Is human trafficking a question of transnational crime or migration policies?

Coming out of Sine Plambech’s research on trafficking from Nigeria to Europe, the article "Between “Victims” and “Criminals”: Rescue, Deportation, and Everyday Violence Among Nigerian Migrants" is about the lives of Nigerian sex workers after deportation from Europe, as well as the institutions that intervene in their migration trajectories. In Europe, some of these women's situations fit the legal definitions of trafficking, and they were categorized as “victims of human trafficking”; others were categorized as undocumented migrants—“criminals” guilty of violating immigration laws. Yet, despite the growing political attention devoted to protect victims of trafficking, the article argues that in areas of Nigeria, prone to economic insecurity and gender-based violence, the categories of “victim” and “criminal” collapse into, and begin to resemble, one another once on the ground. The need to identify and distinguish groups of migrants from one another illustrates the dilemmas that have arisen in the wake of increasingly restrictive European immigration policies.

The article is a part of a special issue on trafficking of the journal Social Politics published by Oxford University Press entitled Sexual Economies and New Regimes of Governance edited by Elizabeth Bernstein.