Key Anti-Slavery and Anti-Trafficking Laws

1807

In 1807, Britain and the United States enacted legislation abolishing the contemporary slave trade, which eliminated the international trade and forced labor of tens of millions of Africans. (Despite this legislation, slavery within the United States remained legal until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.) Other countries then followed suit with their own laws abolishing slavery to the point where today, slavery is illegal everywhere.

1901, 1904, 1910

Nearly a century after the first abolition of slavery laws, the term “white slavery,” which referred exclusively to the abduction and forceful movement of white women and girls into prostitution, came into use. Says Bales, “White slavery was a huge issue before WW1, and while some have called it a 'moral panic' I think it was likely widespread slavery given the very high levels of corruption prior to the progressive reforms. Note, though, that the term was still slavery, albeit 'White Slavery.'”

The 1901,1904, and 1910 "International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic" grew out of this new awareness and concern about white women and girls being forced into commercial sexual exploitation.

Learn more about “white slavery”:

“Loose Women or Lost Women” by Jo Doezema, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex 

“Short History of Trafficking in Persons” by Kristiina Kangaspunta, Deputy Director, UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute 

1921

In 1921, the League of Nations ratified the 1910 “Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade,” but added children to its scope and changed the title to “International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children.”  

At this point, says Bales, the words “traffic” and “trafficking” entered the anti-slavery vocabulary, and slavery terminology, at least in English, shifted to an emphasis on trafficking. 

1926, 1956 Slavery Convention

The 1926 Slavery Convention, also known as the “Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery,” was an international treaty signed by the League of Nations. This treaty was further defined and adopted by the United Nations in 1956.  

1930 Forced Labor Convention

The Forced Labor Convention was one of eight fundamental conventions adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO). From the ILO’s inception, its mandate has been labor rights. It wasn’t until their 2001 “Stopping Forced Labour” Global Report that the ILO introduced the term “slavery” and other practices similar to slavery into their reporting and scope.

1949, 1951

After its inception following World War II, the United Nations continued to advance the anti-trafficking legislation set forward by its predecessor, the League of Nations. The UN expanded the League’s 1921 “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children” with a resolution they called the “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.” While the resolution magnified the original legislation to include all persons, and not simply women and girls, its scope was still centered on “prostitution” and the “traffic in persons for the purpose of prostitution.”

“Then we have the Cold War period,” says Bales, “where no one talked about slavery except in completely politicized terms. Nothing happened in international law or the UN concerning slavery during the Cold War. A deadlock existed because of differing perspectives about slavery in the East and West. The East said ‘slavery can only exist under capitalism.' The West said 'your system is one of slavery to the state’.

“When the Cold War ended was when terminology started to get really confusing,” continues Bales. “It's 1990 and 'slavery' has been relegated to the past—gone since the 19th century is the common view—so what do we call this movement of Eastern Europeans (white women mostly) into forced prostitution? Ah! That must be ‘traffic in women,’ that's… ‘human trafficking.’ Since the consensus was that slavery didn’t exist anymore, this phenomenon had to be something else. It must be trafficking.”

2000 (passed into law in 2003)

The United Nations “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children,” introduced in 2000, is specific to “trafficking in persons” and, says Bales, “led to the terrible mess which defined slavery as a subset of trafficking.” The legislation continued the traditional emphasis of women and children as a group that warrants special attention and who are forced into commercial sexual exploitation. 

(a) “Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs;

To date, there are 117 signatories and 159 parties to this Trafficking Protocol. The international law enforcement agency INTERPOL, the Council of Europe, the Arab League, the International Organization for Migration, and many others have used language from the UN’s Trafficking Protocol in their own definitions of human trafficking, according to Professors Michelle Madden Dempsey, Carolyn Holye, and Mary Bosworth, authors of “Defining Sex Trafficking in International and Domestic Law: Mind the Gaps” (2012, Emory International Law Review). But as Dempsey et al. also point out, UN member states have often revised the Protocol’s language when applying it to their own domestic criminal codes, making it narrower or broader according to each country’s unique circumstances and national concerns. 

2000

In 2000, the United States passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act which, through several reauthorizations, is now known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). 

The TVPA defines “severe forms of trafficking in persons” as:

      a. sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age;

      b. the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

A victim need not be physically transported from one location to another in order for the crime to fall within these definitions.

The above list of major anti-trafficking and slavery laws and some of the history that surrounds them helps explain the myriad definitions and terms used by today’s anti-trafficking organizations and why confusion and disagreement over definitions remain.

From a legislative and legal point of view, laws criminalizing human trafficking (or trafficking in persons) are newer than those defining and abolishing slavery. Trafficking in persons laws have generally focused on the suppression of trafficking of women and children into forced commercial sexual exploitation. 

Why Human Trafficking Statistics Don’t Measure Up

Because of the various forms that slavery can take, and the varying legal definitions of slavery in different countries, collecting data on  international human trafficking convictions and victims is clearly a complicated task.

“What this means,” says Matt Friedman, veteran counter-trafficking activist and Chief Advisor to The Mekong Club, an association committed to removing slavery from the business supply chain in Asia, is that “many criminal acts related to human trafficking do get prosecuted, but using other criminal categories—soliciting, kidnapping, rape, murder, battery, fraud, etc. If these cases were included in the global human trafficking statistics, we’d see that many more cases we’d call ‘human trafficking’ are indeed getting prosecuted and are ending with convictions.”

And as for the 41,201 rescued victims in 2011, Friedman says that “a large number of victims find their own way out of their trafficking experience without any outside intervention. These are people who don’t show up in the statistics as being rescued because they have found their own way back to freedom.”