Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative (ASHTI)https://hdl.handle.net/1808/110972024-03-28T13:24:36Z2024-03-28T13:24:36Z‘Now More Than Ever, Survivors Need Us’: Essential labouring and increased precarity during COVID-19Schwarz, CorinneBritton, HannahNay, Eden D. E.Holland, Christiehttps://hdl.handle.net/1808/348012023-10-14T06:07:32Z2023-09-29T00:00:00Z‘Now More Than Ever, Survivors Need Us’: Essential labouring and increased precarity during COVID-19
Schwarz, Corinne; Britton, Hannah; Nay, Eden D. E.; Holland, Christie
During the earliest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, much media and public discourse focused on the effects of increasing precarity on already vulnerable populations. As in-person work added a layer of viral risk and unemployment drastically exacerbated economic precariousness, the category of ‘essential worker’ gained new prominence in these conversations. In this paper, we focus on the complicated relationship between two groups of workers depicted as marginalised and exploited to different degrees during COVID-19: trafficked persons and anti-trafficking service providers. Though media coverage did not conflate these groups, it applied a capacious understanding of precarious labour and structural inequalities that encapsulated different types of essential work. We draw on media produced by frontline anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights organisations between March and May 2020. Even with renewed attention to macro-level harms, many publications still emphasised individualism over collectivity. This emphasis on singular organisational representatives—frontline workers—as heroic rescuers mirrored larger, normative anti-trafficking discourses. At the point at which the ‘new normal’ was nowhere in sight, COVID-19 served as a flashpoint to reconsider current intervention strategies and instead emphasise a critique of precarious labour along multiple vectors.
2023-09-29T00:00:00ZUnderstanding Risk and Prevention in Midwestern Antitrafficking Efforts: Service Providers' PerspectivesBritton, Hannah E.https://hdl.handle.net/1808/344582023-06-29T06:07:29Z2020-06-22T00:00:00ZUnderstanding Risk and Prevention in Midwestern Antitrafficking Efforts: Service Providers' Perspectives
Britton, Hannah E.
Since the 2000 passage of both the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the U.N.’s Palermo Protocols, human trafficking has gained a notable global presence as a human rights concern. Community organizations, nonprofits, scholars, policymakers, and service providers have developed programs to identify and address human trafficking. Despite these efforts, finding reliable methods to document and quantify the instances of human trafficking continues to challenge researchers. Moreover, many believe trafficking is a problem primarily located in urban areas or along national borders.
Drawing from seven years of interviews with service providers who work in this sector, combined with survey results from an additional 722 service providers, this project adds to the growing body of research on human trafficking, specifically in the Midwestern United States. The findings of this study indicate that place and location matter in antitrafficking, especially with regard to availability of and access to resources across urban and rural areas. However, these service providers also identify similar concerns across regions with regards to trafficking warning signs and risk factors—for both sex and labor trafficking—as well as community resources that could prevent trafficking or alleviate vulnerability. These findings point toward the benefit of research that is geographically focused and involves both qualitative and quantitative research.
Additionally, this research has uncovered unexpected groups of community members that may be vital in the identification and prevention of human trafficking. Though there is a growing body of research about the role of medical practitioners, law enforcement, foster care workers, and social workers in the struggle to address trafficking, there are other groups that also have important insight into the risks their communities face. Interviews revealed that firefighters have particular relationships with the communities they serve and may be ideally positioned to address human trafficking, exploitation, and vulnerability because of these relationships.
2020-06-22T00:00:00ZAligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human TraffickingSchwarz, CorinneKennedy, Emily J.Britton, Hannah E.https://hdl.handle.net/1808/253062018-01-31T21:36:08Z2017-01-01T00:00:00ZAligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking
Schwarz, Corinne; Kennedy, Emily J.; Britton, Hannah E.
Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities.
2017-01-01T00:00:00ZHuman Trafficking in the Midwest: Service Providers’ Perspectives on Sex and Labor TraffickingSchwarz, Corinnehttps://hdl.handle.net/1808/238532018-01-31T21:36:08Z2017-04-01T00:00:00ZHuman Trafficking in the Midwest: Service Providers’ Perspectives on Sex and Labor Trafficking
Schwarz, Corinne
This report covers the findings of ASHTI’s two-state survey to gather information from service providers working with vulnerable persons in the Midwest. Based on previous ASHTI interviews, the research team created a survey for a broad range of service providers who worked with vulnerable or trafficked persons. These service providers were selected because of their system-wide perspective on exploitation and vulnerability as well as their in-depth knowledge of individual client cases. This survey asked a range of questions to address: 1. If service providers believe they have encountered human trafficking? 2. What markers of physical or mental health are used to identify trafficked persons? 3. Which social factors can increase the risk of exploitation or trafficking? 4. What community resources can protect against the risk of trafficking?
This project was generously supported by the University of Kansas Department of Political Science. Additional support comes from the University of Kansas Institute for Policy & Social Research. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1624317. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
2017-04-01T00:00:00Z