Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts
![handle is hein.journals/hhrj11 and id is 71 raw text is: Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking
in Women:
Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts
Janie Chuang*
As evidenced by international treaties dating back to the early
twentieth century, the problem of trafficking in women is by no means
a new phenomenon. However, it has only been in recent years that the
problem of trafficking has again drawn world-wide concern, partly in
response to reports of the sexual enslavement of Muslim women in
Serbian brothels during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and
partly in response to the increasing prevalence of the trafficking of
children for sexual purposes.'
Despite the considerable amount of attention recently paid to this
issue, however, analyses and reporting have focused on the more tradi-
tional forms of trafficking and its obvious victims-i.e., women and
children forcibly recruited for the purposes of forced prostitution. In
contrast, modern manifestations of trafficking can involve the coerced
recruitment and transportation of women not only for forced prostitu-
tion, but for a variety of other forced labor and slavery-like practices,
such as forced domestic labor, factory labor, and commercial marriages.2
Moreover, not all trafficked women ultimately are subjected to forced
*.J.D., Harvard Law School, 1998; B.A., Yale University, 1995. The author is grateful to
Professor Martha Minow for her insightfhl comments on drafts of this Article, and to Christiana
Ochoa, Gillian Caldwell, Regan Ralph of the Human Rights Watch/Women's Rights Project,
Peter Rosenblum, Deborah Anker, and Lara Stemple of the Harvard Law School Human Rights
Clinical, and Ali Miller of the International Human Rights Law Group for their support and
guidance in the formulation of the ideas contained within. The views expressed herein are solely
those of the author.
1. Nora Demleitner, Forced Prostitution: Naming an International Offense, 18 FoRDHAM INT'L L.J.
163, 163-64 (1994). Children's rights advocates have called attention to the expansion of
trafficking and forced prostitution into the sale of young children, who are valued for their
innocence and virginity due to customers' fears of contracting AIDS. See id
2. Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences, U.N.
ESCOR, Commission on Human Rights, 53rd Sess., Provisional Agenda Item 9(a), at 19, U.N.
Doe. E/CN.4/1997/47 (1997) (hereinafter Report of the Spe ial Rapporteur on Violence Against Women].
This Article uses the term fIrced labor/slavery-like practices to connote the wide range of
coercive working and living conditions to which women can be subjected, including, among other
practices, forced domestic labor, factory labor, forced marriages, and false adoptions.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hhrj11&div=6&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts
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