This chapter covers the complete life cycle of microRNAs, from start to finish. Beginning with their location in the genome, how they are transcribed and some of the factors that switch microRNAs on and off, it moves next to the biochemical steps involved in the step-wise processing of the precursor RNA by the enzymes Drosha and Dicer, before the microRNA is eventually loaded into a pocket in the Argonaute protein ready to carry out gene silencing. For some steps, a deeper look is taken into the atomic structures of these biological nanomachines and how they pivot and adjust to join together proteins and RNA as they perform their functions. This includes the remarkable search strategy by which the gene silencing complex containing a microRNA probes for binding sites on mRNA targets. Finally comes the molecular decision-making behind how much protein is reduced and by what mechanism. The when and how a microRNA knows its work is done and what finally extinguishes its effects. Again, the chapter conveys the intense competition among scientists vying to answer the next question and the one after that, which was a potent accelerant for discovery.

This chapter shifts to undesirable men and disreputable expressions of masculinity, depicting the world of pimps and traffickers from the perspective of the migration paradigm. With examples that span the United States, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico, I show how anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution discourse, in addition to articulating gendered ideas about sexual respectability and normative migration patterns, employed equally moralistic concepts to distinguish honest labor from illegitimate work. Some traffickers sought upward social mobility by engaging with both the licit and illicit economies of their destination countries, while for others, pimping and trafficking was the logical extension of a longer criminal history, shirking work discipline, and refusing the responsibilities of family and nation. French men were central to a broader story of migrant criminality in the Americas, namely through their participation in the sex trade.

I explore the role of identity documents, including forgeries, in this chapter. I analyze the gendered social meanings attributed to passports, as well as the strategies of underage female migrants – the primary targets of the anti-trafficking crusade – in response to state surveillance. Young women were savvy actors in procuring and using forged papers. They stole or borrowed the birth certificates of older sisters, friends, and acquaintances to apply for passports, and they lied, often convincingly, to border control agents about their identity, profession, and final destination. This chapter also shows how the gendered identity of migrants and class-based notions of sexual respectability determined access to the passport, and how age- and gender-based restrictions on mobility prompted some women to resort to forgeries.

This chapter considers the repatriation of French women and girls in the midst of the moral panic of trafficking. Advocates for repatriation justified this protocol with reference to regulatory aims: protecting the vulnerable from exploitation, guarding borders against undesirables, and managing the sexual order of nations. International conventions and French national law designated the consulate as the body responsible for returning trafficking victims to France; by authorizing or denying repatriation, the consul functioned as a powerful agent of migration control. Consuls focused their efforts on trafficking victims while placing consenting prostitutes in a category apart, although in practice, this line was not so easy to draw. Vulnerability did not always track neatly with youthfulness, passivity, or moral purity. In addition, vulnerability occurred in a wide range of exploitative labor arrangements, including but not limited to prostitution.

This chapter attends to the uniquely French stakes of this global moral panic. Early twentieth-century anecdotes attested to the prevalence of French women in brothels overseas, along with the idea that they were the most desirable and best paid in the business. In addition, state-regulated prostitution began in Paris in 1802 and then proliferated across the world. Because most anti-trafficking activists believed that regulationism caused the traffic in women, they considered France a false ally in their crusade. French representatives at international anti-trafficking conventions, and later at the League of Nations, ardently defended state-sponsored prostitution and women’s freedom to migrate for opportunities in the sex industry abroad. They also acknowledged the legitimacy of male demand for prostitution, in stark contrast to Anglo-American anti-vice crusaders. Moreover, by recognizing women’s individual liberty to sell sex, they injected the thorny question of consent into an already contentious discussion. Both proponents and opponents of regulated prostitution battled to determine the terms of the trafficking debate. Respective notions of national character and sexual morality, as well as migration policy, followed along these lines.

This chapter reveals how ideological notions of French decadence, US sexual restraint, and Cuban moral regeneration shaped immigration law and anti-trafficking protocols. Undercover investigations and social scientific studies discovered a flood of European women, especially from France, migrating for work in prostitution. The same studies described the erotic cachet afforded to Frenchness, the global marketing of vice, and what exactly French women offered for sale. According to US and Cuban reformers, a debased European morality promoted these “undesirable” migrations. This premise bolstered exclusionary legislation passed in both countries, barring suspected prostitutes from crossing the border, along with traffickers and pimps. Thus the desire for undesirable women – and not the protection of trafficking victims – motivated immigration reform.

This chapter turns to the legendary “Road to Buenos Aires,” which was widely considered the most significant trafficking route of the era. This case study illustrates how both coercion and choice functioned in the discourse and practice of migratory prostitution. When French women made official statements to the police, they strategically employed themes common to the trafficking narrative, including coercion, victimhood, and abuse. Their personal correspondence with family, in contrast, expresses how moments of both exploitation and agency punctuated their lives. Letters describe tender ties with mothers, sisters, and goddaughters; how poverty and unhappiness marked their existence in France; the everyday trials of poor migrants abroad; and expressions of wonder at the first ocean crossing. The lives of French women oscillated between moments of profound vulnerability and perceived opportunity, as reflected in their experiences of migrating and selling sex.

The conclusion opens with interwar debates on the deportation of women working in prostitution, highlighting how for many reformers, trafficking was a migration problem to be solved through migration controls. Rather than protecting vulnerable women, however, anti-trafficking policies that relied on exclusion and expulsion safeguarded the perceived vulnerability of national borders instead. The conclusion then turns to contemporary examples in which humanitarian efforts to protect “trafficking victims” serve as punishments instead, particularly if individuals are unable to rehearse the script of ideal victimhood, and embody its accompanying form of gendered sexual respectability. It closes with a discussion of French prostitution policy in the postwar period, including the abolition of regulationism in two stages, in 1946 and 1960; the domestic security law of 2003; and the criminalization of sex buyers (the “Nordic Model”) in 2016. In each of these examples, advocates framed the respective laws as humanitarian, progressive, and protective of sex workers. Yet all were efforts to moralize public space, promote law and order, and comply with a larger infrastructure of migration controls.

Around the 1880s, the issue of “white slavery” – the ostensibly coerced prostitution of young women – first emerged as a moral problem of international concern. Social reformers, journalists, politicians, and the public debated whether migrant women involved in prostitution had been trafficked, or if they willingly left their homelands for work in the sex trade. I show that trafficking discourse, framed in terms of coercion, passivity, and gendered moral reform, conceals the migration story at the heart of these journeys: most importantly, the search for better paying work, but also the quest for adventure and self-discovery. However, agency and exploitation are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Migrants’ lives unfolded on the spectrum between coercion and choice, and in the interstices of illicit and licit economies. This book seeks to explain why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of global prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. It offers a provocative account of France’s role in modern world history: as an exporter of the theory and practice of state-regulated prostitution; of purportedly French sexual practices; and desirable or undesirable French women migrants, depending on point of view.

Gregoriou presents a study of characterisation in a crime fiction novel on child trafficking. Her choice of analytic tools (speech presentation, naming strategies, transitivity, modality and metaphor analysis) narrows the focus to an in-depth exploration of these selected five, bringing to light character Muna’s mind style.

Examining two of the most influential novels of late imperial China, Ransmeier’s essay finds enslaved people to be both omnipresent and unremarkable in this period. Both the high Qing era The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Late Ming The Plum and the Golden Vase are set in opulent households doomed to decline, in part by the emotional needs or sexual appetites of their fallible male protagonists. Consuming these narratives, readers become invested in their fate, and accept a world in which human trafficking, slavery, and sexual exploitation played a natural part of domestic life. While unfreely obtained labor was a characteristic feature of the households described in these epic novels and played a central role in attending to the creature comforts of elite masters and mistresses, and while the authors did not necessarily obscure the emotional struggles of individual enslaved people, neither text advocates for social change. The essay also shows how both Dream author Cao Xueqin and the anonymous author of Plum bind their protagonists to karmically determined ends, deploy enslaved people in service of their storytelling, and take advantage of the predominant hierarchical system of their time, creating worlds in which no one was truly free.

Why do people leave home and seek asylum? Conflict, war, and persecution, living in fragile states, being trafficked, and climate change may all play a part.Global statistics of forced displacement are reviewed.

Types of journeys and attendant experiences are considered, and reasons for how and why people may come to the United Kingdom.

We then review developments in international refugee policy and law, and problems with the current approach, including the role of socioeconomic status, the difficulties in how initiatives are funded, and the lack of long-term perspectives.There are barriers to resettlement in wealthier third countries.Restrictive and punitive asylum policies have a high human cost.There are limits to international cooperation.

This all matters to health professionals because understanding someone’s context explains much about individual behaviour.It enables relevant enquiries to be made, and appropriate help offered. Some possible misapprehensions are considered.