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“I can’t go home until I have more money for my little girl,” says Seyani, a 27-year-old domestic worker from Nepal. Seyani moved to Dubai to support her family. After taking out a significant loan to make the journey and pay her recruiter, she arrived in Dubai only to learn that her employer was refusing to pay her promised wages. She worked day and night for two years for a fraction of her agreed salary, afraid to complain out of fear of deportation. “It was hard every day, but I didn’t leave because every day I was thinking of my little one,” she explained. Seyani was held in debt bondage in order to support her daughter. When her mother called and told her that her daughter was ill and in need of financial support for surgery, Seyani, incredibly, sold her kidney to pay her way home.
Chitra, a 32 year old woman from the south of India, moved to Kuwait in search of employment, adventure, and love. She was placed in the home of a local family who, according to Chitra, treated her “very well and nice[ly],” and gave her two days off per week, during which she would stay with friends. On one of her days off she met Amir, a Syrian young man with whom she began a relationship. After six months in Kuwait, Chitra became pregnant. When her employers learned of her pregnancy, they were angry and felt betrayed. They began withholding her wages and physically abusing Chitra. The children would join their parents in throwing things at Chitra, and on several occasions they withheld food from her. By the time Chitra was seven months pregnant her boyfriend dumped her and moved to neighboring Dubai. Fed up with the abuse, and distraught at being left behind, Chitra decided to run away. When she fled to the Indian embassy, she was told that she would have to resolve things with her employer, as they had the right to terminate her employment and withhold her legal papers because she had become pregnant. Due to her extramarital pregnancy, she was told she faced incarceration and deportation. After giving birth to her child in the shelter, Chitra was sent to jail while the baby was kept in the hospital. Due to laws about citizenship transfer in Chitra’s home country (India) as well as the host country (Kuwait), Chitra’s baby will be stateless and forced to remain in Kuwait while she is sent home. The baby, like thousands of others before her, will be vulnerable to abuse and mental health disorders as a result of her abandonment, statelessness and immobility. Like Chitra, the baby’s movement across borders will be tightly regulated.
Many migrants across the globe are caught in a complex web of laws and policies on migration and human trafficking. Children of trafficked individuals may live in countries where they do not have citizenship. Migrant women who become pregnant in some host countries can be forcibly detained, deported, and separated from their children. Nonetheless, women and men frequently remain in trafficking situations to support their children back home. Their stories are rarely heard.
Although the past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in questions of human trafficking, statelessness, and migration, few conversations have positioned the family at the center of analysis. Rather, policies and paradigms about human trafficking tend to focus on the type of labor involved (usually the sex industry) and the circumstances of migration. Debates about human trafficking focus on the questions of choice: was the person kidnapped and forced? Or did they choose to migrate? If it is the latter, the individual is rarely able to access the services designed for survivors.
But dichotomizing force and choice is actually part of the problem. What about the thousands of migrants who, like Seyani and Chitra, are literally forced to choose between a series of limited and undesirable options? If trafficking is defined as “force, fraud or coercion” within migration, Seyani, Chitra, and arguably even Chitra’s baby, are trafficked. Seyani is not paid her due wages but remains in a trafficking situation of fraud and coercion in order to support her child. Chitra experienced force and coercion as soon as her employers learned of her pregnancy, and then when she went in search of help, she was forcibly detained. Chitra and Seyani are among the many migrants who end up in trafficking situations not necessarily because of the type of labor they engage or the circumstances of their migration, but because of their status as parents or children. Hundreds of thousands of migrant women and men become susceptible to trafficking either because of children at home, or (for women) because they become pregnant while in the host country.
The experiences of people like Chitra and Seyani are eclipsed when trafficking policies and activism are exclusively focused on a popular paradigm of young women kidnapped or tricked into the sex industry. It is true that many women (and men) are trafficked into the sex industry, but it is also true that there are hundreds of thousands of migrants who work in a number of industries who are trafficked not because they were tricked or kidnapped, but because of the realities of their daily lives. These realities include laws that privilege employers over employees, high migration costs which lead to debt bondage, a sense of familial duty and fears of deportation which keep people in trafficking situations, and laws about pregnancy outside of marriage and citizenship transfers in places like Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
Conversations about forced labor, migration, and trafficking tend to focus either on the sex industry or on the cultures within which abuse is taking place. In the Gulf, blame has often wrongfully been placed on Islam or the repressive authoritarian regimes of the host countries. What is missing from these conversations is a more robust understanding of the challenges faced both by migrants as well as host countries seeking to adjust to the changing demands of large and often rapid demographic shifts.
Currently, trafficking paradigms would have us looking for “victims” who are chained to beds or kept behind locked doors. While this is a reality for some, there are also a large number of survivors whose chains are metaphorical. If we direct our attention to how financial pressures, a sense of familial duty, and citizenship and reunification laws place many migrants in trafficking-like situations, we can better examine the systemic symptoms of structural inequalities.
A more robust understanding of the contours of migrants’ lives beyond their identities as just laborers will result in policies that are more in line with lived experience. Activism and pressure directed toward labor laws, citizenship laws, and laws regarding pregnancy, marriage, children and reunification are a way of combating trafficking. A fight for migrants’ rights is a fight against trafficking.
Pardis Mahdavi is an Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Pomona College. She will be speaking on human trafficking at the Trust Women conference, 3-4 December London. Tickets are still available – register now at www.trustwomenconf.com.
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