Human trafficking is a juridical concept invented in the nineteenth century that reappeared in the late twentieth century. The concept was created amid discussions about policing of national borders and reflected panics concerning the ideal of feminine purity, when women were seen in the discourse of the time as needing protection. In this chapter we will show how discourse in support of combating human trafficking for sexual exploitation has used ideas about gender and raciality to justify policies to contain migration. The twentieth century was marked by conquests of women”s rights, and white women are no longer seen as being in need of protection as were those of the nineteenth century. However, attributes that are both accusatory and victimizing still weigh on non-white women, especially when they are involved in sex work across national borders. In these terms, there is no space for women understood as victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation to be able to affirm their labour demands based on their own understandings about what constitutes sex work, violence, and exploitation.

The ineluctable presence of slavery and other forms of servitude made its mark both on the Niger and the Congo expedition. The leader of the Niger expedition selected his force from among British convict soldiers and freed African slaves who had been forced into military service. Both had reason to resent their states of servitude, though they posed different challenges. The white soldiers were undisciplined and often drunk, while the black ones were likely to desert if the expedition reached their native lands. Slavery and servitude manifest itself differently for the Congo expedition. It encountered hostility from European and African traders who suspected it was a Royal Navy anti-slaving patrol, though it also benefitted from an ex-slave who mediated on its behalf in an important slave port. Another form of servitude was the sex trade, exoticized and eroticized by explorers as the Black Venus. Both expeditions were entangled in the slave trade even as they heralded its demise.

Human trafficking is a global public health problem that affects people of all races, nationalities, socioeconomic classes, and genders. Human traffickers prey on the vulnerable, strip them of their basic human rights and inflict physical and psychological damage to their victims and their communities. The true scope of the problem is unknown because of the hidden nature of the crime. Over 40 million people are estimated to be victims of human trafficking worldwide – 25% of whom are children. Over 24 million people are thought to be trapped in forced labor and 4.8 million in sex trafficking. Women and girls are estimated to be the majority of victims and account for 71% of victims of human trafficking and 99% of sexual exploitation. However, trafficking of men, boys and other genders is highly underrecognized. Additionally, urban areas may have a high density of diverse under regulated or under paid employment that could be particularly difficult for clinicians to identify human trafficking. Clinicians, particularly in the emergency department, have the responsibility to identify, protect, and provide resources to people experiencing human trafficking.

The conclusion outlines why this book resonates with issues of injustice facing Black women today, particularly sex trafficking survivors.

A contemporary anti-slavery movement has emerged in response to the diverse array of forms of forced labour that proliferate in the twenty-first-century global economy. The movement has encouraged survivors to speak out about their experiences of enslavement and to work as activists in a new abolitionist cause. As a result, the genre of the slave narrative, so popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists, has reemerged as a form of protest literature. This article suggests that by documenting the very fact of enslavement in the 21st century, the new slave narrators collectively reveal the widespread failure of the promises of globalisation, even as they celebrate their emergence into it. Through these narratives, we are able to discern the true contours of globalisation, the radical inequalities that remain and are fed by the transnational flow of commodities, including but not exclusively labour, and the slavery that is endemic and even encouraged in these global transactions.

Contemporary abolitionists frequently turn to anti-slavery abolitionism for inspiration. This chapter argues that they should look to the more ambivalent legacy of anti-prostitution abolitionism in order to learn from earlier mistakes. It examines the League of Nation’s investigations into global sex trafficking in the interwar period to explore what the study of anti-trafficking abolitionism can reveal to contemporary activists and policymakers. It suggests that anti-prostitution abolitionist campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s warn of the oversized influence of philanthropists on the construction of global agendas; the dangers of the Global North shaping the terms of international knowledge production that become implicated with racialized understandings of trafficking; the (un)intended outcomes of stricter border control and empowered carceral systems that target women assumed to be migratory prostitutes.