Human Trafficking: What we know and what we need to know

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Last week I attended and presented at the UNL First Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking: What we know and what we need to know.  One of the valuable things about this conference was that it very much concentrated on trafficking research,
including thinking intensely about where the subdiscipline of human trafficking is in terms of its/our research agenda and where we need to go.

Dr. Kevin Bales, president and co-founder of Free the Slaves and a professor at Roehampton University, was the keynote speaker.  Bales gave a lecture on Thursday night for conference attendees, the UNL community and the general public.  In this lecture he observed that the number of people trafficked into the US each year and the number of murder victims each year are roughly equivalent (~17,000).  Yet, if you look at the number of homicide specialists and departments in law enforcement agencies and the number of human trafficking specialists or departments, you see huge differences -- differences which are impacting our ability to address trafficking effectively. 

He also mused about why he (and others) have had to start non-profits to raise money to end trafficking when there are national and international laws against it.  Do we usually rely on non-profits to fund our law enforcement efforts?  Bales drew connections between the African slave trade in our earlier history and modern-day slavery, calling on us to recognize that if we don't end slavery, we're saying -- as a world -- that it's OK for slavery to exist.  How, he asked powerfully, are we going to remove slavery from our communities?

Friday morning Bales offered the opening conference plenary.  This talk was tightly focused on building and strengthening our interdisciplinary research on human trafficking.  Bales discussed the need to pair our passion for the issue with rigorous research and careful scholarship.  In addition to asserting a need for definitional clarity, Bales outlined some of the items that belong on our research agenda:

• Estimate demand function
• Build indices of predictive factors
• Explore how young men learn to buy sex
• Document how women are sexually abused in all forms of slavery, not only in sex trafficking
• Test tipping point measures

He also called for adherence to a strict code of ethics, which involves both professional competence and a recognition of our social responsibility.  This audience, Bales said, already knows the horror stories and recognizes that it is not about who got saved last week but about making systemic and structural changes that will end slavery.

Bales pointed out that anecdotes and viewpoints are not evidence that will lead to real solutions.  He also said that "this is not literary criticism.  If our thinking is not precise, if our logic is sloppy, people die."  Since my paper was about representational strategies of sex trafficking in fiction and creative non-fiction, this comment certainly caught my attention!! 

Three breakout sessions followed the plenary, including mine.  Bales chose to attend the session in which I was presenting, which meant (to me) that I needed to address his comment.  I did this by discussing the ways in which the narratives and discourses circulating about trafficking impact the public consciousness, which has an effect on political will and public policy.  

In the lively and intense discussion after my talk, it became clear that Bales was using this false opposition between literary criticism and other kinds of research to make a rhetorical point [at the expense of my discipline!].  He expressed strong agreement in the necessity for and power of narrative and, in fact, shared his wish for the 21st century's *Uncle Tom's Cabin* to be written to help move the cause forward.

There were many strong and interesting presentations throughout the conference.  Dr. Laura Lederer (who presented at our 2006 conference) gave one of the plenaries, discussing trafficking in persons and international case law.  Michael Shively presented the preliminary results of a national assessment of sex trafficking demand reduction efforts.  Amy Farrell of Northeastern University discussed the ways in which law enforcement are (or are not) identifying human trafficking in their jurisdictions.  These were just a few of the highlights for me.

UNL will be publishing the proceedings of the conference online in an open-access environment.  Keep an eye out at digitalcommons.unl.edu if you'd like to read more.

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