Mara Clemente
ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia, Lisboa, Portugal
Almost a year ago, in August 2023, the article Feminism and Counter-Trafficking: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Feminism in Portugal was published in Social & Legal Studies. My research on “human trafficking” and counter-trafficking started much earlier and, in this blog, I want to discuss some insights regarding the research that provided a foundation for the article, and share my views about what the article seeks to do, and look at where my work on trafficking and counter-trafficking has gone since the article was published.
From trafficking to counter-trafficking
I started working on “human trafficking” when I took up a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte), Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon at the end of 2014. With the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), my interest at first focused on the experiences of trafficking and post-trafficking of people moved to, from or within Portugal with the aim of their exploitation. When I began studying this topic, there was a limited amount of research specifically relating to this national context, and the few studies that did exist, largely funded by government institutions via various European programmes, aimed at informing the construction of a Portuguese counter-trafficking system. The few attempts to conduct research outside this framework faced challenges, especially in regard to securing access to trafficked persons. Meanwhile, as in other contexts, research on the sex market challenged some attempts to identify sex trafficking with sex work.
In regard to my approach, fieldwork took the form of participation at various events, training exercises and awareness actions within Portuguese counter-trafficking, as well as making observations at a shelter for trafficked women. This research enabled me to reconsider what I now came to see as the somewhat simplistic understanding of “human trafficking” constructed by counter-trafficking law and public discourse, a theme I discussed in a chapter published in The Palgrave Handbook of Youth Mobility and Educational Migration.
Moving on from this work, through combining documentary research with almost sixty qualitative interviews conducted with state and non-state actors as well as trafficked persons, I have also discussed the limited value of counter-trafficking for trafficked persons. In “The counter‐trafficking apparatus in action: who benefits from it?”, I argued that one reason why trafficked persons fail to benefit relates to debates that have been marginalized within counter-trafficking, including important perspectives on the politics of prostitution and the rights of migrant labourers, in addition to viewing trafficking through a securitization lens alongside the disciplinary effects of identity politics. In this article I argued that, through privileging technical policy discourses and depriving the lives of trafficked persons of politics, counter-trafficking has come to act as an anti-politics machine, reinforcing the bureaucratic power of the state and marginalizing the participation of bearers of differing understandings of counter-trafficking.
In more recent times, with the start of a new research project on “The articulation of anti-trafficking regimes in Mediterranean Europe”, my interest has shifted more definitively from trafficking to counter-trafficking. Through funding for further research from FCT, I started focusing on the experience of counter-trafficking non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which I have described in the title of one article as “The long arm of the neoliberal leviathan in the counter-trafficking field”. The empirical research conducted in Portugal for this work suggests that in contexts characterized by a strong institutionalization of counter-trafficking, and a structurally weak civil society, NGOs have little hope of assuming a role beyond acting as an adjunct of a neoliberal state apparatus. This includes NGOs being outsourced as certain counter-trafficking services, making them an integral part of counter-trafficking, and rendering them effectively silent in debate about, but not limited to, a security-focused approach to trafficking.
As I began this latest project, in the autumn of 2018, my position, both in academia and within the counter-trafficking field, changed in response to an invitation from a Portuguese feminist organization to support it in its counter-trafficking activities. The participation of this organization in national and international counter-trafficking networks provided me with the opportunity to strengthen my academic commitment to justice and social change, and encouraged me to analyze the opportunities and limitations of contemporary counter-trafficking coalitions and networks can meet in their work. In fact, national and transnational collaborations, within and across different sectors, are often described as critical elements of counter-trafficking efforts. Using autoethnography as a methodological and narrative tool, in “Opportunities and limitations in the counter-trafficking field: the experience of participating in Portuguese counter-trafficking networks”, I argued that differences in priorities, capital and the (lack of) power of network members help shape the scope for interventions of anti-trafficking networks, that are largely configured as an anti-politics instrument of the neoliberal counter-trafficking apparatus.
Feminism and Counter-Trafficking
“Feminism and Counter-Trafficking: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Feminism in Portugal” fits into the context of studying counter-trafficking actors and their ability, or lack of it, to challenge or reinforce some of the most controversial counter-trafficking policy outcomes, including a controversial focus on criminal justice objectives, the stiffening of migration policies, an increasing number of what might (at best) be termed “questionable” controls at borders and in the sex market, as well as “voluntary” or “forced” return practices involving “trafficking victims” and migrants.
Feminists and feminist organizations have often played a significant role in shaping international and national counter-trafficking conventions and legislation, and narratives on trafficking and its “victims.” However, in the article I show that difficult institutional and social contexts, that can be interpreted as the institutionalized weakness of feminism pitted against the intense institutionalization of counter-trafficking, limit the ability of feminist organizations to define the problem of trafficking and their political and social claims, independently of institutional narratives. In this article I argue that in neoliberal times, the alternative to feminist organizations’ state co-option is their exclusion from counter-trafficking policy debate and intervention. I also suggest that counter-trafficking can hardly be conceptualized as constituting a space of opportunity for feminist social and political transformation.
This article also drew upon analysis of policy documents and feminist material, as well as notes taken at counter-trafficking events and meetings and interviews with both feminist and women’s organisations. Drawing upon critical trafficking scholarship, I hope that this article has contributed to empirical research on and within trafficking and counter-trafficking as well as current counter-trafficking interventions. I firmly believe that among the challenges facing research and intervention on/within counter-trafficking is one of resisting a neoliberal logic, and the power dynamics and violence at play, while maintaining social justice goals.
Contributing to critical trafficking scholarship
Subsequent to this work, I have had the chance to explore the (de)mobilization of “trafficking victims” identity by Brazilian migrant sex workers, co-authoring a forthcoming article. Research on counter-trafficking has included analysis of the work experiences of Spanish professionals involved in counter-trafficking initiatives and the challenges they face in enacting activities while avoiding (re)producing new forms of violence on trafficked persons. While this work is yet to be published, I have paid attention to promoting greater dissemination of the contribution of critical trafficking scholarship in research contexts where mainstream approaches to the topic have prevailed for a long time. The co-editing of a special issue (in Portuguese and Spanish) on “Trafficking, counter-trafficking and critical perspectives”, as well as articles in Sociologia On Line, the journal of the Portuguese Association of Sociology, are part of these efforts. Both the editing of special issues (see also “International Counter-Trafficking: A Zero-Sum Game?” in progress) and my work in the Sociology Department of Iscte-Iul suggest growing interest among early career stage researchers and an ever greater attention to the contribution of critical trafficking studies. The latter, however, sometimes seems loaded with contradictions that suggest the opportunities, in the near future, to reflect more broadly on the limits that critical, empirically informed, trafficking and counter-trafficking research is currently encountering.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing this blog, my empirical research is focused on exploring the experience of sex worker organizations in counter-trafficking fields in Southern Europe. Keeping in mind the contribution of critical trafficking scholarship, I am planning new research on the interplay between technology, trafficking and counter-trafficking. My current work includes a monograph proposal aimed at discussing the work carried out so far on trafficking and anti-trafficking in a more comprehensive manner.
Read more by this author
Clemente, M. (2023). Feminism and Counter-Trafficking: Exploring the Transformative Potential of Contemporary Feminism in Portugal. Social & Legal Studies, 32(3), 420–440.
Clemente, M. (2022). The counter-trafficking apparatus in action: who benefits from it? Dialectical Anthropology, 46, 267–289.
Clemente, M. (2022). Opportunities and limitations in the counter-trafficking field: the experience of participating in Portuguese counter-trafficking networks. Etnográfica, 26(2).
Clemente, M. (2022). ‘I was not prepared to go to Spain’. Work mobility of young people at the margins in Portugal. In: D. Cairns (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Youth Mobility and Educational Migration. Second Edition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 401–413.
Clemente, M. (2021). The long arm of the neoliberal leviathan in the counter-trafficking field: the case of Portuguese NGOs. International Review of Sociology, 31(1), 182–203.
About the author
Mara Clemente is an Integrated Researcher at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte) of the Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Theory and Social Research from Sapienza University of Rome. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality and different forms of mobility – from movements with the aim of recreation to labour migration, including issues related to “refuge” and “human trafficking.” Among the recent publications is the book, The Immobility Turn: Mobility, Migration and the COVID-19 Pandemic, co-authored with David Cairns, published by Bristol University Press in 2023.
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