A Senior Lecturer of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus has warned that the practice of deportation does nothing more than punish victims of sex trafficking.
Dr. Joan Phillips is therefore calling on Caribbean governments to change their approach to this dimension of human trafficking.
Contributing to the US Embassy’s lunchtime lecture in recognition of National Human Trafficking Awareness Day, she said there is anecdotal evidence that illegal migrants from Jamaica, Guyana, Haiti, and Dominican Republic are more vulnerable to being trafficked across the Caribbean.
“From my research experience and others who have written in the area, we know sex trafficking has been conflated with the whole idea of migrant sex work. So, it is very difficult to extrapolate sex trafficking from migrate sex work. And what we find, the assumptions of the Caribbean governments are to say they are illegal, criminalise the victims, arrest them and deport them.”
“The system of deportation as the way to resolve the trafficking issue is not a victim-centred approach to combating sex trafficking,” she stressed, further insisting that this approach denies the voices of the victims to be heard, and consequently their ability to inform any policy that can be developed.
“We know little about their stories – their working conditions and their outcomes. And that is why we need further research in the area; further underground research interviewing these women, men and so on who have been trafficked.”
Dr. Phillips also argued that trafficking in the Caribbean based on the research does not “look or align itself” with what is seen in the media. She told the panel, “There is no person in a white van throwing women in a trunk and driving off and they are never seen by their families for five or ten years – that’s not the case.
“The case here is that people make the decision, although some will say it was a forced decision – and maybe it is a forced decision because there are very limited options to make a living. Do we say that it is sex trafficking or do we say that sex trafficking is much more fluid and much more complex than the United Nations definition?”
The Senior Lecturer in Sociology further pointed out, “It is also very difficult to ask somebody have you been trafficked – was this forced. If the person says this is not forced, this is a decision that I have made – is it sex trafficking; was that person trafficked?
“And I think this is the conundrum faced by Caribbean governments, which is to challenge a system that they are not quite sure how to approach – a system that is already linked to sex tourism and sex work,.
“So, when we do look at sex trafficking, we have to pause and reflect as we do today, in the context of how we define sex trafficking in this particular situation – one size does not fit all, and I think that’s the challenge some of the Caribbean governments have been facing in terms of trying to combat trafficking. If it doesn’t look like trafficking -is it trafficking?” she added. (TL)