Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Epigraph
- 1 Contexts and Complexities
- 2 Productive Ignorance: Assessing Public Understanding of Human Trafficking in Ukraine, Hungary and Great Britain
- 3 The Application of International Legislation: Is the Federalisation of Anti-trafficking Legislation in Europe Working for Trafficking Victims?
- 4 International and European Standards in Relation to Victims and Survivors of Human Trafficking
- 5 Child Protection for Child Trafficking Victims
- 6 Responding to Victims of Human Trafficking: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- 7 Does It Happen Here?
- 8 Promoting Psychological Recovery in Victims of Human Trafficking
- 9 ‘We Cannot Collect Comprehensive Information on All of These Changes’: The Challenges of Monitoring and Evaluating Reintegration Efforts for Separated Children
- 10 Policing Forced Marriages Among Pakistanis in the United Kingdom
- 11 Criminalising Victims of Human Trafficking: State Responses and Punitive Practices
- 12 Root Causes, Transnational Mobility and Formations of Patriarchy in the Sex Trafficking of Women
- 13 The New Raw Resources Passing Through the Shadows
- 14 Human Trafficking: Capital Exploitation and the Accursed Share
- Postscript
- Index
14 - Human Trafficking: Capital Exploitation and the Accursed Share
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Epigraph
- 1 Contexts and Complexities
- 2 Productive Ignorance: Assessing Public Understanding of Human Trafficking in Ukraine, Hungary and Great Britain
- 3 The Application of International Legislation: Is the Federalisation of Anti-trafficking Legislation in Europe Working for Trafficking Victims?
- 4 International and European Standards in Relation to Victims and Survivors of Human Trafficking
- 5 Child Protection for Child Trafficking Victims
- 6 Responding to Victims of Human Trafficking: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- 7 Does It Happen Here?
- 8 Promoting Psychological Recovery in Victims of Human Trafficking
- 9 ‘We Cannot Collect Comprehensive Information on All of These Changes’: The Challenges of Monitoring and Evaluating Reintegration Efforts for Separated Children
- 10 Policing Forced Marriages Among Pakistanis in the United Kingdom
- 11 Criminalising Victims of Human Trafficking: State Responses and Punitive Practices
- 12 Root Causes, Transnational Mobility and Formations of Patriarchy in the Sex Trafficking of Women
- 13 The New Raw Resources Passing Through the Shadows
- 14 Human Trafficking: Capital Exploitation and the Accursed Share
- Postscript
- Index
Summary
I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles – the overturning of the ethics that grounds them.
Bataille 1991: 25Introduction
Over the last twenty-five to thirty years fundamental changes have taken place in the global labour market (Wallerstein 1995; Harvey 2005; Arrighi 2007). The unconstrained development of capital accumulation into new regions has not only intensified international competition, but brought about changes in the rate of exploitation and surplus extraction. Many of these changes in exploitation and accumulation, most commonly characterised under the descriptive term of neoliberalism, have been constructed on a strategy of driving out millions of people from, what we may loosely describe as, the formal economy into informal grey zones (Fraser 2014). The journey from the formal to the informal, which takes place both within and across national borders, has been in part facilitated, and often driven, by the illegal trafficking of human beings. It is by no means accidental that over this past of a quarter century human trafficking has emerged as a major global problem.
Lee (2005) argues that the increase in transnational border crossings over this period has been stimulated not only by the distinctive role of markets in neoliberal society, but also in part by political turmoil, social conflict and civil war where migration through irregular means has become the only means of escape for many caught up in such events. She argues that the combination of enlarged global flows of people caused by both economic and political factors, and reduced formal migration programmes has encouraged breaches of migration rules and the trading of people as ‘commodities’. Many authors such as Bales (2012) and Skinner (2008) view this commodification of people as a modern form of slavery, arguing that there are now more ‘slaves’ worldwide than when slavery was abolished in the United States in 1861. However, an important difference between then and now is the replacement of a legal market with an illegal one, and such comparisons, while highlighting the moral bankruptcy of human trafficking, are problematic as the social and economic conditions of both forms of ‘slavery’ are fundamentally different not only in relation to different forms of capital and exploitation, but also to new forms of consumption (see Blackburn 2010).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Human TraffickingThe Complexities of Exploitation, pp. 224 - 245Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016