioner located in Geneva took on the responsibility of dealing with human trafficking at the international, regional and national levels. The OHCHR trafficking program builds anti-trafficking initiatives to address problems and produce technical solutions at the legal and political levels and has a two-prong strategy which aims to ameliorate the economic and social conditions which sustain the phenomenon of trafficking and prioritizes the protection of victim’s rights.

In 2000 the UN General Assembly adopted the Protocol to Prevent Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children as a supplement to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). To date, 110 countries have ratified the Protocol whereas 76 have yet to do so. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC established in 1997), which has been tasked with addressing how crimes associated with transnational trafficking and the protection of trafficking victims are handled in the criminal justice system, was named the custodian of the Protocol. UNICEF, the UN Children’s Fund, is another high-profile agency involved in the issue of trafficking and its relationship with child labor, illegal adoption, abuse and sexual exploitation.

The UN’s framing of human trafficking has focused on women and children while linking the phenomenon to issues of human rights, criminality and security. Assigning custodianship to UNDOC helped to heighten the profile of the UN’s efforts by framing human trafficking as a crime against humanity perpetrated by criminal networks. On its website, UNDOC stresses prevention, prosecution of traffickers, and protection of trafficked persons. The agency estimates that there are between two and four million persons trafficked annually which contributes to the framing of trafficking as a serious problem which authorities and civil society actors need to eliminate.

UNDOC initially established the Global Programme Against Trafficking in Human Beings (GPAT) to monitor instances of trafficking and in March of 2007 launched UN.GIFT with a grant provided by the United Arab Emirates. UN.GIFT has been designed to consolidate and coordinate the global fight against human trafficking. The agency works with a broad array of stakeholders in government, business, academia, civil society and the media with the objective of fostering new partnerships and to develop better means by which to fight transnational organized crime. It provides a forum for governments and civil society organizations such as Secours Catholique, Caritas, European Women’s Lobby, and the Samilia Foundation and representatives of UN member states. The agency has helped launch the Women Leaders’ Council which sustains a dialog among female professionals working in fields related to the prevention of trafficking.

In February of 2008, UN.GIFT organized The Vienna Forum to fight Human Trafficking which was attended by representatives from 118 countries. Many workshops were held, including one entitled “The Role of the Media” (organized by the Advocacy Section of UNDOC) which addressed the framing of human trafficking in the media. As recent as two weeks ago UNDOC released a new “Tool Kit” for professionals working with the issue of trafficking. Therefore, it appears that the UN is now actively involved in bringing human trafficking, a global agenda item, to broader audiences at the local, regional and international level. By heightening awareness and coordinating efforts to suppress trafficking, the UN hopes to persuade the remaining 76 countries who have not yet ratified the Protocol to Prevent Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children to do so.

Imaginative Initiatives!

Children Protest Slave Labor Chocolate Production Outside a Nestle Headquarters

Stop the Traffik Wins New Media Award

Innovation: The Chocolate Campaign

UN.GIFT - United Nations Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking

Useful Background Papers from the February 2008 Conference in Vienna

012 Workshop: The Role of the Media in Building Images

024 Workshop: Quantifying Human Trafficking, its Impact and the Responses to it

UN.GIFT Partners

Partners in "Civil Society"

The Role of the Media

Examine the role of media – how were activists successful in getting media coverage? What type of media? Did the media play a helpful or harmful role? Was success contingent on the media?

We learned in our reading Transnational Information Politics: NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986-2000 that, although Amnesty International did increase the number of its press reports released in the 1990s, it did so while publishing less background papers. The organization’s relationship with the media could be construed as a dependent one and that this must naturally condition its work. However, the authors argue that their data instead supports claims made by Amnesty insiders of a shift in strategy as the organization grew wise to the power of press coverage. They report that the internal strategy of Amnesty became creating sound-bite style reporting which could be easily appropriated by the media and turned around quickly for audience consumption. Of course, now that this relationship has been forged over time, and press releases have become an important part of the organizations repertoire for building public support of its causes, it could be argued that the successes of Amnesty campaigns (now that arguably success is measured by those producing the press releases as specific to the kind of attention media coverage has the potential to produce) are contingent, at least in part, on the media. Furthermore, and most importantly for my analysis, the authors found that background reports and press releases used one year affect what gets covered and how it is covered in the next. In other words, new issues are grafted on to existing, known issues. Thus press releases and background papers launch a cycle of press coverage in a procedural, expanding, incremental way. Amnesty insiders see this as a form of persistence which allows them to keep governments on the defensive when they know scrutiny will continue even after the parent issue loses some of its ability to attract page-one press coverage and the public’s attention.

Therefore, we can say that although only a few major issues make it on to the global agenda through campaigns and press coverage, there are potentially many related issues riding their coat tails thanks in part to world events and NGOs seizing windows of opportunity to keep long-standing core issues in the public’s eye. Those issues that eventually see the light of day, thanks to ground-breaking work by NGOs and the press, will naturally impact how the parent issue is perceived. Frames are made, but we must not assume that they are fixed.

To evaluate the kind of press coverage the issue of human trafficking garnered over the years, I did a search in the Lexis-Nexis databases of international publications from 1970-2008. Reports of human trafficking initially appeared in my search with a report released in May of 1979 contending that Vietnam was exporting thousands of its refugees to neighboring Asian countries. In July of that same year, China labeled Vietnam’s problem “slave trafficking.” In 1981 the South Korean government was accused of trafficking in prostitutes and in 1982 the Thai government was accused of child slavery with a sensational report published in the Daily Mirror. This was followed in the same year with reports of sex slaves working in Bangkok brothels and instances of child snatching in the press and television news series. In 1983 China was accused of allowing trafficking in women by organized crime networks. Then, in 1986, there were quite a few articles about children sold for sex followed by reports concerning the trafficking of body parts. Trafficking in human organs and drug trafficking dominated the news from the Reagan years (with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign) from approximately 1986 to 1990.

Meanwhile, in 1988 there was a report of a million children being sold in the sex trade. By 1989, this number had increased to 10 million. In 1990 there was a new spate of articles concerning human slavery followed by a similar number of reports on the sex trade in 1992. In 1992 China was reported to have banned trade in organs and in 1993 the UN condemned child slavery. This kind of press coverage continued throughout the 1990s and into this century touching upon various related subjects such as child smuggling, mail order brides, and child brides. However, perhaps most importantly for the framing of human trafficking today, 1993 and 1994 saw trafficking coincide with an increased focus on the problems of illegal immigration.
Although our readings contend that the media did not influence to any significant extent Amnesty International’s work, it does appear that the media has played an important role in forming the public’s perception of problems and solutions. I would argue that media coverage had a lot to do with the success of human trafficking reaching its present frame on the global agenda; the problem is now firmly linked to prostitution, women, children, poor countries, illegal immigration, and organized crime.

Whereas trafficking and prostitution in the late 1970s and early 1980s focused on states as perpetrators of the problem, the issue gradually became associated with organized crime networks in Asia. A shift in focus to illegal immigration certainly brought the already-known issue of human slavery and trafficking into the backyards of many western observers thus making it a problem requiring the developed world to act as well. Certainly the women’s rights movements and associated NGOs, as I have previously reported, increased the profile of human rights violations in the form of domestic and public violence against women, and, with these issues, trafficking of women and children was also brought to the fore. We also have learned from our readings that NGOs such as Amnesty international purposefully focused on the abuses of the wealthy and powerful countries of the North to counter any claims of bias they were encountering in the global South.

Certainly this strategy had the effect of increasing awareness in the West that they too shared in the problem of trafficking. Bridging the problems of the developing world with the problems of the West, I believe, has been one of NGOs greatest success stories. Of course, there is an undeniable dark side to this success; the framing of human trafficking as inextricably with prostitution and criminality – and the subsequent securitizing of immigration – has narrowed the world’s focus to only a narrow sliver of those being trafficked. Press coverage of sordid situations and acute human suffering certainly contributed to the framing of human trafficking and, therefore, the solutions being proposed today to combat the phenomenon. Governments now see the issue as one of crime control and prevention (Musto, 8) rather than one that might seek to ameliorate the conditions in the third world from which traffickers and the West profits. But our focus here, I remind myself, is not the normative or subjective aspects of our issues, but rather on how our issues made their way onto the global agenda and its implications. I would therefore like to close by pointing out that the way an agenda gets shaped by NGOs and the press and how that gets interpreted by powerful states conditions to a great extent the framing of the issue, who adopts it, and the division of labor among global actors combating the problems it exposes.

How Central Were NGOs for Human Trafficking?

The framing of human trafficking and its ascendancy to the global agenda was a two-way street shared among domestic, national, and international actors. All participants in some ways impacted what is now understood to be ‘human trafficking’ and the working of the human trafficking issue affected them in turn. This post however, will highlight how NGOs played a central role in making the issue resonate among various national publics and international organizations such as the UN. The rise of trafficking has been punctuated by a contest which began among conservatives and radical feminists to define trafficking as it relates to prostitution; conservatives wanting all migrant prostitution (forced and consensual) to fall under the umbrella of trafficking and human rights-focused activists wishing to leave consensual migrant prostitution out of the equation. Above all, however, what makes the issue of trafficking differ from other issues on the global agenda are its competing frames which resulted from NGOs adjusting dominant frames to adapt to national contexts. Other than prostitution, the frames have centered on slavery, forced labor, and law enforcement.

That said, human trafficking has two dominant frames on the global agenda; the first and most salient is trafficking as prostitution and the second is human trafficking as a modern-day form of human slavery. The connections between human trafficking, prostitution, and slavery go back to the movement to end the international slave trade in the nineteenth century, and in the early 20th century when it was believed young American and British girls were being abducted to serve as sex slaves in South America and the Middle East. By the mid 20th-century, the issue of ‘trafficking in girls’ changed to ‘trafficking in persons with the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others which was connected to trafficking in women and encompassing all forms of prostitution.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s when the international women’s human rights movement and the transnational advocacy networks it entailed brought violence against women in public and private life to the attention of governments that trafficking returned to public discourse again. The issue of trafficking was first relevant among the networks linking North America, Asia, and Europe. Interestingly Andrea Bertone (2008) makes clear that the anti-trafficking message resonated more strongly and caught on more readily in Southeast Asia, in Thailand specifically, than in the US or Europe because Thai NGOs and the Thai government had been dealing with forms of modern day slavery for some time. In fact, the issue of human trafficking spread throughout Asia thanks to Thai NGOs who began to talk to NGOs in other Asian countries about the problem. The US came on board after countries like Thailand, financing 100s of NGOs involved in issues of trafficking by the year 2000. NGOs found it initially difficult to make the issue relevant in developed countries until they were able to frame it in a way which facilitated its association with the problems then facing Western societies as destination countries for trafficked women and children.

Early strategies by NGOs to bring the issue of trafficking in human beings to the forefront or public discourse and to the attention of states and institutions such as the IOM, ILO and the UN tended to focus on trafficking’s helpless female victims resident in the third world. This simplification of the problem ignored the tough choices which many women in poor countries faced concerning how to survive and made the issue so urgent as to make any objective analysis of the problem a dangerous delay in action. NGO stories were mainly of two variations, one about the 12 year-old girl sold into slavery by her parents in Southeast Asia, and the other message was an alarm bell warning that trafficking was increasing to uncontrollable proportions. The take-home message from NGO discourse was that human trafficking could be resolved by going after a few bad people and that time was of the essence while the window of opportunity was still open to act.

Where NGOs made the most important impact, perhaps, was their involvement in two influential human rights transnational networks: the liberal Human Rights Network and conservative Human Rights Caucus. In 1999 these networks dramatically influenced the framing of trafficking during the Vienna negotiations of the UN Transnational Organized Crime Convention. Through their efforts, the criminal focus of human trafficking was tempered with a human rights focus; the difference between the two definitional focuses being that states would not be able to deal with trafficking as solely a matter of apprehending and prosecuting traffickers, but that they also had a responsibility to protect the victims of trafficking. Both networks, although opposed to each others’ agenda in significant ways, spent the next two ears negotiating a mutually-acceptable definition of trafficking which would become the UN’s definition in 2001.

An idea for CIVIC: Providing Actors with New Kinds of Action

Webb Keane, in his chapter on anthropology in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences (George Steinmetz, editor) writes:

...the existence of a moral domain does not guarantee shared descriptions of action. The husband who insists on his conjugal rights confronts the wife who fears domestic rape; the joker's "fun" is the victim's "ethnic slur"...as the development of the category "domestic rape" suggests, the contest of interpretations involves a historical dynamic, in which, for example, emergent descriptions will have "looping effects" (Hacking 1995) as they provide actors with new kinds of action (73).

Celebrities - Help or Hinderance?

Celebrities Ricky Martin and Emma Thompson are two among many well-known, active supporters of the fight against human trafficking. The UN estimates that there are 2.5 million in forced labor world wide and that annually close to 10 billion dollars are earned by traffickers which makes human trafficking in the world third only to trafficking in drugs and arms.
Ricky Martin has been most vocal about the need to protect children from abuse worldwide and more specifically their and their mothers’ need for protection against human trafficking. In 2002 he opened the Ricky Martin Foundation in Puerto Rico to advocate for the welfare of children everywhere and launched in 2004 the campaign “People for Children” a global initiative linking NGOs and other grassroots groups with an endeavor to educate the world about trafficking and to expose the inhumane practice more widely around the world. In 2005, Martin participated in the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) campaign “Llama e Vive” (Call and Live) which established a telephone hotline for potential victims to call and receive assistance. As recently as 2008, Martin traveled to Cambodia to hear first hand from child victims of trafficking about their ordeals and warned Cambodian officials to open their eyes to the trafficking problem in their country citing that an undeniable problem must exist if there are over 200 NGOs working in their country to combat trafficking.
Emma Thompson is also a human rights advocate but in more general terms than Martin. Her support for women’s rights has led her to work with the Ellen Bamber Foundation in 2007 in a campaign designed to “offer hope to the living disappeared” who are victims of trafficking in the West.
While it is beyond the scope of this blog post to delve deeply into Martin and Thompson’s endeavors, I may speculate about the extent of their impact on the issues/campaigns they support based on our class readings by Daniel Drezner, Heribert Dieter and Rajiv Kuman, and Andrew F. Cooper. First, in regards to the issue of human trafficking, Drezner notes that celebrities have had a better track record heightening the profile of human rights abuses throughout the world than the abuses resulting from military operations and although there is growing hostility towards celebrity activism, it would appear that Martin’s focus on helpless children and his focus on straight-forward solutions (such as the campaign to launch the OIM’s hotline for potential victims of human trafficking) are likely to meet with public approval. Where Martin might earn the ire of policy makers and diplomats is his poorly-couched and very public scolding of Cambodian officials. This shaming may earn him points with his fans, but diplomats who must maintain a working relationship with Cambodian officials may find their work more difficult as a result. If Cambodia becomes resentful of the West’s hypocritical criticism, Martin’s efforts might be blamed for causing more problems than solutions.
Emma Thompson’s advocacy for the rights of the “living disappeared”, victims of Western greed and consumption, may be an entirely different situation. However, from what I have been able to gather, this emphasis on human trafficking victims in the West is only part of Thompson’s larger human rights agenda and she may be hitting the right balance between what Drezner calls “sustained focus and righteous indignation.”
As Dieter and Kuman point out, another pitfall that both Martin and Thompson may face is the problem that results from overly simplistic framing and solutions. In their efforts to make the issue of human trafficking come across clear and strong to the public, they are proposing solutions that are too simplistic. Human trafficking is not only about punishing traffickers, but also about complex push-pull factors that directly relate to mammoth problems such as global inequality and the capitalist system. And although celebrities can come under fire for lacking a global mandate, Martin and Thompson are both advocating arguably for the world’s most vulnerable, abused, and silenced human beings. Thompson, because she is advocating on her home turf about a problem most citizens choose to overlook, is in a particularly legitimate position as a concerned citizen giving back, as it were, to the community for all the fame and fortune her fans and country have blessed her with.
No one can argue with Andrew Cooper who points out how valuable celebrity issue endorsements are for diplomacy; they garner extended face time with elites and are able to reach mass publics in a way that politicians can only dream of. Celebrities have become “ascendant diplomatic actors in a global system that is open to their inclusion in ways that very few would have anticipated.” Certainly, no one would deny that global capitalism, marketing, and design have all contributed to the proliferation of specialized media making entertainment one of the most important facets of both developed and “underdeveloped” economies throughout the world. Celebrities like Martin and Thompson are able to allie with global “fixers” (as opposed to the “nixers”) and to take advantage of the media spotlight focused on international events such as the G8 summits. Martin helps to put a face on a large, faceless NGOs like IOM and the UN and both Thompson and Martin are able to breath new life into networks of fatigued activists.
Interestingly, Cooper refers to Bono as the “charmer” and Geldorf as the “provocateur” at the G8 summits. Granted, Martin and Thompson do not have the cache nor the power that Bono or Geldorf have in humanitarian issues (although their reputation may be increasingly criticized), I would contend that Ricky Martin must surely play an effective role as charmer and the Latin with a big heart (raising awareness and much needed funds for his cause in the west while increasing his positive image) but should perhaps watch his step when he attempts to play the provocateur with foreign countries. Thompson, on the other hand, seems better positioned, as a white woman of privilege and fame, to be the provocateur, awakening fellow citizen’s consciences to a problem which exists in their own back yard.

Human Trafficking Cluster Map - First Try

Homework: September 9

Where is your issue now in the global agenda-cycle? How “salient” is it? How do you know? Where is CIVIC now in the global agenda cycle? How might you compare the salience of your issue to that of CIVIC’s?

As discussed in class, the global agenda-cycle begins with when political entrepreneurs identify and define a problem stemming from existing social and political conditions. From problem definition the global agenda cycle moves to issue definition (expressed as a problem, the cause, and a solution) which leads, if promoters are lucky, to the issue being adopted by a host of global actors such as influential networks of NGOs, the UN, or the EU. Once the issue is adopted at the global level, campaigns are launched by governments, NGOs, international organizations, and the like to combat the problem. Combating the problem is often begun by increasing public awareness and sensibilities, offering training to officials whose work is connected to the phenomenon, judicial reforms to increase the compatibility of laws among states, enhanced cooperation among states, monitoring, and mechanisms for enforcement. If the campaign is successful (and not all are), new global norms emerge and ultimately political change occurs.

The issue of human trafficking is now in the campaign stage, having passed problem and issue definition stages (The 2000 UN declaration, which defined trafficking as distinct from illegal migration) as well as issue adoption by important international norm makers such as the UN, the Council of Europe, the European Union, and the OSCE. Based on my analysis of the OSCE Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings of 2003, I judge the issue of human trafficking to be a very salient issue partly because: 1) the Action Plan is the culmination of previous work begin during the 2000 Vienna Ministerial Decision, the Bucharest Ministerial Decision of 2001, the Porto Ministerial Declaration of 2002, and the efforts made by the OSCE’s individual member states during this time to combat trafficking. That Action Plan mentions the “tremendous increase” in human trafficking while the prosecution of traffickers remains uneven and lackluster. Furthermore, the scope of the document is broad and ambitious indicating clearly the problem, cause and solution:

The Action Plan adopts a multidimensional approach to combating trafficking in
human beings. It addresses the problem comprehensively, covering the protection
of victims, the prevention of THB [Trafficking in Human Beings] and the
prosecution of those who facilitate or commit the crime. It provides
recommendations as to how participating States and relevant OSCE institutions,
bodies and field operations may best deal with the political, economic, legal,
law enforcement, educational and other aspects of the problem (1, Annex).

I am surprised by the comprehensive approach taken by the OSCE to human trafficking (for example, the document mentions economic development and launching gender equality campaigns in sending states – tackling not only political equality, but economic as well). The OSCE plan somewhat contradicts the “magic bullet” thesis that short causal chains are essential for issue adoption (DeMar, 145, 33).

Another measure of issue salience is the extent to which the OSCE plan will rely on existing networks of expertise and cooperation. For example, in order to achieve the Action Plan objectives, the OSCE intends to help participating states by taking advantage and building upon “existing regional experience gained through the implementation of such concrete initiatives and measures as those undertaken by the Stability Pact Task Force on Trafficking in Human Beings in South Eastern Europe” (1)

Comparing the salience of the issue of trafficking with that of CIVIC’s, trafficking has obviously reached a level that may be many years down the road for the issue of civilian victims of war and war parties taking responsibility to heal (with indemnities and perhaps other forms of victim assistance) where they have hurt. Although our readings indicate that it is not entirely necessary to link an emerging issue with an issue that has already been widely identified as a serious problem, I believe that the salience of trafficking gets a boost when promoters speak of the phenomenon as “modern slavery” which the US general public prefers to believe was eradicated with the US Civil War. Being so closely perceived as a threat to the project of modernity (raising the specter of backwardness in the heart of Western civilization) gives the issue of modern slavery a very high level of salience and urgency. Linking the issue to security, while emphasizing the rights of the victims, is also a very shrewd strategy for gaining broad support among hawks and doves alike.

CIVIC’s issue, on the other hand, has yet to gain the notoriety of human trafficking. This may be largely due to the fact that the crime and the victims are neatly separated by the abyss which exists between the modern world of emancipation and regulation and the non-modern world of violence and appropriation (Boaventura de Sousa Santos). Therefore, CIVIC may find it easier to convince states in the West who have conflicts on their borders (like member states of the EU) to support their cause, as well as those states who suffer from large influxes of war refugees. In fact, it would be interesting to see how the issue of helping civilian victims of war could be tied (or “grafted" onto) to the issue of trafficking and whether or not it would be desirable to do so (Keck and Sikkink, page).

Abyssal Thinking: Creating the Two Worlds of Regulation-Emancipation and Apropriation-Violence

"Guantanamo is today one of the most grotesque manifestations of abyssal legal thinking, the creation of the other side of the line as a non-area in legal and political terms, an unthinkable ground for the rule of law, human rights, and democracy. But it would be an error to consider it exceptional. There are many other Guantanamos in sexual and racial discrimination both in the public and the private sphere, in the savage zones of the mega-cities, in ghettos, in sweatshops...in the new forms of slavery, in the black market of human organs, in child labour and prostitution"
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Eurozine.com

UN Defines Trafficking in Persons in 2000

Article 3 of the UN's Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children – complements and reinforces the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime by offering the following definition:

“Trafficking in persons shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring 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, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs”.