What if human trafficking were less a contemporary form of violence than a category of public action with ambivalent effects? This is Milena Jakšić’s thesis: the fight against trafficking consecrates a figure of “good” victim to the detriment of those who do not conform to it.
How is it that, in a climate of absolute consensus on the need to denounce and combat human trafficking, considered an attack on fundamental rights, no case has been brought before the courts in recent years in France? How is it that while human trafficking concerns a wide spectrum of practices, ranging from confinement to forced labor or domestic slavery, it is above all the prostitution of migrant women that, in France, attracts the attention of associations, the media and public authorities? So many questions that serve as a common thread to Milena Jakšić’s fascinating investigation.
Contrary to what the title might suggest, her book does not present the experiences and suffering endured by victims, or the different forms of violence and coercion that trafficking can take, but attempts to trace the genesis and institutionalization of this issue as a public problem. The author offers a sociology of its institutional treatment which, from one arena to another, from one framing to another, has made it possible to establish trafficking as a category of public action and to legitimize a restricted definition. The aim of the book is therefore not to discuss the scale or reality of the phenomenon, but to show how the categories of public action that aim to combat trafficking can contribute to obscuring the complexity of situations, and to excluding certain women, even though they are in situations of obvious violence, from the category of victim.
To be called a victim
Beyond trafficking, this book is primarily about the “treatment of absence” and its social production. Because the great absentees from the field that Milena Jakšić has explored, from associations to administrations and judicial institutions, are the victims themselves. Not that there are none, or that there is no trafficking, or violence, or that we must denounce a moral panic, this is not the purpose of the book. But it is that most of the time, as the author shows with great finesse, the victims “are spoken” by others.
Many associations and institutional actors act as their spokespersons and contribute to shaping their story, their testimony, and to making audible a voice that, once heard, strangely always has the same characteristics – that of an innocent, vulnerable, naïve and abused young woman who had no control over her daily life. The “victim condition is first and foremost the result of a social relationship” (p. 256) states the author in conclusion, and this social relationship contributes to selecting good and bad victims, and to confirming the opprobrium that weighs on the latter.
In the first part, “Recognize”, Milena Jakšić first follows the journey of people who claim to be victims of trafficking and traces, from police stations to the prefecture via associations, their progress and their difficult recognition as rights holders – despite the commitment of many actors and actresses. Between different professional and institutional logics – division of police work, need for associations to legitimize their position and their relationships of trust with the police and the prefecture, moral positioning of each -, Milena Jakšić manages to show the multiple tensions that hinder the recognition of victims as such and engage a logic of suspicion that weighs continuously on their shoulders. Is their story true? Are they not taking advantage of a system that is favorable to them and circumventing migration legislation? Are they not a little guilty?
Denounce and control
By grasping the social life of norms, the way in which these are the object of multiple interpretations and applications in everyday life, in the manner of the ” street level bureaucracy » analyzed by Michael Lipsky, Milena Jakšić presents the fight against trafficking as a plural social practice. She shows the different logics of control that from one association to another, from one institution to another, continue to weigh on the victims and contribute to selecting the stories to take into consideration only those of the “ideal” victims, those who correspond to a certain representation of constraint. In this selection, the choices made by people occupying a structurally disadvantaged position have little place. The chapter that focuses on the practices of abolitionist associations captivates with its analysis of the continuity of the forms of control and judgment to which women are subjected by volunteers supposed to help them escape exploitation or coercion.
These logics of control are all the more significant as they are part of the ever-polarized debate around prostitution, because it is the victims of pimping who are primarily concerned by the current definition of trafficking in France. This leads us to reflect on the way in which violence, particularly against women, is defined in this context. By taking the antagonistic positions on the definition of prostitution as so many ways of constituting the issue of trafficking as a public problem, Milena Jakšić’s work contributes to a much-needed reflection today on the way in which the category of “violence against women” is invested in a contrasting way, and sometimes mobilized to legitimize the exercise of increased repression on the bodies of foreign women and to deny their words and experiences.
Between humanitarian and security logics, the fight against violence against women has indeed constituted, paradoxically, one of the primary justifications for the strongest repression of street prostitution and the maintenance of suspicion on women who would not begin a process of leaving prostitution. So many “guilty victims”, says the author, an expression which allows us to better understand the reasons for this absence which serves as a common thread for the investigation: the victims barely embody the ideal image that public institutions have of them, whether administrative, associative or judicial.
The second part, “Unveiling”, allows us to better understand the multiple logics that organize this suspicion. In a journey from the arenas of international mobilizations to French political and penal institutions, Milena Jakšić returns to the expressions and framings of indignation, and to the dominant definitions of trafficking that emerge from them, as well as the multiple displacements they have experienced.
The erasure of dubious victims
After presenting the main international non-governmental coalitions and the issues relating to the definition of prostitution – do all forms of sexual services fall under exploitation? Should we distinguish between forced and chosen prostitution? Is the problem to monetize one’s body and sexuality, or the conditions in which this transaction takes place? – Milena Jakšić presents the attempts, in France, to broaden the cause of trafficking to various forms of exploitation and coercion – notably domestic slavery. She reports on the different ways in which the entrepreneurs of this cause have aroused and mobilized emotion and pity. Between over- and under-politicization, she discusses the ways to define, frame, legitimize, and technicalize the cause of trafficking, which will ultimately be focused mainly on the prostitution of foreign women.
In these mobilizations, she insists, one element is recurrent: the distancing of the people concerned. Unlike other struggles and mobilizations, “the voiceless literally remain voiceless” (p. 200) and only experts and politicians discuss, debate, in sometimes radically different conceptions, but which constantly exaggerate and homogenize the nevertheless diverse situations covered by the sale of sexual services. So many elements which, taken up in the French parliamentary debates, will lead to the inclusion of trafficking in the Penal Code and legitimize security policies and the hunt for “guilty victims”, in a spirit of fighting illegal immigration and transnational organized crime, as well as maintaining public order.
The analysis of the debates surrounding the 2003 Internal Security Act shows this inherent tension, where the criminalization of trafficking, in an effort to protect victims but also “local residents”, legitimizes the increased control of migrant women and the refusal to grant rights to prostitutes, who are nevertheless considered the primary victims of said trafficking. This ambiguity, Milena Jakšić claims, persists in the new 2016 law and perpetuates the absence of those primarily concerned and the denial of their voice.
A convincing sociological work, therefore, in a fluid and easily accessible writing, and which draws on a broad spectrum of sociological studies – sociology of public problems and public action, sociology of judicial practices, sociology of sexual questions and without a doubt sociology of gender. Because if the author explains in conclusion that she has freed herself from a perspective in terms of gender which would have forced her to focus on the words of women and their migratory journey to the detriment of the analysis of those who manage the question of trafficking, it is clear that by highlighting the gap between idealized figures of the victim and actual profiles of the people concerned, this book contributes to a fruitful reflection on the way in which gender logics structure the constitution of the trafficking in question and explain the absence of the main people concerned. The characteristics of ideal victims in fact cover all the ideal categories of femininity (fragility, vulnerability, even naivety) and recognizing victims as autonomous or desiring people seems difficult to think of, less tolerable or simply out of line.