Boukli, Avi (2023) Antitrafficking human rights. In, Boukli, Avi (ed.) Zemiology and Human Trafficking. 1 ed. Routledge. (doi:10.4324/9781315296654-4).
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, the antithesis between a criminalisation and a human rights approach in the context of transnational human trafficking has shaped the conditions of securitisation and criminalisation previously examined. As a reaction to these conditions, a human rights approach to trafficking was envisioned as correcting criminal law's austere punitiveness, while inscribing the humanistic, if not humane, face of security. Within this approach, the powerful imagery of victimhood features as a political tool to convey conflicts over rights and accelerate financialisation and neoliberalisation of local economies. Drawing on the national case study of Hellenic antitrafficking structures from the early 2000s, this chapter traces the practical application of the above antithesis. It reveals the evolution of the local economy of trafficking victimhood, characterised by two key features: Firstly, the strategic responsibilitisation of trafficking victims raised the currency of victimhood. In what is effectively a victimhood stock exchange, formal recognition of victimhood and formal ascription of rights is attached to, and exchanged within, border regimes and market conditions. Secondly, the ‘victim industry complex’ emerges to connote diverse ideological modes of victim support governance, which animate actors, technologies, and strategies. Therefore, this chapter presents diverse understandings of what is crime, who is to be protected, and under what conditions.
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