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Stephanie J. Nawyn is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. Nur Banu Kavakli Birdal is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University, Turkey. Naomi Glogower is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. The authors wish to acknowledge the Center for Gender in Global Context, the Center for Advanced Studies in Development, and the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University for their financial support of this project. The authors thank April Zeoli and the anonymous review-ers for their comments on earlier drafts. Address correspondence to Stephanie J. Nawyn, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 509 E Circle Dr., 316 Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1111; e-mail: nawyn@msu.edu.

International Journal of Sociology, vol. 43, no. 3, Fall 2013, pp. 55–71.© 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.comISSN 0020–7659 (print)/ISSN 1557–9336 (online)DOI: 10.2753/IJS0020-7659430303

Stephanie J. nawyn, nur Banu KavaKli Birdal, and naomi GloGower

Estimating the Extent of Sex TraffickingProblems in Definition and Methodology

Abstract: There is a growing scholarly interest in human trafficking, particularly the trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of coerced sex work. However, the field is hindered by both inconsistent definitions of sex trafficking (some of which categorizes all sex work as trafficking) and unreliable methods for estimating the numbers of people who are trafficked. Further, there is a dearth of empirical data on the different types of exploitation involved in trafficking that would allow for an understanding of how trafficking may be part of a larger system of global labor ex-ploitation. In this article we review the different ways that trafficking has been defined, how researchers have estimated the number of people who are trafficked, and the different underlying dynamics of trafficking identified in both scholarly and policy literatures. Using an epistemological framework from forced migration studies, we then suggest improved methods for defining and estimating sex trafficking.

The published work on human trafficking has exploded in the past decade. Nu-merous articles and books have been written on the topic, but much of it has

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been speculative and wrought with hyperbole. Commonly described by advocacy nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies as “modern-day slavery,” empirical evidence suggests that present-day human trafficking bears little resemblance to phenomena such as the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade that oper-ated through the mid-1800s. But associations of nineteenth- with twenty-first-century slavery continue (see side-by-side comparisons of escaped slave advertisements in the U.S. Department of State “Trafficking in Persons Report,” 2012, which largely serve to disguise important differences in people’s experiences of labor exploitation). Conceptions of “force,” “coercion,” and “choice” should not be assumed, but rather explored in human trafficking research to understand how trafficking happens, and most important, to create effective interventions to ameliorate it.

In this article, we describe the disparate ways that trafficking is defined and studied, and provide a critique of the methodological flaws. We explore the tensions between morality, exploitation, and agency that underpin anti-trafficking laws and policies. We then propose a better way of understanding the phenomenon that uses reactive migration (Richmond 1993) and bounded rationality (Chin and Finckenaur 2012) to both recognize the choices that migrants make and the constraints under which they make those choices.

Definitions and Contradictions

Estimates of the number of people trafficked globally vary considerably, with advocacy and governmental organizations frequently citing 20 million people or more (Bales, Trodd, and Williamson 2009; International Labour Office 2012). The estimates have shifted over time, in part because more types of labor exploitation have been included; the U.S. Department of State “Trafficking in Persons Report” (2012) illustrates this, with otherwise legal low-wage, dangerous jobs included in their most recent estimations. The accuracy of these estimates remains a question. Scholars of human trafficking have critiqued these estimates for lacking empirical support (Agustín 2007; O’Connell Davidson 2010; Zhang 2009). Given the policy and advocacy interest in human trafficking, there are surprisingly few empirical in-vestigations of the phenomenon. Of the existing studies, not all use clear definitions of trafficking, nor are definitions consistent across different studies (Di Nicola 2007). Studies that include an explicit definition generally use the criteria of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which defines trafficking as:

[T]he 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, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (UNODC 2004: 42)

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While this is a relatively comprehensive definition, there are variations in how it is interpreted. Coercion, for example, has included different acts that range from emotional manipulation, flirting, and false promises of a better financial future to debt bondage, death threats (against oneself or one’s family), confiscation of travel documents, being held against one’s will, torture, rape, and physical violence (Bloch 2003; Chin and Finckenaur 2012; Hepburn and Simon 2010; Saat 2009; Tverdova 2011; Warren 2012; Zhang 2011). Physical violence or threats of physical violence are commonly associated with slavery, but emotional and financial manipulation are also included in these empirical definitions and are more commonly found by researchers.

To better understand the dynamics of trafficking and produce more precise es-timates, it is useful to consider the different scenarios that fall under the umbrella term of trafficking. One can think of these as typologies falling along axes of movement (domestic vs. international), type of labor (sexual vs. nonsexual), and age (minor vs. legal adult). Overlaying these axes, then one must also consider the presence or absence of consent. Such a typology is but a first step in thinking about the different scenarios various authors have categorized as trafficking.

1. Underage prostitution (assumed to be involuntary by most legal frameworks);2. Underage nonsexual labor (assumed to be involuntary by most legal

frameworks);3. Adult sexual labor assumed involuntary without clear evidence of force;4. Adult sexual labor with evidence of force, coercion, or deceit; and5. Adult nonsexual labor with evidence of force, coercion, or deceit.

All five scenarios can then be divided by domestic (in which the person does not relocate, or relocates within a nation-state border) and international (in which a person crosses a nation-state border to perform coerced work, with the migration itself possibly involving coercion). The domestic/international categorization is important because different forms of coercion and fraud are made possible when a person crosses a nation-state border, such as the withholding of documents or the incurrence of large debts to enter a country without authorization. While these different scenarios represent different kinds of exploitation that necessitate dif-ferent strategies for intervention (e.g., a minor who has run away from home and is cajoled into sex work requires different kinds of assistance than does an adult woman who immigrates from another country to work in domestic labor and finds her pay withheld and her movement restricted), all have been categorized under the blanket term “trafficking.” While it is theoretically possible that nonsexual labor with assumed force but lacking clear evidence of force could be categorized as trafficking, we can find no evidence that such a category is ever considered in the literature on human trafficking. It is only when the labor is of a sexual nature, especially when that labor is prostitution (by which we mean sexual labor involv-ing some type of bodily penetration), is coercion or force assumed without clear

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evidence. For purposes of our argument, we focus on international adult sexual labor categorized as trafficking. This type of trafficking scenario includes the most contentiousness around definitions of force, coercion, and deceit. Thus, an explora-tion of this type of trafficking allows us to focus on the area of the literature that requires the most clarity, in terms of both theory and policy.

The lack of a cohesive definition of trafficking is a tremendous problem, leading to wildly varying numbers of trafficked people from study to study. Even from the same official agency, the numbers vary dramatically. For example, authors relying on the U.S. Department of State estimates claim the number of annual trafficking victims to be 12 million (Avadan 2012), 600,000–800,000 (Fry 2008), and 900,000 (Tverdova 2011). These estimates are at the lower end of what is commonly cited by anti-trafficking NGOs, but even these more conservative estimates are not useful if we do not know what kind or severity of coercion was present that delineated a given person as trafficked rather than just exploited. To get a clear picture, there has to be better consistency in how trafficking is defined, not just in general terms as with the UN protocol but in how researchers and law enforcement understand the elements of trafficking (e.g., coercion, deception, and force). This involves determining how different sources define illegal coercion, given that much labor in the global marketplace involves some coercion. Second, we have to determine how many people actually meet that definition of being illegally coerced into labor. Given that the UN definition does not actually require slavery conditions (in which the person is owned, has no autonomy, and receives no compensation for his/her labor) be present to qualify as trafficking, the law prohibits a far greater range of coercive treatment than the label “modern-day slavery” allows. In the following sections we outline how researchers conducting empirical studies of trafficking have made determinations of sufficient coercion to constitute trafficking, and how many trafficked people they have identified.

The best way for researchers to avoid conflating sex work with sex trafficking and to attend to the uncertain boundaries between these concepts is to provide detailed descriptions of the circumstances involving a person’s performance of sexual labor. In research on trafficking, researchers commonly do not include details of the type of coercion used or the severity of the coercion. For example, Kamalesh Sarkar and colleagues (2008: 226) give a breakdown of the number of sex workers in West Bengal who are trafficked, with 24 percent of the 580 respondents reporting that they were cheated and forced to perform sex work against their will and 8 percent were forced “directly or indirectly” by spouses or family members. However, while the authors provide some details about the fraudulent claims made by the recruit-ers (such as promises of non-sex-work jobs and better quality of life), they give no indication of the type of force used. This absence of detail is prevalent in NGO reports such as the most recent report from the International Labour Office (2012), which did not provide details on the type of coercion used in different cases.

Even with varying interpretations of what constitutes trafficking, researchers consistently find that many of the assumed victims of trafficking have not actually

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experienced coercion, particularly among people doing sex work. This is especially true of studies that take a convenience or purposive sampling of sex workers, rather than relying solely on respondents who have been apprehended or identified by the police as victims of trafficking. For example, Sheldon Zhang (2011) found that among the sex workers in Tijuana studied, only 5 percent experienced coercion that met the definition of trafficking. In interviews with sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa, Chandré Gould (2011) found that of the 1,209 sex workers in her study, only a small number fit the definition of having been trafficked. Thomas Steinfatt (2011) critiqued the estimates produced by NGOs in Cambodia (which claimed that between 80,000 and 100,000 women were trafficked in Phnom Penh). His research, consisting of three separate studies, found 2,774 observed cases of trafficking from an estimated 25,230 sex workers in Cambodia (however, Steinfatt estimated the number of trafficked workers to be slightly higher, and defined trafficking only by venue managements’ reports of how many of their workers were indentured).

A few studies provide explicit details on the types of exploitation that sex-trafficked individuals experience; these studies provide the most insight into the phenomenon. Ko-Lin Chin and James Finckenaur (2012) performed an extensive study of migrant Chinese women selling sex in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Thai-land, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United States. Of the 149 overseas women workers interviewed, none said that they had been sold as property, only one said that she was deceived into doing sex work (although about 10 percent indicated that they had been deceived into doing sex work previously in mainland China), and one indicated that she had been “traded” from one agent (to whom she owed money) to another. About 15 percent of women (numbering twenty-two) indicated that their movements were restricted; these women were likely to owe money to a recruiter, agent, or other facilitator for the cost of their travel or false documents, or to be employed in spas and saunas, escort agencies, or nightclubs. Those working independently of such venues nearly always felt that their freedoms were not restricted. Many of the women in Chin and Finckenaur’s study argued it was not possible to force a woman to be a prostitute, and many found the assump-tion that they had been tricked infantilizing.

Debt peonage is a common form of coercion in trafficking situations, and col-lecting data on the amount of debt (especially in relation to the amount of money workers can earn) and who controls the debt is essential to understanding the severity of trafficking. In her study of Filipina hostesses in Tokyo clubs, Rhacel Salazar Par-reñas (2011) found no women who reported being coerced or deceived into taking their jobs, but most owed so much debt they rarely did more than break even dur-ing their first contract in Japan. However, this debt was not to an organized crime syndicate or other “trafficker,” but to the state-sanctioned agencies that recruited and trained them, and managed their contracts with the club owners.

As the case of the Filipina hostesses in Parreñas’s (2011) study illustrate, laws intended to protect women from sex trafficking can themselves produce exploita-tion. Protecting girls and women from exploitation, especially sexual exploitation,

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is a central discursive framework of anti-trafficking policies, but these policies do not always lead to greater autonomy for women and girls. The term “sexual slavery” implies the existence of victims requiring rescue, and often conceptualizes all prostitution as trafficking (which we take up later). Yet, some feminist scholars have critiqued this rhetoric as patriarchal and disconnected from the reality of many women working in the sex industry (Chapkis 2003; Soderlund 2005). We argue that the discourse of sexual slavery is rooted in patriarchal notions of the importance of sexual purity; in the next section we describe how these notions undergird the morality arguments around sex trafficking.

Morality and Women’s Sexual Purity

Patriarchal conceptions of sexual morality, virginity, and notions of honor are central to the construction of prostitution as always being a form of trafficking. Patriar-chy defines women’s sexual morality as a marker of her worth as an individual as well as the social standing of the men to whom she ostensibly “belongs” (usually a father, husband, or whatever male family member holds the position of family patriarch). The control over women’s lives is practiced especially by the control over their bodies and sexuality embodied in the codes of honor and shame of the society. Honor is basically concerned with a man’s ability to protect his belong-ings (Delaney 1987). In patriarchal societies women are considered to be both the property of and protected by their male kin; the honor of the man is defined through the honorability of his women (wife, daughter, mother, sisters, and nieces). For women to be honorable, they need to be chaste, which is equated with sexual purity: a man’s honor is defined through the sexual conduct of “his” women.

Honor is used to assess the social standing of both women and men. However, connotations for women and men are completely different. While a man’s honor is measured by his trustworthiness and “decency,” women are judged on being sexu-ally pure. It is important to note, however, that no man can claim honor if any of the women he is responsible for are suspected of being dishonorable. An honorable man is not supposed to be a virgin or stay away from women. But the women he is responsible for are supposed to be virgins (until they get married) and to refrain from overt sexual behavior. Simply stated, it does not matter what her character traits are, an honorable woman is a virgin and an honorable man is someone whose wife, daughters, sisters, nieces, and so on are virgins.

F. Mernissi takes the discussion of the relationship between patriarchy and virgin-ity a step further and defines virginity “as a matter between men” (Mernissi 2000: 203). She sees virginity as identical to honor, in the sense that it works to generate self-confidence for men in a context of inequality, scarcity, and deprivation. By locating the prestige of men between the women’s legs, men’s status is secured. Controlling the bodies and movements of women who are related to them by blood or by marriage frees men from the need to accomplish much harder tasks to regain

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power, such as being a provider in a fierce capitalist economy or overcoming class and ethnic inequalities that subjugate them.

In the interests of controlling women’s sexuality, men who have lost honor through the sexual behavior of women sometimes use violence (frequently state-sanctioned due to a lack of prosecution of perpetrators) to reinstate the gender order and reestablish “honor.” Veena Das (2007) states that violence is not an exception but a constructive element of all societies. In every society, bodies are marked and molded for the socialization of those same bodies. Violence is not distributed equally among members of modern societies. On the contrary, asymmetrical power relations define those who apply violence and those who experience it. Das ana-lyzes this inequality in terms of a debtor–creditor relationship. Certain segments of the society (women) fail to fulfill their social responsibilities (maintaining the appearance of sexual purity) and thus incur a debt by harming the social order. They then have to experience violence to compensate for their debt. Violence is thus legitimized. Moreover, the memory of violence and pain teaches them and others to conform to social norms. In patriarchal societies in which honor killings are prevalent, women suspected of dishonorable conduct are indebted to the society and can only settle their debt by destroying their bodies, the physical evidence of their debt, by committing suicide. If they do not settle the debt themselves, male family members are obligated to murder them (see Birdal 2010 for an in-depth analysis of honor killings in Turkey). The absence of their bodies and the memory of their destruction help reproduce social order.

While honor killings are not common everywhere, many cultures stigmatize women’s sexual agency and sexuality outside of patriarchal notions of honor, which limits women’s economic opportunities (Menjivar 2000) and contributes to women’s vulnerability to sex trafficking (Akpinar 2003). Much of the anti-trafficking rhetoric uncritically mobilizes the stigma associated with women who have multiple sex partners, and thus a woman who freely chooses to have sex with multiple partners, and even worse, commodifies that sex through an economic exchange, is inconceiv-able. Therefore, women cannot engage in sex-for-money exchanges without the presence of coercion. Of course, some women who sell sex are coerced or have limited options when choosing to sell sex, so prostitution can be exploitative. But is that exploitation significantly different from what occurs with a great deal of low-wage, low-status labor in which many migrant women engage? This is the question we take up in the next section.

Labor Exploitation Versus Labor Trafficking

A major flaw in the theorizing of sex trafficking is the fuzzy delineation between coercion/force and exploitation. Trafficking is clearly identified as a relationship of exploitation between the person being trafficked and the person or persons doing the trafficking. However, not all exploitation is trafficking. The enforcement of

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anti-human-trafficking law requires making a delineation between perhaps immoral but still legal labor exploitation (such as offering unpleasant or difficult work to people whose economic situations makes it difficult for them to decline such work), illegal labor exploitation (which might include requiring longer working hours or providing lower pay than is allowed by national law), and trafficking. Popular discourse on trafficking constructs trafficking as a form of slavery. However, em-pirical evidence of widespread slavery-like conditions among trafficked victims is sparse, and there is now general consensus among scholars that traffickers rarely use abduction as a method of force (Newman 2006).

Julia O’Connell Davidson (2010) describes this conundrum as a problem of binaries that obfuscates the complexity of people’s lived experiences. The binary of freedom/slavery assumes absolute exploitation versus absolute agency. A person who is free can move unimpeded through the world (even across national borders), and make choices about what labor to perform and what to accept for remuneration. A person who is a slave has no ability to move, has no control over his/her labor, and is given no remuneration for his/her labor. But few if any people fall cleanly within these binary categories. Real world situations complicate a clean division between “sex slaves” and people who migrate voluntarily but lack authorization and perform work that is dangerous, poorly compensated, or in other ways ex-ploitative. This real world fuzziness in the boundary between coercion and choice shows that the freedom/slavery binary frequently mobilized in anti-trafficking rhetoric does not produce a category of “trafficked person” distinguishable from “exploited worker.”

Being able to separate coercion from exploitation is integral to the implementa-tion of anti-trafficking policy. The International Labour Organization (ILO 2005) makes a distinction between exploitative labor practices (such as nonpayment of statutory minimum wages) and coercive labor practices (such as not allowing a worker to leave the workplace). However, it is not clear from these guidelines how “withholding of wages” differs from “nonpayment of statutory minimum wages,” nor how a “threat of denunciation to authorities” is not an implicit part of all employer–employee relations when the employee cannot legally work in the country. Migration-related debts are also quite common, even in cases of authorized migration, further problematizing the distinction between people who are trafficked and people who work voluntarily (with few other options) to repay migration-related loans (O’Connell Davidson 2013).

In the case of sexual labor, some scholars find that economic desperation alone is enough to constitute a situation as trafficking, propagating the assumption that all or most prostitutes are trafficked (e.g., Deer 2010; Nair and Sen 2005). While economic deprivation may in fact make concepts of choice and consent in sex work problematic, there is no reason to limit this problematizing to sexual labor. The same critique has been made regarding the “choice” to perform other kinds of labor, such as domestic work (Agustín 2007; Mahdavi and Sargent 2011; O’Connell Davidson 2013). One could also view situations such as those of Chinese factory

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workers (Chan 2001; Chan and Pun 2010) and South Asian construction workers in the United Arab Emirates (Al-Maskari et al. 2011) as compelled by economic necessity as prostitution is.

Equating prostitution with sex trafficking also requires treating women in poverty as if they have no agency. The language that writers use in making this argument mirrors the emotive calls for action from many anti-trafficking NGOs, and erases the variation in experiences described by prostitutes themselves. For example, Sankar Sen and Jayashree Ahuja wrote about prostitution in India this way:

It is highly deplorable and heart-rending to note that many poverty stricken children and girls in the prime of youth are taken to “flesh market” and forcibly pushed into the “flesh trade” which is being carried on in utter violation of all cannons of morality, decency and dignity of humankind. There cannot be two opinions—in-deed there is none that this obnoxious and abomindable crime committed with all kinds of unthinkable vulgarity should be eradicated at all levels by drastic steps. (Sen and Ahuja 2009: 163)

In this quote, Sen and Ahuja refer to “children and girls;” in differentiating between “girls” and “children,” it seems they are referring to young women (“in the prime of youth”) as girls. This infantilizing turn of words positions women as children who cannot make choices about their bodies, however constrained those choices are. In an effort to describe the harsh conditions that many prostitutes in India endure, they erase the possibility of agency for all women in prostitution.

Janice Raymond describes prostitution similarly, in a more explicitly feminist framework, likening prostitution to sexual harassment and abuse made legal through the exchange of money (Raymond 1998: 2). Raymond makes an astute point that determining an age of consent is problematic—if a seventeen-year-old can marry in a country, why can she not consent to sex work? What about a sixteen-year-old? And is she very much different from a fifteen-year-old? But Raymond, as well as Sen and Ahuja, in their depiction of prostitution as always a crime against women, construct unsustainable divisions between exploitation in sex work and exploita-tion of nonsexual labor. Raymond argues that prostitution should not be considered work, in part because there are no discernible skills acquired that would improve a woman’s employability. But the same could be said for most low-wage, highly exploitative jobs. Raymond and Sen and Ahuja also ignore the variation in expe-riences reported by women who perform sex work. Empirical research indicates that some women enjoy aspects of sex work and describe their participation in it as voluntary (Agustín 2005, 2007; Chin and Finckenaur 2012; Gülçür and Ølk-karacan 2002; Sanders 2005). Scholars should not ignore those experiences in an effort to address the severe exploitation that also exists in sex work. Furthermore, by conceptualizing sex work as uniquely exploitative, we downplay the significant exploitation that exists in nonsexual labor and trafficking (Uy 2011).

While separating acts of labor exploitation from acts of trafficking is critical to creating clear juridical interventions (i.e., charging someone with the crime of trafficking versus charges of labor exploitation, with different criminal penalties

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attached to each charge), it is also important to explore the relationship between labor exploitation and trafficking. Migration scholarship shows that the satisfac-tion with one’s decision to migrate is dependent not so much upon the absolute opportunities one gains from migrating, but rather how good those opportunities are related to the opportunities left behind (De Jong 2000; Fitzgerald 2009; Gold 2003; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Therefore, people tend to judge their migration a success using the home country context as their referent. Applying this to human trafficking, if women working in the sex industry have extremely unfavorable employment options in their home region or country, they may be willing to tolerate trafficking situations because they are earning more (or have been promised that they will eventually earn more) than they would have had they not been trafficked. Alternatively, women with fewer options may not need to be defrauded, coerced, or forced into sex work in order to extract their labor, making trafficking less likely to happen when women are more economically vulnerable.

Agency Versus Trafficking

Seemingly in contradiction to coercion is agency, or how much control people have over their own lives and how much ability they have to act freely. Authors explor-ing this issue define agency as autonomy in the decision to migrate or enter the sex industry, independence in work with regard to clientele, services performed, and hours worked, ability to talk back to managers, and personal control over sexual-ity (Bloch 2003; Gould 2011; Sarkar et al. 2008; Tverdova 2011). These authors found that in situations in which the “modern-day slavery” discourse would predict a total lack of agency, the women found their own ways to exhibit control. For example, Alexia Bloch (2003) discovered that post-Soviet sex workers in Turkey saw themselves as more educated than their club managers, and often insulted the managers to their faces in Russian as a way of bolstering their status. Other post-Soviet sex workers saw their sexuality and ability to dress in a provocative fashion as a physical representation of their freedom (Tverdova 2011). In these situations, the authors found the women had far more agency than was to be expected. Steinfatt (2011) indicated that agency is dependent upon the type of work performed. For example, a woman working the street will have more freedom than a woman who is forced to remain in a brothel.

In some studies, researchers found that agency shifted over time, as workers moved up in the hierarchy of the sex industry or became vulnerable through a changing legal status in the receiving country. For example, in Kay Warren’s (2012) study on sex trafficking in Japan, she found that many women entered the industry voluntarily, coming to the work through a web of referrals in which former prostitutes became pimps and recruited their daughters to work for them. The older woman moved up the chain, complete with more freedom and control, while the younger women replaced the older women in the brothel. Gusni Saat (2009) noted that women working in Malaysia sometimes left, ran away, or returned

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to their home in the Philippines when their work contracts expired and they had paid off their debt. Women interviewed for this study said they only felt a lack of independence when their visitor visas expired and they had to rely on the people who facilitated their migration (Saat 2009). Often, their travel documents were withheld from them and they were lied to about the type of job they would have in Malaysia, and yet they felt a sense of freedom in the work itself and the economic independence it provided.

Elif Özer (2012) found that women who had been coerced into sex work in Turkey still feared the police more than their traffickers. She interviewed coerced sex workers rescued by state authorities or who had escaped and contacted an NGO (HRDF-Human Resource Development Foundation) as part of its Combating Hu-man Trafficking Program. Özer found that these women from former Soviet Union countries were voluntarily involved in the migration process with the prospect of being employed in care work or domestic work. There are accounts of victims being informed about the possibility of sex work, with false promises regarding the earn-ings and work conditions associated with it, however. All of the workers in Özer’s study were involuntarily forced to become sex workers after they entered Turkey, with their traffickers withholding their documents, hindering communication op-portunities, and confiscating their earnings. The network of traffickers is made up of “mediators,” “merchants,” and “pimps.” Mediators are predominantly women related to the victims as relatives or neighbors. Asymmetrical power relations exist between the mediator women and potential immigrant women. The higher status and power of the mediators stem from their migration experience and in certain cases their holding of citizenship due to marriage. It turns out that when women are brought out of the web of sex work through the interference of state authorities, they feel not as if they have been rescued but as if they have been caught. This is due to the fear of deportation resulting from their undocumented status and the feeling of guilt and illegality associated with sex work. In this case, the women defined the police has the source of oppression, and not the mediators, merchants, or pimps.

Many scholars are critical of existing methods for studying sex trafficking and the rhetoric of the rescue industry maintaining that all sex workers are trafficking victims that need to be saved. Warren expressed concern over this rhetoric be-cause “this international paradigm reproduces the grammar of evil predators and innocent victims with some heroic local figures and critical support from the West to rescue slaves” (Warren 2012: 109). This freedom/slavery binary is not only an inadequate way of understanding sex trafficking, it also directs resources toward inefficient “rescue” efforts and supports the passage of laws that hurt rather than protect vulnerable migrant workers.

Portraying Women’s Experiences Through Bounded Rationality

Two points emerge from the empirical literature on sex trafficking; (1) situations that might be defined as trafficking rarely involve a complete lack of freedom on

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the part of the migrant, and (2) the freedom that migrants have to make choices falls within a range of agency and constraint, with some migrants having more freedom to choose their situation than others. Chin and Finckenaur (2012) refer to this as “bounded rationality.” Bounded rationality was originally conceptualized by economists as a corrective to neoclassical economic theory (March 1978; Simon 1972). As Chin and Finckenaur use it, agency is always available but constrained to a greater or lesser degree depending on local context. Local context includes condi-tions for a given individual in his/her home country and the context of reception in the receiving country in terms of national-level migration policies and “on the ground” working conditions for migrants in a given industry. People make choices about whether or not to migrate, how to carry out migration, and what work to perform at their destination based on what conditions facilitate or constrain their choices, with those conditions experienced locally by individuals.

Bounded rationality inherently attends to different dimensions of global inequal-ity because the conditions of a potential migrant’s life in wealthy countries will be different from those of someone in a poor country, as well as from the inequality experience of different people within a nation-state. Therefore, broad assumptions about the inherent characteristics of exploitation in any given type of migration or form of labor will flatten out the nuance in any individual’s process of making “rational” choices. Bounded rationality provides a useful lens through which to examine the experiences of people defined as trafficked, and helps us to understand the different dimensions of trafficking as well as what might constitute a helpful intervention versus an intervention that continues to oppress migrant workers, just in different ways.

How we define trafficking does more than shape how we categorize certain circumstances as criminal and necessitating intervention. It also shapes where we locate the origination of the problem, and thus the intervention devised to address it. The agency versus coercion tension is central to this. If we think of migrant women as inherently vulnerable to the point that they are insufficiently equipped to act in their own self-interest, we have located the source of migrant women’s vulnerability within their own persons. They literally embody vulnerability, and thus something outside of themselves must be devised to protect them. Such ex-planations of trafficking have led to the laws that Parreñas (2011) described. What Parreñas found was that the requirements devised to ensure that Filipina migrants were not trafficked produced a substantial bureaucracy of government oversight and private sector middlemen facilitators, such that Filipina entertainers rarely recovered their costs during their first migration to Japan. Furthermore, their ability to make decisions about their work was highly constrained by the laws ostensibly designed to protect them. In essence, Parreñas found that rather than being exploited by nefarious organized crime syndicates, they were instead exploited by the state and state-sanctioned private agents.

Rather than categorize people as trafficked or not trafficked, it is more useful to

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think about a range of labor exploitation that might constitute trafficking. In other words, the exploitation is categorized rather than the person. In reality, people move in and out of situations that give them differing degrees of autonomy and result in differing circumstances of exploitation. A discursive move away from identifying trafficking victims to identifying trafficking situations avoids the disempowering strategy of defining people by their victimization,1 and instead focuses on the specifics of exploitation and the people perpetrating it. It also allows us to view certain types of labor exploitation as meeting the criteria for trafficking while also recognizing that for those trafficked, their experiences as trafficked people may be preferable to other types of oppression they experience (such as the inability to find self-sustaining work in their home country). It also creates room for un-derstanding how legal structures like labor laws and restrictive migration policies contribute to the exploitation of people identified as trafficked, and may in fact facilitate trafficking.

To help us make this discursive shift, we propose using a framework of “reactive migration.” This term was conceptualized by Anthony Richmond (1993) to explain the different motivators of refugee or forced migration, in which the decision to migrate takes place along a continuum of proactive migration (i.e., migrating to maximize advantages) and reactive migration (i.e., migrating to minimize nega-tive consequences). Richmond intended to dissolve the artificial division between individual decision making and macro-level structural factors. His theory of reac-tive migration includes economic and political structural influences, and because it encompasses more than just migration decisions based on labor market consider-ations (as Chin and Finckenhaur’s bounded rationality largely does), it provides a mechanism for theorizing state and even supra-state influences on migration, such as the effects that United Nations counter-trafficking protocols might have on the opportunities of people to migrate (or not) and their vulnerability to exploitation that might result in trafficking. Richmond’s theory also includes cultural conditions in the home country that may be both influential in women’s decisions to migrate and produce social and psychological constraints on their actions upon arrival in the receiving country. Therefore, using a reactive migration framework would help us understand how women might decide to enter an exploitative labor situation to escape oppressive patriarchal constraints in their home country, or why they might be unwilling to avail themselves of assistance to leave a trafficking situation because they fear being ostracized from their home community if people find out they engaged in prostitution.

Methodological Innovations Moving Forward

Because the term “trafficking” combines a wide range of exploitative experiences, with shifting operationalizations of what counts as trafficking, we propose a bet-ter method for studying the phenomenon that seeks to describe the range of labor

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exploitation people experience, rather than attempting to make a dichotomous de-termination of who can be categorized as trafficked or not trafficked. In the case of sex trafficking, it is critical to address questions to sex workers themselves, rather than relying on secondary sources such as police, NGOs, or media reports (which are far more prevalent in the literature than is research with possible trafficking victims). Detailing the different types of exploitation that sex workers experi-ence is ideal for understanding what types of fraud, coercion, or force are most prevalent, in what circumstances they occur, and who perpetrates them. Ques-tions for sex workers could include experiences of: (1) fraudulent or misleading promises prior to migration; (2) a range of coercive experiences from those that might appear positive, such as flattery or gaining one’s affections, to threats of physical/sexual violence; (3) limitations on mobility once a person begins sex work; (4) withholding of earnings, application of debt, or charging of fees that are deducted from the person’s earnings; (5) fraudulent or misleading promises about how much of their earnings workers will be able to keep, or the amount deducted in fees; (6) lack of control over working conditions (i.e. number of required work hours, what sexual services must be provided, ability to require customers to wear condoms, or to refuse serving customers who are disrespectful or abusive); and (7) coercion exerted to keep the person working for the pimp or establishment owner when they wish to stop performing sex work or work for someone else or work in a different venue.

It is also important to ask sex workers about their level of satisfaction with their current jobs, and what other alternatives they think they have. This would help us understand how sex workers themselves view their situation. It will also give us insight into how they understand their options outside of their current situation, and how having other options (or a lack of other options) contributes to their as-sessment of those feelings and possibly the desire to remain in an exploitative position. These types of questions are either infrequently asked of sex workers or not reported systematically. Asking sex workers whether they choose to engage in sex work or if they are being forced to does not get at the underlying issues of bounded rationality; the choices they make depend entirely upon the other choices they think they have.

When conceptualizing human trafficking within a legal framework, it is neces-sary at some point to delineate trafficking from other forms of labor exploitation to determine what actions constitute criminality and to create laws and punishments for criminal acts. However, juridical bodies must reconsider the current definitions and interpretations of trafficking to avoid creating laws that only further harm people in trafficking situations (or even producing trafficking-like conditions). Scholars of trafficking, who perhaps have more flexibility in embracing complexity, must always present clearly defined parameters of what situations they consider as traf-ficking, and interrogate their own interpretations of their data so as not to make false assumptions about choice and freedom in the lives of people in trafficking situations.

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Note

1. Feminists working in anti-domestic-violence social movements used this strategy to reframe victimhood, using the term “survivor” rather than “victim” as a way of acknowledging the agency that people have even in situations of exploitation and oppression (Dunn 2005).

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