Counter Trafficking Interventions in South Africa: Critical Reflections on Global and Local Praxis.

In this paper, I present some findings of a 5-year research programme in South Africa into the development and implementation of counter – trafficking policies and interventions. The focus of the research was on understanding how global interests, coalitions, institutions, and advocacy shaped and were shaped by local conditions. Together, the research studies aimed to understand how trafficking became a preoccupation in South Africa, how policy responses were developed, the ways in which the response to trafficking was constructed and what form the interventions took. The research findings show how global influences on policy and programming that South Africa reproduced colonial narratives by evoking gendered and racialized notions of trauma, victimization and rescue. Whilst the anti-trafficking campaigns have been critiqued globally for their regulation of women’s sexuality and morality, the existing literature has failed to account for the colonial logic inherent to how and why they have been taken up globally. By focussing on poverty in the global South, alongside gendered notions of home, the response to trafficking in South Africa has justified and reproduced geographically defined inequalities and justified responses that focused on restricting movement based on gender and race. In this presentation, I focus particularly on how the campaigns drew on a gendered and racialized notion of trauma and victimization that resulted in interventions that addressed trafficking as an individual risk, rooted in women’s naiveté and need for protection, over the structural reforms to migration policy that could make women’s movement safer.