It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. 
Laura María Agustín's trenchant and controversial critique of the 
anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter - 
in this case, "human trafficking" - on the operating table, dissects it, 
unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes 
eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a 
capital W. It's a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living 
from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it 
violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also 
be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years.

Most of us recognise the ideological under pinnings of old-style baiting 
of migrants. When newspaper hacks or populist politicians talk about 
evil Johnny Foreigners coming here and stealing our jobs or eating our 
swans, it does not take much effort to sniff out their xenophobic 
leanings. Agustín's contention is that the new "discourse" on migrants 
(in which many of them, especially the women and children, are seen as 
"victims of trafficking" in need of rescue) is also built on ideological 
foundations. Like its demented cousin - tabloid hysteria about foreign 
scroungers - the trafficking scare is based on a deeply patronising view 
of migrants, rather than any hard statistical evidence that human 
trafficking is rife.

Agustín begins by challenging the idea that there is a "new slave trade" 
in which hundreds of thousands of women and children are sold like 
chattels across borders. The US state department claims that between 
600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labour or sex 
worldwide every year; Unicef says a million children and young people 
are trafficked each year. Upmarket newspapers - which have embraced the 
seemingly PC "trafficking discourse" with the same fervour as the 
tabloid newspapers screech about fence-leaping job-stealers from 
Sangatte - tell us that "thousands" of women and children have been 
trafficked into Britain and "traded for tawdry sex", and that some of 
them (the African ones) "live under fear of voodoo".

Agustín says the numbers are "mostly fantasies". She does not doubt that 
there are instances of forced migration, or that, in a world where 
freedom of movement is restricted by stiff laws and stringent border 
controls, many aspiring migrants have little choice but to seek 
assistance from dodgy middlemen. Yet, having researched trafficking and 
sex workers' experiences for the past five years, both academically and 
through fieldwork in Latin America and Asia, she concludes that the 
figures are based on "sweeping generalisations" and frequently on "wild 
speculation". "Most of the writing and activism [on trafficking] does 
not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by 
academics," she notes. Many of the authors rely on "media reports" and 
"statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity 
about definitions".

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on 
numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or 
neutral font of information when it comes to inter national issues), 
even though the CIA refuses to "divulge its research methods". The 
reason why the "new slavery" statistics are so high is, in part, that 
the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes 
disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women 
who work as prostitutes "trafficked persons", basing their rationale on 
the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex 
industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that "all 
children and the majority of women in the sex trade" should be 
considered "victims of trafficking". As Agustín says, such an approach 
"infantilises" migrant women, "eliminating any notion that women who 
sell sex can consent". Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as 
unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

The reality is very different, the author says. Most migrant women, 
including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear 
decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are not 
"passive victims" who must be "saved" by anti-trafficking campaigners 
and returned to their country of origin. Rather, frequently, they are 
headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape 
"small-town prejudices, dead-end jobs, dangerous streets and suffocating 
families". Shocking as it might seem to the feminist social workers, 
caring police people and campaigning journalists who make up what 
Agustín refers to as the "rescue industry", she has discovered that some 
poor migrant women "like the idea of being found beautiful or exotic 
abroad, exciting desire in others". I told you it was controversial.

One of Agustín's chief concerns is that the anti-trafficking crusade is 
restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a 
campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts 
to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often 
difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. She writes 
about the "rescue raids" carried out by police and non-governmental 
organisations, in which even women who vociferously deny having been 
trafficked may be arrested, imprisoned in detention centres and sent 
back home - for the benefit of their own mental stability, of course. It 
used to be called repatriation; now, dolled up in therapeutic lingo, it 
is called "rescue".

For all its poisonous prejudices, the old racist view of migrants as 
portents of crime and social instability at least treated them as 
autonomous, sentient, albeit "morally depraved", adults. By contrast, as 
the author illustrates, the anti-trafficking lobby robs migrants of 
agency and their individual differences, and views them as a helpless, 
swaying mass of thousands who must be saved by the more savvy and 
intelligent women of the west and by western authorities.

Agustín reserves her most cutting comments for the flourishing "rescue 
industry", arguing convincingly that it is driven by a colonial-style, 
maternalistic attitude to foreign women. In its world, "victims become 
passive receptacles and mute sufferers who must be saved, and helpers 
become saviours - a colonialist operation". Bitingly, she compares 
today's anti-trafficking feminists with the "bourgeois women" of the 
19th century who considered it a moral virtue to save poor prostitutes, 
who were "mistaken, misled, deviant". Like them, anti-trafficking 
crusaders see women as weak, easily victimised, and in need of guidance 
from a caring chaperone.

In truth, poor women - and men and children - migrate for many different 
reasons and have many different experiences, some good, some bad, some 
tragic. Such migrants are wise and wily, says Agustín; they have 
gumption, ambition and hope; they are often cosmopolitan, too, working, 
mixing and having flings with migrants from the other side of the world 
whom they meet in some big city in Europe or the United States. And many 
of them have far more liberal attitudes to freedom of movement than the 
westerners who campaign on their behalf. She quotes a Kurdish migrant to 
the Netherlands who thinks borders should be abolished: "I don't come 
from the sun or moon. I'm from earth just like everybody else and the 
earth belongs to all of us." Now that's an argument I can get behind.