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10 H. Khan, J. Bacchus and N. Marcus, Report on Our Visit to Venezuela (April 2006),
unpublished report.
11 Ibid.
12 Red Thread, One Heart, One Fist, One Voice: statement by grassroots women organizers of all races (Georgetown, Guyana, 31 March 2006).

The war on human trafcking in the

Caribbean
By Kamala Kempadoo
Abstract: Encouraged by the US, the Caribbean is being drawn into a
global panic over human trafcking, leading to greater policing and
surveillance of migrant women and the sex trade. Drawing on colonial
precedents, the moral outrage about women trafcked into prostitution, embodied in legislation such as the US Trafcking Victims Protection Act, obscures the deeper causes of exploitation and oppression and
leads to the demonisation of those in undocumented, hyper-exploited
labour forces. Moreover, the false equation of trafcking with prostitution renders sexual labour as coerced labour and, as such, misrepresents
sexual agency.
Keywords: border controls, forced labour, irregular migration, moral
panic, sex work, slave trade, US hegemony

On the eve of the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade, the Vatican likened human trafcking in the
twenty-rst century to the trade of African slaves in the past, claiming,
its worse than the slavery of those . . . who were taken from Africa and
brought to other countries.1 Concern about this modern-day slavery
xes attention on women in prostitution and child labour and produces
lurid accounts about child and sex slaves, while sustaining a multimillion dollar industry to combat human trafcking. To African
Caribbean peoples or scholars of slavery, the Vaticans claim may
sound preposterous, given the magnitude and extreme violence of the
Atlantic slave trade and the injustice such a claim does to the history
of Africans. To sex workers rights activists or transnational feminists,
the claim may seem equally absurd and adds to the global panic about
sexual labour and irregular migrants, doing an injustice to womens

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and childrens rights and agency. Nevertheless, the image that slavery
evokes is persuasive. The impact of this on the Caribbean is that,
rather than foregrounding causes of undocumented migration and
forced labour practices (which together constitute human trafcking
in dominant discourse), it incites governments in the region to clamp
down on the sex trade and to intensify border controls, while deepening
racialised sexualised divides. The role of the US is of particular interest
here, as it is through US government policy on human trafcking that
the Caribbean is drawn into participating in this global panic.
Caribbean governments are asked to report annually to the US State
Department about unregulated migration and forced labour, especially
within domestic and regional sex industries, and to develop strategies to
x these problems. Annually, the countries are ranked into three tiers
according to their compliance with US standards on the issue and
countries that are placed in the lowest tier are threatened with economic sanctions.2 Cuba has been consistently placed in Tier 3 and is
therefore continuously on the list of sanctioned countries. The Cuban
authorities, it is claimed in the annual US Trafcking in Persons
(TIP) reports, do not admit to the existence of a problem of human
trafcking.3 Guyana, Suriname, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Belize and Jamaica have also all been ranked negatively at various times.
Responses to such rankings have varied from deance to full complicity. In the case of Cuba, the ranking and threat of sanctions are purely
symbolic given the sanctions already in place. The ranking thus constitutes part of continued US policy to demonise and isolate the Cuban
government, linking it in Tier 3 with countries such as Burma, North
Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe all of which fall into
US categories of rogue or non-compliant states. Unlike Cuba, countries such as Belize and Jamaica are, in principle, seen as cooperative
with the US and hence in a position to move out of Tier 3 and save
themselves from economic sanctions. The Guyanese government has
proven to be one of the most compliant with the USs demands. In
2004, after inquiries about human trafcking in Guyana, the government rushed to demonstrate that it was taking steps to combat the problem. Young Amerindian women found working in the sex trade far
from their home communities were held up as victims and a national
effort to save them was designed. Guyana became the rst country in
the region to enact domestic anti-trafcking laws and was duly recognised by the State Department as a deserving nation. It was moved
swiftly out of Tier 3 and threats of economic sanctions were lifted.
Caribbean scrutiny on the issue of human trafcking has increased
since 2004 and is supported by the International Organisation for
Migration (IOM), which has funded several research projects and
meetings and helped to push the issue on to Caribbean public and
state agendas.4 Regional bodies such as the Organization of American

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81

States, the Association of Caribbean States and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have shown signs of making human trafcking
an issue.5 The trafcking of persons is now believed to be a growing
regional problem that will require extra attention after the full implementation of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).
By and large, the region has been corralled by the US and its allies
into adopting the human trafcking discourse, and many Caribbean
countries are positioned to be part of the international community of
good nations with regard to this issue.
The noise about human trafcking in the region rests principally
upon the idea of young women in prostitution. Whether about Cuba,
Jamaica, Belize, Suriname or Guyana, the US Department of State
claims that the main problem is either internal or cross-border movements of women and girls for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
The deployment of a notion of violence to women conceals the US political and economic drive for global hegemony, as well as the conditions
of migration and employment for many men and women. Womens
sexuality becomes the key for securing compliance and silencing dissent. Sex work, prostitution or sexual-economic activities are painted
as always-and-already violent and coercive for women, and adoption
of an anti-prostitution, anti-trafcking discourse allows womens
sexual purity to be rescued in the national imagination. By extension,
Caribbean nations are restored to respectability and moral rectitude.
It is important to keep in mind that the analogy between human
trafcking today and the slave trade of yesteryear is not new. In the
nineteenth century, as the enslavement of Africans was drawing to a
halt, a moral panic about a white slave trade grew, which perceived
dangers to women as autonomous economic migrants on the world
stage. These migrations were part of the large-scale international relocations and displacements that ensued after the abolition of slavery
and which accompanied the internationalisation of waged labour
under the globalisation of capitalism between 1850 and 1914.
Working-class women and men were, at that time, crossing borders
to nd new futures, enduring systems of bonded labour and indentured
servitude that positioned and maintained them as cheap, disposable
work forces. Women moved independently or were moved through
organised channels (commonly as sexual and domestic partners)
servicing and reproducing the migrant labour force and obtaining
new freedoms through non-marital sexual relations and waged work
in a variety of sectors. Nevertheless, ideologies about womens mobility
and the trade of their labour ignored the impact of colonialism and
patriarchy and the demands of capital, and dened these women as
either hapless victims of cruel, criminal men or as sexually loose or
debased persons who contaminated the social body. In particular, it
was the image of the violation of innocent, pure womanhood that

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fuelled stories about the trafc of women. In these nineteenth-century

narratives, trafcked women were those who were coerced, deceived,
lured, trapped, kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery.
Global interventions and campaigns took shape to protect the
women. For some, such as Indian women under British colonial indentureship systems, policies restricted or even banned their migration.
For others, rescue operations were designed to return them to their
homes, where they were to live as decent women. Nineteenth-century
campaigns for the abolition of the trafc in women, despite leaning
heavily on the politics of the womens suffrage movements in both
Europe and the US, left unchallenged ideologies about womens roles
in the nuclear, heterosexual family. Most perniciously, the ideology
was lodged in white patriarchal anxieties about freedoms of both
people of colour and of women. It foregrounded the circumstances of
Euro-American women while demonising men of other cultures, echoing the ideologies that fuelled lynching of black men in the US. Cloaked
in moral outrage about violations to womanhood, the white slavery
discourse of a century ago was structured in racism and aided patriarchal state control of womens sexuality and mobility. The moral outrage about women in prostitution, as Emma Goldman wrote in the
early twentieth century, served conveniently to obscure the causes of
exploitation and oppression.
Little has changed. Ideologies about the trafc of persons today are
couched in various feminist and human rights discourses, yet continue
to rest on moral indignation about violations of womanhood and
support migration-management policies and tighter border controls,
greater policing of (im)migrant and Third World populations and
rescue missions in sex industries. In short, the panic about human trafcking leads to an intensication of state surveillance of the migration
and income-generating activities of working people and to greater state
control of womens sexual labour and agency. In a country such as the
US, this moral panic is supported by the Christian Right and radical
feminists, who have joined forces with the US State Department to
nd ways to engage the rest of the world in a war on human trafcking.
The US Trafcking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 is one such
instrument, and its ideology, design and implementation are linked to
the conguration of twenty-rst century US imperialism. The TVPA
war on human trafcking gathers strength from the UN Trafcking
Protocol that supplements the 2000 Convention on Transnational
Organised Crime. However, it differs from the UN Protocol in that
it views prostitution and any related activities, including pimping,
pandering, and/or maintaining brothels as contributing to the phenomenon of trafcking in persons.6 Any country that directly or indirectly
supports prostitution or has legalised sex industries stands to be classi-

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83

ed by the US State Department as aiding and abetting in the trafcking of human beings.
In the Caribbean, other elements are marshalled in the narrative
about trafcking. For example, the mobilisation of Amerindian
women in the trafcking debate in Guyana shores up the legitimacy
of the state and deects attention away from its political and economic
weaknesses. The opportunistic use of Guyanas indigenous hinterland
communities in the debate on human trafcking deepens the distance
between the peoples of the coast and the hinterland, further entrenching the geo-racialised relations of dominance within the country.
Elsewhere in the region, the debate hinges on the presence of undocumented migrants in the sex trade, and here too the plight of trafcked
women is complicated by notions of racial, ethnic and national difference. However, unlike the situation for Amerindian women in Guyana,
who are systematically portrayed as passive victims in the national discourse, the migrant prostitute slips into the category of demonised
racial or ethnic other who sullies the purity of nation. Illegal migrant
sex workers, such as (Indo-)Guyanese women in Barbados, Dominicanas in Curac ao or Brazilian women in Suriname, if not deemed t to be
saved, represent immorality and indecency and become targets of racial
discrimination, harassment, detention and deportation.
The basis for claims about human trafcking, however, remains
dubious. Research, including that commissioned by the IOM, has produced little data and identied very few trafcked victims. What is
likened to the Atlantic slave trade turns out, in the Caribbean region,
to be akin to the conditions that followed slavery. It is the similarities
with contracted and bonded labour in the nineteenth-century Caribbean that are pertinent for discussions today. Under contemporary
conditions, men and women increasingly move across internal and
regional borders with or without papers to nd income-generating
opportunities. They are hired without documentation or a decent
wage in a range of industries, including construction, agriculture,
domestic work, tourism and entertainment and become indebted to
persons who recruit or assist them to travel and nd employment
and housing. These new migrant workers become debt-bonded or
exist on the margins of the nation state as a despised, undocumented,
hyper-exploited labour force, subject to a range of discriminations
and forms of violence enacted by state and civil institutions.
Moreover, the equation of trafcking with prostitution in the
trafcking discourse renders sexual labour as coerced labour and, as
such, misrepresents sexual agency. When sexuality is experienced and
understood as an economic resource that can be self-activated and
used to benet the individual or family, a woman (or man) may opt
in the face of very limited alternatives and opportunities for economic

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participation for sex work as an income-generating strategy. Prostitution may then become work that women and men consciously decide
to take up. The righteous call to end the trafc of women collides
with a reality that makes sex work a viable alternative for economic
advancement.
The politics of this war deserves critical attention from Caribbean
governments, intellectuals and activists so that the region does not
simply bow to international and national patriarchal, racialised state
interest. This can be accomplished on a number of fronts. First, attention to distinctions between systems of slavery and indentured or debtbonded labour in the past would help to clarify conditions for migrant
workers in the twenty-rst century. Rather than contributing to a
moral crusade against human trafcking, research and analysis of
forced labour and undocumented migrations within the global and
Caribbean political economy allow us both to better understand situations today and to draw informed parallels with the past. Second, the
equation of human trafcking with sexual slavery which permeates
accounts of what is taking place in the Caribbean requires ongoing
interrogation. Prostitution cannot automatically be construed as violence to women and the undocumented migration of women around
the region for sex work can be examined as something more than
victimisation and enslavement. Investigation into the Caribbean sex
trade would enable a more complex conceptualisation of sexual
labour and of the ways in which women participate in prostitution
and other sexual-economic relations. Examinations of Caribbean
sexual laws and morality would also help to discern the grounds for
constructing alternative ideologies about womens sexuality and dispel
the stigmatisation and moral indignation that surround sexualeconomic activities. Finally, the panic around human trafcking needs
to be exposed for the racial and gender violence it visits upon marginalised communities, particularly the Caribbeans indigenous people
and migrant women. Immobilising the hype around modern day
slavery remains a critical and necessary step towards charting viable
alternatives in the Caribbean.
Kamala Kempadoo is associate professor in the division of social sciences and
director of the graduate programme in social and political thought at York University, Toronto. She is author and editor of several books on the global sex trade,
including Trafcking and Prostitution Reconsidered: new perspectives on
migration, sex work and human rights (Boulder, CO, Paradigm Press, 2005).

References
1 Associated Press, Vatican ofcial blasts human trafcking (14 November 2006).
2 The annual Trafcking in Persons (TIP) reports from the US Department of State,
which started in 2001, include the US denition of human trafcking, information

Commentary

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4

85

about the US minimum standards, country narrative and, from 2003, the tier placements. See <http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt>. The tiers into which countries
are ranked are dened as follows: Tier 1: Countries whose governments fully
comply with the Acts minimum standards. Tier 2: Countries whose governments
do not fully comply with the Acts minimum standards but are making signicant
efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards. Tier 3: Countries
whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not
making signicant efforts to do so. In 2003, a Tier 2 Special Watch List was created
for countries that were to receive special scrutiny.
US Secretary of State, Victims of Trafcking and Violence Protection Act of 2000:
trafcking in persons report (Washington DC, Department of State, June 2005).
In a report about IOM activities in the region, it is noted that the organisation recommends three multilateral treaties for monitoring compliance and that it urges government to use CARICOM to draft anti-trafcking legislation see <http://
www.jonesbahamas.com/?c=45&a=9050>. See also IOM/OAS, Report and outcomes: regional meeting on counter-trafcking strategies in the Caribbean region,
1416 March 2005, <http://www.oas.org/cim/Documentos/Trata-%20Caribbean%
20Regional%20Meeting%20Report%20nal.doc>.
At the twenty-seventh meeting of the CARICOM Heads of Government Conference,
held in July 2006, it was agreed that a multilateral evaluation mechanism was needed
to address the issue of human trafcking and that a technical working group would be
set up to undertake a study and make specic policy recommendations. See <http://
www.caricom.org/jsp/pressreleases/pres147_06.jsp>.
US Secretary of State, Victims of Trafcking and Violence Protection Act of 2000:
trafcking in persons report (Washington DC, US Department of State, 2006).

Disposable populations: the CSME,

HIV and AIDS
By Robert Carr and R. Anthony Lewis
Abstract: The implementation of the Caribbean Single Market and
Economy (CSME) will bring, among other things, the free movement
of qualied labour, which political leaders hope will give the benets
of an economic bloc to the micro-economies of the region. There is,
however, the question of whether the current status quo of unequal
rights and the unequal distribution of benets for various vulnerable
groups will continue. This is particularly relevant as the epidemics of
HIV and AIDS deepen in the region. This commentary argues for a
critical analysis of the trends now emerging in the Caribbean Single
Market that may reinforce the structural vulnerabilities that act as
the drivers of these epidemics.
Keywords: HIV treatment, infection rates, labour migration, prejudice,
sex work, structural vulnerability