This article presents a case study of how sex worker and anti-trafficking organisations and activists in San Francisco, California, worked together to develop and pass the ‘Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy’. This policy, as enacted by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department, creates a legal environment where people can come forward and report to law enforcement when they are a victim of or witness to an array of violent crimes while engaged in sex work, and not be arrested or prosecuted for their involvement in that criminalised behaviour or for any misdemeanour drug offences. The article details how the groups came together and the challenges they faced while developing the policy. The work was fuelled by the recognition that no one wants people in the sex industry to experience violence. That is true whether selling sex is their choice, influenced by their life circumstances, or something they are being forced or coerced to do. The Prioritizing Safety for Sex Workers Policy is a unique example of the way in which sex workers, people who have experienced trafficking, service providers, activists, women’s rights policymakers, the police department, and the District Attorney’s office came together around a common goal.

This article challenges the notion that the organised sex worker movement originated in the Global North. Beginning in Havana, Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century, sex workers in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region have been organising for recognition and labour rights. This article focuses on some of the movement’s advances, such as the election of a sex worker to public office in the Dominican Republic, the system where Nicaraguan sex workers act as court-appointed judicial facilitators, the networks of sex worker organisations throughout the region, and cutting-edge media strategies used to claim social and labour rights. Sex workers are using novel strategies designed to disrupt the hegemonic social order; contest the inequalities, discrimination, and injustices experienced by women in the sex trade; provoke critical reflection; and raise the visibility of sex work advocacy. New challenges to the movement include the abolitionist movement, the conflation of all forms of sex work with human trafficking, and practices that seek to ‘rescue’ consenting adults from the sex trade.

In Mexican child protection circles the term ‘circuit children’ has been used to designate people under the age of 18 who cross the US-Mexico border irregularly and cyclically for the purpose of smuggling drugs or irregular migrants. Young people of the border region have historically been involved in these markets. Yet their activities have become more visible in recent years in the context of increased border militarisation, and immigration and crime controls implemented by both the US and Mexican governments. Depicted in official and media discourses as forced recruits of local organised crime gangs, circuit children have increasingly been at the centre of initiatives that seek to identify and treat them as victims of trafficking. These efforts often rely on portrayals that frame them as gullible and defenceless, and their families and communities as inherently dysfunctional, dangerous and crime-prone. The structural and geopolitical conditions related to the children’s participation in smuggling, however, remain unchallenged. Most troublingly, trafficking discourses tend to silence the perspectives of circuit children themselves. This paper, based on interviews and participant observation, shows how circuit children, rather than seeing themselves as victims, articulate legitimate, important claims concerning their engagement in illicit markets, reflective of the ways they navigate the complex economic, socio-political and migratory contexts of the US-Mexico border.

The corridor linking Indonesia with Malaysia is particularly rife with transborder mobility, including large-scale labour migration. While irregularity has long been a major feature of these flows, much of the movement now falls under the migration regimes adopted by Malaysia and Indonesia. Long-established casual migration flows collide with recently codified norms and, as a result, oscillate between regularity and irregularity. This paper explores the following questions: How does the regulatory state view and handle undocumented migrants? How does it interact with established social networks that have facilitated irregular labour migration? Particular attention is given to the distinction between the categories of deportable criminals and victims deserving protection, as ascribed by state actors to certain groups of migrants. Based on interviews with twelve deported Florenese migrant workers, the paper discusses how the Indonesian-Malaysian migration regime seeks to shape mobility. It argues that shifting categorisations reflect political imperatives more than the migrants’ needs that prompt them to migrate in the first place.

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons.’
 The image of rubber dinghies densely packed with people floating precariously in the Mediterranean Sea has become a symbol of our times. Among those in peril are persons who may have fled conflict, others who have left poverty and many who have suffered exploitation en route. Upon arrival, states are obliged to meet their immediate needs and to determine for what reasons they came, thereby identifying their rights under international and domestic law.

Response to the ATR Debate Proposition: ‘It is important and necessary to make clear distinctions between (irregular) migrants, refugees and trafficked persons.’
 Upon first reading this issue’s debate proposition, I was struck by its structure rather than its content. Its content is subject to lively discussions among scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers, as attested to by other contributions in this issue of the journal. Its curious structure, though, raises issues that merit articulation. In what follows, I briefly problematise the bracketing of the word ‘irregular’ in the debate proposition. What the brackets do is prompt an additional question: migrants, irregular migrants, or (irregular) migrants?

The Modern Slavery Act (2015) was a symbol of the UK’s commitment to combatting exploitation and human trafficking. Yet the Act offers little help to people who have been trafficked to, or in, the UK to recover and build a new life.

This paper argues that the foundation of modern anti-trafficking laws in England and Wales was created at the turn of the twentieth century, during the peak of white slavery hysteria. It shows that a series of interrelated legal interventions formed that foundation. While white slavery as a myth has been analysed, this paper turns the focus on legal regulation and shows why it is important to analyse its history in order to understand modern responses to trafficking. It focuses, in particular, on the first legal definition of victims of trafficking, involvement of vigilance associations in law reform, and on restrictions put in place on women’s immigration. Finally, it reflects on how laws enacted at the turn of the twentieth century still resonate with those of today.

Under systems of indenture in the Caribbean, Europeans such as Irish, Scots and Portuguese, as well as Asians, primarily Indians, Chinese and Indonesians, were recruited, often under false pretences, and transported to the ‘New World’, where they were bound to an employer and the plantation in a state of ‘interlocking incarceration’. Indentureship not only preceded, co-existed with, and survived slavery in the Caribbean, but was distinct in law and in practice from slavery. This article argues that the conditions of Caribbean indenture can be seen to be much more analogous to those represented in contemporary discussions about human trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ than those of slavery. Caribbean histories of indenture, it is proposed, can provide more appropriate conceptual tools for thinking about unfree labour today—whether state or privately sponsored—than the concept of slavery, given the parallels between this past migrant labour system in the Caribbean and those we witness and identify today as ‘modern slavery’ or human trafficking. This article thus urges a move away from the conflation of slavery and human trafficking with all forced, bonded and migrant labour, as is commonly the case, and for greater attention for historical evidence.

The Anti