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.